Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies - Plurality: How Taiwan Managed to Unite Its People Through Tech - Audrey Tang & Glen Weyl

Episode Date: June 21, 2024

In a world constantly torn by social division amplified by polarizing scissor statements throughout social media, Taiwan conducted a social experiment aimed at strengthening social unity while also embracing diversity. Plurality details how Taiwan’s Digital Minister Audrey Tang and her collaborators achieved inclusive, technology-fueled growth that harnessed digital tools to provide an antidote to information chaos and warfare. The open-source book is living proof that present global challenges can be solved through democratic solutions that embody a decentralised ethos.We were joined by Audrey Tang and Glen Weyl, co-authors of Plurality, to discuss the social dynamics they studied and how technology can be used to unite rather than divide.Topics covered in this episode:How Audrey & Glen met and Plurality’s genesisAudrey’s journey from civic hacker to Taiwan’s Digital Affairs MinisterHow democracy is perceived around the worldEstablishing a co-creating mentalityScissor statements and how to avoid divisionHow Polis worksLeveraging Web3 to strengthen democracy & social collaborationDecentralised co-ownershipWeb3 governanceHuman facilitatorsEpisode links:Audrey Tang on TwitterGlen Weyl on TwitterPlurality Book on TwitterPlurality Institute on TwitterRadical xChangeSponsors:Gnosis: Gnosis builds decentralized infrastructure for the Ethereum ecosystem, since 2015. This year marks the launch of Gnosis Pay— the world's first Decentralized Payment Network. Get started today at - gnosis.ioChorus One: Chorus One is one of the largest node operators worldwide, supporting more than 100,000 delegators, across 45 networks. The recently launched OPUS allows staking up to 8,000 ETH in a single transaction. Enjoy the highest yields and institutional grade security at - chorus.oneThis episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst.

One of the greatest forms of freedom is freedom from politics. The Sunflower Movement, which is half a million people on the street and many more online, participated in a non-violent demonstration, occupying the parliament for three weeks to not protest, but rather show. What would it be like if you involve the entire society in a deliberation? The great thing about police is that if there's like 500 people, all very loud, but belaboring the same point, it doesn't increase the area in Polis. It doesn't increase their statement's ranking because instead of sorting by controversy by default,

on Polis, it's sorting by bridgemaking by default. If you have that sort of a process and it serves some things as bridging and some things as divisive, both can be very beneficial because you don't take action on the divisive things, but you form community around the divisive things. So people can come out of the process learning, both that they have new friends that they can ally with, that there's some things they can move forward on together.

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Your assets always remain in your custody, so you can have complete peace of mind. Startsaking today at corus.1. Welcome to Epicenter, the show which talks about the technologies, projects and people driving decentralization in the blockchain and revolution. I'm Frederica Ernst, and today I'm super honored to be here with Glenn Weil, the founder of Radical Exchange and Audrey Tang, the first digital minister of Taiwan, who both wrote a book together. It's called Plurality, and it's on the future of collaborative technology and democracy. It's a groundbreaking book that explores how digital tools can enhance democratic principles. processes and foster a more inclusive and better society. So, welcome.

Welcome to the podcast. It's super nice to have you on. Good luck of time. Very happy to be on the podcast. Dwighted to be here again. It's been a few years. It has been a few years. So I think both of you are pretty well-known.

So I will venture an introduction nevertheless. So Audrey, you were Taiwan's first minister of digital affairs. You are a globally recognized digital pioneer. You have been relentlessly promoting transparency and innovation, and you have played a pivotal role in Taiwan's digital democracy initiatives. You are also widely known for your contributions to free software and kind of for general advocacy in the digital space. And Glenn, you've been on before.

And back then, kind of we talked about radical exchange, the book you had just released. You are a principal researcher at Microsoft Research. You are a rare breed in that you are both an economist and a social technologist. You have worked extensively on radical markets, innovative governance models, and so on. The recurrent theme is kind of this, this, uh, this, uh, It's conversations on how technology can transform societal structures. And recently, you co-wrote a book with a bunch of other people called plurality. There was a very long introduction by our standards.

So tell me about yourselves. How did you two meet? And what inspired you to actually write this book together? Well, because of radical markets, I met Metallic Buderan. We started working together. He introduced me to Audrey. We started working remotely. with each other on some of the applications of ideas in radical markets in Taiwan,

and then had the chance to meet in person together in Berlin, the same place we met you. And that was an experience that kind of changed my life. Audrey, both who she is and what she was doing, really changed my perspective on many things. And my life started to sort of orient towards that over the coming years. and eventually I managed to kind of free myself from the role that I had at that time, which was fabulous and fascinating, but constraining in my ability to speak publicly. I was in the office of the CTO at Microsoft. And when I did, sort of the first thing I wanted to undertake was to write about

in a more sort of analytic, crisp way with Audrey, the things that she has, Done, and that was the journalist on purportality. Yeah, and when I received the initial outline of the book, I was just kind of wrapping up my work in the country pandemic, which included, you know, mask provisioning and contact tracing, vaccination, all that. And so the teams that are interacted with the most during the pandemic, we decided to bind them together, So whether it's universal services, spectrum allocation, platform economy, department of cybersecurity, data pipelines, and so on, we decided to just bind them over into a single ministry called the Ministry of Digital Affairs.

And so it is kind of a blank canvas, and Taiwan never had such a dedicated digital ministry with such an all-income role. So in a sense, Glenn's outline of the fundamental human rights that we should guarantee on the Internet from a human right perspective of not individuals, but rather associated individuals in groups, as well as this idea of plurality or collaboration across diversity became kind of the blueprint of the Ministry of Digital Affairs that was in 2022. Wow. There's a lot of information here. So we know you both, New Vittalik, So then because you had co-written your previous book with him, how did you meet him, Audrey? Oh, no, I did not co-write my previous book with Vidalek. I wrote it with Eric Posner. But Vidalc sort of picked up on that book and a big part of its reception in the world became because of his interest in it and the things we built based on it together.

So it's not literally true that we wrote it together. But he did end up writing the preface for the paperback edition. Sorry, it's kind of like quadratic voting and kind of. of Harberger taxes and so on. They are just in my brain. They are very tightly connected to Vitalik. I'm sorry for the misattribution here. It's actually very funny because recently several people have come up to me and said, have you heard about this idea from Vitalik Buterin called Quadratic Voting?

And I was like, I actually heard about that quite a while before Vitalik heard about it, but I'm delighted that you heard about it now as well. Well, we kind of preempted this. dynamic in this particular book by relinquishing the copyright. So plurality.net is entirely in the public domain. So it doesn't matter if you take a couple of paragraphs and say it's your work. Yeah, so attributed to whoever you want to attribute it. Exactly.

Unless you attributed to yourself and kind of you get done in for plagiarism, which is always a very real danger in academia. The whole point of public domain really is that the ideas are the protagonists. We are just the vehicles, the vessels, right, that inhabit those ideas. Before we go into the ideas that kind of form core of your new book, Audrey, let's talk about you for a little while. Because I think it's exceedingly rare that kind of people who kind of I would classify as kind of like, in some sense, actually go into government, right? So I think this is something that,

because working with governments often very bureaucratic and frustrating, how did you end up in this very unique position of first digital minister? But first of all, it is not that rare in Taiwan to have actual experts as ministers. My successor, the current digital minister, is not just IEEF fellow, but also an expert in privacy-enhancing technologies and zero knowledge and all sort of the cutting-edge things. So I think that the point I'm making is that Taiwan had a long history of working to think of democracy as a social technology, not as a like 200-year tradition. Well, we only had our first presidential election in 96.

So at that time, already the World Wide Web is part of the conversation. Now, as for me personally, I've worked as a reverse mentor, a young person younger than 35, to advise cabinet ministers in 2014. And the reason why I was involved was that in 2014, the administration was enjoying a 9% trust rate from the citizens because of its opaqueness handling a trade deal with the Beijing regime, the CSSTA, the cross-trade, service trade agreements. And so the Sunflower Movement, which is half a million people on the street and many more online, participated in a non-violent demonstration occupying the parliament for three weeks to not protest but rather show. What would it be like if you involve the entire society in a deliberation about this trade deal with a lot of facilitation, a lot of live streaming and all the cutting-edge technologies at the time? So because of the demo was successful at the end of three weeks,

the head of the parliament essentially is okay if that's what people want we'll just ratify it. So it was one of those very rare successful occupies. And so the cabinet members then tapped us, the young facilitators and so on, to serve as reverse mentors. And I work with them for two years, always saying that I'm working with the government, not for the government, with the people, not just for the people, before being, I guess, promoted into administer myself two years after that. It was in 2016. So, I mean, you travel the world a lot. Do you feel that the democratic... Especially now. It was harder for her to travel before, but now it's easier. Yeah, I've just been in like seven European cities and now in South America.

Do you feel that the democratic tradition, or, I mean, it's not that much of a tradition because, as you said, it's not been around for all that long, but do you think it markedly differs from Western Europe or North America? Well, I would say that I was just in Finland, and there's a lot of similarities, I would say, in the sense that it is not about polarization. It is not about like us versus them. It is more about a matter that everybody thinks together and a high trust now in Taiwan, in the institutional capability to think beyond polarization to co-create.

So I would classify Taiwan's democracy as embracing the conflict. So whenever people see a incoming conflict, instead of thinking that half of the population is against this and half the population is for it, we're usually about creating a space where those newfound conflicts and so on can be tapped into energy. So one metaphor I usually use is that we have a lot of earthquakes because we're caught between the tectonic plates of euration on one part and Pacific plate on the other, but because we have very good resilience in our building codes, each earthquake actually pushed the tip of Taiwan a little bit upward toward the sky, so to speak.

So to make a more synthetic way of looking at things. Whereas, I would say in many more fossilized democracies, people feel that they have to wait for four years to make a change. and you see a lot of this flip-flopping, like one side takes it, and four years later the other side wins and four years' size win, the other side wins, and so on, there's less of this dynamic co-creation potentials. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I would say this is definitely the case in Germany where I am from.

And Glenn, I'm sure you would agree it's most definitely the case in your native U.S. as well. Except I'm also a German citizen, so both are native to me. both have similar issues. Yes. Fantastic. Yeah, but how do you create this atmosphere where people kind of start creating together rather than kind of entering this tribal thing

where kind of it becomes about kind of like identity and kind of how you identify and kind of who is wrong and who's wrong and who's right on a very primal level? Yeah, I think a lot of the recent. and polarization can be traced into this like button and the share button and the retweet button nowadays called the repost button because a lot of those buttons do is to surface to the front only the viral ideas that puts people into a very quick impulsive action of clicking you know like or retweet and so on and so in Taiwan in 2014 we observed and

as part of the Sunflower Movement. That social media is somewhat anti-social in a sense that it manufactures counterpower very easily, but it doesn't build bridges easily. So we decided to build or adapt our own pro-social versions of social media. So at the Sunflower Movement, we tapped into a lot of co-creative tools at a time,

Hackpad, Lumio, and so on. Many of them are not even around anymore. Hackpad became part of Dropbox and so on. But one thing state, which is the ability to create a toolkit of bridge making pro-social social media. So one example is this system called Polis, which we deploy in 2015. The idea is that you can be pro-UBER, you can be pro-taxie, you can be pro-disorder that. But on this social media, you can post your comments for other people to like or unlike. But there's no reply button and there's no retweet button.

So there's no way to don't on each other. The only way to get viral, so to speak, or visible is if you propose a statement that was also liked by the people who are like you. So the more that you unify, the more bridge you build, the more visibility your ideas get. And people see very clearly how the different islands are and how they're brought together by ideas, for example, that, you know, raising prices is fine during a price surge, but undercutting existing meter isn't fine. or the insurance is important. So very nuanced, very eclectic ideas. And we honor the top 10 ideas by reading them out to the multi-stakeholder meeting and have the minister deciding a law based on those crowdsourced agenda.

And so giving voice to those bridge makers has always been the core idea, collaboration across difference. And we're very happy now that the community notes of X.com previously Twitter or nowadays YouTube and so on are all picking up on those ideas. Yeah, super cool. I want to go into the Polis thing in just a bit. I just wanted to ask, there was a short story on the internet a couple of years ago, maybe like five, four, ten years ago.

It was called Suede by Controversial. I'll put it in the show notes. I'll send it to you guys later. So basically, it's this idea that it's a short story. So basically it kind of comes across as kind of like a comment on social media or Reddit or something, where someone describes that they worked at a social media company, and they had made a startling discovery, namely that there is such a thing as scissors statements. So basically statements that you can craft such that they kind of divide the population into more or less

equal-sized chunks, and half of it will agree with it vehemently, and the other half were kind of defined the notion of that statement utterly abhorrent. So kind of like there's no middle ground at all. And kind of they kind of they mention examples of like where this was dropped and kind of it's kind of like

it's kind of like this conspiracy leaning thing where where kind of governments use them to kind of cover up things that are really going, things that's really going on and so on. And to a certain extent I actually think the author actually picked up on something that actually really does happen.

So it feels like there's a lot of manufactured conflict out there. Oh, yeah, definitely, yes. There's actually very clear research on this. You don't need to use it a hypothetical. Molly Roberts, Gary King, and Jen Pan have a wonderful article showing that the most effective and in many cases in their sample of research at least, primary approach of the Chinese government is not censorship. Instead, is the manufacturing of scissors statements in context when collective organizing

might otherwise occur so that the group that might organize is distracted and divided against itself by the scissors statement. It's what we call polarization attack or mass destruction or whatever, yes. what you guys kind of advocate for is kind of like this this culture of kind of like bringing everyone together at the same table and kind of just surfacing the differences to kind of make sure that kind of a compromise can be reached that kind of that honors everyone that everyone's equally unhappy or happy with how do you but how do you actually get to that stage how do you actually get people to the same table I wouldn't say that it's trying to get people equally unhappy or equally happy. I would say that it's coming up with something we can all live with. So the difference here is that it's not trying to reach a conclusion or a decision, but just some lower-hanging fruits that let people see that after all we think similarly

as our neighbors are some very basic things. So for example, we sent 200,000 SMS in my previous job as digital minister to random numbers in Taiwan. So anyone who with the phone has a chance to get a SMS number from 1-1-1, which is a recognized government-only number. And, of course, contained with it a survey asking, what do you think about information integrity online? What do you think about the defakes and cheat fakes and fraud and whether? So the idea here is not for us to come up with a preset compromise positions and ask people to pick their position. The idea really is to ask people how do you feel about the current situation. And there's far more potential for overlap for feelings instead of solutions.

And then after that, we chose through random stratified sampling, 450 people that are statistically representative of the Taiwanese population. and randomly assigned 10 people into the same room, so for 45 rooms of 10 people each, and they just deliberate it, just have a conversation. And there's no facilitator. The room is the facilitator. So it's not just people who don't speak. It allows interruption budgets for five seconds.

It knows the common points, but also knows the points of differences, make a whole transcript and all that. But the end result is very, very nuanced. It is not getting people to a place. where they all agree 100%. But most people actually agreed, for example, that if you are a large advertisement platform

that reaches more than 10% of Taiwanese people, and you have advertisement, but you do not do K-YC, like digital signature or whatever, so that you open up to scammers to call people using deepfakes, then if somebody get caught for $1 million, you probably should be liable for that $1 million. So what this technology does is that, that it gets into this very compressed, but not lossy compression, very nuanced positions

that can go straight into a law. It's actually already in the parliament now. And to your question of why people participate, well, because it's effective. It is much more effective than waiting for four years. And also we pay people some, I don't know, $100 U.S. dollars for their time to participate in this process. The thing I'd also say is I think that scissors statements aren't good or bad. It all depends on context. In fact, it's great to expose people to the scissors statements in the context of understanding

this is something that would divide the population. Here's a set of people who would like it. Here's who not. There's also other things that would not divide the population. The way I think about this is we're very grateful to the Chinese common. I mean, for the party, they did great research. Just like medical research, you can do the research, and you can find the vaccine where you can spread the disease, right? And so we just believe in spreading the vaccine, which is that you give a little bit of it at low volume to a large population,

rather than injecting a very large amount at a very high volume to a small population. Right, you make it a social object so people can't talk around the fact that there is this division in our society. but you do not amplify that division itself. It is similar to an MRNA vaccine just as Glenn said. Yeah, or with my children, it's actually great for my children to have intense emotions and to reflect on those emotions and understand how those emotions affect them. It's not so great for them just to completely experience

without any reflection those emotions that get lost in them, right? Yeah, I totally hear that. If you kind of look at these Taiwanese examples, of these deliberative processes, I hear you say that it's a representative sample of society. When we go to social media, where a lot of kind of like these echo chambers exist, I feel it's very much not a faithful representation of society.

It's kind of just very few people who are very loud. Do you think there's a way of kind of tuning that down as a society kind of giving more weight to the quieter people? Yeah, I think so. I mean, part of the design of Polis, which, by the way, isn't just used in Taiwan. I was in Finland, and Finland have this, what do Finland think conversation

that has almost a million votes on Polis. Bigger than any Taiwanese Polish single. Yeah, it's bigger than any Taiwanese Polish examples. And the most divisive point, by the way, in Finland a year ago, was this statement that says, nowadays you can't say the words like jokes or whatever as you could anymore without offending someone, end of quote. Which really portrays, you know,

the new generation maybe in the past five years or so on, the awareness of how words can offend or trigger people. So that's their divisive points. Anyway, but my point being, the great thing about Polis is that if there's like 500 people, all very loud, but belaboring the same point. It doesn't increase the area in Polis. It doesn't increase their statement's ranking,

because instead of sorting by controversy by default, on Polis, it's sorting by bridge making by default. So if 500 people make essentially the same point over and over again, they're really in this very small area, and there's no bridge to be made. And therefore, it's not visible at all on the scoreboard. the scoreboard only highlights really the ones that bridges across large divides, which is difficult to come by.

So the idea of abridging bonus or just changing the sorting algorithm by default gives the voice to the quiet people. And if you're the quieter people that doesn't think in a mainstream way, it creates a island of people that is quite distant from the majority clusters. But it also means if people manage to bridge your values, view with theirs, then the bridging bonus is actually larger. And you see this dynamic in Polis, in community notes, and nowadays in YouTube notes as well. And by the way, I don't think there's anything wrong, and Polis does allow it for those divisive things to exist. It's just that just by screaming louder, they shouldn't be the only thing that gets seen. It shouldn't amplify by getting more

louder than screaming it. Yeah. So we've talked about Polis quite a bit. Maybe let's kind of dig into what is. So kind of in my understanding, Polis is this clustering algorithm that kind of takes things into n dimensional space where kind of you have n statements and everyone says yes, no to the statements. And then then it kind of clusters you

in that, it clusters people in that n dimensional space. So kind of it shows which opinions kind of cluster together and where different clusters kind of actually meet. Is that more less? That's more or less.

Okay, description? Yes, yes. And it's coupled with a visualization like a group selfie that's dynamically updated so that people can see what new divisions are being formed. The mathematical term is a dimensional reduction so that you can always see what are the like two most divisive points that currently separates people apart. One way I think about it is there was a regime in the United States that's very famous and often hearkened back to called the Fairness Doctrine and the Hutchins Commission.

And the idea of these was very simple. It was that what media was required to do was surface and reporters news, things that people generally would agree on. And for anything that was not like that, they had to show the different sides of the debate. Right. And Fullis is just a way of doing that. Right. So like the facts that people agree on, the common facts, the divides. So take one, take two, and also not confuse the facts with opinions. So what do you feel? So your own feelings about it. So it's these four different segments. This is a very simple thing to do, but it used to be very expensive to do this and require a lot of gatekeeping and top down and whatever. And policies just do a way to like cheaply do that in a social media environment,

rather than have the social media environment be curated by some other set of principles that applied before the Hutchins Commission's were, which was called yellow journalism, where you take the thing that is most divisive and basically the U.S. moved from one regime to the other and Polish is just a way to move social media in the same way. But basically for that to work, you actually have to agree on the facts first, right? No, no, because they get surfaced by the algorithm as there's no prior definition of facts. Facts are the things that people all agree on and agree that other people agree on. Exactly.

Okay, and basically if there's too little common ground, I mean, because kind of like, I think this is something that kind of we have all noticed over the last couple of years, there's now a very significant number of people who kind of deny obviously true facts. Well, I mean, it depends on how you see the conversation. I remember at the beginning of the pandemic,

There were a lot of different takes, different scientific opinions even, about the efficacy of masks. But one of the communication statements that we push out in the early 2020 was a very cute dog, Shiba Inu, putting the paw on her face, saying, wear a mask to protect your own mouth against your dirty and wash tent. So, I mean, for that, people generally agree on because it doesn't talk about virus or aerosol or whatever. it's mostly Musk as a hand-washing reminder. And so I think it's called overlapping consensus. You can almost always find some lower-hanging fruits like that, that people maybe laugh at it, maybe it's humorous,

but at the end of the day, nobody really seriously disputed that. And by the way, you know, let's take about as divisive an issue as it gets, the Israel-Palestine situation. Community notes, contrary to what many people would think, has actually been enormously valuable in that situation. there are many notes that get posted that are very opinionated that don't make it out. But community notes has played a huge role in debunking a huge range of things, because there are a range of just verifiable things using what people in this audience might

call the blockchain, but other people would just call timestamps, you know, that just can show that certain things are not true. And there's a wide range of things where community notes has played a key role. Yes, so I think it's this thickness, right? In Polis, you cannot unsee the bridges. In community notes, you cannot unsee the top notes that is posted along with the tweet. You literally can't take it down. And so when people become in that context aware that there are some things that are bridge making,

then they cannot think anymore that we live in the post-fact world. I actually love the approach of community notes. And so in the way that I'm not sure whether everyone's familiar. with it. But the way that it kind of works under the hood is that if someone posts a community note, then kind of like you can opt into kind of

seeing it first and kind of up voting or downvoting it. But basically if people who have very different social media patterns actually upvoted, it gets a lot more visibility rather than kind of if like 10,000 people who do the exact same things and like the exact same things

upvoted, then kind of that gets seen much, much less than kind of if it's a diverse crowd. Is that fair? Right. It's the same bridging bonus. It's actually inspired by Polis. Super nice. Yeah, you guys have many, many examples of kind of these collaborative technologies

and kind of how to use them to aid this notion of digital pluralism. But I kind of I also want to talk about kind of how. how you see kind of like Web 3 playing into this. So and for that kind of, I actually want to start super simply, kind of how would you yourself kind of define Web 3? What does it mean to you? Oh, so as you know, I-18N is just a shorthand for internationalization. So to me, Web 3, all overcase with no space,

web 3 is just a shorthand for decentralized. So whenever I see decentralized and I don't want to type that many letters, I just write Web3. How do you think we can use Web3 technologies to kind of leverage for outcomes you would like to see in kind of the democracy and collaborative arena? Well, let me give you an example of a tool, but it can see it in a very different way. So like the default imagination for many people of what a Web3 technology is is like Bitcoin, like a like a O.B, public, fully financialized blockchain. But here's something that uses two Web3 technologies to build something very different. Imagine that we have a group of people and they all are exchanging messages or maybe even payments or something like this. And all of the messages are

on a shared ledger, but it's protected by a designated verifier proof. That is, the only people who can have confidence that the message was sent correctly are people who are part of that community. So that is a distributed ledger and a zero knowledge technology put together to create something that's actually almost completely opposite to the notion of a financialized public blockchain. Because that group of people is the only people who can know what's on it. And it can't be permissioned by a global financial value. It's permissioned by some social certificate of that community. So I think, you know, tools can be very useful, but they can be used in a variety of different ways.

Yeah. And in my previous job, when we faced unprecedented denial of service attack in 2022 on our websites, we went to this technology called IPFS, Interplanetary File System, and we use it just as a super CDN where people can just pin our website at IPN. as colonel slash moda that you of e.wiva tw to keep us afloat so that when people even in very low connection capabilities want a copy of the official websites and communications and so on they can actually go ahead and do it without relying on any centralized cdn systems now of course we still use cloud layer and many other cdn solutions but having the ability for people to participate and through

participating, verifying that we have not tempered the official website. That is actually very, very useful because that means the code is all on JavaScript, is all on the front end. We have nothing to hide. When we publish my transcripts of lobbyist visit or interviews or whatever, it lives on your computer too, and you can verify that I have not temper with it because tampering with it will change the content addressable hash code. Again, I don't own file This is not a cryptocurrency application, but wins trust by trusting the people. Okay. So I kind of what I hear is transparency.

How do you guys feel about co-ownership? Because that's another thing that kind of like Web 3 technology enables at its school. So kind of like when you're on the internet today, most of the value, you accrue, you actually accrue to the same five companies. Do you think kind of we can turn this thing around by leveraging decentralized technology? Well, I think Glenn's example is actually co-ownership. The ownership is around the integrity of the context. So in the group of five, only these five people own the contextual integrity. And for anyone outside of that group, anyone has deniability, right? If you get a screenshot or whatever, it really doesn't work that way. Right. So I think ownership is not meant for me as something that is necessarily about the financial value of, of things that you can sell or things like that, it's more like the collaborative governance,

that people would not exceed the expectations of each other so that we co-own this context, but we're not necessarily assigned monetary value to it. Yeah, I think there are many different ways to conceptualize co-ownership, and I think that often in some Web3 community is the only way to think about that is financialized. And like there are some limited use cases where financialized ways if they knew about things are the right way to approach them.

But I would argue that that's actually a very simplistic way. There's, you know, it's kind of choosing one out of a million and then putting all the focus on that one, which really is kind of an edge case that you might want to use at a very limited set of set of context. So I think that that may be the mistake is that to take a good idea like, ownership and then assume that it means, you know, monetary, financialized, fungible, blah, blah, blah. I would subscribe to that. And I think, kind of, to me, the monetary element is just as much about not feeding the

man in a way. So kind of not actually by kind of being on Twitter, which is the only social media platform I'm actually on, but to not kind of accrue all that value that I create to Elon Musk. I'd much rather kind of have it go back to the entirety of the Twitter usership rather than, and I think kind of this hyperfinancialization where kind of you kind of, you know the price of everything and kind of there's like a token behind everything and so on. I think, yeah, that's obviously that's a misstep. I think it's kind of just because people love to.

speculate, right? I mean, people love number go up. But the fact that you can actually create something that is legitimately co-owned by 10,000 or hundreds of thousands or millions of people, I think this is fundamentally new, right? Well, I mean, I'm not sure I would say it's all new, but it can be made more efficient. So there's old literature and sociology that is all about different symbolic media. So money is one, voting is another. These are two ways that we take sort of inputs from people and then allocate something based on them. But there are many others. There's like the way that if you've worked at a particular restaurant, that you might be able to work at another restaurant later in another country, or there's the way in which if you've

written a paper and it got certain kinds of citations, that that might enable you to get a job at a university, which might let you write other people. Like, all of these are different, uh, maybe imperfectly or incompletely articulated mathematical functions that take various kinds of inputs and turn them to outputs. You know, there's a game civilization six, or civilization in general, where there's many different media. There's like faith and there's money and there's like scientific, whatever. And like, I think that's a very nice, like simplistic model of the notion that like, yeah, there can be many currencies, but they're not all like exchangeable in the same way. they can be used to do different types of things.

And I think that's existed forever, you know, that that's the way that most things work. It's just a very easy thing to talk about money and because it's easy to talk about it, it gets talked about more, but it's not actually like that runs most things in the world. And so I think the misstep that we've taken is taken the simplest, easiest to describe thing,

not the most useful, not the most relevant, not the most helpful thing, and only tried to describe that one thing. Which other things do you think are helpful, to look at in this context? Well, I mean, community notes is a really good example because it's a open source decentralized thing.

Vitaleck set up his own node, a verifier node, a validation node of community active nodes. So it can conceptually exist in a separate layer that is not tied to x.com as seen recently by the YouTube adopting something like that.

So I think a community node layer on the entire social network. It is something that we can't imagine already now in a decentralized way. And because I already said that I just abbreviate decentralized to Web 3, so I would say that it's a Web 3 layer than around social media.

And that, I think, addresses one of the over-concentrated nexus of power, exactly as you said, that my posts, my accounts, and so on X.com should not be simply for somebody's taking if I somehow want to exchange companies across the Fediverse or across many other interoperable protocols. I mean, just to give you a very simple example,

you can imagine that there's a person, like three people, all of whom have made the same amount of money. One is like a social entrepreneur who's involved in lots of big world causes. A second person is someone who works at a very standard company, and spends most of their time with their family. And a third person is a local industrialist

who's done great things for a town but is not widely known outside of that. All these people might have made the same amount of money. But the types of social roles that we would want to place this person into are radically different, right? Like the first person might be a good candidate for like a UN leadership role

or to be on television, you know, in a global way. The second person might, you know, reasonably have a good degree of material comfort, but it's not someone you'd want to really be in a social leadership role. And the third person is someone who might be a very good mayor for a local community, but probably not in either of the other two roles, right? And so clearly, and that's like, that doesn't require any moving way from our, like, that's just true in our society. But the problem is our money systems don't capture that. Like, you need to read a biography of the person and run advertisements. That's a very inefficient way to gather that information.

So on the one end, we have this very efficient thing called money that captures very little. It really just doesn't tell us about most of what we care about. And then we have these very inefficient things that are capturing more with social richness. So like why rather than just like doing the very easy and I think kind of stupid task of making money like, you know, go more and more places and faster and faster? Why don't we try to take some of these things that are totally inefficient and try to find some way to capture them better so they can scale a bit more? So that would kind of take the form of kind of like some sort of reputation score, social graph, or how would you kind of envisage that? Yeah, I mean, like in the book, we have quite a lot of description of a range of different algorithms like this.

But, you know, like one simple example of this kind of thing is the recovery of a key. So you might want to recover your key and you might want to give some guardians that let you recover your key but you might want these guardians to be diverse relative to your social graph which is to say you might want to choose five guardians who the only point of social connection is through you

because then it makes it almost impossible for them to collude with you like almost any way that they would try to collude with each other would have to go through like either contacting you or like someone who's a very close friend of yours. so that's a very secure way that is based on a reputation but not based on a reputation that's like this person is good and this person is bad

which is just as stupid as money reduces everything to one dimension instead it's based on an understanding of the social context of these people and the notion that when it comes to being your form of security it should be something that connects only through you rather than through other routes

yeah that's super interesting and I personally have thought about recovery a lot because I started a project called NOSSAFE. It's kind of an Ethereum wallet, a Malteseech wallet. And we once did a survey among users, kind of asking them kind of how they would choose guardians for key recovery. And the thing that we heard most often was that in principle, they would kind of love to take people like from their real lives,

kind of their sisters or brothers, fathers, best friends, and so on. But they don't want to do that because their balance is visible. So kind of like anyone who would be a guardian to their account could immediately see how much funds they actually have on that address, which I thought was, so kind of we thought about kind of like, how would you choose them so they wouldn't collude with each other and so on? and this wasn't people's concern at all. Like almost no one actually brought that up.

So I, and I think kind of, I mean, obviously those are kind of like things we will move past kind of once we have better privacy on chain and so on. But in principle, I think it kind of shows how important it is to kind of like to speak with people to see what it actually is that bothers them. So, yeah. Very interesting. I'm not sure how into kind of Web 3 governance you guys are but it's terrible so kind of like despite the fact that kind of

we often say that leveraging decentralization for better governance is kind of where we want to go and kind of how we want to leverage this technology actually Web 3 governance is terrible so kind of there's this continuous uphill battle of

low voter turnout and voter fatigue and kind of attention as the scarce resource and so on. And I think in some way it actually makes sense because kind of like in a way, democracies are also just very convoluted algorithms. And yeah, they could probably do with a little refactoring. But in principle, a lot of parts are there for a reason and kind of actually making people vote on almost everything. is not a very scalable way of kind of like running any sort of operation.

Do you think it kind of, it will require a more orchestrated push to kind of get some of these things we already know work in kind of like traditional democracies into this decentralized world? Or do you think kind of we should continue doing what we're doing now, which is mostly kind of like very kind of like evolutionary in terms of its, you know, algorithms? just starting from scratch and making it marginally more complex here and more complex there and kind of adding to it rather than kind of replicating things that are already there. I mean, Hannah Arendt famously said that one of the greatest forms of freedom is freedom from politics because most people don't, you know, want to spend too many evenings working on socialism.

And so the question is, how can you make it very easy for people to express the things that really matter to them and not impose on them to do everything else that they don't care about. For example, you might think I'm a very politically sophisticated person. I'm involved in these global issues. I have no idea about local politics where I live. And I really wish I could give that over to people in my community who are knowledgeable, but with some things that I feel distinctively. So we need to design ways that make it possible for people to do. And do that, to make it possible for people to opt into participation without the converse of that, which is that, of course, then the most interested people can get too much of a voice.

And that's a lot of the problem of designing these things, is taking those issues seriously and designing systems expecting that that is part of the design, rather than thinking that we just want some sort of idealized, simplified model and the thing that performs best in that case. Yeah, and I also think it's far easier to look at one statement from your fellow citizen and say, I feel this way or I don't feel this way, which is the Polish way, or to be in the room of a video chat of nine fellow citizens, and just listen what they're feeling and share your own feeling. In both of these modalities, you get to know viewpoints, no new people, and there is no kind of decision-making burden on you,

like you're the final arbiter, you're the final referendum caster or things like that, is much more exploratory. And very interestingly, we have discovered earlier in the process of a decision-making. The more you ask people in the exploratory way, in the discovery, in the agenda-setting way, the more interest they have in learning because they get something out of it.

They get love, actually, community love, that is to say, they get to know more people. And the more you're finally at the point where you have to count the votes. You have to make the final decision, referendum and so on. The less agency one have on it, because at the end of the day, half of the people will feel they have lost or something like that, right? So I think the earlier the engagement is, the lower the threshold it is, and the more psychological support we provide in the context of just learning about it.

each other, a learning circle of sorts, the more likely that people will see governance as something that they participate for fun or for communal interest, but instead of just for the decision itself. And that can happen for both the divisive and the bridging things, because if you have that sort of a process and it serves some things as bridging and some things as divisive, both can be very beneficial because you don't take action on the divisive things, but you form community around the divisive things. So people can come out of the process. just learning both that they have new friends that they can ally with and that there are some things they can move forward on together.

In principle, and I'm 100% on board. I mean, these methods that you describe, they've been around for 10, 15 years or so. Why aren't they more widely adopted by nation states and other decision-making bodies at this point? Well, because facilitation and summarization are very, very costly, they require special training. Taiwan's used to be youth ministry. Nowadays, the youth administration, have a whole program that's been running for more than 10 years to train the facilitators and the summarizers.

And even with the best trained ones, I've worked with some of them. If you hit, say, 150 people, there's a limit to how much they can facilitate and summarize. But nowadays, the cost is rapidly decreasing. As I mentioned, there are now technologies that can not just turn speech to text, but actually take the non-verbal cues in language models, multi-modal models. And that does a summarization that doesn't feel like forced, that compresses but without losing nuanced. And that does the facilitation, I would argue better than many of the best facilitators that I have met. So just the combination of natural language processing technologies

and the recent language models, multimodal process, made the cost essentially zero. It's like before open whisper and after open whisper when it comes to speech recognition. And so I think this is really the year where we're seeing a lot more interest by investing into the digital participation infrastructure as infrastructure without the prohibiting cost of human facilitation.

as summarization. I also think, you know, it's always much easier and requires much less imagination to use some new tool to just, you know, very rapidly reduce the cost or automate things that are actually happening, but it doesn't accomplish very much. In fact, you don't even see very much productivity gains

from that kind of thing. Whereas the much harder work is to actually get people to change social practices along with the technology. Because that requires cultural imagination. requires actually involving people in the process of the change. And I think that's where you're going to see much broader productivity gains, much bigger transformation, not by the way that AI is usually talked about, but actually the way that's hard to talk about AI is it requires people to think about it a little bit.

So it moves slowly and it repairs things rather than moving fast and breaking things. But it can actually bring a lot deeper, change a lot more, I would say, even economic as well as more importantly, social growth. So there are the fast changes that are happening because of the low cost, and there are deeper, scaling deeply, changes that are happening also. Can you describe the role of a human facilitator? So what do they do and kind of how, I think kind of becoming more of a facilitator for each, well, to each and every one of us?

I mean, often people go into a confrontative mode where really they don't have to. Do you think these skills that kind of you teach those people in the facilitator academies, Do they transfer to kind of like general life? Yeah, they do. I mean, there are different schools, right? But they all revolve around this idea of like nonviolent communication, focus conversation methods to ensure that people speak toward something we can all live with instead of winning at a moment and controlling 100% of things, right?

So it is a lot about the everyday practice of. listening, of listening actively, listening with care, listening without taking one side over the other, but listening to both sides or all the sides, and so on. So, yes, practicing facilitation, even though in the age of AI makes you a better person in everyday life as well. It's a general skill that transfers to life. But what I was saying was that it is also something that this current generation of language model also does very well. If you ask any language model that is pre-trained in the past year or so to facilitate a conversation like Audrey Tongue actually does a very good job.

And Hasker will definitely try that. So what can listeners do to contribute to a more pluralistic digital future? Well, you know, we in the book, we lay out a whole range of things from like the easiest, simplest, short-term, you know, retweet, etc., to the longest, you know, most investment. But, you know, we would certainly encourage everyone to read the book to check out the trailer of the film about Audrey's life that's available online. Also just came out today, a wonderful interview with her with Christiana on Manpur that I'd encourage people to look at. And then there are so many technologies that we need to build.

I know many, you know, listeners are in that community. The book describes an order of magnitude more things than already exist. but many of them within near reach. So we would really welcome entrepreneurship. We would welcome people to contribute to the book as they build those things so that there's documentation and ability to share and learn and scale those practices.

We would welcome people doing research on some of the infinite number of open questions that we describe in the book. We would welcome people financially supporting the communities, we would welcome people telling their friends about the ideas. We welcome all kinds of cultural creation that both instantiate the idea of bridge building, instant sheets and the technology associated with it, and that tell the story of how that's all happening. So those are a few examples from the book, but there's many more. Yeah, I just read a novel by Amanda Scott,

I'll call Any Human Power, which is like a fictionalized version of whatever, we just talk about the plurality ideas and it's set in a very immersive world almost like you know earth sea or something like that and which I find will reach a audience maybe teenage readers and so on that is quite apart from this podcast readers but this kind of cross-pollination between cultural products is exactly why we chose to a public domain our work because we never can tell whether somebody remixed that into a hip-hop on or a rapper or something like that. Cool.

So where does the plurality community gather? Is there some sort of forum or discord or telegram groups? Or how do you all talk with each other? Well, for the book, there's a discord. There's a discord group for the book. There's also a lot of people who are involved in radical exchange groups around the world. There's Plurality Institute, which is more of an academic community. So there's many different communities.

the book, the plurality discord is a great one. And there's also a GitHub where people actually work on creating the book. Yeah, you can find all of this plurality done it. Perfect. Thank you both for coming on. It's been a true honor. I wish you both the best for the rest of your book too. I know you've been on the road for a very long time now. So yeah, thank you so much for your. Thank you. Live long and prosper. Thank you for joining us on this week's episode. We release new episodes every week. You can find and subscribe to the show on iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, SoundCloud, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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