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?
Same way it works in a country but globally.
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You mean like direct democracy where everyone votes on everything? Would there be any guardrails like the bill of rights from the us (currently being trampled on)? I could not see it working. You would at least need a legislature to craft legislation and then have at most one general populace vote a month with at least a month of lead time to read the legislature and the character count would need to be limited.
Scan everyone’s Iris, give them a forum like Reddit or Lemmy, tie the vote to their Iris scan, and create a funding mechanism like world coin to enable the transfer of value from other systems to the new system. Boom. Let people directly fund the initiatives they support, up to a certain amount of you want to avoid Citizens United type shit. By definition there will be people left out of the process, but a good version of this system would have an initiative to distribute tools to interested people without access.
As a bonus: don’t even ask to vote, infer what people actually want automatically, by scanning and processing all their activity by AI.
We were looking for good ideas, not dystopian ones.
I think there would have to be a constitution with an enumeration of basic rights, and unfettered access to the global internet would have to be one of them. I’m leery of biometrics, for one, not everyone has eyes or fingers, and two, biometric signatures can be spoofed and if someone can spoof your biometric signatures, it’s hard to prove your identity. I think there would have to be some kind of managed citizen ID, something that can be replaced by your local government if it gets compromised.
I think direct funding would probably have to be a big component at the start, especially before the government is able to levy taxes. But capital power tends to favor itself and lead to increased inequality. The fundamental assumption of one person = one vote would have to be able to ultimately overrule the wealthy for it to be a real democracy.
Maybe a blockchain type signature that encodes your DNA. Would also serve as a patent on it so orgs couldn’t use your genetic information without compensating you.
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Please stop posting while high
You need social proximity for democracy to work, because that’s how you have conversations about issues. We would need a shared global culture and factors that mean people at every level of society have friends distributed around the world. The specific rules and bureaucratic procedure are less important, the main thing is people in different places need to become more connected to each other.
Given that a decent chunk of the world holds political views I find repulsive, most notably around women’s rights, this sounds like a terrible idea.
Yeah, lol. This person clearly hasn’t thought through the consequences of letting india, the muslim world, and latin america vote on things that will impact their own nation.
Same sex relationships are another one, I’d wager less than half the global population are in favour of gay marriage.
By a lot. Not to mention trans rights
Then again, it could mean improvements in the most backwards nations.
The world is going to suck either way. It’s not like gay executions stop being a thing if they’re on the other side of the “Western” bubble.
Very much depends. The biggest driver of liberal social stances is economic prosperity. The biggest driver of economic prosperity is giving people the opportunities and resources they need in order to seek a more prosperous future for themselves. A world democratic government would presumably result in some sort of wealth redistribution from currently prosperous areas to currently poor areas. But the question is, how would that money be spent? If it were spent well, I would expect more liberal world views to emerge in currently poor areas in a generation or two. During that time, currently prosperous areas would see either stagnation or regression in their views. If spent poorly (say, if it were snapped up by local warlords or unscrupulous bureaucrats)…
But the question is, how would that money be spent?
We’re so far away from anything that could happen any time soon it’s almost a weird question, haha. Which was more my own answer to OP.
I’d argue that to be a global direct internet democracy it’d have to effectively prevent corruption. And square any number of other circles.
It really does seem like social progress follows some kind of wealth and stability. That’s good in that it means a virtuous cycle can be created, at least in theory, but I don’t understand why it’s so. Can’t you scrounge and reflect at the same time? And what of the working class progressives of the 20th and 19th centuries? A very different logic seems to have existed then, and I just can’t read it.
I think perhaps something like a Grey Council from Babylon5 would be nice.
Honestly we would need to create a new way of making it work.
We have yet to see a new type of governance that was developed with our current tech capability taken into account.
There is no reason we can’t have medicament increased representation, and major decisions could easily get public opinion on, but we are trying to build on methods that are hundreds of years old.
I’m sure there has been many students that have written papers about a novel form of governance, would be interesting if she country actually tried it. Communism didn’t work so good in reality inspite of how it looks on paper… And neither did democracy apparently
Everyone would need infrastructure, not only internet access, but also power, a smartphone and/or a PC. Still millions of people live in areas where they don’t even have reliable electricity acces, or don’t even know how to read and write. How would these people, that live of soley their land, buy a smartphone or PC and internet access and be able or know how to use it?
You first need world education, basic world infrastructure (water, electricity) before you can even dream of internet access.
Take a moment and think about what the global conditions were like 300 years ago, and think about how things improved every 50 years since then.
Around 1725, most of the world was rural, poor, and ruled by monarchies, with low life expectancy and little technology. By 1775, Enlightenment ideas and early industrialization began shifting societies. In 1825, machines and railroads transformed economies. By 1875, electricity and vaccines improved life. In 1925, cars, radios, and modern medicine spread. By 1975, civil rights, global trade, and computers reshaped the world. And today? Well, you can probably tell how our modern lives are better today than they were in the 1970s.
To put things in perspective, in the 1800s, only around the 10% of the world was literate, but today only around 10% are illiterate. Similarly, in the 1800s, more than 90% people were living in extreme poverty, but today that’s around 10%. The same goes for many other stats. What does this tell us? It tells us that things do get better with time. Even though we went through plagues, wars, famines, droughts, and genocides we did come out the other side better than we did before.
So maybe, just maybe, we don’t need a global government. Maybe vastly different people separated by culture, land, and history shouldn’t be forced into a system with people they don’t understand very well. Maybe it’s better for us to respect the concept of sovereignty that has persisted throughout history, and focus on strengthening the trends that have brought us tremendous progress over time… like improving the access and quality of education globally, developing and sharing new advancements in medicine, innovating new technologies to make our lives easier, pushing for and protecting civil rights and individual liberties, and generating wealth and prosperity through market economies.
The point is that maybe it’s better that we focus on improving what we know works from historical trends instead trying to create a global government, which will certainly create a whole new set of issues. Perhaps what we need is more dialogue and cooperation through forums like the UN instead of consolidation through a world government.
These don’t need to be mutually exclusive though. A lot of the progress in Europe the past 80 years is a result of the improved cooperation brought by the EU.
The EU isn’t like the UN, where everyone is equally represented (sans veto powers), but is a democratically elected super-national body with opposing super-national political factions. I can see a concept like that working on a global scale some time in the (relatively far) future.
The EU consists of a bunch of European countries that are similar culturally, economically, and politically. It makes sense for them to form a union that aims to achieve their common interests. A lot of similar unions exist like ASEAN, Arab League, African Union, etc. These are still different than having a single government for the entire world. There are way too many differences for that to work, different cultures, unequal economies, different religions, different politics, etc. This global government would end up trying to appease everyone to maintain the unity, but this would ultimately lead to have no teeth. In other words it’ll be reduced to what the UN is now.
Oh, I definitely meant far future. While the differences are far too big today, I can see gradually increasing cooperation between e.g. the EU and African Union at some point culminating in the construction of a governmental body that has some regulatory power over them both.
Once such a body exists, I can imagine that it over time accumulates power, bringing the two unions even closer together. The EU started out as a relatively small organ, and has grown gradually to what it is today over many decades. My point was that if some “global government” ever forms, I think that kind of gradual process is how it will happen. Starting out with trade agreements, and then gradually regulating more aspects of government.
I mean that’s a completely fair point of view. If we make the assumption that humanity will continue to progress with time, even if there are periods of regression, then I could see where you’re coming from. Humanity did evolve from being nomadic tribes to creating settlements of tribes to creating nations from settlements to creating empires from nations to today where we’re forming unions of empires and nations. It’s logical to think that with time we’ll have these unions merge and create a higher authority, and if we follow this trajectory it should eventually lead to a global government. I just hope we don’t go extinct before that happens.
I think we probably agree that OP is being overly ambitious and idealistic, but…
Maybe it’s better for us to respect the concept of sovereignty that has persisted throughout history
How do you read history and go “ah yes, everyone always respected borders”, or even “everyone respected borders the subset of the time they agreed to do so”.
I don’t just mean the famous historical war examples, either, but like, recent history and diplomacy.
That’s not what I meant, I meant that the concept of sovereignty has persisted over time. Different groups of people have sought out their independence and they go to great lengths to protect it. I obviously didn’t mean that sovereignty was protected throughout history because that’s clearly not true. The world is filled with empires and invasions. However, I think most people today agree that this was bad. I think a lot of people today would see a modern global government in a similar negative light as it would greatly favor regions in the world that are already rich, heavily populated, and strong. In other words, countries like the US and China would still end up dominating and poor regions would still be screwed over.
You’re probably right about that, although the reasons people want their own country to be independent are usually going to be less well-though-out or noble. Neither the US nor China are in favour of more global democracy. China prefers the ability to bully smaller states with no recourse built in, and the zeitgeist in the US is towards total isolationism.
But anyway, that’s a bit beside the point. I did think you meant there was some kind of traditional idea of who gets sovereignty, because it’s advanced that way sometimes. The real situation is more of a clusterfuck. Civilising the savages, liberating the workers and expansionism because god said so (or because good is dumb, for secular fascists) are just as often trotted out, and usually people don’t give their internal separatist movements the time of day even when they’re all about avoiding union with their culturally distinct neighbors.
A global government at it’s core is a form of imperialism. The idea is going to pushed by specific regions who stand to gain the most and it’ll opposed by region who stand to gain the least. No matter what shape the global government takes on, it will always be dominated by a select number of regions. Where the seats of government are going to be, who enforces its laws, who makes up the government, what ideals it would embody, how the voting system is set up, what degree of autonomy can be granted and who grants it, and so on these are things that have to be forced upon people by an authority that seeks to monopolize violence. Imperialism as a concept of where a nation spreads expanding it’s influence and power isn’t inherently bad, but based on human history this is an idea that can get bad pretty quick. I don’t think a global government can be implemented without a great deal of push back, resistance, and force to squash it all.
Imperialism is pretty much used as a snarl word on Lemmy, a lot of the time. When it does have a definition, it’s often more centered around the extractive aspect of the empires of the past. Examples of redistribution outwards from the cultural center, instead of inwards, have also existed, like the EU, USSR, or to a degree Canada. So, I don’t think it’s inevitable things work out that way.
Even now, international laws and agreements cover more and more all the time, because there fundamentally are just shared resources and concerns. If it continues, we won’t necessarily have OP’s thing, but you’re talking about something like a government, and there will be some use of force, like you see in international hotspots now. I wouldn’t compare it to, like, the British Empire, though.
This sounds horrible, sorry.
We need borders because people are different with different and incompatible values. Good fences make good neighbours isn’t just a pithy saying, it’s a strong statement about the need for people to respect each other’s boundaries.
Look at the state of the US right now. It’s a horrific clash of incompatible ideologies. It would be much better for everyone involved if the US split up and people on both sides of that divide went their separate ways.
I’m at a point right now where I’m beginning to think the internet was a mistake that has undone so much progress in peace and civility. The internet accelerates divisions and allows extreme ideologies to grow and fester. It’s awful.
So we should just let people from harmful cultures abuse children or women?
Because it worked out so fantastically well when the US invaded Afghanistan, right?
So we shouldn’t even try?
To play world police? Hell no.
Afghanistan was a peaceful country until Soviet influence led to a communist coup that overthrew the government in 1978. Ever since then Afghanistan has had near-endless conflict as different factions (internal and external) have wrestled for control. The Taliban itself, first known as the Mujahideen, was armed and supported by Ronald Reagan’s government.
It’s a textbook example of outsiders ruining a country’s natural course of history and development. You can find the same story in Iran, much of Central and South America, and Africa. Foreign influence creates more conflict and suffering than it prevents.
I’m at a point right now where I’m beginning to think the internet was a mistake that has undone so much progress in peace and civility.
Technology is not inherently evil, its how its being used.
For Example: Technology allows my parents to talk to our relatives across the world, where as letters would’ve taken months to get across the ocean. Its not even just words, if you have a good camera, you can even see each other in HD.
Internet allowed the spread of the video that documented George Floyd’s Murder. The internet has solved cold cases of crimes. The internet brought down Nepal’s corrupt government. The internet provided safe spaces for LGBT+ people. The internet provided discussion forums for many TV shows, especially niche ones where you have no one geographically close to you to discuss, and niche video games too. There are a lot of entertaining and educational youtube channels.
Talking to people across borders allow you to develop a more global perspective, instead of viewing the world solely from your small city/town.
This would literally never work unless there is international nationship, that is to say, democracy doesn’t work unless there’s a sense of belonging to the same nation, otherwise one group will always feel the other is imposing something on the other.
India manages with a population of over 1.4 billion people. It’s a mere six-fold increase from there to the planet, so probably whatever India is doing.
Ive had that opinion for a while too. Though my understanding is that cultural enforcement of norms and rules is big part that minimizes some of the need for a stronger state. Though this also has issues such as caste system and strict gender roles in some areas (speaking broadly about 1.4 billion over a huge land mass, so plenty of exceptions and the like).
I can’t see how a global democracy would be possible without some kind of “Other” as a uniting factor for humanity.
People would always put their interests first at the expense of others.
Now, some kind of proof of Aliens or something? Extra-dimensional psychic squid like at the end of Watchmen? Maybe.
Genuinely, I think the “other” in this case is the extinction of the human species. It’s very scary to me that there are people like Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump are in charge of nuclear arsenals. Do I think they are going to start a nuclear war? At this point the best I can do is “hopefully not 🤞”. But the longer we roll the nuclear armageddon dice, the better our chances that we’ll eventually wipe ourselves out. And the predicament that Ukraine finds itself in currently is proof that no nation with nukes should ever give them up as long as there’s a real threat of invasion by another nation. And as technology advances and we find more efficient ways of harnessing huge amounts of energy, that arms race will only escalate. I think the only long-term solution is to find a way for all of us to disarm and find a stable way to prevent rearming, or in other words, world peace.
