Ask Lemmy

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.

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.

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.

You might be interested in the idea of World Federalism

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

I think perhaps something like a Grey Council from Babylon5 would be nice.

Same way it works in a country but globally.

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.

Well, step 1 would be doing something about the US. The US wields enormous power and influence around the world despite having a relatively small population (compared to how much influence it has). What you're proposing is that every person in Africa, China, Southeast Asia, etc, should have equal say in what happens in the world as an American - I agree with that, as anyone who believes in democratic ideals should. But countries like the US that benefit from the current arrangement would never allow it, and are well armed enough to be a serious impediment to that goal.

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?

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.

I found the book another now very insightful and it kind of touches on this

Unironnically: Crypto, bro.

1. Scandinavian-style education everywhere.
2. Virtue > everything else in life > profits.
3. Only people like Marcus Aurelius in charge.

Make it hierarchical. Every 50-100 people in their little community elect a leader. Then, all those leaders get together into groups of 50-100 and elect a leader of that group. And then, all the leaders of those groups, et cetera you get the idea.

Do away with this concept where people are voting for random dickheads in faraway lands who will never interact with them, they have no daily concept of and no familiarity with, and there is this weird middleman involved of a distant organization that is deciding who out of hundreds of millions of potential candidates are the 2-3 that are permitted to be on the ballot of us to vote for. Do away with the team sports aspect where people are coalesced into artificial groupings with colors assigned to them and then the default is for them to vote for whoever's got the right color attached to them.

Obviously it doesn't mean that whoever's at the very top of the pile gets unquestioned power. You could have it as a sort of parliamentary system, where the top person carries executive power and then ones below them (or maybe 2 levels down) are the parliament or legislative branch. And then the courts are just separate from that, similar to today.

Maybe make it so that anyone who can gather 50 votes can be in the L1 grouping. So you can choose to organize yourselves into little communities without needing to be in the same location or having districts drawn by some suspect person. All the people who work at one company, all the people who like Linux, all the people who care about one racial or cultural grouping's issues can always put their person in L1 if there are enough of them. And then, any number of the L1 people can put in an L2 person. And so on.

Maybe there are flaws, but I feel like the lack of information and day-to-day familiarity with the people you're voting for, and the barriers to entry for ordinary people, are some of the biggest problems with all of this right now. It would be dope as hell if everyone who frequents one particular game store or college or housing project could get a couple of their people up into the very lowest levels of government just by all deciding. But, the person they're going to pick is based on actually knowing and respecting (at least vaguely) that person, not on TV commercials. And then the L1 people can do likewise, they obviously will start to know each other and they can develop some consensus about who should go up to the city council on their behalf or whatever.

This is just my random pipe dream but I think it is a good idea

It would be like EU, but worldwide.

As for internet voting, nah, you can't preserve anonymity while ensuring election integrity

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.

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.

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.

You seem to have a funny definition of democracy....

In real definitions, police, taxes, anonymity, internet etc. have no place. Democracy means (in simple words) that the people vote for their government. The other aspects can differ.

Look at real existing countries outside of your own. Their systems have huge differences while many of them are democracies.

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.