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?
Scan everyone’s Iris, give them a forum like Reddit or Lemmy, tie the vote to their Iris scan, and create a funding mechanism like world coin to enable the transfer of value from other systems to the new system. Boom. Let people directly fund the initiatives they support, up to a certain amount of you want to avoid Citizens United type shit. By definition there will be people left out of the process, but a good version of this system would have an initiative to distribute tools to interested people without access.
I think there would have to be a constitution with an enumeration of basic rights, and unfettered access to the global internet would have to be one of them. I’m leery of biometrics, for one, not everyone has eyes or fingers, and two, biometric signatures can be spoofed and if someone can spoof your biometric signatures, it’s hard to prove your identity. I think there would have to be some kind of managed citizen ID, something that can be replaced by your local government if it gets compromised.
I think direct funding would probably have to be a big component at the start, especially before the government is able to levy taxes. But capital power tends to favor itself and lead to increased inequality. The fundamental assumption of one person = one vote would have to be able to ultimately overrule the wealthy for it to be a real democracy.
Maybe a blockchain type signature that encodes your DNA. Would also serve as a patent on it so orgs couldn’t use your genetic information without compensating you.
As a bonus: don’t even ask to vote, infer what people actually want automatically, by scanning and processing all their activity by AI.
We were looking for good ideas, not dystopian ones.