NYX: The Cooperative.

Our community throughout the Solar System and its colonies is called the Cooperative.

Not Alliance.  Not Federation.  Not Union.

All of those suggest some sort of unified, central authority.  That is not what makes the Cooperative as strong as it is.  The Cooperative ousted the Old Nations, the Powers That Were.  How?  And more importantly, why did it do so?

The Cooperative is the name for the relationship between the automated democratic artificial genius loci of each colony in the system.  That complicated phrase of gobbledegok is nicknamed Autogov.  It isn't a direct democracy.  It is a direct republic and has been since the first colony adopted it.

Autogov AI aren't a singular entity, but reflect the living social and legal strata of its residents.  This has its roots in the socialization of social media centuries before earth's unification.  Social media, AR and telepathy all form the basis of Autogov.  Within an Autogov apparatus, non-sapient AI form electronic representatives.  These are formed on a daily basis.  The number of residents, how they vote, their organization, all of that, is determined during their daily server update.

Citizens don't vote, but each citizen's online presence and actions are processed by autogov.  Most autogov's have a privacy czar- an individual or agency whose job is make sure that individuals whose privacy has felt violated are reviewed and used to correct the system.

There is no centralized autogov.  They exist on local levels.  The Cooperative isn't centralized that way.  It refers to how each autogov works with the others.

Technically, conflict could still occur.  But the Cooperative lacks any true military these days.  A centralized governing authority doesn't exist.

The Cooperative's closest analog to a central governing body or military is known as the United System Corps of Discovery.  The USCD is a research body.  Each autogov that patronizes it benefit from the shared research projects the USCD performs.

AI Spirits, artificial sapient minds of immense processing power, such as Huma work for the USCD.  Scientific endeavours like the Firegate prototypes are examples of their work.  As FTL travel becomes more and more of a possibility, the Cooperative buzzes with the possibility of having to make something new.  A new set of rules and thinking to handle the changes it'll bring.

The suggestion for some sort of autogov that connects all the members of the Cooperative together, a federalized technological achievement, is one suggestion.  The question of where this autogov would be housed, how it would select its digital representatives and the limits of light-based communication make it a daunting concept to bring to fruition.