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?
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
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
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.
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.