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Description and Summaries
Digital technology threatens to tear free and open societies apart through polarization, inequality, and loneliness. But in the decade since the weekslong occupation of their parliament, a diverse island of resilience has shown another way is possible.
Taiwan achieved inclusive, technology-fueled growth, overcame the pandemic without lockdowns and the infodemic without takedowns, entrusted its people to tackle shared challenges like environmental protection while capitalizing on a culture of innovation to “hack the government.”
Here, the architects of Taiwan’s internationally acclaimed digital democracy share the secret of their success. Plurality (symbolized ⿻) harnesses digital tools not to replace humans or trust, but to channel the potential energy in social diversity that can erupt in conflict instead for progress, growth and beauty. From intimate digitally empowered telepathy to global trade running on social networks rather than money, ⿻ offers tools to radically enrich relationships while leaving no one behind.
⿻ thus promises to transform every sector from healthcare to media, as illustrated by the way it has been written: as an open, self-governing chorus of voices collaborating around the globe. Their work in public on this openly available text shows — as well as tells — how everyone from a devout African farmer to a Hollywood celebrity can help build a more dynamic, harmonious and inclusive world.
In addition to Glen and Audrey, this book was written by dozens of people around the world who democratically contributed and steered its development and it carries no copyright, being free for anyone to distribute and remix.
We must reclaim technology from authoritarianism as a force of freedom, democracy, and liberation.
Technology and democracy are increasingly in conflict in the West, but Taiwan shows an alternative model where they are close allies.
In the West, technology is increasingly undermining democracy while democracies constrain rather than support technology.
But in the decade since the weekslong occupation of their parliament, a diverse island of resilience has shown another way is possible.
Taiwan achieved inclusive, technology-fueled growth, overcame the pandemic without lockdowns and the infodemic without takedowns, entrusted its people to tackle shared challenges like environmental protection while capitalizing on a culture of innovation to “hack the government.”
We call the philosophy behind this success ⿻ 數位 Plurality, the harnessing of digital tools not to replace humans or trust, but to channel the potential energy in social diversity that can erupt in conflict instead for progress, growth, and beauty.
⿻, inspired by the ideas of Hannah Arendt, Danielle Allen, and Audrey Tang, views diversity as the fundamental fuel of development that digital technology must harness.
It rests on the recognition that the world is not made up of atoms and large wholes, but instead of diverse, intersecting social groups and units (e.g. people) whose identities are constituted by those intersections.
As such, it sees social success and progress resting on our ability to represent and organize around such diversity and complexity, building diverse yet connected societies.
The key role of digital technology, as envisioned by the founders of the internet like JCR Licklider, was precisely to build infrastructure that allows this, a program which was derailed by its own international success and the shifting priorities of the US government.
The foundation of ⿻ is thus to pick up where this agenda left off, building the core open protocols that constitute human rights in a digital open society around identity, association, commerce, contract, and access.
Human rights are the operating system on which democracies run and open protocols extend these rights into our shared digital lives.
The most fundamental of these rights is that to personhood, instantiated in digital identity systems that, from a ⿻, are grounded in many interesting social affiliations.
The complement to personhood is freedom of association, which in the digital world is instantiated in protocols of publicity and privacy that allow a diversity of social groups to achieve common understanding shielded from external surveillance.
Commerce in a ⿻ is grounded in protocols that capture a diversity of formalized social trust rather than primarily in a global fungible currency.
To take on ambitious collaborations, associations must be able to commonly manage shared digital assets like data, computation, and storage using open protocols.
For all these to be true human rights, there needs to be universal access to these above capabilities with informational integrity, hence the need for them to be open protocols grounded to validated, redundantly stored data.
The core of ⿻ is technology for collaboration across social difference, making it possible for people to connect more deeply across greater social divides.
Such collaboration always involves a tension between depth and breadth, meaning there are a range of present ways to connect from intimacy to capitalism, at every point along the spectrum of which ⿻ aims to mitigate the trade-off.
On the most intimate end of the spectrum, “post-symbolic communication” aims to create direct brain-to-brain connections to allow deeper sharing of subjective experience than ever before.
“Immersive shared reality” technologies aim to allow the sharing of remote multisensory experiences that build empathy and community.
“Creative collaboration” allows people to work together on projects ranging from art to science, blending their intelligence and experience.
“Augmented deliberation” aims to scale our ability to talk and think together, allowing “broad listening” to complement broadcast.
“Adaptive administration” builds translators across administrative and legal systems, allowing people to live in a wider diversity of ways while still collaborating with each other under the rule of law.
“⿻ Voting” allows collective decisions that more richly reflect diversity by allowing more expression by voters and more social context to enter choices.
“Social Markets” express social structure and collective consumption, allowing shared, partially public goods and democratic co-governance to be the basis of large-scale economic cooperation.
Building on this breadth of technologies, ⿻ can transform every social sector, not just governments usually associated with the idea of “democracy”.
The ideal sites for impact should be diverse internally and diverse across the sites, as illustrated by the range of sectors we consider.
In the workplace, ⿻ can build strong remote teams and provide less hierarchical ways to encourage intrapreneurship at scale without reverting to simplistic “markets”.
In the health sector, ⿻ allows us to move beyond insuring individual risk to building infrastructures for shared goods that support health from exercise infrastructures to disease detection models.
⿻ offers a vision of pro-social media that provide information consensual and uniting to a range of communities (e.g. religious groups or local governments) supported financially by those communities rather than by subscriptions or advertising.
⿻ can allow us to directly represent the needs of our natural environment through a mixture of emergent shared goods funding, environmental sensing data cooperatives and models for language generation.
⿻ must emerge in a ⿻ way, not from the top down nor from “the market”, but instead by the mobilization of a diversity of communities everywhere traversing boundaries.
⿻ policy involves transnational public networks raising taxes on digital services to support the civil society-led development of future shared digital infrastructure, leaving both nation states and for-profit companies in a supporting role.
To build the support and vision this will require will call on action at every level of commitment across every sector (e.g. cultural, business/technology, politics/government, and academic/research) and thus offers an opportunity for every reader to be a change agent.