A Plurality Atlas
A map of the book Plurality and the ideas, mechanisms, practices, people and debates around it, one "What is…?" question at a time. Written for first-time readers; every article ends with links to the book, talks and other primary sources. About this site (how it is made, who runs it) ・ Terms across languages ・ Bibliography ・ Introduce this site (QR code)
Start here
Four articles to read first.
What is ⿻ Plurality?Technology — and a way of thinking about it — that helps people with different views and backgrounds work together instead of clashing. Audrey Tang of Taiwan and the economist Glen Weyl define it in their book of the same name as "technology for collaboration across social difference".What is Broad Listening?Technology and practice that uses AI to read thousands or tens of thousands of free-form comments, group similar opinions, and turn them into a "map of issues", so that one person can listen to many. It is the reverse of broadcasting on TV or radio.What is the 6-Pack of Care?Six principles for checking whether AI actually serves people — not only by looking inside the AI, but by asking whether people on the ground were heard, who is accountable, whether failures can be repaired, and whether it can be switched off. Audrey Tang and Caroline Green set them out in 2025.What is Reverse Alignment?The other side of "alignment", which fits AI to humans: an effort to rebuild society's institutions, rules, people's skills and the ways decisions are made so that AI can be used safely and its benefits widely shared. Glen Weyl and others put it forward as an agenda in 2026.
Core ideas
The ideas that form the backbone of the book Plurality.
What is Adaptive Administration?The book *Plurality*'s vision of using technologies such as text-generating AI to let the fixed forms and rules of government offices and large companies adapt to each user's own words and circumstances. The rules that ensure fairness stay in place, while diverse people can use the system as they are.What is Augmented Deliberation?Using digital technology to extend people's ability to talk and think together at scale. It answers a problem: technology for carrying one voice to many has advanced enormously, yet it is still very hard for one person to listen to the many different voices of a crowd.What is Civic AI?AI that is properly answerable to the people it affects. Instead of one giant AI governing everyone, Audrey Tang and colleagues propose building many small AIs that local communities, schools and organizations can own, inspect, correct and even switch off by themselves.What is collaboration across social difference?People who differ in their views, faith, culture or position achieving something together without erasing those differences. The book ⿻ Plurality makes technology that supports this the very definition of Plurality, and treats difference as both a spark for conflict and a fuel for progress.What is collaborative technology?Technology that does not work in place of people, but helps people — especially people of different positions and cultures — think, decide and make things together. The phrase appears in the subtitle of the book ⿻ Plurality, whose Part 5 sets out concrete examples, from deliberation and voting to markets and creative work.What is Commerce and Trust (⿻ money)?Phone payments and cryptocurrencies have made paying as easy as handing over cash. But the book *Plurality* says this merely recreates cash in digital form. Its vision is to record trust between people, favors owed and contributions to a community as they are, and make them the basis of exchange.What is contextual integrity?The idea that privacy is not about hiding information, but about information being handled according to the norms of the setting in which it was shared. The book *Plurality* uses it as a yardstick for designing online identity, payments and data sharing.What are Creative Collaborations?Many people from different countries and fields, from art to science, pooling their knowledge and experience to create something together. The book *Plurality* describes how online collaboration tools and AI that generates text and images widen its reach, while warning against homogenization and monopoly.What is digital democracy?The idea and practice of using digital technologies such as the internet and AI so that citizens can take part more widely and more deeply in political and public decisions. The book ⿻ Plurality holds up Taiwan as the world's leading example, and presents it as an alternative to AI-centered technocracy and crypto-centered libertarianism.What is digital public infrastructure (DPI)?Just as roads and water systems are built with public money, the idea is to build the basic parts of the internet, such as identity checks, payments and data exchange, as public systems that no single company owns. The book *Plurality* also calls for everyone to have access to information that has not been tampered with, as a right.What are emergent publics?The idea that when a new technology draws previously unconnected people into affecting one another, the people affected form a new "public", which then needs to govern that problem itself. It comes from the philosopher John Dewey, and the book *Plurality* makes it a pillar of its view of democracy.What are generative foundation models (GFMs)?Large programs, like ChatGPT and Claude, that learn from huge numbers of examples of text and images and produce text, images and voices. The book *Plurality* mostly avoids calling them "AI", and treats them as tools that help people collaborate across their differences.What is a hypergraph?A mathematical model that extends the familiar network diagram so that not only a line between two people, but also a group of any size, can count as a single connection. The book Plurality pictures society this way.What is Identity and Personhood (⿻ identity)?The idea of supporting how we show online that "I am me" not with a password, a single number or a fingerprint, but with the overlap of many people and organizations who can say "I know this person". The book Plurality argues this makes identity easier to establish and harder to spy on from one place.What is Immersive Shared Reality (ISR)?Using VR, AR and similar technologies so that people in distant places can enter the same virtual space and share an experience through many senses. The book *Plurality* presents it as a tool for building empathy and community by experiencing someone else's situation with your body.What is intersectional identity?The idea that who "I" am is not settled by any single group. Each of us belongs a little to many groups (work, faith, politics, hobbies), and because no one else has exactly the same overlap, each of us becomes a unique individual. It comes from the sociologist Georg Simmel, and *Plurality* puts it at the base of its view of people.What is monist atomism?A way of thinking about society in terms of only two things, separate individuals and a single whole that binds them (such as the nation), while overlooking the overlapping groups in between: families, workplaces, religions, localities. The book Plurality coined the name to contrast this view with its own position.What is Post-Symbolic Communication?Communication that shares sensations, feelings and experiences with others directly, without first turning them into "symbols" such as words or pictures. The term was coined by the virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier, and the book *Plurality* presents it as a chance to extend, with technology, old forms of intimacy like dancing and embracing.What is Property and Contract (⿻ property)?When you rent out a house, the tenant receives only the right to live in it; the rights to sell it and to collect rent stay with the landlord. Ownership, in other words, can be split up and shared. The book *Plurality* proposes extending this idea to digital assets such as computing power and data.What is the rights operating system?Just as phone apps run only on top of an operating system, democracy runs only on a foundation of rights. Now that we spend so much of our lives online, the book *Plurality* argues, that foundation should be rebuilt as shared digital protocols.What are Social Markets?The book Plurality's plan for remaking markets. Markets connect strangers around the world more widely than anything else, but as a form of collaboration they are the simplest. Social Markets try to keep that reach while building public goods, sharing and human connections into the workings of prices.What is supermodularity?The property that "the whole is greater than the sum of the parts". When people or things come together and work jointly, they create more value than the total they would produce working separately. The book Plurality uses this word to describe the power of collaboration.What are ⿻ publics?People belong to many groups: clubs, workplaces, families, neighborhood associations. Inside each group it can be easy to reach a state where "everyone knows the same thing", and what is shared there does not easily leak out. ⿻ publics is the idea of letting many such groups exist side by side online.What is the ⿻ theory of change?The book *Plurality*'s view that instead of overturning the world all at once, new ways of doing things should first be tried in communities of around 100,000 people with many different kinds of members, and that many such small successes should be built and spread while being loosely linked together.What is ⿻ Voting (plural voting)?A name used in the book Plurality for voting designs that fix the weak points of "one person, one vote, and the most votes win". They try to let a vote reflect how strongly people care, and how people are connected to one another.What are 數位 (shuwei) and the ⿻ symbol?數位 (shuwei) is the word for "digital" in Taiwan. The book Plurality explains that when applied to people it also means "plural", and to show "digital = plural" in a single character it uses the symbol ⿻, drawn as two overlapping squares.
Mechanisms and tools
Concrete mechanisms and software for cooperation across difference.
What is Bridging?A design principle that ranks highest the things supported by people who usually disagree. Instead of ordering content by likes or views, it values support that crosses divides, so that what rises to the top is what both sides accept. Community Notes and Polis are the best-known examples.What are Community Notes?A system on X (formerly Twitter) that lets users attach explanatory notes to posts that might mislead. It does not work by majority vote: a note is shown only when people who usually disagree in their ratings both rate it "helpful".What is data dignity?The data we produce online is valuable raw material for AI and advertising. Data dignity is the idea that, instead of letting companies soak it up for free, we should recognize it as the work of the people who made it, and bargain over and manage it collectively through intermediary organizations, rather like labor unions.What is Gov4Git (GitRules)?An open-source tool that, when many people build code or documents together, records and runs who the members are, how much say each has, and which contributions are accepted. It was used to make the book *Plurality*, and was renamed GitRules in 2024.What is a Harberger tax?A proposed system in which owners declare for themselves the price at which they would be willing to part with their property, and pay tax in proportion to it. If someone offers to buy at that price, they must sell. It aims at honest valuations and at moving idle assets to people who want to use them.What is Idobata?A Japanese-made discussion tool in which each person talks with an AI in a chat, and AI gathers what was said into shared issues and proposed revisions to policy. Digital Democracy 2030 (DD2030) publishes it for free, and it was used in drawing up Team Mirai's manifesto.What is a Kami?A small AI that serves only one place or one group. The people there can inspect it, correct it and retire it at any time. It is a metaphor from Audrey Tang that borrows the shape of the Shinto idea of a "god of a particular place".What is Kouchou AI?Free Japanese software that takes thousands of free-form comments in a spreadsheet-style file and has AI group similar opinions into an "opinion map" with summaries. Digital Democracy 2030 (DD2030) built it on the basis of Talk to the City, a tool from the United States.What is liquid democracy?A system in which, for each issue, you choose either to vote yourself or to entrust your vote to someone you trust. The person you entrust can pass it on again to someone else, and you can take your vote back at any time and cast it yourself.What is the Plural Management Protocol (PMP)?A set of operating rules for when many people make one book or piece of software together, so that "what to do next" and "whether to accept a contribution" are decided by the participants rather than by one leader. The book *Plurality* itself was made under these rules.What is Polis?An online discussion tool where participants write short statements and simply click "agree", "disagree" or "pass" on other people's. From the voting patterns it draws a map of opinion groups, and brings to the surface the statements that win support across those groups.What is proof of personhood?A way to show online that "this account belongs to a real human, and that human has only one". It reveals no name or address, and proves only two things — that you are human, and that you are a different person from everyone else.What is prosocial media?A proposal for building social media that does the opposite of platforms that profit by spreading posts designed to provoke anger or shock. It shows which groups accept a post and where opinion splits, gives priority to posts that can be shared across divides, and has communities pay for the value of those connections.What is Quadratic Funding?A rule for how a matching fund tops up people's donations — one that weighs the number of people who gave more heavily than the amount they gave. A project backed by many small donors receives far more matching money than one backed by a single big donor.What is Quadratic Voting?A way of voting in which everyone gets the same budget of points to spread across the options they care about. One vote costs 1 point, two votes cost 4, three cost 9 — the square of the number of votes — so you can show how strongly you feel, but piling everything onto one option gets expensive.What are Soulbound Tokens (SBTs)?Digital certificates that cannot be sold or handed to others. They tie things like education, memberships, attendance and promises to repay to an account called a "Soul". In 2022, Buterin, Weyl and Ohlhaver proposed them as part of a "Decentralized Society" (DeSoc) that would rebuild money-centered Web3 on human relationships.What is Talk to the City (TTTC)?A free, openly published tool that has AI read large numbers of free-form comments, group them by similar points, and turn them into a map of dots with summaries. Built by the US-based AI Objectives Institute, it has been used in discussions in Taiwan and at the start of broad listening in Japan.What are ⿻ credits (Plural credits)?Points given to people who contributed to making the book *Plurality*, designed not to be bought or sold for money. They are a record of who made how much of the book, and also a "community currency" used in votes to set the priority of tasks and decide whether contributions are accepted.
Practice and cases
Where these have actually been used, in Taiwan, Japan and elsewhere.
What is the AI Objectives Institute (AOI)?A US nonprofit research organization that aims to steer AI toward protecting and strengthening human agency (the ability to think, decide and act for oneself). It built Talk to the City, a tool that uses AI to turn large numbers of opinions into a map. The tool was used in discussions in Taiwan and became the starting point for broad listening in Japan.What are Alignment Assemblies?An effort to decide "how AI should behave" not only among companies and experts, but by bringing ordinary citizens together to discuss it and feeding the results into the decisions of AI companies and governments. A US nonprofit started it in 2023, and Taiwan's government joined in.What is the broad listening for Tokyo's "Shin Tokyo 2050"?In November and December 2024, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government invited opinions on "the Tokyo of the 2050s". It used AI to sort and visualize the roughly 28,000 submissions and rearranged how the policies of its long-term plan were grouped. The book *Broad Listening* presents it as the leading example of a government using broad listening.What is broad listening in local governments?Efforts by towns and prefectures in Japan to summarize residents' voices, such as free-form survey answers, automatically with tools like Kouchou AI, and so make visible what residents are saying as a whole. In 2025 this was done in the town of Utazu in Kagawa, Iwate Prefecture, Shibuya Ward in Tokyo, Hiroshima Prefecture and elsewhere.What is civic tech?Activity in which citizens use technology with their own hands, working with government, to solve local and social problems and make it easier to take part in politics. Code for America in the United States, g0v in Taiwan and Code for Japan are leading examples.What is Cofacts?An open fact-checking system in Taiwan: when citizens forward a suspicious message they received on LINE or elsewhere to a chatbot, they get back an answer researched and written by volunteers. Anyone can take part. It grew out of g0v, the civic hacker community, and its data can be used by anyone.What is the Collective Intelligence Project (CIP)?A nonprofit that researches and tests ways for ordinary people's discussions, not just a few companies or experts, to decide the direction of technologies that transform society, such as AI. Divya Siddarth and Saffron Huang started it at the end of 2022.What is Cybozu, and how is it connected to the book Plurality?A Japanese software company that makes tools for communicating and sharing information at work (groupware). Through its own publishing imprint, Cybozu Shiki Books, it published the Japanese edition of the book Plurality, titled PLURALITY, in May 2025. It is also the employer of this site's operator.What is Digital Democracy 2030 (DD2030)?A volunteer community in Japan that builds tools to help citizens' voices reach politics and government, as open source that anyone can use for free. Takahiro Anno and Ken Suzuki started it in January 2025, and it develops Kouchou AI, Idobata and Polimoney. It commits itself to neutrality, favoring no party.What is g0v?A civic open-source community of volunteers started by Taiwanese programmers in 2012. It "rebuilds" government websites in clearer, easier-to-use form and tackles civic problems at regular hackathons. It gave rise to vTaiwan, the mask map, the fact-checking service Cofacts and more.What is the German citizen hackathon "Deutschland, was geht?"The citizen hackathon "Deutschland, was geht?" was run in 2026 by SPRIND, a German federal agency, and Germany's federal digital ministry. Modeled on Taiwan's Presidential Hackathon, it turned 27,707 complaints about government offices into 13 issues, which citizens then ranked by quadratic voting.Plurality in CzechiaIn Czechia, no translation of the book *Plurality* has been found, and there is hardly any reporting on the book or on E. Glen Weyl. What stands out are the contacts with Taiwan that have continued since the Senate president's 2020 visit. Audrey Tang is mostly described as a partner in countering disinformation within those contacts.Plurality in DenmarkAlmost the only visible link between Denmark and the book *Plurality* is The Synthetic Party, an AI-led political party the book uses as an example. No Danish translation or review of the book has been found, but Denmark has overlapping foundations, such as its long practice of creating places where citizens discuss technology.Plurality in EstoniaThe book *Plurality* presents Estonia as a country "often cited as the most digitized democratic government". Yet no Estonian translation has been found. What stands out locally is the citizens' assembly Rahvakogu and the citizens' initiative website that grew out of it.Plurality in FinlandIn Finland, hardly any translation of the book *Plurality* or reporting on Audrey Tang or E. Glen Weyl can be found. What stands out is how the Sitra fund brought in Polis, an online tool for gathering opinions, in 2023, and how it was renamed Voxit in 2025.Plurality in GreeceThe Greek translation of the book *Plurality* stopped in 2025, after a Greek developer had translated only the front matter. Even so, the book's official site lists Greek among the languages on its top page. No Greek-language reporting on the book has been found.Plurality in HungaryIn Hungary, no Hungarian translation of the book *Plurality* has been found, and reporting on Audrey Tang or E. Glen Weyl is scarce. The overlaps are civic groups trying to learn from Taiwan's measures against disinformation, and Budapest's citizens' assemblies chosen by lot and its participatory budgeting.Plurality in IndonesiaIn Indonesia, neither an Indonesian translation of the book *Plurality* nor any reporting on the book has been found. What stands out are profiles of Audrey Tang and reports on Taiwan's measures against disinformation. Collaborative fact-checking and a system of community participation in development planning existed beforehand, separately from the book.Plurality in IsraelIn Israel, no Hebrew translation of *Plurality* has been found, nor any Hebrew-language reporting on the book or on Weyl. What turned up were interviews with and profiles of Tang, and reporting on X's Community Notes. It cannot be said for certain that no translation exists.Plurality in ItalyIn Italy, volunteers began translating the book *Plurality* into Italian on GitHub, but the work has stopped at 14 of 36 files. Ties with Taiwan go back further than the book: they have been discussed through a civic group that modeled itself on Taiwan's g0v, and in contrast with the Five Star Movement's voting system.Plurality in KoreaIn South Korea, no commercial Korean edition of *Plurality* has yet been confirmed, and the only translation of every chapter is an unofficial machine translation. Instead, the ideas have been introduced little by little through Audrey Tang's talks in Korea, Glen Weyl's earlier book 『래디컬 마켓』 (*Radical Markets*), and Korea's own institutions of deliberation.Plurality in LatviaIn Latvia, no translation of the book *Plurality* and no reporting on Audrey Tang or E. Glen Weyl has been found. The book's themes overlap with three local contexts: ManaBalss.lv, a citizens' initiative site that reaches parliament with 10,000 signatures; NATO's center against disinformation in Riga; and contacts with Taiwan.Plurality in LithuaniaIn Lithuania, no translation of the book *Plurality* and no reporting on E. Glen Weyl has been found. What stands out are the opening of a Taiwanese representative office in 2021 and China's backlash, Audrey Tang's visit in 2023, and the "elfai" (elves), citizens who stand up to disinformation.Plurality in NorwayIn Norway, volunteers are translating the book *Plurality* in two stages, first rewriting it in plain English and then translating that into Norwegian. The first drafts are made with AI. Eight of the 35 chapters have gone through both stages, but nothing has been published yet.Plurality in PolandIn Poland, no translation of the book *Plurality* has been found, and discussion that names the book is scarce. In 2022, RadicalxChange held events in Łódź and Warsaw. Institutions that overlap with the book, such as citizens' panels chosen by lot, had already existed in the country before that.Plurality in SwedenIn Sweden, no translation of *Plurality* has been found, and there is almost no reporting on the book. What stands out is the coverage and the talks when Tang received the 2025 Right Livelihood Award, known in Swedish as "Alternativa Nobelpriset" (the alternative Nobel Prize).Plurality in TaiwanIn Taiwan the book *Plurality* is known by the Chinese rendering "多元宇宙", coined by its co-author Audrey Tang. The word spread before the book did, as the name of a "多元宇宙科" (Plurality section) set up in a new ministry in 2022, and it was criticized as hard to understand. The Chinese edition came out in July 2024.Plurality in ThailandIn 2024 a translator in Bangkok produced a complete Thai translation of the book *Plurality*, which can be read on the book's website. No printed Thai book has been found. Before the book arrived, Thailand already had Cofact, a fact-checking project that grew out of Audrey Tang's visit, and exchanges with Taiwan's civic technologists.Plurality in the Arabic-speaking worldIn the Arabic-speaking world, no translation of *Plurality* has been found, nor any article dealing with the book or Weyl. In the news, Tang appears as Taiwan's minister. In the book, the UAE and Saudi Arabia appear as examples of authoritarian countries that outperform democracies in e-government.Plurality in the Chinese-speaking world beyond TaiwanThe only Chinese edition of *Plurality* that has been found is Taiwan's Traditional Mandarin edition, 《多元宇宙》. In mainland China, web3 communities and some scholars have discussed the ideas less through the book itself than through Weyl's earlier book *Radical Markets* and its mechanism of quadratic voting.Plurality in the French-speaking worldIn the French-speaking world, the French translation of the book *Plurality* stopped at a partial draft in 2023. Meanwhile, Audrey Tang has been introduced in Paris since 2016, has worked with the French organization Make.org and has testified before the National Assembly. Her approach has been discussed alongside France's "Great National Debate" and its citizens' conventions.Plurality in the German-speaking worldIn Germany, Austria and Switzerland, five volunteers translated the book *Plurality* into German, and the German edition *Pluralität* came out in 2026. Audrey Tang spoke repeatedly in Berlin and Zurich, and a German federal agency used quadratic voting, taking Taiwan as its model.Plurality in the Netherlands and FlandersIn the Netherlands, Audrey Tang, who visited in 2019, and Polis, the opinion-gathering tool used in Taiwan, arrived before the book *Plurality* did. Municipal trials grew into the government's Polis NL, while the Dutch translation of the book has so far gone no further than an individual's partial translation.Plurality in the Persian-speaking worldHow *Plurality* is being read in the Persian-speaking world is almost entirely unknown. No translation was found, and no reporting on Tang or Weyl could be retrieved. What can be seen is reporting on Community Notes, and conversations in which getting around censorship is the topic.Plurality in the Portuguese-speaking worldAs of October 2026, there is no Portuguese translation of the book *Plurality*. In Brazil, the lawyer Ronaldo Lemos has introduced the book and quadratic voting in a newspaper column, and in 2024 Audrey Tang and Glen Weyl visited the country. As the birthplace of participatory budgeting, Brazil is also spoken of as having ties with Taiwan.Plurality in the Russian-speaking worldNo Russian translation of the current edition of the book *Plurality* has been found. What has reached Russian readers is a translation of an early outline, coverage in cryptocurrency media, and Vitalik Buterin's own writing. The contrast with Russia's state-built systems of "participation" offers a useful point of comparison.Plurality in the Spanish-speaking worldAs of October 2026, no Spanish translation of the book *Plurality* has been found. Even so, Audrey Tang has spoken about Taiwan's experience in Chile, Mexico and Spain. In the other direction, Tang herself has said that part of Taiwan's participation mechanisms came from a tool built in Madrid.Plurality in TurkeyIn September 2026 a single developer translated every chapter of the book *Plurality* into Turkish and published it. The records show that the second half was translated together with AI. So far, however, no Turkish-language reviews or news reports discussing the book have been found.Plurality in UkraineA Ukrainian translation of *Plurality* appears in the book's official list, but only as a name, with no translated text. Instead, the book itself uses Ukraine as an example, citing the government app Diia and the Minister of Digital Transformation. Tang has also spoken many times about Diia and communication after the invasion.Plurality in VietnamIn Vietnam, no Vietnamese translation of the book *Plurality* has been found, and almost no articles discussing the book. Domestic newspapers introduce E. Glen Weyl as a scholar who came to AI gatherings, while Audrey Tang and Taiwan's practices have been reported mainly by Vietnamese-language media outside the country.What is the Plurality movement in Japan?In Japan, the book *Plurality* spread from around 2023 as volunteers read it, translated it and held events about it. A Japanese edition came out in May 2025, reading groups and reviews followed across the country, and the book's name even appeared in a political party's policy platform.What is RadicalxChange?An international nonprofit that the economist Glen Weyl set up after his book Radical Markets (2018), and the movement around it. It has studied new mechanisms for voting and data and tried them out in practice. It also supports outreach for the book Plurality.What is the Sunflower Movement?A movement in March and April 2014 in which Taiwanese students and citizens, protesting that a trade agreement with China was being pushed through without proper review, occupied the national legislature (the Legislative Yuan) for more than three weeks. The civic technologists' community g0v livestreamed and documented it, and it became a starting point for Taiwan's later digital democracy.What is the Synthetic Party?A political party founded in Denmark in 2022 that calls itself a party driven by AI. Its public face is a chatbot trained on the writings of small parties, and it says it represents people who do not vote. It is also an art and research experiment, and the book *Plurality* gives it as an example.What is Taiwan's digital democracy?After the 2014 Sunflower Movement, the civic programmers of g0v and Taiwan's government joined forces, using digital tools for policy discussion, open data, countering false rumors and responding to COVID-19. The book Plurality portrays this as the world's most advanced real example of digital democracy.What is Team Mirai?A Japanese political party founded in 2025 by the AI engineer Takahiro Anno. It puts forward "digital democracy", including a system that lets voters give opinions on its manifesto by talking with an AI, and names Plurality as one of its guidelines. It won 11 seats in the 2026 House of Representatives election.What are the X Dignity Center and PRANCE at Keio University?Two organizations within KGRI, a research institute of Keio University in Japan. The X Dignity Center co-hosted the event celebrating the release of the Japanese edition of the book *Plurality*, and PRANCE was set up in 2026 with the aim of realizing the "Nameraka Society" and Plurality.Timeline of Plurality and digital democracy in JapanIn 2023, an event championing Plurality, "Plurality Tokyo", was held in Tokyo. After the 2024 Tokyo governor's election, activity spread to the Tokyo Metropolitan Government's long-term strategy, an open-source tool called Kouchou AI, a Japanese edition of the book, and a new party entering parliament. This timeline follows those events in date order.What is vTaiwan?A forum started in late 2014 by g0v, Taiwan's community of civic hackers, where citizens, experts and government discuss together how laws and regulations should be written. This article also covers Join, the government-run site for proposals and public comment.What AI and digital parties are there?Among parties that promise to open up politics with technology are Europe's "digital parties", built around online voting by members; Denmark's The Synthetic Party, which made an AI its public face; and Japan's Team Mirai, which uses AI to listen to voters' voices. This article sets them side by side, following the sources.What was Takahiro Anno's 2024 Tokyo campaign?A campaign in the July 2024 election for Governor of Tokyo in which the AI engineer Takahiro Anno used AI to turn voters' comments into maps, revised a manifesto published online during the campaign, and had an AI double, "AI-Anno", answer questions. He received 154,638 votes and finished fifth.
Background and neighbours
Ideas discussed alongside Plurality, including rival views.
What is the AI futures debate (AI 2027 and others)?Between 2024 and 2026, a string of forecasts and scenarios about when AI smarter than humans will arrive, and what the world will look like then, set off a major debate. People on the Plurality side responded by asking, rather than where one AI is headed, how society prepares and who holds the steering wheel.What is d/acc (defensive acceleration)?The idea that technology should move fast, but that we should choose to push ahead first with technologies that help defense rather than attack, and that spread power out rather than concentrate it. Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum, gave it its name in 2023.What is Digital Nature?A worldview put forward since around 2015 by the media artist and researcher Yoichi Ochiai. It refers to a state in which computers stop being tools inside screens and merge with light, sound, objects and bodies to become an environment like "nature". A text under Ochiai's name says it parts ways with Plurality over whether humans or the environment take the lead.What is the dividual?The idea of seeing a person not as an "individual" that cannot be divided further, but as something made of many parts. The book Plurality introduces it through two lines of thought: the sociologist Georg Simmel, and Ken Suzuki, who drew on the philosopher Gilles Deleuze.What is General Will 2.0?A book and an idea published in 2011 by the philosopher Hiroki Azuma. It argued that the "will of society as a whole" could be read from the traces of people's actions and words left on the internet, and put to use in politics. Azuma later withdrew his hopes for the internet, and now criticizes leaving politics to AI.What is Mitou (the IPA Mitou program)?A program that the Japanese government agency IPA has run since 2000, selecting young, exceptional software creators as individuals and nurturing them with a dedicated mentor, called a PM. Several of the people in Japan involved with Plurality and broad listening are alumni of the program or connected with it.What are modes of exchange (Kojin Karatani)?A theory by the Japanese philosopher Kojin Karatani that divides societies into four types by what people exchange with one another and how: gift and return, domination and protection, money and commodities, and a fourth form not yet realized. Audrey Tang calls this fourth form "mode of exchange X" and openly acknowledges its strong influence.What is the Nameraka Society?A vision of society that Ken Suzuki developed in the 2000s and set out in a 2013 book. It aims for a society where people do not split cleanly into friends and enemies, and can live in a complex world with its complexity intact. It includes PICSY, a currency whose value flows backward along transactions, and dividual democracy, which lets you split and entrust your vote.What is the network state?A proposed new way of founding a country. Like-minded people first form a tight-knit community online, pool money to acquire land around the world, and eventually win recognition as a state from existing countries. The entrepreneur Balaji Srinivasan set it out in a 2022 book. People on the Plurality side criticize it as leaning too heavily on exit.What is Radical Markets?A 2018 book by the legal scholar Eric Posner and the economist Glen Weyl. It argues that private property and one person, one vote are human-designed systems that can be redesigned, and puts forward five bold reforms. Weyl later moved on to Plurality and has criticized the book's way of thinking himself.What is superintelligence?An intelligence that greatly outperforms the smartest humans in almost every field. Many AI companies have made it their goal, and at the same time it is feared as something that could threaten humanity. People on the Plurality side reframe it: superintelligence, they say, is already here, in ourselves working together.What are the "three paths"?A map drawn in the book Plurality that sorts where technology could take society into three directions — "Technocracy", in which AI and experts plan; "Libertarianism", in which cryptography frees individuals; and "⿻" (Digital Democracy), in which technology helps different people work together. The book chooses the third.What are the criticisms of Plurality?The book Plurality and the practices around it have drawn criticism in English, Japanese and Chinese: that technology cannot solve politics, that Taiwan's success stories have not lasted, that the book is too optimistic, and that in Japan the idea risks becoming a mere slogan or a dogma. This article sets out who said what, when, and how they were answered.What is The Lost Dao?The American researchers of the 1960s and 70s who laid the groundwork for the internet aimed for people to connect, think together and govern together through computers. But as public investment dwindled, part of that ambition was never built and was forgotten. The book Plurality calls this "the lost dao".What editions and translations of Plurality exist?Plurality is a CC0 book that anyone can read for free on GitHub and plurality.net. English and Traditional Mandarin are the root versions. Printed books appeared in English and Traditional Mandarin (2024) and Japanese (2025). Other languages are volunteer translations, ranging from complete to empty.
People
People who built, spread and debated these ideas.
Who is Audrey Tang?A Taiwanese "civic hacker" who served as Taiwan's first Minister of Digital Affairs. Tang wrote the book ⿻ Plurality with the economist Glen Weyl, and as of September 2026 works on the "6-Pack of Care", which aims to put AI to work for local care.Who is Aviv Ovadya?A technologist and researcher who named the idea of "bridging", which raises to the top what people who disagree support in common, and who researches and proposes ways of deciding the policies of social media platforms and AI through deliberation among ordinary citizens.Who is Balaji Srinivasan?An entrepreneur who, in his 2022 book *The Network State*, set out the "network state": a community formed online acquires land and is eventually recognized as a country. The book *Plurality* names him as one of the leading voices of libertarianism.Who is Caroline Green?A researcher at the University of Oxford's Institute for Ethics in AI in the UK, who has studied "social care", which supports the daily lives of older and disabled people. With Audrey Tang, Green created the "6-Pack of Care", which governs AI through the ideas of "care".Who is Colin Megill?One of the people who built Polis, a tool that turns the opinions of many people into a map from their "agree / disagree" votes on short statements. Polis was used in Taiwan's vTaiwan, and the book *Plurality* presents it as a leading example of technology that helps deliberation.Who is Danielle Allen?An American political philosopher and professor at Harvard University. She wrote about the idea of a "connected society", in which people form ties across their differences, and the book *Plurality* links one of the three pillars of Plurality to this idea. She leads the research network GETTING-Plurality.Who is Dario Amodei?Co-founder and CEO of Anthropic, the company that makes Claude. Amodei has described a future in which AI goes well while also writing about its risks, and in September 2026 called for slowing the pace at which AI capabilities advance. People on the Plurality side call for citizens to be involved.Who is Divya Siddarth?A researcher and practitioner who builds ways for the direction of AI to be decided through discussion among ordinary people, not only by a few companies and experts. A co-founder of the nonprofit Collective Intelligence Project (CIP), Siddarth has co-written much with Weyl and Tang, and the book Plurality cites Siddarth's papers.Who is E. Glen Weyl?An American economist and the main writer of the book ⿻ Plurality, which he wrote with Audrey Tang. He is one of the people behind "Quadratic Voting", which lets votes express how strongly people feel, and the founder of RadicalxChange.Who is Hannah Arendt?The thinker who wrote *The Human Condition* (1958) and *On Revolution* (1963). The book *Plurality* ties one of the meanings of its title word, "plurality", to Arendt, and places her as one of "three thinkers", alongside Danielle Allen and Audrey Tang.Who is Haruyuki Seki?The representative director of Code for Japan and a central figure in Japanese civic tech. Seki is one of the organizers of Plurality Tokyo, introduced Talk to the City to Takahiro Anno, and serves as a board member of Digital Democracy 2030.Who is Henry George?A nineteenth-century American political economist known for his worldwide bestseller *Progress and Poverty* (1879). Arguing that rises in land value are created by society, he advocated a "single tax" on land. The book *Plurality* calls George "a founder of ⿻ social science".Who is Hirokazu Nishio?A researcher at Cybozu Labs in Japan, who helped edit the English edition of the book *Plurality* and led the project that published its Japanese edition. Nishio also gave technical support to Takahiro Anno's campaign for Governor of Tokyo, and works on developing Kouchou AI, which uses AI to organize the voices of many people.Who is Hiroki Azuma?A Japanese philosopher and critic, and founder of the publisher Genron. He wrote *General Will 2.0* (2011), which envisioned gathering the popular will through the internet, and later warned against hopes that AI could automate politics. He supports Plurality while asking about its tension with politics.Who is Hiroo Yamagata?A Japanese critic, translator and development consultant, known as the translator of works such as Piketty's *Capital in the Twenty-First Century*. Yamagata translated the Japanese edition of the book *Plurality* (*PLURALITY*, Cybozu Shiki Books, 2025), and the translation went forward alongside an online gathering of readers.Who is Hélène Landemore?A political scientist at Yale University who studies and advocates a democracy in which ordinary citizens chosen by lot, rather than elected politicians, discuss things carefully and decide. Together with Audrey Tang, she has proposed using citizens' assemblies (gatherings of citizens chosen by lot) to govern AI.Who is J. C. R. Licklider?A psychologist who in the 1960s led the Information Processing Techniques Office at the US agency ARPA and sowed the seeds of what became the internet. He advocated "man-computer symbiosis". The book *Plurality* makes him the central figure of chapter 3-3, "The Lost Dao".Who is Jaron Lanier?A computer scientist and writer who pioneered the field of "virtual reality" (VR) in the 1980s. He advocates "data dignity", linking data to the people who made it and sometimes paying them, and has co-written a series of pieces with Glen Weyl. The book *Plurality* treats him as one of its forerunners.Who is Kao Chia-liang (clkao)?A Taiwanese programmer who in 2012, with fellow hackers, started "g0v" (零時政府), a movement in which citizens rebuild government websites to show how they could be. The book *Plurality* names him as one of the founders of g0v, the starting point of Taiwan's digital democracy.Who is Ken Suzuki?A Japanese researcher and entrepreneur, author of the 2013 book *The Nameraka Society and Its Enemies*, who devised the currency system PICSY and "dividual democracy". The book *Plurality* presents his ideas; he wrote the commentary for its Japanese edition, and launched Digital Democracy 2030 with Takahiro Anno.Who is Kojin Karatani?A Japanese philosopher who reads society through what people exchange with one another, and how. The book *Plurality* states that one of its frameworks is inspired by his *The Structure of World History*, and Audrey Tang says that the "X" in RadicalxChange is the X of Karatani's modes of exchange.Who is Leopold Aschenbrenner?A researcher who was an early member of OpenAI's Superalignment team. In *Situational Awareness* (2024), a series of essays, Aschenbrenner argued that AGI could arrive around 2027 and that the US and China are in a race for superintelligence, which the free world must win.Who is Marc Andreessen?Co-founder of Netscape and of the investment firm a16z. Andreessen wrote "The Techno-Optimist Manifesto" (2023), which argues that growth driven by technology and markets is progress. The book *Plurality* quotes a passage from it at the opening of chapter 2-0.Who is Mustafa Suleyman?A British entrepreneur who co-founded the AI company DeepMind and has been CEO of Microsoft AI since 2024. In his 2023 book *The Coming Wave* (its Japanese edition is titled "Contain AI"), he argues for the need to "contain" powerful technologies, which are hard both to stop and to leave unchecked.Who is Petar Maymounkov?The engineer who handled the technical side of Gov4Git (later GitRules) and the Plural Management Protocol, the systems used to write and run the book *Plurality* with many contributors. At the time, Maymounkov was a researcher at Protocol Labs, the technology partner of the book project.Who is Peter Thiel?An American investor who, as one of its founders, conceived PayPal. He has written that he no longer believes freedom and democracy are compatible, and has argued for using technology to create spaces for freedom outside politics. The book *Plurality* treats him as the central figure of libertarianism.Who is Puja Ohlhaver?Co-author, with Glen Weyl and Vitalik Buterin, of the 2022 paper "Decentralized Society" (DeSoc). The paper proposed bringing into money-centered Web3, built around tradable tokens, a way to represent trust and relationships between people. Ohlhaver also took part in writing the book *Plurality*.Who is Sam Altman?Co-founder and CEO of the American AI company OpenAI, which made ChatGPT, and co-founder of Worldcoin (now World), which issues IDs by scanning people's irises. The book *Plurality* takes him up as a leading exponent of "Technocracy", and also criticizes Worldcoin.Who is Shinta Nakayama?A Japanese machine learning engineer and business owner, known online as "tokoroten". Nakayama is a maintainer of Kouchou AI, open-source software that uses AI to organize the opinions of many people and make them visible, and coordinates *Broad Listening* (政治・自治体・企業に広がるブロードリスニング), the book that gathers that experience.Who is Sunji Lee?An associate professor in the Faculty of Sociology at Hosei University in Japan, and author of *テクノ専制とコモンへの道* (2025), a paperback that explains the book *Plurality* for general readers. Lee has held conversations with Weyl and Tang, and written many introductions to related books and essays.Who is Takahiro Anno?A Japanese AI engineer, entrepreneur and science fiction writer. In the 2024 election for Governor of Tokyo, he ran a campaign that used AI and broad listening to hear voters' voices. The next year he founded the party Team Mirai, became its leader, and has served in the House of Councillors. The book *Plurality* cites him as an example.Who is Ted Nelson?The person who named "hypertext", text linked to other text. He devoted his life to "Project Xanadu", an ideal information network, and kept warning of the flaws in the design of the World Wide Web. The book *Plurality* traces his path in chapter 3-3.Who is Vitalik Buterin?The creator of the blockchain Ethereum. He co-wrote papers with Glen Weyl and others on mechanisms such as Quadratic Funding, contributed an endorsement to the book ⿻ Plurality and took part in editing it. He has also written a long review of the book.Who are the people of g0v and vTaiwan?Taiwan's digital democracy is not the work of Audrey Tang alone. This article introduces the civic hackers, civil servants and researchers who have run g0v, the civic technologists' community; vTaiwan, a forum for citizen participation; Cofacts, which checks rumors; and the mask map.Who is Yoichi Ochiai?A Japanese media artist and researcher who puts forward the idea of "Digital Nature" (計算機自然, computational nature). Ochiai has held several conversations with Audrey Tang, and essays published under Ochiai's name set out what Digital Nature shares with Plurality and where they differ: whether humans or the environment take the lead.Who is Yuval Noah Harari?A historian and philosopher known for *Sapiens*. In *Nexus*, Harari discussed the future of AI and democracy through the history of information networks. In 2020 Harari held a conversation with Audrey Tang about an age in which technology can "hack" human beings.Who is Zoë Hitzig?A researcher who, with Buterin and Weyl, wrote the first paper on "Quadratic Funding", which adds larger matching funds to what many people have each given a little to. Hitzig took part in editing the book *Plurality*, and the book also cites Hitzig's paper criticizing mechanism design.