What is ⿻?
什么是⿻？
"Action, the only activity that goes on directly between men without the intermediary of things or matter, corresponds to the human condition of plurality, to the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world." - Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 1958[^Arendt]
"行动，唯一直接发生在人与人之间，无需借助事物或物质的活动，对应着人类存在的多元性，对应着生活于世、栖居于世界的人们，而非人类本身。"——汉娜·阿伦特，《人的境况》，1958[^阿伦特]
"(A)n ideal of 'social connectedness'...denotes a society where bridging ties, across lines of difference are formed at a high rate." - Danielle Allen, "Towards a Connected Society", 2017[^Allen]
"（一种）‘社会关联’的理想……指的是一个社会，在这个社会中，跨越差异界限的桥梁式联系大量形成。"——丹妮尔·艾伦，《迈向互联社会》，2017[^艾伦]
"Democracy is a technology. Like any technology, it gets better when more people strive to improve it." - Audrey Tang, Interview with Azeem Azhar, 2020[^Audrey]
"民主是一项技术。像任何技术一样，当更多人努力改进它时，它就会变得更好。"——唐凤，2020年接受阿齐姆·阿扎尔采访[^唐凤]
The increasing tensions between democracy and technology and the way that, starting from such extreme divisions, Taiwan seems to have overcome them naturally raises a question: is there a more broadly applicable lesson on how technology and democracy can interact to be gleaned? We usually think of technology as something that inexorably progresses, while democracy and politics as the static choice between different competing forms of social organization. Taiwan's experience shows us that more options may be available for our technological future, making it more like politics, and that one of these may involve radically enhancing how we live together and collaborate, progressing democracy much like we do technology. It also shows us that while social differences may generate conflict, using appropriate technology, they may also be a fundamental source of progress.
民主与技术之间日益紧张的关系，以及台湾是如何从这种极端分歧中自然而然地克服它们，引发了一个问题：能否从中汲取更广泛适用的经验教训，了解技术和民主如何互动？我们通常认为技术是一种不可避免地进步的东西，而民主和政治则是不同竞争性社会组织形式之间的静态选择。台湾的经验向我们表明，我们的技术未来可能还有更多选择，使其更像政治，而其中一种选择可能涉及彻底改善我们的共同生活和协作方式，从而像改进技术一样改进民主。它还向我们表明，虽然社会差异可能会产生冲突，但运用适当的技术，它们也可能是进步的基本源泉。
Nor is the possibility of such a direction for technology especially novel. Perhaps the most canonical work of science fiction and thus vision of a positive future is Star Trek, in the original series of which the heroic Vulcans maintain a philosophy of "Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations...a...belief that beauty, growth, progress -- all result from the union of the unlike." Consistent with this idea, 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.
这种技术发展方向的可能性也并非特别新颖。也许最经典的科幻作品，以及对美好未来的展望，就是《星际迷航》，在该剧的原版系列中，勇敢的瓦肯人坚持着“无限多样性，无限组合……一种……相信美丽、成长、进步——所有这些都源于不同事物的结合”的哲学。与这一理念一致，我们将本书其余部分的主题“⿻ 数字多元性”简要定义为“跨越社会差异的协作技术”。这与自由主义和技术官僚主义之间的一个共同点形成对比：两者都认为世界是由原子（即个人）和社会整体组成的，我们称之为“一元原子论”的观点。虽然它们对应该赋予每个原子多少权力持不同立场，但它们错过了⿻数字多元性的核心思想，即：相互交织的不同社会群体以及身份由这些交叉点构成的多元化和协作的人们是社会世界的核心结构。
将多元性定义的三部分显示为维恩图，标题为“无限多样性，无限组合”。第一个圆圈显示汉娜·阿伦特的照片、用于表示多元性的互锁正方形Unicode字符以及“是什么”字样。第二个圆圈显示丹妮尔·艾伦的照片、由彩虹色的小圆角正方形组成的正方形以及“应该判断”字样。第三个圆圈显示唐凤的照片、繁体中文“數位”以及“采取行动”字样。前两个圆圈的交集是“哲学”，后两个圆圈的交集是“设计”，前三个圆圈的交集是“技术”。所有圆圈的中心是本书的封面图片，融合了这三张图片。
Figure 3-0-A. Three-part definition of ⿻ 數位 Plurality
图3-0-A. ⿻ 数字多元性的三部分定义
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, as captured in Figure A above:
更精确地说，我们可以将多元性分解为三个组成部分（描述性、规范性和规定性），每个部分都与三位思想家（汉娜·阿伦特、丹妮尔·艾伦和唐凤）中的一位相关，他们每个人都以这三种截然不同却又紧密联系的方式使用了这个术语，如上图A所示：
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. We identify this descriptive element of Plurality especially with the Universal Coded Character (unicode) ⿻ which captures its emphasis on the intersectional, overlapping nature of identity for both groups and individuals. Furthermore, in the next chapter, Living in a ⿻ World, we highlight that this description applies not merely to human social life, but, according to modern (complexity) science, to essentially all complex phenomena in the natural world.
描述性：社会世界既不是孤立个体的无组织集合，也不是整体性的整体。相反，它是由多种相互交织的关联构成的结构，这些关联既定义了我们的个人身份，也定义了我们的集体组织。我们将这个概念与汉娜·阿伦特联系起来，特别是她的著作《人的境况》，她在书中将多元性称为人类境况最基本的要素。我们将多元性的这种描述性要素特别与通用编码字符 (Unicode) ⿻ 联系起来，它捕捉了其对群体和个人身份交叉重叠性质的强调。此外，在下一章“生活在⿻的世界”中，我们将重点说明，这种描述不仅适用于人类社会生活，而且根据现代（复杂性）科学，适用于自然界中几乎所有复杂的现象。
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. While Allen has given perhaps the clearest exposition of these ideas, as we explore in The Lost Dao they are deeply rooted in a philosophical tradition including many of the American thinkers who deeply influenced Taiwan, such as Henry George and John Dewey.
规范性：多样性是社会进步的燃料，虽然它像任何燃料一样都可能爆炸（引发冲突），但社会的成功很大程度上取决于它们在多大程度上设法利用其潜在能量来促进增长。我们将这个概念与哲学家丹妮尔·艾伦的“互联社会”理想联系起来，并将其与构成书封和上图中复杂⿻图像中正方形交集的彩虹元素联系起来。虽然艾伦或许对这些思想做了最清晰的阐述，但正如我们在《迷失的道》中探讨的那样，这些思想深深植根于哲学传统中，其中包括许多深刻影响台湾的美国思想家，例如亨利·乔治和约翰·杜威。
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. We identify this concept by the use by one of us, beginning in 2016, of the term Plurality to refer to a technological agenda. 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. A primary goal of the rest of the book is to clearly state this vision and thus help it become the alternative it should be to the Libertarian, Technocratic and stagnant democratic stories that dominate much discussion today.
规定性：数字技术应该致力于构建能够驾驭并避免多样性冲突的引擎，就像工业技术构建了能够驾驭物理燃料并控制其爆炸的引擎一样。我们将这个概念与我们中的一位从2016年开始使用“多元性”一词来指代技术议程联系起来。我们更将其与她在头衔（数字部长）中使用繁体中文“數位”（英文发音为“shuwei”）联系起来，在台湾，“數位”同时指代“多元的”（指人）和“数字的”，从而捕捉了阿伦特和艾伦提出的哲学与数字技术的变革潜力之间的融合。在本节的最后一章“用于协作多样性的技术”中，我们认为，虽然不那么明确，但这种哲学推动了所谓的“互联网”的许多发展，但由于它没有得到充分的阐述，因此自那时以来它在某种程度上已经失传。本书其余部分的主要目标是清楚地阐明这一愿景，从而帮助它成为当今主导许多讨论的自由主义、技术官僚主义和停滞的民主叙事的替代方案。
Given this rich definition and the way it blends together elements from traditional Mandarin and various English traditions, throughout the rest of the book we use the Unicode ⿻ to represent this idea set in both noun form (viz. to stand in for "Plurality") and in the adjective form (viz. to stand in for 數位).
鉴于这个丰富的定义以及它如何将繁体中文和各种英语传统中的元素融合在一起，在本书的其余部分中，我们使用Unicode字符⿻来表示这个概念集，既可以用作名词形式（即代表“多元性”），也可以用作形容词形式（即代表“數位”）。
In English this may be read in a variety of ways depending on context:
在英语中，根据上下文，这可以有多种解读：
As "Plurality" typically when used as a concept;[^Taiwan]
作为“多元性”，通常用作概念时；[^台湾]
As "digital", "plural", "shuwei", "digital/plural" or even as a range of other things such as "intersectional", "collaborative" or "networked" when used as an adjective;
作为“数字的”、“多元的”、“shuwei”、“数字/多元的”，甚至是一系列其他事物，例如“交叉的”、“协作的”或“网络化的”，用作形容词时；
None of these existing words perfectly captures this idea set, and thus, in some cases, one might simply say "overlap" or "overlapping" to describe it literally. The rest of the book describes more deeply the content, vision and ambition of ⿻.
现有的词语都不能完美地捕捉这个概念集，因此，在某些情况下，人们可能会简单地说“重叠”或“重叠的”来对其进行字面描述。本书的其余部分更深入地描述了⿻的内容、愿景和雄心。
[^Taiwan]: Note that ⿻ could also be used to represent the closely overlapping meanings of Audrey's interpretations of the two standard variations on the name of her jurisdiction, obviating the need for conflict over ROC v. Taiwan. However, we will leave this observation for someone else to build on given the risk of creating too much ambiguity in the meaning of ⿻.
[^台湾]：请注意，⿻也可以用来表示唐凤对管辖区名称的两种标准变体含义的密切重叠，从而避免了对中华民国与台湾的冲突。然而，鉴于可能造成⿻含义过于模糊的风险，我们将把这一观察留给其他人去进一步研究。
[^Arendt]: Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958). [^Allen]: 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. [^Audrey]: “View Section: 2020-10-07 Interview with Azeem Azhar,” SayIt, https://sayit.pdis.nat.gov.tw/2020-10-07-interview-with-azeem-azhar#s433950, 2020.
[^阿伦特]：汉娜·阿伦特，《人的境况》（芝加哥：芝加哥大学出版社，1958年）。[^艾伦]：丹妮尔·艾伦，“第2章：迈向互联社会”，载于《我们令人信服的利益》（普林斯顿：普林斯顿大学出版社，2017年），https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400881260-006。[^唐凤]：“查看章节：2020年10月7日接受阿齐姆·阿扎尔采访”，SayIt，https://sayit.pdis.nat.gov.tw/2020-10-07-interview-with-azeem-azhar#s433950，2020年。