Consider our political reality. Congress has a 10% approval rating and both sides hate the other’s presidential candidate. The electorate is at each other’s throats, the media serves the state, the law enforcement agencies serve a political party, and the state serves itself. As governance goes, it is about as crappy as it could be; really no different than any other third-world government. And all the while, we all, supposedly, or theoretically, wish that we had good governance. So what would good governance look like?
The parameters of good governance is a high approval rating from the public and a lack of corruption. It would be effective at addressing problems and at the very least, the same problems wouldn’t persist for decades. The fact that our current government not only does it not fix problems, it exacerbates them means that we need to be able to accept the fact that our current structure of government leaves expansive room for improvement and rethinking.
A great irony is that among a sea of people, a simple and apparently too obvious a solution is readily available and that is government-by-smartphone, where every citizen is a voting member in their community’s online legislature and every community is semi-sovereign unto itself. Under such a system of governance, it is not necessary to manipulate and propagandize the entire population into a shoe of one size, it is ultimately inclusive, and everybody gets what they want except for a would-be dictatorial ruling class.
Every function of a legislature, from proposing bills, to debating them, to seconding them, and to voting on every piece of legislation, is possible with an online legislature. Then, if every community is semi-sovereign, as in being able to decide for themselves issues like affirmative action or abortion etc, then no community would need to concern themselves about the other and there would be no need for opposing sides of the political spectrum to fight to the death for a single ring of power. But most importantly, there would be no concentration of power into a ruling class and potentially no opportunity for corruption.
Then consider the allocation of public resources. Some people think the government should not spend anything on a military while others think it is the only thing on which the government should be spending money. Some subscribe to giving a man a fish while others only subscribe to teaching a man to fish. And most fall somewhere in the middle. However, if every person can allocate their share of the federal budget according to their perspective, then everyone can get what they want as those preferences would be averaged into a collective result.
If we, as a society, continue to cling to an 18th-century, winner-take-all, most-corrupt-organization-wins form of governance that is clearly corrupt to the core and not just ineffective, but legitimately toxic, we will eventually end up at its current trajectory. If we cannot rise to our occasion, and deliberately transition to an inclusive, digital, online, government-by-smartphone form of governance, our current ruling-class, winner-take-all, power-to-the-richest form of government is almost certainly likely to end in nuclear war and societal collapse. And how can it not? The entire premise of a winner-take-all government is to crush everyone under your boot.
So I encourage anyone with ears to hear to fight for a 21-st century form of governance. Fight for citizen-government against an all-powerful, BORG-state of centralized power by only the wealthiest. If you can allow yourself to think about it, Government-by-Smartphone is the obvious solution to the world’s governance woes, perhaps too obvious.