Meatspace Forking Governance

People sometimes speculate how we can take governance systems that blockchains use and apply them to “the real world” (meatspace). Below I’ll outline a rough idea on how we can use fork based governance in physical space to ensure long term legitimacy of governance while still allowing experimentation and value drift over time.

• There is a fixed set of rules and they are enumerated (like the constitution/amendments).
• If you don’t like the rules, you can vote to change them, but only one rule can be changed per vote, and the rules must be kept simple and free from conditions (no pork, no loopholes).
• If the vote receives a vast majority (e.g., 95%+), then the rule changes.
• If the vote receives an insignificant minority (e.g., 5%-) then the rule remains unchanged.
• If the vote receives a significant number of both yes and no votes (e.g., between 5% and 95%), then the governed region peacefully splits into two independent regions (the “yes” voters secede from the “no” voters).

Work Needed

Figure out how to divide up the land during a secession such that you end up with two contiguous and distinct geographic regions, because governing non-contiguous areas is complicated, and weird stringy regions are similarly hard. Ideally, this would be done fully autonomously (with an algorithm that is encoded into the rules) and somehow be a function of where the voters who voted each way currently “live”, so that as few people as possible end up living in the area that doesn’t align with their desires. It is impossible to guarantee both contiguity and everyone living in their preferred region, but we can try to get most people aligned and people can always move after the vote.

Another interesting option is to have the threshold for secession be a function of how segregated the population is. If everyone who voted YES lives in some contiguous community already (e.g., the Amish), perhaps the threshold should be incredibly small (less than 1% even), while if the population of YES/NO voters is perfectly distributed, perhaps the requirement to secede is incredibly high (e.g., 49.99%).

Possible Modifications

Make voting non-binary. Allow people to vote with any of:

• yes, and I want to secede over this
• yes, but I don’t want to secede over this
• no, but I don’t want to secede over this
• no, and I want to secede over this

This allows people to vote for their true beliefs/desires, while also expressing how much they care about a particular issue. You would need to develop a mechanism for vote counting such things. You could offer even more options like “yes, but I only want to secede if 45% of other people vote yes” and then have a fancy algorithm for figuring out what the largest set of people you can satisfy with secession is, given all of their different personal weights.

Allow a mechanism for two different locations to merge. If a region secedes, but then later realizes that perhaps the rule change was bad, there should be a mechanism for them to rejoin the larger collective. Maybe just make it so if two regions share a ruleset, then they are considered a single region. Then the way “back into the fold” would be by voting for rule changes back to the original set (or whatever some other region has as their ruleset).