⿻ 數位 Plurality

1. The Digital Divide: Technology's Threat to Democracy

The dominant trends in technology in recent decades have been artificial intelligence and blockchains. These have, respectively, empowered centralized top-down control and turbo-charged atomized polarization and financial capitalism.

A widening gulf. Information technology and democracy, once seen as natural allies, are now at loggerheads, creating a "narrow corridor" for free societies. Artificial intelligence (AI) and blockchain technologies, while powerful, have inadvertently fueled centralization and polarization, eroding democratic pluralism. This has led to widespread anxiety, with technology often perceived as a threat to democratic values and a tool for authoritarian regimes.

Dual threats. Technology's impact on democracy manifests in two opposing yet related ways:

• Anti-social threats: Social media, cryptography, and financial technologies are seen as breaking down social fabric, heightening polarization, undermining norms, and accelerating unaccountable financial markets.
• Centralizing threats: Machine learning and the Internet of Things increase surveillance capacity, allowing small groups of engineers to shape rules for billions, reducing meaningful participation.
  Both undermine the decentralized social connections vital for democracy.

Democracy's hostility. Democracies have largely responded to these threats with hostility, focusing on constraint rather than proactive development. This "techlash" has led to reduced public investment in IT, slow adoption of technology in the public sector, and a failure to address critical areas where public participation and regulation are needed. This neglect leaves democracies vulnerable, contrasting sharply with authoritarian regimes that eagerly embrace technology for their own ends.

2. Taiwan: A Living Blueprint for Digital Plurality

Taiwan’s ability to achieve among the world’s lowest fatality rates without any lockdowns during the Covid crisis — while maintaining among the fastest economic growth rates in the world — show the results of the plural spirit of Taiwan’s information society.

A unique convergence. Taiwan, a small island nation at a global crossroads, offers a compelling model for digital democracy. Its history of diverse cultures, colonial influences, and political upheavals has forged a unique form of democracy. The "Sunflower Movement" of 2014, a student occupation of the legislature, demonstrated how pro-social digital innovation could channel extreme divisions into shared progress and consensus, leading to significant political shifts.

Digital democracy in action. Taiwan has institutionalized collaborative digital practices, showcasing their efficacy:

• g0v (gov-zero): A civic hacker movement that "forks" government websites to improve services and data transparency, often leading to official adoption.
• vTaiwan & Join: Platforms for public deliberation on policy (using tools like Polis for opinion clustering) and soliciting citizen proposals, with government mandates for response.
• Presidential Hackathon: Mixed teams of civil servants, academics, and activists collaborate on civic problems, with winners selected by Quadratic Voting.
• COVID-19 Response: Rapid, citizen-led initiatives like the "Mask App" and effective contact tracing, combined with "humor over rumor" strategies, enabled Taiwan to fight the "infodemic" without takedowns, just as it fought the pandemic without lockdowns.

Quantitative success. Taiwan's digital democratic practices correlate with impressive national performance: strong economic growth, low unemployment and inflation, relatively low inequality, high social trust, low crime rates, and exceptional pandemic response. This demonstrates that technology, when properly conceived and implemented, can be a powerful ally for democracy and societal well-being.

3. Plurality: Technology for Collaboration Across Difference

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”.

Beyond monist atomism. The book introduces "Plurality" (represented by the Unicode character ⿻) as a new framework for understanding and shaping the world. It challenges the "monist atomism" underlying Technocratic and Libertarian ideologies, which reduce reality to universal laws acting on fundamental atoms. Instead, Plurality aligns with modern science (quantum physics, ecology, neuroscience) that emphasizes complexity, emergence, multi-level organization, and multidirectional causality.

Three dimensions of Plurality:

• Descriptive (Hannah Arendt): The social world is a fabric of diverse, intersecting affiliations that define both personal identities and collective organization.
• Normative (Danielle Allen): Diversity is the fuel of social progress, and societies succeed by harnessing its potential energy for growth, rather than letting it explode into conflict.
• Prescriptive (Audrey Tang): Digital technology should build "engines" that harness and contain diversity, much as industrial technology harnessed physical fuels.

Harnessing complexity. Plurality views social systems as complex, emergent networks where individuals and groups are constantly shifting and reconfiguring. It seeks to steer society towards the "edge of chaos"—a state between rigid order and random chaos—where complex, life-like structures can emerge and thrive. This perspective offers an inviting path for recombination and innovation, moving beyond simplistic ideological caricatures.

4. Reclaiming the Internet's Original Vision

At the core of the development of what became the internet was replacing centralized, linear and atomized structures with ⿻ relationships and governance.

The lost Dao. The internet, as originally conceived by pioneers like J.C.R. Licklider and Robert Taylor, was intended to be a "network of networks" – a platform for collaboration across diverse social groups and for sharing digital assets. This vision, rooted in "Man-Computer Symbiosis," aimed to augment human creativity and facilitate computer-mediated co-governance, moving beyond centralized, linear, and atomized structures.

Foundational innovations:

• Packet switching: Replaced centralized switchboards with decentralized, resilient networks that could "route around damage."
• Hypertext: Liberated communication from linear interpretation, enabling "pluralism" of paths through material.
• Open standards (RFCs, TCP/IP): Fostered a culture of collegiality and informal collaboration across competing universities and sectors, leading to seamless inter-operation.

Triumph and tragedy. While the internet achieved widespread adoption, its original "Dao" (path) was largely lost. Shifting government priorities and the rise of private monopolies filled the vacuum, leading to the current internet's issues: pervasive surveillance, corporate exploitation, misinformation, and information siloing. The founders' warnings about insecurity and exploitative structures largely came to pass.

Nodes of light. Despite the deviation, pockets of the original vision persist and are being revived:

• Wikipedia: A large-scale, open, collaborative, self-governing project for shared understanding.
• Open Source Software (OSS): Embodies participatory, networked, transnational self-governance (e.g., Linux, Android, GitHub).
• Web3 & Decentralized Web: Efforts to build missing layers (identity, payments, data sharing) using cryptography and blockchains.
• Civic Tech: Movements like g0v and Code4America that strengthen digital participation in government and civil society. These efforts represent a proof of concept for a more systematic pursuit of Plurality.

5. Digital Rights: An Operating System for Society

Rights are also often aspirations and goals, rather than fixed and attainable realities.

Rights as an OS. Just as operating systems (OSs) define the possibilities for applications, a system of rights forms the foundation for democratic societies. These "rights-as-OS" must be dynamic, networked, and adaptive, supporting democratic exploration and the evolution of application environments. This contrasts with rigid Libertarian rights or Technocratic utility maximization.

Core elements of ⿻ freedom:

• Identity/Personhood: Moving beyond thin, insecure government IDs and surveillant corporate accounts. "Intersectional identity" based on social relationships and "sociometrics" offers comprehensive, private, and secure verification.
• Association: Enabling "common knowledge" within groups and protecting it from external surveillance. "⿻ publics" use distributed ledgers and privacy-enhancing technologies to create secure, context-preserving communities.
• Commerce/Trust: Redefining money beyond a universal, anonymous medium. "⿻ money" (community currencies, direct interpersonal debt networks) can quantify and scale diverse forms of value, especially for collaborative goods.
• Property/Contract: Facilitating the sharing of digital assets (storage, computation, data) beyond centralized cloud models. "⿻ property" uses secure multi-party computation, federated learning, and data collaboratives to manage data rights and foster collaboration.
• Access: Ensuring universal, equitable access to contextually complete and uncorrupted information. This requires robust "digital infrastructure" and "information integrity" to combat manipulation.

Beyond traditional frameworks. This approach recognizes that rights are not merely individual but also protect groups and relationships. It moves beyond simplistic notions of "privacy" to "contextual integrity," ensuring information remains within its intended social setting. This dynamic, networked vision of digital rights is crucial for a truly pluralistic future.

6. Beyond Words: High-Bandwidth Human Connection

Temporal conversation with aging, experiences of proprioceptive, non-symbolic communication today are ubiquitous and include mediation, psychedelics, religious experience, romantic intimacy, dance, yoga, combat, and sports.

The limits of symbols. Traditional communication relies heavily on words and symbols, which compress rich human experience. Post-symbolic communication, a concept exploring direct and immersive shared experience, harnesses all senses, including proprioception (the internal sense of one's body). This "higher-bandwidth communication" is correlated with deep human bonding and connection, as seen in dance, combat, romantic intimacy, and meditation.

Tomorrow's intimacy. Technological innovations are expanding the possibilities for post-symbolic communication:

• Neural & Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI): Direct brain-to-device connections, potentially allowing sharing of thoughts and emotions between minds.
• Haptic feedback & Homuncular flexibility: Devices simulating touch and physical interactions, enabling control over virtual bodies.
• Immersive soundscapes & Wearable tracking: Enhancing virtual presence and conveying emotional/physical states.
• Neurofeedback & Neuromodulation: Self-regulation of brain function and cognitive enhancement.
  Combined with Generative Foundation Models (GFMs), these could allow real-time generation of visual representations of thoughts and responsive virtual environments.

Immersive Shared Reality (ISR). ISR technologies (VR, AR, MR) create shared virtual environments for multisensory copresence, enabling broader human interaction beyond physical limitations. Applications range from virtual gatherings and mass online gaming to immersive learning and cross-cultural exchange. Future ISR promises hybrid realities, emotional connectivity, and even simulated worlds for collective memory or design.

Risks and balance. These technologies, while promising profound empathy and connection, also pose risks: loss of individuality, surveillance, homogenization, and virtual escapism. Balancing high-bandwidth communication with lower-bandwidth, structured forms like markets and voting is essential to preserve privacy, autonomy, diversity, and human governance.

7. Collective Intelligence: Amplifying Creativity and Deliberation

In a demonstration of interdisciplinary and global cross-collaboration, a team comprising Luke Farritor (a 21-year-old college student and SpaceX intern), Nader (a doctoral student in Berlin), and Julian Schilliger (a recent master’s graduate in robotics at ETH Zurich) shared a breakthrough victory to win.

Beyond individual genius. Creative collaboration, traditionally slow and expensive, is being transformed by digital tools. Online platforms, cloud-based software, and open-source projects (like Wikipedia and GitHub) enable unprecedented accessibility, real-time interaction, and shared creative spaces, leveraging the collective intelligence of global communities. The Vesuvius Challenge, which virtually unwrapped ancient scrolls through crowdsourced innovation, exemplifies this power.

Augmenting deliberation. Human conversations, while rich, struggle with scale and diversity. Digital tools can transform them into powerful engines for amplifying and connecting diverse perspectives:

• Collective Response Systems (e.g., Polis, Community Notes): Combine social media's interactivity with features that encourage thoughtful listening and consensus-building by clustering opinions and highlighting bridging statements.
• Networked In-Person Conversations (e.g., Cortico): Use natural language processing to surface insights from recorded discussions, allowing them to travel across conversations while maintaining privacy.
• GFM-extended deliberation: Future GFMs could condense conversations, allow full expression, and identify rough consensus, even representing "points of view" of organizations or natural features ("parliament of things").

Regenerating diversity. These tools not only bridge divides but also support the regeneration of diversity and productive conflict. By identifying opinion groups and surfacing consensus positions with diverse support, they can foster new conflicts that cut across existing lines, preventing homogenization and fueling dynamism.

8. Adaptive Governance: Flexible Bureaucracy and Voting

The classic complaints against bureaucracy and administration are that they are at once capricious, granting excessive discretionary power to those who hold various adjudicatory positions in the administration, and rigid, unable to adapt to either the nuances of an individual case nor to cultural settings outside the scope of the bureaucracy’s expectations.

Reforming administration. Bureaucracy, central to modern life, is often criticized for its rigidity and complexity. Generative Foundation Models (GFMs) offer a promising path to "adaptive administration," allowing systems to handle diverse, unstructured inputs and adapt like knowledgeable experts, without imposing undue burdens on users. This can improve access to public services, legal aid, and inclusive hiring.

Frontiers of adaptive administration:

• Badge-based education: Replacing traditional coursework and grades with diverse "badges" that reflect granular skills, allowing more flexible learning paths.
• Cultural translation: GFMs could translate not just languages but cultural norms, integrating diverse legal systems and traditional practices into formal structures, enriching diversity.
• Network states & charter cities: Enabling experimentation with novel and traditional practices within existing legal frameworks.

Innovating voting. Traditional voting systems (plurality rule) suffer from "lesser of two evils" dynamics and "tyranny of the majority." New approaches aim to represent degrees and weights of interests and make representation flexible:

• Quadratic Voting (QV): Aggregates not just direction but strength of preferences, with vote cost increasing quadratically, preventing disproportionate influence.
• Liquid Democracy (LD): Allows voters to delegate their votes, creating emergent patterns of representation, though it can concentrate power.
• Future voting: "Correlation discounting" and "eigenvoting" could create dynamic, adaptive consociationalism, while "predictive voting" and "assisted real-time voting" could make processes more frequent and informed.

Beyond rigidity and complexity. These innovations promise to make governance more responsive, inclusive, and legitimate, moving beyond the cold, arbitrary nature of traditional systems.

9. Social Markets: Redefining Value and Cooperation

In short, perhaps the greatest paradox of global capitalism is that it is at once the largest scale example of collaboration and yet has trouble precisely supporting the forms of technological collaboration that it heralds.

Capitalism's paradox. Global capitalism, while a powerful mode of cooperation, struggles with increasing returns, market power, externalities, and distribution. Its simplistic model of bilateral transactions often fails to account for emergent, supermodular effects and shared goods, leading to under-provision of public goods and concentration of power.

Reimagining markets. "Social markets" aim to maintain capitalism's dynamism while fostering diverse human collaboration:

• Partial Common Ownership (PCO): Owners self-assess property value, subject to sale at that value, forcing truthful valuations and turnover of underutilized assets (e.g., Taiwan's land tax, NFTs).
• Quadratic/Plural Funding: Matches small, diverse contributions to public goods, giving greater weight to broad community support (e.g., GitCoin Grants for open-source software).
• Stakeholder Corporations: Renewed movements to ensure organizations serve stakeholders (customers, workers) beyond just shareholders, through models like DAOs and benefit corporations.
• Participatory Design & Prediction Markets: Digital platforms allow customers and stakeholders to contribute to product design and predict outcomes, aligning incentives.
• Market Design: Applies economic theory to create markets that mitigate power imbalances and externalities (e.g., carbon permits, community currencies).
• Economies of Esteem: Online systems where social capital (badges, followers) partly replaces money as currency of accomplishment, interoperating with broader markets.

Frontiers of value. Future social markets could feature "circular investment" (where common ownership taxes fund supermodular investments), "⿻ property" (integrating voting into asset use rights), and "polypolitan migration policy" (community-based sponsorship for labor mobility). These approaches offer a radical reconception of markets, moving beyond the state-vs-market binary to foster a web of dynamic, legitimate governance.

10. Real-World Impact: Transforming Society's Core Sectors

⿻ has the tangible potential, in the next decade, to transform almost every sector of society.

A theory of change. Dramatic social and technological progress, unlike violent revolutions, thrives when innovations emerge from diverse, internally connected, and loosely networked communities. This "experimentation with" communities, rather than "experimentation on" them, builds authority and legitimacy for new systems. While rapid "blitzscaling" of technologies can be dangerous, a ⿻ strategy diffuses innovations in a balanced way across existing social divides, ensuring equitable spread and preventing weaponization.

Fertile ground for change. The most promising sites for planting the seeds of Plurality are communities and organizations with roughly 100,000 people – the "square-root scale" of global population. This includes middle-sized municipalities, large corporations, median nations, dioceses, large universities, and civic organizations. Taiwan and Web3 communities serve as early testbeds, focusing on different aspects of Plurality.

Sectoral transformation:

• Workplace: Strengthen remote teams (ISR), design inclusive campuses (virtual prototyping), facilitate difficult conversations (augmented deliberation), enable inclusive hiring (social identity, LLMs), align wisdom and influence, and support intrapreneurship (plural funding). Estimated 10% GDP increase, 0.5% growth rate increase.
• Health: Reimagine health insurance as "health production societies" (pooling risk, addressing social determinants), tokenize health impact (open impact pools), use deliberative tools for policy (pandemic response), and leverage post-symbolic communication (BCIs, ISR) and GFMs for diagnosis and treatment. Potential to add 20 years to life expectancy.
• Media: Foster empathy (ISR), enable citizen co-journalism (GFMs for community voice), secure sources cryptographically (ZKPs), create unifying stories (bridging algorithms), and establish "⿻ public media" funded by diverse communities. Potential to reduce affective polarization and increase press freedom.
• Environment: Build data coalitions for action (citizen science, Civil IoT), enable "conversations with nature" (GFMs for environmental data), and foster cogovernance across borders (natural legal personhood, digital twins). Crucial for sustainable co-existence with nature.
• Learning: Develop resilient learning systems (Taiwan's curriculum), foster diverse and collaborative learning networks (online platforms, open-source projects like Moedict), and enable globally connected lifelong learning (AI for cross-cultural communication, gamified environments). This fosters "infinite games" of continuous co-creation and identity formation.

Last updated: July 29, 2025