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?

  • Goldholz @lemmy.blahaj.zone
    4·
    3 days ago

    Federal republic or swiz model (which is a federation). Just yk bigger. Decentralised. Good example of how that would be is germany. There would be the top level: global parliament

    then regional/continental determined by cultural / geographic similaritys so example a european council, indian, north american (excluding mexico), latin american, central african, arabic, west african and so on

    Below that basicly like country borders today down to sub regional administration and then munincipalities/citys

    Its not one person as the “head” but always a council.

    The problems you listed arent problems. One can either vote in paper or online. Lots of examples there that it works, doesnt get tampered with and the annonymity is also perserved.

    Crimes are on the country/munincipalities levels and should be handled there

    Tax is global as are the armed forces

    • thebestaquaman@lemmy.world
      2·
      2 days ago

      I think something like this is the most reasonable, and we’re already closer to it than at any previous point in history. We have the EU, the African Union (AU), and I think there’s a South American union as well (?) there’s also the US, which is a bit between a union and a single state (US states have more autonomy than regional municipalities most other places, but far less than any full-fledged county).

      I think that if a “global government” ever develops, it will be due to these unions forming an overarching union. The major hurdle is that we’re a very far way off anybody wanting to concede any governing power to an organisation above the “continental union” level. Even holding the EU together is non-trivial, because a lot of people feel that too much power is concentrated far away in Brussels.

      Regarding judicial systems and military forces, the UN has showed that it’s possible to have a kind of global system for this, but it’s still a far stretch from anything that could be called a “global judicial system with enforcement powers”.

    • Schlemmy@lemmy.ml
      2·
      3 days ago

      Belgium (theoretically) has 7 governments. 1 Federal 3 Regional (geographically) 3 communities (by language)

      So you have a representation by subsidiarity. If a matter is more related to ‘hard’ matters, the regions have jurisdiction. If dealing with soft matters like education or culture, the communities wil be able to make legislation. The federal government oversees matters they can’t be delegated to the regions or communities like taxes, defense, foreign policy,…

      In this system a geographical representation and a cultural representation is present but my goodness, it doesn’t make things easier. It seems that cultural matters aren’t always aligning with geography.