Finding Your Dao

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1
Contents

Endorsements 6

Section 1: Preface 15
1 Seeing Plural . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

Section 2: Introduction 17
2-0 Information Technology and Democracy: a Widening Gulf . 17
2-1 A View From Yushan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
2-2 The Life of a Digital Democracy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62

Section 3: Plurality 81
3-0 What is ⿻? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
3-1 Living in a ⿻ World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
3-2 Connected Society . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98
3-3 The Lost Dao . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114

Section 4: Freedom 137

4-0 Rights, Operating Systems and ⿻ Freedom . . . . . . . . . . 137
4-1 Identity and Personhood . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151
4-2 Association and ⿻ Publics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 172
4-3 Commerce and Trust . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 188
4-4 Property and Contract . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 205
4-5 Access . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 224

Section 5: Democracy 231

5-0 Collaborative Technology and Democracy . . . . . . . . . . 231
5-1 Post-Symbolic Communication . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 246
5-2 Immersive Shared Reality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 255
5-3 Creative Collaborations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 266
5-4 Augmented Deliberation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 276
5-5 Adaptive Administration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 290
5-6 ⿻ Voting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 301
5-7 Social Markets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 310

2
Section 6: Impact 327
6-0 From ⿻ to Reality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 327
6-1 Workplace . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 339
6-2 Health . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 351
6-3 Media . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 365
6-4 Environment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 373
6-5 Learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 377

Section 7: Forward 387

7-0 Policy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 387
7-1 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 411

E. Glen Weyl is Founder of RadicalxChange, Microsoft Research’s Plural

Technology Collaboratory & Plurality Institute & co-author of Radical
Markets. Audrey Tang is the inaugural Minister of Digital Affairs in &
the inaugural minister in the .

3
This book is open-source and its contents may be freely copied, with or
without attribution. In addition to the primary named authors, dozens
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to the principles described in this book by this community.

Credits

Placeholder for credits for contributions across a diversity of domains

that helped create the book. Contributors will be highlighted in line with
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4
Coming soon after the finalization of the English print edition text.

5
Endorsements

In the vast, boundless expanse of Plurality, each life is a unique and pre-
cious existence…Regardless of how perilous external circumstances may
be…(l)et us take positive action to allow the seeds of shared goodness to
break through the earth and blossom into flowers of empathy, joy and
harmony.

— His Holiness the Dalai Lama XIV of Tibet

In a technologically advanced, politically challenging, and rapidly evolv-

ing 21st century, what does a free and open future look like? Glen, Audrey
and their coauthors offer a compelling view of a way forward.

— Vitalik Buterin, Founder of Ethereum

Democracy has been a confrontation between opposing values. In Tai-

wan, however, it has become a conversation among a diversity of values.
Audrey Tang has shown us how to create a “digital democracy” that tran-
scends the constraints of ideology — that is the major contribution of this
book.

— Tsai Ing-wen, President of the ROC (Taiwan)

They offer us a portal into a future where technology supports democracy,

pluralism, and broad human flourishing. We know this future is possible
because Tang has been building it in Taiwan. The conceptual foundations
laid here usher in a much needed paradigm change for modern life.

6
— Danielle S. Allen, political philosopher, James Bryan Conant University
Professor at Harvard, MacArthur Fellow, and author of Our Declaration
and Cuz

Plurality reads like optimistic sci-fi, already happening in real life! Can
democracies around the world follow in Taiwan’s footsteps to upgrade
free society for the digital age? Fingers crossed for a happy ending.

— Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Emmy-winning artist and founder of HITRECORD

Plurality is…a truly fascinating…potential global accelerator…of collabo-

ration that is African in perspective…a must-read and a must-co-create
for African thought leaders…who have embraced the challenge of mak-
ing the 21st century the African century.

— Oby Ezekwesili, Co-Founder of Transparency International, #Bring-

BackOurGirls, Founder of the School of Politics, Policy and Governance
and #FixPolitics, and Nigerian political leader

With wit, erudition and optimism, Audrey Tang and her collaborators ar-
gue that we can harness digital technology to confront authoritarianism,
and that we can do so by leaning into, rather than shying away from, the
principles of an open society.

— Anne Applebaum, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and author of The Twi-
light of Democracy and Red Famine

Glen and Audrey lead a team offering a master class in how to harness
advanced computation to augment rather than replace human social and
economic systems, simultaneously showing and telling us how digital
technology can make the world dramatically more cooperative and
productive.

— Michael I. Jordan, Pehong Chen Distinguished Professor of Computer

Science and Statistics at the University of California, Berkeley, inaugural
winner of the World Laureates Association Prize in Computer Science or

7
Mathematics, and named by Science as the most influential computer sci-
entist in the world in 2016.

In financial technology and digital infrastructure, Kenya and other

African countries are…ahead of outdated models in the North. With
Plurality we (can)…take this…deeper…to accelerate our growth and be
part of global models of a more inclusive, participatory and productive
future.

— Ory Okolloh-Mwangi, Co-Founder of Ushahidi and Partner at Verod-

Kepple Africa Ventures

Digital technologies that were supposed to support freedom and democ-

racy have turned into weapons of misinformation, extremism and surveil-
lance. This wonderful book outlines a technical and philosophical strat-
egy, grounded in practical applications in Taiwan, for doing this all better.

— Daron Acemoglu, Elizabeth and James Killian Professor of Economics

at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Winner of the John Bates
Clark Medal and co-author of Power and Progress and Why Nations Fail

What would the world be like if our dearest dreams in the social
justice…movement had come to pass? (They) offer radical yet prag-
matic solutions to…reinventing democracy…(to) truly serve the
people…Some…have …been implemented, serving as a beacon …to
make real change.

— Stav Shaffir, leader of the Israeli Social Justice protests that inspired
“Occupy” and youngest woman Member of the Knesset

For too long, diversity and technology have been used as swords by the
forces of secularization. Remarkably, in the skilled hands of these au-
thors, they are here reforged into a shield for the faithful.

— Rev. Johnnie Moore Jr., President of the Congress of Christian Leaders,

8
former member of the United States Commission on International Reli-
gious Freedom and informal advisor to Fmr. US President Donald Trump

Audrey Tang sets a new standard for what it means to be a pioneering

leader. I hope we will all have the courage to follow in her path, as she
lays out so eloquently here.

— Claudia López Hernández, former Mayor and first woman mayor of Bo-
gotá, Colombia and highest ever LGBT elected official in the Global South

It is clear…technologies will impact the future of culture and democracy.

We lack a pluralistic…vision of living with them! Fortunately this book
embodies the principles it advocates. Like AI, it is a monumental collec-
tive accomplishment, greater than the sum of its parts.

— Holly Herndon, musician, artist, Co-Host of Interdependence and Co-

Founder of Spawning

Audrey Tang and Glen Weyl’s project will be effective and meaningful in
helping Taiwan (and other countries) move in the direction of a new social
democracy.

— Karatani Kōjin, Author of The Structure of World History and winner of

the Berggruen Prize for Culture and Philosophy

Plurality unveils the powerful blueprint of Taiwan’s resilient digital trans-

formation…provides valuable insight for concerned citizens everywhere
and…can help preserve democracy amidst…a precarious moment in his-
tory for liberty and open societies around the world.

— Frank McCourt, Founder of McCourt Global and Project Liberty and

co-author of Our Biggest Fight

I find it exhilarating to read the rules to new games and imagine the world
that they build; I get that excitement here, but the game is global affairs

9
and the way communities work together. Fantastic!

— Richard Garfield, creator of Magic: The Gathering

(They) have written a brilliant book of breathtaking possibility, offer-

ing…hope in a dark time…drawing on disciplines from mathematics
to literature…readers are likely to find plenty of things to ponder and
challenge…(and) are invited to join the conversation!

— Anne-Marie Slaughter, CEO of the New America Foundation, former

Director of Policy Planning at the US Department of State and author of
Unfinished Business and The Chess Board and the Web

Rejoice! Here is a burst of creativity that gives us a peek at the humanistic

high tech future we suspected was possible.

— Jaron Lanier, inventor of Virtual Reality, author of Who Owns the Fu-
ture? and The Dawn of the New Everything and Microsoft’s Office of the
Chief Technology Officer Prime Unifying Scientist (OCTOPUS)

At last, we have a book that centers plurality – both in theory and in prac-
tice. This is a much-needed guide for developing new strategies to navi-
gate the relationship between technology and democracy, and for think-
ing beyond the usual Western frame.

— Kate Crawford, Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research, research pro-

fessor at the University of Southern California, artist, musician and au-
thor of Atlas of AI

Read the first chapters on the and can’t recommend it enough. I used
to be an avid reader, but now I’m usually bored w books; however, this
one grabbed my attention again. It’s super necessary so we don’t have
this apocalyptic macho idea of the future. It’s in our hands, btw.

— Violeta Ayala, first Quechua-native member of the Oscars and award-

winning XR filmmaker

10
(P)opulists globally use technology to divide nations…Plurality invites a
new journey where we can indeed use technology to reclaim that space in
world of canceling to become more connected, and bring back our sense
of humanity, UBUNTU as we say in Africa.

— Mmusi Maimane, South African Presidential candidate, former Leader

of the Opposition, Founder of Build One South Africa, and pastor and el-
der of the Liberty Church

Here in lucid and non-technical prose is a sweeping vision for how to in-
tegrate so much of what we’ve learned about technology and society in
the past decades to remake the future of democracy, from someone who
is actually doing it on the ground.

— Alex “Sandy” Pentland, Inaugural Academic Head of the MIT Media Lab
and founding father of Computational Social Science and Data Science

(A) remarkable book which provides accessible, deep and novel insights
into the way in which technology has, is, will and should shape our lives.
It draws on a wealth of evidence to provide a powerful case in favour of
promoting plurality…It holds important lessons for all of us.

— Colin Mayer, Peter Moores Professor of Management Studies at the Ox-

ford Saïd School of Management and author of Prosperity: Better Business
Makes the Greater Good

If internet technology has accelerated fragmentation, it should be possi-

ble to achieve a comfortable coexistence. Plurarity is full of hints for this
purpose.

— Aono Yoshihisa, Co-Founder and CEO of Cybozu

Plurality is an important book on one of today’s central challenges—

building collaboration and shared purpose across diversity. The authors

11
approach this challenge not simply in … politics…but also offer valuable
insights on…technology, economics, and beyond.

— Julius Krein, Founder and Editor-in-Chief, American Affairs

Drawing inspiration from Taiwan, the world’s most under-appreciated

democracy, Plurality makes a powerful case that digital technologies can
be harnessed to facilitate…a more democratic future…Reading this bril-
liant book left…a new sense of urgency, but it also provided real reasons
for hope.

— Steven Levitsky, David Rockerfeller Professor of Government at Har-

vard and co-author of How Democracies Die and Tyranny of the Minority

In an era of anxiety and division, Glen Weyl and Audrey Tang provide a
rare, grounded vision for how technology and democracy can harmonize,
and propel us to a better future.

— Tristan Harris, Co-Founder of the Center for Humane Technology and

star of The Social Dilemma

An exciting, creative and provocative set of ideas on how to make progress

on some of the most fundamental problems in the world. You will never
think the same way again after reading this book.

— Jason Furman, Former Chair of the Council of Economic Advisors and

Aetna Professor of the Practice of Economic Policy, Harvard University

(T)his book…places Taiwan at the center of the world. Will it be the ful-
crum of conflict or…apex of a…democratizing revolution of peace, hu-
manity, and technology? This is our century’s question. Tang, Weyl, and
their collaborators have written a guide to finding the answer.

— Michael Hartley Freedman, winner of the Fields Medal, the MacArthur

Fellowship and the National Medal of Science and former director of Mi-
crosoft’s Station Q quantum computing research unit

12
It is a delight to finally see a vision for the future of human progress so
clearly grounded in its past. With Plurality, we have a framework for
building the engines that harness the abundant energy latent in human
diversity to power the next hundred years of economic growth.

— Oded Galor, Author of The Journey of Humanity and Herbert Goldberger

Professor of Economics at Brown University

At once optimistic and pragmatic, Plurality offers a roadmap to reforge

democracy for the AI era…we need not limit ourselves to the libertarian
or authoritarian visions…a third way…leans into openness, plurality and
the human spirit. So worth reading!

— Mark Surman, President and Executive Director of the Mozilla Founda-

tion

Can the public sector move as fast to harness emerging technologies as

the rest of society? Audrey Tang has shown on the ground that it can, and
here she teaches you how to do the same.

— Shlomit Wagman, former Director General of the Israel Money Laun-

dering and Terror Financing Prohibition Authority and Privacy Protec-
tion Authority

(S)ingularity… elicit(s) fear about how technology will overtake humans.

This seminal book provides…a compelling, bold alternative. Weyl and
Tang present…how technology can advance a pluralistic world…to
strengthen relationships and bring people together across diversity.

— Mike Kubzansky, CEO of the Omidyar Network

(V)isionary in design, execution and substance.

— Brad Carson, President of University of Tulsa and Americans for Re-

sponsible Innovation, Fmr. US Congressman and Undersecretary of the

13
Army

“Regulation” remains elusive as a path to taming our technofeudal

masters. It will not succeed in dispersing power. Plurality charts a
different path for us to take - open and democratic - to bypass and
dis-intermediate these powers.

— Cristina Caffarra, Honorary Professor at University College London and

Co-Founder of the CEPR Competition Research Policy Network

Plurality is a social philosophy of the technological era…a third way be-

yond Libertarianism and Technocracy. Its essence lies in the emergence
of life at the edge of chaos, and whether this ideal is realized depends on
whether the readers of this book become true activists who leap into that
edge.

— Ken Suzuki, Co-founder, Executive Chair at SmartNews, Inc. and inven-

tor of Propagational Investment Currency SYstem(PICSY)

14
Section 1: Preface

1 Seeing Plural
“In order to carry out a positive action we must develop here
a positive vision… It is under the greatest adversity that there
exists the greatest potential for doing good, both for oneself
and others.” — Dalai Lama XIV

The advent of the internet unfurled the world. Beginning in the 1960s, this
new technology created unprecedented possibilities to tie distant commu-
nities together across space and time. Knowledge transcended borders,
spreading instantaneously across languages and cultures.

At the same time, globalization ushered in an era marked by increased

disparities in wealth and social standing. The rapid evolution of digital
technology fueled the rise of towering tech giants, which lured individu-
als into polarized enclaves.

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 sow-
ing new forms of division.

It is no coincidence that democracy now finds itself at a low tide. Au-

thoritarian 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
1
V-Dem Institute, Democracy Report 2023 (Gothenburg, Sweden: V-Dem Institute, 2023):

15
Every culture, akin to a river, tells its own tale. We see the river of democ-
racy as a conduit of hope. As its waters wane, we must replenish it.

This book, a surging communal effort, is one attempt to restore the flow
– and with it, hope.

In Mandarin, 數位 means both “digital” and “plural.” To be plural is to be

digital. To be digital is to be plural.

Plurality captures the symbiotic relationship between democracy and col-

laborative technology. Together, democracy and collaborative technol-
ogy can power infinite diversity in infinite combinations.

Let’s free the future — together.

7.

16
Section 2: Introduction

2-0 Information Technology and Democracy: a

Widening Gulf
“Surveillance capitalism is…a coup from above…an overthrow
of the people’s sovereignty and a prominent force in the per-
ilous drift towards democratic deconsolidation…” — Shoshana
Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism2 , 2019

“We are being lied to…told that technology takes our jobs, re-
duces our wages, increases inequality, threatens our health,
ruins the environment, degrades our society, corrupts our chil-
dren, impairs our humanity, threatens our future, and is ever
on the verge of ruining everything.” — Marc Andreessen, “The
Techno-Optimist Manifesto”3 , 2023

Anxiety over technology and geopolitics is pervasive today. Yet there is

a more fundamental conflict underway than that between great powers
over technical supremacy. More deeply, the path technology and democ-
racy as systems have taken have put them at loggerheads and the ensuing
battle has claimed victims on both sides.

The dominant trends in technology in recent decades have been artificial

intelligence and blockchains. These have, respectively, empowered cen-
2
Shoshanna Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (New York: Public Affairs, 2019):
513.
3
Marc Andreessen, “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto”, Andreessen Horowitz Blog, October
16, 2023, https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/.

17
tralized top-down control and turbo-charged atomized polarization and
financial capitalism. Both outcomes are corrosive to the values of demo-
cratic pluralism. It is little surprise, then, that technology is widely seen
as one of the greatest threats to democracy and as a powerful tool for both
external authoritarians and those who would subvert democracies from
within.

At the same time, democracy was once a radical experiment to scale

the governance of a city-state to many millions of citizens spread across
continents. 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. We should not be shocked, therefore, at the disdain that so
many technologists have for democratic participation, viewing it as an
impediment to progress, nor should we be surprised by the fear among
so many advocates of democracy that technical advance will result in the
dominance of authoritarian adversaries or internal collapse.

In this book, we hope to show that this tragic conflict is avoidable and that,
properly conceived, technology and democracy can be powerful and nat-
ural allies. However, it is no accident that arguments in this direction
evoke eye-rolling in many quarters. A gulf of grievance and distrust be-
tween the two sides of this divide has developed over the last decade and
will not easily be laid to rest. Only by fully acknowledging and embracing
the legitimate concerns and critiques of both sides of this conflict shall
we have a chance to see its root cause and seek to transcend it. Thus, we
begin by drawing out these grievances with a generous spirit, accepting
critiques that have raised broad concerns even when they are imperfectly
supported by the available evidence. Trying to reconcile these extreme di-
vergences offers an opportunity to raise the ambition of democratic tech-
nology.

18
Technology’s attack on democracy
The last decade of information technology has threatened democracy in
two related yet opposite ways. As Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson
famously argued, free democratic societies exist in a “narrow corridor”
between social collapse and authoritarianism4 . From both sides, infor-
mation technologies seem to be narrowing the corridor, squeezing the
possibility of a free society.

On the one hand, technologies (e.g., social media, cryptography and some
other financial technology) are seen to be breaking down the social fabric,
heightening polarization, eroding norms, undermining law enforcement
and accelerating the speed and expanding the reach of financial markets
to the point where they are unaccountable to democratic polities. We
shall call these threats “anti-social”. On the other hand, technologies (e.g.,
machine learning, foundation models, the internet of things) are increas-
ing the capacity for centralized surveillance, the ability of small groups
of engineers to set patterns in systems that shape the rules of social life
for billions of citizens and customers and reduce the scope for people to
meaningfully participate in shaping their lives and communities. We will
call these threats “centralizing”. Both threats strike at the heart of democ-
racy, which, as Alexis de Tocqueville famously highlighted in Democracy
in America, depends on deep and diverse, non-market, decentralized so-
cial and civil connections to thrive5 .

The antisocial threat from recent technologies has social, economic, legal,
political, and existential faces.

• Socially, there is growing evidence that while social media have

offered powerful new platforms for those who have previously
been socially isolated (e.g. sexual or religious minorities in con-
servative locales) to forge connections, on average these tools
have contributed to exacerbating social isolation and feelings of
exclusion6 .
4
Daron Acemoglu, and James A Robinson, The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the
Fate of Liberty. (New York: Penguin Books, 2020).
5
Such relationships differ from those established in markets, which are based on bilat-
eral, transactional exchange in a “universal” currency, as they denominate value in units
based on local value and trust.
6
Mary Gray, Out in the Country: Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in Rural America (New
York: NYU Press, 2009). See also O’Day, Emily B., and Richard G. Heimberg, “Social Me-

19
 • Economically, the geographic, temporal and multiemployer flexibil-
ity facilitated by the internet and increasingly by telecommuting
have expanded opportunities for many workers in developing
countries or who fit poorly in traditional labor markets. Yet they
have largely been unmatched by the emergence of appropriate
labor market institutions (such as unions and labor regulations)
that allow workers to share in the potential benefits of these ar-
rangements. Thus, they have tended to raise workplace precarity
and contribute to the “hollowing-out” of the middle class in many
developed countries7 .

• Politically, polarization and the influence of extremist parties has

been steadily rising in many developed democracies. While the role
of the internet-based social media landscape is a topic of significant
academic debate, recent surveys suggest that these tools have fallen
far short of their promise of strengthening social and political bonds
across differences and may well have contributed to the secular rise
in polarization since 2000, especially in the US8 .

• Legally, the proliferation of financial innovation in the past few

decades has led to limited measurable consumer benefits (in terms
of risk reduction, capital allocation or access to credit) while in-
creasing risk in much of the financial system and proliferating
financial instruments, thereby challenging or even skirting existing
dia Use, Social Anxiety, and Loneliness: A Systematic Review,” Computers in Human Behav-
ior Reports 3, no. 100070 (January 2021), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chbr.2021.100070; and see
also Hunt Allcott, Luca Braghieri, Sarah Eichmeyer, and Matthew Gentzkow, “The Welfare
Effects of Social Media,” American Economic Review 110, no. 3 (March 1, 2020): 629–76.
https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.20190658.
7
Siddharth Suri, and Mary L Gray, Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley
from Building a New Global Underclass, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019).
David H. Autor, “Why Are There Still So Many Jobs? The History and Future of
Workplace Automation”, Journal of Economic Perspectives 29, no. 3 (2015): 3-30,
https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257%2Fjep.29.3.3&source=post_page.
8
Steven Levitsky, and Daniel Ziblatt. How Democracies Die, (New York: Broadway Books,
2018).; See also Yascha Mounk, The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and
How to Save It, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2018); Cass Sunstein,
#Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media, (Princeton, New Jersey: Prince-
ton University Press, 2017; Kathleen Jamieson, and Joseph Cappella, Echo Chamber: Rush
Limbaugh and the Conservative Media Establishment, (Oxford, New York: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 2008). Levi Boxell, Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse M. Shapiro, “Greater Internet
Use is Not Associated with Faster Growth in Political Polarization among US Demographic
Groups” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 114, no. 40: 10612-10617. Levi
Boxell, Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse M. Shapiro, “Cross-Country Trends in Affective Polar-
ization” Review of Economics and Statistics Forthcoming.

20
 regulatory regimes intended to mitigate these harms9 . While
innovations surrounding housing finance leading up to the 2008
financial crisis were some of the most important examples, perhaps
the most extreme (if more contained) case has been the recent
activity around digital “crypto” assets and currencies. Given their
mismatch for existing regulatory regimes, they have offered perva-
sive opportunities for speculation, gambling, fraud, regulatory and
tax evasion, and other anti-social activities10 .

• 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)11 .

Yet even as technology is seen to erode the cohesion of democratic soci-

eties, it is also increasingly seen to threaten democracy by strengthening
the control of governments and centralizing power in the hands of a small
group of private actors.

• Socially, perhaps the most consistent effect of information technol-

ogy has been to expand the availability and accelerate the spread
9
Alp Simsek, “The Macroeconomics of Financial Speculation,” Annual Review of Eco-
nomics 13, no. 1 (May 11, 2021), https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-economics-092120-050543.
10
Ben McKenzie, and Jacob Silverman, Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capi-
talism, and the Golden Age of Fraud, (New York: Abrams, 2023); “Financial Stability
Board, “Regulation, Supervision and Oversight of Crypto-Asset Activities and Markets
Consultative Document,” 2022, https://www.fsb.org/wp-content/uploads/P111022-3.pdf;
Greg Lacurci, “Cryptocurrency Poses a Significant Risk of Tax Evasion,” CNBC, May
31, 2021, https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/31/cryptocurrency-poses-a-significant-risk-of-
tax-evasion.html; Arianna Trozze, Josh Kamps, Eray Akartuna, Florian Hetzel, Bennett
Kleinberg, Toby Davies, and Shane Johnson, “Cryptocurrencies and Future Financial
Crime,” Crime Science 11, no. 1 (January 5, 2022), https://doi.org/10.1186/s40163-021-
00163-8; Baer, Katherine, Ruud De Mooij, Shafik Hebous, and Michael Keen, “Crypto
Poses Significant Tax Problems—and They Could Get Worse,” IMF, July 5, 2023,
https://www.imf.org/en/Blogs/Articles/2023/07/05/crypto-poses-significant-tax-problems-
and-they-could-get-worse; and “Crypto-Assets: Implications for Financial Stability, Mon-
etary Policy, and Payments and Market Infrastructures.” ECB Occasional Paper, no. 223
(May 17, 2019), https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3391055.
11
Tristan Harris, “Ethics for Designers — How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds
— from a Magician and Google’s Design Ethicist,” Ethics for Designers, March 4,
2017, https://www.ethicsfordesigners.com/articles/how-technology-hijacks-peoples-minds;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LqaotiGWjQ; and Daniel Schmachtenberger, “Explo-
rations on the Future of Civilization,” n.d. https://civilizationemerging.com/.

21
 of information. This has dramatically eroded the sphere of private
life, making an increasing range of information publicly available.
While such transparency might in principle have a range of social ef-
fects, the power to process and make sense of such information has
increasingly concentrated in the hands of corporations and firms
that have a combination of privileged access to the information and
the capital to invest in large scale statistical models (viz. “AI”) to
make these data actionable. Furthermore, because these models im-
prove greatly with access to more data and capital, societies where
central actors have access to very large pools of both have tended
to pull ahead in the perceived “AI race”, putting pressure on all so-
cieties to allow such concentration of informational power to com-
pete12 . Together, these forces have normalized unprecedented sys-
tems of surveillance and centralized control over information flow.

• 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,
12
Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Fu-
ture at the New Frontier of Power, (New York, NY: PublicAffairs, 2019); Cathy O’neil,
Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democ-
racy, (New York: Crown, 2016); Evangelos Simoudis, The Big Data Opportunity in Our
Driverless Future. (Menlo Park, Ca: Corporate Innovators, Llc, 2017); Philippe Aghion,
Benjamin Jones, and Charles Jones, “Artificial Intelligence and Economic Growth,” 2017,
https://web.stanford.edu/~chadj/AI.pdf; Ford, Martin, Rise of the Robots: Technology and the
Threat of a Jobless Future, (New York: Basic Books, 2015); Kai-Fu Lee, AI Superpowers China,
Silicon Valley, and the New World Order, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018); David
Brin, The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose between Privacy and Free-
dom? (New York: Basic Books, 1999); Safiya Noble, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search En-
gines Reinforce Racism (New York: New York University Press, 2018); and Virginia Eubanks,
Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor, (New York:
St. Martin’s Press, 2018).

22
 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 govern13 .

• Economically, there is growing evidence that AI and the related

broader tendency of information technology since the mid-1980s to
replace rather than complement (especially low-educated) human
labor has been a central factor in the dramatic rise in the share of
income accruing to capital (rather than labor) in past decades and
thereby has been a core cause of increased income inequality in
developed countries.14 A rise in market power, mark-ups and (less
consistently) industrial concentration around the world has accom-
panied this decline in labor’s share, particularly in countries and
sectors that have most heavily adopted information technology15 .

• (Geo-)Politically, the above forces have strengthened authoritarian

regimes and political movements against democratic countries. Cre-
ating both the tools and incentives for mass surveillance, AI, and
other large-scale data processing tools, has made it easier for govern-
ments to directly maintain censorship and social control. Indirectly,
by concentrating economic power and the levers of social control in
a small set of (often corporate) choke points, the increase in capi-
13
Meredith Broussard. Artificial Unintelligence: (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT
Press, 2018), https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/11022.001.0001; Cathy O’neil, Weapons of Math
Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy, (New York:
Crown, 2016); Ruha Benjamin, “Race after Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim
Code,” Social Forces 98, no. 4 (December 23, 2019), https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soz162; Victor
Margolin, The Politics of the Artificial: Essays on Design and Design Studies, (Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 2002).
14
Daron Acemoglu, and Pascual Restrepo, “The Race between Man and Machine: Im-
plications of Technology for Growth, Factor Shares, and Employment,” American Eco-
nomic Review 108, no. 6 (June 2018): 1488–1542. https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.20160696;
Jonathan Haskel, and Stian Westlake, “Capitalism without Capital: The Rise of the In-
tangible Economy (an Excerpt),” Journal of Economic Sociology 22, no. 1 (2021): 61–70,
https://doi.org/10.17323/1726-3247-2021-1-61-70; Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, Avi Goldfarb,
and Catherine Tucker, The Economics of Artificial Intelligence, (Illinois: University of Chicago
Press, 2024).
15
Jan De Loecker, Jan Eeckhout, and Gabriel Unger. “The Rise of Market Power and
the Macroeconomic Implications,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 135, no. 2 (Jan-
uary 23, 2020): 561–644, https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjz041; John Barrios, Yael V. Hochberg,
and Hanyi Yi. “The Cost of Convenience: Ridehailing and Traffic Fatalities,” SSRN
Electronic Journal, 2019, https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3361227; and Tali Kristal, “The Cap-
italist Machine: Computerization, Workers’ Power, and the Decline in Labor’s Share
within U.S. Industries,” American Sociological Review 78, no. 3 (May 29, 2013): 361–89.
https://doi.org/10.1177/0003122413481351.

23
 tal income and market power and the increasing authority of small
groups of engineers have made it easier for authoritarian regimes to
manipulate or seize the “commanding heights” of the economy and
society when they wish16 .

Furthermore, these two threats intersect; authoritarian regimes have in-

creasingly 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 mis-
information and opinion clustering. Yet, even when they are not actively
complementing each other and may in many ways have opposite motiva-
tions, both forces have pressured democratic societies and helped under-
mine confidence in them, confidence that is now at its lowest ebb in much
of the developed democratic world since it has been measured.17
16
Kai-Fu Lee, AI Superpowers China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order, (Boston
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018); Bruce Dickson, The Dictator’s Dilemma: The Chinese Com-
munist Party’s Strategy for Survival, (Oxford, England, New York: Oxford University Press,
2016); Nick Couldry, and Ulises Mejias, “Data Colonialism: Rethinking Big Data’s Relation
to the Contemporary Subject,” Television & New Media 20, no. 4 (September 2, 2019): 336–
49. Steven Feldstein, The Rise of Digital Repression: How Technology Is Reshaping Power,
Politics, and Resistance, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021).
17
Richard Wike and Jannell Fetterolf, “Global Public Opinion in an Era of Democratic Anx-
iety” Pew Trust Magazine May 27, 2022. Ironically, in fragile democracies where the state
has limited capacity for technology governance, chaos (the collapse of the prevailing or-
der through disruptive technologies) could be an ally of democracy. From the Arab Spring
that swept across North Africa in the early 2010s to Nigeria’s #EndSARS movement in 2020,
autocracies and fragile democracies have recorded the rise of an emerging class of social
media-savvy, financial technology (fintech)-enabled and cryptocurrency-empowered class
of young citizens deploying these technologies to challenge authoritarian state institutions.
These disruptors have been aided by the algorithms of the technology companies, albeit to
the extent that the objectives of such social movements align with the commercial interests
of the corporations. Michael Etter and Oana Albu, “Activists in the Dark: Social Media Algo-
rithms and Collective Action in Two Social Movement Organizations.” Organization 28, no.
1 (September 29, 2020): 135050842096153. https://doi.org/10.1177/1350508420961532. In
some cases, such movements have been boosted by the explicit endorsement and backing
of the influential founder. Jack Dorsey (@Jack) “Donate via #Bitcoin to help #EndSARS …,”
X, October 14, 2020, 10.05pm, https://twitter.com/jack/status/1316485283777519620? With-
out a doubt, such interventions foster democratic movements and amplify the otherwise
repressed voices of citizens. However, aside from the risk of poor understanding of context
and potential divisiveness that such foreign interventions could be prone to, they under-
score the debate around the impact of non-state actors such as the global corporation on
state sovereignty in Africa and the global South by extension. Ohimai Amaize, How Twitter
Amplified the Divisions That Derailed Nigeria’s #EndSARS Movement, Slate Magazine, April
20, 2021, https://slate.com/technology/2021/04/endsars-nigeria-twitter-jack-dorsey-feminist-
coalition.html.

24
Democracies’ hostility to technology
Yet the hostilities have been far from one-sided. Democracies have, by
and large, returned this hostility, viewing technology increasingly as a
monolithic. Where once the public sector in democratic countries was
the global driving force behind the development of information technol-
ogy (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 chal-
lenges it creates.

This failure has manifested in four ways. First, public opinion in demo-
cratic 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 re-
duced their direct investment in the development of information technol-
ogy. Third, democratic countries have been slow to adopt technology in
public sector applications or that require significant public sector par-
ticipation. Finally, and relatedly, democratic governments have largely
failed to address the areas where most technologists believe public par-
ticipation, regulation, and support are critical to technology advancing in
a sustainable way, focusing instead on more familiar social and political
problems18 .
18
European Commission published a study on the impact of open source software (OSS).
Strict control of data in the EU has led to a lack of competition and innovation, as well as
an increased risk of the market. However, we can see more investments in OSS in response
to the steps of innovation in many eastern European countries. If the West fails to main-
tain and keep its investment in digital tech, it will experience huge losses in the future.
For instance, we see the importance of digital OSS in the war between Ukraine and Russia.
For more on Europe’s digital position, see “Open Technologies for Europe’s Digital Decade,”
OpenForumEurope, n.d, https://openforumeurope.org/.

25
**

Figure 2-0-A. The rise of the Techlash. Source: Google nGram Viewer19

**

Public and policymaker attitudes towards technology took a decidedly

negative turn during the 2010s. While at the end of the 2000s and early
2010s, social media and the internet were seen as forces for openness and
participation, in the late 2010s they were widely blamed in commentary
and to a lesser extent in public opinion surveys for many of the ills listed
20
above . This shift in attitudes has perhaps been most clearly reflected
in elite attitudes, with best-selling books on technology, such as Weapons
of Math Destruction by Cathy O’Neil and The Age of Surveillance Capital-
ism by Shoshanna Zuboff and films like The Social Dilemma, dominating
the public conversation and political leaders across the spectrum (e.g.,
Jeremy Corbyn on the left and Josh Hawley on the right) taking an increas-
ingly pessimistic and aggressive tone on the technology industry. The
techlash rose to prominence to describe these concerns and is pictured
in Figure A. This has been reinforced by the rise of a “cancel culture” that
often harnesses social media to attack or reduce the cultural currency of
prominent figures and has frequently targeted leaders in the technology
industry.
19
Google ngram Viewer, op. cit.
20
“Views of Big Tech Worsen; Public Wants More Regulation,” Gallup.com, Febru-
ary 18, 2021, https://news.gallup.com/poll/329666/views-big-tech-worsen-public-wants-
regulation.aspx; but see also “Europeans Strongly Support Science and Technology
according to New Eurobarometer Survey,” European Commission, September 23, 2021,
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_21_4645.

26
Regulators in both the EU and US have responded with a range of actions,
including dramatically increased antitrust scrutiny of leading technology
companies, a series of regulatory interventions in Europe including the
General Data Protection Regulation and the trio of the Data Governance
Act, the Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act. All these actions
have clear policy rationales and could well be part of a positive technol-
ogy agenda. However, the combination of negative tone, relative discon-
nection from naturally allied developments in technology and general
reticence on the part of commentators and policymakers in developed
democracies to articulate a positive technology vision has created an im-
pression of an industry under siege.

Perhaps the clearest quantitative mark for this declining proactive public
interest in information technology has been falling public expenditures
on research and development (R&D) as a share of gross domestic prod-
uct (GDP), especially in information technology. In the great majority
of developed democracies, public sector research and development ex-
penditure as a share of GDP has been declining in recent decades even
as business spending on R&D has dramatically expanded and spending
by the PRC (People’s Republic of China) government has dramatically in-
creased as a share of GDP and focused on information technology.21 Fig-
ure B shows the example of the US.
21
See Fredrik Erixon, and Björn Weigel, The Innovation Illusion: How so Little Is Cre-
ated by so Many Working so Hard, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017) and Robert
Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the
Civil War, (Princeton; Oxford Princeton University Press, 2017). See also Carl Benedikt,
and Michael Osborne, “The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Com-
puterisation,” The Oxford Martin Programme on Technology and Employment, 2013.
https://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/downloads/academic/future-of-employment.pdf. Erik
Brynjolfsson, and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosper-
ity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies, (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2014). Calestous
Juma. Innovation and Its Enemies: Why People Resist New Technologies. (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2019). Paul De Grauwe, and Anna Asbury. The Limits of the Market: The
Pendulum between Government and Market. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. For
data sources, see “Gross Domestic Spending on R&D,” 2022. https://data.oecd.org/rd/gross-
domestic-spending-on-r-d.htm.; OECD. “OECD Main Science and Technology Indicators,”
OECD, March 2022. https://web-archive.oecd.org/2022-04-05/629283-msti-highlights-march-
2022.pdf.; and “R&D Expenditure,” Eurostat, n.d., https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-
explained/index.php?title=R%26D_expenditure&oldid=590306.

27
**

Figure 2-0-B. The decline over time in government funding for research
and development and its eclipse by the private sector. Source: National
Center for Science and Engineering Statistics22

**

Beyond this quantitative story, the declining appearance of public finan-

cial support for information technology development has been at least as
dramatic. Where once the public sector took the lead in developing what
became the internet (in the US), foundations of the personal computer
and analogous projects in other democratic countries (e.g., France’s Mini-
tel), today almost all major breakthroughs in information technology are
driven by the private sector.23

While the original internet was almost entirely developed by the public
and academic sectors (see Chapter “The Lost Dao” below) and based
on open standards, the “Web 2.0” wave that dominated the late first
two decades of the new millennium and the recent movements around
“web3” and decentralized social technologies have received virtually
22
Gary Anderson and Francisco Moris, “Federally Funded R&D Declines as a
Share of GDP and Total R&D”, National Center for Science and Engineering Statis-
tics NSF 23-339 (Alexandria, VA: National Science Foundation, 2023) available at
https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf23339/.
23
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.

28
no public financial support, as governments in democratic countries
struggle to explore the potential of digital currencies, payments, and
identity systems. While many of the most fundamental advances in
computing arose from democratic governments during World War II and
the Cold War, today governments have played virtually no role in the
breakthroughs in “foundation models” that are revolutionizing computer
science. In fact, OpenAI Founders Sam Altman and Elon Musk report
having initially sought government funding and only having turned
to private, profit-driven sources after being repeatedly turned down;
OpenAI went on to develop the Generative Pretrained Transformer (GPT)
models that have increasingly captured the public’s imagination about
the potential of AI.24 Again, this contrasts sharply with authoritarian
regimes, like the PRC and the United Arab Emirates, that have laid out
and to a large extent successfully deployed ambitious public information
technology strategies, including developing their own cutting-edge
competitors to GPTs.25

This lack of public sector engagement with technology extends beyond

research and development to deployment, adoption, and facilitation. The
easiest areas to measure this are the quality and availability of digital
connectivity and education. Here the data are somewhat mixed, as many
high-functioning democracies (such as the Scandinavian countries) have
high quality and high availability internet. But it is striking that lead-
ing authoritarian regimes dramatically outperform democracies at sim-
ilar development levels, especially in the latest connectivity technology.
For example, according to Speedtest.net, the PRC ranks 16th in internet
speeds in the world, while only 72nd in income per head; Saudi Arabia
and other Gulf monarchies similarly punch above their weight26 . Perfor-
24
“Transcript: Ezra Klein Interviews Sam Altman,” The New York Times, June 11,
2021, sec. Podcasts. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/11/podcasts/transcript-ezra-klein-
interviews-sam-altman.html.
25
Emily Crawford, “Made in China 2025: The Industrial Plan That
China Doesn’t Want Anyone Talking About,” Frontline PBS, May 7, 2019.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/made-in-china-2025-the-industrial-plan-
that-china-doesnt-want-anyone-talking-about/; Ramnath Reghunadhan, “Innovation in
China: Challenging the Global Science and Technology System,” Asian Affairs 50, no. 4
(August 8, 2019): 656–57. https://doi.org/10.1080/03068374.2019.1663076. United Arab
Emirates National Strategy for Artificial Intelligence (2018) available at https://ai.gov.ae/wp-
content/uploads/2021/07/UAE-National-Strategy-for-Artificial-Intelligence-2031.pdf.
26
See Robert Mcchesney, Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet
against Democracy, (New York; London: The New Press, 2013). See also Matthew Hindman,

29
mance on 5G, the latest generation of mobile connectivity, is more dra-
matic: a range of surveys find Saudi Arabia and the PRC consistently in
the top 10 best-covered jurisdictions by 5G, far above their income levels.

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 authori-
tarian 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).27

Digitization of conventional public services is perhaps the least ambi-

tious dimension along which one might expect democracies to advance
in adopting technology. Technology has redefined what services are
relevant and in these novel areas, democratic governments have almost
entirely failed to keep up with changing times. Where once government-
provided postal services and public libraries were the backbone of
democratic communication and knowledge circulation, today most com-
munication 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 pub-
lic support, running instead on Patreon donations.28 More broadly, open
The Internet Trap: How the Digital Economy Builds Monopolies and Undermines Democracy,
(Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2018); Adam Segal, The Hacked World
Order: How Nations Fight, Trade, Maneuver, and Manipulate in the Digital Age, (New York:
Publicaffairs, September, 2017); Richard Stengel, Information Wars: How We Lost the Global
Battle against Disinformation and What We Can Do about It, (St. Louis: Grove Press Atlantic,
2020); and Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get inside Our Heads,
(New York: Vintage Books, 2017).
27
United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs. E-Government Knowledge
Database, 2022 available at https://publicadministration.un.org/egovkb/Data-Center
28
Sara Perez, “Amid Twitter chaos, Mastodon grew donations 488% in

30
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.

Most ambitiously, democracies could, as so many autocracies have been

doing, help facilitate radical experiments with how technologies could
reshape social structures. Yet, here again, democracy seems so often to
stand in the way rather than facilitate such experimentation. The PRC gov-
ernment has built cities and reimagined regulations to facilitate driver-
less cars, such as Shenzhen, and has more broadly built a detailed na-
tional technology strategy covering nearly every aspect of policy, regula-
tion and investment.29 Saudi Arabia is busy building a new smart city in
the desert, Neom, to showcase a range of green and smart city technology,
while even the most modest localized projects in democratic countries,
such as Google’s Sidewalk Labs, have been swamped by local opposition.30

Even when it comes to areas where technologists agree regulation and

caution are critical, democracies are falling ever further behind the needs
of the industry to find solutions to social challenges. There is a grow-
ing consensus among technologists that a range of emerging technologies
may pose catastrophic or even existential risks that will be hard to pre-
vent after they start to emerge. Examples include artificial intelligence
systems that could rapidly self-improve their capacities, cryptocurrencies
that could pose systemic financial risks, and the development of highly
contagious bioweapons. They regularly bemoan the failure of democratic
governments to even contemplate much less plan to confront such risks.
Yet, beyond these catastrophic possibilities, a whole range of new tech-
2022, reached 1.8M monthly active users”, Tech Crunch, October 2, 2023 at
https://techcrunch.com/2023/10/02/amid-twitter-chaos-mastodon-grew-donations-488-
in-2022-reached-1-8m-monthly-active-users/)
29
See Rogier Creemers, Hunter Dorwart, Kevin Neville, Kendra Schaefer, Johanna Costi-
gan, and Graham Webster, “Translation: 14th Five-Year Plan for National Informatization
– Dec. 2021.” DigiChina, January 24, 2022, https://digichina.stanford.edu/work/translation-
14th-five-year-plan-for-national-informatization-dec-2021/.
30
Josh O’Kane, Sideways: The City Google Couldn’t Buy (Toronto: Random House Canada,
2022).

31
nologies require regulatory change to be sustainable. Labor law misfits
geographically and temporally flexible work empowered by technology.
Copyright is far too rigid to deal with the attribution of value to data inputs
to large AI models. Blockchains are empowering new forms of corporate
governance that securities laws struggle to make sense of and are often
put into legal jeopardy.

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 mod-
ern tools of communication or data analysis are regular parts of the
democratic lives of citizens.

At the same time, autocracies have increasingly harnessed the latest dig-
ital innovations to empower their regimes of surveillance (for good and
ill) and social control. For example, the PRC government has widely used
facial recognition to monitor population movements, has encouraged the
adoption of its Digital Yuan and other surveilled digital payments (while
cracking down on more private alternatives) to facilitate financial surveil-
lance, and has even worked on developing a comprehensive “social credit
score” that would track a wide range of citizen activities and condense
them to a single and widely-consequential “rating”.31 For several years,
the Russian government has been using facial recognition to determine
who is participating in protests and detain them after the fact, allowing it
to remove dissenters on a large scale with much lower risks to the regime
or its police forces.32 These techniques have intensified and have also
31
See, for, instance, John, Alun, Samuel Shen, and Tom Wilson. “China’s Top Reg-
ulators Ban Crypto Trading and Mining, Sending Bitcoin Tumbling.” Reuters, Septem-
ber 24, 2021, https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-central-bank-vows-crackdown-
cryptocurrency-trading-2021-09-24/. See also Bernhard Bartsch, Martin Gottske, and
Christian Eisenberg, “China’s Social Credit System,” n.d., https://www.bertelsmann-
stiftung.de/fileadmin/files/aam/Asia-Book_A_03_China_Social_Credit_System.pdf.
32
Gleb Stolyarov, and Gabrielle Tétrault-Farber, “ ‘Face Control’: Russian Police Go Digital
against Protesters,” Reuters, February 11, 2021, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-russia-

32
been used to enforce war conscription since the full-scale invasion of
Ukraine in February 2022.33 In some sense, democracy is being left be-
hind by technology as much by its neglect of technology, compared to
many authoritarian states’ eager willingness to embrace it for their own
ends, as by any anti-democratic tendencies of technology itself.

You get what you pay for

How did we end up here? Are these conflicts the natural course of tech-
nology and of democratic societies? Is a different future possible?

A range of work suggests that technology and democracy could co-evolve

in a diversity of ways and that the path most democracies are on is a result
of collective choices they have made through policies, attitudes, expecta-
tions, and culture. The range of possibilities can be seen through a variety
of lenses, from science fiction to real-world cases.

Science fiction shows the astonishing range of futures the human mind is
capable of imagining. In many cases, these imaginings are the foundation
of many of the technologies that researchers and entrepreneurs end up
developing. Some of these correspond to the directions we have seen tech-
nology take recently. In his 1992 classic, Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson
imagines a future where most people have retreated to live much of their
lives in an immersive “metaverse”.34 In the process they undermine the
engagement necessary to support real-world communities, governments,
and the like, making space for mafias and cult leaders to rule and develop
weapons of mass destruction. This future closely corresponds to elements
of the “antisocial” threats to democracy from technology we discussed
above. Stephenson and other writers further extend these possibilities,
which have had a profound effect in shaping technology development;
for example, Meta Platforms is named after Stephenson’s metaverse. Sim-
ilar examples are possible for the tendency of technology to concentrate
politics-navalny-tech-idUSKBN2AB1U2. See also Mark Krutov, Maria Chernova, and Robert
Coalson, “Russia Unveils a New Tactic to Deter Dissent: CCTV and a ‘Knock on the Door,’
Days Later,” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, April 28, 2021, https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-
dissent-cctv-detentions-days-later-strategy/31227889.html.
33
Anastasiia Kruope, “Russia Uses Facial Recognition to Hunt down Draft Evaders,” Human
Rights Watch, October 26, 2022, https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/10/26/russia-uses-facial-
recognition-hunt-down-draft-evaders.
34
Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash (New York: Bantam, 1992).

33
power through creating “superintelligences” as in the fiction of Isaac Asi-
mov and Ian Banks, the predictive futurism of Ray Kurzweil and Nicholas
Bostrom, and films like Terminator and Her.35

But these possibilities are both very different from each other and are far
from the only visions of the technological future to be found in sci-fi. In
fact, some of the most prominent science fiction shows very different pos-
sibilities. Two of the most popular sci-fi television shows of all time, The
Jetsons and Star Trek, show futures where, respectively, technology has
largely reinforced the culture and institutions of 1950s America and one
where it has enabled a post-capitalist world of diverse intersecting alien
intelligences (on which more below). But these are two among thousands
of examples, from the post-gender and post-state imagination of Ursula Le
Guin to the post-colonial futurism of Octavia Butler. All suggest a dizzying
range of ways technology could coevolve with society36 .

But science fiction writers are not alone. The primary theme of the field
of Science and Technology Studies, including the philosophy, sociology,
and history of science, has been the contingency and possibility inher-
ent in the development of science and technology and the lack of any
single necessary direction for their evolution37 . These conclusions have
been increasingly accepted in social sciences, like political science and
35
Isaac Asimov, I, Robot (New York: Gnome Press: 1950). Ian Banks, Consider Phlebas
(London: Macmillan, 1987). Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines (New York: Viking,
1999). Nicholas Bostrom, Superintelligence (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2014).
36
Ursula K. LeGuin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (New York: Harper & Row,
1974). Octavia E. Butler, Wild Seed (New York: Doubleday, 1980). Marge Piercy, Woman
on the Edge of Time (New York: Knopf, 1976). Karl Schroeder, “Degrees of Freedom” in Ed
Finn and Kathryn Cramer eds. Hieroglyph: Stories & Visions for a Better Future (New York:
William Morrow, 2014). Karl Schroeder, Stealing Worlds (New York: Tor Books, 2019) An-
nalee Newitz, The Future of Another Timeline (New York: Tor Books, 2019). Cory Doctorow,
Walkaway (New York: Tor Books, 2017). Malka Older, Infomocracy (New York: Tor Books,
2016). Naomi Alderman, The Power, (New York:Viking, 2017) Cixin Liu, The Three-Body Prob-
lem (New York: Tor Books, 2014) Paolo Bacigalupi, The Windup Girl (New York: Start Pub-
lishing LLC, 2009). Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age (New York: Spectra, 2003). William
Gibson, The Peripheral (New York: Berkley, 2019).
37
Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society (New York: Vintage Books, 1964). Paul Hoch,
Donald MacKenzie, and Judy Wajcman, “The Social Shaping of Technology,” Technology and
Culture 28, no. 1 (January 1987): 132 https://doi.org/10.2307/3105489. Andrew Pickering,
“The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future,” Kybernetes 40, no. 1/2 (March 15, 2011)
https://doi.org/10.1108/k.2011.06740aae.001. Deborah Douglas, Wiebe E. Bijker, Thomas P.
Hughes, and Trevor Pinch, The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions
in the Sociology and History of Technology (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2012),
available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5vjrsq. Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelation
of the Americas Before Columbus (New York: Knopf, 2005).

34
economics, that traditionally viewed technology progress as fixed and
given. Two of the world’s leading economists, Daron Acemoglu and Si-
mon Johnson, have recently published a book that argues that the direc-
tion of technological progress is a key target for social policy and reform
while documenting the historical contingencies that led to the directions
of technology we have seen in the past38 .

Perhaps the most striking illustration comes from comparing the ways
technology has advanced across countries today. Where once leading
thinkers predicted the power of technology to sweep away social differ-
ences, today the technological systems of powers great and sometimes
small define their competing social systems as much as their formally
stated ideologies: the PRC surveillance regime looks like one technolog-
ical future, while the Russian hacking networks seem another, the grow-
ing space of web3-driven communities a third, the mainstream Western
capitalist countries on which we have focused a fourth and the heteroge-
neous digital democracies of India, Estonia, and Taiwan something else
entirely that we will explore in depth below. Also possible, largely along
the web3 community-driven approach, is an African model that could
be built on open source and interoperability, reflective of the communal
inclination of many African cultures. Far from converging, technology
seems to be proliferating possible futures.

So, if our current trajectory of technology and social relationship to it in

Western liberal democracies is not inevitable, in what ways are we choos-
ing to be on this conflictual path? And how might we get off it?

While there are many ways to describe the choices democratic societies
have made about technology, perhaps the most concrete and easiest to
quantify are the investments realized. These show clear choices about
technological paths that Western liberal democracies (and thus most of
the financial capital in the world) have made about investments in the
future of technology, many are of quite recent origin. While these have
recently been driven primarily by the private sector, they reflect earlier
priorities set by governments that are in many ways just beginning to
filter through to private sector applications.
38
Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle
over Technology and Prosperity (New York: PublicAffairs, 2023).

35
Beginning with recent trends in the increasingly well-measured venture
capital industry, the last decade has seen a dramatic and overwhelming
focus of venture capital within the high technology sector into artificial
intelligence and cryptocurrency-adjacent “web3” technologies. Figure C
displays data on private investment in AI collected by NetBase Quid and
charted by Stanford’s Center for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence’s
2022 AI Index Report, showing its explosive growth over the course of the
2010s, growth that has come to dominate private technology investment;
Figure D shows the same (over a different period and quarterly) for the
web3 space based on data from Pitchbook.

**

Figure 2-0-C. Private investment in AI over the last seven years. Source:
NetBase Quid via 2023 AI Index Report39

**
39
Nestor Maslej, Loredana Fattorini, Erik Brynjolfsson, John Etchemendy, Katrina Ligett,
Terah Lyons, James Manyika, Helen Ngo, Juan Carlos Niebles, Vanessa Parli, Yoav Shoham,
Russell Wald, Jack Clark, and Raymond Perrault, “The AI Index 2023 Annual Report,” AI
Index Steering Committee, Institute for Human-Centered AI, Stanford University, Stanford,
CA, April 2023.

36
**

Figure 2-0-D. Time trend in crypto VC deals and investment. Source: Na-
tional Venture Capital Association and Pitchbook40

**

However, while these priorities are relatively recent and appear to

emerge from the logic of “the market”, they reflect a much longer-
running and collectively direct set of choices. These stem from the
41
investments governments in democratic countries have made. .
40
Pitchbook, “Crypto Report” Q4 2023 at https://pitchbook.com/news/reports/q4-2023-
crypto-report.
41
According to a report by the research and advisory company, Gartner, worldwide gov-
ernment spending on AI is expected to reach 37 billion in 2021, a 22.4% increase from the
previous year. - China leads the world in AI investment: Chinese companies invested 25
billion in AI in 2017, compared to 9.7 billion in the US. In 2021, the US Senate passed a 250
billion bill that includes $52 billion for semiconductor research and development, which
is expected to boost the country’s AI capabilities. Additionally, in the same year, the Eu-
ropean Union announced an 8.3 billion investment in artificial intelligence, cybersecurity,
and supercomputers as part of its Digital Decade plan. In 2021, the Bank of Japan started ex-
perimenting with central bank digital currency (CBDC) and China’s central bank launched
a digital yuan trial program in several cities.

37
**

Figure 2-0-E. The relative frequency of ”artificial intelligence in English

books 1950-2019. Source: Google Ngrams[^2-0-Ngrams]

**

Furthermore, these investments are not just choices that could have been
made differently; they are quite recent and were made very differently
immediately prior. These investments are reflected in the canonical tech-
nologies of the last few decades. Artificial intelligence was heralded as a
coming revolution throughout much of the 1980s, as reflected in Figure E
showing the relative frequency of this phrase in English books as tracked
by Google Ngrams. Yet the defining technology of the 1980s was quite
opposite: the personal computer that made computing a complement to
individual human creativity. The 1990s were haunted by Stephenson’s
science fictional imagination of the possibilities of escapist virtual worlds
and atomizing cryptography, the connective tissue of the internet swept
the world, ushering in an unprecedented age of communication and co-
operation. Mobile telephony in the 2000s, social networking in the 2010s,
and the scaffolding of remote work in the 2020s…none of these have fo-
cused on either cryptographic hypercapitalism or artificial superintelli-
gence. This reflects, with an extensive lag, the shift in investments made
by public sector research funders away from supporting these technolo-
gies and towards investment in cryptography and artificial intelligence,
as we discuss and document in “The Lost Dao” below, driven by a variety
of (geo)political factors.

38
Ideologies of the twenty-first century
If the path of technology is not predetermined and instead can be signifi-
cantly shaped by collective choices regarding investment, how should we
think about the flexibility we have as a society in choosing among possi-
ble directions? How much scope is there for choice and what do these
look like?

One useful analogy for thinking about choice over directions a society
might take is ideologies. It is “common sense” that different societies
have chosen or might choose to organize themselves in terms of differ-
ent (combinations of) ideologies: communism, capitalism, democracy,
fascism, theocracy, etc. Each of these incorporates strengths and weak-
nesses, appeals to some more than to others, and coheres and prescribes
to differing degrees. There may be configurations of these ideologies that
simply do not work or require specific historical and social conditions.

We might look at different trajectories for technology in a similar way.

The range of futures is not unlimited or infinitely malleable: some
things are easier, harder, or outright impossible. But neither is it pre-
determined. There are clusters of plausible visions of the future and
technologies that empower these; through our collective technological
investments, we help choose among these possibilities.

While a bit less familiar than the linear and progressive story about tech-
nology that is most common today, this perspective is very far from origi-
nal. It is a recurring theme in literature, scholarship, and even entertain-
ment. One striking example is the series of computer games Civilization
created by Sid Meier, in which the player charts a course for a people
from prehistory to the future. A defining characteristic of the game is the
diversity of possible technological paths and the way these interact with
social systems a society may adopt.

The latest entry in the series, Civilization VI, and specifically the “Gather-
ing Storm” expansion pack for it, illustrates our argument quite elegantly.
In that game, the “Information Era” features a choice among three ideolo-
gies: “Synthetic Technocracy,” “Corporate Libertarianism”, and “Digital
Democracy”, with corresponding strengths, weaknesses, and connections
to technological development. While the names for each of these are a bit

39
awkward and we shorten them below, we will argue in what follows that
they do a good job describing in broad strokes, like Communism, Fascism
and Democracy in the 20th century, the great techno-ideological debate
of our time.

Artificial Intelligence and technocracy

The first and most widely expressed vision of the future of technology to-
day centers around Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the way social systems
will have to adapt to it; it is captured by the Civilization VI “Synthetic Tech-
nocracy” category, or Technocracy for short.

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 abo-
lition, at least in principle, of material scarcity.42 Yet this potential abun-
dance 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 redistribu-
tion, 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 In-
telligence” (AGI) is central: machines that exceed human capabilities in
some generalized way, leaving little measurable utility in human individ-
ual or collective cognition.

Leading exponents of this view in Silicon Valley are Altman and his men-
tor Reid Hoffman and until recently Altman’s OpenAI co-founder Elon
Musk. The view is also popular in the PRC, where it has been advanced by
Jack Ma, economist Yu Yong-Ding and even by the PRC’s official New Gen-
eration Artificial Intelligence Development Plan with a strong reliance on
the Marxist idea of “central planning”. It also appears throughout science
fiction, particularly the work of authors mentioned above like Asimov,
42
Sam Altman, “Moore’s Law for Everything”, March 16, 2021
https://moores.samaltman.com/.

40
Banks, Kurzweil and Bostrom. Bostrom’s latest book, Deep Utopia: Life
and Meaning in a Solved World, is perhaps the purest expression of this
view.43 Leading organizations aligned with this perspective include Ope-
nAI, DeepMind, and other advanced artificial intelligence projects. The
political campaigns of Andrew Yang in the United States helped bring this
perspective to the mainstream of politics and technocratic ideas show up
in toned-down forms in much of the thought of the “tech left”, including
commentators like Ezra Klein, Matthew Yglesias, and Noah Smith.

Crypto and hyper-capitalism

A second view is much less common in the mainstream media but has
been a dominant theme in the community that has built around Bitcoin
and other cryptocurrencies and in various related internet communities;
it is captured by the Civilization VI “Corporate Libertarianism” category,
which we will abbreviate to “Libertarianism” below.

Libertarianism focuses on the potential (or in some telling inevitabil-

ity) 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 collec-
tive “coercion” and regulation. Fiction has been the central inspiration
for libertarian thinking, including the work of Ayn Rand and Stephen-
son.44 Stephenson’s books, especially Snow Crash discussed above
and Cryptonomicon (1999), while seemingly and expressly intended as
dystopian warnings, have been adopted as blueprints by adherents of
Libertarianism.45 Exemplary technologies in these works and have since
become central to the Libertarian community are immersive virtual
worlds (viz. Stephenson’s metaverse), digital currencies independent
of governments, private sovereignties especially based in ungoverned
spaces such as floating cities or “seasteads” and strong cryptography as a
means of evading collective control/law. The Bitcoin, Web3, 4Chan, and
other “peripheral” but influential online communities are core to the
social base of the Libertarian perspective.
43
Nicholas Bostrom, Deep Utopia: Life and Meaning in a Solved World (Washington, DC:
Ideapress, 2024).
44
Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (New York: Random House, 1957).
45
Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon (New York: Avon, 1999).

41
Perhaps partly because it is less mainstream than Technocracy, lib-
ertarianism 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.46 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.

Libertarianism has a close, but also somewhat complicated, relationship

with the nationalist and far-right in democratic countries. On the one
hand, most participants identify with this group and support it, to the
extent they engage with politics, as illustrated by Thiel’s emergence as a
primary financial supporter of Donald Trump and his supporters. In fact,
several leading hard right politicians are closely connected to the Liber-
tarian worldview: prominent British Conservative Member of Parliament
Jacob Rees-Mogg is the son of Lord William Rees-Mogg, Thiel employs for-
mer Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz and Thiel protégés Blake Masters
and J. D. Vance ran for Senate in 2022, with the latter winning a seat.

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 re-
solved 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 in-
evitable technological trends as an accelerant and possible ally in the dis-
solution of the nation-state.
46
James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg, The Sovereign Individual: Master-
ing the Transition to the Information Age (New York: Touchstone, 1999). Mencius Moldbug,
Unqualified Reservations https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/. Balaji Srinavasan, The
Network State (Self-published, 2022) available at https://thenetworkstate.com/. Bronze Age
Pervert, Bronze Age Mindset (Self-published, 2018).

42
Stagnation and inequality
These two ideologies have, to a significant extent though often in mod-
erated form, dominated public imagination about the future of technol-
ogy in most liberal democracies and thus shaped the direction of technol-
ogy investment for most of the last half-century. While the Technocratic
story sounds fresh and related to recent progress in AI, related discus-
sions around AI were almost as fever pitched as far back as the 1980s, as
illustrated by Figure E. While the recent discussions around web3 tech-
nologies have raised its profile, Libertarianism was arguably at its peak
in the 1990s, with John Perry Barlow’s “Declaration of the Independence
of Cyberspace”, Stephenson’s novels and the publication of The Sovereign
Individual.

The radical promises of these visions led many to anticipate dramatic eco-
nomic and productivity growth from information technology, as well as
the waves of privatization, deregulation and tax cuts that went along with
them in most liberal democracies beginning roughly half a century ago.
Yet these promises are far from bearing fruit and economic analysis in-
creasingly suggests these directions for technology may play a key role in
explaining that failure.

**

Figure 2-0-F. Improvement in technology represented by growth in “To-

tal Factor Productivity”. Source: Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American
Growth47
47
Robert J. Gordon, op. cit.

43
**

Instead of the promised explosion of economic possibility, the last half-

century has seen a dramatic deceleration of economic and especially pro-
ductivity growth. Figure F shows the growth in the United States of “To-
tal Factor Productivity (TFP)”, economists’ most inclusive measure of the
improvement in technology, averaged by decades from the beginning of
the 20th century to today. Rates during the mid-century “Golden Age”
roughly doubled their levels both before and after during the period we
dub the “Digital Stagnation”. The pattern is even more dramatic in other
liberal democratic countries in Europe and in most of democratic Asia,
with South Korea and Taiwan notable exceptions.

To make matters worse, this period of stagnation has also been one of
dramatically rising inequality, especially in the United States. Figure G
shows average income growth in the US by income percentile during the
Golden Age and Great Stagnation respectively. During the Golden Age,
income growth was roughly constant across the distribution, but trailed
off for top-income earners. During the Digital Stagnation, income growth
was higher for higher earners and only exceeded the average level during
the Golden Age for those in the top 1%, with even smaller groups earning
the great majority of the overall much lower income gains.

**

Figure 2-0-G. Average income growth in the US by income percentile dur-

ing the Golden Age and Great Stagnation. Source: Saez and Zucman, “The

44
Rise of Income and Wealth Inequality”48

**

What has gone so wrong in the last half-century compared to the one be-
fore? Economists have studied a range of factors, from the rise of market
power and the decline of unions to the progressively greater challenge of
innovating when so much has already been invented. But increasing ev-
idence focuses on two factors closely tied to the influence of technocracy
and libertarianism respectively: the shift in the direction of technological
progress towards automation and away from labor augmentation and the
shift in the direction of policy away from proactively shaping industrial
development and relations and towards an assumption that “free markets
know best”.

On the first point, in a series of recent papers, Acemoglu, Pascual Re-

strepo, and collaborators have documented the shift in the direction of
technical progress from the Golden Age to the Digital Stagnation. Figure
H summarizes their results, plotting cumulative changes in productivity
over time from labor automation (what they call “displacement”) and la-
bor augmentation (what they call “reinstatement”)49 . During the Golden
Age, reinstatement roughly balanced displacement, leaving the share of
income going to workers essentially constant. During the Digital Stagna-
tion, however, displacement has slightly accelerated while reinstatement
has dramatically fallen, leading to slower overall productivity growth and
a significant reduction in the share of income going to workers. Further-
more, their analysis shows that the inegalitarian effects of this imbalance
have been exacerbated by the concentration of displacement among low-
skilled workers.
48
Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, “The Rise of Wealth and Inequality in America:
Evidence from Distributional Macroeconomic Accounts,” Journal of Economic Perspectives
34, no. 4 (2020): 3-26.
49
Daron Acemoglu and Pascual Restrepo, “Automation and New Tasks: How Technology
Displaces and Reinstates Labor.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 33, no. 2 (May 2019): 3–
30. https://doi.org/10.1257/jep.33.2.3. Note that the precise Golden Age-Digital Stagnation
cutoff differs across these studies, but it is always somewhere during the 1970s or 1980s.

45
**

Figure 2-0-H. Cumulative changes in productivity over time from Displace-

ment (labor automation) and Reinstatement (labor augmentation) during
the Golden Age and Great Stagnation. Source: Acemoglu and Restrepo,
“Automation and New Tasks: How Technology Displaces and Reinstates
Labor”50

**

The role of “neoliberal” policies in contributing to the stagnation and in-

equality of this period is widely debated and we suspect most readers
have formed their own views on the matter. One of us was also co-author
of a book that contains a review of the evidence as of roughly a decade
ago.51 We will thus not go into detail here and refer readers to instead to
that or other related writing.52 However, clearly, the defining ideological
and policy direction of this period was an embrace of capitalist market
economics, often closely tied to claims that such an embrace was necessi-
tated by the globalization of technology and the resulting impossibility of
collective governance/action that is core to the Libertarian ideology. The,
largely failed, last half-century of technology and policy has thus been
characterized by the dominance of Technocracy in the sphere of technol-
ogy and Libertarianism in the sphere of policy.

Of course, the last half century has hardly been devoid of technological
breakthroughs that have genuinely brought about positive, if uneven and
50
Ibid.
51
Eric Posner, Glen Weyl, and Vitalik Buterin, Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and
Democracy for a Just Society, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019).
52
Thomas Philippon, The Great Reversal: How America Gave up on Free Markets, (Cam-
bridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press Of Harvard University Press, 2019); Jonathan
Tepper, The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition, New York: Harper
Business, 2018).

46
sometimes fraught, transformations. Personal computers empowered un-
precedented human creativity in the 1980s; the internet allowed com-
munication and connection across previously unimaginable distances in
the 1990s; smartphones integrated these two revolutions and made them
ubiquitous in the 2000s. Yet, it is striking that none of these most canoni-
cal innovations of our time fit neatly into the Technocratic or Libertarian
stories. They were clearly all technologies that augmented human creativ-
ity, often called “intelligence augmentation” or IA, rather than AI.53 Yet
neither were they envisioned primarily as tools to escape existing social
institutions; they facilitated rich communication and connection rather
than market transactions, private property, and secrecy. As we will see,
these technologies emerged from a very different tradition than either of
these two. Thus, even the few major technological leaps in this period
were largely independent of or in contrast to these visions.

A fraying social contract

Yet the economic conditions surrounding the embrace of Technocracy
and Libertarianism are only the easiest to quantify and thus most
headline-grabbing. Deeper, more insidious, and ultimately more damag-
ing have been the corrosion of the confidence, faith, and trust on which
social support of both democracy and technology rest.

Faith in democratic institutions has been falling, especially in the last

decade and a half in all democracies, but especially in the US and develop-
ing democracies. In the US, dissatisfaction with democracy has gone from
being the opinion of a fringe (less than 25%) to being the majority opin-
ion in the last 3 decades.54 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 consid-
ered 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 Pub-
lic Affairs Council, Morning Consult, Pew Research and Edelman Trust
53
John Markoff, Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans
and Robots (New York: Ecco, 2015).
54
Fred Lewsey, “Global Dissatisfaction with Democracy at a Record High,” University of
Cambridge, January 29, 2020, https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/dissatisfactiondemocracy.

47
Barometer.55

These concerns have spilled out more broadly to a general loss of faith in
a range of social institutions. The fraction of Americans expressing high
confidence in several leading institutions (including organized religions,
federal governments, public schools, media, and law enforcement) has
fallen to roughly half its level when such surveys began, around the end
of the Golden Age in most cases.56 Trends in Europe are more moderate
and the global picture is uneven, but the general trend towards declining
55
According to the 2021 Edelman Trust Barometer, only 57% of global respondents trust
technology as a reliable source of information. This represents a decline of 4 points from the
previous year’s survey. A 2020 survey by Pew Research Center found that 72% of Americans
believe that social media companies have too much power and influence over the news that
people see. Additionally, 51% of respondents said they were very or somewhat concerned
about the role of technology in political polarization. A 2019 survey by the Center for the Gov-
ernance of AI at the University of Oxford found that only 33% of Americans believe that tech
companies are generally trustworthy. In a 2020 survey of 9,000 people in nine countries,
conducted by Ipsos MORI, only 30% of respondents said that they trust social media compa-
nies to behave responsibly with their data. These data points suggest that there is a growing
sense of skepticism and concern about the role of technology in society, including its im-
pact on democracy. See Richard Wike, Laura Silver, Janell Fetterolf, Christine Huang, Sarah
Austin, Laura Clancy, and Sneha Gubbala. “Social Media Seen as Mostly Good for Democ-
racy across Many Nations, but U.S. Is a Major Outlier,” Pew Research Center, December
6, 2022, https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2022/12/06/social-media-seen-as-mostly-good-
for-democracy-across-many-nations-but-u-s-is-a-major-outlier/. Pew Research shows ordi-
nary citizens see social media as both a constructive and destructive component of political
life, and overall most believe it has actually had a positive impact on democracy. Across the
countries polled, a median of 57% say social media has been more of a good thing for their
democracy, with 35% saying it has been a bad thing. There are substantial cross-national
differences on this question, however, and the United States is a clear outlier: Just 34% of
U.S. adults think social media has been good for democracy, while 64% say it has had a bad
impact. In fact, the U.S. is an outlier on a number of measures, with larger shares of Ameri-
cans seeing social media as divisive. See OAIC, “Australian Community Attitudes to Privacy
Survey 2020 Prepared for the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner by Lon-
ergan Research,” 2020, https://www.oaic.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0015/2373/australian-
community-attitudes-to-privacy-survey-2020.pdf. Many consumer respondents to a recent
Australian survey (58%) admitted they do not understand what firms do with the data
they collect, and 49% feel unable to protect their data due to a lack of knowledge or
time, as well as the complexity of the processes involved (OAIC, 2020). “Twitter, Face-
book, YouTube, and Instagram are critical in disseminating the rapid and far-reaching
spread of information,” a systematic review by WHO explains. See World Health Orga-
nization, “Infodemics and Misinformation Negatively Affect People’s Health Behaviours,”
September 1, 2022. https://www.who.int/europe/news/item/01-09-2022-infodemics-and-
misinformation-negatively-affect-people-s-health-behaviours–new-who-review-finds. The
repercussions of misinformation on social media include such negative effects as “an in-
crease in erroneous interpretation of scientific knowledge, opinion polarization, escalat-
ing fear and panic or decreased access to health care”. See Janna Anderson, and Lee
Rainie, “Concerns about Democracy in the Digital Age,” Pew Research Center, February 21,
2020. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2020/02/21/concerns-about-democracy-in-the-
digital-age/.
56
Gallup, “Confidence in Institutions,” n.d., https://news.gallup.com/poll/1597/confidence-
institutions.aspx.

48
institutional confidence in democratic countries is widely accepted.57

Reclaiming our future

Technology and democracy are trapped between two sides of a widening
gulf. That war is damaging both sides of the conflict, undermining democ-
racy 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 unprece-
dented technology to have any chance of being realized. By reimagining
our future, shifting public investments, research agendas, and private de-
velopment, we can build that future. In the rest of this book, we hope to
show you how. And we will begin by telling you the story of a place that
has gone farther than any other in realizing that future, a place where
democracy and digital technology are not just allies, but deeply mutually
entwined.

2-1 A View From Yushan

Swirling ocean, beautiful islands;
A transcultural republic of citizens.58

57
United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, “Trust in
Public Institutions: Trends and Implications for Economic Security,” n.d.,
https://social.desa.un.org/publications/trust-in-public-institutions-trends-and-implications-
for-economic-security. See also Marta Kolczynska, Paul-Christian Bürkner, Lau-
ren Kennedy, and Aki Vehtari, “Modeling Public Opinion over Time and Space:
Trust in State Institutions in Europe, 1989-2019,” SocArXiv, August 11, 2020.
https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/3v5g7.
58
This is an alternate interpretation of 中華民國 (lit. “amidst” “cultures” “citizens” “na-
tion”), usually translated as “Republic of China”.

49
Standing at the summit of East Asia’s highest peak, Yushan (Jade Moun-
tain), one can not only look down on Taiwan, but also feel how this small,
mountainous island nation is a global crossroad. Located at the junction
of the Eurasian and Pacific tectonic plates, Taiwan’s geological fault line
yearly pushes it up, even as it also regularly causes earthquakes against
which rigorous building code protect inhabitants. In the same way, the
clash of Taiwan’s diverse culture, history and values has built a prosper-
ous and innovative society, while pro-social digital innovation has man-
aged to protect it from polarization.

Today, with a voter turnout rate over 70%59 , second-highest religious

diversity in the world60 , and 90% of global supply capacity for advanced
chips, Taiwan has broken through geographic constraints and demon-
strated the resilience of a democratic society to collaborate with its region
and the world.

Taiwan’s ability to achieve among the world’s lowest fatality rates with-
out 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. Whether it’s a map of masks
or a social safety distance, these are all manifestations of technologies for
collaborative diversity, deeply rooted in daily life.61

Place of convergence
One etymology of Taiwan’s name is from the indigenous word “Taivoan”,
meaning “place of convergence”. Taiwan has arguably been a launching
point for long-distance cooperation longer than anywhere on earth, being
believed to be the starting point for the journeys of thousands of miles by
Polynesian voyagers in the second millennium BCE.62 The story of this
island and its people, influenced by indigenous cultures, colonial powers,
and political ideologies from the region and world, centers on the ongoing
59
“Billing Profile Information,” Central Election Commission, n.d,
https://db.cec.gov.tw/ElecTable/Election?type=President.
60
Joseph Liu, “Global Religious Diversity,” Pew Research Center, April 4, 2014.
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2014/04/04/global-religious-diversity/.
61
“Tracking Covid-19 Excess Deaths across Countries,” The Economist, October 20, 2021.
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-deaths-tracker.
62
Peter Bellwood, Man’s Conquest of the Pacific: the Prehistory of Southeast Asia and Ocea-
nia (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1979).

50
conflict and co-creation between different notions of what this place is
and what it can be. This raucous and rich clash has poured out a unique
form of democracy forged by a history of constant upheaval.

Two dramatic personal experiences of the lead authors of this book il-
lustrate this unique cultural and political setting. On March 18, 2014, a
group of students frustrated by the substance and process of a new trade
deal with Beijing and inspired by the global “Occupy” movement climbed
over the fence surrounding the legislature building. A similar occupation
of the American legislative Capitol almost seven years later lasted only a
few hours and yet is one of the most divisive events in American history.
In contrast, the “Sunflower” (318) occupation lasted more than a hundred
times as long (more than 3 weeks) and yet the demands of the protesters
were eventually largely accepted as a consensus; the movement led to a
change of government and the rise of new political parties.

Perhaps most importantly, the movement led to a deeper and more last-
ing shift in politics, 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. One particularly proactive such minis-
ter, one of the world’s first ministers in charge of digital participation, Ja-
clyn Tsai recruited one of us to begin our journey of public service. Even-
tually this led to her taking that role in 2016 and in 2022 becoming the
first Minister of Digital Affairs.

Almost a decade after these events, the other primary author of this
book visited to witness the general election held January 13, 2024,
which launched a “year of elections” in which more people than in any
previous year will vote and followed hot on the heels of the “year of AI”,
when generative models like GPT burst into the public consciousness.
Many expect these models to turbocharge information manipulation
and interference by authoritarian actors. This election seemed a test
case, with a more concerted, better-funded adversary focused on a small
population than anywhere in the world.63 Walking the streets of Taipei
on the eve of that election, he saw no shortage of divisions for such
attacks to exploit. At the rally of the ruling Democratic Progressive Party
63
“Disinformation in Taiwan: International versus Domestic Perpetrators,” V-Dem, 2020.
https://v-dem.net/weekly_graph/disinformation-in-taiwan-international-versus

51
(DPP) he found not a single official flag, only placards of the island, the
party’s signature green color and occasional rainbow flags . At the
rally of the opposition Kuomintang (KMT or Nationalist) party, he saw
only the flag of the Republic of China (ROC) . It made him imagine
how much more extreme the divisions of his American home would be if
Democrats waved a historical British flag and Republicans the stars and
stripes.

Yet, despite these extreme divides and harnessing the technologies de-
veloped partly as a result of the Sunflower movement, the January 13
election has become a positive model to the world, with the candidate of
the party opposed by the authoritarian adversary outperforming opinion
polls, calm prevailing after the election and a largely consensual outcome
being reached across the society. This capacity to harness technology and
social organization to channel widely divergent attitudes towards shared
progress was most sharply manifested in the decade of work following
the Sunflower movement. Yet it has far deeper historical roots, roots that
come from different starting points and converge on this fateful decade
of digital democracy.

Taiwan’s historical lineage

The divergent identities emphasized by the DPP and KMT correspond to
different facets and imaginations of what “this place is.” These resonate
with an alternate etymology for the island’s name: “tayw”-“an”, which
means “people”-“place” in another, closed-related indigenous language
(Siraya). For the KMT (identified with the color blue), Taiwan is defined
by most of its people speaking Chinese languages such as Mandarin, Taigi
(Taiwanese Hokkien) and Hakka. Some would go as far as to argue that
Taiwan is more ethno-historically “Chinese” than the PRC, with more
than 80% speaking Mandarin as a primary language (compared to 70%
in PRC), more than 40% following traditional religions such as Daoism
(compared to less than 20% in PRC) and the official government ideology
being Tridemism (more below) rather than imported Marxism. In
contrast, for those influenced by the DPP (identified with “green”) view,
Taiwan is a place, an island whose history is diverse and transcultural,
spent only two centuries as a periphery under Qing Chinese rule and

52
should be the center of determining its own future. To make sense of
these divides, we must therefore trace briefly both the history of this
island and of the ROC government.

The island’s history is replete with war, rebellion, colonizers, and national
independence narratives at every turn. Like many islands in the South
China Sea, indigenous peoples in Taiwan encountered larger imperial
powers, such as the Spanish, the Japanese, and the Dutch, through colo-
nial expansion. By the seventeenth century, the Dutch settled in the south-
ern part of the island while the Spanish settled in the northern region;
both of these settlements were ports intended for trade, while much of
the island remained inaccessible due to terrain and indigenous peoples
violently opposing colonial control.64

South China Sea merchants (or pirates, depending on how you encoun-
tered them), all hailing from Japan, China, and Southeast Asia, also settled
on the island or used the ports. In 1662, Zheng Chenggong, or Koxinga, in
open rebellion against the newly established Qing dynasty (1644-1911),
forcibly removed the Dutch from their seat of power in the southern re-
gion and continued his campaign against the Qing from Taiwan.65 By
1683, the Zheng family-led rebellion was defeated, and Taiwan came nom-
inally under the control of the Qing.

Little more than two hundred years later, in 1895, Qing dynasty’s defeat in
the Sino-Japanese war set in motion two sequences of events that would
define the modern history of Taiwan. First, Qing ceded Taiwan and its
immediately surrounding islands to Japan, marking the beginning of a
half-century of Japanese colonial rule in Taiwan. Second, this defeat fu-
eled the rise of a nationalist movement that created the ROC.66 We must
follow each of these strands as they diverge.

In Taiwan, Japanese occupation marked the beginning of the democracy

movement. Governor Tang Jingsong took advantage of the change in lead-
ership to establish a short-lived independent Formosa Republic, which
64
Emma Teng, Taiwan’s Imagined Geography: Chinese Colonial Travel Writing and Pictures,
1683-1895, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2004), 33.
65
Emma Teng, Taiwan’s Imagined Geography: Chinese Colonial Travel Writing and Pictures,
1683-1895, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2004), 33, 1-2.
66
Suisheng Zhao, The Dragon Roars Back: Transformational Leaders and Dynamics of Chi-
nese Foreign Policy, (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2022), 132.

53
was in turn suppressed at the cost of 12,000 lives in a 36,000-square-
kilometer island. During Japanese colonial rule, the policy of “dōka”
(assimilation) once again attempted to incorporate the Taiwanese into
the Japanese cultural and linguistic system. The policy in the Japanese
Empire acted to thoroughly integrate language, governmental structure,
urban construction, and the education of Taiwan’s elite and intelligentsia
with Japan’s, including bringing many to Japan for education.

Despite the enormous efforts and funds invested by the Japanese empire,
Taiwan’s resistance and identity remained. Different ethnic groups
were considered more or less “civilized”; the less civilized a group of
people was, the harsher and more violent the Japanese government
was, thus creating fundamentally different experiences for indigenous,
Taigi and Hakka people under Japanese control.67 The rise of the global
anti-colonial movement and the Taishō democratic reforms within Japan
at the beginning of the 20th century provided intellectuals and activists
in Taiwan with the ideological foundation for self-determination. Local
elections held in 1935 that included a small fraction of property-owning
men as electors provided a first taste of democratic participation at least
to Taiwanese elites, encouraging the pursuit of greater autonomy and
expression.68

Tridemism
Across the Taiwan strait, a young, American-educated, Christian doctor
and activist, Sun Yat-Sen, was similarly influenced in a revolutionary
democratic direction by Qing’s defeat at Japan’s hands, but for a very
different reason. Concluding that the dynasty was unreformable, Sun
and his “Revive China Society” led a series of unsuccessful uprisings that
forced him into exile in Japan, where he (like the Taiwanese elites sent to
Japan to be educated) absorbed nascent democratic reform. Drawing on
these Japanese, Christian and American influences as well as Confucian
traditions, Sun articulated his Three Principles of the People in 1905,
laying the foundation of the “Tridemism” that would become the official
67
Jeffrey Jacobs, Democratizing Taiwan, (Boston: Brill, 2012), 22.
68
Ashley Esarey, “Overview: Democratization and Nation Building in Taiwan” in Taiwan in
Dynamic Transition: Nation Building and Democratization, edited by Thomas Gold, (Seattle:
University of Washington Press, 2020), 24

54
philosophy (and national anthem) of the ROC.

The first principle is 民族/Mínzú (literally “civil clan”), which is typically

translated as “nationalism”. However, perhaps more notable was its em-
phasis on ethnic pluralism (五族共和) reflected in the original flag of the
ROC69 , which included colors for each of the major ethnicities at the time.
The second is 民權/Mínquán (literally “civil rights”), usually translated as
“democracy” and articulated as a combination of rights of election, recall,
initiative and referendum and division of powers among five “Yuans” (the
Legislative, Executive and Judicial of the European tradition plus the Con-
trol and Examination divisions of the Confucian tradition). The third is
民生/Mínshēng (literally “civil livelihood”), usually translated as “social-
ism”, draws from a variety of economic philosophies, including the ideas
of Henry George, an American political economist known for his advo-
cacy of land rights equality, anti-monopoly stances, and support for coop-
erative enterprises. We will discuss these ideas much more extensively
in the next part of the book.

Harnessing these ideas, Sun built international support from foreign al-
lies and expatriates around the world that eventually allowed him and
his allies to overthrow the Qing in 1911 and found the ROC in 1912. De-
spite this initial success, internal conflict quickly forced him again into
exile and then back to take part in a civil war. In 1919, he managed to
marshal his forces and found the modern KMT.

That year he also met another crucial influence on the ideas of the
ROC, a disciple of Henry George who was visiting China partly to see
how George’s ideas might play out on a social scale. John Dewey was
perhaps the most respected American philosopher and among the most
respected educators and philosophers of democracy globally. Dewey’s
“pragmatic” theory of democracy (translated by his Chinese student Hu
Shih as “experimentalism”), which we will discuss in greater detail in
the next part of this book, resonated with the uncertain and exploratory
atmosphere of early ROC.

On the one hand, this fluid, experimental and emergent approach shared
much with Taoist traditions popular among democratic opponents of
69
“Flag of China (1912–1928),” n.d. Wikimedia Commons,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Flag_of_China_(1912%E2%80%931928).svg.

55
Qing and warlord monarchy.70 On the other hand, unlike many more
imperialistic foreign observers, Dewey advocated the ROC following
its own path of “collaborative problem solving” as the axis of modern
experimental model schools. This led Dewey to become something of a
bridge between the ROC and the West, especially the US, giving over 200
lectures in China while writing monthly columns on his experiences for
emerging outlets such as The New Republic. In the process, he helped
forge a deep and enduring connection between the ROC and the US.

The roughly concurrent success of the Russian revolution brought finan-

cial support and military training to the previously marginal Chinese
Communist Party (CCP). While inspired by a different, Marxist vision
of socialism, Sun allied with the communists to unify the country. This
effort, nearly successful at the time of his death in 1925, has made Sun
the “Father of the Nation” for the Nationalists and the “Forerunner of the
Revolution” for the Communists.

That moment of unity was, however, short-lived, with the communists

(under Mao Zedong) and nationalists (under Chiang Kai-shek) alternat-
ingly engaging in civil war and alliances against warlords and Japanese
occupiers during the next twenty years, until the final defeat of the
Japanese in 1945. Focused overwhelmingly on both the struggle for
national liberation and against each other, neither the Communists nor
the Nationalists thought much of Taiwan.71

Postbellum Taiwan
In 1949, having been defeated by Communists, Chiang and two million
ROC soldiers and civilians relocated to Taiwan, declaring it the home of
“free China”, while simultaneously imposing martial law on the eight mil-
lion native, primarily Taigi- and Hakka-speaking population that came to
be known as the “White Terror”. Acting as dictator, Chiang positioned
the ROC to the world as the true representatives of China. Internally, peo-
70
Richard Shusterman, “Pragmatism and East‐Asian Thought,” Metaphilosophy 35, no. 1-2
(2004): 13, https://www.academia.edu/3125320/Pragmatism_and_East_Asian_Thought.
71
Yet, to the extent they did address it, Mao supported Taiwan as an independent commu-
nist state much as he hoped for Korea and Vietnam, while Chiang (almost as an afterthought)
requested the return of Taiwan after the war along with other territories formerly occupied
by Japan, including Manchuria.

56
ple in Taiwan experienced a violent outsider government, one that had
swiftly taken control of the island and began to suppress any sign of Tai-
wanese identity systematically and ruthlessly.72

At the same time, the government whose official ideology was Tridemism
began sowing many seeds of social reform that would eventually sprout
into democratic movements in Taiwan. Given his lack of ties to the island
and its local elites, Chiang was able to impose the Rural Land Reform,
including a rent reduction to 37.5% in 1949, the release of public land in
1951 and the breaking up of large estates in the 1953 policy of “land to
the tiller”. This was extended to impose a Georgist land value tax in 1977,
the details of which we will describe later. Together, as many scholars
have argued, these reforms laid an egalitarian economic foundation that
proved critical to Taiwan’s later social and economic development.73

Another outgrowth of Tridemism was a focus on cooperative enter-

prise, enshrined in Articles 145 of the ROC Constitution, which states
that “private wealth and privately-operated enterprises, the State shall
restrict them by law if they are deemed detrimental to a balanced
development… Cooperative enterprises… and foreign trade shall receive
encouragement.” While influenced by Georgist ideas, this support for
industrial cooperatives and participative production also drew heavily
on traditions of agricultural and industrial cooperation developed during
the Japanese colonial rule, further influenced by American thinkers like
Edward Deming who emphasized the empowerment of line workers in
improving production under the US occupation of Japan that he worked
for.74
72
Chien-Jung Hsu, The Construction of National Identity in Taiwan’s Media, 1896-2012, (Lei-
den: Brill, 2014), 71.
73
Joe Studwell, “How Asia Works: Success and Failure in the World’s Most Dynamic Re-
gion,” (London: Profile, 2013).
74
After World War II, Japan’s industrial infrastructure was devastated, and product qual-
ity 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 automo-
tive 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, analyz-
ing 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).

57
Together these influences fostered the development of a robust civil and
cooperative sector in Taiwan (which we collectively call the Third Sec-
tor), critical to its industrial and political future. Furthermore, the con-
stitutional and historical focus on trade, as well as public investment in
export-supporting infrastructure, propelled Taiwan’s rise. By the 1970s,
Taiwan became a major supplier of components for advanced Western
technologies.

Taiwan’s education system was similarly influenced by the intellectual

ferment of the early ROC period, with Dewey’s student Hu fleeing to Tai-
wan alongside the KMT that he sometimes feuded with. As President of
the national research institute Academia Sinica and a leading intellectual,
Hu became a central influence on the development of Taiwan’s educa-
tional system. His fusion of Confucian traditions with Deweyian pragma-
tism, egalitarianism and democracy helped shape Taiwanese education
into the envy of the world, topping world league tables on a range of
benchmarks.75

Coming of democracy
The 1960s, parallel to the American Civil Rights movement, saw an out-
burst of demands against the KMT and Chiang Kai-Shek for Taiwan’s in-
dependence and a truly democratic government. Taiwan-born National
Taiwan University Professor Peng Ming-min (1921-2022) and two of his
students, Hsieh Tsung-min and Wei Ting-chao, circulated the Taiwan Self-
Salvation Manifesto, which called for a freed and independent Taiwan,
decrying the ROC as an illegitimate government.76 Though this moment
ended with Peng’s exile, the manifesto sparked a national conversation
that further spurred democratic advocates to demand access to national
elections.

The United Nations was central to the ROC’s early identity under the White
Terror as it was not only one of the founding members of the UN, but also
the only Asian permanent member of the Security Council. This promi-
nent international role was the leading irritant to the People’s Republic
75
“John Dewey and Free China,” Taiwan Today, January 1, 2003,
https://taiwantoday.tw/news.php?unit=12.
76
Ryan Dunch, and Ashley Esarey, Taiwan in Dynamic Transition: Nation-Building and De-
mocratization, (Seattle: University Of Washington Press, 2020), 28.

58
of China (PRC) regime, preventing it from participating in international
affairs and leading the CCP to change its position from initially supporting
Taiwanese independence to an ideological focus on conquering Taiwan.
However, as the US sought to contain its failures in Vietnam, President
Richard Nixon secretly pursued accommodation with the PRC, including
supporting an Albanian-sponsored Resolution 2758 by the General Assem-
bly on October 25, 1971 that transferred recognition of “China” from the
ROC to the PRC, finally culminating in Nixon’s visit to PRC in 1972. As
a result, the ROC “withdrew” from the UN, transforming its identity and
international standing.

On the one hand, this withdrawal internationally greatly limited the

scope of Taiwan’s international activities and its ability to engage in
economic and trade activities. It also led the US and much of the non-
Communist world to shift from a position of unconditional alliance with
the ROC to one of careful balancing of interests and ambiguity, seeking
to prevent PRC’s violence over Taiwan while also supporting a policy of
acknowledging its “One China” position.

Internally, this change in identity undermined much of the rationale for

the White Terror, as the prospect of global support for a war to suppress
the “Communist rebellion” withered and undermined the aspirational
identity of “free China”. The contradictions between the increasingly
egalitarian, Third Sector-driven and highly progressively educated
population, on the one hand, and an authoritarian repressive state on
the other thus became increasingly overwhelming, especially with the
development of labor unions and political civic associations and the
death of Chiang all before the end of the 1970s. The lives of the parents of
one of the authors of this book are a perfect illustration of these trends:
as pioneers of community college and consumer cooperative movements,
they benefited from the cooperative support in the ROC constitution.
Yet, as journalists, they covered and helped support those repressed by
the state, such as in the Kaohsiung Incident of 1979 when leaders of
the political opposition were imprisoned, building the foundation for
democratization.

Taiwan’s weakened international position also allowed dissidents exiled

during the White Terror to put increasing pressure on Chiang’s son and

59
successor Chiang Ching-Kuo. The liberalization of Taiwan under the
younger Chiang in the 1980s created an environment where democratic
action, protests, essays, songs, and art reflected the growing belief for
general elections. Those who called for democracy were still in exile or
jailed, but their relatives and friends began to run for local and national
political offices.77

Vibrant democratic generation

In 1984, Chiang Ching-Kuo selected Lee Teng-hui (1923-2020) as the first
Taiwan-born vice president. This choice signaled a change in the political
landscape of Taiwan.78 When Lee became President in 1988, he quickly
instituted a range of democratic reforms, calling for the direct election of
the President and vesting the sovereignty of the country in the “citizens
of the Free Area” of the ROC (those living on the Taiwan islands). This
led him to become the first directly elected President in 1996, just a few
months after the Bill Gates’s “Internet Tidal Wave” memo heralded the
mainstream arrival of the internet age.

Already among the most technology-intensive export economies in the

world, this tidal wave swept the Taiwanese economy and society with the
same force as democratization. Thus the internet and democracy were
something of Siamese twins in Taiwan. Four years later, the first DPP
President, Chen Shui-bian, narrowly won election as the Blue camp splin-
tered. With the return of the KMT to the Presidency eight years later in
2008, a system of alternation between the Blue vision of “free China” and
the Green vision of “island nation” was established as the pattern of poli-
tics.

Yet despite this deep and persistent division that fueled the Sunflower
movement, the overlapping consensus between these perspectives is
striking:

1. Pluralism: Both the Blue and Green stories share a strong emphasis
on pluralism. For Blue, it’s about fusing both contemporary and tra-
ditional culture (exemplified by the National Palace Museum) and
77
Ryan Dunch, and Ashley Esarey, Taiwan in Dynamic Transition: Nation-Building and De-
mocratization, (Seattle: University Of Washington Press, 2020), 31.
78
Jeffrey Jacobs, Democratizing Taiwan, (Boston: Brill, 2012), 62.

60
 the Tridemist tradition of pluralism, while highlighting ROC’s role
as a cultural inheritor and leader; while the Greens focus on the di-
versity of those who have settled in Taiwan, including the indige-
nous peoples, Japanese, Hokkien, Hakka, Westerners, and new im-
migrants.
2. Diplomatic nuance: To navigate the challenging relationship with
the PRC, both have had to embrace a range of complex and nuanced
public positions around the security posture of the US and other al-
lies, the meaning of ROC and Taiwan, as well as the concept of “in-
dependence”.
3. Democratic freedom: The ideas of “democracy” and “freedom” are
core to both ideologies. For Greens, these ideas are the core of Tai-
wan’s rallying cries overcoming both the White Terror and PRC au-
thoritarianism. To Blues, these ideas are core to Tridemism and
thus, in their eyes, qualities that a ROC leadership must focus on.
4. Anti-authoritarianism: Both are deeply concerned about growing
authoritarianism in the PRC, especially in the last decade with the
failure of the “One Country, Two Systems” formula in Hong Kong.
5. Export-orientation: Both parties celebrate success as a commercial
exporter and also see the ability to export ideas and culture as cen-
tral to the future. For Blues this focuses more on influencing the
PRC to be more like Taiwan, while for Greens it focuses on gaining
respect in the “free world” that Taiwan needs to defend itself.

In addition to this ideological overlap, the two sides have both benefited
from and been immersed in the central role the island has come to play
in the global electronics industry. As the center of the semiconductor and
smartphone supply chain, while also having the fastest internet in the
world79 , no country is more thoroughly immersed in the digital world
than Taiwan.

This combination of an overlapping consensus on plural, complex, free,

world-facing democracy, where digital tools are easily available to help
navigate the resulting ambiguity, has allowed Taiwan to become, in the
last decade, the world’s leading example of digital democracy.
79
Taiwan News, “Taiwan Has No. 1 Fastest Internet in World,” October 23, 2023.
https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/5025449.

61
2-2 The Life of a Digital Democracy
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

Without living in Taiwan and experiencing it regularly, it is hard to grasp

what such an achievement means, and for those living there continuously
many of these features are taken for granted. Thus we aim here to provide
concrete illustrations and quantitative analyses of what distinguishes Tai-
wan’s digital civic infrastructure from those of most of the rest of the
world. Because there are far too many examples to discuss in detail, we
have selected six diverse illustrations that roughly cover a primary focal
project for each two-year period since 2012; after we briefly list a wide
range of other programs.

Illustrations
g0v

More than any other institution, g0v (pronounced gov-zero) symbolizes

the civil-society foundation of digital democracy in Taiwan. Founded in
2012 by civic hackers including Kao Chia-liang, g0v arose from discontent
with the quality of government digital services and data transparency.80
Civic hackers began to scrape government websites (usually with the suf-
fix gov.tw) and build alternative formats for data display and interaction
80
g0v Manifesto defines it as “a non-partisan, not-for-profit, grassroots movement”. Moe-
Dict, an early g0v project, was led by one of the authors of this book.

62
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.

**

Figure 2-2-A. Principles of g0v displayed in a venn diagram.

**

g0v built on this success to establish a vibrant community of civic hackers

interacting with a range of non-technical civil society groups at regular
hackathon, called “jothons” (based on a Mandarin play on words, mean-
ing roughly “join-athon”). While hackathons are common in many parts
of the world, some of the unique features of g0v practices include the di-

63
versity of participants (usually a majority non-technical and with nearly
full gender parity), the orientation towards civic problems rather than
commercial outcomes and the close collaboration with a range of civic or-
ganizations. These features are perhaps best summarized by the slogan
“Ask not why nobody is doing this. You are the ‘nobody’!”, which has led
the group to be labeled the “nobody movement”. They are also reflected
in a Venn diagram commonly used to explain the movement’s intentions
shown in Figure A. As we will note below, a majority of the initiatives we
highlight grew out of g0v and closely aligned projects.

Sunflower

While g0v gained significant public attention and support even in its ear-
liest years, it burst most prominently onto the public scene during the
Sunflower Movement we described above. Hundreds of contributors in
the g0v community were present during the occupation of the Legisla-
tive Yuan (LY), aiding in broadcasting, documenting and communicating
civic actions. Livestream-based communication sparked heated discus-
sion among the public. Street vendors, lawyers, teachers, and designers
rolled up their sleeves to participate in various online and offline actions.
Digital tools brought together resources for crowdfunding, rallies, and in-
ternational voices of support.

On March 30, 2014, half a million people took to the streets in the largest
demonstration in Taiwan since the 1980s. Their demands, thus formu-
lated, for a review process prior to the passage of the Cross-Straits Ser-
vices Trade Agreement was accepted by LY Speaker Wang Jin-pyng on
April 6, about three weeks after the start of the occupation, leading to
its dispersal soon thereafter. The contributions of g0v to both sides and
the resolution of their tensions led the sitting government to see the merit
in g0v’s methods and in particular cabinet member Jaclyn Tsai recruited
one of us as a youth “reverse mentor” and began to attend and support
g0v meetings, putting an increasing range of government materials into
the public domain through g0v platforms.

Many Sunflower participants devoted themselves to the open govern-

ment movement; the following local (2014) and general (2016) elections
saw a dramatic swing in outcomes of roughly 10 percentage points

64
towards the Green camp, as well as the establishment of a new political
party by the Sunflower leaders, the New Power Party, including leading
Taiwanese rock star Freddy Lim. Together, these events significantly
added to the momentum behind g0v and led to one of our appointment
as Minister without Portfolio responsible for open government, social
innovation and youth participation.

vTaiwan and Join

During this process of institutionalization of g0v, there was growing de-

mand to apply the methods that had allowed for these dispute resolu-
tions to a broader range of policy issues. This led to the establishment
of vTaiwan, a platform and project developed by g0v for facilitating delib-
eration on public policy controversies. The process involved many steps
(proposal, opinion expression, reflection and legislation) each harness-
ing 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, which we discuss further in
our chapter on Augmented Deliberation below. In short, Polis functions
similarly to conventional microblogging services like Twitter/X, except
that it employs dimension reduction techniques to cluster opinions as
shown in Figure B. Instead of displaying content that maximizes engage-
ment, Polis shows the clusters of opinion that exist and highlights state-
ments that bridge them. This approach facilitates both consensus forma-
tion and a better understanding of the lines of division.

65
**

Figure 2-2-B. Clusters of consensual opinions generated by Polis on vTai-

wan. Source: vTaiwan.tw, CC0 license.

**

vTaiwan was deliberately intended as an experimental, high-touch, inten-

sive platform for committed participants. It had about 200,000 users or
about 1% of Taiwan’s population at its peak and held detailed delibera-
tions 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.

66
As a decentralized, citizen-led community, vTaiwan is also a living organ-
ism that naturally evolves and adapts as citizen volunteers participate
in various ways. The community’s engagement experienced a downturn
following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, which interrupted face-
to-face meetings and led to decreased participation. The platform faced
challenges due to the intensive volunteering effort required, the absence
of mandates for governmental responses, and its somewhat narrow fo-
cus. In response to these challenges, vTaiwan’s community has sought
to find a new role between the public and the government and extend
its outreach beyond the realm of Taiwanese regulation in recent years.
A significant effort to revitalize vTaiwan was its collaboration with Ope-
nAI’s Democratic Input to AI project in 2023. Through partnerships with
Chatham House and the organization of several physical and online delib-
erative events centered on the topic of AI ethics and localization, vTaiwan
successfully integrated local perspectives into the global discourse on AI
and technology governance. Looking ahead to 2024, vTaiwan plans to en-
gage in deliberations concerning AI-related regulations in Taiwan and be-
yond. In addition to Polis, vTaiwan is constantly experimenting with new
deliberation and voting tools, integrating LLMs for summarization. The
vTaiwan community remains committed to democratic experimentation
and finding consensus among the public for policymaking. The earlier
experience of vTaiwan outside of government also inspired the design of
the official Join platform, which is actively used by citizens as a means of
proposing issues and ideas to the government.

The Public Digital Innovation Space (PDIS) that one of us established

in 2016 to work with vTaiwan and other projects we discuss below
in the ministerial role therefore supported a second, related platform
Join. 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.

67
Hackathons, coalitions and quadratic signals

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. Even more concentrated applications
of this principle have come by placing the weight of government behind
the g0v practice of hackathons through the Presidential Hackathon (PH)
and a variety of supporting institutions.

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 prob-
lems. 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. Winning project received a trophy – a microprojector
showing the President of Taiwan giving the award to the winners, lever-
age they could use to induce relevant government agencies or localities to
cooperate in their mission, given the legitimacy g0v has gained as noted
above.

More recently, this practice has been extended beyond developing techni-
cal solutions to envisioning of alternative futures and production of me-
dia content to support this through “ideathons”. It has also gone beyond
symbolic support to awarding real funding to valued projects (such as
around agricultural and food safety inspections) using an extension of
Quadratic Voting to Funding as we discuss in our Social Markets chapter.

68
Pandemic

These diverse approaches to empowering government to more agilely

leverage civil participation most dramatically came to a head during the
Covid-19 pandemic. Taiwan is widely believed (based on statistics we will
discuss in the next section of this chapter) to have had one of the world’s
most effective responses to the crisis stage of the pandemic. Notably, it
achieved among the lowest global death rates from the disease during
that stage without using lockdowns and while maintaining among the
fastest rates of economic growth in the world. While being an island,
having as Taiwan did an epidemiologist ready for an instant response as
Vice-President and restricting travel clearly played a key role, a range of
technological interventions played an important role as well.

The best documented example and the one most consistent with the previ-
ous 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 al-
lowed 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.

Another critical aspect of the Taiwanese response was the rigorous use of
testing, tracing and supported isolation to avoid community spread of the
disease. While most tracing occurred by more traditional means, Taiwan
was among the only place that was able to reach the prevalence of adop-
tion of phone-based social distancing and tracing systems necessary to
make these an important and effective part of their response. This was, in
turn, largely because of the close cooperation facilitated by PDIS between
government health officials and members of the g0v community deeply
concerned about privacy, especially given the lack in Taiwan of an inde-
pendent privacy protection regime, a point we return to below. This led
to the design of systems with strong anonymization and decentralization
features that received broad acceptance.

69
Information integrity

Yet perhaps the single most important digital contributor to Taiwan’s pan-
demic response was its ability to rapidly and effectively respond to mis-
information and deliberate attempts to spread disinformation. This “su-
perpower” has extended, however, well beyond the pandemic and been
critical to the successful elections Taiwan has held during a time when a
lack of information integrity has challenged many other jurisdictions.

Central to those efforts, in turn, has been the g0v spin-off project “Cofacts,”
in which participating citizens rapidly respond to both trending social me-
dia 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 engag-
ingly to rumors than can professional fact checkers, who are much more
bandwidth constrained.81

The technical sophistication of Taiwan’s civil sector and its support from
the public sector have aided in other ways as well. This has allowed
organizations like MyGoPen and private sector companies like Gogolook
to develop and, with public support, rapidly spread chatbots for private
messaging services like Line that make it fast and easy for citizens to
anonymously receive rapid responses to possibly misleading informa-
tion. 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.

Together these policies have helped Taiwan fight off the “infodemic”
without takedowns, just as it fought of the pandemic without lock-
downs. This culminated in the January 13, 2024 election we mentioned
above, in which a PRC campaign of unprecedented size and AI-fueled
sophistication failed to polarize or noticeably sway the election.
81
Andy Zhao and Mor Naaman, “Insights from a Comparative Study on the Variety, Ve-
locity, 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.

70
Other programs

While these are some of the most prominent examples of Taiwanese dig-
ital democratic innovation, there are many other examples we lack the
space to discuss in detail but will briefly list here.

1. Alignment assemblies: Taiwan has pioneered convening, increas-

ingly common around the world, of citizen participation in the reg-
ulation and steering of AI foundation models.
2. Information security: Taiwan has become a world leader in the use
of distributed storage to guard against malicious content takedowns
and of “zero trust” principles in ensuring the security of citizen ac-
counts.
3. Gold cards: Taiwan has among the most diversely accessible paths
to permanent residence through its “gold card” program, including
in a “digital field” to those who have contributed to open source and
public interest software.
4. Transparency: Building on and extending broader government poli-
cies of data transparency, one of us has modeled this idea by making
recordings and/or transcripts all of her official meetings public with-
out copyrights.
5. Digital competence education: Since 2019, Taiwan has pioneered a
12-Year Basic Education Curriculum that enshrines “tech, info & me-
dia literacy” as a core competency, empowering students to become
active co-creators and discerning arbiters of media, rather than pas-
sive consumers.
6. Land and spectrum: Building on the ideas of Henry George, Taiwan
has among the most innovative policies in the world to ensure full
utilization of natural resources, land and electromagnetic spectrum
through taxes that include rights of compulsory sale (as we discuss
further in our Property and Contract and Social Markets chapters).
7. 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.
8. Broadband access: Taiwan has one of the most universal internet ac-
cess rates and has been recognized two years in a row as the fastest
average internet in the world.

71
 9. 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.
10. Digital diplomacy: Based on these experiences, Taiwan has become
a leading advisor and mentor to democracies around the world con-
fronting similar challenges and with similar ambitions to harness
digital tools to improve participation and resilience.

Furthermore, this work sufficiently won the confidence of both the public
and the government that in August 2022 Taiwan created a Ministry of
Digital Affairs, elevating one of us from Minister without Portfolio to lead
this new ministry.

Decade of accomplishment
While this is an interesting set of programs, one might naturally inquire
about evidence of their efficacy. Tracing causal impacts precisely for so
many projects is obviously an arduous task beyond our scope here. But
at very least it is reasonable to ask how Taiwan has performed overall
on the range of challenges that has so troubled most liberal democracies
in the last decades. We consider each categories of these in turn. Un-
fortunately, the quality of analysis and comparison possible is not all it
could be given the complex geopolitics around Taiwan’s international sta-
tus meaning that many standard international comparators choose not to
include it in their data.

Economic

While the economic lens of Taiwan’s performance is far from the most im-
portant, it is one of the easier to quantify and provides a useful baseline
for understanding the starting point for the rest. In one sense, Taiwan is
an upper-middle income country, like much of Europe, with a Gross Do-
mestic Product (GDP) per capita of $34,000 per person in 2024 according
to the International Monetary Fund (IMF).82 However, prices are much
82
“GDP per Capita, Current Prices,” International Monetary Fund, n.d.,
https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/NGDPDPC@WEO/ADVEC/WEOWORLD/TWN/CHN.

72
lower in Taiwan on average than in almost any other rich country; mak-
ing 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. Furthermore, as we dis-
cuss below, most sources suggest that Taiwan is much more equal than
the US, which means it is likely the country of that size with the highest
typical living standards in the world. Thus Taiwan is best thought of as
among the absolute most developed economies in the world, rather than
as a middle-income country.

The sectoral focus of Taiwan’s economy stands out as well. While per-
fectly comparable data are hard to come by, Taiwan is almost certainly
the most digital export-intensive economy in the world, with exports of
electronics and information and communication products accounting for
roughly 31% of the economy, compared to less than half that fraction in
other leading technology exporters such as Israel and South Korea.83 This
fact is best known to the world for what it reflects: that most of the world’s
semiconductors, especially the most advanced ones, are manufactured in
Taiwan and Taiwan is also a major both manufacturer and domicile for
manufacturers of smartphones such as Foxconn.

Taiwan is also unusual among rich countries in its relatively low tax take;
according to the Asia Development Bank, Taiwan collected only 11% of
GDP in taxes compared to 34% on average in the Organization of Eco-
nomic Cooperation and Development (OECD) club of rich countries.84 Re-
latedly, Taiwan ranked 4th in the world in the Heritage Foundation’s Eco-
nomic Freedom Index.85

Given this background, several features of Taiwan’s economic perfor-

mance in the last decade stand out.

1. Growth: Taiwan has averaged real GDP growth of 3% over the last
decade, compared to less than 2% for the OECD, a bit over 2% for the
US and 2.7% for the world overall.86
83
“Exports,” Trading Economics, n.d., https://tradingeconomics.com/country-list/exports.
84
“Key Indicators Database,” Asian Development Bank, n.d.,
https://kidb.adb.org/economies/taipeichina; “Revenue Statistics 2015 - the United States,”
OECD, 2015, https://www.oecd.org/tax/revenue-statistics-united-states.pdf.
85
“Index of Economic Freedom.” The Heritage Foundation, 2023.
https://www.heritage.org/index/.
86
“GDP Growth (Annual %),” World Bank, 2023. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/ny.gdp.mktp.kd.zg;

73
 2. Unemployment: Taiwan has averaged an unemployment rate of just
under 4% steadily in the last decade, compared to an OECD average
of 6%, a US average of 5% and a world average of around 6%.
3. Inflation: While inflation has spiked and wildly fluctuated around
the world including almost all rich countries, Taiwan’s inflation rate
has remained relatively steady the last decade in the 0-2% range,
averaging 1.3% according to the IMF.
4. Inequality: The last decade has seen significant debate about meth-
ods in calculating inequality statistics. Using more traditional meth-
ods, Taiwan’s Survey of Family Income and Expenditure has found
that Taiwan’s Gini Index of inequality (ranging from 0 for perfectly
equal to 1 for perfectly unequal) has been steady at around .28 for
the last decade, placing it around the level of Austria on the lower
end of global inequality and far lower than the roughly .4 of the
US. Other analyses, using innovative but controversial administra-
tive approaches pioneered by economists including Emmanuel Saez,
Thomas Piketty, and Gabriel Zucman show Taiwan’s top 1% income
share at 19%, not far behind the US at 21% and well above a coun-
try like France at 13%. However, even in these data, Taiwan’s top
1% share has fallen by about a tenth in the last decade, while in
both France and the US it has risen by a similar proportion. Fur-
thermore, a number of studies have recently argued these methods
tend to find higher inequality in countries and time periods with
lower and less progressive taxes as they rely on tax administration
data and struggle to fully account for induced avoidance.87 Given
Taiwan’s dramatically lower tax take than either the US or France,
it seems likely that if these issues apply anywhere, they would lead
to a substantial overstatement of Taiwanese inequality.88

Putting these facts together, what is notable is that Taiwan’s economic per-
formance has been strong and fairly egalitarian or at least not becoming
“GDP per Capita, Current Prices,” International Monetary Fund, n.d.,
https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/NGDPDPC@WEO/ADVEC/WEOWORLD/TWN/CHN.
87
Gerald Auten, and David Splinter, “Income Inequality in the United States: Using Tax
Data to Measure Long-Term Trends,” Journal of Political Economy, November 14, 2023.
https://doi.org/10.1086/728741.
88
The most interesting statistic we woudl like to report on is labor’s share of income and
its trends in Taiwan. However, to our knowledge no persuasive and internationally compa-
rable study of this exists. We hope to see more research on this soon.

74
more unequal despite its wealth and extreme tech-intensity. As we docu-
mented above, economists have widely blamed the role of technology for
many recent economic woes, including slow growth, unemployment and
rising inequality. In the world’s most tech-intensive economy, this seems
not to be the case.

Social

Internationally comparable social indicators are far more difficult than

even economic ones for Taiwan, given that it is excluded from the World
Health Organization (WHO). However, we were able to find roughly com-
parable data on two commonly cited social indicators: loneliness and self-
reported technology addiction. Loneliness among older adults (above 65)
in Taiwan stands at roughly 10%, which puts it around similar rates in the
least affected countries in the world (mostly in Northern Europe), better
than in North America (roughly 20%) and much better than in the PRC
(more than 30%).89 Another comparison is self reported cellphone addic-
tion rates, which are fairly high in Taiwan (at roughly 28%) but much
lower than in the US (at 58%).90 Differences in rates of addiction to con-
trolled substances are even more dramatically different, with about 10
times as many Americans reporting using illegal drugs at least monthly
than Taiwanese who have ever tried an illegal drug.91

Taiwan is also marked by a unique experience with religion among rich

countries, almost all of which (especially the United States) are both dom-
inated by a single broad religious group (e.g. Christianity) and have seen
dramatic declines in a range of measures of religiosity including affilia-
tion and participation in the past decades.92 Religion in Taiwan, by con-
89
S. Schroyen, N. Janssen, L. A. Duffner, M. Veenstra, E. Pyrovolaki, E. Salmon, and S. Adam,
“Prevalence of Loneliness in Older Adults: A Scoping Review.” Health & Social Care in the
Community 2023 (September 14, 2023): e7726692. https://doi.org/10.1155/2023/7726692.
90
“More than Half of Teens Admit Phone Addiction .” Taipei Times, February 4,
2020. https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/biz/archives/2020/02/04/2003730302; “Study Finds
Nearly 57% of Americans Admit to Being Addicted to Their Phones - CBS Pittsburgh.” CBS
News, August 30, 2023. https://www.cbsnews.com/pittsburgh/news/study-finds-nearly-57-of-
americans-admit-to-being-addicted-to-their-phones/.
91
“NCDAS: Substance Abuse and Addiction Statistics [2020],” National Center for Drug
Abuse Statistics, 2020, https://drugabusestatistics.org/; Ling-Yi Feng, and Jih-Heng Li, “New
Psychoactive Substances in Taiwan,” Current Opinion in Psychiatry 33, no. 4 (March 2020):
1, https://doi.org/10.1097/yco.0000000000000604.
92
Ronald Inglehart, “Giving up on God: The Global Decline of Religion,” Foreign Affairs 99
(2020): 110. https://heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage?handle=hein.journals/fora99&div=123&id=&page=.

75
trast, is far more diverse with a roughly equal mix of followers of four dis-
tinct religious traditions: folk religion, Taoism, Buddhism, Western and
minority religions, with about an equal proportion as each of these being
non-believers.93 At the same time, while there has been some shift among
these groups, there has hardly been any significant increase in non-belief
or non-practicing in Taiwan in the past decades.94

Political

Taiwan is widely recognized both for the quality of its democracy and
its resilience against technology-driven information manipulation.
Several indices, published by organizations such as Freedom House95 ,
the Economist Intelligence Unit96 , the Bertelsmann Foundation and
V-Dem, consistently rank Taiwan as among the freest and most effective
democracies on earth.97 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; even if one includes the wave of
post-Soviet democracies immediately before this, almost all are less than
half Taiwan’s size, typically an order of magnitude smaller. Thus Taiwan
is at least regarded as Asia’s strongest democracy and the strongest
young democracy of reasonable size and by many as the world’s absolute
strongest. Furthermore, while democracy has generally declined in
every region of the world in the last decade according to these indices,
Taiwan’s democratic scores have substantially increased.

In addition to this overall strength, Taiwan is noted for its resistance to po-
larization and threats to information integrity. A variety of studies using
a range of methodologies have found that Taiwan is one of the least politi-
cally, socially and religiously polarized developed countries in the world,
93
“2022 Report on International Religious Freedom: Taiwan,” American Institute in Tai-
wan, June 8, 2023, https://www.ait.org.tw/2022-report-on-international-religious-freedom-
taiwan/#:~:text=According%20to%20a%20survey%20by.
94
“Religion in Taiwan,” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, January 12, 2020.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Taiwan.
95
“Freedom in the World,” Freedom House, 2023, https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-
world.
96
“Democracy Index 2023,” Economist Intelligence Unit, n.d.,
https://www.eiu.com/n/campaigns/democracy-index-2023.
97
“Democracy Indices,” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, March 5, 2024.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_indices#:~:text=Democracy%20indices%20are%20quantitative%20and..

76
though some have found a slight upward trend in political polarization
since the Sunflower movement.98 This is especially true in affective polar-
ization, the holding of negative or hostile personal attitudes towards po-
litical opponents, with Taiwan consistently among the 5 least affectively
polarized countries.

This is despite analyses consistently finding Taiwan to be the jurisdiction

targeted for the largest volume of disinformation on earth.99 One reason
for this paradoxical result may be the finding by political scientists Bauer
and Wilson that unlike in many other contexts, foreign manipulation fails
to exacerbate partisan divides in Taiwan. Instead, it tends to galvanize a
unified stance among Taiwanese against external interference.100

Legal

Taiwan is consistently ranked as one of the five safest countries in the

world and the safest democracy in the world with more than 100,000 peo-
ple by a very large margin.101 When one of us first traveled to Taiwan, he
was shocked to receive compensation for his flight as a large envelope of
cash, which most Taiwanese feel comfortable carrying given the extreme
safety. Furthermore, crime in Taiwan continues to trend steadily down-
ward even as countries like the US have seen dramatic surges in especially
violent crime.102 It is worth noting, however, that it has achieved this his-
torically with a fairly strong police presence (somewhat higher than the
US) and an incarceration rate that while far short of the US is high by
global standards.

Taiwan’s legal-political system has also distinguished itself for its ability
to adapt to inclusively resolve long-standing social conflicts. In 2017, the
98
Laura Silver, Janell Fetterolf, and Aidan Connaughton, “Diversity and Di-
vision in Advanced Economies,” Pew Research Center, October 13, 2021,
https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2021/10/13/diversity-and-division-in-advanced-
economies/.;
99
Adrian Rauchfleisch, Tzu-Hsuan Tseng, Jo-Ju Kao, and Yi-Ting Liu, “Taiwan’s Public Dis-
course about Disinformation: The Role of Journalism, Academia, and Politics,” Journalism
Practice 17, no. 10 (August 18, 2022): 1–21, https://doi.org/10.1080/17512786.2022.2110928.
100
Fin Bauer, and Kimberly Wilson, “Reactions to China-Linked Fake News: Ex-
perimental Evidence from Taiwan,” The China Quarterly 249 (March 2022): 1–26.
https://doi.org/10.1017/S030574102100134X.
101
“Crime Index by Country,” Numbeo, 2023, https://www.numbeo.com/crime/rankings_by_country.jsp.
102
“Taiwan: Crime Rate,” Statista, n.d, https://www.statista.com/statistics/319861/taiwan-
crime-rate/#:~:text=In%202022%2C%20around%201%2C139%20crimes.

77
Constitutional Court ruled that the government must pass a law to legalize
same-sex marriage within two years. After the failure of a referendum on
a straightforward same-sex marriage proposal in 2018, the government
found a creative way to respond to the interests of all sides. Many who
opposed same-sex marriage were concerned that because of traditions
of extended families being bound together by marriage, family members
opposing the practice could be forced to participate. At the same time,
most young people who planned to take advantage of the new provision
had more individualistic, partner-based visions of marriage and had no
desire to bind their families either, leading the government to pass a le-
galization bill that exempted kin from the same-sex marriage process.

Existential

Crises come rarely and with low probability. It is thus hard to know how
well Taiwan might perform in avoiding or mitigating one. However, per-
haps the closest one can reach for is an emergency that did occur: the
Covid-19 pandemic. As noted above, Taiwan was widely seen as among
the best if not the very best performing country in the world during this
episode and here we discuss the quantitative reasons for this esteem.

The exceptional performance that won Taiwan this international acclaim

occurred during the focal early stages of the pandemic, during which
much of the world was in rolling lockdowns prior to the availability of
the vaccine. We can call this the “crisis” stage of the pandemic and de-
clare it to have ended in April 2021, when vaccines were widely available
in the US. From the start of the pandemic to April 2021, Taiwan suffered
only 12 deaths to the pandemic, giving it by far the lowest death rate to
that point of any jurisdiction with estimates considered internationally ac-
curate. Furthermore, Taiwan achieved this without any lockdowns and
achieved the fastest economic growth of any rich country bar Ireland in
2020. More broadly, Taiwan’s health system has for the better part of a
decade been ranked as the world’s most efficiently performing by Num-
beo, though life expectancy in Taiwan is merely among the highest in the
world.103

It is important to note, however, that Taiwan performed much less

103
https://www.numbeo.com/health-care/rankings_by_country.jsp

78
impressively during the “post-crisis” phase following mid-2021, during
which vaccine availability and uptake were the most critical components
of response and challenges with domestic vaccine production and distri-
bution led to significant loss of life in the coming years. Taiwan still had
among the lowest death rates and best economic performance reliably
measured by a rich jurisdiction of significant size, but its exceptional
leadership early in the pandemic did not fully persist after the crisis
phase. This may indicate that the cohesion and civic engagement fostered
by crises (like Sunflower and the Pandemic) allow Taiwan to respond
more effectively than anywhere in the world, but that additional care
and focus is needed to ensure these efforts are institutionalized and
sustainable, an important direction for the future we discuss further
below.

Another slow-burning crisis that may illustrate this challenge is climate

change. While Taiwan has joined many other countries in enshrining its
2050 net zero ambitions into law and has won praise for its plans to reach
this goal, its progress thus far has been modest.104 More broadly, Taiwan
has a strong but not outstanding record on environmental protection.105

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.106
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.107

In short, while like all countries it has key limitations, Taiwan deserves a
leading place among global exemplars that it is too rarely afforded. Ad-
miration for Scandinavian countries is a constant refrain on the left in
the West, as is praise for Singapore on the right. While all these jurisdic-
104
“Net Zero Tracker,” Energy & Climate Intelligence Unit, 2023.
https://eciu.net/netzerotracker.
105
“2022 EPI Results,” Environmental Performance Index, 2022, https://epi.yale.edu/epi-
results/2022/component/epi.
106
Drew DeSilver, “Turnout in U.S. Has Soared in Recent Elections but by Some Mea-
sures Still Trails that of Many Other Countries.” Pew Research Center, November
1, 2022. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/11/01/turnout-in-u-s-has-soared-in-
recent-elections-but-by-some-measures-still-trails-that-of-many-other-countries/.
107
“Taiwan Country Report Report,” BTI Transformation Index, n.d., https://bti-
project.org/en/reports/country-report/TWN.

79
tions have important lessons and in fact many important points of over-
lap with Taiwan, few places offer the breadth of promise in addressing
today’s leading challenges that Taiwan does and appeal across the typical
divides as it does. As an economically free, vibrantly participatory liberal
democracy Taiwan both has something to offer all points on the political
spectrum of the West and holds arguably the most compelling example
available to those looking to leapfrog the practices of increasingly ailing
Western democracies. This is especially true given its starting point: with-
out abundant natural resources or strategic position, in a fragile geopolit-
ical setting, with a deeply divided rather than homogeneous and robust
sized population and only democratizing a few decades ago, rising from
abject poverty in less than a century.

It will doubtless take decades of study to understand the precise causal

connections between Taiwan’s unique and dramatic digital democratic
practices and the range of success it has found in confronting today’s most
vexing challenges. Yet given this appeal, in the interim, it seems critical to
articulate as so many have done for Scandinavia and Singapore, the gen-
eralizable philosophy behind the strategies of the world’s most admired
digital democracy. It is to that task that the rest of this book is devoted.

80
Section 3: Plurality

3-0 What is ⿻?
“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, 1958108

“(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”, 2017109

“Democracy is a technology. Like any technology, it gets better

when more people strive to improve it.” - Audrey Tang, Inter-
view with Azeem Azhar, 2020110

The increasing tensions between democracy and technology and the way
that, starting from such extreme divisions, Taiwan seems to have over-
come them naturally raises a question: is there a more broadly applica-
ble 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 com-
108
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958).
109
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.
110
“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.

81
peting 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 enhanc-
ing 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 fun-
damental source of progress.

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 Combina-
tions…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 collabora-
tion across social difference”. This contrasts with a common element be-
tween 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 au-
thority should go to each, they miss the core idea of ⿻ 數位 Plurality, that
intersecting diverse social groups and the diverse and collaborative peo-
ple whose identities are constituted by these intersections are the core
fabric of the social world.

82
**

Figure 3-0-A. Three-part definition of ⿻ 數位 Plurality

**

To be more precise, we can break Plurality into three components (de-

scriptive, 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:

1. Descriptive: The social world is neither an unorganized collec-

tion of isolated individuals nor a monolithic whole. Instead,
it is a fabric of diverse and intersecting affiliations that de-

83
 fine both our personal identities and our collective organiza-
tion. 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 intersec-
tional, overlapping nature of identity for both groups and individ-
uals. 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.
2. 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 poten-
tial 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 philosoph-
ical tradition including many of the American thinkers who deeply
influenced Taiwan, such as Henry George and John Dewey.
3. Prescriptive: Digital technology should aspire to build the en-
gines that harness and avoid conflagration of diversity, much
as industrial technology built the engines that harnessed phys-
ical 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 char-
acters 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

84
 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 dom-
inate much discussion today.

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).

In English this may be read in a variety of ways depending on context:

• As “Plurality” typically when used as a concept;111

• 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;

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 ⿻.

3-1 Living in a ⿻ World

Until lately the best thing that I was able to think in favor of
civilization…was that it made possible the artist, the poet, the
philosopher, and the man of science. But I think that is not
the greatest thing. Now I believe that the greatest thing is
a matter that comes directly home to us all. When it is said
that we are too much occupied with the means of living to
live, I answer that the chief worth of civilization is just that it
makes the means of living more complex; that it calls for great
and combined intellectual efforts, instead of simple, uncoor-
dinated ones, in order that the crowd may be fed and clothed
111
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 ⿻.

85
 and houses and moved from place to place. Because more
complex and intense intellectual efforts mean a fuller and
richer life. They mean more life. Life is an end in itself, and
the only question as to whether it is worth living is whether
you have enough of it. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1900112

(A)re…atoms independent elements of reality? No…as quan-

tum theory shows: they are defined by their…interactions with
the rest of the world…(Q)uantum physics may just be the real-
ization that this ubiquitous relational structure of reality con-
tinues all the way down…Reality is not a collection of things,
it’s a network of processes. — Carlo Rovelli, 2022113

Technology follows science. If we want to understand ⿻ as a vision of

what our world could become, we need to start off by understanding ⿻ as
a perspective on how the world already is. The Technocratic and Libertar-
ian perspectives are rooted in a science, namely the monist atomism we
described in the previous chapter: the belief that a universal set of laws
operating on an fundamental set of atoms is the best way to understand
the world.

Technocracy has a long history of being justified by science and rational-

ity. The idea of “scientific management” (a.k.a. Taylorism) that became
popular in the early 1900s was justified by making analogies between so-
cial systems and simple mathematical models, and logic and reason as
ways of thinking about them. High modernism in architecture is simi-
larly inspired by the beauty of geometry.114 Libertarianism also borrows
heavily from physics and other sciences: just like particles “take the path
of least action”, and evolution maximizes fitness, economic agents “max-
imize utility”. Every phenomenon in the world, from human societies to
the motion of the stars, can, in the monist atomist view, ultimately be re-
duced to these laws.
112
Harper’s Magazine. “Holmes – Life as Art,” May 2, 2009.
https://harpers.org/2009/05/holmes-life-as-art/.
113
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.
114
James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition
Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999).

86
These approaches have achieved great successes. Newtonian mechanics
explained a range of phenomena and helped inspire the technologies of
the industrial revolution. Darwinism is the foundation of modern biology.
Economics has been the most influential of the social sciences on public
policy. And the Church-Turing vision of “general computation” helped
inspire the idea of general-purpose computers that are so broadly used
today.

Yet the last century taught us how much progress is possible if we

transcend the limitations of monist atomism. Gödel’s Theorem un-
dermined the unity and completeness of mathematics and a range of
non-Euclidean geometries are now critical to science.115 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.

⿻ approaches social systems similarly. A corporation plays in the game of

global competition, yet is simultaneously itself a game played by employ-
ees, shareholders, management and customers. There is no reason to ex-
pect the resulting outcomes often to cohere as preferences. What’s more,
many games intersect: employees of a corporation are often each influ-
enced through their other relationships with the outside world (e.g. polit-
ical, 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.

⿻ is thus heavy with analogies to the last century of natural sciences.

Drawing out a ⿻ of these influences and analogies, without taking any
too literally or universally, allows us to glimpse an inviting path ahead of
inspiration and recombination. While Libertarianism and Technocracy
115
Cris Moore and John Kaag, “The Uncertainty Principle”, The American Scholar March 2,
2020 https://theamericanscholar.org/the-uncertainty-principle/.

87
can be seen as ideological caricatures, they can also be understood in sci-
entific terms as ever-present threats to complexity.

Essentially every complex system, from the flow of fluids to the devel-
opment of ecosystems to the functioning of the brain, can exhibit both
“chaotic” states (where activity is essentially random) and “orderly” states
(where patterns are static and rigid). There is almost always some param-
eter (such as heat or the mutation rate) that conditions which state arises,
with chaos happening for high values and order for low values. When
the parameter is very close to the “critical value” of transition between
these states, when it sits on what complexity theorists call the “edge of
chaos”, complex behavior can emerge, forming unpredictable, develop-
ing, life-like structures that are neither chaotic nor orderly but instead
complex.116 This corresponds closely to the idea we highlighted above of
a “narrow corridor” between centralizing and anti-social, Technocratic
and Libertarian threats that we have highlighted above.

As such, ⿻ can take from science the crucial importance of steering to-
wards and widening this narrow corridor, a process complexity scientists
call “self-organizing criticality”. In doing so, we can draw on the wisdom
of many sciences, ensuring we are not unduly captured by any one set of
analogies.

Mathematics
Nineteenth century mathematics saw the rise of formalism: being precise
and rigorous about the definitions and properties of mathematical struc-
tures that we are using, so as to avoid inconsistencies and mistakes. At the
beginning of the 20th century, there was a hope that mathematics could
be “solved”, perhaps even giving a precise algorithm for determining the
truth or falsity of any mathematical claim.117 20th century mathematics,
on the other hand, was characterized by an explosion of complexity and
uncertainty.

• Gödel’s Theorem: A number of mathematical results from the

116
M. Mitchell Waldrop, Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos
(New York: Open Road Media, 2019).
117
Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell, Principia Mathematica (Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press, 1910).

88
 early 20th century, most notably Gödel’s theorem, showed that
there are fundamental and irreducible ways in which key parts
of mathematics cannot be fully solved. Similarly, Alonzo Church
proved that some mathematical problems were “undecidable” by
computational processes.118 This dashed the dream of reducing all
of mathematics to computations on basic axioms.
• Computational complexity: Even when reductionism is feasible
in principle/theory, the computation required to predict higher-
level phenomena based on their components (its computational
complexity) is so large that performing it is unlikely to be practically
relevant. In some cases, it is believed that the required computation
would consume far more resources than could possibly be recov-
ered through the understanding gained by such a reduction. In
many real-world use cases, the situation can often be described as a
well-studied computational problem where the “optimal” algorithm
takes an amount of time growing exponentially in the problem size
and thus rules of thumb are almost always used in practice.
• Sensitivity, chaos, and irreducible uncertainty: Many even rel-
atively simple systems have been shown to exhibit “chaotic” behav-
ior. A system is chaotic if a tiny change in the initial conditions trans-
lates into radical shifts in its eventual behavior after an extended
time has elapsed. The most famous example is weather systems,
where it is often said that a butterfly flapping its wings can make
the difference in causing a typhoon half-way across the world weeks
later.119 In the presence of such chaotic effects, attempts at predic-
tion via reduction require unachievable degrees of precision. To
make matters worse, there are often hard limits to how much pre-
cision is feasible known as “the Uncertainty Principle”, as precise
instruments often interfere with the systems they measure in ways
that can lead to important changes due to the sensitivity mentioned
previously.
• Fractals: Many mathematical structures have been shown to have
similar patterns at very different scales. A good example of this is
the Mandelbrot set, generated by repeatedly squaring then adding
118
Alonzo Church, “A note on the Entscheidungsproblem”, The Journal of Symbolic Logic 1,
no. 1: 40-41.
119
James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science (New York: Penguin, 2018).

89
 the same offset to a complex number. These illustrate why breaking
structures down to atomic components may obscure rather than il-
luminate their inherently multi-scale structure.

**

Figure 3-1-A: The Mandelbrot Set (characterizing the chaotic behavior of

simple quadratic functions depending on parameter values in the func-
tion) shown at two scales. Source: Wikipedia CC 3.0 BY-SA.

**

• Relationality in mathematics: in mathematics, different branches

are often interconnected, and insights from one area can be applied
to another. For instance, algebraic structures are ubiquitous in
many branches of mathematics, and they provide a language for
expressing and exploring relationships between mathematical
objects. The study of algebraic geometry connects these structures
to geometry. Moreover, the study of topology is based on under-
standing the relationships between shapes and their properties.
The mix of diversity and interconnectedness is perhaps the defining
feature of modern mathematics.

Physics
In 1897, Lord Kelvin infamously proclaimed that “There is nothing new
to discover in physics now.” The next century proved, on the contrary, to
be the most fertile and revolutionary in the history of the field.

• Einstein’s theories of relativity overturned the simplicity of Eu-

90
 clidean geometry and Newtonian dynamics of colliding billiard balls
as a guide to understanding the physical world at large scales and
fast speeds. When objects travel at large fractions of the speed of
light, very different rules start describing their behavior.
• Quantum mechanics and string theory similarly showed that
classical physics is insufficient at very small scales. Bell’s Theorem
demonstrated clearly that quantum physics cannot even be fully
described as a consequence of probability theory and hidden
information: rather, a particle can be in a combination (or “super-
position”) of two states at the same time, where those two states
cancel each other out.
• “Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle”, mentioned above, puts a
firm upper limit on the precision with which the velocity and posi-
tion of a particle can even be measured.
• The three body problem, now famous after its central role in Liu
Cixin’s science-fiction series, shows that an interaction of even three
bodies, even under simple Newtonian physics, is chaotic enough
that its future behavior cannot be predicted with simple mathe-
matical problems. However, we still regularly solve trillion-body
problems well enough for everyday use by using seventeenth-
century abstractions such as “temperature” and “pressure”.

Perhaps the most striking and consistent feature of the revolutions in

twentieth century physics was the way they upset assumptions about a
fixed and objective external world. Relativity showed how time, space,
acceleration, and even gravity were functions of the relationship among
objects, rather than absolute features of an underlying reality. Quan-
tum physics went even further, showing that even these relative relation-
ships are not fixed until observed and thus are fundamentally interac-
tions rather than objects.120 Thus, modern science often consists of mix-
ing and matching different disciplines to understand different aspects of
the physical world at different scales.

The applications of this rich and ⿻ understanding of physical reality are

at the very core of the glories and tragedies of the twentieth century.
Great powers harnessed the power of the atom to shape world affairs.
120
Carlo Rovelli, “Relational Quantum Mechanics”, International Journal of Theoretical
Physics 35, 1996: 1637-1678.

91
Global corporations powered unprecedented communications and intel-
ligence by harnessing their understanding of quantum physics to pack
ever-tinier electronics into the palms of their customers’ hands. The burn-
ing of wood and coal by millions of families has become the cause of
ecological devastation, political conflict, and world-spanning social move-
ments based on information derived from microscopic sensors scattered
around the world.

Biology
If the defining idea of 19th century macrobiology (concerning advanced
organisms and their interactions) was the “natural selection”, the defin-
ing idea of the 20th century analog was “ecosystems”. Where natural se-
lection emphasized the “Darwinian” competition for survival in the face
of scarce resources, the ecosystem view (closely related to the idea of “ex-
tended evolutionary synthesis”) emphasizes:

• Limits to predictability of models: We have continued to discover

limits in our ability to make effective models of animal behavior
that are based on reductive concepts, such as behaviorism, neuro-
science, and so forth, illustrating computational complexity.
• Similarities between organisms and ecosystems: We have dis-
covered that many diverse organisms (“ecosystems”) can exhibit fea-
tures similar to multicellular life (homeostasis, fragility to destruc-
tion or over propagation of internal components, etc.) illustrating
emergence and multiscale organization. In fact, many higher level
organisms are hard to distinguish from such ecosystems (e.g., multi-
cellular life as cooperation among single-celled organisms or “euso-
cial” organisms like ants from individual insects). A particular prop-
erty of the evolution of these organisms is the potential for mutation
and selection to occur at all these levels, illustrating multi-scale or-
ganization.121
• The diversity of cross-species interactions, including traditional
competition or predator and prey relationships, but also a range
of “mutualism”, where organisms depend on services provided by
121
David Sloan Wilson and Edward O. Wilson, “Rethinking the Theoretical Foundation of
Sociobiology” Quarterly Review of Biology 82, no. 4, 2007: 327-348.

92
 other organisms and help sustain them in turn, exemplifying entan-
glement, and relationality.122
• Epigenetics: We have discovered that genetics codes only a portion
of these behaviors, and “epigenetics” or other environmental fea-
tures play important roles in evolution and adaptation, showing the
multi-level and multidimensional causation inherent even to molec-
ular biology.

This shift was not simply a matter of scientific theory. It led to some of the
most important changes in human behavior and interaction with nature
of the twentieth century. In particular, the environmental movement and
the efforts it created to protect ecosystems, biodiversity, the ozone layer,
and the climate all emerged from and have relied heavily on this science
of “ecology”, to the point where this movement is often given that label.

Neuroscience
Modern neuroscience started in the late 19th century, when Camillo
Golgi, Santiago Ramón y Cajal, and collaborators isolated neurons and
their electrical activations as the fundamental functional unit of the
brain. This analysis was refined into clear physical models by the work
of Alan Hodgkin and Andrew Huxley, who built and tested on animals
their electrical theories of nervous communication. More recently, how-
ever, we have seen a series of discoveries that put chaos and complexity
theory at the core of how the brain functions:

• Distribution of brain functions: mathematical modeling, brain

imaging, and single-neuron activation experiments suggested that
many if not most brain functions are distributed across regions of
the brain, emerging from patterns of interactions rather than pri-
marily physical localization.
• The Hebbian model of connections, where they are strengthened
122
These discoveries have continually and deeply intertwined with ⿻ social thought, from
“mutualism” being used almost interchangeably by early anarchist thinkers like Pierre-
Joseph Proudhon to one of the authors of this book publishing his second paper on biolog-
ical mutualism, then developing these ideas further into the theories we will return to in
our chapter on Social Markets. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, System of Economic Contradictions
(1846). E. Glen Weyl,Megan E. Frederickson, Douglas W. Yu and Naomi E. Pierce, “Economic
Contract Theory Tests Models of Mutualism” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
107, no. 36, 2010: 15712-15716.

93
 by repeated co-firing, is perhaps one of the most elegant illustrations
of the idea of “relationality” in science, closely paralleling the way
we typically imagine human relationships developing
• Study of artificial neural networks: As early as the late 1950s, re-
searchers beginning with Frank Rosenblatt built the first “artificial
neural network” models of the brain. Neural networks have become
the foundation of the recent advances in “artificial intelligence”. Net-
works of trillions of nodes, each operating on fairly simple principles
inspired by neurons of activation triggered by crossing a threshold
determined by a linear combination of inputs, are the backbone of
the “foundation models” such as BERT and the GPT models.

From science to society

⿻ is, scientifically, the application of an analogous perspective to the un-
derstanding of human societies and, technologically, the attempt to build
formal information and governance systems that account for and resem-
ble these structures as physical technologies built on ⿻ science do. Per-
haps the crispest articulation of this vision appears in the work of the
leading figure of network sociology, Mark Granovetter.123 There is no ba-
sic individual atom; personal identity fundamentally arises from social
relationships and connections. Nor is there any fixed collective or even
set of collectives: social groups do and must constantly shift and reconfig-
ure. This bidirectional equilibrium between the diversity of people and
the social groups they create is the essence of ⿻ social science.

Moreover, these social groups exist at a variety of intersecting and non-

hierarchical scales. Families, clubs, towns, provinces, religious groups of
all sizes, businesses at every scale, demographic identities (gender, sex-
ual identity, race, ethnicity, etc.), education and academic training, and
many more co-existing and intersecting. For example, from the perspec-
tive of global Catholicism, the US is an important but “minority” country,
with only about 6% of all Catholics living in the US; but the same could be
said about Catholicism from the perspective of the US, with about 23% of
Americans being Catholic.124
123
Mark Granovetter, “Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embedded-
ness”, American Journal of Sociology 91, no. 3 (1985): 481-510.
124
Pew Research Center, “The Global Catholic Population”, February 13, 2013

94
While we do not have the space to review it in detail, a rich literature
provides quantitative and social scientific evidence for the explanatory
power of the ⿻ perspective 125 . Studies of industrial dynamics, of social
and behavioral psychology, of economic development, of organizational
cohesion, and much else, have shown the central role of social relation-
ships that create and harness diversity126 . Instead, we will pull out just
one example that perhaps will be both the most surprising and most re-
lated to the scientific themes above: the evolution of scientific knowledge
itself.

A growing interdisciplinary academic field of “Metascience” studies the

emergence of scientific knowledge as a complex system from networks
among scientists and ideas.127 It charts the emergence and proliferation
of scientific fields, sources of scientific novelty and progress, the strate-
gies of exploration scientists choose, and the impact of social structure
on intellectual advancement. Among other things, they find that scien-
tific exploration is biased towards topics that have been frequently dis-
cussed within a field and constrained by social and institutional connec-
tions among scientists, which diminishes the efficiency of the scientific
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2013/02/13/the-global-catholic-population/.
125
In assemblage theory, as articulated by Manuel DeLanda, entities are understood as
complex structures formed from the symbiotic relationship between heterogeneous compo-
nents, 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.
126
Scott Page, The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms,
Schools, and Societies, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); César Hidalgo, Why
Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies, (New York: Basic
Books, 2015); Daron Acemoglu, and Joshua Linn, “Market Size in Innovation: Theory and
Evidence from the Pharmaceutical Industry,” Library Union Catalog of Bavaria, (Berlin and
Brandenburg: B3Kat Repository, October 1, 2003), https://doi.org/10.3386/w10038; Mark
Granovetter, “The Strength of Weak Ties,” American Journal of Sociology 78, no. 6 (May
1973): 1360–80; 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; Jonathan Michie, and Ronald S. Burt, “Structural Holes:
The Social Structure of Competition,” The Economic Journal 104, no. 424 (May 1994): 685.
https://doi.org/10.2307/2234645; 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.
127
Santo Fortunato, Carl T. Bergstrom, Katy Borner, James A. Evans, Dirk Helbing, Stasa
Milojevič, Filippo Radicchi, Robeta Sinatra, Brian Uzzi, Alessandro Vespignani, Ludo Walt-
man, Dashun Wang and Alberto-László Barbási, “Science of Science” Nature 359, no. 6379
(2018): eaao0185.

95
knowledge discovery process.128 Furthermore, they discover that a de-
centralized scientific community, made up of mostly independent, non-
overlapping teams that use a variety of methods and draw upon a broad
spectrum of earlier publications, tends to yield more reliable scientific
knowledge. In contrast, centralized communities marked by repeated col-
laborations and restricted to a limited range of approaches from previous
129 130
studies are likely to generate less reliable outcomes It also finds
strong connections between research team size and hierarchy with the
types of findings (risky and revolutionary v. normal science) developed
and documents the increasingly dominant role of teams (as opposed to in-
dividual research) in modern science.131 Although the largest innovations
tend to arise from a strong grounding in existing disciplines deployed in
unusual and surprising combinations 132 133 134 , it illustrates that most in-
centive structures used in science (based e.g. on publication quality and
citation count) create perverse incentives that limit scientific creativity.
These findings have led to the development of new metrics in scientific
communities that can reward innovations and offset these biases, creat-
ing a more ⿻ incentive set.135

Science policy research that directly accounts for and enhances ⿻ in sci-
ence demonstrates advantages for both the rigor of existing knowledge
and the discovery of novel insights. When more distinct communities and
their approaches work to validate existing claims, those independent per-
spectives ensure their findings are more robust to rebuttal and revision.
128
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.
129
Valentin Danchev, Andrey Rzhetsky, and James A Evans, “Centralized Scientific
Communities Are Less Likely to Generate Replicable Results.” ELife 8 (July 2, 2019),
https://doi.org/10.7554/elife.43094.
130
Alexander Belikov, Andrey Rzhetsky, and James Evans, “Prediction of robust scientific
facts from literature,” Nature Machine Intelligence 4.5 (2022): 445-454.
131
Lingfei Wu, Dashun Wang, and James Evans, “Large teams develop and small teams
disrupt science and technology,” Nature 566.7744 (2019): 378-382.
132
Yiling Lin, James Evans, and Lingfei Wu, “New directions in science emerge from dis-
connection and discord,” Journal of Informetrics 16.1 (2022): 101234.
133
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.
134
Jacob Foster, Andrey Rzhetsky, and James A. Evans, “Tradition and Innovation in Scien-
tists’ Research Strategies,” American Sociological Review 80.5 (2015): 875-908.
135
Aaron Clauset, Daniel Larremore, and Roberta Sinatra, “Data-driven predictions in the
science of science,” Science 355.6324 (2017): 477-480.

96
Moreover, when building analytic models based on ⿻ principles by sim-
ulating the diversity we see in the most ⿻ scientific ventures, discoveries
exceed those produced by normal human science.136

Thus, even in understanding the very practice of science, a ⿻ perspec-

tive, grounded in many intersecting levels of social organization, is crit-
ical. Science of science findings regarding the driving forces behind the
emergence of disruptive, innovative knowledge have been replicated in
other communities of creative collaboration, such as patents and software
projects in GitHub, revealing that a ⿻ outlook could transcend the ad-
vance of science and technology of any flavor.

A future ⿻?

Yet the assumptions on which the Technocratic and Libertarian visions of

the future discussed above diverge sharply from such ⿻ foundations.

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.
136
Jamshid Sourati, and James Evans, “Accelerating science with human-aware artificial
intelligence,” Nature Human Behaviour 7.10 (2023): 1682-1696.

97
Luckily, the twentieth century saw the systematic development of such a
vision, from philosophical and social scientific foundations to the begin-
nings of technological expression.

3-2 Connected Society

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, 1927137

The twentieth century saw as fundamental shifts in social as natural sci-

ences. Henry George, author of the best-selling and most influential book
on economics in American and perhaps world history, made his career as
a searing critic of private property. Georg Simmel, one of the founders of
sociology, originated the idea of the “web” as a critique of the individualist
concept of identity. John Dewey, widely considered the greatest philoso-
pher of American democracy, argued that the standard national and state
137
John Dewey, The Public and its Problems (New York: Holt Publishers, 1927): p. 81.

98
institutions that instantiated the idea hardly scratched the surface of what
democracy required. Norbert Wiener coined the term “cybernetics” for
a field studying such rich interactive systems. By perceiving the limits of
the box of modernity they highlighted even as they helped construct it,
these pioneers helped us imagine a social world outside it, pointing the
way towards a vision of a Connected Society that harnesses the potential
of collaboration across diversity.

Limits of Modernity
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) institu-
tions intercede.

Three foundational institutions of modern social organization represent

this structure most sharply: property, identity and voting. We will illus-
trate how this works in each context and then turn to the ways that ⿻
social science has challenged and offers ways past the limits of atomist
monism.

Property

Simple and familiar forms of private property, with most restrictions and
impositions on that right being imposed by governments, are the most
common form of ownership in liberal democracies around the world.
Most homes are owned by a single individual or family or by a single land-
lord who rents to another individual or family. Most non-governmental
collective ownership takes the form of a standard joint stock company
governed by the principle of one-share-one-vote and the maximization of
shareholder value. While there are significant restrictions on the rights
of private property owners based on community interests, these over-

99
whelmingly take the form of regulations by a small number of govern-
mental levels, such as national, provincial/state and local/city. These prac-
tices 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 “tra-
ditional” 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 pur-
poses than was possible within full social context.138

Identity

Prior to modernity, individuals were born into families rooted within

kin-based institutions that provided everything, livelihood, sustenance,
meaning, and that were for the most part inescapable. No “official docu-
ments” were needed or useful as people rarely traveled beyond the bound-
aries of those they knew well. Such institutions were eroded by the Ro-
man Empire and the spread of Christianity in its wake.139 As European
cities grew in the first centuries of the second millennium of the common
era, impersonal pro-sociality of citi-zens began to take shape through the
emergence of a diversity of extra-kin social institutions such as monas-
taries, universities and guilds. Paper-based markers of affiliations with
such institutions began to supplant informal kin knowledge. In particu-
lar, Church records of baptisms helped lay the foundation for what be-
came the widespread practice of issuing birth certificates. This, in turn,
became the foundational document on which essentially all other identi-
fication practices are grounded in modern states.140

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 chil-
138
Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1944).
139
Joseph Henrich, The WEIRDest People in the World How the West Became Psychologically
Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous, (New York Macmillan, 2010).
140
It is worth noting, however, that universal birth registration is a very recent phe-
nomenon and only was achieved in the US in 1940. Universal registration for Social Security
Numbers did not even begin until 1987 when Enumeration at Birth was instituted at the fed-
eral level in collaboration with county level governments where births are registered.

100
dren’s sports teams to medical care providers. These abstract representa-
tions 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 ab-
stracted universal sense relative to the state. This “WEIRD” (Western Ed-
ucated 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 con-
trast 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 anchor-
ing that limited travel and the formation of new relationships.

**

Figure 3-2-A. Flexible taxonomies across a broad spectrum of recognition.

Source: Learning Agents Inc. (https://www.learningagents.ca)

**

Voting

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

101
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 imagi-
nation and in formal rules, the idea that numerical majorities (or in some
cases supermajorities) should prevail regardless of the social composi-
tion of groups is at the core of how democracy is typically understood.141
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.142 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.

This regime began to develop during the Renaissance and Enlightenment,

when traditional, commons-based property systems, community-based
identity and multi-sectoral representation were swept away for the “ra-
tionality” and “modernity” of what became the modern state.143 This sys-
tem solidified and literally conquered the world during the industrial and
colonial nineteenth century and was canonized in the work of Max We-
ber, reaching its ultimate expression in the “high modernism” of the mid-
twentieth century, when properties were further rationalized into regu-
lar shapes and sizes, identity documents reinforced with biometrics and
one-person-one-vote systems spread to a broad range of organizations.

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 sys-
141
There are, of course, limited exceptions that in many ways prove the rule. The two
most notable examples are “degressive proportionality” and “consociationalism”. Many
federal systems (e.g. the US) apply the principle of degressive proportionality to which we
will return later: namely, that smaller sub-units (e.g. provinces in national voting) are over-
represented relative to their population. Some countries also have consociational structures
in which designated social groups (e.g. religions or political parties) agree to share power
in some specified fashion, ensuring that even if one group’s vote share declines they re-
tain something of their historical power. Yet these counterexamples are few, far between
and usually subjects of on-going controversy, with significant political pressure to “reform”
them in the direction of a standard one-person-one-vote direction.
142
David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything (London: Allen Lane, 2021).
143
Andreas Anter, Max Weber’s Theory of the Modern State, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

102
tems inhibited innovation when outsiders and industrialists found it im-
possible 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, lib-
eral democracies to rise, flourish and rule, making what Joseph Heinrich
calls the “WEIRDest people in the world”. Just as the insights of Newto-
nian mechanics and Euclidean geometry gave those civilizations the phys-
ical power to sweep the earth, liberal social institutions gave them the so-
cial 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.

Henry George and the networked value

We remember Karl Marx and Adam Smith more sharply, but the social
thinker that may have had the greatest influence during and immediately
following his lifetime was Henry George.144 Author of the for-years best-
selling book in English other than the Bible, Progress and Poverty, George
inspired or arguably founded many of the most successful political move-
ments and even cultural artifacts of the early twentieth century includ-
ing:145

• the American center-left, as a nearly-successful United Labor candi-

date for Mayor of New York City;
• the Progressive and social gospel movements, which both traced
their names to his work;
144
Christopher William England, Land and Liberty: Henry George and the Crafting of Mod-
ern Liberalism (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023).
145
Henry George, Progress and Poverty: An Inquiry into the Cause of Industrial Depressions
and of Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth: The Remedy (New York: D. Appleton and
Company, 1879)

103
 • Tridemism, which, as we saw above in our chapter A View from
Yushan, had its economic leg firmly founded in Georgism;
• and the game Monopoly, which originated as an educational device
“The Landlord’s Game”, to illustrate how an alternate set of rules
could avoid monopoly and enable common prosperity.146

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 indi-
vidual 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 Tai-
wan, 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”. We return to all these points in our chapter
on Social Markets.

Yet, as attractive as this argument has proven to politicians and intellec-

tuals from Leo Tolstoy to Albert Einstein, in practice it has raised many
more questions than it has answered. Simply saying that land does not
belong to an individual owner says nothing about who or what it does
belong to. The city? The nation state? The world?
146
Mary Pilon, The Monopolists: Obsession, Fury and the Scandal Behind the World’s Fa-
vorite Board Game (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015).

104
Given this is a book about technology, an elegant illustration is the San
Francisco Bay Area, where both authors and George himself lived parts
of their lives and which has some of the most expensive land in the world.
To whom does the enormous value of this land belong?

• Certainly not to the homeowners who simply had the good fortune
of seeing the computer industry grow up around them. Then
perhaps to the cities in the region? Many reformers have argued
these cities, which are in any case fragmented and tend to block
development, can hardly take credit for the miraculous increase in
land values.

• Perhaps Stanford University and the University of California at

Berkeley, to which various scholars have attributed much of the
dynamism of Silicon Valley?147 Certainly these played some role,
but it would be strange to attribute the full value of Bay Area land to
two universities, especially when these universities succeeded with
the financial support of the US government and the collaboration
of other universities across the country.
• Perhaps the State of California? Arguably the national defense
industry, research complex that created the internet (as we discuss
below) and political institutions played a far greater role than
anything at the state level.

• Then to the US? But of course the software industry and internet are
global phenomena.
• Then to the world in general? Beyond the essential non-existence of
a world government that could meaningfully receive and distribute
the value of such land, abstracting all land value to such heights is
a bit of an abdication: clearly many of the entities above are more
relevant than simply “the entire world” to the value of the software
industry; if we followed that path, global government would end up
managing everything simply by default.

To make matters yet more complex, the revenue earned on the property
is but one piece of what it means to own. Legal scholars typically describe
147
AnnaLee Saxenian, The New Argonauts: Regional Advantage in a Global Economy (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).

105
property as a bundle of rights: of “usus” (to access the land), “abusus” (to
build on or dispose of it) and “fructus” (to profit from it). 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 differ-
ent scales (universities, municipalities, nation states, etc.) all contribute
to differing degrees to create value, just as networks of waves and neu-
rons 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.

106
Georg Simmel and the intersectional (in)dividual

**

107
Figure 3-2-B. Georg Simmel. Source: Wikipedia, public domain.

**

But if network thinking was implicit in George’s work, it took another

thinker, across the Atlantic, to make it explicit and, accidentally, give it
a name. Georg Simmel, pictured in Figure B, was a German philosopher
and sociologist of the turn of the twentieth century who pioneered the
idea of social networks. The mistranslation of his work as focused on a
“web” eventually went “worldwide”. In his 1955 translation of Simmel’s
classic 1908 Soziologie, Reinhard Bendix chose to describe Simmel’s idea
as describing a “web of group-affiliations” over what he described as the
“almost meaningless” direct translation “intersection of social circles”.148
While the precise lines of influence are hard to trace, it is possible that,
had Bendix made an opposite choice, we might talk of the internet in
terms of “intersecting global circles” rather than the “world wide web”.149

Simmel’s “intersectional” theory of identity offered an alternative to

both the traditional individualist/atomist (characteristic at the time
in sociology with the work of Max Weber and deeply influential on
Libertarianism) and collectivist/structuralist (characteristic at the time of
the sociology of Émile Durkheim and deeply influential on Technocracy)
accounts. From a Simmelian point of view, both appear as extreme
reductions/projections of a richer underlying theory.

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 par-
ticipation in social, linguistic, and solidaristic groups. In simple societies
(e.g., isolated, rural, or tribal), people spend most of their life interact-
ing with the kin groups we described above. This circle comes to (pri-
marily) define their identity collectively, which is why most scholars of
simple societies (for example, anthropologist Marshall Sahlins) tend to
favor methodological collectivism.150 However, as we noted above, as so-
148
Georg Simmel, Soziologie: Untersuchungen Über Die Formen Der Vergesellschaftung,
Prague: e-artnow, 2017.
149
Miloš Broćić, and Daniel Silver, “The Influence of Simmel on American Sociol-
ogy since 1975,” Annual Review of Sociology 47, no. 1 (July 31, 2021): 87–108,
https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-soc-090320-033647.
150
Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics (Chicago: Aldine-Atherton, 1972).

108
cieties urbanize social relationships diversify. People work with one cir-
cle, worship with another, support political causes with a third, recreate
with a fourth, cheer for a sports team with a fifth, identify as discrim-
inated 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 individ-
ualism. 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 methodolog-
ical 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 interdepen-
dence, identity systems that truly empower and support modern life
would need to mirror its ⿻ structure.

John Dewey’s emergent publics

If (in)dividual identity is so fluid and dynamic, surely so too must be the so-
cial circles that intersect to constitute it. As Simmel highlights, new social
groups are constantly forming, while older ones decline. Three examples
he highlights are for his time, the still-recent formations of cross-sectoral
‘working men’s associations’ representing the general interest of labor,
the emerging feminist associations, and the cross-sectoral employers’ in-

109
terest groups. The critical pathway to creating such new circles was the
establishment of places (e.g. workman’s halls) or publications (e.g. work-
ing 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.151 Developing these shared, but hidden, knowledge allows
the emerging social circle to act as a collective agent.

In his 1927 work that defined his political philosophy, The Public and its
Problems, John Dewey (who we meet in A View from Yushan) considered
the political implications and dynamics of these “emergent publics” as he
called them.152 Dewey’s views emerged from a series of debates he held, as
leader of the “democratic” wing of the progressive movement after his re-
turn from China with left-wing technocrat Walter Lippmann, whose 1922
book Public Opinion Dewey considered “the most effective indictment of
democracy as currently conceived”.153 In the debate, Dewey sought to re-
deem democracy while embracing fully Lippmann’s critique of existing
institutions as ill-suited to an increasingly complex and dynamic wold.

While he acknowledged a range of forces for social dynamism, Dewey

focused specifically on the role of technology in creating new forms of in-
terdependence that created the necessity for new publics. Railroads con-
nected people commercially and socially who would never have met. Ra-
dio created shared political understanding and action across thousands
of miles. Pollution from industry was affecting rivers and urban air. All
these technologies resulted from research, the benefits of which spread
with little regards for local and national boundaries. The social challenges
(e.g. governance railway tariffs, safety standards, and disease propaga-
tion; fairness in access to scarce radio) arising from these forms of interde-
pendence are poorly managed by both capitalist markets and preexisting
“democratic” governance structures.
151
Georg Simmel, “The Sociology of Secrecy and of Secret Societies,” American Journal of
Sociology 11, no. 4 (January 1906): 441–98, https://doi.org/10.1086/211418.
152
John Dewey, op. cit.
153
Robert Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press).

110
Markets fail because these technologies create market power, pervasive
externalities (such as “network externalities”), and more generally ex-
hibit “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 accumu-
late market power, raise prices and exclude participants, undermining
the value created by increasing returns. Leaving these interdependen-
cies “to the market” thus exacerbates their risks and harms while failing
to leverage their potential.

Dewey revered democracy as the most fundamental principle of his ca-

reer; barely a paragraph can pass without him harkening back to it. He
firmly believed that democratic action could address the failings of mar-
kets. Yet he saw the limits of existing “democratic” institutions just as
severely as those of capitalism. The problem is that existing democratic
institutions are not, in Dewey’s view, truly democratic with regards to the
emergent challenges created by technology.

In particular, 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 ac-
tually shaped by the phenomenon in question, manage that challenge.
Because technology is constantly throwing up new forms of interdepen-
dence, which will almost never correspond precisely to existing political
boundaries, true democracy requires new publics to constantly emerge
and reshape existing jurisdictions.

Furthermore, because new forms of interdependence are not easily per-

ceived by most individuals in their everyday lives, Dewey saw a critical
role for what he termed “social science experts” but we might with no
more abuse of terminology call “entrepreneurs”, “leaders”, “founders”,
“pioneer” or, as we prefer, “mirror”. Just as George Washington’s lead-
ership helped the US both perceive itself as a nation and a nation that
had to democratically choose its fate after his term in office, the role of

111
such mirrors is to perceive a new form of interdependence (e.g. solidarity
among workers, the carbon-to-global-warming chain), explain it to those
involved by both word and deed, and thereby empower a new public to
come into existence. Historical examples are union leaders, founders of
rural electricity cooperatives, and the leaders who founded the United
Nations. Once this emergent public is understood, recognized, and em-
powered to govern the new interdependence, the role of the mirror fades
away, just as Washington returned to Mount Vernon.

Thus, as the mirror image of Simmel’s philosophy of (in)dividual iden-

tity, 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 pro-
cess even more dynamic than a market, led by a diverse range of en-
trepreneurial mirrors, who draw upon the ways they are themselves in-
tersections 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 con-
stantly evolving.

Norbert Wiener’s cybernetic society

All of these critiques and directions of thought are suggestive, but none
seems to offer clear paths to action and further scientific development.
Could the understanding of the ⿻ nature of social organization be turned
into a scientific engine of new forms of social organization? This hypoth-
esis was the seed from which Norbert Wiener sprouted the modern field
of “cybernetics”, from which comes all the uses of “cyber” to describe dig-
ital technology and, many would argue, the later name of “computer sci-
ence” given to similar work. 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

112
networks”.154 The word was drawn from a Greek analogy of a ship di-
rected by the inputs of its many oarsmen.

Wiener’s scientific work focused almost exclusively on physical, biolog-

ical and information systems, investigating the ways that organs and
machines can obtain and preserve homeostasis, quantifying information
transmission channels and the role they play in achieving such equilib-
rium and so on. Personally and politically, he was a pacifist, severe critic
of capitalism as failing basic principles of cybernetic stabilization and
creation of homeostasis and advocate of radically more responsible use
and deployment of technology.155 He despaired that without profound
social reform his scientific work would come to worse than nothing,
writing in the introduction to Cybernetics, “there are those who hope that
the good of a better understanding of man and society which is offered
by this new field of work may anticipate and outweigh the incidental con-
tribution we are making to the concentration of power (which is always
concentrated, by its very conditions of existence, in the hand of the most
unscrupulous. I write in 1947, and I am compelled to say that it is a very
slight hope.” It is thus unsurprising that Wiener befriended many social
scientists and reformers who vested “considerable…hopes…for the social
efficacy of whatever new ways of thinking this book may contain.”

Yet while he shared the convictions, he believed these hopes to be mostly

“false”. While he judged such a program as “necessary”, he was unable
to “believe it possible”. He argued that quantum physics had shown the
impossibility of precision at the level of particles and therefore that the
success of science arose from the fact that we live far above the level of
particles, but that our very existence within societies meant that the same
principles made social science essentially inherently infeasible. Thus as
much as he hoped to offer scientific foundations on which the work of
George, Simmel and Dewey could rest, he was skeptical of “exaggerated
expectations of their possibilities.”

Across all of these authors, we see many common threads. We see appre-
ciation of the ⿻ and layered nature of society, which often shows even
greater complexity than other phenomena in the natural sciences: while
154
Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics, Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Ma-
chine (Paris: Hermann & Cie, 1948).
155
Norbert Wiener, Human Use of Human Beings (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1950).

113
an electron typically orbits a single atom or molecule, a cell is part of one
organism, and a planet orbits one star, in human society each person, and
even each organization, is part of multiple intersecting larger entities, of-
ten with no single of them being fully inside any other. But how might
these advancements in the social sciences translate into similarly more
advanced social technologies? This is what we will explore in the next
chapter.

3-3 The Lost Dao

(D)ecisions about the development and exploitation of com-
puter 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”, 1980156

Can a ⿻ understanding of society lay the foundation for social transforma-

tions as dramatic as those that fields like quantum mechanics and ecology
have brought to natural sciences, physical technology and our relation-
ship to nature? Liberal democracies often celebrate themselves as plural-
istic societies, which would seem to indicate they have already drawn the
available lessons from ⿻ social science. Yet despite this formal commit-
ment 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.

⿻ launches
This was the mission pursued by the younger generation that followed in
Wiener’s lead but had a more human/social scientific background. This
156
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)

114
generation included a range of pioneers of applied cybernetics such as
the anthropologist Margaret Mead157 (who heavily influenced the aesthet-
ics of the internet), W. Edwards Deming158 (whose influence on Japanese
and to a lesser extent Taiwanese inclusive industrial quality practices we
saw above) and Stafford Beer159 (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. Yet the most ambitious and systemic
impact of this work was heralded by a blip moving across the sky in Octo-
ber 1957, a story masterfully narrated by M. Mitchell Waldrop in his The
Dream Machine, from which much of what follows derives.160

Sputnik and the Advanced Research Projects Agency

The launch by the Soviet Union of the first orbital satellite was followed
a month later by the Gaither Committee report, claiming that the US had
fallen behind the Soviets in missile production. The ensuing moral panic
forced the Eisenhower administration into emergency action to reassure
the public of American strategic superiority. Yet despite, or perhaps be-
cause of, his own martial background, Eisenhower deeply distrusted what
he labeled America’s “military industrial complex”, while having bound-
less admiration for scientists.161 He thus aimed to channel the passions of
the Cold War into a national strategy to improve scientific research and
education.162

While that strategy had many prongs, a central one was the estab-
157
Fred Turner, The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World
War II to the Psychedelic Sixties (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).
158
While we do not have space to pursue Deming’s or Mead’s stories in anything like the
depth we do the development of the internet, in many ways the work of these two pioneers
parallels many of the themes we develop and in the industiral and cultural spheres laid the
groundwork for ⿻ just as Licklider and his disciples did in computation. UTHSC. “Deming’s
14 Points,” May 26, 2022. https://www.uthsc.edu/its/business-productivity-solutions/lean-
uthsc/deming.php.
159
Dan Davies, The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions -
and How The World Lost its Mind (London: Profile Books, 2024).
160
M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine (New York: Penguin, 2002).
161
Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon, Where the Wizards Stay up Late: The Origins of the
Internet (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998).
162
Dickson, Paul. “Sputnik’s Impact on America.” NOVA | PBS, November 6, 2007.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/sputnik-impact-on-america/.

115
lishment, within the Department of Defense, of a quasi-independent,
scientifically administered Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA)
that would harness expertise from universities to accelerate ambitious
and potentially transformative scientific projects with potential defense
applications.

While ARPA began with many aims, some of which were soon assigned to
other newly formed agencies, such as the National Aeronautics and Space
Administration (NASA), it quickly found a niche as the most ambitious gov-
ernment supporter of ambitious and “far out” projects under its second
director, Jack Ruina. One area was to prove particularly representative
of this risk-taking style: the Information Processing Techniques Office led
by Joseph Carl Robnett (JCR) Licklider.

Licklider hailed from a different field still from the political economy of
George, sociology of Simmel, political philosophy of Dewey and mathe-
matics of Wiener: “Lick”, as he was commonly known, received his PhD
in 1942 in the field of psychoacoustics. After spending his early career de-
veloping applications to human performance in high-stakes interactions
with technology (especially aviation), his attention increasingly turned to
the possibility of human interaction with the fastest growing form of ma-
chinery: the “computing machine”. He joined the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology (MIT) to help found Lincoln Laboratory and the psychol-
ogy program. He moved to the private sector as Vice President of Bolt,
Beranek and Newman (BBN), one of the first MIT-spin off research start-
ups.

Having persuaded BBN’s leadership to shift their attention towards

computing devices, Lick began to develop an alternative technological
vision to the then-emerging field of Artificial Intelligence that drew on
his psychological background to propose “Man-Computer Symbiosis”, as
his path-breaking 1960 paper was titled. Lick hypothesized that while “in
due course…‘machines’ will outdo the human brain in most of the func-
tions we now consider exclusively within its province…(t)here will…be a
fairly long interim during which the main advances will be made by men
and computers working together…those years should be intellectually
the most creative and exciting in the history of mankind.”163
163
J. C. R. Licklider. “Man-Computer Symbiosis,” March 1960.

116
These visions turned out to arrive at precisely the right moment for ARPA,
as it was in search of bold missions with which it could secure its place
in the rapidly coalescing national science administration landscape. Ru-
ina appointed Lick to lead the newly-formed Information Processing Tech-
niques Office (IPTO). Lick harnessed the opportunity to build and shape
much of the structure of what became the field of Computer Science.

The Intergalactic Computer Network

While Lick spent only two years at ARPA, they laid the groundwork for
much of what followed in the next forty years of the field. He seeded
a network of “time sharing” projects around the US that would enable
several individual users to directly interact with previously monolithic
large-scale computing machines, taking a first step towards the age of per-
sonal computing. The five universities thus supported (Stanford, MIT, UC
Berkeley, UCLA and Carnegie Mellon) went on to become the core of the
academic emerging field of computer science.

Beyond establishing the computational and scientific backbone of mod-

ern computing, Lick was particularly focused on the “human factors” in
which he specialized. He aimed to make the network represent these am-
bitions in two ways that paralleled the social and personal aspects of hu-
manity. On the one hand, he gave particular attention and support to
projects he believed could bring computing closer to the lives of more
people, integrating with the functioning of human minds. The leading ex-
ample of this was the Augmentation Research Center established by Dou-
glas Engelbart at Stanford.164 On the other hand, he dubbed the network
of collaboration between these hubs, with his usual tongue-in-cheek, the
“Intergalactic Computer Network”, and hoped it would provide a model
of computer-mediated collaboration and co-governance.165

This project bore fruit in a variety of ways, both immediately and longer-
term. Engelbart quickly invented many foundational elements of per-
https://groups.csail.mit.edu/medg/people/psz/Licklider.html.
164
“Douglas Engelbart Issues ‘Augmenting Human Intellect: A
Conceptual Framework’ : History of Information,” October 1962.
https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=801.
165
J.C.R. Licklider, “Memorandum For: Members and Affiliates of the Intergalac-
tic Computer Network”, 1963 available at https://worrydream.com/refs/Licklider_1963_-
_Members_and_Affiliates_of_the_Intergalactic_Computer_Network.pdf.

117
sonal computing, including the mouse, a bitmapped screen that was a
core precursor to the graphical user interface and hypertext; his demon-
stration of this work, six short years after Lick’s initial funding, as the
“oNLine system” (NLS) is remembered as “the mother of all demos” and
a defining moment in the development of personal computers.166 This
in turn helped persuade Xerox Corporation to establish their Palo Alto
Research Center (PARC), which went on to pioneer much of personal com-
puting. US News and World Report lists four of the five departments Lick
funded as the top four computer science departments in the country.167
Most importantly, after Lick’s departure to the private sector, the Inter-
galactic Computer Network developed into something less fanciful and
more profound under the leadership of his collaborator, Robert W. Tay-
lor.

A network of networks

Taylor and Lick were naturally colleagues. While Taylor never completed
his PhD, his research field was also psychoacoustics and he served as
Lick’s counterpart at NASA, which had just split from ARPA, during Lick’s
leadership at IPTO. Shortly following Lick’s departure (in 1965), Taylor
moved to IPTO to help develop Lick’s networking vision under the lead-
ership of Ivan Sutherland, who then returned to academia, leaving Tay-
lor in charge of IPTO and the network that he more modestly labeled the
ARPANET. He used his authority to commission Lick’s former home of
BBN to build the first working prototype of the ARPANET backbone. With
momentum growing through Engelbart’s demonstration of personal com-
puting and ARPANET’s first successful trials, Lick and Taylor articulated
their vision for the future possibilities of personal and social computing in
their 1968 article “The Computer as a Communication Device”, describing
much of what would become the culture of personal computing, internet
and even smartphones several decades later.168

By 1969, Taylor felt the mission of the ARPANET was on track to success
and moved on to Xerox PARC, where he led the Computer Science Labora-
166
Engelbart, Christina. “Firsts: The Demo - Doug Engelbart Institute.” Doug Engelbart
Institute, n.d. https://dougengelbart.org/content/view/209/.
167
https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/rankings/computer-science-overall
168
J.C.R. Licklider and Robert Taylor, “The Computer as a Communication Device” Science
and Technology 76, no. 2 (1967): 1-3.

118
tory in developing much of this vision into working prototypes. These
in turn became the core of the modern personal computer that Steve
Jobs famously “stole” from Xerox to build the Macintosh, while ARPANET
evolved into the modern internet.169 In short, the technological revolu-
tions of the 1980s and 1990s trace clearly back to this quite small group
of innovators in the 1960s. While we will turn to these more broadly-
known later developments shortly, it is worth lingering on the core of the
research program that made them possible.

At the core of the development of what became the internet was replac-
ing 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

All three ideas had their seeds at the edges of the early community Lick
formed and grew into core features of the ARPANET community.

While the concept of networks, redundancy and sharing permeate Lick’s

original vision, it was Paul Baran’s 1964 report “On Distributed Communi-
cations” that clearly articulated how and why communications networks
should strive for a ⿻ rather than centralized structure.170

Baran argued that while centralized switchboards achieved high reliabil-

ity at low cost under normal conditions, they were fragile to disruptions.
Conversely, networks with many centers could be built with cheap and
unreliable components and still withstand even quite devastating attacks
by “routing around damage”, taking a dynamic path through the network
based on availability rather than prespecified planning. While Baran re-
ceived support and encouragement from scientists at Bell Labs, his ideas
were roundly dismissed by AT&T, the national telephone monopoly in
whose culture high-quality centralized dedicated machinery was deeply
169
Michael A. Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age
(New York: Harper Business, 2000).
170
Paul Baran, “On Distributed Communications Networks,” IEEE Transactions on Commu-
nications Systems 12, no. 1 (1964): 1-9.

119
entrenched.

Despite the apparent threat it posed to that private interest, packet switch-
ing caught the positive attention of another organization that owed its
genesis to the threat of devastating attacks: ARPA. At a 1967 conference,
ARPANET’s first program manager, Lawrence Roberts, learned of packet
switching through a presentation by Donald Davies, who concurrently
and independently developed the same idea as Baran, and drew on
Baran’s arguments that he soon learned of to sell the concept to the team.
Figure A shows the decentralized logical structure of early ARPANET that
resulted

**

Figure 3-3-A. Early logical structure of ARPANET. Source: Wikipedia, pub-

lic domain.

**

If one path to networked thinking was thus motivated by technical

resilience, another was motivated by creative expression. Ted Nelson
trained as a sociologist, was inspired in his work by a visit to campus
he hosted in 1959 by cybernetic pioneer Margaret Mead’s vision of

120
democratic and pluralistic media and developed into. an artist. Follow-
ing these early experiences, he devoted his life beginning in his early
20s to the development of “Project Xanadu”, which aimed to create a
revolutionary human-centered interface for computer networks. While
Xanadu had so many components that Nelson considered indispensable
that it was not released fully until the 2010s, its core idea, co-developed
with Engelbart, was “hypertext” as Nelson labeled it.

Nelson imagined hypertext as a way to liberate communication from the

tyranny of a linear interpretation imposed by an original author, empow-
ering a “pluralism” (as he labeled it) of paths through material through
a network of (bidirectional) links connecting material in a variety of se-
quences.171 This “choose your own adventure”172 quality is most familiar
today to internet users in their browsing experiences but showed up ear-
lier in commercial products in the 1980s (such as computer games based
on hypercard). Nelson imagined that such ease of navigation and recom-
bination would enable the formation of new cultures and narratives at
unprecedented speed and scope. The power of this approach became ap-
parent 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.

While Engelbart and Nelson were lifelong friends and shared many simi-
lar visions, they took very different paths to realizing them, each of which
(as we will see) held an important seed of truth. Engelbart, while also
a visionary, was a consummate pragmatist and a smooth political oper-
ator, and went on to be recognized as the pioneer of personal comput-
ing. Nelson was an artistic purist whose relentless pursuit over decades
of Xanadu embodying all of his seventeen enumerated principles buried
his career.

As an active participant in Lick’s network, Engelbart conversely tempered

his ambition with the need to persuade other network nodes to support,
adopt or at least inter-operate with his approach. As different user inter-
171
Theodor Holm Nelson, Literary Machines (Self-published, 1981), available at
https://cs.brown.edu/people/nmeyrowi/LiteraryMachinesChapter2.pdf
172
“Choose Your Own Adventure,” interactive gamebooks based on Edward Packard’s con-
cept 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.

121
faces and networking protocols proliferated, retreated from the pursuit
of perfection. Engelbart, and even more his colleagues across the project,
instead began to develop a culture of collegiality, facilitated by the com-
munication network the were building, across the often competing uni-
versities they worked at. The physical separation made tight coordina-
tion of networks impossible, but work to ensure minimal inter-operation
and spreading of clear best practices became a core characteristic of the
ARPANET community.

This culture manifested in the development of the “Request for Com-

ments” (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 com-
mon 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.173 Together these three dimensions
of networking (of technical communication protocols, communicative
content and governance of standards) converged to create the internet
we know today.

Triumph and tragedy

Much of what resulted from this project is so broadly known it hardly
bears repeating here. During the 1970’s, Taylor’s Xerox PARC produced a
series of expensive, and thus commercially unsuccessful, but revolution-
ary “personal workstations” that incorporated much of what became the
personal computer of the 1990s. At the same time, as computer compo-
173
Mailland and Driscoll, op. cit.

122
nents were made available to broader populations, businesses like Apple
and Microsoft began to make cheaper and less user-friendly machines
available broadly. Struggling to commercialize its inventions, Xerox al-
lowed Apple Co-Founder Steve Jobs access to its technology in exchange
for a stake, resulting in the Macintosh’s ushering in of modern personal
computing and Microsoft’s subsequent mass scaling through their Win-
dows operating system. By 2000, a majority of Americans had a personal
computer in their homes. Internet use has steadily spread, as pictured in
Figure B.

**

Figure 3-3-B. Population share with internet access over time in the world
and various regions. Source: Our World in Data.174

**
174
World Bank, “World Development Indicators” December 20, 2023 at
https://datacatalog.worldbank.org/search/dataset/0037712/World-Development-Indicators.

123
The internet and its discontents

And much as it had developed in parallel from the start, the internet grew
to connect those personal computers. During the late 1960s and early
1970s, a variety of networks grew up in parallel to the largest ARPANET,
including at universities, governments outside the United States, interna-
tional standards bodies and inside corporations like BBN and Xerox. Un-
der the leadership of Kahn and Cerf and with support from ARPA (now
renamed DARPA to emphasize its “defense” focus), these networks began
to harness the TCP/IP protocol to inter-operate. As this network scaled,
DARPA looked for another agency to maintain it, given the limits of its
advanced technology mission. While many US government agencies took
their hand, the National Science Foundation had the widest group of sci-
entific participants and their NSFNET quickly grew to be the largest net-
work, leading ARPANET to be decommissioned in 1990. At the same time,
NSFNET began to interconnect with networks in other wealthy countries.

One of those was the United Kingdom, where researcher Tim Berners-Lee
in 1989 proposed a “web browser”, “web server” and a Hypertext Mark-
Up Language (HTML) that fully connected hypertext to packet-switching
and made internet content far more available to a broad set of end users.
From the launch of Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web (WWW) in 1991, inter-
net usage grew from roughly 4 million people (mostly in North America)
to over 400 million (mostly around the world) by the end of the millen-
nium. With internet start-ups booming in Silicon Valley and life for many
beginning its migration online though the computers many now had in
their home, the era of networked personal computing (of “The Computer
as a Communication Device”) had arrived.175

In the boom and bust euphoria of the turn of the millennium, few people
in the tech world paid attention to the specter haunting the industry, the
long-forgotten Ted Nelson. Stuck on his decades-long quest for the ideal
networking and communication system, Nelson ceaselessly warned of the
insecurity, exploitative structure and inhumane features of the emerging
WWW design. Without secure identity systems (Xanadu Principles 1 and
3), a mixture of anarchy and land-grabs by nation states and corporate
actors would be inevitable. Without embedded protocols for commerce
175
Licklider and Taylor, op. cit.

124
(Xanadu Principles 9 and 15), online work would become devalued or
the financial system controlled by monopolies. Without better structures
for secure information sharing and control (Xanadu Principles 8 and 16),
both surveillance and information siloing would be pervasive. Whatever
its apparent success, the WWW-Internet was doomed to end badly.

While Nelson was something of an oddball, his concerns were surpris-

ingly broadly shared among even the mainstream internet pioneers who
would seem to have every reason to celebrate their success. As early as
1980, while TCP/IP was coalescing, Lick foresaw in his classic essay “Com-
puters 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 mobiliza-
tion that made computing serve and support democracy.176 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 flour-
ishing. 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 net-
working.
7. Government data and statistics becoming increasingly inaccurate
and irrelevant.
8. Control by private entities of the fundamental platforms for speech
and public discourse.

The wider internet adoption spread, the the less relevant such complaints
appeared. Government did not end up playing as central of a role as
he imagined, but by 2000 most of the few commentators who were even
aware of his warnings assumed we were surely on the path of Lick’s sce-
nario 2. Yet in a few places, concern was growing by late in the first decade
of the new millennium. Virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier sounded the
176
Licklider, “Comptuers and Government”, op. cit.

125
alarm in two books You are Not a Gadget and Who Owns The Future?, high-
lighting Nelson’s and his own version of Lick’s concerns about the future
of the internet.177 While these initially appeared simply an amplification
of Nelson’s fringe ideas, a series of world events that we discuss in the In-
formation Technology and Democracy: a Widening Gulf above eventually
brought much of the world around to seeing the limitations of the inter-
net economy and society that had developed, helping ignite the Techlash.
These patterns bore a striking resemblance to Lick and Nelson’s warnings.
The victory of the internet may have been far more Pyrrhic than it at first
seemed.

Losing our dao

How did we fall into a trap clearly described by the founders of hyper-
text and the internet? After having led the development of the internet,
why did government and the universities not rise to the challenge of the
information age following the 1970s?

It was the warning signs that motivated Lick to put pen to paper in 1980 as
the focus of ARPA (now DARPA) shifted away from support for network-
ing protocols towards more directly weapons-oriented research. Lick saw
this resulting from two forces on opposite ends of the political spectrum.
On the one hand, with the rise of “small government conservatism” that
would later be labeled “neoliberalism”, government was retreating from
proactively funding and shaping industry and technology. On the other
hand, the Vietnam War turned much of the left against the role of the de-
fense establishment in shaping research, leading to the Mansfield Amend-
ments of 1970, 1971 and 1973 that prohibited ARPA from funding any re-
search not directly related to the “defense function”.178 Together these
were redirecting DARPA’s focus to technologies like cryptography and ar-
tificial intelligence that were seen as directly supporting military objec-
tives.

Yet even if the attention of the US government had not shifted, the internet
177
Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto (New York: Vintage, 2011) and Who
Owns the Future? (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014).
178
Phil Williams, “Whatever Happened to the Mansfield Amendment?” Survival: Global
Politics and Strategy 18, no. 4 (1976): 146-153 and “The Mansfield Amendment of 1971” in
The Senate and US Troops in Europe (London, Palgrave Macmillan: 1985): pp. 169-204.

126
was quickly growing out of its purview and control. As it became an in-
creasingly global network, there was (as Dewey predicted) no clear public
authority to make the investments needed to deal with the socio-technical
challenges needed to make a network society a broader success. To quote
Lick

From the point of view of computer technology itself, ex-

port…fosters computer research and development [but that]
(f)rom the point of view of mankind…the important thing
would…be a wise rather than a rapid…development…Such
crucial issues as security, privacy, preparedness, participa-
tion, and brittleness must be properly resolved before one can
conclude that computerization and programmation are good
for the individual and society…Although I do not have total
confidence in the ability of the United States to resolve those
issues wisely, I think it is more likely than any other country
to do so. That makes me doubt whether export of computer
technology will do as much for mankind as a vigorous effort
by the United States to figure out what kind of future it really
wants and then to develop the technology needed to realize it.

The declining role of public and social sector investment left core
functions/layers that leaders like Lick and Nelson saw for the internet
(e.g. identity, privacy/security, asset sharing, commerce) to which we
return below absent. While there were tremendous advances to come in
both applications running on top of the internet and in the WWW, much
of the fundamental investment in protocols was wrapping up by the time
of Lick’s writing. The role of the public and social sectors in defining and
innovating the network of networks was soon eclipsed.

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

127
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 proto-
cols 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.179

While the internet backbone continued to improve in limited ways,

adding security layers and some encryption, the basic features Lick
and Nelson saw as essential were never integrated. Public financial
support for the networking protocols largely dried up, with remaining
open source development largely consisting of volunteer work or work
supported by private corporations. As the world woke to the Age of the
Internet, the dreams of its founders faded.

Flashbacks
Yet faded dreams have a stubborn persistence, nagging throughout a day.
While Lick passed away in 1990, many of the early internet pioneers lived
to see their triumph and tragedy.
179
Ben Tarnoff, Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future (New York: Verso,
2022).

128
**

Figure 3-3-C. Ted Nelson at Keio University, Japan, 1999. Source:

Wikipedia, used under CC 4.0 BY-SA.

**

Ted Nelson (shown in Figure C) and many other pioneers in Project

Xanadu continue to carry their complaints about and reforms to the
internet forward to this day. Engelbart, until his death in 2013, continued
to speak, organize and write about his vision of “boosting Collective IQ”.
These activities included supporting, along with Terrence Winograd (PhD
advisor to the Google founders), a community around Online Delibera-
tion based at Stanford University that nurtured key leaders of the next
generation of ⿻ as we will see below. While none of these efforts met
with the direct successes of their earlier years, they played critical roles
as inspiration and in some case even incubation for a new generation of
⿻ innovators, who have helped revive and articulate the dream of ⿻.

129
Nodes of light

While, as we highlighted in the introduction, the dominant thrust of tech-

nology has developed in directions that put it on a collision course with
democracy, this new generation of leaders has formed a contrasting pat-
tern, scattered but clearly discernible nodes of light that together give
hope that with renewed common action, ⿻ could one day animate tech-
nology writ large. Perhaps the most vivid example for the average inter-
net user is Wikipedia.

This open, non-profit collaborative project has become the leading global
resource for reference and broadly shared factual information.180 In
contrast to the informational fragmentation and conflict that pervades
much of the digital sphere that we highlighted in the introduction,
Wikipedia has become a widely accepted source of shared understand-
ing. It has done this through harnessing large-scale, open, collaborative
self-governance.181 Many aspects of this success are idiosyncratic and
attempts to directly extend the model have had mixed success; trying
to make such approaches more systematic and pervasive is much of
our focus below. But the scale of the success is quite remarkable.182
Recent analysis suggests that most web searches lead to results that
prominently include Wikipedia entries. For all the celebration of the
commercial internet, this one public, deliberative, participatory, and
roughly consensual resource is perhaps its most common endpoint.
180
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).
181
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.
182
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 Relation-
ship 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 Im-
portance 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.

130
The concept of “Wiki,” from which Wikipedia derives its name, comes
from a Hawaiian word meaning “quick,” and was coined by Ward Cun-
ningham in 1995 when he created the first wiki software, WikiWikiWeb.
Cunningham aimed to extend the web principles highlighted above of hy-
pertextual navigation and inclusive ⿻ governance by allowing the rapid
creation of linked databases.183 Wikis invite all users, not just experts, to
edit or create new pages using a standard web browser and to link them
to one another, creating a dynamic and evolving web landscape in the
spirit of ⿻.

While Wikis themselves have found significant applications, they have

had an even broader impact in helping stimulate the “groupware” revo-
lution that many internet users associate with products like Google docs
but has its roots in the open source WebSocket protocol.184 HackMD, a
collaborative real-time Markdown editor, is used within the g0v commu-
nity to collaboratively edit and openly share documents such as meeting
minutes.185 While collaboratively constructed documents illustrate this
ethos, it more broadly pervades the very foundation of the online world
itself. Open source software (OSS) embodies this ethos of participatory,
networked, transnational self-governance. Significantly represented by
the Linux operating system, OSS underlies the majority of public cloud
infrastructures and connects with many through platforms like GitHub,
boasting over 100 million contributors, growing rapidly in recent years
especially in the developed world as pictured in Figure D. The Android
OS, which powers over 70% of all smartphones, is an OSS project, despite
being primarily maintained by Google. The success and impact of such
“peer production” has forced the broad reconsideration of many assump-
183
Bo Leuf and Ward Cunningham, The Wiki Way: Quick Collaboration on the Web (Boston:
Addison-Wesley, 2001).
184
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 popular-
ized the concept of collaborative real-time editing.
185
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.

131
tions underlying standard economic analysis.186

**

Figure 3-3-D. GitHub contributors as share of working-age population by

country. Source: GitHub Innovation Graph187 , World Bank188 and Taiwan
Ministry of Interior189 .

**

OSS emerged in reaction to the secretive and commercial direction of the

software industry that emerged in the 1970s. The free and open devel-
opment approach of the early days of ARPANET was sustained even after
the withdrawal of public funding, thanks to a global volunteer workforce.
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.

OSS has expanded across various internet and computing sectors, even
earning support from formerly hostile companies like Microsoft, now
owner of leading OSS service company GitHub and employer of one of
186
Yochai Benkler, “Coase’s Penguin, Or, Linux and the Nature of the Firm,” n.d.
http://www.benkler.org/CoasesPenguin.PDF.
187
GitHub Innovation graph at https://github.com/github/innovationgraph/
188
World Bank, “Population ages 15-64, total” at https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.1564.TO.
189
Department of Household Registration, Ministry of the Interior, “Household Registration
Statistics in January 2024” at https://www.ris.gov.tw/app/en/2121?sn=24038775.

132
the authors of this book. This represents the practice of ⿻ on a large
scale; emergent, collective co-creation of shared global resources. Com-
munities form around shared interests, freely build on each other’s work,
vet contributions through unpaid maintainers, and “fork” projects into
parallel versions in case of irreconcilable differences. The protocol “git”
supports collaborative tracking of changes, with platforms like GitHub
and GitLab facilitating millions of developers’ participation. This book
is a product of such collaboration and has been supported by Microsoft
and GitHub.

However, OSS faces challenges such as chronic financial support short-

age due to the withdrawal of public funding, as explored by Nadia Eghbal
(now Asparouhova) in her book Working in Public. Maintainers are often
unrewarded and the community’s growth increases the burden on them.
Nonetheless, these challenges are addressable, and OSS, despite its busi-
ness model limitations, exemplifies the continuance of the open collabo-
ration ethos (the lost dao) that ⿻ aims to support. Hence, OSS projects
will be frequent examples in this book.

Another contrasting reaction to the shift away from public investment in

communication networking was exemplified by the work of Lanier from
above. A student and critic of AI pioneer Marvin Minsky, he sought to de-
velop a technological program of the same ambition as AI, but centered
around human experience and communication. Seeing existing forms of
communication as being constrained by symbols that can be processed by
the ears and eyes like words and pictures, he aspired to empower deeper
sharing of and empathy for experiences only expressible by sense like
touch and proprioception (the internal sense). Through his research and
entrepreneurship during the 1980s, this developed into the field of “vir-
tual reality”, one that has been a continual source of innovation in user
interaction since, from the wired glove190 to Apple’s release of the Vision
Pro 191 .
190
A wired glove is an input device like a glove. It allows users to interact with digital en-
vironments 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).
191
The Vision Pro is a head mount display, released by Apple in 2024. This device inte-
grates high-resolution displays with sensors capable of tracking the user’s movements, hand
actions and the environment to offer an immersive mixed reality experience.

133
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 pay-
ments, 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 prove-
nance and value.192 While many projects in the space have been influ-
enced by Libertarianism and hyper-financialization, the enduring con-
nection to original aspirations of the internet, especially under the leader-
ship of Vitalik Buterin (who founded Ethereum, the largest smart contract
platform), has inspired a number of projects, like GitCoin and decentral-
ized identity, that are central inspirations for ⿻ today as we explore be-
low.

Other pioneers on these issues focused more on layers of communica-

tion 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 me-
dia, ranging from Mastodon to Twitter’s now-independent and non-profit
BlueSky initiative. This space has also produced many of the most cre-
ative ideas for re-imagining identity and privacy with a foundation in so-
cial 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 im-
prove the delivery of government services and bring the public into the
process in a more diverse range of ways. Leaders in the US include Jen-
nifer Pahlka, founder of GovTech pioneer Code4America, and Beth Si-
192
Satoshi Nakamoto, “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System” at
https://assets.pubpub.org/d8wct41f/31611263538139.pdf.

134
mone Noveck, Founder of The GovLab.193

Noveck, in particular, is a powerful bridge between the early develop-

ment 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.194 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 prac-
tices that formed the core of the g0v movement we highlighted above.195
Noveck was a critical mentor not just to g0v but to a range of other am-
bitious civic technology projects around the world from the Kenya collec-
tive crisis reporting platform Ushahidi founded by Juliana Rotich and col-
laborators 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 va-
riety of features of these settings has made it challenging for these exam-
ples 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 ⿻. Es-

tonia 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.196 Fin-
land has built on and scaled the success of its neighbor, extending digital
inclusion deeper into society, educational system and the economy than
193
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 Govern-
ment: How Technology Can Make Government Better, Democracy Stronger, and Citizens More
Powerful (New York: Brookings Institution Press, 2010).
194
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.
195
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/.
196
Gary Anthes, “Estonia: a Model for e-Government” Communications of the ACM 58, no.
6 (2015): 18-20.

135
Estonia, as well as adopting elements of digitized democratic participa-
tion. Singapore has the most ambitious Georgist-style policies on earth
and harnesses more creative ⿻ economic mechanisms and fundamen-
tal protocols than any other jurisdiction. South Korea has invested ex-
tensively 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 juris-
diction. Kenya, Brazil and especially India have pioneered digital infras-
tructure for development. We will return to many of these examples in
what follows.

Yet none of these have institutionalized the breadth and depth of ⿻ ap-
proaches to socio-technical organization across sectors that Taiwan has.
It is thus more challenging to take these cases as broad national exam-
ples 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 dig-
ital 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.

136
Section 4: Freedom

4-0 Rights, Operating Systems and ⿻ Freedom

Each day, Luna navigates a labyrinth of tech,
From towering giants to startups, a trek.
Interviews blend into a monotonous dance,
Jargon-filled words, devoid of values’ stance.
She yearns for projects of substance and worth,
But opportunities veer from her dreams’ birth.

One night, deflated, she sinks into her couch,

Holographic ads engulf her, a sensory slouch.
“Nourishing democracy’s river,” the narration begins,
Capturing her gaze as the manifesto spins.
Fatigue fades as her mind starts to churn,
Screen in hand, words illuminating her concern.

“To those crafting digital communication’s frame,

Ensuring privacy, free speech, and equality’s flame.”
She imagines a hackathon, debates fierce yet fair,
Creating controversial yet impactful software.

“To innovators mirroring our best relations,

Where clicks and interactions build shared celebrations.”
She dreams of heartfelt thanks from children she’s aided,
Buying soda with gratitude, community ties unfrayed.

“To pioneers of digital assets, a toast,

Empowering choice, economic equality’s coast.”

137
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.

Internet founder JCR Licklider (Lick) saw a far wider range of fundamen-
tal protocols as foundational to a network society than have thus far been
manifest in internet protocols. Yet his analysis was more a laundry list
than a philosophical analysis. To articulate a clear vision of the founda-
tions of a ⿻ society, in this chapter we draw on the definitional concepts
of ⿻ to outline what these protocols should consist of and the role they
should play socially. Then, in the rest of this part of the book, we system-
atically explore these, the limits to their implementation today and how
they might be more fully achieved.

We argue that ⿻ societies must be founded on infrastructure that matches

the principles of ⿻ in both form and structure. Formally, they must com-
bine 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 under-
take ambitious and inclusive collaborations.

138
Rights as foundation of democracy
Rights are a ubiquitous feature underpinning democratic life. Most sim-
ply imagined, democracy (etymologically “rule of the people”) is a system
of government, of collective decision-making by the people, rather than
a set of actions a government takes towards its people. Yet evolving from
its ancient Athenian origins, shaped by Enlightenment philosophy and
forged through revolution, democracy came to also enshrine a set of fun-
damental freedoms and rights. While these “rights” have varied across
democracies in both time and space, broad patterns are not only identi-
fiable but have formed the foundation of documents such as the United
Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), including equal-
ity, life, liberty, personal security, speech, thought, conscience, property,
association—to name a few. While there are important debates around
the edges of these principles, in broad outlines they define and defend
core aspects of the nearly universal characteristics of human behavior as
highlighted by leading anthropologists like Nicholas Christakis.197 These
include what Christakis calls the “social suite”, the nearly universal ten-
dency of humans to have a sense of personal identity, to form familial re-
lationships as well as long-term friendships, for these to form the basis of
broader cooperative social networks and groups towards which members
are “biased”, to have differentiated trust within these networks based on
relationships and capacities and to learn from each other.

Regardless of the precise makeup and universality, however, what we are

most interested in is why they are so integral to democracy as a system of
government and why so many people and organizations believe a democ-
racy cannot exist without protecting these rights. In her recent book,
Justice by Means of Democracy, leading ⿻ political philosopher Danielle
Allen provides a clear account of this connection: government cannot re-
spond to the “will of the people” if their will cannot be safely and freely
expressed.198 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,
197
Nicholas A. Christakis, Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society (New York:
Little Brown Spark, 2019).
198
Danielle Allen, Justice by Means of Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2023).

139
they cannot coordinate to contest decisions by those in power. If they can-
not seek livelihood through a diversity of economic interactions (for ex-
ample, 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.

Many prominent democracies have “committed suicide” through un-

dermining the rights from which they were forged. Perhaps the most
famous example was the Weimar Republic that governed Germany for
most of the 30 years between the World Wars and ended in the election of
the National Socialist German Workers (Nazi) party to a plurality of seats
in the parliament, or Reichstag. This famously led to the appointment
of Adolf Hitler as Chancellor.199 Yet, today many democratic societies
have elected leaders and governments that have curtailed liberties
in a manner that converts them from democracies to what political
scientists Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way have labeled “competitive
authoritarian” regimes.200 Concerns about unfree societies undermining
democratic functioning are neither abstract nor theoretical, but current.

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 function-
ing. For example, Scandinavian countries have emphasized the impor-
tance 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. Oth-
ers (e.g. in Asia) tend to emphasize rights of assembly and association as
more central to democratic function. Despite these variances, the under-
lying assumption of rights of speech and association is that they protect
agency, so citizens may have the autonomy to form and advance associa-
tions for their common interests, so these common interests can be heard
199
Richard Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich (New York: Penguin, 2005).
200
Steven Levitsky, Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War (Cam-
bridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

140
politically.

National (and subnational) governments, especially judicial systems,

often play a critical role in ensuring that rights are respected and adjudi-
cating their boundaries. Yet thinking of rights only in terms of national
legal systems is misleading. Rights represent deeply held beliefs and
values rooted in a range of diverse cultural contexts (national, subna-
tional, transnational, etc.). Rights not only carve the possibility space for
human action, they confer legitimacy. For example, private workplaces
or internet platforms generally may restrict speech. Yet expectations
of rights of free speech put severe limits on the kinds of restrictions
on speech employees and customers are willing to accept. Similarly,
although documents like the UDHR are generally not legally binding, they
still inspire and influence laws in many countries, including decisions
made by the Supreme Court of Appeal in South Africa.201 Institutions
of different scales (courts, corporations, civil society groups, etc,) are
crucial in ensuring these shared cultural expectations are upheld, and
no one institution on their own is the “enforcer” or “source” of rights.
Furthermore, many religious traditions hold that the source of rights is
divine rather than earthly. In this sense, rights may be thought to exist
across, above and beyond states, even if states are one critical defender
of them.

Rights are also often aspirations and goals, rather than fixed and attain-
able realities. Much of the history of the US is a drama about the fulfill-
ment of founding aspirations to equality that were long denied.202 Many
positive rights (e.g. a quality education, decent housing) are outside the
capacity or mandate of governments, especially in developing countries,
to immediately deliver but nonetheless are testaments to the deepest as-
pirations of a people.203
201
Hurst Hannum, “The Status of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in National
and International Law” Georgia Journal of International and Comparative Law 25, no. 287
(1995-1996): 287-397.
202
Jill Lepore, These Truths: A History of the United States (New York: Norton, 2018).
203
Jamal Greene, How Rights Went Wrong: How our Obsession with Rights is Tearing Amer-
ica Apart (Boston: Mariner, 2021).

141
Operating systems as the foundation of applications
Operating systems (OSs) are a ubiquitous feature underpinning digital
life. Almost every digital interaction you have had depends on an un-
derlying OS. Linux is the most ambitious and successful open-source soft-
ware project of all time. Windows, produced by one of our employers,
is another ubiquitous piece of software. iOS and Android power most
smartphones.

OSs roughly define the possibility space for applications that run on them.
There are basic traits in terms of performance, appearance, speed, ma-
chine memory usage—to name a few—that applications running on a par-
ticular OS share and must respect to work on that platform. For example,
iOS and Android allow for touch interfaces, while earlier smartphones
(like the Blackberry or Palm) relied on styluses or keyboard entry. Even
today, iOS and Android apps have different looks, feels and performance
characteristics. Applications are coded for one (or possibly multiple) of
these platforms, drawing on the processes built into the OS to determine
what their application can and cannot do, what it has to build bespoke
and what it can rely on underlying processes for.

Boundaries are rarely sharp. While Macintosh was the first mass-market
computer with a graphical user interface (GUI) OS

142
**

Figure 4-0-A. Apple LISA II Macintosh-XL, one of the first commercially

available personal computers using a graphical user interface. Source:
bGerhard »GeWalt« Walter, retrieved from Wikipedia. CC0.

**

Earlier computers with a command-line interface sometimes had pro-

grams that included elements like a GUI. Similarly, while virtual (VR) and
augmented reality (AR) headsets (see our chapter on Immersive Shared
Reality below) are much more effective today, there are some VR and
AR experiences that can run on a smartphone, properly worn on the
head. Furthermore, while OS designers try to include security protocols
that defend against application behaviors that violate or threaten the
integrity of the underlying OS, they can never hope to avoid them en-
tirely.204 Many, perhaps most, computer “viruses” are precise examples
of such violations. OSs thus define the normal behavior of applications
on their system, providing tools applications can harness and reasonable
204
Nicole Perlroth, This is How They Tell Me the World Ends: the Cyberweapons Arms Race
(New York: Bloomsbury, 2021).

143
expectations they can have about other applications, defining the terrain
of the easily possible.

OSs constantly must adapt to unanticipated behaviors by applications,

both desired (so as to empower new applications) and undesired to de-
fend against viruses. These adaptations may be minor and superficial;
for example, we often receive updates to the OSs on smartphones to de-
fend against security threats. Or, over time phones have transitioned
away from users typing “emoticons” and “emojis” with character com-
binations to natively integrating them into the OS’s typing features.205
Other changes are more dramatic: for example, Google introducing An-
droid versions compatible with cars and televisions.

OSs also defend their integrity in a variety of ways; while security patches
are the sharpest and most adversarial, they coexist with developer ed-
ucation, the building of a broad ecosystem of developer support, the
gradual development of customer usage and expectations, and more.
Applications built on an OS not only support its internal development
but also facilitate updates and even new OSs that can enhance or even
rival the original OS. And while different OSs differ and compete, they
share many common affordances. They at least partially attempt to
allow cross-development and both backward and forward compatibility,
so that applications designed for previous versions continue to work and
that applications are “future proof” to new generations, thereby ensuring
users access to a wide range of applications.

OSs are almost always works-in-progress. They aim to support and foster
functionality they are incompletely able to support. From these repeated
attempts, they recursively learn to offer better support. For example, the
first prominent audio “smart assistant” released (such as Apple’s Siri and
Amazon’s Alexa) were often comically low quality; quality improved over
time with user participation through the systems themselves, enabling
more profound oral functions over time in these operating systems.
205
Gretchen McCulloch, Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language (New
York: Riverhead Books, 2019).

144
⿻ foundations
Systems of rights and OSs have many common traits: they serve as foun-
dations for democratic societies and applications that run on top of them,
have background conditions assumed in their processes, require special
defense and protection to ensure the integrity of a system, and nonethe-
less, are often at least partly aspirational and incompletely fulfilled, at
times in tension internally. And while they are often backed by powerful
enforcement mechanisms, they are also part of a diffuse culture in ad-
dition to sharply defined institutions and code.206 Beyond these general
parallels, however, there are two aspects of both rights and OSs that are
particularly important and distinctive to a ⿻ perspective, which we will
draw out and contrast to Libertarian and Technocratic approaches.

Dynamism

OSs are self-evidently dynamic, just as systems of rights, on reflection, are.

This dynamism is central to ⿻. Rights support the democracies that rest
on them and OSs support the applications that run on top of them. But
the framers of rights and designers of OSs cannot anticipate (or cannot
see except “through a glass darkly”) how these foundations will be used,
abused and reimagined, as different and sometimes adversarial actors
harness (often through technological means) precisely the space they pro-
vide for such experimentation and innovation. The PRC’s Great Firewall,
for example, restricts and censors internet content, codifying authoritar-
ianism. Yet, global social media platforms endemic to democracies today
have sometimes auctioned the attention of their customers including with
micro-targeting for election interference and misinformation by adver-
saries.207 Continued effective facilitation of democratic conversation will
therefore require not just avoiding censorship, but also the sale of the
attention economy to authoritarian influences, as highlighted by the re-
cent international debate over potential authoritarian influences on the
short-form video application, TikTok.208
206
Lawrence Lessig, Code: And Other Laws of Cyberspace (New York: Basic Books, 1999).
207
Renee DiResta, Kris Shaffer, Becky Ruppel, David Sullivan, Robert Matney, Ryan
Fox, Jonathan Albright and Ben Johnson, “The Tactics & Tropes of the Internet Re-
search Agency” (2019), presented to the Congress of the United States, available at
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/senatedocs/2/.
208
The Economist, “Tick, Tock: Will TikTok Still Exist in America?” March 13, 2024.

145
Thus, our understanding of free speech, once considered the primary ex-
pression of a right that ensures citizens can freely form and build sup-
port for political positions, is being challenged as a result of information
technology. This assumption was founded on an environment where in-
formation was scarce and thus its suppression was one of the more ef-
fective 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 dissi-
dents and unwanted content (documented dramatically by the research
of Gary King, Jennifer Pan and Molly Roberts).209 Under such attacks, en-
suring diverse, relevant and genuine content is surfaced for attention is
the challenge, not (only) preventing literal censorship. We suspect our
protections around free speech will need to evolve correspondingly and
discuss pathways to ensure this happens below.

Yet dynamism is not desirable for its own sake, nor should it be used in a ⿻
vision to subsume the entire structure in the pursuit of some total ultimate
goal. Instead, dynamism is an emergent property of adaptive systems dis-
covering their future while renewing and improving their ability to con-
tinue to adapt in the future, self-organizing to the “edge of chaos” where
complexity thrives and grows. OSs and rights can and should evolve to
support the applications and democracies that run on top of it, rather than
collapsing to an external will—whether it be the narrow profit interest of
a company or some national interest.

Rights and relationships

A ⿻ understanding of rights recognizes systems and groups as much as

people. Freedom of association and religion protect associations and re-
ligions themselves, as much as those who compose them. Federalist sys-
tems, like the US Constitution, recognize the rights of states and locali-
ties, not simply individuals. Even commercial freedoms, while often con-
ceived of in terms of individual choices and bilateral exchange, usually
209
Gary King, Jennifer Pan and Margaret E. Roberts, “How the Chinese Government Fabri-
cates Social Media Posts for Strategic Distraction, Not Engaged Argument”, American Politi-
cal Science Review 111, no. 3 (2017): 484-501.

146
protect at least as vigorously the rights of corporate entities and their con-
tractual arrangements, and rights to collective bargaining. Similarly, OSs
protect the interactions between applications and users, as much as ap-
plications and users separately. Thus, while some elements of a system
of rights or OSs may be thought of as protecting or servicing individual
users, there is nothing inherently individualistic about them. Similarly,
speech, as a form of communication, necessarily involves more than one
party. Whether within OSs or in “the public square,” the viability of a com-
munication network depends on the collective participation and consent
of its many willing applications, users, and groups.

Furthermore, the entities protecting and defending these freedoms are

rarely simply nation-states and their associated institutions. Commercial
law is a leading example. As scholars such as Anne-Marie Slaughter and
Katharina Pistor have highlighted, international networks of legal rules,
trade agreements and mutual respect for precedents are (for better or
worse) central to important topics like intellectual property, antitrust and
capital requirements for financial institutions.210 Each of these is gov-
erned by a different network of professionals, international institutions,
and even lobbying groups. Thus, rights are not just held by a diversity of
groups forming an interacting network; they are also defined by a similar
intersecting network of cultures, institutions, and agents. Rights emerge
from intersecting people and social circles defending and protecting their
networks of social interactions.

Contrast with Libertarianism and Technocracy

The dynamic, networked, and adaptive foundations of ⿻ rights and OSs

that respectively support democratic exploration and the evolution of ap-
plication environments stand in stark contrast to the political and tech-
nical monistic perspectives embodied in the ideologies of Libertarianism
and Technocracy. Libertarianism is grounded in a rigid and “immutable”
set of well-defined historical rights, which primarily emphasize individ-
ual private property and the prevention of any “violence” that challenges
these property relations. Under this view, rights are abstracted or de-
210
Anne-Marie Slaughter, A New World Order (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2004). Katharina Pistor, The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019).

147
tached from both other rights and any social or cultural context from
which they emerged. Rights belong exclusively to atomic individuals, and
technical systems ought to insulate these rights as thoroughly and com-
pletely from any change or social intrusion as possible. On the other
hand, Technocracy is rooted in the notion of an “objective,” “utility” or
“social welfare” function that technical systems are designed to “align to”
and maximize. Where Libertarians see rights as absolute, unambiguous,
static, and universal, the Technocrats deem them as mere obstacles, or
encumbrances, in the pursuit of a definable social good.

⿻ freedom
However skeptical one may be of a future immersed in digitally simulated
worlds (sometimes called “metaverses”), few would deny that many peo-
ple live large parts of their lives online these days. 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 Con-
nected Society focuses on the need to move beyond the simplistic frame-
works 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. Technologically, the early networking protocols
that provided a governance framework for intercomputer communica-
tion attempted precisely to accomplish this, fusing together the parallel
but distinct ideas of rights and OSs. Here, interpersonal networking OSs
aimed to provide the fundamental capacities to participants needed to
support a ⿻ conception of rights.

148
**

Figure 4-0-B. A hypergraph that visualizes people, groups, relationships,

and digital assets

**

Because technological systems are instantiated in formal mathematical

relationships, a simple way to see what this requires is to use the canon-
ical mathematical model that directly corresponds to ⿻ description of
society such as the “hypergraph” as pictured in the figure. A hyper-
graph, 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 sub-
strate 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.

149
The project of constructing shared digital protocols to reflect these is
in nascent stages, as we highlighted in our chapter The Lost Dao and
as increasingly accepted by many leading civil actors.211 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
identification212 that protects rights to life and personhood online, no
widely adopted non-proprietary protocols for the ways we communicate
213 214 215
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, memory216 and data217 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.

Luckily, it has begun to. 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
211
Jenny Toomey and Michelle Shevin, “Reconceiving the Missing Lay-
ers 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/. 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.
212
Closed proprietary namespaces and globally managed registries (see “Decentralized
Identifiers (DIDs) V1.0.” W3C, July 19, 2022, https://www.w3.org/TR/did-core/) as well as ver-
ifiable credentials that support collection of credentials from a variety of sources (see “Ver-
ifiable Credentials Data Model 1.0.” W3C, March 3, 2022. https://www.w3.org/TR/vc-data-
model/.)
213
“More Instant Messaging Interoperability (Mimi),” Datatracker, n.d.
https://datatracker.ietf.org/group/mimi/about/.
214
“Messaging Layer Security,” Wikipedia, January 31, 2024,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messaging_Layer_Security.
215
“DIDComm v2 Reaches Approved Spec Status!” Decentralized Identity Foundation, July
26, 2022, https://blog.identity.foundation/didcomm-v2/.
216
See Filecoin Foundation (https://fil.org/) and IPFS (https://www.ipfs.tech/)
217
See Holochain (https://www.holochain.org/)

150
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 Libertar-
ian 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.

4-1 Identity and Personhood

In the swiftly moving line, a sense of hope melded with palpable anxiety.
The big screen above reiterated the criticality of the evacuation creden-
tials. Mulu, a well-respected figure in her crumbling community, was on
the cusp of a pivotal moment. Climate change had left her homeland in
tatters, and she aspired to find solace and clear skies for her daughters in
a new land.

As Mulu stepped forward, her past—rich and vibrant—flashed before

her. She feared an uncertain future, mainly for her daughters, who faced
potential stagnation. The government official, welcoming and friendly,
asked her to scan the code for the Common European Asylum System
procedure.

Her nearly defunct phone loaded a page with a few straightforward ques-
tions.

“Do you grant the common asylum system the consent to request a yes/no
answer of…”

1. … your eligibility for our support program?

2. … whether you pose any potential threats to our community?
3. … whether your previous experiences could contribute to a produc-
tive role within our society?

She swiftly affixed her signature on the screen. Her phone then began dis-
playing pertinent information to assist her in responding to the questions

151
accurately.

• In a conflict-torn village, you built makeshift schools, bringing

smiles to children’s faces. This beacon of hope is echoed by 76
trustworthy sources, their praises contained in multiple digital
credentials, endorsed by agencies recognized by the EU.
• At a press conference, your firm stance against affiliations with
harmful individuals to your community echoed powerfully, backed
by 41 affirming digitally signed testimonials, showcasing an
unyielding protector of society.
• Your efforts in bridging dialogue between communities and 34 gov-
ernment agencies have crafted a shield of trust and safety around
you, each acknowledgment a mark of your dedication, immortalized
in a digital shield of recognition.
• Your innovation fueled life-changing projects, celebrated by 78% of
your peers through vibrant digital narratives, weaving a dynamic
tapestry of your significant contributions to the engineering sector.
• Your support for…

The list goes on. She recalled the lively scenes of children frolicking in
the schoolyard, the mentors who inspired her to grace the stage with con-
fidence, and the countless late nights spent collaborating with her dedi-
cated colleagues.

The official’s desk illuminated with green lights, approving her applica-
tion based on the collected affirmations and her proven history.

The same acceptance embraced her daughters, welcoming them to a new

beginning. With heartfelt warmth, the official welcomed them into a
promising world that seemed ready to know and appreciate them truly,
offering a fresh start for Mulu and her daughters to thrive once again.

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

152
most false credentials, degenerating into a plutocracy. There is a famous
New Yorker cartoon from 1993 “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a
dog”, so famous it has its own Wikipedia page; to the extent this is true,
we should expect attempts at online democracy to, quite literally, go to the
dogs.218 This is dramatized in many “Web3” communities that have relied
heavily on pseudonymity or even anonymity and have thus often been
captured by the interests of those with access to physical and financial
resources.219

Thus, identity systems are central to digital life and gate access to most on-
line activities: social media accounts, electronic commerce, government
services, employment and subscriptions. What each of these systems can
offer depends intimately on how richly it can establish user identity. Sys-
tems that can only determine that a user is a person will not, for example,
be able to offer free benefits without ensuring that person has not already
signed up for this offer. Systems that can determine a user is unique but
nothing else can only offer services that can legally and practically be
made available to every person on the planet.220 Given the ease of at-
tacks online, only what can be established about a person can securely
exist there.

At the same time, many of the simplest ways to establish identity para-
doxically simultaneously undermine it, especially online. A password is
often used to establish an identity, but unless such authentication is con-
ducted with great care it can reveal the password more broadly, making it
useless for authentication in the future as attackers will be able to imper-
sonate 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.

To see how this challenge plays out, it is important to keep in mind the
several interlocking elements of identity systems:
218
Peter Steiner, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog” The New Yorker July 5, 1993.
219
Vitalik Buterin, “On Nathan Schneider on the Limits of Cryptoeconomics”, September
26, 2021 at https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2021/09/26/limits.html.
220
Puja Ohlhaver, Mikhail Nikulin and Paula Berman, “Compressed
to 0: The Silent Strings of Proof of Personhood”, 2024 available at
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4749892.

153
 • Creation: Enrolling in an identity system involves establishing an
account and getting assigned an identifier. Different types of sys-
tems have different requirements for enrollment related to how con-
fident the system owner is in the identifying information presented
by an individual (called Levels of Assurance)221 .
• Access: To access the account on an ongoing basis, the participant
uses a simpler process, such as presenting a password, a key or a
multi-factor authentication.
• Linkage: As the participant engages with the systems that their ac-
count gives them access to, many of their interactions are recorded
and form part of the record that constitutes the system’s understand-
ing of them, information that can later be used for other account
functions.
• Graph: Among these data that accumulate about a user, many are in-
teractive with other accounts. For example, two users may harness
the system to exchange messages or participate together in events.
These create data that belong to multiple accounts and thus a “social
graph” of connections.
• Recovery: Passwords and keys get lost or stolen and multi-factor au-
thentication 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.222

In this chapter, we discuss the operation of existing digital identity sys-

tems and the limits to how they navigate the dual imperatives of estab-
lishment and protection. We then discuss a number of important, but
limited, ongoing initiatives around the world to address these problems.
Next, we illustrate how to build on and extend this important work more
ambitiously to empower a more ⿻ future. Finally, we highlight how, be-
221
For example, the International Civil Aeronautics Organization that oversees in-
ternational commercial air travel developed a Guide to [Evidence of Identity], available
athttps://www.icao.int/Security/FAL/TRIP/Documents/ICAO%20Guidance%20on%20Evidence%20of%20Identity.pdf.
222
A leading open standard that allows this is OAuth (Open Authorization), an Internet En-
gineering Task Force open standard published originally as RFC 5849 in 2010 and then up-
dated to OAuth 2.0 as RFC 6749 in 2012.

154
cause of the fundamental role of identity, it connects to and entangles
with other fundamental protocols and rights, especially rights of associa-
tion that we focus on in the next chapter.

Digital identity today

When most people think of their formal “identity”, they are usually refer-
ring to government-issued documents. While these vary across countries,
common examples include

• Birth certificates.
• Certificates of enrollment in public programs, often with an asso-
ciated identification number (such as Social Security for pensions
and taxes in the US or the Taiwanese National Health Insurance pro-
gram).
• Licenses for the use of potentially hazardous tools, such as automo-
biles or firearms.
• Unified national identification cards/numbers/databases in some
countries.
• Passports for international travel, which constitute perhaps the
widest system of identification given its implicit international fed-
eration. While these systems vary across countries, they generally
share several notable features:

1. They are canonical and highly trusted in a range of settings, to the

point where they are often referred to as “legal” or even “true”
identities, with all other forms of identity deriving being either
“pseudonyms” or deriving their legitimacy from reference to them.
2. Partly because of 1), they are used for enrollment into other systems
in a variety of contexts (e.g. checking age at a bar, registering for a
bank account, paying taxes) even when they were/are intended to
be purpose or program specific. A notorious example is the United
States Social Security Number (SSN), which was created originally
in the 1930s to help manage a new pension system.223 By the 1960’s
it was regularly being requested by many different government and
223
See Carolyn Puckett, “The Story of the Social Security Number,” Social Security Admin-
istration, July 2009. https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/ssb/v69n2/v69n2p55.html.). See also
Kenneth Meiser, “Opening Pandora’s Box: The Social Security Number from 1937-2018,”
UT Electronic Theses and Dissertations, June 19, 2018, http://hdl.handle.net/2152/66022.

155
 private sector entities. This widespread use meant people’s activities
across many different contexts could be profiled. In the late 1960s
and early 1970s concerns were raised about these practices224 and
a series of laws were passed limiting the ability of agencies within
the federal government to share data between agencies and limited
the usage of the SSN in the private sector.225 Since then the federal
government has been working to reduce SSN usage and is actively
considering alternatives.226
3. They are typically issued based on narrow signals of identity, trac-
ing back to other government-issued documents, usually at root a
birth certificate that is itself dependent only on the signature of a
single doctor. Occasionally these are supplemented by infrequent
in-person appearance. However, they are often backstopped by ar-
duous legal procedures if there are persistent disputes over an iden-
tity.

These features together create a volatile mix. On the one hand,

government-issued identities are foundational to modern life and
often intended to avoid invasions of privacy. On the other hand, they
do a poor job protecting identity because they are used across so many
contexts that they cannot be kept secret and are founded on thin signals.
Furthermore, as we discuss below, these problems are currently being
exacerbated by the advance of technologies, like generative foundation
models (GFMs), which can easily imitate and modify content and draw
sophisticated inferences from public signals. Additionally, the process
of creating digital versions of these IDs has been slow and inconsistent
224
Willis Hare, “Records, Computers and the Rights of Citizens,”
https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/papers/2008/P5077.pdf, Rand Corporation,
August 1973.
225
See “Social Security Numbers: Private Sector Entities Routinely Obtain and Use SSNs,
and Laws Limit the Disclosure of This Information.” United States General Accounting
Office, 2004. https://epic.org/wp-content/uploads/privacy/ssn/gao-04-11.pdf (GAO Report to
the Chairman, Subcommittee on Social Security, Committee on Ways and Means, House of
Representatives). See also Barbara Bovbjerg, “Social Security Numbers: Federal and State
Laws Restrict Use of SSNs, yet Gaps Remain,” United States General Accounting Office, 2005,
https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-05-1016t.pdf (GAO Testimony Before the Committee on Con-
sumer Affairs and Protection and Committee on Governmental Operations, New York State
Assembly.)
226
“News Release: DHS Awards for an Alternative Identifier to the Social Security Num-
ber,” US Department of Homeland Security, October 9, 2020, https://www.dhs.gov/science-
and-technology/news/2020/10/09/news-release-dhs-awards-alternative-identifier-social-
security-number.

156
across jurisdictions. For all these reasons, existing physical (paper or
plastic) government-issued IDs are in an increasingly precarious position
and offer quite an unattractive trade-off between establishment and
protection.

A second group of widely used identity systems is account management

for the leading technology platforms such as Meta, Amazon, Microsoft (Mi-
crosoft Accounts, LinkedIn, GitHub), Alphabet, Apple and others. These
platforms have leveraged open standards like OAuth 227 and OpenID Con-
nect228 to allow users to use their account from their platform to log into
other systems sometimes called “single sign-on” (SSO). These services are
the foundation of the “sign in with …” buttons that often appear on au-
thentication interfaces online. Via this single sign-in process the issuer
of the identifier, a.k.a. “the identity provider”, the large platform “sees”
everywhere an individual who has an account with them and uses it else-
where goes.

Just as there are a range of government-issued identities that nonetheless

share common traits, so too SSO systems are diverse but have important
features in common: 1. They are mostly administered by private, for-
profit corporations. The convenience they offer and the data they rely on
(more on this soon) are used as features to maximize customer retention
and value.
2. They harness a wide range of signals and properties of users to main-
tain the integrity of and harness the value of user identities. While the
specifics of the type of data (e.g. purchase histories, social network con-
nections, email correspondence, GPS locations) vary by case, in all cases
the maintainer has extensive, detailed, extended and sometimes intimate
awareness of a full profile of behavior by the subject often across multi-
229
ple domains. . 3. Because of 2), these network endpoint identifiers
are widely federated and are accepted for a range of authentication ser-
vices online, including by services with a limited relationship with the
227
OAuth 2.0 is the industry-standard protocol for authorization and provides
specific authorization flows for web applications, desktop applications, mo-
bile phones, and living room devices. https://oauth.net/2/ IETF Working Group
https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/oauth/about/
228
OpenID Connect enables application and website developers to launch sign-in flows and
receive verifiable assertions about users across Web-based, mobile, and JavaScript clients.
https://openid.net/developers/how-connect-works/
229
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_capitalism

157
SSO provider.

There are two other important classes of entities that collect a lot of iden-
tity information or attributes about people. They share many of these
characteristics but are not digital platform SSO systems and they do not
have a direct relationship with the people about whom they collect in-
formation: advertising, data brokers, credit-scoring and national secu-
rity agencies (who develop dossiers on people for both general surveil-
lance and their own screening purposes for employees who agree to be
screened to get clearances to do their work).

They similarly rely on rich signals, with high integrity and fairly broad
use, but without the public legitimacy of more standard government iden-
tities. These data collection systems thus stand on the opposite end of
the trade-off spectrum from government identities. They are far better
at providing a rich profile about people, however they operate largely in
the shadows because their “all-seeing” nature is socially illegitimate and
vests a great deal of power in a few hands.

At a neat halfway point between these extremes in most countries sit

accounts for crucial/foundational services such as bank accounts and
mobile telephones. Banking is typically regulated by the government and
requires government-issued ID before you can enroll (a process known
as “know your customer” or KYC). Telecommunications providers often
ask for government-issued ID to support effective account management
(where do we send the bill) and recovery (I lost my phone. Yes it is me.)
and in some countries they are required to know who their customers
are before they can get a phone number. Both banks and telephone
companies are privately administered and linked to rich user data that
can be harnessed for security, and thus often become a crucial input
to other identity systems (like SSO systems), but are typically far more
regulated than SSO systems and thus typically have greater legitimacy
and portability across private providers. In many contexts these systems
are thus viewed as a useful combination of security and legitimacy,
anchoring ultimate security for many services through multi-factor
authentication. However, they at the same time suffer many of the flaws
of both corporate surveillance and insecurity, as both can be relatively
easily stolen, are hard to recover if stolen and lack the strong legal

158
grounding of government-issued IDs.

In a different direction entirely from this spectrum are smaller, more di-
verse, and more local identity systems, in both more traditional contexts
and digitally native contexts. Examples of these are explored by Kaliya
Young in her book Domains of Identity:230

• Civil society enrollment and transaction, such as educational creden-

tials, membership in professional associations and trade unions, po-
litical parties and religious organizations.
• Employment enrollment and transactions, such as work-related cre-
dentials and access.
• Commercial enrollment and transactions, such as loyalty cards and
membership in private insurance.
• Pseudonymous identities used in a variety of online social and polit-
ical interactions from “dark web” fora (e.g. 4chan or Reddit) to video
game and virtual world interactions (e.g. Steam).
• Accounts used in “Web3” for financial transactions, Distributed Au-
tonomous Organizations (DAOs, more on these below) and associ-
ated discussions often on servers such as Discord.
• Personal digital and real-life connections that record, in machine or
biological (viz. mental) substrates, shared personal and relational
histories, communications exchanged, etc.

These identities are the most ⿻ of all we have discussed and have the
least common characteristics. They share a few features precisely related
to their fragmentation and heterogeneity: 1. These systems are highly
fragmented, currently have limited interoperability, are rarely federated
or connected and thus tend to have a very limited scope of application.
231
Emerging standards such as Verifiable Credentials are seeking to ad-
dress this challenge. 2. At the same time, these sources of identification
are often experienced as the most natural, appropriate and non-invasive.
They seem to arise from the natural course of human interactions, rather
than from top-down mandates or power structures. They are viewed as
highly legitimate, and yet not as a definitive or external source of “legal”
230
Kaliya “Identity Woman” Young, Domains of Identity: A Framework for Understanding
Identity Systems in Contemporary Society (London: Anthem Press, 2020).
231
Verifiable Credentials Data Model v1.1 W3C Recommendation 03 March 2022
https://www.w3.org/TR/vc-data-model/

159
identity, often being seen as pseudonymous or otherwise private. 3. They
tend to record rich and detailed, personal information, but in a narrow
context or slice of life, clearly separated from other contexts. As a result,
they have strong potential recovery methods based on personal relation-
ships. 4. They tend to have a poor digital user experience; either they
are not digitized at all, or the process of managing the digital interface is
unfriendly to non-technical users.
While these examples are perhaps most marginal to digital identity, they
are also perhaps most representative of its systemic state. Digital identity
systems are heterogeneous, generally quite insecure, only weakly inter-
operable and have limited functionality while allowing entities with con-
centrated power to engage in extensive surveillance and breaking norms
of privacy that in many cases they were established to protect. This prob-
lem is increasingly widely recognized, leading to focus in many technol-
ogy projects on overcoming it.

Public and decentralized digital identity

In sharp contrast to most prominent trends in technology, the most influ-
ential developments in identity tools have been in and/or targeting as a
market the development world, often under the banner of “Digital Public
Infrastructure”. This partly arises from the fact that identity systems are
particularly underdeveloped in these countries, creating a strong need
for such systems. Perhaps partly as a result, however, these systems have
opted to follow a highly unitary and centralizing structure, usually based
on biometrics, that while providing an impressive demonstration of what
a digital-native identity infrastructure can accomplish, also falls short of
helping richly establish and strongly protect identity.

The most prominent example is the Aadhaar identity system supported

by the Indian government as part of the India Stack program. Aadhaar
enrollment originally required residents to present some existing type of
identification from any number of potential entities - existing state-level
governments, ration cards (the list was extensive).232 Each enrollee had
232
They were asked for only 4 pieces of demographic information, name, birthdate, sex
and physical mailing address (although phone numbers and e-mail addresses were also re-
quested but not required). These are collected by enrollment agents who send the new en-
rollee information into the central databases managed by the Unique Identification Author-

160
a photo taken, each iris scanned and shared all ten fingerprints. The new
enrollees had the information associated with their identities checked
against the database to see if they had already been enrolled. If unique,
they were issued an Aadhaar number which was sent to them in the mail
on a card. India’s Unique Identification Authority (UIDAI).233 Through
special entities that have capabilities to do authentication against the
database provides authentication services - people who are interacting
with government services were able to assert an Aadhaar number and
then presented a fingerprint that was sent into the system and a yes/no
answer was returned on authentication.

Subsequently, the Indian Supreme Court limited the extent to which the
system can be used by the private sector.234 Nonetheless, Aadhaar has
enrolled more than 99% of the Indian population because enrollment
agents were paid to maximize enrollment across the country. The gov-
ernment has also made Aadhaar a key part of social service provisioning
including a monthly ration that over 800 million people get monthly and
has also pushed to link Tax ID numbers (called PANs). It is believed that
Aadhaar achieved some of the most impressive mixes of scale, inclusion
of marginalized communities and security of any identity scheme in the
world. The Aadhaar model has inspired the development of the Modu-
235
lar Open-Source Identity Platform (MOSIP) and its adoption in Asia
(e.g. Philippines, Sri Lanka) and Africa (e.g. Uganda, Morocco, Ethiopia).
To date, they have enrolled 100 million people. The MOSIP platform has
created a decentralized identity module, Inji236 , that gives those who de-
ploy it the ability to issue verifiable credentials into the wallets of resi-
dents/citizens enrolled in a given national system.

Partly inspired by this success, a group of technologists including OpenAI

Co-Founder Sam Altman and collaborators launched Worldcoin in 2019
with the aim of becoming the first globally universal biometric identity.237
ity of India in batches.
233
The official UIDAI site https://uidai.gov.in/en/
234
Read: Full Text of the Supreme Court’s Verdict in the Aadhaar Case. Of the
five judge-bench that delivered the verdict, three justices delivered separate opinions.
https://thewire.in/law/aadhaar-judgment-supreme-court-full-text
235
“Overview,” MOSIP, 2021, https://docs.mosip.io/1.2.0/overview.
236
Inji is a user-centric digital credential stack in MOSIP for all types of credentials and
identification solutions. https://docs.mosip.io/inji/
237
Elizabeth Howcroft, and Martin Coulter, “Worldcoin Aims to Set up

161
Using a propriety “orb”, they have scanned the irises of several million
people, almost exclusively in developing countries, to date. Harnessing
cryptography, they “hash” these scans so that they cannot be viewed or
recovered, but any future scan can be checked against them to ensure
uniqueness. They use this to initialize an account that they deposit units
of a cryptocurrency into. Their mission is to ensure that, as GFMs be-
come increasingly capable of imitating humans, there remains a secure
foundation for identity that could be used, for example, to distribute an
equal “universal basic income” to every person on the planet or to allow
participation in voting and other universal rights.

Despite this strong interest in these broad biometric systems, they have
important limits on their ability to establish and protect identities. Link-
ing such a wide variety of interactions to a single identifier associated
with a set of biometrics from a single individual collected at enrollment
(or registration) forces a stark trade-off. On the one hand, if (as in Aad-
haar) 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 ca-
pacity to surveil citizen activities across a wide range of domains and,
potentially, to undermine or target the identities of vulnerable popula-
tions.238 Activists have raised concerns over this issue have been repeat-
edly 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 bio-

metrics only to initialize an account, the system becomes vulnerable to
stealing or selling of accounts, a problem that has decimated the opera-
tion of related services.239 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 recog-
nized government, that they are a citizen of some country, and maybe
Global ID Network Akin to India’s Aadhaar,” Reuters, November 2, 2023,
https://www.reuters.com/technology/worldcoin-aims-set-up-global-id-network-akin-indias-
aadhaar-2023-11-02/.
238
It is worth noting, however, that if such systems are augmented with cryptogra-
phy such as Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs), they can partially protect the user’s pri-
vacy. Projects such as Anon-Aadhaar allow an Aadhaar user to selectively reveal only
a subset of information to some entity in a provable way. “Advancing Anon Aad-
haar: What’s New in V1.0.0,” Mirror, February 14, 2024, https://mirror.xyz/privacy-scaling-
explorations.eth/YnqHAxpjoWl4e_K2opKPN4OAy5EU4sIJYYYHFCjkNOE.
239
Ohlhaver et al., op. cit.

162
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 bur-
den on the technical performance of biometric systems. If eyeballs can,
sometime in the future, be spoofed by artificial intelligence systems com-
bined with advanced printing technology, such a system may be subject
to an extreme “single point of failure”.240 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 ⿻.

Starting from a very different place, another set of work on identity has
reached a similar challenging set of trade-offs. Work on “decentralized
identity” grew from many of the concerns about digital identity we have
highlighted above: fragmentation, lack of natural digital infrastructure,
issues with privacy, surveillance and corporate control. A key founding
document was Microsoft identity architect Kim Cameron’s “Laws of Iden-
tity” 241 , which emphasized the importance of user control/consent, min-
imal disclosure to appropriate parties, multiple use cases, pluralism of
participation, integration with human users and consistency of experi-
ence across context. Kim Cameron worked on developing the cardspace
242 243
system while at MSFT and this became the InformationCard stan-
dards. These did not get market adoption in part because they were too
early - smartphones were not widely adopted yet and the idea that this
device could hold a wallet for people.

The emergence of blockchain-distributed ledgers renewed interest in

the decentralized identity community on achieving individual control
over identifiers rather than being excessively tied to a single issue. This
spurred the creation of the Decentralized Identifiers (DID) standard at
the W3C that defines a way to have decentralized globally resolvable
endpoints with associated public keys.244 This creates a way to grant
240
Vitalik Buterin, “What Do I Think about Biometric Proof of Personhood?” July 24, 2023
at https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2023/07/24/biometric.html.
241
Kim Cameron, “7 Laws of Identity,” Kim Cameron’s Identity Weblog, August 20, 2009,
https://www.identityblog.com/?p=1065.
242
Wikipedia, “Windows CardSpace,” December 14, 2023,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_CardSpace.
243
Wikipedia, “Information Card,” January 25, 2024, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_card.
244
“Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) V1.0,” W3C, July 19, 2022, https://www.w3.org/TR/did-

163
individuals “ownership” over identities, rooted in “public” data reposito-
ries such as blockchains, and create standardized formats for a variety
of entities to issue digital credentials referencing these identifiers.

The systems have the flexibility to allow individuals to have multiple

accounts/pseudonyms. They also share a common practical challenge,
namely that for an individual to truly “own” their identity, they must ei-
ther control some ultimate key that gives them access to it and/or be able
to reliably recover that key without resorting to some higher, controlling
authority. Other than possibly biometrics (the problems with which we
discussed above), there is no widely agreed method to allow recovery
without a trusted authority and no example of keys that individuals have
been reliably able to self-manage in large, diverse societies.

Despite these common challenges, the details of these schemes vary dra-
matically, 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, ad-
vocates of “soulbound tokens” (SBTs) or other blockchain-centric identity
systems emphasize the importance of credentials that are public commit-
ments 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 de-
bate we see the unattractive trade-off between establishing and protect-
ing identities.

Identity as an intersection
Is there a way past this seemingly irreconcilable conflict, ensuring the
secure establishment and strong protection of identity without central-
ized surveillance? The natural answer draws on the tradition of ⿻ we
described in Connected Society and The Lost Dao: harnessing the ⿻
nature of identity and the potential of network architectures. Just as
packet switching reconciled and actually connected decentralization
and performance and hypertext reconciled speed with a diversity of
pathways through text, it seems increasingly plausible that, with the right
mix of experimentation and standards building, a ⿻ approach to identity
core/.

164
could reconcile the goals of establishing and protecting identities.

The basic idea can be understood perhaps most easily by contrast to bio-
metrics. Biometrics (e.g. iris scans, fingerprints, genetic information) is
a detailed set of physical information that uniquely identifies a person
and that in principle anyone with access to that person and appropriate
technology may ascertain. Yet people are not just biological but sociolog-
ical beings. Far richer than their biometric profile is the set of shared
histories and interactions they have with other people and social groups.
These may include biometrics; after all, anytime we meet someone in per-
son we at least partly perceive their biometrics, and they may leave traces
of others behind. But they are far from limited to them. Instead, they en-
compass all behaviors and traits that are naturally jointly observed in the
course of social interactions, including

• Location, as the very act of being together in a place implies joint

knowledge of others’ locations (which is the basis of alibis in foren-
sics) and most people spend most of their time in the detectable vicin-
ity of other.
• Communication, as it always has at least two participants.
• Actions, whether at work, play or workshop are usually performed
for or in the presence of some audience. As we quoted in our chapter
What is ⿻?, this is how Hannah Arendt defines “action”.
• Personality traits, which usually manifest in interactions with other
people. In fact, the way we think of others’ identities is usually pri-
marily in terms of such “sociometrics”: things we did with the per-
son, places we went together, things they did and ways they acted,
rather than primarily their appearance or biology.

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.245 While she focused primarily on the benefits of such
a system for feelings of personal agency (in the spirit of Simmel), the po-
tential benefits for the balance between identity establishment and pro-
tection are even more astonishing:
245
danah boyd, Faceted Id/entity: Managing Representation in a digital world 2002,
Masters Thesis for Program in Media Arts and Sciences at the Massachusetts Insti-
tute of Technology, available at https://www.media.mit.edu/publications/faceted-identity-
managing-representation-in-a-digital-world/.

165
• Comprehensiveness and redundancy: ’Jointly, these data cover al-
most everything meaningful there is to know about a person; the
great majority of what we are is determined by various interactions
and experiences shared with others. For almost anything we might
want to prove to a stranger, there is some combination of people
and institutions (typically many) who can “vouch” for this informa-
tion without any dedicated strategy of surveillance. For example, a
person wanting to prove that they are above a particular age could
call on friends who have known them for a long time, the school
they attended, doctors who verified their age at various times as
well, of course, on governments who verified their age. Such ⿻ at-
tribute verification systems are fairly common: when applying for
some forms of government identification many jurisdictions allow
a variety of attribute-proving methods for addresses including bank
statements, utility bills, leases, etc.
• Privacy: Perhaps even more interestingly, all of these “issuers” of
attributes know this information from interactions that most of us
feel consistent with “privacy”: we do not get concerned about the
co-knowledge of these social facts in the way we would surveillance
by a corporation or government. However, we will be more precise
in the next chapter about the sense in which these (should/could)
approaches allay privacy concerns.
• Progressive authentication: While standard verification by a single
factor allows the user to gain confidence in the attested fact/attribute
equal to their confidence in the verifying party/system, such ⿻ sys-
tems allow a wide range of confidence to be achieved by drawing on
more and more trusted issuers of attributes. This allows adaptation
to a variety of use cases based on the security they require.
• Security: ⿻ also avoids many of the problems of a “single point of
failure”. The corruption of even several individuals and institutions
only affects those who rely on them, which may be a very small part
of society, and even for them, the redundancy described above im-
plies they may only suffer a partial reduction in the verification they
can achieve. This is particularly important given the potential risks
(as mentioned above) to e.g. biometric systems from advances in AI
and printing technology. Given the basis of other verification meth-
ods above are much more diverse (a range of communicative acts,

166
 physical encounters, etc.) the chances of these all failing based on a
particular technological advance are far less likely.
• Recovery: This approach also offers a natural solution to one of the
most challenging problems above: the recovery of lost credentials.
As noted there, recovery typically relies on interactions with a sin-
gle, powerful entity that can investigate the validity of a claim to an
account; alternatives based on giving individuals full “ownership”
are usually highly susceptible to hacking or other attacks. Yet a natu-
ral alternative would be for individuals to rely on a group of relation-
ships allowing, for example, 3 of 5 friends or institutions to recover
their key. Such “social recovery” has become the gold standard in
many Web3 communities and is increasingly being adopted even
by major platforms such as Apple.246 As we will explore in a later
chapter, more sophisticated approaches to voting could make such
an approach even more secure by ensuring that distinct parts of an
individual’s network who are unlikely to cooperate against her in-
terest would together be able to recover her credentials, something
we call “community recovery”.247

The above benefits are remarkable when compared to the trade-offs de-
scribed above. But essentially they are fairly simple extensions of the ben-
efits we discussed in The Lost Dao that ⿻ structures generally have over
more centralized ones, the benefits that motivated the move to packet
switching architectures for communications networks in the first place.
This is why some of the leading organizations seeking to achieve a future
like this, such as the Trust over IP Foundation, draw tight analogies to the
history of the creation of the internet protocols themselves. There are of
course many technical and social challenges in making such a ⿻ system
work:

• Inter-operation: Making such a system work would obviously re-

quire a very wide range of present identity and information systems
to interoperate while maintaining their independence and integrity.
Achieving this would obviously be a herculean task of coordination,
but it is fundamentally a similar one to that underlying the internet
246
Vitalik Buterin, “Why We Need Broad Adoption of Social Recovery Wallets”, January 11,
2021 at https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2021/01/11/recovery.html.
247
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.

167
 itself.
• Complexity: Managing and processing trust and verification rela-
tionships with such a diversity of individuals and institutions is
beyond the capacity of most people or even institutions. Yet there
are several natural approaches to addressing this complexity. One
is to harness the growing capacity of GFMs, trained to adapt to the
relationships and context of the individual or institution using the
model, to extract meaning from such diverse signals; we discuss
this possibility extensively in a later chapter on Adaptive Adminis-
tration. Another approach is to limit the number of relationships
any individual or institution has to manage and rely on either
institutions of medium size (e.g. medium businesses, churches, etc.)
that play intermediary roles (which Jaron Lanier and one of us
have called “mediators of individual data or MIDs) or on”friends
of friends” relationships (which we call “transitive trust”) which
are known to connect, within a small number of links (roughly
six), almost any two people on earth.248 We will discuss the appeal,
trade-offs and compatibility between these two approaches below.
• Trust at a distance: Another closely related problem is that many
of the natural verifiers for strangers we meet may be people who
we do not know ourselves. Here again, some combination of using
transitive trust and MIDs as we discuss shortly is natural. Currency,
as we will discuss in a later chapter of this part of the book, may also
play a role here.
• Privacy: Finally, while most people would feel comfortable with
the recording of information from the natural flow of social events
above, the sharing of it for verification could pose important privacy
issues. Such information is meant to stay in the natural flow of so-
cial life and a great deal of care is required to ensure any use of it
for identity verification does not violate these norms of “contextual
integrity”. Addressing this challenge is the focus of the next chapter,
as we discuss at the end of this one.
248
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. Duncan J. Watts and Steven
H. Strogatz, “The Collective Dynamics of ‘Small World’ Networks” Nature 393 (1998): 440-
442.

168
⿻ identity
How can we manage the complexity and social distance involved in ⿻
identity systems? We will return in a future chapter to the potential role
of GFMs. Focusing instead on firmly network-based approaches, the two
natural strategies correspond to the two types of networks that in The
Lost Dao we recounted internet pioneer Paul Baran imagining: “decen-
tralization” (also called “polycentrism”, which we will use), where there
are many verifiers of significant size but not so many as to create over-
whelming complexity, or “distribution”, where there are few larger-scale
verifiers and we instead use transitive trust to span social distances.249
A basic heuristic that is useful to keep in mind in considering all these
possibilities is the “Dunbar number”. This is the number (usually around
150) of people that an anthropologist, Robin Dunbar, argued people could
maintain stable relationships with absent significant information technol-
ogy.250 Whatever the precise number is, it seems clear most people cannot
manage more than a few hundred relationships, evaluation of reputation,
etc. without significant technological assistance.

The polycentric approach tries to manage this problem by limiting the

number of players. While this obviously limits ⿻ some, it is not a ma-
jor problem as long as participants maintain a reasonable diversity of
affiliations. Suppose, for example, that we have a population of 10 bil-
lion, and each person maintains 100 relationships with potentially veri-
fying institutions (e.g. governments, churches, employers etc.). Suppose
that to have a reasonable chance for verification to work, any two-person
meeting must share at least 5 overlapping memberships. If memberships
are randomly distributed, 300 verifiers could co-exist and still allow the
chance that verification fails for any random pair of individuals to be one
in several million. Of course, individuals who meet are rarely random nor
do they form their affiliations randomly, nor are 5 overlapping member-
ships likely to be absolutely necessary for most interactions, especially
among people meeting randomly. All of these suggest many more veri-
fiers could thrive in such an environment of ⿻ memberships.

Yet this number would clearly be far smaller than the population size,
249
Cameron, op. cit.
250
R.I.M. Dunbar, “Neocortex Size as a Constraint on Group Size in Primates”, Journal of
Human Evolution 22, no. 6 (1992): 469-493.

169
perhaps around 100,000, the number with the property that goes into 10
billion 100,000 times. This would be vastly more ⿻ than our current iden-
tity landscape, allowing a far better trade-off between autonomy/control
and functionality/security. But is even more possible?

One of the most important discoveries in quantitative sociology is that,

despite Dunbar-like limits, by traversing a few degrees of separation
most humans are connected to each other. To see how this is possible,
suppose that each of us can only maintain 100 relationships. This
would imply that we might have 100^2=10,000 second-degree relation-
ships, 100^3=1,000,000 third-degree relationships, 100^4=100,000,000
fourth-degree relationships and 100^5=10,000,000,000 fifth-degree rela-
tionships, greater than the global population. Thus it is entirely possible
that each of us could be within 5 degrees of separation from every other
person on the planet. Given that some of these relationships will, at any
level, overlap, the number of degrees of separation should be somewhat
larger: most sociological studies have found roughly 6 degrees of separa-
tion between any two randomly chosen people.251 Furthermore, at least
if one goes to chains of 7, there are usually many mostly independent
chains of social connection between any two people.

Furthermore, the idea of establishing relationships, information and

validity through transitive chains is ancient and common. It lies behind
the concept of an introduction, the game “telephone” (which emphasizes
some of its limitations) and the popular professional social network
LinkedIn. Finding and managing the many possible chains of introduc-
tions between socially distant people clearly requires some technical
support, but nothing much greater than has already been shown pos-
sible by computer science research where it is known as the classical
“maximum flow” problem. The problem is actually quite similar to that
underlying the packet switching that powers the internet.

Furthermore, the decentralized and distributed strategies can be com-

bined to greatly amplify each other. To take a simple example, consider
our suggestion above that there might be 100,000 issuers of attributes. In
a world of 10 billion, each would have to be managing relationships with
100,000 participants, on average. If they were also able to manage a sim-
251
Watts and Strogatz, op. cit.

170
ilar number of relationships with other issuers, every issuer would have
a direct relationship with every other issuer. Two degrees of separation
could do far more, allowing millions of issuing organizations to thrive un-
der the same logic that can leverage the attributes from other issuers to
do verification. Thus a mixture of transitive trust and polycentrism can
quite easily allow, even without any of the magic of GFMs we discuss be-
low, a highly ⿻, and thus both functional and private, identity landscape.

Identity and association

The key question that then remains is whether the process of such ⿻ so-
cial verification would end up undermining the protection of identities.
After all, a core part of why we have such a dysfunctional identity land-
scape is that liberal democratic polities have resisted the creation of iden-
tity systems is precisely this fear. If we are to build better alternatives, we
need to ensure they are better most of all along this dimension. Yet, to do
so requires us to dig deeper into what precisely “privacy” and “control”
mean from a ⿻ perspective.

As we noted above, almost everything relevant about us is known by oth-

ers and is typically just as much about them as us. None of us feels this
bare fact as an infringement on privacy. In fact, erasing the memory of
our first kiss from the mind of the partner to that kiss would be just as
much a violation of privacy as would one of us sharing that information
inappropriately. What we are after, therefore, is not well-described by
the term “privacy”. It is about information remaining in the social set-
ting for which it was intended, what leading privacy scholar Helen Nis-
senbaum calls “contextual integrity”.252 In fact, it requires a certain kind
of publicity: if information is not shared and understood by those for
whom it is intended this can be as damaging as if information is over-
shared. Given that these are inherently social settings, furthermore, they
are not primarily about individual choice or protection, but rather the
protection of groups of people against violations of their collective norms
about information. In short, the central problems are about another fun-
damental right: the freedom of association. In essence, systems support-
252
Helen Nissenbaum, “Privacy as Contextual Integrity”, Washington Law Review 119
(2004): 101-139.

171
ing and implementing the right of personhood must simultaneously bol-
ster the freedom of association and the dual challenge of establishing and
protecting associations parallels those in the identity context.

4-2 Association and ⿻ Publics

As the cacophony of war reverberated through the narrow streets of the
Middle Eastern city, a relentless barrage of gunfire and the ghostly dance
of flames cast a shroud over the metropolis, with a blackout plunging
nearly half of it into fear-strewn darkness. The digital backbone of
the city, once a beacon of interconnected brilliance, lay in tatters—
government databases lay in ruin, communications networks severed
by skilled enemy hacks, leaving the city’s guardians grappling for any
remaining strategies to wrest back control from the chaos.

Amidst the chaos, the hope of an entire nation rested on a group of hack-
ers. They were the last bastions of defense, the last guardians. This decen-
tralized group convened a hackathon aptly named “Guard.” Faisal was
one of them. In a world in chaos, the group’s unwavering determination
and skill had made them a beacon of hope.

Slipping on his headset, he activated his assistive agent, establishing an

untraceable internet address. He turned on the privacy option of his dig-
ital wallet, showcasing his proof of citizenship and a myriad of creden-
tials from hackathons gone by. Such precautions had become essential in
these dark times.

As Faisal entered the “Guard” interface, it seemed just like any other on-
line chatroom. The anonymity was palpable, as no one spoke or even
typed a message. All that could be seen were silent avatars represent-
ing participants. But the difference lay in its secure foundation, which
stopped anyone in the room from showing its contents to those outside
while ensuring everyone there had heard exactly what was said in this
last bastion of hope.

The host, the only voice in the silent room, began, “Several introductions
and ground rules are about to show on your screen. Each of you will be
asked questions to confirm your presence.” A warning followed, high-

172
lighting the risk of expulsion for non-compliance or suspicion.

Soon, a virtual Roman soldier appeared on screen, laying out the grand
vision of “Guard”—to construct a decentralized defense system for the dig-
ital city. Faisal quickly went through the questions, and upon returning to
the main room, found that only half of the initial participants remained.
This filtering process seemed to break the ice, as the room came alive with
chatter.

Wasting no time, the guardians began their mission. Faisal, with his exper-
tise, was naturally drawn to the power grid security group. But their con-
versation was interrupted by a sudden ring. Faisal picked up the phone,
and the voice from the other side rushed, “Have you gotten anything? We
need the rest of the power grids down.”

The urgency in the voice was palpable. Faisal replied, “I can’t find a se-
cretive way in. The security is covered by the protocols. I can formally
request access, but everyone must agree.” He continued, “If even one par-
ticipant objects, I might receive a copy, but I won’t be able to discern if it’s
authentic.”

“Is there no way to duplicate the original code?” the voice asked, desper-
ation evident.

“I’ll keep trying,” Faisal promised.

In his classic summary of his observations of Democracy in America,

French aristocrat and traveler Alexis De Toqueville highlighted the cen-
trality of the civic association to American self-government “Nothing…is
more deserving of our attention than the intellectual and moral associa-
tions of America.” Furthermore, he believed that such associations were
necessary for political action and social improvement because equality
across individuals had rendered large-scale action by individuals alone
impossible: “If men are to remain civilized…the art of associating to-
gether must grow and improve in the same ratio in which the equality of
conditions is increased.”253
253
Alexis De Tocqueville, Democracy in America, (Lexington, Ky: Createspace, 2013), also
available at https://www.gutenberg.org/files/815/815-h/815-h.htm.

173
No individual has ever, alone, made political, social or economic change.
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.

The potential of computers and networking to facilitate such association

was the core of Lick and Taylor’s vision of “The Computer as Communi-
cation Device”: “They will be communities not of common location, but
of common interest.”254 In fact, as of this writing the online version of
the popular English dictionary Merriam-Webster defined an association
precisely this way: “an organization of persons sharing a common inter-
est”.255 Given their shared goals, beliefs, and inclinations, Lick and Tay-
lor believed these communities would be able to achieve far more than
pre-digital associations. The only challenge the authors foresaw was that
of ensuring that “ ‘to be on line’…be a right” rather than “a privilege”.
Much of this vision has, of course, proven incredibly prescient as many
of today’s most prominent political movements and civic organizations
formed or achieved their greatest success online.256

Yet, perhaps paradoxically, there is an important sense in which the rise

254
Joseph Licklider, and Robert Taylor, “The Computer as a Commu-
nication Device,” Science and Technology, April 1968, also available
at https://internetat50.com/references/Licklider_Taylor_The-Computer-As-A-
Communications-Device.pdf.
255
See https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/association.
256
Japanese philosopher Kojin Karatani explores this concept in his book “The Principle
of NAM.” Karatani argues that individuals belong not only to geographical regions but also
to global “regions” based on their interests. He calls this the “rhizomatic association” and
depicts it as a network formation system consisting of diverse “regions.” This concept re-
sembles the network structure where small, closely-knit communities are interconnected.
Kojin Karatani (2000). “NAM 原理” 太田出版 (Published in Japanese. Not translated in En-
glish). In this year Karatani founded the New Associationist Movement in Japan. It was an
anti-capitalist, anti-nation-state association inspired by experiments with Local Exchange
Trading Systems.

174
of the internet has actually threatened some of the core features of free
association. As Lick and Taylor emphasized, forming an association or
community requires establishing a set of background shared beliefs, val-
ues and interests that form a context for the association and communica-
tion within it. Furthermore, as emphasized by Simmel and Nissenbaum,
it also requires protecting this context from external surveillance: if indi-
viduals believe their communications to their association are being mon-
itored 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.

The internet, while enabling a far broader range of potential associations,

has made the establishment and protection of context more challenging.
As information spreads further and faster, knowing who you are speaking
to and what you share with them has become challenging. Furthermore,
it has become easier than ever for nosy outsiders to spy on associations
or for their members to inappropriately share information outside the
intended context. Achieving Lick and Taylor’s dream, and thus enabling
the digital world to be one where ⿻ associations thrive, requires, there-
fore, understanding informational context and building ⿻ systems that
support and protect it.

Therefore, in this chapter, we will outline a theory of the informational

requirements for association. Then we will discuss existing technologies
that have begun to aid or could aid in the establishment of context and
in its protection. We will then highlight a vision of how to combine these
technologies to achieve not privacy or publicity but rather “⿻ publics”,
the flourishing of many associations of common understanding protected
from external surveillance, and why this is so critical to supporting the
other digital rights.

Associations
How do people people form “an organization of persons sharing a com-
mon interest”? Clearly, a group of people who simply happen to share an
interest is insufficient. People can share an interest but have no aware-
ness of each other, or might know each other and have no idea about
their shared interest. As social scientists and game theorists have recently

175
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”.

To motivate what this means to a game theorist, it may be helpful to con-

sider why simply sharing a belief is insufficient to allow effective common
action. Consider a group of people who all happen to speak a common sec-
ond language, but none are aware that the others do. Given they all speak
different first languages, they won’t initially be able to communicate eas-
ily. Just knowing the language will not do them much good. Instead, what
they must learn is that the others also know the language. That is, they
must have not just basic knowledge but the “higher-order” knowledge
that others know something.257

The importance of such higher-order knowledge for collective action is

such a truism that it has made its way into folklore. In the classic Hans
Christian Andersen tale of “The Emperor’s New Clothes”, a swindler fools
an emperor into believing he has spun him a valuable new outfit, when
in fact he has stripped him bare. While his audience all see he is naked,
all are equally afraid to remark on it until a child’s laughter creates un-
derstanding not just that the emperor is naked, but that others appreciate
this fact and thus each is safe acknowledging it. Similar effects are famil-
iar from a range of social, economic and political settings:

• Highly visible statements of reassurance are often necessary to stop

bank runs, as if everyone thinks others will run, so will they.258
• Denunciations of “open secrets” of misdeeds (e.g. sexual miscon-
duct) often lead to a flood of accusations, as accusers become aware
that others “have their back” as in the “#MeToo” movement.259
• Public protests can bring down governments long opposed by the
population, by creating common awareness of discontent that trans-
257
That common knowledge is precisely the foundation of context against which commu-
nication must optimize is elegantly formally proven by Zachary Wojowicz, “Context and
Communication” (2024) at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4765417.
258
Stephen Morris and Hyun Song Shin, “Unique Equilibrium in a Model of Self-Fulfilling
Currency Attacks”, American Economic Review 88, no. 3 (1998): 587-597.
259
Ing-Haw Cheng and Alice Hsiaw, “Reporting Sexual Misconduct in the #MeToo Era”,
American Economic Review 14, no. 4 (2022): 761-803.

176
 lates to political power.260

Mathematically, “common knowledge” is defined as a situation where a

group of people know something, but also know that all of them know
it, and know that all of them knows that all of them knows it and so on
ad infinitum. “Common belief” (often quantified by a degree of belief) is
when a group believes that they all believe that they all believe that… A
great deal of game theoretic analysis has shown that such common belief
is a crucial precondition of coordinated action in “risky collective action”
situations like the above where individuals can accomplish a common
goal if enough coordinate but will be harmed if they act without support
from others.261

While the common beliefs of a group of people are obviously related to

the actual shared beliefs of their average members, they are conceptually
distinct. We all know of examples when some “conventional wisdom”
or norm persisted even though, individually and privately, almost every-
one in a group disagreed with it; in fact, it was precisely this observation
that led economist J.K. Galbraith to coin the idea of “the conventional wis-
dom”.262 Furthermore, we can use this notion of community to refer not
just to beliefs about facts, but also moral or intentional beliefs. We can
think of a “common belief” (in the moral sense) of a community as being
things that everyone believes everyone else holds as a moral principle
and believes everyone else believes that everyone holds, etc. Similarly,
a “common goal” can be something everyone believes others intend and
believes everyone believes everyone intends and so on. Such “common
beliefs” and “common intentions” are important to what is often called
“legitimacy”, the commonly understood notion of what is appropriate.263

In game theory, it is common to model individuals as collections of in-

tentions/preferences and beliefs. This notion of community gives a way
to think about groups similarly and distinctly from the individuals that
make them up, given that common beliefs and intentions need not be the
260
Timur Kuran, Private Truth, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsifica-
tion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).
261
Stephen Morris and Hyun Song Shin, “Social Value of Public Information”, American
Economic Review 92, no.5 (2002): 1521-1534.
262
John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1958).
263
Vitalik Buterin, “The Most Important Scarce Resource is Legitimacy” March 23, 2021 at
https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2021/03/23/legitimacy.html.

177
same as those of the individuals that are part of that group (on average):
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 se-
crets 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. As such, privacy from external surveillance
or internal over-sharing is just as critical as is establishing associations to
their freedom.

It is little surprise, then, that many of the historical technologies and

spaces that come to mind when we think of the freedom of association
are precisely geared toward achieving common beliefs and shielding
common beliefs from external beliefs from outsiders. Searching, in the
imagery online or the writings of political philosophers, for “freedom of
association” typically yields images of protests in public spaces, meetings
in public spaces like parks and squares and group discussions in private
clubs.264 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 obser-
vation, 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.

But purely public spaces have important limitations: they do not allow
groups to form their views and coordinate their actions outside the
broader public eye. This may undermine their cohesion, their ability
to present a united face externally, and their ability to communicate
effectively harnessing an internal context. This is why associations so
often have enclosed gathering places open only to members: to allow
the secrecy that Simmel emphasized as critical to group efficacy and
264
Pragmatist political philosophy Richard Rorty wrote “We can urge the construction of a
world order whose model is a bazaar surrounded by lots and lots of exclusive private clubs.”
Richard Rorty, “On ethnocentrism: A reply to Clifford Geertz” Michigan Quarterly Review 25,
no. 3 (1986): 533.

178
cohesion.265 The crucial question we thus face is how systems of network
communication can offer the brave new world of “communities of inter-
est” these same or even more effective affordances to create protected
common beliefs.

Establishing context
To the extent parks and squares are the site of protest and collective
action, we might well search for a digital public square, a function
many platforms have purported to serve.266 Sites on the original World
Wide Web offered unprecedented opportunities for a range of people
to make their messages available. But as Economics Nobel Laureate
Herbert Simon famously observed, this deluge of information created a
paucity of attention.267 Soon it became hard to know if, who and how
one was reaching an audience with a website and proprietary search
systems like Google. Proprietary social networks like Facebook and
Twitter became the platforms of choice for digital communication, but
only partly addressed the issue as they had limited (and usually pay-for)
affordances for understanding audiences. The digital public square had
become a private concession, with the CEO of these companies proudly
declaring themselves the public utility or public square of the digital
age while surveilling and monetizing user interactions through targeted
advertising.268

A number of recent efforts have begun to address this problem. The

World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) published Christine Lemmer Web-
ber and Jessica Tallon’s ActivityPub standard as a recommendation to
enable an open protocol for social networking that has empowered
open systems like Mastodon to offer federated, decentralized services
similar to Twitter to millions of people around the world. Twitter itself
recognized the problem and launched the BlueSky initiative in 2019
265
George Simmel. “The Sociology of Secrecy and of Secret Societies.” American Journal of
Sociology 11, no. 4 (January 1906): 441–98. https://doi.org/10.1086/211418.
266
Eli Pariser, “Musk’s Twitter Will Not Be the Town Square the World Needs”, WIRED Oc-
tober 28, 2022 at https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-twitter-town-square/.
267
Herbert Simon, Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World (Baltimore, MD:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971): pp. 37-52.
268
danah boyd, “Facebook is a utility; utilities get regulated” May 15, 2010 at
https://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2010/05/15/facebook-is-a-utility-utilities-get-
regulated.html.

179
which rapidly gained attention after the acquisition of Twitter (now
X under his leadership) by Elon Musk. Philanthropist Frank McCourt
has invested heavily in Project Liberty269 and its Decentralized Social
Networking Protocol as another, blockchain-based foundation for decen-
tralized networking. While it is hard to predict exactly which of these
will flourish, how they will consolidate and so forth, the recent struggles
of X combined with the diversity of vibrant activity in this space suggests
the likelihood of cooperation and convergence on some open protocol
for usable digital publication.

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 cer-
tainly 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 identifi-
able 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.

One of the most interesting potential solutions to address this challenge

in recent years has been distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) including
blockchains. These technologies maintain a shared record of information
and append something to this record only when there is “consensus” (suf-
ficient shared acknowledgment of the item to be included) that it should
be. This has led cryptographers and game theorists to conclude that DLTs
hold special promise in creating common beliefs among the machines on
which they are stored.270 Arguably this is why such systems have sup-
ported coordination on new currencies and other social experiments.

Yet even such community among machines does not directly imply it
among the people operating these machines. This problem (from the
perspective of creating community) is exacerbated by the financial
incentives for maintaining blockchains, which lead most participants,
motivated by financial gain, to run “validator” software rather than
269
Frank McCourt, and Michael Casey, Our Biggest Fight: Reclaiming Liberty, Humanity, and
Dignity in the Digital Age, (New York: Crown, 2024).
270
Joseph Y. Halpern and Rafael Pass “A Knowledge-Based Analysis of the Blockchain Pro-
tocol” (2017) available at https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.08751.

180
monitor activity directly. This also implies those participating are likely
to be whoever can profit, rather than those interested in common, non-
commercial action. Nonetheless one can imagine, as we will below, DLTs
being an important component of a future infrastructure of association.

Protecting context
If establishing context is primarily about creating strong social notions of
publicity, protecting context is about strong social notions of privacy. And,
just as with technologies of publicity, those of privacy have primarily been
developed in a more atomistic monist direction than in ones that support
⿻ sociality.

The field of cryptography has long studied how to securely and pri-
vately transmit information. In the canonical “public key cryptography”
scheme, individuals and organizations publish a public key while pri-
vately holding its controlling counterpart. This allows anyone to send
the holder an encrypted message that can only be decrypted by their
private key. It also allows the key controller to sign messages so that
others can verify the authenticity of the message. Such systems are
the foundation of security on the internet and throughout the digital
world, protecting email from spying, and allowing end-to-end encrypted
messaging systems like Signal and digital commerce.

Building on top of this foundation and branching out from it, a number
of powerful privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) have been developed
in recent years. These include:

• Zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs)- these allow the secure proof of a fact

without leaking the underlying data. For example, one might prove
that one is above a particular age without showing the full driver’s
license on which this claim is based.
• Secure multi-party computation (SMPC) and homomorphic encryp-
tion- These allow a collection of individuals to perform a calculation
involving data that each of them has parts of without revealing the
parts to the others and allow for the process to be verified both by
themselves and others. For example, a secret ballot can be main-

181
 tained while allowing secure verification of election results.271
• Unforgeable and undeniable signatures- These allow key controllers
to sign statements in ways that cannot be forged without access to
the key and/or cannot be denied except by claiming the key was com-
promised.272 For example, parties entering into a (smart) contract
might insist on such digital signatures just as physical signatures
that are hard to forge and hard to repudiate are important for ana-
log contracts.
• Confidential computing- This solution to similar problems as above
is less dependent on cryptography and instead accomplishes similar
goals with “air gapped” digital systems that have various physical
impediments to leaking information.
• Differential privacy- This measures the extent to which disclosures
of the output of a computation might unintentionally leak sensitive
information that entered the calculation.273 Technologists have de-
veloped techniques to guarantee such leaks will not occur, typically
by adding noise to disclosures. For example, the US Census is legally
required both to disclose summary statistics to guide public policy
and keep source data confidential, aims that have recently been
jointly satisfied using mechanisms that ensure differential privacy.
• Federated learning- Less a fundamental privacy technique than a so-
phisticated application and combination of other techniques, feder-
ated learning is a method to train and evaluate large machine learn-
ing models on data physically located in dispersed ways.274

It is important to recognize two fundamental limitations of these tech-

niques that depend most on cryptography (especially the first three);
namely that they depend on two critical assumptions. First, keys must
remain in the possession of the desired person, a problem closely related
271
Josh Daniel Cohen Benaloh, Verifiable Secret-Ballot Elections, Yale University Disserta-
tion (1987) at https://www.proquest.com/openview/05248eca4597fec343d8b46cb2bef724/1?pq-
origsite=gscholar&cbl=18750&diss=y.
272
David Chaum and Hans van Antwerpen, “Undeniable Signatures” Advances in Cryptol-
ogy – CRYPTO’ 89 Proceedings 435: 212-216 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/0-387-
34805-0_20.
273
Cynthia Dwork, Frank McSherry, Kobbi Nissim and Adam Smith, “Calibrating Noise to
Sensitivity in Private Data Analysis”, Theory of Cryptography (2006): 265-284.
274
Brendan McMahan, Eider Moore, Daniel Ramage, Seth Hampson and Blaise Aguera y
Arcas, “Communication-Efficient Learning of Deep Networks from Decentralized Data” Pro-
ceedings of the 20th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (2017).

182
to the identity and recovery questions we discussed in the previous
chapter. Second, almost all cryptography in use today will break and
in many cases its guarantees be undone by the advent of quantum
computers, though developing quantum-resistant schemes is an active
area of research.

Furthermore, these technical solutions increasingly intersect and inte-

grate with a range of technical standards and public policies that support
privacy. These include cryptographic standards set by governments,
privacy regulations and rights such as the EU General Data Protection
Regulation and standards for the inter-operation of encryption.

Yet a basic limitation of almost all this work is the focus on protecting com-
munication from external surveillance rather than from internal over-
sharing. Preventing external snooping is obviously the first line of de-
fense, but anyone who followed the saga of US National Security Agency
leaker Edward Snowden knows that internal moles and leaks are one of
the most important threats to information security. While military intel-
ligence is the most dramatic example, the point stretches much further,
especially in the internet age. Increasingly common phishing attacks rely
on social engineering, not the ability of the attacker to “crack the code.”
As highlighted in works ranging from danah boyd’s classic study It’s Com-
plicated to Dave Eggers’s book and film The Circle, the ease of credibly
sharing digital information has made the danger of over-sharing a con-
stant threat to privacy.275

The basic problem is that while most cryptography and regulation treat
privacy as about individuals, most of what we usually mean when we talk
about privacy relates to groups. After all, there is almost no naturally
occurring data that pertains to exactly a single individual. Let’s revisit
some of the examples of the social life of data from the previous chapter.

• Genetic data: genes are, of course, significantly shared in a family,

implying that the disclosure of one individual’s genetic data reveals
things about her family and, to a lesser extent, about anyone even
distantly related to her. Related arguments apply to many medical
data, such as those related to genetic conditions and transmissible
275
danah boyd, It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 2014). Dave Eggers, The Circle (New York: Knopf, 2013).

183
 diseases.
• Communications and financial data: communications and transac-
tions are by their nature multiparty and thus have multiple natural
referents.
• Location data: few people spend much of their time physically dis-
tant from at least some other person with whom they have common
knowledge of their joint location at that moment.
• Physical data: There are many data that are not personal to anyone
(e.g. soil, environmental, geological). One of the only truly individ-
ualistic data are the bureaucratically created identifying numbers
created as part of identity schemes deliberately for the purpose of
being individualistic, and even these actually pertain not to the indi-
vidual alone but to her relationship to the issuing bureaucracy.

This implies that in almost every relevant case, unilateral disclosure of

data by an individual threatens the legitimate privacy interests of other
individuals.276 Protecting privacy therefore requires protecting against
unilateral over-sharing. This has generally been thought essentially im-
possible to externally enforce, as anyone who knows something can share
that information with another. Strategies have thus primarily focused on
norms against over-sharing, gossiping and the like, tools to aid individu-
als in remembering what they should not share, attempts to make it hard
to secretly over-share and policies to punish ex post facto those who do
engage in oversharing. All of these are important strategies: literature,
media and everyday experience are full of shaming for over-sharing and
enforcement against leakers. Yet they fall far short of the guarantees en-
forced by cryptography, which does not merely condemn snoops but locks
them out of systems.

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 cryp-
tographic technique is “designated verifier proofs” (DVPs) which prove
276
danah boyd, “Networked Privacy” June 6, 2011 at https://www.danah.org/papers/talks/2011/PDF2011.html.
Daron Acemoglu, Ali Makhdoumi, Azarakhsh Malekian and Asu Ozdaglar, “Too Much Data:
Prices and Inefficiencies in Data Markets” American Economic Journal: Microeconomics 14,
no. 4 (2022): 218-256. Dirk Bergemann, Alessandro Bonatti and Tan Gan, “The Economics
of Social Data” The RAND Journal of Economics 53, no. 2 (2022): 263-296.

184
authenticity only to a single recipient while appearing potentially forged
to everyone else.277 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.

Yet most types of information are harder to independently and immedi-

ately verify. Even the location of buried treasure requires significant re-
sources to pursue and dig up, otherwise the many adventure stories about
such would not be nearly as interesting. 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 individ-
ual 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.

⿻ publics
If properly combined in a new generation of networking standards, a com-
bination of these tools could give us the capacity to move beyond the su-
perficial traditional divide between “publicity” and “privacy” to empower
true freedom of association online. While we usually think of publicity
and privacy as a one-dimensional spectrum, it is easy to see that another
dimension is equally important.

Consider first information “hidden in plain sight”, lost in a pile of irrel-

evant 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 concen-
trated common understanding v. diffuse availability.

This example illustrates why “privacy” and “publicity” are far too simplis-
277
Markus Jakobsson, Kazue Sako and Russell Impagliazzo, “Designated Verifier Proofs and
Their Appliations”, Advances in Cryptology–EUROCRYPT ’96 (1996): 143-154.

185
tic concepts to describe the patterns of co-knowledge that underpin free
association. While any simple descriptor will fall short of the richness we
should continue to investigate, a more relevant model may be what else-
where we have called “⿻ publics”. ⿻ 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 coex-
ist. 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 communi-
cations.278

Luckily, in recent years some of the leaders in open standards technolo-

gies 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. A growing group of researchers in the Web3
and blockchain communities are working on combining these with
privacy technologies, especially ZKPs.279

One of the most interesting possibilities opened by this research is achiev-

ing formal guarantees of combinations of common knowledge and the
impossibility of disclosure. One could, for example, create ledgers dis-
tributed among members of a community group using DVPs. This would
create a record of information that is common knowledge to this commu-
nity and ensure this information (and its status as common knowledge)
could not be credibly shared outside this community. Additionally, if the
protocol’s procedure for determining “consensus” relied on more sophis-
ticated voting rules than at present such as those we describe in our chap-
ter on voting below, it might instantiate richer and more nuanced notions
278
Jain Shrey, Zoë Hitzig, and Pamela Mishkin, “Contextual Confidence and
Generative AI,” ArXiv (New York: Cornell University, November 2, 2023),
https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2311.01193. 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/.
279
Elena Burger, Bryan Chiang, Sonal Chokshi, Eddy Lazzarin, Justin
Thaler, and Ali Yahya, “Zero Knowledge Canon, Part 1 & 2,” a16zcrypto,
September 16, 2022, https://a16zcrypto.com/posts/article/zero-knowledge-
canon/.https://a16zcrypto.com/posts/article/zero-knowledge-canon/.

186
of common knowledge than present ledgers.

Furthermore, all the space around these topics is suffused with work on
standards: for cryptography, blockchains, open communications proto-
cols like Activity Pub, etc. It therefore does not require great stretches
to imagine these standards converging on a dynamically evolving but
widely accepted technical notion of an “association” and therefore
broadly observed standards enabling associations online to form and
preserve themselves. Such a future could enshrine a right to digital
freedom of association.

Association, identity and commerce

In 1995, one of De Tocqueville’s most prominent heirs, political scientist
Robert Putnam, began documenting the decline of American civic life
starting in the 1960s in his essay “Bowling Alone”. He attributes this to
a corresponding reduction in participatory community associations such
as fraternal organizations, religious groups and parent teacher associa-
tions, leading to his quip that there are more people bowling and fewer
bowling leagues. He argues that the decrease in associative behavior di-
rectly affects the development of social capital and trust which “facilitate
coordination and cooperation for mutual benefit.”280

Putnam addresses several possible reasons but focuses in particular on

television and the “privatizing” of our leisure time, noting that “television
has made our communities … wider and shallower.” His essay preceded
the modern Internet but we might import into his argument a phrase
from our contemporary digital lives: there’s an app for that. A challenge
then for the extraordinary reach of 21st century digital technology is the
harnessing of that power to form meaningful communities and deeper
social interactions. Strong community engagement also cultivates robust
civic discourse where social and political problems can be hashed out by
constituent citizens.

Digital freedom of association is tightly connected to the other freedoms

we discuss in this part of the book. As we saw in the previous chapter,
280
Robert Putnam, “Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital,” Journal of Democ-
racy 6, no. 1 (1995): 65–78 and Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Commu-
nity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000).

187
“privacy” is at the core of the integrity of identity systems yet concerns
usually labeled as such are more appropriately connected to the diversity
of contexts an individual navigates rather than privacy in an individual-
istic sense. Thus, the right to freedom of association and the right to the
integrity of personhood are inseparable: if it is our entanglement in a di-
versity of social groups that creates our separateness as a person, it is only
by protecting the integrity of that diversity that separate personhood is
possible. And, of course, because groups are made up of people, the oppo-
site is true as well: without people with well-articulated identities, there
is no way to create groups defined by common knowledge among these
persons.

Furthermore, the right of free association is the foundation on which com-

merce and contracts are built. Transactions are among the simplest forms
of association and how digital transaction systems can replicate the pri-
vacy that is often touted as a core benefit of cash depends intimately on
who can view what transactions at what resolution. Contracts are more
sophisticated forms of association and corporations even more so. All rely
heavily on information integrity and common understandings of obliga-
tions. In this sense, the freedom of association we outlined in this chapter,
together with identity in the last, are the linchpins for what follows in the
rest of the book.

4-3 Commerce and Trust

The ambient hum of excitement echoed through the open air, punctu-
ated by distant laughter and chatter. Local families had gathered once
more for the beloved retro cinema night—a tradition deeply cherished in
this community. Like a canvas of memories, families, lovers, and teens
lounged on camping chairs, ready to relive moments from an old movie
under the vast expanse of the starlit sky.

Amidst the seasoned attendees was Zvi, standing out with an air of nov-
elty. New to town and having only recently taken up a teaching position
at the local school, he was keen to mingle and partake in community fes-
tivities. Grasping a bag of chips he intended to share, he joined the queue,
absorbing the unique spirit of the evening.

188
“Thank you for your street art contributions,” a voice echoed from the
front. Zvi turned his attention to the ticketing booth. Charity event? I
wasn’t aware, he thought, slightly puzzled.

“I would love us to watch Rogue Stardust.” Zvi craned his neck and caught
sight of a familiar face, a student from his school, proudly flaunting her
school hoodie.

That’s unexpected, he mused.

His musings were interrupted as he overheard another exchange,

“Ma’am, which movies would you like to choose for tonight, you have
several votes from your nursing home and community work.”

A gentle, elderly voice responded, “I’d prefer Whispers in the Void and
The Last Alchemist, if you don’t mind.”

“Thank you for your contributions, ma’am.” the man at the booth re-
sponded, his tone courteous.

Soon, it was Zvi’s turn. The man at the booth had an aura of tranquility,
reminiscent of a seasoned surfer. His warm smile was contagious.

“Good evening, sir! If you’d like, you can tap your phone here to share
your community experiences. It’s completely optional but a nice way for
us to acknowledge everyone’s contributions to our town,” the attendant
offered, gesturing towards a small, unobtrusive screen on the counter.

Zvi, intrigued yet cautious, queried, “And what happens if I do? Just curi-
ous about privacy and all.”

“Of course, privacy is key. This device simply displays public community
messages and thank-you notes on our local community app. It’s the same
info anyone can see on the app. Think of it as a digital way of saying
thanks and sharing positive vibes,” the attendant explained, his tone re-
assuring.

Zvi, feeling at ease with the explanation, decided to participate. He tapped

his phone on the device, and the screen lit up, displaying a colorful array
of thank-you messages and fun emojis from local residents, acknowledg-
ing his recent help with community projects.

Smiling at the warm messages, Zvi replied, “That’s a nice touch. Makes

189
you feel part of something special.”

“Exactly! And as a part of our community, you get to suggest a movie for
tonight. What would you like to add to the lineup?” the attendant asked,
his eyes twinkling with friendliness. “Also, thank you for taking the time
to help my sister’s child after school that day; it truly made a difference
for her family.”

The warmth of acceptance spread through Zvi as he realized he had been

welcomed. With a nod of heartfelt thanks, he made his way to a comfort-
able nook within the gathering, sharing his crackers with the delighted
children nearby.

Beneath a sky speckled with stars, against a backdrop laden with memo-
ries, Zvi watched as his cherished film began to play. In this moment, he
was enveloped by the profound sense of community—where he was not
merely a spectator, but an integral thread woven into the vibrant tapestry
of collective memories and experiences.

It’s a testament to the commercial nature of the contemporary world

that none of the protocols we discuss in this section have received nearly
the attention in media and policy as new approaches to facilitating
payment and commerce. Cryptocurrencies have been one of the focal
technologies of the last decade. But only slightly less heralded and far
more broadly adopted have been a range of government and other public
payments innovations including instant payment technologies using gov-
ernment identities in places like [India] (https://www.npci.org.in/what-
we-do/upi/product-overview), Brazil and Singapore, central bank digital
currencies (CBDCs), and regulated inter-operable digital payment sys-
tems like those used in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). While they
are far from universally adopted or interoperable, a new generation of
payment systems is increasingly prevalent in the lives of many people
around the globe, making payment in digital spaces increasingly as easy
or easier than what cash facilitated in the past.

Yet, in many ways, the relatively rapid success of these efforts is a symp-
tom of what is so disappointing about their progress so far. Cash is per-
haps one of the “dumbest” technologies of the pre-digital era: it is a sin-

190
gle, homogeneous substance transmitted between roughly anonymous,
abstracted accounts. While it has proven far harder to replicate this ba-
sic function, and thus recent advances are important, this is not a rev-
olutionary technique enabled by digital technology as, for example, hy-
pertext improved on what had been possible in previous writing. In this
chapter, we will summarize progress thus far, discuss the limitations of
traditional money compared to higher aspirations for commerce online,
and discuss ways to build on recent advances to allow a more ⿻ vision of
digital commerce.

Traditional payments
While the early history of money has been the subject of a great deal of
recent research, to which we will return below, most people associate the
idea with currency in the form of tokens or notes that pass from one hand
to another and view other forms of money as abstractions of this more ba-
sic concept. This form of “money of exchange” dates back to the early civ-
ilizations of Babylon, India and China and in the first millennium BC was
increasingly based on precious metals like bronze, silver and gold.281 The
durability, scarcity and wide belief in the value of these metals facilitated
broad acceptance of them in payment for a range of goods and services.

Yet none of these properties pertain exclusively to precious metals

and their use as currency detracted from more practical applications,
whether to weapons, machinery or decorations. This led many societies
to move away from the direct use of precious metals to other represen-
tations of their value that could be made scarce but had no direct use,
including commercial receipts, bank notes and government-issued paper
that was deemed “legal tender” and thus mandated to be accepted for its
face value.

Closely connected was the development of banks, which held currency

and other valuables that they promised to return on demand, using these
deposits to fund lending to others. Because banks are rarely simultane-
ously called on to return the full set of deposits, they began to lend out
more than they had on deposit, giving rise to a system of “fractional re-
serve banking” and making banks a source of the creation of new money.
281
Glyn Davies, A History of Money (Cardiff, UK: University of Wales Press, 2010).

191
While the obvious dangers of a bank run this creates are not a topic we
have space to focus on here, they created a natural role for “central banks”
to help control this process of money creation and avoid banking col-
lapses.

By the early twentieth century, the overwhelming majority of money was

held as accounts, rather than currency (paper or otherwise). Given its
rigid denominations and bulk, currency is only effective for relatively
small transactions. In parallel to, and arguably earlier than currency, di-
rected transfers between bank accounts with flexible denominations de-
veloped, typically called “cheques” today. By the mid-twentieth century,
these had become the dominant (by aggregate value) method of funds
transfer. Cheques came, and come, in a variety of forms, some more re-
liant on information exchanges across banks and others operating more
similarly to cash (unconditional and undirected value transfers).

Cheques, of course, have familiar disadvantages of being slow to both fill

out and in order to clear must be sent around physically. Beginning in the
late nineteenth century, some stores began to issue tokens representing
“credit accounts” for regular customers and utopian writers like Edward
Bellamy began to imagine a world where all payments could be conducted
using one or a few lightweight cards.282 In 1928, Charga-Plate, an early
predecessor of the credit card, began operations.283 Over the following
three decades, the use of cards to “buy now, and pay later” gradually ex-
panded first through the airline industry and later through dining.284

In 1958, Bank of America launched the BankAmericard, which would be-

come the first successful recognizably modern credit card, which was
eventually licensed to other banks around the United States and then
around the world.285 This system was computerized in 1973 under the
282
Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward (Boston, Ticknor & Co., 1888).
283
It was a 64 mm × 32 mm rectangle of sheet metal related to Addressograph and military
dog tag systems. It sped up back-office bookkeeping and reduced copying errors that were
done manually in paper ledgers in each store.
284
In 1934 American Airlines offered an Air Travel Card, passengers could “buy now, and
pay later” for a ticket against their credit and receive a fifteen percent discount at any of
the accepting airlines. By the 1940s, all of the major U.S. airlines offered Air Travel Cards
that could be used on 17 different airlines. The concept of customers paying different mer-
chants using the same card was expanded in 1950 by Ralph Schneider and Frank McNamara,
founders of Diners Club, to consolidate multiple cards.
285
Bank of America chose Fresno because 45% of its residents used the bank, and by send-
ing a card to 60,000 Fresno residents at once, the bank was able to convince merchants to

192
leadership of Dee Hock, the first CEO of Visa, allowing reduced transac-
tion time, with magnetic strips easing processing. In 1976, all BankAmeri-
card licensees united themselves under the common brand Visa, orga-
nized as a bank consortium to manage networks of agreements between
banks. During the 1980s, electronic merchant terminals allowed for in-
creasingly wider and faster acceptance of the cards, further accelerated
in the 2000s when chips and PINs were widely added.

Cheque clearing systems began to leverage database and telecommu-

nications networks in the 1970s with the development of Automated
Clearing Houses (ACHs). These process large volumes of credit and debit
transactions between accounts at banks in batches on a net settlement
basis. This system supports government payments to people (employees,
pensioners) Employer payments to employees, business-to-business
payments, consumer-to-bank payments (mortgages) and other such
transactions made from one bank account to another. The first ACH,
BACS began operation in the UK in 1968, in the US the first one, oper-
ated by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco began processing
transactions in 1972. By 2012 there were 98 ACH systems.286

This acceleration of electronic transfers led banks themselves to consider

how to transfer money internationally and in 1973 they came together to
form the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication
(SWIFT), a co-operative they all own and manage. SWIFT is a carrier of
messages containing the payment instructions between financial institu-
tions involved in a transaction”.287 . By 2018 messages about half of all
288
high-value cross-border payments went through its network.

Until roughly the last decade, this constellation covered most trans-
actions. A mix of cash and payment cards were used for small value
transactions in physical proximity and wires were used to send money
abroad, while larger value transactions flowed primarily over ACHs
and to a lesser extent wires and cheques. All these systems predate the
accept the card.
286
“Global Payment Systems Survey (GPSS),” World Bank, January 26, 2024.
https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/financialinclusion/brief/gpss#:~:text=The%20Global%20Payment%20Systems%20Survey%
287
Susan Scott, and Markos Zachariadis, The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial
Telecommunication (Swift): Cooperative Governance for Network Innovation, Standards, and
Community, (New York, NY: Routledge), pp. 1, 35, doi:10.4324/9781315849324.
288
Martin Arnold, “Ripple and Swift Slug It out over Cross-Border Payments,” Financial
Times, June 6, 2018, https://www.ft.com/content/631af8cc-47cc-11e8-8c77-ff51caedcde6.

193
emergence of the internet and none of them match its reach, pace or
flexibility: payment cards were traditionally cumbersome and insecure
to use online, cash irrelevant and ACHs far too slow (typically 3 days).
Unsurprisingly, therefore, Lick, Tim Berners-Lee, Nelson and others
believed a native payment system was one of the core features missing
from the early development of the Internet. The last decade and a half
has seen a variety of attempts to address this lacuna.

Digital money and privacy

**

Figure 4-3-A. An early implementation of Bitcoin code. Source:

Wikipedia, public domain.

**

One of the first and the most attention-grabbing of these was the emer-
gence of Bitcoin in 2008 and later a range of other “cryptocurrencies”
in the 2010s.289 These systems used DLTs, like those we discussed in the
289
Satoshi Nakamoto, “Bitcoin: A Peer-To-Peer Electronic Cash System” (2008)
at https://assets.pubpub.org/d8wct41f/31611263538139.pdf. Vitalik Buterin,
“A Next-Generation Smart Contract and Decentralized Application Platform”
(2014) at https://finpedia.vn/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/Ethereum_white_paper-

194
last chapter, paired with internally generated financial structures to cre-
ate a validated substrate for tracking transactions. First, instead of an
identity system based on accounting for human participants, they used
protocols to prove control over some resource (such as “proof of work”
protocols based on solving a puzzle that requires access to powerful com-
puters) to protect against predatory participants. This created an effec-
tive financial screen for participation. On the other hand, they rewarded
“honest” participants (those whose recording of transactions matches oth-
ers’) with “coins” created by including transactions to their own accounts.
The ledger was otherwise openly available to any participant, creating a
global, purely financial ledger with pseudonymous accounts that allowed
individual people to potentially have many different identitifiers.

The early success of Bitcoin inspired attention and interest for at least
three reasons:

1. It seemed to fill the lacuna in the digital payments space mentioned

above, allowing relatively easy cross-border transfers.
2. It was one of the first examples of a large-scale and “important” (car-
rying real financial consequences) online application without a cen-
tralized identity and permissioning system.
3. Because of its financial structure and scarcity, it was possible for the
value of the coins to rapidly appreciate, which they did over several
stretches in the following decade and a half, creating great fortunes,
speculation and interest.

While many governments and mainstream business actors recognized

the importance of the first point, they saw decentralization as largely su-
perfluous or wasteful and the speculation around cryptocurrencies as a
frivolous and potentially destabilizing bubble. This spurred a number of
efforts to re-imagine payment systems for the digital age. The most am-
bitious efforts were “central bank digital currencies”, which have been
launched or piloted in dozens of countries, especially in Africa and Asia
and are being explored in many others. These most directly respond to
the cryptocurrency trend by creating digital, currency-like claims on the
central banks.
a_next_generation_smart_contract_and_decentralized_application_platform-vitalik-
buterin.pdf.

195
Yet while holding and trading of currency has become a defining image
for many people in recent decades, the accounts above and below suggest
this may be a bit of an anomaly in human history. As highlighted by media
scholar Lana Swartz in New Money, commerce has depended more on the
communication of, and the partially local accounting for, obligations.290
It is thus perhaps not terribly surprising that some of the most widely
adopted innovations in payments in the last decade have taken the form
of changes to processing and account transfers, rather than the creation
of “currency” per se.

This realization interestingly parallels the development of one of the first

major means of online payment, the services of the company that came
to be known as PayPal. PayPal was originally conceived by founders
Max Levchin, Luke Nosek and Peter Thiel as a new digital currency, but
quickly moved to become an internet-compatible payments processor.291
Following the early growth of Bitcoin, many other private, rapid and low-
cost processors entered the market. These included Square and Stripe
(targeting businesses) and Venmo (targeting more casual individual-
to-individual transactions) all of which were founded in the US in the
years immediately following the launch of Bitcoin. Perhaps even more
impressive was the rapid spread of very low-cost social payments in the
PRC through WeChat Pay and in the rest of Asia through Line Pay. These
were rapidly followed by a range of similar services facilitated by the
largest technology platforms in the West, such as Apple, Amazon and
Google.

Seeking to bring these services at lower cost and more inclusively espe-
cially in markets incompletely served by these US and PRC-based services,
several major developing-world governments have created publicly sup-
ported instant payment services, including Singapore’s FAST system in
2014, Brazil’s Pix system in 2020 and India’s Unified Payments Interface
in 2016. Even the US has followed with FedNow in 2023. While there are
still significant impediments to international inter-operation, there is an
increasing consensus that the immediate gap in making instant payments
290
Lana Swartz, New Money: How Payment Became Social Media (New Haven, CT: Yale Uni-
versity Press, 2020).
291
Today’s PayPal was a merger of the original PayPal with X.com, founded by Elon Musk,
Harris Fricker, Christopher Payne and Ed Ho, the name of which is now being revived by
Musk as the successor to Twitter.

196
online and in person through digital channels has been met.

Yet the challenges raised by cryptocurrencies cannot be laid to rest quite

so easily, as suggested by the resilience of interest and recent currency val-
ues in the space. The decline of cash, heralded by defenders of sanction
regimes and battlers against financial criminals like economist Kenneth
Rogoff, has been bemoaned by privacy advocates and civil libertarians,
who argue that the collapse of private payments will have systemic effects
individual users fail to account for when choosing how to pay.292 The oft-
touted privacy benefits of Bitcoin have largely proven illusory given that
it has become increasingly easy for well-resourced analysts to uncover
the controllers of pseudonymous accounts.293 However, interest in pri-
vacy technology has become a primary focus in the space, stimulating
the development of highly private currencies like Zcash and “mixer” ser-
vices like Tornado cash on top of other currencies. These have stimulated
controversy over the trade-offs between privacy and legal accountabil-
ity, leading to forceful government actions to shut down various privacy
features in some jurisdictions. These conflicts have also been at the root
of the challenges of achieving seamless international inter-operation for
digital payments systems, as countries fight over who can surveil and reg-
ulate what activity.

Many of these challenges arise from the same kinds of misspecification of

issues usually labeled “privacy” that we highlighted in our identity chap-
ter. There is wide agreement, on the one hand, that financial transactions
should be protected from inappropriate surveillance. On the other hand,
there is a similarly wide agreement that, with appropriate checks and
balances, it should be possible to hold individuals and organizations ac-
countable for facilitating criminal activity. The question of how these can
be reconciled is essentially the same as those we addressed in the previ-
ous chapter: how can a diversity of informational communities partially
interoperate while maintaining their integrity?

After all, financial transactions can never be purely private: they always
292
Kenneth S. Rogoff, The Curse of Cash (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016).
293
Alyssa Blackburn, Christoph Huber, Yossi Eliaz, Muhammad S. Shamim, David Weisz,
Goutham Seshadri, Kevin Kim, Shengqi Hang and Erez Lieberman Aiden, “Cooperation
Among an Anonymous Group Protected Bitcoin during Failures of Decentralization” (2022)
at https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.02871.

197
involve several parties and are at least partly detectable by others in a
community where the inflow of transactions affects the economic envi-
ronment. The goal, then, is not privacy as much as it is contextual in-
tegrity: ensuring that this information stays within the affected commu-
nity unless it is having important and widely recognized spillover effects
on other communities (precisely what fiduciary duties, financial and busi-
ness ethics and, when necessary, law enforcement is meant to capture).
And, if it is, it is the community’s responsibility to either ensure their
culture is not supporting such externally harmful activity or to defend
their right to support it if the external claim is unjust.294 The essence of
⿻ “checks and balances” is that the communities involved must become
partly aware and involved in such external surveillance, rather than it
being asymmetrically and externally imposed.

Yet surveillance is only the beginning of responsibilities that communities

of various kinds, ranging from lending circles to nations, would have to
take on to create such contextually appropriate financial freedom. Little
surveillance is mere voyeurism. Instead, it is intended to prevent a range
of financial crimes, from fraud to trading with aggressors against inter-
national law (sanctions). Beyond such dramatic transgressions, a range
of transactions legitimately matter for people other than the transacting
parties: sales of drugs and weapons, taking on unreported debts that bur-
den someone’s ability to repay other debts, taxable sales, and much more.
All this suggests why the anonymous and unaccountable image of cash
and centralized control by a government of accounts are both insufficient
ways to understand a ⿻ system of commercial trust.

History and limits of currency

Imagining a more ⿻ alternative brings us back to the history of money
and why it evolved in the first place. In his account of the institution,
the late anthropological historian David Graeber articulated the view of
many of the leading scholars of money such as R. G. Hawtrey, Geoffrey In-
gham, L. Randall Wray and Samuel A. Chambers to argue that long before
294
Recently, interest in explicitly creating communities for such purposes has grown in
the Web3 world. Vitalik Buterin, Jacob Illum, Matthias Nadler, Fabian Schär and Ameen
Soleimani, “Blockchain Privacy and Regulatory Compliance: Towards a Practical Equilib-
rium” Blockchain: Research and Applications 5, no. 1 (2024): 100176.

198
money, societies engaged in a range of mutually beneficial collaboration
under norms of reciprocity.295 These were rarely quantified in terms of
formal “value” and followed a range of logics beyond simple bilateral fa-
vor trading. For example, the community services of a hunter for a village
or an elder might put the community in general in their “debt”, making
gifts to them customary. The richness and diversity of these traditions
made their quantification unnatural, but also hard to extend beyond the
Dunbar number we discussed in the Identity and Personhood chapter of
roughly 150 close associates.

As collaboration and exchange extended across larger distances, times

or groups, quantification and recording of debts owed and value given
became necessary to manage the complexity. While it seems that the ear-
liest such accounts attempted to record the specifics of a debt in terms of
the good or service offered, this similarly became quickly unmanageable
and common units of quantification were used to simplify accounting and
produce the first notions of “currency”. Media of exchange, banks, and
their notes and various of the other forms of money we discussed above
grew as ways of making these accounts more portable. “Credit” thus was
more primary than “cash”.

But if currency arose as a simplification to deal with the limits of pre-

modern information technology, the natural question is whether one
might do much better today. Recording more about transactions and
other forms of value creation is not just possible today; it is a routine part
of most electronic commerce. Reducing all this to a transfer of money is
no longer a necessary simplification, it is a projection of an antiquated
historical ritual.

Nor is the role of money as a solvent in socially long-distance trust par-

ticularly relevant today. One of the most common stories economists tell
for the advantage of money-based exchanges is “the double coincidence
of wants”: Person A may have something B wants, but the other may not
have anything to directly offer in exchange. Money allows them to easily
offer goods or services to C, who may have something A wants, without
295
David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, (Brooklyn: Melville House, 2014). See also
Ralph Hawtrey, Currency and Credit, (London, Longmans, 1919); Larry Randall Wray, and Al-
fred Mitchell Innes, Credit and State Theories of Money: The Contributions of A. Mitchell Innes,
(Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2014); and Samuel Chambers, Money Has No Value, (Berlin:
Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG, 2023).

199
having to assemble the full group. Yet the role of money in avoiding the
need for such “trading cycles” is dated: in fact, economists today regularly
use “trading cycles” algorithms directly in a variety of contexts without
relying on money, given that modern computation makes them cheap to
perform.296

Similarly, as we noted in the Identity and Personhood chapter, it may once

have been necessary to offer someone in a distant land a widely valued
token, such as gold, instead of a promise to offer a gift in the future, given
the low likelihood of a future exchange. Yet such shorthand is far less im-
portant today: with everyone within six degrees of social separation and
the accounting for relational trust computationally trivial, today it would
be almost as easy to harness interpersonal “debts” in chains of relation-
ships directly as to transfer funds.

A natural question is whether harnessing these new capabilities adds any-

thing meaningful. While we will reserve a detailed discussion of applica-
tions of ⿻ commerce and trust to the next part of this book, it is not hard
to imagine why such information is important in appropriately allocating
the trust and influence that money confers. Someone who has conferred
many small benefits across a local community, but interacted little out-
side of it, and is single has a very different profile of appropriate social
favor than someone who is deeply devoted to their family and profession
but has few extra-familial social connections in a large city. These two
may deserve the same “degree” of social esteem (if quantifying such is
even useful), but the esteem is of very different kinds. The former, for
example, would be a far more plausible civic or political leader in her
community, while the latter would naturally be entitled to professional
esteem and a degree of material comfort.

Furthermore, the very economic theory that typically justified the rele-
vance of money confirms this intuition, when applied to social reality.
Under certain well-studied conditions, money held by individuals suffices
to track value creation. But these conditions require that all goods are
private (everything can be consumed by one individual and others’ con-
suming it prevents them from doing so) and production is “submodular”,
296
Alvin E. Roth, Tayfun Sönmez and M. Utku Ünver, “Kidney Exchange”, Quarterly Journal
of Economics 119, no. 2 (2004): 457-488.

200
meaning that combining a group of people or assets produces less than
the sum of what they could produce separately (the whole is less than the
sum of the parts). If, on the other hand, consumption is at least partly
social and production may be super-modular, money is a poor or even
hopeless way to keep track of value.

An open-source software (OSS) project is an example. Collaboration

among multiple individuals often creates greater value than individual
actions alone. It is a supermodular production. And the resulting
products are replicated and provide utility to many people. It is social
consumption. In these situations, money-based management does not
function well. Consider a scenario where two individuals collaborate
to create value and both actions are necessary. There is no simple or
obvious way to divide any value created among these contributors; the
value created is fundamentally joint. Furthermore, if the two partici-
pants could engage in multiple possible joint projects, which to prioritize
depends on the preferences of both, making choices fundamentally
collective, decisions that require logic closer to that of voting than
commerce.297

More broadly, in practice, as sociologists have extensively documented,

social influence does in practice work in these richer ways. People vote,
gain esteem and authority, and develop reputations in a range of contexts:
a doctor’s lab coat, the standing of an athlete, awards for prestigious aca-
demic papers, etc. All of these are sources of influence and command def-
erence from those who regard them highly, allowing the bearer of these
marks of status to achieve things someone without them could not.

Of course, these systems are not entirely separate from the commercial
sphere: reputations for leadership, nobility, or skill can (sometimes) be
monetized by, for example, advertising against or charging for access to
the person holding the prestige or by using trust to establish a commer-
cial enterprise harnessing it. But none of these conversions are simple
or linear, and, in fact, if one is seen to directly “sell” one’s social stand-
ing such as “selling out” or “corruption”, it can quickly undermine that
standing. Clearly, therefore, the simplest ideas of “sales” and “conver-
297
Divya Siddarth, Matthew Prewitt, and Glen Weyl, “Supermodular,” The Collective Intel-
ligence Project, 2023. https://cip.org/supermodular.

201
sion” are not effective ways to allow money to inter-operate with these
other “symbolic media”. This makes money nearly useless as a way to
quantify, make transparent and scale these other systems. The question,
then, is how more ⿻ systems of value might overcome this limitation, a
question to which we now turn.

⿻ money
While there has been a great deal of excitement about the decentraliza-
tion of cryptocurrencies, there is an important sense in which any cur-
rency that aspires to universality is inherently highly centralized: it cre-
ates trust and cooperation by everyone ascribing value to the same thing.
A more ⿻ approach can, as in our Identity and Personhood chapter, fol-
low either a decentralized/polycentric or distributed structure in a way
that roughly parallels our ideas there.

In a polycentric structure, instead of a single universal currency, a variety

of communities would have their own currencies which could be used in
a limited domain. Examples would be vouchers for housing or schooling,
scrip for rides at a fair, or credit at a university for buying food at vari-
ous vendors.298 These currencies might partially interoperate. For exam-
ple, two universities in the same town might allow exchanges between
their meal programs. But it would be against the rules or perhaps even
technically impossible for a holder to sell the community currency for
broader currency without community consent.299 In fact, it was the pro-
liferation of experiments with various currencies, some of them with sim-
ilar intentions, that inspired then-Bitcoin Magazine writer Vitalik Buterin
to conceive Ethereum as a platform for such experimentation, though
challenges with secure identities have limited community currency ex-
periments as they make it too easy to sell an account and thus circumvent
controls on prohibited transfers.300

Such a community currency played a central role in the creation of this

298
An early example of community currencies are Local Exchange Trading Systems (LETS)
by Michael Linton in 1983. He later visited Kojin Karatani’s home, which sparked the New
Associationist Movement.
299
For more elaboration of this idea, see https://www.radicalxchange.org/concepts/plural-
money/.
300
Ohlhaver, Weyl and Buterin, op. cit.

202
book. We used it to measure contributions and to allow contributors to
make collective decisions on prioritizing and approving changes to the
text in a manner we will discuss later in this book. However, we did not
use some of the most sophisticated potential approaches, harnessing the
tools from the last chapter. For example, in the future community curren-
cies might be recorded on contextually integral chains that make it hard
for currency holders to use the currencies more broadly by preventing
them from showing others outside the community how much they hold.

A distributed approach would go farther than even a large collection of

community currencies, replacing currencies entirely with direct repre-
sentations of interpersonal debt and trust. In such a system, rather than
receiving payment for a good or service, people would effectively “call in a
favor” from someone who owes one to them. If you need something from
someone who does not owe you a favor, you would leverage the principle
of six degrees of separation in the network of “favors owed”, as discussed
in the Identity chapter. Many potential paths of such favors could be cal-
culated and the total amount of “credit” one can get would be computed
by classical computer science algorithms for calculating the “maximum
flow” (maxflow) that can flow between two points in a network. While
such calculations are obviously impractical for people to make on the
fly when they want to buy a coffee, they are trivial for a computer net-
work. Supporting such richer, socially-grounded alternatives to quantify-
ing value primarily through universally fungible currency seems increas-
ingly within reach, with various social currencies (of likes, friends, net-
work centrality, citations, etc.) illustrating first examples of what could
become a far richer substrate for future cooperation.301

Of course, this will only be possible with the support of widely adopted
protocols, ones that facilitate the formation and validation of community
ledgers extending those discussed in the previous chapter and/or ones
that facilitate long-distance, networked transmission of trust and “debt”
in the way TCP/IP did packets of information. These are the aspirations
of open source and internet working committees like the aforementioned
Trust Over IP Foundation and start-up ventures like Holochain. Beyond
301
Nicole Immorlica, Matthew O. Jackson and E. Glen Weyl, “Verifying Identity as a Social In-
tersection” (2019) at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3375436. E. Glen
Weyl, Kaliya Young (Identity Woman) and Lucas Geiger, “Intersectional Social Data”, Radi-
calxChange Blog (2019) at https://www.radicalxchange.org/media/blog/2019-10-24-uh78r5/.

203
the important work of establishing basic, high-quality digital native pay-
ments systems, it is this next generation of truly networked and ⿻ sys-
tems of commercial trust systems that can underpin the ⿻ markets and
cooperation we discuss in much of the rest of this book.

Commerce in a ⿻ society
Establishing trust, credit and value across long social distances lies at the
core of both the identity systems we described previously and the sys-
tems of contracting and asset use that we focus on in the next chapter.
Identity systems are about trusting/credit claims made by someone about
a third party. Anyone who accepts an arbitrary number of such claims
from someone they do not know well exposes themselves to potentially
devastating attacks. On the other hand, accepting some claims about rel-
atively unimportant matters from a less trustworthy source is not too
risky. The trust established by a network of verifiers in an identity sys-
tem is thus quantitative and thus depends on the quantification of trust,
and consequences for betraying this trust, in networks, precisely the sort
of system we described here. At the same time, these systems clearly de-
pend on the technologies of identity and association we developed in the
previous chapters, to underpin the definition and information structures
of the communities and people who form the network of commercial re-
lationships described here. And, as we will now explore, all are critical
to joint use, contracting over and enterprise harnessing the critical as-
sets of the digital age: computation, storage and data. These ideas should
be of particular interest to African communities in which trust-based ⿻
and open-source social systems, interacting with mobile and digital tech-
nologies, indigenously invented the concept of mobile money, and set the
pace for Africa’s burgeoning fintech industries302 even as the continent
grapples with identification system gaps303 .
302
Omoaholo Omoakhalen, “Navigating the Geopolitics of Inno-
vation: Policy and Strategy Imperatives for the 21st Century
Africa,” Remake Africa Consulting, 2023, https://remakeafrica.com/wp-
content/uploads/2023/12/Navigating_the_Geopolitics_of_Innovation.pdf.
303
“The State of Identification Systems in Africa.” World Bank Group, 2017,
https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/5f0f3977-838c-5ce3-
af9d-5b6d6efb5910/content.

204
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vice captures the topography, transforming it into a dynamic, magi-
cal world within the game. This means your real-world adventures
directly expand the game’s virtual territory, for all players.

3. Forge Connections, Discover Riches: “Yusha” introduces a novel

twist to classic gaming mechanics by not randomly dispersing
treasures throughout the game map. Instead, these treasures are
hidden within the storage of the players’ devices, and can only
be discovered through engaging in social interactions with fellow
players. These interactions vary widely and include activities like
embarking on joint quests, healing a fellow player, crafting weapons
for others, or simply engaging in conversation and listening to their
stories. The method to unlock these treasures remains a mystery,
not even known to the players themselves. The only way forward
is to persist in fostering genuine connections with others, reflecting
the cooperative essence reminiscent of the legendary Dragon Quest

205
 adventures.

4. Guarded Realms: Information regarding your device, location, and

surroundings, along with your in-game actions, are thoroughly safe-
guarded by advanced privacy technologies. The enchanting realm
of Yusha is crafted from the players’ exploration of the real world.
We transfigure these physical environments into resplendent moun-
tains and gleaming golden cities, ensuring that your actual location
remains confidential.

5. Live the Adventure: “Yusha” is designed to augment your reality,

not just serve as a virtual escape. Your dedication and exploration
in the real world directly empower your Yusha and expand your
virtual realm. True to the spirit of Dragon Quest, the treasures of
our game lie in the connections you make and the adventures you
embark upon, both virtually and physically.

Join the ranks of Vasana’s adventurers where fantasy and reality blend
into an epic saga. When you invest not just your time, but also the com-
puting resources of your device, the physical effort exerted in traversing
the real world, and the genuine intent to forge authentic connections,
the world of Yusha transforms into a realm that is profoundly immersive
and interactive. This convergence of digital and physical efforts brings
the game’s environment to life, enriching the gaming experience with a
unique depth and realism that encourages a deeper sense of engagement
and community among players.

Embark on the Adventure, The Vasana Team

Most large-scale cooperation today takes place through the pooling of as-
sets into entities that are considered chartered as corporations, including
limited liability partnerships, civic organizations, religious organizations,
trade associations, unions, and of course, for-profit stock corporations.
Their legal basis is in contractual arrangements that govern a sharing of
assets (real, intellectual, human and financial) in a common undertaking
towards a shared purpose. Even the simplest, most common, and smallest
scale contracts, such as rental agreements, involve the sharing of assets
across people.

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A core aim of Lick’s “Intergalactic Computer Network” was to facilitate the
sharing of digital assets, such as computation, storage and data. And, in
some ways, such sharing is the heart of today’s digital economy, with “the
Cloud” providing a vast pool of shared computation and storage and the
wide range of information shared online forming the foundation of the
generative foundation models (GFMs) that are sweeping the technology
industry. Yet for all the success of this work, it is confined to limited slices
of the digital world and controlled by a small group of highly profitable,
for-profit entities based in at most a handful of countries, creating both
tremendous waste of opportunity and concentration of power. The dream
that the internet could enable broad and horizontal asset sharing remains
a dream.

As with the other fundamental protocols we have discussed in this part

of the book, there have been significant recent efforts to address these
gaps. In this chapter, we will review the potential of digital asset sharing
and survey existing digital asset sharing efforts. We will highlight the
accomplishments and limitations of the existing efforts and sketch a path
towards a robust and ⿻ online asset-sharing ecosystem.

Assets in the digital age

As highlighted perhaps most dramatically in Kate Crawford’s beautifully
drawn Atlas of AI, the digital world is built on top of the physical world:
computer circuits are made from rare metals mined with all the ensuing
social challenges, data centers work much like and are often co-located
with power plants, data is created by people like the “ghost workers” docu-
mented by Mary Gray and Siddarth Suri etc.304 Any serious account of the
digital realm must thus grapple with real property relations. Yet there are
crucial assets that emerge from these physical substrates as digital-native
abstractions and that are the crucial components of life online.

We will focus on three categories that are most ubiquitous: storage, com-
putation and data. Yet there are many other examples that intersect with
these and have many related challenges, including the electromagnetic
304
Kate Crawford, Atlas of AI (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2022). Mary Gray,
and Siddhath Suri. Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Un-
derclass. (Boston: Houghton Miffilin Harcourt, 2019).

207
spectrum, code, names and other addresses (e.g. Uniform Resource Lo-
cator/URLs), “physical” space in virtual worlds and non-fungible tokens
(NFTs).

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).

While land, fuel, labor and capital are often treated as homogeneous
“commodities”, as social theorist Karl Polanyi famously argued this is
a simplifying fiction.305 Storage, computation and especially data are
heterogeneous, tied to places, people and cultures and these connections
affect both their performance characteristics and the social impacts and
meanings of using them in a digital economy and society. While these
challenges are significant for fictitious commodities “in real life”, in
some ways they are even more severe for digital assets and at the very
least societies have had far less time to jointly adapt economic and social
structures around them. These challenges are among the key inhibitors
to a functional digital system of sharing, property and contract.

The Intergalactic Computer Network

Lick’s 1963 “Memorandum For Members and Affiliates of the Intergalactic
Computer Network” did not focus on the potential for online socialization
or commerce that characterized so much of his contemporary and later
writing.306 Instead, perhaps because of his scientific audience at the time,
he emphasized the potential for scientists to massively increase their pro-
ductivity through computer networks by sharing analytic tools, memory,
storage, computation, research findings and the promise this might have
305
Polanyi, op. cit.
306
Licklider, “Memorandum for Members and Affiliates of the Intergalactic Computer Net-
work”, op. cit.

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for related military applications. This was also a natural extension of the
“time-sharing” systems that were one of the first projects Lick funded and
aimed to allow a semblance of what would become the “personal com-
puting” experience in the era of large mainframe computers by allowing
many users to share access to a larger machine’s capacity. In this sense,
the internet began, above all, as a platform for precisely the sort of large-
scale computational resource sharing that we focus on in this chapter.307

To appreciate why such an apparently dull topic excited such an (other-

wise) expansive mind, it is useful both to look back from today at the lim-
its he was trying to overcome and forward to the limits we might, in de-
livering on his vision, overcome ourselves. During the 1950s and 1960s,
the dominant paradigm of computing was large “mainframes” sold pri-
marily by International Business Machines (IBM). These were expensive
machines intended to serve the needs of an entire business, university de-
partment or other large grouping. To access these machines, users would
have to bring programs to a central administrator, and they would, infre-
quently, have a single “high risk” chance to run their desired computa-
tion. If it turned out to have a bug, as it often did, they would have to
return later, having meticulously and without practical tests attempted
to fix these errors. At the same time, because preparing programs and
managing the machine was so challenging, much of their time was spent
idling, waiting for programs to arrive.

Contrast this to today’s world of personal computing, where most people

in developed countries today have computers on their desks, laps, wrists
and in their pockets that perform a dizzying array of computations with
near-instant feedback. Of course, much of this has been empowered by
Moore’s Law of doubling computational power per unit price every eigh-
teen months. But what Lick and some of the early projects he funded
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and other universities saw
was that at least some of this was possible even with the computers of the
time if they were used more efficiently and with greater attention to the
human need for feedback that he had studied in his work on designing
airplane interfaces.

Much of the limited computation power then available was wasted in idle
307
Waldrop, The Dream Machine, op. cit.

209
time and the feedback desired by users did not require a full machine
at every desk. Instead, every user could have a basic display and input
station (“client”) connected via a network to a central machine (“server”)
whose time they shared, a set-up first pioneered a few years earlier in
the Plato project at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champagne as a
computer-based teaching system.308 This allowed ARPANET members,
such as Douglas Engelbart, to simulate a future of personal computing in
the era of the mainframe.

What amazing future could we simulate if we could more effectively

share our computational assets? It is hard to know without a tighter
accounting of the underutilization of digital assets than we currently
have. But it seems likely that we could at least buy half a decade more
of effective Moore’s Law simply by utilizing more effective digital as-
sets that lay fallow. The possibilities for data sharing are richer and
potentially even more transformative. 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.

The state of sharing

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.309 While there is little systematic study, personal experi-
ence 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
308
Brian Dear, The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the
Dawn of Cyberculture (New York: Pantheon, 2017)
309
Gartner, “Gartner Forecasts Worldwide Semiconductor Revenue to Grow 17% in
2024” (2023) at https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2023-12-04-gartner-
forecasts-worldwide-semiconductor-revenue-to-grow-17-percent-in-2024

210
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.

Asset sharing may have important implications for values such as na-
tional security and the environment. Waste of resources effectively re-
duces the supply of semiconductors that national security policies have
aimed at maximizing and, like any waste, increases the demand for envi-
ronmental resources per unit of output. However, it is important to bear
in mind that the sources of energy employed by distributed devices and
their efficiency in converting this energy to computation may in some
cases be lower than those of cloud providers, making it important to pair
improvements to digital asset sharing with the greening of the consumer
electrical grid. Perhaps the most important implication of digital asset
sharing for security may be increased interdependence between partici-
pants in these sharing networks which may bring them into tighter geopo-
litical alignment, especially given the requisite alignments of privacy and
collaboration regulations.

What is most shocking about these figures is perhaps their comparison

to physical assets, which one would naturally assume should be harder
to share and ensure full utilization given the difficulty of transportation
and physical redeployment. When unemployment rates for workers or
vacancy rates for housing rise above single digits, political scandal usually
ensues; such waste is omnipresent in the digital world. In short, rates of
waste (effective under- and unemployment) of physical assets even close
to these would be considered a global crisis.

The key reason why this silent crisis is a bit less surprising than the fig-
ures suggest is that these purely digital assets are comparatively new.
Societies have had thousands if not tens of thousands of years to experi-
ment with various social organizational systems to provide for the needs
of the people within them 310 . The origins of our contemporary systems of
310
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.

211
property (rental systems, capital management), labor, and practices that
311
involve the abstract representation of value (with deeds, documents
issued to people, supply chain transactions, and money) can be traced to
certain social-psychological qualities that arose after 1000 years of cul-
tural practices. The ban on cousin marriages in Christian Europe led to
the emergence of people who were free to form new institutions and re-
constitute how property was held which created new types of democratic
312
institutions that didn’t exist before . There have been decades to fig-
ure out how to efficiently rent cars and increasingly harness digital tools
to improve the sharing of these assets (e.g. ride and house-sharing plat-
forms). Digital assets, especially those in the hands of large groups of
non-technical people, date back only a few decades. A vital task before
us, then, is to determine the crucial social and technical barriers to utiliz-
ing digital assets with the same effectiveness we have come to expect of
physical assets.

One way to consider what stands in the way of computational asset shar-
ing is to consider the areas where it has been relatively successful and
draw out the differences between these domains and those where it has
thus far mostly failed. To do so, we will run through the three areas of
focus above: storage, computation and data.

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 stor-
age to each other at a reasonable cost in a peer-to-peer, fragmented, en-
crypted and distributed manner that helps ensure redundancy, robust-
ness and data secrecy/integrity. Prominent services built on the protocol
include the use by Taiwan’s Ministry of Digital Affairs and other govern-
ments facing strong adversaries who may hold leverage over more cen-
tralized service providers. To ensure the persistence of their data and
311
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and
Fails Everywhere Else, (New York: Basic Books, 2000). In the book, he emphasizes that the
abstract representation of property through formal titles and documentation allows assets
to be leveraged in the financial system, enabling them to generate wealth and spur economic
growth
312
see Henrich, “Part III: New Institutions, New Psychologies,” in op. cit.

212
the storage market PL also created the Filecoin system to allow commer-
cial transactions and incent users to store as much of the entire network’s
data as they can. Yet even IPFS has been a limited success for “real-time”
storage, where files need to be stored to allow their rapid access from
many places around the world. It thus seems to be the relative simplicity
of “deep” storage (think of the equivalent of the “public storage” spaces
provided as a commodity service in real life) that has allowed IPFS to sur-
vive.

The more complicated challenge of optimizing for latency has been han-
dled overwhelmingly by large corporate “cloud” providers such as Mi-
crosoft Azure, Amazon Web Services Google Cloud Platform and Sales-
force. 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 busi-
ness data being stored in proprietary clouds and the top two proprietary
cloud providers (Amazon and Microsoft) capturing almost two-thirds of
the market.313

Yet even beyond the drawbacks of this space being controlled by a few
for-profit companies, these cloud systems have achieved, in many ways,
far less than the visionaries like Lick imagined.

First, heralds of the “cloud era” such as the Microsoft team that helped
persuade the company to pursue the opportunity saw many of the gains
from the cloud arising from more efficient resource sharing across ten-
ants and applications to ensure full utilization.314 Yet, in practice, most of
the gains from the cloud have come from physical cost savings of data cen-
ters co-located with abundant power sources and efficiently maintained,
rather than from meaningful cross-tenant resource-sharing as few cloud
providers have effectively facilitated this kind of market and few cus-
tomers have found ways to make sharing resources work for them.
313
Josh Howarth, “34 Amazing Cloud Computing Stats” Exploding Topics, Febru-
ary 19 2024 at https://explodingtopics.com/blog/cloud-computing-stats. Felix Richter,
“Amazon Maintains Cloud Lead as Microsoft Edges Closer” Statista February 5, 2024
at https://www.statista.com/chart/18819/worldwide-market-share-of-leading-cloud-
infrastructure-service-providers/
314
Rolf Harms, and Michael Yamartino, “The Economics of the Cloud,” 2010,
https://news.microsoft.com/download/archived/presskits/cloud/docs/The-Economics-of-
the-Cloud.pdf.

213
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.

Yet even these limited successes have been far more encouraging than
what has been achieved in data sharing. The largest-scale uses of data to-
day are either extremely siloed not just within corporate or institutional
boundaries but even highly subdivided by privacy policies within these or
otherwise based on the ingestion of publicly available data online without
even the awareness, much less consent, of the data creators. The leading
example of the latter is the still-undisclosed data sets on which the GFMs
were trained. 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 collabo-
rations.

This problem is widely recognized and the subject of a variety of cam-

paigns 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.

Impediments to sharing
What lessons can we glean from these failures about the impediments
to more effective sharing of digital assets? From the fact that data shar-
ing has failed most spectacularly, and storage sharing has struggled most
with issues around data sharing, a natural hypothesis is that related issues

214
may lie at the core of many of these problems. After all, related challenges
reoccur in all these domains. Much of the structure of IPFS and the chal-
lenges it faces relate to maintaining data privacy while allowing storage
far from the person or organization seeking to maintain this privacy. A
central advantage of the cloud providers has been their reputation for
security and privacy of customer data while allowing those customers to
share it across their devices and perform large-scale computations on it.

A basic contrast between data and many real-world assets is important in

understanding these challenges. Lending and pooling of assets is ubiqui-
tous in the economy as we discussed above. Critical to it is the possibility
of decomposing the rights one has to an asset. Legal scholars typically de-
scribe three attributes of property: “usus” (the right to use something),
“abusus” (the right to alter or dispose of it) and “fructus” (the right to
the value it creates). A standard rental contract, for example, transfers
to the renter the usus rights, while retaining abusus and fructus for the
landlord. A corporation grants usus of many assets to employees, abusus
only to senior managers (and often only with checks and balances), and
reserves fructus for shareholders.

Achieving this crucial separation is different and arguably more challeng-

ing 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 oth-
ers (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. Of course, norms,
laws and cryptography could all potentially play a role in correcting this
situation, and we turn to these shortly. At present these are all underde-
veloped relative to expectations in, for example, corporate governance or
housing rentals, impairing the ability of data sharing to thrive.

To make matters more complicated, settling on such a set of standards

is, for the reasons we highlighted in the Association and ⿻ Publics chap-
ter, challenged by the other key property of data: that interests in it are
rarely if ever usefully understood as mostly individual rights. Data are
inherently associational, social and intersectional, making many of the

215
simplest “quick fixes” for this problem (in terms of privacy regulations
and cryptography) so misfitting that they impede progress more than they
facilitate it.

Furthermore, even if there were a clear set of solutions to these chal-

lenges, there is no straightforward way to implement them directly. The
most simplistic understanding of contracts is that they are commitments
between parties described and mutually agreed to in a document. The
freedom of contract simply requires these be enforced. The reality is
much richer, however: it is impossible to specify in a contract how to
resolve many conflicts that may arise and no one could read and process
such a detailed document if it were.315 Contracts are necessarily both am-
biguous on many points and deliberately do not touch many questions
(e.g. “the worker should work really hard” and “the employer should be
fair”) that are important but hard to precisely specify. Most contractual
arrangements are therefore governed primarily by customary expecta-
tions, legal precedent, statutes that are consistent with these, mutually ex-
pected norms, etc. In many contexts, contractual provisions that conflict
with these evolved principles will not be enforced. These norms and le-
gal structures have co-evolved over decades and even centuries to govern
canonical relationships like rental and employment, minimizing the role
that formal court-based contractual provisions and enforcement have to
play. While self-enforcing digital “smart contracts” might thus provide a
way to implement such norms smoothly, they cannot substitute for the
process of creating a stable social understanding of how data collabora-
tion works, what different parties can expect, and when various legal and
technical enforcement mechanisms should and will kick in.

Challenges of this sort surround efforts to build infrastructure for shar-

ing digital assets like data. The basic problem is that information has a
near-infinity of possible uses, meaning that heavily “contractualist” ap-
proaches that seek to define exactly how parties may use information
run into unmanageable complexity. Such contracts’ zones of “incomplete-
ness” are overwhelmingly vast because it is not possible even to imagine,
let alone catalog and negotiate over all the possible future uses of infor-
mation like genetics or geolocation. That means that the most promising
315
Sanford J. Grossman and Oliver D. Hart, “The Costs and Benefits of Ownership: A Theory
of Vertical and Lateral Integration”, Journal of Political Economy 94, no. 4: 691-719.

216
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 poten-
tial 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.

Of course, these are far from the only problems besetting digital asset
sharing: optimizing for latency, mapping security measures, appropri-
ately standardizing units of compute and other such technical obstacles
are also significant. But the challenges created by the lack of clear and
meaningful standards (both legal and technical) for protecting data while
it is shared spill out into almost every aspect of scalable digital coopera-
tion. While no deductive analysis can substitute for the social experimen-
tation and evolution that will be needed to reach such standards, we can
highlight some of the components and efforts that seem likely to address
the central tensions above and thus should become important to social
exploration if we are going to get past the current barriers to digital asset
sharing.

⿻ property
The first and simplest issue to address is standards for performance and
security for computational asset sharing. When users store their data or
entrust a computation to others, they need assurances that their data will
not be compromised by a third party and that the computation will be
performed according to their expectations, that their data will be retriev-
able by themselves or their customers with an expected distribution of
latency by people in various places etc. Currently, these sorts of guaran-
tees are central to the value propositions of the cloud providers. Because
there are no standards that can easily be met by a broad set of individuals
and organizations offering computational services, these powerful com-
panies dominate the market. An analogous example is the introduction
of Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS), which allowed a range of
web hosting services to meet security criteria that give web content con-

217
sumers confidence that they can access data from that website without
being maliciously surveilled. Such standards could naturally be paired
with standardized formats for searching, requesting, and matching on ad-
ditional performance and security features.

However, as noted above, the thorniest questions pertain not to perfor-

mance or third-party attacks, but to the problems at the heart of data
collaboration: what should a collaborator Party B with whom Party A
shares data or other digital assets learn about Party A’s data? While this
obviously has no single right answer, setting parameters and expectations
in ways that allow participants to benefit from collaboration without fre-
quently undermining their critical interests or those of other people af-
fected by this collaboration is central to making data collaboration feasi-
ble and sustainable. Luckily, a number of tools are becoming available
that will help provide technical scaffolding for such relationships.

While we have discussed it in the Association chapter, it is worth recalling

their relevance here. Secure multiparty computation (SMPC) and homo-
morphic encryption allow multiple parties to perform a computation to-
gether and create a collective output without each revealing to the others
the inputs. While the simplest illustrative examples include calculating
an average salary or tallying votes in an election, far more sophisticated
possibilities are increasingly within reach, such as training or fine-tuning
a GFM. These more ambitious applications have helped create the field
of “federated learning” and “data federation”, which allow the computa-
tions necessary for one of these ambitious applications to be performed
locally on a distributed network of personal or organizational computers
with the inputs to the model being passed back and forth securely without
the underlying training data ever leaving the machine or servers of the re-
spective parties to the communication. In collaboration with open-source
providers of these tools such as OpenMined, international organizations
like the United Nations have increasingly built experimental showcase
platforms for data collaboration harnessing these tools.316 An alternative
to this distributed approach is to use specialized “confidential computers”
that can be verified to perform particular calculations but give no one ac-
cess to their intermediate outputs. Because these machines are expensive
316
“The UN is Testing Technology that Processes Data Confidentially” The Economist Jan-
uary 29, 2022.

218
and produced by only a limited range of companies, however, these lend
themselves more to control by a trusted central entity than diffuse collab-
oration.

While these approaches can help achieve a collaboration without un-

necessary information being conveyed across collaborators, other tools
are needed to address the information contained in the desired outputs
(e.g. statistics or models) created by the collaboration. Models may both
leak input information (e.g. a model reproduces intimate details of the
medical history of a particular person) or may, conversely, obscure
the source of information (e.g. reproduce input creative text without
attribution, in violation of a license). Both are significant impediments to
data collaboration, as collaborators will typically want agency over the
use of their data.

Tools to address these challenges are more statistical than cryptographic.

Differential privacy limits the degree to which input data can be guessed
from a collection of output data, using a “privacy budget” to ensure that
together disclosures do not reliably reveal inputs. Watermarking can cre-
ate “signatures” in content showing its origin in ways that are hard to
erase, ignore or even in some cases detect. “Influence functions” trace
the role a particular collection of data plays in producing the output of a
model, allowing at least partial attribution of the output of an otherwise
“black box” model.317

All these techniques have fallen somewhat behind the speed, scale and
power of the development of GFMs. For example, differential privacy
focuses mostly on the literal statistical recoverability of facts, whereas
GFMs are often capable of performing “reasoning” as a detective would,
inferring for example someone’s first school from a constellation of only
loosely related facts about later schools, friendships, etc. Harnessing the
capacity of these models to tackle these technical challenges and deriv-
ing technical standard definitions of data protection and attribution, es-
pecially as models further progress, will be central to making data collab-
oration sustainable.
317
Pan Wei Koh and Percy Liang, “Understanding Black-Box Predictions via Influence Func-
tions”, Proceedings of the 34th International Conference on Machine Learning, 70 (2017): 1885-
1894

219
Yet many of the challenges to data collaboration are more organizational
and social than purely technical. As we noted earlier, interests in data are
rarely individual as almost all data are relational. Even beyond this most
fundamental point, there are many reasons why organizing data rights
and control at the individual level is impractical including:

• Social leakage: Even when data do not directly arise from a social in-
teraction, they almost always have social implications. For example,
because of the shared genetic structure of relatives, something like
a 1% statistical sample of a population allows the identification of
any individual from their genetic profile, making the preservation
of genetic privacy a profoundly social undertaking.
• Management challenges: it is nearly impossible for an individual
alone to understand the implications, both financial and personal,
of sharing data in various ways. While automated tools can help,
these will be made or shaped by social groups, who will need to be
fiduciaries for these individuals.
• Collective bargaining: The primary consumers of large data sets are
the largest and most powerful corporations in the world. The bil-
lions of data creators around the world can only achieve reasonable
terms in any arrangement with them, and these companies could
only engage in good faith negotiations if data creators act collec-
tively.

Organizations capable of taking on this role of collectively representing

the rights and interests of “data subjects”318 have been given a variety of
names: data trusts,319 collaboratives,320 cooperatives,321 or, in a whimsi-
cal turn of phrase one of the authors suggested, “mediators of individual
data” (MIDs).322 Some of these could quite naturally follow the lines of
existing organizations: for example, unions for creative workers repre-
senting their content, or Wikipedia representing the collective interest of
its volunteer editors and contributors. Others may require new forms of
318
Jaron Lanier, Who Owns the Future?, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014).
319
Sylvie Delacroix, and Jess Montgomery, “Data Trusts and the EU Data Strategy,” Data
Trusts Initiative, June 2020. https://datatrusts.uk/blogs/data-trusts-and-the-eu-data-strategy.
320
See the Data Collaboration Alliance at https://www.datacollaboration.org/
321
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.
322
Lanier and Weyl, op. cit.

220
organization, such as the contributors of open-source code that is being
used to train code-generation models, authors of fan fiction and writers
of Reddit pages may need to organize their own forms of collective repre-
sentation.

Beyond these formal technologies, organizations and standards, broader

and more diffuse concepts, expectations and norms will have to develop
so as to ensure broad understanding of what is at stake in data collab-
orations, so that contributors feel empowered to strike fair agreements
and hold their collaborators accountable. Given the pace of technologi-
cal change and adaptation in what data collaborations will thus become,
these norms will both have to become pervasive and reasonably stable
and dynamic and adaptive. Achieving this will require practices of edu-
cation and cultural engagement that keep pace with technical change, as
we discuss in the following chapters.

Once they develop and spread sufficiently, data collaboration tools, orga-
nizations 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 or-
ganization of a joint-stock corporation. They will, as we noted, need to in-
clude 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 dis-
closure by a member of a MIDs (analogous to prohibitions against unilat-
eral 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.

⿻ real property
Achieving ⿻ property will be a challenge, but it is instructive to remem-
ber that many property rights systems in other realms are contested and
in flux. In some ways, the deeply social character of data sets it apart from
real-world assets, and therefore our existing modes of designing prop-
erty rights and contractual systems are not readily applied to data. But
in other ways, the deeply social character of data accentuates, through its

221
unfamiliarity, many of the ways traditional property systems are them-
selves ill-suited to managing real assets today.

We take one step away from the purely digital asset world and look to
two examples of digitally-related assets whose property rights regimes
are changing rapidly. These two examples are the electromagnetic spec-
trum and namespaces on the internet.

Traditionally, entitlements to broadcast on a particular electromagnetic

frequency in a particular geographic range have (in many countries in-
cluding the US) been assigned or auctioned to operators with licenses be-
ing renewed at low cost. This has effectively created a private property-
like entitlement based on the idea that users of frequencies will interfere
if many are allowed to operate on the same band in the same place and
that licensees will steward the band if they have property rights over it.
These assumptions have been tested to the breaking point recently, how-
ever, as many digital applications (such as WiFi) can share spectrum and
the rapidly changing nature of uses for spectrum (e.g. moving from over-
the-air broadcasting to 5G wireless) has dramatically changed interfer-
ence patterns, requiring a reorganization of the spectrum against which
legacy license holders can often serve as holdouts.323 This, in turn, has led
to significant changes to the property system, allowing licensing agencies
like America’s Federal Communications Commission to relocate holdouts
in auctions, and proposals by leaders in the space for even more radical
designs that would mix elements of rental and ownership as we discuss in
our Social Markets chapter below or leave spectrum unlicensed for spec-
ified shared uses.324

The evolution of property in namespaces has been even more radical.

Traditionally the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers
(ICANN) allowed registration of domain names at relatively low cost with
nominal fees for renewal, similar to the property-like licensing regime for
spectrum. While this system has evolved, the more fundamental change
323
Paul R. Milgrom, Jonathan Levin and Assaf Eilat, “The Case for Unlicensed Spectrum” at
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1948257 and Paul Milgrom, “Auction
Research Evolving: Theorems and Market Designs”, American Economic Review 111, no. 5
(2021): 1383-1405.
324
E. Glen Weyl and Anthony Lee Zhang, “Depreciating Licenses”, American Economic Jour-
nal: Economic Policy 14, no. 3 (2022): 422-448. Paul R. Milgrom, E. Glen Weyl and Anthony
Lee Zhang, “Redesigning Spectrum Licenses to Encourage Innovation and Investment”, Reg-
ulation 40, no. 3 (2017): 22-26.

222
has been that today, most people reach websites through search engines
rather than direct navigation. These engines usually list sites associated
with a given name based on a variety of (mostly not publicly disclosed)
signals of their relevance to users as well as including some paid adver-
tisements that are auctioned in real-time.325 While relevance algorithms
are something of a black box, a reasonable first mental model for them
is the original “PageRank” algorithm of Google founders Sergey Brin and
Larry Page, which ranked pages based on their “network centrality”, a
notion related to the network-based voting systems we will discuss in our
326
chapter on ⿻ Voting below. Thus, to a first blush, we can think of the de
facto property regime of Internet namespaces today as being a combina-
tion of collective direction towards the interest of browsers (rather than
domain owners) combined with a real-time auction for domain owners.
Both are a far cry from traditional property systems.

This is not, of course, to suggest that any of this is ideal and certainly not
socially legitimate. These systems have been largely designed far from
the public eye, without public understanding by teams of technocratic
engineers and economists. Few even recognize that they operate much
less believe they are appropriate.327 On the other hand, they respond to
real challenges in creative ways, and the issues they address stretch well
beyond the narrow domains to which they have been applied thus far.
Addressing holdout problems and spectrum sharing is central to allowing
digital development that is broadly demanded by the public and viewed
as central to even issues of national security. Similar holdout issues per-
vade the redevelopment of urban spaces and the building of common in-
frastructure, and much land currently held as private property could be
made into shared spaces like parks (or vice-versa).

Treating name spaces as private property makes little sense, given that
325
Benjamin Edelman, Michael Ostrovsky and Michael Schwarz, “Internet Advertising and
the Generalized Second-Price Auction: Selling Billions of Dollars Worth of Keywords”, Amer-
ican Economic Review 97, no. 1: 242-259
326
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.
327
In fact, authors of this book have been prominent critics of these designs for these
reasons. Zoë Hitzig, “The Normative Gap: Mechanism Design and Ideal Theories of Jus-
tice”, Economics and Philosophy 36, no. 3: 407-434. Glen Weyl, “How Market Design
Economists Helped Engineer a Mass Privatization of Public Resources”, Pro-Market May 28,
2020 at https://www.promarket.org/2020/05/28/how-market-design-economists-engineered-
economists-helped-design-a-mass-privatization-of-public-resources/.

223
those who happen to own a name that is contested (e.g. “ABC.com”) may
be domain squatters, legacy owners serving a limited audience, fraud-
sters exploiting a brand, etc. While some of the stability and signal of
importance from owners’ willingness to pay offered by property rights
are clearly important, the systems used by search engines achieve this
in arguably a better balance by explicitly accounting for the public in-
terest in stability and the real-time demands from those who would pay
for the namespace than does a simple private property system. Again,
these issues show up frequently in “real world” domains from trademarks
and other intellectual property to the ownership of antiquities and his-
toric locations in cities. It only takes a slight stretch of imagination to
see how, if they combine with far better public engagement, education
and advocacy, the innovative alternatives to property that evolved and
are evolving in the digital realm might help us rethink property systems
more broadly in a ⿻ direction, a theme we will explore in greater depth
in our Social Markets chapter below.

4-5 Access
Lucy: Hello, this is Lucy from Château du Soleil Couchant out of Bordeaux.

Municipal Rep: Greetings, Lucy. What can I do for you today?

Lucy: Well, we at Château du Soleil Couchant are in talks with several

other vineyards about the idea of creating a coalition for the implementa-
tion of a new hail cannon system across our properties. We’ve secured
backing from 12 of the 14 regional vineyards; however, we require a
mechanism that guarantees openness, fair decision-making, and the dis-
tribution of costs and advantages among all the parties involved.

Lucy: To pull this off, we need a governance framework that encourages

participation from neighboring vineyards. We’ve noticed the Wine Trade
Association has had great success with their collaborative efforts, and we
aim to emulate their model.

Municipal Rep: I appreciate the overview. Could you elaborate on why

you need these collaborative tools?

Lucy: Certainly. There’s been skepticism among local vineyards about the

224
efficacy of hail cannons, but the latest generation has been scientifically
validated to disrupt hailstorm formation. Hail is a longstanding menace
to our crops. To be effective, we need widespread adoption of these sys-
tems. We’re initiating a pilot program to build trust locally, but a gov-
ernance system akin to what helped the Wine Trade Association resolve
their differences would be invaluable.

Municipal Rep: Thanks for elaborating. The collaboration framework the

French Wine Trade Association uses was adapted from the U.S. Wine and
Spirit Association’s model back in 2036. Based on what you’ve described,
we’ve already tailored it to better fit your regional circumstances. It’s im-
portant to note, though, that these tools are designed to foster inclusive
discussion and consensus, not to drive specific outcomes like the adoption
of hail cannons.

Lucy: Understood, and I appreciate the clarification.

Municipal Rep: Great. I’ve just configured the platform based on our dis-
cussion and launched it at www.bordeauxhailcannon.assoc. A detailed
changelog has been dispatched to you. Should you need further modifica-
tions, please let me know.

Lucy: I certainly will. Could you also send over some advice or common
hurdles that others have faced?

Municipal Rep: Definitely. While I can’t share confidential details from

past projects, I can definitely walk you through the general use of these
tools, as well as our past learning.

Lucy: That sounds perfect, thank you. I’ll review the changelog and get
back to you by tomorrow.

Municipal Rep: Excellent, have a good evening.

Long before the rise of the internet, access to information had always
been a crucial part of human civilization: as Sir Francis Bacon put it cen-
turies ago, “knowledge is power”. In today’s information age, and even
more in the future we describe in this book, the literal truth in this dic-
tum is ever more present. While the previous chapters of this part focus
on the aspects of digital life that ensure human rights, these mean noth-

225
ing to human life unless every human can securely and faithfully access
this world we imagine. In this chapter, we will explore what making such
access a fundamental right must mean.

We are not interested in mere access, but access with integrity. If the infor-
mation 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 differ-
ently. But this diversity of perspective must come founded on underlying
common access to uncorrupted input data if it is to contribute to a ⿻ fu-
ture. We all can and must make our own meanings of life, but we are de-
nied our equal right to do so if some of us receive manipulated versions
of the inputs to the global information commons.

From the United Nations’ adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human

Rights in 1948 to the Declaration for the Future of the Internet in 2022,
human society has continuously emphasized the importance of freedom
of expression and access. These two documents illustrate a pathway that
extends from basic human rights to the principles of freedom and security
in the digital age. In 2023, the Global Declaration on Information Integrity
Online directly addressed the collective challenges posed by generative AI
and its potential for mass manipulation.

In simple terms, we must ensure that everyone has equal access to contex-
tually complete information; otherwise, it can become worthless or even
a harmful weapon. This imperative is not solely driven by digital technol-
ogy; it also requires a collective, universal, and inclusive digital alliance,
supported by a democratic structure. In today’s era, where internet ac-
cess is considered a digital human right, the spirit of ⿻ flows seamlessly
across the globe, much like the ancient concept of ‘dao.’ This spirit is wo-
ven from zeros and ones, continuously expanding our ‘internet of beings’
and integrating with societal structures in ways that combine democratic
governance with collaborative technology. Thus, ‘access’ signifies not just
technological availability but also contributes to the realization of every-
one’s innate vision, naturally fostering trust, mutual respect, and safety.

Next, we will clarify the current status of internet access, countries’ efforts
towards access, as well as our expectations for the digital environment

226
and prospects for future development.

Bridging the digital divide

In the course of global digitalization, nations like Taiwan, Estonia, and the
Scandinavian nations have pioneered the principle of digital access as a
foundational right through proactive government support for internet de-
velopment, cross-disciplinary collaboration, and the involvement of local
community workers as key policy and implementation participants. But
this is just a downpayment on the long-term investment we need to sup-
port digital public infrastructure. These collective efforts not only propel
societal change but also help consolidate democratic values and establish
collective consensus. It is no surprise that these countries that lead in ac-
cess are also those which have most strongly embraced the substantive
digital democracy we discuss in the next section of the book.

Yet, these positive outcomes are not widespread. Digital disparity exem-
plifies social polarization, particularly between rural and urban areas.
Prior to the pandemic, 76% of urban households around the world had ac-
cess to home internet, which was nearly double the 39% in rural regions.
The pandemic has intensified public attention on such disparities as more
areas of life — from work and education to socializing — have moved
online. The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) reports that
in 2020 alone, 466 million people used the internet for the first time.328
While the number and global penetration of internet users have contin-
ued to grow, multifaceted inequalities in access remain. These contribute
to a wide range of economic, political, and social inequities.

Building on previous chapters of this book, we need to understand the

fundamental right of access from ⿻ perspectives, and the role of policy-
makers is crucial. They need to focus on global digital divides and take
corresponding measures to resolve the inequality in access. Such steps
must also include investment in digital public infrastructure to protect
contextual integrity for online exchange.

While openness is promoted, digital participants also need to contribute

328
International Telecommunications Union, Facts and Figures (2022) at
https://www.itu.int/itu-d/reports/statistics/2022/11/24/ff22-internet-use-in-urban-and-rural-
areas/.

227
their efforts to illuminate the dark and tricky corners existing on the inter-
net, watching out for each other. Of course, this issue touches upon global
social structures and cultural diversity. Fortunately, we no longer need to
cross oceans as De Tocqueville did to learn from the valuable experiences
of different countries in building digital democracy and sustainable devel-
opment. 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 interna-

tional infrastructures that overcomes the challenges of collective ac-
tion we discuss in the Social Markets chapter below, thereby provid-
ing 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 de-
scribed 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. As we have
highlighted throughout the book, many public services and social inter-
actions in today’s digital environment seem overshadowed by capitalism.
Nowadays, “internet access is a human right.” is nearly a consensus
among democracies. What remains is to untangle the complications
between democracy and internet access.

Infrastructures for information integrity

Forestry expert Suzanne Simard focuses on exploring the collaborative
nature of forests, viewing them as intelligent systems.329 These forests
not only possess self-awareness and spontaneous development capa-
bilities, but also feature close interactions between various ecological
components. Simard has studied how tree roots and symbiotic mycor-
rhizal 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
329
Suzanne Simard, Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest (New
York: Knopf, 2021).

228
signals to each other and share essential sugars, water, carbon, nitrogen,
and phosphorus.330

In such a vibrant forest, a single ‘mother tree’ can establish connections

with hundreds of other trees. Multiple such mother trees ensure the con-
tinuity of the entire forest as a collective organism through overlapping
networks, ensuring a secure and robust environment through open con-
nections.

Digital infrastructure follows a similar pattern with open standards (pro-

tocols), 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.

Taiwan is one of the world’s primary distributed denial of service (DDoS)

hotspots, according to Cloudflare’s report.331 Its government has adopted
the IPFS framework discussed in the previous chapter for its websites, al-
lowing it to interconnect with both private digital services and emerging
open networks. This structure is not only more resistant to sudden DDoS
attacks but is also conducive to open collaboration and mutual support
with global technology communities. This provides an illustration of how
to make systems more robust against information manipulation.

Furthermore, it is essential to ensure that people have the right to ac-

cess information with contextual confidence. The primary goals of open
government data align with this: granting more power to citizens and
increasing government transparency and accountability, can together ef-
fectively combat corruption and enable democratic systems to serve the
people more efficiently. The Ukrainian “Diia” and the Estonian “mRiik”
serve as examples that highlight the bidirectional features of trusted net-
works 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 citi-
330
Suzanne W. Simard, David A. Perry, Melanie D. Jones, David D. Myrold, Daniel M. Durall
and Randy Molina, “Net Transfer of Carbon Between Ectomycorrhizal Tree Species in the
Field”, Nature 388 (1997): 579–582.
331
Omer Yoachimik and Jorge Pacheco, “DDoS threat report for 2023 Q4” Cloudflare Blog
January 9, 2024 at https://blog.cloudflare.com/ddos-threat-report-2023-q4.

229
zens 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 in-
spired by the Ukrainian app Diia.332

Digital infrastructure does not point to a one-size-fits-all solution; each na-

tion still needs to adapt based on its unique development needs. However,
the fundamental functions and democratic essence are of similar values
and offer a common ground for expansion. Taiwan, Estonia, and Ukraine
show us how information integrity and digital infrastructure intertwine
to enhance societal resilience.

In conclusion, the right to access is a cornerstone for achieving digital

democracy and social inclusivity. To move towards such a future requires
multi-dimensional efforts, including technological innovation and policy
cooperation. The next chapter will delve deeper into these intertwined
issues.

332
Note Ukraine’s readiness to share its code and UX/UI design methods with Estonia
(see Igor Sushon, “Estonia Launches the State Application MRiik, Built on the Basis of the
Ukrainian Application Diia,” Mezha, January 19, 2023, https://mezha.media/2023/01/19/diia-
mriik/.https://mezha.media/2023/01/19/diia-mriik/)”

230
Section 5: Democracy

5-0 Collaborative Technology and Democracy

This book was created to demonstrate ⿻ in action and as well as describe
it: to show as well as tell. As such, it was created using many of the tools
we describe in this section. The text was stored on and updated using the
Git protocol that open source coders use to control versions of their soft-
ware. The text is shared freely under a Creative Commons 0 license, im-
plying that no rights to any content herein are reserved to the community
creating it and it may be freely reused. At the time of this writing, dozens
of diverse experts and citizens from every continent contributed to the
writing as highlighted in our credits above and we hope many more will
the continued evolution of the text after physical publication, embodying
the practices we describe in our Creative Collaboration chapter.

Work was collectively prioritized and rewards determined using a

“crowd-funding” approach we describe in our Social Markets chapter
below. Changes to the text in future evolution will be approved col-
lectively by the community using a mixture of the advanced voting
procedures described in our ⿻ Voting chapter below and prediction
markets. Contributors were recognized using a community currency and
group identity tokens as we described in our Identity and Personhood
and Commerce and Trust chapters above, which in turn was used in
voting and prioritization of outstanding issues for the book. These
priorities in turn determined the quantitative recognition received by
those whose contributions addressed these challenges, an approach we

231
have described with other as a “⿻ Management Protocol”.333 All this
was recorded on a distributed ledger through an open-source protocol,
GitRules, grounded on open-source participation rather than financial
incentives. Contentious issues were resolved through tools we discuss
in the Augmented Deliberation chapter below. The book has been
translated and copy-edited by the community augmented by many of
the cross-linguistic and subcultural translation tools we discuss in our
Adaptive Administration chapter.

To support the financial needs of the book during the publication process,
we harnessed several of the tools we describe in the Social Markets chap-
ter. We hope to harness technologies from the Immersive Shared Reality
chapter to communicate and explore the ideas from the book with audi-
ences around the world.

For all these reasons, as you read this book you are both learning about
the ideas and evaluating them on their merits and at the same time ex-
periencing what they put into practice, can create. If you are inspired by
that content, especially critically, we encourage you to contribute to the
living and community managed continuations of this document and all its
translations by submitting changes through a git pull request or by reach-
ing out to one of the many contributors to become part of the community.
We hope as many criticisms of this work as possible will be inspired by
the open-source mantra “so fix it!”

While a human rights operating system is the foundation, the point of the
system for most people is what is built on top of it. On top of the bedrock
of human rights, liberal democratic societies run open societies democra-
cies, and welfare capitalism. On top of operating systems, customers run
productivity tools, games, and a range of internet-based communication
media. In this chapter, we will illustrate the collaboration technologies
that can be built on the foundation of ⿻ social protocols of the previous
section.

While we have titled this section of the book “democracy”, what we plan to
333
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.

232
describe goes well beyond many conventional descriptions of democracy
as a system of governance of nations. Instead, to build ⿻ on top of funda-
mental social protocols, we must explore the full range of ways in which
applications can facilitate collaboration and cooperation, the working of
several entities (people or groups) together towards a common goal. Yet
even these phrases miss something crucial that we focus on the power
that working together has to create something greater than the sum of
what the parts could have created separately.

Mathematically, this idea is known as “supermodularity” and captures

the classic idea attributed to Aristotle that “the whole is greater than the
sum of the parts”.334 An early example of the quantitative application of
supermodularity is the idea of “comparative advantage”, the first compre-
hensive description of which that we are aware of presented by the En-
glish economist David Ricardo in 1817.335 “Comparative advantage” says,
roughly, that overall welfare will be maximized when all trading part-
ners specialize in making their most efficient product, even when some
other partner can make everything more efficiently. Comparative advan-
tage is understood as an ‘economic law’ stating in effect that there are
guaranteed gains from diversity that can be realized through the market
mechanism. This idea has been extremely influential in neoliberal eco-
nomics (see Social Markets), although later iterations are more sophisti-
cated than the Ricardian version and one need not accept the simplistic
“free trade” implications to appreciate the benefits of gains from trade.
Furthermore, given our emphasis on diversity, what we mean by “gains”
here is context specific and need not be simplistically economic; instead,
it will be defined by the norms and values of the individuals and com-
munities coming together. Furthermore, our focus is less on people or
groups per se than on the fabric running through and separating them,
social difference. Thus, what we will describe in this part of the book
is, most precisely, how technology can empower supermodularity across
social difference or, more colloquially, “collaboration across diversity”.

This chapter, which lays out the framework for the rest of this part of the
book, will highlight why collaboration across diversity is such a funda-
334
Divya Siddarth, Matt Prewitt and Glen Weyl, “Beyond Public and Private: Collective Pro-
vision Under Conditions of Supermodularity” (2024) at https://cip.org/supermodular.
335
David Ricardo, On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, (London: John Mur-
ray, 1817).

233
mental and ambitious goal. We then define a spectrum of domains where
it can be pursued based on the trade-off between depth and breadth of col-
laboration. Next, we highlight a framework for design in the space that
navigates between the dangers of premature optimization and chaotic ex-
perimentation. Yet harnessing the potential of collaboration across diver-
sity also holds the risk of reducing the diversity available for future col-
laboration. To guard against this we discuss the necessity of regenerating
diversity. We round out this chapter by describing the structure followed
in each subsequent chapter in this part.

Collaboration across diversity: promise and challenges

Why are we so focused on collaboration across diversity? A simple way
to understand this is by analogy to energy systems. Prior to industrial-
ism, rare encounters with powerful thermodynamic effects (such as oil
fires in the ground) were met with fear and attempts to suppress these
conflagrations. Yet with the advent of industrial harnessing of fossil fu-
els, it became more common to greet such explosions with a prospector’s
eye, looking to harness the potential energy that led to these explosions
productively. In a world beset by conflict, we must learn to build engines
that, just as in the Taiwanese example we opened with, convert the po-
tential energy driving these conflicts into useful work. The ⿻ age must
learn to harness social and informational potential energy as the indus-
trial age did for fossil fuels and the nuclear age did for atomic energy.336
Such an age may fulfill the prophecy of Matthew 20:16, “So the last shall
be first, and the first last”, as the most diverse and conflict-plagued places
on earth (especially in Africa) hold arguably more potential energy than
anywhere on the planet.

While novel in a certain sense, this is also one of the oldest and most
universally resonant of all human ideas. All life depends on survival
and reproduction, and cooperation across difference is critical to both:
336
The analogy here is even tighter than it might seem at first. What is usually called “en-
ergy” 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 “uncon-
trolled” 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.

234
avoiding deadly conflict, but also reproduction that requires the unlike
to come together, especially if inbreeding is to be avoided. Perhaps the
most universal feature of religions around the world and across history
have been their celebration of those who have achieved peace and coop-
eration across difference.

For those with a more practical and quantitative orientation, however,

perhaps one of the most compelling bodies of evidence is the finding, pop-
ularized by economist Oded Galor in his Journey of Humanity.337 Building
on his work with Quamrul Ashraf charting long-term comparative eco-
nomic development, he argues that perhaps the most robust and funda-
mental driver of economic growth is societies’ ability to productively and
cooperatively harness the potential of social diversity.338

While using migratory distance from Africa (where diversity is maximum

as noted above) as a proxy for “diversity”, Galor and collaborators have
since argued that diversity takes a wide range of forms and leads to a
broad range of divergent outcomes.339 Today the word “diversity” is in
many contexts used to specify some dimensions along which oppression
was historically organized in societies like the US that are particularly
culturally dominant in the world today. Yet such a definition is simplistic
relative to the tremendous diversity of forms of diversity that define our
world:

• Religion and religiosity: A diverse range of religious practices, in-

cluding secularism, agnosticism, and forms of atheism, are central
to the metaphysical, epistemological and ethical perspective of most
people around the world.
• Jurisdiction: People are citizens of a range of jurisdictions, including
nation states, provinces, cities etc.
• 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.
337
Oded Galor, The Journey of Humanity: A New History of Wealth and Inequality with Im-
plications for our Future (New York: Penguin Random House, 2022).
338
Quamrul Ashraf and Oded Galor, “The ‘Out of Africa’ Hypothesis, Human Genetic Diver-
sity, and Comparative Economic Development”, American Economic Review 103, no.1 (2013):
1-46.
339
Oded Galor, Marc Klemp and Daniel Wainstock, “The Impact of the Prehistoric Out of
Africa Migration on Cultural Diversity” (2023) at https://www.nber.org/papers/w31274.

235
• Profession: Most people spend a large portion of their lives working
and define important parts of their identities by a profession, craft
or trade.
• Organizations: People are members of a range of organizations, in-
cluding their employers, civic associations, professional groups, ath-
letic clubs, online interest groups etc.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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 di-
mensions in some contexts, while religious or national origin divides
may be more important in others).
• Education: People have a range of kinds and levels of educational
attainment.
• Epistemology/field: Different fields of educational training structure
thought. For example, humanists and physical scientists typically
approach knowledge differently.
• Gender and sexuality: People differ in physical characteristics asso-
ciated with reproductive function and in social perception and self-
perception associated with these, as well as in their patterns of inti-
mate association connected to these.
• Abilities: People differ greatly in their natural and acquired physical
capabilities, intelligence, and challenges.
• Generation: People differ by age and life experiences.
• Species: Nearly all the above has assumed that we are talking exclu-
sively 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

236
 from human life.

Furthermore, as we have emphasized repeatedly above, human identities

are defined by combinations and intersections of these forms of diversity,
rather than their mere accumulations, just as the simple building blocks
of DNA’s four base pairs give rise to life’s manifold diversity.

Yet, if history teaches anything, it is that for all its potential, collabora-
tion across diversity is challenging. Social differences typically create
divergences in goals, beliefs, values, solidarities/attachments, and cul-
ture/paradigm. Simple differences in beliefs and goals alone are the
easiest to overcome by sharing information or agreeing to disagree,
many differences in beliefs can be bridged and with common under-
standing of objective circumstances, compromises on goals are fairly
straightforward. Values are more challenging, as they involve things that
both sides will be reluctant to compromise over and tolerate.

But the hardest differences to bridge are typically those related to systems
of identification (solidarity/attachment) of meaning-making (culture). Sol-
idarity and attachment relate to the others to which one feels allied or
sharing in a “community of fate” and interests, groups by which one de-
fines who and what one is. Cultures are systems of meaning-making that
allow us to attach significance to otherwise arbitrary symbols. Languages
are the simplest example, but all kinds of actions and behaviors carry dif-
fering meaning depending on cultural contexts.340

Solidarity and culture are so challenging because they stand in the way
not of specific agreements about information or goals but of communica-
tion, mutual comprehension, and the ability to regard someone else as a
partner capable and worthy of such exchange. While they are in an ab-
stract sense related to beliefs and values, solidarities and culture in prac-
tice precede these in human development: we are aware of our family
and those who will protect us and learn to communicate long before we
consciously hold any views or aim for any goals. Being so foundational,
they are the hardest to safely adjust or change, usually requiring shared
life-shaping experiences or powerful intimacy to reform.

Beyond the difficulty of overcoming difference, it also holds an important

340
Lisa Wedeen, “Conceptualizing Culture: Possibilities for Political Science”, American Po-
litical Science Review 96, no. 4 (2002): 713–728.

237
peril. Bridging differences for collaboration often erodes them, harness-
ing 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 illustra-
tion 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.

The depth-breadth spectrum

Because of the tensions between collaboration and diversity, one would
naturally expect a range of approaches that make different trade-offs in
terms of depth and breadth. Some aim to allow deep, rich collaboration
at the cost of limiting this collaboration to small and/or homogeneous
groups. We can think of the “depth” of collaboration roughly in terms of
the degree of supermodularity for a fixed set of participants: how much
greater is what they create than the sum of what they can create sepa-
rately, according to the standards of participants. Relationships of love or
other deep connection are among the deepest as they allow transforma-
tions that are foundational to life, meaning and reproduction that those
participating could never have known separately. Superficial, transac-
tional, and often anonymous transactions, as permeate market-based cap-
italism, on the other hand, brings small gains from trade but nowhere
near the depth of connection of intimate love.

One rough way to think about quantifying the differences between these
interaction modes is in terms of the information theoretical concept of
bandwidth. Capitalism tends to reduce everything to a single number
(scalar) of money. Intimacy, on the other hand, typically not only im-
merses all senses but goes beyond this to touch “proprioception” (also
known as kinesthesia), the internal sensations of one’s own body and

238
being that neuroscientists believe constitute a majority of all sensory in-
put.341 Intermediate modalities lie between, activating structured forms
of symbols or limited sets of sense.

The natural trade-off, however, that is the reason capitalism has not been
superseded by universal intimacy is that high bandwidth communication
is challenging to establish among large and diverse groups. Thinner and
shallower collaboration scales more easily. While the simplest notion of
scale is the number of people involved, this is shorthand. Breadth is best
understood in terms of inclusion across lines of social and cultural dis-
tance rather than simply large numbers of people. For example, deep col-
laboration may well be easier among a large extended family, physically
co-located and sharing a language and religion than among a handful of
people scattered around the world, speaking different languages, etc.

**
341
Uwe Proske and Simon C. Gandevia, “The Proprioceptive Senses: Their Roles in Signaling
Body Shape, Body Position and Movement, and Muscle Force”, Physiological Review 92, no.
4: 1651-1697.

239
Figure 5-0-A. The trade-off between breadth of diversity and depth of col-
laboration represented as points along a production possibilities frontier

**

We can see there being a full spectrum of depth and breadth, representing
the trade-off between the two. Economists often describe technologies by
“production possibilities frontiers” (PPF) illustrating the currently possi-
ble trade-offs between two desirable things that are in tension. In Figure
A, we plot this spectrum of cooperation as such a PPF, grouping different
specific modalities that we study below into broad categories of “commu-
nities” with rich but narrow communication, “states” with intermediate
on both and “commodities” with thin but broad cooperative modes. The
goal of ⿻ is to push this frontier outward at every point along it, as we
have illustrated in these seven points, each becoming a technologically
enhanced extension.342

One example illustrating this trade-off is common in political science: the

debate over the value of deliberation compared to voting in democratic
polities. High quality deliberation is traditionally thought to only be fea-
sible in small groups and thus require processes of selection of a small
group to represent a larger population such as representative govern-
ment elections or sortition (choosing participants at random), but is be-
lieved to lead to richer collaboration, more complete airing of partici-
pant perspectives and therefore better eventual collective choices. On
the other hand, voting can involve much larger and more diverse popu-
lations at much lower cost but comes at the cost of each participant pro-
viding thin signals of their perspectives in the form (usually) of assent for
one among a predetermined list of options.

But for all the debate between the proponents of “deliberative” and “elec-
toral” democracy, it is important to note that these are just two points
along a spectrum (both mostly within the “state” category) and far from
even representing the endpoints of that spectrum. As rich as in-person de-
liberations can be, they provide nowhere near the depth of sharing, con-
342
This tripartite division of modes of exchange into communities, state, and commodities
is inspired by Kojin Karatani, The Structure of World History: From Modes of Production
to Modes of Exchange (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014). Karatani’s aspiration to
achieve the return of community at a broader scale can be seen as an ambitious example of
⿻.

240
nection and building of common purpose and identity that the building of
committed teams (as in e.g. the military) and long-term intimate relation-
ships do. And while voting can allow hundreds of millions to have a say
on a decision, it has never cut across social boundaries in any way close to
what impersonal, globalized markets do everyday. All these forms have
trade-offs and the very diversity of the ways in which we have historically
navigated them and the ways in which these have improved overtime
(e.g. the advent of video conferencing) should be a source of hope that
concerted development can radically improve these trade-offs, allowing
richer collaboration across a broader diversity of social differences than
in the past.

Goals, affordances and multipolarity

Yet aiming at “improving” this trade-off requires us to specify at least
something about what would count as an improvement. What makes a
collaboration good or meaningful? What precisely constitutes social dif-
ference and diversity? How can we measure both?

One standard perspective, especially in economics and quantitatively in-

clined fields is to insist that we should specify a global “objective” or “so-
cial welfare” function against which progress should be judged. The dif-
ficulty, of course, is that, in the face of the limitless possibilities of social
life, any attempt to specify such a criterion is destined to crash land on
the shores of the unknown and possibly unknowable. The more ambi-
tiously we apply such a criterion in pursuing ⿻, the less robust it will
prove, because the more deeply we connect to others across greater dif-
ference, the more likely we are to realize the failings of our initial vision
of the good. Insisting on specifying such a criterion in advance of learn-
ing about the shape of the world leads to premature optimization, which
prominent British computer scientist Tony Hoare once labeled “the root
of all evil”.343

One of the worst such evils is papering over the richness and diversity of
the world. Perhaps the archetypal example is conclusions about the opti-
mality of markets in neoclassical economics, which depend on extremely
343
Randall Hyde, “The Fallacy of Premature Optimization” Ubiquity February, 2009 avail-
able at https://ubiquity.acm.org/article.cfm?id=1513451.

241
simplistic assumptions and have often been used to short-circuit attempts
to discover systems for social resource management that deal with prob-
lems of increasing returns, sociality, incomplete information, limited ra-
tionality, 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 de-
scribe and easy to achieve, rather than anything we are really after.

Optimization, especially in the pursuit of a “social welfare function” car-

ries another pitfall: of “playing God” or idolatry. Maximizing social wel-
fare requires taking a “view from nowhere” and imagining one can influ-
ence conditions on a universal level available to no one. We all act from
and for specific people and communities, with goals and possibilities lim-
ited by who we are, where we sit and who cares what we say, in a network
of other forces that hopefully together form a pattern that can avoid dis-
aster. Tools that are only good for some abstractly universal perspectives
do not just overreach: they will appeal to no one who can actually adopt
them.

At the same time, there is an opposite extreme danger. If we simply pur-

sue designs that imitate features of life and thus engage our attention with
little sense of purpose or meaning, we can easily be co-opted to serve the
darkest of human motives. The profit motives and power games that or-
ganize so much of today’s world do not naturally serve any reasonable
definition of a common good. The dystopian novels of Neal Stephenson,
the Black Mirror series and the predicament of technologist Tunde Mar-
tins in the recent Nigerian science fiction show Iwájú remind us of how
technical advance decoupled from human values can become traps that
fray social bonds and allow the power-hungry to loot, control and enslave
us.

Nor do we look to hypothetical scenarios to perceive the danger of com-

pelling technologies pursued without a broader guiding mission. The
dominant online platforms of the “Web2” era such as Google, Facebook
and Amazon grew precisely out of a mentality of bringing critical features

242
of real-world sociality (viz. collectively determined emergent authority,
social networks and commerce) to the digital world. While these services
have brought many important benefits to billions of people around the
world, we have extensively reviewed above, their many shortcomings
and the dangerous path they have brought the world without a broader
set of public goals to guide them. We must build tools that serve the felt
needs of real, diverse populations, meeting them where they are, and yet
we cannot ignore the broader social contexts in which they sit and the
conflicts that we might exacerbate in meeting those perceived needs.

Luckily, a middle, pragmatic, ⿻ path is possible. We need neither take

a God’s eye nor a ground-level view exclusively. Instead, we can build
tools that pursue the goals of a range of social groups, from intimate fami-
lies and friends to large nations, always with an eye to limitations of each
perspective and on the parallel developments we must connect to and
learn from emanating from other parallel directions of development. We
can aim to reform market function by focusing on social welfare, but al-
ways doing so based on adding to our models’ key features of social rich-
ness revealed by those pursuing more granular perspectives and expect-
ing our solutions will at least partly founder on their failures to account
for these. We can build rich ways for people to empathize with others’
internal experience, but with an understanding that such tools may well
be abused if not paired with the discipline of deliberation, regulation and
well-structured markets.

We can do this guided by a common principle of cooperation across differ-

ence that is too broad to be formulated as a consistent objective function,
yet elegant enough to unify a wide range of technologies: we develop
tools that allow greater cooperation and consensus at the same time
as they make space for greater diversity. Consider two extremely dif-
ferent examples we will discuss below that both can be justified by this
logic: brain-to-brain interfaces and approval voting. While the first is a
wildly futuristic and disturbingly invasive concept, the second is an old
and widely applied voting method. Yet the simple idea of cooperation
across difference helps justify both: a key aspiration of brain-to-brain in-
terface is to allow children to retain more of their imagination as they
grow to adulthood by allowing them to directly share this imagination

243
rather than having to fit it into what they can write or draw.344 This al-
lows much greater diversity and much greater common understanding.
Similarly, a key goal of approval voting (where citizens can vote for as
many candidates as they wish and the one with the most votes wins) is to
simultaneously ensure that the elected candidate has very wide general
consensus and enable there to exist a much broader diversity of candi-
dates because voters are not afraid a “third party” will act as a spoiler as
voters can choose both the third party and one of the leading ones.345

Each of these technologies carries its risks: brain-to-brain interfaces

could easily be used to manipulate, and approval voting could create
a race towards mediocrity, as we discuss in relevant chapters below.
Yet the diversity of modes highlighted by this approach gives hope that
any connections we make and conflicts we resolve are but one stage
in a process of collaboration across diversity. Every successful step
forward should bring even more challenging forms of diversity into the
world we can perceive, reshaping our understanding of ourselves and
our aspirations and demanding that we struggle that much harder to
bridge them. While such an aspiration lacks the satisfying simplicity of
maximizing an objective function or pursuing technical advance and
social richness wherever they lead, this is precisely why it is the hard
path worth pursuing. Following another Star Trek slogan, ad astra per
aspera: “to the stars, through adversity” or in the words of Nobel laureate
André Gide, “Trust those who seek trust, but fear those who have found
it.”

Regenerating diversity
Yet, as noted above, even if we manage to avoid these pitfalls and suc-
cessfully 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. In-
timate relationships that form families can homogenize participants, un-
dermining the very sparks of complementarity that ignited love. Building
344
Rajesh P. N. Rao, Andrea Stocco, Matthew Bryan, Devapratim Sarma, Tiffany M.
Youngquist ,Joseph Wu and Chantel S. Prat, “A Direct Brain-to-Brain Interface in Humans”
PLOS One 9, no. 11: e111322 at https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0111332.
345
Steven J. Brams and Peter C. Fishburn, “Approval Voting”, American Political Science
Review 72, no. 3: 831-847.

244
political consensus can undermine the dynamism and creativity of party
politics.346 Translation and language learning can undermine interest in
the subtleties of other languages and cultures.

Yet homogenization is not an inevitable outgrowth of bridging, even when

one effect is to recombine existing culture and thus lessen their average
divides. The reason is that bridging plays a positive, productive role, not
just a defensive one. Yes, interdisciplinary bridging of scientific fields may
loosen the internal standards of a field and thus the distinctive perspec-
tive it brings to bear. But it may also give rise to new, equally distinctive
fields. For example, the encounter between psychology and economics
has created a new “behavioral economics” field; encounters between bi-
ology, physics and computer science have birthed the blossoming field of
“systems biology”; the encounter between computer science and statistics
has helped launch “data science” and artificial intelligence.

Similar phenomena emerge throughout history. Bridging political divides

may lead to excess homogenization, but it can also lead to the birth of new
political cleavages. Families often bear children, who diverge from their
parents and bring new perspectives. Most artistic and culinary novelty
is born of “bricolage” or “fusion” of existing styles.347 The syntheses that
emerge when thesis and antithesis meet are not always compromises, but
instead theremay be new perspectives that realign a debate.348

None of this is inevitable and of course there are many stories of inter-
sections that undermine diversity. But this range of possibilities gives
hope that with careful attention to the issue, it is possible in many cases
to design approaches to collaboration that renew the diversity that pow-
ers them.
346
Nancy L. Rosenblum, On the Side of the Angels: An Appreciation of Parties and Partisan-
ship (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010).
347
Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969).
348
This concept is often erroneously attributed to the work of G.W.F. Hegel, but actually
originates with Johann Gottlieb Fichte and was not an important part of Hegel’s thought.
Johann Gottlieb Fichte, “Renzension des Aenesidemus”, Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung 11-12
(1794).

245
Infinite diversity in infinite combinations
In this part of the book, we will (far from exhaustively) explore a range of
approaches to collaboration across difference and how further advances
to ⿻ can extend and build on them. Each chapter will begin, as this one
did, with an illustration of technology near the cutting edge of what is
possible that is in use today. It will then describe the landscape of ap-
proaches that are common and emerging in its area. Next it will high-
light the promise of future developments that are being researched, as
well as risks these tools might pose to ⿻ (such as homogenization) and
approaches to mitigating them, including by harnessing tools described
in other chapters. We hope that the wide range of approaches we high-
light draws out not just the substance of ⿻, but also the consistency of its
approach with its substance. Only a ⿻ complementary and networked
directions can support the development of a ⿻ future.

5-1 Post-Symbolic Communication

Overlooking Tokyo, nestled within the National Museum of Emerging Sci-
ence 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.349 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 mar-
ket. 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 con-
versation 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.
349
The entire artificial island of Odaiba on which Miraikan sits is something of a monument
to ⿻. It contains a monument to Doraemon, a Manga robotic cat from the future who in
Japanese cartoons of the 1970s returned to guide the imagination of children in the present,
who has been a major inspiration in Taiwan. The largest mall on the island is named Di-
verCity and is devoted to the role of diversity in innovation.

246
The Park of Aging is a poignant example of proprioceptive, post-symbolic
communication, where participants receive information through an inti-
mate, sensorial experience beyond merely interpreting words and sym-
bols, utilizing all sensemaking of the body; the Park immerses partici-
pants in the sensations of being old, unlocking the first-hand experience
of the deteriorating senses, including seeing and hearing words and sym-
bols.

Temporal conversation with aging, experiences of proprioceptive, non-

symbolic communication today are ubiquitous and include mediation,
psychedelics, religious experience, romantic intimacy, dance, yoga, com-
bat, and sports. Not coincidentally, these experiences which harness in-
formation gathered from many senses including proprioception (“higher-
bandwidth communication”) are also correlated with long-lasting human
bonding and connection when shared. Perhaps it is the diversity of infor-
mation simultaneously presented to the senses (depth) that contribute to
the significance of the experience and therefore strength of connection
and “union.”

Technological innovations such as neural interfaces, mediated real-

ity, and generative foundation models (GFMs) expands the possibility
space of post-symbolic communication, where unions within oneself
and among people can occur not only in person, but across temporal,
physical, and social distance facilitated by technology. In this chapter,
we describe these technologies and explore their frontiers. We examine
how these technologies could revolutionize interpersonal connections,
education, and collaboration by enabling the transmission of thoughts,
feelings, and sensory experiences beyond the compression of words
and symbols. We consider the opportunities to rectify cultural misun-
derstandings and conflicts by fostering profound empathy and shared
experience. Yet, in a space where ideas flow as seamlessly as emotions,
we must also explore the risks of this level of connectivity, including
surveillance, homogenization, disconnection and oblivion.

247
Intimacy today
Post-symbolic communication, a term coined by Jaron Lanier , ventures
beyond the realm of language and symbols to explore the potential for
direct and immersive shared experience by harnessing all senses, includ-
ing proprioception.350 Our first experience of non-verbal communica-
tion is in the natal womb; the synchronization of heartbeats between a
mother and her unborn child, especially when the mother breathes rhyth-
mically, suggests an intrinsic communication pathway.351 As we develop,
humans convey information nonverbally through body language, facial
expression, tone, touch, laughter, crying, facial blood flow and smell. Bio-
chemical messengers can convey emotional states and trigger responses
in others, often unconsciously. For instance, research has shown that hu-
man sweat contains compounds that, when detected by others, can con-
vey stress or fear, influencing the receiver’s perception and behavior.352 .
We also see glimpses of the post-symbolic potential in long-established
practices of intimacy among humans:

• Dance: stepping deeper into music, participants synchronizing their

movements, both feel their body and anticipate their partner’s move-
ments to create shared experience. Traditional dances like the Ad-
umu ritual of the Maasai people also serve as a way for communal
shared experiences through synchronicity.
• Combat: on the battlefield, soldiers experience heightened senses,
adrenaline, and a battery of sounds, leading to intense awareness
of their surroundings and their comrades. Non-verbal cues become
critical for survival and strategy. This shared high-stress environ-
ment creates a bond and deep understanding and trust develop
among those who rely on each other for their lives.
• Sports: in team sports, players develop a keen sense of each
other’s presence and movements. Teammates often anticipate each
350
Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget a Manifesto, (London [Etc.]: Penguin Books, 2011).
351
P. van Leeuwen, D. Geue, Michael Thiel, Dirk Cysarz, S Lange, Marino Romano, Niels
Wessel, Jürgen Kurths, and Dietrich Grönemeyer, “Influence of Paced Maternal Breath-
ing on Fetal–Maternal Heart Rate Coordination,” Proceedings of the National Academy
of Sciences of the United States of America 106, no. 33 (August 18, 2009): 13661–66.
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0901049106.
352
Judith Fernandez, “Olfactory interfaces: toward implicit human-computer interaction
across the consciousness continuum,” Diss. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School
of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2020.

248
 other’s actions and work as a cohesive unit, relying on signals
communicated through sound, movement, and hand gestures. This
synchrony is somewhere between dance and combat, also fueled
by common purpose.
• Romantic intimacy: through touch, eye contact, and emotional vul-
nerability, partners create a unique, shared experience. Attention to
the internal experience of a partner is critical to a successful bond,
building proprioceptive empathy that demands perhaps the deepest
mutual trust and understanding humans are capable of.
• Religious experience: in mystical practices like Sufism, participants
collectively engage in rituals like whirling and chanting. These
shared spiritual practices engage the senses in the same way, and
create a sense of unity and connection with something greater than
oneself, fostering community not just among people, but with a
greater spiritual presence.
• Yoga: in a yoga class, practitioners move together through sequences
of poses, guided by the rhythm of their breath. Despite the individ-
ual nature of the practice, there is a collective harmony in the move-
ments and the shared goal of health and peace, as well as a heighten-
ing nervous system through stretches and poses. This shared phys-
ical and meditative experience fosters a sense of communal energy
and focus.

Each of these contexts illustrates how shared experiences, beyond the

scope of verbal communication, can create deep bonds and understand-
ing between participants through intensive, shared sensorial inputs. Yet,
communication can also happen within oneself (or between oneself and
the spiritual world), as a form of introspection, yielding some of the most
profound and transformative experiences.

• Meditation: a practice of inward focus and mindfulness, meditation

has a diverse set of practices across a range of traditions. One com-
mon practice is to observe one’s own thoughts and feelings without
judgment, fostering greater recognition and understanding of one’s
own mental and emotional states, offering an opportunity to bridge
and reconcile internal differences and contradictions.
• Psychedelics: The use of psychedelics can lead to profound internal
experiences and altered states of consciousness that disrupt usual

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 patterns of thought and perception, opening alternative narratives
to make sense. Users often report experiencing deep introspective
insights, a sense of oneness with the universe, confronting deep-
seated emotions and memories, or communication with seemingly
non-embodied forms of consciousness.
• Prayer: Similarly, through prayer, contemplation, or participation
in religious rituals, individuals open communication to something
beyond their sensory experience. Whether through a feeling of di-
vine presence or an internal sense of clarity and peace, these ex-
periences can be deeply impactful and transformative, and foster
a greater connection to themselves and their place in the universe.

Intimate experience today is rich with examples that touch upon the
edges of post-symbolic communication. From physiological signals to
chemosignals we are just beginning to learn the non-verbal, information-
dense modes that can synchronize human experience and form the
deepest human bonds between oneself and other humans, groups, and
the universe broadly.

Post-symbolic communication tomorrow

Today, we stand on the cusp of a Cambrian explosion in technologies that
can advance post-symbolic communication and enable participants to
communicate their physiological, psychological, and even phenomeno-
logical states of being. The Park of Aging is an example of an early
experiment, but we can expect deeper, immersive, wholly sensorial
experiences with novel integrations of technology that combine in
supermodular ways. A number of these technologies include:

• Neural and Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI): devices that connect

directly to the brain capture neural activity and offer a direct path-
way for communicating complex thoughts and emotions.353 BCIs en-
able direct communication between the brain and external devices.
Future developments could allow for the sharing of thoughts, emo-
tions, and experiences directly from one mind to another, allowing
for an unprecedented level of interaction.
353
Rao et al., op. cit.

250
 • Haptic feedback and homuncular flexibility: Haptic devices provide
tactile sensations, simulating touch and physical interactions in
virtual environments and allowing users to feel and respond to
virtual stimuli as if they were real. Similarly, with homuncular
flexibility, individuals can learn to control virtual bodies that differ
significantly from their own, thereby transcending the limitations
of their physical bodies.354 A leading examples is the near-universal
capacity of humans to “regain” from their evolutionary past a sense
of agency over a tail, given sufficient feedback and control in a
virtual world.355

• 3D audio and immersive soundscapes: Advanced sound technolo-

gies that create three-dimensional auditory experiences can deeply
enhance the sense of immersion in a virtual space, conveying emo-
tions and atmosphere in a way that traditional stereo sound cannot.
• Wearable tracking of affect and physiology: Devices that monitor
heart rate, skin conductance, and other physiological markers can
provide insight into a user’s emotional and physical state, enabling
shared experiences that are responsive to these states.
• Projection mapping and spatial computing: Technologies allow for
the transformation of physical spaces into interactive, digitally aug-
mented environments. They can create shared, multi-sensory expe-
riences that blend the physical and digital worlds.
• Neurofeedback and mindfulness: These applications use real-time
displays of brain activity to teach self-regulation of brain function.
They can be used for meditation, mental health therapy, and enhanc-
ing self-awareness and empathy.356
• Neuromodulation: Neuromodulation techniques, such as deep
brain stimulation have implications for enhancing cognitive func-
tion, treating neurological disorders, and even augmenting human
354
Andrea Won, Jeremy Bailenson, Jimmy Lee, and Jaron Lanier, “Homuncular Flexibility
in Virtual Reality,” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Volume 20, Issue 3, 1 May
2015, Pages 241–259, https://doi.org/10.1111/jcc4.12107
355
William Steptoe, Anthony Steed and Mel Slater, “Human Tails: Ownership and Control
of Extended Humanoid Avatars” IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics
19, no. 4 (2013): 583-590.
356
Hengameh Marzbani, Hamid Reza Marateb and Marjan Mansourian, “Neurofeedback:
A Comprehensive Review on System Design, Methodology and Clinical Applicaitons”, Basic
Clinical Neuroscience 7, no, 2: 143-158.

251
 capabilities. However, they also introduce neuroethical challenges
such as moral bio-enhancement (MBE) - the use of biomedical
technology to morally improve humans.

When combined with GFMs, these technologies will further enable us to

generate visual representations of our thoughts at a pace that closely mir-
rors the speed of our imagination. These technologies together are unlock-
ing responsive, adaptive environments or characters in virtual spaces
that can react in real-time to users’ emotions, actions, or choices beyond
simple interpretation of natural language inputs.357 Researchers have
already shown how brain implants can connect the intentions of a par-
alyzed patient into physical movements, demonstrating the remarkable
potential of neural interfaces to bridge the gap between thought and ac-
tion.358

Combined, these capabilities enable the transmission of ideas and emo-

tions that can occur directly and seamlessly and have profound impli-
cations for how we share and understand one another’s internal expe-
riences, creative visions, aspirations and even past traumas to facilitate
reconciliation, healing and forgiveness. For example, imagine a child im-
mersing 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.

Frontiers of post-symbolic communication

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, re-
defining intimacy not as a physical or emotional proximity but as a deep,
seamless sharing of consciousness. Telepathy, once a realm of science
357
Han Huang, Fernanda De La Torre, Cathy Fang, Andrzej Banburski-Fahey, Judith
Amores, and Jaron Lanier. “Real-Time Animation Generation and Control on Rigged
Models via Large Language Models,” arXiv (Cornell University, February 15, 2024),
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2310.17838.pdf (Originally at the 37th Conference on Neural Informa-
tion Processing Systems (NeurIPS) Workshop on ML for Creativity and Design in 2023).
358
Henri Lorach, Andrea Galvez, Valeria Spagnolo, et al., Walking naturally af-
ter spinal cord injury using a brain–spine interface, Nature 618, 126–133 (2023),
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06094-5

252
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 ex-
periences 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 transfor-

mation. 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 commu-
nication is poised to undergo a metamorphosis, redefining what it means
to be intimately connected and be “human.”

Limits of post-symbolic communication

The journey into post-symbolic communication is not without its perils.
The very tools that promise deeper connection could also lead to a loss
of individuality. Worse, participants could be surveilled, leaving our
thoughts, emotions, and motivations open to manipulation; any window
into our mind is also a window of influence. At the extreme, there is a
risk that participants no longer have a private inner world while also
disconnecting from the outer world, a dystopia of which we have be
warned at least since the time of E. M. Forster and most vividly in recent
years by the 1999 film The Matrix.359 Unchecked visibility into our minds
allows for unprecedented levels of manipulation and control, potentially
359
E. M. Forster, “The Machine Stops”, Oxford and Cambridge Review November 1909.

253
by technology companies or governments that distract humanity with
an alternate reality, or simulation. As humans lose touch with the
reality of the physical world, over-reliance on telepathic communica-
tion could lead to the atrophy of traditional communication skills and
cultural practices, with people becoming dependent on direct mental
connections. Furthermore, in a world where the boundaries between
self and other blur, the sanctity of individual thought and experience
could be threatened. High-bandwidth communication could lead to a
homogenization of thoughts and experiences as individual perspectives
merge into collective consciousness, erasing our differences.

Balancing telepathic communication with lower-bandwidth, structured

forms of communication is essential to preserve privacy, autonomy,
diversity, and human governance in the future. Communication, like
speech and text, is less direct and immediate than telepathy but is
structured and deliberate. It requires the sender to formulate thoughts
into words or sentences, providing a level of control and reflection that
instantaneous telepathic communication lacks. 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 indi-
viduals express their political and social preferences at a fixed point in
time. Unlike continuous and invasive telepathic streams, voting encap-
sulates 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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5-2 Immersive Shared Reality
“Stand up and face the mirror”, the at-first innocent but gradually
more-threatening refrain, echoes through Courtney Cogburn’s 1000 Cut
Journey.360 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.

In Becoming Homeless, you look around your already-bare apartment to

decide which possessions to sell next.361 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 succes-
sion. 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 cham-
pagne. “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.

Immersive shared reality technologies unlocks a new chapter in human

interaction, leveraging cutting-edge virtual reality (VR), augmented re-
ality (AR) and mixed reality (MR) systems. Unlike the deeply personal
and sensorially rich exchanges of post-symbolic communication, shared
immersive reality presents a broader canvas for human interaction, en-
abling people to engage in shared, multisensory experiences. This chap-
ter delves into the landscape of immersive technologies, today’s applica-
360
Cogburn Research Group. “1,000 Cut Journey,” n.d.
https://cogburnresearchgroup.socialwork.columbia.edu/research-projects/1000-cut-
journey.
361
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.

255
tions, tomorrow’s potential, and the frontier. It shows how immersive
technologies may facilitate shared experiences that blend physical and
virtual reality, complementing and expanding human experience with
interactions that surpass physical, spatial, and social limitations. Immer-
sive shared reality (ISR) creates spaces where communities may converge
for socialization, gaming, entertainment, and more, facilitating connec-
tions that, while less intense than symbolic communication, are meaning-
ful and emotionally resonant. From virtual reality gatherings that unite
people across the globe, to mass online gaming and virtual music festi-
vals, these digital arenas extend the possibility space of shared human
experience.

On the horizon, shared ISR is poised for rapid expansion. Technological

advance will deepen the sensory integration of these virtual experiences,
extending beyond sight and sound to include touch, smell, and even taste.
This future, teeming with hybrid reality environments and emotional con-
nectivity, 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 widen-
ing of surveillance to virtual escapism, these challenges demand thought-
ful consideration to ensure that our digital futures augment, rather than
eclipse, the richness of human experience.

Copresence today
Throughout history, of the most meaningful human experiences involve
multisensory copresence. Religious observances often engage many
senses in large groups. Clubs and parties are among the most treasured
entertainment experiences because of their multisensory activation.
Political rallies, group assemblies (whether at schools or for concerts),
collective outings (hiking, sports, etc.) all engage a range of sense.

Technology has increasingly played a role in facilitating such copresence,

especially at a distance, in recent years. ISR refers to technology that cre-
ates a shared virtual environment where users can interact in real-time.
This type of “reality” can be considered a subset application of Mediated
Reality as illustrated in Figure A, a broader term that encompasses vari-
ous technologies that mediate our perception of reality, including Virtual,

256
Augmented and Mixed Reality (a.k.a. VR, AR, MR).

**

Figure 5-2-A. Mediated Reality Framework adapted from Mann and Nnlf
(1994). Source: Wikipedia, CC 3.0 BY-SA.

**

ISR can apply to many human interactions. Some of the most common
applications are socialization, gaming, entertainment, sports, and fitness:

• VR gatherings: These digital spaces enable people from around the

world to interact in a shared virtual environment. Here, avatars rep-
resent participants, allowing for expressive movements and inter-
actions that go beyond verbal communication. These virtual gath-
erings can range from collaborative work meetings to social events,

257
 where the sense of presence is amplified by the immersive, 3D envi-
ronment. Participants experience a sense of togetherness and com-
munity, facilitating connections that, while not as intense as physi-
cal interactions, are still meaningful and emotionally resonant.
• Mass online gaming: Online multiplayer games create expansive
worlds where players collaborate, compete, and strategize together.
Communication is a blend of in-game gestures, strategic planning,
and quick decision-making, often under time pressure. This envi-
ronment nurtures a form of camaraderie and collective intelligence,
as players become attuned to each other’s play styles and tactics and
take common action towards common goals.
• Online religious services: In the digital era, religious gatherings
have expanded into online platforms, allowing congregations to
participate in services and rituals remotely. This form of communal
worship, while lacking the physical closeness of traditional services,
still offers a sense of shared belief, uniting participants in a common
religious experience.
• Virtual music festivals and parties: With the advent of streaming
technology, music festivals and parties have found a new home in
the virtual world through a range of media, from opera in movie the-
aters to VR concert and music festival experiences. Virtual elements
have even become increasingly central to the most prized in-person
music venues, leading to massive investments that integrate digital
and physical experiences ever more closely.
• E-sports tournaments: E-sports have gained immense popularity,
with spectators and players engaging in highly competitive gaming
at a professional level. These events, often streamed to vast audi-
ences, create a shared sense of excitement and allegiance among
fans.
• Remote fitness classes: The rise of online fitness, especially during
the pandemic, has brought people together in pursuit of health and
wellness. Participants engage in synchronized workouts, yoga ses-
sions, or dance classes from their own homes, sharing a common
goal and a sense of group motivation.
• Virtual tourism: travelers can experience remote places, walking
through historic cities or visiting foreign landscapes from the
comfort of their homes. This technology enables travelers to virtu-

258
 ally walk through historic cities, marvel at natural wonders, and
immerse themselves in foreign landscapes.
• Immersive artistic experiences: Alongside the rise of remote shared
experience, a new genre of in-person immersive art has developed
and become increasingly prevalent form at the intersection of live
entertainment and museums. Participants jointly explore myster-
ies, escape from puzzles, live in the world of an artist who saw the
world through differently abled eyes, or surround themselves in
worlds of novel tactile and visual sensations that transport them to
new shared understandings of the possible.

Immersive shared reality tomorrow

ISR technology is connecting people to learn and empathize at unprece-
dented scales and social distances, as highlighted in our opening exam-
ple. The future of ISR promises to make distant or imagined experiences
palpably real, enveloping users in a synthetic world that simulates mul-
tiple senses simultaneously. While sight and sound have been the tradi-
tional focus, new sensors and actuators promise to deepen integration
of touch, smell, and even taste. Haptic feedback systems will replicate
the subtleties of physical contact. Olfactory technology will enable fra-
grances and odors to be part of storytelling, education, and even retail ex-
periences in VR. Taste retargeting will unlock virtual dining experiences
through the altering of taste perception by delivering chemical modula-
tors to the mouth.362 Here are a few envisioned advancements and novel
examples that extend the concept of ISR into new dimensions:

• Hybrid reality environments: Leveraging augmented reality (AR)

and virtual reality (VR) in tandem, these environments blend physi-
cal and digital elements seamlessly. Imagine attending a conference
where remote participants appear as full-size holograms, capable
of interacting with physical objects and participants in real-time, a
technique one of us frequently uses for remote appearances. This
blurs the line between who is present physically and who is digital.
362
Jas Brooks, Noor Amin, and Pedro Lopes, “Taste Retargeting via Chemical Taste Modu-
lators,” In Proceedings of the 36th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and
Technology (UIST ’23), Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article
106, (2023): 1–15, https://doi.org/10.1145/3586183.3606818.

259
 • Emotional connectivity: Emerging technologies aim to transmit nu-
anced human emotions and physical sensations through VR, using
advanced haptic feedback, biometric sensors, and emotional GFMs.
This could enable users to feel the warmth of a handshake, the pres-
sure of a hug, or even the subtleties of emotional expression con-
veyed through a virtual avatar, deepening connections and empathy
between participants and enabling those with visual or auditory im-
pairments to engage through other senses.
• Massive multi-user online laboratories (MMOLs): Scientists can
collaboratively conduct experiments in a shared virtual labora-
tory. MMOLs could facilitate real-time collaboration on scientific
research and education across the globe, breaking down barriers
to access and enabling a form of immersive, collective discovery.
• Civic Spaces: Digital replicas of civic centers, town halls, and com-
munity 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 exist-
ing online spaces do, thus helping improve the creation of context
and common understanding online.
• Immersive learning: From virtual field trips to interactive historical
reenactments, educational content will become more immersive, al-
lowing students of all ages to explore and learn in ways that are en-
gaging, 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 possi-
ble.363
• 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
363
For example, education of nurses in VR has shown significant potential to accelerate
tactile learning. Jeeyae Choi, Elise C. Thompson, Jeungok Choi, Colette Waddill and Soyoung
Choi, “Effectiveness of Immersive Virtual Reality in Nursing Education”, Nurse Educator 47,
no. 3: E57-E61.

260
 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
364
Policing Project , which shares the lived experiences of people
with law enforcement in a controlled, yet realistic virtual chamber,
improving understanding and trust on both sides.
• Environmental climate experiences: Interactive simulations that al-
low users to experience the potential impacts of climate change first-
hand. For example, the Tree demonstrates how VR can evoke empa-
thy 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.365
• Therapy: Leveraging the power of VR to create therapeutic environ-
ments, sessions increasingly offer greatly enhanced cognitive behav-
ioral therapy, enabling patients to be exposed in a carefully mod-
ulated 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 hyperac-
tivity disorders is increasingly bearing fruit.366

As these technologies mature, they are increasingly harnessed to not just

simulate reality but to enhance it, creating a bridge between diverse cul-
tures and fostering a global community of shared experiences and mutual
understanding regardless of one’s origin or language. These envisioned
applications of ISR hold the potential to transform how we interact with
the world and each other, fostering understanding, empathy, and collab-
oration across all facets of human endeavor.
364
“Portals Policing Project,” The Justice Collaboratory, n.d.,
https://www.justicehappenshere.yale.edu/projects/portals-policing-project.
365
See www.treeofficial.com
366
Paul M.G. Emmelkamp and Katharina Meyerbröker, “Virtual Reality Therapy in Mental
Health”, Annual Review of Clinical Psychology 17 (2021): 495-519.

261
Frontiers of immersive shared reality
As we gaze to the horizon of ISR, the very nature of communal experience
and human connection undergoes a profound metamorphosis. Imagine
stepping into a world where shared virtual spaces are not mere simula-
tions, but extensions of our physical reality, offering experiences that are
as rich and complex as those encountered in the tangible world. In this fu-
ture, ISR technologies enable a fusion of senses, thoughts, and emotions.
At the frontiers of ISR, we are not merely spectators but active partici-
pants in a revolution of multisensory integration.367

• Imagined worlds and shared dreams: More sophisticated and con-

trolled use of sensory inputs (e.g. smell, taste, visual and auditory),
will enable participants to generate and share realities that deeply
resonate with participants’ emotions and memories. Such stimuli,
when reactivated during sleep, not only can enhance these memo-
ries368 , but facilitate sharing altered states of consciousness 369 and
370
shared lucid dreams . Participants will be able to explore the
subconscious playground of the human mind together. GFMs are
already enabling users to “speak the world into existence” and as in-
put modalities become richer, sharing imagination and dreams be-
come every more possible.371
• Simulated worlds: Virtual environments can simulate realities—
both the future and past—under different conditions. For example,
participants will be able to experiment with scenarios of climate
change, such as rising sea levels or the impact of extreme weather
events, making distant concepts an immediate and personal ex-
367
Patricia Cornelio, Carlos Velasco, and Marianna Obrist, “Multisensory Integration as per
Technological Advances: A Review,” Frontiers in Neuroscience (2021): 614.
368
Judith Fernandez, Nirmita Merha, Bjoern Rasch, and Pattie Maes, “Olfactory Wear-
ables for Mobile Targeted Memory Reactivation,” Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference
on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Hamburg, Germany, Article 717, (2023): 1–20,
https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.35808922023.
369
Michelle Carra, Adam Haarb, Judith Amoresb, Pedro Lopesc, et al., “Dream Engineering:
Simulating Worlds through Sensory Stimulation,” Consciousness and Cognition 83 (2020):
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2020.102955.
370
Karen Konkoly, Kristoffer Appel, Emma ChabaniKonkoly et al., Real-time dialogue
between experimenters and dreamers during REM sleep, Current Biology 32, 7 (2021):
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2021.01.026
371
Han Huang, Fernanda De La Torre, Cathy Mengying Fang, Andrzej Banburski-Fahey,
Judith Amores and Jaron Lanier, “Real-time Animation Generation and Control on Rigged
Models via Large Language Models” (2024) at https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.17838.

262
 perience, or potentially beneficial futures to plan to both achieve
them and avoid unintended harm. With affective computing, the
system may adapt to the environment based on the user’s response,
physiology as well as memories or preferences, creating a feedback
loop that heightens awareness and empathy.
• Virtual design studios: Community members, architects, and engi-
neers may come together to co-create the green spaces of tomor-
row to redefine “planning.” Participants virtually touch the bark of
trees slated for planting and inhale the fragrant blossoms intended
for the gardens. Participant feedback can modify the simulation in
real-time, enabling sensorial immersion into different visions for
a project. Harnessing methods from our Augmented Deliberation
chapter below, they could deliberate and see the possibilities for
joint design come to life around them, printing the design on to phys-
ical space only having lived in it together virtually.
• 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 individ-
uals 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 memorial-
izing collective traumas, allowing them to be told from a variety of
perspectives quickly and flexibly.
• 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 di-
verse 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.
• 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 collec-
tive awareness. This network would enable a form of communica-

263
 tion and connection that goes beyond language, allowing for an un-
paralleled synchronization of human intention and action towards
global challenges.
• Inter-specific communication platforms: Beyond human-to-human
interaction, ISR could extend the boundaries of communication to
include other species as we discuss further in our Environment chap-
ter. By translating non-human languages and experiences into for-
mats we can understand and vice versa, these platforms could fos-
ter an unprecedented level of empathy and cooperation between hu-
mans and other life forms on our planet.
• 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.
• Collective creativity spaces: These digital platforms would enable
artists, musicians, writers, and creators of all kinds to collaborate in
real-time, across the globe, in shared virtual spaces. Here, ideas and
inspirations merge in a communal creative flow, leading to art and
innovation that truly represents the collective human spirit, tran-
scending individual capabilities, as we elaborate on further in the
next chapter.

As we embark on this journey, we stand on the brink of redefining human

experience and collaboration. The technologies that lie ahead promise
not just advancements in the way we interact with the world, but a rev-
olution in the way we perceive, connect, and innovate. In this new era,
the barriers between individual consciousness and collective experience
become more fluid, heralding a future where our shared realities foster
a deeper unity and yet more creative collaborations.

Limits of immersive shared reality

Unlike the intimate, direct exchange of thoughts and emotions envisioned
in post-symbolic communication, ISR unlocks new dimensions for human
interaction and coordination from simple social interaction to education,

264
work, and entertainment— bringing with them a distinct set of limitations
and ethical concerns. If the Matrix is a dystopia of post-symbolic commu-
nication, a similar and a fitting dystopian parallel can be drawn from Neal
Stephenson’s Snow Crash and the similar but more broadly known Ready
Player One by Ernest Cline, adapted into a film directed by Steven Spiel-
berg.372 In both stories, people retreat into ISR simulations (“the Meta-
verse” for Stephenson, “the OASIS” for Cline) in response to social and
environmental decline, further reinforcing that decline as they abandon
civic engagement in the physical world. 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 under-
mine their future training and the risk of industrial development
destroying the environment on which it depends.
• Diminished physical health: Immersing oneself in alternative reali-
ties 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 ac-
cess is treated as a human right in the same way as we have advo-
cated above for internet access.
• Physical health implications: Prolonged engagement in virtual en-
vironments raises concerns about physical health, including the ef-
fects 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 in-
teraction becomes a crucial health consideration.
372
Ernest Cline, Ready Player One (New York: Crown, 2011).

265
 • Corporate control, surveillance, and monopolization: ISR blurs the
lines between public and private, where digital spaces can be simul-
taneously intimate and open to wide audiences or observed by cor-
porate 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 per-
sonas 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.

We must, therefore, prevent a headlong rush into a monopolistic and

dystopian “metaverse” undermining the very real potential of these tech-
nologies to empower richer human connection by understanding them in
the context of the other tools that must complement, support and under-
gird their development.

5-3 Creative Collaborations

In 79 AD, the cataclysmic eruption of Mount Vesuvius entombed the Ro-
man cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum along with a trove of 1,800 pa-
pyrus scrolls from the first and second centuries BC that otherwise would
have deteriorated over time. These scrolls, containing significant philo-
sophical and literary relics of an ancient world, have long tantalized schol-
ars. Early attempts at unrolling them, beginning in the 18th century, often
ended in destruction of the brittle, carbonized documents. Modern imag-
ing techniques, however, opened new avenues for exploration, exempli-
fied by the Vesuvius Challenge 2023— a landmark prize at the intersection
of history, technology, and collaborative problem-solving. The Challenge
would allow contestants computer access to the scanned scrolls to win a
series of prizes for virtually unwrapping them.

To counter information siloing, the organizers introduced smaller

266
“progress prizes” awarded bi-monthly that required participants to
publish their code or research open source, enriching the entire com-
munity’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.373 Youssef Nader later harnessed domain adaptation techniques
on these findings.374 As the competition progressed, its structure fostered
a dynamic where winners not only shared their findings and methodolo-
gies 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.

Announced February 5, 2024, the Grand Prize of $700,000 criterion was

to decipher 4 passages of 140 characters each, with at least 85% of char-
acters recoverable. In a demonstration of interdisciplinary and global
cross-collaboration, a team comprising Luke Farritor (a 21-year-old col-
lege 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. Together they exceeded expecta-
tions by recovering an additional 11 columns of text, containing more
than 2000 characters. Each team member brought their expertise and
earlier achievements to this collaborative effort. Their success not only
marked a significant academic milestone but also propelled the entire
field of digital archaeology forward.

Artistic expression through media such as music, visual arts, theater, ar-
chitecture, film and even cuisine are among the most powerful and canon-
ical foundations for forming the shared cultures that define social groups.
While not as powerfully engaging as full multisensory shared experience,
they can spread much farther and engage fully one and sometimes more
sensory experiences in a richer way than verbal communication. Today,
373
Stephen Parsons, C. Seth Parker, Christy Chapman, Mami Hayashida and W. Brent Seales,
“EduceLab-Scrolls: Verifiable Recovery of Text from Herculaneum Papyri using X-ray CT”
(2023) at https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.02084. Casey Handmer, “Reading Ancient Scrolls” August
5, 2023 at https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2023/08/05/reading-ancient-scrolls/
374
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/.

267
the boundaries of geography, expertise, and even audience are dissolv-
ing thanks to a mix of digital tools and platforms that unlock creative
collaboration. This chapter explores how these technologies are foster-
ing a new era of collaborative creation, characterized by unprecedented
accessibility, real-time interaction, and a shared creative space. We will
see how artists, educators, and entrepreneurs can harness the power of
crowdsourcing and online platforms to break down barriers and expand
the creative process. These technologies not only connect individuals but
also foster a shared creative process that is more inclusive, dynamic, and
expansive than ever before.

Cocreation today
Artistic cocreation is nothing new. For thousands of years, musicians,
dancers and actors have formed bands. Some of the most canonical lit-
erary texts such as the Bible, the Bhagavad Gita and the Homerian epics
were all almost certainly written by many hands over generations. Films
sometimes have distractingly long credit rolls for a reason.

Yet these culture-defining collaborative projects have traditionally been

slow and expensive, limiting both access to outputs and participation in
the process of creation. Cowriting, for example, has traditionally involved
months, years or even generations of retelling, adaptation, rewriting, etc.
to achieve a coherent and digestible narrative. The massive live entertain-
ment industry testifies to the expense of flying teams around the world
to present the experience of creative collaboration to diverse audiences.
Other forms of joint creativity, such as scientific collaborations like those
highlighted above, have traditionally taken place in massive physically
co-located laboratories like Los Alamos.

Yet early ⿻ technologies that became part of the fabric of the internet,
imagined by people like Ted Nelson as we highlighted in The Lost Dao,
have already transformed the possibilities of collaborative creative prac-
tice and sharing.

• Online collaboration: Tools like Slack, Asana and Notion (which we

used in this project) have revolutionized the workspace by enabling
teams to collaborate in real-time, regardless of geographic location.

268
 These platforms support a wide range of creative projects, from soft-
ware development to marketing campaigns, by providing an infras-
tructure for communication, project management, and document
sharing. They exemplify how digital workspaces can enhance pro-
ductivity and foster a sense of community among team members.
• Cloud-based creative software: Adobe Creative Cloud, Autodesk,
and GitHub (which was the primary platform for writing this book)
offer sophisticated tools for designers, engineers, and developers to
work on shared projects simultaneously. This technology allows for
real-time feedback and iteration, reducing the time from concept to
creation and enabling a more fluid and dynamic creative process.
Even more prominently, collaborative word processing software
such as Google docs has enabled real-time collaborative editing by
many people in diverse geographies.
• Open-source projects: Some of the most ambitious creative collabo-
rations take place in open-source co-edited projects like Wikipedia,
where thousands co-create increasingly canonical content. Plat-
forms like GitHub and GitLab facilitate similar codevelopment for
software, while others like Hugging Face allow this for development
of Generative Foundation Models (GFMs). This collaborative model
leverages the collective intelligence of a global community, acceler-
ating innovation and improving software quality through diverse
inputs and perspectives.
• Remote artistic collaborations: Artists and creators use platforms
like Twitch, Patreon, and Discord (the primary collaborative plat-
form we used to discuss this project) to collaborate on projects,
share their creative process, and engage with audiences in real-
time. These platforms enable artists to co-create with other artists
and fans, breaking down the barriers between creator and audience
and fostering a participatory culture around the creative process.
• Educational collaborations: Online non-profit education platforms
like Coursera, edX, and Khan Academy bring together educators and
learners from across the globe. They support collaborative learning
experiences, peer-to-peer feedback, and group projects, making ed-
ucation more accessible and fostering a global learning community.
• Crowdsourced innovation: Platforms like Kickstarter and Indiegogo
enable entrepreneurs to collaborate with the public to fund and re-

269
 fine new products and projects. This model of collaboration invites
input and support from a broad audience, validating ideas and en-
suring they meet the needs and desires of potential users.

As we move forward, the possibilities for collaborative innovation can

increase in breadth and depth, thriving on the collective intelligence, di-
verse perspectives and unique contributions of larger (and even global)
communities, redefining the boundaries of innovation, art, science, and
education.

Creative collaboration tomorrow

At the boundaries of ⿻ practice we are already seeing a world where
real-time global collaboration assisted by advance computational models
become the norm, propelling the creative process to new heights of in-
clusivity and innovation. The story of the Herculaneum scrolls encapsu-
lates the essence of collaborative innovation—bridging the past with the
future, merging diverse expertise to illuminate the unknown. It serves
as an emblematic beginning to our exploration, reminding us that at the
heart of every great discovery lies the spirit of collaboration, a spirit that
continues to drive humanity forward, beyond the limits of our imagina-
tion. Rather than exceptional, the Vesuvius Challenge and its winners
trace a common pattern. Consider the 2009 Netflix Prize, which offered
a million dollars to the team that could beat their internal movie recom-
mendation 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.375 One might even use this concep-
tion to reimagine neural networks as social networks, simulating diver-
sity 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.376

We are seeing the beginnings of this future in a diversity of emerging prac-

tices.
375
Scott E. Page, The diversity bonus: How great teams pay off in the knowledge economy
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019).
376
James Evans. “The case for alien AI,” TedxChicago2024, October 6th, 2023, https://www.
youtube.com/watch?v=87zET-4IQws.

270
 • Synthetic instruments and generative art: The electronic musical
forms that rose to prominence in the 1980s were grounded in the
ability to synthesize a wide range of sound profiles electronically
that in the past would have required elaborate instrumentation or
have been impossible. Today we are seeing the seed of an even
more radical revolution, as GFMs are increasingly being harnessed
by artists to allow a far broader range of people to synthesize a daz-
zling array of experiences. For example, leading artists Holly Hern-
don, Mat Dryhurst and their collaborators have harnessed GFMs to
allow them to sing in the voices of historical figures or others not
present and to allow others to sing in their voices. Artist and musi-
cian Laurie Anderson has used a variety of models to produce texts
that speak to contemporary problems with historical style and wis-
dom. A generation of “generative artists” have explored the inter-
secting creativity embedded in these models to draw out elements of
the collective psyche. In a small way, in this project we have blended
voice samples of many participants to create an audio version read
in our common voice.
• Cross-cultural collaboration: Where once language and cultural
misunderstanding were central barriers to creative collaboration
across widely varying contexts, GFMs are increasingly able to
translate not just languages, but cultural styles, making fusions
increasingly fruitful in music, film, and more.
• Alien art: While GFMs can mimic and automate the way humans
generate ideas, we could instead aspire to generate “alien intelli-
gence” that takes our thought in directions humans are unlikely to
identify, thus generating new fodder for collaboration across diver-
sity.377 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 play-
ers. Research demonstrates that interacting with these diverse AI
strategies has increased the novelty and diversity of the human
377
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.

271
 378
Go-playing population . 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.
• Digital twins and simulation for creative testing: Advanced simula-
tions 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 be-
haviors, we could conduct in-silico social experiments at an unprece-
dented speed and scale. For instance, by deploying alternative news
feed algorithms on in-silico social media platforms, where large lan-
guage model (LLM) agents that mimic human social media users in-
teract with one another, we can explore and test the impact of these
alternative algorithms on macro-level social outcomes, such as con-
flicts and polarization.379

Tomorrow, we expect digital tools to unlock a symphony of minds, am-

plified and harmonized by GFMs and real-time high bandwidth remote
synchronization. Yet, this is merely the prelude to a grand concerto
of human and digital collaboration. As we wield these digital tools to
broaden the space of creative collaboration, we will find ourselves in
an ever-evolving dance, one where technology not only aids us but also
reshapes our perspectives, fostering a rapid integration of diverse ideas
and talents. We are not just witnessing the emergence of new creative
processes; we are participating in the birth of a globally inclusive, multi-
disciplinary renaissance, one that promises to redefine the landscape of
creativity and problem-solving for generations to come.
378
Minkyu Shin, Jin Kim, Bas van Opheusden, and Thomas L. Griffiths, “Superhuman arti-
ficial 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.
379
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.

272
Frontiers of creative collaboration
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 communica-
tion technologies to include non-human perspectives will open new
frontiers in creativity. Collaborations could extend to other intelli-
gence species (e.g., dolphins, octopuses), incorporating their percep-
tions 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 hu-
manity 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 ad-
dressing issues such as climate change, harnessing the power of di-
verse perspectives and innovative thinking to create sustainable and
impactful solutions.

As we embark on this collaborative odyssey, humanity stands poised to

redefine creativity itself. It is a future where creativity is not just a shared
endeavor but a shared experience, connecting participants in a web of col-

273
lective imagination and innovation. Yet, as we approach this crescendo of
human potential—where the symphony of collaborative genius reaches
its zenith—we also have to explore its ethical considerations and limita-
tions.

Limits of creative collaboration

The future of creative collaborations, while pregnant with potential for
novel collaboration paradigms, also has a range of limitations and ethi-
cal dilemmas. As we envision the zenith of creative synergy enabled by
technologies that dissolve the barriers of distance, language, and even
individual cognition, the shadow of potential dystopian outcomes looms
large. Dave Eggers’s classic The Circle highlights the dangers of constant
creative sharing to erode the very sense of self that is the locus of creative
genius. 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 ex-
ploration and connections of novel, heterogeneous ideas. For in-
stance, crowdsourced innovation and co-creation processes could
further be facilitated by AI that bridges existing ideas and commu-
nities that are less likely to be connected in the platform.380
3. Over-reliance on technology: Future collaborations might lean
380
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, no. 1 (2023): 1641, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-36741-4.

274
 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 tech-
nology 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 ex-
ploitation 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 collabora-
tions are mediated by global platforms, there’s a risk that local cul-
tural expressions and minority voices are overshadowed by domi-
nant narratives. This could lead to a dilution of cultural diversity in
creative outputs, ending in monolithic culture that neutralizes dis-
sent and diversity.

In addressing these challenges, the future of creative collaboration must

navigate the delicate balance between leveraging the immense potential
of technology to enhance human creativity and ensuring that this does
not come at the expense of privacy, autonomy, and cultural diversity. Cen-
tral to this journey is the leveraging of open-source technologies and the
principles of ⿻. Open-source platforms, by their very nature, encourage
transparency and collective ownership, countering the risks of hidden
monopolies and collusion that can arise in proprietary systems. These
can be further augmented by many of the economic and governance mod-

275
els we highlight in what follows. Something that is already beginning to
happen as leading ⿻ artists like Holly Herndon, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and
will.i.am champion not only harnessing GFMs but also ensuring they are
designed to attribute, celebrate and empower creators to live sustainably.

Furthermore, many of the risks of cultural homogenization arise from

the encroachment of a single medium, with all its sensory limits, into a
broader range of life. To preserve creativity, we must bolster the space for
the even deeper intimate connections and reflection on which creativity
depends. Luckily, this is precisely the role that the even-more-intimate
technologies we discussed in the preceding chapters can play, ensuring
that an endless stream of shared music and artistic mashups do not crowd
out the deep relationships that are the foundation of physical and cultural
reproduction.

5-4 Augmented Deliberation

As we have noted above, one of the most common concerns about social
media has been its tendency to entrench existing social divisions, creat-
ing “echo chambers” that undermine a sense of shared reality.381 News
feed algorithms based on “collaborative filtering” selects content that is
likely to maximize user engagements, prioritizing like-minded content
that reinforces users’ existing beliefs and insulates them from diverse in-
formation. Despite mixed findings on whether these algorithms truly ex-
acerbate political polarization and hamper deliberations, it is natural to
ask how these systems might be redesigned with the opposite intention
of “bridging” the crowd. The largest-scale attempt at this is the Commu-
nity Notes (formerly Birdwatch) system in the X (formerly Twitter) social
media platform.
381
Cass Sunstein, republic.com (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001) and #repub-
lic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2018).

276
**

Figure 5-4-A. Community Notes on X correcting a misleading post. Source:

Direct capture from application, by fair use.

**

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 mis-
leading. 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.382

Specifically, raters are placed on a one-dimensional spectrum of opinion,

discovered by the statistical analysis from the data but in practice corre-
sponding 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 consid-
ered to be “helpful” if this objective quality, rather than the overall rat-
ings, is sufficiently high. Instead of prioritizing notes that are supported
382
Vitalik Buterin, “What do I think about Community Notes?” August 16, 2023 at
https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2023/08/16/communitynotes.html.

277
by a biased, like-minded cluster of users, the system rewards notes that
are supported by diverse groups of users, correcting biases driven by po-
litical and social fragmentation. This approach leverages alternative so-
cial media algorithms to augment human deliberations, prioritizing con-
tents based on the principle of collaboration across diversity, consistent
with ⿻, to which hundreds of millions of people are currently exposed
each week.383 This platform has been shown to encourage the exploration
of diverse political information, compared to the previous methods of
moderating misinformation 384 .

In this chapter, we explore the considerable power and limitations of hu-

man conversations, expressing hope that advances in ⿻ might transform
conversations into a more powerful engine for both amplifying and con-
necting diverse perspectives in ways previously unimaginable.

Conversation today
The oldest, typically richest, and still most common form of conversations
is the “in-person meeting.” Idealized portraits of democracy typically re-
fer to discussions involved in these in-person conversations, such as what
took place among traditional tribes, in the Athenian marketplaces, or in
New England town halls, rather than to votes or media. The recent film,
Women Talking, brilliantly captures this spirit in its portrait of a trauma-
tized community coming to a plan for common action through discussion.
Groups of friends, clubs, students and teachers, all exchange perspectives,
learn, grow, and form a common purpose through in-person talk. In ad-
dition to their interactive nature, in-person interactions often carry ele-
ments of richer, non-verbal communication, as participants share a phys-
ical context and can perceive many non-verbal cues, such as facial expres-
sions, body language, and gestures, from others in the conversation.
383
Stefan Wojcik, Sophie Hilgard, Nick Judd, Delia Mocanu, Stephen Ragain, M.B. Fallin
Hunzaker, Keith Coleman and Jay Baxter, “Birdwatch: Crowd Wisdom and Bridging Algo-
rithms can Inform Understanding and Reduce the Spread of Misinformation”, October 27,
2022 at https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.15723.
384
Junsol Kim, Zhao Wang, Haohan Shi, Hsin-Keng Ling, and James Evans, “Individual mis-
information tagging reinforces echo chambers; Collective tagging does not,” arXiv preprint
arXiv:2311.11282 (2023), https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.11282.

278
The next oldest and most common communicative form is writing. While
far less interactive, writing enables words to travel over much greater
distances and time. Typically conceived as capturing the voice of a sin-
gle “author”, written communications can spread broadly, even globally,
with the aid of printing and translation. They can endure for thousands
of years, allowing for a “broadcast” of messages much farther than am-
phitheaters or loudspeakers can achieve.

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 con-
versations serve as links among individuals who are physically and so-
cially proximate, and writing serves as a bridge, connecting people who
385
are geographically distant from each other. The World Cafe or Open
386
Space Technology 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.
Other examples include constitutional and rule-making processes, book
clubs, editorial boards for publications, focus groups, surveys, and other
research processes. A typical pattern is that a group deliberates on writ-
ing that is then submitted to another deliberative group that results in
another document that is then sent back, and so on. One might recognize
this in legal tradition via oral and written arguments, as well as the aca-
demic peer review process.

One of the most fundamental challenges this variety of forms tries to nav-
igate is the trade-off between diversity and bandwidth.387 On the one
hand, when we attempt to engage individuals with vastly diverse per-
spectives 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 (some-
times attributed to Oscar Wilde) that “socialism takes too many evenings”.
385
“The World Cafe”, The World Café Community Foundation, last modified 2024,
(https://theworldcafe.com/)
386
“Open Space”, Open Space World, last modified 2024, https://openspaceworld.org/wp2/
387
Sinan Aral, and Marshall Van Alstyne, “The diversity-bandwidth trade-off,” American
journal of sociology 117, no. 1 (2011): 90-171.

279
On the other hand, when we attempt to increase the bandwidth and effi-
ciency of conversations, they often struggle to remain inclusive of diverse
perspectives. People engaging in the conversation are often geographi-
cally 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 nec-
essary for conversation to cross broad social diversity, as we will discuss
at length below.

Perhaps the fundamental limit on all these approaches is that while meth-
ods of broadcast (allowing many to hear a single statement) have dramat-
ically improved, broad listening (allowing one person to thoughtfully di-
gest a range of perspectives) remains extremely costly and time consum-
ing.388 As economics Nobel Laureate and computer science pioneer Her-
bert Simon observed, “(A) wealth of information creates a poverty of at-
tention.”389 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.

A number of strategies have, historically and more recently, been used to

navigate these challenges at scale. Representatives are chosen for conver-
sations by a variety of methods, including:

1. Election: A campaign and voting process are used to select repre-

sentatives, 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 cit-
388
To our knowledge, this concept of “broad listening” originates with Andrew Trask. How-
ever, we have no written reference for it with him and thus want to ensure he is credited
here.
389
Herbert Simon, “Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World,” In Comput-
ers, Communications, and the Public Interest, edited by Martin Greenberger, 38–72. Balti-
more: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1971. https://gwern.net/doc/design/1971-simon.pdf.

280
 390
izen deliberative councils on contentious policy issues.391 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.

Once participants to a deliberation are selected and arrive, facilitating

a meaningful interaction is an equally significant challenge and is a sci-
ence unto itself. Ensuring all participants, whatever their communicative
modes and styles, are able to be fully heard requires a range of social tech-
nologies and practices, including clear purpose and agenda setting, ac-
tive inclusion, small group breakouts, careful management of notes (often
called the “harvest” of many small group conversations), turn-taking, and
encouragement of active listening and often translation and accommoda-
tion of differing abilities for auditory and visual communication styles. 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.392 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 ex-
change 393 .

Appropriate use of digital technologies can augment the social technolo-

gies for engagement, and the intersection of the two can be fruitful. Phys-
390
A Citizen Deliberative Council (CDC) article on the Co-Intelligence Site https://www.co-
intelligence.org/P-CDCs.html
391
Tom Atlee, Empowering Public Wisdom (2012, Berkley, California, Evolver Editions, 2012)
392
Liberating Structures (2024) has 33 methods for people to work together in liberating
ways. Participedia is public participation and democratic innovations platform document-
ing 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 Democ-
racy Pattern Language.
393
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.

281
ical travel distance used to be a severe impediment to deliberation. How-
ever, phone and video conferences have significantly mitigated this chal-
lenge, making various formats of distance/virtual meetings increasingly
common venues for challenging discussions.

The rise of internet-mediated writing, including formats such as email,

message boards/usenets, webpages, blogs, and notably social media, has
significantly broadened “inclusion” in written communication. These
platforms offer unique opportunities for individuals to gain visibility and
attention easily through user interactions (e.g., “likes” or “reposts”) and
algorithmic ranking systems. This paradigm shift has enabled the diffu-
sion of information among the public, a process once firmly controlled
by the editorial procedures of legacy media. However, the effectiveness
of these platforms in optimally distributing attention remains a topic of
debate. A common drawback is the lack of context and thorough mod-
eration in the diffusion of information, contributing to issues like the
spread of “misinformation” and “disinformation,” and the dominance of
well-resourced entities. Moreover, the reliance on algorithmic ranking
can inadvertently create “echo chambers,” confining users to a narrow
stream of content that reflects their existing beliefs, thus limiting their
exposure to a diverse range of perspectives and knowledge.

Conversation tomorrow
Recent advancements are progressively shifting the dynamics of the
trade-offs, enabling more efficient and networked sharing of rich,
in-person deliberations. Simultaneously, these developments are facili-
tating more thoughtful, balanced, and contextualized moderation within
increasingly inclusive forms of social media, thereby enhancing the
overall quality and reach of these platforms.

As we discussed in The Life of a Digital Democracy chapter above, one

of the most successful examples in Taiwan has been the vTaiwan sys-
tem, which harnesses OSS called Polis.394 This platform shares some fea-
tures with social media services like X, but builds abstractions of some
394
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.

282
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 per-
spectives. Representative statements that highlight these differing opin-
ion 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.

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”.395 Other leading exam-
ples 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. Such systems have been used to make increasingly
consequential policy and design decisions, around topics such as the
regulation of ride-hailing applications and the direction of some of
the leading generative foundation models (GFMs).396 In particular,
working closely with the ⿻ NGO the Collective Intelligence Project (CIP),
Anthropic’s recently released Claude3 model, considered by many to be
the current state-of-the-art in GFMs, sourced the constitution used to
395
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. Aviv Ovadya
and Luke Thorburn, “Bridging Systems: Open Problems for Countering Destruc-
tive Divisiveness across Ranking, Recommenders, and Governance” (2023) at
https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.09976. Aviv Ovadya, “ ‘Generative CI’ Through Collective Re-
sponse Systems” (2023) at https://arxiv.org/pdf/2302.00672.pdf.
396
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.

283
steer model behavior using Polis.397 OpenAI, the other leading provider
of GFMs today, also worked closely with CIP to run a grant program on
“democratic inputs to AI” that dramatically accelerated research in this
area and on the basis of which they are now forming a “Collective Align-
ment Team” to incorporate these inputs into the steering of OpenAI’s
models.398

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.399 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.

A third approach attempts to leverage and organize existing media con-

tent and exchanges, rather than induce participants to produce new con-
397
Anthropic, “Collective Constitutional AI: Aligning a Language Model with Public Input”
October 17, 2023 at https://www.anthropic.com/news/collective-constitutional-ai-aligning-a-
language-model-with-public-input.
398
Tyna Eloundou and Teddy Lee, “Democratic Inputs to AI Grant Program:
Lessons Learned and Implementation Plans”, OpenAI Blog, January 16, 2024 at
https://openai.com/blog/democratic-inputs-to-ai-grant-program-update
399
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, Octo-
ber 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/.

284
tent. This approach is closely allied to academic work on “digital human-
ities”, 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 in-
creasingly scalable with some of the tools we describe below by harness-
ing digital technology to extend the tradition described above by extend-
ing the scale of deliberation by networking conversations across different
venues together.

Other more experimental efforts, closely aligned with the techniques dis-
cussed in our Immersive Shared Reality chapter above, aim to enhance
the depth and quality of remote deliberations, aspiring to emulate the
richness and immediacy typically found in in-person interactions. 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 expe-
riences with such violence across physical and social distance.400 Other
promising elements include the increasing ubiquity of high-quality,
low-cost and increasingly culturally aware machine translation tools and
work to harness similar systems to enable people to synthesize values
and find common ground building from natural language statements.

Frontiers of augmented deliberation

Some of these more ambitious experiments begin to point towards a fu-
ture, especially harnessing language capabilities of GFMs to go much fur-
ther towards addressing the “broad listening” problem, empowering de-
liberation of a quality and scale that has henceforth been hard to imagine.
The internet enables collaboration at an extreme scale by reducing the
possible space of collaborative actions, such as to buy/sell market trans-
400
Amer Bakshi, Tracey Meares and Vesla Weaver, “Portals to
Politics: Perspectives on Policing from the Grassroots” (2015) at
https://www.law.nyu.edu/sites/default/files/upload_documents/Bakshi%20Meares%20and%20Weaver%20Portals%20to%20Poli

285
actions, and by utilizing a similar reduction in information transmission,
i.e. to five star rating systems. An effective increase in our ability to trans-
mit and digest information can result in a corresponding increase in our
ability to deliberate on difficult and nuanced social issues.

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 in-
teractive 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 conversa-
tion. 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.
A recent large-scale study highlights the positive impact of such tools in
enhancing online democratic discussions. In this experiment, a GFM was
used to provide real-time, evidence-based suggestions aimed at refining
the quality of political discourse to each participant in the conversation
401
. The results indicated a noticeable improvement in the overall qual-
ity of conversations, fostering a more democratic, reciprocal exchange of
ideas.

While most discussion of bridging systems focuses on building consensus,

another powerful role is to support the regeneration of diversity and pro-
ductive conflict. On the one hand, they help identify different opinion
groups in ways that are not a deterministic function of historical assump-
tions or identities, potentially allowing these groups to find each other
and organize around their perspective. On the other hand, by surfacing
as representing consensus positions that have diverse support, they also
create diverse opposition that can coalesce into a new conflict that does
not reinforce existing divisions, potentially allowing organization around
401
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 Na-
tional Academy of Sciences 120, no. 41 (2023): e2311627120.

286
that perspective. In short, collective response systems can play just as im-
portant a role in mapping and evolving conflict dynamically as helping to
navigate it productively.

In a similar spirit, one can imagine harnessing and advancing elements of

the design of Community Notes to reshape social media dynamics more
holistically. While the system currently lines up all opinions across the
platform on a single spectrum, one can imagine mapping out a range of
communities within the platform and harnessing its bridging-based ap-
proach not just to prioritize notes, but to prioritize content for attention
in the first place. Furthermore, bridging can be applied at many different
scales and to diverse intersecting groups, not just to the platform overall.
One can imagine a future, as we highlight in our Media chapter below,
where different content in a feed is highlighted as bridging and being
shared among a range of communities one is a member of (a religious
community, a physically local community, a political community), rein-
forcing context and common knowledge and action in a range of social
affiliations.

Such dynamic representations of social life could also dramatically im-

prove how we approach representation and selection of participants for
deeper deliberation, such as in person or in rich immersive shared real-
ities. 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 increas-
ingly use the full intersectional richness of identity as a basis for consider-
ing 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 ex-
ample, choosing a collection of participants that minimizes how marginal-
ized 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 si-
multaneously, especially if combined with some of the liquid democracy
approaches that we discuss in the voting chapter below.

It may be possible to, in some cases, even more radically re-imagine the
idea of representation. GFMs can be “fine-tuned” to increasingly accu-

287
rately mimic the ideas and styles of individuals.402 One can imagine train-
ing 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 op-
erate as a fairly direct collective representative, possibly as an aid, com-
plement 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”.403 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.404 Something similar might occur for unborn future genera-
tions, as in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future.405 For better
or worse, such GFM-based representatives might be capable of carrying
out deliberations faster than most humans can follow and might then
convey summaries to human participants, allowing for deliberations
that include individual humans and also allow for other styles, speeds
and scales of natural language exchange.

Limits of augmented deliberation

The centrality of natural language to human interaction makes it tempt-
ing to forget its severe limitations. Words may be richer symbols than
numbers, but they are as dust compared to the richness of human sen-
sory experience, not to mention proprioception. “Words cannot capture”
far more than they can. Whatever emotional truth it has, it is simply in-
formation, so it is theoretically logical that we form far deeper attention
in common action and experience than in verbal exchange. Thus, how-
402
Junsol Kim, and Byungkyu Lee, “Ai-augmented surveys: Leveraging large language mod-
els for opinion prediction in nationally representative surveys,” arXiv (New York: Cornell
University, November 26, 2023): https://arxiv.org/pdf/2305.09620.pdf.
403
Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University
Press, 1993).
404
Dr. Seuss, The Lorax (New York: Random House, 1971)
405
Kim Stanley Robinson, Ministry for the Future (London: Orbit Books, 2020).

288
ever far deliberation advances, it cannot substitute for the richer forms
of collaboration we have already discussed.

On the opposite side, talk takes time, even in the sophisticated versions
we describe. Many decisions cannot wait for deliberation to fully run
its course, especially when great social distance must be bridged, which
will generally slow the process. The other approaches to collaboration we
discuss below will address the need for timely decisions typical in many
cases.

Many of the ways in which the slow pace of discussion can be overcome
(e.g. using LLMs to conduct partially “in silico” deliberation) illustrate an-
other important limitation of conversation: other methods are often more
easily made transparent and thus broadly legitimate. The way conversa-
tions take inputs and produce outputs are hard to fully describe, whether
they occur across people or in machines. In fact, one could consider in-
putting natural language to a machine and producing a machine dicta-
tion as just a more sophisticated, non-linear form of voting. But, in con-
trast to the administrative and voting rules we will discuss in the next
two chapters, it might be very hard to achieve common understanding
and legitimacy on how this transformation takes place and thus make it
the basis for common action in the way that voting and markets often
are. Thus, checks on the way deliberations occur and are observed aris-
ing from those other systems are likely to be important for a long time to
come.

Furthermore, deliberation in the democratic process is also limited by the

ability for humans to practically audit more capable GFMs. GFMs have
also been demonstrated to adhere to instructions blindly in a way that
may lead them to censor some perspectives.406 To be properly ⿻ mod-
els mus offer a diverse array of reasonable responses, enabling them to
adapt and reflect various perspectives, and ensuring they are accurately
calibrated to the nuances of specific populations.

Lastly, deliberation is sometimes idealized as helping overcome divisions

and reach a true “common will”. Yet, while reaching points of overlap-
406
David Glukhov, Ilia Shumailov, Yarin Gal, Nicolas Papernot, and Vardan Papyan, “LLM
Censorship: A Machine Learning Challenge or a Computer Security Problem?” arXiv (New
York: Cornell University, July 20, 2023): https://arxiv.org/pdf/2307.10719.pdf.

289
ping and rough consensus is crucial for common action, so too is the re-
generation of diversity and productive conflict to fuel dynamism and en-
sure productive inputs to future deliberations. Thus, deliberations and
their balance with other modes of collaboration must always attend, as
we have illustrated above, to this stimulus to productive conflict as much
as it does to the resolution of conflict and the mitigation of explosive con-
flict.

5-5 Adaptive Administration

To launch what has come be known as the “Year of AI”, Microsoft CEO
Satya Nadella demonstrated at the World Economic Forum in Davos,
Switzerland how a farmer speaking a local language in rural India could
use a feature phone paired with a large language model (LLM) back end
to access public services. The model understood the voice, translated
from the local language to the national language in which the relevant
forms were available, helped navigate what needed to be filled out, and
returned guidance via voice to the farmer.

This demonstration built on years of work and multi stakeholder collab-

orations including AI4Bharat, Karya and IVR Junction, which have em-
ployed Indians to gather data on local languages, harnessed these data
to empower LLMs to translate across these languages and connected il-
literate Indians with access only to simple feature phones to connect to
a “voice-based internet”. Together these hold the promise of helping pre-
serve and strengthen the cultural diversity of India by ensuring those who
speak less prominent languages and live far from cities are still able to ac-
cess the public services they need to sustain their ways of life.

290
**

Figure 5-5-A. The results of this work can be seen taking place already.
Source: Courtesy of Microsoft.

**

Building on these demonstrations, Indian business, civil and government

entities have launched services to harness these capabilities at scale.
These include a government-provided chatbot to support applications
to farmer financial support programs and a free What’s App based
multilingual chatbot that offers guidance on a variety of public services.

Administration and bureaucracy are central features organizing much

of the world. They involve structured forms of communication and
rule-bound processing of this information that is much more formal and
stricter than the conventions of natural language. It is a less rich sensory
experience that often has the aim of achieving legitimacy, equity, and
procedural fairness. Yet they usually allow some form of extended com-
munication in contrast to more strictly mathematical and mechanical
interactions of voting or markets. Thus, they generally require deeper
common understanding between participants to proceed effectively and
ensure that conventions are harnessed and not violated. Administration
is at the core of most interactions between individuals or small busi-

291
nesses with governments or large corporations. It is also central in the
formation of medium-term relationships between people within a polity
without tight social connections. It governs most of what we think of as
law, property systems, identification, hiring and admissions and most
functions of the “administrative state” and “corporate bureaucracy”.

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. In
this chapter we aim to illustrate how advances in digital technology, es-
pecially generative foundation models, may help alleviate some of these
trade-offs, allowing more diverse groups of people to cooperate in admin-
istrative systems while respecting their ways of life.

Administration today
Many of the most consequential junctures of life turn on administrative
outcomes based on information structures (various kinds of “forms”) that
are much thinner than the way we conduct most of our lives. Examples
include:

• Identification and travel documents

• Educational transcripts, resumés and other summaries of “the
course of a life” (curriculum vitae/CV)
• Legal documents, including property deeds and contracts.
• Tax fillings.
• Structured performance evaluations
• Medical intake and evaluation forms
• Legal filings (though these usually include more detail and context
than the above)

These structured forms of information allow for “fair”, “just” and “im-
partial” evaluation of potential allocations or choices that are too com-
plex to rely on universally transparent rules, as markets and votes do. To
achieve fairness, these systems often deliberately discard a range of infor-
mation, as dramatically illustrated by the blindness of justice in various
personified representations in European tradition. As scholars since at

292
least pioneering sociologist Max Weber have remarked, to achieve these
twin goals of harnessing richer information than votes or markets while
maintaining fairness, administrative systems employ large “bureaucra-
cies” and much digital processing to evaluate these structured data ac-
cording to rules and procedures.407

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.408

The first might be called the problem of “rigidity”, namely that bureau-
cratic 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 ridicu-
lous. Consider:

• Most jurisdictions have speed limits for driving cars to ensure safety.
Yet the safe speed for driving varies dramatically with road, envi-
ronmental and other related conditions. This means that speed lim-
its are, most of the time, either too high or too low for the circum-
stances. Similar logic applies to almost all administrative policy set-
tings, 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 bureau-
cratic 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 “complex-
407
Max Weber, Economy and Society (Somerville, NJ: Bedminster Press, 1968).
408
A forthcoming book provides an excellent study in these pathologies, as well as provid-
ing the squirrel example below. Davies, op. cit.

293
ity”: that they often are inscrutable, hard to navigate (see, for example,
Franz Kafka’s classic work The Castle), full of red tape, and give exces-
sive discretion to apparently arbitrary bureaucrats.409 These problems
are among the most infuriating features of bureaucracies and are a con-
stant source of complaint by libertarians. In fact, they have largely in-
spired many of the ideas about “distributed autonomous organizations”
(DAOs) and “smart contracts” that are intended to escape excessive discre-
tion, as well as leading to the high costs of the legal sector. 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 technolo-
gies 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.

Adaptive administration tomorrow

The most important suite of technologies so far in achieving elegant com-
plexity navigation have been those usually referred to as “artificial intel-
ligence”(AI). However, as we have repeatedly noted, the term AI refers
more to an aspiration than to a particular set of tools and in this case,
the details of the tools involved are critical to what distinguishes the ad-
ministrative bureaucracies of old from the potential opened up by gener-
ative foundation models (GFMs). The AI work that dominated the field in
the 1970s and 1980s, sometimes called “good old-fashioned AI” (GOFAI),
was in many ways an attempt to automate traditional bureaucratic pro-
cessing. Programmers, by talking to “experts”, would attempt to encode
administrative processes in complicated sets of nested rules (often called
“decision trees”): Does the patient have a fever? If yes, are her eyes red;
if not are her lymph nodes inflamed?… This style of AI ran into major ob-
stacles and fell from favor during the 1990s. It has since largely been re-
placed by “machine learning”, especially neural networks, and their most
ambitious and recent outgrowth, GFMs.
409
Franz Kafka, The Castle (Munich: Kurt Wolff Verlag, 1926).

294
In sharp contrast to GOFAI, machine learning is a statistical and emergent
approach to classification, prediction, and decisions. Rather than apply-
ing a top-down set of hard-coded rules, the system learns to classify based
on examples, in a probabilistic manner and in ways that often have no
simple explanation. In neural networks, and especially GFMs, there are
often billions or even trillions of “nodes” that receive input from each
other. These nodes then triggering and inputting to other nodes, all co-
alescing to predict an outcome such as the next word or image. Based
on such processes, GFMs have shown remarkable and rapidly improving
ability to realistically reproduce the type of flexible classification, reac-
tion and reasoning humans are often capable of in a rapidly scalable and
largely reproducible way.

Such successes have created the tantalizing prospect of GFMs ameliorat-

ing the fundamental tradeoff at the heart of administration. Harnessing
GFMs as components in administrative processes could allow them to take
a far more diverse and unstructured range of inputs, adapt to them in the
manner that a thoughtful and knowledgeable expert might, and do so in
a way that offers a degree of reproducibility without imposing undue bur-
dens on users to fill out specialized forms.

Explorations of this possibility have emerged especially in the last two

years as interest around GFMs has exploded:

• As we highlighted in our introductory vignette, these tools have

shown significant promise in allowing marginalized communities
access public services that they may otherwise struggle to discover
and navigate. A primary role of social workers has long been to
support such navigation, but public expenditures have typically
been far too small to ensure anywhere close to universal access,
especially in developing countries. Leaders in such practices have
been the Finnish government’s Kela-Kelpo project, Germany’s
Federal Pension Insurance system and the Benefits Data Trust in
the US.
• 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 Le-
gal Robot and DoNotPay, both of which aim to help customers with

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 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.410
• Job markets often fall into a “rich get richer” pattern as top employ-
ers often recruit exclusively from elite universities or use job expe-
rience at famous peer firms as a primary indicator of potential, fore-
closing paths to opportunity for many who may have less conven-
tional paths and, perhaps more importantly, forcing everyone inter-
ested in such opportunities down a narrow educational and career
path. Several new human resources platforms (such as HiredScore,
Paradox.ai, Turing and Untapped) aim to expand the breadth and di-
versity of candidates that hiring managers can consider. A leading
challenge is that the limited examples of hiring such diverse candi-
dates in the past can undermine the reliability and flexibility of such
algorithms.
• Many of the most environmentally and culturally rich regions of
the earth are either poorly mapped or mapped in ways that im-
pose the perspective of colonial outsiders, rather than indigenous
peoples who are more attentive to the environment and have long-
existing relationships.411 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.412

As the last example especially suggests, a range of digital technologies not

traditionally associated with “AI” are also relevant here, including map-
ping (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.413 Also included
410
Marc Galanter, “Why the ‘Haves’ Come Out Ahead: Speculations on the Limits of Legal
Change”, Law and Society Review 9, no. 1 (1974): 95.
411
Aníbal Quijano, “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality”, Cultural Studies 21, no. 2-3:
168-178.
412
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.
413
Ory Okolloh, “Ushahidi, or ‘Testimony’: Web 2.0 Tools for Crowdsourcing Crisis Informa-

296
are transparent databases (including distributed ledgers) as illustrated in
a range of cases where these are being used as substrates for refugee iden-
tities by organizations like ID2020 or for land registries in Honduras. Fur-
thermore, the power of GFMs stems less from being “AI” than from their
networked and probabilistic structure, which allows them to adapt to a
greater diversity and ambiguity of inputs. Such structures can also exist
in networks of human relationships, including more adaptive forms of
bureaucracy, packet-switching based trust relationships, etc.

Frontiers of adaptive administration

Whether grounded in networks of human minds, computer-simulated
neurons or, most likely and effectively, an interweaving mesh of both,
the potential for such systems could stretch well beyond these first
experiments which largely aim to fit into existing rigid administrative
structures and thus, in many cases, to reinforce their limitations. It is
thus worth freeing our minds from some of these constraints to imagine
building towards more transformative change.

One of the most promising directions was proposed by Danielle Allen,

David Kidd and Ariana Zetlin.414 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 eventu-
ally ladder up to recognizable “macro badges” that can be used by poten-
tial 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 meaning-
ful 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 stan-
dard classroom practices to it and the fact that many students, especially
tion” in Holly Ashley ed., Change at Hand: Web 2.0 for Development (London: International
Institute for Environment and Development, 2009).
414
Danielle Allen, David Kidd and Ariana Zetlin, “A Call to More Equitable Learn-
ing: 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.

297
historically marginalized and/or academically disinclined ones, often end
up excluded from opportunity by such rigid structures.

Not only could GFMs and other neural networks be mirrored in the
structure of such a system, they might be directly useful to it in allowing
employers to cope with the more complex CVs it would create. GFMs
could also help students navigate the more diverse learning pathways
they would allow and could directly instantiate and produce some of
the relevant badges. Furthermore, technologies of publicity (including
social networks, verifiable credentials, and distributed ledgers) would
likely be critical to achieving trust, credibility and transparency around
such badges. Relatedly, but perhaps more broadly, many practices
of identification and admission to credentialed spaces (clubs, schools,
nations via migration etc.) could rely on a more distributed network of
signals from a variety social relations as we discussed in our Identity
and Personhood chapter if such a range of signals could be meaningfully
processed by more adaptive administrative infrastructure in the future.

Even more ambitiously, it might be possible to one day integrate far more
diverse legal systems into administrative practices. The arrival of moder-
nity and colonialism around the world largely overrode a range of tradi-
tional practices that varied dramatically by geography and culture. Many
of these practices persist informally but jar with formal legal structures
imposed by often distant national governments. These include practices
around gender and sexual relationships, obligations associated with gift
giving, the resolution of familial conflict and obligations, land use and
more. While in some cases there is growing consensus that the aboli-
tion of such traditions is appropriate (e.g. prohibitions on female geni-
tal 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 some-
times 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.

Just as GFMs are increasingly capable of providing low-cost translation

across a growing number of languages, it is just possible to imagine

298
that equally rapid translation across cultural norms may become feasi-
ble. These services in the past have been provided imperfectly and at
great expense by cultural anthropologists and ethnographers. Just as
far cheaper and easier translation may allow a much wider range of
languages to remain viable and attractive to new generations because
of the external interoperability it would allow, far cheaper and easier
translation of norms might make a much broader range of legal and
property practices sustainable. This would reduce the constant burden
of fitting into modernity imposed not just on colonized but also on a
range of “traditional” communities within the developed world, often in
rural areas. It would also greatly enrich the diversity that remains as the
fuel for social growth and progress, as next generations of GFMs learn
from being stretched by these cultural differences to perform ever more
flexibly.

Beyond the preservation of existing diversity, such a future could help

support its further diversification and speciation. Many of the practices
we have sketched in this book challenge the imaginations of even ambi-
tious 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 so-
cial 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 tradi-
tional practices, while maintaining cooperation across broad social differ-
ences, and empowering the flourishing of ever expanding, infinite diver-
sity in infinite combinations.

Limits of adaptive administration

There may be no technology today whose pitfalls and dangers are more
discussed than GFMs and for good reason. Their opacity, mystique of au-
tonomy (implicit in the common “AI” terminology that we mostly there-
fore avoid) that helps obscure the conditions of their creation, potential
to inherit the biases of both their source data and creators, and potential

299
for misuse all pose significant dangers.

In the context of administrative applications, the manifestations of these

flaws are easy to see. While GFMs may be less burdensome to interact
with, they arguably further exacerbate the opacity of bureaucracy and
may not much mitigate the problems of discretion and human bias given
that it is often extremely challenging to map the biases of such systems
or what clusters of human behaviors in the past shape their outputs to-
day.415 Because such models overwhelmingly train on existing data, mea-
suring the data diversity that AI researchers value, but struggle to define,
is crucial to ensuring the models are generally performant and able to
cope with diversity in the way we imagine. The terms of power on which
such diversity is explored and incorporated into the models will shape
how they offer opportunity for diversity or force conformity. Many of
the ethnographers of old became tools of colonial subjugation rather than
voices of inclusive translation.416 Furthermore, if abused by powerful in-
terests, interoperability across legal regimes can easily slip into regula-
tory arbitrage, taking advantage of the gap between legal intent and for-
mal rules.

Luckily, some of the technologies we highlight in other chapters of this sec-

tion have the potential to address at least partially some of these harms.
While GFMs logic is hopelessly opaque when we try to reduce it to the
simplistic representations of mathematics, richer formats like immersive
shared reality or post-symbolic communication may give access to deeper
modes of connection and understanding that aid in the establishment of
the trust in human communities that enables the use of richer discretion.
Many of the methods of collective deliberation and decision-making we
highlighted in the previous chapter and further explore in the next have
natural applications to defining legitimate distributions of power that can
directly shape the governance of GFMs, the distribution of the economic
value they create, and the ways they are collectively steered to behave in
line with public wills. Grounded in legitimacy such practices can provide
415
See for example Safiya Umoja Noble, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines
Reinforce Racism (New York: New York University Press, 2018). Cathy O’Neil, Weapons of
Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy (New York:
Broadway Books, 2016). Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the
New Jim Crow (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2019).
416
Talal Asad, Anthropology & the Colonial Encounter (Ithaca, NY: Ithaca Press, 1973).

300
and explore through richer interaction modes, these and other digital sys-
tems hold significant promise of overcoming the simultaneously cold and
arbitrary nature of the world of systems that has been the price of moder-
nity.

5-6 ⿻ Voting
In the best-selling strategy game of all time, Civilization VI, players man-
age a civilization from the birth of the first settlements to the near fu-
ture, competing and sometimes cooperating with other civilizations in a
race to victory through culture, military conquest, diplomatic support,
scientific achievement and/or religious influence. In the game’s widely
adopted and climate change-themed expansion pack “Gathering Storm”,
diplomatic decisions affecting the whole world are decided in a “World
Congress”. Civilizations accumulate “diplomatic favor” from alliances, in-
frastructure, and so forth. They can then spend these to influence global
policies, such as regulation of fossil fuels, controls on nuclear weapons or
immigration rules.

**

Figure 5-6-A. A player chooses how to spend their accumulated Diplo-

matic Favor in the ‘World Congress’ of Civilization VI. Source: Direct

301
screen capture from application, by fair use.

**

When voting, countries can choose from a range of options, such as which
civilization will be targeted for closer scrutiny of its actions by the world.
Every civilization gets a single vote for free, but additional votes cost in-
creased diplomatic favor, at an increasing rate. The first additional vote
costs 10 diplomatic favor, the second 20, and so on, as illustrated in Figure
A. There are typically several votes on different issues in a single Congress
and diplomatic favor can be saved across Congresses as well as used for
other purposes such as nominating special issues for consideration. 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.417 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”.

A main theme of this part of the book has been how much broader collab-
orative technologies and democracy are than the institutions we might
usually associate with them. Yet, the formal institutions that most come
to mind when we think about “democracy” are systems for holding votes
and elections. Voting is used throughout not just democratic systems, but
governance regimes more broadly: corporate governance, management
of cooperative housing, book clubs, games etc. It provides a way for a
large and diverse group to, relatively quickly and at relatively low cost,
make a definite decision on a point of disagreement. While the communi-
cation it allows is far thinner than the technologies we have thus far de-
scribed, it can often be a much more broadly inclusive process that leads
to verdicts of the “common will” that are typically thought of as more legit-
417
The Economist, “The Mathematical Method that Could Offer a Fairer Way to Vote”, De-
cember 18, 2021.

302
imate (at least among the usually limited set of those enfranchised) than
the outcomes of markets. In this chapter, we will explore the ways voting
works and fails to work in the settings it is most often applied today, inno-
vations like quadratic voting (QV) that are creating higher-fidelity signals
of the “public will”, and peer into the horizon of ways researchers are re-
imagining how large groups of people can choose their future together.

Voting today
In the most common form of voting, every member of some community
selects one of several mutually exclusive options and the option with the
most votes is selected. Some trace this practice to the ability of a group
with greater numbers to triumph in certain kinds of violent conflicts (such
as phalanx engagements in Ancient Greece), which could be avoided by
tallying the strength of positions. 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 “Du-

verger’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.418
2. In many contexts, the simple equality assumed in such a tally is not
widely legitimate. Different participants in a vote may have differ-
ing degrees of legitimate interest in an issue (e.g. representing dif-
ferent 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”.

A range of widely used voting procedures aim to address these challenges

in limited ways such as:

• Ranked choice and approval voting: These two recently popular sys-
tems partially address issue 1. In ranked choice systems, partici-
418
Maurice Duverger, Les Partis Politiques (Paris: Points, 1951).

303
 pants 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 can-
didates becomes their new vote. In approval voting, voters may
choose as many options as they wish to “approve” and the most ap-
proved 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 “reason-
able” representation of the common will.419
• Weighted voting: In contexts where equality of voters is obviously in-
appropriate, 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 signifi-
cant dispute and lead to paradoxes of their own, such as the “51% at-
tack” (also known as “tunneling”) where someone can buy 51% of a
corporation and loot its assets, expropriating the remaining 49%.420
• 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-
419
Kenneth J. Arrow, Social Choice and Individual Values (New York, John Wiley & Sons,
1951). See also Kenneth O. May, “A Set of Independent Necessary and Sufficient Conditions
for Simple Majority Decision” 20, no. 4 (1952): 680-684, Allan Gibbard,“Manipulation of
Voting Schemes: A General Result”, Econometrica 41, no. 4 (1973): 587-601 and Mark A.
Sattherthwaite, “Strategy-Proofness and Arrow’s Conditions: Existence and Correspondence
Theorems for Voting Procedures and Social Welfare Functions”, Journal of Economic Theory
10, no. 2 (1975): 187-217.
420
Simon Johnson, Rafael La Porta, Florencio Lopez-de-Silanes and Andrei Shleifer, “Tun-
neling”, American Economic Review 90, no. 2 (2000): 22-27.

304
 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 unpopu-
lar.421 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.

Thus, while voting is a canonical democratic technology, it is also one rid-

dled with paradoxes, rigidity and widely recognized unsolved problems.
A new generation of approaches has recently tried to improve more dra-
matically on what is possible.

⿻ Voting tomorrow
While the above problems seem diverse, they boil down to two questions:
how to appropriately represent degrees and weights of interests and
how to make representation flexible and adaptive. As Nobel Laureate
Amartya Sen famously observed, problems with Arrow’s Theorem vanish
once strength and weight of preference is accounted for, and evidently
weighted voting is all about such issues.422 Representation of subgroups
is challenging as there are strong ⿻ reasons for doing it, yet many
ways of achieving it seem insufficient or overly rigid and prescriptive.
These strike at the core of the problem with the extreme simplicity of
votes: they carry very limited information about voters’ thoughts and
preferences.

Two recent developments have offered exciting, though incomplete, ap-

proaches to addressing these problems. We highlighted the first at the
start of the chapter: quadratic voting and other related approaches to in-
421
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/.
422
Amartya Sen, Collective Choice and Social Welfare, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard
University Press, 1970).

305
corporating voting weights. Quadratic voting originates with statistician
(and, unfortunately, eugenicist) Lionel Penrose, father of the prominent
contemporary astrophysicist Roger Penrose. He noted that, when weigh-
ing votes, it is natural, but misleading, to give a party with twice the legit-
imate stake in a decision twice the votes. The reason is that this will typ-
ically 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.423

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.424 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.

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
423
L. S. Penrose, “The Elementary Statistics of Majority Voting”, Journal of the Royal Statis-
tical Society 109, no. 1 (1946): 53-57.
424
J. C. R. Licklider, “The Influence of Interaural Phase Relations upon the Masking of Speech
by White Noise”, Journal of the Acoustic Society of America 20, no. 2 (1948): 150-159. Thus,
deeply ironically, Lick may be seen as one of the fathers of QV as well.

306
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.

It is important to note, however, that these clean rules are only optimal
when voters are perfectly internally unified and perfectly externally un-
correlated/uncoordinated. ⿻ thinking cautions us against such simplistic
models, encouraging us to perceive the social connections across individ-
uals and organizations, though of course accounting for these within a
voting system requires identity systems that can record and account for
these.

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 weight-
ing of votes for people holding multiple votes that helped inspire QV.425
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.426 Such systems are in-
creasingly common, especially in corporate and other for-profit (e.g. DAO)
governance, as well as in a limited set of political contexts such as Ice-
land. However, these systems have an unfortunate tendency to concen-
trate power often excessively, given that delegation often flows to a small
number of hands. This tendency has somewhat soured initial enthusi-
asm.
425
Charles L. Dodgson, The Principles of Parliamentary Representation (London, Harrison
and Sons, 1884).
426
An early implementation of such a value-propagating system is exemplified by PICSY,
pioneered by Ken Suzuki in 2009. While he initially developed it independently from Kojin
Karatani, he later joined the New Associationist Movement. Ken Suzuki, Propagational in-
vestment currency system (PICSY): proposing a new currency system using social computing.
PhD diss., Tokyo University, 2009.

307
Frontiers of voting
The radical and transformative potential of QV and LD suggest ways that
voting systems in the future may be vastly richer than those we are accus-
tomed to. The range of possibilities are nearly endless, but a few promis-
ing ones are useful to illustrate this breadth:

• 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 dis-
counting” based on the degree of social connection and, perhaps, the
identification of underlying “principal” social factors that drive co-
ordination and correlation, as is common in statistical modeling.427
These underlying independent factors, called “eigenvalues”, could
then be viewed as the “real” independent voters, to whom degres-
sive proportionality could be applied, a process not dissimilar to
how PageRank works. This could create a dynamic, adaptive, op-
timized version of consociationalism that avoids its rigidity and en-
trenchment of existing divides.
• 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 in-
stead current social divides, such as geographic type (urban v. ru-
ral), 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.
• Predictive voting: Robin Hanson has long advocated combining pre-
diction 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 be-
427
Ohlhaver, Weyl and Buterin, op. cit. Joel Miller, E. Glen Weyl and Leon Erichsen, “Beyond
Collusion Resistance: Leveraging Social Information for Plural Funding and Voting” (2023)
at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4311507.

308
 ing able to simultaneously vote and predict the outcome of a deci-
sion, being rewarded for a correct decision.428 Such systems may be
particularly useful when there is a large range of proposals or op-
tions: predictions can help bring attention to proposals deserving
attention that voting can then decide on.
• 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.
• Assisted real-time voting: Another commonly discussed idea is that
voting could be made far more frequent and granular if digital assis-
tants could learn to model voters’ perspectives and preferences and
vote on their behalf and subject to their review/auditing.429

Perhaps the most exciting possibilities are now these could combine infi-
nite diversity, infinitely combining to support the infinite combinations
that they help infinite diversity form.

Limits of ⿻ voting
One natural concern, however, about even these highly flexible and adap-
tive approaches to reach a sense of compromise is that the compromise
itself throws the baby of diversity out with the bathwater of conflict. Yet
one of the most interesting properties of systems like eigenvoting or so-
phisticated forms of liquid democracy is the new kinds of coalitions and
representations they might help form. If one-person-one-vote rules orig-
inated from the attempt to avoid conflict by giving the side with greater
support a non-violent way to take power, these systems help diffuse con-
flict based on a more sophisticated theory: that it arises from the con-
sistent reinforcement of existing social divisions by allowing the same
groups to consistently form majorities and minorities. By discounting
support from previously affiliated groups, they avoid reinforcing existing
conflicts, while creating new ones that cut across these lines, hopefully
428
Robin Hanson, “Shall we Vote on Values but Bet on Beliefs?”, Journal of Political Philoso-
phy 20, no. 2: 151-178.
429
Nils Gilman and Ben Cerveny, “Tomorrow’s Democracy is Open Source”, Noema Septem-
ber 12, 2023 at https://www.noemamag.com/tomorrows-democracy-is-open-source/.

309
thereby generating nearly as much diversity as they compromise over,
but in directions that avoid entrenching persistent divides.

Yet despite these strengths, even in its richest form, voting expresses and
determines preferences about decisions already posed by other social pro-
cesses. Some combination of the methods above can completely trans-
form 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 believ-
ing 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 administra-
tive systems we have sketched can collective decisions be meaningful.

Nor is it likely that, anytime in the near future, voting systems will stretch
greatly beyond the national boundaries that currently contain them. The
demands of ⿻ identity systems supporting some of the above suggest that
while voting in new transnational configurations is imaginable, systems
of voting are unlikely any time soon to truly reach global legitimacy. To
truly reach that scope of diversity, we have to turn to the re-imagining of
the thinnest of all the substrates for collaboration: market economies.

5-7 Social Markets

As we have noted above, open-source software (OSS) is one of the most
dynamic ⿻ ecosystems in the world. Yet, because software is made freely
available, it has long struggled for reliable sources of funding. At the same
time, many public and charitable funders see value in the ecosystem but
find it hard to navigate what projects to support given the heterogeneity
of the ecosystem compared, say, to traditional academic research.

Recent attempts to overcome this challenge have focused on matching

funds and community donations, where a sponsor supports a class
of projects, but this pool of funds is directed by the small donations
of participants in the projects. Traditionally such systems (such as
GitHub Sponsors) could be manipulated by wealthy participants (such as
corporations), whose donations could command most matching funds.

310
To overcome this, a number of new matching platforms, such as GitCoin
Grants, connect sponsors (small donors and grants) using a “plural fund-
ing” 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 fund-
ing 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 ap-
plied to domains (e.g. environment, local business development) outside
OSS.

**

Figure 5-7-A. Contributions on Gitcoin are matched by a matching pool,

powered by Quadratic Funding. Quadratic Funding is a ⿻ funding for-
mula because it elevates many small contributions across social distance.
Source: GitCoin Team contribution.

**

311
**

Figure 5-7-B. The project page for the ⿻ book on Gitcoin. As of February
2, 2024, the ⿻ book had received $332.84 in funding from 87 contributors.
Source: Direct screen capture from application, by fair use.

**

No institutions connect more people across broader social diversity in

collaborative exchange than those of global capitalism. The limited re-
mit and strength of international governance create severe limits on the
ability to provide transnational public goods through voting and deliber-
ation, but the almighty dollar (and yuan) is respected in most corners of
the planet. Capital flows and the technology it is invested in shape lives
around the world. International trade and other commercial agreements
are among the strongest and nearly universally respected agreements.
Private ownership has become a far more consistent pattern across the

312
planet than any other feature of the “rule of law”.430 Since the fall of the
Soviet Union, while national borders have hardly budged and few new
nations have been born, companies like Amazon, Google and Meta have
arguably grown to a position of prominence around the planet exceeding
all but a handful of nation states.

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 ap-
plied 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.431
On the one hand, markets have been seen to be almost uniquely univer-
sally “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.432
On the other hand, markets are poor at supporting the flourishing of other
forms of scaled social interaction. They corrode many of the other tech-
nologies of collaboration we describe. While allowing the creation of
some new forms, they tend to turn these into exploitative, socially irre-
sponsible, and often reckless monopolies. In this chapter we will explore
this paradox and how radical new forms of markets, like those we de-
scribed above, can maintain, and extend this inclusive and dynamic char-
430
Pistor, op. cit.
431
Albert Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests, (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1997).
432
Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (New York: Harper & Broth-
ers: 1942). Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018).

313
acter while fostering a far more diverse range of rich human collabora-
tion.

Capitalism today
Capitalism is typically understood as a system based on private property
in the means of production, voluntary market-based exchange, and free
and vigorous operation of the profit motive from this starting point.
Global capitalism today (sometimes called “neoliberalism”) features
several interlocking sectors and features, including:

1. Free trade: Extensive free trade agreements, overseen by organi-

zations such as the World Trade Organization, ensure that a wide
range of goods can flow mostly unimpeded across jurisdictions cov-
ering most of the planet.
2. Private property: Most real and intellectual assets are held as pri-
vate property, conferring joined rights of use, disposal, and profit.
These rights are protected by international territorial and intellec-
tual property treaties.
3. Corporations: Most large-scale collaborations using extra-market
governance are undertaken either by nation states or by transna-
tional corporations that are operated for profit, owned by share-
holders, 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 finan-
cial instruments are traded on sophisticated financial markets that
allocate capital to projects and physical investments based on pro-
jections 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 ex-
change for the funding they need to begin a new business.

Many textbooks have been written, including some by some of our close

314
friends, on this structure.433 It is hard to doubt that it is one of the most
powerful modes of cooperation humans have ever devised and has been
central to the unprecedented progress in material conditions around the
world in the last two centuries. Furthermore, the most famous theoreti-
cal results in economics are the “fundamental welfare theorems”, which
assert that under certain conditions markets lead selfish individuals “by
an invisible hand” to serve the common good.434 Yet the conditions and
scope of this result are quite circumscribe, which is why capitalism has
so many familiar problems.

**

Figure 5-7-C. Payment of marginal returns requires paying workers and

other factor providers an amount derived from tracing the tangent to
graph of output as a function of inputs back to 0 input. The gap to the
origin indicates profits, which are positive under decreasing returns, but
negative (thus loses) under increasing returns.

**

1. Increasing returns and public goods: Perhaps the most restrictive

condition, highlighted by the founding fathers of the “marginal rev-
olution” that ushered in modern economics, is “decreasing returns”,
the opposite of the supermodularity we used to define collaboration.
433
Daron Acemoglu, David Laibson and John List, Economics (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pear-
son, 2021).
434
Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (London: W.
Strahan and T. Cadell, 1776).

315
 This requires that production have “decreasing marginal returns”
or more generally and less formally, that “the whole is less than the
sum of its parts”. Only then can profitable production be consistent
with the principle of, for example, paying workers their marginal
contributions to production; when there are increasing returns, pay-
ing everyone their marginal product yields a loss, as shown in Figure
C. Public goods that benefit a large number of people at little addi-
tional cost and are hard to stop people from using are an extreme
case and economists have long argued that markets dramatically
under-supply these. But even less extreme cases of increasing re-
turns/supermodularity are severely under-provided by capitalism.
Nobel Prizes, among others, to Paul Romer and Paul Krugman for
showing how fundamental these goods are to growth and develop-
ment.435 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 collabo-
ration that it heralds.
2. Market power: In some cases where exclusion from shared goods
can be imposed by barriers or violence, funding of such collabora-
tion can be partially alleviated by charging for access. But this tends
to create monopolistic control that concentrates power and reduces
the value created by scaling collaboration, undermining the very col-
laboration it aims to support.
3. Externalities: At the core of John Dewey’s 1927 classic The Public
and its Problems, is recognizing the genius of innovation to create
new forms of interdependence, both for good and ill.436 The motors
of the nineteenth century transformed human life, yet also turned
out to transfigure the environment in unanticipated ways. Radio,
flight, chemicals…all redesigned how we can cooperate, but also cre-
ated risks and harms that previous systems of “property rights” and
rules generally did not account for. The victims (or in some cases
beneficiaries) of these “externalities” are, by construction, not di-
rectly partly to market transactions. Thus, precisely to the extent
435
Paul Krugman, “Scale Economies, Product Differentiation and the Pattern of Trade”,
American Economic Review 70, no. 5 (1980): 950-959. Paul Romer, “Increasing Returns and
Long-Term Growth”, Journal of Political Economy 94, no. 5 (1986):1002-1037.
436
John Dewey, The Public and its Problems, op. cit.

316
 that new means of collaboration developed in markets are revolu-
tionary, markets and the corporations they spawn will not directly
involve those affected by their innovations, preventing either their
benefits from being fully tapped or their risks from being mitigated.
4. Distribution: Theoretically, markets are simply indifferent to distri-
bution and “endowments” can be rearranged to achieve desired dis-
tributive goals. But achieving this ideal redistribution faces enor-
mous practical hurdles and thus markets tend to often yield shock-
ingly inegalitarian outcomes, sometimes for reasons fairly divorced
from their alleged “efficiency” benefits. In addition to the direct
concerns these create, they also often help undermine the greater
equality often assumed or harnessed in other collaborative forms
described in previous chapters.

Recognition of and response to these challenges are arguably the leading

currents of the politics of the last hundred and fifty years in much of the
world, so we must review them only very superficially.

1. Antitrust and utility regulation: A primary focus of the populist

movement of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth in the
US was the restraint of the power of corporate monopolies using
a mixture of structural (e.g. corporate break-ups or prevention of
mergers) or behavioral (e.g. price or non-discrimination regulation)
interventions.437 While these help address some of the abuses of
monopoly, they often do so at the cost of reducing the advantages
of collaboration (scale) and/or by reintroducing the rigidities of
nation-state based governance that it is the great advantage of
entrepreneurship to help transcend.
2. Labor unions and cooperatives: An alternative approach to address-
ing market power has been the creation of corporate governance
modes that try to give voice to those over whom a company holds
power. Powerful unions are created to “countervail” the labor mar-
ket power of firms and enable customer or worker representation
in company governance through cooperative or “codetermination”
structures.438 While these have been some of the most vibrant and
437
Matt Stoller, Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy (New
York: Simon & Schuster, 2020).
438
John Kenneth Galbraith, American Capitalism: The Concept of Countervailing Power
(New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1952).

317
 effective correctives to corporate power, they have been limited pri-
marily to a traditional model of full-time employment that has strug-
gled to keep pace with the dynamism and internationalism of labor
markets and the diversity of collaboration in the digital age.
3. Eminent domain/compulsory purchase and land/wealth taxes: To
address smaller-scale market power (e.g. over land and specific
pieces of wealth), many jurisdictions have rights of “eminent do-
main” or “compulsory purchase” allowing the forced repurchase of
private property with the support of public authorities, usually with
compensation and subject to judicial review. Some jurisdictions
also charge taxes on land, wealth or inheritance to both reduce
inequality and help increase the circulation of assets away from
those who might monopolize them. While crucial to social equity
and development, these approaches rely heavily on often fragile
administrative processes to reach equitable valuations.
4. Industrial, infrastructure and research policy: To overcome the ten-
dency of markets to underfund public goods and more generally
supermodular collaboration, many governments provide funding
for infrastructure (e.g. transportation, communications, electrifica-
tion), research and development of new technologies and the devel-
opment to scale of new (for the country) industries. While critical to
technical, industrial, and social progress, these investments struggle
to span national borders in the way capitalism does and are often ad-
ministered by bureaucracies with far less information that the par-
ticipants in the fields they support have.
5. Open source, charity and the third sector: A more flexible approach
to similar goals is the “third” or “social” sector efforts including char-
ity and volunteer effort (like the OSS community) that build scal-
able collaboration on a voluntary, non-profit basis. While they are
among the most dynamic forms of scaled collaboration today, these
efforts often struggle to scale and sustain themselves given the lack
of financial support from the most powerful market and govern-
ment institutions.
6. Zoning and regulation: The risk of markets failing to account
for external harms and benefits are generally addressed by
government-imposed restrictions on market activity, usually called
“regulation” at broader levels and “zoning restrictions” on more

318
 local levels. Occasionally, especially in environmental matters,
economists’ preferred solutions of “Pigouvian” taxes or tradeable
permits are used. While these restrictions are the central and thus
indispensable way to address externalities, they are beset by all
the limits of rigid, nation-state- (or corresponding local justifica-
tion) based decision-making we discussed above, and given their
economic stakes are often captured/controlled by interest groups
imperfectly aligned to the interests of even the supposedly relevant
public.439
7. Redistribution: Most developed capitalist nations have extensive
systems of taxation of income and commerce that fund, among
other things, social insurance and public welfare schemes that
ensure the availability of a range of services and fiscal support as a
check against extreme inequality. In contrast to the promise of land
and wealth taxes, however, these primary income sources generally
partly impedes the functioning of markets, struggle to extract many
of the most runaway fortunes and only imperfectly correct the
structural ways inequality impedes other forms of collaboration.

The limitations of these solutions are so widely understood that they led
to a significant backlash in many countries beginning in the 1970s, the
so-called “neoliberal reaction”. Yet the limits of markets persist and there
has been a resurgence in the last decade of both of these solutions, but
also of creative attempts to transcend them and avoid many of the trade-
offs they create.

Social markets tomorrow

As we highlighted in the Connected Society chapter above, the desire to
combine and even enhance the dynamism of markets while at the same
time addressing their limits was a primary motivation for ⿻, especially
the thought of Henry George and his followers, including economics No-
bel Laureate William Vickrey, to whom the previous book written by one
of the authors of this one was dedicated.440 Vickrey pioneered the eco-
439
Edward L. Glaeser and Joseph Gyourko, “The Impact of Zoning on Housing Affordability”
(2002) at https://www.nber.org/papers/w8835.
440
Eric A. Posner and E. Glen Weyl, Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy
for a Just Society (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018).

319
nomics subfield of “mechanism design”, which explores these possibili-
ties and has led to many of the creative possibilities that have been de-
ployed in the past decades.

• Partial common ownership: To overcome the challenges of adminis-

tering land taxes, a variety of historical thinkers, including Founder
of the Chinese Republic Sun Yat-Sen (who we discussed exten-
sively in our A View from Yushan chapter) and economist Arnold
Harberger, have proposed having owners self-assess the value of
their property under penalty of having to sell at this self-assessed
value.441 This has the simultaneous effect of forcing truthful val-
uations for taxation and of forcing turnover of underutilized or
monopolized assets to broader publics. It is particularly easy to
enforce in digital asset registries, such as blockchains, and thus has
gained popularity in recent years, especially for non-fungible token
(NFT) art works, as well having been used for many years for land
in Taiwan.442
• Quadratic and ⿻ funding: As described at the start of this chapter, a
natural way to fund public/supermodular goods without relying ex-
cessively on the limited knowledge of administrators is for such an
administrator, philanthropist, or public authority to match contribu-
tions by distributed individuals. Mechanism design theory, similar
to the logic supporting quadratic voting in the previous chapter, can
be used to show that under similar assumptions of atomized behav-
ior, matching funds should be proportioned to the square of the sum
of square roots of individual contributions, giving greater weight to
a large number of small contributors than to a few large ones.443
Recently designs have stretched beyond traditional individualistic
designs to account for ⿻ group interests and affiliations.444
• Stakeholder corporation: While partial common ownership and
441
Sun, op. cit. Arnold C. Harberger, “Issues of Tax Reform for Latin America” in Joint Tax
Program of the Organization of American States eds., Fiscal Policy for Economic Growth in
Latin America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1965).
442
Emerson M. S. Niou and Guofu Tan, “An Analysis of Dr. Sun Yat-Sen’s Self-Assessment
Scheme for Land Taxation”, Public Choice 78, no. 1: 103-114. Yun-chien Chang, “Self-
Assessment of Takings Compensation: An Empirical Analysis”, Journal of Law, Economics
and Organization 28, no. 2 (2012: 265-285.
443
Vitalik Buterin, Zoë Hitzig and E. Glen Weyl, “A Flexible Design for Funding Public
Goods”, Management Science 65, no. 11 (2019): 4951-5448.
444
Ohlhaver et al., op. cit. and Miler et al., op. cit.

320
 quadratic funding may help ensure the turnover of organization
and asset control, they do not directly ensure that organiza-
tions serve rather than exercising illegitimate power over their
“stakeholders”, such as customers and workers. Drawing on the tra-
ditions 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.445
• Participatory design and prediction markets: Digital platforms and
mechanisms are also increasingly used to allow more dynamic re-
source allocation both within corporations and in connections be-
tween corporations and their customers.446 Examples include ways
for customers to contribute and be rewarded for new product de-
signs, such as in entertainment platforms like Roblox or Lego Ideas,
and prediction markets where stakeholders can be rewarded to pre-
dict company-relevant outcomes like sales of a new product.
• Market design: The field of market design, for which several Nobel
Prizes have recently been awarded, applies mechanism design to
create market institutions that mitigate problems of market power
or externalities created by ignoring the social implications of trans-
actions. Examples include markets for tradable carbon permits, the
auction design examples we discussed in the Property and Contract
chapter above and a number of markets using community curren-
cies or other devices to facilitate market-like institutions in commu-
nities (e.g. education, public housing or organ donation) where using
445
Colin Mayer, Prosperity: Better Business Makes the Greater Good (Oxford, UK: Oxford
University Press, 2019). Zoë Hitzig, Michelle Meagher, André Veig and E. Glen Weyl,
“Economic Democracy and Market Power”, CPI Antitrust Chronicle April 2020. Michelle
Meagher, Competition is Killing us: How Big Business is Harming our Society and Planet -
and What to Do About It (New York: Penguin Business, 2020).
446
See Erich Joachimsthaler, The Interaction Field: The Revolutionary New Way to Create
Shared Value for Businesses, Customers, and Society, PublicAffairs, 2019. See also Gary
Hamel, and Michele Zanini, Humanocracy: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the Peo-
ple inside Them, (Boston, Massachusetts: Harvard Business Review Press, 2020).

321
 external currency can severely undermine core values.447
• Economies esteem: Related to these local currency markets are
online systems where various quantitative markers of social es-
teem/capital (e.g. badges, followers, leaderboards, links) partly
or fully replace transferable money as the “currency” of accom-
plishment.448 These can often, in turn, partly interoperate with
broader markets through various monetization channels such as
advertising, sponsorship and crowdfunding.

While this blossoming of alternatives to simplistic markets is a powerful

proof of concept for moving beyond the traditional limits of the market.
But they represent the beginning, not the end, of the possibilities for the
technologically enabled social markets of the future.

Frontiers of social markets

Building off these experiments, we are just able to glimpse what a compre-
hensively transformed market system might look like. Some of the most
promising elements include:

1. Circular investment: One of the most remarkable results of eco-

nomic theory is named after Henry George. Proved originally by
Vickrey but first published by Richard Arnott and Nobel Laureate
Joseph Stiglitz, the Henry George Theorem states, roughly, that the
taxes that can be raised from correctly designed common owner-
ship taxes can fund all the subsidies required to fund supermodular
investments.449 While the result is much more general, a simple
illustration is the way that building better local public schools tend
to raise land values: if this value can be raised by a land tax, in prin-
ciple any education investment worth funding can be supported.
447
Atila Abdulkadiroğlu, Parag A. Pathak and Alvin E. Roth, “The New York City High School
Match”, American Economic Review 95, no. 2 (2005): 365-367. Nicole Immorlica, Brendan
Lucier, Glen Weyl and Joshua Mollner, “Approximate Efficiency in Matching Markets” Inter-
national Conference on Web and Internet Economics (2017): 252-265. Roth et al., op. cit.
448
Nicole Immorlica, Greg Stoddard and Vasilis Syrgkanis, “Social Status and Badge De-
sign”, WWW ’15: Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on World Wide Web (2015:
473-483.
449
William Vickrey, “The City as a Firm” in Martin S. Feldstein and Robert P. Inman, eds.,
The Economics of Public Services: 334-343. Richard Arnott, and Joseph Stiglitz, “Aggregate
Land Rents, Expenditure on Public Goods, and Optimal City Size,” The Quarterly Journal of
Economics 93, no. 4 (November 1979): 471. https://doi.org/10.2307/1884466.

322
 More generally, the result suggests a near limitless potential, like
that realized in a superconducting circuit, for innovation in taxa-
tion/common property and allocation of funds to super-modular
activity, to generate progress.
2. ⿻ property: How can these funds be raised? While partial common
property schemes are an interesting start, they need to be paired
with tools that can recognize and protect common interests in the
way and stability with which land and other assets are used. The
voting systems we described in the previous chapter are a natural
answer here and there may be great potential in ⿻ property sys-
tems that can bring these together, returning much of the value of
a range of wealth to intersecting publics (“fructus”) while also giv-
ing important access (“usus”) and disposal (“abusus”) rights to these
communities.
3. ⿻ funding across boundaries: ⿻ funding can also extend dra-
matically beyond its current bounds, to allocate the resources
thus raised. Two of the most interesting directions are cross-
jurisdictional and inter-temporal. Current international trade
treaties focus primarily on breaking down trade barriers, including
the subsidies that help support supermodular production as we
discussed above. A future form of international economic coop-
eration could assemble matching funds for cross-jurisdictional
economic ventures, harnessing a mechanism like ⿻ funding. One
key advantage of capitalism is that it is one of the few scaled systems
with a significant intertemporal planning component, where com-
panies raise funds for profits that appear distant. One can imagine,
however, even more ambitious inter-temporal economic systems
with matching funds, for example, for institutions that promote
cooperation across generations or with those who are not even
born yet. This might overcome concerns about the lack of long-term
planning, as well as the conservation of valued past institutions, in
many quarters, creating an organic version of a “ministry for the
future”.450
4. Emergent publics: Possibilities are equally promising for how the or-
ganizations thus supported can be made truly accountable to their
450
Robinson, op. cit.

323
 stakeholders. Stakeholding of various kinds (as workers, customers,
suppliers, targets of negative externalities like pollution dumping or
misinformation, etc.) could be tracked by harnessing the type of ⿻
identity systems we discussed above. These could then be linked
to participation using voting and deliberation systems like those we
highlighted earlier in ways that are much less demanding on indi-
viduals’ time and attention and able to more quickly reach broadly
legitimate decisions than existing collective governance.451 These
in turn can make truly democratic and ⿻ governance of emergent
publics a realistic alternative to traditional corporate governance.
One could then imagine a future where new democratic entities gov-
erning emerging technologies in ways that are close to as legitimate
as governments emerge as frequently as start-ups, creating a web of
dynamic and legitimate governance.
5. ⿻ management: Internally, it is also increasingly possible to see
past the hierarchical structure that typically dominates corporate
control. 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.452
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.
6. Polypolitan migration policy: It is also increasingly possible to imag-
ine breaking down the stringency of international labor markets
through related mechanisms. As philosopher Danielle Allen has pro-
posed, migration could be conditioned upon endorsement or sup-
port from one or more civil society groups in the receiving country,
451
An interesting first experiment in this direction is being undertaken by the Web3 proto-
col Optimism, which uses a mixture of one-share-one-vote and more democratic methods
in different “houses” to govern its protocol.
452
South et al., op. cit.

324
 extending and combining existing practices in countries like Canada
and Taiwan that respectively allow private community-based spon-
sorship and allow a diversity of qualifying pathways for long-term
work permits.453 These could diffuse the stringent control of labor
mobility by nation states while maintaining accountability to avoid
harms or challenges with social integration.

While these only begin to scratch the surface of possibilities, they hope-
fully illustrate how completely markets could be re-conceived harness-
ing ⿻ principles. While the debates over markets and the state often falls
into predictable patterns, the possibilities for moving radically beyond
this simplistic binary are just as broad as for any other area of ⿻.

Limits of social markets

Yet the potential of markets should not be mistaken for being a miracle
cure or the primary pattern for the future of ⿻. Even in these greatly
enriched forms, markets remain a thin shell that at best is able to com-
fortably fit and provide material support and interface for a diversity of
richer human relationships, and at worst can undermine them. The best
we can therefore hope for is to create market forms flexible enough that
they fade into the background of the flowering of emergent social forms
they support.

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 ex-
isting concentrations of power, like those we have highlighted. It also re-
quires, as we have suggested, constantly bringing other forms of collabo-
ration across diversity454 to intersect with markets, whether voting, delib-
453
Danielle Allen, “Polypolitanism: An Approach to Immigration Policy to Support a Just
Political Economy” in Danielle Allen, Yochai Benkler, Leah Downey, Rebecca Henderson &
Josh Simons, etc., A Political Economy of Justice (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press,
2022): ch. 14.
454
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 exam-
ple, 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

325
eration, or creative collaboration, while creating market systems (like ⿻
money) that can deliberately insulate these from broader market forces.

Yet despite all their manifest dangers and limitations, those pursuing ⿻
should not wish markets away. Something must coordinate at least coex-
istence if not collaboration across the broadest social distances and many
other ways to achieve this, even ones as thin as voting, carry much greater
risks of homogenization precisely because they involve deeper ties. So-
cially aware global markets offer much greater prospect for ⿻ than a
global government. Markets must evolve and thrive, along with so many
other modes of collaboration, to secure a ⿻ future.

an exception to the rule that ‘public goods’ are always under-supplied.

326
Section 6: Impact

6-0 From ⿻ to Reality

⿻ has the tangible potential, in the next decade, to transform almost ev-
ery sector of society. Examples we study are:

1. The workplace, where we believe it could raise economic output by

10% and increase the growth rate by a percentage point;
2. Health, where we believe it can extend human life by two decades;
3. Media, where it can heal the divides opened by social media, pro-
vide sustainable funding, expand participation and dramatically in-
crease press freedom;
4. Environment, where it is core to addressing most of the serious envi-
ronmental problems we face, perhaps even more so than traditional
“green” technologies;
5. Learning, where it can upend the linear structure of current school-
ing to allow far more diverse and flexible, lifelong learning paths.

While we do not detail them here, we also expect fundamental effects in a

wide range of other areas, including energy, where it can help underpin a
fundamental transition from the “hunter-gatherer” model of fossil fuels
to the “agricultural” model of directly harnessing solar energy.

The previous parts of this book have sketched lofty visions of transform-
ing a broad range of social systems. Yet however imaginative such fu-
turism is, it can quickly feel impractical, empty, and false if disconnected
from the presently felt needs of real people today and pathways to address

327
these needs while bringing systemic change. Furthermore, much of the
rhetoric so far has focused on broad social systems like “democracy” that,
while inspiring, can often feel distant from the lived experience or scope
of agency of most people.

In this section, we therefore try to bring the potential impact of ⿻ down

to the concrete challenges facing citizens, workers and leaders across a
range of social activities and sectors. Before turning to specific such sec-
tors, in this chapter we aim to sketch the general contours of a ⿻ “theory
of change”, highlighting how these sectors are natural starting points and
showing how and why experiments in these areas can prove both of di-
rect value and capable of spreading to the systemic, global empowerment
of ⿻.

The graph structure of social revolutions

Radical social and technological change holds an irresistible allure to hu-
man imagination, yet so often ends in tragedy, as the Beatles lamented in
their social ballad “Revolution”. Political scientists Steven Levitsky and
Lucan Way found in a recent analysis that not a single violent revolution
in the twentieth century led to lasting democratic government.455 Yet we
can all think of many dramatic changes for the better in human history,
from the dramatic advances in information and communications tech-
nologies of the twentieth century to the establishment of a diversity of
free and democratic governments around the world over the last three
hundred years.

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.456 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 re-
cently learned, that of their new neighbors) to build a life together in a
new and often hazardous setting.457 As they traded ideas and built on
related concepts circulating at the time, they came to a broad conclusion
455
Steven Levitsky, and Lucan Way, Revolution and Dictatorship, (Princeton: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 2022).
456
Hannah Arendt, On Revolution, (New York: Penguin, 1963).
457
David Graeber, and David Wengrow, op. cit.

328
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 gov-
ernment. Their War of Independence against Britain allowed this author-
itative structure to be empowered in a manner that, for all its inconsis-
tencies, 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 popu-
lar 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 Rev-
olution, 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 Rev-
olution 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.

While Arendt’s example is drawn from the political sphere, it resonates

with literature on innovation in a wide range of fields from evolution-
ary biology to linguistics. While the precise results differ, this work all
indicates that dramatic innovation thrives in environments where a di-
versity of “groups” (e.g. linguistic, economic or biological) that are inter-
nally tightly connected and externally loosely connected interact.458 This
allows innovation to gain the necessary scale and show its resilience, and
then to spread. More connected structures or more centralized ones ei-
ther stifle innovation or make it dangerous, as changes are only occasion-
ally net benefits. More disconnected structures do not allow innovation
to spread.
458
R. A. Fisher, The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press,
1930). James Milroy and Lesley Milroy, “Linguistic Change, Social Network and Speaker In-
novation”, Journal of Linguistics 21, no. 2: 339-384. Gretchen McCulloch, Because Internet:
Understanding the New Rules of Language (New York: Riverhead, 2019). Daron Acemoglu,
Asuman Ozdaglar and Sarath Pattathil, “Learning, Diversity and Adaptation in Changing
Environments: The Role of Weak Links” (2023) at https://www.nber.org/papers/w31214.

329
While intuitive, these observations are a significant contrast to the model
of experimentation and innovation increasingly discussed in both the sci-
ence and social science literature on “randomized controlled trials” and
the technology business literature on “blitzscaling”, each of which we
will consider in turn. Randomized controlled trials, derived primarily
from individual, non-transmissible medical and cognitive psychology ap-
plications, focus on the randomized testing of treatments across individ-
uals or other social subgroups leading to an approval and then rapid dis-
bursement of the treatment to all indicated patients as with, for example,
Covid-19 vaccines.459 This literature has become increasingly influential
throughout the social sciences, especially development economics and as-
sociated applied work on poverty alleviation.460 This has encouraged the
spread of a model of “experimentation on” communities, where economic
and design experts construct interventions and test them on communi-
ties that may benefit from them, evaluate them according to often prereg-
istered metrics, and then propagate thus-measured effective treatments
more broadly.

This approach contrasts with “community-based innovation” allied to aca-

demic “Participatory Action Research” (PAR), pioneered in public rather
than individual health research, which also has provided a rough approx-
imation to the way that many early digital technologies that laid the foun-
dation for ⿻ later on (such as the time-sharing, personal computing, and
many applications).461 As we discussed briefly in “The Lost Dao” chap-
ter, these began in communities of early adopters which usually included
many of the system designers “experimenting with” digital tools. While
these communities often had some nascent ideas of what their systems
were good for, they rarely could reduce desired outcomes to pre-specified
metrics and, in fact, many of the components of their systems were cre-
ated by other early adopters. These systems spread to adjacent commu-
nities and eventually out to the public through many rounds of learning
from the community in unexpected ways and feeding such learning back
into product designs, as well as the making available of applications cre-
459
Donald B. Rubin, “Estimating Causal Effects of Treatments in Randomized and Nonran-
domized Studies,” Journal of Educational Psychology 66, no. 5: 688-701.
460
Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo, Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way
to Fight Poverty (New York: PublicAffairs, 2011).
461
Fran Baum, Colin MacDougall and Danielle Smith, “Participatory Action Research”, Jour-
nal of Epidemiology and Community Health 60, no. 10: 854-857.

330
ated by communities.

**

Figure 6-0-A. Time of various consumer digital products to 100 million

users over the year. Source: Data from Netscribes at https://www.netscribes.com/chatgpt-
4-a-near-to-perfect-ai-powered-digital-assistant/ and logos from Icons8 at
https://icons8.com/ by fair use.

**

“Experimentation on” and “experimentation with” each clearly have

their strengths and drawbacks. However, the latter mode has become
increasingly inconsistent and even dangerous given the style of adoption
spread that is sought in today’s venture capital-fueled digital technol-
ogy industry. Venture capitalists like LinkedIn Founder Reid Hoffman
have celebrated the “masters of scale” who champion “blitzscaling”,
in which start-ups receive large, early injections of venture financing
to allow them to invest in growing their user base rapidly and then
leveraging the benefits of this supermodularity (e.g. network effects,
learning from user data, etc.) to achieve a dominant market position.462
Perhaps the most dramatic example of this was Hoffman-backed OpenAI,
which achieved 100 million users within a few months of launching
its ChatGPT. We display this trend in Figure A, which shows how long
462
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.

331
various consumer products took to reach the 100 million user mark,
with a clear downward trend over time, capped by ChatGPT. Such rapid
adoption led to widespread public concern about the potential social
harms from such systems and regulation aimed at avoiding the cycle of
“move fast and break things” and the social backlash that accompanied
comparatively earlier, slower-growing technologies (like ride-hailing
and social media).463

The basic challenge is that “experimentation with” is dangerous when

paired with a fully capitalist market-driven model of managing new tech-
nologies. Because it seeks to manage system harms, challenges and inter-
dependencies 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.464 This is precisely what many of the early ⿻ experiments
discussed in “The Lost Dao” aimed to provide, through the involvement
of many social sectors and standardization processes, with commercial
scaling circumscribed. Yet even this more balanced version of “experi-
mentation with” falls short of the highest aspirations we might have for
the safe and inclusive development of technologies that eventually aspire
to be globally transformative, but which may carry significant risks.

In particular, even when technologies are successfully developed in the

interests of the communities harnessing them, accounting for all the sys-
temic harms they may create in these communities, they still may have
significant spillovers on those not among this early adopter community.
The key danger is that technologies may be usable as weapons or other-
wise 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.465
463
Future of Life Institute, “Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter” March 22, 2023
at https://futureoflife.org/open-letter/pause-giant-ai-experiments/.
464
Daron Acemoglu and Todd Lensman, Regulating Tranformative Technologies (2023) at
https://www.nber.org/papers/w31461.
465
Brad Smith and Carol Ann Browne, Tools and Weapons: The Promise and the Peril of the
Digital Age (New York: Penguin, 2019).

332
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 ex-
clusion 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.

A natural way to overcome this tendency is for the technology to develop

in rough balance across primary existing social divides, allowing a net-
work of participants to both govern its internal harms but also to resolve
the potentially competing interests of the groups represented in access-
ing and directing the technology. At the same time, for such spread to be
effective, early adopters must hold sufficient prestige or be able to gain
it through the benefits of the tools that, in a roughly balanced way across
their respective networks, the technology can spread.

This sketches an ambitious but reasonably clear picture of what a ⿻ strat-

egy 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.

333
**

Figure 6-0-B. Illustration of the ⿻ marketing approach of bridging and

covering social divisions.

**

While it is obviously impossible to perfectly achieve these five goals simul-

taneously, each challenging in itself, they provide a rough “north star” to
guide towards as we consider sectors for impact of ⿻. Furthermore, 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 as-
sociated “tree”. As to whether the result of this approach was effective
and whether we did a good job implementing this, you should be able to
judge on reading this book and its endorsements better than we can at
the time of writing this! As in many parts of this project, we invite you to
experiment and learn with us.

334
Fertile ground
Let us first consider the question of scale. 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 immer-
sive 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, espe-
cially in their socially enriched forms, making entry points far scarcer,
more ambitious, and potentially hazardous.

335
**

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 ex-
perimental sites, along with symbols of the sectors we study. Source: Gen-
erated by authors, all icons in the public domain.

**

However, given the reasonable flexibility across scales of most ⿻ tech-

nologies, the most broadly attractive sites for experimentation will be
those that both contain enough diversity within them to enable most appli-
cations and are themselves sufficiently diverse across them to allow the
reasonable choice of diverse, safe, prestigious seeds. While any simplistic
quantitative representation falls short of the richness needed to charac-
terize 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 corpo-
ration 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 re-
sembles the membership of many mid-sized civic organizations or social
movements. Culturally, it is roughly the active fan base of a typical tele-
vision 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.

336
Surveyor’s map
Perhaps the two most prominent sites of experimentation with ⿻ we
have highlighted above are Taiwan and web3 communities. These two
sites share some important characteristics, and yet also sharply diverge
in many ways both in terms of their character and the ⿻ applications
they have focused on. Both are roughly the same size. In 2021, web3
applications (dApps) had about 1.5 million monthly active users, though
only a fraction of these actively participated in the most ⿻-adjacent
services, such as GitCoin. The ⿻ services of all kinds built by the g0v
466
community in Taiwan have reached similar numbers . The types of
diversity in each community, however, are radically different.

While statistics are not entirely reliable, web3 users are spread quite
broadly around the globe according to patterns similar to the internet.
However, users tend to be extremely technically sophisticated, skew
male, very young, and, anecdotally based on our experience in the
space, tend to be atheistic, politically right of center, and ethnically of
European, Semitic and Asian origin.467 Participants in the Taiwanese
digital ecosystem are obviously mostly from Taiwan and thus mostly
of the ethnicities represented there. But they are more diverse in age,
technical background, political perspective and religious background.468

The two ecosystems have also focused on different sides of the spectrum
of ⿻ we discussed in the previous part of the book. Taiwan has focused
primarily on the deeper and narrower applications of ⿻ and the funda-
mental protocols (identity and access) that support these most strongly.
Global web3 communities have focused on the shallower and more inclu-
sive applications and the fundamental protocols (association, commerce
and contract) that most support these.

Both have been critical early testbeds for ⿻, yet measuring them against
our criteria also illustrates their limitations. The Taiwan ecosystem is
466
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.
467
a16zcrypto. “State of Crypto 2023.” Https://A16z.Com. Andressen Horowitz, 2023.
https://api.a16zcrypto.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/State-of-Crypto.pdf.
468
Austin, Sarah. “Web3 Is About More Than Tech, Thanks to Its Inclusivity.” Entrepreneur,
June 3, 2022. https://www.entrepreneur.com/science-technology/web3-is-about-more-than-
tech-thanks-to-its-inclusivity/425679.

337
larger than required for many of the applications developed there, which
is likely why it has hosted a range of subcommunities (that they often call
“data coalitions”) engaging in more advanced experiments supported by
the broader ecosystem. The Taiwan ecosystem has strong potential for
prestige in Asia and many of the countries typically called democracies,
while the geopolitical conflicts surrounding it create some challenges in
making it a seed for fully equitable global spread. Web3 communities, on
the other hand, may actually be a bit small and homogeneous to allow for
a fully robust test of whether new market institutions can rival the reach
of capitalism. Furthermore, many of the scandals that have plagued the
web3 space endanger its ability to generally serve as a beacon of innova-
tion that can equitably spread.

It is therefore crucial to carefully consider which places might be the most

promising for ⿻ to spread next. One obvious example that pervades our
discussions so far is the governance of cities. Yet precisely because we
have drawn on such public sector examples so heavily thus far, we focus
in this part of the book on a diversity of social sectors where ⿻ can seed
reality that touches a much broader range of life than the narrow defini-
tion of public sector “democracy”. In doing so, we aim to match the scales
mentioned above and cover a broad range of life experiences, while at-
tending to areas with respect and prestige in a broad range of societies.

In particular, we consider, as symbolized also in Figure C:

1. Workplace, which is a highly influential sector because so much of

the capitalist economy is driven by it. Again, especially in the largest
companies, finding scale matches is quite straightforward.
2. Health, which is another sector touching almost every life, is espe-
cially relevant outside of the working years we cover in the previous
chapter and perhaps the most widely respected social sector. Many
health systems, as noted above, match in scale.
3. Media, which perhaps has the greatest capacity to spread new prac-
tices as it is close to the conceptual, communicative and ideational
foundation of most societies. Many publications and social media
platforms match the relevant scale.
4. The environment, which surrounds us all and touches us at a global
scale unlike anything else, and which complements the other sec-

338
 tors, appealing to many who urge us to think beyond human work,
health and idea exchange.

We highlight each of these domains through a series of vignettes and at-

tempt to roughly quantify how a range of ⿻ technologies could transform
practice in ways that could potentially scale across or even beyond the
sector.

6-1 Workplace
More than a billion people worldwide work outside their homes in formal
organizations with at least a few other people.469 These “workplaces” pro-
duce about 70% of global output and are the first thing most people think
of when they hear “economy”. Just as we consider the vast contribution
of workplaces to the global economy, it is essential to address inefficien-
cies that hinder productivity. U.S. workers spend an average of 31 hours
per month in meetings deemed unproductive, a significant drain on both
time and resources.470 If ⿻ is to help re-imagine the economy, it must
restructure formal work, which we turn to in this chapter.

The advances we discuss, which are just a sampling of potential implica-

tions of ⿻ in the workplace, cover strengthening remote teams, design-
ing effective corporate campuses, improving communication, accessing
talent more inclusively and supporting more effective provision of com-
mon corporate infrastructure and more dynamic adaptation to changing
industries. We estimate that the first four of these components could in-
crease global gross domestic product by approximately 10% in total and
that the last might permanently increase the GDP growth rate by half a
percentage point a year.471
469
International Labor Organization, ” World Employment and Social Out-
look: Trends” (2023) at https://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/—dgreports/—
inst/documents/publication/wcms_865387.pdf
470
Alyson Krueger, “Fewer Work Meetings? Corporate America Is Trying,” The New
York Times, April 10, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/07/business/office-meetings-
time.html.
471
If, as noted in the chapter, about 50% of formal sector work will be remote and, as in
this study, if team-building exercises increase team performance by about 25%, if this ap-
plies to about half of formal sector work and if about half the benefit goes into cost, we
should expect a gain of about 2% of GDP from improved remote team-building. If agglom-
eration benefits are about 12% for work facilities and this applies again to half of formal
sector work and can be improved by 50%, again we get 2% of GDP. If meetings are 25%

339
Strong remote teams
The COVID-19 pandemic transformed the world of work, bringing
changes expected for decades to fruition in a year. A leading study by
Barreto et al., for example, found that work from home rose from 5%
of the American workforce to a high above 60%.472 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. While there has been a substantial return to physical
work since the end of the pandemic, at least a part of the change appears
here to stay; Barreto et al. find that after the pandemic, workers on
average want to work about half the week from home and believe their
productivity is similar or better in that setting. While some studies have
found some evidence of mildly reduced productivity, these effects do not
seem large enough to overcome the persistent demands for hybrid work
styles.473

Yet there is little question that remote work has real downsides. Some
of formal sector work time and can be improved by 25%, this is about 4% of GDP. Stan-
dard economic estimates of the costs of labor search and matching are about 4% of GPD,
similar to the cost spent on human resources; if mitigated by 50% this would raise GDP
by 2% (not to mention significantly dampen the cost of business cycle unemployment). Fi-
nally, most GDP growth (of roughly 2-3% annually globally) has been traced by economists
to technological advance through the research and development of new products, which
is now about 80% in the private sector according to the figures we discussed in the intro-
duction. If the efficiency of this could be increased by a quarter through more flexible in-
trapreneurship, this could raise global GDP growth annually by half a percent. 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. Michael Greenstone, Richard
Hornbeck, and Enrico Moretti, “Identifying Agglomeration Spillovers: Evidence from Win-
ners and Losers of Large Plant Openings,” Journal of Political Economy 118, no. 3 (June 2010):
536–98. https://doi.org/10.1086/653714.
472
Jose Barrero, Nicholas Bloom, and Steven J. Davis. 2023, “The Evolution of Working
from Home,” __Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR) Working Paper_ no.
23-19 (July 2023): https://siepr.stanford.edu/publications/working-paper/evolution-working-
home.
473
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.

340
of these, such as ensuring work-life balance, avoiding distractions and
unhealthy at-home working conditions, are not easily addressed through
remote collaboration tools. But many others are: lack of organic inter-
actions with colleagues, missing opportunities for feedback or forming
deeper personal connections with colleagues, etc.474 While ⿻ can be used
to address most of these, we will focus on one in particular: the building
of strong and deeply trusting teams.

Remote immersive shared reality (ISR) significantly enhances team build-

ing and training across disciplines by facilitating collaborative and cre-
ative teamwork in virtual environments. Global collaboration in virtual
environments has been effective for interdisciplinary teamwork, particu-
larly in healthcare education475 , highlighting its utility in overcoming ge-
ographic barriers.476 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.477 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 situ-
ational awareness among team members, proving essential for teamwork
in safety-critical domains.478479

In-person teams often engage in a variety of joint learnings or other not-

474
Longqi Yang, David Holtz, Sonia Jaffe, Siddharth Suri, Shilpi Sinha, Jeffrey We-
ston, Connor Joyce, et al., “The Effects of Remote Work on Collaboration among In-
formation Workers,” Nature Human Behaviour 6, no. 1 (September 9, 2021): 43–54.
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-021-01196-4.
475
Lin Lu, Honglin Wang, Pengran Liu, Rong Liu, Jiayao Zhang, Yi Xie, Songxi-
ang Liu, et al., “Applications of Mixed Reality Technology in Orthopedics Surgery:
A Pilot Study,” Frontiers in Bioengineering and Biotechnology 10 (February 22, 2022):
https://doi.org/10.3389/fbioe.2022.740507.
476
Rachel Umoren, Dora Stadler, Stephen L. Gasior, Deema Al-Sheikhly, Barbara Truman,
and Carolyn Lowe, “Global Collaboration and Team-Building through 3D Virtual Environ-
ments,” Innovations in Global Medical and Health Education 2014, no. 1 (November 1, 2014),
https://doi.org/10.5339/igmhe.2014.1.
477
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.
478
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.
479
Heide Lukosch, Bas van Nuland, Theo van Ruijven, Linda van Veen, and Alexander Ver-
braeck, “Building a Virtual World for Team Work Improvement,” Frontiers in Gaming Simu-
lation, 2014, 60–68, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-04954-0_8.

341
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”480 , simulated military exercises, ropes courses, etc.
What nearly all these have in common is that they create a shared activ-
ity that benefits from and thus helps develop trust among members, in a
similar manner to the way we discussed shared military service develop-
ing strong and lasting cooperative bonds in the Post-Symbolic Communi-
cation chapter.

Obviously most such activities currently rely heavily on being in person,

thus many hybrid and fully remote teams, especially those that have
many members who started as remote employees, miss the team-building
benefits created by such activities or can achieve them only at consider-
able travel expense. ISR offers significant potential for overcoming this
challenge. Lunches among sufficiently realistic avatars, ones reflecting
detailed facial expressions for example, may soon help bring the rich
connections achieved in the office within the reach of remote teams.
While it would seem impossible to achieve the vivid connections of
parties or extreme sports in remote shared reality, there is increasingly
strong evidence that real experiences of fear and trust can develop in
sufficiently realistic simulated environments.481 As “e-sports” begin to
rival the popularity and, in the right ISR environments, physical intensity
of in-person physical sports, the benefits of “campus athletics” may
increasingly make their way to remote work.

Yet even more promising how recreation-at-a-distance can mimic ap-

proaches of in-person teams is the harnessing of digital tools to create
even deeper connections than are possible without digital aids. The
simplest examples would be extensions to extreme sports or military
scenarios that would be unsafe or unreasonably costly to simulate in
person. But these are only the beginning; eventually, direct neural
interfaces may allow colleagues to remotely share a level of intimate
empathy that will be bound primarily by professional propriety, rather
480
A “trust fall” is an exercise where a person falls backward, counting on others to catch
them. This activity is used to build trust and teamwork, as it requires relying on others to
prevent injury. From the mid-2010s, the trust fall became less popular due to the potential
for traumatic brain injuries if catchers fail.
481
Jih-Hsuan Tammy Lin, “Fear in Virtual Reality (VR): Fear Elements, Coping Reactions,
Immediate and Next-Day Fright Responses Toward a Survival Horror Zombie Virtual Reality
Game”, Computers in Human Behavior 72 (2017): 350-361.

342
than by the barriers of physical distance.

Designing inclusive campuses

Much work, especially white-collar work, is physically localized to signifi-
cant extents in large “corporate campuses”. While many of the functions
these campuses bring together are fairly separate or organizationally dis-
tant, broad co-location is often a goal because of the chance intersections
it is thought to allow that may stimulate work across divisions of the com-
pany. Such “agglomeration” effects have been shown by a large economic
literature to be an important source of the economic benefit of cities.482
A core role of corporate campuses is to capture these benefits within a
company.

Achieving this goal, however, requires careful design. Excessive segre-

gation by organization and discipline or focus on core work undermines
the benefit of agglomerative spontaneity. Excessive fragmentation by or-
ganization and discipline undermines direct productivity. Different ele-
ments of campus (walkways, dining facilities, offices, shared space, recre-
ational facilities etc.) play diverse roles in fostering direct work and spon-
taneous connections. For instance, Steve Jobs redesigned Pixar’s head-
quarters to include a central atrium with a large theater, cafeteria, mail-
boxes, and viewing rooms.483 By encouraging computer scientists, anima-
tors and other staff to mingle in a shared space, this layout boosts chance
encounters and cross-pollination. Yet architectural revamps pose signif-
icant challenges: they’re costly and need to support other elements that
are specific to each company, such as nature of the work or brand iden-
tity. It is thus little surprise that there is no standard best campus design;
campuses differ radically in their design, a leading exemplar being Ap-
ple’s torus spaceship shown in Figure A. Anything that could reduce the
costs of exploration could significantly improve the quality.
482
Jane Jacobs, The Economy of Cities (New York: Vintage, 1969). Edward L. Glaeser, Hedi D.
Kallal, José A. Scheinkman and Andrei Shleifer, “Growth in Cities”,Journal of Political Econ-
omy 100, no. 6 (1992): 1126-1152.
483
Pixar Headquarters and the Legacy of Steve Jobs (2012)
https://officesnapshots.com/2012/07/16/pixar-headquarters-and-the-legacy-of-steve-jobs/

343
**

Figure 6-1-A. Apple’s famously unusually shaped corporate campus.

Source: Unsplash stock photo, free for commercial use.

**

A natural way to make such experiments dramatically easier is to create

ISR campuses in which employees can explore potential configurations
and attend virtual meetings. These configurations can be prototyped far
more rapidly and flexibly than building a physical campus, allowing for a
range of exploration in the course of time employees spend attending vir-
tual meetings. Based on feedback, employees can even help redesign the
space and iterate on the layout. If a potential design seems to be achieving
its goals reasonably well and fits a potential site, it could then be “printed”
through a more standard engineering and construction process. In short,
these tools could make the design of physical space much more like what
word processing and collaborative documents have made writing: a pro-
cess that is able to engage in broad experimentation and accumulate di-
verse feedback before it must be greatly scaled.

344
Difficult conversations
Meetings are a central part of white collar work, consuming on average
approximately a quarter of working time.484 Yet for all the time they
take up, perhaps the greater cost is the meetings that do not happen be-
cause of how burdensome they are. Business leaders frequently misun-
derstand the needs of their customers, the challenges within their teams
and the duplication of work because meeting with the relevant stakehold-
ers would take too long. To make matters worse, many meetings are
quite ineffective, as dominant personalities carry on and the wisdom of
those who are less empowered or assertive is lost. 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 en-
compasses meetings that 30% of employees find unnecessary. Moreover,
a reduction in meetings by 40% has been linked to a 71% surge in produc-
tivity, underlining the critical need for streamlining communication.485
Anything that could significantly speed meetings and increase their qual-
ity could transform organizational productivity.486

While meetings have a variety of goals and structures, perhaps the

most common type is an attempt to share a variety of perspectives on a
common project to achieve alignment and assignment of responsibilities.
Such meetings are closely connected to the deliberative conversations
we highlighted in our chapter on Augmented Deliberation. An impor-
tant 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
484
Branka, “Meeting Statistics – 2024”, Truelist Blog February 17, 2024 at
https://truelist.co/blog/meeting-statistics/.
485
Arthur Brooks, “Why Meetings Are Terrible for Happiness,” The Atlantic, De-
cember 15, 2022, https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2022/11/why-meetings-are-
terrible-happiness/672144/.
486
Michael Gibbs, Friederike Mengel, and Christoph Siemroth, “Work from Home and Pro-
ductivity: Evidence from Personnel and Analytics Data on Information Technology Profes-
sionals,” Journal of Political Economy Microeconomics 1, no. 1 (February 1, 2023): 7–41,
https://doi.org/10.1086/721803.

345
promise to significantly improve this, making it increasingly possible to
have respectful, inclusive and informative asynchronous conversations
that include many more stakeholders.

⿻ practices and tools can also enable more open and inclusive conversa-
tions about the biggest issues facing the organization. Today, the respon-
sibility for setting direction is typically limited to the top of the pyramid.
This simplifies strategy development, but at the cost of resilience and cre-
ativity: if a handful of executives are unwilling to adapt and learn, the
whole organization stalls. And even if executives were all exceptional
visionaries, their combined intellect is unlikely to suffice for the task at
hand. 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.487 Imag-
ine 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 chal-
lenges we need to tackle head-on? What aspiration truly reflects our com-
mon 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.

Beyond office politics, national politics are also increasingly entering and
dividing workplaces, leading some executives to take extreme measures
such as banning political discussions at work.488 A potential alternative to
such stringent restrictions, which may suppress but not resolve tensions
and undermine employee morale, might be to build channels such as the
above to allow thoughtful and inclusive discussions of social issues, espe-
cially those relevant to corporate policies, to take place respectfully and
at scale. Overall, these technologies promise to make workplaces more ef-
ficient, engaging, consensual and harmonious, providing the tools to help
487
W. Edwards Deming, “Improvement of Quality and Productivity through Action by Man-
agement”, National Productivity Review 1, no. 1 (1981): 12-22.
488
Ellen Huet, “Basecamp Follows Coinbase In Banning Politics Talk at Work,” Bloomberg,
April 26, 2021, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-26/basecamp-follows-
coinbase-in-banning-politics-talk-at-work. Ibid.

346
achieve the cultural goals many executives strive for.

⿻ hiring
Many businesses and roles have “standard career paths”, recruiting
primarily graduates from a limited number of degree programs, set of
professional backgrounds/experiences, etc. While these businesses often
regret that they thereby exclude many talented and diverse candidates,
recruiting from backgrounds that have lower “hit rates” is often very
costly: it would require them to learn to identify promising resumés
from a broader range of settings, verify accomplishments and credentials
outside of typical channels, send representatives traveling more and
further, understand unfamiliar dimensions of diversity and train those
who may be less prepared for the culture of their organization. The
rigidity created by this hiring process is a leading reason so many are
forced into the narrow paths of learning we highlighted in the previous
chapter.

The capabilities of social identity systems, modern large language mod-

els (LLMs) and remote shared reality technologies may help in address-
ing many of these challenges. Network-based verification systems, as we
described in the Identity and Personhood chapter can allow the secure
verification of a diversity of credentials and accomplishments across a
large gulf of social distance rapidly and cheaply. LLMs, properly trained
and fine-tuned, should soon allow the “translation” of resumés not just
across languages, but across diverse social contexts, helping hiring man-
agers understand “equivalent” qualifications across a range of settings
and a diversity of paths that could support performance in a role. They
can similarly help applicants better understand the range of roles their
background may qualify them for.

They also may be able to provide a richer sense of the range of diversity
spanned by a company’s customer base that would be helpful to repre-
sent among employees and help them to empathize and connect with
customers. It could also allow human resource departments to optimize
for diversity in more sophisticated, intersectional ways rather than sim-
ply seeking to match population proportions in salient categories. Re-
mote shared reality experiences can help them hold interactive recruit-

347
ing events in a wider range of venues at lower cost and allow applicants a
deeper sense of the work environment. They can also accelerate the accul-
turation and onboarding processes much as we described in the previous
chapter. In short, these tools can together allow for a future of human re-
sources that reaches a far wider range of talent and allows opportunities
for everyone to shine as the unique intersectional contributors they are.

Aligning wisdom and influence

In most organizations, power—whether it’s about controlling resources,
making decisions, accessing important information, or having the power
to reward or discipline others—is tied to one’s position. Formal hierarchy
provides clarity in terms of who is responsible for what, but this “legibil-
ity” has significant drawbacks. Positional authority can be too expansive,
like a finance executive becoming CEO and suddenly claiming expertise in
product design. It is also binary (you either have it or you do not), which
means that incompetent managers retain power until they’re removed
(often much later than ideal). Finally, traditional hierarchies don’t give
employees a say in selecting their leaders. This is the opposite of the so-
cial web, where power emerges from the bottom up.489

In ⿻ workplaces, the traditional single hierarchy can be complemented

by multiple, issue-specific hierarchies in the spirit of the ⿻ theory of iden-
tity. Power can shift fluidly based on contribution. Emerging technolo-
gies can help match value added with decision rights. For example, natu-
ral language processing can sift through communication data to spot asso-
ciates who consistently provide valuable insights on specific topics. Gen-
erative 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 irre-
spective 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.
489
See Hamel and Zanini, op. cit. ch. 9.

348
Supporting intrapreneurship
Another effect of traditional hierarchies is that those managed by differ-
ent high-level managers come to form different organizations within the
parent, each with their own cultures, goals and visions. While these in-
ternal distinctions are usually viewed as important to ensuring account-
ability, they are also often viewed as a barrier to organizational cooper-
ation and dynamism, potentially undermining the collaborations needed
to provide common infrastructure and meet the needs (“disruptions”) of
changing political, economic, social and technological environments. For
example, the organization in which one of us works, Microsoft, has some-
times been satirized for its internal organization conflicts and, under the
leadership of its current CEO Satya Nadella has worked to forge a “One
Microsoft” culture to overcome this.490

While much of this has been demonstrated through exemplars of such co-
operation and inspirational leadership, Nadella has also helped establish
some institutions intended to help achieve the organizational equivalent
of the “solidarity and dynamism” we have discussed above. In particular,
one of us had the honor to serve in the Office of Chief Technology Officer
(OCTO) Kevin Scott, whose duties included coordinating cross-company
investments that no one organization would find it in their interest to
take on and stimulating “intrapreneurship”, the building of new business
lines often drawing on expertise across existing organizations.491

While OCTO achieved much (including incubating the now well-known

relationship with OpenAI) during the author’s time there, a persistent
challenge was harnessing a small staff that was necessarily much less in-
formed than those “on the ground” about business needs and opportu-
nities to decide on major investments and incubations intended to bring
cross-cutting benefits. A leading example was the cross-company tech-
nical project he was most involved with, around Web3 strategy, where
interested and expert employees were widely scattered across the com-
490
Satya Nadella with Greg Shaw and Jill Tracie Nichols, Hit Refresh: The Quest to Redis-
cover Microsoft’s Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone (New York: Harper Business,
2017).
491
An entertaining outgrowth of corporate acronyms in this case was that he had the title
OCTOPEST (Office of the Chief Technology Officer Political Economist and Social Technolo-
gist), paralleling the title of his colleague Jaron Lanier who at the time of this writing remains
Microsoft’s OCTOPUS (Office of the Chief Technology Officer Prime Unifying Scientist).

349
pany. This was particularly difficult because the intention was for many
of these investments to accrue not directly to the bottom line of an inter-
nal start-up, but to other business lines. Because of this and the structure
of jobs at Microsoft, the typical use of large incentives for eventual success
to compensate for the likelihood of failure are hard to apply. Various or-
ganizations navigate this challenge in different ways; for example, Google
(now Alphabet) has traditionally given employees 20% of their time free
to pursue passion projects for the organization, outside their primary or-
ganizational role.492 Yet this suffers the obvious challenge that individu-
als 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.

A natural alternative to the extremes of centralized management and un-

coordinated 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 inter-
nal communication platforms to identify cross-organizational clusters of
interests, host free and fun events to build connections across these orga-
nizations, 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 gen-
uine 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.

Putting these together, we can imagine a future where remote teams can
form the same strong bonds as in-person teams, where in-person teams
can co-design inclusive workplaces that foster spontaneous connections
while maintaining focus, where meetings are far more efficient and inclu-
sive even when asynchronous, where a far wider range of talent can be
492
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.

350
placed into leading roles. This could create a more inclusive and repre-
sentative workplace where employees can easily collaborate across divi-
sions and with corporate support to overcome hurdles and build the com-
mon infrastructure and new ventures their employer needs to survive
and thrive in a dynamic business environment. In short, it is not hard to
see a future of truly ⿻ workplaces, embracing and harnessing collabora-
tion across a wide range of internal and external diversity to achieve a
more productive and inclusive future.

6-2 Health
In the past 75 years, the human race has added 25 years to global life
expectancy, significantly more than in the previous 10,000 years. These
advances were realized through a monist atomist model of health and
healthcare as we highlighted in our Living in a ⿻ World chapter. Such
models (e.g. ‘tropical medicine’) were developed and refined through
centuries of imperial and colonial governance, but their implementation
worldwide was rapidly accelerated following the formation of the United
Nations. This included achievements like the eradication of smallpox, the
rapid expansion of immunizations including through Gavi the Vaccine
Alliance, the massive expansion of antiretroviral therapy for HIV, and
the recent reductions in maternal mortality through improvements in
skilled birth attendance. Perhaps the most dramatic illustration of this
model was that within two years of the appearance of COVID-19, 70% of
the world’s population had received at least a single vaccine dose.

At the same time, progress in health-related Sustainable Development

Goals (SDGs) has stalled or reversed493 , half the world’s population lacks
access to essential health services494 , impoverishing healthcare pay-
ments affect hundreds of millions each year495 , mental health services
493
“The Sustainable Development Goals Report: Special Edition,” (New York: UN DESA, July
2023), https://desapublications.un.org/file/1169/download.
494
“Tracking Universal Health Coverage: 2023 Global Monitoring Re-
port,” (Geneva: World Health Organization, September 18, 2023),
https://iris.who.int/bitstream/handle/10665/374059/9789240080379-eng.pdf?sequence=1.
495
“Tracking Universal Health Coverage: 2023 Global Monitoring Re-
port,” (Geneva: World Health Organization, September 18, 2023),
https://iris.who.int/bitstream/handle/10665/374059/9789240080379-eng.pdf?sequence=1.

351
worldwide are severely underdeveloped496 , half of premature deaths are
caused by non-communicable diseases497 costing more than $2 trillion
annually498 , 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 aids499 . 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.

Achieving this goal, however, requires embracing a ⿻ concept of health

(Figure A). Of course, the world will still need doctors, nurses, health facil-
ities, laboratories, vaccines, drugs, and medical devices. But it also needs
to empower the co-construction of health agency on the part of individu-
als and their communities, a term Jennifer Prah Ruger uses to describe the
promotion of individuals’ capabilities to act in their own interests with re-
spect to their health500 . However, health agency is rightly understood as
primarily emergent, multiscale, embedded and complex (see our chapter
Living in a ⿻ World ). In this view and as we now highlight, the central
blockers to the next great era of human life extension are:

1. Lack of financing
2. Missing markets
3. Coordination failures
4. Missing communities
5. Non-aligned incentives
6. Lack of enabling services.
496
“Transforming Mental Health for All,” (Geneva: World Health Organisation, 2022),
https://iris.who.int/bitstream/handle/10665/356119/9789240049338-eng.pdf?sequence=1.
497
“Noncommunicable Diseases,” World Health Organization, September 16, 2023,
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/noncommunicable-diseases.
498
“Financing NCDs,” NCD Alliance, March 2, 2015, https://ncdalliance.org/why-
ncds/financing-ncds.
499
“Assistive Technology.” World Health Organization: WHO, May 15, 2023.
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/assistive-technology.
500
Jennifer Ruger, Health and Social Justice, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010),
pp. 276.

352
**

Figure 6-2-A. The Relational Concept of Health - Including social and in-
tersubjective aspects of health rather than just the atomistic

**

Reimagining health insurance

Health insurance allows people facing a range of risks to support their
common health expenditures, both facilitating payments and evening out
risk across time and people. While the role of insurance in “saving for a
rainy day” is clear to most, the value of “pooling” risk across individu-
als is subtler: it facilitates both the collection of regular and predictable
payments to offset unpredictable and sudden expenses and the redistribu-
tion from the better to the worse off.501 This latter function of insurance
is common to all expenditures intended to alleviate the suffering of the
worse off, who from the “original position” prior to birth that John Rawls
asks us to consider, are the victims of bad luck in their social or genetic
501
In his 1991 Lindley Lecture, the philosopher Derek Parfit distinguished a novel theory
of ethics, in contrast to either utilitarianism or egalitarianism, which he called “the priority
view”. Its main tenet is that the worse off have a special claim on resources. Prioritarianism
(before the term) has been used by economists in the analysis of social welfare functions
(‘optimal taxation’) since at least the 1970s. Prioritarianism is not usually considered - as it
is here - as a form of insurance.

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position.502

Health insurance in practice varies along the three dimensions of prepay-

ment, 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 patients503 . Private health
insurance in a market economy thus tends to reduce to an actuarially in-
formed health savings plan (i.e. with no risk pooling or redistribution),
similar to self-managed Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) in the US.504 This
voids the HSA of most insurance value, including that of prudential sav-
ings, since individuals cannot calibrate their savings rates without actu-
arial 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 coun-
tries admired for their socialization of risk have smaller populations
than most large private health insurers in the US.

A natural alternative to this simplistic dichotomy of extremes precedes

both in practice, namely social health insurance in which communities of
solidarity care for those in need. Such a pattern is familiar to nearly ev-
eryone from their family lives, and it is not hard to understand how it ex-
tended to tribes and kin relationships. However, it also played a key role
in classical Western civilization, such as the Roman collegia (the members
of which co-deputize each other to act in their interests), where such fam-
ily relations were extended to emerging urban social formations. Modern
forms of social health insurance also emphasize the shared responsibility
of a community for its members’ healthcare costs and thus supplement
individual, usually risk-adjusted prepayments, with collectivized contri-
502
John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, Revised edition, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1999).
503
Kenneth Arrow, “Uncertainty and the welfare economics of medical care,” American
Economic Review 53, 5 (1963): 941-973.
504
See Healthcare.gov, “Health Savings Account (HSA),” HealthCare.gov, 2019,
https://www.healthcare.gov/glossary/health-savings-account-HSA/.

354
butions, usually not risk-adjusted, from the employer (formerly, from the
guilds, such as the medieval German Knappschaften) and/or from another
actor such as the state. Most health systems in the world predominantly
follow either the social or the national insurance model, although private
health insurance can be found virtually everywhere. Many current cri-
tiques of social health insurance object to i) financing healthcare from a
tax on wages assessed through payroll deductions and ii) limiting entitle-
ment to those who contribute such payments through the formal sector.
Although there is merit in these concerns, it is useful to take a ⿻ perspec-
tive on social health insurance: there is a valid sense in which individuals
who share a profession, or employer, and who therefore tend to share a
common set of beliefs and values, should manifest a sense of solidarity
that is particularly acute.505

Accordingly, we can reimagine health insurance as a ‘⿻ good’ as in So-

cial Markets: one that exhibits supermodularity in group size (especially
across those facing diverse risks or life situations), but not requiring or
even benefiting from universal participation. A ⿻ good builds on the
strength of common belief across diverse scales and shapes embodied by
⿻ publics (see our chapter Association and ⿻ Publics). Of note is that
the social model of health insurance began with the fact of ‘association’,
namely, the creation of shared space for the enactment of common belief,
shielded from full public surveillance and financed by ⿻ mechanisms.
This reconceptualization allows for a dramatic expansion in the scope
and role of insurance: rather than simply offering savings, risk smooth-
ing or redistribution, ⿻ insurance might be used to finance the condi-
tions required for health, rather than merely the payment of services to
treat disease or infirmity. The more strongly a community interacts, the
more likely it is to face common environmental or behavioral health risks,
whether from the spread of communicable diseases, the ensuring of safe
working conditions, the social spread of practices of healthy living or the
creation of a healthy local natural environment. Health insurance might
then look more like life insurance, and there is no strong reason for the
two to be segmented and several strong reasons for them not to be.506
Essentially, such an insurance fund could act as a mutual-aid society to
505
Émile Durkheim, De la Division du Travail Social (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,
1893).
506
Robin Hanson, Buy Health, Not Health Care, Cato Journal 14, 1 (1994):135-141, Summer.

355
foster coordination in the joint production of health rather than merely
in its restoration: ‘healthy minds in healthy bodies’ but also healthy per-
sons in healthy families and communities (see Figure A, above). Such a
model, which we might call a “health production society”, would ensure
risk pooling and redistribution but could be much more relevant and ef-
fective at targeting the social determinants of health.

For example, it might be formed, in a developing country, to ensure the

provision of clean water, sanitation, or adequate nutrition or in a wealthy
country to mitigate the abuse of substances and ultra-processed foods
that together account for 20 million global deaths a year.507 The relevant
needs are highly localized and, in fact, are often hard to address outside of
a community context grounded in shared values, professional goals and
belief systems. Or another such society might be formed on the global
level for infections and globally transmissible diseases such as malaria,
HIV or tuberculosis, such as the Global Fund to AIDS, Tuberculosis and
Malaria. National reinsurers for local health production societies could
help ensure that local networks most effective at interventions do not ex-
cessively fall prey to shared health risks. In short, a range of intersecting
⿻ health production societies could move beyond an atomistic, risk-based
understanding of health to address the full range of social challenges in
health, recognizing the pooling of risk as simply one example of super-
modularity. Such societies would rely on the full host of technologies we
have described above for building community consensus, common under-
standing/purpose and shielding action from outside surveillance (such as
by a national insurer) that could undermine it.

Health impact tokenization

For the purpose of this discussion, outputs are the direct result of health
services (e.g. people vaccinated); outcomes are the final intended result
(e.g. deaths avoided through morbidity or mortality risk reduction); and
impacts are the knock-on effects outcomes have in the world at large
(e.g. future children born). Impact is thus an open-source commodity:
507
Anna Gilmore, Alice Fabbri, Fran Baum, Adam Bertscher, Krista Bondy, Ha-Joon Chang,
Sandro Demaio, et al., “Defining and Conceptualising the Commercial Determinants of
Health,” The Lancet 401, no. 10383 (April 8, 2023): 1194–1213. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-
6736(23)00013-2.

356
it can be forked to whatever use the beneficiary can devise (Figure B).
Although impacts are a causal effect of health services (e.g. a child who
otherwise would have died did not, and then went on to be a parent),
impacts are not the primary intended effect of health services. The
primary intended effect of health services is reducing morbidity or
mortality risk, which as we have seen is an insurance function. Health
services, which produce non-market-traded outcomes (e.g. lives saved
and healthier lives, through the insurance function) and market-traded
and non-market-traded impacts (e.g. more labour to sell and more time
for visits with friends, through the open-source function), thus have an
accounting problem: it is hard to measure the value of outcomes (e.g. the
value of a life saved) but it is often still harder to measure the value of
relevant impacts. Thus, since the full social value of health projects is in
practice never counted, let alone captured or rendered tradeable, many
win-win health investments remain blocked.

**

Figure 6-2-B. Different Pathways to Impact - Illustrating the knock-on ef-

fects that outcomes have in the world at large

**

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For example, the Global Fund claims to have saved 44 million lives over 20
years at a cumulative cost of $55.4 billion in disbursements plus approx-
imately $6 billion in operating costs funded primarily by governments
and philanthropists. Median estimates for the insurance value of a mor-
tality risk reduction of this scale would come in at about $200 trillion dol-
lars, attributing to the Global Fund an (undiscounted) outcomes-based re-
turn on investment (ROI) of over 3000:1. Accordingly, if the Global Fund
could have captured a fraction of the insurance value of the outcomes it
produced, it would be one of the most valuable entities in the world to-
day, and everyone would want to buy its shares. In fact, everyone in the
world already does own non-tradeable shares in the Global Fund, which
pays out regular dividends in the form of reduced rates of disease con-
traction, increased economic growth and the benefits of loved ones living
fuller lives among many other things. The question is how to raise rev-
enue against these implicit, untraded shares to fund investment that can
increase the benefits they pay out.508

1. We must be able to represent both the insurance and the broader

social value of these investments. These can be tokenized based on
digital certificates that use a combination of technocratic outcome
evaluation, but also using “crowd-sourced” intelligence as high-
lighted, for example, in our ⿻ Voting chapter.

2. Build on this to coordinate fragmented funders and implementers

through open impact pools that address the shortcomings noted
with existing health financing. Develop an open coordination
standard for subscription to pools that addresses the drawbacks of
current health financing. Tokens can be used to participate in the
governance of projects or of the funding pools. Projects can allocate
tokens linked to contributions. Tokens can be used to participate in
governance; to trade and invest; to exchange for selected services;
or to fund further projects.
3. Harness generative foundation models (GFMs) and other applica-
tions to accelerate the process of forming such instruments and
adapting them to particular investments. Through tokenization,
508
In 2023, two of the contributors to this chapter created a Swiss-registered Association
with the name Unexia that is pursuing the measures described here with a range of UN and
other partner organizations.

358
 bundling and trading, it can be made as simple to buy health impact
as carbon credits. Tokens can be reinvested into projects or used to
purchase health services according to a standardized impact model.
Value can be linked to specific projects or aggregated into blocks,
supporting the development of cascading (‘fractal’) health-impact
markets.

Incenting equitable benefit sharing

Health insurance consists of pooled mechanisms for the prepayment of
health services that reduce mortality or morbidity risk, with a flexible
element of benefit and risk redistribution. Benefit sharing in particu-
lar has bedeviled blended-finance agreements that promised to mobilize
additional sources of funds from private, profit-seeking actors; instead
of mobilizing new sources of funding, however, existing arrangements
have tended to allow private investors to capture the benefits of public de-
risking while offering little or no financial incentive to ensure the active
engagement of direct (or indirect) beneficiaries or to reward the commit-
ment of, for example, biological, behavioural, or other services by stake-
holders and participants. Open impact pools that allow for broad partic-
ipation in governance including by beneficiaries themselves, and there-
fore also a broader entitlement to benefits through productizing benefit
classes based on a standardized impact model, can more equitably dis-
tribute both risk and benefit and help incentivize the at-scale production
of key ⿻ goods.

Deliberative tools for health cooperation

The world has experienced an increasing wave of pandemics, with 6 oc-
curring already this century. In circumstances such as those in which
COVID-19 emerged, one principle stands out: public health policy must
be formulated in the presence of massive uncertainty about basic facts.
For example, in early 2020, we knew we were confronted with two im-
portant unknowns: Q1. How long would it take to develop an effective
COVID vaccine? and Q2. Would populations tolerate the imposition of so-
cial distancing measures? Policymakers got these questions badly wrong,
estimating “at least 18 months” for the first and “no” for the second when

359
“5 months” and “yes” were closer to correct. In fact, diverse publics world-
wide largely led government response rather than following it during
February and March of 2020.

If diffuse populations of individuals or loosely organized non-health asso-

ciations, such as soccer clubs, can formulate objectively better pandemic
policy than a government that is advised by the world’s top epidemio-
logical experts, then governments are turning a blind eye to a critical
source of information and analysis. The use of online tools such as expert-
elicitation databases maintained on a variety of collaborative, delibera-
tive, voting or prediction-market (i.e. ‘governance’) technologies as we
described in our chapter on Augmented Deliberation would have multi-
plied by orders of magnitude the power of ‘the wisdom of the crowd’.509
Indeed, in the long run, more important than ‘getting policy right’ is pre-
serving social cohesion and public trust in policy-makers since without
these, ‘policy’ rapidly becomes meaningless anyway. Taiwan followed a
very different path, with rapid government support of citizen-led initia-
tives for, for example, tracking the supply of masks. By moving quickly to
empower citizen-led online initiatives (g0v, Polis), Taiwan was able to har-
vest the power of localized and contextual knowledge as a ⿻ good without
imposing centralized control while respecting privacy. Taiwan’s “extitu-
tional” 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 epidemiologi-
cal experts in closed-room consultations, and that ⿻ technologies will be
widely used for the large-scale formulation of and coordination around
collective action.

In virtually every part of the world, healthcare is administered through a

model originating in colonizing powers, usually as a mirror of the forms
of administration found in the respective imperial centers but with the
additional mission of ‘development’ tacked on. Results have naturally
been mixed. Nevertheless, in a number of former colonies, notably in
Canada and Australia, concerted efforts are being made on the part of
colonialist successor administrations to learn from Indigeneous models
509
Kristin Shrader-Frechette, “Experts in Uncertainty: Opinion and Subjective
Probability in Science.Roger M. Cooke,” Ethics 103, no. 3 (April 1993): 599–601,
https://doi.org/10.1086/293541.

360
of health and healthcare, to engage in the co-administration of healthcare
and other health services in accordance with Indigeneous community val-
ues, and to allow for the self-determination of solutions by Indigeneous
peoples. As these experiments remain few and far between, GFMs seem
a promising tool to leverage the large and diffuse bodies of textual data
produced in these initiatives for the purpose of interpreting, criticizing,
reimagining, and eventually redesigning, systems of healthcare adminis-
tration to be more responsive to cultural value systems. As discussed in
our chapter on Augmented Deliberation, “points of view” that are held
(albeit diffusely) by organizations and even entire cultures can be rep-
resented as an “individual” whose “synthetic wisdom” can be queried
in real-time interactions, or who can be tasked with designing incentive-
compatible healthcare and interventions along a non-colonialist model.

Post-symbolic communication for health

Brain computer interfaces (BCIs, see our chapter Post-Symbolic Commu-
nication) are not some futuristic fantasy of science fiction but familiar
objects in common use. The usual operating system is that of the sensory
and motor organs. 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 bidirection-
ally (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.

361
It would be futile to insist that such devices are not now an integral part
of our (transhuman) personality.510 Common applications of such tech-
nologies exist in the form of mobile health (e.g. text-message alerts, wear-
able devices, contact-tracing tools), telemedicine and telehealth (e.g. vir-
tual fracture clinics)511 , and e-health (e.g. digital health records). It is natu-
ral and obvious that the trend towards further modalities of interactivity,
and higher bit-rate throughput, will have in time important implications
for health, especially for visual, hearing, mobility, self-care, and speech
disorders, notably through Extended Reality (XR) services. Biomedical en-
gineering is already working to connect prosthetic devices at the cellular
level (i.e. bionics)512 , and BCIs hold out the corollary promise of allowing
for such connectivity at cognitive, emotional and experiential levels with,
for example, powerful applications in speech and communication disor-
ders, in the enhancement (or maintenance) of cognitive functions such as
memory and, almost certainly, in novel applications for common mental
disorders such as depression and anxiety, as well as for impulse control
for addictive disorders.

Immersive shared reality (ISR) has thus far primarily been used in
non-interpersonal medical settings, such as to de-risk medical training
for health workers, much as flight simulators do for pilots. It is natural,
however, to imagine the gamification of health-based ISR so as to incent
the learning of complex cognitive, relational, and behavioural skills
(such as self-care, self-insight, and self-management), as well as a suite of
simulated interpersonal applications (see our Immersive Shared Reality
chapter). Similar to the examples cited there, new horizons of simu-
lated and non-simulated social interaction can be opened to those with
disabilities that less immersive, lower-throughput, traditional assistive
technologies cannot address.
510
Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in
the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature
(New York; Routledge, 1991), pp. 149-181.
511
Gillian Anderson, Paul Jenkins, David McDonald, Robert Van Der Meer, Alec Morton,
Margaret Nugent, and Lech A Rymaszewski, “Cost Comparison of Orthopaedic Fracture Path-
ways Using Discrete Event Simulation in a Glasgow Hospital,” BMJ Open 7, no. 9 (September
2017): e014509, https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2016-014509.
512
Laurent Frossard, Silvia Conforto, and Oskar Aszmann, “Editorial: Bionics Limb
Prostheses: Advances in Clinical and Prosthetic Care Editorial on the Research Topic
Bionic Limb Prostheses: Advances in Clinical and Prosthetic Care Context Impor-
tance of Residuum Health,” Frontiers in Rehabilitation Sciences 3 (August 18, 2022).
https://doi.org/10.3389/fresc.2022.950481.

362
GFMs and data sharing to assist in diagnosis and treat-
ment
A human radiographer can at the upwards limit view and interpret per-
haps as many one million diagnostic imaging scans during a lifetime of
practice. While this is sufficient to achieve expert status in diagnosing
common conditions, GFMs can fine-tune on datasets orders of magnitude
larger and thus outperform human readers for the diagnosis of rarely
seen conditions. Of course, human beings might specialize in such con-
ditions and dedicate themselves to viewing a collection of many rare im-
ages, but the need for ⿻ technologies then becomes more acute: it seems
impossible to imagine how large diagnostic databases of rare conditions
can be compiled without established data-sharing practices across many
image centres. In this case, too, we see diffuse pockets of diversity that
show ‘affinity’ in terms of markers that cannot be organized into low-
entropy pockets based merely on traditional variables such as place, pro-
fession, or parentage; in these cases, another organizing principle must
be found, and online technologies are the obvious solution. Such tech-
nologies also need to respect privacy and confidentiality, both as a norma-
tive and legal principle. Various forms of privacy-enhancing technologies
(see our chapter Association and ⿻ Publics) such as zero- (or low-) knowl-
edge proofs, allow for specific kinds of information to be reliably shared
without over-sharing, helping enable simultaneous respect for medical
privacy and large-scale data sharing.513

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 adminis-
trative 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
513
Nicola Rieke et al. “The Future of Digital Health with Federated Learning” npj Digital
Medicine 3 (2020): article 119.

363
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 prin-
ciples 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.

Given the enormous amount of value currently ‘left on the table’ by the
under-production of health, it is critical that ⿻ technologies increasingly
be used to:

• Unlock successive layers of value for health funders, implementers

and beneficiaries.
• Attract a broader group of health funders, implementers and benefi-
ciaries who will want to work with novel mechanisms to coordinate
around funding and production of health goods.
• Empower the construction of health-oriented communities of prac-
tice by funders, implementers and beneficiaries.
• Ensure the reciprocal, symmetric, and equitable governance of
pooled, co-created health assets by funders, implementers and
beneficiaries.
• Enable new forms of international, regional and local cooperation
in the co-production of health.
• Unlock new avenues for healthy human (and transhuman) function-
ing.

The blockers noted above (lack of financing, missing markets, coordina-

364
tion failures, missing communities, misaligned incentives, and lack of en-
abling services) will be overcome, and the dark clouds blocking the path
to another 20 years of healthy life expectancy will dissipate the world
over.

6-3 Media
Immersive and telepathic media experiences promise to transform con-
nection across difference, making the experiences of the marginalized
as palpable to us as those of our neighbors. Collaborative journalism
promises to increase by an order of magnitude the number of citizens
who can meaningfully contribute to shaping our shared narration of his-
tory as it happens. Cryptographic securing of sources can increase free-
dom of the press, the equivalent of moving every country up a category
(viz. from Satisfactory to Good in the Reporters without Borders World
Press Freedom Index) by lessening the trade-offs between source confi-
dentiality and state secrecy. Creating a more ⿻ structure of attention al-
location and business models to support it could at least undo the rise in
affective polarization in many jurisdictions and possibly reduce them to
the levels seen today in the least polarized jurisdictions like Taiwan and
the Netherlands.

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. An important promise of digital technol-
ogy has been to transform media, a possibility we take up here with a
keen awareness of the dangers and harms to media that are widely at-
tributed to digital technology and social media. We explore how ⿻ could
help correct many of these harms and help achieve something of the po-
tential that internet pioneers like J. C. R. Licklider and Robert Taylor saw
in digital media.514
514
Licklider and Taylor, op. cit.

365
In particular, we highlight how the coming tide of ⿻ may help increase
empathy across social distance even more dramatically than photogra-
phy and television did; how it could increase by an order of magnitude or
more the number of people who can meaningfully and helpfully partici-
pate in the journalistic process; how it could help restore the level of trust
in media, as well as norms of respect for confidentiality, much of the way
towards what they were at their mid-twentieth-century peak; how they
could undo most of the rises in levels of “affective polarization” (viz. dis-
like across lines of political division) not just within national polities but
across a range of other social organizations; and how it could help restore
sustainable and aligned funding for media. In short, we show how ⿻ can
help address and reverse many of the crises media face today.

Walking in others’ shoes

As noted above, a central role of journalism is to allow people to experi-
ence the events and sensations of parts of the world they may never visit.
Every generation of technology has made this more vivid and thus cre-
ated a “smaller world”. Abolitionists like Frederick Douglass harnessed
photography to bring the experience of slaves to Northerner whites.515 Ra-
dio helped make the Great War a truly World War by allowing the sounds
of conflict to echo around the world. Television allowed millions to share
Neil Armstrong’s landing on the moon.

Immersive shared reality promises to create even deeper empathetic con-

nections. Journalists may soon be able to bridge social divides with vivid
empathy as never before. 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 Mil-
ica 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.516
515
John Stauffer, Zoe Trodd, and Celeste-Marie Bernier, Picturing Frederick Douglass: An
Illustrated Biography of the Nineteenth Century’s Most Photographed American (New York:
Liveright, 2015).
516
Milica Zec and Winslow Porter, Tree (2017). Decontee Davis, Surviving Ebola (2015). Yas-
min Elayat, Zero Days VR (2017).

366
Yet these are only the first successful forays into an emerging medium.
As shared reality technologies branch out into other senses (smell, touch
and taste), far more complete multisensory connections will be possible
with even more surprising and enlightening results. Brain interfaces will
be transformative in a way that is hard to even describe. The future of
journalism empowering us to know things that are profoundly different
is therefore bright.

Citizen co-journalism
One of the most important trends in the production of journalism in the
internet era has been the rise of so-called “citizen journalism” and the al-
lied “open-source intelligence” movement, both of which aim to empower
a much broader diversity of people than those traditionally employed as
formal journalists or intelligence analysts to document important events
in the world around them. Such journalism has been central to document-
ing many of the most important events in recent years, from terrorist at-
tacks to wars and police abuse. Yet it also faces significant criticism and
social concern over bias, rigor of verification of facts, and legibility and
digestibility.

It is easy to see how many recent technological developments could

dramatically exacerbate these problems. Generative foundation models
(GFMs) will make the production of realistic fakes far easier and will
spread distrust of any material without rigorous, multi-source validation.
The echo chambers of anti-social media will allow fakes to spread even
absent such vetting, proliferating misleading content and the conditions
under which people will believe it.

Yet there are equally clear precedents for how technology could offset
these challenges. Wikipedia has shown the speed and scale at which dis-
tributed participation can produce roughly and broadly consensual ac-
counts of many events, though not quite yet at the speed required of jour-
nalism. Many of the tools we have described above and detail below can
help address challenges of rigorous verification at distance and scale and
rapid achievement of rough and socially contextual consensus that is a
more appropriate frame for thinking about “objectivity”.

Perhaps one of the most interesting possibilities, though, is the way in

367
which GFMs may allow for a new form of coherent, digestible, broadly
traveling and yet authentic community voice. There is a long-standing
tension in journalism between allowing a community to “speak for itself”
(often through quotes or extended descriptions of community practices)
and crafting a compelling narrative digestible to the target audience, and
an even greater one that arises when articles are translated for other au-
diences. GFMs will increasingly allow communities to finesse these trade-
offs, as they can learn from and synthesize the speech patterns of commu-
nity members, incorporate verified facts, and at the same time smoothly
translate to a range of languages and subcultural standards and styles.
This will empower groups of citizens who are not trained as journalists
to convey the important stories they have to tell with precision and clarity
to diverse publics.

Cryptographically secure sources

One of the most frequently dramatized tensions in journalism surrounds
the role of source confidentiality. Confidentiality to the subject of the re-
port is often broken by a confidential source to create the credibility of re-
ports. Journalists have to verify the authenticity of their sources and the
information they provide, while ensuring their secrecy from (among oth-
ers) the organizations they inform on and the credibility of their report
to the public. In many cases, confidential informants are sharing infor-
mation that the norms of their organization prohibit them from sharing.
This creates strong tensions between many of the values we have high-
lighted above: protecting the associations, ensuring the integrity of the
public sphere, etc. How might the tools of ⿻ help navigate these challeng-
ing waters?

Many parts of the above process are naturally facilitated by the tools
we highlight in the “Identity and Personhood” and “Association and ⿻
Publics” chapters. Most of the tools for protecting ⿻ publics could be
applied by organizations to reduce the credibility of documents shared
outside their intended social context. At the same time, zero-knowledge
proofs (ZKPs) based on public credentials could allow sources to remain
confidential even to journalists while proving (elements of) their position
to journalists’ audiences. Yet, absent some reconciliation, such strategies

368
could quickly become an “arms race”, escalating cryptography without
arriving at a better social outcome.

A potential resolution of this impasse arises from the subtle distinctions

these protocols make regarding verification. If someone publicly holds a
position in an organization, they will typically be able to prove this to oth-
ers using a ZKP without revealing other elements of their identity. They
may then be able to harness the associated reputation, but no more, to
make claims about things occurring in the organization. But for more
sensitive information and expansive claims, especially if the person only
holds a relatively low position in the organization, additional verification
will usually be required to make this credible. One way is by revealing
more (public) information about themselves, but this will narrow the pool
of people they could be and thus expose them. Another is to provide di-
rect verification (“receipts”) of the claims. However, if these receipts are
protected by technologies like designated verifier signatures, this is only
possible by exposing their “private key” to another person (e.g. the jour-
nalist or legal authority), which puts them at risk of exploitation or expo-
sure by that other person unless she is herself highly trustworthy.

Of course, the precise details vary greatly depending on which precise

tools are used by each participant in this dance. But overall, it illustrates
how ⿻ cryptography can simultaneously allow for a quite intricate mix
of trustworthy and private disclosures, protection of community norms
of confidentiality and the ability to override these norms at personal cost
in a broader social interest when critical.

Stories that bring us together

While many Americans look back with nostalgia on the history of the
press, the era of “press responsibility” against which they judge the harms
of anti-social media, dates only to the 1940s. This was when the “Hutchins
Commission on Freedom of the Press” developed a code of social responsi-
bility under which the press would act as the “common carriers of public
discussion”, creating a baseline of shared understanding on which pub-
lic debate could proceed.517 That commission argued that a central role
517
The Commission on Freedom of the Press, A Free and Responsible Press: A General Report
on Mass Communications (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1947).

369
of a free press in a democratic society is to clarify to all citizens both
the points of consensus (viz. the “Walter Cronkite effect” of commonly
watched, consensual news) and fact and those of divergence (viz. the “fair-
ness doctrine” and practice of balancing diverging perspectives) to allow
self-government to thrive. While many appreciate what this era achieved
at the national level for one country, the essence of ⿻ is that we live (es-
pecially today) in a much richer and more diverse world, with many loci
of democracy across, between, within and beyond nations. Whatever the
many failings of social media, one thing it has achieved is to allow this
diversity to shape the media ecosystem. How might it do this while still
being pro-social media in the sense of the Hutchins report?

Our Augmented Deliberation chapter above suggests a natural strategy.

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 inter-
sectional 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 associ-
ated political outcomes are not achieved or “pluralistic ignorance” where
netizens are unable to act collectively on “silent majority” views.518 Fur-
518
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. 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. An example of false

370
thermore, 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. It is relevant beyond “hard journalism” per
se as many other cultural forms (e.g. music) benefit from audiences who
want to share cultural objects and fandom with others.

⿻ public media
The recommendations of the Hutchins Commission were largely adopted
by leading media outlets as part of the then-prominent campaign for “so-
cial responsibility”, which has recently made a comeback in the form
of commitments to “environmental, social and governance” (ESG) goals
among many companies. Yet a firmer foundation for encouraging such re-
sponsibility would be to align the funding sources of media more closely
with the pro-social design goals above.

Neither individual subscriptions nor advertising offer a particularly

promising path here, as both aim to appeal to consumers rather than
citizens of diverse communities, and thus encourage serving consumers
only the “dessert” they are tempted by rather than balancing this with
the “vegetables” that bring them together with their communities. If
we want social media to bring us together, we should aspire for it to
be funded by organizations with a dedicated interest in achieving that
goal: collective organizations including churches, civic associations,
governments at many levels, charities, universities, corporations etc.

Replacing advertising with funding from a diversity of communities does

not require much of a stretch of imagination from existing business mod-
els in adjacent industries. One of the largest and most profitable business
consensus is that many observers believe SARS-Cov-2 escaped from a laboratory (‘lab leak’
hypothesis). The rationalist website Rootclaim even assessed ‘lab leak’ at 89% probability
(~8 to 1 in favour). Subsequently, educated laypersons were exposed to the evidence in
over 18 hours of adversarial debate and found posterior probabilities on the order of ~800
to 1 against lab leak, implying a Bayes factor of ~100,000 to 1 against lab leak. Despite the
strength of the evidence, the lab leak claim persists since not only does zoonosis lack emo-
tional resonance but it also requires hard work to evaluate and offers no cathartic pay-off.
Similarly, due to pluralistic ignorance, despite the fact that more than 81 million people
in the United States voted for Joe Biden in 2020, a small crowd of several thousand highly
motivated individuals almost succeeded in disrupting the Electoral College vote count on 6
January 2021. Jonathan E. Pekar et al.,”The Molecular Epidemiology of Multiple Zoonotic
Origins of SARS-CoV-2“, Science 377, no. 6609 960-966. Michael Worobey et al.,”The Huanan
Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan was the Early Epicenter of the COVID-19 Pandemic”,
Science 377, no. 6609: 951-959.

371
models, pursued by corporations like Microsoft and Slack, is selling pro-
ductivity software, which often includes social media-like components,
to companies to boost productivity. These companies have no interest in
“engaged” or polarized employees; the goal of the tools is to bring employ-
ees together to accomplish shared goals and adjust to change. A new, pro-
social media model could thus naturally be incubated in such settings and
then sold, in broader social contexts, to other organizations interested in
solidarity and dynamism.

Furthermore, there are good reasons to believe such organizations could

afford to displace advertising revenue. Most democratic governments
(e.g. Germany, Finland, United States) spend more than a billion dollars
a year supporting public media and far more than that subsidizing other
culture.519 Even religious media received more than $100 million in the
United States alone in 2022.520 This compares to roughly $5 billion in ad-
vertising revenue earned by Twitter (now X) in 2022, at its peak.521 It
thus seems quite plausible that, together, a range of community repre-
sentative organizations could replace advertising as a revenue stream, if
community leaders focused on this space and social media channeled its
attention to this new business model.

This might play out in a variety of ways, but a simple one would be for par-
ticipants to opt into a set of communities they identify with. Each would
“sponsor” their community members’ use in exchange for the prioritiza-
tion of their members’ attention to the community-relevant content we
discussed above. Users who did not sign up for communities paying suf-
ficiently might have to accept some amount of advertising or pay a sub-
scription fee, and the service could identify from its own patterns com-
munities and approach their leaders to ask for payment. In short, social
media might become a more ⿻ version of public media.

Overall, the examples above show how ⿻ can empower a new pro-social,
519
Kleis Nielsen, Rasmus, and Geert Linnebank, “Public Support for the
Media: A Six-Country Overview of Direct and Indirect Subsidies,” (Ox-
fordshire: Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism: University of
Oxford, 2011), https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/2017-
11/Public%20support%20for%20Media.pdf.
520
“Grants for Religious Media Organizations,” Cause IQ, n.d.,
https://www.causeiq.com/directory/grants/grants-for-religious-media-organizations/.
521
“Advertising Revenue of X (Formerly Twitter) Worldwide from 2017 to 2027,” Statista,
2023, https://www.statista.com/statistics/271337/twitters-advertising-revenue-worldwide/.

372
⿻ media environment: one where we can connect deeply with others
from very different backgrounds, where people come together to tell their
stories in authoritative and verifiable ways without compromising com-
munity or individual privacy and where we come to understand what
unites and divides us in the interests of the dynamism and solidarity of
all our communities.

6-4 Environment
⿻ may be even more core to addressing the most pressing environmen-
tal problems we face, from climate change to biodiversity loss, than even
“green technologies” like clean energy are, because it provides a basis
both for cooperation on developing those technologies and for establish-
ing positive communication with natural features that represents their
interests in social decisions. As such, ⿻ may be central to the survival of
the earth as a human-supporting habitat.

What does “Collaboration Across Difference” have to do with the environ-

ment? Local legends, stories, traditional religions, and many contempo-
rary religions, spanning the length of human history, emphasize nature
as a target of respect and a participant in cooperation with just as much
as other humans are.

This chapter explores how ⿻ can transform our technological relation-

ship with nature. In the past, technology has often been conceived of as
a means to master nature, just as sometimes technology has previously
been seen as a means to master fellow humans. Instead, we explore how
⿻ can facilitate communication, cooperation and synergy with nature,
empowered by data. Whether we see these ecosystems as alive and sen-
tient in their own right, or as indispensable life-support systems for hu-
man societies, these approaches will enable us to co-exist with nature
more sustainably.

Human activities — particularly our reliance on non-renewable energy

sources — have profoundly altered the Earth since the 1950s. Deforesta-
tion, global warming, ocean acidification, and mass extinctions have all

373
escalated as the climate changes. At the beginning of the 21st century,
Nobel laureate Paul Jozef Crutzen proposed the term “Anthropocene” to
recognize this new epoch driven primarily by human influence.522 Biodi-
versity 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.523

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.524

Data coalitions for environmental action

Climate, air quality, and water data, which often rely on government
agencies for input and maintenance, are resources that benefit each other
internationally. Environmental awareness has become a distinctive fea-
ture of the implementation of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals,
driven by open data organizations and environmental groups. The civic
technology movement has opened up a new space for digital social en-
gagement; not simply providing tools, but also actively supporting civil so-
ciety to work with the government to create more environmental knowl-
edge, which can then be developed into a public movement that coordi-
nates the interests of multiple parties.

In Taiwan, the Location Aware Sensor System (LASS), an open-source en-

vironment sensing network, empowers ordinary citizens to gather and
share information freely, developing into a model of digital communica-
tion that incorporates local wisdom through citizen science. Instead of
relying on authoritative organizations to shape public perceptions, LASS
522
Will Steffan, Paul J. Crutzen and John R. McNeill, “The Anthropocene: Are Humans Now
Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature?” in Ross E. Dunn, Laura J. Mitchell and Kerry
Ward, eds., The New World History (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2016). Note
that this proposal was recently rejected by the International Union of Geological Sciences.
523
Gerardo Ceballos, Paul R. Ehrlich, and Peter H. Raven, “Vertebrates on the Brink as Indi-
cators of Biological Annihilation and the Sixth Mass Extinction”, Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences 117, no. 24: 13596-13602.
524
World Health Organization, “Air Pollution Resource Guide” at
https://www.who.int/health-topics/air-pollution#tab=tab_1.

374
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 con-
tributes 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 prob-
lems to be examined and disseminated.

Data coalitions are interconnected with social movement-based civic

technologies; a series of hackathon-themed fields have begun around
the globe that will serve as mutually supportive gateways for mobility,
acting as a technological conduit between natural environments and
volunteers, and facilitating collective action on a global scale. It can
be argued that the nature of collaborative networks is not just about
information gathering and value re-engineering, but also about the
foundation of community knowledge systems and the promotion of
environmental justice.

Before conservationism was a widespread concept, conservative

thinkers like Edmund Burke saw community groups as ‘little platoons’
– social hubs situated between individuals and the state.525 Effective
communication and cultivation are particularly important given that
environmental problems often hit the most vulnerable first and hardest,
such as low-income families or indigenous communities. The key is to
ensure, through law and policy, that community members have an equal
participation and voice in the development, resource allocation and
implementation process, and that they are transformed from research
subjects to data-driven actors.

Conversations with nature

Recent years have seen a growing movement to grant waterways ‘natural
legal personhood’. These waterways, with inherent rights and appointed
guardians, include the Magpie River (Muteshekau Shipu) in Canada, the
525
Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France and on the Proceedings in Certain
Societies in London Relative to that Event (London: James Dodley, 1790).

375
Whanganui in New Zealand, and the Ganga and Yamuna rivers in In-
dia.526 This signifies a shared commitment to preserving these ecosys-
tems for future generations.

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. In pro-
moting environmental sustainability, GFMs demonstrate a new model
of co-existence between technology and humanity. As environmental
data flows through verifiable relationships, it generates value (e.g., air
and water quality monitoring), sending pulses of images, sounds, and
messages to engage people, offering real-time feedback to ideas, and
encouraging more nature-conscious partners to join the effort.

It is important to emphasize that such advances can promote a mutu-

ally beneficial cocreation relationship, allowing all parties to work more
closely together with the common goal of protecting the planet. Partic-
ularly in addressing transjurisdictional environmental issues, they offer
unprecedented opportunities to analyze and address complex challenges
such as global climate change, biodiversity loss and water management.
By engaging in direct dialogues with nature, we are able to better under-
stand environmental change and develop effective strategies and solu-
tions based on it.

Cogovernance across borders

Fluidity defines our natural world; oceans, rivers, and the atmosphere
flow without regard for borders. Environmental solutions must tran-
scend rigid hierarchical approaches that work within single towns, cities,
or even countries. In response, we can draw from civic hacking culture,
which celebrates cross-disciplinary teamwork among programmers,
designers, and citizens across diverse communities.

Building GFMs models for natural environments involves challenges:

526
Mihnea Tanasescu, “When a River is a Person: From Ecuador to
New Zealand, Nature Gets its Day in Court”, Open Rivers 8, Fall 2017 at
https://openrivers.lib.umn.edu/article/when-a-river-is-a-person-from-ecuador-to-new-
zealand-nature-gets-its-day-in-court.

376
open-source governance, capital and compute investments, and collab-
oration are key. 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.527

Just as biometrics and sociometrics help establish identity, we need bet-

ter ways to establish and protect the identity of natural ecosystems like
rivers. A new conceptualization of identity is in order – one that factors in
the connections between individual people and the ecosystems they rely
on. ⿻ publics, as explored earlier in this book, also establish and pro-
tect the identity of collective entities, often devoted to cultural and care
relationships. Some of these relate to natural ecosystems and can offer a
foundation for conceptualizing the identity of such an ecosystem.

Notably, this perspective transcends the often contentious debate around

whether GFM systems can become legal agents; data coalitions can be
viewed both as “little platoons” created by the people who benefit from
the ecosystem, but also at the same time, through the legal positioning
of natural personhood, the river’s digital twin can be seen as a subject
with rights and responsibilities. Similarly, a GFM created for whatever
purpose of, by and for a community can exist both as a “person” and as a
shared ⿻ good, depending on the perspective one adopts.

6-5 Learning
Learning is a lifelong journey universally recognized around the globe. It
begins with the influence of family, culture, and social circles, while the
educational environment is a common collective experience along this
journey. Different background stories shape the diverse communication
languages, cooperation methods, and values in dealing with people and
527
Josh Blumenfeld, “NASA and IBM Openly Release Geospatial AI Foundation
Model for NASA Earth Observation Data”, NASA Earth Data August 3, 2023 at
https://www.earthdata.nasa.gov/news/impact-ibm-hls-foundation-model.

377
things between each other. For example, there are significant differences
between the East and West, especially in the pursuit of knowledge and the
integration of groups. The ⿻ technology of “collaboration across social
differences” stimulates co-creation by bringing together different knowl-
edge inheritance processes from around the world.

To this end, learners can fully explore their own and society’s potential,
avoiding setting boundaries at the starting point. This requires build-
ing an open, non-dogmatic social cognition system, allowing everyone’s
unique talents to find appropriate space for expression without fear of
communication. With the assistance of ⿻ technologies such as machine
translation, shared reality, and cross-border communities like Wikipedia
(3-3 The Lost Dao), the traditional rigid learning paths are supplemented
and challenged, going beyond the scope of traditional classrooms and text-
books.

With the popularization of the Internet, collaborative learning environ-

ments have become more prevalent. The compound annual growth
rate of the online learning market is estimated to exceed 10%528 . The
improvement of cognitive skills is expected to increase the long-term
economic growth rate of developing countries by 2%. Reports indicate529
that a workforce with such skills can achieve stable GDP growth (annual
increment of 0.6%). Interactive and personalized collaborative learning
environments can help more people achieve learning goals, master key
skills530 , and meet society’s resource development needs531 .

This chapter will depict how to empower communities to overcome rigid

teaching models and adapt to the ⿻ environment of lifelong learning.
Through these entertaining, collaborative problem-solving, and mission-
oriented projects, we can bridge cultural divides.
528
https://www.renub.com/online-education-market-p.php
529
Eric A. Hanushek and Ludger Woessmann’s paper, published in the 2008 Journal of Eco-
nomic Literature, analyzed the relationship between cognitive skills and economic growth
in 50 countries and found a significant positive correlation between the two.
530
Economist Eric Hanushek’s research shows that in developing countries, for each stan-
dard deviation increase in cognitive skills, the long-term economic growth rate can increase
by 2 percentage points. This means that the impact of improving education quality on eco-
nomic growth is even greater than years of schooling.
531
https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/education/oecd-skills-outlook-2023_27452f29-en

378
Resilient Learning Systems
The 2022 global reports of PISA532 & ICCS533 point out that Taiwan, Japan,
South Korea, and Lithuania grew against the trend during the pandemic,
and are considered to have resilient education systems534 . One of the out-
standing factors for Taiwan is the diverse co-creation teaching model of
2019 Basic Education Curriculum, which successfully combines physical
and digital learning tools, and regards “spontaneity, interaction, and com-
mon good” as new core values, inspiring a sense of mission towards global
sustainable development535 .

For example, the “Chenyuluoyan” font536 on the cover of this book comes
from the autonomous learning project of two high school students, lever-
aging social networks and related team co-learning. Such independent
creation demonstrates the spirit of open-source collaboration starting
from one’s own interests. The knowledge and creativity in the learning
process shine in open sharing, inspiring more people to participate537 .

In the educational institutions of the last century, learning often relied

on rote memorization and detailed recall; while the lack of open content
made problem-solving and teamwork fragmented. With the rise of ex-
perimental education in various countries, self-directed learning models
that encompass both critical thinking and interpersonal communication
skills have emerged. These two abilities are not mutually exclusive but
complementary, and with the assistance of ⿻ technology, they transcend
the limitations of each other’s ideologies and strengthen social resilience.

Diverse and Collaborative Learning Networks

As countries transition from agriculture-based models to information-
centric social relationships, liberalization, democratization, diverse
choices, and pluralistic identities become mutually supportive ⿻ pillars
in learning. These factors are also important directions for the innova-
tion and progress of democratic regimes and civil society. However, in
532
https://www.oecd.org/pisa/ & https://focustaiwan.tw/culture/202312060017
533
https://www.iea.nl/studies/iea/iccs/2022
534
https://www.cna.com.tw/news/ahel/202312050365.aspx
535
https://en.rti.org.tw/news/view/id/2010665
536
https://github.com/Chenyu-otf/chenyuluoyan_thin
537
https://blog.luckertw.com/chenyuluoyan-interview/

379
this process, we often face traditional pressures such as competition,
resource inequality, job insecurity, and civic education gaps.

The pandemic has accelerated the popularization of self-directed learning

and the integration of online and offline, promoting the digitization of ed-
ucational 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 exam-
ples. They break traditional limitations and provide learners and educa-
tors with diverse learning methods and cross-cultural exchange opportu-
nities.

“FutureLearn” is Europe’s largest online course platform, bringing to-

gether course resources from universities and professional institutions,
covering multiple specialized fields such as social sciences, humani-
ties and arts, and programming. It also collaborates with UNESCO on
global lifelong learning538 projects; furthermore, the platform offers
free courses including those providing basic English online learning for
refugees539 , allowing anyone to access quality education at low or zero
cost, meet diverse learning goals, and have flexibility.

The mobile university education system Minerva540 breaks the limita-

tions of traditional campuses. Students migrate to different cities every
semester, interacting with diverse teaching methods and cultural charac-
teristics through practical application. Minerva differs from traditional
universities in student selection and learning methods, adopting global
recruitment and online small group models, encouraging critical think-
ing and practical application-oriented cooperation, which has drawn
attention for its innovation541 .

The civic tech collaboration mentioned in Taiwan’s vibrant tech society

(2-2 The Life of a Digital Democracy) has also promoted the open-source
“Moedict”542 project, which involves teachers, students, and parents
learning by doing. This service has uploaded 160,000 Mandarin entries,
20,000 Taiwanese entries, and 14,000 Hakka entries, with an open and
538
https://www.uil.unesco.org/en/learning-cities
539
https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/collections/refugees-displaced-people
540
https://www.minerva.edu/
541
https://www.wuri.world/2023-global-top-100
542
https://www.moedict.tw/

380
diverse compilation mechanism, making it a multilingual interactive on-
line civic dictionary, demonstrating a global yet localized “collaborative
cataloging” paradigm. It not only supports a broad community writing
space but also serves as a platform for exchanges between different
languages and cultures.

Moedict has prompted the public sector to actively adopt the “Creative
Commons” license543 , contributing value to the development of AI mod-
els like TAIDE in Taiwan544 . Local languages and public knowledge can
be interconnected into collaborative networks. The application of such an
open-source paradigm as “Moedict” established close ties with official ed-
ucational institutions and social innovation organizations a decade ago,
demonstrating the interoperability between open-source co-editing cul-
ture and the formal education system.

Online libraries, Wikipedia, and CC-licensed image and text sharing de-
scribed in (3-3 The Lost Dao) are all valuable global assets comparable to
commons, generated based on open-source collaboration. Like in a vast
world park, works co-created by citizens from different countries and
languages can be understood and actively maintained by more people,
further promoting the democratization of knowledge and filling the gaps
in civic education. These are practical examples of learning evolving to-
wards the ⿻ path and mutually benefiting the public.

Globally Connected Lifelong Learning

In human society, ⿻ learning networks have opened up an innovative
path, becoming an effective tool for addressing complex problems.
Global common issues such as climate change, epidemics, and wealth
inequality are not problems that can be solved by going it alone. They
cross geographical boundaries and affect everyone’s lives, challenging
long-standing human divisions and barriers.

However, crises also bring opportunities. To overcome difficulties

together, people begin to understand the importance of setting aside
prejudices and learning from each other. The current global connectivity
carries the cultural differences and social barriers accumulated over
543
https://language.moe.gov.tw/001/Upload/Files/site_content/M0001/respub/index.html
544
https://taide.tw/index/training-data?type=2

381
hundreds and thousands of years, and its development is profoundly
influencing the next generation. However, these biases seem small in the
face of major crises of survival. Only by working together and trusting
each other can we spark new ideas and find innovative solutions never
encountered before.

The wisdom of different groups, through open collaboration, converges

into a more powerful force. Encyclopedias compiled by global users and
free software built by open-source communities are all ⿻ learning fields
where humanity works together and transcends barriers.

In the face of breakthroughs in AI technology, we can actively try to

apply innovative thinking to areas such as deliberation, the workplace,
and health. Through open-source concepts, neutral datasets, and bias
detection tools, AI can help us build more flexible cross-cultural commu-
nication models and enhance organizations’ ability to address complex
problems. Taiwan has used augmented deliberation technologies such as
“Talk to the City”545 , based on the concept of open source, to mitigate the
impact of AI. Through public participation, it ensures the completeness
of information, transcends cultural understanding, and ensures social
resilience.

AI can help build more broadly inclusive cross-cultural communication

models by analyzing cultural norms, social customs, and subtle differ-
ences in language. By understanding these factors and feasible directions,
AI can also help individuals overcome potential cultural barriers and ad-
just their communication styles to ensure mutual understanding. It can
identify and address potentially harmful or biased language. These neu-
tral datasets can also be used to eliminate discrimination and malicious
attacks, serving as an alternative suggestion tool to control dangerous bi-
ases that may exist in new datasets, aligning in real-time with diverse col-
laborative open-source tools. If not done so, these datasets may corrupt
or influence generations of AI.

This means that labeled instructions will start to change. In addition to

increasing trust in the important learning path of broader thought com-
munication, it can also increase the fun of participation and broaden real
paths.
545
https://moda.gov.tw/major-policies/alignment-assemblies/2023-ideathon/1459

382
How data transforms into knowledge on the Internet depends on our con-
nections with ourselves, life, the world, and learning. When we lose these
connections, meaning disappears. But through the broad spectrum of
global community networks, we can draw energy and return to reality
to see more future possibilities. We can endlessly create new senses of
learning meaning: learning is both a continuation of past knowledge and
the birth of innovation. Imagine being able to use collaborative skills and
open content to verify information when faced with a lengthy treatise.
In today’s rapidly developing technology, human wisdom will not disap-
pear; instead, it will show greater vitality due to our deep understanding
of knowledge and experience, as well as our diverse use of tools.

If we can skillfully interconnect reciprocal technologies with crowd

knowledge, we can cultivate lifelong learners who dare to take intel-
lectual risks and explore unknown areas. These learners can break
the framework of binary oppositions and create diverse, boundless ⿻
shared knowledge networks in cross-disciplinary mechanisms. We will
elaborate on this ideal below.

Infinite Games and ⿻ Citizens

The spirit of “edutainment” interweaves the pursuit of knowledge with
the sharing of joy. With infinite possibilities for combination, there are
countless possibilities for the co-creation of innovative thinking. Intro-
ducing this perspective into the context of collaborative learning, we can
see that true joyful learning is more like a process of infinite combina-
tions. It is not confined to narrow evaluation criteria but encourages
learners to break free from fixed thinking patterns. Under the interweav-
ing of multiple perspectives, innovative insights constantly emerge.

In James Carse’s book “Finite and Infinite Games,” he compares life’s jour-
ney to a game, proposing the concepts of finite and infinite games. This
perspective can also be used to compare the core spirit of edutainment:
in the journey of life, do we choose to follow social power, accept the
win-lose model of finite games with established boundaries, and pursue
short-lived victories; or do we choose to be open participants, engaging
in various aspects of creation from interpersonal interactions to cultural
exchanges, experiencing the joy of continuous login?

383
In the book “Imagined Communities,” Benedict Anderson deeply ex-
plores how communication through a common language forms a sense
of national identity. He proposes how the common language in literature
and narrative promotes the formation of community consciousness.
Anderson believes that the formation of national identity is a process of
social construction, mediated through print capitalism—that is, news-
papers and novels—enabling people to imagine themselves as part of
a larger community with shared interests and identities. This process
is similar to the learning environment, where narratives, languages,
and symbols play a crucial role in shaping learners’ identities and sense
of belonging to the community, whether at the local community level,
national level, or on a global scale.

Anderson’s analysis emphasizes the importance of narrative and dis-

course in constructing systems, shared knowledge, and community
development. Furthermore, if educational content and teaching meth-
ods can acknowledge and incorporate diverse narratives, it can create a
more inclusive and pluralistic learning environment, thereby encourag-
ing learning systems to have greater resilience and global commonality.
Learners deeply shape their self-perception and sense of community
belonging through interaction with different stories.

However, the values instilled by society, government, and capitalism

often stem from collective dependence, such as parents’ expectations
of children, mutual demands between partners, peer pressure, and
self-expectations, both rational and irrational factors. But these should
not become the sole compass for personal growth and learning. As Taylor
Swift shared in her commencement speech at New York University546
— bravely becoming the person you want to be in your heart—the way
we encourage is natural, allowing the discovery of self and enjoyment of
learning in an open, diverse learning journey, which is the driving force
for people to explore.

The knowledge and skills learned from group life, such as etiquette in
school, are tools for dealing with people, respecting human rights, under-
standing freedom and diversity, and coping with various situations after
graduation, in the workplace, and in life. This reminds us that learning
546
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBG50aoUwlI

384
is not only a process of knowledge accumulation but also a process of “es-
tablishing identity and a sense of community belonging,” and it is an even
richer intertwined state. For example, the significant contributions of the
Amateur Radio (also known as Ham Radio) community to science, indus-
try, social services, and satellite communications are based on the joy of
learning and a strong sense of community identity.

Driven by globalization, subcultures have rapidly evolved from niche

circles to a kind of imagined community. Amateur radio enthusiasts,
online interactive communities, and the cultural spread of ACG (anima-
tion, comics, and games) all reveal that the boundaries of knowledge,
education, and learning are being redefined. This collaborative innova-
tion that transcends traditional boundaries and breaks the interaction
of traditional identity roles allows the uniqueness and potential of each
person’s learning journey to be deeply explored and respected, further
enriching the co-learning landscape of diverse citizens.

The field of digital games, especially multiplayer games, is well-suited as

a learning environment. Minecraft and the “Civilization” game series are
two striking examples. Players can explore areas such as social develop-
ment, global warming, voting fairness, space exploration, and AI through
games, which not only promote collaboration, creativity, and problem-
solving among participants but also are not limited by age or occupation.
With the development of virtual reality, learning paths will be broadened,
and the value of meaning and practicality will be far more important than
a piece of paper.

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

385
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.

386
Section 7: Forward

7-0 Policy
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 govern-
ments 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 sup-
ported 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.

Making these a bit more precise opens our eyes to how different such a
future could be. Today, most research and development and the over-
whelming majority of software development occurs in for-profit private
corporations. What little (half a percent of GDP in an average OECD coun-
try) funding is spent on research and development by governments is pri-
marily 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.

387
In the future we imagine that governments and charities will ensure we
devote roughly 1% of GDP to digital public research, development, proto-
cols 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 or-
ders of magnitude and, given how much volunteer investment even lim-
ited financial investment in open source software and other public in-
vestment has been able to stimulate, completely change the character
of digital industries: the “digital economy” would become a ⿻ society.
Furthermore, public sector investment has primarily taken place on a na-
tional or regional (e.g. European Union) level and is largely obscured from
broader publics. The investment we imagine would, like research collab-
orations, private investment, and open source development, be under-
taken by transnational networks aiming to create internationally inter-
operable applications and standards similar to today’s internet protocols.
It would be at least as much a focus for the public as recently hyped tech-
nologies such as AI and crypto.

As we emphasized in the previous section, ⿻ innovation does not take pol-

icy by a single government as a primary starting point: it proceeds from a
variety of institutions of diverse and usually middling sizes outward. Yet
governments are central institutions around the world, directing a large
share of economic resources directly and shaping the allocation of much
more. We cannot imagine a path to ⿻ without the participation of govern-
ments as both users of ⿻ technology and supporters of the development
of ⿻.

Of course, a full such embrace would be a process, just as ⿻ is, and would
eventually transform the very nature of governments. Because much of
the book so far has gestured at what this would mean, in this chapter
we instead focus on a vision of what might take place in the next decade
to achieve the future we imagined above. While the policy directive we
sketch is grounded in a variety of precedents (such as ARPA, Taiwan, and
to a lesser extent India) that we have highlighted above, it does not di-
rectly follow any of the standard models employed by “great powers” to-
day, instead drawing, combining and extending elements from each to

388
form a more ambitious agenda than any of these are today pursuing. To
provide context, we therefore begin with a stylized description of these
“models” before drawing lessons from historical models. We describe
how these can be adapted to the global scope of today’s transnational net-
works, how such investments can be financially supported and sustained,
and finally the path to building the social and political support these poli-
cies will need, on which the next chapter focuses.

Digital empires
The most widely understood models of technology policy today are
captured by legal scholar Anu Bradford in her Digital Empires.547 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.

The US model has been driven by a broad trend widely documented since
the 1970s for government and the civil sector to disengage from the econ-
omy and technology development, focusing instead on “welfare” and na-
tional defense functions.548 Despite pioneering the ARPANET, the US pri-
vatized almost all further development of personal computing, operating
systems, physical and social networking and cloud infrastructure.549 As
the private monopolies predicted by J.C.R. Licklider (Lick) came to fill
these spaces, US regulators primarily responded with antitrust actions
547
Anu Bradford, Digital Empires: The Global Battle to Regulate Technology (Oxford, UK:
Oxford University Press, 2023).
548
Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw, The Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World
Economy (New York: Touchstone, 2002).
549
Tarnoff, op. cit.

389
that, while influencing market dynamics in a few cases (such as the Mi-
crosoft actions) were generally understood as too little too late.550 In par-
ticular, they are understood as having allowed monopolistic dominance
or tight oligopoly to emerge in the search, smartphone application, cloud
services and several operating systems markets. More recently, American
antitrust regulators under the leadership of the “New Brandeis” move-
ment have doubled down on the primary use of antitrust instruments
with limited success in court and have seen the challenges of emerging
monopolies only expand in the market for chips and generative founda-
tion models.551

The primary rival model to the US has been the PRC, where the Central
Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has drafted a series
of Five-Year plans that have increasingly in recent years directed a
variety of levers of state power to invest in and shape the direction
of technology development.552 These coordinated regulatory actions,
party-driven directives to domestic technology companies and primarily
government-driven investments in research and development have
dramatically steered the direction of Chinese technology development in
recent years away from commercial and consumer applications towards
hard and physical technology, national security, chip development and
surveillance technologies. Investment that has paralleled the US, such
as into large foundation models, has been tightly and directly steered
by government, ensuring consistency with priorities on censorship and
monitoring of dissent. A consistent crackdown on business activity not
forming part of this vision has led to a dramatic fall in activity in much of
the Chinese technology sector in recent years, especially around financial
technology including web3.

In contrast to the US and the PRC, the European Union (EU) and United
Kingdom (UK) have (despite a few notable exceptions) primarily acted
550
Licklider, “Comptuers and Government”, op. cit. Thomas Philippon, The Great Reversal
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019).
551
Lina Khan, “The New Brandeis Movement: America’s Antimonopoly Debate”, Jour-
nal of European Competition Law and Practice 9, no. 3 (2018): 131-132. Akush
Khandori, “Lina Khan’s Rough Year,” New York Magazine Intelligencer December
12, 2023 at https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/12/lina-khans-rough-year-running-the-
federal-trade-commission.html.
552
Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, 14th Five-Year Plan, March 2021;
translation available at https://cset.georgetown.edu/publication/china-14th-five-year-plan/.

390
as importers of technical frameworks produced by these two geopolitical
powers. The EU has tried to harness its bargaining power in that role,
however, to act as a “regulatory powerhouse”, intervening to protect the
interests of human rights that it fears the other two powers often ignore
in their race for technological supremacy. This has included setting the
global standard for privacy regulation with their General Data Protection
Regulation, taking the lead on regulation of generative foundation models
(GFMs) with their AI Act, and helping shape the standards for competitive
marketplaces with a series of recent ex-ante competition regulations in-
cluding the Digital Services Act, the Digital Markets Act and the Data Act.
While these have not defined an alternative positive technological model,
they have constrained and shaped the behavior of both US and Chinese
firms who seek to sell into the European market. The EU also aspires to
tight interoperability across the markets they serve, often leading to copy-
cat legislation in other jurisdictions.

A road less traveled

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 il-
lustrated in Figure A. From the US model, Taiwan has drawn the empha-
sis on a dynamic, decentralized, free, entrepreneurial ecosystem open
to the world that generates scalable and exportable technologies, espe-
cially 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.

391
**

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/.

**

Together these add up to a model where the public sector’s primary role
is active investment and support to empower and protect privately comple-
mented but civil society-led, technology development whose goal is proac-
tively building a digital stack that embodies in protocols principles of hu-
man rights and democracy.

The Presidential Hackathon in Taiwan is a prime example of this unique

model, blending public sector support with civil society innovation. Since
its inception in 2018, this annual event has drawn thousands of social in-
novators and public servants, as well as teams from numerous countries,
all collaborating to enhance Taiwan’s ⿻ infrastructure. Each year, five
outstanding teams are honored with a presidential commitment to sup-
port their initiatives in the upcoming fiscal year — elevating successful
local-scale experiments to the level of national infrastructure projects.

A key feature of the Presidential Hackathon is its use of quadratic voting

392
for public participation in selecting the top 20 teams. This elevates
the event beyond a mere competition, transforming it into a powerful
coalition-building platform for civil society leadership. For instance,
environmental groups focused on monitoring water and air pollution
saw their contributions gain national prominence through the Civil IoT
project — backed by a significant investment of USD $160 million —
showcasing how the Taiwan model effectively amplifies the impact and
reach of grassroots initiatives.

Lessons from the past

Of course, the “Taiwan model” did not emerge de novo over the last
decade. Instead, as we have highlighted above, it built on the synthesis of
the Taiwanese tradition of public support for cooperative enterprise and
civil society (see our A View from Yushan chapter) with the model that
built the internet at the United States Department of Defense’s Advanced
Research Projects Agency (ARPA), which we highlighted in The Lost Dao.
At a moment when the US and many other advanced economies are
turning away from “neoliberalism” and towards “industrial policy”, the
ARPA story holds crucial lessons and cautions.

On the one hand, ARPA’s Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO)

led by Lick is perhaps the most successful example of industrial policy
in American and perhaps world history. IPTO provided seed funding
for the development of a network of university-based computer inter-
action projects at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Stan-
ford, University of California Berkeley, Carnegie Technical Schools (now
Carnegie Mellon University or CMU) and University of California Los An-
geles. Among the remarkable outcomes of these investments were:

1. The development of this research network into the seeds of what

became the modern internet.
2. The development of the groups making up this network into the
many of the first and still the among the most prominent computer
science and computer engineering departments in the world.
3. The development around these universities of the leading regional
digital innovation hubs in the world, including Silicon Valley and the
Boston Route 128 corridor.

393
Yet while these technology hubs have become the envy and aspiration
of (typically unsuccessful) regional development and industrial policy
around the world, it is critical to remember how fundamentally differ-
ent the aspirations underpinning Lick’s vision were from those of his
imitators.

Where the standard goal of industrial policy is directly to achieve out-

comes like the development of a Silicon Valley, this was not Lick’s inten-
tion. He was instead focused on developing a vision of the future of com-
puting grounded in human-computer symbiosis, attack-resilient network-
ing and the computer as a communication device. ⿻ builds closely on
Lick’s very much unfinished vision. Lick selected participating universi-
ties not on the basis of an interest in regional economic development, but
rather to maximize the chances of achieving vision of the future of com-
puting.

Industrial policy often aims at creating large-scale, industrial “nation

champions” and is often viewed in contrast to antitrust and competition
policies, which typically aim to constrain excessively concentrated indus-
trial power. As Lick described in his 1980 “Computers and Government”
and in contrast to both of these traditions, the IPTO effort took the rough
goals of antitrust (ensuring the possibility of open and decentralized
marketplace) but applied the tools of industrial policy (active public
investment) to achieve them. Rather than constraining the winners of
predigital market competition, IPTO aimed to create a network infras-
tructure on which the digital world would play out in such a way as to
avoid undue concentrations of power. It was the failure to sustain this
investment through the 1970s and beyond that Lick predicted would
lead to the monopolization of the critical functions of digital life by what
he at the time described as “IBM” but turned out to be the dominant
technology platforms of today: Microsoft, Apple, Google, Meta, Amazon,
etc. Complementing this approach, rather than directly fostering the
development of private, for-profit industry as most industrial policy
does, Lick supported the civil society-based (primarily university-driven)
development of basic infrastructure that would support the defense,
government and private sectors.553
553
Licklider, “Computers and Government”, op. cit.

394
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 shar-
ing resources with other networks to enable scalable cooperation.

Yet while dictating this mission, Lick did not prejudge the right com-
ponents 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 de-
velopment, 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.

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 develop-
ment of the “India Stack” has many similar characteristics.554 More re-
cently, 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
554
Vivek Raghavan, Sanjay Jain and Pramod Varma, “India Stack—Digital Infrastructure as
Public Good”, Communications of the ACM 62, no. 11: 76-81.

395
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 advocat-
ing 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.

A new ⿻ order
The key reason for an updated model is that there are basic elements of
the ARPA model that are a poor fit for the shape of contemporary digital
life, as Lick began realizing as early as 1980. While it was a multisectoral
effort, ARPA was centered around the American military-industrial com-
plex and its collaborators in the American academy. This made sense in
the context of the 1960s, where the US was one of two major world pow-
ers, scientific funding and mission was deeply tied to its stand-off with
the Soviet Union and most digital technology was being developed in the
academy. As Lick observed, however, even by the late 1970s this was al-
ready becoming a poor fit. Today’s world is (as discussed above) much
more multi-polar even in its development of leading DPI. The primary
civil technology developers are in the open source community, private
companies dominate much of the digital world and military applications
are only one aspect of the public’s vision for digital technology, which in-
creasingly shapes every aspect of contemporary life. To adapt, a vision of
⿻ infrastructure for today must engage the public in setting the mission of
technology through institutions like digital ministries, network transna-
tionally and harness open source technology, as well as redirecting the
private sector, more effectively.

Lick and the ARPANET collaborators shaped an extraordinary vision that

laid the groundwork for the internet and ⿻. Yet Lick saw that this could
not ground the legitimacy of his project for long; as we highlighted central
to his aspirations was that “decisions about the development and exploita-
tion 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

396
decision-making processes that will shape their future.” Military technoc-
racy cannot be the primary locus for setting the agenda if ⿻ is to achieve
the legitimacy and public support necessary to make the requisite invest-
ments to center ⿻ infrastructure. Instead we will need to harness the full
suite of ⿻ technologies we have discussed above to engage transnational
publics in reaching an overlapping consensus on a mission that can mo-
tivate a similarly concerted effort to IPTO’s. These tools include ⿻ com-
petence education to make every citizen feel empowered to shape the ⿻
future, cultural institutions like Japan’s Miraikan that actively invite cit-
izens into long-term technology planning, ideathons where citizens col-
laborate on future envisioning and are supported by governments and
charities to build these visions into media that can be more broadly con-
sumed, alignment assemblies and other augmented deliberations on the
direction of technology and more.

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, who helped inspire both the popular television series Borgen
and the middle name of the daughter of one of this book’s authors.555

These ministries, inherently collaborative, work closely with other gov-

ernment sectors and international bodies. In 2023, the G20 digital minis-
ters identified DPI as a key focus for worldwide cooperation, aligning with
the UN global goals.556 In contrast to institutions like ARPA, digital min-
555
Danny Hakim, “The Danish Politician Who Accused Google of Antitrust Violations”, New
York Times April 15, 2015.
556
Benjamin Bertelsen and Ritul Gaur, “What We Can Expect for Digital Pub-
lic Infrastructure in 2024”, World Economic Forum Blog February 13, 2024 at
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2024/02/dpi-digital-public-infrastructure. Especially
in the developing world, many countries have ministries of planning that could naturally
host or spin off such a function.

397
istries offer a more fitting platform for initiating international missions
that involve the public and civil society. As digital challenges become cen-
tral to global security, more nations are likely to appoint digital ministers,
fostering an open, connected digital community.

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 interna-
tional 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 pri-
mary 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. Consider,
for example, the relationship of rough equality between the Ethereum
community and the Taiwanese Ministry of Digital Affairs.

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. For example, web3
communities and civic technology organizations like g0v and Radicalx-
Change have significant presences even in countries that are not widely
understood as “democratic” in their national politics. Similar patterns
at larger scales have been central to the transnational environmental,
human rights, religious and other movements.557
557
Alexander Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1999). For a recent case study of the role of religion in Middle East cooperation,
see Johnnie Moore, “Evangelical Track II Diplomacy in Arab and Israeli Peacemaking”, Lib-
erty University dissertation (2024).

398
While there is no necessary path from such interactions to broader de-
mocratization, it would also be an important mistake to miss the oppor-
tunity to expand the scope of interoperation in areas where it is possible
while waiting for full government-to-government alignment. In her book
A New World Order, leading international relations scholar Anne-Marie
Slaughter sketched how such transnational policy and civil networks will
increasingly complement and collaborate with governments around the
world and form a fabric of transnational collaboration.558 This fabric
or network could be effective than current international bodies like the
United Nations. As such we should expect (implicit) support for these kind
of initiatives to be as important to the role of digital ministries as are their
direct relationships with one another.

Some of the transnational networks that will form the key complements to
digital ministries may be academic collaborations. Yet the element of the
digital ecosystem most neglected by governments today is not academia,
which still receives billions of dollars of research support. Instead it is
the largely ignored world of open source and other non-profit, mission-
driven technology developers. 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 in-
terest.

Furthermore, this sector is in many ways better-suited to the develop-

ment of infrastructure than academic research, much as public infras-
tructure in the physical world is generally not built by academia. Aca-
demic research is heavily constrained by disciplinary foci and boundaries
that civil infrastructure that is broadly usable is unlikely to respect. Aca-
demic careers depend on citation, credit and novelty in a way that is un-
likely 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. Aca-
demic research often focuses on a degree and disciplinary style of rigor
558
Anne-Marie Slaughter, A New World Order (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2005). This book has a special place in one of our hearts, as obtaining a prerelease signed
copy was the first birthday present one author gave to the woman who became his wife.

399
and persuasiveness that differs in kind from the ideal user experience.
While public support for academic research is crucial and in some ar-
eas 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.559

** Figure 2-0-B. Comparing known funding of open source software and

venture capital investment. Source: Chart by authors, sources various
see footnote.560

**

Furthermore, open source communities are just the tip of the iceberg in
terms of what may be possible for public-interested, civil society-driven
technology development. Organizations like the Mozilla and Wikimedia
Foundations, while primarily interacting with and driving open source
559
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.
560
Jessica Lord, “What’s New with GitHub Sponsors”, GitHub Blog, April 4, 2023
at https://github.blog/2023-04-04-whats-new-with-github-sponsors/. GitCoin im-
pact report at https://impact.gitcoin.co/. Kevin Owocki, “Ethereum 2023 Fund-
ing Flows: Visualizing Public Goods Funding from Source to Destination” at
https://practicalpluralism.github.io/. Open Collective, “Fiscal Sponsors. We need you!”
Open Collective Blog March 1, 2024 at https://blog.opencollective.com/fiscal-sponsors-we-
need-you/. Optimism Collective, “RetroPGF Round 3”, Optimism Docs January 2024 at
https://community.optimism.io/docs/governance/retropgf-3/#. ProPublica, “The Linux
Foundation” at https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/460503801.

400
projects, have significant development activities beyond pure open
source code development that have made their offerings much more
accessible to the world. Furthermore, there is no necessary reason why
public interest technology need inherit all the features of open source
code.

Some organizations developing generative foundation models, such as

OpenAI and Anthropic, have legitimate concerns about simply making
these models freely available but are explicitly dedicated to developing
and licensing them in the public interest and are structured to not ex-
clusively maximize profit to ensure they stay true to these missions.561
Whether they have, given the demands of funding and the limits of their
own vision, managed to be ideally true to this aspiration or not, one can
certainly imagine both shaping organizations like this to ensure they can
achieve this goals using ⿻ technologies and structuring public policy to
ensure more organizations like this are central to the development of core
⿻ infrastructure. Other organizations may develop non-profit ⿻ infras-
tructure but wish to charge for elements of it (just as some highways have
tolls to address congestion and maintenance) while others may have no
proprietary claim but wish to ensure sensitive and private data are not
just made publicly available. Fostering a ⿻ ecosystem of organizations
that serve ⿻ publics including but not limited to open source models will
be critical to moving beyond the limits of the academic ARPA model. Luck-
ily a variety of ⿻ technologies are available to policymakers to foster such
an ecosystem.

Furthermore, whatever the ideal structures, it is unlikely that such public

interest institutions will simply substitute for the large, private digital
infrastructure built up over the last decades. Many social networks,
cloud infrastructures, single-sign-on architectures, and so forth would be
wasteful to simply scrap. Instead it likely makes sense to harness these
investments towards the public interest by pairing public investment
with agreements to shift governance to respect public input in much the
way we discussed in our chapters on Voting, Media and Workplace. This
closely resembles the way that a previous wave of economic democracy
561
OpenAI, “OpenAI Charter”, OpenAI Blog April 9, 2018 at https://openai.com/charter.
Anthropic, “The Long-Term Benefit Trust”, Anthropic Blog September 19, 2023 at
https://www.anthropic.com/news/the-long-term-benefit-trust.

401
reform with which Dewey was closely associated did not simple out-
compete privately created power generation, but instead sought to bring
them under a network of partially local democratic control through
utility boards. Many leaders in the tech world refer to their platforms as
“utilities”, “infrastructure” or “public squares”; it stands to reason that
part of a program of ⿻ digital infrastructure will be reforming them so
they truly act as such.

Fostering a ⿻ ecosystem of organizations that serve ⿻ publics including

but not limited to open source models will be critical to moving beyond
the limits of the academic ARPA model. Luckily a variety of ⿻ technolo-
gies are available to policymakers to foster such an ecosystem.

⿻ regulation
To allow the flourishing of such an ecosystem will depend on reorienting
legal, regulatory and financial systems to empower these types of orga-
nizations. 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. Gov-
ernments, 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 inter-
national 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

402
process of dissolving as of this writing. The competitive disadvantage
of Third-Sector technology providers could hardly be starker.562 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.

Other organizational forms likely need even further support. Data coali-
tions that aim to collectively protect the data rights of creators or those
with relevantly collective data interests, as we discussed in our Property
and Contract chapter, will need protection similar to unions and other col-
lective bargaining organizations that they not only do not have at present
but which many jurisdictions (like the EU) may effectively prevent them
from having, given their extreme emphasis on individual rights in data.
Just as labor law evolved to empower collective bargaining for workers,
law will have to evolve to allow data workers to collectively exercise their
rights in order to avoid either their being disadvantaged relative to con-
centrated model builders or so disparate as to offer insuperable barriers
to ambitious data collaboration.

Beyond organizational forms, legal and regulatory changes will be critical

to empowering a fair and productive use of data for shared goals. Tradi-
tional intellectual property regimes are highly rigid, focused on the de-
gree 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 de-
veloped 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
562
Open Collective Team, “Open Collective Official Statement - OCF Dissolution”
February 28, 2024 at https://blog.opencollective.com/open-collective-official-statement-ocf-
dissolution/.

403
them.563 New rules like these will build on the reforms to property rights
that empowered the re-purposing of radio spectrum and should be devel-
oped for a variety of other digital assets as we discussed in our Property
and Contract chapter.

Furthermore, if properly concerted with such a vision, antitrust laws,

competition rules, interoperability mandates and financial regulations
have an important role to play in encouraging the emergence of new
organizational forms and the adaptation of existing ones. Antitrust and
competition law is intended to ensure concentrated commercial interests
cannot abuse the power they accumulate over customers, suppliers and
workers. Giving direct control over a firm to these counterparties is a nat-
ural way to achieve this objective without the usual downsides in com-
petition policy of inhibiting scaled collaboration. ⿻ technologies offer
natural means to instantiate meaningful voice for these stakeholders as
we discussed in the Workplace chapter. It would be natural for antitrust
authorities to increasingly consider mandating such governance reforms
as alternative remedies to anticompetitive conduct or mergers and to con-
sider governance representation as a mitigating factor in evaluating the
necessity of punitive action.564

Mandating interoperability, in cooperation with standard setting pro-

cesses that develop the meaning and shape of these standards, is a
critical lever to make such standards workable and avoid dominance by
an illegitimate private monopoly. Financial regulations help define what
kinds of governance are acceptable in various jurisdictions and have
unfortunately, especially in the US and UK, weighed heavily towards
damaging and monopolistic one-share-one-vote rules. Financial regu-
latory reform should encourage experimentation with more inclusive
governance systems such as Quadratic and other ⿻ voting forms that ac-
count for and address concentrations of power continuously, rather than
offsetting the tendencies of one-share-one-vote to raiding with bespoke
provisions like “poison pills”.565 They should also accommodate and
563
An interesting line of research suggesting possibility here is that of neural network and
genetic algorithm pioneer John H. Holland, who tried to draw direct analogies between net-
works of firms in an economy linked by markets and neural networks. John H. Holland and
John M. Miller, “Artificial Adaptive Agents in Economic Theory”, American Economic Review
81, no. 2 (1991): 365-370.
564
Hitzig et al., op. cit.
565
Eric A. Posner and E. Glen Weyl, “Quadratic Voting as Efficient Corporate Governance”,

404
support worker, supplier, environmental counterparty and customer
voice and steer concentrated asset holders who might otherwise have
systemic monopolistic effects towards employing similar tools.

⿻ taxes
However, rules, laws and regulations can only offer support to positive
frameworks that arise from investment, innovation and development.
Without those to complement, they will always be on the defense, play-
ing catch up to a world defined by private innovation. Thus public and
multisectoral investment is the core they must complement and making
such investments obviously requires revenue, thus naturally raising the
question of how it can be raised to make ⿻ infrastructure self-sustaining.
While directly charging for services largely reverts to the traps of the pri-
vate sector, relying primarily on “general revenue” is unlikely to be sus-
tainable or legitimate. Furthermore, there are many cases where taxes
can themselves help encourage ⿻. It is to taxes of this sort that we now
turn our attention.

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 net-
works of collaboration and knowhow among employees at companies, of-
ten 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 Co-
operation and Development are likely to help, they are not tightly adap-
tive to the digital environment and thus will likely only partly address the
challenge.

Yet while from one side these present a challenge, on the other hand they
offer an opportunity for taxes to be raised in an explicitly transnational
way that can accrue to supporting ⿻ infrastructure rather than, in a fairly
arbitrary way, to wherever the corporation may chose to domicile. Ideally
University of Chicago Law Review 81, no. 1 (2014): 241-272.

405
such taxes should aim to satisfy as fully as possible several criteria:

1. Directly ⿻ (D ⿻): Digital taxes should ideally not merely raise rev-
enue, but directly encourage or enact ⿻ aims themselves.566 This
ensures that the taxes are not a drag on the system, but actually part
of the solution.
2. Jurisdictional alignment (JA): The jurisdictional network in which
taxes are and can naturally be raised should correspond to the juris-
diction that disposes of these taxes. This ensures that the coalition
required to enact the taxes is similar to that required to establish the
cooperation that disposes of the revenue.
3. Revenue alignment (RA): The sources of revenue should correspond
to the value generated by the shared value created by the use of the
revenue, ensuring that those disposing of the revenue have a natural
interest in the success of their mission. It also ensures that those
who pay for the tax generally benefit from the goods created with it,
lessening political opposition to the tax.
4. Financial adequacy (FA): The tax should be sufficient to fund the re-
quired investment.

The principle of “circular investment” that we described in our Social Mar-

kets chapter suggests that eventually they can all be generally jointly sat-
isfied. The value created by supermodular shared goods eventually must
accrue somewhere with submodular returns, which can and should be
recycled back to support those values sources. Extracting this value can
generally be done in a way that reduces market power and thus actually
encourages assets to be more fully used.

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:
566
Economists would refer to such taxes as “Pigouvian” taxes on “externalities”. While a
reasonable way to describe some of the below, as noted in our Markets chapter, externalities
may be more the rule than the exception and thus we prefer this alternative formulation.
For example, many of these taxes address issues of concentrated market power which do
create externalities, but are not usually considered in the scope of Pigouvian taxation.

406
 1. Concentrated computational asset tax: Application of a progressive
(either in rate or by giving a generous exemption) common own-
ership tax to digital assets such as computation, storage and some
kinds of data.567
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.568
3. Implicit data/attention exchange tax: Taxes on implicit data or at-
tention 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 la-
bor law could be taxed.569

While a much more detailed policy analysis would be needed to compre-

hensively “score” these taxes according to our criteria above, a few illus-
trations will hopefully illustrate the design thinking pattern behind these
suggestions. A concentrated computational asset tax aims simultaneously
to encourage more complete use of digital assets (as any common owner-
ship tax will), deter concentrated cloud ownership (thus increasing com-
petition while decreasing potential security threats) and to drag on the in-
centives for accumulating the kind of computational resources that may
allow training of potentially dangerous-scale models outside public over-
sight, all instantiating D ⿻. Most forms of digital land tax would naturally
accrue not to any nation state, but to the transnational entities that sup-
port internet infrastructure, access and content achieving JA. An implicit
data exchange tax would provide a clearer signal of the true value being
created in digital economies and encourage infrastructure facilitating this
567
See the ongoing work developing this idea of Charlotte Sieg-
mann, “AI Use-Case Specific Compute Subsidies and Quotas” (2024) at
https://docs.google.com/document/d/11nNPbBctIUoURfZ5FCwyLYRtpBL6xevFi8YGFbr3BBA/edit#heading=h.mr8ansm7nxr8.
568
Paul Romer, “A Tax That Could Fix Big Tech”, New York Times May 6, 2019 advocated
related ideas.
569
Gray and Suri, op. cit.

407
to maximize that value, achieving RA.

Of course, these are just first suggestions and much more analysis and
imagination will help expand the space of possibilities. However, given
that these examples line up fairly closely with the primary business mod-
els in today’s digital world (viz. cloud, advertising, digital asset sales, etc.)
it seems plausible that, with a bit of elaboration, they could be used to
raise a significant fraction of value flowing through that world and thus
achieve the FA necessary to support a scale of investment that would fun-
damentally transform the digital economy.

While this may seem a political non-starter, an illuminating precedent is

the gas tax in the US, which while initially opposed by the trucking indus-
try was eventually embraced by that industry when policymakers agreed
to set aside the funds to support the building of road infrastructure.570
Though the tax obviously put a direct drain on the industry, its indirect
support for the building of roads was seen to more than offset this by pro-
viding the substrate truckers needed for their work. Some would, rightly,
object that there may have been even better targeted taxes for this pur-
pose (such as road congestion charges), but gas taxes also carried ancil-
lary benefits in discouraging pollution and were generally well-targeted
at the primary users of roads at a time when charging for congestion
might have been costly.

It is just possible to imagine assembling today an appropriate coalition

of businesses and governments to support such an ambitious set of dig-
ital infrastructure supporting taxes. Doing so would require correct set
asides of raised funds, more clever tax instruments harnessing the abun-
dant data online, sophisticated and low-friction means of collecting taxes,
careful harnessing of appropriate but not universal jurisdictions to im-
pose and collect the taxes in a way that cajoles others to follow along and,
of course, a good deal of public support and pressure as we discuss below.
Effective policy leadership and public mobilization should, hopefully, be
able to achieve these and create the conditions for supporting ⿻ infras-
tructure.
570
John Chynoweth Burnham, “The Gasoline Tax and the Automobile Revolution” Missis-
sippi Valley Historical Review 48, no. 3 (1961): 435-459.

408
Sustaining our future
To embody ⿻, the network of organizations that are supported by such
resources cannot be a de novo monolithic global government. Instead it
must be ⿻ itself both in its structure and in its connection to existing fora
to realize the commitments of ⿻ to uplift diversity and collective coop-
eration. While we aspire to basically transform the character of digital
society, we cannot achieve ⿻ if we seek to tear down or undermine exist-
ing 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.

Different elements of our vision require very different degrees of govern-

ment engagement. Many of the most intimate technologies, for example,
such as immersive shared reality intend to operate at relatively intimate
scales and thus should be naturally developed in a relatively “private”
way (both in funding models and in data structures), with some degree
of public support and regulation steering them away from potential pit-
falls. The most ambitious reforms to the structure of markets, on the other
hand, will require reshaping basic governmental and legal structures, in
many cases cutting across national boundaries. Development of the fun-
damental protocols on which all of this work rests will require perhaps
the greatest degree of coordination but also a great deal of experimenta-
tion, fully harnessing the ARPA coopetitive structure as nodes in the net-
work (such as India and Taiwan) compete to export their frameworks into
global standards. An effective fabric of ⿻ law, regulation, investment and
control rights will, as much as possible, ensure the existence of a diversity
of national and transnational entities capable of matching this variety of
needs and deftly match taxes and legal authorities to empower these to
serve their relevant roles while interoperating.

Luckily, while they are dramatically underfunded, often imperfectly coor-

dinated and lack the ambitious mission we have outlined here, many of
the existing transnational structures for digital and internet governance
have roughly these features. In short, while specific new capabilities need
to be added, funding improved, networks and connections enhanced and
public engagement augmented, the internet is already, as imagined by

409
the ARPANET founders, ⿻ in its structure and governance. More than
anything, what needs to be done is build the public understanding of and
engagement with this work necessary to uplift, defend and support it.

Organizing change
Of course, achieving that is an enormous undertaking. The ideas dis-
cussed in this chapter, and throughout this book, are deeply technical and
even the fairly dry discussion here barely skims the surface. Very few will
deeply engage even with the ideas in this book, much less the much far-
ther ranging work that will need to be done both in the policy arena and
far beyond it in the wide range of research, development and deployment
work that policy world will empower.

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 ar-
ticulate. 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 oth-
erwise 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 technolo-
gies and intellectual analyses. It will have to become a broadly under-
stood cultural current and social movement, like environmentalism, AI
and crypto, grounded in a deep, both intellectual and social, body of fun-
damental 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 ac-
tivism, 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.

410
7-1 Conclusion
This book describes a vision for the future of technology and society that
we hope is ambitious and serious enough to be real competitor to, but will
be more attractive to most readers than, that developed by Libertarians
and Technocrats. If we are right and you share that vision, join us in the
movement for ⿻.

Our concrete aspirations match our ambitious vision. By 2030, ⿻ will

be as recognizable to people around the globe as a direction for technol-
ogy as AI or blockchain are and as recognizable as a political movement
as the Green movement. People will expect their democracy to progress
as rapidly as their devices. They will see Taiwan as a guiding light and
symbol for ⿻ and thus as important to the thriving of ⿻ as Israel is for
the Jewish people or as Ukraine is for freedom in Europe. People around
the world will find surprising allies and heroes through ⿻, like those con-
cerned about authoritarian expansionism coming to admire a transgen-
der Taiwanese leader on the front lines of that conflict and those seeking
more ⿻ technology finding allies among devout conservatives.

Technology is the most powerful force transforming our world. Whether

or not we understand its inner workings, deploy it tentatively or vora-
ciously, 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 rela-

tionships. 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 kinder-
garten friends and new like-minded allies to teleconferencing holding
businesses and families together during Covid, we have benefited enor-
mously from technology’s capacity to forge and strengthen human con-
nection while honoring our differences.

411
Yet, technology has also clearly driven us apart and suppressed our dif-
ferences. 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 rad-
ically 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 hu-
man 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, decel-
erating technological progress. Yet, while of course some directions are
unwise and there are limits to how rapidly we should proceed into the un-
known, the dynamics of competition and geopolitics makes simply slow-
ing progress unlikely to be sustainable. Instead, we face a choice of direc-
tions 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, complex-
ity and beauty in human society and nature. Life and ⿻ thrive in the nar-
row 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

412
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, pre-
cisely 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, gov-

ernments, 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 fu-
ture. 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.

Promise of ⿻
Over the last half century, most Western liberal democracies have learned
to be helpless in the face of technology. They are intrigued by it and alter-
nately delighted and frustrated by it, but tend to assume that it emerges
inexorably, like modernity itself, instead of as the sum of the choices of
small groups of engineers. Most citizens in these polities do not believe
“we the people” have any ability, much less any right, to influence the
direction of the platforms that are the operating system of our lives.

But we do have the right, and even the duty, to demand better. Some tech-
nology pulls us apart and flattens our differences; other technology brings
us together and celebrates them. Some fuels our resentment and obedi-
ence, some helps us find interdependence. If we mobilize to demand the
latter, ⿻ technologies that are designed to help us collaborate across dif-
ference, we can re-engineer that operating system.

We see our opportunity to act across three horizons: the immediate, the

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intermediate, and the transformative.

Immediate horizon

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. Business leaders, engineers,
product managers at these companies can both build ⿻ technologies into
their products in modest ways, employ these tools in their productivity
workflows, receive more effective feedback from customers and support
public policies that embody them.

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.

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 docu-
mentary. 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 Mi-
raikan in Tokyo does.

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Intermediate horizon

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 ⿻ com-
munities around the world, telling in a wide variety of idioms, languages
and forms the potential for a more ⿻ future and inviting friends to par-
ticipate in co-creating it. Anyone can join what will be increasingly orga-
nized political movements explicitly dedicated to ⿻, contribute to a grow-
ing range of ⿻ civil and charitable causes, attend a growing number of
hackathons and ideathons that help address the local concerns of diverse
communities using ⿻.

Policy leaders can form political platforms and perhaps even political par-
ties 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 har-
ness ⿻ and to substantively embody ⿻, moving away from “international
trade” to substantive, supermodular international cooperation and stan-
dards setting.

Business and more broadly organizational leaders can harness ⿻ to

transform their internal operations, customer relations, hiring prac-
tice 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.

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

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communities of practice to shorten the loop from research ideation to
practical experimentation.

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 ad-
vertisers and end consumers. They can build participatory experiences
that extend our ability to jointly design and imagine future, from the con-
crete design of physical spaces to the detailed interactive back-casting of
potential science fiction scenarios.

Transformative horizon

For those of you with even more expansive vision, we have spent a good
deal of this book articulating the kinds of truly transformative ⿻ that
could ultimately rewire the way humans communicate and collaborate.
This ambition goes to the root of the ⿻ movement’s insight—that person-
hood, the core unit of democracy, is not merely atomistic or “monistic,”
but is also defined by social relationships – and it therefore gives rise to a
broader conception of rights, going beyond individual rights to recognize
⿻ concepts of affiliation, commerce, property, and other building blocks
of our society. All these will require fundamental rewriting of a range of
technical infrastructures, social relationships and organizing institutions.

Such change cannot come directly, but instead must follow a gradual pro-
cess of transformation, occurring in a range of social sectors that build on
one another. To be truly ⿻, these will need to engage and empower peo-
ple across many lines of difference, which will in turn require that they
understand and can articulate what they want from their future. Cultural
creation, like those we have discussed above, will have to increasingly
manifest ⿻ in its form and substance to make this possible. This can cre-
ate broad public understanding and expectation of public steering of the
direction of technology and diverse social participation its design.

This foundation of ⿻ imagination across lines of difference can empower

social and political organization around such goals. This in turn can al-
low political leaders to feature such visions as core to their agendas and
to make the implementation in the functioning of governments, in their

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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 teach-
ing that will cross disciplinary boundaries and the boundaries between
knowledge creation and deployment, engaging deeply with such emerg-
ing 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 reinforc-
ing 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.

Mobilization
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. In charting a third course,
pluralists are committed to technology strengthening and diversifying re-
lationships, rather than tearing them down, and regenerating diversity,

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not fostering conformity. Relationships and the love, loss, adversity and
achievement are what makes life, not the violence of the jungle mani-
fested in books like The Lord of the Flies or the optimization of undiffer-
entiated data points.571

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.

This book is just one part of a great tapestry. One author of this book, for
example, is also Executive Producer of a forthcoming documentary (men-
tioned above) about the life of another, which we suppose will reach a
far broader audience than this book can; together we have founded an-
other institution to network academics working on ⿻, obviously a much
narrower audience. While these are just a couple of examples, they illus-
trate a crucial broader point: for 1000 people to be deeply involved (say
in writing the book), they will need each 100 that will read it and they in
turn will need each 100 who know about it and are supportive of the gen-
eral idea. Thus to succeed we need people at wide levels of engagement
in mutually supportive relationships.

If 1000 people are deeply enough involved with this book to speak about
it publicly, 10,000 are part of the community and actively contribute,
100,000 deeply digest the material, 1 million buy or download it, 10
million consume an hour of media content around it, 100 million see
a film or other entertaining treatment of a related theme and 1 billion
know about and are sympathetic to the aims, we will reach our 2030
goals.

Pluralists are in every country in the world, every sector of the economy.
Connect, affiliate, rally, mobilize … and join us, in the deliberate and com-
571
William Golding, The Lord of the Flies (London: Faber and Faber, 1954).

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mitted movement to build a more dynamic and harmonious world and
let us free the future, together.

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