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?
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.