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?
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.