Skip to content

Commit

Permalink
Updating from ⿻ to Reality to reflected added diagram from Lilian
Browse files Browse the repository at this point in the history
  • Loading branch information
GlenWeyl committed Mar 10, 2024
1 parent d32a91a commit dbd7c52
Showing 1 changed file with 5 additions and 3 deletions.
8 changes: 5 additions & 3 deletions contents/english/06-00-from-⿻-to-reality.md
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -57,9 +57,11 @@ While it is obviously impossible to perfectly achieve these five goals simultane

### Fertile ground

Let us first consider the question of scale. To realize the benefits of ⿻ technology within a community requires the community to contain at least a rough approximation of the diversity that technology aims to span. This differs dramatically across various directions of technology. The most intimate technologies of post-symbolic communication and immersive shared reality can be powerful even in the smallest communities and relationship, creating few constraints on scale and diversification of seeing and thus making it natural to prioritize other criteria above. At the opposite extreme, voting systems and markets are rarely used in intimate communities and require significant scale to be relevant, especially in their socially enriched forms, making entry points far scarcer, more ambitious and potentially hazardous.
Let us first consider the question of scale. To realize the benefits of ⿻ technology within a community requires the community to contain at least a rough approximation of the diversity that technology aims to span. This differs dramatically across various directions of technology. The most intimate technologies of post-symbolic communication and immersive shared reality can be powerful even in the smallest communities and relationship, creating few constraints on scale and diversification of seeing and thus making it natural to prioritize other criteria above. At the opposite extreme, voting systems and markets are rarely used in intimate communities and require significant scale to be relevant, especially in their socially enriched forms, making entry points far scarcer, more ambitious and potentially hazardous.

However, given the reasonable flexibility across scales of most ⿻ technologies, the most broadly attractive sites for experimentation will be those that both contain enough diversity to enable most applications and are themselves sufficiently diverse to allow reasonable choice of diverse, safe, prestigious seeds. While any simplistic quantitative representation falls short of the richness needed to characterize such examples, a simple rule of thumb is to seek for roughly the same diversity *of communities* as *within communities* as quantified by the number of units. In a world of (very roughly) 10 billion people, these would be units of roughly 100,000 people, as there are 100,000 such units if the whole world were partitioned into them: they have the scale of the square root of global population. There is, of course, nothing magic about 100,000, but it offers a rough sense for the scale of communities and organizations that are the most fertile ground in which to plant the seeds of ⿻.
<img src="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pluralitybook/plurality/main/figs/squarerootscale.png" width="100%" alt="Bubbles filled with smaller bubbles, some of which contain symbols of the social areas of workplace, media, health and environment.">

However, given the reasonable flexibility across scales of most ⿻ technologies, the most broadly attractive sites for experimentation will be those that both contain enough diversity to enable most applications and are themselves sufficiently diverse to allow reasonable choice of diverse, safe, prestigious seeds. While any simplistic quantitative representation falls short of the richness needed to characterize such examples, a simple rule of thumb is to seek for roughly the same diversity *of communities* as *within communities* as quantified by the number of units as illustrated in the figure. In a world of (very roughly) 10 billion people, these would be units of roughly 100,000 people, as there are 100,000 such units if the whole world were partitioned into them: they have the scale of the square root of global population. There is, of course, nothing magic about 100,000, but it offers a rough sense for the scale of communities and organizations that are the most fertile ground in which to plant the seeds of ⿻.

There are many kinds of communities at this scale. Geographically, this is roughly the scale of most middle-sized municipalities (large towns or small cities). Economically, it is the size of employees in a large corporation or, politically, in a median nation. Religiously, it is, for example, roughly the number of Catholics in a Diocese. Educationally, it is a bit larger than the number of students at a large university. Socially, it resembles the membership of many mid-sized civic organizations or social movements. Culturally, it is roughly the active fan base of a typical television program, performing artist or professional sports club. In short, it is a prevalent level of organization in a wide range of social sphere, offering rich terrain for surveying.

Expand All @@ -77,7 +79,7 @@ Both have been critical early testbeds for ⿻, yet measuring them against our c

It is therefore crucial to carefully consider places where might be the most promising places for ⿻ to spread next. One obvious example, that pervades our discussions so far, is the governance of cities. Yet precisely because we have drawn on such public sector examples so heavily thus far, we focus in this part of the book on a diversity of social sectors where ⿻ can seed reality that touch a much broader range of life than the narrow definition of public sector "democracy". In doing so, we focus on matching the scales mentioned above and covering a broad range of life experiences, while attending to areas with respect and prestige in a broad range of societies.

In particular, we consider:
In particular, we consider, as symbolized also in the figure above:
1. Workplace, which is a highly influential sector because so much of the capitalist economy is driven by it. Again, especially in the largest companies, finding scale matches is quite straightforward.
2. Health, which is another sector touching almost every life, especially relevant outside of the working years we cover in the previous chapter and perhaps the most widely respected social sector. Many health systems, as noted above, match in scale.
3. Media, which perhaps has the greatest capacity to spread new practices as it is close to the conceptual, communicative and ideational foundation of most societies. Many publications and social media platforms match the relevant scale.
Expand Down

0 comments on commit dbd7c52

Please sign in to comment.