Design for Plurality (Panel) - Tokyo 2024

all right everybody so next we have another panel coming up um we will have designing for plurality with Audrey Tang Glenn whale and Nisha hir uh herazo I I'm Glenn W I'm uh the founder of the radical exchange Foundation uh the plurality Institute and the uh Microsoft research uh plural technology collaboratory and I'm co-author with Audrey of the book that you've probably seen outside uh plural uh digital shouer plurality the future of uh collaborative technology and democracy um which is a joint project with Audrey but also with a community of dozens of people uh from around the world and it's the first uh fully open- Source uh Global um democratically governed book and Audrey do you want to introduce yourself briefly uh I'm Audrey uh this is my third panel uh today I'm really happy uh to be here uh after served for eight years as taiwan's disal minister in a sense the plurality uh project is a distillation of the kind of work uh we did in Taiwan over the past decade but I think uh the world um can learn a little bit from Taiwan and I also want to learn from the world on how to take this model this idea of collaborative technology into more jurisdictions and maybe evolve even more than what we have achieved in Taiwan and nishio has really been uh an in the plurality community in Japan so Nish do you want to ince yes I'm a reader of translation CH for into Japanese the I'm translating uh sorry I'm sorry I'm a reader of translation Cham to Japanese version of PR book Sor thank you great okay perfect wonderful uh so uh this book um as I said it's both by Audrey and myself but also by This Global Community uh Japan is probably except for maybe Taiwan the country with the most contributors uh and those contributors are Blended in this image you see above and then tiled with the individual contributors images um and it responds to something that I think is uh much more of a western than a uh Japanese frame and in fact I think uh they changed this a bit in the Japanese version but uh the conflict between democracy and technology that you often hear about where people feel that uh technology is fueling polarization Driving Miss and disinformation uh and therefore undermining Democratic systems and at the same time many technologists feel that uh democracy has it out for them their uh democracies are trying to regulate they're trying to restrict they're trying to stop technology rather than supporting it um and that authoritarian regimes are investing much more as investment goes down in Democratic countries and the reason we believe for this is because the two dominant stories that you hear about the future of technology are basically antithetical to democracy on the one hand you hear about uh a giant AI uh does everything for you every one gets a universal basic income and we're all just kind of happy uh with whatever we get um we call this idea technocracy it's very associated with AI with people like Reed Hoffman and books like deep Utopia by Nick brostrom on the other hand uh there's a vision very popular in the crypto world where you're going to use uh Bitcoin other uh crypto currencies to replace the need for governments replace the need for communities replace the need for religions and trade unions and so forth uh and instead you're going to have sort of anarco capitalism governing everything uh this is very associated with books like the network State sovereign individual and uh the Republican Party in the United States just uh nominated for vice president and adherent of this uh philosophy Mr Vance but we we believe that there's another Vision that uh underlies a lot of the Technologies we use every day uh like the internet and personal Computing as well as many pop cultural things like Star Trek or here in Japan uh Duron and uh Miron Museum and uh this vision is uh just as uh grounded but maybe less clearly articulated and that's kind of our goal and uh we really have three principles in this idea that we call plurality the first is that Society is not made up of isolated individuals and a social whole but instead diverse intersecting groups that intersect to make both personal identity and the social Fabric and we represent that with this Universal coded character um one of the ones that is least commonly used and therefore uh sort of not attached to any particular language these intersecting squares and uh this is the way in which Hanah arant the great social philosopher used the term plurality and so this is associated with her thinking second is a vision of what the world should be like which is that social diversity holds energy that energy often explodes as conflicts and gets dissipated as heat but instead societies will succeed to the extent that they manage to harness the energy implicit in Social diversity for progress and co-creation and the rainbow that's at the center of our symbol represents this idea and we Associated it with the work of uh philosopher Danielle Allen on the idea of a connected society and finally um we uh use plurality to represent a strategy of what we should do which is that the role of digital technology is not to build the giant machine that does everything for us it's not to replace community and Trust instead it is to harness the energy of social diversity for progress and we represent this uh to build the engines that do that you know just like industrial technology build engines to harness the implicit energy of fossil fuels nuclear did it for the atom we're going to do that for uh social diversity and we use these uh Kani to represent that that in traditional Mandarin our Shou way which means both digital and plural and that's we associate with Audrey's work and this is very much played out in Taiwan increasingly playing out in Japan as we've learned today um Taiwan is uh the wealthiest uh country in in terms of per capita sorry median income for any country with more than 10 million people at purchasing power parity and it has the largest uh digital economy 50% of its economy comes from the export of digital technology and yet while many say that that should increase inequality in Taiwan over the last decade when they've had this incredible digital democracy movement they've actually seen a slight decline in inequality um while democracy is declining in the rest of the world Taiwan has actually risen in many indices to be the uh freest and fairest democracy in the world even though it's only 35 years old um but this does not come from as many people uh have claimed to us it being a small homogeneous Island in fact um Taiwan uh a decade ago saw a three- weekl long occupation of their National Parliament by students not three hours as we saw in the US it was nonviolent however and it helped launch this movement that we were just describing but even a decade after that I went to observe their elections rated by many as the freest and fairest in the world in January um and uh they were uh really remarkable in how profound the uh divides are within Taiwanese Society over identity I went to the ruling parties rally and everyone was waving green flags rainbow Flags pictures of the island I went to the opposition rally and everyone was waving uh pictures of the national flag and uh so you're talking about a jurisdiction here where the government doesn't even use the official name of the jurisdiction in English and doesn't really use the flag so there's a very profound divide and yet rather than that divide turning into uh conflict turning into violence turning into heat they've found a way to channel this towards progress and growth and Improvement how have they done that well they've opened it up to the citizens to remake the government what do I mean they have this uh government websites atg zv people can download these and improve on them and put them up atg o.w and shame the government into adopting them and this was the basis of them having the world's best performance in combating covid while without any lockdowns with one of the fastest economic growth rates similarly when people in Taiwan are very upset and want to speak on social media they can rather than going to a system that tries to harness that energy to sell them products they can instead harness that energy to make laws by finding consensus across those differences and uh through their system V Taiwan that clusters different opinions and then surfaces uh the things that bridge those clusters they've managed to have 20 pieces of legislation addressing a range of controversial issues issues and recently including issues around AI alignment like we were hearing about using a related system so I hope that some of you will want to join in this process like many folks here in Japan already have uh the book is fully open source collaborative and uh you're very welcome to help us improve it and with that I want to give you a visual uh you know a motive representation of what this looks like by playing you a short video can you play the video it links directly from that if you just click on it yep it should open the just click on that slide and you should get the video is it not working otherwise I'll give it give you the address uh plurality Donnet if you click on enjoy you'll see the video so while we're uh waiting on the video uh maybe uh I think uh a lot of the work uh that we've been doing in the plurality datet project uh is not about prescribing exactly what to do but rather presenting a t kit of potentials so if you click enjoy you will see uh the good enough ancestor and that is not meant to say that you should also occupy your Parliament uh it is meant to say that there are a set of tools uh to use so you can play Maybe in full screen make sure the volume goes there's [Music] no AC the world democracy is on a deine authoritarianism is on the rise glal Freedom has eroded for the 18th consective year Audrey Tom what is your greatest for democracy across the globe that it has higher bandwidth yes exactly people see democracy and yeah maybe we wait for the buffering uh maybe you cck uh click pause uh and then you waited for for download um but I think um the the thing here uh is that we can see democracy as a social technology and whereas we had to wait for four years for a vote that is very long latency and each vote is just for one out of many candidates uh that's very low bit rate we want to in World democracy is on a what is your greatest hope for democracy across the globe that people see democracy as a social technology something that people can construct together that they can improve in the heing I don't think that works sorry yeah it buffered all the way and you switch no it's fine yeah so um yeah so in the here and now so no but I can I'll autoc complete this um so uh yeah sure it's now fully buffered and if you go ahead yes a social technology something that people can construct together that they okay no let let's just uh forget about this no it's okay for forget about that not not a good idea okay uh well with that we really just want to uh take questions from you all about this that's the main main goal because we want to be a platform for you all uh making a difference uh in in and you already are doing incredible things in that way so so how can we help yes and there's like more than 10 minutes so feel free to start asking questions um yeah thank you so much I really like that you uh gave us the keyword um and it's not because it's a homogeneous society and I think like the the term homogeneity is almost a dog whistle and I love some more words of encouragement how uh let's say we we don't have to let us be defined by things like that and we can still feel connected and think that this kind of progress is possible anywhere despite the like ethnic makeup for example of a society I think that would be really important for me to hear okay yeah um so I think uh a lot of the work that we're doing is to highlight that even though that we're designing Technologies as technologists uh we ourselves as technologists are not simply labeled as technologists each of us belong to many communities maybe place-based Community maybe purpose-based communities maybe spirituality communities and so on and so if we imbue in the technologies that we Design This inherent plurality that we uh are belonging to multiple different groups then it tends to have the veilance the kind of links that can link us together across the social distances whereas if we code things up in a vacuum uh and only thinking about everybody's adoption or engagement of our simple platform then that is uh homogeneous that is kind of the P to Singularity and so the idea of plurality rather than saying that there must be one way to implement plurality in the book we show at least seven different dimensions among which you can deepen the connection in the group communities you are in or you can expand the number that you can broadly listen uh and everything in between and so this toolkit approach rather than a solutionism approach I think is the key uh to overcome this tendency to Simply say let's build a huge platform a flat platform connect the world and create a lot of negative externalities any other questions uh thanks uh so my question is um and your talk earlier today you were talking about the different pieces that we need to to make this um so do you think any pieces are still missing and if not what do you think is the biggest bottleneck like the weakest link that deserves like the most attention right now that's a great question um I think it differs from jurisdiction to jurisdiction there are some jurisdictions uh like here in Japan or in Taiwan uh where the social fabric of trust is already high and so what is really needed is just proof of Concepts that gets people's imaginations into a different kind of technology that can scale well beyond the existing uh scale of community on the other hand there are jurisdictions in which polarization is already so high so that if you do not show that you can build Bridges across those polarizations then no matter uh how scalable your work is uh they will not use those building tool kits to bridge the social device so I think the number one question to ask really is that how how fragmented how polarized how damaged is the trust fabric if it's very damaged then you start from the small layers uh a small distances of healing even just within smaller communities of 10 people or a 100 people but in societies like in Japan where the trust level is already high then maybe the missing link is actually the lia facee that shows oh this model can work with much more people a much larger your jurisdiction or even internationally so uh relating to the uh previous uh questions uh so in some countries uh there lot of the protest uh going on but it's it also mean uh has a meaning of the demonstration yes so there's always a mixture this is what I feel but your discussion the more recommend people to focus on the demonstration yes so that doesn't mean the uh those those areas that the people should gradually move on to the more uh demonstration forus or mixture can be last it for for a while or yeah I mean protest uh outrage uh are still useful in that it focuses people's energy right on a issue that urgently need Clarity but you cannot just have counterpower without the subsequent Network making power if all you have is counterpower like many occupy movements they end up going nowhere uh because there is no network that can form as a alternate way for people to place their energy into so you need the initial counterpower a little bit to highlight the urgency but more than that you need Clarity and plurality is all about uh practical ways that you can then harness this conflict this energy into Clarity I think in Taiwan and also maybe in Japan in many East Asian cultures when we see the protests when we see the conflict one instinct is to dis distance us away from it because we don't want to confront uh the conflict we would simply want the fire to to run its course uh and pray that it doesn't spread right uh but if uh sometimes we see fire and we think oh there's energy underneath we can drill down there's oil underneath we can use it for energy then we equip ourself with the kind of fireproof way of using this energy for something that you can place your trust in and so trusting the Instinct of the protesters uh requires our inner trust we need to both hold the counterpower in our mind but also have space in our mind that says by the way you can also use this to harness this power to build a alternative and so keeping both sides in one's own mind is the requirement to turn the protesting energy into demonstration yeah I think the I like the analogy of the engine you know you could the demonstration is the engine and the protest is the fuel and uh engine doesn't work without Fuel and fuel without engine is dangerous so that's thought thank you very much questions thank you so much um in Japan it is kind of like bureaucratic societ soety now I think so I you want to realize uh kind of digital democracies but in order to realize that um we have to tle with such traditional groups traditional bureaucratic uh groups so but so is it possible to like um talk with to talk with each other and um collaborate with such traditional groups is how do you do that yeah uh in Taiwan uh when we started introducing such ideas in 2014 like with f Taiwan and so on we uh never went to the policy maker the senior people and say uh we're replacing you uh with crowdsourcing we're replacing you uh with the wisdom of the internet we don't say that uh we say that we help you to see things better like this eyeglass right it's assistive technology um you put it on you see things more clearly you can see more ideas from the society so that it's less risk for you because if you don't have this kind of Eyeglass and you miss uh the issues that people think are important then you ended up getting occupied or or people becoming very uh upset uh with the policy maker so in a sense this is uh in design thinking it is better Discovery and a better definition of the shared issue it is the first diamond in the Double Diamond model it does not directly challenge the power uh to develop Solutions or to deliver them that is still within the parliamentary system or the budget system or the bureaucratic system so for many bureaucrats to adopt this kind of assistive technology for them assistive collective intelligence for them this is lower risk and also save their time and if you can prove again and again as we did over 100 or more collaborative meetings none of which result in explosion and all of which result in reducing some risk then the career public servants the bureaucrats are actually your best friends because they're always there uh no matter how the ministers change no matter how the president or legislature change the uh midlevel career public servants uh will see the um use of such tools and once they have internalized the use of such tools even in the education system then you have a generation of public servants that are your natural allies when it comes to digital democracy so don't just go to the president or the mayor or the uh Minister and push them uh you can walk uh with the career public service and say this is like eyasses for you thank you so much I I'd like to especially encourage if there's anyone who identifies as a woman in the audience who wants to answer ask a question oh you want to ask something okay I just want to announcement uh uh my presentation for this session was accidentally skipped by miscommunication so uh I put it on YouTube and announce on Twitter please watch it later thank you any other question any fin question yeah sure I think there's one over sure thank you very much for the talk I'm lucky so I'm very curious about the media uh so I completely agreee with the concept of priority but uh what we observe during the election in Tokyo met government so each candidat is connected to the each media right so the governor itself is connected to the mass media and second uh round second one person isar is connected to the YouTube short video and third one is that R is connected to the X and actual demo so when we create the EOS ecosystem place of theity sometimes it's be little bit because they are rely on the different Medias right or tools so do you have any ideas or thoughts about the differen of the media they rely on yeah definitely uh I mean currently there are media uh social media companies that are already uh really um building an affinity to the ideas of the plurality book in the book we already talk about Community notes on x.com and YouTube recently just adop Ed Community notes and I think uh rather than asking yourself to adapt to the logic of the social media companies or traditional media and so on we also encourage you to think about how you can leverage uh the use of plurality or the bridg making algorithms and so on for example to make sure that you make full use of community notes uh the full use of Wikipedia the full use of collaborative media uh for disc kind of campaign because if you use the logic of the existing media then you're basically condensing your message into something that's more one-dimensional but as the social media scene itself is expanding to higher dimensions and to also build more bridges across different dimensions we can also take advantage of that and then join there that is partly why uh I really believe uh in the fediverse uh I joined mtoo many years ago uh and now with stress. net uh also start interoperating uh with the fediverse I think there's some real work to be done to separate the publishing layer with the curation layer and a lot of the work that we do uh for the plurality work can happen at a curation layer independent of the underlying publishing layer all right we'll actually take two more questions uh since this is the last panel okay all right you and you hi um do you think the idea of plurality can be applied to a international relation as well internal relation like within a school within International oh International International Yeah country to Country yeah in in a sense yes uh I mean there are many um like interoperable systems that really need to work together across different uh Nations uh so a classical example uh is the xroad uh system that was built uh with uh Iceland and Estonia and Finland uh together uh technical interoperability and recently we have seen many people uh building on the decentralized identifiers verifiable credentials and so on so that uh by definition it takes on a International interoperability uh status uh and so in all these uh different terms uh the idea of plurality all applies because it is about making sure that as more people adopt those interoperable standards more people can meaningfully steer the direction of the future governance of such standards and so in standard making bodies or even in like NATO with interoperating uh cyber security or some other digital means we see more and more people more willing uh to adopt this kind of listening a skill or deliberative um Technologies because they also reach more stakeholders and they want more Rich feedback from those uh stakeholders so I think a lot of the uh work we do on the policy chapter in the book uh talks specifically about how to identify the digital public infrastructures that are more amable to a plurality based investment and governance structure and many of them work internationally as well just one quick you know illustration I'd give is you you know a default way of thinking about international relations Is free trade reduce the subsidies reduce the tariffs and alternative is Imagine each country is doing qf internally uh new form of international economic cooperation could be to set up a joint qf fund for projects that bridge between the two countries you see what I mean so that's like a different way to conceptualize international relations um I saw a question over there yeah uh well uh first of all thank you guys like uh you changed my mind literally today my mind was blown up every time that I went into a workshop or either a conference like for me it has been very like overwhelming with all the information but at the same time like very clarified like you open my my my mind a lot and I want to ask I come from a Latin American country in in well Mexico and I want to know the you like if you can think in a use case for poity in an emerging country like Mexico because as you not might know uh like a transparency and and maybe can be an issue like for for government but I think it's like very useful so can you give me like your opinion about maybe how can we use ity in an American country Latin American country uh well uh we actually got an incredibly enthusiastic reception in Latin America uh and we're working with uh leaders in Chile Argentina and Colombia right now on a variety of topics uh Sovereign AI to help defend the values of those countries because a lot of the AI models are very uh secular and people care a lot about religion in those countries and about the values that people there have so we're thinking a lot about steering AI uh in conjunction with the Holy SE to be amenable to uh the Catholic tradition for example uh another one is um the idea of Argentina as a home for open source because open source projects are very mistreated they don't get treated like NGS they don't get treated like nonprofit uh so Argentina is very excited in changing that and defending cryptography and making it a home for uh open source and crypto cryptography um another example in Chile huge failures of constitution process there uh because of lack of trying to make consensus so the interest in using some of these tools for those so those are some examples and one last one I'll give is Taiwan if you spend eight years contributing to digital Commons Wikipedia YouTube uh GitHub you get permanent residents in the country with the highest median income for uh uh at PPP so you think it's good for Latin Americans come to the United States much better to go to Taiwan so you can check out Taiwan gold cart one more one last one Encore can you hear me can everyone hear me yeah one of the theories of change for societal change says that change comes through four dimensions uh law culture Tech and markets I kind of get the first three in the context of plurality can you talk a little bit more about where markets come in and the private sector in this architecture I guess I'll take that I'm The Economist so um look I I think markets are number one place where it comes in because uh there is no uh more appropriate scale of cooperation in many ways than within companies companies uh have a huge problem because they have they're broken up into many divisions that need to cooperate but are constantly in conflict with each other because of organizational incentives so if you can use these tools to get them working together for the common interests of the company that's how you avoid disruption that's how you get bottomup Innovation uh that's how you keep the company alive and fresh uh so we have a very Vibrant Community of people using plurality for business purposes okay that's all F Li live long and prosper yeah live long and [Applause] [Music] [Applause] prosper awesome thank you all so much let's give one more round of applause for our panelists today thank you all wow [Applause]