A State-Free Society
Solarpunk ideology, thanks to Solarpunk Grampy, gets me thinking about the political structures of their world. For example, in Grampy's future, there appears to be some structure in place to facilitate direct-democratic voting. But, at the same time, a lot of their ideology in their future revolves around the rejection of authority, replacing it with peer pressure and the collective will of the local community. While I still think that as long as there is a way for some man to gain power over another person, they're going to, assuming we figure out how to move past that, how would such a society operate?
Welcome back to Futurism, a surprisingly long-lasting gemlog speculating about solarpunk and the future we all want: one worth living in.
An early question to answer is: if we don't have a State, what kind of government would we have?
Hear me out here, I get that the whole idea is not having a government, but listen to me, that's not going to work.
We actually already have a governance organization (or a few, come to think of it) close to what I think would be ideal. But first, let's explore what the criteria of such an organization or government would include:
- It's not backed by violence.
- It has a limited scope.
- It covers the whole world -- chiefly, because the kinds of things that this organization would need to govern affect the entire world!
In addition to standards organizations like the ISO, the closest thing we have to this right now is...
The United Nations
Look, look, I get that the United Nations is basically America's puppet. But there's something they're doing right, as a de-facto world government that, at least on its face (cough cough without the abusers' vetoes), seems to care about things like human rights and the climate. It hosts or sponsors or created (or something!) various task forces and sub-groups, like the International Court of Justice (read: The Hague), UNESCO, the World Health Organization, and the World Meteorological Organization. It also has published some very famous, well agreed upon documents like the UDHR and the lesser known Declaration of the Rights of the Child.
List of specialized agencies of the United Nations
When and if we topple the world's governments, we should be sparing things like the National Weather Service and helping to internationalize them. We'll probably have local agencies for these things too, a lot like local news stations often have their own radars and run their own models today.
For the UN in particular, it should be restructured and rebranded to respond to people, not nations or regions. A lot of its agencies will probably stay mostly as-is, they're fine.
Radio callsigns
Currently, the ITU manages callsign prefixes based on its issuing nation. If there is no issuing nation, where are your callsigns coming from?
More or less, either local radio unions (which would need to be recognized by either other radio unions or the ITU themselves) would become callsign issuers or the ITU themselves would handle it.
Or, callsigns go away. I don't think that's wise, though. And it's less cool, because callsigns are cool.
I'd also like some callsign limits to be removed, particularly the length, and for all radio services to be able to use the same callsign.
There's a little more to think about for radio, too, that maybe I'll come back to another time: what constitutes a "radio service" when the FCC is gone? Are there any protections, or consequences for interfering or jamming?
Jurisdiction of the New World Order
The reformed UN would have to have jurisdiction over things that affect the whole world. One example that Grampy's videos showed was the "global vote" on whether to reinstate the space program. Apparently, "they" had banned space exploration and satellite stuff because, you know, burning fuel. (The Kessler effect is a great reason, too.) This would be within the UN's new jurisdiction.
Even though we all universally agree that murder and whatever is bad, that would not be in the UN's jurisdiction. That's up to the communities in which it happens to resolve, because (I mean, unless someone was a worldwide serial murderer with millions dead) the thing to be banned is not of worldwide consequence.
If you burn fuel, that pollutes not just your air but that of your community and, with enough burning, that pollutes everyone and contributes to global warming.
I'm not lawyerly enough to come up with more than this.
Voter fraud
One thing that I think would remain a challenge is voter fraud: creating more votes than there are people, to vote on issues in your favor.
I personally can't think of any method that would remedy this except for voter ID and registration. But not only does this require centralized authority(ies), those authorities could be engaging in voter fraud themselves.
I mean, you probably could have some kind of ID system. I'd like more varied IDs that have the information you need from it, potentially including who they're registered with, and maybe matters of what you're trained to do (so, a less-enforced driver's license or pilot's license, in a way).
Maybe the way to do it is let communities establish ID and registration agencies, get all the necessary information, and host/issue your voting identity (an online version of such an ID). Like for callsigns, they'd have to themselves register with the UN.
I'm not sure this counts, though.
State violence and scarcity
I don't think I have to list out the millions of instances of state violence: the police and/or military performing their enforcement with arms and force.
Artificial scarcity, particularly for digital goods, is one instance where the term "state violence" gets thrown around a lot, and for good reason: the only reason "piracy" of digital media (really, it's copying) is "bad" is because IP, copyright, and patents are enforced by state violence.
The United Nations has the capacity of enacting violence through their borrowed-military so-called Peacekeepers force.
Tell me that "Peacekeepers" doesn't sound like something straight out of Brave New World or Fahrenheit 451. (It is in one of those but I can't remember which.)
Even in the physical world, we have more than enough food and medicine for everyone; it's just that it's not Profitable to just give it all away. That's a whole feedback loop on its own but profit and money and really the entire financial system is just state violence in a trenchcoat.
See also:
The global direct democracy
One of the problems with direct democracy is "spam." If anyone can submit something to be voted on, there will be myriad duplicates and any real, valuable proposals will get lost in the noise. Plus, if anyone opts to vote for everything, and in some versions of direct democracy it's more or less required, it's a full time job.
Hell, it's a full time job for lots of people in our supposed representative democracy; not just politicians but pundits too.
In this imaginary future, it'll probably be a full time job for some people as well, to sift through the noise, at least. But if you're introducing that, who gets to determine what's noise and what's not?
Assuming false petitioners are not an issue, maybe one way would be to have petitions raised. You go around and get signatures on your petition, and if it reaches some percentage or number of registered voters (1%? 1,000?), it automatically gets put to a vote. Maybe, too, the voting time will be pinned to cycles of weeks or months, so you have a while to put in your vote, and you get new things to vote on regularly. Add in some kind of automatic pass/fail system, where once a proposal gets above a certain amount of one vote in proportion to the total population, it's automatically and immediately considered passed or failed.
Still there's the possibility that a majority of people conclude that the jurisdiction of the UN should be expanded, or that some kind of World Controller should be instituted. We need both social and legal protections from those things, but if anyone is able to form a military, we're in trouble.
Closing thoughts
- The New UN would only have its power because people agree to it voluntarily, and the people would enforce it on each other.
Thinking about how these things could work, still radically different than they do now but not magically so, is helping me see this kind of future as less fantastical. I'm still not convinced it's within the realm of possibility, though.
Maybe it would help to see it.
I might work on the State-Free World Map at some point, but don't count on it. What you can count on is more anarchistic, solarpunk thoughts headed your way on Futurism (but I cannot guarantee timestamp or topic yet)!
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