diff --git a/ReadMe.md b/ReadMe.md
index 995e3b2f..5e8e47dc 100644
--- a/ReadMe.md
+++ b/ReadMe.md
@@ -14,6 +14,7 @@ All materials in this repo and in all other parts of this project (unless explic
To cite this text, you can use this bibtex as a sample
+```bibtex
@online{plurality2023,
title={Plurality: The Future of Collaborative Technology and Democracy},
author={Weyl, E. Glen and Tang, Audrey and {the Plurality Community}},
@@ -21,6 +22,7 @@ To cite this text, you can use this bibtex as a sample
url={https://github.com/pluralitybook/plurality/blob/main/contents/english},
publisher={GitHub},
}
+```
# Identity and credit
@@ -82,7 +84,7 @@ Active translation communities and repositories
- Ukrainian: https://github.com/vlree-alt/plurality-ukrainian
- Japanese: https://github.com/nishio/plurality-japanese
- German: https://github.com/GermanPluralityBook/pluralitaet
-- Korean: https://github.com/hopelee327/plurality-korean
+- Korean: https://github.com/parkhaewon0617/plurality
- French: https://github.com/xitobal/radicalxchangeparis.github.io/tree/main/public/Plurality%2C%20le%20livre%20-%20G%20Weil
# Summary and next steps
diff --git a/contents/english/0-0-endorsements.md b/contents/english/0-0-endorsements.md
index f0802688..4caf7b38 100644
--- a/contents/english/0-0-endorsements.md
+++ b/contents/english/0-0-endorsements.md
@@ -25,8 +25,7 @@
> *Plurality* reads like optimistic sci-fi, already happening in real life! Can democracies around the world follow in Taiwan’s footsteps to upgrade free society for the digital age? Fingers crossed for a happy ending.
-— [Joseph Gordon-Levitt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Gordon-Levitt), E
-mmy-winning artist and founder of [HITRECORD](https://hitrecord.org/)
+— [Joseph Gordon-Levitt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Gordon-Levitt), Emmy-winning artist and founder of [HITRECORD](https://hitrecord.org/)
diff --git a/contents/english/0-1-About-the-authors.md b/contents/english/0-1-About-the-authors.md
index f01b3dc6..7da4ba50 100644
--- a/contents/english/0-1-About-the-authors.md
+++ b/contents/english/0-1-About-the-authors.md
@@ -5,4 +5,4 @@
-This book is open-source and its contents may be freely copied, with or without attribution. In addition to the primary named authors, dozens of members of the ⿻ community around the world contributed to the book, doing most of the total work. These contributors are listed on the next page and represented in this machine-generated blending of their faces, tiled by their individual faces. The free online version of this book at [https://www.plurality.net/](https://www.plurality.net/) will continue to evolve, governed according to the principles described in this book by this community.
+This book is open-source and its contents may be freely copied, with or without attribution. In addition to the primary named authors, dozens of members of the ⿻ community around the world contributed to the book, doing most of the total work. These contributors are listed on the next page and represented in this machine-generated blending of their faces, tiled by their individual faces. The free online version of this book at [https://www.plurality.net/](https://www.plurality.net/) will continue to evolve, governed according to the principles described in this book by this community.
diff --git a/contents/english/2-2-the-life-of-a-digital-democracy.md b/contents/english/2-2-the-life-of-a-digital-democracy.md
index d4ed7bb4..764bbc44 100644
--- a/contents/english/2-2-the-life-of-a-digital-democracy.md
+++ b/contents/english/2-2-the-life-of-a-digital-democracy.md
@@ -182,7 +182,7 @@ It will doubtless take decades of study to understand the precise causal connect
[^EconFreedom]: “Index of Economic Freedom.” The Heritage Foundation, 2023. https://www.heritage.org/index/.
[^Inequalitycritique]: Gerald Auten, and David Splinter, “Income Inequality in the United States: Using Tax Data to Measure Long-Term Trends,” _Journal of Political Economy_, November 14, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1086/728741.
-[^CapitalShare]: The most interesting statistic we woudl like to report on is labor's share of income and its trends in Taiwan. However, to our knowledge no persuasive and internationally comparable study of this exists. We hope to see more research on this soon.
+[^CapitalShare]: The most interesting statistic we would like to report on is labor's share of income and its trends in Taiwan. However, to our knowledge no persuasive and internationally comparable study of this exists. We hope to see more research on this soon.
[^Loneliness]: S. Schroyen, N. Janssen, L. A. Duffner, M. Veenstra, E. Pyrovolaki, E. Salmon, and S. Adam, “Prevalence of Loneliness in Older Adults: A Scoping Review.” _Health & Social Care in the Community 2023_ (September 14, 2023): e7726692. https://doi.org/10.1155/2023/7726692.
[^Addiction]: “More than Half of Teens Admit Phone Addiction .” Taipei Times, February 4, 2020. https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/biz/archives/2020/02/04/2003730302; “Study Finds Nearly 57% of Americans Admit to Being Addicted to Their Phones - CBS Pittsburgh.” CBS News, August 30, 2023. https://www.cbsnews.com/pittsburgh/news/study-finds-nearly-57-of-americans-admit-to-being-addicted-to-their-phones/.
[^drugs]: “NCDAS: Substance Abuse and Addiction Statistics [2020],” National Center for Drug Abuse Statistics, 2020, https://drugabusestatistics.org/; Ling-Yi Feng, and Jih-Heng Li, “New Psychoactive Substances in Taiwan,” _Current Opinion in Psychiatry_ 33, no. 4 (March 2020): 1, https://doi.org/10.1097/yco.0000000000000604.
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 ba7a1a66..466e661b 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"
@@ -41,7 +41,7 @@ Therefore, in this chapter, we will outline a theory of the informational requir
### Associations
-How do people people form "an organization of persons sharing a common interest"? Clearly, a group of people who simply happen to share an interest is insufficient. People can share an interest but have no awareness of each other, or might know each other and have no idea about their shared interest. As social scientists and game theorists have recently emphasized, the collective action implied by "organization" requires a stronger notion of what it is to have an "interest", "belief" or "goal" in common. In the technical terms of these fields, the required state is what they call (approximate) "[common knowledge](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_knowledge_(logic))".
+How do people form "an organization of persons sharing a common interest"? Clearly, a group of people who simply happen to share an interest is insufficient. People can share an interest but have no awareness of each other, or might know each other and have no idea about their shared interest. As social scientists and game theorists have recently emphasized, the collective action implied by "organization" requires a stronger notion of what it is to have an "interest", "belief" or "goal" in common. In the technical terms of these fields, the required state is what they call (approximate) "[common knowledge](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_knowledge_(logic))".
To motivate what this means to a game theorist, it may be helpful to consider why simply sharing a belief is insufficient to allow effective common action. Consider a group of people who all happen to speak a common second language, but none are aware that the others do. Given they all speak different first languages, they won't initially be able to communicate easily. Just knowing the language will not do them much good. Instead, what they must learn is that the *others* also know the language. That is, they must have not just basic knowledge but the "higher-order" knowledge that others know something.[^Contextcomm]
diff --git a/contents/english/4-3-commerce-and-trust.md b/contents/english/4-3-commerce-and-trust.md
index 6da9ee56..cb2b4222 100644
--- a/contents/english/4-3-commerce-and-trust.md
+++ b/contents/english/4-3-commerce-and-trust.md
@@ -36,7 +36,7 @@ Beneath a sky speckled with stars, against a backdrop laden with memories, Zvi w
---
-It's a testament to the commercial nature of the contemporary world that none of the protocols we discuss in this section have received nearly the attention in media and policy as new approaches to facilitating payment and commerce. Cryptocurrencies have been one of the focal technologies of the last decade. But only slightly less heralded and far more broadly adopted have been a range of government and other public payments innovations including instant payment technologies using government identities in places like [India] (https://www.npci.org.in/what-we-do/upi/product-overview), [Brazil](https://www.bcb.gov.br/en/financialstability/pix_en) and [Singapore](https://www.abs.org.sg/consumer-banking/fast), central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), and regulated inter-operable digital payment systems like those used in the People's Republic of China (PRC). While they are far from universally adopted or interoperable, a new generation of payment systems is increasingly prevalent in the lives of many people around the globe, making payment in digital spaces increasingly as easy or easier than what cash facilitated in the past.
+It's a testament to the commercial nature of the contemporary world that none of the protocols we discuss in this section have received nearly the attention in media and policy as new approaches to facilitating payment and commerce. Cryptocurrencies have been one of the focal technologies of the last decade. But only slightly less heralded and far more broadly adopted have been a range of government and other public payments innovations including instant payment technologies using government identities in places like [India](https://www.npci.org.in/what-we-do/upi/product-overview), [Brazil](https://www.bcb.gov.br/en/financialstability/pix_en) and [Singapore](https://www.abs.org.sg/consumer-banking/fast), central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), and regulated inter-operable digital payment systems like those used in the People's Republic of China (PRC). While they are far from universally adopted or interoperable, a new generation of payment systems is increasingly prevalent in the lives of many people around the globe, making payment in digital spaces increasingly as easy or easier than what cash facilitated in the past.
Yet, in many ways, the relatively rapid success of these efforts is a symptom of what is so disappointing about their progress so far. Cash is perhaps one of the "dumbest" technologies of the pre-digital era: it is a single, homogeneous substance transmitted between roughly anonymous, abstracted accounts. While it has proven far harder to replicate this basic function, and thus recent advances are important, this is not a revolutionary technique enabled by digital technology as, for example, hypertext improved on what had been possible in previous writing. In this chapter, we will summarize progress thus far, discuss the limitations of traditional money compared to higher aspirations for commerce online, and discuss ways to build on recent advances to allow a more ⿻ vision of digital commerce.
diff --git a/contents/english/5-7-social-markets.md b/contents/english/5-7-social-markets.md
index eb03d763..040f7765 100644
--- a/contents/english/5-7-social-markets.md
+++ b/contents/english/5-7-social-markets.md
@@ -101,7 +101,7 @@ As we highlighted in the [Connected Society](https://www.plurality.net/v/chapter
[^Marketdesign]:Atila Abdulkadiroğlu, Parag A. Pathak and Alvin E. Roth, "The New York City High School Match", *American Economic Review* 95, no. 2 (2005): 365-367. Nicole Immorlica, Brendan Lucier, Glen Weyl and Joshua Mollner, "Approximate Efficiency in Matching Markets" *International Conference on Web and Internet Economics* (2017): 252-265. Roth et al., op. cit.
[^Esteem]: Nicole Immorlica, Greg Stoddard and Vasilis Syrgkanis, "Social Status and Badge Design", *WWW '15: Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on World Wide Web* (2015: 473-483.
-While this blossoming of alternatives to simplistic markets is a powerful proof of concept for moving beyond the traditional limits of the market. But they represent the beginning, not the end, of the possibilities for the technologically enabled social markets of the future.
+While this blossoming of alternatives to simplistic markets is a powerful proof of concept for moving beyond the traditional limits of the market, they represent the beginning, not the end, of the possibilities for the technologically enabled social markets of the future.
### Frontiers of social markets
diff --git a/contents/english/7-0-policy.md b/contents/english/7-0-policy.md
index c995283d..4ea1e492 100644
--- a/contents/english/7-0-policy.md
+++ b/contents/english/7-0-policy.md
@@ -1,16 +1,15 @@
# Policy
-If ⿻ succeeds, in a decade we imagine a transformed relationship among and across governments, private technology development and open source/civil society. In this future, public funding (both from governments and charitable initiatives) is the primary source of financial support for fundamental digital protocols, while the provision of such protocols in turn becomes a central item on the agenda of governments and charitable actors. This infrastructure is developed trans-nationally, by civil society collaborations and standard setting organizations supported by an international network of government leaders focused on these goals. The fabric created by these networks and the open protocols they develop, standardize, safeguard and become the foundation for a new "international rules-based order", an operating system for a transnational ⿻ society.
+If ⿻ succeeds, in a decade we imagine a transformed relationship among and across governments, private technology development and open-source/civil society. In this future, public funding (both from governments and charitable initiatives) is the primary source of financial support for fundamental digital protocols, while the provision of such protocols in turn becomes a central item on the agenda of governments and charitable actors. This infrastructure is developed trans-nationally, by civil society collaborations and standard-setting organizations supported by an international network of government leaders focused on these goals. The fabric created by these networks and the open protocols they develop, standardize, and safeguard become the foundation for a new "international rules-based order", an operating system for a transnational ⿻ society.
-Making these a bit more precise opens our eyes to how different such a future could be. Today, most research and development and the overwhelming majority of software development occurs in for-profit private corporations. What little (half a percent of GDP in an average OECD country) funding is spent on research and development by governments is primarily non-digital and overwhelmingly funds "basic research." This is in contrast to open source code and protocols that can be directly be used by most citizens, civil groups and businesses. Spending on public software R&D pales by comparison to the several percent of GDP most countries spend on physical infrastructure.
+Making these a bit more precise opens our eyes to how different such a future could be. Today, most research and development and the overwhelming majority of software development occurs in for-profit private corporations. What little (half a percent of GDP in an average OECD country) funding is spent on research and development by governments is primarily non-digital and overwhelmingly funds "basic research." This is in contrast to open-source code and protocols that can be directly used by most citizens, civil groups, and businesses. Spending on public software R&D pales by comparison to the several percent of GDP most countries spend on physical infrastructure.
-In the future we imagine that governments and charities will ensure we devote roughly 1% of GDP to digital public research, development, protocols, and infrastructure, amounting to nearly a trillion US dollars a year globally or roughly half of currently global investment in information technology. This would increase public investment by at least two orders of magnitude and, given how much volunteer investment even limited financial investment in open-source software and other public investment has been able to stimulate, completely change the character of digital industries: the "digital economy" would become a ⿻ society. Furthermore, public sector investment has primarily taken place on a national or regional (e.g. European Union) level and is largely obscured from broader publics. The investment we imagine would, like research collaborations, private investment, and open-source development, be undertaken by transnational networks aiming to create internationally inter-operable applications and standards similar to today's internet protocols. It would be at least as much a focus for the public as recently hyped technologies such as AI and crypto.
+In the future, we imagine that governments and charities will ensure we devote roughly 1% of GDP to digital public research, development, protocols, and infrastructure, amounting to nearly a trillion US dollars a year globally or roughly half of current global investment in information technology. This would increase public investment by at least two orders of magnitude and, given how much volunteer investment even limited financial investment in open-source software and other public investment has been able to stimulate, completely change the character of digital industries: the "digital economy" would become a ⿻ society. Furthermore, public sector investment has primarily taken place on a national or regional (e.g. European Union) level and is largely obscured from broader publics. The investment we imagine would, like research collaborations, private investment, and open-source development, be undertaken by transnational networks aiming to create internationally interoperable applications and standards similar to today's internet protocols. It would be at least as much a focus for the public as recently hyped technologies such as AI and crypto.
---
-
As we emphasized in the previous section, ⿻ innovation does not take policy by a single government as a primary starting point: it proceeds from a variety of institutions of diverse and usually middling sizes outward. Yet governments are central institutions around the world, directing a large share of economic resources directly and shaping the allocation of much more. We cannot imagine a path to ⿻ without the participation of governments as both users of ⿻ technology and supporters of the development of ⿻.
Of course, a full such embrace would be a process, just as ⿻ is, and would eventually transform the very nature of governments. Because much of the book so far has gestured at what this would mean, in this chapter we instead focus on a vision of what might take place in the next decade to achieve the future we imagined above. While the policy directive we sketch is grounded in a variety of precedents (such as ARPA, Taiwan, and to a lesser extent India) that we have highlighted above, it does not directly follow any of the standard models employed by "great powers" today, instead drawing, combining, and extending elements from each to form a more ambitious agenda than any of these are today pursuing. To provide context, we therefore begin with a stylized description of these "models" before drawing lessons from historical models. We describe how these can be adapted to the global scope of today's transnational networks, how such investments can be financially supported and sustained, and finally the path to building the social and political support these policies will need, on which the next chapter focuses.
@@ -18,31 +17,33 @@ Of course, a full such embrace would be a process, just as ⿻ is, and would eve
### Digital empires
-The most widely understood models of technology policy today are captured by legal scholar Anu Bradford in her *Digital Empires*.[^Bradford] In the US and the large fraction of the world that consumes its technology exports, technology development is dominated by a simplistic, private sector-driven, neoliberal free market model. In People's Republic of China (PRC) and consumers of its exports, technology development is steered heavily by the state towards national goals revolving around sovereignty, development, and national security. In Europe, the primary focus has been on regulation of technology imports from abroad to ensure they protect European standards of fundamental human rights, forcing others to comply with this "Brussels effect". While this trichotomy is a bit stereotyped and each jurisdiction incorporates elements of each of these strategies, the outlines are a useful foil for considering the alternative model we want to describe.
+The most widely understood models of technology policy today are captured by legal scholar Anu Bradford in her *Digital Empires*.[^Bradford] In the US and the large fraction of the world that consumes its technology exports, technology development is dominated by a simplistic, private sector-driven, neoliberal free market model. In the People's Republic of China (PRC) and consumers of its exports, technology development is steered heavily by the state towards national goals revolving around sovereignty, development, and national security. In Europe, the primary focus has been on regulating technology imports from abroad to ensure they protect European standards of fundamental human rights, forcing others to comply with this "Brussels effect". While this trichotomy is a bit stereotyped and each jurisdiction incorporates elements of each of these strategies, the outlines are a useful foil for considering the alternative model we want to describe.
+
[^Bradford]: Anu Bradford, *Digital Empires: The Global Battle to Regulate Technology* (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2023).
-The US model has been driven by a broad trend widely documented since the 1970s for government and the civil sector to disengage from the economy and technology development, focusing instead on "welfare" and national defense functions.[^Yergin] Despite pioneering the ARPANET, the US privatized almost all further development of personal computing, operating systems, physical and social networking and cloud infrastructure.[^Tarnoff] As the private monopolies predicted by J.C.R. Licklider (Lick) came to fill these spaces, US regulators primarily responded with antitrust actions that, while influencing market dynamics in a few cases (such as the Microsoft actions) were generally understood as too little too late.[^Lick] In particular, they are understood as having allowed monopolistic dominance or tight oligopoly to emerge in the search, smartphone application, cloud services and several operating systems markets. More recently, American antitrust regulators under the leadership of the "New Brandeis" movement have doubled down on the primary use of antitrust instruments with limited success in court and have seen the challenges of emerging monopolies only expand in the market for chips and generative foundation models.[^NewBrandeis]
+The US model has been driven by a broad trend widely documented since the 1970s for government and the civil sector to disengage from the economy and technology development, focusing instead on "welfare" and national defense functions.[^Yergin] Despite pioneering the ARPANET, the US privatized almost all further development of personal computing, operating systems, physical and social networking, and cloud infrastructure.[^Tarnoff] As the private monopolies predicted by J.C.R. Licklider (Lick) came to fill these spaces, US regulators primarily responded with antitrust actions that, while influencing market dynamics in a few cases (such as the Microsoft actions) were generally understood as too little too late.[^Lick] In particular, they are understood as having allowed monopolistic dominance or tight oligopoly to emerge in the search, smartphone application, cloud services, and several operating systems markets. More recently, American antitrust regulators under the leadership of the "New Brandeis" movement have doubled down on the primary use of antitrust instruments with limited success in court and have seen the challenges of emerging monopolies only expand in the market for chips and generative foundation models.[^NewBrandeis]
[^Yergin]: Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw, *The Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World Economy* (New York: Touchstone, 2002).
[^Tarnoff]: Tarnoff, op. cit.
[^Lick]: Licklider, "Comptuers and Government", op. cit. Thomas Philippon, *The Great Reversal* (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019).
[^NewBrandeis]:Lina Khan, "The New Brandeis Movement: America’s Antimonopoly Debate", *Journal of European Competition Law and Practice* 9, no. 3 (2018): 131-132. Akush Khandori, "Lina Khan's Rough Year," *New York Magazine Intelligencer* December 12, 2023 at https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/12/lina-khans-rough-year-running-the-federal-trade-commission.html.
-The primary rival model to the US has been the PRC, where the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has drafted a series of Five-Year plans that have [increasingly in recent years](https://cset.georgetown.edu/publication/china-14th-five-year-plan/) directed a variety of levers of state power to invest in and shape the direction of technology development.[^Plan] These coordinated regulatory actions, party-driven directives to domestic technology companies and primarily government-driven investments in research and development have dramatically steered the direction of Chinese technology development in recent years away from commercial and consumer applications towards hard and physical technology, national security, chip development and surveillance technologies. Investment that has paralleled the US, such as into large foundation models, has been tightly and directly steered by government, ensuring consistency with priorities on censorship and monitoring of dissent. A consistent crackdown on business activity not forming part of this vision has led to a dramatic fall in activity in much of the Chinese technology sector in recent years, especially around financial technology including web3.
+The primary rival model to the US has been the PRC, where the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has drafted a series of Five-Year plans that have [increasingly in recent years](https://cset.georgetown.edu/publication/china-14th-five-year-plan/) directed a variety of levers of state power to invest in and shape the direction of technology development.[^Plan] These coordinated regulatory actions, party-driven directives to domestic technology companies, and primarily government-driven investments in research and development have dramatically steered the direction of Chinese technology development in recent years away from commercial and consumer applications towards hard and physical technology, national security, chip development, and surveillance technologies. Investment that has paralleled the US, such as into large foundation models, has been tightly and directly steered by government, ensuring consistency with priorities on censorship and monitoring of dissent. A consistent crackdown on business activity not forming part of this vision has led to a dramatic fall in activity in much of the Chinese technology sector in recent years, especially around financial technology including web3.
[^Plan]: Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, *14th Five-Year Plan*, March 2021; translation available at https://cset.georgetown.edu/publication/china-14th-five-year-plan/.
-In contrast to the US and the PRC, the European Union (EU) and United Kingdom (UK) have (despite a few notable exceptions) primarily acted as importers of technical frameworks produced by these two geopolitical powers. The EU has tried to harness its bargaining power in that role, however, to act as a "regulatory powerhouse", intervening to protect the interests of human rights that it fears the other two powers often ignore in their race for technological supremacy. This has included setting the global standard for privacy regulation with their [General Data Protection Regulation](https://gdpr-info.eu/), taking the lead on regulation of generative foundation models (GFMs) with their [AI Act](https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/the-act/), and helping shape the standards for competitive marketplaces with a series of recent ex-ante competition regulations including the [Digital Services Act](https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/digital-services-act-package), the [Digital Markets Act](https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-2019-2024/europe-fit-digital-age/digital-markets-act-ensuring-fair-and-open-digital-markets_en) and the [Data Act](https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/data-act). While these have not defined an alternative positive technological model, they have constrained and shaped the behavior of both US and Chinese firms who seek to sell into the European market. The EU also aspires to tight interoperability across the markets they serve, often leading to copycat legislation in other jurisdictions.
+In contrast to the US and the PRC, the European Union (EU) and the United Kingdom (UK) have (despite a few notable exceptions) primarily acted as importers of technical frameworks produced by these two geopolitical powers. The EU has tried to harness its bargaining power in that role, however, to act as a "regulatory powerhouse", intervening to protect the interests of human rights that it fears the other two powers often ignore in their race for technological supremacy. This has included setting the global standard for privacy regulation with their [General Data Protection Regulation](https://gdpr-info.eu/), taking the lead on the regulation of generative foundation models (GFMs) with their [AI Act](https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/the-act/), and helping shape the standards for competitive marketplaces with a series of recent ex-ante competition regulations including the [Digital Services Act](https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/digital-services-act-package), the [Digital Markets Act](https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-2019-2024/europe-fit-digital-age/digital-markets-act-ensuring-fair-and-open-digital-markets_en) and the [Data Act](https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/data-act). While these have not defined an alternative positive technological model, they have constrained and shaped the behavior of both US and Chinese firms who seek to sell into the European market. The EU also aspires to tight interoperability across the markets they serve, often leading to copycat legislation in other jurisdictions.
### A road less traveled
-Just as Taiwan's Yushan (Jade) Mountain rises from the intersection of the Eurasian and Pacific tectonic plates, the policy approach we surveyed in our [Life of a Digital Democracy](https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/2-2/eng/?mode=dark) chapter from its peak arises from the intersection of the philosophies behind these three digital empires as illustrated in Figure A. From the US model, Taiwan has drawn the emphasis on a dynamic, decentralized, free, entrepreneurial ecosystem open to the world that generates scalable and exportable technologies, especially within the open source ecosystem. From the European model, it has drawn a focus on human rights and democracy as the fundamental aspirations both for the development of basic digital public infrastructure and on which the rest of the digital ecosystem depends. From the PRC model, it has drawn the importance of public investment to proactively advance technology, steering it toward societal interests.
+Just as Taiwan's Yushan (Jade) Mountain rises from the intersection of the Eurasian and Pacific tectonic plates, the policy approach we surveyed in our [Life of a Digital Democracy](https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/2-2/eng/?mode=dark) chapter from its peak arises from the intersection of the philosophies behind these three digital empires as illustrated in Figure A. From the US model, Taiwan has drawn the emphasis on a dynamic, decentralized, free, entrepreneurial ecosystem open to the world that generates scalable and exportable technologies, especially within the open-source ecosystem. From the European model, it has drawn a focus on human rights and democracy as the fundamental aspirations both for the development of basic digital public infrastructure and on which the rest of the digital ecosystem depends. From the PRC model, it has drawn the importance of public investment to proactively advance technology, steering it toward societal interests.
-
+
+
+**Figure 7-0-A. An illustration of how the Taiwan policy model emerges from the intersection of PRC, US, and EU competing alternatives. Source: generated by authors, harnessing logos from the Noun Project by Gan Khoon Lay, Alexis Lilly, Adrien Coquet, and Rusma Trari Handini under CC BY 3.0 at https://thenounproject.com/. **
-**Figure 7-0-A. An illustration of how the Taiwan policy model emerges from the intersection of PRC, US, and EU competing alternatives. Source: generated by authors, harnessing logos from the Noun Project by Gan Khoon Lay, Alexis Lilly, Adrien Coquet and Rusma Trari Handini under CC BY 3.0 at https://thenounproject.com/. **
@@ -56,33 +57,33 @@ A key feature of the Presidential Hackathon is its use of quadratic voting for p
Of course, the "Taiwan model" did not emerge *de novo* over the last decade. Instead, as we have highlighted above, it built on the synthesis of the Taiwanese tradition of public support for cooperative enterprise and civil society (see our [A View from Yushan](https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/2-1/eng/?mode=dark) chapter) with the model that built the internet at the United States Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), which we highlighted in [The Lost Dao](https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/3-3/eng/). At a moment when the US and many other advanced economies are turning away from "neoliberalism" and towards "industrial policy", the ARPA story holds crucial lessons and cautions.
-On the one hand, ARPA's Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) led by Lick is perhaps the most successful example of industrial policy in American and perhaps world history. IPTO provided seed funding for the development of a network of university-based computer interaction projects at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Stanford, University of California Berkeley, Carnegie Technical Schools (now Carnegie Mellon University or CMU) and University of California Los Angeles. Among the remarkable outcomes of these investments were:
+On the one hand, ARPA's Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) led by Lick is perhaps the most successful example of industrial policy in American and perhaps world history. IPTO provided seed funding for the development of a network of university-based computer interaction projects at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Stanford, University of California Berkeley, Carnegie Technical Schools (now Carnegie Mellon University or CMU), and University of California Los Angeles. Among the remarkable outcomes of these investments were:
1. The development of this research network into the seeds of what became the modern internet.
-2. The development of the groups making up this network into the many of the first and still the among the most prominent computer science and computer engineering departments in the world.
+2. The development of the groups making up this network into many of the first and still the among the most prominent computer science and computer engineering departments in the world.
3. The development around these universities of the leading regional digital innovation hubs in the world, including Silicon Valley and the Boston Route 128 corridor.
Yet while these technology hubs have become the envy and aspiration of (typically unsuccessful) regional development and industrial policy around the world, it is critical to remember how fundamentally different the aspirations underpinning Lick's vision were from those of his imitators.
- Where the standard goal of industrial policy is directly to achieve outcomes like the development of a Silicon Valley, this was not Lick's intention. He was instead focused on developing a vision of the future of computing grounded in human-computer symbiosis, attack-resilient networking and the computer as a communication device. ⿻ builds closely on Lick's very much unfinished vision. Lick selected participating universities not based on an interest in regional economic development, but rather to maximize the chances of achieving vision of the future of computing.
+Where the standard goal of industrial policy is directly to achieve outcomes like the development of a Silicon Valley, this was not Lick's intention. He was instead focused on developing a vision of the future of computing grounded in human-computer symbiosis, attack-resilient networking, and the computer as a communication device. ⿻ builds closely on Lick's very much unfinished vision. Lick selected participating universities not based on an interest in regional economic development, but rather to maximize the chances of achieving his vision of the future of computing.
+
- Industrial policy often aims at creating large-scale, industrial "nation champions" and is often viewed in contrast to antitrust and competition policies, which typically aim to constrain excessively concentrated industrial power. As Lick described in his 1980 "Computers and Government" and in contrast to both of these traditions, the IPTO effort took the rough goals of antitrust (ensuring the possibility of an open and decentralized marketplace) but applied the tools of industrial policy (active public investment) to achieve them. Rather than constraining the winners of predigital market competition, IPTO aimed to create a network infrastructure on which the digital world would play out in such a way as to avoid undue concentrations of power. It was the failure to sustain this investment through the 1970s and beyond that Lick predicted would lead to the monopolization of the critical functions of digital life by what he at the time described as "IBM" but turned out to be the dominant technology platforms of today: Microsoft, Apple, Google, Meta, Amazon, etc. Complementing this approach, rather than directly fostering the development of private, for-profit industry as most industrial policy does, Lick supported the civil society-based (primarily university-driven) development of basic infrastructure that would support the defense, government, and private sectors.[^Lick2]
+Industrial policy often aims at creating large-scale, industrial "nation champions" and is often viewed in contrast to antitrust and competition policies, which typically aim to constrain excessively concentrated industrial power. As Lick described in his 1980 "Computers and Government" and in contrast to both of these traditions, the IPTO effort took the rough goals of antitrust (ensuring the possibility of an open and decentralized marketplace) but applied the tools of industrial policy (active public investment) to achieve them. Rather than constraining the winners of predigital market competition, IPTO aimed to create a network infrastructure on which the digital world would play out in such a way as to avoid undue concentrations of power. It was the failure to sustain this investment through the 1970s and beyond that Lick predicted would lead to the monopolization of the critical functions of digital life by what he at the time described as "IBM" but turned out to be the dominant technology platforms of today: Microsoft, Apple, Google, Meta, Amazon, etc. Complementing this approach, rather than directly fostering the development of private, for-profit industry as most industrial policy does, Lick supported the civil society-based (primarily university-driven) development of basic infrastructure that would support the defense, government, and private sectors.[^Lick2]
- [^Lick2]: Licklider, "Computers and Government", op. cit.
+[^Lick2]: Licklider, "Computers and Government", op. cit.
- While Lick's approach mostly played out at universities, given they were the central locus of the development of advanced computing at the time, it contrasted sharply with the traditional support of fundamental, curiosity-driven research of funders like the US National Science Foundation. He did not offer support for general academic investigation and research, but rather to advance a clear mission and vision: building a network of easily accessible computing machines that enabled communication and association over physical and social distance, interconnecting and sharing resources with other networks to enable scalable cooperation.
+While Lick's approach mostly played out at universities, given they were the central locus of the development of advanced computing at the time, it contrasted sharply with the traditional support of fundamental, curiosity-driven research of funders like the US National Science Foundation. He did not offer support for general academic investigation and research, but rather to advance a clear mission and vision: building a network of easily accessible computing machines that enabled communication and association over physical and social distance, interconnecting and sharing resources with other networks to enable scalable cooperation.
Yet while dictating this mission, Lick did not prejudge the right components to achieve it, instead establishing a network of "coopetitive" research labs, each experimenting and racing to develop prototypes of different components of these systems that could then be standardized in interaction with each other and spread across the network. Private sector collaborators played important roles in contributing to this development, including Bolt Beranek and Newman (where Lick served as Vice President just before his role at IPTO and which went on to build a number of prototype systems for the internet) and Xerox PARC (where many of the researchers Lick supported later assembled and continued their work, especially after federal funding diminished). Yet, as is standard in the development and procurement of infrastructure and public works in a city, these roles were components of an overall vision and plan developed by the networked, multi-sectoral alliance that constituted ARPANET. Contrast this with a model primarily developed and driven in the interest of private corporations, the basis for most personal computing and mobile operating systems, social networks, and cloud infrastructures.
-As we have noted repeatedly above, we need not only look back to the "good old days" for ARPANET or Taiwan for inspiration. India's development of the "[India Stack](https://indiastack.org/)" has many similar characteristics.[^Indiastack] More recently, the EU has been developing initiatives including [European Digital Identity](https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-2019-2024/europe-fit-digital-age/european-digital-identity_en)and [Gaia-X](https://gaia-x.eu/). Jurisdictions as diverse as [Brazil](https://www.bcb.gov.br/en/financialstability/pix_en) and [Singapore](https://www.abs.org.sg/consumer-banking/fast) have experimented successfully with similar approaches. While each of these initiatives has strengths and weaknesses, the idea that a public mission aimed at creating infrastructure that empowers decentralized innovation in collaboration with civil society and participation but not dominance from the private sector is increasingly a pattern, often labeled "digital public infrastructure" (DPI). To a large extent, we are primarily advocating for this approach to be scaled up and become the central approach to the development of global ⿻ society. Yet for this to occur, the ARPA and Taiwan models need to be updated and adjusted for this potentially dramatically increased scale and ambition.
+As we have noted repeatedly above, we need not only look back to the "good old days" for ARPANET or Taiwan for inspiration. India's development of the "[India Stack](https://indiastack.org/)" has many similar characteristics.[^Indiastack] More recently, the EU has been developing initiatives including [European Digital Identity](https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-2019-2024/europe-fit-digital-age/european-digital-identity_en)and [Gaia-X](https://gaia-x.eu/). Jurisdictions as diverse as [Brazil](https://www.bcb.gov.br/en/financialstability/pix_en) and [Singapore](https://www.abs.org.sg/consumer-banking/fast) have experimented successfully with similar approaches. While each of these initiatives has strengths and weaknesses, the idea that a public mission aimed at creating infrastructure that empowers decentralized innovation in collaboration with civil society and participation but not dominance from the private sector is increasingly a pattern, often labeled "digital public infrastructure" (DPI). To a large extent, we are primarily advocating for this approach to be scaled up and become the central approach to the development of global ⿻ society. Yet for this to occur, the ARPA and Taiwan models need to be updated and adjusted for this potentially dramatically increased scale and ambition.
[^Indiastack]: Vivek Raghavan, Sanjay Jain and Pramod Varma, "India Stack—Digital Infrastructure as Public Good", *Communications of the ACM* 62, no. 11: 76-81.
### A new ⿻ order
-The key reason for an updated model is that there are basic elements of the ARPA model that are a poor fit for the shape of contemporary digital life, as Lick began realizing as early as 1980. While it was a multisectoral effort, ARPA was centered around the American military-industrial complex and its collaborators in the American academy. This made sense in the context of the 1960s, when the US was one of two major world powers, scientific funding and mission was deeply tied to its stand-off with the Soviet Union and most digital technology was being developed in the academy. As Lick observed, however, even by the late 1970s this was already becoming a poor fit. Today's world is (as discussed above) much more multi-polar even in its development of leading DPI. The primary civil technology developers are in the open source community, private companies dominate much of the digital world and military applications are only one aspect of the public's vision for digital technology, which increasingly shapes every aspect of contemporary life. To adapt, a vision of ⿻ infrastructure for today must engage the public in setting the mission of technology through institutions like digital ministries, network transnationally and harness open source technology, as well as redirecting the private sector, more effectively.
-
+The key reason for an updated model is that there are basic elements of the ARPA model that are a poor fit for the shape of contemporary digital life, as Lick began realizing as early as 1980. While it was a multisectoral effort, ARPA was centered around the American military-industrial complex and its collaborators in the American academy. This made sense in the context of the 1960s, when the US was one of two major world powers, scientific funding and mission was deeply tied to its stand-off with the Soviet Union, and most digital technology was being developed in the academy. As Lick observed, however, even by the late 1970s this was already becoming a poor fit. Today's world is (as discussed above) much more multi-polar even in its development of leading DPI. The primary civil technology developers are in the open-source community, private companies dominate much of the digital world, and military applications are only one aspect of the public's vision for digital technology, which increasingly shapes every aspect of contemporary life. To adapt, a vision of ⿻ infrastructure for today must engage the public in setting the mission of technology through institutions like digital ministries, network transnationally and harness open-source technology, as well as redirect the private sector, more effectively.
Lick and the ARPANET collaborators shaped an extraordinary vision that laid the groundwork for the internet and ⿻. Yet Lick saw that this could not ground the legitimacy of his project for long; as we highlighted central to his aspirations was that "decisions about the development and exploitation of computer technology must be made not only 'in the public interest' but in the interest of giving the public itself the means to enter into the decision-making processes that will shape their future." Military technocracy cannot be the primary locus for setting the agenda if ⿻ is to achieve the legitimacy and public support necessary to make the requisite investments to center ⿻ infrastructure. Instead, we will need to harness the full suite of ⿻ technologies we have discussed above to engage transnational publics in reaching an overlapping consensus on a mission that can motivate a similarly concerted effort to IPTO's. These tools include ⿻ competence education to make every citizen feel empowered to shape the ⿻ future, cultural institutions like Japan's [Miraikan](https://www.miraikan.jst.go.jp/en/) that actively invite citizens into long-term technology planning, ideathons where citizens collaborate on future envisioning and are supported by governments and charities to build these visions into media that can be more broadly consumed, [alignment assemblies](https://cip.org/alignmentassemblies) and other augmented deliberations on the direction of technology and more.
@@ -93,25 +94,25 @@ Digital (hopefully soon, ⿻) ministries, emerging worldwide, are proving to be
These ministries, inherently collaborative, work closely with other government sectors and international bodies. In 2023, the [G20 digital ministers identified DPI](https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2024/02/dpi-digital-public-infrastructure/) as a key focus for worldwide cooperation, aligning with the UN global goals.[^Planning] In contrast to institutions like ARPA, digital ministries offer a more fitting platform for initiating international missions that involve the public and civil society. As digital challenges become central to global security, more nations are likely to appoint digital ministers, fostering an open, connected digital community.
-Yet national homes for ⿻ infrastructure constitute only a few of the poles holding up its tent. There is no country today that can or should alone be the primary locus for such efforts. They must be built as at least international and probably transnational networks, just as the internet is. Digital ministers, as their positions are created, must themselves form a network that can provide international support to this work and connect nation-based nodes just as ARPANET did for university-based nodes. Many of the open source projects participating will not themselves have a single primary national presence, spanning many jurisdictions and participating as a transnational community, to be respected on terms that will in some cases be roughly equal to those of national digital ministries. Consider, for example, the relationship of rough equality between the Ethereum community and the Taiwanese Ministry of Digital Affairs.
+Yet national homes for ⿻ infrastructure constitute only a few of the poles holding up its tent. There is no country today that can or should alone be the primary locus for such efforts. They must be built as at least international and probably transnational networks, just as the internet is. Digital ministers, as their positions are created, must themselves form a network that can provide international support to this work and connect nation-based nodes just as ARPANET did for university-based nodes. Many of the open-source projects participating will not themselves have a single primary national presence, spanning many jurisdictions and participating as a transnational community, to be respected on terms that will in some cases be roughly equal to those of national digital ministries. Consider, for example, the relationship of rough equality between the Ethereum community and the Taiwanese Ministry of Digital Affairs.
-Exclusively high-level government-to-government relationships are severely limited by the broader state of current international relations. Many of the countries where the internet has flourished have at-times had troubled relationships with other countries where it has flourished. Many civil actors have stronger transnational relationships than their governments would agree to supporting at an intergovernmental level, mirroring consistent historical patterns where civil connections through, for example, religion and advocacy of human rights have created a stronger foundation for cooperation than international relations alone. Technology, for better or worse, often crosses borders and boundaries of ideology more easily than treaties can be negotiated. For example, web3 communities and civic technology organizations like g0v and RadicalxChange have significant presences even in countries that are not widely understood as "democratic" in their national politics. Similar patterns at larger scales have been central to the transnational environmental, human rights, religious and other movements.[^Wendt]
+Exclusively high-level government-to-government relationships are severely limited by the broader state of current international relations. Many of the countries where the internet has flourished have at times had troubled relationships with other countries where it has flourished. Many civil actors have stronger transnational relationships than their governments would agree to support at an intergovernmental level, mirroring consistent historical patterns where civil connections through, for example, religion and advocacy of human rights have created a stronger foundation for cooperation than international relations alone. Technology, for better or worse, often crosses borders and boundaries of ideology more easily than treaties can be negotiated. For example, web3 communities and civic technology organizations like g0v and RadicalxChange have significant presences even in countries that are not widely understood as "democratic" in their national politics. Similar patterns at larger scales have been central to the transnational environmental, human rights, religious and other movements.[^Wendt]
-While there is no necessary path from such interactions to broader democratization, it would also be an important mistake to miss the opportunity to expand the scope of interoperation in areas where it is possible while waiting for full government-to-government alignment. In her book *A New World Order*, leading international relations scholar Anne-Marie Slaughter sketched how such transnational policy and civil networks will increasingly complement and collaborate with governments around the world and form a fabric of transnational collaboration.[^Slaughter] This fabric or network could be effective than current international bodies like the United Nations. As such we should expect (implicit) support for these kinds of initiatives to be as important to the role of digital ministries as are their direct relationships with one another.
+While there is no necessary path from such interactions to broader democratization, it would also be an important mistake to miss the opportunity to expand the scope of interoperation in areas where it is possible while waiting for full government-to-government alignment. In her book *A New World Order*, leading international relations scholar Anne-Marie Slaughter sketched how such transnational policy and civil networks will increasingly complement and collaborate with governments around the world and form a fabric of transnational collaboration.[^Slaughter] This fabric or network could be more effective than current international bodies like the United Nations. As such we should expect (implicit) support for these kinds of initiatives to be as important to the role of digital ministries as are their direct relationships with one another.
[^Wendt]: Alexander Wendt, *Social Theory of International Politics* (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999). For a recent case study of the role of religion in Middle East cooperation, see Johnnie Moore, "Evangelical Track II Diplomacy in Arab and Israeli Peacemaking", Liberty University dissertation (2024).
[^Slaughter]: Anne-Marie Slaughter, *A New World Order* (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). This book has a special place in one of our hearts, as obtaining a prerelease signed copy was the first birthday present one author gave to the woman who became his wife.
+Some of the transnational networks that will form the key complements to digital ministries may be academic collaborations. Yet the element of the digital ecosystem most neglected by governments today is not academia, which still receives billions of dollars of research support. Instead, it is the largely ignored world of open-source and other non-profit, mission-driven technology developers. As we have extensively discussed, these already provide the backbone of much of the global technology stack. Yet they receive virtually no measurable financial support from governments and very little from charities, despite their work belonging (mostly) fully to the public domain and their being developed mostly in the public interest.
-Some of the transnational networks that will form the key complements to digital ministries may be academic collaborations. Yet the element of the digital ecosystem most neglected by governments today is not academia, which still receives billions of dollars of research support. Instead, it is the largely ignored world of open source and other non-profit, mission-driven technology developers. As we have extensively discussed, these already provide the backbone of much of the global technology stack. Yet they receive virtually no measurable financial support from governments and very little from charities, despite their work belonging (mostly) fully to the public domain and their being developed mostly in the public interest.
-
-Furthermore, this sector is in many ways better suited to the development of infrastructure than academic research, much as public infrastructure in the physical world is generally not built by academia. Academic research is heavily constrained by disciplinary foci and boundaries that civil infrastructure that is broadly usable is unlikely to respect. Academic careers depend on citation, credit and novelty in a way that is unlikely to align with the best aspirations for infrastructure, which often can and should be invisible, "boring" and as easily interoperable with (rather than "novel" in contrast to) other infrastructure as possible. Academic research often focuses on a degree and disciplinary style of rigor and persuasiveness that differs in kind from the ideal user experience. While public support for academic research is crucial and, in some areas, academic projects can contribute to ⿻ infrastructure, governments and charities should not primarily look to the academic research sector. And while academic research receives hundreds of billions of dollars in funding globally annually, open source communities have likely received less than two billion dollars in their entire history, accounting for known sources as we illustrate in Figure B. Many of these concerns have been studied and highlighted by the "[decentralized science](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-03642-9)" movement.[^DeSci]
+Furthermore, this sector is in many ways better suited to the development of infrastructure than academic research, much as public infrastructure in the physical world is generally not built by academia. Academic research is heavily constrained by disciplinary foci and boundaries that civil infrastructure that is broadly usable is unlikely to respect. Academic careers depend on citation, credit, and novelty in a way that is unlikely to align with the best aspirations for infrastructure, which often can and should be invisible, "boring" and as easily interoperable with (rather than "novel" in contrast to) other infrastructure as possible. Academic research often focuses on a degree and disciplinary style of rigor and persuasiveness that differs in kind from the ideal user experience. While public support for academic research is crucial and, in some areas, academic projects can contribute to ⿻ infrastructure, governments and charities should not primarily look to the academic research sector. And while academic research receives hundreds of billions of dollars in funding globally annually, open-source communities have likely received less than two billion dollars in their entire history, accounting for known sources as we illustrate in Figure B. Many of these concerns have been studied and highlighted by the "[decentralized science](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-03642-9)" movement.[^DeSci]
-** Figure 7-0-B. Comparing known funding of open source software and venture capital investment. Source: Chart by authors, sources various see footnote.[^Sources] **
+** Figure 7-0-B. Comparing known funding of open-source software and venture capital investment. Source: Chart by authors, sources various see footnote.[^Sources] **
+
@@ -120,16 +121,20 @@ 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 necessary 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 goals 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. 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.
[^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.
+
+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
@@ -138,47 +143,46 @@ 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 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.
[^OCFdiss]: Open Collective Team, "Open Collective Official Statement - OCF Dissolution" February 28, 2024 at https://blog.opencollective.com/open-collective-official-statement-ocf-dissolution/.
-Other organizational forms likely need even further support. Data coalitions that aim to collectively protect the data rights of creators or those with relevantly collective data interests, as we discussed in our [Property and Contract](https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/4-4/eng/?mode=dark) chapter, will need protection similar to unions and other collective bargaining organizations that they not only do not have at present but which many jurisdictions (like the EU) may effectively prevent them from having, given their extreme emphasis on individual rights in data. Just as labor law evolved to empower collective bargaining for workers, law will have to evolve to allow data workers to collectively exercise their rights in order to avoid either their being disadvantaged relative to concentrated model builders or so disparate as to offer insuperable barriers to ambitious data collaboration.
+Other organizational forms likely need even further support. Data coalitions that aim to collectively protect the data rights of creators or those with relevantly collective data interests, as we discussed in our [Property and Contract](https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/4-4/eng/?mode=dark) chapter, will need protection similar to unions and other collective bargaining organizations that they not only do not have at present but which many jurisdictions (like the EU) may effectively prevent them from having, given their extreme emphasis on individual rights in data. Just as labor law evolved to empower collective bargaining for workers, the law will have to evolve to allow data workers to collectively exercise their rights in order to avoid either their being disadvantaged relative to concentrated model builders or so disparate as to offer insuperable barriers to ambitious data collaboration.
-Beyond organizational forms, legal and regulatory changes will be critical to empowering a fair and productive use of data for shared goals. Traditional intellectual property regimes are highly rigid, focused on the degree of "transformativeness" of a use that risk either subjecting all model development to severe and unworkable limitations or depriving creators of the moral and financial rights they need to sustain their work that is so critical to the function of these models. New standards need to be developed by judges, legislators and regulators in close collaboration with technologists and publics that account for the complex and partial way in which a variety of data informs the output of models and ensures that the associated value is "back-propagated" to the data creators just as it is to the intermediate data created within the models in the process of training them.[^Holland] New rules like these will build on the reforms to property rights that empowered the re-purposing of radio spectrum and should be developed for a variety of other digital assets as we discussed in our [Property and Contract](https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/4-4/eng/?mode=dark) chapter.
+Beyond organizational forms, legal and regulatory changes will be critical to empowering a fair and productive use of data for shared goals. Traditional intellectual property regimes are highly rigid, focused on the degree of "transformativeness" of a use that risk either subjecting all model development to severe and unworkable limitations or depriving creators of the moral and financial rights they need to sustain their work that is so critical to the function of these models. New standards need to be developed by judges, legislators, and regulators in close collaboration with technologists and publics that account for the complex and partial way in which a variety of data informs the output of models and ensures that the associated value is "back-propagated" to the data creators just as it is to the intermediate data created within the models in the process of training them.[^Holland] New rules like these will build on the reforms to property rights that empowered the re-purposing of radio spectrum and should be developed for a variety of other digital assets as we discussed in our [Property and Contract](https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/4-4/eng/?mode=dark) chapter.
[^Holland]: An interesting line of research suggesting possibility here is that of neural network and genetic algorithm pioneer John H. Holland, who tried to draw direct analogies between networks of firms in an economy linked by markets and neural networks. John H. Holland and John M. Miller, "Artificial Adaptive Agents in Economic Theory", *American Economic Review* 81, no. 2 (1991): 365-370.
-Furthermore, if properly concerted with such a vision, antitrust laws, competition rules, interoperability mandates and financial regulations have an important role to play in encouraging the emergence of new organizational forms and the adaptation of existing ones. Antitrust and competition law is intended to ensure concentrated commercial interests cannot abuse the power they accumulate over customers, suppliers and workers. Giving direct control over a firm to these counterparties is a natural way to achieve this objective without the usual downsides in competition policy of inhibiting scaled collaboration. ⿻ technologies offer natural means to instantiate meaningful voice for these stakeholders as we discussed in the [Workplace](https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/6-1/eng/?mode=dark) chapter. It would be natural for antitrust authorities to increasingly consider mandating such governance reforms as alternative remedies to anticompetitive conduct or mergers and to consider governance representation as a mitigating factor in evaluating the necessity of punitive action.[^econdem]
+Furthermore, if properly concerted with such a vision, antitrust laws, competition rules, interoperability mandates, and financial regulations have an important role to play in encouraging the emergence of new organizational forms and the adaptation of existing ones. Antitrust and competition law is intended to ensure concentrated commercial interests cannot abuse the power they accumulate over customers, suppliers, and workers. Giving direct control over a firm to these counterparties is a natural way to achieve this objective without the usual downsides in competition policy of inhibiting scaled collaboration. ⿻ technologies offer natural means to instantiate meaningful voice for these stakeholders as we discussed in the [Workplace](https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/6-1/eng/?mode=dark) chapter. It would be natural for antitrust authorities to increasingly consider mandating such governance reforms as alternative remedies to anticompetitive conduct or mergers and to consider governance representation as a mitigating factor in evaluating the necessity of punitive action.[^econdem]
[^econdem]: Hitzig et al., op. cit.
-Mandating interoperability, in cooperation with standard setting processes that develop the meaning and shape of these standards, is a critical lever to make such standards workable and avoid dominance by an illegitimate private monopoly. Financial regulations help define what kinds of governance are acceptable in various jurisdictions and have unfortunately, especially in the US and UK, weighed heavily towards damaging and monopolistic one-share-one-vote rules. Financial regulatory reform should encourage experimentation with more inclusive governance systems such as Quadratic and other ⿻ voting forms that account for and address concentrations of power continuously, rather than offsetting the tendencies of one-share-one-vote to raiding with bespoke provisions like "poison pills".[^QVcorp] They should also accommodate and support worker, supplier, environmental counterparty and customer voice and steer concentrated asset holders who might otherwise have systemic monopolistic effects towards employing similar tools.
+Mandating interoperability, in cooperation with standard-setting processes that develop the meaning and shape of these standards, is a critical lever to make such standards workable and avoid dominance by an illegitimate private monopoly. Financial regulations help define what kinds of governance are acceptable in various jurisdictions and have unfortunately, especially in the US and UK, weighed heavily towards damaging and monopolistic one-share-one-vote rules. Financial regulatory reform should encourage experimentation with more inclusive governance systems such as Quadratic and other ⿻ voting forms that account for and address concentrations of power continuously, rather than offsetting the tendencies of one-share-one-vote to raiding with bespoke provisions like "poison pills".[^QVcorp] They should also accommodate and support worker, supplier, environmental counterparty, and customer voice and steer concentrated asset holders who might otherwise have systemic monopolistic effects towards employing similar tools.
[^QVcorp]: Eric A. Posner and E. Glen Weyl, "Quadratic Voting as Efficient Corporate Governance", *University of Chicago Law Review* 81, no. 1 (2014): 241-272.
### ⿻ taxes
-However, rules, laws and regulations can only offer support to positive frameworks that arise from investment, innovation and development. Without those to complement, they will always be on the defense, playing catch up to a world defined by private innovation. Thus, public and multisectoral investment is the core they must complement and making such investments obviously requires revenue, thus naturally raising the question of how it can be raised to make ⿻ infrastructure self-sustaining. While directly charging for services largely reverts to the traps of the private sector, relying primarily on "general revenue" is unlikely to be sustainable or legitimate. Furthermore, there are many cases where taxes can themselves help encourage ⿻. It is to taxes of this sort that we now turn our attention.
+However, rules, laws, and regulations can only offer support to positive frameworks that arise from investment, innovation, and development. Without those to complement, they will always be on the defense, playing catch up to a world defined by private innovation. Thus, public and multisectoral investment is the core they must complement and making such investments obviously requires revenue, thus naturally raising the question of how it can be raised to make ⿻ infrastructure self-sustaining. While directly charging for services largely reverts to the traps of the private sector, relying primarily on "general revenue" is unlikely to be sustainable or legitimate. Furthermore, there are many cases where taxes can themselves help encourage ⿻. It is to taxes of this sort that we now turn our attention.
-The digital sector has proven one of the most challenging to tax, because many of the relevant sources of value are created in a geographically ambiguous way or are otherwise intangible. For example, data and networks of collaboration and know-how among employees at companies, often spanning national borders, can often be booked in countries with low corporate tax rates even if they mostly occur in jurisdictions with higher rates. Many free services come with an implicit bargain of surveillance, leading neither the service nor the implicit labor to be taxed as it would be if this price were explicit. While [recent reforms](https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2024/02/oecd-minimum-tax-rate/) to create a minimum corporate tax rate agreed by the G20 and Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development are likely to help, they are not tightly adaptive to the digital environment and thus will likely only partly address the challenge.
+The digital sector has proven one of the most challenging to tax because many of the relevant sources of value are created in a geographically ambiguous way or are otherwise intangible. For example, data and networks of collaboration and know-how among employees at companies, often spanning national borders, can often be booked in countries with low corporate tax rates even if they mostly occur in jurisdictions with higher rates. Many free services come with an implicit bargain of surveillance, leading neither the service nor the implicit labor to be taxed as it would be if this price were explicit. While [recent reforms](https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2024/02/oecd-minimum-tax-rate/) to create a minimum corporate tax rate agreed by the G20 and Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development are likely to help, they are not tightly adaptive to the digital environment and thus will likely only partly address the challenge.
-Yet while from one side these present a challenge, on the other hand they offer an opportunity for taxes to be raised in an explicitly transnational way that can accrue to supporting ⿻ infrastructure rather than, in a fairly arbitrary way, to wherever the corporation may choose to domicile. Ideally such taxes should aim to satisfy as fully as possible several criteria:
+Yet while from one side these present a challenge, on the other hand they offer an opportunity for taxes to be raised in an explicitly transnational way that can accrue to supporting ⿻ infrastructure rather than, in a fairly arbitrary way, to wherever the corporation may choose to domicile. Ideally, such taxes should aim to satisfy as fully as possible several criteria:
1. Directly ⿻ (D⿻): Digital taxes should ideally not merely raise revenue, but directly encourage or enact ⿻ aims themselves.[^Ext] This ensures that the taxes are not a drag on the system, but part of the solution.
2. Jurisdictional alignment (JA): The jurisdictional network in which taxes are and can naturally be raised should correspond to the jurisdiction that disposes of these taxes. This ensures that the coalition required to enact the taxes is similar to that required to establish the cooperation that disposes of the revenue.
-3. Revenue alignment (RA): The sources of revenue should correspond to the value generated by the shared value created using the revenue, ensuring that those disposing of the revenue have a natural interest in the success of their mission. It also ensures that those who pay for the tax generally benefit from the goods created with it, lessening political opposition to the tax.
-4. Financial adequacy (FA): The tax should be sufficient to fund the required investment.
+3. Revenue alignment (RA): The sources of revenue should correspond to the value generated by the shared value created by using the revenue, ensuring that those disposing of the revenue have a natural interest in the success of their mission. It also ensures that those who pay for the tax generally benefit from the goods created with it, lessening political opposition to the tax.
+4. Financial adequacy (FA): The tax should be sufficient to fund the required investment.
-
-The principle of "circular investment" that we described in our [Social Markets](https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/5-7/eng/?mode=dark) chapter suggests that eventually they can all be generally jointly satisfied. The value created by supermodular shared goods eventually must accrue somewhere with submodular returns, which can and should be recycled back to support those values sources. Extracting this value can generally be done in a way that reduces market power and thus actually encourages assets to be more fully used.
+The principle of "circular investment" that we described in our [Social Markets](https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/5-7/eng/?mode=dark) chapter suggests that eventually they can all be generally jointly satisfied. The value created by supermodular shared goods eventually must accrue somewhere with submodular returns, which can and should be recycled back to support those values' sources. Extracting this value can generally be done in a way that reduces market power and thus actually encourages assets to be more fully used.
Despite this theoretical ideal, in practice identifying practicable taxes to achieve it is likely to be as much a process of technological trial and error as any of the technological challenges we discuss in the Democracy part of the book. Yet there are a number of promising recent proposals that seem plausibly close to fulfilling many of these objectives as we iterate further:
1. Concentrated computational asset tax: Application of a progressive (either in rate or by giving a generous exemption) common ownership tax to digital assets such as computation, storage, and some kinds of data.[^Siegmann]
2. Digital land tax: Taxing the commercialization or holding of scarce digital space, including taxes on online advertising, holding of spectrum licenses and web address space in a more competitive way and, eventually, taxing exclusive spaces in virtual worlds.[^Romer]
-3. Implicit data/attention exchange tax: Taxes on implicit data or attention exchanges involved in "free" services online, which would otherwise typically accrue labor and value added taxes.
-4. Digital asset taxes: Common ownership taxes on pure-digital assets, such as digital currencies, utility tokens and non-fungible token.
+3. Implicit data/attention exchange tax: Taxes on implicit data or attention exchanges involved in "free" services online, which would otherwise typically accrue labor and value-added taxes.
+4. Digital asset taxes: Common ownership taxes on pure-digital assets, such as digital currencies, utility tokens, and non-fungible tokens.
5. Commons-derived data tax: Profits earned from models trained on unlicensed, commons-derived data could be taxed.
6. Flexible/gig work taxes: Profits of companies that primarily employ "gig workers" and thus avoid many of the burdens of traditional labor law could be taxed.[^Gray]
@@ -187,19 +191,16 @@ Despite this theoretical ideal, in practice identifying practicable taxes to ach
[^Gray]: Gray and Suri, op. cit.
-While a much more detailed policy analysis would be needed to comprehensively "score" these taxes according to our criteria above, a few illustrations will hopefully illustrate the design thinking pattern behind these suggestions. A concentrated computational asset tax aims simultaneously to encourage more complete use of digital assets (as any common ownership tax will), deter concentrated cloud ownership (thus increasing competition while decreasing potential security threats) and to drag on the incentives for accumulating the kind of computational resources that may allow training of potentially dangerous-scale models outside public oversight, all instantiating D⿻. Most forms of digital land tax would naturally accrue not to any nation state, but to the transnational entities that support internet infrastructure, access and content achieving JA. An implicit data exchange tax would provide a clearer signal of the true value being created in digital economies and encourage infrastructure facilitating this to maximize that value, achieving RA.
+While a much more detailed policy analysis would be needed to comprehensively "score" these taxes according to our criteria above, a few illustrations will hopefully illustrate the design thinking pattern behind these suggestions. A concentrated computational asset tax aims simultaneously to encourage more complete use of digital assets (as any common ownership tax will), deter concentrated cloud ownership (thus increasing competition while decreasing potential security threats), and to drag on the incentives for accumulating the kind of computational resources that may allow training of potentially dangerous-scale models outside public oversight, all instantiating D⿻. Most forms of digital land tax would naturally accrue not to any nation-state, but to the transnational entities that support internet infrastructure, access and content achieving JA. An implicit data exchange tax would provide a clearer signal of the true value being created in digital economies and encourage infrastructure facilitating this to maximize that value, achieving RA.
Of course, these are just the first suggestions and much more analysis and imagination will help expand the space of possibilities. However, given that these examples line up fairly closely with the primary business models in today's digital world (viz. cloud, advertising, digital asset sales, etc.) it seems plausible that, with a bit of elaboration, they could be used to raise a significant fraction of value flowing through that world and thus achieve the FA necessary to support a scale of investment that would fundamentally transform the digital economy.
-
-
-
-While this may seem a political non-starter, an illuminating precedent is the gas tax in the US, which while initially opposed by the trucking industry was eventually embraced by that industry when policymakers agreed to set aside the funds to support the building of road infrastructure.[^Gas] Though the tax obviously put a direct drain on the industry, its indirect support for the building of roads was seen to more than offset this by providing the substrate truckers needed for their work. Some would, rightly, object that there may have been even better targeted taxes for this purpose (such as road congestion charges), but gas taxes also carried ancillary benefits in discouraging pollution and were generally well-targeted at the primary users of roads at a time when charging for congestion might have been costly.
+While this may seem a political non-starter, an illuminating precedent is the gas tax in the US, which while initially opposed by the trucking industry was eventually embraced by that industry when policymakers agreed to set aside the funds to support the building of road infrastructure.[^Gas] Though the tax obviously put a direct drain on the industry, its indirect support for the building of roads was seen to more than offset this by providing the substrate truckers needed for their work. Some would, rightly, object that there may have been even better-targeted taxes for this purpose (such as road congestion charges), but gas taxes also carried ancillary benefits in discouraging pollution and were generally well-targeted at the primary users of roads at a time when charging for congestion might have been costly.
[^Gas]: John Chynoweth Burnham, "The Gasoline Tax and the Automobile Revolution" *Mississippi Valley Historical Review* 48, no. 3 (1961): 435-459.
-It is just possible to imagine assembling today an appropriate coalition of businesses and governments to support such an ambitious set of digital infrastructure supporting taxes. Doing so would require correct set asides of raised funds, more clever tax instruments harnessing the abundant data online, sophisticated, and low friction means of collecting taxes, careful harnessing of appropriate but not universal jurisdictions to impose and collect the taxes in a way that cajoles others to follow along and, of course, a good deal of public support and pressure as we discuss below. Effective policy leadership and public mobilization should, hopefully, be able to achieve these and create the conditions for supporting ⿻ infrastructure.
+It is just possible to imagine assembling today an appropriate coalition of businesses and governments to support such an ambitious set of digital infrastructure supporting taxes. Doing so would require correct set-asides of raised funds, more clever tax instruments harnessing the abundant data online, sophisticated, and low friction means of collecting taxes, careful harnessing of appropriate but not universal jurisdictions to impose and collect the taxes in a way that cajoles others to follow along and, of course, a good deal of public support and pressure as we discuss below. Effective policy leadership and public mobilization should, hopefully, be able to achieve these and create the conditions for supporting ⿻ infrastructure.
### Sustaining our future
@@ -209,17 +210,19 @@ To embody ⿻, the network of organizations that are supported by such resources
Different elements of our vision require very different degrees of government engagement. Many of the most intimate technologies, for example, such as [immersive shared reality](https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/5-2/eng/?mode=dark) intend to operate at relatively intimate scales and thus should be naturally developed in a relatively "private" way (both in funding models and in data structures), with some degree of public support and regulation steering them away from potential pitfalls. The most ambitious reforms to the structure of markets, on the other hand, will require reshaping basic governmental and legal structures, in many cases cutting across national boundaries. Development of the fundamental protocols on which all of this work rests will require perhaps the greatest degree of coordination but also a great deal of experimentation, fully harnessing the ARPA coopetitive structure as nodes in the network (such as India and Taiwan) compete to export their frameworks into global standards. An effective fabric of ⿻ law, regulation, investment, and control rights will, as much as possible, ensure the existence of a diversity of national and transnational entities capable of matching this variety of needs and deftly match taxes and legal authorities to empower these to serve their relevant roles while interoperating.
-Luckily, while they are dramatically underfunded, often imperfectly coordinated and lack the ambitious mission we have outlined here, many of the existing transnational structures for digital and internet governance have roughly these features. In short, while specific new capabilities need to be added, funding improved, networks and connections enhanced and public engagement augmented, the internet is already, as imagined by the ARPANET founders, ⿻ in its structure and governance. More than anything, what needs to be done is build the public understanding of and engagement with this work necessary to uplift, defend and support it.
+Luckily, while they are dramatically underfunded, often imperfectly coordinated, and lack the ambitious mission we have outlined here, many of the existing transnational structures for digital and internet governance have roughly these features. In short, while specific new capabilities need to be added, funding improved, networks and connections enhanced, and public engagement augmented, the internet is already, as imagined by the ARPANET founders, ⿻ in its structure and governance. More than anything, what needs to be done is build the public understanding of and engagement with this work necessary to uplift, defend, and support it.
### Organizing change
-Of course, achieving that is an enormous undertaking. The ideas discussed in this chapter, and throughout this book, are deeply technical and even the fairly dry discussion here barely skims the surface. Very few will deeply engage even with the ideas in this book, much less the much farther ranging work that will need to be done both in the policy arena and far beyond it in the wide range of research, development and deployment work that policy world will empower.
+Of course, achieving that is an enormous undertaking. The ideas discussed in this chapter, and throughout this book, are deeply technical and even the fairly dry discussion here barely skims the surface. Very few will deeply engage even with the ideas in this book, much less the much farther-ranging work that will need to be done both in the policy arena and far beyond it in the wide range of research, development, and deployment work that policy world will empower.
+
+
+It is precisely for this reason that "policy" is just one small slice of the work required to build ⿻. For every policy leader, there will have to be dozens, probably hundreds of people building the visions they help articulate. And for each one of those, there will need to be hundreds who, while not focused on the technical concerns, share a general aversion to the default Libertarian and Technocratic directions technology might otherwise go and are broadly supportive of the vision of ⿻. They will have to understand it at more of an emotive, visceral, and/or ideological level, rather than a technical or intellectual one, and build networks of moral support, lived perspectives, and adoption for those at the core of the policy and technical landscape.
-It is precisely for this reason that "policy" is just one small slice of the work required to build ⿻. For every policy leader, there will have to be dozens, probably hundreds of people building the visions they help articulate. And for each one of those, there will need to be hundreds who, while not focused on the technical concerns, share a general aversion to the default Libertarian and Technocratic directions technology might otherwise go and are broadly supportive of the vision of ⿻. They will have to understand it at more of an emotive, visceral and/or ideological level, rather than a technical or intellectual one, and build networks of moral support, lived perspectives and adoption for those at the core of the policy and technical landscape.
+For them to do so, ⿻ will have to go far beyond a set of creative technologies and intellectual analyses. It will have to become a broadly understood cultural current and social movement, like environmentalism, AI, and crypto, grounded in a deep, both intellectual and social, body of fundamental research, developed and practiced in a diverse and organized set of enterprises and supported by organized political interests. The path there includes, but moves far beyond, policymakers to the world of activism, culture, business, and research. Thus, we conclude by calling on each of you who touches any of these worlds to join us in the project of making this a reality.
-For them to do so, ⿻ will have to go far beyond a set of creative technologies and intellectual analyses. It will have to become a broadly understood cultural current and social movement, like environmentalism, AI and crypto, grounded in a deep, both intellectual and social, body of fundamental research, developed and practiced in a diverse and organized set of enterprises and supported by organized political interests. The path there includes, but moves far beyond, policymakers to the world of activism, culture, business, and research. Thus, we conclude by calling on each of you who touches any of these worlds to join us in the project of making this a reality.
[^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.
diff --git a/contents/english/7-1-conclusion.md b/contents/english/7-1-conclusion.md
index 67e0f683..7e208e22 100644
--- a/contents/english/7-1-conclusion.md
+++ b/contents/english/7-1-conclusion.md
@@ -12,29 +12,29 @@ Our concrete aspirations match our ambitious vision. By 2030, ⿻ will be as rec
Technology is the most powerful force transforming our world. Whether or not we understand its inner workings, deploy it tentatively or voraciously, or agree with the companies and policymakers that have shaped its development to date, it remains our single greatest lever to shape our collective future.
-That collective is not simply a group of individuals but a fabric of relationships. Whether you look at it from a scientific, historical, sociological, religious or political point of view, it is increasingly clear that reality is defined not just by who we are, but how we connect.
+That collective is not simply a group of individuals but a fabric of relationships. Whether you look at it from a scientific, historical, sociological, religious, or political point of view, it is increasingly clear that reality is defined not just by who we are, but how we connect.
Technology drives and defines those connections. From the railroad to the telegraph to the telephone to social media connecting us to old kindergarten friends and new like-minded allies to teleconferencing holding businesses and families together during Covid, we have benefited enormously from technology’s capacity to forge and strengthen human connection while honoring our differences.
-Yet, technology has also clearly driven us apart and suppressed our differences. Business models based on a fight for attention have prioritized outrage over curiosity, echo chambers over shared understanding, and proliferated mis- and disinformation. The rapid spread of information online, out of context and against our privacy expectations, has too often eroded our communities, driven out our cultural heritage and created a global monoculture. As a new generation of technologies including GFMs, Web3 and augmented reality spreads through our lives, it promises to radically increase technology’s effects, good and bad.
+Yet, technology has also clearly driven us apart and suppressed our differences. Business models based on a fight for attention have prioritized outrage over curiosity, echo chambers over shared understanding, and proliferated mis- and disinformation. The rapid spread of information online, out of context and against our privacy expectations, has too often eroded our communities, driven out our cultural heritage, and created a global monoculture. As a new generation of technologies including GFMs, Web3, and augmented reality spreads through our lives, it promises to radically increase technology’s effects, good and bad.
-Thus we stand at a crossroads. Technology could drive us apart, sowing chaos and conflict that bring down social order. It could suppress the human diversity that is its lifeblood, homogenizing us in a singular technical vision. Or it could dramatically enrich our diversity while strengthening the ties across it, harnessing and sustaining the potential energy of ⿻.
+Thus we stand at a crossroads. Technology could drive us apart, sowing chaos and conflict that bring down the social order. It could suppress the human diversity that is its lifeblood, homogenizing us in a singular technical vision. Or it could dramatically enrich our diversity while strengthening the ties across it, harnessing and sustaining the potential energy of ⿻.
-Some would seek to avoid this choice by slamming on the breaks, decelerating technological progress. Yet, while of course some directions are unwise and there are limits to how rapidly we should proceed into the unknown, the dynamics of competition and geopolitics makes simply slowing progress unlikely to be sustainable. Instead, we face a choice of directions more than velocity.
+Some would seek to avoid this choice by slamming on the breaks, decelerating technological progress. Yet, while of course some directions are unwise and there are limits to how rapidly we should proceed into the unknown, the dynamics of competition and geopolitics make simply slowing progress unlikely to be sustainable. Instead, we face a choice of directions more than velocity.
-Should we, as Libertarians like Peter Thiel, Marc Andreesen and Balaji Srinavasan would have us do, liberate individuals to be atomistic agents, free of constraints or responsibilities? Should we, as Technocrats like Sam Altman and Reid Hoffman would have us do, allow technologists to solve our problems, plan our future and distribute to us the material comfort it creates?
+Should we, as Libertarians like Peter Thiel, Marc Andreesen, and Balaji Srinivasan would have us do, liberate individuals to be atomistic agents, free of constraints or responsibilities? Should we, as Technocrats like Sam Altman and Reid Hoffman would have us do, allow technologists to solve our problems, plan our future, and distribute to us the material comfort it creates?
-We say, loudly and clearly, neither! Both chaos and top-down order are the antitheses not just of democracy and freedom, but of all life, complexity and beauty in human society and nature. Life and ⿻ thrive in the narrow corridor on the "edge of chaos". For life on this planet to survive and thrive, it must be the central mission of technology and politics to widen this corridor, to steer us constantly back towards that edge of chaos where growth and ⿻ are possible. That is the aspiration and the imperative of ⿻.
+We say, loudly and clearly, neither! Both chaos and top-down order are the antitheses not just of democracy and freedom, but of all life, complexity, and beauty in human society and nature. Life and ⿻ thrive in the narrow corridor on the "edge of chaos". For life on this planet to survive and thrive, it must be the central mission of technology and politics to widen this corridor, to steer us constantly back towards that edge of chaos where growth and ⿻ are possible. That is the aspiration and the imperative of ⿻.
-⿻ is thus the third way beyond Libertarianism and Technocracy, just as the life is the third way beyond rigid order and chaos. It is a movement we have perhaps three to five years to set in motion. Within that time frame, a critical mass of the technology that people and companies use every day will have become deeply dependent on "AI" and "the metaverse". At that point, we won’t be able to reverse the *fait accompli* that Technocracy and Libertarianism have generated for us. But between now and then, we can mobilize to re-chart the course: toward a relationship-centered, empowering digital democracy in which diverse groups of people, precisely because they do not agree, are able to cooperate and collaborate to constantly push our imaginations and aspirations forward.
+⿻ is thus the third way beyond Libertarianism and Technocracy, just as life is the third way beyond rigid order and chaos. It is a movement we have perhaps three to five years to set in motion. Within that time frame, a critical mass of the technology that people and companies use every day will have become deeply dependent on "AI" and "the metaverse". At that point, we won’t be able to reverse the *fait accompli* that Technocracy and Libertarianism have generated for us. But between now and then, we can mobilize to re-chart the course: toward a relationship-centered, empowering digital democracy in which diverse groups of people, precisely because they do not agree, are able to cooperate and collaborate to constantly push our imaginations and aspirations forward.
-Such a pivot will take a whole-of-society mobilization. Businesses, governments, universities, and civil society organizations must demand that our technology deepen and broaden our connections across the many forms of diversity, show us that this is possible, build the tools we need to achieve it and make it a reality. That is the key, and the only path, to strengthening human stability, prosperity, and flourishing into the future. For all that it offers, the internet’s potential for truly transformative progress has never materialized. If we want to realize that potential, we have a brief window of opportunity to act.
+Such a pivot will take a whole-of-society mobilization. Businesses, governments, universities, and civil society organizations must demand that our technology deepen and broaden our connections across the many forms of diversity, show us that this is possible, build the tools we need to achieve it, and make it a reality. That is the key, and the only path, to strengthening human stability, prosperity, and flourishing into the future. For all that it offers, the internet’s potential for truly transformative progress has never materialized. If we want to realize that potential, we have a brief window of opportunity to act.
### Promise of ⿻
-Over the last half century, most Western liberal democracies have learned to be helpless in the face of technology. They are intrigued by it and alternately delighted and frustrated by it, but tend to assume that it emerges inexorably, like modernity itself, instead of as the sum of the choices of small groups of engineers. Most citizens in these polities do not believe “we the people” have any ability, much less any right, to influence the direction of the platforms that are the operating system of our lives.
+Over the last half-century, most Western liberal democracies have learned to be helpless in the face of technology. They are intrigued by it and alternately delighted and frustrated by it, but tend to assume that it emerges inexorably, like modernity itself, instead of as the sum of the choices of small groups of engineers. Most citizens in these polities do not believe “we the people” have any ability, much less any right, to influence the direction of the platforms that are the operating system of our lives.
But we do have the right, and even the duty, to demand better. Some technology pulls us apart and flattens our differences; other technology brings us together and celebrates them. Some fuels our resentment and obedience, some helps us find interdependence. If we mobilize to demand the latter, _⿻ technologies_ that are designed to help us collaborate across difference, we can re-engineer that operating system.
@@ -43,41 +43,41 @@ We see our opportunity to act across three horizons: the immediate, the intermed
#### Immediate horizon
-Some of this change is ripe for action today. Anyone reading this book can explain, recommend and tell its stories to friends and help spread various surrounding media content. Anyone can adopt a range of tools already widely available from meetings in immersive shared reality to open source tools for making collective decisions with their communities.
+Some of this change is ripe for action today. Anyone reading this book can explain, recommend, and tell its stories to friends and help spread various surrounding media content. Anyone can adopt a range of tools already widely available from meetings in immersive shared reality to open-source tools for making collective decisions with their communities.
-Anyone can support political leaders and organize in political movements around the policy agenda we developed in the previous chapter, and especially political and policy leaders can work together to implement these ideas, as well as near-term political reforms in a ⿻ direction such as ranked-choice or approval voting. Anyone can choose to lean the diet of technology they use towards open source tools and those of companies that adopt and incorporate ⿻ in their work. Business leaders, engineers, product managers at these companies can both build ⿻ technologies into their products in modest ways, employ these tools in their productivity workflows, receive more effective feedback from customers and support public policies that embody them.
+Anyone can support political leaders and organize in political movements around the policy agenda we developed in the previous chapter, and especially political and policy leaders can work together to implement these ideas, as well as near-term political reforms in a ⿻ direction such as ranked-choice or approval voting. Anyone can choose to lean the diet of technology they use towards open-source tools and those of companies that adopt and incorporate ⿻ in their work. Business leaders, engineers, and product managers at these companies can both build ⿻ technologies into their products in modest ways, employ these tools in their productivity workflows, receive more effective feedback from customers and support public policies that embody them.
Academics can study ⿻ technologies and their impact on the ground today. They can devise rigorous measures to help us know what truly works. They can address key open questions in a range of fields that will allow the design of the next generation of ⿻ technologies and form relationships and collaborations across academic institutions through networks like the Plurality Institute. They can adopt ⿻ in the dissemination of research and peer review.
-Cultural leaders, artists, journalists and other communicators can tell the stories of the ⿻ movement, like Oscar-winner Director [Cynthia Wade](https://www.cynthiawade.com/) and Emmy-winning Producer [Teri Whitcraft](https://resolutionproject.org/team/teri-whitcraft/) are doing in a forthcoming documentary. They can incorporate ⿻ in their creative practice, as this book did and as we saw Mat Dryhurst and Holly Herndon doing. They can immerse citizens in constructive imagining of a more ⿻ future, like Miraikan in Tokyo does.
+Cultural leaders, artists, journalists, and other communicators can tell the stories of the ⿻ movement, like Oscar-winner Director [Cynthia Wade](https://www.cynthiawade.com/) and Emmy-winning Producer [Teri Whitcraft](https://resolutionproject.org/team/teri-whitcraft/) are doing in a forthcoming documentary. They can incorporate ⿻ in their creative practice, as this book did and as we saw Mat Dryhurst and Holly Herndon doing. They can immerse citizens in constructive imagining of a more ⿻ future, like Miraikan in Tokyo does.
#### Intermediate horizon
-With more systemic imagination and ambition, there are opportunities to pursue ⿻ across a more intermediate horizon, reinventing institutions to include more diverse voices, build deeper connections and foster the regeneration of more diversity. Anyone can become part of local ⿻ communities around the world, telling in a wide variety of idioms, languages and forms the potential for a more ⿻ future and inviting friends to participate in co-creating it. Anyone can join what will be increasingly organized political movements explicitly dedicated to ⿻, contribute to a growing range of ⿻ civil and charitable causes, attend a growing number of hackathons and ideathons that help address the local concerns of diverse communities using ⿻.
+With more systemic imagination and ambition, there are opportunities to pursue ⿻ across a more intermediate horizon, reinventing institutions to include more diverse voices, build deeper connections, and foster the regeneration of more diversity. Anyone can become part of local ⿻ communities around the world, telling in a wide variety of idioms, languages, and forms the potential for a more ⿻ future and inviting friends to participate in co-creating it. Anyone can join what will be increasingly organized political movements explicitly dedicated to ⿻, contribute to a growing range of ⿻ civil and charitable causes, attend a growing number of hackathons and ideathons that help address the local concerns of diverse communities using ⿻.
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 practice 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 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, diffusing social and regulatory tension in the process.
-Academics and researchers can form new fields of inquiry around ⿻ and harnessing ⿻ 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.
+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.
-Cultural leaders can reimagine cultural practices harnessing ⿻, creating powerfully empathetic emergent experiences that bridge cultural divides. They can sell this to media organizations that have adopted new business models serving public, civic and business organizations rather than advertisers and end consumers. They can build participatory experiences that extend our ability to jointly design and imagine future, from the concrete design of physical spaces to the detailed interactive back-casting of potential science fiction scenarios.
+Cultural leaders can reimagine cultural practices harnessing ⿻, creating powerfully empathetic emergent experiences that bridge cultural divides. They can sell this to media organizations that have adopted new business models serving public, civic, and business organizations rather than advertisers and end consumers. They can build participatory experiences that extend our ability to jointly design and imagine the future, from the concrete design of physical spaces to the detailed interactive back-casting of potential science fiction scenarios.
#### Transformative horizon
-For those of you with even more expansive vision, we have spent a good deal of this book articulating the kinds of truly transformative ⿻ that could ultimately rewire the way humans communicate and collaborate. This ambition goes to the root of the ⿻ movement’s insight—that personhood, the core unit of democracy, is not merely atomistic or “monistic,” but is also defined by social relationships – and it therefore gives rise to a broader conception of rights, going beyond individual rights to recognize _⿻_ concepts of affiliation, commerce, property, and other building blocks of our society. All these will require fundamental rewriting of a range of technical infrastructures, social relationships and organizing institutions.
+For those of you with even more expansive vision, we have spent a good deal of this book articulating the kinds of truly transformative ⿻ that could ultimately rewire the way humans communicate and collaborate. This ambition goes to the root of the ⿻ movement’s insight—that personhood, the core unit of democracy, is not merely atomistic or “monistic,” but is also defined by social relationships – and it therefore gives rise to a broader conception of rights, going beyond individual rights to recognize _⿻_ concepts of affiliation, commerce, property, and other building blocks of our society. All these will require the fundamental rewriting of a range of technical infrastructures, social relationships, and organizing institutions.
-Such change cannot come directly, but instead must follow a gradual process of transformation, occurring in a range of social sectors that build on one another. To be truly ⿻, these will need to engage and empower people across many lines of difference, which will in turn require that they understand and can articulate what they want from their future. Cultural creation, like those we have discussed above, will have to increasingly manifest ⿻ in its form and substance to make this possible. This can create broad public understanding and expectation of public steering of the direction of technology and diverse social participation its design.
+Such change cannot come directly, but instead must follow a gradual process of transformation, occurring in a range of social sectors that build on one another. To be truly ⿻, these will need to engage and empower people across many lines of difference, which will in turn require that they understand and can articulate what they want from their future. Cultural creation, like those we have discussed above, will have to increasingly manifest ⿻ in its form and substance to make this possible. This can create broad public understanding and expectation of public steering of the direction of technology and diverse social participation in its design.
-This foundation of ⿻ imagination across lines of difference can empower social and political organization around such goals. This in turn can allow political leaders to feature such visions as core to their agendas and to make the implementation in the functioning of governments, in their relationship to each other and private entities and in their policy agenda the creation of ⿻.
+This foundation of ⿻ imagination across lines of difference can empower social and political organization around such goals. This in turn can allow political leaders to feature such visions as core to their agendas and to make the implementation in the functioning of governments, in their relationship to each other and private entities, and in their policy agenda the creation of ⿻.
-Such policies and practices can in turn allow the development of novel technologies basically different, dramatically expanding the scope of the Third Sector and allowing the constant emergence of new social and democratic enterprise transnationally. These emergent enterprises can then take on an increasing range of responsibilities legitimately, given their democratic accountability, and blur the lines of responsibility usually assumed for nation states, building a new ⿻ order.
+Such policies and practices can in turn allow the development of novel technologies to be fundamentally different, dramatically expanding the scope of the Third Sector and allowing the constant emergence of new social and democratic enterprise transnationally. These emergent enterprises can then take on an increasing range of responsibilities legitimately, given their democratic accountability, and blur the lines of responsibility usually assumed for nation-states, building a new ⿻ order.
Such enterprise can thus rely on new institutions of research and teaching that will cross disciplinary boundaries and the boundaries between knowledge creation and deployment, engaging deeply with such emerging social enterprises. That educational sector will continually produce new technologies that push the boundaries of ⿻, helping build the basis of new social enterprises and forming a base of ideas which will in turn support the progress of cultural imagination on which this all rests.
@@ -86,14 +86,16 @@ Thus together culture, politics and activism, business and technology and resear
### Mobilization
-This is why, of course, there can be no top-down, one-size-fits-all path to ⿻. What there can be, however – and soon, if this book has its intended effect – are intersecting circles of people, linked together in groups and individuals loosely federated across the globe, who are committed to ⿻ over its foils: Libertarianism and Technocracy. In charting a third course, pluralists are committed to technology strengthening and diversifying relationships, rather than tearing them down, and regenerating diversity, not fostering conformity. Relationships and the love, loss, adversity and achievement are what makes life, not the violence of the jungle manifested in books like *The Lord of the Flies* or the optimization of undifferentiated data points.[^Lord]
+
+This is why, of course, there can be no top-down, one-size-fits-all path to ⿻. What there can be, however – and soon, if this book has its intended effect -- are intersecting circles of people, linked together in groups and individuals loosely federated across the globe, who are committed to ⿻ over its foils: Libertarianism and Technocracy. In charting a third course, pluralists are committed to technology strengthening and diversifying relationships, rather than tearing them down, and regenerating diversity, not fostering conformity. Relationships and love, loss, adversity, and achievement are what makes life, not the violence of the jungle manifested in books like *The Lord of the Flies* or the optimization of undifferentiated data points.[^Lord]
+
[^Lord]: William Golding, *The Lord of the Flies* (London: Faber and Faber, 1954).
If you believe that the central condition of a thriving, progressing, and righteous society is social diversity, and collaboration across such rich diversity – then come on board. If you believe that technology, the most powerful tool in today’s society, can yet be made to help us flourish, both as individuals and across our multiple, meaningful affiliations – then come on board. If you want to contribute to ⿻’s immediate horizon, intermediate horizon, or truly transformative horizon —or across all of them—you have multiple points of entry. If you work in tech, business, government, academia, civil society, cultural institutions, education, and/or on the home-front, you have limitless ways to make a difference.
-This book is just one part of a great tapestry. One author of this book, for example, is also Executive Producer of a forthcoming documentary (mentioned above) about the life of another, which we suppose will reach a far broader audience than this book can; together we have founded another institution to [network academics](https://plurality.institute) working on ⿻, obviously a much narrower audience. While these are just a couple of examples, they illustrate a crucial broader point: for 1000 people to be deeply involved (say in writing the book), they will need each 100 that will read it and they in turn will need each 100 who know about it and are supportive of the general idea. Thus to succeed we need people at wide levels of engagement in mutually supportive relationships.
+This book is just one part of a great tapestry. One author of this book, for example, is also the Executive Producer of a forthcoming documentary (mentioned above) about the life of another, which we suppose will reach a far broader audience than this book can; together we have founded another institution to [network academics](https://plurality.institute) working on ⿻, obviously a much narrower audience. While these are just a couple of examples, they illustrate a crucial broader point: for 1000 people to be deeply involved (say in writing the book), they will need each 100 that will read it and they in turn will need each 100 who know about it and are supportive of the general idea. Thus to succeed we need people at wide levels of engagement in mutually supportive relationships.
If 1000 people are deeply enough involved with this book to speak about it publicly, 10,000 are part of the community and actively contribute, 100,000 deeply digest the material, 1 million buy or download it, 10 million consume an hour of media content around it, 100 million see a film or other entertaining treatment of a related theme and 1 billion know about and are sympathetic to the aims, we will reach our 2030 goals.
-Pluralists are in every country in the world, every sector of the economy. Connect, affiliate, rally, mobilize … and join us, in the deliberate and committed movement to build a more dynamic and harmonious world and let us free the future, together.
+Pluralists are in every country in the world, and every sector of the economy. Connect, affiliate, rally, mobilize … and join us, in the deliberate and committed movement to build a more dynamic and harmonious world and let us free the future, together.
diff --git a/contents/english/8-blurb.md b/contents/english/8-blurb.md
index 5ea0b418..9cee6906 100644
--- a/contents/english/8-blurb.md
+++ b/contents/english/8-blurb.md
@@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ Technology and democracy are increasingly in conflict in the West, but Taiwan sh
#### Chapter 2-0: Information Technology and Democracy: A Widening Gulf
-In the West, technology is increasingly undermining democracy while democracies constrain rather than supporting technology.
+In the West, technology is increasingly undermining democracy while democracies constrain rather than support technology.
#### Chapter 2-1: A View from Yushan
@@ -43,7 +43,7 @@ We call the philosophy behind this success ⿻ 數位 Plurality, the harnessing
#### Chapter 3-1: Living in a ⿻ World
-It rests on the recognition that the world is not made up of atoms and large wholes, but instead of diverse, intersecting social groups and units (e.g. people) whose identities that are constituted by those intersections.
+It rests on the recognition that the world is not made up of atoms and large wholes, but instead of diverse, intersecting social groups and units (e.g. people) whose identities are constituted by those intersections.
#### Chapter 3-2: Connected Society
@@ -71,7 +71,7 @@ The complement to personhood is freedom of association, which in the digital wor
#### Chapter 4-3: Commerce and Trust
-Commerce in a ⿻ is grounded in a protocols that capture a diversity of formalized social trust rather than primarily in a global fungible currency.
+Commerce in a ⿻ is grounded in protocols that capture a diversity of formalized social trust rather than primarily in a global fungible currency.
#### Chapter 4-4: Property and Contract
@@ -82,6 +82,7 @@ To take on ambitious collaborations, associations must be able to commonly manag
For all these to be true human rights, there needs to be universal access to these above capabilities with informational integrity, hence the need for them to be open protocols grounded to validated, redundantly stored data.
### Part 5: Democracy
+
The core of ⿻ is technology for collaboration across social difference, making it possible for people to connect more deeply across greater social divides.
#### Chapter 5-0: Collaborative Technology and Democracy
@@ -89,6 +90,7 @@ The core of ⿻ is technology for collaboration across social difference, making
Such collaboration always involves a tension between depth and breadth, meaning there are a range of present ways to connect from intimacy to capitalism, at every point along the spectrum of which ⿻ aims to mitigate the trade-off.
#### Chapter 5-1: Post-Symbolic Communication
+
On the most intimate end of the spectrum, “post-symbolic communication” aims to create direct brain-to-brain connections to allow deeper sharing of subjective experience than ever before.
#### Chapter 5-2: Immersive Shared Reality
diff --git "a/contents/traditional-mandarin/2-0-\350\263\207\350\250\212\346\212\200\350\241\223\350\210\207\346\260\221\344\270\273\357\274\232\346\227\245\347\233\212\346\223\264\345\244\247\347\232\204\351\264\273\346\272\235.md" "b/contents/traditional-mandarin/2-0-\350\263\207\350\250\212\346\212\200\350\241\223\350\210\207\346\260\221\344\270\273\357\274\232\346\227\245\347\233\212\346\223\264\345\244\247\347\232\204\351\264\273\346\272\235.md"
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+++ "b/contents/traditional-mandarin/2-0-\350\263\207\350\250\212\346\212\200\350\241\223\350\210\207\346\260\221\344\270\273\357\274\232\346\227\245\347\233\212\346\223\264\345\244\247\347\232\204\351\264\273\346\272\235.md"
@@ -190,7 +190,7 @@
第二點，「新自由主義」（Neoliberalism）政策在這個時期對於停滯和不平等方面的影響引起了廣大爭議，因此我們懷疑大多數的讀者對這個現象已經有了自己的見解。本書的作者之一也是《激進市場》的合著者，這本書包含了對約莫十年前證據的回顧 [^29]。因此，我們在這裡並不會再詳細介紹，而是建議讀者可參考該著作或相關資訊[^30]。然而，顯然這個時期的主流意識型態和政策方向擁抱了資本主義市場經濟，而這與一種主張密切相關，即「技術全球化的浪潮」導致社會對於集體治理、集體行動可能性的否定，而這樣的否定正是放任主義意識形態的核心。因此，技術和政策發展在過去半世紀基本上是失效的，因為專家統治**主導了技術領域**，而放任主義**主導了政策領域**。
-當然，過去半個世紀不乏技術的突破，這些突破確實帶來了積極的變革，儘管這種變革並不均衡，有時後甚至令人擔憂。1980 年代，個人電腦賦予了人類前所未有的創造力；1990 年代，網際網路連結了通訊和社群，跨越了往昔難以想像的距離；2000 年代，智慧型手機將這兩種革新融合在一起，並且變得無所不在。但是令人驚訝的是，這些現代最為典範的創新，卻都與專家統治或放任主義的敘事格格不入。這些典範顯然都是增強人類創造力的技術，通常被稱為「擴增智慧」或 IA（intelligence augmentation），而不是 AI。它們也不是主要被設計為逃避現有社會制度的工具；它們促進的是豐富的社交溝通和聯絡，而不僅止於市場交易、私有財產和祕密通訊。正如我們將看到的，這些技術源自於與專家統治或放任主義截然不同的的傳統。因此，即使是這個時代少數且重大的技術躍升，在很大程度上也獨立於上述兩種願景之外，甚至與這二者分庭抗禮。
+當然，過去半個世紀不乏技術的突破，這些突破確實帶來了積極的變革，儘管這種變革並不均衡，有時候甚至令人擔憂。1980 年代，個人電腦賦予了人類前所未有的創造力；1990 年代，網際網路連結了通訊和社群，跨越了往昔難以想像的距離；2000 年代，智慧型手機將這兩種革新融合在一起，並且變得無所不在。但是令人驚訝的是，這些現代最為典範的創新，卻都與專家統治或放任主義的敘事格格不入。這些典範顯然都是增強人類創造力的技術，通常被稱為「擴增智慧」或 IA（intelligence augmentation），而不是 AI。它們也不是主要被設計為逃避現有社會制度的工具；它們促進的是豐富的社交溝通和聯絡，而不僅止於市場交易、私有財產和祕密通訊。正如我們將看到的，這些技術源自於與專家統治或放任主義截然不同的的傳統。因此，即使是這個時代少數且重大的技術躍升，在很大程度上也獨立於上述兩種願景之外，甚至與這二者分庭抗禮。
### 我們磨損的社會契約
diff --git "a/contents/traditional-mandarin/2-2-\346\225\270\344\275\215\346\260\221\344\270\273\347\232\204\346\227\245\345\270\270.md" "b/contents/traditional-mandarin/2-2-\346\225\270\344\275\215\346\260\221\344\270\273\347\232\204\346\227\245\345\270\270.md"
index 57693f82..bd7df250 100644
--- "a/contents/traditional-mandarin/2-2-\346\225\270\344\275\215\346\260\221\344\270\273\347\232\204\346\227\245\345\270\270.md"
+++ "b/contents/traditional-mandarin/2-2-\346\225\270\344\275\215\346\260\221\344\270\273\347\232\204\346\227\245\345\270\270.md"
@@ -146,7 +146,7 @@ vTaiwan 的目的是為積極的參與者，提供實驗性、高接觸、緊密
### 應變
-危機很少發生，而且機率很低。因此，很難知道臺灣在避免或緩解危機方面的表現如何。不過，也許最接近的是確實已知的全且緊急情況：大流行新型冠狀病毒（COVID-19）Covid19。如上所述，在這一事件中，臺灣被全球公認為是世界上表現最好的國家之一，在此我們將從數量上討論這一評價的原因。
+危機很少發生，而且機率很低。因此，很難知道臺灣在避免或緩解危機方面的表現如何。不過，也許最接近的是確實已知的全球緊急情況：大流行新型冠狀病毒（COVID-19）Covid19。如上所述，在這一事件中，臺灣被全球公認為是世界上表現最好的國家之一，在此我們將從數量上討論這一評價的原因。
在大流行早期階段，臺灣就贏得了國際讚譽的出色表現，在疫苗上市之前，世界上大部分地區都處於滾動封鎖狀態。我們可以將這一階段稱為大流行的「危機」階段，持續到 2021 年 4 月，疫苗在美國廣泛供應時為止。從疫情開始到 2021 年 4 月，臺灣僅有 12 人死於疫情，是當時全球具有準確統計的區域裡最低的。此外，臺灣在沒有封城的情況下實現了這一目標，並在 2020 年實現了僅次於愛爾蘭，所有富裕國家中最快的經濟增長。更廣泛來說，臺灣的醫療系統在過去十年裡，持續被 Numbeo 評為全球效率第一，雖然臺灣的預期壽命僅僅是世界上最高之一[^Numbeohealth]。
@@ -177,7 +177,7 @@ vTaiwan 的目的是為積極的參與者，提供實驗性、高接觸、緊密
[^EconFreedom]: “Index of Economic Freedom.” The Heritage Foundation, 2023. https://www.heritage.org/index/.
[^Inequalitycritique]: Gerald Auten, and David Splinter, “Income Inequality in the United States: Using Tax Data to Measure Long-Term Trends,” _Journal of Political Economy_, November 14, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1086/728741.
-[^CapitalShare]: The most interesting statistic we woudl like to report on is labor's share of income and its trends in Taiwan. However, to our knowledge no persuasive and internationally comparable study of this exists. We hope to see more research on this soon.
+[^CapitalShare]: The most interesting statistic we would like to report on is labor's share of income and its trends in Taiwan. However, to our knowledge no persuasive and internationally comparable study of this exists. We hope to see more research on this soon.
[^Loneliness]: S. Schroyen, N. Janssen, L. A. Duffner, M. Veenstra, E. Pyrovolaki, E. Salmon, and S. Adam, “Prevalence of Loneliness in Older Adults: A Scoping Review.” _Health & Social Care in the Community 2023_ (September 14, 2023): e7726692. https://doi.org/10.1155/2023/7726692.
[^Addiction]: “More than Half of Teens Admit Phone Addiction .” Taipei Times, February 4, 2020. https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/biz/archives/2020/02/04/2003730302; “Study Finds Nearly 57% of Americans Admit to Being Addicted to Their Phones - CBS Pittsburgh.” CBS News, August 30, 2023. https://www.cbsnews.com/pittsburgh/news/study-finds-nearly-57-of-americans-admit-to-being-addicted-to-their-phones/.
[^drugs]: “NCDAS: Substance Abuse and Addiction Statistics [2020],” National Center for Drug Abuse Statistics, 2020, https://drugabusestatistics.org/; Ling-Yi Feng, and Jih-Heng Li, “New Psychoactive Substances in Taiwan,” _Current Opinion in Psychiatry_ 33, no. 4 (March 2020): 1, https://doi.org/10.1097/yco.0000000000000604.
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