Seriously, how would a global democracy work?

[email protected]

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?

[email protected]

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.

[email protected]

There's no good reason not to have a global direct democracy

It's just old sacks of shit that don't want to give up power

Despite not everyone having internet, more people would still end up participating in the process than our current systems.

[email protected]

As a bonus: don't even ask to vote, infer what people actually want automatically, by scanning and processing all their activity by AI.

[email protected]

Nation States exist primarily as a bi-product of war. The Russia/Ukraine war, as well as the Israeli genocide in Palestine, show that global economics carry significant weight in modern warfare. IMO in the long run, we will see the role of nation states reduced to legislated authorities. while their provinces/states shoulder the majority of the actual administrative responsibility. International trade, defense, and regulatory agreements will become become global standards (like GAAP) providing the stability that nation states used to.
The economy will not function to create artificial scarcity as the current economic status quo does. Taxes will not be something people think about regularly because our economies can sustainable provide for its citizens when there aren't rich people carving out a massive slice for themselves.
With war largely being a bi-product of scarcity and greed; armed forces will expand it's role as a logistics entity. They'll continue being the primary vehicle for disaster and emergency relief. International collaboration in training and deployment will be the norm.
The global economy will boom as infrastructure and amenities are built for billions of people. Elections will become digital using block chain tech to verify integrity. Hopefully elections will shift away from electing individuals and towards electing policies.

In general I believe that the majority of shitty human behaviour should be expected in a dog eat dog world. As our global society shifts slowly towards egalitarianism, so will many of our contemporary problems fade away.

[email protected]

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

[email protected]

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.

[email protected]

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.

[email protected]

I have a similar thought about 100-1000 person groups at the base level. I think the basic unit of organization would need to be geographical, for a couple of reasons: one, I think it's important for us as humans to be able to meet and talk to your fellows (and your elected officials) in person, and two, I think a purely online bloc would be vulnerable to technological capture. Like, an attacker could MITM an entire bloc and manipulate how they vote. I think interest groups / parties / factions etc. will still happen but I wouldn't want to organize voting around them.

[email protected]

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.

[email protected]

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.

[email protected]

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.

[email protected]

I agree. I think with a robust enough proposal, there are a lot of people with power who would be willing to get on board. Some people though... they've shown that they're willing to kill huge numbers of people to maintain and expand their power, and I don't know that that kind of powermonger can be dealt with gracefully. And I think an internet-native global democratic movement would have to be started by people with internet access, and one of its goals would have to be providing, to the best of its ability, internet access to everyone.

[email protected]

This is representative democracy which is pretty much how most western-style democracies are today…

The risks you’re trying to mitigate are somewhat mitigated in a structure like the European Union has: the European Parliament, European Council, Council of the European Union, and European Commission, etc.

[email protected]

For something to work like this, there would have to be a constitution that follows the Scriptures (and no, not a Catholic-infested Scriptures like an ESV, NIV, ISR2009, etc.), not the Talmud or Qur'an (for I hypothesize that those texts were written by Roman monks and/or nuns). There would be 83 laws (because there are 83 commandments that apply to us today as followers of Messiah [not Christians]), and sublaws thereof would end up being under these laws as clarifications (what us Khazars call guardrails). These laws are human-readable, period.

The governmental structure would end up, ultimately, being a meritocratic and somewhat theocratic monarchy, and the Scriptures I mentioned would be used as said law, with sublaws thereof only clarifying what defines these 83 main laws. There would be groups of leaders over millions, thousands, hundreds, fifties, and tens, as the Scriptures describe. On top of that, there would be no voting (because elections are selections; for they're fake, scripted, and completely unconstitutional), as we've seen in selections past.

That's all I could think of as of right now.

[email protected]

Direct democracy sounds good on the surface, but it's an impractical system when you actually into it. For example, direct democracy can overwhelm voters with complex issues they may not fully understand, leading to uninformed or emotionally driven decisions. Participation tends to be inconsistent, with only a small, active minority shaping outcomes. The process itself is often slow and expensive, requiring frequent referendums that delay urgent action. There's the risk of majority tyranny, where the will of the majority can override minority rights, and it’s vulnerable to manipulation by well funded interest groups. Complex policies are also often reduced to oversimplified yes/no choices, bypassing the expertise and deliberation that's required.

We don't have direct democracy because it's only practical in small scales. Once you get outside of your immediate communities like neighborhoods, schools, families, the system just doesn't work. There's a reason why the evolution of political system led us to where we are. History has shown that the best form of governments are liberal representative democracies with strong checks and balances. We should strive for that.

[email protected]

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.

[email protected]

It would be like EU, but worldwide.

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

[email protected]

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.

[email protected]

I think internet voting for the less important things tonbe voted on. Like in addition, not to replace current big elections.

agnos.is Forums

Seriously, how would a global democracy work?