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?

  • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
    6·
    2 days ago

    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.

    So, I used to have similar thoughts. Then I got into politics and figured out why it’s naive.

    I had a whole lecture about it written out, but you don’t know me or why you should believe me, so I’ll skip it. What I will say is that you can’t really start from scratch here. People’s lives and livelihoods hang in the balance, they’re not going to shake everything up just because you have a proposal. When a law changes people listen to it because there’s an implied threat of force of some kind, and the implied threat of force itself comes from an existing power structure.

    Real societies can be stable because there’s a cold, self-reinforcing logic to how that power is gained. It’s not anything spooky, just kind of dumb and depressing.

    So, how would we get from where we are to where we want to be?

    Just convincing people that the lives of foreigners are worth something is hard right now, unfortunately.

    World government seems inevitable in one form or another, because there are shared resources, but it seems like it’s at least a century out, and one of the paths to it is just a gradual deepening of the international legal system that actually exists.