Modular Government

Google revolutionized server farms by designing for failure. Instead of relying on expensive, highly reliable servers, they used many cheap servers and expected individual failures. The system was built to handle failures quickly and keep running smoothly.

I argue that societal structures, borders, and governments function like living entities, having their own life cycle. When young, they grow fast and have few rules. They are energetic but immature and make mistakes. Some fail early or struggle from the start. As they age, they add more rules, close legal loopholes, impose taxes, build infrastructure, and support business. In old age, they become burdened with bureaucracy, slow, weak, and corrupt. The ruling class may become kleptocratic, exploiting a failing system. Often, they end in a violent death.

The strength of Google's server design was its modularity. Each server was self-contained. When a server failed, it could be removed and replaced. The servers were independent; the exact hardware or operating system did not matter. What mattered were the loosely coupled communication protocols that connected them.

I propose applying this modular approach to societies and governments. This idea is not new: the US system was originally modular - a voluntary union of independent governments working together. However, this structure was destroyed when Lincoln and the North decided the union was not voluntary after all. This was a tragic blow to the great experiment of a modular US, which doomed it to inevitable failure as the modular structure became progressively monolithic and is now well into its senior, bloated, and bureaucratic end state.

Key Features

1. Relatively small geographic regions. The 50 states of the US might seem like too many already, but some states are vast with many millions of people. Ideally, states should be smaller, with populations from 1 to 10 million people. State borders are immutable. The structure should be hexagonal or similar with the goal of each state having maximum exposure to the states around it. This is necessary to prevent isolation of any one state by a small group of surrounding states. Peripheral states will have the ocean or other countries' borders. Interior land-locked states will have 6 other neighbors to trade with. This makes isolation of one state by others very difficult.
2. The absolute right to leave. No state is obligated to take a person in, but all states must let people leave should they choose to do so and find a receptive state (or another country) to move to. No matter what happens with politics, the ultimate vote is the right to leave and go somewhere else.
3. The right of refusal to let others in. No state is forced to let other people in. If a population wishes to set up an isolated 'ethnostate' or some other restrictive criteria (intelligence, wealth, religion, etc.), then so be it. This would be allowed.
4. Enforced soft reset. No permanent government. All politicians, all leaders, all judges, all police, and all bureaucrats would have a time limit beyond which they would have to go back to being a regular citizen. I propose some limit on the order of 8 years. This is the most important rule of all as well as the hardest to keep in place. In addition to this, people could not be replaced with close family members. Time and again society has shown that the longer people and/or families stay in positions of power, the more effort they put into keeping it that way to the detriment of everyone else. Entrenched bureaucracies inevitably become corrupt and eventually focus most of their efforts on protecting their hold on power.
5. An agreement by all states to repel the invasion or political takeover of any one state by another. Merging is not allowed. The only time intervention is allowed is when one state invades another or a state violates the soft-reset requirement. Then collective action is required to restore compliance.
6. And last and perhaps most importantly, there are no other rules.

The population in each state is then on its own to form a government in any way it sees fit and cooperate (or not) with the other states around it as it sees fit.

If a state wants to have communism, it can have communism. If a state wants a king, it can have a king. If it wants to try its hand at a libertarian utopia or unrestricted freedom, it can do so. If it wants slaves, it can have slaves, although this would be difficult with the enshrined right to leave requiring slaves to stay voluntarily.

This then allows evolution to work. Diversity of strategy. Planned bureaucratic-power death to make room for new generations and new ideas. Failed states will have people leave until they collapse. Successful states will grow and also have their systems copied as a form of 'reproduction'.