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?

  • AA5B@lemmy.world
    1·
    19 hours ago

    Is that even desirable? Sure we really need to get our shit together as a species, but most voted are irrelevant to most people. If I have no stake in an election and no reason to be informed, aside from whatever streamers form my echo chamber, do you really want me voting in something local to you?

    Why wouldn’t we still have representatives, organizational structure? If there are some things we all care about like world president, why wouldn’t that organizational structure hold votes like they do now? My state runs an election and gets a result. My country rolls up all the states and gets a result. The world election bureau rolls up all the countries and tabulates the overall. A practical answer doesn’t need the internet and can operate similar to now, except give the UN more power

    I think you’re talking about “direct democracy”. Where I live, it’s fairly common to implement that by town hall such that every resident votes for every item. There are good things about that but it’s very unscalable: it only works for small towns. The internet can help with the procedural aspect of scaling, but you’d still be left having to figure out to vote on a massive scale for things you don’t know anything about and have no stake in. Who’s got time for that?