Notes

Preface

1: Seeing Plural

• Internet creates communities but also polarization and surveillance
• Democracy is waning
• Plurality: democracy + collaborative technology

2: Information Technology and Democracy

2-0: A Widening Gulf

• “Laws and institutions must go hand-in-hand with the human mind”
• “We might as well require a man to wear the coat which fit him as a boy as a civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors”
• ↑ sclerotic democracies
• The Narrow Corridor
• IT is narrowing ↑
  • Antisocial threats: breaking down social fabric: polarization, eroding norms, undermining police, unaccountable markets
  • Centralizing threats: surveillance, platform control / policy
• Competitive pressure to centralize data flow + processing (eg. AI race)
• Tech backlach
• Collapse in gov’t R&D spend

1. Technocracy = Sam’s Moore’s Law for Everything = material abundance, UBI
   • OpenAI, Elon, DeepMind, Andrew Yang
2. Libertarianism = hyper-capitalism = crypto
   • Peter Theil

• The Great Stagnation:
  1. Augmentation → automation
  2. Proactive shaping → free market
• Collapsing trust in institutions
• Shift to “large scale digital democracy”

2-1: A View from Yushan

• Taiwan - the world’s leading digital democracy*

2-2: The Life of a Digital Democracy

• Nobody movement: “ask not why nobody is doing this - you are the nobody” civic hackers
• Pollis: product of Gov0 → VTaiwan which is like X but clusters by dimension reduction
  • Challenges due to: Covid → less in person, high volunteering demands, no requirements for gov’t response, somewhat narrow focus
• Taiwan’s presidents hackathon
• Project Cofax: combatting misinformation
• Projects for steering AI models, transparency, digital competence education, etc.
• Good economic growth, low inequality, etc.
• Generally considered world’s strongest democracy
• ↓ rest of book dedicated to generalizable takeaways from ↑ (much like US already does with Norwegian countries)

3: Plurality

3-0: What is ⿻?

• Importance of diversity
• 3 aspects of plurality:
  • Philosophy
  • Design
  • Technology
• Normative, descriptive, predictive
• ⿻ = plurality

3-1: Living in a ⿻ World

• Quantum physics = “reality is not a collection of things, it is a network of processes.”
• Taylorism = scientific management in 1900s
• Libertarianism borrows from physics + social sciences
  • Evolution maximizes fitness
  • Economic agents maximize utility
• “Every phenomenon in the world, from human societies to the motions of the stars, can - in the modern Atomist view - be reduced to these laws.”
• Last century: transcending ↑
  • Gödel’s Theorem
  • Symbiosis, ecology, extended evolutionary synthesis
  • Neuroscience: networks + emergent capabilities
• ↑ focus on complexity, emergence, multi-level organization, multi-level causation
  • Multi-level game theory
  • Complex = edge of chaos and order
  • “Steering towards and widening this narrow corridor”
  • Gödel + Church un-solvability
  • Chaos theory
  • Fractals
  • Bell’s theorem = superposition
  • Relativity, quantum physics
• Plurality: “the application of an analogous perspective to the understanding of human societies and technologically the attempt to build formal institutions and government systems that account for and resemble these structures”
• Technocratic: replace messy bureaucracy with massive unified rational AI system
• Libertarian: sovereignty of the atomistic individual
• ↑ there must be another way

3-2: Connected Society

• 3 core of modern democracy:
  • Property, identity, voting
• Henry George: taxes and land must be used productively
  • Eg. who should capture all the land value accrual for the SF Bay Area?
  • Argues it should be captured plurally, not by any individual
• Georg Simmel: pioneered social networks
  • We’re deeply / fundamentally social
  • In small isolated groups, tend to define self largely collectively
  • Individuation occurs largely through affiliation with groups
  • Cities → many affiliations → not much in common with generalized person
  • Feeling of unique ↔ isolated
  • Rather than analyzing starting with the individual, view them as “an emergent property of the complexity and dynamism of modern urban societies”
• John Dewey
  • Trade groups → secrets → shared identity + culture → allows the social circle to act as a collective agent
  • Govt’s + markets fail due to externalities at large scale
  • Democratic action can address the failing of markets
  • We need more “mirrors” - social entrepreneurs
  • ↑ job: perceive + explain the new forms of interdependence + empower this new emergent public to come into existence
• Norbert Weiner
  • Cybernetics: “the science and control of communication in complex systems like the animal and machine”
  • “The science of communication within and governance of, by, and for networks.”
  • “Severe critic of capitalism as failing basic principles of cybernetic stabilization and creation of homeostasis and advocate of radically more responsible use and deployment of technology.”

3-3: The Lost Dao

• “Every country has been forced by the limits of available IT to homogenize and simplify social institutions in a modem atomist mold that runs into direct conflict with such [democratic] values”
• JCR Lichliter (The Dream Machine)
  • Led ARPA IPTO
  • Man computer symbiosis
  • “Built and shaped much of what became the field of computer science”
  • Dave Engelbart PC
  • ARPANET
• Open standards > top-down decision making
• Ease of navigation + recombination (packet switching, HTTP, TCP/IP)
• Ted Nelson
  • “Long forgotten” “insecurity, exploitative structure, inhumane features of WWW”
  • Secure identity systems
  • Embedded protocols for commerce
  • Secure information sharing + control
• Lick’s 1980 “Computers and Government” manifesto
  • Two scenarios:
    1. Dominated by monopolistic corporate control
    2. Full societal mobilization to make computing support + serve democracy
  • Potential social ills:
    1. Pervasive surveillance, public distrust of gov’t
    2. Paralysis of gov’t as falling behind in tech
    3. Debasement of creative professions
    4. Monopolization + corporate exploitation
    5. Pervasive digital misinformation
    6. Siloing of info
    7. Gov’t data inaccurate
    8. Control by private entities of fundamental platforms for speech + public discourse
• Wikipedia as shining light of deliberative participatory resource
• OSS challenges underlying assumptions of market economies
• Crypto
• Gov tech, civic tech
  • Online deliberation

4: Freedom

4-0: Rights, Operating Systems and ⿻ Freedom

• Rights are the foundation of democracy
• UN UDHR:
  • Equality, life, liberty, personal security, speech, thought, conscience, property, association, etc.
• Many democracies have destroyed themselves by eroding rights
• Europe positive definition of rights, US negative (freedom-based)
• OSs must constantly adapt, defend integrity
• New phenomenon: information is abundant, attention is scarce
• Rights x OSs = “interpersonal networking OSs”
• Need more specialized INOSs
• Hypergraph:
  • Nodes + communities + levels
• 5 rights / OS properties:
  1. Identity + personhood
  2. Association
  3. Commercial trust
  4. Property + contract
  5. Access
• Need widely shared non-proprietary protocols for payments, sharing property, etc. (crypto?)

4-1: Identity and Personhood

• Linkage, graph
• Tradeoff: establishment vs protection
• Gov’t issued identities do a poor job of protecting identity
• SSO providers
• Data collection dossiers
• Online identities
  • Fragmented, low interoperability
  • Potentially pseudonymous
  • Rich but narrow slice of life
• Digital national ID (eg. India)
• Biometric (eg. World Coin) not good enough*
• Plural methods, eg. friends + family attesting claims
  • Social forms of recovery for sensitive info
• Solving trust thru transitivity
• Dunbar’s number
• Preserving social context is more important than “privacy” (eg. first kiss fellow lover)

4-2: Association and ⿻ Publics

• Alexis De Tocqueville “if men are to remain civilized, the art of associating together must grow and improve in the same ratio as the quality of conditions is increased”
• “Collective actions through political parties, civic associations, labor unions, and businesses are always necessary”
• Goal: outline a theory of the informational requirements for association
• ↑ main requirement is common knowledge: ↓ “”
  • When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows…
• Common knowledge, common beliefs, common intentions:
• In a sense, the freedom to create association is the freedom to create common beliefs and intentions
• Privately-owned public squares (social media)
• Blockchain
  • Eg. ZK proofs, smart contracts, etc.
• The right to association and identity are essential and inseparable

4-3: Commerce and Trust

• Currency + digital commerce
• Central banks
• Checks
• 1928 → 1958 → 1973 credit cards
• Instant digital payments
• Crypto
• Debt
• Status / reputation vs financial markets
  • Selling out, corruption
• Single store of value → inherently centralized
• Polycentric = interoperability of value / reputation systems (eg. memberships)
  • “Community currencies” on Ethereum
• Various social currencies
• Networks of trust, identity

4-4: Property and Contract

• Corporations: how most large-scale cooperation takes place - pooling of assets into entity
  • LL partnerships, civic + religious organizations, trade associations, unions, for-profit stock corporations
• ↑ legal basis: contractual arrangements that govern a sharing of assets - real, human, intellectual, financial - in a common undertaking towards a shared purpose
• Eg. “the cloud” for digital asset sharing
• Focusing here on storage, computation, and data
  • Not focusing on electromagnetic spectrum, code, names, URLs, NFTs, etc.
• Analogies to real world:
  • Storage = land
  • Computation = fuel
  • Data = human inputs / labor + artifacts people use / capital
• Time sharing
• Many of resources above lay dormant / wasted
• Despite physical assets seeming to be more challenging to share on the face of it, we’re far more efficient because society has had more time to experiment, iterate, optimize allocation
• Storage:
  • Filecoin not ubiquitous, not for live data
  • Top 2 cloud providers capture 2/3 of the market
• Lending + pooling of assets is ubiquitous in the economy
• 3 rights of property:
  • Usus: right to use
  • Abusus: right to alter or dispose
  • Fructus: the right to the value it creates
• Norms + legal structures often >> contracts
  • Thus, need a “stable social understanding” of data sharing
• Need more social Darwinian evolution of methods for data sharing
• Federated learning + data federation
• Data policy needs to be more group > individual - especially since almost all data is social / networked
• Data trusts / mediators of individual data (MIDs): data creators need to act collectively
  • Eg. unions
• Data should become more like property
• FCC, ICANN largely defined technoctatically
• Eg. search engine is actually better for market than domain squatting

4-5: Access

• “We all can and must make our own meanings of life, but we are denied our own equal right to do so if some of us receive manipulated inputs to the global information commons.”
• Potential for mass manipulation

1. Global coordination infra
2. Information integrity

• Transparent gov’t info

5: Democracy

5-0: Collaborative Technology + Democracy

• Method for this book:
  • Git
  • CC0 license
  • Rewards crowdfunded + collectively determined
  • Future changes determined by advanced voting procedures (below) + prediction markets
• Supermodularity: whole is greater than sum of parts
  • Comparative advantage
• Goal: “collaboration across diversity”
  • Difference / disagreement = potential energy (must harness)
• Differences in goals, values, beliefs, solidarities, attachments, cultures, paradigms
  • Identity thru solidarity, attachment, meaning making hardest to reconcile
• Colonialism + globalization destroy diversity
• Must harness + generate diversity
• Must balance:
  • Breadth of interoperability (eg. markets)
  • Depth of collaboration (eg. love)
• Eg. electoral vs deliberative democracy
  • Not extremes in spectrum, eg. team formation would be far more collaborative
• Any attempt to define a goal / objective function is destined to fail
  • Leads to premature optimization “the root of all evil” - Tony Huare
  • Eg. the optimality of markets in neoliberalism
• Must build for a range of social groups, not just ground level or god level
• More challenge thru diversity > optimizing an objective function
• “Trust those who seek truth, but fear those who’ve found it”

5-1: Post-Symbolic Communication

• We’re at the cusp of a Cambrian explosion of technologies that can expand post-symbolic communication
  • Physiological, psychological, even phenomenological states of being
• Eg. BCIs, haptic feedback, etc.
• Intimacy transitions from nearness to deep seamless sharing of consciousness

5-2: Immersive Shared Reality

• VR AR MR
• Presence
• Digital town halls etc.*
• Collective memory palace
• Global consciousness network

5-3: Creative Collaborations

• Vesuvius Challenge / Prize example
• Discord, Slack, etc.
• Perhaps temporal + cross-species?
• Possibilities*

5-4: Augmented Deliberation

• Twitter/X community notes system*
  • (The current frontier?)
  • Compares sentiment across spectrum
  • Encourages exploration of diverse information > misinformation
• In-person, writing
• Eg. World Cafe Method
• Given limits, must have some form of representation
• “A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”
• Representatives chosen by:
  1. Election
  2. Surreptition
  3. Administration
• Dialog + deliberation research*
  • Clear purpose + agenda setting, active inclusion, small group breakouts, management of notes / harvest, turn taking, encouragement of active listening
• Tyranny of structureless-ness: unfair informal norms + dominance hierarchies override intentions for inclusive exchange
• Anthropic’s Claude 3 worked with Shu Wei / Collective Intelligence Project (CIP) to source model steering constitution using Pollis
• Need to add LLMs / GFMs and graph theory to Pollis
• Community notes++: eg. choose the maximally diverse group for deliberation
• Could have representatives for nature, other species, future generations
• LLM/GFM-based representatives may make decisions faster than we can keep up with
• Caveats:
  • Discussion << sensory experience
  • Takes too long for many decisions
  • Other forms are often more transparent and thus legitimate
• Must regenerate gradients, so stimulate productive conflict

5-5: Adaptive Administration

• 2 main opposing complaints of admin:

1. Rigidity: rules that throw away detail poorly generalize
   • Eg. speed limits
2. Complexity: hard to navigate

• DAOs, AI
• Elite hiring practices
• Education restructuring:
  • Micro → meso → macro badges (degrees)
• Languages
• “Overcoming the simultaneously cold and arbitrary nature of systems that has been the price of modernity”