diff --git "a/contents/english/3-1-living-in-a-\342\277\273-world.md" "b/contents/english/3-1-living-in-a-\342\277\273-world.md" index 60531691..8ce181ea 100644 --- "a/contents/english/3-1-living-in-a-\342\277\273-world.md" +++ "b/contents/english/3-1-living-in-a-\342\277\273-world.md" @@ -112,7 +112,7 @@ Thus, even in understanding the very practice of science, a ⿻ perspective, gro **A future ⿻?** -Yet the assumptions on which the Technocratic and Libertarian visions of the future discussed above diverge sharply from such ⿻ foundations. +Yet the assumptions on which the Technocratic and Libertarian visions of the future discussed above are founded 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. diff --git a/contents/english/3-2-connected-society.md b/contents/english/3-2-connected-society.md index 4ac2fbd6..9c5784b5 100644 --- a/contents/english/3-2-connected-society.md +++ b/contents/english/3-2-connected-society.md @@ -132,7 +132,7 @@ Thus the individual that the national identity systems seek to strip away from t If (in)dividual identity is so fluid and dynamic, surely so too must be the social 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' interest groups. The critical pathway to creating such new circles was the establishment of places (e.g. workman’s halls) or publications (e.g. working 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.[^SecretSocieties] 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](https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/2-1/eng/?mode=dark)) considered the political implications and dynamics of these “emergent publics” as he called them.[^PublicProblems]Dewey's views emerged from a series of debates he held, as leader of the "democratic" wing of the progressive movement after his return from China with left-wing technocrat Walter Lippmann, whose 1922 book *Public Opinion* Dewey considered "the most effective indictment of democracy as currently conceived".[^Westbrook] In the debate, Dewey sought to redeem democracy while embracing fully Lippmann's critique of existing institutions as ill-suited to an increasingly complex and dynamic world. +In his 1927 work that defined his political philosophy, *The Public and its Problems*, John Dewey (whom we meet in [A View from Yushan](https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/2-1/eng/?mode=dark)) considered the political implications and dynamics of these “emergent publics” as he called them.[^PublicProblems]Dewey's views emerged from a series of debates he held, as leader of the "democratic" wing of the progressive movement after his return from China with left-wing technocrat Walter Lippmann, whose 1922 book *Public Opinion* Dewey considered "the most effective indictment of democracy as currently conceived".[^Westbrook] In the debate, Dewey sought to redeem democracy while embracing fully Lippmann's critique of existing institutions as ill-suited to an increasingly complex and dynamic world. [^Westbrook]: Robert Westbrook, *John Dewey and American Democracy* (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press). diff --git a/contents/english/3-3-the-lost-dao.md b/contents/english/3-3-the-lost-dao.md index 2965d606..f748bea6 100644 --- a/contents/english/3-3-the-lost-dao.md +++ b/contents/english/3-3-the-lost-dao.md @@ -144,7 +144,7 @@ Yet even if the attention of the US government had not shifted, the internet was 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 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 protocols 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.[^Tarnoff] +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 keep 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 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 protocols 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.[^Tarnoff] [^Tarnoff]: Ben Tarnoff, _Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future_ (New York: Verso, 2022). @@ -212,7 +212,7 @@ Finally and perhaps most closely connected to our own paths to ⿻ have been the Noveck, in particular, is a powerful bridge between the early development 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.[^Unchat] 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 practices that formed the core of the g0v movement we highlighted above.[^Noveckwork] Noveck was a critical mentor not just to g0v but to a range of other ambitious civic technology projects around the world from the Kenya collective crisis reporting platform [Ushahidi](https://www.ushahidi.com/) founded by [Juliana Rotich](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juliana_Rotich) and collaborators to a variety of European participative policy-making platforms like [Decidim](https://decidim.org/) founded by [Francesca Bria](https://www.francescabria.com/) and collaborators and [CONSUL](https://consuldemocracy.org/) 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 variety of features of these settings has made it challenging for these examples 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 ⿻. Estonia 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.[^Estoniamodel] Finland has built on and scaled the success of its neighbor, extending digital inclusion deeper into society, educational system and the economy than Estonia, as well as adopting elements of digitized democratic participation. Singapore has the most ambitious Georgist-style policies on earth and harnesses more creative ⿻ economic mechanisms and fundamental protocols than any other jurisdiction. South Korea has invested extensively 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 jurisdiction. Kenya, Brazil and especially India have pioneered digital infrastructure for development. We will return to many of these examples in what follows. +Other countries have, of course, excelled in various elements of ⿻. Estonia 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.[^Estoniamodel] Finland has built on and scaled the success of its neighbor, extending digital inclusion deeper into society, the educational system and the economy than Estonia, as well as adopting elements of digitized democratic participation. Singapore has the most ambitious Georgist-style policies on earth and harnesses more creative ⿻ economic mechanisms and fundamental protocols than any other jurisdiction. South Korea has invested extensively 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 jurisdiction. Kenya, Brazil and especially India have pioneered digital infrastructure for development. We will return to many of these examples in what follows. [^Estoniamodel]: Gary Anthes, "Estonia: a Model for e-Government" _Communications of the ACM_ 58, no. 6 (2015): 18-20. diff --git a/contents/english/4-1-identity-and-personhood.md b/contents/english/4-1-identity-and-personhood.md index d38fe66a..d78ea376 100644 --- a/contents/english/4-1-identity-and-personhood.md +++ b/contents/english/4-1-identity-and-personhood.md @@ -101,7 +101,7 @@ These identities are the most ⿻ of all we have discussed and have the least co 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" 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 relationships. 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 interoperable and have limited functionality while allowing entities with concentrated power to engage in extensive surveillance and breaking norms of privacy that in many cases they were established to protect. This problem is increasingly widely recognized, leading to focus in many technology projects on overcoming it. +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 interoperable and have limited functionality while allowing entities with concentrated power to engage in extensive surveillance and breaking norms of privacy that in many cases they were established to protect. This problem is increasingly widely recognized, leading many technology projects to focus on overcoming it. ### Public and decentralized digital identity diff --git "a/contents/english/4-2-association-and-\342\277\273-publics.md" "b/contents/english/4-2-association-and-\342\277\273-publics.md" index 466e661b..d591d00a 100644 --- "a/contents/english/4-2-association-and-\342\277\273-publics.md" +++ "b/contents/english/4-2-association-and-\342\277\273-publics.md" @@ -31,7 +31,7 @@ The potential of computers and networking to facilitate such association was the [^MW]: See https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/association. [^Karatani]: 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 resembles 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 English). 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. -Yet, perhaps paradoxically, there is an important sense in which the rise 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, values and interests that form a *context* for the association and communication within it. Furthermore, as emphasized by Simmel and Nissenbaum, it also requires protecting this context from external surveillance: if individuals believe their communications to their association are being monitored 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. +Yet, perhaps paradoxically, there is an important sense in which the rise 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, values and interests that form a *context* for the association and communication within it. Furthermore, as emphasized by Simmel and Nissenbaum, it also requires protecting this context from external surveillance: if individuals believe their communications to their association are being monitored 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 not 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, therefore, understanding informational context and building ⿻ systems that support and protect it. @@ -137,7 +137,7 @@ Yet most types of information are harder to independently and immediately verify If properly combined in a new generation of networking standards, a combination of these tools could give us the capacity to move beyond the superficial 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 irrelevant 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 concentrated common understanding v. diffuse availability. +Consider first information "hidden in plain sight", lost in a pile of irrelevant facts, available to all but reaching the awareness of no one a bit like Waldo 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 concentrated common understanding v. diffuse availability. This example illustrates why "privacy" and "publicity" are far too simplistic 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 elsewhere 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 coexist. Achieving this requires maintaining what Shrey Jain, Zoë Hitzig and Pamela Mishkin have called "[contextual confidence](https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.01193)", where participants in a system can easily establish and protect the context of their communications.[^ContextualConfidence] diff --git a/contents/english/5-0-collaborative-technology-and-democracy.md b/contents/english/5-0-collaborative-technology-and-democracy.md index 7189641f..ccbad904 100644 --- a/contents/english/5-0-collaborative-technology-and-democracy.md +++ b/contents/english/5-0-collaborative-technology-and-democracy.md @@ -134,7 +134,7 @@ Yet, as noted above, even if we manage to avoid these pitfalls and successfully 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 perspective 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 biology, 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.[^Levi] The syntheses that emerge when thesis and antithesis meet are not always compromises, but instead theremay be new perspectives that realign a debate.[^Fichte] +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.[^Levi] The syntheses that emerge when thesis and antithesis meet are not always compromises, but instead there may be new perspectives that realign a debate.[^Fichte] [^Fichte]: 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). diff --git a/contents/english/5-3-creative-collaborations.md b/contents/english/5-3-creative-collaborations.md index 918ca2d1..e4014b28 100644 --- a/contents/english/5-3-creative-collaborations.md +++ b/contents/english/5-3-creative-collaborations.md @@ -56,7 +56,7 @@ Tomorrow, we expect digital tools to unlock a symphony of minds, amplified and h 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 communication technologies to include non-human perspectives will open new frontiers in creativity. Collaborations could extend to other intelligence species (e.g., dolphins, octopuses), incorporating their perceptions 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. + - Inter-specific collaborative projects: The expansion of communication technologies to include non-human perspectives will open new frontiers in creativity. Collaborations could extend to other intelligent species (e.g., dolphins, octopuses), incorporating their perceptions 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 humanity 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 addressing issues such as climate change, harnessing the power of diverse perspectives and innovative thinking to create sustainable and impactful solutions. diff --git a/contents/english/5-4-augmented-deliberation.md b/contents/english/5-4-augmented-deliberation.md index 81461669..05596e92 100644 --- a/contents/english/5-4-augmented-deliberation.md +++ b/contents/english/5-4-augmented-deliberation.md @@ -98,8 +98,7 @@ Such dynamic representations of social life could also dramatically improve how It may be possible to, in some cases, even more radically re-imagine the idea of representation. GFMs can be "fine-tuned" to increasingly accurately mimic the ideas and styles of individuals.[^LLMFinetune] One can imagine training 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 operate as a fairly direct collective representative, possibly as an aid, complement or check on the discretion of a person intended to represent that group. A striking real-world implementation of this concept is [The Synthetic Party](https://www.detsyntetiskeparti.org) (Det Syntetiske Parti) of Denmark. Founded in 2022, it is officially the world’s first political party driven by artificial intelligence,[^xiang] aiming to make generative text-to-text models genuinely democratic rather than merely populist. This synthetic party encapsulates a broad spectrum of often contradictory policies to reflect the diverse and fragmented views of unrepresented voters. The Synthetic Party—a collaboration between the "Computer Lars"-artist group of Asker Bryld Staunæs and Benjamin Asger Krog Møller, and the tech-hub MindFuture—conceptualized this initiative by investigating Denmark’s voter turnout statistics. They identified a persistent 15-20% abstention rate and correlated it with the existence of over 200 micro-parties failing to gain electoral seats.[^Wikipedia] By fine-tuning their GFM on data from these micro-parties, The Synthetic Party algorithmically integrates abstention rates and disenfranchised presence, hypothetically aiming to capture 20% of the voting populace, which approximates 20-36 seats in the 179-seat parliament. This creative approach to data-driven representation brings an almost alien perspective on democratic processes of inclusion and exclusion by probabilistically determining its representative seats based on voter disengagement, thus providing a channel to the discourse of abstentionist constituencies. -Most boldly, this idea could in principle extend beyond living human beings as we explore further in our [Environment](https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/6-4/eng/?mode=dark) chapter below. In his classic *We Have Never Been Modern*, philosopher Bruno Latour argued tha -t natural features (like rivers and forests) deserve representation in a "parliament of things."[^latour] 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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lorax)," Dr. Seuss's mythical creature who speaks for the trees and animals that cannot speak for themselves.[^Lorax] Something similar might occur for unborn future generations, as in Kim Stanley Robinson's [*Ministry for the Future*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ministry_for_the_Future).[^Robinson] 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. +Most boldly, this idea could in principle extend beyond living human beings as we explore further in our [Environment](https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/6-4/eng/?mode=dark) 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."[^latour] 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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lorax)," Dr. Seuss's mythical creature who speaks for the trees and animals that cannot speak for themselves.[^Lorax] Something similar might occur for unborn future generations, as in Kim Stanley Robinson's [*Ministry for the Future*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ministry_for_the_Future).[^Robinson] 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. [^xiang]: Chloe Xiang, [*This Danish Political Party is Led By an AI*](https://www.vice.com/en/article/jgpb3p/this-danish-political-party-is-led-by-an-ai?fbclid=IwAR0HQzFUbfxwruvrRd2VeaMEn0IOFBIZJuJsbyaPx5y3UjyyNV6goKh4j0A), Vice: Motherboard, 2022 [^Wikipedia]: [The Synthetic Party (Denmark)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Synthetic_Party_(Denmark)), Wikipedia diff --git a/contents/english/5-7-social-markets.md b/contents/english/5-7-social-markets.md index 040f7765..7d90503d 100644 --- a/contents/english/5-7-social-markets.md +++ b/contents/english/5-7-social-markets.md @@ -58,7 +58,7 @@ Many textbooks have been written, including some by some of our close friends, o 1. Increasing returns and public goods: Perhaps the most restrictive condition, highlighted by the founding fathers of the "marginal revolution" that ushered in modern economics, is "decreasing returns", the opposite of the supermodularity we used to define collaboration. 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, paying everyone their marginal product yields a loss, as shown in Figure C. Public goods that benefit a large number of people at little additional 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 returns/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 development.[^Pauls] In short, perhaps the greatest paradox of global capitalism is that it is at once the largest scale example of collaboration and yet has trouble precisely supporting the forms of technological collaboration that it heralds. 2. Market power: In some cases where exclusion from shared goods can be imposed by barriers or violence, funding of such collaboration 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 collaboration 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.[^Dewey] 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 created 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 directly partly to market transactions. Thus, precisely to the extent that new means of collaboration developed in markets are revolutionary, 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. +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.[^Dewey] 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 created 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 directly party to market transactions. Thus, precisely to the extent that new means of collaboration developed in markets are revolutionary, 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 distribution and "endowments" can be rearranged to achieve desired distributive goals. But achieving this ideal redistribution faces enormous practical hurdles and thus markets tend to often yield shockingly 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. [^Pauls]: 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. @@ -73,7 +73,7 @@ Recognition of and response to these challenges are arguably the leading current 4. Industrial, infrastructure and research policy: To overcome the tendency of markets to underfund public goods and more generally supermodular collaboration, many governments provide funding for infrastructure (e.g. transportation, communications, electrification), research and development of new technologies and the development 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 administered by bureaucracies with far less information that the participants 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 charity and volunteer effort (like the OSS community) that build scalable 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 government 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 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 justification) 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.[^Zoningcapture] -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. +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 impede 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. [^Stoller]: Matt Stoller, *Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy* (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020). [^Galbraith]: John Kenneth Galbraith, *American Capitalism: The Concept of Countervailing Power* (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1952). @@ -87,7 +87,7 @@ As we highlighted in the [Connected Society](https://www.plurality.net/v/chapter - Partial common ownership: To overcome the challenges of administering land taxes, a variety of historical thinkers, including Founder of the Chinese Republic Sun Yat-Sen (who we discussed extensively in our [A View from Yushan](https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/2-1/eng/?mode=dark) chapter) and economist [Arnold Harberger](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnold_Harberger), have proposed having owners self-assess the value of their property under penalty of having to sell at this self-assessed value.[^Harberger] This has the simultaneous effect of forcing truthful valuations 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](https://www.radicalxchange.org/wiki/pco-art/), as well having been used for many years for land in Taiwan.[^Tan] - Quadratic and ⿻ funding: As described at the start of this chapter, a natural way to fund public/supermodular goods without relying excessively on the limited knowledge of administrators is for such an administrator, philanthropist, or public authority to match contributions 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 behavior, 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.[^Hitzig] Recently designs have stretched beyond traditional individualistic designs to account for ⿻ group interests and affiliations.[^Pluralfunding] -- Stakeholder corporation: While partial common ownership and quadratic funding may help ensure the turnover of organization and asset control, they do not directly ensure that organizations serve rather than exercising illegitimate power over their "stakeholders", such as customers and workers. Drawing on the traditions 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.[^Stakeholder] +- Stakeholder corporation: While partial common ownership and quadratic funding may help ensure the turnover of organization and asset control, they do not directly ensure that organizations serve rather than exercise illegitimate power over their "stakeholders", such as customers and workers. Drawing on the traditions 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.[^Stakeholder] - Participatory design and prediction markets: Digital platforms and mechanisms are also increasingly used to allow more dynamic resource allocation both within corporations and in connections between corporations and their customers.[^interact] Examples include ways for customers to contribute and be rewarded for new product designs, such as in entertainment platforms like [Roblox](https://www.roblox.com/) or [Lego Ideas](https://ideas.lego.com/), and prediction markets where stakeholders can be rewarded to predict 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 transactions. Examples include markets for tradable carbon permits, the auction design examples we discussed in the [Property and Contract](https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/4-4/eng/?mode=dark) chapter above and a number of markets using community currencies or other devices to facilitate market-like institutions in communities (e.g. education, public housing or organ donation) where using external currency can severely undermine core values.[^Marketdesign] - Economies esteem: Related to these local currency markets are online systems where various quantitative markers of social esteem/capital (e.g. badges, followers, leaderboards, links) partly or fully replace transferable money as the "currency" of accomplishment.[^Esteem] These can often, in turn, partly interoperate with broader markets through various monetization channels such as advertising, sponsorship and crowdfunding. diff --git a/contents/english/7-0-policy.md b/contents/english/7-0-policy.md index 4ea1e492..6816fadf 100644 --- a/contents/english/7-0-policy.md +++ b/contents/english/7-0-policy.md @@ -121,11 +121,11 @@ Furthermore, this sector is in many ways better suited to the development of inf [^DeSci]: 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. -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](https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/) and [Wikimedia](https://wikimediafoundation.org/) Foundations, while primarily interacting with and driving open-source 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. +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](https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/) and [Wikimedia](https://wikimediafoundation.org/) Foundations, while primarily interacting with and driving open-source 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 reason why public interest technology need inherit all the features of open-source code. -Some organizations developing generative foundation models, such as [OpenAI](https://openai.com/charter) and [Anthropic](https://www.anthropic.com/news/the-long-term-benefit-trust), 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 exclusively maximize profit to ensure they stay true to these missions.[^OAI] 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 goal 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 ⿻ infrastructure 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. Luckily a variety of ⿻ technologies are available to policymakers to foster such an ecosystem. +Some organizations developing generative foundation models, such as [OpenAI](https://openai.com/charter) and [Anthropic](https://www.anthropic.com/news/the-long-term-benefit-trust), 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 exclusively maximize profit to ensure they stay true to these missions.[^OAI] 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 goal 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 ⿻ infrastructure 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. [^OAI]: 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. @@ -143,7 +143,7 @@ To allow the flourishing of such an ecosystem will depend on reorienting legal, The most important role for governments and intergovernmental networks will arguably be one of coordination and standardization. Governments, 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 international presence. Organizations like the [Open Collective Foundation](https://opencollective.com/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](https://blog.opencollective.com/open-collective-official-statement-ocf-dissolution/) and thus is in the process of dissolving as of this writing. The competitive disadvantage of Third-Sector technology providers could hardly be starker.[^OCFdiss] 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](https://www.wyoleg.gov/2024/Introduced/SF0050.pdf) 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. +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 international presence. Organizations like the [Open Collective Foundation](https://opencollective.com/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](https://blog.opencollective.com/open-collective-official-statement-ocf-dissolution/) and thus is in the process of dissolving as of this writing. The competitive disadvantage of Third-Sector technology providers could hardly be starker.[^OCFdiss] Many other forms of innovative, democratic, transnational organizations, like Distributed Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) constantly run into legal barriers that only a few jurisdictions like the [State of Wyoming](https://www.wyoleg.gov/2024/Introduced/SF0050.pdf) 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. [^OCFdiss]: Open Collective Team, "Open Collective Official Statement - OCF Dissolution" February 28, 2024 at https://blog.opencollective.com/open-collective-official-statement-ocf-dissolution/. diff --git a/contents/english/7-1-conclusion.md b/contents/english/7-1-conclusion.md index 7e208e22..6ead163e 100644 --- a/contents/english/7-1-conclusion.md +++ b/contents/english/7-1-conclusion.md @@ -59,7 +59,7 @@ With more systemic imagination and ambition, there are opportunities to pursue Policy leaders can form political platforms and perhaps even political parties 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 harness ⿻ and to substantively embody ⿻, moving away from "international trade" to substantive, supermodular international cooperation and standards setting. -Business and more broadly organizational leaders can harness ⿻ to transform their internal operations, customer relations, hiring practices, 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 it more directly accountable to a wider range of regulators, diffusing social and regulatory tension in the process. +Business and more broadly organizational leaders can harness ⿻ to transform their internal operations, customer relations, hiring practices, 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 it more directly accountable to a wider range of regulators, defusing social and regulatory tension in the process. Academics and researchers can form new fields of inquiry around ⿻ and harness ⿻ 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 communities of practice to shorten the loop from research ideation to practical experimentation.