🇹🇼 ⿻ How Taiwan is leading the way in digital democracy

Excerpts from E. Glen Weyl and Audrey Tang’s new book on Plurality

We’re seeking a Senior Software Engineer for our international coalition to improve public conversation and make democracies more resilient. Learn more and apply here.

⿻ 數位 Plurality: The Future of Collaborative Technology and Democracy is a new book by E. Glen Weyl, Audrey Tang, and a community of contributors. The authors put forth a positive vision for democratic cooperation, diversity, and cooperation through tech:

Technology and democracy can be each other’s greatest allies. In fact, as we will argue, large-scale “Digital Democracy” is a dream we have only begun to imagine, one that requires unprecedented technology to have any chance of being realized. By reimagining our future, shifting public investments, research agendas, and private development, we can build that future. 

Among so much new writing about technology and politics, ⿻ 數位 Plurality stands out as a creative, unique project with a lot to offer on many different, interconnected topics. It’s brand new, only released last week. It also focuses on history that may be less familiar to Western audiences, especially about Taiwan, where Audrey just stepped back from her role as the nation’s first Minister of Digital Affairs. After touring to support the book, she’s joining Collective Intelligence Project as a Senior Research Fellow. 

Audrey spoke at our 2021 festival and there’s also a short documentary about her planned for later this year. Her co-author, Glen, is an author and Advisory Board member of New_ Public. He’s also Founder of RadicalxChange, Microsoft Research's Plural Technology Collaboratory and Plurality Institute.

⿻ 數位 Plurality was created with a Creative Commons “No Rights Reserved” license, and it exists in several forms online, including on Github, where you can suggest changes to the book through pull requests. They write, “We have structured the text in a ‘circular’ manner, where readers can start at a variety of points, read from there and circle back to the ‘earlier’ material at the end.”

Below, you'll find excerpts from ⿻ 數位 Plurality, but to lean into this structure I’ve curated a selection of pieces that may be interesting through the lens of New_ Public. Scroll down to begin your journey through this “living document.”

–Josh Kramer, New_ Public Head of Editorial

Note: I’ve added in links instead of footnotes where applicable, as well as additional links for extra context. The authors often use the symbol ⿻ to stand in for “technology for collaboration across social difference.” Often, I have cut between paragraphs within the same section of the book. I’ve added bolding to the text.

On the unique threats recent advances in technology pose towards democracy:

The last decade of information technology has threatened democracy in two related yet opposite ways. As Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson famously argued, free democratic societies exist in a “narrow corridor” between social collapse and authoritarianism. From both sides, information technologies seem to be narrowing the corridor, squeezing the possibility of a free society.

On the one hand, technologies (e.g., social media, cryptography, and some other financial technology) are seen to be breaking down the social fabric, heightening polarization, eroding norms, undermining law enforcement, and accelerating the speed and expanding the reach of financial markets to the point where they are unaccountable to democratic polities. We shall call these threats “anti-social”. On the other hand, technologies (e.g., machine learning, foundation models, the internet of things) are increasing the capacity for centralized surveillance, the ability of small groups of engineers to set patterns in systems that shape the rules of social life for billions of citizens and customers and reduce the scope for people to meaningfully participate in shaping their lives and communities.

Confidence in democracy is lower than ever in the developed world, but democratic governments have become solely focused on constraining new tech, potentially missing opportunities to build valuable, useful tools for the people:

Where once the public sector in democratic countries was the global driving force behind the development of information technology (e.g. the first computers, the internet, global positioning satellites), today most democratic governments are focused instead on constraining its development and are failing to respond to both opportunities and challenges it creates.

Technology has redefined what services are relevant and in these novel areas, democratic governments have almost entirely failed to keep up with changing times. Where once government-provided postal services and public libraries were the backbone of democratic communication and knowledge circulation, today most communication flows through social media and search engines. Where once most public gatherings took place in parks and literal public squares, today it is almost a cliché that the public square has moved online. Yet democratic countries have almost entirely ignored the need to provide and support digital public services.

For the authors, Taiwan is a model for Digital Democracy in action. After recounting the history of modern Taiwan, the authors theorize how Taiwan became a unique lab for democracy and technology and bring receipts:

More than any other institution, g0v (pronounced gov-zero) symbolizes the civil-society foundation of digital democracy in Taiwan. Founded in 2012 by civic hackers including Kao Chia-liang, g0v arose from discontent with the quality of government digital services and data transparency.¹ Civic hackers began to scrape government websites (usually with the suffix gov[dot]tw) and build alternative formats for data display and interaction for the same website, hosting them at g0v.tw. These “forked” versions of government websites often ended up being more popular, leading some government ministers, like Simon Chang to begin “merging” these designs back into government services.

Principles of g0v displayed in a Venn diagram.

g0v built on this success to establish a vibrant community of civic hackers interacting with a range of non-technical civil society groups at regular hackathon, called “jothons” (based on a Mandarin play on words, meaning roughly “join-athon”). While hackathons are common in many parts of the world, some of the unique features of g0v practices include the diversity of participants (usually a majority non-technical and with nearly full gender parity), the orientation towards civic problems rather than commercial outcomes and the close collaboration with a range of civic organizations.

During this process of institutionalization of g0v, there was growing demand to apply the methods that had allowed for these dispute resolutions to a broader range of policy issues. This led to the establishment of vTaiwan, a platform and project developed by g0v for facilitating deliberation on public policy controversies.

vTaiwan was deliberately intended as an experimental, high-touch, intensive platform for committed participants. It had about 200,000 users or about 1% of Taiwan’s population at its peak and held detailed deliberations on 28 issues, 80% of which led to legislative action. These focused mostly on questions around technology regulation, such as the regulation of ride sharing, responses to non-consensual intimate images, regulatory experimentation with financial technology and regulation of AI. 

Perhaps the single most important digital contributor to Taiwan’s pandemic response was its ability to rapidly and effectively respond to misinformation and deliberate attempts to spread disinformation. This “superpower” has extended, however, well beyond the pandemic and been critical to the successful elections Taiwan has held during a time when a lack of information integrity has challenged many other jurisdictions.

Central to those efforts, in turn, has been the g0v spin-off project “Cofacts,” in which participating citizens rapidly respond to both trending social media content and to messages from private channels forwarded to a public comment box for requested response. Recent research shows that these systems can typically respond faster, equally accurately and more engagingly to rumors than can professional fact checkers, who are much more bandwidth constrained. 

We usually think of technology as something that inexorably progresses, while democracy and politics as the static choice between different competing forms of social organization. Taiwan’s experience shows us that more options may be available for our technological future, making it more like politics, and that one of these may involve radically enhancing how we live together and collaborate, progressing democracy much like we do technology. It also shows us that while social differences may generate conflict, using appropriate technology, they may also be a fundamental source of progress.

Considering how social media and AI might be designed for plurality, bridging differences between different kinds of people, and facilitating productive conflict:

One of the most common concerns about social media has been its tendency to entrench existing social divisions, creating "echo chambers" that undermine a sense of shared reality. News feed algorithms based on "collaborative filtering" selects content that is likely to maximize user engagements, prioritizing like-minded content that reinforces users' existing beliefs and insulates them from diverse information. Despite mixed findings on whether these algorithms truly exacerbate political polarization and hamper deliberations, it is natural to ask how these systems might be redesigned with the opposite intention of “bridging” the crowd. The largest-scale attempt at this is the Community Notes (formerly Birdwatch) system in the X (formerly Twitter) social media platform.

 Community Notes on X correcting a misleading post. Source: Direct capture from application, by fair use.

This approach leverages alternative social media algorithms to augment human deliberations, prioritizing content based on the principle of collaboration across diversity, consistent with ⿻, to which hundreds of millions of people are currently exposed each week. This platform has been shown to encourage the exploration of diverse political information, compared to the previous methods of moderating misinformation.

One of the most obvious directions that is a subject of active development is how systems like Polis and Community Notes could be extended with modern graph theory and GFMs. The "Talk to the City" project of the AI Objectives Institute, for example, illustrates how GFMs can be used to replace a list of statements characterizing a group's views with an interactive agent one can talk to and get a sense of the perspective. Soon, it should be possible to go further, with GFMs allowing participants to move beyond limited short statements and simple up-and-down votes. Instead, they will be able to fully express themselves in reaction to the conversation. Meanwhile, the models will condense this conversation, making it legible to others who can then participate. Models could also help look for areas of rough consensus not simply based on common votes but on a natural language understanding of and response to expressed positions. A recent large-scale study highlights the positive impact of such tools in enhancing online democratic discussions. In this experiment, a GFM was used to provide real-time, evidence-based suggestions aimed at refining the quality of political discourse to each participant in the conversation. The results indicated a noticeable improvement in the overall quality of conversations, fostering a more democratic, reciprocal exchange of ideas.

While most discussion of bridging systems focuses on building consensus, another powerful role is to support the regeneration of diversity and productive conflict. On the one hand, they help identify different opinion groups in ways that are not a deterministic function of historical assumptions or identities, potentially allowing these groups to find each other and organize around their perspective. On the other hand, by surfacing as representing consensus positions that have diverse support, they also create diverse opposition that can coalesce into a new conflict that does not reinforce existing divisions, potentially allowing organization around that perspective. In short, collective response systems can play just as important a role in mapping and evolving conflict dynamically as helping to navigate it productively.

There’s a lot more that’s of interest in ⿻ 數位 Plurality. Start from the beginning, or jump into any section: technical and engineering, real-world impact in specific social sectors, or public policy and government. The authors close the book with a call to join them in the advancement of ⿻:

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 ⿻. 

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. 

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 today, 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.

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.

Thanks Glen and Audrey!

Join us in Berlin for re:publica! New_ Public Co-Directors Eli Pariser and Deepti Doshi will be on panels about the Public Spaces Incubator and innovative business models for care and community building on social platforms.

Reminiscing about the bullet trains in Taiwan,

–Josh

1. g0v Manifesto defines it as “a non-partisan, not-for-profit, grassroots movement”. MoeDict, an early g0v project, was led by one of the authors of this book.