If you live in a democracy, you already do run your own country. Vote accordingly. Get involved in politics.

The problem with "us" is that it's not enough to agree on one small question ("is hardware attestation good or bad") to happily live together in our own country. "We" have a wide variety of opinions about pretty much everything.

In other words, "we" exist only to fight against this one thing we disagree with. And even there, we probably don't all agree on how to fight it or what to do instead.

I'm convinced that in the billions of people living on Earth, there are a couple million that could agree on things that currently divide countries, like this. Sadly they're unlikely to ever be able to gather together in a single state.

The status quo is nation-states in roughly their post-WW2 borders, and it's fiercely protected. The upside is stability and fewer wars, the downside is that the only way to try anything new is to co-opt an existing country. Adding to that, most countries are ethnostates that would prefer to have only a small percentage of their population be migrants. It's an easy way toward social cohesion, you just stay roughly where you're born, with people who were also born there and share the same cultural background. As we can see, it's not ideal - two lifelong neighbours can easily hold completely opposite moral values.

Where would you do that? Realistically, the question is one that cannot even be asked safely: are there enough of us to overthrow the existing systems and replace them with something better?

The answer to either question, really, is no. The powers that be have systematically implemented policies that keep us divided to prevent that eventual outcome.

Who is the "us" in your question? Theoretically in democracies we should be able to decide this, if we aren't being distracted from real political questions with the culture war stuff that divides the public's attention and divides neighbors from each other.

Any new country will have these same issues, eventually, and probably a lot more that don't seem obvious on the surface.

Fighting against these sorts of monopolies seems far more likely if we can figure out what forces inside the EU and the US are driving these changes and find a way to educated the public, interest groups, and politicians about what's going on.

We already have a republic. If we can keep it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micronation

Ideally, we just run our own lives, collaboratively. That's the anarchist default position that we all start in.

What we really need is to meaningfully participate outside of the hierarchical monopolistic systems that demand our participation. That doesn't just mean that we create and hang out in distributed networks: it also means that we make and do interesting shit there, too.

The biggest hurdle I see is that we only really use uncensored spaces to do the shit that would otherwise be censored. We don't use distributed networks to plan a party with grandma, or bitch about the next series of layoffs. We don't use distributed networks to share scientific discovery or art.

I think part of the solution is to make software that is better at facilitating those kind of interactions, and the other part of the solution is actually fucking using it. How many of us are only waiting for the first part?

I’m not sure why you’re asking this question, but you can run a country as a population of 1 (ie just yourself) if you wanted.

The problem being raised isn’t due to the size of the country though. It’s the size of the company (ie Apple and Google)

The question is rather: can political parties develop a vision beyond libertarian views or full state control on the other side.

I feel that we need a better political consensus on a free society that puts the monopoly of force in the hand of democratic legitimate forces. I currently feel that all digital violence lies in the hands of a few corporations. And at the same time there is politician that like this because they can through this proxy can indirectly execute control without any political legitimacy. Sorry, I do not believe in markets as guarantees for freedom. I have read too much dystopian sci-fi for that.