Merge branch 'main' of https://github.com/pluralitybook/plurality

contents/english/3-0-what-is-⿻.md

@@ -16,6 +16,7 @@ Nor is the possibility of such a direction for technology especially novel.  Per
 <img src="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pluralitybook/plurality/main/figs/triptych.png" width="100%" alt="Three-part definition of Plurality">
 
 To be more precise, we can break Plurality into three components (descriptive, normative and prescriptive) each associated with one of three thinkers (Hannah Arendt, Danielle Allen and Audrey Tang) each of whom has used the term in these three distinct and yet tightly connected ways, as captured in the figure above:
+
 1. Descriptive: **The social world is neither an unorganized collection of isolated individuals nor a monolithic whole. Instead, it is a fabric of diverse and intersecting affiliations that define both our individual identities and our collective organization.**  We identify this concept with Hannah Arendt and especially her book, *The Human Condition*, where she identifies Plurality as the most fundamental element of the human condition.  We identify this descriptive element of Plurality especially with the Universal Coded Character (unicode) ⿻ which captures its emphasis on the intersectional, overlapping nature of identity for both groups and individuals.  Furthermore, in the next chapter, "Living in a Plural World", we highlight that this description applies not merely to human social life, but, according to modern (complexity) science, to essentially all complex phenomena in the natural world.
 2. Normative: **Diversity is the fuel of social progress and while it may explode like any fuel (into conflict), societies succeed largely to the extent they manage to instead harness its potential energy for growth.**  We identify this concept with philosopher Danielle Allen's ideal of "A Connected Society" and associate it with the rainbow elements that form at the intersection of the squares in the elaborated ⿻ image on the book cover and in the figure above.  While Allen has given perhaps the clearest exposition of these ideas, as we explore in "The Lost Dao" they are deeply rooted in a philosophical tradition including many of the American thinkers who deeply influenced Taiwan, such as Henry George and John Dewey.
 3. Prescriptive: **Digital technology should aspire to build the engines that harness and avoid conflagration of diversity, much as industrial technology built the engines that harnessed physical fuel and contained its explosions.** We identify this concept the use by one of us, beginning in 2016, of the term Plurality to refer to a technological agenda. We associate it even more closely with  the use in her title (as Digital Minister) of the traditional Mandarin characters 數位 (pronounced in English as "shuwei") which, in Taiwan, mean simultaneously "plural" when applied to people and "digital" and thus capture the fusion of the philosophy arising in Arendt and Allen with the transformative potential of digital technology.  In the last chapter of this section, "Technology for Collaborative Diversity", we argue that, while less explicit, this philosophy drove much of the development of what has come to be called the "internet", tough because it was not sufficiently articulated it has been somewhat lost since.  A primary goal of the rest of the book is to clearly state this vision and thus help it become the alternative it should be to the libertarian, technocratic and stagnant democratic stories that dominate much discussion today.

contents/english/3-3-the-lost-dao.md

@@ -59,7 +59,7 @@ But despite the apparent threat it posed to that private interest, packet switch
 
 If one path to networked thinking was thus motivated by technical resilience, another was motivated by creative expression.  Ted Nelson trained as a sociologist, was inspired in his work by a visit to campus he hosted in 1959 by cybernetic pioneer Margaret Mead's vision of democratic and pluralistic media and developed into. an artist.  Following these early experiences, he devoted his life beginning in his early 20s to the development of "Project Xanadu", which aimed to create a revolutionary human-centered interface for computer networks.  While Xanadu had so many components that Nelson considered indispensable that it was not released fully unto the 2010s, its core idea, co-developed with Engelbart, was "hypertext" as Nelson labeled it.
 
-Nelson imagined hypertext as a way to liberate communication from the tyranny of a linear interpretation imposed by an original author, empowering a "pluralism" (as he labeled it) of paths through material through a network of (bidirectional) links connecting material in a variety of sequences.    This "choose your own adventure" quality is most familiar today to internet users in their browsing experiences but showed up earlier in commercial products in the 1980s (such as computer games based on hypercard).  Nelson imagined that such ease of navigation and recombination would enable the formation of new cultures and narratives at unprecedented speed and scope.  The power of this approach became apparent to the broader world when Tim Berners-Lee made it central to his "World Wide Web" approach to navigation in the early 1990s, ushering in the era of broad adoption of the internet.
+Nelson imagined hypertext as a way to liberate communication from the tyranny of a linear interpretation imposed by an original author, empowering a "pluralism" (as he labeled it) of paths through material through a network of (bidirectional) links connecting material in a variety of sequences.    This "choose your own adventure"[^ChooseYourOwnAdventure] quality is most familiar today to internet users in their browsing experiences but showed up earlier in commercial products in the 1980s (such as computer games based on hypercard).  Nelson imagined that such ease of navigation and recombination would enable the formation of new cultures and narratives at unprecedented speed and scope.  The power of this approach became apparent to the broader world when Tim Berners-Lee made it central to his "World Wide Web" approach to navigation in the early 1990s, ushering in the era of broad adoption of the internet.
 
 While Engelbart and Nelson were lifelong friends and shared many similar visions, they took very different paths to realizing them, each of which (as we will see) held an important seed of truth.    Engelbart, while also a visionary, was a consummate pragmatist and a smooth political operator, and went on to be recognized as the pioneer of personal computing.  Nelson was an artistic purist whose relentless pursuit over decades of a software system ("Project Xanadu") that instantiated all of his seventeen enumerated principles buried his career.
 
@@ -181,4 +181,4 @@ Yet none of these have institutionalized the breadth and depth of ⿻ approaches
 [^benkler_linux]: Benkler, Y., 2002. Coase's penguin, or, Linux and "The Nature of the Firm". Yale Law Journal, pp.369-446.
 [^wiredglove]: A wired glove is an input device like a glove. It allows users to interact with digital environments through gestures and movements, translating physical hand actions into digital responses. The first wired glove was invented in 1977.
 [^visionpro]: The Vision Pro is a head mount display, released by Apple in 2024. This device integrates high-resolution displays with sensors capable of tracking the user's movements, hand actions and the environment to offer an immersive mixed reality experience.
-
+[^ChooseYourOwnAdventure]: "Choose Your Own Adventure," interactive gamebooks based on Edward Packard's concept from 1976, peaked in popularity under Bantam Books in the '80s and '90s, with 250+ million copies sold. It declined in the '90s due to competition from computer games.

contents/english/4-2-association-and-⿻-publics.md

@@ -53,7 +53,7 @@ While the common beliefs of a group of people are obviously related to the actua
 
 In game theory and other formal social science disciplines, it is common to model individuals as collections of intentions/preferences and beliefs.  This notion of community gives a way to think about groups similarly and distinctly from the individuals that make them up, given that common beliefs and intentions need not be the same as those of the individuals that are part of that group: group beliefs and goals are common beliefs and goals of that group.  In this sense, the freedom to create associations can be understood as the freedom to create common beliefs and goals.  Yet creating associations is not enough.  Just as we argued in the previous chapter that protecting secrets is critical to maintaining individual identity, so too associations must be able to protect themselves from surveillance, as should their common beliefs become simply the beliefs of everyone, they cease to be a separate association.  As such privacy from external surveillance or internal over-sharing is just as critical as is establishing associations to their freedom.
 
-It is little surprise, then, that many of the historical technologies and spaces that come to mind when we think of the freedom of association are precisely geared to achieving common beliefs and shielding common beliefs from external beliefs from outsiders. Searching for "freedom of association" typically yields images of protests in public spaces, meetings in public spaces like parks and squares and group discussions in private clubs.  As illustrated above, group meetings and statements made openly in front of group members are crucial to achieving common beliefs and understanding among that group.  Private pamphlets may achieve individual persuasion, but given the lack of common observation, game theorists have argued that they struggle to create public beliefs in the same way a shared declaration, like the child's public laughter, can.
+It is little surprise, then, that many of the historical technologies and spaces that come to mind when we think of the freedom of association are precisely geared to achieving common beliefs and shielding common beliefs from external beliefs from outsiders. Searching for "freedom of association" typically yields images of protests in public spaces, meetings in public spaces like parks and squares and group discussions in private clubs.[^PrivateClubs]  As illustrated above, group meetings and statements made openly in front of group members are crucial to achieving common beliefs and understanding among that group.  Private pamphlets may achieve individual persuasion, but given the lack of common observation, game theorists have argued that they struggle to create public beliefs in the same way a shared declaration, like the child's public laughter, can.
 
 But purely public spaces have important limitations: they do not allow groups to form their views and coordinate their actions outside the broader public eye.  This may undermine their cohesion, their ability to present a united face externally and their ability to communicate effectively harnessing an internal context.  This is why associations so often have enclosed gathering places open only to members: to allow the secrecy that Simmel emphasized as critical to group efficacy and cohesion.[^SimSec] The crucial question we thus face is how systems of network communication can offer the the brave new world of "communities of interest" these same or even more effective affordances to create protected common beliefs.
 
@@ -112,6 +112,8 @@ Yet most types of information are harder to independently and immediately verify
 
 If properly combined in a new generation of networking standards, a combination of these tools could give us the capacity to move beyond the superficial traditional divide between "publicity" and "privacy" to empower true freedom of association online.  While we usually think of publicity and privacy as a one-dimensional spectrum, it is easy to see that another dimension is equally important.  
 
+Japanese philosopher Kojin Karatani explores this concept in his book "The Principle of NAM."[^NAMPrinciple] Karatani argues that individuals belong not only to geographical regions but also to global "regions" based on their interests. He calls this the "rhizomatic association" and depicts it as a network formation system consisting of diverse "regions." This concept resembles the network structure where small, closely-knit communities are interconnected.
+
 Consider first information "hidden in plain sight", lost in a pile of irrelevant facts, available to all but reaching the awareness of no one.  Contrast this with the secret of the existence of the Manhattan Project, which was shared among roughly 100,000 people but was sharply hidden from the rest of the world.  Both are near the midpoint of the "privacy" v. "publicity" spectrum, as both are in important ways broadly shared and also obscure.  But they sit at opposite ends of another spectrum: of concentrated common understanding v. diffuse availability.
 
 This example illustrates why "privacy" and "publicity" are far too simplistic concepts to describe the patterns of co-knowledge that underpin free association.  While any simple descriptor will fall short of the richness we should continue to investigate, a more relevant model may be what elsewhere we have called "⿻ publics".  ⿻ publics is the aspiration to create information standards that allow a diverse range of communities with strong internal common beliefs shielded from the outside world to coexist.  Achieving this requires maintaining what Shrey Jain, Zoë Hitzig and Pamela Mishkin have called "contextual confidence", where participants in a system can easily establish and protect the context of their communications.[^ContextualConfidence]
@@ -142,3 +144,5 @@ Furthermore, the right of free association is the foundation on which commerce a
 [^Spritely]: Spritely Project. https://spritelyproject.org/
 [^ZKCanon]: Elena Burger, Bryan Chiang, Sonal Chokshi, Eddy Lazzarin, Justin Thaler, Ali Yahya. Zero Knowledge Canon. https://a16zcrypto.com/posts/article/zero-knowledge-canon/
 [^BowlingAlone]: Putnam, R.D. (1995). "Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital". *Journal of Democracy*. https://doi.org/10.1353/jod.1995.0002.
+[^NAMPrinciple]: Kojin Karatani (2000). "NAM原理" *太田出版* (Published in Japanese. Not translated in English). In this year Karatani founded the New Associationist Movement in Japan. It was an anti-capitalist, anti-nation-state association inspired by experiments with Local Exchange Trading Systems.
+[^PrivateClubs]: Richard Rorty wrote "We can urge the construction of a world order whose model is a bazaar surrounded by lots and lots of exclusive private clubs." in Rorty, R. (1986). "On ethnocentrism: A reply to Clifford Geertz". University of Michigan. He suggests we need not only public spaces but also a variety of small communities.

contents/english/6-1-workplace.md

@@ -14,7 +14,7 @@ The Covid-19 pandemic transformed the world of work, bringing changes expected f
 
 Yet there is little question that remote work has real downsides.  Some of these, such as ensuring work-life balance, avoiding distractions and unhealthy at-home working conditions, are not easily addressed through remote collaboration tools.  But many others are: lack of organic interactions with colleagues, missing opportunities for feedback or to form deeper personal connections with colleagues, etc. [^remote-shift-impact] While ⿻ can be used to address most of these, we will focus on one in particular: the building of strong and deeply trusting teams.
 
-In-person teams often engage in a variety of joint learnings or other not-directly-productive activities to build team trust, connection and spirit.  These range from casual lunches to various kinds of extreme team sports, such as "trust falls", simulated military exercises, ropes courses, etc.  What nearly all these have in common is that they create a shared activity that benefits from and thus helps develop trust among members, in a similar manner to the way we discussed shared military service developing strong and lasting cooperative bonds in the "Post-Symbolic Communication" chapter.  
+In-person teams often engage in a variety of joint learnings or other not-directly-productive activities to build team trust, connection and spirit.  These range from casual lunches to various kinds of extreme team sports, such as "trust falls"[^TrustFall], simulated military exercises, ropes courses, etc.  What nearly all these have in common is that they create a shared activity that benefits from and thus helps develop trust among members, in a similar manner to the way we discussed shared military service developing strong and lasting cooperative bonds in the "Post-Symbolic Communication" chapter.  
 
 Obviously most such activities currently rely heavily on being in person, thus many hybrid and fully remote teams, especially those that have many members who started as remote employees, miss the team-building benefits created by such activities or can achieve them only at considerable travel expense.  Remote shared reality offers significant potential for overcoming this challenge.  Lunches among sufficiently realistic avatars, ones reflecting detailed facial expressions for example, may soon help bring the rich connections achieved in the office within the reach of remote teams.  While it would seem impossible to achieve the vivid connections of parties or extreme sports in remote shared reality, there is increasingly strong evidence that real experiences of fear and trust can develop in sufficiently realistic simulated environments.  As "e-sports" begin to rival the popularity and, in the right remote shared reality environments, physical intensity of in-person physical sports, the benefits of "campus athletics" may increasingly make their way to remote work.
 
@@ -91,3 +91,4 @@ Huet, Ellen. “Basecamp Follows Coinbase In Banning Politics Talk at Work.” B
 [^remote-shift-impact]: Yang, Longqi, David Holtz, Sonia Jaffe, Siddharth Suri, Shilpi Sinha, Jeffrey Weston, Connor Joyce, et al. “The Effects of Remote Work on Collaboration among Information Workers.” Nature Human Behaviour 6, no. 1 (September 9, 2021): 43–54. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-021-01196-4.
 [^meeting-stats]: Krueger, Alyson. “Fewer Work Meetings? Corporate America Is Trying.” The New York Times, April 10, 2023. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/07/business/office-meetings-time.html.
 [^meeting-stats2]: Brooks, Arthur C. “Why Meetings Are Terrible for Happiness.” The Atlantic, December 15, 2022. https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2022/11/why-meetings-are-terrible-happiness/672144/.
+[^TrustFall]: A "trust fall" is an exercise where a person falls backward, counting on others to catch them. This activity is used to build trust and teamwork, as it requires relying on others to prevent injury. From the mid-2010s, the trust fall became less popular due to the potential for traumatic brain injuries if catchers fail.