The collaboratively written book “Plurality” offers insights about democracy innovations from Taiwan
Books dealing with the internet, digitalization and AI come in two categories: Some praise the opportunities and benefits of the new technologies. Others focus on risks and deterioration. Plurality. The Future of Collaborative Technology and Democracy by E. Glen Weyl and Audrey Tang starts, in its opening chapters, as one of the latter – only to offer a brighter version of a possible digital future over the greater part of its almost 600 pages. In its techno-enthusiastic spirit, Plurality can be seen as an updated version of books such as Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody (2008).
Democracy is, in the end, about the distribution of power.
Glen Weyl is a US economist and free-market evangelist working for Microsoft Research. Audrey Tang is a Taiwanese software engineer and politician. From 2022 to 2024 she was Taiwan’s first Minister of Digital Affairs, having served a minister without portfolio for digital affairs since 2016. The book is open-source and can be freely copied via plurality.net. In addition to the two main authors, dozens of members of the so-called plurality community around the world have contributed to the book. But although the book is explicitly presented as the product of a collaborative effort, there is no clear trace to what the community members have added. Editorial decisions were taken by Tang and Weyl exclusively. Plurality’s overall claim is: Whereas we witness today that digital technology, social media and AI lead to polarization, social division and the centralization of power, the same set of technologies could be employed to strengthen democracy and to harness plurality as a resource.
The internet, social media and AI are not about ideas.
How can that be achieved? The central answer is: mass deliberation. Online technologies, Weyl and Tang point out, can accomplish something which in the non-digital sphere is hardly possible. We have deep conversations and successful deliberation in small groups. But small groups are hardly representative. Furthermore, small groups are just small groups. “Mini-publics” such as citizens’ assemblies and town hall meetings typically exclude more citizens than they include. The expression and exchange of opinions in social media, on the other hand, can be rather inclusive – but it produces “bubbles” and does not meet the standards for deep conversations and deliberation.
Plurality has a solution to offer: Pol.is. Pol.is is, basically, a tool for online discussion and opinion polling. Unlike the usual approaches, the goal of pol.is is not to find out what a majority of people think – but to discover options for consensus across otherwise opposed camps. Pol.is is the flagship for Weyl and Tang’s idea of harnessing the power of plurality as a resource.
One famous success story: In 2016, about 450 citizens engaged on pol.is to discuss and vote on recommendations for the governance of online alcohol sales. Within weeks, they came up with a set of recommendations supported by otherwise rival camps: Online alcohol sales should be limited to a few distributors; transactions should be by credit card only; and purchases should be picked up at convenience stores, making it nearly impossible for children to get hold of alcohol. Just a month later, the Taiwanese government incorporated the suggestions into a draft bill that it sent to parliament.
Without the willingness of the government and its institutions to genuinely incorporate pol.is into their decision-making procedures, nothing really happens.
In the beginning, when Tang started to promote the use of pol.is as digital minister, about 80 % of the 26 consultations conducted via pol.is resulted in action taken by the government – that, at least, is what Tang and her team claim.
Pol.is is a great tool for citizen participation. And it is certainly worth looking at what Audrey Tang has done and achieved in her days as Minister of Digital Affairs of Taiwan (Plurality is full of stories from Taiwan). But what is not said so clearly in the book: In most of the cases, the line from online consultation to government action was anything but straight. Rather, the survey via pol.is was part of a more complex political process. And from 2018 on, no further political decisions were initiated by pol.is. A “whole-of-society mobilization” (which is the authors’ acclaimed goal) looks different.
This is already one of the biggest limitations of the whole story: Without the willingness of the government and its institutions to genuinely incorporate pol.is into their decision-making procedures, nothing really happens. One reason why tools like pol.is do not, in the end, bring about as much political change as they could may be the reluctance of politicians and administrators to give up power. But there may also be reasons why pol.is itself should not be used without reservations. Pol.is is just a tool, supported by AI. There is no agreed-upon procedure for verifying that the tool works properly and legitimately – as we have procedures to validate and monitor, say, voting procedures and elections. Just handing over democracy to whatever tool might not be such a good idea. And even for issues of a limited scope, pol.is has its limits. Both the platform and the background-idea are rather sophisticated. In most cases where citizen participation is called for, simpler solutions which are easier to handle and to understand for the audience would be more suitable. (Most cases reported in Plurality deal with issues of digital politics – engaging participants that are probably both technically more skilled and better informed on political matters than average people.)
The internet, social media and AI are not about ideas. It’s all about power.
Back to the book. All in all, Plurality follows a rather intellectual path. And it’s this path which is severely misleading. The internet, social media and AI are not about ideas. It’s all about power. Netopia has reported on that topic over and over, especially in its many book reviews. We have written about the monopolization of information and knowledge. About predicting and steering people’s behaviour. About overtaking the public banking systems and transforming money itself into a service run by Silicon Valley. About gaining control over people’s thoughts and uploading whole brains into commercial service providers’ clouds. All this is quite different from the gentle exchange of ideas.
Democracy is, in the end, about the distribution of power. That’s why there is no technological fix, neither for democracy nor for the internet. Slogans like “People will expect their democracy to progress as rapidly as their devices” demonstrate clearly what Plurality is about: it’s good old solutionism. Plurality is a nice idea. But technological innovation (as you can also read in Netopia’s book reviews) is inherently linked to the monopolization of power, not to its distribution.
