The internet is a powerful technology for tying people together in new collaborations across vast differences. Unfortunately, it has also recently proven to be a powerful tool for thwarting those collaborations and sowing new forms of division.
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It is no coincidence that democracy now finds itself at a low tide. Authoritarian regimes now command nearly half of the global GDP. Only a modest one billion people find solace under the umbrella of democratic systems, while over two billion dwell under authoritarian rule.1
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A quote on the wall of the memorial in Washington, D.C. to United States Founding Father Thomas Jefferson reads “(L)aws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind… We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.” Yet today democracy has become a synonym in much of the world for the increasingly desperate effort to preserve rigid, outmoded, polarized, paralyzed, and increasingly illegitimate governments.
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Existentially, there is growing concern that the fragmentation of the social sense-making and collective action capacity is dangerous in the face of the increasing sophistication of technologies of mass destruction with impact ranging from environmental devastation (e.g., climate change, biodiversity loss, ocean acidification) to the potentially apocalyptic disruptions of more direct weapons (e.g., misaligned artificial intelligence and bioweapons)10.
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- [note::This is the thing that most excites me about the promise of democratic/collaborative technology (in addition to generally better, more inclusive decision-making)]

Legally, the speed of recent advances in AI have overwhelmed core rights of many democratic societies, leaving critical choices in the hands of restricted groups of engineers from similar social backgrounds. Intellectual property law and other protections of creative activity have been largely obviated by the capacity of large AI models to “remix and replace” content; privacy regimes have failed to keep up with the explosive spread of information; discrimination law is woefully unsuited to address issues raised by the potential emergent biases of black box AI systems. The engineers who could potentially address these issues, on the other hand, typically work for profit-seeking companies or the defense sector, come overwhelmingly from a very specific educational and demographic background (typically white or Asian, male, atheist, highly educated, etc.). This has challenged the core tenets of democratic legal regimes that aim to represent the will of the broad society they govern12.
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Furthermore, these two threats intersect; authoritarian regimes have increasingly harnessed the “chaos” of social media and cryptocurrencies to sow internal division and conflict in democratic countries. Centralized social media platforms have leveraged AI to optimize user engagement with their services, often helping to fuel the centrifugal tendencies of misinformation and opinion clustering. Yet, even when they are not actively complementing each other and may in many ways have opposite motivations, both forces have pressured democratic societies and helped undermine confidence in them, confidence that is now at its lowest ebb in much of the developed democratic world since it has been measured.16
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Where once the public sector in democratic countries was the global driving force behind the development of information technology (e.g. the first computers, the internet, global positioning satellites, today most democratic governments are focused instead on constraining its development and are failing to respond to both opportunities and challenges it creates.
This failure has manifested in four ways. First, public opinion in democratic countries and their policymakers are increasingly hostile to large technology companies and even many technologists, a trend commonly called the “techlash”. Second, democratic countries have significantly reduced their direct investment in the development of information technology. Third, democratic countries have been slow to adopt technology in public sector applications or that require significant public sector participation. Finally, and relatedly, democratic governments have largely failed to address the areas where most technologists believe public participation, regulation, and support are critical to technology advancing in a sustainable way, focusing instead on more familiar social and political problems17.)
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More central to the heart of governmental responsibility in democracies, however, is the digitization of public services. Many middle-income and wealthy democracies invest less in e-government compared to authoritarian counterparts. The UN e-government development index (EGDI) is a composite measure of three important dimensions of e-government, namely: provision of online services, telecommunication connectivity, and human capital. In 2022, several authoritarian governments ranked highly, including UAE (13th), Kazakhstan (28th), and Saudi Arabia (31st), ahead of many democracies including notably Canada (32nd), Italy (37th), Brazil (49th), and Mexico (62nd).26
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Where once government-provided postal services and public libraries were the backbone of democratic communication and knowledge circulation, today most communication flows through social media and search engines. Where once most public gatherings took place in parks and literal public squares, today it is almost a cliché that the public square has moved online. Yet democratic countries have almost entirely ignored the need to provide and support digital public services. While privately-owned Twitter is the target of constant abuse by public figures, its most important competitor, the non-profits Mastodon and the open Activity Pub standard on which it runs have received a paltry few hundreds of thousands of dollars in public support, running instead on Patreon donations.27 More broadly, open source software and other commons-based public goods like Wikipedia have become critical public resources in the digital age; yet governments have consistently failed to support them and have even discriminated against them relative to other charities (for example, open source software providers generally cannot be tax-exempt charities). While authoritarian regimes plow ahead with plans for Central Bank Digital Currencies, most democratic countries are only beginning explorations.
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Yet while bold experiments with new visions of the public sector are more common in autocracies, there is an element far more fundamental to democracy itself: the mechanisms of public consent, participation, and legitimation, including voting, petitioning, soliciting citizen feedback and so forth. Voting in nearly all democracies occurs for major offices once every several years according to rules and technologies that have been largely unchanged for a century. While citizens communicate instantaneously across the planet, they are represented in largely fixed geographic configurations at great expense with low fidelity. Few modern tools of communication or data analysis are regular parts of the democratic lives of citizens.
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Technocracy focuses on the potential of AI to create what OpenAI Founder Sam Altman calls “Moore’s Law for Everything”: a transformation where AI makes all material goods cheap and abundant and thus allows the abolition, at least in principle, of material scarcity.41 Yet this potential abundance may not be equally distributed; it is plausible that its value will concentrate in a small group that controls and directs AI systems. A key element of the technocratic social vision is therefore material redistribution, usually through a “universal basic income” (UBI). Another central focus is on the risk of AI(s) getting out of human control and threatening human survival, and thus on the need for strong and often centralized control over who has access to these technologies, as well as ensuring they are built to faithfully execute human desires. While the precise contours differ across the exponents of this view, the idea of “Artificial General Intelligence” (AGI) is central: machines that exceed human capabilities in some generalized way, leaving little measurable utility in human individual or collective cognition.
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Libertarianism focuses on the potential (or in some telling inevitability) of cryptography and networking protocols supplanting the role of human collective organization and politics, liberating individuals to participate in unfettered markets free from government and other collective “coercion” and regulation.
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libertarianism has a much clearer intellectual canon and set of leaders. The Sovereign Individual by James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg, the writings of Curtis Yarvin under the pen name Mencius Moldbug, The Network State by Balaji Srinavasan and Bronze Age Mindset are widely read and cited in the community.45 Venture capitalist Peter Thiel is widely seen as the central intellectual leader, along with others (such as the authors mentioned) whom he has funded or promoted the work of.
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On the other hand, Libertarianism is consistently hostile to nationalism (or any other form of collectivism or solidarity) and Libertarian followers routinely mock and dismiss many core religious, national and cultural values associated with the right. This apparent contradiction may be resolved by a shared antipathy to what they perceive as dominant left-wing cultural values or by an “accelerationist” attitude as advocated by Yarvin, Davidson and Rees-Mogg that views the “nationalist backlash” to the inevitable technological trends as an accelerant and possible ally in the dissolution of the nation-state.
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(highlight::
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Figure 2-0-F. Improvement in technology represented by growth in “Total Factor Productivity”. Source: Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth46
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(highlight::
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Figure 2-0-G. Average income growth in the US by income percentile during the Golden Age and Great Stagnation. Source: Saez and Zucman, “The Rise of Income and Wealth Inequality”47
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Faith in democratic institutions has been falling, especially in the last decade and a half in all democracies, but especially in the US and developing democracies. In the US, dissatisfaction with democracy has gone from being the opinion of a fringe (less than 25%) to being the majority opinion in the last 3 decades.53 While it is less consistently measured, faith in technology, especially leading technology companies, has been similarly declining. In the US, the technology sector has fallen from being considered the most trusted sector in the economy in the early and mid-2010s to amongst the least trusted, based on surveys by organizations like the Public Affairs Council, Morning Consult, Pew Research and Edelman Trust Barometer.54
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(highlight:: Technology and democracy are trapped between two sides of a widening gulf. That war is damaging both sides of the conflict, undermining democracy and slowing technological development. As collateral damage, it is slowing economic growth, undermining confidence in social institutions, and fueling inequality. This conflict is not inevitable; it is the product of the technological directions liberal democracies have collectively chosen to invest in, once fueled by ideologies about the future that are antithetical to democratic ideals. Because political systems depend on technologies to thrive, democracy cannot thrive if we continue down this path.
Another path is possible. Technology and democracy can be each other’s greatest allies. In fact, as we will argue, large-scale “Digital Democracy” is a dream we have only begun to imagine, one that requires unprecedented technology to have any chance of being realized. By reimagining our future, shifting public investments, research agendas, and private development, we can build that future.)
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- [note::Core argument of the book]

as the government at the time gained respect for the movement and ministers invited younger “reverse mentors” to help them learn from youth and civil society.
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- [note::Huh, first time I'm hearing of a "reverse mentor" - sounds like something the US government desperately needs.]

(highlight:: > When we see “internet of things,”

let’s make it an internet of beings.
When we see “virtual reality,”
let’s make it a shared reality.
When we see “machine learning,”
let’s make it collaborative learning.
When we see “user experience,”
let’s make it about human experience.
When we hear “the singularity is near” —
let us remember: The Plurality is here.
— Audrey Tang, Job Description, 2016)
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g0v
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Founded in 2012 by civic hackers including Kao Chia-liang, g0v arose from discontent with the quality of government digital services and data transparency.79 Civic hackers began to scrape government websites (usually with the suffix gov.tw) and build alternative formats for data display and interaction for the same website, hosting them at g0v.tw. These “forked” versions of government websites often ended up being more popular, leading some government ministers, like Simon Chang to begin “merging” these designs back into government services.
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(highlight::
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Figure 2-2-A. Principles of g0v displayed in a venn diagram.
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Sunflower
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vTaiwan and Join
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This led to the establishment of vTaiwan, a platform and project developed by g0v for facilitating deliberation on public policy controversies. The process involved many steps (proposal, opinion expression, reflection and legislation) each harnessing a range of open source software tools, but has become best known for its use of the at-the-time(2015)-novel machine learning based open-source “wikisurvey”/social media tool Polis
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Polis shows the clusters of opinion that exist and highlights statements that bridge them. This approach facilitates both consensus formation and a better understanding of the lines of division.
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(highlight::
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pluralitybook/plurality/main/figs/vtaiwan-polis-ai.png
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Figure 2-2-B. Clusters of consensual opinions generated by Polis on vTaiwan. Source: vTaiwan.tw, CC0 license.
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vTaiwan was deliberately intended as an experimental, high-touch, intensive platform for committed participants. It had about 200,000 users or about 1% of Taiwan’s population at its peak and held detailed deliberations on 28 issues, 80% of which led to legislative action. These focused mostly on questions around technology regulation, such as the regulation of ride sharing, responses to non-consensual intimate images, regulatory experimentation with financial technology and regulation of AI.
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While Join also sometimes used Polis, it has a lighter-weight user interface and focuses primarily on soliciting input, suggestions and initiatives from a broader public, and has an enforcement mechanism where government officials must respond if a proposal receives sufficient support. Unlike vTaiwan, furthermore, Join addresses a range of policy issues, including controversial non-technological issues such as high school’s start time, and has strong continuing usage today of roughly half of the population over its lifetime and an average of 11,000 unique daily visitors.
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Hackathons, coalitions and quadratic signals
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While such levels of digital civic engagement may seem surprising to many Westerners, they can be seen simply as the harnessing of a small portion of the energy typically wasted on conflict on (anti-)social media towards solving public problems.
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- [note::Great point - people spend SO much time on social media commenting on local news. Deliberative platforms can help redirect that energy towards positive aims (increased civic engagement, better policy outcomes, etc)]

The PH convened mixed teams of civil servants, academics, activists and technologists to propose tools, social practices and collective data custody arrangements that allowed them to “collectively bargain” with their data for cooperation with government and private actors supported by the government-supported program of “data coalitions” to address civic problems. Examples have included the monitoring of air quality and early warning systems for wildfires. Participants and broader citizens were asked to help select the winners using a voting system called Quadratic Voting that allows people to express the extent of their support across a range of projects and that we discuss in our ⿻ Voting chapter below. This allowed a wide range of participants to be at least partial winners, by making it likely everyone would have supported some winner and that if someone felt very strongly in favor of one project they could give it a significant boost.
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- participatory democracy, quadratic_voting, data coalitions, participatory grantmaking,

Pandemic
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The best documented example and the one most consistent with the previous examples was the “Mask App”. Given previous experience with SARS, masks in Taiwan were beginning to run into shortages by late January, when little of the world had even heard of Covid-19. Frustrated, civic hackers led by Howard Wu developed an app that harnessed data that the government, following open and transparent data practices harnessed and reinforced by the g0v movement, to map mask availability. This allowed Taiwan to achieve widespread mask adoption by mid-February, even as mask supplies remained extremely tight given the lack of a global production response at this early stage.
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Information integrity
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Central to those efforts, in turn, has been the g0v spin-off project “Cofacts,” in which participating citizens rapidly respond to both trending social media content and to messages from private channels forwarded to a public comment box for requested response. Recent research shows that these systems can typically respond faster, equally accurately and more engagingly to rumors than can professional fact checkers, who are much more bandwidth constrained.80
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Government leaders’ close cooperation with such civil groups has allowed them to model and thus encourage policies of “humor over rumor” and “fast, fun and fair” responses. For example, when a rumor began to spread during the pandemic that there would be a shortage of toilet paper created by the mass production of masks, Taiwan’s Premier Su Tseng-chang famously circulated a picture of himself wagging his rear to indicate it had nothing to fear.
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Other programs
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Digital competence education: Since 2019, Taiwan has pioneered a 12-Year Basic Education Curriculum that enshrines “tech, info & media literacy” as a core competency, empowering students to become active co-creators and discerning arbiters of media, rather than passive consumers.
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- [note::Would love to learn more about this]

Participation Officer Network: PDIS helped create a network of civil servants across departments committed to citizen participation, collaboration across government departments and digital feedback, who could act as supporters and conduits of practices such as these.
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- [note::Is there a US equivalent to this? Perhaps the US Digital Corps?]

Open parliament: Taiwan has become a leader in the global “open parliament” movement, experimenting with a range of ways to make parliamentary procedures transparent to the public and experimenting with innovative voting methods.
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Economic
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Taiwan is an upper-middle income country, like much of Europe, with a Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita of $34,000 per person in 2024 according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF).81 However, prices are much lower in Taiwan on average than in almost any other rich country; making this adjustment (which economists call “purchasing power parity”) makes Taiwan the second richest country on average other than the US with more than 10 million people in the world.
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Political
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Several indices, published by organizations such as Freedom House94, the Economist Intelligence Unit95, the Bertelsmann Foundation and V-Dem, consistently rank Taiwan as among the freest and most effective democracies on earth.96 While Taiwan’s precise ranking differs across these indices (ranging from first to merely in the top 15%), it nearly always stands out as the strongest democracy in Asia and the strongest democracy younger than 30 years old;
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A variety of studies using a range of methodologies have found that Taiwan is one of the least politically, socially and religiously polarized developed countries in the world, though some have found a slight upward trend in political polarization since the Sunflower movement.97 This is especially true in affective polarization, the holding of negative or hostile personal attitudes towards political opponents, with Taiwan consistently among the 5 least affectively polarized countries.
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Legal
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Existential
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Taiwan nonetheless exhibits unusually high levels of participation and trust in institutions, particularly in its democracy. Voter turnout is among the highest in the world outside countries where voting is compulsory.105 91% consider democracy to be at least “fairly good”, a sharp contrast to the dramatic declines in recent years in support for democracy even in many long-established democracies.106
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Daniel Schmachtenberger, “Explorations on the Future of Civilization,” n.d. https://civilizationemerging.com/.
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For more on Europe’s digital position, see “Open Technologies for Europe’s Digital Decade,” OpenForumEurope, n.d, https://openforumeurope.org/.
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See Fredrik Erixon, and Björn Weigel, The Innovation Illusion: How so Little Is Created by so Many Working so Hard, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017)
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Innovation and Its Enemies: Why People Resist New Technologies. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019).
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- 1resource/book, innovation, technology adoption,

See Julien Mailland and Kevin Driscoll, Minitel: Welcome to the Internet (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017). For example, even public interest open source code is mostly invested in by private actors, though recently the US Government has made some efforts to support that sector with the launch of code.gov.
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Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle over Technology and Prosperity (New York: PublicAffairs, 2023).
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James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg, The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age (New York: Touchstone, 1999).
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Balaji Srinavasan, The Network State (Self-published, 2022) available at https://thenetworkstate.com/.
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After World War II, Japan’s industrial infrastructure was devastated, and product quality was poor. In this context, Deming was invited by the Union of Japanese Scientists and Engineers(JUSE) in 1950. He introduced Statistical Process Control (SPC) and the PDCA (Plan-Do-Check-Act) cycle, emphasizing continuous improvement (Kaizen) and the importance of employee involvement. His principles were particularly embraced by the Japanese automotive industry, notably Toyota and became integral to the Toyota Production System (TPS). In 1990, James P. Womack and others published The Machine That Changed the World, analyzing the Toyota Production System and introducing it as the Lean manufacturing to a global audience. James P. Womack, Daniel T. Jones and Daniel Roos, The Machine that Changed the World (New York: Free Press, 2007). In 2011, Eric Ries, who coined the term “Lean Startup,” drew inspiration from the Lean manufacturing principles in entrepreneurship. Eric Ries, The Lean Startup (New York: Crown Currency, 2011).
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g0v Manifesto defines it as “a non-partisan, not-for-profit, grassroots movement”.
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(highlight:: • .↩︎
• Andy Zhao and Mor Naaman, “Insights from a Comparative Study on the Variety, Velocity, Veracity, and Viability of Crowdsourced and Professional Fact-Checking Services”, Journal of Online Trust and Safety 2, no. 1. https://doi.org/10.54501/jots.v2i1.118.)
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we define “⿻ 數位 Plurality”, the subject of the rest of this book, briefly as “technology for collaboration across social difference”. This contrasts with a common element between Libertarianism and Technocracy: that both consider the world to be made up of atoms (viz. individuals) and a social whole, a view we call “monist atomism”. While they take different positions on how much authority should go to each, they miss the core idea of ⿻ 數位 Plurality, that intersecting diverse social groups and the diverse and collaborative people whose identities are constituted by these intersections are the core fabric of the social world.
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(highlight::
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Figure 3-0-A. Three-part definition of ⿻ 數位 Plurality
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To be more precise, we can break Plurality into three components (descriptive, normative and prescriptive) each associated with one of three thinkers (Hannah Arendt, Danielle Allen and Audrey Tang) each of whom has used the term in these three distinct and yet tightly connected ways
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Descriptive: The social world is neither an unorganized collection of isolated individuals nor a monolithic whole. Instead, it is a fabric of diverse and intersecting affiliations that define both our personal identities and our collective organization. We identify this concept with Hannah Arendt and especially her book, The Human Condition, where she labels Plurality as the most fundamental element of the human condition.
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Normative: Diversity is the fuel of social progress and while it may explode like any fuel (into conflict), societies succeed largely to the extent they manage to instead harness its potential energy for growth. We identify this concept with philosopher Danielle Allen’s ideal of “A Connected Society” and associate it with the rainbow elements that form at the intersection of the squares in the elaborated ⿻ image on the book cover and in the figure above.
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Prescriptive: Digital technology should aspire to build the engines that harness and avoid conflagration of diversity, much as industrial technology built the engines that harnessed physical fuel and contained its explosions.
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We associate it even more closely with the use in her title (as Digital Minister) of the traditional Mandarin characters 數位 (pronounced in English as “shuwei”) which, in Taiwan, mean simultaneously “plural” when applied to people and “digital” and thus capture the fusion of the philosophy arising in Arendt and Allen with the transformative potential of digital technology. In the last chapter of this section, Technology for Collaborative Diversity, we argue that, while less explicit, this philosophy drove much of the development of what has come to be called the “internet”, though because it was not sufficiently articulated it has been somewhat lost since.
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(A)re…atoms independent elements of reality? No…as quantum theory shows: they are defined by their…interactions with the rest of the world…(Q)uantum physics may just be the realization that this ubiquitous relational structure of reality continues all the way down…Reality is not a collection of things, it’s a network of processes. — Carlo Rovelli, 20226
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- [note::Reminds me of how the behavior of a complex systems is determined by the relationships between elements, not the elements themselves.]

Yet the last century taught us how much progress is possible if we transcend the limitations of monist atomism. Gödel’s Theorem undermined the unity and completeness of mathematics and a range of non-Euclidean geometries are now critical to science.8 Symbiosis, ecology, and extended evolutionary synthesis undermined “survival of the fittest” as the central biological paradigm and ushered in the age of environmental science. Neuroscience has been reimagined around networks and emergent capabilities and given birth to modern neural networks. What all these share is a focus on complexity, emergence, multi-level organization and multidirectional causality rather than the application of a universal set of laws to a single type of atomic entity.
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- [note::Some good examples of society's gradual transition from linear -> networked ways of thinking. It seems the core argument of this book is that systems of government have been top slow to recognize and embrace this paradigm shift.]

⿻ approaches social systems similarly. A corporation plays in the game of global competition, yet is simultaneously itself a game played by employees, shareholders, management and customers. There is no reason to expect the resulting outcomes often to cohere as preferences. What’s more, many games intersect: employees of a corporation are often each influenced through their other relationships with the outside world (e.g. political, social, religious, ethnic), and not only through the corporation itself. Countries too are both games and players, intersected by corporations, religions and much more, and there too we cannot cleanly separate apart actions between countries and actions within a country: the writing of this very book is a complex mix of both in multiple ways.
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⿻ is, scientifically, the application of an analogous perspective to the understanding of human societies and, technologically, the attempt to build formal information and governance systems that account for and resemble these structures as physical technologies built on ⿻ science do.
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(highlight:: In the Technocratic vision we discussed in the previous chapter, the “messiness” of existing administrative systems is to be replaced by a massive-scale, unified, rational, scientific, artificially intelligent planning system. Transcending locality and social diversity, this unified agent is imagined to give “unbiased” answers to any economic and social problem, transcending social cleavages and differences. As such, it seeks to at best paper over and at worst erase, rather than fostering and harnessing, the social diversity and heterogeneity that ⿻ social science sees as defining the very objects of interest, engagement, and value.
In the Libertarian vision, the sovereignty of the atomistic individual (or in some versions, a homogeneous and tightly aligned group of individuals) is the central aspiration. Social relations are best understood in terms of “customers”, “exit” and other capitalist dynamics. Democracy and other means of coping with diversity are viewed as failure modes for systems that do not achieve sufficient alignment and freedom.
But these cannot be the only paths forward. ⿻ science has shown us the power of harnessing a ⿻ understanding of the world to build physical technology. We have to ask what a society and information technology built on an analogous understanding of human societies would look like. Luckily, the twentieth century saw the systematic development of such a vision, from philosophical and social scientific foundations to the beginnings of technological expression.)
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Industry and inventions in technology, for example, create means which alter the modes of associated behavior and which radically change the quantity, character and place of impact of their indirect consequences. These changes are extrinsic to political forms which, once established, persist of their own momentum. The new public which is generated remains long inchoate, unorganized, because it cannot use inherited political agencies. The latter, if elaborate and well institutionalized, obstruct the organization of the new public. They prevent that development of new forms of the state which might grow up rapidly were social life more fluid, less precipitated into set political and legal molds. To form itself, the public has to break existing political forms. This is hard to do because these forms are themselves the regular means of instituting change. The public which generated political forms is passing away, but the power and lust of possession remains in the hands of the officers and agencies which the dying public instituted. This is why the change of the form of states is so often effected only by revolution. — John Dewey, The Public and its Problems, 192730
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- [note::It's wild that this was written in 1927 - I've often thought about this dynamic in the context of transition from first-past-the-post to approval voting.]

Private property. Individual identity and rights. Nation state democracy. These are the foundations of most modern liberal democracies. Yet they rest on fundamentally monist atomist foundations. Individuals are the atoms; the nation state is the whole that connects them. Every citizen is seen as equal and exchangeable in the eyes of the whole, rather than part of a network of relationships that forms the fabric of society and in which any state is just one social grouping. State institutions see direct, unmediated relationships to free and equal individuals, though in some cases federal and other subsidiary (e.g. city, religious or family) institutions intercede.
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Property
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While there are significant restrictions on the rights of private property owners based on community interests, these overwhelmingly take the form of regulations by a small number of governmental levels, such as national, provincial/state and local/city. These practices are in sharp contrast to the property regimes that have prevailed in most human societies throughout most of history, in which individual ownership was rarely absolutely institutionalized and a diversity of “traditional” expectations governed how possessions can rightly be used and exchanged. Such traditional structures were largely erased by modernity and colonialism as they attempted to pattern property into a marketable “commodity”, allowing exchange and reuse for a much broad set of purposes than was possible within full social context.31
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(highlight:: Paper-based markers of affiliations with such institutions began to supplant informal kin knowledge. In particular, Church records of baptisms helped lay the foundation for what became the widespread practice of issuing birth certificates. This, in turn, became the foundational document on which essentially all other identification practices are grounded in modern states.33
This helped circumvent the reliance on personal relationships, building the foundation of identity in a relationship to a state, which in turn served as a trust anchors for many other types of institutions ranging from children’s sports teams to medical care providers. These abstract representations enabled people to navigate the world not based on “who they know” or “where they fit” in a tight social world but as who they are in an abstracted universal sense relative to the state. This “WEIRD” (Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democratic) universalism thus broke with the social embedding of identity while thereby “freeing” people to travel and interact much more broadly using modern forms of identification issued by governments like passports and national identity cards. While other critical credentials, such as educational attainment are more diverse, they almost uniformly conform to a limited structure, implying one of a small number of “degrees” derived from courses with a particular “Carnegie unit” structure (in theory, 120 hours spent with an instructor), in contrast to the broad range of potential recognition that could be given to learning attainment as illustrated in Figure A. In short, just as modernity abstracted ownership private property, removing it from its many social entanglements, it also abstracted personal identity from the social anchoring that limited travel and the formation of new relationships.)
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(highlight::
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pluralitybook/plurality/main/figs/taxonomies.png
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Figure 3-2-A. Flexible taxonomies across a broad spectrum of recognition. Source: Learning Agents Inc. (https://www.learningagents.ca)
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Voting
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Voting
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In most liberal democracies, the principle of “one-person-one-vote” is viewed as a sacred core of the democratic process. Of course, various schemes of representation (multi-member proportional representation or single-member districts), checks-and-balances (mutli- v. unicameral legislatures, parliamentary v. presidential) and degrees of federalism vary and recombine in a diverse ways. However both in popular imagination and in formal rules, the idea that numerical majorities (or in some cases supermajorities) should prevail regardless of the social composition of groups is at the core of how democracy is typically understood.34 Again this contrasts with decision-making structures throughout most of the world and most of history, including ones that involved widespread and diverse representation by a range of social relationships, including family, religious, relationships of fealty, profession, etc.35 We again see the same pattern repeated: liberal states have “extracted” “individuals” from their social embedding to make them exchangeable, detached citizens of an abstracted national polity.
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(highlight:: Governments and organizations around the world adopted these systems for some good reasons. They were simple and thus scalable; they allowed people from very different backgrounds to quickly understand each other and thus interact productively. Where once commons-based property systems inhibited innovation when outsiders and industrialists found it impossible to navigate a thicket of local customs, private property cleared a path to development and trade by reducing those who could inhibit change. Administrators of the social welfare schemes that transformed government in the twentieth century would have struggled to provide broad access to pensions and unemployment benefits without a single, flat, clear database of entitlements. And reaching subtle compromises like those that went into the US Constitution, much less ones rich enough to keep up with the complexity of the modern world, would have likely undermined the possibility of democratic government spreading.
In fact these institutions were core to what allowed modern, wealthy, liberal democracies to rise, flourish and rule, making what Joseph Heinrich calls the “WEIRDest people in the world”. Just as the insights of Newtonian mechanics and Euclidean geometry gave those civilizations the physical power to sweep the earth, liberal social institutions gave them the social flexibility to do so. Yet just as the Euclidean-Newtonian worldview turned out to be severely limited and naïve, ⿻ social science was born by highlighting the limits of these atomist monist social systems.)
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(highlight:: George wrote on many topics helping originate, for example, the idea of a secret ballot. But he became most famous for advocating a “single tax” on land, whose value he argued could never properly belong to an individual owner. His most famous illustration asked readers to imagine an open savannah full of beautiful but homogeneous land on which a settler arrives, claiming some arbitrarily chosen large plot for her family. When future settlers arrive, they choose to settle close to the first, so as to enjoy company, divide labor and enjoy shared facilities like schools and wells. As more settlers arrive, they continue to choose to cluster and the value of land rises. In a few generations, the descendants of the first settler find themselves landlords of much of the center of a bustling metropolis, rich beyond imagination, through little effort of their own, simply because a great city was built around them.
The value of their land, George insisted, could not justly belong to that family: it was a collective product that should be taxed away. Such a tax was not only just, it was crucial for economic development, as highlighted especially by later economists including one of the authors of this book. Taxes of this sort, especially when carefully designed as they were in Taiwan, ensure property owners must use their land productively or allow others to do so. The revenue they raise can support shared infrastructure (like those schools and wells) that gives value to the land, an idea called the “Henry George Theorem”.)
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- [note::The origin of property tax - this actually makes a lot of sense when laid out in this way.]

Who should be able to access the land of the Bay Area under what circumstances? Who should be allowed to build what on it, or to sell exclusive rights to do so to others? Most of these questions were hardly even considered in George’s writing, much less settled. In this sense, his work is more a helpful invitation to step beyond the easy answers private property offers, which is perhaps why his enormously influential ideas have only been partly implemented in a small number of (admittedly highly successful places like Estonia and Taiwan.
The world George invites us to reflect on and imagine how to design for is thus one of ⿻ value, one where a variety of entities, localized at different scales (universities, municipalities, nation states, etc.) all contribute to differing degrees to create value, just as networks of waves and neurons contribute to differing degrees to the probabilities of particles being found in various positions or thoughts occurring in a mind. And for both justice and productivity, property and value should belong, in differing degrees, to these intersecting social circles. In this sense, George was a founder of ⿻ social science.)
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In his view, humans are deeply social creatures and thus their identities are deeply formed through their social relations. Humans gain crucial aspects of their sense of self, their goals, and their meaning through participation in social, linguistic, and solidaristic groups. In simple societies (e.g., isolated, rural, or tribal), people spend most of their life interacting with the kin groups we described above. This circle comes to (primarily) define their identity collectively, which is why most scholars of simple societies (for example, anthropologist Marshall Sahlins tend to favor methodological collectivism.43 However, as we noted above, as societies urbanize social relationships diversify. People work with one circle, worship with another, support political causes with a third, recreate with a fourth, cheer for a sports team with a fifth, identify as discriminated against along with a sixth, and so on. These diverse affiliations together form a person’s identity. The more numerous and diverse these affiliations become, the less likely it is that anyone else shares precisely the same intersection of affiliations.
As this occurs, people come to have, on average, less of their full sense of self in common with those around them at any time; they begin to feel “unique” (to put a positive spin on it) and “isolated/misunderstood” (to put a negative spin on it). This creates a sense of what he called “qualitaitive individuality” that helps explain why social scientists focused on complex urban settings (such as economists) tend to favor methodological individualism. However, ironically as Simmel points out, such “individuation” occurs precisely because and to the extent that the “individual” becomes divided among many loyalties and thus dividual. Thus, while methodological individualism (and what he called the “egalitarian individualism” of nation states we highlighted above that it justfied) takes the “(in)dividual” as the irreducible element of social analysis, Simmel instead suggests that individuals become possible as an emergent property of the complexity and dynamism of modern, urban societies.
Thus the individual that the national identity systems seek to strip away from the shackles of communities actually emerges from their growth, proliferation and intersection. As a truly just and efficient property regime would recognize and account for such networked interdependence, identity systems that truly empower and support modern life would need to mirror its ⿻ structure.)
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- [note::But how does one even begin to quantify these intersecting identities? The idea of a singular identity, as indicated by one's passport, may be reductive in an abstract sense, but it's based around the idea that one person has (and will always have) one singular body.
I guess what the author's are trying to point out here is that base assumption that an individual is, in fact, a single individual (and not the culmination of numerous intersecting identities) results in problematic assumptions in other domains.]

Markets fail because these technologies create market power, pervasive externalities (such as “network externalities”), and more generally exhibit “supermodularity” (sometimes called “increasing returns”), where the whole of the (e.g. railroad network) is greater than the sum of its parts; see our chapter on Social Markets. Capitalist enterprises cannot account for all the relevant “spillovers” and to the extent they do, they accumulate market power, raise prices and exclude participants, undermining the value created by increasing returns. Leaving these interdependencies “to the market” thus exacerbates their risks and harms while failing to leverage their potential.
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what it means to say an institution is “democratic” is not just that it involves participation and voting. Many oligarchies had these forms, but did not include most citizens and thus were not democratic. Nor would, in Dewey’s mind, a global “democracy” directly managing the affairs of a village count as democratic. Core to true democracy is the idea that the “relevant public”, the set of people whose lives are actually shaped by the phenomenon in question, manage that challenge. Because technology is constantly throwing up new forms of interdependence, which will almost never correspond precisely to existing political boundaries, true democracy requires new publics to constantly emerge and reshape existing jurisdictions.
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The critical pathway to creating such new circles was the establishment of places (e.g. workman’s halls) or publications (e.g. working men’s newspapers) where this new group could come to know one another and understand, and thus to have things in common they do not have with others in the broader society. Such bonds were strengthened by secrecy, as shared secrets allowed for a distinctive identity and culture, as well as the coordination in a common interest in ways unrecognizable by outsiders.44 Developing these shared, but hidden, knowledge allows the emerging social circle to act as a collective agent.
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- [note::The formation of social groups require:

1. A place to gather
2. Some form exclusivity]

Dewey’s conception of democracy and emergent publics is at once profoundly democratic and yet challenges and even overturns our usual conception of democracy. Democracy, in this conception, is not the static system of representation of a nation-state with fixed borders. It is a process even more dynamic than a market, led by a diverse range of entrepreneurial mirrors, who draw upon the ways they are themselves intersections of unresolved social tensions to renew and re-imagine social institutions. Standard institutions of nation state-based voting are to such a process as pale a shadow as Newtonian mechanics is of the underlying quantum and relativistic reality. True democracy must be ⿻ and constantly evolving.
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Wiener defined cybernetics as “the science of control and communication in (complex systems like) the animal and machine”, but perhaps the most broadly accepted meaning is something like the “science of communication within and governance of, by and for networks”.47
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(D)ecisions about the development and exploitation of computer technology must be made not only “in the public interest” but in the interest of giving the public itself the means to enter into the decision-making processes that will shape their future. — J. C. R. Licklider, “Computers and Government”, 198049
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Liberal democracies often celebrate themselves as pluralistic societies, which would seem to indicate they have already drawn the available lessons from ⿻ social science. Yet despite this formal commitment to pluralism and democracy, almost every country has been forced by the limits of available information systems to homogenize and simplify social institutions in a monist atomist mold that runs into direct conflict with such values. The great hope of ⿻ social science and ⿻ built on top of it is to use the potential of information technology to begin to overcome these limitations.
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This generation included a range of pioneers of applied cybernetics such as the anthropologist Margaret Mead50 (who heavily influenced the aesthetics of the internet), W. Edwards Deming51 (whose influence on Japanese and to a lesser extent Taiwanese inclusive industrial quality practices we saw above) and Stafford Beer52 (who pioneered business cybernetics and has become something of a guru for social applications of Wiener’s ideas including in Chile’s brief cybernetic socialist regime of the early 1970s). They built on his vision in a more pragmatic mode, shaping technologies that defined the information era.
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The Intergalactic Computer Network
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(highlight:: At the core of the development of what became the internet was replacing centralized, linear and atomized structures with ⿻ relationships and governance. This happened at three levels that eventually converged in the early 1990s as the World Wide Web:

1. packet switching to replace centralized switchboards,
2. hypertext to replace linear text,
3. and open standard setting processes to replace both government and corporate top-down decision-making)
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Nelson imagined hypertext as a way to liberate communication from the tyranny of a linear interpretation imposed by an original author, empowering a “pluralism” (as he labeled it) of paths through material through a network of (bidirectional) links connecting material in a variety of sequences.64 This “choose your own adventure”65 quality is most familiar today to internet users in their browsing experiences but showed up earlier in commercial products in the 1980s (such as computer games based on hypercard). Nelson imagined that such ease of navigation and recombination would enable the formation of new cultures and narratives at unprecedented speed and scope. The power of this approach became apparent to the broader world when Tim Berners-Lee made it central to his “World Wide Web” approach to navigation in the early 1990s, ushering in the era of broad adoption of the internet.
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- [note::If only they were actually bidirectional though!]

This culture manifested in the development of the “Request for Comments” (RFC) process by Steve Crocker, arguably one of the first “wiki”-like processes of informal and mostly additive collaboration across many geographically and sectorally (governmental, corporate, university) dispersed collaborators. This in turn contributed to the common Network Control Protocol and, eventually, Transmission Control and Internet Protocols (TCP/IP) under the famously mission-driven but inclusive and responsive leadership of Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn between 1974 when TCP was first circulated as RFC 675 and 1983 when they became the official ARPANET protocols. At the core of the approach was the vision of a “network of networks” that gave the “internet” its name: that many diverse and local networks (at universities, corporations and government agencies) could inter-operate sufficiently to permit the near-seamless communication across long distances, in contrast to centralized networks (such as France’s concurrent Minitel) that were standardized from the top down by a government.66 Together these three dimensions of networking (of technical communication protocols, communicative content and governance of standards) converged to create the internet we know today.
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(highlight::
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pluralitybook/plurality/main/figs/data/share_online/share_online.png
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Figure 3-3-B. Population share with internet access over time in the world and various regions. Source: Our World in Data.67
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Lick foresaw in his classic essay “Computers and Government” “two scenarios” (one good, the other bad for the future of computing: it could be dominated and its potential stifled by monopolistic corporate control or there could be a full societal mobilization that made computing serve and support democracy.69 In the former scenario, Lick projected all kinds of social ills, one that might make the advent of the information age a net detractor to democratic social flourishing. These included:

1. Pervasive surveillance and public distrust of government.
2. Paralysis of government’s ability to regulate or enforce laws, as they fall behind the dominant technologies citizens use.
3. Debasement of creative professions.
4. Monopolization and corporate exploitation.
5. Pervasive digital misinformation.
6. Siloing of information that undermines much of the potential of networking.
7. Government data and statistics becoming increasingly inaccurate and irrelevant.
8. Control by private entities of the fundamental platforms for speech and public discourse.)
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Into the resulting vacuum stepped the increasingly eager private sector, flush with the success of the personal computer and inflated by the stirring celebrations of Reagan and Thatcher. While the International Business Machines (IBM) that Lick feared would dominate and hamper the internet’s development proved unable to key pace with technological change, it found many willing and able successors. A small group of telecommunications companies took over the internet backbone that the NSF freely relinquished. Web portals, like America Online and Prodigy came to dominate most Americans’ interactions with the web, as Netscape and Microsoft vied to dominate web browsing. The neglected identity functions were filled by the rise of Google and Facebook. Absent digital payments were filled in by PayPal and Stripe. Absent the protocols for sharing data, computational power and storage that motivated work on the Intergalactic Computer Network in the first place, private infrastructures (often called “cloud providers”) that empowered such sharing (such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure) became the platforms for building applications.72
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- [note::Thinking about Gal's Law, I wonder if it would have been better to define these protocols up front as opposed to letting private actors carve out "ecology niches". By impression is that letting private actors fill in these functions was better than what this book is making it out to be.
That said, I think if you had complete global cooperation (a pipe dream), one could come up with a better system.]

While Wikis themselves have found significant applications, they have had an even broader impact in helping stimulate the “groupware” revolution that many internet users associate with products like Google docs but has its roots in the open source WebSocket protocol.77 HackMD, a collaborative real-time Markdown editor, is used within the g0v community to collaboratively edit and openly share documents such as meeting minutes.78 While collaboratively constructed documents illustrate this ethos, it more broadly pervades the very foundation of the online world itself.
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Open source software (OSS) embodies this ethos of participatory, networked, transnational self-governance.
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Richard Stallman, opposing the closed nature of the Unix OS developed by AT&T, led the “free software movement”, promoting the “GNU General Public License” that allowed users to run, study, share, and modify the source code. This was eventually rebranded as OSS, with a goal to replace Unix with an open-source alternative, Linux, led by Linus Torvalds.
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Other pioneers on these issues focused more on layers of communication and association, rather than provenance and value. Calling their work the “Decentralized Web” or the “Fediverse”, they built protocols like Christine Lemmer Webber’s Activity Pub that became the basis for non-commercial, community based alternatives to mainstream social media, ranging from Mastodon to Twitter’s now-independent and non-profit BlueSky initiative. This space has also produced many of the most creative ideas for re-imagining identity and privacy with a foundation in social and community relationships.
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Finally and perhaps most closely connected to our own paths to ⿻ have been the movements to revive the public and multisectoral spirit and ideals of the early internet by strengthening the digital participation of governments and democratic civil society. These “GovTech” and “Civic Tech” movements have harnessed OSS-style development practices to improve the delivery of government services and bring the public into the process in a more diverse range of ways. Leaders in the US include Jennifer Pahlka, founder of GovTech pioneer Code4America, and Beth Simone Noveck, Founder of The GovLab.86
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Noveck, in particular, is a powerful bridge between the early development of ⿻ and its future, having been a driving force behind the Online Deliberation workshops mentioned above, having developed Unchat, one of the earliest attempts at software to serve these goals and which helped inspire the work of vTaiwan and more.87 She went on to pioneer, in her work with the US Patent and Trademark Office and later as Deputy Chief Technology Officer of the US many of the transparent and inclusive practices that formed the core of the g0v movement we highlighted above.88 Noveck was a critical mentor not just to g0v but to a range of other ambitious civic technology projects around the world from the Kenya collective crisis reporting platform Ushahidi founded by Juliana Rotich and collaborators to a variety of European participative policy-making platforms like Decidim founded by Francesca Bria and collaborators and CONSUL that arose from the “Indignado” movement parallel to g0v in Spain, on the board of which one of us sits.
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Other countries have, of course, excelled in various elements of ⿻. Estonia is perhaps the leading example and shares with Taiwan a strong history of Georgism and land taxes, is often cited as the most digitized democratic government in the world and pioneered digital democracy earlier than almost any other country, starting in the late 1990s.89 Finland has built on and scaled the success of its neighbor, extending digital inclusion deeper into society, educational system and the economy than Estonia, as well as adopting elements of digitized democratic participation. Singapore has the most ambitious Georgist-style policies on earth and harnesses more creative ⿻ economic mechanisms and fundamental protocols than any other jurisdiction. South Korea has invested extensively in both digital services and digital competence education. New Zealand has pioneered internet-based voting and harnessed civil society to improve public service inclusion. Iceland has harnessed digital tools to extend democratic participation more extensively than any other jurisdiction. Kenya, Brazil and especially India have pioneered digital infrastructure for development.
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Danielle Allen, “Chapter 2: Toward a Connected Society,” in In Our Compelling Interests, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400881260-006.
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Carlo Rovelli, “The Big Idea: Why Relationships Are the Key to Existence.” The Guardian, September 5, 2022, sec. Books. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/sep/05/the-big-idea-why-relationships-are-the-key-to-existence.
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M. Mitchell Waldrop, Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos (New York: Open Road Media, 2019).
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James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science (New York: Penguin, 2018).
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In assemblage theory, as articulated by Manuel DeLanda, entities are understood as complex structures formed from the symbiotic relationship between heterogeneous components, rather than being reducible to their individual parts. Its central thesis is that people do not act exclusively by themselves, and instead human action requires complex socio-material interdependencies. DeLanda’s perspective shifts the focus from inherent qualities of entities to the dynamic processes and interactions that give rise to emergent properties within networks of relations. His book “A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity” (2006) is a good starting point.
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Scott Page, The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007);
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César Hidalgo, Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies, (New York: Basic Books, 2015);
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César Hidalgo, Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies, (New York: Basic Books, 2015);
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Mark Granovetter, “The Strength of Weak Ties,” American Journal of Sociology 78, no. 6 (May 1973): 1360–80;
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Brian Uzzi, “Social Structure and Competition in Interfirm Networks: The Paradox of Embeddedness,” Administrative Science Quarterly 42, no. 1 (March 1997): 35–67. https://doi.org/10.2307/2393808;
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McPherson, Miller, Lynn Smith-Lovin, and James M Cook. “Birds of a Feather: Homophily in Social Networks.” Annual Review of Sociology 27, no. 1 (August 2001): 415–44.
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Andrey Rzhetsky, Jacob Foster, Ian Foster, and James Evans, “Choosing Experiments to Accelerate Collective Discovery,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112, no. 47 (November 9, 2015): 14569–74. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1509757112.
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(highlight:: • .↩︎
• Lingfei Wu, Dashun Wang, and James Evans, “Large teams develop and small teams disrupt science and technology,” Nature 566.7744 (2019): 378-382.)
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Lingfei Wu, Dashun Wang, and James Evans, “Large teams develop and small teams disrupt science and technology,” Nature 566.7744 (2019): 378-382.
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Yiling Lin, James Evans, and Lingfei Wu, “New directions in science emerge from disconnection and discord,” Journal of Informetrics 16.1 (2022): 101234.
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Feng Shi, and James Evans, “Surprising combinations of research contents and contexts are related to impact and emerge with scientific outsiders from distant disciplines,” Nature Communications 14.1 (2023): 1641.
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Jacob Foster, Andrey Rzhetsky, and James A. Evans, “Tradition and Innovation in Scientists’ Research Strategies,” American Sociological Review 80.5 (2015): 875-908.
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John Dewey, The Public and its Problems (New York: Holt Publishers, 1927): p. 81.
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Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1944).
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Joseph Henrich, The WEIRDest People in the World How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous, (New York Macmillan, 2010).
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Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics, Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (Paris: Hermann & Cie, 1948).
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Norbert Wiener, Human Use of Human Beings (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1950).
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J.C.R. Licklider, “Computers and Government” in Michael L. Dertouzos and Joel Moses eds., The Computer Age: A Twenty-Year View (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1980)
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Dan Davies, The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions - and How The World Lost its Mind (London: Profile Books, 2024).
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J. C. R. Licklider. “Man-Computer Symbiosis,” March 1960. https://groups.csail.mit.edu/medg/people/psz/Licklider.html.
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(highlight:: • ↩︎
• Ben Tarnoff)
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Ben Tarnoff, Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future (New York: Verso, 2022).
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Sohyeon Hwang, and Aaron Shaw. “Rules and Rule-Making in the Five Largest Wikipedias.” Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media 16 (May 31, 2022): 347–57, https://doi.org/10.1609/icwsm.v16i1.19297 studied rule-making on Wikipedia using 20 years of trace data.
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- [note::Omg this sounds FASCINATING]

Bo
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The term “groupware” was coined by Peter and Trudy Johnson-Lenz in 1978, with early commercial products appearing in the 1990s, such as Lotus Notes, enabling remote group collaboration. Google Docs, originated from Writely launched in 2005, has widely popularized the concept of collaborative real-time editing.
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Scrapbox, a combination of real-time editor with a wiki system, is utilized by the Japanese forum of this book. Visitors of the forum can read the drafts and add questions, explanations, or links to related topics in real time. This interactive environment supports activities like book reading events, where participants can write questions, engage in oral discussions, or take minutes of these discussions. The feature to rename keywords while maintaining the network structure helps the unification of variations in terminology and provides a process to find the good translation. As more people read through, a network of knowledge is nurtured to aid the understanding of subsequent readers.
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- [note::Just checked out the website - public projects are free!]

GitHub Innovation graph at https://github.com/github/innovationgraph/
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Jennifer Pahlka, Recoding America: Why Government is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better (New York: Macmillan, 2023).
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Beth Simone Noveck, Wiki Government: How Technology Can Make Government Better, Democracy Stronger, and Citizens More Powerful (New York: Brookings Institution Press, 2010).
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Beth Noveck, “A Democracy of Groups,” First Monday 10, no. 11 (November 7, 2005), https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v10i11.1289.
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Gary Anthes, “Estonia: a Model for e-Government” Communications of the ACM 58, no. 6 (2015): 18-20.
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(highlight:: “To pioneers of digital assets, a toast,
Empowering choice, economic equality’s coast.”
She envisions harnessing her phone’s might,
Buying magical potions, adventuring through the night.
“To creators of digital democracy, a cheer,
Where governance is a journey, transparent and clear.”
She pictures modernizing her family’s ancient vines,
Adopting UN techniques, progress intertwines.
“To moral compasses, navigating the virtual sea,
Ensuring digital realms reflect our highest decree.”
Luna realizes her calling transcends mere platforms,
Building societal pillars, enriching human norms.
“Together, this community isn’t just coding software,
We’re sculpting a legacy of compassion and welfare.”
In each digital interaction, a chance to uplift,
Connecting humanity, mending the rifts.)
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We argue that ⿻ societies must be founded on infrastructure that matches the principles of ⿻ in both form and structure. Formally, they must combine seamlessly the closely related political idea of a system of rights and technological concept of an operating system. Substantively they must allow the digital representation of societies in the terms ⿻ understands them: as diverse, intersecting social groups and people that jointly undertake ambitious and inclusive collaborations.
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In her recent book, Justice by Means of Democracy, leading ⿻ political philosopher Danielle Allen provides a clear account of this connection: government cannot respond to the “will of the people” if their will cannot be safely and freely expressed.2 If voting one’s conscience is personally dangerous, there is no reason to believe that outcomes reflect anything other than a coercer’s will. If citizens cannot form social and political associations free of duress, they cannot coordinate to contest decisions by those in power. If they cannot seek livelihood through a diversity of economic interactions (for example, because they are enslaved either by the state or a private master), we should expect their expressed politics to obey their masters, not their inner voice. Without rights, elections become shams.
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Almost all democracies share a focus, and expect others to share a focus, on the preservation of some strongly overlapping set of such rights of speech and association as basic preconditions for democratic functioning. For example, Scandinavian countries have emphasized the importance of what might be called “positive freedom of speech,” namely that every citizen regardless of means has a viable path for their voice to be heard, whereas others such as the US, emphasize “negative freedom of speech,” that no one may impede through government intervention the expression of a view. Some societies (e.g. in Europe) tend to emphasize the importance of privacy as a fundamental right necessary for civil society to exist independently of the state and thus for politics to be possible. Others (e.g. in Asia) tend to emphasize rights of assembly and association as more central to democratic function. Despite these variances, the underlying assumption of rights of speech and association is that they protect agency, so citizens may have the autonomy to form and advance associations for their common interests, so these common interests can be heard politically.
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- [note::Democracy comes in many flavors, but the common thread is the freedom to have their interests represented politically]

Operating
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Operating
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Dynamism
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Thus, our understanding of free speech, once considered the primary expression of a right that ensures citizens can freely form and build support for political positions, is being challenged as a result of information technology. This assumption was founded on an environment where information was scarce and thus its suppression was one of the more effective ways to avoid voices being heard. The present environment is different: information is abundant and attention scarce. Thus it is often easier for adversaries who seek to suppress or censor inconvenient views (attacking the foundations of democracy) to simply flood the information commons with distractions and spam, rather than try to suppress dissidents and unwanted content (documented dramatically by the research of Gary King, Jennifer Pan and Molly Roberts).13 Under such attacks, ensuring diverse, relevant and genuine content is surfaced for attention is the challenge, not (only) preventing literal censorship.
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freedom
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In that growing part of our lives, what we do, say, and trade is constrained by the possibilities offered by the technologies that network us together—and thus weave our social fabric. The protocols that connect us thus define our rights in the digital age, forming the OS on which societies run. Intellectually and philosophically, the ⿻ tradition we described in our chapter on Connected Society focuses on the need to move beyond the simplistic frameworks for property, identity and democracy on which liberal democracies have been built in favor of more sophisticated alternatives that match the richness of social life.
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- [note::"We need better operations systems for society" - I kind of love this as a tag line. Perhaps I could use this as part of a future organization's mission.]

(highlight::
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pluralitybook/plurality/main/figs/hypergraph.png
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Figure 4-0-B. A hypergraph that visualizes people, groups, relationships, and digital assets
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a simple way to see what this requires is to use the canonical mathematical model that directly corresponds to ⿻ description of society such as the “hypergraph” as pictured in the figure. A hypergraph, which extends the more common idea of a network or graph by allowing groups rather than just bilateral relationships, is a collection of “nodes” (viz. people, represented by the dots) and “edges” (viz. groups, represented by the blobs). The shade of each edge/group represents the strength of the relationship involved (viz. mathematically its “weight” and “direction”), while the digital assets (e.g. data, computation and digital storage) contained in the edges represent the collaborative substrate of these groups. Any such digital model is, of course, not literally the social world but an abstraction of it and for real humans to access it requires a range of digital tools, which we represent by the arrows entering into the diagram. These elements constitute jointly a menu of rights/OS properties which each of the next five chapters articulates one of more completely: identity/personhood, association, commercial trust, property/contract and access.
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Most of the natural, fundamental affordances of networking are not available to most people even in wealthy countries as basic parts of the online experience. There is no widely adopted, non-proprietary protocol for identification16 that protects rights to life and personhood online, no widely adopted non-proprietary protocols for the ways we communicate 17 18 19 and form groups online that allows free association, no widely adopted non-proprietary protocols for payments to support commerce on real-world assets and no protocols for the secure sharing of digital assets like computation, memory20 and data21 that would allow rights of property and contract in the digital world. Many of these services are almost all controlled and often quasi-monopolized by nation-state governments or more often by private corporations. And even the basic conception of networks that lies behind most approaches to addressing these challenges is too limited, ignoring the central role of intersecting communities. If rights are to have any meaning in our digital world, this has to change.
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- [note::My impression is the primary reason for this fragmentation/privatization is the core challenge of coordination/collective action. Is this really all that tractable, given all the other problems that governments have to contend with? I guess one won't know until such protocols are developed and advocated for.]

A variety of developments in the past decade have fitfully taken up the mantle of the “missing layers” of the internet. This work includes the “web3” and “decentralized web” ecosystems, the Gaia-X data-sharing framework in Europe, the development of a variety of digital-native currencies and payment systems and most prominently growing investment in “digital public infrastructure” as exemplified by the “India stack” developed in the country in the last decade. These efforts have been underfunded, fragmented across countries and ideologies and in many cases limited in ambition or misled by Technocratic or Libertarian ideologies or overly simplistic understanding of networks. But they together represent a proof of concept that a more systematic pursuit of ⿻ is feasible. In this part of the book, we will show how to build on these projects, invest in their future and accelerate our way towards a ⿻ future.
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Just as the most fundamental human rights are those to life, personhood and citizenship, the most fundamental protocols for a ⿻ society are those that establish and protect participant identities. It is impossible to secure any right or provide any service without a definition of who or what is entitled to these. Without a reasonably secure identity foundation, any voting system, for example, will be captured by whoever can produce the most false credentials, degenerating into a plutocracy.
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- [note::What are the privacy implications around this? I'm imagining a pluralist world where there exists few places where identity verification is not required. Seems very Black Mirror-esque.]

At the same time, many of the simplest ways to establish identity paradoxically simultaneously undermine it, especially online. A password is often used to establish an identity, but unless such authentication is conducted with great care it can reveal the password more broadly, making it useless for authentication in the future as attackers will be able to impersonate them. “Privacy” is often dismissed as “nice to have” and especially useful for those who “have something to hide”. But in identity systems, the protection of private information is the very core of utility. Any useful identity system has to be judged on its ability to simultaneously establish and protect identities.
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(highlight:: • belong to multiple accounts and thus a “social graph” of connections.
• Recovery: Passwords and keys get lost or stolen and multi-factor authentication systems break down. Most identity systems have a way to recover lost or stolen credentials, using secret information, access to external identity tokens or social relationships.
• Federation: Just as participants creating an account draw on (often verified) information about them from external sources, so too do most accounts—allowing the information contained in them to be at least partially used to create accounts in other systems.26)
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On the one hand, if (as in Aadhaar the administrators of the program are constantly using biometrics for authentication, they become able to link or see activities to these done by the person who the identifier points to, gaining an unprecedented capacity to surveil citizen activities across a wide range of domains and, potentially, to undermine or target the identities of vulnerable populations.42 Activists have raised concerns over this issue have been repeatedly raised in relation to the status of the Muslim minority in India.
On the other hand, if privacy is protected, as in Worldcoin, by using biometrics only to initialize an account, the system becomes vulnerable to stealing or selling of accounts, a problem that has decimated the operation of related services.43 Because most services people seek to access require more than proving they are a unique human (e.g. that they have a particular name, an ID number of some type issued to them by a recognized government, that they are a citizen of some country, and maybe some other attributes like educational or employment credentials at a company, etc.) this extreme preservation of privacy undermines most of the utility of the system. Furthermore, such systems place a great burden on the technical performance of biometric systems. If eyeballs can, sometime in the future, be spoofed by artificial intelligence systems combined with advanced printing technology, such a system may be subject to an extreme “single point of failure”.44 In short, despite their important capacity for inclusion and simplicity, biometric systems are too reductive to establish and protect identities with the richness and security required to support ⿻.)
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Despite these common challenges, the details of these schemes vary dramatically, however. On one extreme, advocates of “verifiable credentials” (VCs) prioritize privacy and the ability of users to control which of the claims about them are presented at any time. On the other extreme, advocates of “soulbound tokens” (SBTs) or other blockchain-centric identity systems emphasize the importance of credentials that are public commitments to e.g. repay a loan or not produce further replicas of a work of art and thus require that the claims be publicly tied to an identity. Here, again, in both the challenges around recovery and the DID/VC-SBT debate we see the unattractive trade-off between establishing and protecting identities.
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Identity
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This social, ⿻ approach to online identity was pioneered by danah boyd in her astonishingly farsighted master’s thesis on “faceted identity” more than 20 years ago.49 While she focused primarily on the benefits of such a system for feelings of personal agency (in the spirit of Simmel), the potential benefits for the balance between identity establishment and protection are even more astonishing:
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4-2
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Collective efforts, through political parties, civic associations, labor unions and businesses, are always necessary. For ⿻, these and other less formal social groupings are just as fundamental as individuals are to the social fabric. In this sense, associations are the Yin to the Yang of personhood in the most foundational rights and for the same reason are the scourge of tyrants. Again, to quote De Tocqueville, “No defect of the human heart suits [despotism] better than egoism; a tyrant is relaxed enough to forgive his subjects for failing to love him, provided that they do not love one another.” Only by facilitating and protecting the capacity to form novel associations with meaningful agency can we hope for freedom, self-government and diversity.
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As Lick and Taylor emphasized, forming an association or community requires establishing a set of background shared beliefs, values and interests that form a context for the association and communication within it. Furthermore, as emphasized by Simmel and Nissenbaum, it also requires protecting this context from external surveillance: if individuals believe their communications to their association are being monitored by outsiders, they will often be unwilling to harness the context of shared community for fear their words will be misunderstood by those these communications were no intended for.
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How do people people form “an organization of persons sharing a common interest”? Clearly, a group of people who simply happen to share an interest is insufficient. People can share an interest but have no awareness of each other, or might know each other and have no idea about their shared interest. As social scientists and game theorists have recently emphasized, the collective action implied by “organization” requires a stronger notion of what it is to have an “interest”, “belief” or “goal” in common. In the technical terms of these fields, the required state is what they call (approximate) “common knowledge”.
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group beliefs and goals are common beliefs and goals of that group. In this sense, the freedom to create associations can be understood as the freedom to create common beliefs and goals. Yet creating associations is not enough. Just as we argued in the previous chapter that protecting secrets is critical to maintaining individual identity, so too associations must be able to protect themselves from surveillance, as should their common beliefs become simply the beliefs of everyone, they cease to be a separate association just as much as an individual who spills all her secrets ceases to have an identity to protect.
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As illustrated above, group meetings and statements made openly in front of group members are crucial to achieving common beliefs and understanding among that group. Private pamphlets may achieve individual persuasion, but given the lack of common observation, game theorists have argued that they struggle to create public beliefs in the same way a shared declaration, like the child’s public laughter, can.
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Yet publicity is not the same as the creation of community and association. Posting online resembles much more the distribution of a pamphlet than the holding of a public protest. It is hard for those seeing a post to know who and how many others are consuming the same information, and certainly to gauge their views about the same. The post may influence their beliefs, but it is hard for it to create common beliefs among an identifiable group of compatriots. Features that highlight virality and attention of posts may help somewhat, but still make the alignment of an audience for a message far coarser than what is possible in physical public spaces.
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Is there any chance of doing something similar for over-sharing? One common approach is simply to avoid data persistence: SnapChat rose to prominence with disappearing messages, and many messaging protocols have since adopted similar approaches. Another more ambitious cryptographic technique is “designated verifier proofs” (DVPs) which prove authenticity only to a single recipient while appearing potentially forged to everyone else.81 Such an approach is only useful for information that cannot be independently verified: if someone over-shares a community password, DVPs are not of much use as unintended recipients can quickly check if the password works.
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As generative foundation models make persuasive deception ever cheaper, the importance of verification will grow. In such a world, the ability to target verification at an individual and rely on the untrustworthiness of over-shared information may be increasingly powerful. As such, it may be increasingly possible to protect information more fully from over-sharing, as well as snooping.
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Consider first information “hidden in plain sight”, lost in a pile of irrelevant facts, available to all but reaching the awareness of no one a bit like Waldon in the popular American children’s game “Where’s Waldo?” where children must find a man in a striped shirt hidden in a picture. Contrast this with the secret of the existence of the Manhattan Project, which was shared among roughly 100,000 people but was sharply hidden from the rest of the world. Both are near the midpoint of the “privacy” v. “publicity” spectrum, as both are in important ways broadly shared and obscure. But they sit at opposite ends of another spectrum: of concentrated common understanding v. diffuse availability.
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⿻ publics is the aspiration to create information standards that allow a diverse range of communities with strong internal common beliefs shielded from the outside world to coexist. Achieving this requires maintaining what Shrey Jain, Zoë Hitzig and Pamela Mishkin have called “contextual confidence”, where participants in a system can easily establish and protect the context of their communications.82
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Luckily, in recent years some of the leaders in open standards technologies of both privacy and publicity have turned their attention to this problem. Lemmer Webber, of ActivityPub fame, has spent the last few years working on Spritely, a project to create self-governing and strongly connected private communities in the spirit of ⿻ publics, allowing individual users to clearly discern, navigate and separate community contexts in open standards.
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Storage, computation and data lie at the core of essentially every online interaction. Anything that occurs online persists from one moment to the next only because of the data it depends on being stored somewhere. The occurrences themselves are embodied by computations being performed to determine the outcome of instructions and actions. And the input and output of every operation are data. In this sense, storage acts roughly like land in the real economy, computation acts something like fuel and data acts like human inputs (sometimes called labor) and artifacts people create and reuse (sometimes called capital).
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Many of the most intractable problems today have answers if the power we see being unleashed by generative foundation models (GFMs) could be applied to medical diagnosis, environmental resource optimization, industrial production and more that is limited by the challenges today of sharing data across organizational and jurisdictional boundaries.
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- data sharing, open data, data silos, 1action,

Studies of the semiconductor industry indicate that several times as many semiconductors are used in personal devices (e.g. PCs, smartphones, smartwatches, video game consoles) as go into cloud infrastructure and data centers.113 While there is little systematic study, personal experience indicates that most of these devices are mostly little used most of the day. This is likely particularly true of video game consoles, which disproportionately hold exceptionally valuable graphics processing units (GPUs). This suggests that a majority if not a large majority of computation and storage lies fallow at any time, not even accounting for the prevalent waste even in cloud infrastructure. Data are even more extreme; while these are even harder to quantify, the experience of any data scientist suggests that the overwhelming majority of desperately needed data sits in organizational or jurisdictional silos, unable to power collaborative intelligence or the building of GFMs.
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- [note::Never thought about this, but good point. The data silo issue seems compelling to work on, but I'm not so sure about the "not being able to utilize Xbox's for computation" issue (except in a "let's use carbon intensive rare earth metals for something better than simply sitting on millions of TV consoles" sense)]

The closest framework to an open standard for asset sharing exists in storage, through the Interplanetary File System (IPFS) explicitly modeled on Lick’s vision and pioneered by Juan Benet and his Protocol Labs (PL), which was a partner on some of the software that supported building this book. This open protocol allows computers around the world to offer storage to each other at a reasonable cost in a peer-to-peer, fragmented, encrypted and distributed manner that helps ensure redundancy, robustness and data secrecy/integrity.
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The more complicated challenge of optimizing for latency has been handled overwhelmingly by large corporate “cloud” providers such as Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services Google Cloud Platform and Salesforce. Most of the digital services familiar to consumers in the developed world (remote storage of personal files across devices, streaming of audio and video content, shared documents, etc.) depend on these providers. They are also at the core of most digital businesses today, with 60% of business data being stored in proprietary clouds and the top two proprietary cloud providers (Amazon and Microsoft) capturing almost two-thirds of the market.117
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More dramatically, the cloud has largely been built in new data centers around the world, even as most available computation and storage remains severely underutilized in the pockets and on the laps and desks of personal computer owners around the world. Furthermore, these computers are physically closer and often more tightly networked to the consumers of computational resources than the bespoke cloud data centers…and yet the “genius” of the cloud system has systematically wasted them. In short, despite its many successes, the cloud has to a large extent involved a reversion to an even more centralized version of the “mainframe” model that preceded the time-sharing work Lick helped support, rather than a realization of its ambitions.
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(highlight:: The movement to allow data sharing even for clear public interest cases, such as public health or the curing of diseases, has been held out for years under a variety of names and yet has made very little progress either in the private sector or in open standards-based collaborations.
This problem is widely recognized and the subject of a variety of campaigns around the world. Examples include the European Union’s Gaia-X data federation infrastructure and their Data Governance Act, India’s National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy, Singapore’s Trusted Data Sharing Framework and Taiwan’s Plural Innovation strategy are just a few examples of attempts to overcome these challenges.)
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Achieving this crucial separation is different and arguably more challenging for data. The simplest ways of giving access to usus of data also allow the person granted access the ability to abuse or transfer the data to others (abusus) and the ability for others to gain financial benefit from those data (fructus), possibly at the expense of the person sharing it. Many who chose to publish data online that has now been incorporated into GFMs believed they were sharing information for others to use, but they did not perceive the full implications that sharing would have.
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- [note::Never heard the barriers to data sharing framed in the context of rights. Love this!]

Challenges of this sort surround efforts to build infrastructure for sharing digital assets like data. The basic problem is that information has a near-infinity of possible uses, meaning that heavily “contractualist” approaches that seek to define exactly how parties may use information run into unmanageable complexity. Such contracts’ zones of “incompleteness” are overwhelmingly vast because it is not possible even to imagine, let alone catalog and negotiate over all the possible future uses of information like genetics or geolocation. That means that the most promising possible benefits of data sharing – which involve taking advantage of new technical affordance to convey information to distant parties all around the world – are also the most dangerous and ungovernable. The potential market is therefore paralyzed. If we cannot address these problems with conventional contracts, our ideal spheres of information sharing will end up matching the shape of our associations – meaning we need better maps of our associative connections, and, as discussed elsewhere, better assurances against information leakage even from trusted communities.
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Organizations capable of taking on this role of collectively representing the rights and interests of “data subjects”122 have been given a variety of names: data trusts,123 collaboratives,124 cooperatives,125 or, in a whimsical turn of phrase one of the authors suggested, “mediators of individual data” (MIDs).126
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Once they develop and spread sufficiently, data collaboration tools, organizations and practices may become sufficiently familiar to be encoded in common sense and legal practice as deeply as “property rights” are, though as we noted they will almost certainly have to take a different form than the standard patterns governing private ownership of land or the organization of a joint-stock corporation. They will, as we noted, need to include many more technical and cryptographic elements, different kinds of social organizations with a greater emphasis on collective governance and fiduciary duties and norms or laws protecting against unilateral disclosure by a member of a MIDs (analogous to prohibitions against unilateral strikebreaking against unions). These may form into a future version of “property” for the digital world, but one much more attuned to the ⿻ character of data.
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We are not interested in mere access, but access with integrity. If the information some receive is accurate and others corrupted, it is worse than if the latter had no access at all. Democracy depends on a populace that can fully participate: every voice is critical. While, as we have emphasized above, different communities make sense of the pattern of facts differently. But this diversity of perspective must come founded on underlying common access to uncorrupted input data if it is to contribute to a ⿻ future. We all can and must make our own meanings of life, but we are denied our equal right to do so if some of us receive manipulated versions of the inputs to the global information commons.
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(highlight:: To safeguard and establish a safer and more open digital access environment, there are two important courses of action:

1. Digital Infrastructure: Develop an interoperable model for international infrastructures that overcomes the challenges of collective action we discuss in the Social Markets chapter below, thereby providing equitable services globally.
2. Information Integrity: Address the challenges posed by mimetic models (so-called “deepfakes”) to maintain semantic security and allow the continued enjoyment of the benefits of the digital age.
   If we can advance these two fundamental rights, the other rights described in this part of the book can reach into the lived experience of all people and serve as a substrate not just of collective intelligence “online”, but in the daily lives of everyone across the world.)
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(highlight:: Simard has studied how tree roots and symbiotic mycorrhizal fungi communicate in the soil layers of ancient forests in British Columbia. She discovered with colleagues that in this environment driven by fungal networks, different types of trees can send warning signals to each other and share essential sugars, water, carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus.134
In such a vibrant forest, a single ‘mother tree’ can establish connections with hundreds of other trees. Multiple such mother trees ensure the continuity of the entire forest as a collective organism through overlapping networks, ensuring a secure and robust environment through open connections.
Digital infrastructure follows a similar pattern with open standards (protocols), open-source code, and open data. It serves as a public foundation that is open to the global community, collaborating with tens of thousands of digital communities while offering open and secure Internet access and jointly defending against immediate digital threats.)
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- [note::Great analogy]

(highlight:: The Ukrainian “Diia” and the Estonian “mRiik” serve as examples that highlight the bidirectional features of trusted networks and information openness.
Both Estonia and Ukraine are proactive in digitalization toward public participation. They make digital technology a genuinely necessary social tool for the public, providing secure, open digital public services for citizens to access government services and real-time information. Diia has shown the world how digital technology can break down long-standing corruption. This year, Estonia launched its latest app “mRiik,” largely inspired by the Ukrainian app Diia.136)
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Nicholas A. Christakis, Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society (New York: Little Brown Spark, 2019).
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Jamal Greene, How Rights Went Wrong: How our Obsession with Rights is Tearing America Apart (Boston: Mariner, 2021).
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Jenny Toomey and Michelle Shevin, “Reconceiving the Missing Layers of the Internet for a More Just Future”, Ford Foundation available at https://www.fordfoundation.org/work/learning/learning-reflections/reconceiving-the-missing-layers-of-the-internet-for-a-more-just-future/.
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Frank H. McCourt, Jr. with Michael J. Casey, Our Biggest Fight: Reclaiming Liberty, Humanity, and Dignity in the Digital Age (New York: Crown, 2024). McCourt has founded Project Liberty, one of the largest philanthropic efforts around reforming technology largely based on this thesis.
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“More Instant Messaging Interoperability (Mimi),” Datatracker, n.d. https://datatracker.ietf.org/group/mimi/about/.
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Puja Ohlhaver, E. Glen Weyl and Vitalik Buterin, “Decentralized Society: Finding Web3’s Soul”, 2022 at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4105763.
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Jaron Lanier and E. Glen Weyl, “A Blueprint for a Better Digital Society” Harvard Business Review: Big Idea Series (Tracked) September 28, 2018: Article 5 available at https://hbr.org/2018/09/a-blueprint-for-a-better-digital-society.
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Duncan J. Watts and Steven H. Strogatz, “The Collective Dynamics of ‘Small World’ Networks” Nature 393 (1998): 440-442.
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Timur Kuran, Private Truth, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).
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Stephen Morris and Hyun Song Shin, “Social Value of Public Information”, American Economic Review 92, no.5 (2002): 1521-1534.
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John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1958).
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Vitalik Buterin, “The Most Important Scarce Resource is Legitimacy” March 23, 2021 at https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2021/03/23/legitimacy.html.
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Herbert Simon, Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971): pp. 37-52.
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Frank McCourt, and Michael Casey, Our Biggest Fight: Reclaiming Liberty, Humanity, and Dignity in the Digital Age, (New York: Crown, 2024).
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See also Shrey Jain, Divya Siddarth and E. Glen Weyl, “Plural Publics” March 20, 2023 from the GETTING-Plurality Research Network at https://gettingplurality.org/2023/03/18/plural-publics/.
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Divya Siddarth, Matthew Prewitt, and Glen Weyl, “Supermodular,” The Collective Intelligence Project, 2023. https://cip.org/supermodular.
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Kate Crawford
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Kate Crawford, Atlas of AI (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2022).
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David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, (New York: Farrar, Straus And Giroux, 2021). In this book, the authors explore a vast range of political creativity and flexibility surrounding how humans have organized themselves in the last 100,000 years.
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Jaron Lanier, Who Owns the Future?, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014).
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See the Data Collaboration Alliance at https://www.datacollaboration.org/
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Thomas Hardjono and Alex Pentland, “Data cooperatives: Towards a Foundation for Decentralized Personal Data Management,” arXiv (New York: Cornell University, 2019), https://arxiv.org/pdf/1905.08819.pdf.
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Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine”, Computer Systems and ISDN Systems 30, no. 1-7: 107-117.
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In a world beset by conflict, we must learn to build engines that, just as in the Taiwanese example we opened with, convert the potential energy driving these conflicts into useful work. The ⿻ age must learn to harness social and informational potential energy as the industrial age did for fossil fuels and the nuclear age did for atomic energy.4
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perhaps one of the most compelling bodies of evidence is the finding, popularized by economist Oded Galor in his Journey of Humanity.5 Building on his work with Quamrul Ashraf charting long-term comparative economic development, he argues that perhaps the most robust and fundamental driver of economic growth is societies’ ability to productively and cooperatively harness the potential of social diversity.6
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Religion and religiosity: A diverse range of religious practices, including secularism, agnosticism, and forms of atheism, are central to the metaphysical, epistemological and ethical perspective of most people around the world.
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Religion and religiosity: A diverse range of religious practices, including secularism, agnosticism, and forms of atheism, are central to the metaphysical, epistemological and ethical perspective of most people around the world.
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Jurisdiction: People are citizens of a range of jurisdictions, including nation states, provinces, cities etc.
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Geographic type: People live in different types of geographic regions: rural v. urban, cosmopolitan v. more traditional cities, differing weather patterns, proximity to geographic features etc.
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Profession: Most people spend a large portion of their lives working and define important parts of their identities by a profession, craft or trade.
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Organizations: People are members of a range of organizations, including their employers, civic associations, professional groups, athletic clubs, online interest groups etc.
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Ethno-linguistics: People speak a range of languages and identify themselves with and/or are identified by others with a “ethnic” groups associated with these linguistic groupings or histories of such linguistic associations, and these are organized by historical linguists into rough phylogenies.
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Race, caste and tribe: Many societies feature cultural groupings based on real or perceived genetic and familial origins that partly shape collective self- and social perceptions, especially given the legacies of severe conflict and oppression based on these traits.
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Ideology: People adopt, implicitly or explicitly, a range of political and social ideologies organized according to schema that themselves differ greatly across social context (e.g. “left” and “right” are key dimensions in some contexts, while religious or national origin divides may be more important in others).
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Education: People have a range of kinds and levels of educational attainment.
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Epistemology/field: Different fields of educational training structure thought. For example, humanists and physical scientists typically approach knowledge differently.
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Gender and sexuality: People differ in physical characteristics associated with reproductive function and in social perception and self-perception associated with these, as well as in their patterns of intimate association connected to these.
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Abilities: People differ greatly in their natural and acquired physical capabilities, intelligence, and challenges.
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Generation: People differ by age and life experiences.
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Species: Nearly all the above has assumed that we are talking exclusively about humans, but some of the technologies we will discuss may be used to facilitate communication and collaboration between humans and other life forms or even the nonbiological natural or spiritual worlds, which is obviously richly diverse internally and from human life.
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Beyond the difficulty of overcoming difference, it also holds an important peril. Bridging differences for collaboration often erodes them, harnessing their potential but also reducing that potential in the future. While this may be desirable for protection against conflict, it is an important cost to the productive capacity of diversity in the future. The classic illustration is the way that globalization has both brought gains from trade, such as diversifying cuisine, while at the same time arguably homogenizing culture and thus possibly reducing the opportunity for such gains in the future. A critical concern in ⿻ is not just harnessing collaboration across diversity but also regenerating diversity, ensuring that in the process of harnessing diversity it is also replenished by the creation of new forms of social difference. Again, this is analogous to energy systems which must ensure that they not only harvest but also regenerate the sources of their energy to achieve sustainable growth.
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(highlight::
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pluralitybook/plurality/main/figs/PPF.png
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Figure 5-0-A. The trade-off between breadth of diversity and depth of collaboration represented as points along a production possibilities frontier
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One of the worst such evils is papering over the richness and diversity of the world. Perhaps the archetypal example is conclusions about the optimality of markets in neoclassical economics, which depend on extremely simplistic assumptions and have often been used to short-circuit attempts to discover systems for social resource management that deal with problems of increasing returns, sociality, incomplete information, limited rationality, etc. As will become evident in the coming chapters, we know very little about how to even build social systems that are sensitive to these features, much less even approximately optimal in the face of them. This shows why the desire to optimize, chasing some simple notion of the good, often seduces us away from the aspirations of ⿻ as much as it aids us in pursuing it. We can be tempted to maximize what is simple to describe and easy to achieve, rather than anything we are really after.
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Yet, as noted above, even if we manage to avoid these pitfalls and successfully bridge and harness diversity, we run the risk, in the process, of depleting the resource diversity provides. This is possible at any point along the spectrum and at any level of technological sophistication. Intimate relationships that form families can homogenize participants, undermining the very sparks of complementarity that ignited love. Building political consensus can undermine the dynamism and creativity of party politics.14 Translation and language learning can undermine interest in the subtleties of other languages and cultures.
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Civic Spaces: Digital replicas of civic centers, town halls, and community spaces where people can gather to discuss, debate, and make decisions about their communities. These spaces would allow for a more inclusive and accessible form of civic engagement, enabling participants to engage in local governance or community planning processes from anywhere in the world. They would also leverage our intuitions from real world spaces much more closely than existing online spaces do, thus helping improve the creation of context and common understanding online.
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Immersive learning: From virtual field trips to interactive historical reenactments, educational content will become more immersive, allowing students of all ages to explore and learn in ways that are engaging, memorable, and more impactful than traditional methods. Such learning can range from deepening connections to historical experience through immersion to providing vocational training in a far broader range of high-risk scenarios than is currently possible.31
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Cross-cultural exchange: Platforms specifically designed to foster understanding and empathy between diverse cultural groups by immersing users in the experiences of people from different backgrounds. Through narratives, rituals, and daily life activities, these platforms could use VR and AR to bridge cultural divides and build a global sense of community. For example, language learning applications use these to immerse users in the linguistic and cultural background of others. Another example is the Portals Policing Project 32, which shares the lived experiences of people with law enforcement in a controlled, yet realistic virtual chamber, improving understanding and trust on both sides.
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Environmental climate experiences: Interactive simulations that allow users to experience the potential impacts of climate change firsthand. For example, the Tree demonstrates how VR can evoke empathy and compassion for the natural environment by transforming the user into a rainforest tree and exposing them to the threats of deforestation and climate change.33
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Therapy: Leveraging the power of VR to create therapeutic environments, sessions increasingly offer greatly enhanced cognitive behavioral therapy, enabling patients to be exposed in a carefully modulated way to the sources of phobias, traumatic past experiences, anxiety-producing social situations and more. Therapy for children suffering from autism spectrum and attention deficit and hyperactivity disorders is increasingly bearing fruit.34
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Frontiers of immersive shared reality
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Collective memory palaces: Envision virtual environments where entire communities can deposit, share, and experience collective memories and knowledge. These memory palaces serve not only as repositories of communal wisdom but as spaces where individuals can relive historical events or explore the collective psyche of humanity, fostering a deeper understanding and connection across generations. They could also redefine the experience of memorializing collective traumas, allowing them to be told from a variety of perspectives quickly and flexibly.
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Empathy amplifiers: ISR could allow us to experience the world through the eyes of another. This direct sharing of experiences would serve as an empathy amplifier, dissolving prejudices and fostering a profound sense of unity and understanding among diverse groups of people. Envision simulations that allow individuals to live through the collective experiences of entire communities, nations, or civilizations, feeling their struggles, joys, and challenges as their own. This could serve as a powerful tool for education and conflict resolution, promoting peace on a global scale.
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Global consciousness networks: Imagine a future where people can connect their consciousness to a global network, sharing thoughts, emotions, and experiences in a dynamic, evolving stream of collective awareness. This network would enable a form of communication and connection that goes beyond language, allowing for an unparalleled synchronization of human intention and action towards global challenges.
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- [note::Reminds me of Davey's "Plexus" app, a social media network that connects people based on the content of the posts they make.]

Digital legacies: ISR could allow individuals to create digital legacies—entire worlds crafted from their memories, thoughts, and experiences. These realms would not only serve as a form of immortality but also as a means for future generations to explore the lives and insights of their ancestors in a deeply personal and interactive way.
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- [note::This is the interesting thing about personal websites/blogging - you're essential building a repository of thoughts and ideas from which people will remember you by. I remember having an idea for a business that was basically "we'll keep your website running after you die" - probably not an idea worth pursuing.]

(highlight:: These stories illustrate several risks of ISR:
• Virtual escapism: Dependency on ISR at the expense of the real world it depends on, rather than as a way of creating more effective understanding and collective action within it, risk a doom loop similar to the risks of GFMs creating garbage outputs that undermine their future training and the risk of industrial development destroying the environment on which it depends.
• Diminished physical health: Immersing oneself in alternative realities for extended periods can lead to psychological effects, such as difficulty distinguishing between virtual and physical experiences or feeling disconnected from real-world social bonds. The ready availability of an idealized digital escape could impact mental health, leading to isolation or a diminished ability to cope with real-world challenges.
• Digital divide: A new digital frontier risks widening the gap between those with access to the latest technologies and those without. As these ISR becomes more integral to social and professional life, lack of access could marginalize individuals and communities unless access is treated as a human right in the same way as we have advocated above for internet access.
• Physical health implications: Prolonged engagement in virtual environments raises concerns about physical health, including the effects of extended screen time on vision, and the sedentary lifestyle associated with immersive digital activities. Balancing the allure of virtual worlds with the need for physical activity and real-world interaction becomes a crucial health consideration.
• Corporate control, surveillance, and monopolization: ISR blurs the lines between public and private, where digital spaces can be simultaneously intimate and open to wide audiences or observed by corporate service providers. Unless ISR networks are built according to the principles of rights and interoperability we emphasized above and governed by the broader ⿻ governance approaches that much of the rest of this part of the book are devoted to, they will become the most iron monopolistic cages we have known.
• Identity and authenticity: The freedom to create and adopt any personas in ISR sharpens the challenges of authenticity and identity we have highlighted above. It illustrates the potential for anonymity and fluid identity in shared immersive realities to complicate trust and relationships, as well as the possibility of losing one’s sense of self.)
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We must, therefore, prevent a headlong rush into a monopolistic and dystopian “metaverse” undermining the very real potential of these technologies to empower richer human connection by understanding them in the context of the other tools that must complement, support and undergird their development.
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- [note::cough cough Facebook cough cough]

To counter information siloing, the organizers introduced smaller “progress prizes” awarded bi-monthly that required participants to publish their code or research open source, enriching the entire community’s shared knowledge base. Notable contributions included the “Volume Cartographer” by Seth Parker and others in Brent Seales’ lab, and Casey Handmer’s identification of a unique ‘crackle’ pattern forming letters.41 Youssef Nader later harnessed domain adaptation techniques on these findings.42 As the competition progressed, its structure fostered a dynamic where winners not only shared their findings and methodologies but were also able to reinvest their winnings into enhancing their equipment and refining their techniques. This environment also proved fertile for the formation of new collaborations, as exemplified by the Grand Prize winners.
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Consider the 2009 Netflix Prize, which offered a million dollars to the team that could beat their internal movie recommendation algorithm by 10%. The prize competition dragged on for more than two and a half years and only succeeded in the end when the leading teams gave up working alone, but instead combined with diverse other teams and their diverse algorithms.43 One might even use this conception to reimagine neural networks as social networks, simulating diversity and disputes between people with diverse perspectives. Arguably this simultaneous simulation of multiple perspectives is precisely what may account for their increasing dominance in a wide range of tasks.44
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- [note::"social networks are just neural networks of people"]

Alien art: While GFMs can mimic and automate the way humans generate ideas, we could instead aspire to generate “alien intelligence” that takes our thought in directions humans are unlikely to identify, thus generating new fodder for collaboration across diversity.45 For instance, Google DeepMind initially trained AlphaGo to mimic human strategies in playing Go games. Conversely, their next version, AlphaGo Zero, was trained solely against other model adversaries like itself, generating an unfamiliar and disconcerting yet effective “alien” strategy that surprised many master Go players. Research demonstrates that interacting with these diverse AI strategies has increased the novelty and diversity of the human Go-playing population 46. If such approaches were applied to the cultural sphere rather than to games, we might find novel artistic forms emerging to inspire “awe” or resonance in alien machine intelligences, then feeding back to provoke new artistic forms among humans, just as the “encounter with the East” was critical to creating modern art in the West.
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Digital twins and simulation for creative testing: Advanced simulations and digital twin technology will enable creative teams to test and refine their ideas in virtual replicas of real-world environments. With digital twins driven by GFMs that accurately mimics human behaviors, we could conduct in-silico social experiments at an unprecedented speed and scale. For instance, by deploying alternative news feed algorithms on in-silico social media platforms, where large language model (LLM) agents that mimic human social media users interact with one another, we can explore and test the impact of these alternative algorithms on macro-level social outcomes, such as conflicts and polarization.47
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- [note::Woah! This would be fascinating to read about/study. They're essentially describing agent-based modeling, but for digital social networks. If I'm actually interested in studying this, I should take that agent-based modeling course from Santa Fe Institute: https://www.santafe.edu/news-center/news/learn-agent-based-modeling]

(highlight:: The “symphony of minds,” assisted and amplified by technology, is poised to transcend beyond the mere exchange of ideas and creations to a realm where collective consciousness redefines creativity.
• Telepathic creative exchanges: With advancements in post-symbolic communication, collaborators will be able to share ideas, visions, and creative impulses directly from mind to mind. This telepathic exchange will enable creators to bypass the limitations of language and physical expression, leading to a form of collaboration that is instantaneously empathetic and deeply intuitive.
• Inter-specific collaborative projects: The expansion of communication technologies to include non-human perspectives will open new frontiers in creativity. Collaborations could extend to other intelligence species (e.g., dolphins, octopuses), incorporating their perceptions and experiences into the creative process. Such projects could lead to unprecedented forms of art and innovation, grounded in a more holistic understanding of our planet and its inhabitants.
• Legacy and time-travel collaborations: With the creation of digital legacies and immersive experiences that allow for time travel within one’s consciousness, future collaborators might engage not only with contemporaries but also with the minds of the past and future. This temporal collaboration could bring insights from different eras into conversation, enriching the creative process with a multitude of perspectives and wisdom accumulated across generations.
• Collective creativity for global challenges: The challenges facing humanity will be met with a unified creative force, as collaborative platforms enable individuals worldwide to contribute their ideas and solutions. This collective creativity will be instrumental in addressing issues such as climate change, harnessing the power of diverse perspectives and innovative thinking to create sustainable and impactful solutions.)
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- 1idea, 1action,
- [note::Is there a way we could build collections of "individual-based GPT agents" to help with problem solving? I'm imagining being able to build an "advisor" GPT that is made up of 10 other GPTs, each individually trained on the works of influential people like Isaac Newton, Leonardo Da Vinci, Nikola Tesla, etc. You could turn off and on different people based on who's advice/insight you'd like to receive.
It would essentially allow anyone across the globe to have their own "board of advisors"]

(highlight:: As we pursue increasing collaboration, we must constantly guard against:

1. Loss of privacy and autonomy: In a future where every thought, idea, and creative impulse can be shared instantly, the sanctity of private thought is at risk. A society under constant surveillance and pressure to share every aspect of one’s life parallels the potential for creative collaborations to become invasive, where the constant demand for openness stifles individual creativity and autonomy.
2. Homogenization of creativity: As collaborative platforms become more sophisticated, there’s a risk that the algorithms designed to enhance synergy could instead lead to a homogenization of ideas. This could dampen true innovation, as the unique perspectives and unconventional ideas are smoothed over in favor of consensus and algorithmic predictability. This highlights the urgency of exploring the designs of crowdsourced platforms and AIs that reward the exploration and connections of novel, heterogeneous ideas. For instance, crowdsourced innovation and co-creation processes could further be facilitated by AI that bridges existing ideas and communities that are less likely to be connected in the platform.48
3. Over-reliance on technology: Future collaborations might lean heavily on technological interfaces and GFM-driven processes, potentially leading to a depreciation of human skills and intuition in the creative process. This over-reliance is at risk of creating a dependency on technology for social interaction and validation, raising concerns about the atrophy of traditional creative skills.
4. Digital divide and inequality: In a society stratified by access to technology and information, the future of creative collaborations could exacerbate existing inequalities. Those with access to cutting-edge collaboration platforms will have a distinct advantage over those without, potentially widening the gap between the technological haves and have-nots, and monopolizing creativity within echelons of society that can afford such access.
5. Manipulation, exploitation, and collapse: The potential for exploitation of creative content and ideas by corporate overreach is a significant concern. As creative collaborations increasingly occur within digital platforms owned by corporations, the risk of intellectual property being co-opted, monetized, or used for surveillance and manipulation grows, threatening the integrity of the creative process. By reducing the incentive for creativity, such traps risk killing the goose of creativity and diversity that lays the golden eggs of training GFMs in the first place.
6. Erosion of cultural diversity: In a world where creative collaborations are mediated by global platforms, there’s a risk that local cultural expressions and minority voices are overshadowed by dominant narratives. This could lead to a dilution of cultural diversity in creative outputs, ending in monolithic culture that neutralizes dissent and diversity.)
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Community Notes (CN is a community-based “fact-checking” platform. CN allows members of the X community to flag potentially misleading posts and provide additional contexts about why the posts could be misleading. CN participants not only submit these notes to the platform; they also rate the notes proposed by others. These ratings are used to assess whether the notes are helpful and are eligible to be publicly released to the X platform as illustrated in Figure A.50
Specifically, raters are placed on a one-dimensional spectrum of opinion, discovered by the statistical analysis from the data but in practice corresponding in most applications to the “left-right” divide in the politics of much of the Western hemisphere. Then (or really simultaneously), the support each note receives from any community member is attributed to a combination of its affinity to their position on this spectrum and some underlying, position-agnostic “objective quality”. Notes are then considered to be “helpful” if this objective quality, rather than the overall ratings, is sufficiently high. Instead of prioritizing notes that are supported by a biased, like-minded cluster of users, the system rewards notes that are supported by diverse groups of users, correcting biases driven by political and social fragmentation. This approach leverages alternative social media algorithms to augment human deliberations, prioritizing contents based on the principle of collaboration across diversity, consistent with ⿻, to which hundreds of millions of people are currently exposed each week.51 This platform has been shown to encourage the exploration of diverse political information, compared to the previous methods of moderating misinformation 52.)
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- [note::See here for algorithm explanation (it's open source too!): https://communitynotes.x.com/guide/en/under-the-hood/ranking-notes
Also here: https://www.yondonfu.com/p/under-the-hood-of-community-notes]

This underscores a crucial trade-off: the richness and immediacy of in-person discussions versus the extensive reach and permanence of the written word. Many platforms strive to blend elements of both in-person and written communication by creating a network where in-person conversations serve as links among individuals who are physically and socially proximate, and writing serves as a bridge, connecting people who are geographically distant from each other. The World Cafe 53 or Open Space Technology 54 methods allow dozens or even thousands of people to convene and participate in small groups for dialogue while the written notes from those small clusters are synthesized and distributed broadly.
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- [note::Reminds me of what Richard D Bartlett was saying on one podcast about how different communication modalities (e.g. written v.s. verbal) affect the texture of a discussion.]

One of the most fundamental challenges this variety of forms tries to navigate is the trade-off between diversity and bandwidth.55 On the one hand, when we attempt to engage individuals with vastly diverse perspectives in conversations, the discussions could become less efficient, lengthy, costly, and time-consuming. This often means that they have trouble yielding definite and timely outcomes; resulting in the “analysis paralysis” often bemoaned in corporate settings and the complaint (sometimes attributed to Oscar Wilde that “socialism takes too many evenings”.
On the other hand, when we attempt to increase the bandwidth and efficiency of conversations, they often struggle to remain inclusive of diverse perspectives. People engaging in the conversation are often geographically dispersed, speak different languages, have different conversational norms, etc. Diversity in conversational styles, cultures and language often impedes mutual understanding. Furthermore, given that it is impossible for everyone to be heard at length, some notion of representation is necessary for conversation to cross broad social diversity, as we will discuss at length below.)
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Perhaps the fundamental limit on all these approaches is that while methods of broadcast (allowing many to hear a single statement) have dramatically improved, broad listening (allowing one person to thoughtfully digest a range of perspectives) remains extremely costly and time consuming.56 As economics Nobel Laureate and computer science pioneer Herbert Simon observed, “(A) wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”57 The cognitive limits on the amount of attention an individual can give, when trying to focus on diverse perspectives, potentially impose sharp trade-offs between diversity and bandwidth, as well as between richness and inclusion.
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- [note::This is something I've thought about in the context of Polis - effective discussion summarization is always going to seem like a bottleneck after you reach a certain scale of perspective diversity.]

Overlooking Tokyo, nestled within the National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation (Miraikan) lies The Park of Aging, a realm where time bends into the distant future, offering a rare portal to your mind and body after years worn by aging.17 Visors blur vision, mimicking cataracts. Sounds are stripped of high pitches. In a photo booth that mirrors the trials of aged perception, facial expressions are faded and blurred. The simple act of recalling a shopping list committed to memory becomes an odyssey as one is ceaselessly interrupted in a bustling market. Walking in place on pedals with ankle weights on and while leaning on a cart simulates the wear of time on the body or the weight of age on posture. The Park of Aging is not just an exhibit, but an immersive conversation across time; a dialogue with your older self through the senses of sight, sound, and the aches and pains of age. This journey of empathy extends beyond the future self, to also foster a deeper connection with a present overlooked cohort: the elderly.
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Combined, these capabilities enable the transmission of ideas and emotions that can occur directly and seamlessly and have profound implications for how we share and understand one another’s internal experiences, creative visions, aspirations and even past traumas to facilitate reconciliation, healing and forgiveness. For example, imagine a child immersing themselves in the sensory experiences of their parents at the same age. Or two waring groups experiencing the pain and loss of their adversary’s family members.
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- [note::Reminds of the idea of "you can learn to love anyone if you only knew their story" from the Ashoka Systems Change podcast.]

(highlight:: In the more distant future, the evolution of non-symbolic communication promises to profoundly reshape our understanding of intimacy and the very essence of life’s touchstones, such as childhood and relationships. Imagine a world where the boundaries of personal experiences blur, redefining intimacy not as a physical or emotional proximity but as a deep, seamless sharing of consciousness. Telepathy, once a realm of science fiction or religious practice, becomes a scientific reality, allowing for the direct transmission of thoughts, feelings, and sensory experiences from mind to mind. Human relationships evolve into deeper, more meaningful connections where misunderstandings are a choice and empathy abound. Children, in this new paradigm, grow not just by learning from others’ words or observing actions but by immersing themselves in the lived experiences of others from any culture or epoch, including their ancestors. This experiential osmosis accelerates empathy and wisdom, fostering a society where learning is as much about absorbing direct experiences as it is about traditional education.
Long-distance relationships, too, can expect to undergo a radical transformation. Physical distance becomes a matter only of connection speeds, allowing for the sharing of thoughts, emotions, and sensory experiences in real-time, irrespective of geographic separation. Lovers, friends, and family members can experience each other’s joys, sorrows, and mundane moments as if they were in the same room, creating a form of intimacy that transcends physical presence. This paradigm shift brings profound changes in societal structures – the traditional nuclear family could give way to more fluid, globally interconnected familial networks. As we steer towards this horizon, the very fabric of human connection and communication is poised to undergo a metamorphosis, redefining what it means to be intimately connected and be “human.”)
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- [note::Lots of inspiring ideas here - makes me want to let my future kids indulge in lots of story-based, lesson-teaching video games.]

Markets and voting systems also serve as quintessential examples of lower-bandwidth, structured forms of communication, offering a counterbalance. In markets, the myriad decisions made by consumers and producers are communicated through the price mechanism. This system, while less immediate and detailed than telepathic communication, provides a structured and aggregated way of expressing preferences and values. It allows for privacy in decision-making, as individuals do not have to reveal the full spectrum of their thoughts and motivations. Similarly, voting is a deliberate, structured form of communication where individuals express their political and social preferences at a fixed point in time. Unlike continuous and invasive telepathic streams, voting encapsulates the will of the populace in a manner that is both manageable and interpretable, preserving the autonomy of the individual voter. This structured approach is crucial in maintaining a balance between efficient communication and the safeguarding of personal autonomy, privacy, and democratic processes, thereby acting as a vital check against the overreach of an all-encompassing telepathic matrix.
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- [note::Never thought about markets as a form of privacy-preserving communication. Interesting framing.]

5-2
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“Stand up and face the mirror”
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“Stand up and face the mirror”, the at-first innocent but gradually more-threatening refrain, echoes through Courtney Cogburn’s 1000 Cut Journey.28 Simple words that invite the visitor to this immersive-reality environment to experience life through the eyes, ears, and body of Michael Sterling, a black man. Small moments of casual racism build to a crescendo of hopelessness and induce a pervasive sense of helplessness. Perception, or reality? It depends on whose shoes you’re standing in. Some may kick off their shoes the moment they remove the VR headset, but for Michael Sterling, there’s nothing he (or now you) can do to erase the footprints of direct experience.
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In Becoming Homeless, you look around your already-bare apartment to decide which possessions to sell next.29 You’re losing your home, so it does not matter anymore, and you just choose something. Then, from the moment of actual homelessness, the downward spiral accelerates. you lose your dignity, your physical security, and your health in quick succession. No more hopes and dreams, thoughts and prayers cannot help you now. Your new daily grind rips 25 years off your life expectancy faster than “Wolf of Wall Street” Jordan Belfort could uncork a bottle of champagne. “Good luck!” “Work hard!” and - sadly - “I love you!” are now just words you might have heard long ago, spoken to a person you can hardly remember.
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- [note::Oh my God, when I first read this, I didn't realize this was an actual game on Steam. Downloading immediately.]

This future, teeming with hybrid reality environments and emotional connectivity, heralds a new era of human interaction, where digital spaces not only simulate reality but enhance it, bridging divides and fostering broader understanding. However, ISR also has its perils. From the widening of surveillance to virtual escapism, these challenges demand thoughtful consideration to ensure that our digital futures augment, rather than eclipse, the richness of human experience.
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Throughout
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Throughout
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(highlight::
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pluralitybook/plurality/main/figs/mediatedreality.png
**
Figure 5-2-A. Mediated Reality Framework adapted from Mann and Nnlf (1994). Source: Wikipedia, CC 3.0 BY-SA.
**)
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(highlight:: A number of strategies have, historically and more recently, been used to navigate these challenges at scale. Representatives are chosen for conversations by a variety of methods, including:

1. Election: A campaign and voting process are used to select representatives, often based on geographic or political party groups. This is used most commonly in politics, unions and churches. It has the advantage of conferring a degree of broad participation, legitimacy and expertise, but is often rigid and expensive.
2. Sortition: A set of people are chosen randomly, sometimes with checks or constraints to ensure some sort of balance across groups. This is used most commonly in focus groups, surveys and in citizen deliberative councils 58 on contentious policy issues.59 It maintains reasonable legitimacy and flexibility at low cost, but sacrifices (or needs to supplement with) expertise and has limited participation.
3. Administration: A set of people are chosen by a bureaucratic assignment procedure, based on “merit” or managerial decisions to represent different relevant perspectives or constituencies. This is used most commonly in business and professional organizations and tends to have relatively high expertise and flexibility at low cost, but has lower legitimacy and participation.)
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A very rich field of “dialogue and deliberation” research and methods have been innovated over the last 50-60 years, and the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation is a hub for exploring these.60 These tools can help overcome the “tyranny of structurelessness” that often affects attempts at inclusive and democratic governance, where unfair informal norms and dominance hierarchies override intentions for inclusive exchange 61.
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one of the most successful examples in Taiwan has been the vTaiwan system, which harnesses OSS called Polis.62 This platform shares some features with social media services like X, but builds abstractions of some of the principles of inclusive facilitation into its attention allocation and user experience. As in X, users submit short responses to a prompt. But rather than amplifying or responding to one another’s comments, they simply vote these up or down. These votes are then clustered to highlight patterns of common attitudes which form what one might call user perspectives. Representative statements that highlight these differing opinion groups’ perspectives are displayed to allow users to understand key points of view, as are the perspectives that “bridge” the divisions: ones that receive assent across the lines that otherwise divide. Responding to this evolving conversation, users can offer additional perspectives that help to further bridge, articulate an existing position or draw out a new opinion group that may not yet be salient.
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Polis is a prominent example of what leading ⿻ technologists Aviv Ovadya and Luke Thorburn call “collective response systems” and “bridging systems” and others call “wikisurveys”.63 Other leading examples include All Our Ideas and Remesh, which have various trade-offs in terms of user experience, degree of open source and other features. What these systems share is that they combine the participatory, open and interactive nature of social media with features that encourage thoughtful listening, an understanding of conversational dynamics and the careful emergence of an understanding of shared views and points of rough consensus.
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An approach with similar goals but a bit of an opposite starting point centers in-person conversations but aims to improve the way their insights can be networked and shared. A leading example in this category is the approach developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Constructive Communication in collaboration with their civil society collaborators; called Cortico. This approach and technology platform, dubbed Fora, uses a mixture of the identity and association protocols we discussed in the Freedom part of the book and natural language processing to allow recorded conversations on challenging topics to remain protected and private while surfacing insights that can travel across these conversations and spark further discussion. Community members, with permission from the speakers, lift consequential highlights up to stakeholders, such as government, policy makers or leadership within an organization. Cortico has used this technology to help inform civic processes such as the 2021 election of Michelle Wu as Boston’s the first Taiwanese American mayor of a major US city.67 The act of soliciting perspectives via deep conversational data in collaboration with under-served communities imbues the effort with a legitimacy absent from faster modes of communication. Related tools, of differing degrees of sophistication, are used by organizations like StoryCorps and Braver Angels and have reached millions of people.
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This approach is closely allied to academic work on “digital humanities”, which harnesses computation to understand and organize human cultural output at scale. Organizations like the Society Library collect available material from government documentation, social media, books, television etc. and organize it for citizens to highlight the contours of debate, including surfacing available facts. This practice is becoming increasingly scalable with some of the tools we describe below by harnessing digital technology to extend the tradition described above by extending the scale of deliberation by networking conversations across different venues together.
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A recent dramatic illustration was a conversation between Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and leading podcast host Lex Fridman, where both were in virtual reality able to perceive minute facial expressions of the other. A less dramatic but perhaps more meaningful example was the Portals Policing Project, where cargo containers appeared in cities affected by police violence and allowed an enriched video-based exchange of experiences with such violence across physical and social distance.68
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One of the most obvious directions that is a subject of active development is how systems like Polis and Community Notes could be extended with modern graph theory and GFMs. The “Talk to the City” project of the AI Objectives Institute, for example, illustrates how GFMs can be used to replace a list of statements characterizing a group’s views with an interactive agent one can talk to and get a sense of the perspective. Soon, it should be possible to go further, with GFMs allowing participants to move beyond limited short statements and simple up-and-down votes. Instead, they will be able to fully express themselves in reaction to the conversation. Meanwhile, the models will condense this conversation, making it legible to others who can then participate. Models could also help look for areas of rough consensus not simply based on common votes but on a natural language understanding of and response to expressed positions.
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ration, such as in person or in rich immersive shared realities. With a richer accounting of relevant social differences, it may be possible to move beyond geography or simple demographics and skills as groups that need to be represented. Instead, it may be possible to increasingly use the full intersectional richness of identity as a basis for considering inclusion and representation. Constituencies defined this way could participate in elections or, instead of sortition, protocols could be devised to choose the maximally diverse committees for a deliberation by, for example, choosing a collection of participants that minimizes how marginalized from representation the most marginalized participants are based on known social connections and affiliations. Such an approach could achieve many of the benefits of sortition, administration and election simultaneously, especially if combined with some of the liquid democracy approaches that we discuss in the voting chapter below.
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It may be possible to, in some cases, even more radically re-imagine the idea of representation. GFMs can be “fine-tuned” to increasingly accurately mimic the ideas and styles of individuals.70 One can imagine training a model on the text of a community of people (as in Talk to the City and thus, rather than representing one person’s perspective, it could operate as a fairly direct collective representative, possibly as an aid, complement or check on the discretion of a person intended to represent that group.
Most boldly, this idea could in principle extend beyond living human beings as we explore further in our Environment chapter below. In his classic We Have Never Been Modern, philosopher Bruno Latour argued that natural features (like rivers and forests) deserve representation in a “parliament of things”.71 The challenge, of course, is how they can speak. GFMs might offer ways to translate scientific measures of the state of these systems into a kind of “Lorax”, Dr. Seuss’s mythical creature who speaks for the trees and animals that cannot speak for themselves.72 Something similar might occur for unborn future generations, as in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future.73)
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Words may be richer symbols than numbers, but they are as dust compared to the richness of human sensory experience, not to mention proprioception. “Words cannot capture” far more than they can. Whatever emotional truth it has, it is simply information, so it is theoretically logical that we form far deeper attention in common action and experience than in verbal exchange. Thus, however far deliberation advances, it cannot substitute for the richer forms of collaboration we have already discussed.
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(highlight:: Thus, administrations run into two opposing complaints, which roughly correspond to the limits of the richness of the collaboration they allow and the limits of their ability to span social diversity.76
The first might be called the problem of “rigidity”, namely that bureaucratic rules, by throwing away a lot of detail, lead to outcomes that are insensitive to important features of specific cases or local circumstances. Examples range from the mundane to the oppressive and simply ridiculous. Consider:
• Most jurisdictions have speed limits for driving cars to ensure safety. Yet the safe speed for driving varies dramatically with road, environmental and other related conditions. This means that speed limits are, most of the time, either too high or too low for the circumstances. Similar logic applies to almost all administrative policy settings, from the prices of goods to the break time allowed workers.
• To obtain most high-paying jobs, people from a diversity of cultures around the world have to fit their accomplishments and lives into the format of CVs and transcripts designed to make them legible to administrative bureaucracies and hiring managers, rather than to reflect their accomplishments accurately.
• In the late 1990s, a Dutch airliner ended up physically shredding hundreds of live squirrels that lacked appropriate paperwork for transiting Schiphol airport. While a particularly gruesome example, almost anyone who has flown is aware of the rigidity of the bureaucratic systems that administer air travel and will thus not be overly surprised by this outcome.
Yet at the same time as they are rigid, “cold” and “heartless”, an equally common and opposite complaint about bureaucracies is their “complexity”: that they often are inscrutable, hard to navigate (see, for example, Franz Kafka’s classic work The Castle), full of red tape, and give excessive discretion to apparently arbitrary bureaucrats.77)
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And yet, clearly a key reason for such complexity is the need to handle the diversity and nuance of the cases they must administer. The leading reason, therefore, that bureaucracies become illegitimate as they try to span a broad range of social diversity is that, to accommodate this range, they have to become too complex to function properly. Increasingly, however, digital technologies are emerging that allow this trade-off to be navigated more elegantly and thus allow richer cooperation to legitimately span a broader range of diversity.
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A similar but even more ambitious application is harnessing GFMs to improve access to legal advice and services for those who cannot afford high quality traditional legal support. Examples include Legal Robot and DoNotPay, both of which aim to help customers with limited means reduce the imbalance in legal access with corporate entities that can afford high quality legal services because they care not just about case outcomes but the precedents they create.78
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Several new human resources platforms (such as HiredScore, Paradox.ai, Turing and Untapped) aim to expand the breadth and diversity of candidates that hiring managers can consider. A leading challenge is that the limited examples of hiring such diverse candidates in the past can undermine the reliability and flexibility of such algorithms.
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A variety of groups have harnessed digital mapping tools and increasingly GFMs to describe such traditional patterns of rights and assert them against colonial legal systems. These include Digital Democracy, the Rainforest Foundation US, the Australian Government’s Indigenous Land and Sea Corporation and México’s SERVIR Amazonia.80
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As the last example especially suggests, a range of digital technologies not traditionally associated with “AI” are also relevant here, including mapping (global positioning and geographical information systems). This is dramatically illustrated in the collaborative mapping work of Ushahidi that has helped in the response to disasters and conflict.81
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One of the most promising directions was proposed by Danielle Allen, David Kidd and Ariana Zetlin.82 They suggest the gradual replacement of traditional coursework and grades with a far more diverse range of “badges”. Starting with concrete recognition of specific measurable skills which then help qualify holders for “mezzo badges”. Based on holding an appropriate combination of micro and mezzo badges people eventually ladder up to recognizable “macro badges” that can be used by potential employers or educational institutions. This process directly mirrors that which occurs within a neural network, where combinations of lower-level inputs trigger progressively higher-level and thus more meaningful outputs. Allen and her co-authors argue that such a system would be much more consistent with years of research in educational psychology which emphasizes the granular nature of skills and the poor fit of standard classroom practices to it and the fact that many students, especially historically marginalized and/or academically disinclined ones, often end up excluded from opportunity by such rigid structures.
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- [note::I LOVE this idea at face value. Consider reading the whitepaper.]

While in some cases there is growing consensus that the abolition of such traditions is appropriate (e.g. prohibitions on female genital marking), in many cases laws have “overwritten” traditional practices more out of convenience than conviction. Traditional practices make it difficult, for example, for someone from far away to understand how to acquire land or appropriately intermarry in a community. The sometimes enforced, sometimes cajoled homogenization of cultural practices
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While
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While in some cases there is growing consensus that the abolition of such traditions is appropriate (e.g. prohibitions on female genital marking), in many cases laws have “overwritten” traditional practices more out of convenience than conviction. Traditional practices make it difficult, for example, for someone from far away to understand how to acquire land or appropriately intermarry in a community. The sometimes enforced, sometimes cajoled homogenization of cultural practices has brought some benefits to intermixing and dynamism, but at a great cost to often ancient and diverse wisdom of cultures.
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Many of the practices we have sketched in this book challenge the imaginations of even ambitious futurists. This has led those attracted by experiments with these kinds of ideas to propose “network states”, “charter cities”, “seasteads” and other forms of escape from existing legal jurisdictions that, obviously, run into a range of tensions with preserving broader public goods and social order. Yet such clean separation may not be necessary to support such experiments if they can easily be understood by and integrated into existing legal structures by machine translation. This may empower a diverse range of experimentation with combinations of novel and traditional practices, while maintaining cooperation across broad social differences, and empowering the flourishing of ever expanding, infinite diversity in infinite combinations.
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(highlight:: Each civilization must thus gauge how important each issue is to it. Then “buy” votes using diplomatic favor just up to the point where the amount they care matches the increasing cost of having more influence on that issue compared to the value of saving their favor.
This game mechanic is a variant of the “quadratic voting” procedure one of us invented, which is now widely used outside of games as well, as we will explore below.85 Because of the logic above, it aggregates not just the direction of individual preferences but also their strength. Thus, when individual action is independent, it can lead to decisions based not just on “the greatest numbers” but “the greatest good for the greatest number”.)
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Voting
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Voting
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(highlight:: Despite its simplicity, this “plurality rule” is not a particularly compelling representation of ⿻ in the way we use it, for several reasons including:

1. It tends to create a “lesser of two evils” dynamic (known as “Duverger’s Law” to political scientists) where people are forced to vote for one of the two leading alternatives even if they dislike both and some trailing alternative might win broader support.86
2. In many contexts, the simple equality assumed in such a tally is not widely legitimate. Different participants in a vote may have differing degrees of legitimate interest in an issue (e.g. representing different populations, having spent longer time in a community, etc.).
3. Even at its best, it represents the direction in which a majority chooses, rather than an overall sense of the “will of the group”, which should include how important different issues are to people and how much they know about them. This is often called the “tyranny of the majority”.)
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Ranked choice and approval voting: These two recently popular systems partially address issue 1. In ranked choice systems, participants rank a number of alternatives, and the decision depends on this full list in some way. The simplest examples are “run-off” type systems, where the set of candidates is gradually narrowed and, as this happens, the top choice of each person for the remaining candidates becomes their new vote. In approval voting, voters may choose as many options as they wish to “approve” and the most approved option is selected. Both methods clearly have a ⿻ character both literally in allowing multiple votes and spiritually in allowing both greater consensus and greater diversity of parties by avoiding the Duverger “spoiler effect”. However, economics Nobel Laureate Kenneth Arrow famously proved in his “Impossibility Theorem” that no system with such simple inputs can generally achieve a “reasonable” representation of the common will.87
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Weighted voting: In contexts where equality of voters is obviously inappropriate, weighted voting schemes are used. Common examples are “one-share-one-vote” in corporate governance, voting based on population size in federal and confederal bodies (e.g. the European Union or United Nations) and voting based on measures of power (e.g. GDP) in contexts where it is thought important to respect power differences. These weights are, however, often the subject of significant dispute and lead to paradoxes of their own, such as the “51% attack” (also known as “tunneling”) where someone can buy 51% of a corporation and loot its assets, expropriating the remaining 49%.88
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Federal, proportional and consociational representation: While voting systems are, as we have discussed above, usually formally “monistic”, there are important examples of trying to address the tyranny of the majority this can create. In federal, consociational and functional systems, sub-units, such as geographies, religions, ethnic or professional groups, have a status beyond simply their population and usually receive some kind of special or population-disproportionate weight intended to avoid oppression by larger groups. While these systems thus in various ways incorporate ⿻ elements, their design is typically haphazard and rigid, based on historical lines of potential oppression that may no longer track the relevant social issues or can entrench existing divides by formally recognizing them; they thus have become increasingly unpopular.89 More flexible are systems of “proportional representation”, where representatives in some body are chosen in proportion to the votes they receive, helping achieve greater balance, though often at least partly “kicking the can” of majoritarian tensions down the road to the decisions of the representative body’s coalition formation.
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Quadratic voting originates with statistician (and, unfortunately, eugenicist Lionel Penrose, father of the prominent contemporary astrophysicist Roger Penrose. He noted that, when weighing votes, it is natural, but misleading, to give a party with twice the legitimate stake in a decision twice the votes. The reason is that this will typically give them more than twice as much power. Uncoordinated voters on average cancel one another out and thus the total influence of 10,000 completely independent voters is much smaller than the influence of one person with 10,000 votes.91
A physical analogy, prominently studied simultaneously with Penrose by J.C.R. Licklider (our hero in The Lost Dao above), may be useful to see why.92 Consider a noisy room where one is trying to have a conversation. It is often the case that the overall decibels of the noise are far greater than the strength of the voice of a conversation partner. Yet it is often still possible to hear what they are saying. Part of this is driven by the human capacity for focus, but another factor is that precisely what makes the background “noise” is that each contributor is far weaker than the (closer) voice one is attending to. Given that the sounds of all this noise are largely unrelated, they tend to cancel out on average and allow the one voice that is just a bit stronger to shine far stronger. Visual signal processing can be similar, where a range of scribbles fade into a gray or brown background, allowing a clear message that is only slightly stronger to stand out against it.)
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When background signals are completely uncorrelated and there are many of them, there is a simple way to mathematically account for this: a series of uncorrelated signals grows as the square root of their number, while a correlated signal grows in linear proportion to its strength. Thus 10,000 uncorrelated votes will weigh as heavily as only 100 correlated ones. This implies that, to award the holder of stake only proportionately greater power, its voting weight should grow as the square root of its stake, a principle often called “degressive proportionality”. This in turn suggests a direction for addressing several challenges above by making a geometric (multiplicative) compromise between the intuitions of weighted and simple voting and by allowing expression of preference strength across issues and votes but taking the square root of the “weight” a voter puts on any issues. The former idea is Penrose’s “square-root voting” rule, approximately used in several elements of governance in the European Union across member nations. The later is the QV rule we discussed above and used, for another example, frequently in the Colorado State Legislature to prioritize spending.
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Another compatible approach that has gained ground in recent years is “liquid democracy”(LD). This idea, which traces back to the path-breaking work of Charles Dodgson (a.k.a. Lewis Carroll, author of the children’s classic Alice in Wonderland), who also first posed the question of weighting of votes for people holding multiple votes that helped inspire QV.93 LD extends the idea of proportional representation, allowing any voter to delegate their vote(s) to others, who may then re-delegate them, allowing bottom-up, emergent patterns of representation.94 Such systems are increasingly common, especially in corporate and other for-profit (e.g. DAO) governance, as well as in a limited set of political contexts such as Iceland. However, these systems have an unfortunate tendency to concentrate power often excessively, given that delegation often flows to a small number of hands. This tendency has somewhat soured initial enthusiasm.
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Correlation discounting and eigenvoting: QV and the Penrose rule apply degressive proportionality (using the the square-root rule) to the voting weights of respectively individuals and/or social groups (like nations). A natural extension would be to allow for a wider diversity of sources of correlation/coordination within and across individuals, as would be true in a general statistical model. In this case, an optimal rule would likely involve partial “correlation discounting” based on the degree of social connection and, perhaps, the identification of underlying “principal” social factors that drive coordination and correlation, as is common in statistical modeling.95 These underlying independent factors, called “eigenvalues”, could then be viewed as the “real” independent voters, to whom degressive proportionality could be applied, a process not dissimilar to how PageRank works. This could create a dynamic, adaptive, optimized version of consociationalism that avoids its rigidity and entrenchment of existing divides.
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Adaptive representation: Another approach to similarly adaptive representation would be a single-member district or federal system, but with boundaries not based (exclusively) on geography but instead current social divides, such as geographic type (urban v. rural), race, or education. Clearly both this and the previous idea rely heavily on a ⿻ identity system to allow these features to be inputs into the voting process.
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Predictive voting: Robin Hanson has long advocated combining prediction markets (where people bet on future outcomes) with voting. While the “Futarchy” proposal he has advanced focuses on a cleaner separation between these two elements, in the governance of this book described above we use such a mixture, with participants being able to simultaneously vote and predict the outcome of a decision, being rewarded for a correct decision.96 Such systems may be particularly useful when there is a large range of proposals or options: predictions can help bring attention to proposals deserving attention that voting can then decide on.
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Quadratic liquid democracy: As noted above, a natural way to avoid the power concentrations that liquid democracy can give rise to is the use of degressive proportionality. RadicalxChange, a non-profit advancing ⿻, has implemented a related system for its internal decision-making.
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Assisted real-time voting: Another commonly discussed idea is that voting could be made far more frequent and granular if digital assistants could learn to model voters’ perspectives and preferences and vote on their behalf and subject to their review/auditing.97
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Some combination of the methods above can completely transform how we understand voting, leaving today’s approaches as far behind as the computer left the abacus. Yet it would fundamentally undermine the richness of our humanity to allow this potential to fool us into believing they can substitute for the need for the richer communication and codesign we have described in previous chapters. Only in the context of the creative collaborations, deliberations, imaginations, and administrative systems we have sketched can collective decisions be meaningful.
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To overcome this, a number of new matching platforms, such as GitCoin Grants, connect sponsors (small donors and grants) using a “plural funding” formula that accounts not just for the total funding received, but also the diversity of its source across individual contributors and connected social groups. These platforms have become important sources of funding for OSS, channeling in total more than a hundred million dollars in funding. This has been especially important to Web3 related projects, in Taiwan, and in supporting this book. They are also increasingly being applied to domains (e.g. environment, local business development) outside OSS.
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(highlight:: At the same time, for all the elaborate financial and corporate structures built on top of them, markets are perhaps the most simplistic structure conceivable as a pattern for human cooperation. While they can be applied more broadly, as we will see, the argument for their desirability rests on a vision of bilateral transactions between a buyer-seller pair, each of which is representative of a sea of similarly situated and thus equally powerless buyers and sellers, all engaging in a transaction whose effects are bounded by a predetermined set of private property rights that avoid any “externalities” on non-transacting parties. Any notion of emergent, surprising, group level effects, of supermodularity and shared goods, of heterogeneity, or of diversity of information are bracketed as “imperfections” or “frictions” that impede the natural, ideal functioning of markets.
This debate has been at the core of the conflict over capitalism, long before its ascendancy, as documented by social scientist Albert Hirschman.99 On the one hand, markets have been seen to be almost uniquely universally “civilizing”, alleviating the potential for conflict across social groups, and “dynamic”, allowing entrepreneurship to create new forms of large scale social organization that foster and support (social) innovation.100 On the other hand, markets are poor at supporting the flourishing of other forms of scaled social interaction. They corrode many of the other technologies of collaboration we describe. While allowing the creation of some new forms, they tend to turn these into exploitative, socially irresponsible, and often reckless monopolies.)
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Capitalism today
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Capitalism
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Capitalism
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Global capitalism today (sometimes called “neoliberalism” features several interlocking sectors and features, including:

1. Free trade: Extensive free trade agreements, overseen by organizations such as the World Trade Organization, ensure that a wide range of goods can flow mostly unimpeded across jurisdictions covering most of the planet.
2. Private property: Most real and intellectual assets are held as private property, conferring joined rights of use, disposal, and profit. These rights are protected by international territorial and intellectual property treaties.
3. Corporations: Most large-scale collaborations using extra-market governance are undertaken either by nation states or by transnational corporations that are operated for profit, owned by shareholders, and governed by the principle of one-share-one-vote.
4. Labor markets: Labor is based on the idea of “self-ownership” and the wage system, with some important qualifications. People are generally not free to move across jurisdictional boundaries to work.
5. Financial markets: Shares in corporations, loans and other financial instruments are traded on sophisticated financial markets that allocate capital to projects and physical investments based on projections of the future.
6. Ventures and start-ups: New corporations and thus most new forms of large-scale international cooperation come into existence through a system of “venture capital”, where “start-ups” sell shares in their potential future earnings or resale value to public markets in exchange for the funding they need to begin a new business.)
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Drawing on the traditions we described above, there a variety of renewed movements in recent years to create a “stakeholder” corporation, including Environmental, Social and Governance principles, the platform cooperativism, the distributed autonomous organizations (DAOs), “stakeholder remedies” in antitrust (viz. using antitrust violations to mandate abused stakeholders have a voice), data unions and the organization of many of the most important large foundation model companies (e.g. OpenAI and Anthropic) as partial non-profits or long-term benefit corporations.113
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Economies esteem: Related to these local currency markets are online systems where various quantitative markers of social esteem/capital (e.g. badges, followers, leaderboards, links) partly or fully replace transferable money as the “currency” of accomplishment.116 These can often, in turn, partly interoperate with broader markets through various monetization channels such as advertising, sponsorship and crowdfunding.
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Economies esteem: Related to these local currency markets are online systems where various quantitative markers of social esteem/capital (e.g. badges, followers, leaderboards, links) partly or fully replace transferable money as the “currency” of accomplishment.116 These can often, in turn, partly interoperate with broader markets through various monetization channels such as advertising, sponsorship and crowdfunding.
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- influence, social capital, credibility,
- [note::Never thought about badges/followers/likes as a "currency of accomplishment". Makes sense though. Just as money can buy influence, so can credibility.]

The Plural Management Protocol we used to create this book tracks the types and extent of contributions from diverse participants and harnesses mechanisms like we have described above to allow them to prioritize work (which then determines the recognition of those who address those issues) and determine which work should be incorporated into a project though a basis of exerting authority and predicting what others will decide.120 This allows for some of the important components of hierarchy (evaluation by trusted authorities, migration of this authority based on performance according to those authorities) without any direct hierarchical reporting structure, allowing networks to potentially supplant strict hierarchies.
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Limits
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What
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What we must guard against most rigorously is the tendency of markets to concentrate power in private organizations or limited cultural groups in ways that homogenize and erode diversity. Achieving this requires institutions that deliberately encourage new diversity, while eroding existing concentrations of power, like those we have highlighted. It also requires, as we have suggested, constantly bringing other forms of collaboration across diversity122 to intersect with markets, whether voting, deliberation, or creative collaboration, while creating market systems (like ⿻ money) that can deliberately insulate these from broader market forces.
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Tobin South, Leon Erichsen, Shrey Jain, Petar Maymounkov, Scott Moore and E. Glen Weyl, “Plural Management” (2024) at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4688040.[↩︎](private://read/01hybwpdtynd881dpqneg31s9d/#fnref1)
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The analogy here is even tighter than it might seem at first. What is usually called “energy” is actually “low entropy”; a uniformly hot system has lots of “energy” but this is not actually useful. All systems for producing “energy” work by harnessing this low entropy (“diversity”) to produce work; such systems also have the advantage of avoiding “uncontrolled” releases of heat through explosions (“conflict”). There is thus a quite literal and direct analogy between ⿻’s goal of harnessing social low entropy and industrialism’s goal of harnessing physical low entropy.
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Oded Galor
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Oded Galor, The Journey of Humanity: A New History of Wealth and Inequality with Implications for our Future (New York: Penguin Random House, 2022).
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Steven J. Brams and Peter C. Fishburn, “Approval Voting”, American Political Science Review 72, no. 3: 831-847.
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Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget a Manifesto, (London [Etc.]: Penguin Books, 2011).
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Cogburn Research Group. “1,000 Cut Journey,” n.d. https://cogburnresearchgroup.socialwork.columbia.edu/research-projects/1000-cut-journey.
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Alex Shashkevich, “Virtual Reality Can Help Make People More Empathetic,” Stanford News, October 17, 2018, https://news.stanford.edu/2018/10/17/virtual-reality-can-help-make-people-empathetic.
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“Portals Policing Project,” The Justice Collaboratory, n.d., https://www.justicehappenshere.yale.edu/projects/portals-policing-
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“Portals Policing Project,” The Justice Collaboratory, n.d., https://www.justicehappenshere.yale.edu/projects/portals-policing-project.
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www.treeofficial.com
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Youssef Nader, “The Ink Detection Journey of the Vesuvius Challenge” February 6, 2024 at https://youssefnader.com/2024/02/06/the-ink-detection-journey-of-the-vesuvius-challenge/.
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Scott E. Page, The diversity bonus: How great teams pay off in the knowledge economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019).
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James Evans. “The case for alien AI,” TedxChicago2024, October 6th, 2023, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87zET-4IQws.
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Jamshid Sourati and James Evans, “Complementary artificial intelligence designed to augment human discovery,” arXiv preprint arXiv:2207.00902 (2022), https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2207.00902.
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Minkyu Shin, Jin Kim, Bas van Opheusden, and Thomas L. Griffiths, “Superhuman artificial intelligence can improve human decision-making by increasing novelty,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 120, no. 12 (2023): e2214840120, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2214840120.
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Petter Törnberg, Diliara Valeeva, Justus Uitermark, and Christopher Bail. “Simulating social media using large language models to evaluate alternative news feed algorithms,” arXiv preprint arXiv:2310.05984 (2023), https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2310.05984.
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Vitalik Buterin, “What do I think about Community Notes?” August 16, 2023 at https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2023/08/16/communitynotes.html.
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“The World Cafe”, The World Café Community Foundation, last modified 2024, (https://theworldcafe.com/)
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“Open Space”, Open Space World, last modified 2024, https://openspaceworld.org/wp2/
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Sinan Aral, and Marshall Van Alstyne, “The diversity-bandwidth trade-off,” American journal of sociology 117, no. 1 (2011): 90-171.
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Herbert Simon, “Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World,” In Computers, Communications, and the Public Interest, edited by Martin Greenberger, 38–72. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1971. https://gwern.net/doc/design/1971-simon.pdf.
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A Citizen Deliberative Council (CDC) article on the Co-Intelligence Site https://www.co-intelligence.org/P-CDCs.html
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Tom Atlee, Empowering Public Wisdom (2012, Berkley, California, Evolver Editions, 2012)
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Liberating Structures (2024) has 33 methods for people to work together in liberating ways. Participedia is public participation and democratic innovations platform documenting methods and case studies. To get at the heart of the underlying patterns in good and effective processes two communities developed pattern languages 1) The Group Works: A Pattern Language for Brining Meetings and other Gatherings (2022) and 2) The Wise Democracy Pattern Language.
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- collaboration, group facilitation, best of, meeting facilitation, 1action, participatory democracy, relating, social connection,

Jo Freeman, “The Tyranny of Structurelessness.” WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly 41, no. 3-4 (2013): 231–46. https://doi.org/10.1353/wsq.2013.0072.
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Christopher T. Small, Michael Bjorkegren, Lynette Shaw and Colin Megill, “Polis: Scaling Deliberation by Mapping High Dimensional Opinion Spaces” Recerca: Revista de Pensament i Analàlisi 26, no. 2 (2021): 1-26.
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Matthew J. Salganik and Karen E. C. Levy, “Wiki Surveys: Open and Quantifiable Social Data Collection” PLOS One 10, no. 5: e0123483 at https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0123483.
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Aviv Ovadya and Luke Thorburn, “Bridging Systems: Open Problems for Countering Destructive Divisiveness across Ranking, Recommenders, and Governance” (2023) at https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.09976.
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Aviv Ovadya, “‘Generative CI’ Through Collective Response Systems” (2023) at https://arxiv.org/pdf/2302.00672.pdf.
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Through
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Yu-Tang Hsiao, Shu-Yang Lin, Audrey Tang, Darshana Narayanan and Claudina Sarahe, “vTaiwan: An Empirical Study of Open Consultation Process in Taiwan” (2018) at https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/xyhft.
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Meghna Irons, “Some Bostonians Feel Largely Unheard, With MIT’s ‘Real Talk’ Portal Now Public, Here’s a Chance to Really Listen,” The Boston Globe, October 21, 2021, https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/10/25/metro/some-bostonians-feel-largely-unheard-with-mits-real-talk-portal-now-public-heres-chance-really-listen/.
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Lisa Argyle, Christopher Bail, Ethan Busby, Joshua Gubler, Thomas Howe, Christopher Rytting, Taylor Sorensen, and David Wingate, “Leveraging AI for democratic discourse: Chat interventions can improve online political conversations at scale.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 120, no. 41 (2023): e2311627120.
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Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
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Kim Stanley Robinson, Ministry for the Future (London: Orbit Books, 2020).
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- futurism, 1resource/book, science fiction,

Jake Ramthun, Biplov Bhandari and Tim Mayer, “How SERVIR Uses AI to Turn Earth Science into Climate Action”, SERVIR blog November 21, 2023 at https://servirglobal.net/news/how-servir-uses-ai-turn-earth-science-climate-action.
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Ory Okolloh, “Ushahidi, or ‘Testimony’: Web 2.0 Tools for Crowdsourcing Crisis Information” in Holly Ashley ed., Change at Hand: Web 2.0 for Development (London: International Institute for Environment and Development, 2009).↩︎
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Danielle Allen, David Kidd and Ariana Zetlin, “A Call to More Equitable Learning: How Next-Generation Badging Improves Education for All” Edmond and Lil Safra Center for Ethics and Democratic Knowledge Project, August 2022 at https://www.nextgenbadging.org/whitepaper.
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The Economist, “The Mathematical Method that Could Offer a Fairer Way to Vote”, December 18, 2021.
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For a lengthier discussion see E. Glen Weyl, “Why I am a Pluralist” RadicalxChange Blog, February 10, 2022 at https://www.radicalxchange.org/media/blog/why-i-am-a-pluralist/.
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Nils Gilman and Ben Cerveny, “Tomorrow’s Democracy is Open Source”, Noema September 12, 2023 at https://www.noemamag.com/tomorrows-democracy-is-open-source/.
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Eric A. Posner
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Eric A. Posner and E. Glen Weyl, Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018).
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Vitalik Buterin, Zoë Hitzig and E. Glen Weyl, “A Flexible Design for Funding Public Goods”, Management Science 65, no. 11 (2019): 4951-5448.
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See Erich Joachimsthaler, The Interaction Field: The Revolutionary New Way to Create Shared Value for Businesses, Customers, and Society, PublicAffairs, 2019.
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See also Gary Hamel, and Michele Zanini, Humanocracy: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People inside Them, (Boston, Massachusetts: Harvard Business Review Press, 2020).
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An interesting first experiment in this direction is being undertaken by the Web3 protocol Optimism, which uses a mixture of one-share-one-vote and more democratic methods in different “houses” to govern its protocol.
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Pooling across diversity is a very general principle. Although size matters, bigger is not always better, and the strength of the connections formed can matter more. For example, families, teams or troops – small networks connected by high-value interactions – can outperform much larger ones in the production of ⿻ goods. If we consider the record of Paleolithic art, banding together to perform key social functions is extremely ancient, so collaborative pooling at a range of scales, albeit by non-state and non-market actors, seems an exception to the rule that ‘public goods’ are always under-supplied.↩︎
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What allows for peaceful and beneficial, yet dramatic, progress? In her classic treatise on the topic, social philosopher Hannah Arendt contrasts the American and French Revolutions.2 The American Revolution, she argues, grew out of local democratic experiments inspired by migrants exploring ancient ideals (both from their own past and, as we have recently learned, that of their new neighbors) to build a life together in a new and often hazardous setting.3 As they traded ideas and built on related concepts circulating at the time, they came to a broad conclusion that they had discovered something more general about governance that contrasted to how it was practiced in Britain. This gave what Arendt calls “authority” (similar to what in our “Association and ⿻ Publics” chapter we call “legitimacy” to their expectations of democratic republican government. Their War of Independence against Britain allowed this authoritative structure to be empowered in a manner that, for all its inconsistencies, hypocrisies and failures, has been one of the more enduring and progressive examples of social reform.
The French Revolution, on the other hand, was born of widespread popular dissatisfaction with material conditions, which they sought to redress immediately by seizing power, long before they had gained authority for, or even detailed, potential alternative forms of governance. While this led to dramatic social upheavals, many of these were quickly reversed and/or were accompanied by significant violence. In this sense, the French Revolution, while polarizing and widely discussed, failed in many of its core aspirations. By placing immediate material demands and the power to achieve them ahead of the process of building authority, the French Revolution burdened the delicate process of building social legitimacy for a new system with more weight than it could bear. The French Revolution demanded, and got, bread; the American demanded, and got, freedom.)
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The basic challenge is that “experimentation with” is dangerous when paired with a fully capitalist market-driven model of managing new technologies. Because it seeks to manage system harms, challenges and interdependencies as they arise, rather than by a priori testing, it requires that the development process itself be driven by a more holistic notion of the technology’s impact on the adopting community than sales or adoption figures allow.10
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The key danger is that technologies may be usable as weapons or otherwise harnessed by the community to benefit at the expense of others, a far more common effect than may appear at first glance because even “helpful” and “harmless” tools may endow the (often-privileged) early adopted community with social and economic advantages that they can use to subjugate, marginalize or colonize others. As Microsoft’s President Brad Smith frequently repeats, most tools can also be used as weapons.11 This “competitive” effect has some benefits, in spurring adoption by and spread across communities seeking to harness the benefit of the tools partly in their rivalry and potentially by doing so creating pressure to harness and resolve resulting rivalries. But it can also, at best, create exclusion and inequality that undermines the basis of ⿻ freedom and, at worst, can lead to “arms race” dynamics that undermine the benefits of new tools and instead turn them into universal dangers.
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(highlight:: This sketches an ambitious but reasonably clear picture of what a ⿻ strategy for diffusing ⿻ looks like:

1. Seeds must be of a scale of community sufficient to encompass the diversity the technology aims to bridge, but also small enough to be one of a very large number of such experiments.
2. Seeds should be communities of early adopters gaining tangible value or with a clear interest in not just using but contributing to the technology and not so vulnerable that to-be-expected failures will prove deeply harmful.
3. Seeds should have prestige within some network or be able to attain it with help from the technology, so further spread is likely.
4. Seeds should be strong communities with institutions to manage and address the systemic harms and support the systemic benefits of the technologies.
5. Seeds should be diverse among themselves and have loose networks of communication between them to ensure a balanced diffusion, avoid conflict and address spillovers.)
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(highlight::
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Figure 6-0-B. Illustration of the ⿻ marketing approach of bridging and covering social divisions.
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*
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to illustrate that trying to achieve them is not impractical, we implemented using these criteria in marketing this book (viz. in choosing endorsements to pursue, media to seek coverage in, events to hold, etc.), an approach we refer to as ⿻ Marketing. While fully illustrating this is complex, we show our approach to the last criterion in Figure B. We took our full audience, tried to consider the primary lines of division within it, and then chose a marketing vector (such as an endorser) with respect across these lines of division, then recursively applied this approach to each sub-community; Figure B shows the categories thus generated two levels deep into the associated “tree”. As to whether the result of this approach was effective and whether we
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To realize the benefits of ⿻ technology within a community requires the community to contain at least a rough approximation of the diversity that technology aims to span. This differs dramatically across various directions of technology. The most intimate technologies of post-symbolic communication and immersive shared reality can be powerful even in the smallest communities and relationships, creating few constraints on scale and diversification of seeding and thus making it natural to prioritize other criteria above. At the opposite extreme, voting systems and markets are rarely used in intimate communities and require significant scale to be relevant, especially in their socially enriched forms, making entry points far scarcer, more ambitious, and potentially hazardous.
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(highlight::
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Figure 6-0-C. Illustration of the “square-root scale” of social change, where there are an equal number of units within each experimental site as experimental sites, along with symbols of the sectors we study. Source: Generated by authors, all icons in the public domain.
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While any simplistic quantitative representation falls short of the richness needed to characterize such examples, a simple rule of thumb is to seek roughly the same diversity across communities as within communities as quantified by the number of units as illustrated in Figure C. In a world of (very roughly 10 billion people, these would be units of roughly 100,000 people, as there are 100,000 such units if the whole world were partitioned into them: they have the scale of the square root of global population. There is, of course, nothing magic about 100,000, but it offers a rough sense of the scale of communities and organizations that are the most fertile ground in which to plant the seeds of ⿻.
There are many kinds of communities at this scale. Geographically, this is roughly the scale of most middle-sized municipalities (large towns or small cities). Economically, it is the size of employees in a large corporation or, politically, in a median nation. Religiously, it is, for example, roughly the number of Catholics in a Diocese. Educationally, it is a bit larger than the number of students at a large university. Socially, it resembles the membership of many mid-sized civic organizations or social movements. Culturally, it is roughly the active fan base of a typical television program, performing artist or professional sports club. In short, it is a prevalent level of organization in a wide range of social spheres, offering rich terrain for surveying.)
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Perhaps the most extreme manifestation has been the rise of so-called “digital nomads”, who have harnessed the increasing opportunity for remote work to travel continuously and work a variety of remote jobs as encouraged by programs like Sardinia regional program for digital nomads and Estonia and Taiwan’s e-citizenship and gold cards respectively, that one author of this book holds.
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Global collaboration in virtual environments has been effective for interdisciplinary teamwork, particularly in healthcare education21, highlighting its utility in overcoming geographic barriers.22 Virtual worlds foster team creativity by providing avatars for personal expression, immersive experiences for co-presence, and tools for modifying environments, enhancing creative collaboration across distributed teams.23 Furthermore, 3D virtual worlds and games, like those developed in Second Life for team building, offer cost-effective solutions for enhancing communication, emotional engagement, and situational awareness among team members, proving essential for teamwork in safety-critical domains.2425
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In-person teams often engage in a variety of joint learnings or other not-directly-productive activities to build team trust, connection and spirit. These range from casual lunches to various kinds of extreme team sports, such as “trust falls”26, simulated military exercises, ropes courses, etc. What nearly all these have in common is that they create a shared activity that benefits from and thus helps develop trust among member
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- career, team synergy, collaboration, trust,
- [note::"Trust is the lubricant of collaboration"]

In short, these tools could make the design of physical space much more like what word processing and collaborative documents have made writing: a process that is able to engage in broad experimentation and accumulate diverse feedback before it must be greatly scaled.
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- [note::Virtual workplaces allow for collaborative design]

Difficult
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In the realm of white-collar work, meetings are a notorious time sink, with office employees dedicating about 18 hours a week on average. This not only represents approximately $25,000 in annual payroll costs per employee but also encompasses meetings that 30% of employees find unnecessary. Moreover, a reduction in meetings by 40% has been linked to a 71% surge in productivity, underlining the critical need for streamlining communication.31 Anything that could significantly speed meetings and increase their quality could transform organizational productivity.32
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An important reason why, despite the rise of asynchronous communication via services like Slack, Teams and Trello, synchronous meetings remain so prevalent is that asynchronous dialogs often suffer from the same lack of thoughtful time and attention management that are necessary to make synchronous meetings successful. Approaches like Polis, Remesh, All Our Ideas and their increasingly sophisticated LLM-based extensions promise to significantly improve this, making it increasingly possible to have respectful, inclusive and informative asynchronous conversations that include many more stakeholders.
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- [note::Something I wish was a norm: setting aside time in your team members' calendars to NOT meet and instead, have employees asynchronously review or comment on a document or submit their thoughts about a decision to be made. Then, reviewing the responses together at a later date.]

What is instead required is a process that harnesses the ingenuity of everyone who has a stake in the organization’s success, as highlighted by W. Edwards Deming‘s work on Total Quality Management.33 Imagine an open conversation that generates tens of thousands of insights and ideas (for instance around customers’ needs or emerging trends) and uses collective intelligence to combine, prioritize, and ultimately distill them into a common point of view about what lies ahead. What are the big opportunities that can redefine who we are? What are the biggest challenges we need to tackle head-on? What aspiration truly reflects our common purpose? By opening the conversation to new voices, encouraging unorthodox thinking, and fostering horizontal dialogue, it’s possible to transform a top-down ritual into an exciting, participative quest to define a shared future.
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Aligning
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In ⿻ workplaces, the traditional single hierarchy can be complemented by multiple, issue-specific hierarchies in the spirit of the ⿻ theory of identity. Power can shift fluidly based on contribution. Emerging technologies can help match value added with decision rights. For example, natural language processing can sift through communication data to spot associates who consistently provide valuable insights on specific topics. Generative foundation models (GFMs) can create dynamic social graphs that pinpoint key network figures and provide rich context on the nature of their connections
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In ⿻ workplaces, the traditional single hierarchy can be complemented by multiple, issue-specific hierarchies in the spirit of the ⿻ theory of identity. Power can shift fluidly based on contribution. Emerging technologies can help match value added with decision rights. For example, natural language processing can sift through communication data to spot associates who consistently provide valuable insights on specific topics. Generative foundation models (GFMs) can create dynamic social graphs that pinpoint key network figures and provide rich context on the nature of their connections and compile feedback from various sources to present a comprehensive assessment of an individual’s “natural leadership.” These approaches recognize and reward valuable contributions of people irrespective of role, and serve as a reality check for those who still occupy formal positions of authority. Over time, they can reduce dependency on formal hierarchies altogether.
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- [note::Yeahhh, but all these utopian ways of working require the codification and classification of every interaction across. Such codification/classification could be achieved, but it seems to me there would be countless issues related to the technology that's ultimately deciding which people are granted decision making power and why.]

Supporting intrapreneurship
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Google (now Alphabet) has traditionally given employees 20% of their time free to pursue passion projects for the organization, outside their primary organizational role.38 Yet this suffers the obvious challenge that individuals may pursue idiosyncratic projects that at worst may not be aligned to the broader mission and at best usually fail to scale as they do not bring enough people together to cooperate on an ambitious project.
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A natural alternative to the extremes of centralized management and uncoordinated individual initiative would be to harness ⿻ conversational and funding tools. An organization like OCTO could have a much larger budget, but much less discretion, providing matchmaking and cross-pollination services and matching funds for investments with support from many organizations. It could use data from or posting within internal communication platforms to identify cross-organizational clusters of interests, host free and fun events to build connections across these organizations, and then offer matching funds if a diversity of organizations are willing to invest employee time or other resources in supporting a shared investment or incubation. Compared to the “20% time model”, this would offer much more “free time” to pursue projects that have genuine cross-organizational support, but that one’s direct reporting chain sees as tangential, and less support for purely idiosyncratic interests. As such, it would empower employees to coordinate investments among themselves that could transform the business overall, allowing agility to avoid disruption.
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- [note::This sounds similar to Richard D Bartlett's description of Enspiral]

6-2
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At the same time, progress in health-related Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) has stalled or reversed39, half the world’s population lacks access to essential health services40, impoverishing healthcare payments affect hundreds of millions each year41, mental health services worldwide are severely underdeveloped42, half of premature deaths are caused by non-communicable diseases43 costing more than $2 trillion annually44, and less than 3% of the world’s population in some countries has access to basic assistive technologies (wheelchairs, walkers, canes, prosthetic limbs, eyeglasses, white canes, and hearing aids45. If we can address these social and intersubjective threats to health as effectively as we have the atomistic ones, we can easily add another 20 years to human life expectancy in the next century.
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(highlight::
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Figure 6-2-A. The Relational Concept of Health - Including social and intersubjective aspects of health rather than just the atomistic
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Health insurance in practice varies along the three dimensions of prepayment, risk pooling, and redistribution. Private insurance in a competitive market faces the problem that insurers with better information can draw off lower-risk individuals by charging less, leaving the non-discriminating insurer with an ‘adverse selection’ of high-risk patients49. Private health insurance in a market economy thus tends to reduce to an actuarially informed health savings plan (i.e. with no risk pooling or redistribution), similar to self-managed Health Savings Accounts (HSAs in the US.50 This voids the HSA of most insurance value, including that of prudential savings, since individuals cannot calibrate their savings rates without actuarial information.
On the opposite extreme, “single-payer” national health insurance, financed by general government revenues and enacted through a compulsory and universal mandate, embodies the three elements of prepayment, risk pooling, and redistribution. However, such systems are rigidly based on a nation-state concept that is only one way of achieving pooling and redistribution at scale. For example, the Scandinavian countries admired for their socialization of risk have smaller populations than most large private health insurers in the US.)
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(highlight::
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Figure 6-2-B. Different Pathways to Impact - Illustrating the knock-on effects that outcomes have in the world at large
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(highlight:: large
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Taiwan followed a very different path, with rapid government support of citizen-led initiatives for, for example, tracking the supply of masks. By moving quickly to empower citizen-led online initiatives (g0v, Polis), Taiwan was able to harvest the power of localized and contextual knowledge as a ⿻ good without imposing centralized control while respecting privacy. Taiwan’s “extitutional” approach was so successful that it has now been institutionalized. With eloquent examples such as these, it follows that policymaking during the next novel pandemic will not be the sole prerogative of epidemiological experts in closed-room consultations, and that ⿻ technologies will be widely used for the large-scale formulation of and coordination around collective action.
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Eyeglasses and hearing aids are low bitrate computing devices that interface (unidirectionally, or write only) with our brains through the sensory organs; canes, crutches and wheelchairs are low bit-rate mechanical computers that interface with the brain bidirectionally (i.e. read/write), through the intermediary of both the sensory and motor organs. Digital assistive devices, such as smartphones or portable computers, are (slightly) higher bit-rate devices that interface with the brain (read/write) through the intermediary of the sensory-motor system (usually the visual, hearing and fine-motor systems) but also through higher-order domains of functioning such as speech (e.g. voice recognition), cognition (e.g. CAPTCHAs) and memory (e.g. passwords). These ‘BCIs’ interact through a range of input/output devices including keyboards, (touch)screens and a variety of other read/write interfaces. Such higher bit-rate digital computing tools have become for many people an indispensable part of what it means ‘to be human’: as anyone who has lost their smartphone knows, the experience is one of significant disability.
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In Web2 applications such as Facebook and Google, users “willingly” share their private information in exchange for the social benefits afforded by the platforms. That is, even knowing that their information is being harvested for profit by third-party entities, many individuals presumably still find that membership in online Web2 communities offers a net benefit. What if there was no trade-off between privacy and utility? What if accessing medical services did not incur an open-ended contingent liability for the privacy of the individual? Medical administrative data is ‘safe’ for everyone until the system is hacked because of, for example, a phishing attack: in the long run, we all face data theft with Web2 systems. Rethinking medical practice (which requires patient data for the patient’s own benefit) and medical research (which requires patient data for the benefit of others) so as to build in cryptographic principles from the foundation is an essential part of the Web3 project, with important health implications: no doubt some diseases today are still fatal only because of our failure to build such applications. Extending the diagnostic example, medical notes of all kinds (e.g. admission, treatment, discharge) forming a part of a patient’s record are a potentially vast source of information about care and outcomes that is not only highly diffuse and unstructured but also virtually unqueryable outside of a set of specific and restricted medicolegal contexts. If there is a way to extract weak, or highly confounded, signals as the basis for novel causal insights, GFMs are perhaps the only technology that might do so. Variations in medical practice and outcomes should in principle make it possible to identify and extract the relevant counterfactual, much as - at the population level - regression discontinuity design does. Such practices could transform a variety of medical practices, such as making post-approval regulatory changes far more dynamic and adaptive.
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- [note::This might interest Rose in terms of a career in cybersecurity?]

The direct experiences most of us have in our everyday lives expose us to only a tiny sliver of global affairs. Almost everything we believe we know beyond this is mediated through relationships, schooling, and, most of the time, “media”, especially journalism (radio, television, newspapers) and social media, as well as directed small or large group communications such as email and group chats.
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While they have reached a limited audience so far given the image quality and nausea-related challenges of existing virtual reality (VR) headsets, journalists and artists have already begun to pioneer a variety of empathetic VR experiences. Examples include Milica Zec and Winslow Porter’s work to help people experience life as non-human life like a tree, Decontee Davis’s portrait of one of the world’s most horrific diseases from the eyes of an Ebola survivor and Yasmin Eyalat’s animated immersion within the world of cyber-security.62
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Social media algorithms could create “communities” based both on patterns of behavior internal to the platform (e.g. views, likes, responses, propagation, choices to join) and on external data such as social science or group explicit self-identification (more on this below). For each such community, the algorithms could highlight “common content” (commonly agreed facts and values of the group that spans the divides internally, as well as important points of division within the community. Content could then be highlighted to members of the communities within this social context, making clear which content is rough consensus in the communities that a citizen is a member of and which content is divisive, as well as offering opportunities for the citizen to explore content that is consensus on the other side of each divide from the one she is on within that community.
Such a design would continue to offer individuals and communities the agency social media affords them to respectively shape their own intersectional identities and self-govern. Yet at the same time, it would avoid the rampant “false consensus” effect where netizens come to believe that extreme or idiosyncratic views are widely shared, fueling demonization of those who do not share them and a feeling of resentment when associated political outcomes are not achieved or “pluralistic ignorance” where netizens are unable to act collectively on “silent majority” views.64 Furthermore, and perhaps most importantly, it would reshape the incentives of journalists and other creators away from divisive content and towards stories that bring us together.)
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(highlight:: Biodiversity has plummeted; between 2001 and 2014 alone, approximately 173 species vanished—25 times the historical extinction rate. During the 20th century, some 543 vertebrate species disappeared, an event that would typically unfold over 10,000 years.69
Of course, we humans are not immune to the effects. Air pollution alone kills nearly 6.7 million people every year, including half a million infants. In severely polluted countries, average life expectancy falls by up to six years.70)
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In Taiwan, the Location Aware Sensor System (LASS, an open-source environment sensing network, empowers ordinary citizens to gather and share information freely, developing into a model of digital communication that incorporates local wisdom through citizen science. Instead of relying on authoritative organizations to shape public perceptions, LASS embraces direct action, extending community values into environmental care.
This type of citizen science community, which covers air, forest, and river sensing, is based on the spirit of open-source rainmaking, and also contributes to the “Civil IoT” data coalition, which provides real-time sensing information updated every 3-5 minutes across the country, serving as a common ground for activists, and making it easier for ideas to solve problems to be examined and disseminated.)
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Shared data can be transformed by data coalitions using generative foundation models (GFMs) into means of conversation with nature. These can serve as valuable tools for knowledge sharing and collective problem-solving regarding complex, cross-border problems.
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Through GFMs, we can unlock deeper insights into our complex natural world. Scientific research and environmental management benefit from these insights, improving both and potentially reshaping society, as we have seen in the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s ongoing collaboration with IBM on a Geospatial Foundation Model based on NASA’s earth observation data, tackling crucial notions of environmental justice for natural spaces and human communities alike.73
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(highlight:: The pandemic has accelerated the popularization of self-directed learning and the integration of online and offline, promoting the digitization of educational resources and making self-directed learning more widespread. The “FutureLearn” platform supported by the Open University of the UK and the mobile university education system “Minerva” are good examples. They break traditional limitations and provide learners and educators with diverse learning methods and cross-cultural exchange opportunities.
“FutureLearn” is Europe’s largest online course platform, bringing together course resources from universities and professional institutions, covering multiple specialized fields such as social sciences, humanities and arts, and programming. It also collaborates with UNESCO on global lifelong learning84 projects; furthermore, the platform offers free courses including those providing basic English online learning for refugees85, allowing anyone to access quality education at low or zero cost, meet diverse learning goals, and have flexibility.)
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The mobile university education system Minerva86 breaks the limitations of traditional campuses. Students migrate to different cities every semester, interacting with diverse teaching methods and cultural characteristics through practical application. Minerva differs from traditional universities in student selection and learning methods, adopting global recruitment and online small group models, encouraging critical thinking and practical application-oriented cooperation, which has drawn attention for its innovation87.
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AI can help build more broadly inclusive cross-cultural communication models by analyzing cultural norms, social customs, and subtle differences in language. By understanding these factors and feasible directions, AI can also help individuals overcome potential cultural barriers and adjust their communication styles to ensure mutual understanding. It can identify and address potentially harmful or biased language. These neutral datasets can also be used to eliminate discrimination and malicious attacks, serving as an alternative suggestion tool to control dangerous biases that may exist in new datasets, aligning in real-time with diverse collaborative open-source tools. If not done so, these datasets may corrupt or influence generations of AI.
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The
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The spirit of “edutainment” interweaves the pursuit of knowledge with the sharing of joy.
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- [note::Love this term - educational/social video games comes to mind.]

(highlight:: Gamified learning environments break down traditional teacher-student boundaries, creating an immersive and interactive experience. In such an environment, each participant is a creator and sharer of knowledge. This sense of participation and accomplishment is the charm of gamified learning.
Each collaboration and each project is a continuation of the game, where individual uniqueness can be highlighted and collective wisdom can be gathered. It is a dance with oneself, with others, and with the world in an infinite game. In this game, the concept of edutainment comes from the investment of participation, and meaning comes from the process of exploration. Let us embrace this infinite possibility, so that learning is no longer a finite game oriented towards results, but an ⿻ infinite game full of surprises and unleashing potential, in which every participant is an indispensable co-creator.)
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Hannah Arendt, On Revolution, (New York: Penguin, 1963).
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Fran Baum, Colin MacDougall and Danielle Smith, “Participatory Action Research”, Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health 60, no. 10: 854-857.
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Reid Hoffman and Chris Yeh, Blitzscaling: The Lightening-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies (New York: Currency, 2018). For a thoughtful and balanced evaluation see Donald F. Kuratko, Harrison L. Holt and Emily Neubert, “Blitzscaling: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly”, Business Horizons 63, no. 1 (2020): 109-119.
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Daron Acemoglu and Todd Lensman, Regulating Tranformative Technologies (2023) at https://www.nber.org/papers/w31461.
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Brad Smith and Carol Ann Browne, Tools and Weapons: The Promise and the Peril of the Digital Age (New York: Penguin, 2019).
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Friedrich Naumann Foundation. “Examples of Civic Tech Communities-Governments Collaboration Around The World,” n.d. https://www.freiheit.org/publikation/examples-civic-tech-communities-governments-collaboration-around-world.
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Cameron Klein, Deborah DiazGranados, Eduardo Salas, Huy Le, Shawn Burke, Rebecca Lyons, and Gerald Goodwin, “Does Team Building Work?” Small Group Research 40, no. 2 (January 16, 2009): 181–222. https://doi.org/10.1177/1046496408328821.
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Natalia Emanuel, Emma Harrington, and Amanda Pallais, “The Power of Proximity to Coworkers: Training for Tomorrow or Productivity Today?” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper no 31880 (November 2023): https://doi.org/10.3386/w31880.
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Longqi Yang, David Holtz, Sonia Jaffe, Siddharth Suri, Shilpi Sinha, Jeffrey Weston, Connor Joyce, et al., “The Effects of Remote Work on Collaboration among Information Workers,” Nature Human Behaviour 6, no. 1 (September 9, 2021): 43–54. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-021-01196-4.
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Pekka Alahuhta, Emma Nordbäck, Anu Sivunen, and Teemu Surakka, “Fostering Team Creativity in Virtual Worlds,” Journal For Virtual Worlds Research 7, no. 3 (July 20, 2014): https://doi.org/10.4101/jvwr.v7i3.7062.[↩︎](private://read/01hybwpdtynd881dpqneg31s9d/#fnref23)
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Jason Ellis, Kurt Luther, Katherine Bessiere, and Wendy Kellogg, “Games for Virtual Team Building,” Proceedings of the 7th ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (February 25, 2008): pp 295–304, https://doi.org/10.1145/1394445.1394477.
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Heide Lukosch, Bas van Nuland, Theo van Ruijven, Linda van Veen, and Alexander Verbraeck, “Building a Virtual World for Team Work Improvement,” Frontiers in Gaming Simulation, 2014, 60–68, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-04954-0_8.
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Michael Gibbs, Friederike Mengel, and Christoph Siemroth, “Work from Home and Productivity: Evidence from Personnel and Analytics Data on Information Technology Professionals,” Journal of Political Economy Microeconomics 1, no. 1 (February 1, 2023): 7–41, https://doi.org/10.1086/721803.
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W. Edwards Deming, “Improvement of Quality and Productivity through Action by Management”, National Productivity Review 1, no. 1 (1981): 12-22.
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Satya Nadella with Greg Shaw and Jill Tracie Nichols, Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft’s Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone (New York: Harper Business, 2017).
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Annika Steiber and Sverker Alänge, “A Corporate System for Continuous Innovation: the Case of Google Inc.”, European Journal of Innovation Management 16, no. 2: 243-264.
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John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, Revised edition, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).
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Gary Marks and Norman Miller, “Ten Years of Research on the False-Consensus Effect: An Empirical and Theoretical Review, Psychological Bulletin 102, no. 1: 72-90.
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Deborah A. Prentice and Dale T. Miller,”Pluralistic Ignorance and the Perpetuation of Social Norms by Unwitting Actors“, Advances in Social Psychology 28 (1996): 161-209.
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If ⿻ succeeds, in a decade we imagine a transformed relationship among and across governments, private technology development and open source/civil society. In this future, public funding (both from governments and charitable initiatives) is the primary source of financial support for fundamental digital protocols, while the provision of such protocols in turn becomes a central item on the agenda of governments and charitable actors. This infrastructure is developed trans-nationally, by civil society collaborations and standard setting organizations supported by an international network of government leaders focused on these goals. The fabric created by these networks and the open protocols they develop, standardize, safeguard and become the foundation for a new “international rules-based order”, an operating system for a transnational ⿻ society.
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Today, most research and development and the overwhelming majority of software development occurs in for-profit private corporations. What little (half a percent of GDP in an average OECD country funding is spent on research and development by governments is primarily non-digital and overwhelmingly funds “basic research.” This is in contrast to open source code and protocols that can be directly be used by most citizens, civil groups and businesses. Spending on public software R&D pales by comparison to the several percent of GDP most countries spend on physical infrastructure.
In the future we imagine that governments and charities will ensure we devote roughly 1% of GDP to digital public research, development, protocols and infrastructure, amounting to nearly a trillion US dollars a year globally or roughly half of currently global investment in information technology. This would increase public investment by at least two orders of magnitude and, given how much volunteer investment even limited financial investment in open source software and other public investment has been able to stimulate, completely change the character of digital industries: the “digital economy” would become a ⿻ society.)
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The most widely understood models of technology policy today are captured by legal scholar Anu Bradford in her Digital Empires.1 In the US and the large fraction of the world that consumes its technology exports, technology development is dominated by a simplistic, private sector-driven, neoliberal free market model. In People’s Republic of China (PRC) and consumers of its exports, technology development is steered heavily by the state towards national goals revolving around sovereignty, development and national security. In Europe, the primary focus has been on regulation of technology imports from abroad to ensure they protect European standards of fundamental human rights, forcing others to comply with this “Brussels effect”. While this trichotomy is a bit stereotyped and each jurisdiction incorporates elements of each of these strategies, the outlines are a useful foil for considering the alternative model we want to describe.
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Just as Taiwan’s Yushan (Jade) Mountain rises from the intersection of the Eurasian and Pacific tectonic plates, the policy approach we surveyed in our Life of a Digital Democracy chapter from its peak arises from the intersection of the philosophies behind these three digital empires as illustrated in Figure A. From the US model, Taiwan has drawn the emphasis on a dynamic, decentralized, free, entrepreneurial ecosystem open to the world that generates scalable and exportable technologies, especially within the open source ecosystem. From the European model, it has drawn a focus on human rights and democracy as the fundamental aspirations both for the development of basic digital public infrastructure and on which the rest of the digital ecosystem depends. From the PRC model, it has drawn the importance of public investment to proactively advance technology, steering it toward societal interests. ... Together these add up to a model where the public sector’s primary role is active investment and support to empower and protect privately complemented but civil society-led, technology development whose goal is proactively building a digital stack that embodies in protocols principles of human rights and democracy.
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(highlight::
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pluralitybook/plurality/main/figs/Taiwanpolicymodel.png
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Figure 2-0-A. An illustration of how the Taiwan policy model emerges from the intersection of PRC, US, and EU competing alternatives. Source: generated by authors, harnessing logos from the Noun Project by Gan Khoon Lay, Alexis Lilly, Adrien Coquet and Rusma Trari Handini under CC BY 3.0 at https://thenounproject.com/.
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(highlight:: While Lick’s approach mostly played out at universities, given they were the central locus of the development of advanced computing at the time, it contrasted sharply with the traditional support of fundamental, curiosity-driven research of funders like the US National Science Foundation. He did not offer support for general academic investigation and research, but rather to advance a clear mission and vision: building a network of easily accessible computing machines that enabled communication and association over physical and social distance, interconnecting and sharing resources with other networks to enable scalable cooperation.
Yet while dictating this mission, Lick did not prejudge the right components to achieve it, instead establishing a network of “coopetitive” research labs, each experimenting and racing to develop prototypes of different components of these systems that could then be standardized in interaction with each other and spread across the network. Private sector collaborators played important roles in contributing to this development, including Bolt Beranek and Newman (where Lick served as Vice President just before his role at IPTO and which went on to build a number of prototype systems for the internet) and Xerox PARC (where many of the researchers Lick supported later assembled and continued their work, especially after federal funding diminished). Yet, as is standard in the development and procurement of infrastructure and public works in a city, these roles were components of an overall vision and plan developed by the networked, multi-sectoral alliance that constituted ARPANET. Contrast this with a model primarily developed and driven in the interest of private corporations, the basis for most personal computing and mobile operating systems, social networks and cloud infrastructures.)
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As we have noted repeatedly above, we need not only look back to the “good old days” for ARPANET or Taiwan for inspiration. India’s development of the “India Stack” has many similar characteristics.8 More recently, the EU has been developing initiatives including European Digital Identityand Gaia-X. Jurisdictions as diverse as Brazil and Singapore have experimented successfully with similar approaches. While each of these initiatives has strengths and weaknesses, the idea that a public mission aimed at creating infrastructure that empowers decentralized innovation in collaboration with civil society and participation but not dominance from the private sector is increasingly a pattern, often labeled “digital public infrastructure” (DPI). To a large extent, we are primarily advocating for this approach to be scaled up and become the central approach to the development of global ⿻ society. Yet for this to occur, the ARPA and Taiwan models need to be updated and adjusted for this potentially dramatically increased scale and ambition.
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Digital (hopefully soon, ⿻) ministries, emerging worldwide, are proving to be a more natural forum for setting visionary goals in a participatory way, surpassing traditional military hosts. A well-known example is Ukraine’s Mykhailo Fedorov, the Minister of Digital Transformation since 2019. Taiwan was a forerunner in this domain as well, appointing a digital minister in 2016 and establishing a formal Ministry of Digital Affairs in 2022. Japan, recognizing the urgency of digitalization during the pandemic, founded its Digital Agency at the cabinet level in 2021, inspired by discussions with Taiwan. The EU has increasingly formalized its digital portfolio under the leadership of Executive Vice President of the European Commission for a Europe Fit for the Digital Age Margrethe Vestager
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Yet national homes for ⿻ infrastructure constitute only a few of the poles holding up its tent. There is no country today that can or should alone be the primary locus for such efforts. They must be built as at least international and probably transnational networks, just as the internet is. Digital ministers, as their positions are created, must themselves form a network that can provide international support to this work and connect nation-based nodes just as ARPANET did for university-based nodes. Many of the open source projects participating will not themselves have a single primary national presence, spanning many jurisdictions and participating as a transnational community, to be respected on terms that will in some cases be roughly equal to those of national digital ministries.
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Exclusively high-level government-to-government relationships are severely limited by the broader state of current international relations. Many of the countries where the internet has flourished have had at-times troubled relationships with other countries where it has flourished. Many civil actors have stronger transnational relationships than their governments would agree to supporting at an intergovernmental level, mirroring consistent historical patterns where civil connections through, for example, religion and advocacy of human rights have created a stronger foundation for cooperation than international relations alone. Technology, for better or worse, often crosses borders and boundaries of ideology more easily than treaties can be negotiated.
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velopers. As we have extensively discussed, these already provide the backbone of much of the global technology stack. Yet they receive virtually no measurable financial support from governments and very little from charities, despite their work belonging (mostly fully to the public domain and their being developed mostly in the public interest.
Furthermore, this sector is in many ways better-suited to the development of infrastructure than academic research, much as public infrastructure in the physical world is generally not built by academia. Academic research is heavily constrained by disciplinary foci and boundaries that civil infrastructure that is broadly usable is unlikely to respect. Academic careers depend on citation, credit and novelty in a way that is unlikely to align with the best aspirations for infrastructure, which often can and should be invisible, “boring” and as easily interoperable with (rather than “novel” in contrast to) other infrastructure as possible. Academic research often focuses on a degree and disciplinary style of rigor and persuasiveness that differs in kind from the ideal user experience. While public support for academic research is crucial and in some areas academic projects can contribute to ⿻ infrastructure, governments and charities should not primarily look to the academic research sector. And while academic research receives hundreds of billions of dollars in funding globally annually, open source communities have likely received less than two billion dollars in their entire history, accounting for known sources as we illustrate in Figure B. Many of these concerns have been studied and highlighted by the “decentralized science” movement.13
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(highlight:: will depend on reorienting legal, regulatory and financial systems to empower these types of organizations. Tax revenue will need to be raised, ideally in ways that are not only consistent with but actually promote ⿻ directly, to make them socially and financially sustainable.
The most important role for governments and intergovernmental networks will arguably be one of coordination and standardization. Governments, being the largest actor in most national economies, can shape the behavior of the entire digital ecosystem based on what standards they adopt, what entities they purchase from and the way they structure citizens’ interactions with public services. This is the core, for example, of how the India Stack became so central to the private sector, which followed the lead of the public sector and thus the civil projects they supported.
Yet laws are also at the center of defining what types of structures can exist, what privileges they have and how rights are divided between different entities. Open source organizations now struggle as they aim to maintain simultaneously their non-profit orientation and an international presence. Organizations like the Open Collective Foundation were created almost exclusively for the purpose of allowing them to do so and helped support this project, but despite taking a substantial cut of project revenues was unable to sustain itself and thus is in the process of dissolving as of this writing. The competitive disadvantage of Third-Sector technology providers could hardly be starker.16 Many other forms of innovative, democratic, transnational organization, like Distributed Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) constantly run into legal barriers that only a few jurisdictions like the State of Wyoming have just begun to address. While some of the reasons for these are legitimate (to avoid financial scams, etc.), much more work is needed to establish legal frameworks that support and defend transnational democratic non-profit organizational forms.)
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Beyond organizational forms, legal and regulatory changes will be critical to empowering a fair and productive use of data for shared goals. Traditional intellectual property regimes are highly rigid, focused on the degree of “transformativeness” of a use that risk either subjecting all model development to severe and unworkable limitations or depriving creators of the moral and financial rights they need to sustain their work that is so critical to the function of these models. New standards need to be developed by judges, legislators and regulators in close collaboration with technologists and publics that account for the complex and partial way in which a variety of data informs the output of models and ensures that the associated value is “back-propagated” to the data creators just as it is to the intermediate data created within the models in the process of training them.17 New rules like these will build on the reforms to property rights that empowered the re-purposing of radio spectrum and should be developed for a variety of other digital assets as we discussed in our Property and Contract chapter.
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The digital sector has proven one of the most challenging to tax, because many of the relevant sources of value are created in a geographically ambiguous way or are otherwise intangible. For example, data and networks of collaboration and knowhow among employees at companies, often spanning national borders, can often be booked in countries with low corporate tax rates even if they mostly occur in jurisdictions with higher rates. Many free services come with an implicit bargain of surveillance, leading neither the service nor the implicit labor to be taxed as it would be if this price were explicit. While recent reforms to create a minimum corporate tax rate agreed by the G20 and Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development are likely to help, they are not tightly adaptive to the digital environment and thus will likely only partly address the challenge.
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(highlight:: Despite this theoretical ideal, in practice identifying practicable taxes to achieve it is likely to be as much a process of technological trial and error as any of the technological challenges we discuss in the Democracy part of the book. Yet there are a number of promising recent proposals that seem plausibly close to fulfilling many of these objectives as we iterate further:

1. Concentrated computational asset tax: Application of a progressive (either in rate or by giving a generous exemption) common ownership tax to digital assets such as computation, storage and some kinds of data.21
2. Digital land tax: Taxing the commercialization or holding of scarce of digital space, including taxes on online advertising, holding of spectrum licenses and web address space in a more competitive way and, eventually, taxing exclusive spaces in virtual worlds.22
3. Implicit data/attention exchange tax: Taxes on implicit data or attention exchanges involved in “free” services online, which would otherwise typically accrue labor and value added taxes.
4. Digital asset taxes: Common ownership taxes on pure-digital assets, such as digital currencies, utility tokens and non-fungible token.
5. Commons-derived data tax: Profits earned from models trained on unlicensed, commons-derived data could be taxed.
6. Flexible/gig work taxes: Profits of companies that primarily employ “gig workers” and thus avoid many of the burdens of traditional labor law could be taxed.23)
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While we aspire to basically transform the character of digital society, we cannot achieve ⿻ if we seek to tear down or undermine existing institutions. Our aim should be, quite the reverse, to see the building of fundamental ⿻ infrastructure as a platform that can allow the digital pie to dramatically expand and diversify, lifting as many boats as possible while also expanding the space for experimentation and growth.
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(highlight:: It is precisely for this reason that “policy” is just one small slice of the work required to build ⿻. For every policy leader, there will have to be dozens, probably hundreds of people building the visions they help articulate. And for each one of those, there will need to be hundreds who, while not focused on the technical concerns, share a general aversion to the default Libertarian and Technocratic directions technology might otherwise go and are broadly supportive of the vision of ⿻. They will have to understand it at more of an emotive, visceral and/or ideological level, rather than a technical or intellectual one, and build networks of moral support, lived perspectives and adoption for those at the core of the policy and technical landscape.
For them to do so, ⿻ will have to go far beyond a set of creative technologies and intellectual analyses. It will have to become a broadly understood cultural current and social movement, like environmentalism, AI and crypto, grounded in a deep, both intellectual and social, body of fundamental research, developed and practiced in a diverse and organized set of enterprises and supported by organized political interests. The path there includes, but moves far beyond, policymakers to the world of activism, culture, business and research. Thus we conclude by calling on each of you who touches any of these worlds to join us in the project of making this a reality.)
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(highlight:: Technology is the most powerful force transforming our world. Whether or not we understand its inner workings, deploy it tentatively or voraciously, or agree with the companies and policymakers that have shaped its development to date, it remains our single greatest lever to shape our collective future.
That collective is not simply a group of individuals but a fabric of relationships. Whether you look at it from a scientific, historical, sociological, religious or political point of view, it is increasingly clear that reality is defined not just by who we are, but how we connect.
Technology drives and defines those connections. From the railroad to the telegraph to the telephone to social media connecting us to old kindergarten friends and new like-minded allies to teleconferencing holding businesses and families together during Covid, we have benefited enormously from technology’s capacity to forge and strengthen human connection while honoring our differences.
Yet, technology has also clearly driven us apart and suppressed our differences. Business models based on a fight for attention have prioritized outrage over curiosity, echo chambers over shared understanding, and proliferated mis- and disinformation. The rapid spread of information online, out of context and against our privacy expectations, has too often eroded our communities, driven out our cultural heritage and created a global)
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(highlight:: Technology is the most powerful force transforming our world. Whether or not we understand its inner workings, deploy it tentatively or voraciously, or agree with the companies and policymakers that have shaped its development to date, it remains our single greatest lever to shape our collective future.
That collective is not simply a group of individuals but a fabric of relationships. Whether you look at it from a scientific, historical, sociological, religious or political point of view, it is increasingly clear that reality is defined not just by who we are, but how we connect.
Technology drives and defines those connections. From the railroad to the telegraph to the telephone to social media connecting us to old kindergarten friends and new like-minded allies to teleconferencing holding businesses and families together during Covid, we have benefited enormously from technology’s capacity to forge and strengthen human connection while honoring our differences.
Yet, technology has also clearly driven us apart and suppressed our differences. Business models based on a fight for attention have prioritized outrage over curiosity, echo chambers over shared understanding, and proliferated mis- and disinformation. The rapid spread of information online, out of context and against our privacy expectations, has too often eroded our communities, driven out our cultural heritage and created a global monoculture. As a new generation of technologies including GFMs, Web3 and augmented reality spreads through our lives, it promises to radically increase technology’s effects, good and bad.
Thus we stand at a crossroads. Technology could drive us apart, sowing chaos and conflict that bring down social order. It could suppress the human diversity that is its lifeblood, homogenizing us in a singular technical vision. Or it could dramatically enrich our diversity while strengthening the ties across it, harnessing and sustaining the potential energy of ⿻.
Some would seek to avoid this choice by slamming on the breaks, decelerating technological progress. Yet, while of course some directions are unwise and there are limits to how rapidly we should proceed into the unknown, the dynamics of competition and geopolitics makes simply slowing progress unlikely to be sustainable. Instead, we face a choice of directions more than velocity.
Should we, as Libertarians like Peter Thiel, Marc Andreesen and Balaji Srinavasan would have us do, liberate individuals to be atomistic agents, free of constraints or responsibilities? Should we, as Technocrats like Sam Altman and Reid Hoffman would have us do, allow technologists to solve our problems, plan our future and distribute to us the material comfort it creates?
We say, loudly and clearly, neither! Both chaos and top-down order are the antitheses not just of democracy and freedom, but of all life, complexity and beauty in human society and nature. Life and ⿻ thrive in the narrow corridor on the “edge of chaos”. For life on this planet to survive and thrive, it must be the central mission of technology and politics to widen this corridor, to steer us constantly back towards that edge of chaos where growth and ⿻ are possible. That is the aspiration and the imperative of ⿻.
⿻ is thus the third way beyond Libertarianism and Technocracy, just as the life is the third way beyond rigid order and chaos. It is a movement we have perhaps three to five years to set in motion. Within that time frame, a critical mass of the technology that people and companies use every day will have become deeply dependent on “AI” and “the metaverse”. At that point, we won’t be able to reverse the fait accompli that Technocracy and Libertarianism have generated for us. But between now and then, we can mobilize to re-chart the course: toward a relationship-centered, empowering digital democracy in which diverse groups of people, precisely because they do not agree, are able to cooperate and collaborate to constantly push our imaginations and aspirations forward.
Such a pivot will take a whole-of-society mobilization. Businesses, governments, universities, and civil society organizations must demand that our technology deepen and broaden our connections across the many forms of diversity, show us that this is possible, build the tools we need to achieve it and make it a reality. That is the key, and the only path, to strengthening human stability, prosperity, and flourishing into the future. For all that it offers, the internet’s potential for truly transformative progress has never materialized. If we want to realize that potential, we have a brief window of opportunity to act.)
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(highlight:: Some of this change is ripe for action today. Anyone reading this book can explain, recommend and tell its stories to friends and help spread various surrounding media content. Anyone can adopt a range of tools already widely available from meetings in immersive shared reality to open source tools for making collective decisions with their communities.
Anyone can support political leaders and organize in political movements around the policy agenda we developed in the previous chapter, and especially political and policy leaders can work together to implement these ideas, as well as near-term political reforms in a ⿻ direction such as ranked-choice or approval voting. Anyone can choose to lean the diet of technology they use towards open source tools and those of companies that adopt and incorporate ⿻ in their work.)
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- movement building, plurality,

Academics can study ⿻ technologies and their impact on the ground today. They can devise rigorous measures to help us know what truly works. They can address key open questions in a range of fields that will allow the design of the next generation of ⿻ technologies and form relationships and collaborations across academic institutions through networks like the Plurality Institute. They can adopt ⿻ in the dissemination of research and peer review.
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Cultural leaders, artists, journalists and other communicators can tell the stories of the ⿻ movement, like Oscar-winner Director Cynthia Wade and Emmy-winning Producer Teri Whitcraft are doing in a forthcoming documentary. They can incorporate ⿻ in their creative practice, as this book did and as we saw Mat Dryhurst and Holly Herndon doing. They can immerse citizens in constructive imagining of a more ⿻ future, like Miraikan in Tokyo does.
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With more systemic imagination and ambition, there are opportunities to pursue ⿻ across a more intermediate horizon, reinventing institutions to include more diverse voices, build deeper connections and foster the regeneration of more diversity. Anyone can become part of local ⿻ communities around the world, telling in a wide variety of idioms, languages and forms the potential for a more ⿻ future and inviting friends to participate in co-creating it. Anyone can join what will be increasingly organized political movements explicitly dedicated to ⿻, contribute to a growing range of ⿻ civil and charitable causes, attend a growing number of hackathons and ideathons that help address the local concerns of diverse communities using ⿻.
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Anyone can become part of local ⿻ communities around the world, telling in a wide variety of idioms, languages and forms the potential for a more ⿻ future and inviting friends to participate in co-creating it. Anyone can join what will be increasingly organized political movements explicitly dedicated to ⿻, contribute to a growing range of ⿻ civil and charitable causes, attend a growing number of hackathons and ideathons that help address the local concerns of diverse communities using ⿻.
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Policy leaders can form political platforms and perhaps even political parties around comprehensive ⿻ agendas. Regulators and civil servants can deeply embed ⿻ into their practices, improving public engagement and speeding the loop of input. Employees of international and transnational organizations can begin to reform their structure and practices to harness ⿻ and to substantively embody ⿻, moving away from “international trade” to substantive, supermodular international cooperation and standards setting.
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Business and more broadly organizational leaders can harness ⿻ to transform their internal operations, customer relations, hiring practice and corporate governance. They can promote more dynamic intrapreneurship by gradually shifting resources and power from siloed hierarchical divisions to emergent dynamic collaborations. They can harness augmented deliberation to facilitate better meetings and better customer research. They can apply generative foundation models (GFMs) to look for more diverse talent and to reorganize their corporate form to make to make it more directly accountable to a wider range of regulators, diffusing social and regulatory tension in the process.
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- [note::YESSSSS]

Academics and researchers can form new fields of inquiry around ⿻ and harnessing ⿻ to empower these new collaborations bridging fields like sociology, economics and computer science. They can invent disciplines that regularly train experts in ⿻, teach a new generation of students to employ ⿻ in their work and forge closer relationships with a variety of communities of practice to shorten the loop from research ideation to practical experimentation.
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Cultural leaders can reimagine cultural practices harnessing ⿻, creating powerfully empathetic emergent experiences that bridge cultural divides. They can sell this to media organizations that have adopted new business models serving public, civic and business organizations rather than advertisers and end consumers. They can build participatory experiences that extend our ability to jointly design and imagine future, from the concrete design of physical spaces to the detailed interactive back-casting of potential science fiction scenarios.
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(highlight:: This foundation of ⿻ imagination across lines of difference can empower social and political organization around such goals. This in turn can allow political leaders to feature such visions as core to their agendas and to make the implementation in the functioning of governments, in their relationship to each other and private entities and in their policy agenda the creation of ⿻.
Such policies and practices can in turn allow the development of novel technologies basically different, dramatically expanding the scope of the Third Sector and allowing the constant emergence of new social and democratic enterprise transnationally. These emergent enterprises can then take on an increasing range of responsibilities legitimately, given their democratic accountability, and blur the lines of responsibility usually assumed for nation states, building a new ⿻ order.
Such enterprise can thus rely on new institutions of research and teaching that will cross disciplinary boundaries and the boundaries between knowledge creation and deployment, engaging deeply with such emerging social enterprises. That educational sector will continually produce new technologies that push the boundaries of ⿻, helping build the basis of new social enterprises and forming a base of ideas which will in turn support the progress of cultural imagination on which this all rests.
Thus together culture, politics and activism, business and technology and research can form a mutually reinforcing virtuous circle: imagination drives action, which confirms the worth of imagination strengthening it further. This is why, whatever field you find yourself in, you have a chance to contribute to this truly transformative horizon, by being part of building that virtuous cycle, pushing momentum upwards by reinforcing others doing the same in other social sectors. There is no best or most important path to ⿻, because ⿻ is ⿻ and only succeeds by building on and proliferating the tremendous diversity of ways we all form part of networks of support and interdependence.)
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- [note::Visualize this as a cyclical systems diagram]

This is why, of course, there can be no top-down, one-size-fits-all path to ⿻. What there can be, however – and soon, if this book has its intended effect – are intersecting circles of people, linked together in groups and individuals loosely federated across the globe, who are committed to ⿻ over its foils: Libertarianism and Technocracy.
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- [note::Agree in principle, but disagree in practice - there needs to be some top-down structures to form the foundation on which the Plurality movement stands (e.g. course maintainers, local chapters/networks, etc.)]

If you believe that the central condition of a thriving, progressing, and righteous society is social diversity, and collaboration across such rich diversity – then come on board. If you believe that technology, the most powerful tool in today’s society, can yet be made to help us flourish, both as individuals and across our multiple, meaningful affiliations – then come on board. If you want to contribute to ⿻’s immediate horizon, intermediate horizon, or truly transformative horizon —or across all of them—you have multiple points of entry. If you work in tech, business, government, academia, civil society, cultural institutions, education, and/or on the home-front, you have limitless ways to make a difference.
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Anu Bradford, Digital Empires: The Global Battle to Regulate Technology (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2023).
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Vivek Raghavan, Sanjay Jain and Pramod Varma, “India Stack—Digital Infrastructure as Public Good”, Communications of the ACM 62, no. 11: 76-81.
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Anne-Marie Slaughter, A New World Order (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).
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Sarah Hamburg, “Call to Join the Decentralized Science Movement”, Nature 600, no. 221 (2021): Correspondence at https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-03642-9.
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Eric A. Posner and E. Glen Weyl, “Quadratic Voting as Efficient Corporate Governance”, University of Chicago Law Review 81, no. 1 (2014): 241-272.
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Paul Romer, “A Tax That Could Fix Big Tech”, New York Times May 6, 2019 advocated related ideas.
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The internet is a powerful technology for tying people together in new collaborations across vast differences. Unfortunately, it has also recently proven to be a powerful tool for thwarting those collaborations and sowing new forms of division.
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It is no coincidence that democracy now finds itself at a low tide. Authoritarian regimes now command nearly half of the global GDP. Only a modest one billion people find solace under the umbrella of democratic systems, while over two billion dwell under authoritarian rule.1
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A quote on the wall of the memorial in Washington, D.C. to United States Founding Father Thomas Jefferson reads “(L)aws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind… We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.” Yet today democracy has become a synonym in much of the world for the increasingly desperate effort to preserve rigid, outmoded, polarized, paralyzed, and increasingly illegitimate governments.
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Existentially, there is growing concern that the fragmentation of the social sense-making and collective action capacity is dangerous in the face of the increasing sophistication of technologies of mass destruction with impact ranging from environmental devastation (e.g., climate change, biodiversity loss, ocean acidification) to the potentially apocalyptic disruptions of more direct weapons (e.g., misaligned artificial intelligence and bioweapons)10.
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- [note::This is the thing that most excites me about the promise of democratic/collaborative technology (in addition to generally better, more inclusive decision-making)]

Legally, the speed of recent advances in AI have overwhelmed core rights of many democratic societies, leaving critical choices in the hands of restricted groups of engineers from similar social backgrounds. Intellectual property law and other protections of creative activity have been largely obviated by the capacity of large AI models to “remix and replace” content; privacy regimes have failed to keep up with the explosive spread of information; discrimination law is woefully unsuited to address issues raised by the potential emergent biases of black box AI systems. The engineers who could potentially address these issues, on the other hand, typically work for profit-seeking companies or the defense sector, come overwhelmingly from a very specific educational and demographic background (typically white or Asian, male, atheist, highly educated, etc.). This has challenged the core tenets of democratic legal regimes that aim to represent the will of the broad society they govern12.
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Furthermore, these two threats intersect; authoritarian regimes have increasingly harnessed the “chaos” of social media and cryptocurrencies to sow internal division and conflict in democratic countries. Centralized social media platforms have leveraged AI to optimize user engagement with their services, often helping to fuel the centrifugal tendencies of misinformation and opinion clustering. Yet, even when they are not actively complementing each other and may in many ways have opposite motivations, both forces have pressured democratic societies and helped undermine confidence in them, confidence that is now at its lowest ebb in much of the developed democratic world since it has been measured.16
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Where once the public sector in democratic countries was the global driving force behind the development of information technology (e.g. the first computers, the internet, global positioning satellites, today most democratic governments are focused instead on constraining its development and are failing to respond to both opportunities and challenges it creates.
This failure has manifested in four ways. First, public opinion in democratic countries and their policymakers are increasingly hostile to large technology companies and even many technologists, a trend commonly called the “techlash”. Second, democratic countries have significantly reduced their direct investment in the development of information technology. Third, democratic countries have been slow to adopt technology in public sector applications or that require significant public sector participation. Finally, and relatedly, democratic governments have largely failed to address the areas where most technologists believe public participation, regulation, and support are critical to technology advancing in a sustainable way, focusing instead on more familiar social and political problems17.)
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More central to the heart of governmental responsibility in democracies, however, is the digitization of public services. Many middle-income and wealthy democracies invest less in e-government compared to authoritarian counterparts. The UN e-government development index (EGDI) is a composite measure of three important dimensions of e-government, namely: provision of online services, telecommunication connectivity, and human capital. In 2022, several authoritarian governments ranked highly, including UAE (13th), Kazakhstan (28th), and Saudi Arabia (31st), ahead of many democracies including notably Canada (32nd), Italy (37th), Brazil (49th), and Mexico (62nd).26
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Where once government-provided postal services and public libraries were the backbone of democratic communication and knowledge circulation, today most communication flows through social media and search engines. Where once most public gatherings took place in parks and literal public squares, today it is almost a cliché that the public square has moved online. Yet democratic countries have almost entirely ignored the need to provide and support digital public services. While privately-owned Twitter is the target of constant abuse by public figures, its most important competitor, the non-profits Mastodon and the open Activity Pub standard on which it runs have received a paltry few hundreds of thousands of dollars in public support, running instead on Patreon donations.27 More broadly, open source software and other commons-based public goods like Wikipedia have become critical public resources in the digital age; yet governments have consistently failed to support them and have even discriminated against them relative to other charities (for example, open source software providers generally cannot be tax-exempt charities). While authoritarian regimes plow ahead with plans for Central Bank Digital Currencies, most democratic countries are only beginning explorations.
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Yet while bold experiments with new visions of the public sector are more common in autocracies, there is an element far more fundamental to democracy itself: the mechanisms of public consent, participation, and legitimation, including voting, petitioning, soliciting citizen feedback and so forth. Voting in nearly all democracies occurs for major offices once every several years according to rules and technologies that have been largely unchanged for a century. While citizens communicate instantaneously across the planet, they are represented in largely fixed geographic configurations at great expense with low fidelity. Few modern tools of communication or data analysis are regular parts of the democratic lives of citizens.
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Technocracy focuses on the potential of AI to create what OpenAI Founder Sam Altman calls “Moore’s Law for Everything”: a transformation where AI makes all material goods cheap and abundant and thus allows the abolition, at least in principle, of material scarcity.41 Yet this potential abundance may not be equally distributed; it is plausible that its value will concentrate in a small group that controls and directs AI systems. A key element of the technocratic social vision is therefore material redistribution, usually through a “universal basic income” (UBI). Another central focus is on the risk of AI(s) getting out of human control and threatening human survival, and thus on the need for strong and often centralized control over who has access to these technologies, as well as ensuring they are built to faithfully execute human desires. While the precise contours differ across the exponents of this view, the idea of “Artificial General Intelligence” (AGI) is central: machines that exceed human capabilities in some generalized way, leaving little measurable utility in human individual or collective cognition.
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Libertarianism focuses on the potential (or in some telling inevitability) of cryptography and networking protocols supplanting the role of human collective organization and politics, liberating individuals to participate in unfettered markets free from government and other collective “coercion” and regulation.
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libertarianism has a much clearer intellectual canon and set of leaders. The Sovereign Individual by James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg, the writings of Curtis Yarvin under the pen name Mencius Moldbug, The Network State by Balaji Srinavasan and Bronze Age Mindset are widely read and cited in the community.45 Venture capitalist Peter Thiel is widely seen as the central intellectual leader, along with others (such as the authors mentioned) whom he has funded or promoted the work of.
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On the other hand, Libertarianism is consistently hostile to nationalism (or any other form of collectivism or solidarity) and Libertarian followers routinely mock and dismiss many core religious, national and cultural values associated with the right. This apparent contradiction may be resolved by a shared antipathy to what they perceive as dominant left-wing cultural values or by an “accelerationist” attitude as advocated by Yarvin, Davidson and Rees-Mogg that views the “nationalist backlash” to the inevitable technological trends as an accelerant and possible ally in the dissolution of the nation-state.
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(highlight::
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Figure 2-0-F. Improvement in technology represented by growth in “Total Factor Productivity”. Source: Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth46
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(highlight::
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Figure 2-0-G. Average income growth in the US by income percentile during the Golden Age and Great Stagnation. Source: Saez and Zucman, “The Rise of Income and Wealth Inequality”47
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Faith in democratic institutions has been falling, especially in the last decade and a half in all democracies, but especially in the US and developing democracies. In the US, dissatisfaction with democracy has gone from being the opinion of a fringe (less than 25%) to being the majority opinion in the last 3 decades.53 While it is less consistently measured, faith in technology, especially leading technology companies, has been similarly declining. In the US, the technology sector has fallen from being considered the most trusted sector in the economy in the early and mid-2010s to amongst the least trusted, based on surveys by organizations like the Public Affairs Council, Morning Consult, Pew Research and Edelman Trust Barometer.54
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(highlight:: Technology and democracy are trapped between two sides of a widening gulf. That war is damaging both sides of the conflict, undermining democracy and slowing technological development. As collateral damage, it is slowing economic growth, undermining confidence in social institutions, and fueling inequality. This conflict is not inevitable; it is the product of the technological directions liberal democracies have collectively chosen to invest in, once fueled by ideologies about the future that are antithetical to democratic ideals. Because political systems depend on technologies to thrive, democracy cannot thrive if we continue down this path.
Another path is possible. Technology and democracy can be each other’s greatest allies. In fact, as we will argue, large-scale “Digital Democracy” is a dream we have only begun to imagine, one that requires unprecedented technology to have any chance of being realized. By reimagining our future, shifting public investments, research agendas, and private development, we can build that future.)
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- [note::Core argument of the book]

as the government at the time gained respect for the movement and ministers invited younger “reverse mentors” to help them learn from youth and civil society.
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- [note::Huh, first time I'm hearing of a "reverse mentor" - sounds like something the US government desperately needs.]

(highlight:: > When we see “internet of things,”

let’s make it an internet of beings.
When we see “virtual reality,”
let’s make it a shared reality.
When we see “machine learning,”
let’s make it collaborative learning.
When we see “user experience,”
let’s make it about human experience.
When we hear “the singularity is near” —
let us remember: The Plurality is here.
— Audrey Tang, Job Description, 2016)
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g0v
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Founded in 2012 by civic hackers including Kao Chia-liang, g0v arose from discontent with the quality of government digital services and data transparency.79 Civic hackers began to scrape government websites (usually with the suffix gov.tw) and build alternative formats for data display and interaction for the same website, hosting them at g0v.tw. These “forked” versions of government websites often ended up being more popular, leading some government ministers, like Simon Chang to begin “merging” these designs back into government services.
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(highlight::
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Figure 2-2-A. Principles of g0v displayed in a venn diagram.
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Sunflower
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vTaiwan and Join
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This led to the establishment of vTaiwan, a platform and project developed by g0v for facilitating deliberation on public policy controversies. The process involved many steps (proposal, opinion expression, reflection and legislation) each harnessing a range of open source software tools, but has become best known for its use of the at-the-time(2015)-novel machine learning based open-source “wikisurvey”/social media tool Polis
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Polis shows the clusters of opinion that exist and highlights statements that bridge them. This approach facilitates both consensus formation and a better understanding of the lines of division.
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(highlight::
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pluralitybook/plurality/main/figs/vtaiwan-polis-ai.png
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Figure 2-2-B. Clusters of consensual opinions generated by Polis on vTaiwan. Source: vTaiwan.tw, CC0 license.
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vTaiwan was deliberately intended as an experimental, high-touch, intensive platform for committed participants. It had about 200,000 users or about 1% of Taiwan’s population at its peak and held detailed deliberations on 28 issues, 80% of which led to legislative action. These focused mostly on questions around technology regulation, such as the regulation of ride sharing, responses to non-consensual intimate images, regulatory experimentation with financial technology and regulation of AI.
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While Join also sometimes used Polis, it has a lighter-weight user interface and focuses primarily on soliciting input, suggestions and initiatives from a broader public, and has an enforcement mechanism where government officials must respond if a proposal receives sufficient support. Unlike vTaiwan, furthermore, Join addresses a range of policy issues, including controversial non-technological issues such as high school’s start time, and has strong continuing usage today of roughly half of the population over its lifetime and an average of 11,000 unique daily visitors.
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Hackathons, coalitions and quadratic signals
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While such levels of digital civic engagement may seem surprising to many Westerners, they can be seen simply as the harnessing of a small portion of the energy typically wasted on conflict on (anti-)social media towards solving public problems.
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- [note::Great point - people spend SO much time on social media commenting on local news. Deliberative platforms can help redirect that energy towards positive aims (increased civic engagement, better policy outcomes, etc)]

The PH convened mixed teams of civil servants, academics, activists and technologists to propose tools, social practices and collective data custody arrangements that allowed them to “collectively bargain” with their data for cooperation with government and private actors supported by the government-supported program of “data coalitions” to address civic problems. Examples have included the monitoring of air quality and early warning systems for wildfires. Participants and broader citizens were asked to help select the winners using a voting system called Quadratic Voting that allows people to express the extent of their support across a range of projects and that we discuss in our ⿻ Voting chapter below. This allowed a wide range of participants to be at least partial winners, by making it likely everyone would have supported some winner and that if someone felt very strongly in favor of one project they could give it a significant boost.
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- participatory democracy, quadratic_voting, data coalitions, participatory grantmaking,

Pandemic
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The best documented example and the one most consistent with the previous examples was the “Mask App”. Given previous experience with SARS, masks in Taiwan were beginning to run into shortages by late January, when little of the world had even heard of Covid-19. Frustrated, civic hackers led by Howard Wu developed an app that harnessed data that the government, following open and transparent data practices harnessed and reinforced by the g0v movement, to map mask availability. This allowed Taiwan to achieve widespread mask adoption by mid-February, even as mask supplies remained extremely tight given the lack of a global production response at this early stage.
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Information integrity
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Central to those efforts, in turn, has been the g0v spin-off project “Cofacts,” in which participating citizens rapidly respond to both trending social media content and to messages from private channels forwarded to a public comment box for requested response. Recent research shows that these systems can typically respond faster, equally accurately and more engagingly to rumors than can professional fact checkers, who are much more bandwidth constrained.80
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Government leaders’ close cooperation with such civil groups has allowed them to model and thus encourage policies of “humor over rumor” and “fast, fun and fair” responses. For example, when a rumor began to spread during the pandemic that there would be a shortage of toilet paper created by the mass production of masks, Taiwan’s Premier Su Tseng-chang famously circulated a picture of himself wagging his rear to indicate it had nothing to fear.
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Other programs
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Digital competence education: Since 2019, Taiwan has pioneered a 12-Year Basic Education Curriculum that enshrines “tech, info & media literacy” as a core competency, empowering students to become active co-creators and discerning arbiters of media, rather than passive consumers.
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- [note::Would love to learn more about this]

Participation Officer Network: PDIS helped create a network of civil servants across departments committed to citizen participation, collaboration across government departments and digital feedback, who could act as supporters and conduits of practices such as these.
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- [note::Is there a US equivalent to this? Perhaps the US Digital Corps?]

Open parliament: Taiwan has become a leader in the global “open parliament” movement, experimenting with a range of ways to make parliamentary procedures transparent to the public and experimenting with innovative voting methods.
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Economic
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Taiwan is an upper-middle income country, like much of Europe, with a Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita of $34,000 per person in 2024 according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF).81 However, prices are much lower in Taiwan on average than in almost any other rich country; making this adjustment (which economists call “purchasing power parity”) makes Taiwan the second richest country on average other than the US with more than 10 million people in the world.
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Political
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Several indices, published by organizations such as Freedom House94, the Economist Intelligence Unit95, the Bertelsmann Foundation and V-Dem, consistently rank Taiwan as among the freest and most effective democracies on earth.96 While Taiwan’s precise ranking differs across these indices (ranging from first to merely in the top 15%), it nearly always stands out as the strongest democracy in Asia and the strongest democracy younger than 30 years old;
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A variety of studies using a range of methodologies have found that Taiwan is one of the least politically, socially and religiously polarized developed countries in the world, though some have found a slight upward trend in political polarization since the Sunflower movement.97 This is especially true in affective polarization, the holding of negative or hostile personal attitudes towards political opponents, with Taiwan consistently among the 5 least affectively polarized countries.
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Legal
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Existential
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Taiwan nonetheless exhibits unusually high levels of participation and trust in institutions, particularly in its democracy. Voter turnout is among the highest in the world outside countries where voting is compulsory.105 91% consider democracy to be at least “fairly good”, a sharp contrast to the dramatic declines in recent years in support for democracy even in many long-established democracies.106
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Daniel Schmachtenberger, “Explorations on the Future of Civilization,” n.d. https://civilizationemerging.com/.
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For more on Europe’s digital position, see “Open Technologies for Europe’s Digital Decade,” OpenForumEurope, n.d, https://openforumeurope.org/.
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See Fredrik Erixon, and Björn Weigel, The Innovation Illusion: How so Little Is Created by so Many Working so Hard, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017)
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Innovation and Its Enemies: Why People Resist New Technologies. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019).
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- 1resource/book, innovation, technology adoption,

See Julien Mailland and Kevin Driscoll, Minitel: Welcome to the Internet (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017). For example, even public interest open source code is mostly invested in by private actors, though recently the US Government has made some efforts to support that sector with the launch of code.gov.
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Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle over Technology and Prosperity (New York: PublicAffairs, 2023).
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James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg, The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age (New York: Touchstone, 1999).
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Balaji Srinavasan, The Network State (Self-published, 2022) available at https://thenetworkstate.com/.
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After World War II, Japan’s industrial infrastructure was devastated, and product quality was poor. In this context, Deming was invited by the Union of Japanese Scientists and Engineers(JUSE) in 1950. He introduced Statistical Process Control (SPC) and the PDCA (Plan-Do-Check-Act) cycle, emphasizing continuous improvement (Kaizen) and the importance of employee involvement. His principles were particularly embraced by the Japanese automotive industry, notably Toyota and became integral to the Toyota Production System (TPS). In 1990, James P. Womack and others published The Machine That Changed the World, analyzing the Toyota Production System and introducing it as the Lean manufacturing to a global audience. James P. Womack, Daniel T. Jones and Daniel Roos, The Machine that Changed the World (New York: Free Press, 2007). In 2011, Eric Ries, who coined the term “Lean Startup,” drew inspiration from the Lean manufacturing principles in entrepreneurship. Eric Ries, The Lean Startup (New York: Crown Currency, 2011).
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g0v Manifesto defines it as “a non-partisan, not-for-profit, grassroots movement”.
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(highlight:: • .↩︎
• Andy Zhao and Mor Naaman, “Insights from a Comparative Study on the Variety, Velocity, Veracity, and Viability of Crowdsourced and Professional Fact-Checking Services”, Journal of Online Trust and Safety 2, no. 1. https://doi.org/10.54501/jots.v2i1.118.)
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we define “⿻ 數位 Plurality”, the subject of the rest of this book, briefly as “technology for collaboration across social difference”. This contrasts with a common element between Libertarianism and Technocracy: that both consider the world to be made up of atoms (viz. individuals) and a social whole, a view we call “monist atomism”. While they take different positions on how much authority should go to each, they miss the core idea of ⿻ 數位 Plurality, that intersecting diverse social groups and the diverse and collaborative people whose identities are constituted by these intersections are the core fabric of the social world.
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(highlight::
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pluralitybook/plurality/main/figs/triptych.png
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Figure 3-0-A. Three-part definition of ⿻ 數位 Plurality
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To be more precise, we can break Plurality into three components (descriptive, normative and prescriptive) each associated with one of three thinkers (Hannah Arendt, Danielle Allen and Audrey Tang) each of whom has used the term in these three distinct and yet tightly connected ways
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Descriptive: The social world is neither an unorganized collection of isolated individuals nor a monolithic whole. Instead, it is a fabric of diverse and intersecting affiliations that define both our personal identities and our collective organization. We identify this concept with Hannah Arendt and especially her book, The Human Condition, where she labels Plurality as the most fundamental element of the human condition.
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Normative: Diversity is the fuel of social progress and while it may explode like any fuel (into conflict), societies succeed largely to the extent they manage to instead harness its potential energy for growth. We identify this concept with philosopher Danielle Allen’s ideal of “A Connected Society” and associate it with the rainbow elements that form at the intersection of the squares in the elaborated ⿻ image on the book cover and in the figure above.
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Prescriptive: Digital technology should aspire to build the engines that harness and avoid conflagration of diversity, much as industrial technology built the engines that harnessed physical fuel and contained its explosions.
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We associate it even more closely with the use in her title (as Digital Minister) of the traditional Mandarin characters 數位 (pronounced in English as “shuwei”) which, in Taiwan, mean simultaneously “plural” when applied to people and “digital” and thus capture the fusion of the philosophy arising in Arendt and Allen with the transformative potential of digital technology. In the last chapter of this section, Technology for Collaborative Diversity, we argue that, while less explicit, this philosophy drove much of the development of what has come to be called the “internet”, though because it was not sufficiently articulated it has been somewhat lost since.
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(A)re…atoms independent elements of reality? No…as quantum theory shows: they are defined by their…interactions with the rest of the world…(Q)uantum physics may just be the realization that this ubiquitous relational structure of reality continues all the way down…Reality is not a collection of things, it’s a network of processes. — Carlo Rovelli, 20226
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- [note::Reminds me of how the behavior of a complex systems is determined by the relationships between elements, not the elements themselves.]

Yet the last century taught us how much progress is possible if we transcend the limitations of monist atomism. Gödel’s Theorem undermined the unity and completeness of mathematics and a range of non-Euclidean geometries are now critical to science.8 Symbiosis, ecology, and extended evolutionary synthesis undermined “survival of the fittest” as the central biological paradigm and ushered in the age of environmental science. Neuroscience has been reimagined around networks and emergent capabilities and given birth to modern neural networks. What all these share is a focus on complexity, emergence, multi-level organization and multidirectional causality rather than the application of a universal set of laws to a single type of atomic entity.
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- [note::Some good examples of society's gradual transition from linear -> networked ways of thinking. It seems the core argument of this book is that systems of government have been top slow to recognize and embrace this paradigm shift.]

⿻ approaches social systems similarly. A corporation plays in the game of global competition, yet is simultaneously itself a game played by employees, shareholders, management and customers. There is no reason to expect the resulting outcomes often to cohere as preferences. What’s more, many games intersect: employees of a corporation are often each influenced through their other relationships with the outside world (e.g. political, social, religious, ethnic), and not only through the corporation itself. Countries too are both games and players, intersected by corporations, religions and much more, and there too we cannot cleanly separate apart actions between countries and actions within a country: the writing of this very book is a complex mix of both in multiple ways.
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⿻ is, scientifically, the application of an analogous perspective to the understanding of human societies and, technologically, the attempt to build formal information and governance systems that account for and resemble these structures as physical technologies built on ⿻ science do.
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(highlight:: In the Technocratic vision we discussed in the previous chapter, the “messiness” of existing administrative systems is to be replaced by a massive-scale, unified, rational, scientific, artificially intelligent planning system. Transcending locality and social diversity, this unified agent is imagined to give “unbiased” answers to any economic and social problem, transcending social cleavages and differences. As such, it seeks to at best paper over and at worst erase, rather than fostering and harnessing, the social diversity and heterogeneity that ⿻ social science sees as defining the very objects of interest, engagement, and value.
In the Libertarian vision, the sovereignty of the atomistic individual (or in some versions, a homogeneous and tightly aligned group of individuals) is the central aspiration. Social relations are best understood in terms of “customers”, “exit” and other capitalist dynamics. Democracy and other means of coping with diversity are viewed as failure modes for systems that do not achieve sufficient alignment and freedom.
But these cannot be the only paths forward. ⿻ science has shown us the power of harnessing a ⿻ understanding of the world to build physical technology. We have to ask what a society and information technology built on an analogous understanding of human societies would look like. Luckily, the twentieth century saw the systematic development of such a vision, from philosophical and social scientific foundations to the beginnings of technological expression.)
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Industry and inventions in technology, for example, create means which alter the modes of associated behavior and which radically change the quantity, character and place of impact of their indirect consequences. These changes are extrinsic to political forms which, once established, persist of their own momentum. The new public which is generated remains long inchoate, unorganized, because it cannot use inherited political agencies. The latter, if elaborate and well institutionalized, obstruct the organization of the new public. They prevent that development of new forms of the state which might grow up rapidly were social life more fluid, less precipitated into set political and legal molds. To form itself, the public has to break existing political forms. This is hard to do because these forms are themselves the regular means of instituting change. The public which generated political forms is passing away, but the power and lust of possession remains in the hands of the officers and agencies which the dying public instituted. This is why the change of the form of states is so often effected only by revolution. — John Dewey, The Public and its Problems, 192730
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- [note::It's wild that this was written in 1927 - I've often thought about this dynamic in the context of transition from first-past-the-post to approval voting.]

Private property. Individual identity and rights. Nation state democracy. These are the foundations of most modern liberal democracies. Yet they rest on fundamentally monist atomist foundations. Individuals are the atoms; the nation state is the whole that connects them. Every citizen is seen as equal and exchangeable in the eyes of the whole, rather than part of a network of relationships that forms the fabric of society and in which any state is just one social grouping. State institutions see direct, unmediated relationships to free and equal individuals, though in some cases federal and other subsidiary (e.g. city, religious or family) institutions intercede.
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Property
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While there are significant restrictions on the rights of private property owners based on community interests, these overwhelmingly take the form of regulations by a small number of governmental levels, such as national, provincial/state and local/city. These practices are in sharp contrast to the property regimes that have prevailed in most human societies throughout most of history, in which individual ownership was rarely absolutely institutionalized and a diversity of “traditional” expectations governed how possessions can rightly be used and exchanged. Such traditional structures were largely erased by modernity and colonialism as they attempted to pattern property into a marketable “commodity”, allowing exchange and reuse for a much broad set of purposes than was possible within full social context.31
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(highlight:: Paper-based markers of affiliations with such institutions began to supplant informal kin knowledge. In particular, Church records of baptisms helped lay the foundation for what became the widespread practice of issuing birth certificates. This, in turn, became the foundational document on which essentially all other identification practices are grounded in modern states.33
This helped circumvent the reliance on personal relationships, building the foundation of identity in a relationship to a state, which in turn served as a trust anchors for many other types of institutions ranging from children’s sports teams to medical care providers. These abstract representations enabled people to navigate the world not based on “who they know” or “where they fit” in a tight social world but as who they are in an abstracted universal sense relative to the state. This “WEIRD” (Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democratic) universalism thus broke with the social embedding of identity while thereby “freeing” people to travel and interact much more broadly using modern forms of identification issued by governments like passports and national identity cards. While other critical credentials, such as educational attainment are more diverse, they almost uniformly conform to a limited structure, implying one of a small number of “degrees” derived from courses with a particular “Carnegie unit” structure (in theory, 120 hours spent with an instructor), in contrast to the broad range of potential recognition that could be given to learning attainment as illustrated in Figure A. In short, just as modernity abstracted ownership private property, removing it from its many social entanglements, it also abstracted personal identity from the social anchoring that limited travel and the formation of new relationships.)
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(highlight::
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pluralitybook/plurality/main/figs/taxonomies.png
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Figure 3-2-A. Flexible taxonomies across a broad spectrum of recognition. Source: Learning Agents Inc. (https://www.learningagents.ca)
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Voting
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Voting
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In most liberal democracies, the principle of “one-person-one-vote” is viewed as a sacred core of the democratic process. Of course, various schemes of representation (multi-member proportional representation or single-member districts), checks-and-balances (mutli- v. unicameral legislatures, parliamentary v. presidential) and degrees of federalism vary and recombine in a diverse ways. However both in popular imagination and in formal rules, the idea that numerical majorities (or in some cases supermajorities) should prevail regardless of the social composition of groups is at the core of how democracy is typically understood.34 Again this contrasts with decision-making structures throughout most of the world and most of history, including ones that involved widespread and diverse representation by a range of social relationships, including family, religious, relationships of fealty, profession, etc.35 We again see the same pattern repeated: liberal states have “extracted” “individuals” from their social embedding to make them exchangeable, detached citizens of an abstracted national polity.
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(highlight:: Governments and organizations around the world adopted these systems for some good reasons. They were simple and thus scalable; they allowed people from very different backgrounds to quickly understand each other and thus interact productively. Where once commons-based property systems inhibited innovation when outsiders and industrialists found it impossible to navigate a thicket of local customs, private property cleared a path to development and trade by reducing those who could inhibit change. Administrators of the social welfare schemes that transformed government in the twentieth century would have struggled to provide broad access to pensions and unemployment benefits without a single, flat, clear database of entitlements. And reaching subtle compromises like those that went into the US Constitution, much less ones rich enough to keep up with the complexity of the modern world, would have likely undermined the possibility of democratic government spreading.
In fact these institutions were core to what allowed modern, wealthy, liberal democracies to rise, flourish and rule, making what Joseph Heinrich calls the “WEIRDest people in the world”. Just as the insights of Newtonian mechanics and Euclidean geometry gave those civilizations the physical power to sweep the earth, liberal social institutions gave them the social flexibility to do so. Yet just as the Euclidean-Newtonian worldview turned out to be severely limited and naïve, ⿻ social science was born by highlighting the limits of these atomist monist social systems.)
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(highlight:: George wrote on many topics helping originate, for example, the idea of a secret ballot. But he became most famous for advocating a “single tax” on land, whose value he argued could never properly belong to an individual owner. His most famous illustration asked readers to imagine an open savannah full of beautiful but homogeneous land on which a settler arrives, claiming some arbitrarily chosen large plot for her family. When future settlers arrive, they choose to settle close to the first, so as to enjoy company, divide labor and enjoy shared facilities like schools and wells. As more settlers arrive, they continue to choose to cluster and the value of land rises. In a few generations, the descendants of the first settler find themselves landlords of much of the center of a bustling metropolis, rich beyond imagination, through little effort of their own, simply because a great city was built around them.
The value of their land, George insisted, could not justly belong to that family: it was a collective product that should be taxed away. Such a tax was not only just, it was crucial for economic development, as highlighted especially by later economists including one of the authors of this book. Taxes of this sort, especially when carefully designed as they were in Taiwan, ensure property owners must use their land productively or allow others to do so. The revenue they raise can support shared infrastructure (like those schools and wells) that gives value to the land, an idea called the “Henry George Theorem”.)
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- [note::The origin of property tax - this actually makes a lot of sense when laid out in this way.]

Who should be able to access the land of the Bay Area under what circumstances? Who should be allowed to build what on it, or to sell exclusive rights to do so to others? Most of these questions were hardly even considered in George’s writing, much less settled. In this sense, his work is more a helpful invitation to step beyond the easy answers private property offers, which is perhaps why his enormously influential ideas have only been partly implemented in a small number of (admittedly highly successful places like Estonia and Taiwan.
The world George invites us to reflect on and imagine how to design for is thus one of ⿻ value, one where a variety of entities, localized at different scales (universities, municipalities, nation states, etc.) all contribute to differing degrees to create value, just as networks of waves and neurons contribute to differing degrees to the probabilities of particles being found in various positions or thoughts occurring in a mind. And for both justice and productivity, property and value should belong, in differing degrees, to these intersecting social circles. In this sense, George was a founder of ⿻ social science.)
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In his view, humans are deeply social creatures and thus their identities are deeply formed through their social relations. Humans gain crucial aspects of their sense of self, their goals, and their meaning through participation in social, linguistic, and solidaristic groups. In simple societies (e.g., isolated, rural, or tribal), people spend most of their life interacting with the kin groups we described above. This circle comes to (primarily) define their identity collectively, which is why most scholars of simple societies (for example, anthropologist Marshall Sahlins tend to favor methodological collectivism.43 However, as we noted above, as societies urbanize social relationships diversify. People work with one circle, worship with another, support political causes with a third, recreate with a fourth, cheer for a sports team with a fifth, identify as discriminated against along with a sixth, and so on. These diverse affiliations together form a person’s identity. The more numerous and diverse these affiliations become, the less likely it is that anyone else shares precisely the same intersection of affiliations.
As this occurs, people come to have, on average, less of their full sense of self in common with those around them at any time; they begin to feel “unique” (to put a positive spin on it) and “isolated/misunderstood” (to put a negative spin on it). This creates a sense of what he called “qualitaitive individuality” that helps explain why social scientists focused on complex urban settings (such as economists) tend to favor methodological individualism. However, ironically as Simmel points out, such “individuation” occurs precisely because and to the extent that the “individual” becomes divided among many loyalties and thus dividual. Thus, while methodological individualism (and what he called the “egalitarian individualism” of nation states we highlighted above that it justfied) takes the “(in)dividual” as the irreducible element of social analysis, Simmel instead suggests that individuals become possible as an emergent property of the complexity and dynamism of modern, urban societies.
Thus the individual that the national identity systems seek to strip away from the shackles of communities actually emerges from their growth, proliferation and intersection. As a truly just and efficient property regime would recognize and account for such networked interdependence, identity systems that truly empower and support modern life would need to mirror its ⿻ structure.)
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- [note::But how does one even begin to quantify these intersecting identities? The idea of a singular identity, as indicated by one's passport, may be reductive in an abstract sense, but it's based around the idea that one person has (and will always have) one singular body.
I guess what the author's are trying to point out here is that base assumption that an individual is, in fact, a single individual (and not the culmination of numerous intersecting identities) results in problematic assumptions in other domains.]

Markets fail because these technologies create market power, pervasive externalities (such as “network externalities”), and more generally exhibit “supermodularity” (sometimes called “increasing returns”), where the whole of the (e.g. railroad network) is greater than the sum of its parts; see our chapter on Social Markets. Capitalist enterprises cannot account for all the relevant “spillovers” and to the extent they do, they accumulate market power, raise prices and exclude participants, undermining the value created by increasing returns. Leaving these interdependencies “to the market” thus exacerbates their risks and harms while failing to leverage their potential.
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what it means to say an institution is “democratic” is not just that it involves participation and voting. Many oligarchies had these forms, but did not include most citizens and thus were not democratic. Nor would, in Dewey’s mind, a global “democracy” directly managing the affairs of a village count as democratic. Core to true democracy is the idea that the “relevant public”, the set of people whose lives are actually shaped by the phenomenon in question, manage that challenge. Because technology is constantly throwing up new forms of interdependence, which will almost never correspond precisely to existing political boundaries, true democracy requires new publics to constantly emerge and reshape existing jurisdictions.
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The critical pathway to creating such new circles was the establishment of places (e.g. workman’s halls) or publications (e.g. working men’s newspapers) where this new group could come to know one another and understand, and thus to have things in common they do not have with others in the broader society. Such bonds were strengthened by secrecy, as shared secrets allowed for a distinctive identity and culture, as well as the coordination in a common interest in ways unrecognizable by outsiders.44 Developing these shared, but hidden, knowledge allows the emerging social circle to act as a collective agent.
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- [note::The formation of social groups require:

1. A place to gather
2. Some form exclusivity]

Dewey’s conception of democracy and emergent publics is at once profoundly democratic and yet challenges and even overturns our usual conception of democracy. Democracy, in this conception, is not the static system of representation of a nation-state with fixed borders. It is a process even more dynamic than a market, led by a diverse range of entrepreneurial mirrors, who draw upon the ways they are themselves intersections of unresolved social tensions to renew and re-imagine social institutions. Standard institutions of nation state-based voting are to such a process as pale a shadow as Newtonian mechanics is of the underlying quantum and relativistic reality. True democracy must be ⿻ and constantly evolving.
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Wiener defined cybernetics as “the science of control and communication in (complex systems like) the animal and machine”, but perhaps the most broadly accepted meaning is something like the “science of communication within and governance of, by and for networks”.47
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(D)ecisions about the development and exploitation of computer technology must be made not only “in the public interest” but in the interest of giving the public itself the means to enter into the decision-making processes that will shape their future. — J. C. R. Licklider, “Computers and Government”, 198049
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Liberal democracies often celebrate themselves as pluralistic societies, which would seem to indicate they have already drawn the available lessons from ⿻ social science. Yet despite this formal commitment to pluralism and democracy, almost every country has been forced by the limits of available information systems to homogenize and simplify social institutions in a monist atomist mold that runs into direct conflict with such values. The great hope of ⿻ social science and ⿻ built on top of it is to use the potential of information technology to begin to overcome these limitations.
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This generation included a range of pioneers of applied cybernetics such as the anthropologist Margaret Mead50 (who heavily influenced the aesthetics of the internet), W. Edwards Deming51 (whose influence on Japanese and to a lesser extent Taiwanese inclusive industrial quality practices we saw above) and Stafford Beer52 (who pioneered business cybernetics and has become something of a guru for social applications of Wiener’s ideas including in Chile’s brief cybernetic socialist regime of the early 1970s). They built on his vision in a more pragmatic mode, shaping technologies that defined the information era.
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The Intergalactic Computer Network
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- [note::.]

(highlight:: At the core of the development of what became the internet was replacing centralized, linear and atomized structures with ⿻ relationships and governance. This happened at three levels that eventually converged in the early 1990s as the World Wide Web:

1. packet switching to replace centralized switchboards,
2. hypertext to replace linear text,
3. and open standard setting processes to replace both government and corporate top-down decision-making)
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Nelson imagined hypertext as a way to liberate communication from the tyranny of a linear interpretation imposed by an original author, empowering a “pluralism” (as he labeled it) of paths through material through a network of (bidirectional) links connecting material in a variety of sequences.64 This “choose your own adventure”65 quality is most familiar today to internet users in their browsing experiences but showed up earlier in commercial products in the 1980s (such as computer games based on hypercard). Nelson imagined that such ease of navigation and recombination would enable the formation of new cultures and narratives at unprecedented speed and scope. The power of this approach became apparent to the broader world when Tim Berners-Lee made it central to his “World Wide Web” approach to navigation in the early 1990s, ushering in the era of broad adoption of the internet.
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- [note::If only they were actually bidirectional though!]

This culture manifested in the development of the “Request for Comments” (RFC) process by Steve Crocker, arguably one of the first “wiki”-like processes of informal and mostly additive collaboration across many geographically and sectorally (governmental, corporate, university) dispersed collaborators. This in turn contributed to the common Network Control Protocol and, eventually, Transmission Control and Internet Protocols (TCP/IP) under the famously mission-driven but inclusive and responsive leadership of Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn between 1974 when TCP was first circulated as RFC 675 and 1983 when they became the official ARPANET protocols. At the core of the approach was the vision of a “network of networks” that gave the “internet” its name: that many diverse and local networks (at universities, corporations and government agencies) could inter-operate sufficiently to permit the near-seamless communication across long distances, in contrast to centralized networks (such as France’s concurrent Minitel) that were standardized from the top down by a government.66 Together these three dimensions of networking (of technical communication protocols, communicative content and governance of standards) converged to create the internet we know today.
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(highlight::
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pluralitybook/plurality/main/figs/data/share_online/share_online.png
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Figure 3-3-B. Population share with internet access over time in the world and various regions. Source: Our World in Data.67
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Lick foresaw in his classic essay “Computers and Government” “two scenarios” (one good, the other bad for the future of computing: it could be dominated and its potential stifled by monopolistic corporate control or there could be a full societal mobilization that made computing serve and support democracy.69 In the former scenario, Lick projected all kinds of social ills, one that might make the advent of the information age a net detractor to democratic social flourishing. These included:

1. Pervasive surveillance and public distrust of government.
2. Paralysis of government’s ability to regulate or enforce laws, as they fall behind the dominant technologies citizens use.
3. Debasement of creative professions.
4. Monopolization and corporate exploitation.
5. Pervasive digital misinformation.
6. Siloing of information that undermines much of the potential of networking.
7. Government data and statistics becoming increasingly inaccurate and irrelevant.
8. Control by private entities of the fundamental platforms for speech and public discourse.)
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Into the resulting vacuum stepped the increasingly eager private sector, flush with the success of the personal computer and inflated by the stirring celebrations of Reagan and Thatcher. While the International Business Machines (IBM) that Lick feared would dominate and hamper the internet’s development proved unable to key pace with technological change, it found many willing and able successors. A small group of telecommunications companies took over the internet backbone that the NSF freely relinquished. Web portals, like America Online and Prodigy came to dominate most Americans’ interactions with the web, as Netscape and Microsoft vied to dominate web browsing. The neglected identity functions were filled by the rise of Google and Facebook. Absent digital payments were filled in by PayPal and Stripe. Absent the protocols for sharing data, computational power and storage that motivated work on the Intergalactic Computer Network in the first place, private infrastructures (often called “cloud providers”) that empowered such sharing (such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure) became the platforms for building applications.72
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- [note::Thinking about Gal's Law, I wonder if it would have been better to define these protocols up front as opposed to letting private actors carve out "ecology niches". By impression is that letting private actors fill in these functions was better than what this book is making it out to be.
That said, I think if you had complete global cooperation (a pipe dream), one could come up with a better system.]

While Wikis themselves have found significant applications, they have had an even broader impact in helping stimulate the “groupware” revolution that many internet users associate with products like Google docs but has its roots in the open source WebSocket protocol.77 HackMD, a collaborative real-time Markdown editor, is used within the g0v community to collaboratively edit and openly share documents such as meeting minutes.78 While collaboratively constructed documents illustrate this ethos, it more broadly pervades the very foundation of the online world itself.
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Open source software (OSS) embodies this ethos of participatory, networked, transnational self-governance.
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Richard Stallman, opposing the closed nature of the Unix OS developed by AT&T, led the “free software movement”, promoting the “GNU General Public License” that allowed users to run, study, share, and modify the source code. This was eventually rebranded as OSS, with a goal to replace Unix with an open-source alternative, Linux, led by Linus Torvalds.
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Other pioneers on these issues focused more on layers of communication and association, rather than provenance and value. Calling their work the “Decentralized Web” or the “Fediverse”, they built protocols like Christine Lemmer Webber’s Activity Pub that became the basis for non-commercial, community based alternatives to mainstream social media, ranging from Mastodon to Twitter’s now-independent and non-profit BlueSky initiative. This space has also produced many of the most creative ideas for re-imagining identity and privacy with a foundation in social and community relationships.
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Finally and perhaps most closely connected to our own paths to ⿻ have been the movements to revive the public and multisectoral spirit and ideals of the early internet by strengthening the digital participation of governments and democratic civil society. These “GovTech” and “Civic Tech” movements have harnessed OSS-style development practices to improve the delivery of government services and bring the public into the process in a more diverse range of ways. Leaders in the US include Jennifer Pahlka, founder of GovTech pioneer Code4America, and Beth Simone Noveck, Founder of The GovLab.86
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Noveck, in particular, is a powerful bridge between the early development of ⿻ and its future, having been a driving force behind the Online Deliberation workshops mentioned above, having developed Unchat, one of the earliest attempts at software to serve these goals and which helped inspire the work of vTaiwan and more.87 She went on to pioneer, in her work with the US Patent and Trademark Office and later as Deputy Chief Technology Officer of the US many of the transparent and inclusive practices that formed the core of the g0v movement we highlighted above.88 Noveck was a critical mentor not just to g0v but to a range of other ambitious civic technology projects around the world from the Kenya collective crisis reporting platform Ushahidi founded by Juliana Rotich and collaborators to a variety of European participative policy-making platforms like Decidim founded by Francesca Bria and collaborators and CONSUL that arose from the “Indignado” movement parallel to g0v in Spain, on the board of which one of us sits.
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Other countries have, of course, excelled in various elements of ⿻. Estonia is perhaps the leading example and shares with Taiwan a strong history of Georgism and land taxes, is often cited as the most digitized democratic government in the world and pioneered digital democracy earlier than almost any other country, starting in the late 1990s.89 Finland has built on and scaled the success of its neighbor, extending digital inclusion deeper into society, educational system and the economy than Estonia, as well as adopting elements of digitized democratic participation. Singapore has the most ambitious Georgist-style policies on earth and harnesses more creative ⿻ economic mechanisms and fundamental protocols than any other jurisdiction. South Korea has invested extensively in both digital services and digital competence education. New Zealand has pioneered internet-based voting and harnessed civil society to improve public service inclusion. Iceland has harnessed digital tools to extend democratic participation more extensively than any other jurisdiction. Kenya, Brazil and especially India have pioneered digital infrastructure for development.
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Danielle Allen, “Chapter 2: Toward a Connected Society,” in In Our Compelling Interests, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400881260-006.
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Carlo Rovelli, “The Big Idea: Why Relationships Are the Key to Existence.” The Guardian, September 5, 2022, sec. Books. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/sep/05/the-big-idea-why-relationships-are-the-key-to-existence.
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M. Mitchell Waldrop, Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos (New York: Open Road Media, 2019).
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James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science (New York: Penguin, 2018).
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In assemblage theory, as articulated by Manuel DeLanda, entities are understood as complex structures formed from the symbiotic relationship between heterogeneous components, rather than being reducible to their individual parts. Its central thesis is that people do not act exclusively by themselves, and instead human action requires complex socio-material interdependencies. DeLanda’s perspective shifts the focus from inherent qualities of entities to the dynamic processes and interactions that give rise to emergent properties within networks of relations. His book “A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity” (2006) is a good starting point.
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Scott Page, The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007);
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César Hidalgo, Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies, (New York: Basic Books, 2015);
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César Hidalgo, Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies, (New York: Basic Books, 2015);
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Mark Granovetter, “The Strength of Weak Ties,” American Journal of Sociology 78, no. 6 (May 1973): 1360–80;
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Brian Uzzi, “Social Structure and Competition in Interfirm Networks: The Paradox of Embeddedness,” Administrative Science Quarterly 42, no. 1 (March 1997): 35–67. https://doi.org/10.2307/2393808;
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McPherson, Miller, Lynn Smith-Lovin, and James M Cook. “Birds of a Feather: Homophily in Social Networks.” Annual Review of Sociology 27, no. 1 (August 2001): 415–44.
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Andrey Rzhetsky, Jacob Foster, Ian Foster, and James Evans, “Choosing Experiments to Accelerate Collective Discovery,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112, no. 47 (November 9, 2015): 14569–74. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1509757112.
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(highlight:: • .↩︎
• Lingfei Wu, Dashun Wang, and James Evans, “Large teams develop and small teams disrupt science and technology,” Nature 566.7744 (2019): 378-382.)
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Lingfei Wu, Dashun Wang, and James Evans, “Large teams develop and small teams disrupt science and technology,” Nature 566.7744 (2019): 378-382.
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Yiling Lin, James Evans, and Lingfei Wu, “New directions in science emerge from disconnection and discord,” Journal of Informetrics 16.1 (2022): 101234.
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Feng Shi, and James Evans, “Surprising combinations of research contents and contexts are related to impact and emerge with scientific outsiders from distant disciplines,” Nature Communications 14.1 (2023): 1641.
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Jacob Foster, Andrey Rzhetsky, and James A. Evans, “Tradition and Innovation in Scientists’ Research Strategies,” American Sociological Review 80.5 (2015): 875-908.
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John Dewey, The Public and its Problems (New York: Holt Publishers, 1927): p. 81.
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Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1944).
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Joseph Henrich, The WEIRDest People in the World How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous, (New York Macmillan, 2010).
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Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics, Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (Paris: Hermann & Cie, 1948).
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Norbert Wiener, Human Use of Human Beings (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1950).
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J.C.R. Licklider, “Computers and Government” in Michael L. Dertouzos and Joel Moses eds., The Computer Age: A Twenty-Year View (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1980)
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Dan Davies, The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions - and How The World Lost its Mind (London: Profile Books, 2024).
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J. C. R. Licklider. “Man-Computer Symbiosis,” March 1960. https://groups.csail.mit.edu/medg/people/psz/Licklider.html.
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(highlight:: • ↩︎
• Ben Tarnoff)
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Ben Tarnoff, Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future (New York: Verso, 2022).
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Sohyeon Hwang, and Aaron Shaw. “Rules and Rule-Making in the Five Largest Wikipedias.” Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media 16 (May 31, 2022): 347–57, https://doi.org/10.1609/icwsm.v16i1.19297 studied rule-making on Wikipedia using 20 years of trace data.
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- [note::Omg this sounds FASCINATING]

Bo
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The term “groupware” was coined by Peter and Trudy Johnson-Lenz in 1978, with early commercial products appearing in the 1990s, such as Lotus Notes, enabling remote group collaboration. Google Docs, originated from Writely launched in 2005, has widely popularized the concept of collaborative real-time editing.
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Scrapbox, a combination of real-time editor with a wiki system, is utilized by the Japanese forum of this book. Visitors of the forum can read the drafts and add questions, explanations, or links to related topics in real time. This interactive environment supports activities like book reading events, where participants can write questions, engage in oral discussions, or take minutes of these discussions. The feature to rename keywords while maintaining the network structure helps the unification of variations in terminology and provides a process to find the good translation. As more people read through, a network of knowledge is nurtured to aid the understanding of subsequent readers.
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- [note::Just checked out the website - public projects are free!]

GitHub Innovation graph at https://github.com/github/innovationgraph/
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Jennifer Pahlka, Recoding America: Why Government is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better (New York: Macmillan, 2023).
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Beth Simone Noveck, Wiki Government: How Technology Can Make Government Better, Democracy Stronger, and Citizens More Powerful (New York: Brookings Institution Press, 2010).
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Beth Noveck, “A Democracy of Groups,” First Monday 10, no. 11 (November 7, 2005), https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v10i11.1289.
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Gary Anthes, “Estonia: a Model for e-Government” Communications of the ACM 58, no. 6 (2015): 18-20.
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(highlight:: “To pioneers of digital assets, a toast,
Empowering choice, economic equality’s coast.”
She envisions harnessing her phone’s might,
Buying magical potions, adventuring through the night.
“To creators of digital democracy, a cheer,
Where governance is a journey, transparent and clear.”
She pictures modernizing her family’s ancient vines,
Adopting UN techniques, progress intertwines.
“To moral compasses, navigating the virtual sea,
Ensuring digital realms reflect our highest decree.”
Luna realizes her calling transcends mere platforms,
Building societal pillars, enriching human norms.
“Together, this community isn’t just coding software,
We’re sculpting a legacy of compassion and welfare.”
In each digital interaction, a chance to uplift,
Connecting humanity, mending the rifts.)
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We argue that ⿻ societies must be founded on infrastructure that matches the principles of ⿻ in both form and structure. Formally, they must combine seamlessly the closely related political idea of a system of rights and technological concept of an operating system. Substantively they must allow the digital representation of societies in the terms ⿻ understands them: as diverse, intersecting social groups and people that jointly undertake ambitious and inclusive collaborations.
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In her recent book, Justice by Means of Democracy, leading ⿻ political philosopher Danielle Allen provides a clear account of this connection: government cannot respond to the “will of the people” if their will cannot be safely and freely expressed.2 If voting one’s conscience is personally dangerous, there is no reason to believe that outcomes reflect anything other than a coercer’s will. If citizens cannot form social and political associations free of duress, they cannot coordinate to contest decisions by those in power. If they cannot seek livelihood through a diversity of economic interactions (for example, because they are enslaved either by the state or a private master), we should expect their expressed politics to obey their masters, not their inner voice. Without rights, elections become shams.
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Almost all democracies share a focus, and expect others to share a focus, on the preservation of some strongly overlapping set of such rights of speech and association as basic preconditions for democratic functioning. For example, Scandinavian countries have emphasized the importance of what might be called “positive freedom of speech,” namely that every citizen regardless of means has a viable path for their voice to be heard, whereas others such as the US, emphasize “negative freedom of speech,” that no one may impede through government intervention the expression of a view. Some societies (e.g. in Europe) tend to emphasize the importance of privacy as a fundamental right necessary for civil society to exist independently of the state and thus for politics to be possible. Others (e.g. in Asia) tend to emphasize rights of assembly and association as more central to democratic function. Despite these variances, the underlying assumption of rights of speech and association is that they protect agency, so citizens may have the autonomy to form and advance associations for their common interests, so these common interests can be heard politically.
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- [note::Democracy comes in many flavors, but the common thread is the freedom to have their interests represented politically]

Operating
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Operating
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Dynamism
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Thus, our understanding of free speech, once considered the primary expression of a right that ensures citizens can freely form and build support for political positions, is being challenged as a result of information technology. This assumption was founded on an environment where information was scarce and thus its suppression was one of the more effective ways to avoid voices being heard. The present environment is different: information is abundant and attention scarce. Thus it is often easier for adversaries who seek to suppress or censor inconvenient views (attacking the foundations of democracy) to simply flood the information commons with distractions and spam, rather than try to suppress dissidents and unwanted content (documented dramatically by the research of Gary King, Jennifer Pan and Molly Roberts).13 Under such attacks, ensuring diverse, relevant and genuine content is surfaced for attention is the challenge, not (only) preventing literal censorship.
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freedom
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In that growing part of our lives, what we do, say, and trade is constrained by the possibilities offered by the technologies that network us together—and thus weave our social fabric. The protocols that connect us thus define our rights in the digital age, forming the OS on which societies run. Intellectually and philosophically, the ⿻ tradition we described in our chapter on Connected Society focuses on the need to move beyond the simplistic frameworks for property, identity and democracy on which liberal democracies have been built in favor of more sophisticated alternatives that match the richness of social life.
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- [note::"We need better operations systems for society" - I kind of love this as a tag line. Perhaps I could use this as part of a future organization's mission.]

(highlight::
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pluralitybook/plurality/main/figs/hypergraph.png
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Figure 4-0-B. A hypergraph that visualizes people, groups, relationships, and digital assets
**)
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a simple way to see what this requires is to use the canonical mathematical model that directly corresponds to ⿻ description of society such as the “hypergraph” as pictured in the figure. A hypergraph, which extends the more common idea of a network or graph by allowing groups rather than just bilateral relationships, is a collection of “nodes” (viz. people, represented by the dots) and “edges” (viz. groups, represented by the blobs). The shade of each edge/group represents the strength of the relationship involved (viz. mathematically its “weight” and “direction”), while the digital assets (e.g. data, computation and digital storage) contained in the edges represent the collaborative substrate of these groups. Any such digital model is, of course, not literally the social world but an abstraction of it and for real humans to access it requires a range of digital tools, which we represent by the arrows entering into the diagram. These elements constitute jointly a menu of rights/OS properties which each of the next five chapters articulates one of more completely: identity/personhood, association, commercial trust, property/contract and access.
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Most of the natural, fundamental affordances of networking are not available to most people even in wealthy countries as basic parts of the online experience. There is no widely adopted, non-proprietary protocol for identification16 that protects rights to life and personhood online, no widely adopted non-proprietary protocols for the ways we communicate 17 18 19 and form groups online that allows free association, no widely adopted non-proprietary protocols for payments to support commerce on real-world assets and no protocols for the secure sharing of digital assets like computation, memory20 and data21 that would allow rights of property and contract in the digital world. Many of these services are almost all controlled and often quasi-monopolized by nation-state governments or more often by private corporations. And even the basic conception of networks that lies behind most approaches to addressing these challenges is too limited, ignoring the central role of intersecting communities. If rights are to have any meaning in our digital world, this has to change.
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- [note::My impression is the primary reason for this fragmentation/privatization is the core challenge of coordination/collective action. Is this really all that tractable, given all the other problems that governments have to contend with? I guess one won't know until such protocols are developed and advocated for.]

A variety of developments in the past decade have fitfully taken up the mantle of the “missing layers” of the internet. This work includes the “web3” and “decentralized web” ecosystems, the Gaia-X data-sharing framework in Europe, the development of a variety of digital-native currencies and payment systems and most prominently growing investment in “digital public infrastructure” as exemplified by the “India stack” developed in the country in the last decade. These efforts have been underfunded, fragmented across countries and ideologies and in many cases limited in ambition or misled by Technocratic or Libertarian ideologies or overly simplistic understanding of networks. But they together represent a proof of concept that a more systematic pursuit of ⿻ is feasible. In this part of the book, we will show how to build on these projects, invest in their future and accelerate our way towards a ⿻ future.
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Just as the most fundamental human rights are those to life, personhood and citizenship, the most fundamental protocols for a ⿻ society are those that establish and protect participant identities. It is impossible to secure any right or provide any service without a definition of who or what is entitled to these. Without a reasonably secure identity foundation, any voting system, for example, will be captured by whoever can produce the most false credentials, degenerating into a plutocracy.
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- [note::What are the privacy implications around this? I'm imagining a pluralist world where there exists few places where identity verification is not required. Seems very Black Mirror-esque.]

At the same time, many of the simplest ways to establish identity paradoxically simultaneously undermine it, especially online. A password is often used to establish an identity, but unless such authentication is conducted with great care it can reveal the password more broadly, making it useless for authentication in the future as attackers will be able to impersonate them. “Privacy” is often dismissed as “nice to have” and especially useful for those who “have something to hide”. But in identity systems, the protection of private information is the very core of utility. Any useful identity system has to be judged on its ability to simultaneously establish and protect identities.
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(highlight:: • belong to multiple accounts and thus a “social graph” of connections.
• Recovery: Passwords and keys get lost or stolen and multi-factor authentication systems break down. Most identity systems have a way to recover lost or stolen credentials, using secret information, access to external identity tokens or social relationships.
• Federation: Just as participants creating an account draw on (often verified) information about them from external sources, so too do most accounts—allowing the information contained in them to be at least partially used to create accounts in other systems.26)
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On the one hand, if (as in Aadhaar the administrators of the program are constantly using biometrics for authentication, they become able to link or see activities to these done by the person who the identifier points to, gaining an unprecedented capacity to surveil citizen activities across a wide range of domains and, potentially, to undermine or target the identities of vulnerable populations.42 Activists have raised concerns over this issue have been repeatedly raised in relation to the status of the Muslim minority in India.
On the other hand, if privacy is protected, as in Worldcoin, by using biometrics only to initialize an account, the system becomes vulnerable to stealing or selling of accounts, a problem that has decimated the operation of related services.43 Because most services people seek to access require more than proving they are a unique human (e.g. that they have a particular name, an ID number of some type issued to them by a recognized government, that they are a citizen of some country, and maybe some other attributes like educational or employment credentials at a company, etc.) this extreme preservation of privacy undermines most of the utility of the system. Furthermore, such systems place a great burden on the technical performance of biometric systems. If eyeballs can, sometime in the future, be spoofed by artificial intelligence systems combined with advanced printing technology, such a system may be subject to an extreme “single point of failure”.44 In short, despite their important capacity for inclusion and simplicity, biometric systems are too reductive to establish and protect identities with the richness and security required to support ⿻.)
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Despite these common challenges, the details of these schemes vary dramatically, however. On one extreme, advocates of “verifiable credentials” (VCs) prioritize privacy and the ability of users to control which of the claims about them are presented at any time. On the other extreme, advocates of “soulbound tokens” (SBTs) or other blockchain-centric identity systems emphasize the importance of credentials that are public commitments to e.g. repay a loan or not produce further replicas of a work of art and thus require that the claims be publicly tied to an identity. Here, again, in both the challenges around recovery and the DID/VC-SBT debate we see the unattractive trade-off between establishing and protecting identities.
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Identity
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This social, ⿻ approach to online identity was pioneered by danah boyd in her astonishingly farsighted master’s thesis on “faceted identity” more than 20 years ago.49 While she focused primarily on the benefits of such a system for feelings of personal agency (in the spirit of Simmel), the potential benefits for the balance between identity establishment and protection are even more astonishing:
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4-2
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Collective efforts, through political parties, civic associations, labor unions and businesses, are always necessary. For ⿻, these and other less formal social groupings are just as fundamental as individuals are to the social fabric. In this sense, associations are the Yin to the Yang of personhood in the most foundational rights and for the same reason are the scourge of tyrants. Again, to quote De Tocqueville, “No defect of the human heart suits [despotism] better than egoism; a tyrant is relaxed enough to forgive his subjects for failing to love him, provided that they do not love one another.” Only by facilitating and protecting the capacity to form novel associations with meaningful agency can we hope for freedom, self-government and diversity.
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- favorite,

As Lick and Taylor emphasized, forming an association or community requires establishing a set of background shared beliefs, values and interests that form a context for the association and communication within it. Furthermore, as emphasized by Simmel and Nissenbaum, it also requires protecting this context from external surveillance: if individuals believe their communications to their association are being monitored by outsiders, they will often be unwilling to harness the context of shared community for fear their words will be misunderstood by those these communications were no intended for.
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How do people people form “an organization of persons sharing a common interest”? Clearly, a group of people who simply happen to share an interest is insufficient. People can share an interest but have no awareness of each other, or might know each other and have no idea about their shared interest. As social scientists and game theorists have recently emphasized, the collective action implied by “organization” requires a stronger notion of what it is to have an “interest”, “belief” or “goal” in common. In the technical terms of these fields, the required state is what they call (approximate) “common knowledge”.
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group beliefs and goals are common beliefs and goals of that group. In this sense, the freedom to create associations can be understood as the freedom to create common beliefs and goals. Yet creating associations is not enough. Just as we argued in the previous chapter that protecting secrets is critical to maintaining individual identity, so too associations must be able to protect themselves from surveillance, as should their common beliefs become simply the beliefs of everyone, they cease to be a separate association just as much as an individual who spills all her secrets ceases to have an identity to protect.
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As illustrated above, group meetings and statements made openly in front of group members are crucial to achieving common beliefs and understanding among that group. Private pamphlets may achieve individual persuasion, but given the lack of common observation, game theorists have argued that they struggle to create public beliefs in the same way a shared declaration, like the child’s public laughter, can.
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Yet publicity is not the same as the creation of community and association. Posting online resembles much more the distribution of a pamphlet than the holding of a public protest. It is hard for those seeing a post to know who and how many others are consuming the same information, and certainly to gauge their views about the same. The post may influence their beliefs, but it is hard for it to create common beliefs among an identifiable group of compatriots. Features that highlight virality and attention of posts may help somewhat, but still make the alignment of an audience for a message far coarser than what is possible in physical public spaces.
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Is there any chance of doing something similar for over-sharing? One common approach is simply to avoid data persistence: SnapChat rose to prominence with disappearing messages, and many messaging protocols have since adopted similar approaches. Another more ambitious cryptographic technique is “designated verifier proofs” (DVPs) which prove authenticity only to a single recipient while appearing potentially forged to everyone else.81 Such an approach is only useful for information that cannot be independently verified: if someone over-shares a community password, DVPs are not of much use as unintended recipients can quickly check if the password works.
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As generative foundation models make persuasive deception ever cheaper, the importance of verification will grow. In such a world, the ability to target verification at an individual and rely on the untrustworthiness of over-shared information may be increasingly powerful. As such, it may be increasingly possible to protect information more fully from over-sharing, as well as snooping.
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Consider first information “hidden in plain sight”, lost in a pile of irrelevant facts, available to all but reaching the awareness of no one a bit like Waldon in the popular American children’s game “Where’s Waldo?” where children must find a man in a striped shirt hidden in a picture. Contrast this with the secret of the existence of the Manhattan Project, which was shared among roughly 100,000 people but was sharply hidden from the rest of the world. Both are near the midpoint of the “privacy” v. “publicity” spectrum, as both are in important ways broadly shared and obscure. But they sit at opposite ends of another spectrum: of concentrated common understanding v. diffuse availability.
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⿻ publics is the aspiration to create information standards that allow a diverse range of communities with strong internal common beliefs shielded from the outside world to coexist. Achieving this requires maintaining what Shrey Jain, Zoë Hitzig and Pamela Mishkin have called “contextual confidence”, where participants in a system can easily establish and protect the context of their communications.82
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Luckily, in recent years some of the leaders in open standards technologies of both privacy and publicity have turned their attention to this problem. Lemmer Webber, of ActivityPub fame, has spent the last few years working on Spritely, a project to create self-governing and strongly connected private communities in the spirit of ⿻ publics, allowing individual users to clearly discern, navigate and separate community contexts in open standards.
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Storage, computation and data lie at the core of essentially every online interaction. Anything that occurs online persists from one moment to the next only because of the data it depends on being stored somewhere. The occurrences themselves are embodied by computations being performed to determine the outcome of instructions and actions. And the input and output of every operation are data. In this sense, storage acts roughly like land in the real economy, computation acts something like fuel and data acts like human inputs (sometimes called labor) and artifacts people create and reuse (sometimes called capital).
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Many of the most intractable problems today have answers if the power we see being unleashed by generative foundation models (GFMs) could be applied to medical diagnosis, environmental resource optimization, industrial production and more that is limited by the challenges today of sharing data across organizational and jurisdictional boundaries.
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- data sharing, open data, data silos, 1action,

Studies of the semiconductor industry indicate that several times as many semiconductors are used in personal devices (e.g. PCs, smartphones, smartwatches, video game consoles) as go into cloud infrastructure and data centers.113 While there is little systematic study, personal experience indicates that most of these devices are mostly little used most of the day. This is likely particularly true of video game consoles, which disproportionately hold exceptionally valuable graphics processing units (GPUs). This suggests that a majority if not a large majority of computation and storage lies fallow at any time, not even accounting for the prevalent waste even in cloud infrastructure. Data are even more extreme; while these are even harder to quantify, the experience of any data scientist suggests that the overwhelming majority of desperately needed data sits in organizational or jurisdictional silos, unable to power collaborative intelligence or the building of GFMs.
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- [note::Never thought about this, but good point. The data silo issue seems compelling to work on, but I'm not so sure about the "not being able to utilize Xbox's for computation" issue (except in a "let's use carbon intensive rare earth metals for something better than simply sitting on millions of TV consoles" sense)]

The closest framework to an open standard for asset sharing exists in storage, through the Interplanetary File System (IPFS) explicitly modeled on Lick’s vision and pioneered by Juan Benet and his Protocol Labs (PL), which was a partner on some of the software that supported building this book. This open protocol allows computers around the world to offer storage to each other at a reasonable cost in a peer-to-peer, fragmented, encrypted and distributed manner that helps ensure redundancy, robustness and data secrecy/integrity.
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The more complicated challenge of optimizing for latency has been handled overwhelmingly by large corporate “cloud” providers such as Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services Google Cloud Platform and Salesforce. Most of the digital services familiar to consumers in the developed world (remote storage of personal files across devices, streaming of audio and video content, shared documents, etc.) depend on these providers. They are also at the core of most digital businesses today, with 60% of business data being stored in proprietary clouds and the top two proprietary cloud providers (Amazon and Microsoft) capturing almost two-thirds of the market.117
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More dramatically, the cloud has largely been built in new data centers around the world, even as most available computation and storage remains severely underutilized in the pockets and on the laps and desks of personal computer owners around the world. Furthermore, these computers are physically closer and often more tightly networked to the consumers of computational resources than the bespoke cloud data centers…and yet the “genius” of the cloud system has systematically wasted them. In short, despite its many successes, the cloud has to a large extent involved a reversion to an even more centralized version of the “mainframe” model that preceded the time-sharing work Lick helped support, rather than a realization of its ambitions.
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(highlight:: The movement to allow data sharing even for clear public interest cases, such as public health or the curing of diseases, has been held out for years under a variety of names and yet has made very little progress either in the private sector or in open standards-based collaborations.
This problem is widely recognized and the subject of a variety of campaigns around the world. Examples include the European Union’s Gaia-X data federation infrastructure and their Data Governance Act, India’s National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy, Singapore’s Trusted Data Sharing Framework and Taiwan’s Plural Innovation strategy are just a few examples of attempts to overcome these challenges.)
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Achieving this crucial separation is different and arguably more challenging for data. The simplest ways of giving access to usus of data also allow the person granted access the ability to abuse or transfer the data to others (abusus) and the ability for others to gain financial benefit from those data (fructus), possibly at the expense of the person sharing it. Many who chose to publish data online that has now been incorporated into GFMs believed they were sharing information for others to use, but they did not perceive the full implications that sharing would have.
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- [note::Never heard the barriers to data sharing framed in the context of rights. Love this!]

Challenges of this sort surround efforts to build infrastructure for sharing digital assets like data. The basic problem is that information has a near-infinity of possible uses, meaning that heavily “contractualist” approaches that seek to define exactly how parties may use information run into unmanageable complexity. Such contracts’ zones of “incompleteness” are overwhelmingly vast because it is not possible even to imagine, let alone catalog and negotiate over all the possible future uses of information like genetics or geolocation. That means that the most promising possible benefits of data sharing – which involve taking advantage of new technical affordance to convey information to distant parties all around the world – are also the most dangerous and ungovernable. The potential market is therefore paralyzed. If we cannot address these problems with conventional contracts, our ideal spheres of information sharing will end up matching the shape of our associations – meaning we need better maps of our associative connections, and, as discussed elsewhere, better assurances against information leakage even from trusted communities.
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Organizations capable of taking on this role of collectively representing the rights and interests of “data subjects”122 have been given a variety of names: data trusts,123 collaboratives,124 cooperatives,125 or, in a whimsical turn of phrase one of the authors suggested, “mediators of individual data” (MIDs).126
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Once they develop and spread sufficiently, data collaboration tools, organizations and practices may become sufficiently familiar to be encoded in common sense and legal practice as deeply as “property rights” are, though as we noted they will almost certainly have to take a different form than the standard patterns governing private ownership of land or the organization of a joint-stock corporation. They will, as we noted, need to include many more technical and cryptographic elements, different kinds of social organizations with a greater emphasis on collective governance and fiduciary duties and norms or laws protecting against unilateral disclosure by a member of a MIDs (analogous to prohibitions against unilateral strikebreaking against unions). These may form into a future version of “property” for the digital world, but one much more attuned to the ⿻ character of data.
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We are not interested in mere access, but access with integrity. If the information some receive is accurate and others corrupted, it is worse than if the latter had no access at all. Democracy depends on a populace that can fully participate: every voice is critical. While, as we have emphasized above, different communities make sense of the pattern of facts differently. But this diversity of perspective must come founded on underlying common access to uncorrupted input data if it is to contribute to a ⿻ future. We all can and must make our own meanings of life, but we are denied our equal right to do so if some of us receive manipulated versions of the inputs to the global information commons.
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(highlight:: To safeguard and establish a safer and more open digital access environment, there are two important courses of action:

1. Digital Infrastructure: Develop an interoperable model for international infrastructures that overcomes the challenges of collective action we discuss in the Social Markets chapter below, thereby providing equitable services globally.
2. Information Integrity: Address the challenges posed by mimetic models (so-called “deepfakes”) to maintain semantic security and allow the continued enjoyment of the benefits of the digital age.
   If we can advance these two fundamental rights, the other rights described in this part of the book can reach into the lived experience of all people and serve as a substrate not just of collective intelligence “online”, but in the daily lives of everyone across the world.)
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(highlight:: Simard has studied how tree roots and symbiotic mycorrhizal fungi communicate in the soil layers of ancient forests in British Columbia. She discovered with colleagues that in this environment driven by fungal networks, different types of trees can send warning signals to each other and share essential sugars, water, carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus.134
In such a vibrant forest, a single ‘mother tree’ can establish connections with hundreds of other trees. Multiple such mother trees ensure the continuity of the entire forest as a collective organism through overlapping networks, ensuring a secure and robust environment through open connections.
Digital infrastructure follows a similar pattern with open standards (protocols), open-source code, and open data. It serves as a public foundation that is open to the global community, collaborating with tens of thousands of digital communities while offering open and secure Internet access and jointly defending against immediate digital threats.)
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- [note::Great analogy]

(highlight:: The Ukrainian “Diia” and the Estonian “mRiik” serve as examples that highlight the bidirectional features of trusted networks and information openness.
Both Estonia and Ukraine are proactive in digitalization toward public participation. They make digital technology a genuinely necessary social tool for the public, providing secure, open digital public services for citizens to access government services and real-time information. Diia has shown the world how digital technology can break down long-standing corruption. This year, Estonia launched its latest app “mRiik,” largely inspired by the Ukrainian app Diia.136)
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Nicholas A. Christakis, Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society (New York: Little Brown Spark, 2019).
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Jamal Greene, How Rights Went Wrong: How our Obsession with Rights is Tearing America Apart (Boston: Mariner, 2021).
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Jenny Toomey and Michelle Shevin, “Reconceiving the Missing Layers of the Internet for a More Just Future”, Ford Foundation available at https://www.fordfoundation.org/work/learning/learning-reflections/reconceiving-the-missing-layers-of-the-internet-for-a-more-just-future/.
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Frank H. McCourt, Jr. with Michael J. Casey, Our Biggest Fight: Reclaiming Liberty, Humanity, and Dignity in the Digital Age (New York: Crown, 2024). McCourt has founded Project Liberty, one of the largest philanthropic efforts around reforming technology largely based on this thesis.
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“More Instant Messaging Interoperability (Mimi),” Datatracker, n.d. https://datatracker.ietf.org/group/mimi/about/.
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Puja Ohlhaver, E. Glen Weyl and Vitalik Buterin, “Decentralized Society: Finding Web3’s Soul”, 2022 at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4105763.
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Jaron Lanier and E. Glen Weyl, “A Blueprint for a Better Digital Society” Harvard Business Review: Big Idea Series (Tracked) September 28, 2018: Article 5 available at https://hbr.org/2018/09/a-blueprint-for-a-better-digital-society.
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Duncan J. Watts and Steven H. Strogatz, “The Collective Dynamics of ‘Small World’ Networks” Nature 393 (1998): 440-442.
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Timur Kuran, Private Truth, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).
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Stephen Morris and Hyun Song Shin, “Social Value of Public Information”, American Economic Review 92, no.5 (2002): 1521-1534.
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John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1958).
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Vitalik Buterin, “The Most Important Scarce Resource is Legitimacy” March 23, 2021 at https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2021/03/23/legitimacy.html.
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Herbert Simon, Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971): pp. 37-52.
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Frank McCourt, and Michael Casey, Our Biggest Fight: Reclaiming Liberty, Humanity, and Dignity in the Digital Age, (New York: Crown, 2024).
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See also Shrey Jain, Divya Siddarth and E. Glen Weyl, “Plural Publics” March 20, 2023 from the GETTING-Plurality Research Network at https://gettingplurality.org/2023/03/18/plural-publics/.
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Divya Siddarth, Matthew Prewitt, and Glen Weyl, “Supermodular,” The Collective Intelligence Project, 2023. https://cip.org/supermodular.
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Kate Crawford
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Kate Crawford, Atlas of AI (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2022).
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David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, (New York: Farrar, Straus And Giroux, 2021). In this book, the authors explore a vast range of political creativity and flexibility surrounding how humans have organized themselves in the last 100,000 years.
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Jaron Lanier, Who Owns the Future?, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014).
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See the Data Collaboration Alliance at https://www.datacollaboration.org/
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Thomas Hardjono and Alex Pentland, “Data cooperatives: Towards a Foundation for Decentralized Personal Data Management,” arXiv (New York: Cornell University, 2019), https://arxiv.org/pdf/1905.08819.pdf.
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Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine”, Computer Systems and ISDN Systems 30, no. 1-7: 107-117.
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In a world beset by conflict, we must learn to build engines that, just as in the Taiwanese example we opened with, convert the potential energy driving these conflicts into useful work. The ⿻ age must learn to harness social and informational potential energy as the industrial age did for fossil fuels and the nuclear age did for atomic energy.4
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perhaps one of the most compelling bodies of evidence is the finding, popularized by economist Oded Galor in his Journey of Humanity.5 Building on his work with Quamrul Ashraf charting long-term comparative economic development, he argues that perhaps the most robust and fundamental driver of economic growth is societies’ ability to productively and cooperatively harness the potential of social diversity.6
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Religion and religiosity: A diverse range of religious practices, including secularism, agnosticism, and forms of atheism, are central to the metaphysical, epistemological and ethical perspective of most people around the world.
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Religion and religiosity: A diverse range of religious practices, including secularism, agnosticism, and forms of atheism, are central to the metaphysical, epistemological and ethical perspective of most people around the world.
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Jurisdiction: People are citizens of a range of jurisdictions, including nation states, provinces, cities etc.
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Geographic type: People live in different types of geographic regions: rural v. urban, cosmopolitan v. more traditional cities, differing weather patterns, proximity to geographic features etc.
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Profession: Most people spend a large portion of their lives working and define important parts of their identities by a profession, craft or trade.
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Organizations: People are members of a range of organizations, including their employers, civic associations, professional groups, athletic clubs, online interest groups etc.
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Ethno-linguistics: People speak a range of languages and identify themselves with and/or are identified by others with a “ethnic” groups associated with these linguistic groupings or histories of such linguistic associations, and these are organized by historical linguists into rough phylogenies.
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Race, caste and tribe: Many societies feature cultural groupings based on real or perceived genetic and familial origins that partly shape collective self- and social perceptions, especially given the legacies of severe conflict and oppression based on these traits.
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Ideology: People adopt, implicitly or explicitly, a range of political and social ideologies organized according to schema that themselves differ greatly across social context (e.g. “left” and “right” are key dimensions in some contexts, while religious or national origin divides may be more important in others).
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