This is describing something that most futurists have been feeling coming for a while now; something that affects everyone, but that most non-futurists don’t see coming, even though it will have a huge impact on their daily lives.
Read this: The Demise of the Nation-State
My commentary on the above article:
Personally, I believe that the nation-states will only lose about half of their current domain. Everything not directly associated with a geographic location, such as banking, intellectual property, and human rights, will be governed by distributed governments that you enroll in, who will be funded primarily by income tax. Then there will be the “local” governments, which will fund emergency services, postal services, and other geographically-based tasks, and will be funded primarily by property taxes. I’m expecting schools, sales tax, militaries, and other gray-area items to have a mix of local vs distributed.
How will this come about? Speculation is all over the map, and there doesn’t appear to be any leading contenders yet, even as to whether it will be a violent upheaval or a non-violent migration (for the countries not already involved in violent upheavals). I personally suspect it will be different for each of what are currently nation-states, but leading the charge of change (at least in the countries currently faux-stable) will be the near-complete collapse of the job market over the next 30 or so years. There’s nothing like having a large and growing percentage of your population suddenly unemployed and facing starvation, with no hope of jobs anywhere, to drive a change in the political environment. I believe it will be largely up to how those in political power respond (or don’t) to the growing crisis, as to how violent the change-over is for that country.
I actually have a governmental structure designed that I believe will work nicely to adapt to the change, and beyond. It involves dynamically-adjusted localized levels, blockchain-based democratic-republic amalgam systems wherein people are voted into temporary influence over various specific areas of society (science, economics, environmental, education, etc.), and largely AI management of all automatable processes.