[dogscoff]

Vote anarchy! (It's better than no government at all!)

Seriously, as long as there is power, there will be someone willing to abuse that power. IMHO power needs to be held locally, where it can be applied with an understanding of the local situation, and where corrupt/ misguided leaders can only inflict a limited amount of damage.

I think with the internet, and with whatever comes after the internet (IE very portable, highly (and automatically) configurable, permanently connected and seamless devices/ applications that are almost as much a part of a person as their arms or legs or teeth) we can expect power to become more and more distributed, and that will be a good thing.

The kind of thing we are seeing now with the music industry will eventually happen to politics: In other words, politics (or at least, politicians) will cease to become relevant. The music industry is currently losing a grip on the market because the people it held in its hands- namely artists and music lovers- have found the technology to slip between the industry's fingers and are in the process of making the massive, lumbering, centralised structure of the industry utterly irrelevant. Imagine a giant trying to catch grains of sand in a sand-storm. Government will go the same way. Through technology, people will gradually get the power to slip between the fingers of government and administer their own lives. This will mean a lot of law-breaking, probably a lot of totalitarian clamp-downs and riots and shootings as government desperately tries to cling on to the power it once had (think RIAA suing individual file-sharers and bullying governments into passing IP laws for its benefit) but in the end there's nothing they can do.

Obviously all this is very abstract, and it makes it no easier to imagine just how you could run an army or a health service or benefits system or taxation in such a distributed fashion, but I believe people will find ways, and that will be the future. Hell, it worked for the Borg. It won't be world government, it will be self-government on a global scale, and it will be a damn sight better than what we have now. Sadly, it probably won't happen in our lifetimes.

0.02