diff --git a/contents/english/2-0-information-technology-and-democracy-a-widening-gulf.md b/contents/english/2-0-information-technology-and-democracy-a-widening-gulf.md index d38e8f94..af04bfbe 100644 --- a/contents/english/2-0-information-technology-and-democracy-a-widening-gulf.md +++ b/contents/english/2-0-information-technology-and-democracy-a-widening-gulf.md @@ -122,11 +122,11 @@ How did we end up here? Are these conflicts the natural course of technology and A range of work suggests that technology and democracy could co-evolve in a diversity of ways and that the path most democracies are on is a result of collective choices they have made through policies, attitudes, expectations, and culture. The range of possibilities can be seen through a variety of lenses, from science fiction to real-world cases. -Science fiction shows the astonishing range of futures the human mind is capable of imagining. In many cases, these imaginings are the foundation of many of the technologies that researchers and entrepreneurs end up developing. Some of these correspond to the directions we have seen technology take recently. In his 1992 classic, [Snow Crash](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Crash), Neal Stephenson imagines a future where most people have retreated to live much of their lives in an immersive “metaverse”.[^Crash] In the process they undermine the engagement necessary to support real-world communities, governments, and the like, making space for mafias and cult leaders to rule and develop weapons of mass destruction. This future closely corresponds to elements of the “antisocial” threats to democracy from technology we discussed above. Stephenson and other writers further extend these possibilities, which have had a profound effect in shaping technology development; for example, Meta Platforms is named after Stephenson’s metaverse. Similar examples are possible for the tendency of technology to concentrate power through creating “superintelligences” as in the fiction of [Isaac Asimov](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics) and [Ian Banks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_series), the predictive futurism of [Ray Kurzweil](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_Spiritual_Machines) and [Nicholas Bostrom](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superintelligence:_Paths,_Dangers,_Strategies), and films like [Terminator](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superintelligence:_Paths,_Dangers,_Strategies) and [Her](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Her_(film)).[^AISciFi] +Science fiction shows the astonishing range of futures the human mind is capable of imagining. In many cases, these imaginings are the foundation of many of the technologies that researchers and entrepreneurs end up developing. Some of these correspond to the directions we have seen technology take recently. In his 1992 classic, [Snow Crash](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Crash), Neal Stephenson imagines a future where most people have retreated to live much of their lives in an immersive “metaverse”.[^Crash] In the process they undermine the engagement necessary to support real-world communities, governments, and the like, making space for mafias and cult leaders to rule and develop weapons of mass destruction. This future closely corresponds to elements of the “antisocial” threats to democracy from technology we discussed above. Stephenson and other writers further extend these possibilities, which have had a profound effect in shaping technology development; for example, Meta Platforms is named after Stephenson’s metaverse. Similar examples are possible for the tendency of technology to concentrate power through creating “superintelligences” as in the fiction of [Isaac Asimov](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics) and [Iain M. Banks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_series), the predictive futurism of [Ray Kurzweil](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_Spiritual_Machines) and [Nicholas Bostrom](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superintelligence:_Paths,_Dangers,_Strategies), and films like [Terminator](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superintelligence:_Paths,_Dangers,_Strategies) and [Her](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Her_(film)).[^AISciFi] [^Crash]: Neal Stephenson, *Snow Crash* (New York: Bantam, 1992). -[^AISciFi]: Isaac Asimov, *I, Robot* (New York: Gnome Press: 1950). Ian Banks, *Consider Phlebas* (London: Macmillan, 1987). Ray Kurzweil, *The Age of Spiritual Machines* (New York: Viking, 1999). Nicholas Bostrom, *Superintelligence* (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2014). +[^AISciFi]: Isaac Asimov, *I, Robot* (New York: Gnome Press: 1950). Iain M. Banks, *Consider Phlebas* (London: Macmillan, 1987). Ray Kurzweil, *The Age of Spiritual Machines* (New York: Viking, 1999). Nicholas Bostrom, *Superintelligence* (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2014). But these possibilities are both very different from each other and are far from the only visions of the technological future to be found in sci-fi. In fact, some of the most prominent science fiction shows very different possibilities. Two of the most popular sci-fi television shows of all time, *The Jetsons* and *Star Trek*, show futures where, respectively, technology has largely reinforced the culture and institutions of 1950s America and one where it has enabled a post-capitalist world of diverse intersecting alien intelligences (on which more below). But these are two among thousands of examples, from the post-gender and post-state imagination of Ursula Le Guin to the post-colonial futurism of Octavia Butler. All suggest a dizzying range of ways technology could coevolve with society[^ScienceFiction]. diff --git a/contents/english/2-1-a-view-from-yushan.md b/contents/english/2-1-a-view-from-yushan.md index fa86a1b4..1e75d454 100644 --- a/contents/english/2-1-a-view-from-yushan.md +++ b/contents/english/2-1-a-view-from-yushan.md @@ -7,7 +7,7 @@ [^TROC]: This is an alternate interpretation of 中華民國 (lit. "amidst" "cultures" "citizens" "nation"), usually translated as "Republic of China". -Standing at the summit of East Asia's highest peak, [Yushan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yu_Shan) (Jade Mountain), one can not only look down on Taiwan, but also feel how this small, mountainous island nation is a global crossroad. Located at the junction of the Eurasian and Pacific tectonic plates, Taiwan's geological fault line yearly pushes it up, even as it also regularly causes earthquakes against which rigorous building code protect inhabitants. In the same way, the clash of Taiwan's diverse culture, history and values has built a prosperous and innovative society, while pro-social digital innovation has managed to protect it from polarization. +Standing at the summit of East Asia's highest peak, [Yushan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yu_Shan) (Jade Mountain), one can not only look down on Taiwan, but also feel how this small, mountainous island nation is a global crossroad. Located at the junction of the Eurasian and Pacific tectonic plates, Taiwan's geological fault line yearly pushes it up, even as it also regularly causes earthquakes against which rigorous building codes protect inhabitants. In the same way, the clash of Taiwan's diverse culture, history and values has built a prosperous and innovative society, while pro-social digital innovation has managed to protect it from polarization. Today, with a voter turnout rate over 70%[^twelectionv], second-highest religious diversity in the world[^ReligiousDiversityIndex], and 90% of global supply capacity for advanced chips, Taiwan has broken through geographic constraints and demonstrated the resilience of a democratic society to collaborate with its region and the world. @@ -28,7 +28,7 @@ Two dramatic personal experiences of the lead authors of this book illustrate th Perhaps most importantly, the movement led to a deeper and more lasting shift in politics, as the government at the time gained respect for the movement and ministers invited younger "reverse mentors" to help them learn from youth and civil society. One particularly proactive such minister, one of the world's first ministers in charge of digital participation, Jaclyn Tsai recruited one of us to begin our journey of public service. Eventually this led to her taking that role in 2016 and in 2022 becoming the first Minister of Digital Affairs. -Almost a decade after these events, the other primary author of this book visited to witness the general election held January 13, 2024, which launched a "year of elections" in which more people than in any previous year will vote and followed hot on the heels of the "year of AI", when generative models like GPT burst into the public consciousness. Many expect these models to turbocharge information manipulation and interference by authoritarian actors. This election seemed a test case, with a more concerted, better-funded adversary focused on a small population than anywhere in the world.[^VDemInfo] Walking the streets of Taipei on the eve of that election, he saw no shortage of divisions for such attacks to exploit. At the rally of the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) he found not a single official flag, only placards of the island, the party's signature green color and occasional rainbow flags 🏳️‍🌈. At the rally of the opposition Kuomintang (KMT or Nationalist) party, he saw only the flag of the Republic of China (ROC) 🇹🇼. It made him imagine how much more extreme the divisions of his American home would be if Democrats waved a historical British flag and Republicans the stars and stripes. +Almost a decade after these events, the other primary author of this book visited to witness the general election held January 13, 2024, which launched a "year of elections" in which more people than in any previous year will vote and followed hot on the heels of the "year of AI", when generative models like GPT burst into the public consciousness. Many expect these models to turbocharge information manipulation and interference by authoritarian actors. This election seemed a test case, with a more concerted, better-funded adversary focused on a considerably smaller population.[^VDemInfo] Walking the streets of Taipei on the eve of that election, he saw no shortage of divisions for such attacks to exploit. At the rally of the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) he found not a single official flag, only placards of the island, the party's signature green color and occasional rainbow flags 🏳️‍🌈. At the rally of the opposition Kuomintang (KMT or Nationalist) party, he saw only the flag of the Republic of China (ROC) 🇹🇼. It made him imagine how much more extreme the divisions of his American home would be if Democrats waved a historical British flag and Republicans the stars and stripes. [^VDemInfo]: “Disinformation in Taiwan: International versus Domestic Perpetrators,” V-Dem, 2020. https://v-dem.net/weekly_graph/disinformation-in-taiwan-international-versus @@ -109,7 +109,7 @@ The 1960s, parallel to the American Civil Rights movement, saw an outburst of de The United Nations was central to the ROC's early identity under the White Terror as it was not only one of the founding members of the UN, but also the only Asian permanent member of the Security Council. This prominent international role was the leading irritant to the People's Republic of China (PRC) regime, preventing it from participating in international affairs and leading the CCP to change its position from initially supporting Taiwanese independence to an ideological focus on conquering Taiwan. However, as the US sought to contain its failures in Vietnam, President Richard Nixon secretly pursued accommodation with the PRC, including supporting an Albanian-sponsored Resolution 2758 by the General Assembly on October 25, 1971 that transferred recognition of "China" from the ROC to the PRC, finally culminating in Nixon's visit to PRC in 1972. As a result, the ROC "withdrew" from the UN, transforming its identity and international standing. -On the one hand, this withdrawal internationally greatly limited the scope of Taiwan's international activities and its ability to engage in economic and trade activities. It also led the US and much of the non-Communist world to shift from a position of unconditional alliance with the ROC to one of careful balancing of interests and ambiguity, seeking to prevent PRC's violence over Taiwan while also supporting a policy of acknowledging its "One China" position. +On the one hand, this withdrawal internationally greatly limited the scope of Taiwan's international activities and its ability to engage in economic and trade activities. It also led the US and much of the non-Communist world to shift from a position of unconditional alliance with the ROC to one of careful balancing of interests and ambiguity, seeking to prevent PRC violence over Taiwan while also supporting a policy of acknowledging its "One China" position. Internally, this change in identity undermined much of the rationale for the White Terror, as the prospect of global support for a war to suppress the "Communist rebellion" withered and undermined the aspirational identity of "free China". The contradictions between the increasingly egalitarian, Third Sector-driven and highly progressively educated population, on the one hand, and an authoritarian repressive state on the other thus became increasingly overwhelming, especially with the development of labor unions and political civic associations and the death of Chiang all before the end of the 1970s. The lives of the parents of one of the authors of this book are a perfect illustration of these trends: as pioneers of community college and consumer cooperative movements, they benefited from the cooperative support in the ROC constitution. Yet, as journalists, they covered and helped support those repressed by the state, such as in the Kaohsiung Incident of 1979 when leaders of the political opposition were imprisoned, building the foundation for democratization. diff --git a/contents/english/3-2-connected-society.md b/contents/english/3-2-connected-society.md index 9c5784b5..5179787c 100644 --- a/contents/english/3-2-connected-society.md +++ b/contents/english/3-2-connected-society.md @@ -28,7 +28,7 @@ Prior to modernity, individuals were born into families rooted within kin-based [^universalreg]: It is worth noting, however, that universal birth registration is a very recent phenomenon and only was achieved in the US in 1940. Universal registration for Social Security Numbers did not even begin until 1987 when Enumeration at Birth was instituted at the federal level in collaboration with county level governments where births are registered. -This helped circumvent the reliance on personal relationships, building the foundation of identity in a relationship to a state, which in turn served as a trust anchors for many other types of institutions ranging from children's sports teams to medical care providers. These abstract representations enabled people to navigate the world not based on "who they know" or "where they fit" in a tight social world but as who they are in an abstracted universal sense relative to the state. This "WEIRD" (Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democratic) universalism thus broke with the social embedding of identity while thereby "freeing" people to travel and interact much more broadly using modern forms of identification issued by governments like passports and national identity cards. While other critical credentials, such as educational attainment are more diverse, they almost uniformly conform to a limited structure, implying one of a small number of "degrees" derived from courses with a particular "Carnegie unit" structure (in theory, 120 hours spent with an instructor), in contrast to the broad range of potential recognition that could be given to learning attainment as illustrated in Figure A. In short, just as modernity abstracted ownership private property, removing it from its many social entanglements, it also abstracted personal identity from the social anchoring that limited travel and the formation of new relationships. +This helped circumvent the reliance on personal relationships, building the foundation of identity in a relationship to a state, which in turn served as a trust anchors for many other types of institutions ranging from children's sports teams to medical care providers. These abstract representations enabled people to navigate the world not based on "who they know" or "where they fit" in a tight social world but as who they are in an abstracted universal sense relative to the state. This "WEIRD" (Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democratic) universalism thus broke with the social embedding of identity while thereby "freeing" people to travel and interact much more broadly using modern forms of identification issued by governments like passports and national identity cards. While other critical credentials such as educational attainment are more diverse, they almost uniformly conform to a limited structure, implying one of a small number of "degrees" derived from courses with a particular "Carnegie unit" structure (in theory, 120 hours spent with an instructor), in contrast to the broad range of potential recognition that could be given to learning attainment as illustrated in Figure A. In short, just as modernity abstracted ownership private property, removing it from its many social entanglements, it also abstracted personal identity from the social anchoring that limited travel and the formation of new relationships. diff --git a/contents/english/3-3-the-lost-dao.md b/contents/english/3-3-the-lost-dao.md index f748bea6..c57e7464 100644 --- a/contents/english/3-3-the-lost-dao.md +++ b/contents/english/3-3-the-lost-dao.md @@ -86,7 +86,7 @@ Nelson imagined hypertext as a way to liberate communication from the tyranny of While Engelbart and Nelson were lifelong friends and shared many similar visions, they took very different paths to realizing them, each of which (as we will see) held an important seed of truth. Engelbart, while also a visionary, was a consummate pragmatist and a smooth political operator, and went on to be recognized as the pioneer of personal computing. Nelson was an artistic purist whose relentless pursuit over decades of Xanadu embodying all of his [seventeen enumerated principles](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu#Original_17_rules) buried his career. -As an active participant in Lick's network, Engelbart conversely tempered his ambition with the need to persuade other network nodes to support, adopt or at least inter-operate with his approach. As different user interfaces and networking protocols proliferated, retreated from the pursuit of perfection. Engelbart, and even more his colleagues across the project, instead began to develop a culture of collegiality, facilitated by the communication network the were building, across the often competing universities they worked at. The physical separation made tight coordination of networks impossible, but work to ensure minimal inter-operation and spreading of clear best practices became a core characteristic of the ARPANET community. +As an active participant in Lick's network, Engelbart conversely tempered his ambition with the need to persuade other network nodes to support, adopt or at least inter-operate with his approach. As different user interfaces and networking protocols proliferated, retreated from the pursuit of perfection. Engelbart, and even more his colleagues across the project, instead began to develop a culture of collegiality, facilitated by the communication network they were building, across the often competing universities they worked at. The physical separation made tight coordination of networks impossible, but work to ensure minimal inter-operation and spreading of clear best practices became a core characteristic of the ARPANET community. This culture manifested in the development of the "Request for Comments" (RFC) process by Steve Crocker, arguably one of the first "wiki"-like processes of informal and mostly additive collaboration across many geographically and sectorally (governmental, corporate, university) dispersed collaborators. This in turn contributed to the common Network Control Protocol and, eventually, Transmission Control and Internet Protocols (TCP/IP) under the famously mission-driven but inclusive and responsive leadership of Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn between 1974 when TCP was first circulated as RFC 675 and 1983 when they became the official ARPANET protocols. At the core of the approach was the vision of a "network of networks" that gave the "internet" its name: that many diverse and local networks (at universities, corporations and government agencies) could inter-operate sufficiently to permit the near-seamless communication across long distances, in contrast to centralized networks (such as France's concurrent Minitel) that were standardized from the top down by a government.[^Minitel] Together these three dimensions of networking (of technical communication protocols, communicative content and governance of standards) converged to create the internet we know today. @@ -126,7 +126,7 @@ While Nelson was something of an oddball, his concerns were surprisingly broadly 7. Government data and statistics becoming increasingly inaccurate and irrelevant. 8. Control by private entities of the fundamental platforms for speech and public discourse. -The wider internet adoption spread, the the less relevant such complaints appeared. Government did not end up playing as central of a role as he imagined, but by 2000 most of the few commentators who were even aware of his warnings assumed we were surely on the path of Lick's scenario 2. Yet in a few places, concern was growing by late in the first decade of the new millennium. Virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier sounded the alarm in two books _[You are Not a Gadget](https://www.amazon.com/You-Are-Not-Gadget-Manifesto/dp/0307389979)_ and _[Who Owns The Future?](https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Who-Owns-the-Future/Jaron-Lanier/9781451654974)_, highlighting Nelson's and his own version of Lick's concerns about the future of the internet.[^Jaron] While these initially appeared simply an amplification of Nelson's fringe ideas, a series of world events that we discuss in the [Information Technology and Democracy: a Widening Gulf](https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/2-0/eng/?mode=dark) above eventually brought much of the world around to seeing the limitations of the internet economy and society that had developed, helping ignite the Techlash. These patterns bore a striking resemblance to Lick and Nelson's warnings. The victory of the internet may have been far more Pyrrhic than it at first seemed. +The wider internet adoption spread, the less relevant such complaints appeared. Government did not end up playing as central of a role as he imagined, but by 2000 most of the few commentators who were even aware of his warnings assumed we were surely on the path of Lick's scenario 2. Yet in a few places, concern was growing by late in the first decade of the new millennium. Virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier sounded the alarm in two books _[You are Not a Gadget](https://www.amazon.com/You-Are-Not-Gadget-Manifesto/dp/0307389979)_ and _[Who Owns The Future?](https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Who-Owns-the-Future/Jaron-Lanier/9781451654974)_, highlighting Nelson's and his own version of Lick's concerns about the future of the internet.[^Jaron] While these initially appeared simply an amplification of Nelson's fringe ideas, a series of world events that we discuss in the [Information Technology and Democracy: a Widening Gulf](https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/2-0/eng/?mode=dark) above eventually brought much of the world around to seeing the limitations of the internet economy and society that had developed, helping ignite the Techlash. These patterns bore a striking resemblance to Lick and Nelson's warnings. The victory of the internet may have been far more Pyrrhic than it at first seemed. [^Jaron]: Jaron Lanier, _You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto_ (New York: Vintage, 2011) and _Who Owns the Future?_ (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014). diff --git a/contents/english/4-1-identity-and-personhood.md b/contents/english/4-1-identity-and-personhood.md index d78ea376..a5069324 100644 --- a/contents/english/4-1-identity-and-personhood.md +++ b/contents/english/4-1-identity-and-personhood.md @@ -128,7 +128,7 @@ On the other hand, if privacy is protected, as in Worldcoin, by using biometrics -Starting from a very different place, another set of work on identity has reached a similar challenging set of trade-offs. Work on "decentralized identity" grew from many of the concerns about digital identity we have highlighted above: fragmentation, lack of natural digital infrastructure, issues with privacy, surveillance and corporate control. A key founding document was Microsoft identity architect Kim Cameron's "Laws of Identity" [^LawsOfIdentities], which emphasized the importance of user control/consent, minimal disclosure to appropriate parties, multiple use cases, pluralism of participation, integration with human users and consistency of experience across context. Kim Cameron worked on developing the cardspace [^CS] system while at MSFT and this became the InformationCard [^icard] standards. These did not get market adoption in part because they were too early - smartphones were not widely adopted yet and the idea that this device could hold a wallet for people. +Starting from a very different place, another set of work on identity has reached a similar challenging set of trade-offs. Work on "decentralized identity" grew from many of the concerns about digital identity we have highlighted above: fragmentation, lack of natural digital infrastructure, issues with privacy, surveillance and corporate control. A key founding document was Microsoft identity architect Kim Cameron's "Laws of Identity" [^LawsOfIdentities], which emphasized the importance of user control/consent, minimal disclosure to appropriate parties, multiple use cases, pluralism of participation, integration with human users and consistency of experience across context. Kim Cameron worked on developing the cardspace [^CS] system while at MSFT and this became the InformationCard [^icard] standards. These did not get market adoption in part because they were too early - smartphones were not widely adopted yet and, further, the idea that this device could hold a wallet for people was not adopted by application developers. The emergence of blockchain-distributed ledgers renewed interest in the decentralized identity community on achieving individual control over identifiers rather than being excessively tied to a single issue. This spurred the creation of the Decentralized Identifiers (DID) standard at the W3C that defines a way to have decentralized globally resolvable endpoints with associated public keys.[^DID] This creates a way to grant individuals "ownership" over identities, rooted in "public" data repositories such as blockchains, and create standardized formats for a variety of entities to issue digital credentials referencing these identifiers. diff --git a/contents/english/4-3-commerce-and-trust.md b/contents/english/4-3-commerce-and-trust.md index cb2b4222..466eff32 100644 --- a/contents/english/4-3-commerce-and-trust.md +++ b/contents/english/4-3-commerce-and-trust.md @@ -97,7 +97,7 @@ This realization interestingly parallels the development of one of the first maj [^X]: Today's PayPal was a merger of the original PayPal with X.com, founded by Elon Musk, Harris Fricker, Christopher Payne and Ed Ho, the name of which is now being revived by Musk as the successor to Twitter. -Seeking to bring these services at lower cost and more inclusively especially in markets incompletely served by these US and PRC-based services, several major developing-world governments have created publicly supported instant payment services, including Singapore's FAST system in 2014, Brazil's Pix system in 2020 and India's Unified Payments Interface in 2016. Even the US has followed with [FedNow](https://www.frbservices.org/financial-services/fednow) in 2023. While there are still significant impediments to international inter-operation, there is an increasing consensus that the immediate gap in making instant payments online and in person through digital channels has been met. +Seeking to deliver these services less expensively and more inclusively, especially in markets incompletely served by these US and PRC-based services, several major developing-world governments have created publicly supported instant payment services, including Singapore's FAST system in 2014, Brazil's Pix system in 2020 and India's Unified Payments Interface in 2016. Even the US has followed with [FedNow](https://www.frbservices.org/financial-services/fednow) in 2023. While there are still significant impediments to international inter-operation, there is an increasing consensus that the immediate gap in making instant payments online and in person through digital channels has been met. Yet the challenges raised by cryptocurrencies cannot be laid to rest quite so easily, as suggested by the resilience of interest and recent currency values in the space. The decline of cash, heralded by defenders of sanction regimes and battlers against financial criminals like economist Kenneth Rogoff, has been bemoaned by privacy advocates and civil libertarians, who argue that the collapse of private payments will have systemic effects individual users fail to account for when choosing how to pay.[^Priv] The oft-touted privacy benefits of Bitcoin have largely proven illusory given that it has become increasingly easy for well-resourced analysts to uncover the controllers of pseudonymous accounts.[^Bitcoinprivacy] However, interest in privacy technology has become a primary focus in the space, stimulating the development of highly private currencies like [Zcash](https://z.cash/) and "mixer" services like [Tornado cash](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tornado_Cash) on top of other currencies. These have stimulated controversy over the trade-offs between privacy and legal accountability, leading to forceful government actions to shut down various privacy features in some jurisdictions. These conflicts have also been at the root of the challenges of achieving seamless international inter-operation for digital payments systems, as countries fight over who can surveil and regulate what activity. diff --git a/contents/english/5-0-collaborative-technology-and-democracy.md b/contents/english/5-0-collaborative-technology-and-democracy.md index ccbad904..dcbaf82f 100644 --- a/contents/english/5-0-collaborative-technology-and-democracy.md +++ b/contents/english/5-0-collaborative-technology-and-democracy.md @@ -2,7 +2,7 @@ This book was created to demonstrate ⿻ in action and as well as describe it: to show as well as tell. As such, it was created using many of the tools we describe in this section. The text was [stored on and updated](https://github.com/pluralitybook/plurality) using the [Git protocol](https://git-scm.com/) that open source coders use to control versions of their software. The text is shared freely under a [Creative Commons 0](https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/cclicenses/) license, implying that no rights to any content herein are reserved to the community creating it and it may be freely reused. At the time of this writing, dozens of diverse experts and citizens from every continent contributed to the writing as highlighted in our [credits](https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/0-1/eng/?mode=dark) above and we hope many more will the continued evolution of the text after physical publication, embodying the practices we describe in our [Creative Collaboration](https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/5-3/eng/?mode=dark) chapter. -Work was collectively prioritized and rewards determined using a "crowd-funding" approach we describe in our [Social Markets](https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/5-7/eng/?mode=dark) chapter below. Changes to the text in future evolution will be approved collectively by the community using a mixture of the advanced voting procedures described in our [⿻ Voting](https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/5-6/eng/?mode=dark) chapter below and prediction markets. Contributors were recognized using a community currency and group identity tokens as we described in our [Identity and Personhood](https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/4-1/eng/?mode=dark) and [Commerce and Trust](https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/4-3/eng/?mode=dark) chapters above, which in turn was used in voting and prioritization of outstanding issues for the book. These priorities in turn determined the quantitative recognition received by those whose contributions addressed these challenges, an approach we have described with other as a "[⿻ Management Protocol](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4688040)".[^PMP] All this was recorded on a distributed ledger through an open-source protocol, [GitRules](https://gitrules.ai/), grounded on open-source participation rather than financial incentives. Contentious issues were resolved through tools we discuss in the [Augmented Deliberation](https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/5-4/eng/?mode=dark) chapter below. The book has been translated and copy-edited by the community augmented by many of the cross-linguistic and subcultural translation tools we discuss in our [Adaptive Administration](https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/5-5/eng/?mode=dark) chapter. +Work was collectively prioritized and rewards determined using a "crowd-funding" approach we describe in our [Social Markets](https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/5-7/eng/?mode=dark) chapter below. Changes to the text in future evolution will be approved collectively by the community using a mixture of the advanced voting procedures described in our [⿻ Voting](https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/5-6/eng/?mode=dark) chapter below and prediction markets. Contributors were recognized using a community currency and group identity tokens as we described in our [Identity and Personhood](https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/4-1/eng/?mode=dark) and [Commerce and Trust](https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/4-3/eng/?mode=dark) chapters above, which in turn was used in voting and prioritization of outstanding issues for the book. These priorities in turn determined the quantitative recognition received by those whose contributions addressed these challenges, an approach we have described with others as a "[⿻ Management Protocol](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4688040)".[^PMP] All this was recorded on a distributed ledger through an open-source protocol, [GitRules](https://gitrules.ai/), grounded on open-source participation rather than financial incentives. Contentious issues were resolved through tools we discuss in the [Augmented Deliberation](https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/5-4/eng/?mode=dark) chapter below. The book has been translated and copy-edited by the community augmented by many of the cross-linguistic and subcultural translation tools we discuss in our [Adaptive Administration](https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/5-5/eng/?mode=dark) chapter. @@ -45,7 +45,7 @@ While using migratory distance from Africa (where diversity is maximum as noted * Geographic type: People live in different types of geographic regions: rural v. urban, cosmopolitan v. more traditional cities, differing weather patterns, proximity to geographic features etc. * Profession: Most people spend a large portion of their lives working and define important parts of their identities by a profession, craft or trade. * Organizations: People are members of a range of organizations, including their employers, civic associations, professional groups, athletic clubs, online interest groups etc. -* Ethno-linguistics: People speak a range of languages and identify themselves with and/or are identified by others with a "ethnic" groups associated with these linguistic groupings or histories of such linguistic associations, and these are organized by historical linguists into rough phylogenies. +* Ethno-linguistics: People speak a range of languages and identify themselves with and/or are identified by others with "ethnic" groups associated with these linguistic groupings or histories of such linguistic associations, and these are organized by historical linguists into rough phylogenies. * Race, caste and tribe: Many societies feature cultural groupings based on real or perceived genetic and familial origins that partly shape collective self- and social perceptions, especially given the legacies of severe conflict and oppression based on these traits. * Ideology: People adopt, implicitly or explicitly, a range of political and social ideologies organized according to schema that themselves differ greatly across social context (e.g. "left" and "right" are key dimensions in some contexts, while religious or national origin divides may be more important in others). * Education: People have a range of kinds and levels of educational attainment. @@ -113,7 +113,7 @@ Optimization, especially in the pursuit of a "social welfare function" carries a At the same time, there is an opposite extreme danger. If we simply pursue designs that imitate features of life and thus engage our attention with little sense of purpose or meaning, we can easily be co-opted to serve the darkest of human motives. The profit motives and power games that organize so much of today's world do not naturally serve any reasonable definition of a common good. The dystopian novels of Neal Stephenson, the [*Black Mirror*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Mirror) series and the predicament of technologist Tunde Martins in the recent Nigerian science fiction show [Iwájú](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iw%C3%A1j%C3%BA) remind us of how technical advance decoupled from human values can become traps that fray social bonds and allow the power-hungry to loot, control and enslave us. -Nor do we look to hypothetical scenarios to perceive the danger of compelling technologies pursued without a broader guiding mission. The dominant online platforms of the "Web2" era such as Google, Facebook and Amazon grew precisely out of a mentality of bringing critical features of real-world sociality (viz. collectively determined emergent authority, social networks and commerce) to the digital world. While these services have brought many important benefits to billions of people around the world, we have extensively reviewed above, their many shortcomings and the dangerous path they have brought the world without a broader set of public goals to guide them. We must build tools that serve the felt needs of real, diverse populations, meeting them where they are, and yet we cannot ignore the broader social contexts in which they sit and the conflicts that we might exacerbate in meeting those perceived needs. +Nor do we look to hypothetical scenarios to perceive the danger of compelling technologies pursued without a broader guiding mission. The dominant online platforms of the "Web2" era such as Google, Facebook and Amazon grew precisely out of a mentality of bringing critical features of real-world sociality (viz. collectively determined emergent authority, social networks and commerce) to the digital world. While these services have brought many important benefits to billions of people around the world, we have extensively reviewed above their many shortcomings and the dangerous path they have brought the world without a broader set of public goals to guide them. We must build tools that serve the felt needs of real, diverse populations, meeting them where they are, and yet we cannot ignore the broader social contexts in which they sit and the conflicts that we might exacerbate in meeting those perceived needs. Luckily, a middle, pragmatic, ⿻ path is possible. We need neither take a God's eye nor a ground-level view exclusively. Instead, we can build tools that pursue the goals of a range of social groups, from intimate families and friends to large nations, always with an eye to limitations of each perspective and on the parallel developments we must connect to and learn from emanating from other parallel directions of development. We can aim to reform market function by focusing on social welfare, but always doing so based on adding to our models' key features of social richness revealed by those pursuing more granular perspectives and expecting our solutions will at least partly founder on their failures to account for these. We can build rich ways for people to empathize with others' internal experience, but with an understanding that such tools may well be abused if not paired with the discipline of deliberation, regulation and well-structured markets. diff --git a/contents/english/5-4-augmented-deliberation.md b/contents/english/5-4-augmented-deliberation.md index 05596e92..20ad1e59 100644 --- a/contents/english/5-4-augmented-deliberation.md +++ b/contents/english/5-4-augmented-deliberation.md @@ -1,7 +1,7 @@ # Augmented Deliberation -As we [have noted above](https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/2-0/eng/?mode=dark), one of the most common concerns about social media has been its tendency to entrench existing social divisions, creating "echo chambers" that undermine a sense of shared reality.[^Sunstein] News feed algorithms based on "collaborative filtering" selects content that is likely to maximize user engagements, prioritizing like-minded content that reinforces users' existing beliefs and insulates them from diverse information. Despite mixed findings on whether these algorithms truly exacerbate political polarization and hamper deliberations, it is natural to ask how these systems might be redesigned with the opposite intention of “bridging” the crowd. The largest-scale attempt at this is the Community Notes (formerly Birdwatch) system in the [X](https://www.twitter.com) (formerly Twitter) social media platform. +As we [have noted above](https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/2-0/eng/?mode=dark), one of the most common concerns about social media has been its tendency to entrench existing social divisions, creating "echo chambers" that undermine a sense of shared reality.[^Sunstein] News feed algorithms based on "collaborative filtering" select content that is likely to maximize user engagements, prioritizing like-minded content that reinforces users' existing beliefs and insulates them from diverse information. Despite mixed findings on whether these algorithms truly exacerbate political polarization and hamper deliberations, it is natural to ask how these systems might be redesigned with the opposite intention of “bridging” the crowd. The largest-scale attempt at this is the Community Notes (formerly Birdwatch) system in the [X](https://www.twitter.com) (formerly Twitter) social media platform.
A screenshot with an example of Community Notes. One user claimed, with questionable reasoning, that whales are not mammals. A second box is displayed below it stating that 'readers added context' and included referenced information on why they are indeed mammals. diff --git a/contents/english/5-5-adaptive-administration.md b/contents/english/5-5-adaptive-administration.md index 9d319f55..2999b7ad 100644 --- a/contents/english/5-5-adaptive-administration.md +++ b/contents/english/5-5-adaptive-administration.md @@ -10,7 +10,7 @@ This demonstration built on years of work and multi stakeholder collaborations i


-Building on these demonstrations, Indian business, civil and government entities have launched services to harness these capabilities at scale. These include a government-provided chatbot to support applications to [farmer financial support programs](https://opengovasia.com/2023/09/23/ai-based-chatbot-to-support-indian-farmers/) and a free What's App based multilingual chatbot that offers guidance on a variety of public services. +Building on these demonstrations, Indian business, civil and government entities have launched services to harness these capabilities at scale. These include a government-provided chatbot to support applications to [farmer financial support programs](https://opengovasia.com/2023/09/23/ai-based-chatbot-to-support-indian-farmers/) and a free WhatsApp-based multilingual chatbot that offers guidance on a variety of public services. --- diff --git a/contents/english/5-7-social-markets.md b/contents/english/5-7-social-markets.md index 7d90503d..bc029e17 100644 --- a/contents/english/5-7-social-markets.md +++ b/contents/english/5-7-social-markets.md @@ -143,4 +143,4 @@ Yet despite all their manifest dangers and limitations, those pursuing ⿻ shou [^interact]: See Erich Joachimsthaler, _The Interaction Field: The Revolutionary New Way to Create Shared Value for Businesses, Customers, and Society_, PublicAffairs, 2019. See also Gary Hamel, and Michele Zanini, _Humanocracy: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People inside Them_, (Boston, Massachusetts: Harvard Business Review Press, 2020). [^Arnott]: William Vickrey, "The City as a Firm" in Martin S. Feldstein and Robert P. Inman, eds., *The Economics of Public Services*: 334-343. Richard Arnott, and Joseph Stiglitz, “Aggregate Land Rents, Expenditure on Public Goods, and Optimal City Size,” _The Quarterly Journal of Economics_ 93, no. 4 (November 1979): 471. https://doi.org/10.2307/1884466. [^Robinson]: Robinson, op. cit. -[^CollabNote]: Pooling across diversity is a very general principle. Although size matters, bigger is not always better, and the strength of the connections formed can matter more. For example, families, teams or troops – small networks connected by high-value interactions – can outperform much larger ones in the production of ⿻ goods. If we consider the record of Paleolithic art, banding together to perform key social functions is extremely ancient, so collaborative pooling at a range of scales, albeit by non-state and non-market actors, seems an exception to the rule that 'public goods' are always under-supplied. +[^CollabNote]: Pooling across diversity is a very general principle. Although size matters, bigger is not always better, and the strength of the connections formed can matter more. For example, families, teams or troops – small networks connected by high-value interactions – can outperform much larger ones in the production of ⿻ goods. If we consider the record of Paleolithic art, banding together to perform key social functions is extremely ancient, so collaborative pooling at a range of scales, albeit by non-state and non-market actors, seems an exception to the rule that 'public goods' are always under-supplie \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/contents/english/6-1-workplace.md b/contents/english/6-1-workplace.md index 109a2f6d..8237c5e3 100644 --- a/contents/english/6-1-workplace.md +++ b/contents/english/6-1-workplace.md @@ -10,7 +10,7 @@ The advances we discuss, which are just a sampling of potential implications of ### Strong remote teams -The COVID-19 pandemic transformed the world of work, bringing changes expected for decades to fruition in a year. A leading study by Barreto et al., for example, found that work from home rose from 5% of the American workforce to a high above 60%.[^Barreto] Perhaps the most extreme manifestation has been the rise of so-called "digital nomads", who have harnessed the increasing opportunity for remote work to travel continuously and work a variety of remote jobs as encouraged by programs like Sardinia regional program for digital nomads and Estonia and Taiwan's [e-citizenship](https://www.e-resident.gov.ee/) and [gold cards](https://goldcard.nat.gov.tw/en/) respectively, that one author of this book holds. While there has been a substantial return to physical work since the end of the pandemic, at least a part of the change appears here to stay; Barreto et al. find that after the pandemic, workers on average want to work about half the week from home and believe their productivity is similar or better in that setting. While some studies have found some evidence of mildly reduced productivity, these effects do not seem large enough to overcome the persistent demands for hybrid work styles.[^reduce-productivity] +The COVID-19 pandemic transformed the world of work, bringing changes expected for decades to fruition in a year. A leading study by Barrero et al., for example, found that work from home rose from 5% of the American workforce to a high above 60%.[^Barrero] Perhaps the most extreme manifestation has been the rise of so-called "digital nomads", who have harnessed the increasing opportunity for remote work to travel continuously and work a variety of remote jobs as encouraged by programs like Sardinia regional program for digital nomads and Estonia and Taiwan's [e-citizenship](https://www.e-resident.gov.ee/) and [gold cards](https://goldcard.nat.gov.tw/en/) respectively, that one author of this book holds. While there has been a substantial return to physical work since the end of the pandemic, at least a part of the change appears here to stay; Barrero et al. find that after the pandemic, workers on average want to work about half the week from home and believe their productivity is similar or better in that setting. While some studies have found some evidence of mildly reduced productivity, these effects do not seem large enough to overcome the persistent demands for hybrid work styles.[^reduce-productivity] Yet there is little question that remote work has real downsides. Some of these, such as ensuring work-life balance, avoiding distractions and unhealthy at-home working conditions, are not easily addressed through remote collaboration tools. But many others are: lack of organic interactions with colleagues, missing opportunities for feedback or forming deeper personal connections with colleagues, etc.[^remote-shift-impact] While ⿻ can be used to address most of these, we will focus on one in particular: the building of strong and deeply trusting teams. @@ -95,7 +95,7 @@ Putting these together, we can imagine a future where remote teams can form the [^Calc]: If, as noted in the chapter, about 50% of formal sector work will be remote and, as in this study, if team-building exercises increase team performance by about 25%, if this applies to about half of formal sector work and if about half the benefit goes into cost, we should expect a gain of about 2% of GDP from improved remote team-building. If agglomeration benefits are about 12% for work facilities and this applies again to half of formal sector work and can be improved by 50%, again we get 2% of GDP. If meetings are 25% of formal sector work time and can be improved by 25%, this is about 4% of GDP. Standard economic estimates of the costs of labor search and matching are about 4% of GPD, similar to the cost spent on human resources; if mitigated by 50% this would raise GDP by 2% (not to mention significantly dampen the cost of business cycle unemployment). Finally, most GDP growth (of roughly 2-3% annually globally) has been traced by economists to technological advance through the research and development of new products, which is now about 80% in the private sector according to the figures we discussed in the introduction. If the efficiency of this could be increased by a quarter through more flexible intrapreneurship, this could raise global GDP growth annually by half a percent. Cameron Klein, Deborah DiazGranados, Eduardo Salas, Huy Le, Shawn Burke, Rebecca Lyons, and Gerald Goodwin, “Does Team Building Work?” _Small Group Research_ 40, no. 2 (January 16, 2009): 181–222. https://doi.org/10.1177/1046496408328821. Michael Greenstone, Richard Hornbeck, and Enrico Moretti, “Identifying Agglomeration Spillovers: Evidence from Winners and Losers of Large Plant Openings,” _Journal of Political Economy_ 118, no. 3 (June 2010): 536–98. https://doi.org/10.1086/653714. [^Coinbase]: Ellen Huet, “Basecamp Follows Coinbase In Banning Politics Talk at Work,” _Bloomberg_, April 26, 2021, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-26/basecamp-follows-coinbase-in-banning-politics-talk-at-work. Ibid. -[^Barreto]: Jose Barrero, Nicholas Bloom, and Steven J. Davis. 2023, “The Evolution of Working from Home,” __Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR) Working Paper_ no. 23-19 (July 2023): https://siepr.stanford.edu/publications/working-paper/evolution-working-home. +[^Barrero]: Jose Barrero, Nicholas Bloom, and Steven J. Davis. 2023, “The Evolution of Working from Home,” __Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR) Working Paper_ no. 23-19 (July 2023): https://siepr.stanford.edu/publications/working-paper/evolution-working-home. [^reduce-productivity]: Natalia Emanuel, Emma Harrington, and Amanda Pallais, “The Power of Proximity to Coworkers: Training for Tomorrow or Productivity Today?” _National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper_ no 31880 (November 2023): https://doi.org/10.3386/w31880. [^Meetings]: Michael Gibbs, Friederike Mengel, and Christoph Siemroth, “Work from Home and Productivity: Evidence from Personnel and Analytics Data on Information Technology Professionals,” _Journal of Political Economy Microeconomics_ 1, no. 1 (February 1, 2023): 7–41, https://doi.org/10.1086/721803. [^remote-shift-impact]: Longqi Yang, David Holtz, Sonia Jaffe, Siddharth Suri, Shilpi Sinha, Jeffrey Weston, Connor Joyce, et al., “The Effects of Remote Work on Collaboration among Information Workers,” _Nature Human Behaviour_ 6, no. 1 (September 9, 2021): 43–54. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-021-01196-4. diff --git a/contents/english/7-0-policy.md b/contents/english/7-0-policy.md index 6816fadf..2f17daf5 100644 --- a/contents/english/7-0-policy.md +++ b/contents/english/7-0-policy.md @@ -129,14 +129,11 @@ Some organizations developing generative foundation models, such as [OpenAI](htt [^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. - - Furthermore, whatever the ideal structures, it is unlikely that such public interest institutions will simply substitute for the large, private digital infrastructure built up over the last decades. Many social networks, cloud infrastructures, single-sign-on architectures, and so forth would be wasteful to simply scrap. Instead, it likely makes sense to harness these investments towards the public interest by pairing public investment with agreements to shift governance to respect public input in much the way we discussed in our chapters on Voting, Media, and Workplace. This closely resembles the way that a previous wave of economic democracy reform with which Dewey was closely associated did not simply out-compete privately created power generation, but instead sought to bring them under a network of partially local democratic control through utility boards. Many leaders in the tech world refer to their platforms as "utilities", "infrastructure" or "public squares"; it stands to reason that part of a program of ⿻ digital infrastructure will be reforming them so they truly act as such. Fostering a ⿻ ecosystem of organizations that serve ⿻ publics including but not limited to open-source models will be critical to moving beyond the limits of the academic ARPA model. Luckily a variety of ⿻ technologies are available to policymakers to foster such an ecosystem. - ### ⿻ regulation To allow the flourishing of such an ecosystem will depend on reorienting legal, regulatory, and financial systems to empower these types of organizations. Tax revenue will need to be raised, ideally in ways that are not only consistent with but actually promote ⿻ directly, to make them socially and financially sustainable. @@ -227,3 +224,4 @@ For them to do so, ⿻ will have to go far beyond a set of creative technologies [^Planning]: Benjamin Bertelsen and Ritul Gaur, "What We Can Expect for Digital Public Infrastructure in 2024", *World Economic Forum Blog* February 13, 2024 at https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2024/02/dpi-digital-public-infrastructure. Especially in the developing world, many countries have ministries of planning that could naturally host or spin off such a function. [^Ext]: Economists would refer to such taxes as "Pigouvian" taxes on "externalities". While a reasonable way to describe some of the below, as noted in our Markets chapter, externalities may be more the rule than the exception and thus we prefer this alternative formulation. For example, many of these taxes address issues of concentrated market power which do create externalities, but are not usually considered in the scope of Pigouvian taxation. + \ No newline at end of file