Government and physical space

Main article: Community

Government jurisdiction is traditionally coincident with land within specified boundaries. In some sense, it is hard to separate government from this constraint. Much of what we need from government is a result of where we live. Road construction, water & sewer infrastructure, protection from invasion, etc. depends on physical presence. But much of what we need is also independent of location: information, education (at least when delivered virtually), many jobs, monetary transactions, some social transactions, a large amount of consumer activity, etc.

It seems there should be a way to divorce our physical location from official jurisdictional boundaries. Governments are generally only as powerful as people allow them to be. In principle it would seem that for many issues it shouldn’t matter if Person A chooses to be part of Community A and Person B, his physical neighbor, chooses Community B. Both communities can have very different laws. In some sense we already do this. My neighbor lives in a different family which has different “laws” than mine. He is a member of different organizations which have their own rules, and so forth. Virtual communities are no different and, indeed, they are widespread.

It is when two communities need to interact that things become interesting. Interactions are usually governed by agreement, convention, contract, treaty, etc. Clearly A and B who live next to each other will need such devices. Can A operate a steel mill on his land which will be noisy and pollute the neighborhood? In A’s community this is legal. An alternative approach would be to join a community of physical neighbors which handles interactive matters of this nature, maintains the sewers, etc.

We may dismiss this notion as too complicated but we already have multiple interacting jurisdictions in our lives already. We belong to a federal nation with its own laws, a state with other laws, a county which is part of the state but has separate functions, a town within a county with yet other functions and laws, a school district, a regional water authority, etc. Although there is a unifying constitution, it doesn’t do much on a practical level. Agreements, contracts, and conventions rule these interactions for daily activities.

And so it would work for a system of government where we voluntarily join virtual communities. If these displace our current government structures it will be because people have chosen them since they are objectively better. This new infrastructure would presumably be more directly democratic than what we have today. It might require more of its participants in terms of policy-making but nothing would be coerced. “Citizens” can participate or not (just like now) and, importantly, they can find the community that suits their needs, and leave when they want.

The ratings system will extend to communities in the form of a community ratings system (CRS), as a complement to the subjective ratings system (SRS). If a community is judged “bad” by its observers because it allows, say, child rape, members of other communities will have the ability to call this out, rate the community’s morality, etc. It is clear that low-rated communities will have difficulty engaging in the types of agreements mentioned above. Trade, in particular, could be restricted.