The end of government as we know it

Weekend long read (5 min)

Is the end of government as we know it upon us? With the current administration in office, it certainly seems that way. From policy changes to personnel choices, today's administrations are failing in a big way. Governments have become too big, too slow to keep up with today's rate of change. So what does the future hold for the government? And more importantly, what does it mean for us?

I believe most governments will be either lightweight digital or virtual. They will be highly connected with the civilian population, to the point that the government and the society it services will be more like a single entity. It will become more of a self-correcting system that keeps its own balance (just like everything in Nature does eventually) and we will see an explosion of real-time and direct democracy.

In previous centuries, raw power was the only way to enforce behaviors. For much of the twentieth century, many of our needs were met by the state. That’s certainly the case in Europe. For example, in my home country of the Netherlands, all the critical elements of society were taken care of by the state. Postal services, TV, telecom services, our power systems, healthcare, water, and sewage; they were all state-run in the twentieth century. With that much done for us, it’s hardly surprising that we put up with all the rules and regulations and law enforcement. After all, we like to play fair and we understand that we need some boundaries if that’s going to happen. So we put up with it because all those systems are the basis for growth and development.

Also, having a government allows us to centralize things and develop complex and expensive solutions, and spread the costs across the population. Even as far back as the Romans, the population knew that the senate looked after them by controlling much of what was needed for daily life: water systems, planning, wastewater, food, agriculture, and trading regulations. So the population had its needs met and tolerated the taxation that paid for it and the registration of people in exchange for the stability provided. It makes sense why the Romans were so successful. But like all things, there is a limit to exponential growth. Massive growth leads to greater and greater control, trying to coordinate the uncontrollable. Things get bloated and inefficient. Things that get too big tend to get sluggish and slow. It happens in the animal kingdom too. There’s a limit to scalability and downsides that come with excessive size. Ask any dinosaur.

"Massive population growth leads to greater and greater control, trying to coordinate the uncontrollable."

Like all things, it’s a balancing act because governments actually need to be rigid. In fact, it’s actually a requirement of good government. No rigidity equals no solid foundation. Lots of things need a level of rigidity built-in for them to work; your skeleton and your house are good examples. In the early days of development, everything needs to have a physical infrastructure. That’s because, without something that doesn’t actually change very much, you can’t predict anything. But it can’t stay rigid, and it can’t keep growing indefinitely. Nothing can. So the first sign of change is watching to see when the big tasks are distributed to smaller, more specialized operators. It happens in Nature too. Coral is a good example. It’s rigid, it’s slow-growing, and it gets enormous. It might not be the fastest organism in the sea but its very rigidity and size allow a whole ecosystem to exist because it is there – just like our lumbering and slow governments allow us to grow and thrive. But they don’t stay like that forever, and this time, in our technologically more advanced world, we are going to see a different type of change. Instead of governments being toppled in traditional ways, we are going to see the role of governments undermined by people taking things into their own hands.

Credit Photo: Nicole Blaster

The Future is Virtual Government

Nature demands local expertise, and that’s also what you see in our culture. We are seeing more and more trends where people are looking for local solutions inside our local communities so that we don’t depend on our governments, reducing reliance on big structures (like the European Union, banks, and large corporations). We are increasingly trying to solve most of the problems in a local way. It’s not always easy, because there are always political arguments about economies of scale and centralized efficiency. But Nature doesn’t work that way, and increasingly we are trying to keep things local. Thankfully, because we are increasingly empowered by technology it’s getting easier to do. Nature curbs excesses from within. In communities, you see that when there are people who are disturbing the system, the community catches up with them and throws them out of the community. That’s now happening in virtual communities too. Facebook’s platform is allowing members of communities to do everything, from finding lost pets to catching criminals. If someone says something outrageous on social media, they are thrust out of the group. The combined power of communities and communication systems is starting to create the ability for us to self-govern.

It’s not just groups of neighbors, or people with common interests though. Companies and platforms are doing it too. For example, with Uber, the taxi driver rates the client, and the client rates the taxi driver. If there is a bad taxi driver then people say, ‘I don’t want to be picked up by that guy again.’ In time, the whole community starts to steer clear and the bad driver doesn’t get any work, so the system works for the greater good of the user community. Bad passengers get the same treatment, and so the community of taxi drivers gets to avoid the people who make life difficult. TripAdvisor was an early example of helping consumers avoid places where the marketing hype didn’t match the experience. It transformed the travel industry, and – even a few short years later – we now take being able to do travel research for granted. It’s the first time in history we have been able to do that, and it’s opened up the world for many people to travel safely. A global society of travelers has created a database of experiences that we can all benefit from.

What Will Governments Be Doing in 2030?

So what are our governments around the world going to look like by 2030, knowing that Moore’s law and Rose’s law will have transformed the nature of our technology? I believe most governments will be either lightweight digital or virtual. They will be highly connected with the civilian population, to the point that the government and the society it services will be more like a single entity. It will become more of a self-correcting system that keeps its own balance (just like everything in Nature does eventually) and we will see an explosion of real-time and direct democracy.

If I was writing this in 2030, I would probably be telling you that the traditional government structures from the beginning of the century were just too slow to keep up with the exponential change and fast-growing needs of our information-driven communities. More and more government processes were outsourced to organizations and smart communities. As a result, the role of governments had to evolve really quickly and because people could give feedback in real-time, the old-fashioned institutions had rapidly become less dominant and evolved to a more virtual institutions. The number of people that work in the government has shrunk dramatically, and the people that are still working for the government only monitor the automated processes.

In the last decade, more and more people have become able to fulfill their basic survival needs by themselves. Technology has helped to develop solutions to our basic survival challenges so effectively that most of our basic human needs are now fulfilled by smart technology that is still becoming exponentially better and cheaper. In 2030 it’s highly likely that almost all of us are now able to generate and store our own energy, grow our own ecological food in urban and home micro-farms; we will be able to monitor our own health with smart sensors, cloud-based artificial intelligence, and 3D-printed medication from the comfort of our own homes. Advanced new materials and 3D printers enable us to build our products and homes faster and extremely efficiently.

So What’s Even Left for Our Governments To Do in 2030?

Well, it’s now a case of structuring, monitoring, and enforcing an open-source law system and making sure that the laws are applied fairly. In the same way that the highly successful open-source operating system Linux was created by an open-source community, now laws are also being created by the community. When you think about it, our laws are just like an operating system. An operating system that’s created by people working in harmony with each other, and for the good of the many, has a good chance of running a community efficiently and fairly. It’s a law of Nature, as you know. A 2030 open-source law development process is likely to be an entirely open and transparent process where the government only has a curating role. Think of a community that works more like Wikipedia – and that means a future without so many lawyers having to interpret things for us. Now, that’s a future worth fighting for!

Credit Photo: Clay Banks

As with all community projects (even one as serious as the maintenance of the rules and boundaries of laws that govern the behavior of individuals), there always needs to be a curator and an arbitrator. Our government of 2030 will probably curate the process and guide it, but the actual content of the law is likely to be created and maintained by the community itself. That leaves governments to do what governments should do: serve and empower the community, not enforce its will on it and rule it. This is the only way our laws are going to be able to adapt and change fast enough and stay relevant for our fast-changing technology and populations. In 2030 our laws will be more universal, like the DNA information in our cells; there will be multiple versions of the truth at the same time at multiple places, and they will be synchronized in real-time all the time.

"That leaves governments to do what governments should do: serve and empower the community, not enforce its will on it and rule it."

So how will we prevent fraud? Well, I believe that the law will be distributed automatically using some kind of blockchain principle. Laws that are more generic are likely to be shared over the world with other communities, forming a more general or universal?law. When?changes are made and accepted, wiki-style, the law will be updated on?all?the other locations of the truth, so everybody can monitor what is happening and see how the law evolves and adapts to its fast-changing environment. Government functions will largely exist out of multiple smaller online communities with people who know about, care about, and have the ability to influence a certain political topic. The smart community software that structures these political communities automatically incorporates the laws as they are created. It’s likely that our technology will be so fast and so interconnected that all the agreements that are made within these communities will automatically conform to the latest version of the law.

The Big Ethics Question

Another important role of government is to set and hold a moral and ethical role in our society. Technology evolves so fast and impacts our society so deeply that as we get more and more connected and everything happens at a faster pace, there will be more ethical questions to answer. How do we set standards and ethics around the use of new technology and how do we apply those rules for the greatest good and the fairest outcome? Governments may still have this moral and ethical role in our societies of the future. Time will tell. There are some interesting new developments happening right now in this area. Using a combination of peer-to-peer communication platforms, blockchain technology, and an increasingly decentralized World Wide Web platform called Ethereum allows you to take back control over your own online identity without allowing people to cause harm. It’s a clever technology that has the potential to build up your online ‘reputation’ on the blockchain by securely and privately, documenting your behavior through code, without depending on a centralized identity provider organization or government. This is what the co-founder of the Ethereum platform, Joseph Lubin, has to say:

"This future may sound like science fiction, but to those of us who work with blockchain and Ethereum, as decentralized tools become more readily available to us every day, it is fast turning into our reality. In time we can all be presidents of certain communities we care about."

Lubin is also the founder of the cleverly named ConsenSys, a company on a mission to ‘create simplified and automated decentralized applications (dApps) to facilitate peer-to-peer transactions and exchanges. Systems like ConsenSys and the increasingly widespread use of blockchain technology start to give us a glimpse forward in time and help us start to grasp the magnitude and speed of change. It’s becoming clear that technology and the imaginative minds behind many of these new ideas are going to supersede many aspects of government, and it’s not going to take very long for that to happen.

No wonder so many politicians are scared. They know change is coming, but they don’t realize just how fast it’s happening. But you do. You have an incredible opportunity to use your knowledge and foresight wisely.

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About the author

Christian Kromme was an innovative tech-entrepreneur for 15 years until he discovered the DNA code behind disruptive innovation and how to use this to predict the next big wave of technological disruption. Now Christian is one of the most in-demand global futurist keynote speakers, speaking in front of tens of thousands of entrepreneurs, business leaders, and policymakers about the radical impact of disruptive technologies on humans and organizations.?Over the years Christian Kromme has inspired many companies with his keynotes and his bestseller book Humanification.