In my response to Dan Larimer's latest post titled: "Nonviolent Censorship is how Nonviolent Societies create Nonviolent Government"

I wrote in my reply:

"When you use the phrase the government you have to realize the village is the government localized. The digital village is the most localized form."

Reputation governance already exists to a certain extent. It has it's problems because reputations can be created or destroyed on disinformation. Rumor, gossip, lies, shape people's reputations just as much as truth and it's very hard to filter the truth from the lies.

Digital governance is the most local form

My epiphany came months ago when I was researching for DAVS (decentralized autonomous virtual state) which was intended to be a new form of governance. In my research I discovered the distinction between local and global forms of governance and found that due to the technological trajectory, the most local form of government is quickly going to be digital. It is not going to matter where a person is geographically speaking when satellites can track everyone in real time. It will not matter where we are when AI knows everyone better than we each know ourselves.

A virtual state is merely a digital governance technology. The idea is that the virtual state will ultimately evolve into something superior in capabilities to traditional governance structures. It is expected that the virtual state structures will be an overlay or auxiliary on top of whatever nation state structures currently exist. In this way a person can be a Citizen of France, but also be a virtual citizen, Netizen, member, or peer of whatever cyber associations they choose. They would have to follow whatever the laws of France are in order to avoid getting into trouble with French authorities, but also would have to abide by the rules of the virtual state or digital community they choose to join or get invited into. Reputation is a form of rule enforcement in digital space.

I do not seek to promote anti-government, but instead promote better governance

If national or geographical states are doing something well then why change things just for the sake of changing it? But if people complain about how something functions, or if it's simply not functioning effectively, then in my opinion all non-violent avenues should be investigated as a means of producing the desired outcome. If for example Dan Larimer can come up with a better system than what the politicians came up with, then why not allow Dan Larimer to run his experiments and we can find out what people prefer by looking at actual sentiment data? We assume people prefer national government solutions when only national government solutions are offered? But when national government solutions compete with non-government private solutions then we can simply look at the statistics to determine whether or not one is producing a better result than another.

China has started implementing Cyberocracy in the form of a social credit points system

We already know that social credit is a way to measure reputation. We know that something as simple as a score can be used to govern an entire population. Whether this score is generated by a central entity (the national government) or a decentralized entity (the digital global village), it's going to exist in some form because it's the foundation of all governance in general. The reputations are what determine how people are perceived, and the reputation score can be entered into a computer, as it is the quantified rank of a society. People of higher social rank typically receive privileges, in the form of being able to receive certain jobs which require high reliability, integrity, trust.

If we don't govern ourselves, someone else will step in and do it for us

We see with China a very centralized social credit reputation system. Politicians recognized a need for better governance and were able to implement their solution because the global community has been too slow to act in implementing a reputation system. As a result, instead of netizens having the freedom to choose a system, it's imposed according to geography, to promote technologically enhanced nationalism. Geography doesn't make much sense in digital space, or in "thought space", but that doesn't mean we will not someday see a USA blockchain, with some weird mix of political governance enhanced by blockchain and cryptography.

Conclusion

In many instances we always hear about how cyberspace is the "wild west" but even in the west there is order. In fact you can have much more order digitally than you can have with pen and paper rules. The point here is we will have to come together and set build the platforms necessary to allow the digital global village to set rules to govern itself. Whether you are an anarchist or nationalist, a capitalist or communist, it doesn't matter. In digital space you should be able to join with your like minded group and the algorithms should help match you up with people who you agree with. The AI which knows you better than you know yourself would know which digital village you are best fit for without you having to put forth any effort.

Note: Gossip Nets are also forming and it is possible that reputations can be created and or destroyed by lies, half truth, and other disinformation. It is important that if people do rely on reputation, that people utilize an exocortex mechanism to filter out the noise(lies) from the signal(truth). In addition, it is important to actually measure risk the right way and not to rely on irrational moral crusades which demonize weird yet harmless people, or which enforce social norms which are irrational for sake of punishing moral crimes. The self selection feature of digital villages should allow people to join with others who think like they do, and who follow rules similar to or compatible with theirs.

References

1. Ronfeldt, D. (1992). Cyberocracy is coming. The Information Society, 8(4), 243-296.
2. Ronfeldt, D., & Varda, D. (2008). The Prospects for Cyberocracy (Revisited). Available at SSRN 1325809.
3. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-34592186
4. Wang, F. Y., Zeng, D., Hendler, J. A., Zhang, Q., Feng, Z., Gao, Y., ... & Lai, G. (2010). A study of the human flesh search engine: crowd-powered expansion of online knowledge. Computer, 43(8), 0045-53.
5. Wang, B., Hou, B., Yao, Y., & Yan, L. (2009, October). Human flesh search model incorporating network expansion and gossip with feedback. In Proceedings of the 2009 13th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Distributed Simulation and Real Time Applications (pp. 82-88). IEEE Computer Society.