So, you died. Good for you. Luckily, due to various scientific advancements that spit in the face of biology, philosophy, engineering, and general plausibility, you’re technically not dead! Your body is, as well as your brain, but your consciousness has been mapped and uploaded to the big server farm in the sky, and now you’re here!
So, obviously, this is some sort of transhumanistic, ghost-in-the-machine, virtual afterlife, and that comes with two major perks. Functional immortality, and free reality-bending powers, to some degree. But this is where things start to get complicated.
There are two extremes: A setting where everyone can just make or do anything, to anyone, without limits, without any need for skill or experience. At all. Think of a puppy. There is a puppy. You just willed a puppy into existence. Think of someone's head exploding. That guy's head just exploded. You did that. Think of begin god-king of the universe. You are now god-king of the universe. Someone else wants to be god-king. Someone else is now god-king. You kill him with your mind. He comes back and kill you. Now someone else wants to be god-king. You can see where this is going. Clearly, this is a terrible, terrible idea, and the decline of the virtual paradise will be swift and drastic.
The other extreme is that only one person, or maybe only a few people, know how to control the artificial reality, because they’re the ones who made it. This is also not a great idea, for the same reason that if humans can do something without any consequence, they almost invariably always will. Those few with the power of gods will act like gods with human values always do, and things will start to go downhill.
So, our two options are anarchy, and dictatorship. There needs to be a balance between the two, and some form of maintaining general peace and making sure everything doesn’t fly off the rails. But before we implement any kind of existing government, here’s some important information.
Dying
Getting killed is not a big deal. If you die, you pop back up somewhere nearby within a few minutes. It still hurts, but not nearly as much as being killed for real, and doesn’t really have any permanent psychological effects. Killing someone is kind of equivalent to punching someone in the arm, really hard, and for no reason. It’s not the worst thing you can do to someone, but it also makes you kind of a D-bag. If someone killed you, then stole all your stuff, you’d probably be more mad about all of your stuff being gone than actually dying.
Also, you can actually die if you want to, because as we all know, immortality sucks.
Reality-Bending
People can change their reality. Obviously not at first, but the only upper limits are time, determination, and how much you actually have to learn. If you get to the point where you have complete and utter omnipotence and omnipresence, great. You win. There is literally no aspect of reality you cannot control. You hit the level cap. Have fun. This would take a really, really, really long time, and would honestly be pretty boring, so most people don’t do it. It’s kind of like memorizing the dictionary. Theoretically, you could do it, but most people just get to a point where they can see anything within a billion light-year radius, can create entire galaxies with the snap of their fingers, shrug, and say, “Yeah. That’s good enough.”
Some Reality-Bending Rules
- The pre-existing laws of physics are viewed as “suggestions” by most. You can defy gravity, but given that it's pretty useful for keeping stuff on the ground, as long as no one's actively changing it, physics will snap right back to what passes for "normal"
- People can change themselves, including minds and bodies. Do so at your own risk.
- No time travel. Because that would require sending data (i.e. the data making up a person or thing) back or forward in time, and it’s complicated enough already.
- You can’t change some stuff, just because it’s so basic. There are definitely aspects of the universe that would definitely cause everything to stop working if they changed, so the people who built the universe had the foresight to make them tamper-proof. It doesn’t stop people from trying, though.
Destroying Everything
If you do something that would destroy a decent chunk of the universe, then you’re going to get some sort of popup message that says something along the lines of “It looks like the action you’re about to take would destroy most of reality. This will likely inconvenience many hundreds of billions of people, and cause them all to blame you for this. Are you sure you want to continue? Y/N” This does not generally happen, given that it takes a lot of time and skill to even destroy a few square light-years, and when all those billions of people come back, they will likely kick the living daylights out of you, one at a time. This creates a surprising amount of peace.
Self-Contained Universe
It governs itself, because it has to. There is no outside influence upon reality, or at least no provable one. People die, pop up here, and someone shows them around and welcomes them to the club. That’s it. At no point is a lab tech somewhere back in the real world going to use his admin powers to ban someone for being annoying. You have to deal with that yourself. Any laws beyond basic universal structure are made by someone on the inside.
Knowing What You're In For
You sign up when you’re alive, they put a thing in your brain, you die sometime later, and then you wake up here. People may not know exactly what it’s like, they can’t look into the afterlife and see, but they know roughly what to expect. that means that they know they get immortality, reality-bending, and things like that, but they know nothing about the societal or governing structure in-universe.
Infinity?
Computers are bad at infinity, so the universe is only functionally infinite. That means that at any given moment, it has a finite number of space and atoms in it, but you can always make more. The universe can be made bigger, and more things can be made. Difficulty of making them scales up with complexity, so, making a $1\text{m}^3$ block of silicon atoms is a snap, but making an entire computer is quite a bit harder.
All of this clearly invalidates, or at least complicates, most traditional forms of government. So here are some some basic requirements.
- It needs to work, and work well, for a long time. These people are going to be around for a very, very, very long time.
- People need to be happy, or at least the vast majority. The whole point of there being an afterlife is that it’s actually better than normal life.
- There need to be rules. Murder is sort of a non-issue, but other general human terribleness should be kept in check.
- These rules need to be enforced. Maybe the populous is kept in check by those who have ascended to near-godhood. Maybe there are artificial entities already in place as part of the universe’s code, to act as lawmen. Maybe it’s all just held in place by mutually-assured destruction. If you kill someone, they’ll come back to life and kill you right back.
- These rules are subject to public opinion. Same reason that, “If one finkf when one fhould floate, then they are decred gilty of whichcrafte ” isn’t a law that’s on the books anymore. Times change.
- There needs to be some degree of stability. We can’t have the governing body in wherever you live being overthrown every other week.
- Ignore the other six requirements. Of course it can’t work properly! Where’s a story without conflict! People should be dissatisfied, laws should be broken, punishments can be avoided! Chaos needs to exist, if only as the exception to prove the rule. If everyone were happy with everything, all the time, then nothing interesting would happen. A utopian society is not going to happen. All I'm looking for is something that keeps the universe from burning down or being consumed by lovecraftian monstrosities, while still allowing human demi-gods to run around and do/make fun stuff.
So: How to govern a society of functionally immortal reality-benders?