Leading questions:
Representative vs Direct Democracy?
Unitary or Federal?
Presidential or Parliamentary?
How much separations of powers should there be? In presidential systems, such as the United States of America, there is often deadlock between the executive and legislature. In parliamentary systems, the head of government is elected by legislature, therefore, there is practically no deadlock as long as theres is majority support of the executive in the legislature (although, there can still be courts to determine constitutionality of policiss). Would you prefer more checks and balances, but can also result in more deadlock, or a government more easily able to enact policies, for better or for worse?
Electoral method? FPTP? Two-Round? Ranked-Choice/Single-Transferable Vote? What about legislature? Should there be local districts? Single or Multi member districts? Proportional-representation based on votes for a party? If so, how should the party-lists be determined?
Should anti-democratic parties be banned? Or should all parties be allowed to compete in elections, regardless of ideology? In Germany, they practice what’s called “Defensive Democracy” which bans any political parties (and their successors) that are anti-democratic. Some of banned political parties include the nazi party.
How easy or difficult should the constitution br allowed to be changed? Majority support or some type of supermajority support?
Should we really elect officials, or randomly select them via sortition?
These are just some topics to think about, you don’t have to answer all of them.
Edit: Clarified some things
Cool ideas. I like the idea of an accessible, global democracy. But I wondered about two things:
One, I think the complexity of such an identity database would be so great, it would preclude any means of reliably identifying false connections. And if that complexity wasn’t boggling, would it really capture anything more than our present distributed (inefficient) system of records? You would wind up with a, admittedly more sophisticated, statistical model for identifying bogus individuals.
Another thing I wonder is how much help it would actually be. Lots of issues are more complex than “is clean water good?” If and when a decision needs to be made on something outside your expertise, or with no clearly altruistic option, you have to look for help in understanding your choices. And that makes you vulnerable to influence by someone else’s interpretation. Which leaves you where we are now.
So I guess it raises some problems to solve. Can you really create a perfect record of identity without sacrificing privacy? Could you meaningfully interrogate it? How do you provide an unbiased education of every vote and referendum? How do you solve the influence problem or stop organized political machines from springing up again? Does any of this address the root cause of unbalanced wealth and power?
The way I see it, people are able to be influenced, particularly by the power of such forces as group-think and tribalism. For example, consider the Asch conformity experiments. For the majority of people, when they see what “the group” thinks, this has an outstanding impact on their own opinion. This is how the ultra wealthy use culture wars to divide and distract the electorate, by fabricating and propagating narratives in mainstream media and on social media that confirms the political and tribalistic biases that we have that tells us we are right and our political opponents are wrong. They have us fighting culture wars so that we don’t unite and engage them in the class war.
Propaganda exists because it is an effective way of exerting mind control over millions of people. Current forms of for-profit social media are incentivized to have a platform that is maximally engaging, (addicting), because the more time that people spend on the platforms means more exposure to advertisements means more revenue for the for-profit company. Adding to this, rage and anger and hatred are emotions that gets the adrenaline flowing, and this is an addictive loop that Fox news figured out many years ago. Before social media, day after day, night after night you tell your audience that they should be angry and afraid. That insert minority group or political faction is the cause of all of your problems in life. Later, Facebook took the same idea and baked it into the largest social media network in the world. Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok, YouTube, Reddit, Twitter/X, etc., each of these social networks are specifically designed to be as addictive as possible and one of the methods of creating addiction is by providing the users with all of the rage-fuel they could ever consume.
Part of this is you’ve got troll farms out there running many millions of false identities, simulating sentiment. E.g. from the movie Borat 2 : https://imgur.com/gallery/SFVNwWh. Troll farms are a type of propaganda, and they exist because they work. They are on the social media platforms all day every day for the benefit of whoever is funding them, to promote certain narratives in order to divide and distract us away from other real issues.
But, in my perfect world, you would have the technological infrastructure in place that is not dependent on for-profit social media companies, that gives every person a unique verified identity that belongs to them and only them, and that by design such a network would prevent fraudulent identities from existing. Troll farms wouldn’t be able to use endless numbers of false identities to simulate a sentiment and influence the minds of millions of people.
If such a network were to exist, it would give the people of the world the ability to actually express themselves, without having to compete with fabricated propaganda narratives.
Consider for example a twitter/X poll. Nobody trusts a poll on Twitter/X because everyone knows that Twitter is infested with bots and that you don’t have anything that remotely resembles a true democracy there. There is simply so much room for manipulation and no reason to trust it. But, consider a similar kind of poll but one that would exist on top of the hypothetical decentralized identity network. Suddenly you would have a tool in place that could actually truly assess the sentiment of the people, to get a consensus of what the people think of a particular subject, and you could actually trust those results.
And this brings us back to my original point here: People are able to be influenced, people have a tendency to conform, and if you had a global social media network that could effectively get the consensus of people in a way that everyone would trust, you would probably have an environment where things that are true and maximally fair naturally rise to the top, and that issues that benefit one particular political party or ideology to their benefit over the opposing political party or ideology, suddenly wouldn’t be as important and wouldn’t have so much attention given to them. You would be able to have an environment that destroys our filter bubbles, filter bubbles that exist because for-profit social media companies make lots of money by keeping us all addicted to their platforms.