Dear friends,

I know that headline is a mouthful, but it’s all so true. Audrey Tang has been one of the most influential people in my life’s work. She has been a poetic Taoist spirit deeply involved in evoking deliberative participatory democracy worldwide starting with her Taiwanese homeland. She’s a remarkable innovator of practices, technologies, collaborations, perspectives, and compelling language to talk about it all.

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– Tom
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I met Audrey in March 2018 after reading a few articles about her as Taiwan’s federal Digital Minister. She was implementing an official radical democracy initiative called “vTaiwan” which featured a participatory polling platform called Polis. Suddenly it was becoming possible to involve millions of people in empowered deliberative democracy in ways never previously realized.

Audrey talked with me for 9 hours, all recorded on YouTube (an official transparency practice she always followed). (You can watch our three calls here, here, and here.) I was amazed that she devoted so much time talking to me and a few others she’d never met. I thought she’d be too busy in her role as a major federal Minister. In response, she alluded to operating like an Open Space facilitator, such that she was barely needed in the larger vTaiwan system she’d designed to be self-organizing. I was struck by how she manifested the ancient Taoist principles like “When the leader leads well, the people say they did it themselves” and “Under the right conditions, opposites can dance into new forms of shared functionality.”

Audrey has been an inspiration to me ever since. And just last month, she was awarded the alternative Nobel Prize called “the Right Livelihood Award”. I urge you to read their description of her and her work and to listen to her short poetic acceptance speech and her Right Livelihood press conference.

She’s now traveling internationally to invite the rest of us into her startlingly practical transformational vision and to spread adaptation of the tools and principles she and her colleagues have been developing to help that vision take root in hundreds of new places.

Below I’m also offering a handful of her catchy framings for her approach and a summary (thanks, ChatGPT) of PLURALITY, her major tech/philosophical book (with E. Glen Weyl and dozens of colleagues)…. just for a taste of what she brings to the world.

Coheartedly,

Tom

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Some of Audrey’s clever framings for her approaches

• “Uncommon ground” means those rare points of agreement that people with very different ideological views often don’t realize they share. “Through technology, we have a way to discover our uncommon ground so that even though we come from different places, there’s a systemic way to co-create policies and norms.”
• Give trust to get trust – with the help of technology. Create the pro-social space/platform (e.g., with Polis) and then get pre-commitment from government to implement the uncommon ground it generates. Start with a simple local issue with those two steps, and they feed on each other. When the pre-commitment is acted on, trust in the system (and trust in the government, and trust in the people) grows, and more participation from the people and the government engages in the system which further expands the trust, on and on….
• We, the people, are the true super intelligence. All we need are better ways to listen to each other across differences.
• Democracy, in this vision, must be “fast, fair and fun” – fast to respond to people’s needs, fair so every voice counts, and fun so participation is energizing rather than exhausting.
• In Taiwan we do more prebunking than debunking, using a “humour over rumour” response to disinformation and deepfakes: We have this 2-2-2 principle: Whenever the citizen fact-checking network CoFacts detect that there’s a viral disinformation or polarization attack, then within 2 hours we need to roll out either 2 minutes of video or 2 pictures of 200 characters or less each that is funnier than the attack information – because if it’s funny, it will travel faster than outrage. If you do all this well within 2 hours, most people will see your humor before they see the original disinformation.
• As the late, great Leonard Cohen wrote: “Ring the bells that still can ring. Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack, a crack in everything. And that’s how the light gets in.” For democracies, this really is key. We must see the cracks in our societies—broken trust, polarization, environmental cracks—not as reasons for despair, but as invitations for collaboration, those openings for light to get in.
• We must move from human in the loop of AI to AI in the loop of humanity. This involves moving away from AI as addictive intelligence to keep us doomscrolling and start using AI as assistive intelligence designed to help us listen to one another.
• A highway with no on ramp or off ramp is a hamster wheel. People want to put their time and energy into the steering wheel, not a hamster wheel.
• I wrote my own Digital Minister job description that remains my mantra to this day. It goes like this:
  • When we say “Internet of Things,” let’s make it an Internet of Beings.
  • When we say “Virtual Reality,” let’s make it a shared reality.
  • When we say “Machine Learning,” let’s make it collaborative learning.
  • When we say “User Experience,” let’s make it about human experience.
  • And whenever we hear that a Singularity is near, let us always remember: the Plurality is here.
    

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ChatGPT’s summary of Audrey’s Plurality philosophy

My Prompt

I understand that Audrey Tang’s book PLURALITY has something to do with increasing/optimizing uniqueness/diversity AND interconnectivity/interactivity. But I don’t have the whole picture. Can you give me a summary of its philosophical non-technical essence, expressed in somewhat poetic terms. I don’t want your summary to be a reductionist oversimplification of the richness of the book’s ideas, but I want to have a working understanding of the book’s core significance for a lay audience.

ChatGPT

Here is a non-technical, philosophically faithful, gently poetic summary of Plurality: The Future of Collaborative Technology and Democracy (Audrey Tang, E. Glen Weyl, et al.) that honors its core dynamic: increasing uniqueness and interconnection, simultaneously — without flattening its richness.

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Plurality: A Poetic-Philosophical Essence

Plurality begins from a simple, radical observation:

Life flourishes when differences are not merely tolerated but activated as gifts —
and when the space between us becomes a medium for co-creation rather than division.

It asks us to see society not as a machine to be engineered, nor as a battlefield of competing wills, but as a living ecosystem of unique beings whose relationships are the true source of intelligence.

Humans, communities, and even AIs become co-learning partners in a dance where distinctiveness is amplified rather than averaged away, and interdependence becomes a strength rather than a vulnerability.

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1. A Shift of Metaphor: From “One Truth” to “Many Voices in Resonance”

Plurality rejects the old myth that progress requires convergence toward a single worldview, solution, or leader. Instead, it proposes:

• many truths held lightly
• many paths explored simultaneously
• many forms of knowing allowed to touch and inform each other

Truth here is polyphonic.
Wisdom arises not from homogenizing differences but from placing diverse perspectives into generative relation.

Rather than a melting pot, the book envisions a resonant orchestra — each instrument distinct, none replaceable, all needed.

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2. Diversity as Creative Power, Not a Problem to Solve

In Plurality, difference is not an obstacle to understanding —
it is the very source of understanding.

Diversity is treated as:

• a reservoir of untried possibilities
• a shield against systemic blind spots
• a generator of resilience in turbulent times
• a field of latent collaboration waiting for new relationships

Uniqueness is not a deviation from the norm, but part of a mutualistic ecology of minds.

To be different is to be a gift the world has not yet finished unwrapping.

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3. Interconnection as Relationship, Not Control

Plurality seeks to transform how we relate.

Instead of designing systems that predict and manage people, it imagines systems that:

• invite participation rather than compel conformity
• strengthen bonds rather than optimize metrics
• build trust through shared transparency and reciprocity
• support ongoing dialogue instead of issuing final answers

Interactivity is not a feature; it is a moral commitment
to meeting each other as co-creators.

In this frame, connection is the soil in which uniqueness grows taller rather than being trimmed down.

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4. Technology as a Partner in Collective Flourishing

A hopeful thread in the book:
technology is not destined to fragment us — it can weave us into deeper mutuality, if we design it that way.

Plurality imagines digital tools that:

• augment empathy, not bypass it
• surface minority insights, not silence them
• match people across differences to find shared projects
• enable experiments in governance as easily as experiments in code
• support small communities without forcing them into large consensus

It is an invitation to co-evolve technologies that expand our capacity to see each other,
and to see ourselves as part of a larger mosaic of beings.

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5. A New Kind of Democracy: Co-Creation at Many Scales

Democracy in Plurality is not merely voting or deliberation but continuous symbiosis among diverse agents — human and artificial.

It is a democracy where:

• multiple small publics explore solutions in parallel
• networks of communities learn from one another
• governance is less about forcing agreement and more about
  discovering pathways where different needs can thrive together

It imagines a world where:

No single solution must fit everyone;
many solutions can fit together.

This is polycentric governance,
but rendered in warm, relational terms:
a weaving of many autonomies into a shared fabric of care.

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6. The Deep Philosophy: “Uniqueness × Relationship” as the Generative Engine of Life

At its heart, Plurality proposes a deceptively simple formula:

More uniqueness × more relationship = more collective intelligence.

The multiplication is important:
diversity alone can fragment;
connection alone can homogenize.
But together, they amplify each other.

This mirrors ecosystems, immune systems, cities, neural networks —
and perhaps the coming era of human+AI societies.

Plurality is not a compromise between “individualism” and “collectivism.”
It is an ecology of selves becoming wiser through interaction.

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7. A Quiet Spiritual Thread: The World as a Co-Created Commons of Becoming

Implicit in the book is a spiritual sensibility:

• that we are unfinished beings, evolving through relation
• that creativity emerges between us, not only within us
• that our uniqueness is not ours alone — it is shaped in the presence of others
• that the future is a commons we continually co-compose

In this view:

We do not merely live in society;
society lives through us — through our differences,
through our willingness to meet across them,
and through the new worlds that emerge between us.

______________________________

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Tom Atlee, The Co-Intelligence Institute, POB 493, Eugene, OR 97440

Appreciating, evoking and engaging the wisdom and resourcefulness of the whole on behalf of the whole

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