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Seriously, how would a global democracy work? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 5 days ago by oddlyqueer@lemmy.ml to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world

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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?

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[–] thebestaquaman@lemmy.world 2 points 4 days ago

I think something like this is the most reasonable, and we're already closer to it than at any previous point in history. We have the EU, the African Union (AU), and I think there's a South American union as well (?) there's also the US, which is a bit between a union and a single state (US states have more autonomy than regional municipalities most other places, but far less than any full-fledged county).

I think that if a "global government" ever develops, it will be due to these unions forming an overarching union. The major hurdle is that we're a very far way off anybody wanting to concede any governing power to an organisation above the "continental union" level. Even holding the EU together is non-trivial, because a lot of people feel that too much power is concentrated far away in Brussels.

Regarding judicial systems and military forces, the UN has showed that it's possible to have a kind of global system for this, but it's still a far stretch from anything that could be called a "global judicial system with enforcement powers".