With Plurality Institute, I am hosting a reading and discussion group on the Plurality book. In this note I will summarize some personal reactions to Part 6 of the book which is titled “Impact”.

Part 6

What are some of the key points that I take away from

First, they think that plurality approaches can affect a wide range of sectors, with large potential impacts. Specifically, they say that plural approaches can “transform almost every sector of society”. They specifically plan to focus on: (1) the workplace, (2) health, (3) media, and (4) environment. They also mention (5) energy, and (6) education as areas of future consideration. Generally, I am more sympathetic to the points about scope here than the points about scale of impact. The latter is quite difficult to forecast.

Second, they make a set of conceptual points about how social/political/technical innovation can / should occur. They contrast two approaches: “experimentation on” communities vs. “experimentation with” communities. The first the connect with technocratic / top down / precautionary approaches that often involve specific metrics and things like RCTs to test impacts of new innovations. The latter is a more “organic”, bottom-up approach that involves communities of early adopters who are trying new things with more open-ended goals. Innovations then diffuse to others – the S curve.

If I understand correctly, they think that both of these approaches have issues. The problems with “experimentation on” are clear to me (technocratic / top down, limits of quantification etc.), but I didn’t understand as much the “experimentation with” concerns. But the key points seem to be:

  1. “Experimentation with” is dangerous when paired with a fully capitalist market driven model of managing new technologies. The main point here seems to be basically that the development/adoption of new technologies has spillovers / externalities not accounted for in marketized diffusion. VC funders don’t care as much about safe/responsible development & public interest as rapid scaling.
  2. Further, even if design / development is public interested and inclusive with respect to early adopting communities, there is no guarantee that this will account for issues that might arise with respect to other communities / social outcomes as the technology spreads. Possible concerns are: negative externalities (i.e. 1), unintended consequences, bad actors (“tools can be used as weapons”).

So what is the alternative approach? Basically it’s this “plural marketing” approach that I’ve heard GW talk about elsewhere. I am not sure this is fully clear to me, but roughly, it’s a deliberate attempt to seed/promote interest in the innovation across a diverse range of constituents and in particular via people who bridge across different group / social divides.

Third, they discuss two current ecosystems that have currently been experimenting with many plural tools: (1) web3 and (2) Taiwan; there are limitations with both of these in terms of their levels of diversity and what kinds of experiments they have pursued. I wrote a bit about the crypto side of things recently here. While I agree with my earlier point that we can/should learn from these early experiments, I also take the clear point that these communities are unusual and particular in many ways, and so we should be highly cautious about generalizability. Trying to bring in / seed folks from a broader set of backgrounds seems highly reasonable, though a clear question is always: how?

Fourth, they continue to discuss workplace, health, media and environment. I didn’t have much reaction to workplace.

On health, I am curious on what experts in this space think. However, I was interested in a few points they make here in relation to expert governance of the pandemic, including:

Indeed, in the long run, more important than ‘getting policy right’ is preserving social cohesion and public trust in policy-makers since without these, ‘policy’ rapidly becomes meaningless anyway

The alternative path:

Taiwan followed a very different path, with rapid government support of citizen-led initiatives for, for example, tracking the supply of masks. By moving quickly to empower citizen-led online initiatives (g0v, Polis), Taiwan was able to harvest the power of localized and contextual knowledge as a ⿻ good without imposing centralized control while respecting privacy

In general, they seem to endorse more holistic, community-centered approaches to health and healthcare which I sympathize with.

On media, I found the emphasis on “citizen journalism” to be interesting. If one part of journalism is to inform the public about “the truth” of what’s happening in the world, they point towards new technologically-mediated collective approaches to reaching agreement / consensus on what’s happening in the owrld:

Wikipedia has shown the speed and scale at which distributed participation can produce roughly and broadly consensual accounts of many events, though not quite yet at the speed required of journalism. Many of the tools we have described above and detail below can help address challenges of rigorous verification at distance and scale and rapid achievement of rough and socially contextual consensus that is a more appropriate frame for thinking about “objectivity”.

Another clear example is community notes. This is an interesting idea that I have been wanting to think and write about more. There’s a recent piece here that has seemed interesting. In general, later on they point to ways that technological tools can be used to surface various and more-fluid community-level notions truth, agreement and disagreement:

Social media algorithms could create “communities” based both on patterns of behavior internal to the platform (e.g. views, likes, responses, propagation, choices to join) and on external data such as social science or group explicit self-identification (more on this below). For each such community, the algorithms could highlight “common content” (commonly agreed facts and values) of the group that spans the divides internally, as well as important points of division within the community. Content could then be highlighted to members of the communities within this social context, making clear which content is rough consensus in the communities that a citizen is a member of and which content is divisive, as well as offering opportunities for the citizen to explore content that is consensus on the other side of each divide from the one she is on within that community.

I think that this kind of idea is very interesting to think about more.

On environment, they also raise some interesting points:

What does “Collaboration Across Difference” have to do with the environment? [Many traditions] … emphasize nature as a target of respect and a participant in cooperation just as much as other humans are.

The general approach they suggest is as follows:

In the past, technology has often been conceived of as a means to masture nature …. . Instead, we explore how plurality can facilitate communication, cooperation, and synergy with nature, empowered by data. Whether we see these ecosystems as alive and sentient, or as indispensable life support systems for human societies, these approaches will enable to coe-exist with nature more sustainably.

This reminds of some of the ideas in Heidegger’s “The Question Concerning Technology” which I wrote about here. I also thought of CIP’s “Voice of Nature” project that is apparently in development. Here’s what CIP say about that:

In partnership with environmental organizations, CIP is also developing AI agents that can serve as advocates for natural entities (e.g. mountains, rainforests, rivers) in human discussions. We’re looking to leverage advanced environmental data together with LLMs to give voice to non-human stakeholders and better represent/surface relevant information about our ecosystems, as a method to improve these discussions.

Specifically, we’re developing fine-tuned AI agents that can deliberate on behalf of natural elements. We’ll combine various sources of environmental data, including satellite imagery, environmental reports, and scientific papers as sources of data for fine-tuning/prompting large language models to communicate and advocate on behalf of specific natural entities.

We look to design an agent with transparent and flexible objectives (e.g. if the agent is advocating for the health of a rainforest, it might have to balance between the objectives of biodiversity and the speed of forest recovery; the balance should be both modifiable and transparent). We hope that these agents could serve as e.g. observational board members for organizations and companies, or queryable entities for public engagement and deliberation.

Part 7

Digital Empires story. Three main paradigms of digital tech policy:

  • US: Neoliberal free market model.
  • China: Tech development driven by state toward national goals including sovereignty, development, national security.
  • Europe: main focus has been on regulation of tech imports from abroad to ensure they protect EU standards of human rights (implicitly forcing others to comply w this)

Basic idea: Taiwan & Plurality approach is a kind of blend of these:

  • From US: emphasis on a dynamic, decentralized, free, entrepreneurial ecosystem open to the world
  • From EU: emphasis on human rights and democracy as fundamental goals for DPI.
  • From China: emphaiss on public investment to proactively advance technology and steer towards societal interest.

In summary:

Together these add up to a model where the public sector’s primary role is active investment and support to empower and protect privately complemented but civil society-led technology development whose goal is proactively building a digitial stack that embodies in protocols the principles of human rights and democracy.

What’s the approach that they suggest for digital public investment:

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 aptttern, often labeled “digital public infrastructure”

What is the new vision forward:

… a vision of plural infrastcuture for today must engage the pbulic 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

Per Lick, decisions about the development and use of tech must not be made only “in the public interest” but in the interest of giving the public itself the means to enter into the decision-making process that will shape their future.

And their idea is that many of these plural tech tools can help do this better or in new ways.

In terms of approaches, they like digital ministers and ministries as a site of intervention, but also want transnational efforts – focus on creating a network, spanning many jurisdictions etc. Technology, for better or worse, often transcends boundaries. Very networked approach, reminiscent of Actor-Network theory for me.

Academia can be one part of this, but most neglected is open source.

Open source and other non-profit mission-driven technology developers … 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.

In general skeptical (probably mostly Glen) of the ability of academics to engage in a lot of the ways that are broadly necessary (e.g. disciplinary silo limits, focus on novelty, citations etc).

Also supportive of orgs like Mozilla, Wikimedia etc. which do development work that goes beyond just new code.

But in addition to building new things, emphasis on economic democracy innovations similar to past:

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.

Innovation is possible around digital taxes and they point toward some directions that they find appealing.

7-1 Conclusion

I don’t like this superlative rhetoric:

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.

It’s a force. It’s a lever.

Landing points return to the opening setup:

  • Define plurality as a “third-way” alternative to Libertarianism and Technocracy.
  • Emphasize that technological development is not deterministic – “We the people” can / should have a say over the direction of technological change.

Key References for Understanding these sections

  • Digital Empires by Anu Bradford
  • Other work on Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) e.g. from Ethan Zuckerman
  • Decentralized Science Movement (Hamburg)
  • Dewey The Public and its Problems