Why would I include an image of McDonald's in a serious article about cybercommunities? As you may or may not know cybercommunities are a developing set of ideas about how to create a better world that combines the best of what we know works for good.
What works for good is assumed to be a combination of three things -- tolerance, helpfulness and Democracy. These ideas will be fleshed out and a good beginning point is to state an obvious and crucial idea: democracy should be Local. In fact even in nations that are democracies we suffer when local expressions of democracy are threatened or made irrelevant.
I shall explain McD's inclusion now.
The good and bad of McD's
There are many goods and many not-so-goods about McDonald's depending on your viewpoint. The reason I include the huge chain in this exposition is that they are familiar and they are franchised almost everywhere. Trevor Noah, one of my favorite people, swears by the arched entity and notes its immense popularity in South Africa.
As far as I know this corporation never went to war to force itself on our planet. The good of McD is that it is a model of peaceful export.
When people talk about exporting democracy the models we have are atrocious. Do you really believe shock and awe Bush-style is a good way to commend democracy to anyone?
When whistleblowers are castigated as traitors, one wonders. We need forms of democracy that can circle the globe with the success of McDonald's. At times American democracy comes close but not of late. We badly need a law-based local form of governance that can take root universally.
My thesis is that the only way to make democracy truly local is to make it the polity of cybercommunities.
A universal democratic polity
A polity is how something is governed. A democracy proceeds by the consent of the governed. Today's local democracies, save for some truly participatory town halls, are mainly rubber stamps.
They do not seem to care if anyone participates. We speak of whoever runs things as 'they'. As this exposition of cybercommunities develops the essential importance of democracy will emerge and you will see it as not merely local, but familial and finally individual.
