I was musing over this phrase, "a government rules by consent of the governed" which popped up in an earlier essay on digital cash (microcurrency) I wrote here and deserves further elaboration. it seems like a basic and obvious truth on some levels, a concept held sacred by our founding fathers, but on the other hand its exact meaning has escaped precise analysis for many centuries, and in various sense our government seems to have strayed far from this promise. what does it mean? does it mean, "majority of the governed?" how exactly is consent expressed? Barlow brings up this topic in his recent "cyberspace declaration of independence" (which can clearly be criticized as out of touch with physical reality but is nevertheless compelling). the essay comes close to the major point I want to make: I believe that the phrase "a government rules with the consent of the governed" is one of those magic statements that is going to become increasingly defined by new technology. often, the clear intent of a law is not obvious until new technology is introduced that tests its meaning. for example, the "right to bear arms"-- does that mean submachinegun, handguns? what about armor-piercing bullets? new technology is always constantly forcing a new interpretation of laws. or how about "the right to free speech" -- is cyberspace a place for "speech", or is it something where things are published? which laws apply? does it mean I am free to encrypt anything I want in any way I choose? interestingly, does the "freedom from illegal search and seizure" apply to cryptographic encoding? in other words, is there such a thing as search and seizure of bits (plaintext) in encoded messages? these are all questions that have various answers (and I'm not really too interested in debating them), but which in one sense anything besides what a court decides is not relevant. and most of these above questions could take decades to sort out in courts, if ever. === anyway, my main point here: I believe that "a government rules with the consent of the governed" is a phrase that is going to be tested in the next few years, and more closely defined, because the emergence of new cyberspatial technology. it seems to me that libertarians would tend to say, "oh yeah, wouldn't it be great if that were true. no one ever asked ME if I wanted to be in this system". well, what if there was an actual overt choice of government that when on with the citizen? what if we really could choose our government? would be tend to believe that all governments are corrupt inherently, or could new systems based on voluntary cooperation from the start work? in a sense, any government that uses force on its populace is violating a charter rule, (if it was one), that a government rules by the consent of the governed. if some segment of the populace is resisting this government, then obviously there is no consent among that sliver. all this raises the question of how much a government can be split up over a population. what is the "granularity" of government? to date, governments are based on geographic region. they are often circumscribed by various geographic features such as oceans or continents. but would it be possible to construct a governing system in which geographic location is irrelevant? such that anyone, anywhere, can pick whatever government they want? surely if such a thing is possible, cyberspace comes the closest to facilitating it. but it would not really be a government in the current sense of the word. === in my digital cash essay, I introduced a radical new interpretation of the phrase "consent of the governed" that went largely unnoticed but deserves further thought. in it, I proposed that "consent of the governed" is measured by whether people pay their taxes to a government. in other words, not paying taxes is a basic test of whether an individual does not subscribe to a particular government system. there are other obvious tests such as civil disobedience, but I believe this one is going to serve as the basic operative test of the future. this is radical for the following reason: today supposedly a government has the authority to coerce "inhabitants" to pay their taxes and punish them if they don't. interestingly, our whole country was started as a sort of tax revolt, and yet today our taxes are arguably just as onerous and oppressive as any other country's. it is a heresy within government circles to propose that citizens should have a choice in paying taxes. "we could never permit it. it would never work". "nobody would pay them". but is that to say, admittedly, "we do not have the consent of the governed"? I believe that digital cash will give rise to the ability to have completely "black" economic systems on scales far larger than ever before practical. what this means is that anyone who wants to can simply "opt out" of being seen by the existing government in their economic transactions. I think this may actually lead to "underground governments" in which people voluntarily subscribe to certain communities and their "laws" while at the same time opting out of participation in the "overt" system they are geographically constrained to. hence "we could never permit it" said by bureacrats may be true, but not relevant-- their permission has nothing to do with what technology permits. "it would never work" may actually be tested outright by new technology and systems of mass cooperation (in a sense, the basic point of government) developed in cyberspace. in any case, I do believe Barlow has some very important points and that we are on the verge of new forms of government that remove many of the nagging difficulties of earlier human models. much of this innovation will center around new definitions/explorations of the basic concept that "a government rules by the consent of the governed", and the approach to collection of dues, or taxes, and the way that they are allocated based on group decision processes, will be a chief area of experimentation and new approaches.