A Transformational Book That Was Missing — Until Now

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.

– Leonard Cohen, from his poem Anthem

Dear friends,

When my friend and collaborator Martin Rausch set out to translate Audrey Tang’s and Glen Weyl’s philosophical and technical opus Plurality: The Future of Collaborative Technology and Democracy – into German, he kept having the same thought: This is so important, but most people won’t read 500 pages to find out why. 

What was needed was something shorter, more accessible, more readily compelling — a book that could carry the essential insights and energy of Taiwan’s democratic experiment to inspire readers who are curious but not yet awakened to what’s possible.

Finding Light Through the Cracks: Reinventing Democracy with Audrey Tang is that book. Martin wrote it together with co-intelligence facilitator Jenna Büchy and me. I was honored to play several significant roles – helping curate core principles from Audrey’s 2025 Right Livelihood award press conference and other speeches, doing editing work, and contributing an afterword. The book is now fully available in both English and German, as well as in a free pdf version.

Why focus on Taiwan?

Because we were captivated.  We’d never seen anything quite like it – an emerging quality of democracy that looked a lot like co-intelligence.  But there’s a story there….

In 2014, public trust in Taiwan’s government stood at around 9%. Six years later it had risen to 60%. During the COVID pandemic, it reached above 90%. These are not the numbers of a society that just stumbled into good governance. They are the result of deliberate, iterative, often experimental work — and that fascinating work is what this book is all about.

What happened in Taiwan didn’t arise from a single reform or a charismatic leader. It arose from something more interesting: a gradual shift in the relationship between government and citizens, enabled by a generation of what Audrey calls “civic hackers” — people who believed that the internet and democracy had arrived at the same historical moment for a reason, and who decided to make something special out of that coincidence.

The Problem They Named

One of the insights I find most clarifying in the book is the framing of democracy’s structural weaknesses as problems of latency and bandwidth. Democratic systems tend to be slow (high latency) and to only process a narrow range of public input at once (low bandwidth). The result is that by the time a government responds to a social problem, the problem has often changed — and the response reflects the views of the loudest, most passionate, most powerful, but not the wisest. And if citizens and institutions don’t make the necessary choices — or don’t make them in time — others will make them instead.

Taiwan’s innovations — vTaiwan, the JOIN platform, Polis-based digital deliberation, Alignment Assemblies — were designed specifically to address these constraints. Not by bypassing democratic structures, but by making deliberation faster, broader, and more genuinely representative.

Fun, Fast, and Fair

Audrey Tang – with whom I first connected eight years ago – has a formula for what good collective intelligence looks like: Relationship × Uniqueness = Collective Intelligence. The more genuine the connection between participants, and the more their different perspectives are actually heard and valued, the wiser the collective output becomes. Taiwan’s civic tech ecosystem was built to serve exactly this equation.

What strikes me most is the underlying philosophy: strengthen the capacity for self-governance, transparency, and civic participation — but hold the specific structures lightly. What matters is not any particular institution or innovation, but the ongoing ability of citizens to come together, make sense of complex situations, and act with collective wisdom – and to do it in ways that are fair, fast and fun. This is, I would argue, one of the deepest expressions of what I mean by co-intelligence.

Why Now

The urgencies we face — ecological, social, democratic — are outpacing the institutions we have. Taiwan’s approach doesn’t offer a blueprint to copy. But it offers something perhaps more valuable and elusive: proof that the gap between where we are and where we need to be is not fixed. It can be closed, step by step, through patient, creative, whole-system work.

That is what Finding Light Through the Cracks is about. I recommend it warmly.

We have a dedicated page on the co-intelligence.institute site here where you can download the pdf and may consider a donation or you can buy the paperback or ebook version on Amazon here.

If you read the book and it resonates, please consider leaving a review on Amazon. In today’s publishing landscape, reviews are what make a book visible to strangers — and this is a book that deserves to be fully seen. Even a few heartfelt sentences can make a real difference. 

Coheartedly,

Tom

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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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