This is something I’ve been thinking about for a while, and it’s a huge problem, but I don’t really see a lot of discussion about it. We have the technological means now for every single person on the planet to communicate directly with every single other person, in near-real time. The only real barrier to it is logistical (and is mostly impeded by resource hoarding). That’s amazing. And the recent election in Nepal via Discord has me thinking again about how the internet could form the basis for a real, democratic, world government. There are a ton of problems that would need to be addressed, off the top of my head:
- not everyone has internet access
- not everyone that has access has unfettered access
- It’s hard to preserve anonymity and have fair elections
- it’s hard to verify elections haven’t been tampered with
- what happens when violent crimes are committed?
- how do taxes work in this system?
- how do armed forces work in this system?
I don’t think any of these problems are necessarily unsolvable, but I don’t know how. So, how would we get from where we are to where we want to be? How do we even define what the end state should look like?
I think perhaps something like a Grey Council from Babylon5 would be nice.
Is that even desirable? Sure we really need to get our shit together as a species, but most voted are irrelevant to most people. If I have no stake in an election and no reason to be informed, aside from whatever streamers form my echo chamber, do you really want me voting in something local to you?
Why wouldn’t we still have representatives, organizational structure? If there are some things we all care about like world president, why wouldn’t that organizational structure hold votes like they do now? My state runs an election and gets a result. My country rolls up all the states and gets a result. The world election bureau rolls up all the countries and tabulates the overall. A practical answer doesn’t need the internet and can operate similar to now, except give the UN more power
I think you’re talking about “direct democracy”. Where I live, it’s fairly common to implement that by town hall such that every resident votes for every item. There are good things about that but it’s very unscalable: it only works for small towns. The internet can help with the procedural aspect of scaling, but you’d still be left having to figure out to vote on a massive scale for things you don’t know anything about and have no stake in. Who’s got time for that?
In liquid democracy, you can assign representatives in general or by topic or by individual decision or choose yourself on the same degrees of default vs override.
This works well across levels too. Assign someone you trust to represent your interests and concerns on the city level and it could propagate to local to county to county to Union to continent to transnational. Or you choose different people, or decide on some topics or things for yourself.
Pirate parties use a liquid democracy patform in multiple countries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_democracy
There can’t be a single level of democracy. You need multiple levels of local to global.
If you have local institutions it’s not very difficult to collect and distribute tax across levels.
For crime, you certainly need strong checks and balances, across levels.
Well, step 1 would be doing something about the US. The US wields enormous power and influence around the world despite having a relatively small population (compared to how much influence it has). What you’re proposing is that every person in Africa, China, Southeast Asia, etc, should have equal say in what happens in the world as an American - I agree with that, as anyone who believes in democratic ideals should. But countries like the US that benefit from the current arrangement would never allow it, and are well armed enough to be a serious impediment to that goal.
step 1 would be doing something about the US. The US wields enormous power and influence around the world despite
In progress. Sometimes you just need to step back and watch things fall apart. As part of what’s falling apart im fairly upset, but you may not be
Oh no, I’m not happy about the US falling apart, because the military strength is still there, and that creates a very dangerous situation. We could see a situation where a president starts WWIII and nukes China or something, just to distract from internal problems. The right is much better equipped and has more clarity of vision, while the left is weak, disorganized, unarmed, and confused. In the event of chaos and a breakdown in government, it’s hard to imagine that anything good would come of it.
In my ideal world, the US gradually draws back from international commitments while refocusing on domestic problems, accepting a smaller role and (after addressing domestic issues) competing with China through soft power, regarding who can offer developing countries the best deal.
Unfortunately, nobody seems to like my approach (people even call me an accelerationist despite my perapective being pretty much the opposite of that), so we’re going to crash at full speed. Hopefully the rest of the world survives.
I think it’s just American culture, we can’t accept potentially being #2, or not being Superman, or not pouring all our money into bombs.
India manages with a population of over 1.4 billion people. It’s a mere six-fold increase from there to the planet, so probably whatever India is doing.
Ive had that opinion for a while too. Though my understanding is that cultural enforcement of norms and rules is big part that minimizes some of the need for a stronger state. Though this also has issues such as caste system and strict gender roles in some areas (speaking broadly about 1.4 billion over a huge land mass, so plenty of exceptions and the like).
Honestly we would need to create a new way of making it work.
We have yet to see a new type of governance that was developed with our current tech capability taken into account.
There is no reason we can’t have medicament increased representation, and major decisions could easily get public opinion on, but we are trying to build on methods that are hundreds of years old.
I’m sure there has been many students that have written papers about a novel form of governance, would be interesting if she country actually tried it. Communism didn’t work so good in reality inspite of how it looks on paper… And neither did democracy apparently
You might be interested in the idea of World Federalism
That’s amazing. And the recent election in Nepal via Discord has me thinking again about how the internet could form the basis for a real, democratic, world government.
So, I used to have similar thoughts. Then I got into politics and figured out why it’s naive.
I had a whole lecture about it written out, but you don’t know me or why you should believe me, so I’ll skip it. What I will say is that you can’t really start from scratch here. People’s lives and livelihoods hang in the balance, they’re not going to shake everything up just because you have a proposal. When a law changes people listen to it because there’s an implied threat of force of some kind, and the implied threat of force itself comes from an existing power structure.
Real societies can be stable because there’s a cold, self-reinforcing logic to how that power is gained. It’s not anything spooky, just kind of dumb and depressing.
So, how would we get from where we are to where we want to be?
Just convincing people that the lives of foreigners are worth something is hard right now, unfortunately.
World government seems inevitable in one form or another, because there are shared resources, but it seems like it’s at least a century out, and one of the paths to it is just a gradual deepening of the international legal system that actually exists.
Everyone would need infrastructure, not only internet access, but also power, a smartphone and/or a PC. Still millions of people live in areas where they don’t even have reliable electricity acces, or don’t even know how to read and write. How would these people, that live of soley their land, buy a smartphone or PC and internet access and be able or know how to use it?
You first need world education, basic world infrastructure (water, electricity) before you can even dream of internet access.
It would be like EU, but worldwide.
As for internet voting, nah, you can’t preserve anonymity while ensuring election integrity
Yeah, this is simply the correct answer. Everything else I’ve read here ranges from overcomplicated to completely insane.
Why are people so obsessed with digital/internet voting?
Just use normal ballots, with pen and paper, and have a little patience while it gets collected, mailed and counted!
Or an EVM
I think internet voting for the less important things tonbe voted on. Like in addition, not to replace current big elections.
Or atleast what VOLT and the EUROPEAN FEDERALISTS want the EU to reform into
Make it hierarchical. Every 50-100 people in their little community elect a leader. Then, all those leaders get together into groups of 50-100 and elect a leader of that group. And then, all the leaders of those groups, et cetera you get the idea.
Do away with this concept where people are voting for random dickheads in faraway lands who will never interact with them, they have no daily concept of and no familiarity with, and there is this weird middleman involved of a distant organization that is deciding who out of hundreds of millions of potential candidates are the 2-3 that are permitted to be on the ballot of us to vote for. Do away with the team sports aspect where people are coalesced into artificial groupings with colors assigned to them and then the default is for them to vote for whoever’s got the right color attached to them.
Obviously it doesn’t mean that whoever’s at the very top of the pile gets unquestioned power. You could have it as a sort of parliamentary system, where the top person carries executive power and then ones below them (or maybe 2 levels down) are the parliament or legislative branch. And then the courts are just separate from that, similar to today.
Maybe make it so that anyone who can gather 50 votes can be in the L1 grouping. So you can choose to organize yourselves into little communities without needing to be in the same location or having districts drawn by some suspect person. All the people who work at one company, all the people who like Linux, all the people who care about one racial or cultural grouping’s issues can always put their person in L1 if there are enough of them. And then, any number of the L1 people can put in an L2 person. And so on.
Maybe there are flaws, but I feel like the lack of information and day-to-day familiarity with the people you’re voting for, and the barriers to entry for ordinary people, are some of the biggest problems with all of this right now. It would be dope as hell if everyone who frequents one particular game store or college or housing project could get a couple of their people up into the very lowest levels of government just by all deciding. But, the person they’re going to pick is based on actually knowing and respecting (at least vaguely) that person, not on TV commercials. And then the L1 people can do likewise, they obviously will start to know each other and they can develop some consensus about who should go up to the city council on their behalf or whatever.
This is just my random pipe dream but I think it is a good idea
Hah. This is how communism worked in the first few years after the Russian Revolution - what is now referred to as anarcho-communism. The Bolsheviks corrupted the whole thing, of course.
It’s slightly amusing to see people rediscover communist power distribution from first principles. You’ve added the wrinkle of digital communes instead of labor communes, but it’s roughly the same.
Makes sense. Yeah, a lot of things sound great until you put them into practice and then there are 50 different problems with it that were not present in the original purely in the mind genius version.
I have a similar thought about 100-1000 person groups at the base level. I think the basic unit of organization would need to be geographical, for a couple of reasons: one, I think it’s important for us as humans to be able to meet and talk to your fellows (and your elected officials) in person, and two, I think a purely online bloc would be vulnerable to technological capture. Like, an attacker could MITM an entire bloc and manipulate how they vote. I think interest groups / parties / factions etc. will still happen but I wouldn’t want to organize voting around them.
This is representative democracy which is pretty much how most western-style democracies are today…
The risks you’re trying to mitigate are somewhat mitigated in a structure like the European Union has: the European Parliament, European Council, Council of the European Union, and European Commission, etc.
Make it hierarchical. Every 50-100 people in their little community elect a leader. Then, all those leaders get together into groups of 50-100 and elect a leader of that group. And then, all the leaders of those groups, et cetera you get the idea.
That’s the best system in my opinion. I’ve been trying to write-up an outline over on PLT that’s not overly complicated, but I’ve been busy(i.e. lazy). 50 works out really well for a scaling factor:
50 people to a Block
50 Blocks to a Township (2,500 people)
50 Townships to a County (125,000 people)
50 Counties to a State (6M people)
50 States to a Nation (312M people)
50 Nations in the World (15B people)
Every level has a Council, every Council elects a Representative for the next council up. Every Representative has a direct constituency small enough to know everyone personally. Every citizen has a direct line of 5 Reps to the President.
Entwined Jurisdictions can caucus together (multiple Townships might compose a town, for example, and several Counties might compose a metropolis). Jurisdictions at every level should be redrawn with the census to keep population roughly equal, which should be determined democratically.
Honestly the basic structure of the US is pretty close to this, except the Township level, which is arguably the most important. Most people have no representation between the individual and municipal level(besides HOAs, but that barely counts). Also the House Reapportionment Act was a mistake.
This might actually be something we can effect from grassroots. If we can build our local community, start group chats with our neighbors, host Block meetings, etc., we can spontaneously choose representatives to go to our city council meetings and voice our concerns.
My city has neighborhood associations with elected leaders. They are totally voluntary and have basically no authority or budget, but they can pretty easily get the ear of coucil members
This might actually be something we can effect from grassroots. If we can build our local community, start group chats with our neighbors, host Block meetings, etc., we can spontaneously choose representatives to go to our city council meetings and voice our concerns.
I think this is pretty much the answer regardless. If the people are educated and organized and they fight, then over time it’ll come better and better. If the people are not organized, then the best “system” in the world isn’t going to do a damn thing to prevent the end.
You need social proximity for democracy to work, because that’s how you have conversations about issues. We would need a shared global culture and factors that mean people at every level of society have friends distributed around the world. The specific rules and bureaucratic procedure are less important, the main thing is people in different places need to become more connected to each other.
Given that a decent chunk of the world holds political views I find repulsive, most notably around women’s rights, this sounds like a terrible idea.
Yeah, lol. This person clearly hasn’t thought through the consequences of letting india, the muslim world, and latin america vote on things that will impact their own nation.
Then again, it could mean improvements in the most backwards nations.
The world is going to suck either way. It’s not like gay executions stop being a thing if they’re on the other side of the “Western” bubble.
Very much depends. The biggest driver of liberal social stances is economic prosperity. The biggest driver of economic prosperity is giving people the opportunities and resources they need in order to seek a more prosperous future for themselves. A world democratic government would presumably result in some sort of wealth redistribution from currently prosperous areas to currently poor areas. But the question is, how would that money be spent? If it were spent well, I would expect more liberal world views to emerge in currently poor areas in a generation or two. During that time, currently prosperous areas would see either stagnation or regression in their views. If spent poorly (say, if it were snapped up by local warlords or unscrupulous bureaucrats)…
But the question is, how would that money be spent?
We’re so far away from anything that could happen any time soon it’s almost a weird question, haha. Which was more my own answer to OP.
I’d argue that to be a global direct internet democracy it’d have to effectively prevent corruption. And square any number of other circles.
It really does seem like social progress follows some kind of wealth and stability. That’s good in that it means a virtuous cycle can be created, at least in theory, but I don’t understand why it’s so. Can’t you scrounge and reflect at the same time? And what of the working class progressives of the 20th and 19th centuries? A very different logic seems to have existed then, and I just can’t read it.
Same sex relationships are another one, I’d wager less than half the global population are in favour of gay marriage.
By a lot. Not to mention trans rights
Personally i think it would have to work as a series of institutions that each person is part of. Maybe a geographic organization that acts on municiple levels and coordinates with other municiple level orgs with a higher level org that coordinates agendas and the like.
But there some things that would make sense being technically bound by skill set. So more anarcho sydicalist structures for technocratic orgnizations as well.
Its honestly why i try to join democratic orgs where i can. My insurace is a mutual fund, my bank a credit union, grocery coop, electric coop, etc A lot of my software is devoloped in KDEs system whish is pretty democratic as well.
Im saving up with the intention to create a dual community land trust and housing coop in my area as well. Just taking back ownership out of autocrats hands where i can.
This guy fucks. Those are really simple and really effective ways to make a real impact without a lot of effort.
Change your electric provider to a coop and now you’re chipping away at corporate interests while investing in your own community one bill at the time.
Same thing with banks, software has become so accessible that most Credit Unions will have apps and websites that are as good, if not better than any big bank. And you can rest assured knowing that your saved money is helping the guy down the street run his restaurant and not funding dead babies in Gaza.
I’ve been kicking around the same idea of a “community land trust and housing coop” for the better part of a decade now. It’s on my short list of things I want to accomplish with my life that might be beneficial for society. Mixed housing community (large plots, multifamily dwellings, apartments, townhouses), support for cooperative company creation within the community, local store that sells the goods produced by the community (and online), plus actual facilities a community needs to thrive (community education auto/tech/farming/maintenance, help with transportation, etc).
I strongly feel like Cooperative based communities is the only way to gently guide us into a better future. It can compete within the commercialized world while still maintaining growth and development because the profits are being directly funded into the community as a whole. I think one imperative action that needs taken within the coop is the establishment and expansion into other communities so you create a network of these villages that can help sustain each other in harder times. Could even get already established coop’s like land-o-lakes or create other mass industry leaders so you’re not stuck with small ma and pa stores that can’t compete in this style of market we find ourselves in.
The realistic part of it is that we only have to convince a few neighbors at a time to grow it, and reach out to like minds to build the circle of communities. Right now my fights are paying off my house and saving money for it to build a equity base i can contribute and trying to nudge my communities credit unions to supporting coop housing loans.
Ive been too swamped but i was volunteering more with Habitat for Humanity too which would be a great partner for the land trust housing (where people own the invidual houses/condos) and the housing coop for people that dont want the indiviual responsobilty of ownership (but shouldnt be exploited by land lords all the same).
Tenent unions are really interesting options as well to get people organized and slow the grinding wheel down some. I wonder if a tenet union offering rental insurance, legal support, and price transparency might be a good starting place before full collective barganing.
Same way it works in a country but globally.
