Yet, as we highlighted above, Lanier carried forward not only the cultural vision of the computer as a communication device; he also championed Nelson's critique of the gaps and failings of what became the internet. He particularly emphasized the lack of base layer protocols supporting payments, secure data sharing and provenance and financial support for OSS. This advocacy combined with the emergence of (pseudonymous) Satoshi Nakamoto's invention of the Bitcoin protocol in 2008 to inspire a wave of work on these topics in and around "web3" communities that harnesses cryptography and blockchains to create shared understanding of provenance and value.[^Nakamoto] While many projects in the space have been influenced by Libertarianism and hyper-financialization, the enduring connection to original aspirations of the internet, especially under the leadership of Vitalik Buterin (who founded Ethereum, the largest smart contract platform), has inspired a number of projects, like GitCoin and decentralized identity, that are central inspirations for ⿻ today as we explore below.
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.
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.[^GovTech] Hal Seki, a leader in Japan's Civic Tech movement, led the creation of sinsai.info, a data collection and visualization platform developed after the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011, and later founded Code for Japan.
[^GovTech]: Jennifer Pahlka, Recoding America: Why Government is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better (New York: Macmillan, 2023). Beth Simone Noveck, Wiki Government: How Technology Can Make Government Better, Democracy Stronger, and Citizens More Powerful (New York: Brookings Institution Press, 2010).
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.[^Unchat] 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.[^Noveckwork] 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. Yet despite these important impacts, a variety of features of these settings has made it challenging for these examples to have the systemic, national and thus easily traceable macrolevel impacts that g0v had in Taiwan.
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.[^Estoniamodel] Finland has built on and scaled the success of its neighbor, extending digital inclusion deeper into society, the 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. We will return to many of these examples in what follows.
[^Estoniamodel]: Gary Anthes, "Estonia: a Model for e-Government" Communications of the ACM 58, no. 6 (2015): 18-20.
Yet none of these have institutionalized the breadth and depth of ⿻ approaches to socio-technical organization across sectors that Taiwan has. It is thus more challenging to take these cases as broad national examples on which to found imagination of what ⿻ could mean to the world if it could scale up to bridge the divides of nation, culture and sector and forming both the infrastructural foundation and the mission of global digital society. With that anchoring example and additional hope from these other cases, we now turn to painting in greater depth the opportunity a ⿻ global future holds.
[^Unchat]: Beth Noveck, “Designing Deliberative Democracy in Cyberspace: The Role of the Cyber-Lawyer,” New York Law School, n.d. https://digitalcommons.nyls.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1580&context=fac_articles_chapters; Beth Noveck, “A Democracy of Groups,” First Monday 10, no. 11 (November 7, 2005), https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v10i11.1289. [^Noveckwork]: Beth Simone Noveck, Wiki Government op. cit.; Vivek Kundra, and Beth Noveck, “Open Government Initiative,” Internet Archive, June 3, 2009, https://web.archive.org/web/20090603192345/http://www.whitehouse.gov/open/. [^teblunthuis]: In fact, researchers have studied reading patterns in terms of time spent by users across the globe. Nathan TeBlunthuis, Tilman Bayer, and Olga Vasileva, “Dwelling on Wikipedia,” Proceedings of the 15th International Symposium on Open Collaboration, August 20, 2019, https://doi.org/10.1145/3306446.3340829, (pp. 1-14). [^hwang]: 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. [^Wiki]: In an experiment, McMahon and colleagues found that a search engine with Wikipedia links increased relative click-through-rate (a key search metric) by 80% compared to a search engine without Wikipedia links. Connor McMahon, Isaac Johnson, and Brent Hecht, “The Substantial Interdependence of Wikipedia and Google: A Case Study on the Relationship between Peer Production Communities and Information Technologies,” Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media 11, no. 1 (May 3, 2017): 142–51, https://doi.org/10.1609/icwsm.v11i1.14883. Motivated by this work, an audit study found that Wikipedia appears in roughly 70 to 80% of all search results pages for "common" and "trending" queries. Nicholas Vincent, and Brent Hecht, “A Deeper Investigation of the Importance of Wikipedia Links to Search Engine Results,” Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 5, no. CSCW1 (April 13, 2021): 1–15, https://doi.org/10.1145/3449078. [^benkler]: Yochai Benkler, “Coase’s Penguin, Or, Linux and the Nature of the Firm,” n.d. http://www.benkler.org/CoasesPenguin.PDF. [^wiredglove]: A wired glove is an input device like a glove. It allows users to interact with digital environments through gestures and movements, translating physical hand actions into digital responses. Jaron Lanier, Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters with Reality and Virtual Reality (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2017). [^visionpro]: The Vision Pro is a head mount display, released by Apple in 2024. This device integrates high-resolution displays with sensors capable of tracking the user's movements, hand actions and the environment to offer an immersive mixed reality experience. [^ChooseYourOwnAdventure]: "Choose Your Own Adventure," interactive gamebooks based on Edward Packard's concept from 1976, peaked in popularity under Bantam Books in the '80s and '90s, with 250+ million copies sold. It declined in the '90s due to competition from computer games. [^FirstDemo]: Engelbart, Christina. “Firsts: The Demo - Doug Engelbart Institute.” Doug Engelbart Institute, n.d. https://dougengelbart.org/content/view/209/. [^ComputerasCommunicationDevice]: Licklider and Taylor, op. cit. [^DouglasEngelbart]: “Douglas Engelbart Issues ‘Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework’ : History of Information,” October 1962. https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=801. [^Sputnik’sImpact]: Dickson, Paul. “Sputnik’s Impact on America.” NOVA | PBS, November 6, 2007. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/sputnik-impact-on-america/. [^ManComputerSymbiosis]: J. C. R. Licklider. “Man-Computer Symbiosis,” March 1960. https://groups.csail.mit.edu/medg/people/psz/Licklider.html.
