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?
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.