A Plurality Atlas

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.

Whenever a new way of thinking spreads, criticism follows. The book Plurality argues that digital technology can be used to build a democracy in which people who disagree can still cooperate. This article lists criticisms aimed at the book and at the practices in Taiwan and Japan that it takes as models. It does not judge whether the criticisms are right. It records who said what and when, and adds any responses from the authors or their supporters.

In short

Plurality is a book by the economist E. Glen Weyl, Audrey Tang (唐鳳), Taiwan's former Minister of Digital Affairs, and others. The criticisms of the book and the practices around it fall broadly into these groups:

The main criticisms

Criticisms of the book's ideas

Good old solutionism (Netopia, August 2026). Solutionism here means the idea that the problems of democracy can be fixed with technology. In a review for the European commentary site Netopia, Ralf Grötker pointed out that the success of Polis, the opinion-gathering tool at the center of the book, depends on whether governments seriously take it up; without that will, nothing happens. Grötker also writes that no political decision has started from Polis since 2018 [1].

Grötker argues that democracy is in the end a question of how power is distributed, so that there is no technological fix for either democracy or the internet, and calls the book good old solutionism. Grötker also writes that although the book presents itself as collaboratively written, there is no visible trace of what the community added, and that editorial decisions were made by Tang and Weyl alone [1].

Not as a direct reply to this, but in a 2025 interview with Nikkei Asia, Tang said: "Solutionism doesn't work." She explained that "we need to work with the people, not just for the people", rather than elites solving problems on people's behalf [2]. In a Q&A at Funding the Commons Tokyo in 2024, a speaker (neither the transcript nor the video's captions distinguish speakers; from the context, Tang) also said that the book does not fix a single way of putting it into practice but is a toolbox that shows at least seven dimensions [3].

Close to utopian (TIME, May 2024). In a TIME article, Sara Newland, who studies Chinese and Taiwanese politics at Smith College in the United States, cautioned against overstating the effects of Taiwan's digital democracy, suggesting that such efforts may have emerged because Taiwan was already well governed. She also said that the future the book describes borders on utopian, and that Taiwan's case alone may not be enough evidence that it can be realized [4].

In Japanese, syumi_data wrote in reading notes (January 2026) on テクノ専制とコモンへの道 (The road from techno-despotism to the commons), an introductory book by Sunji Lee, that the view that irrational proposals will be rejected through discussion and evidence is too optimistic, and closely resembles the optimism of the internet's early days. On Taiwan's petition site Join, syumi_data also says that it is a question of institutions rather than technology, and suggests that deliberate mass petitioning might even paralyze the administration [5].

One mood bundling separate claims (Buterin, August 2024). In a long review, Vitalik Buterin, the creator of Ethereum, wrote that while he is persuaded by the framework of pluralism, he sometimes feels that the Plurality vibe gathers under one umbrella ideas that have different reasons to be accepted or rejected. His example: that human connections matter, and that voting should take the degree of connection into account, are separate claims [6].

Buterin also said that the book's goals (such as raising workplace output by 10%) suggest it does not envisage a future of radical technological progress, and cited an earlier piece of his saying that he wants a future vastly better than today. In the same review, however, he argues that even people who do not share the vibe can gain from Plurality's ideas, and that they are compatible with wanting rapid progress [6].

Quantum metaphors doing political work (Reading Monkey, July 2026). On note.com, Reading Monkey took up a March 2026 dialogue between Tang and Hiroki Azuma. There, Tang likened party politics to a Newtonian, particle-like kind of measurement, and Plurality to a wave-like kind. Reading Monkey argues that the correspondence between the quantum terms and the political objects is never pinned down, and that this very vagueness makes particular political choices look as if they fit the deep workings of the world. Reading Monkey also says the book's explanations of Bell's theorem and other topics are inaccurate [7]. At the same time, Reading Monkey acknowledges that since the book warns against taking its natural-science analogies literally, dismissing them as simple errors would be unfair [7].

Putting it in formulas does not stop fervor (Project Aequitas, July 2026). On note.com, Project Aequitas set side by side the proposals for renewing democracy of three people: Weyl, Balaji Srinivasan, and Dominic Cummings, who led the Brexit campaign. On Weyl's Quadratic Voting, it argues that as long as the strength of feeling is the input, turning it into mathematics cannot prevent fervor from running out of control, and that algorithms whose workings nobody can check become tools of a new dictatorship. As a flaw shared by all three, it names the lack of any mechanism for fixing things when they break [8].

How does it square with the AI development race? (LessWrong, September 2025). In the comments on Tang's post "⿻ Plurality & 6pack.care" (6-Pack of Care), a user called cousin_it asked whether a society of AIs would be egalitarian or hierarchical, and what to do about the bad incentives of an AI market that works like an arms race for commercial advantage. Tang answered that the Kami view (AI "stewards" with limited scope) is neither egalitarian nor a fixed hierarchy, and named interoperability mandates and public options, among others, as means of changing the incentives [9].

Too little on how to move people (Stanford seminar, March 2024). Ahead of finalizing the English edition, Weyl presented the book at a seminar of the Stanford Digital Economy Lab, and two discussants critiqued it (based on the video's automatic captions) [10]. The discussant whom the moderator introduced as Margaret Levi said that even supposing one accepts both the book's vision and its solutions, its treatment of how to mobilize people toward them is far too thin. What is needed, she said, is the design of institutions that create broad communities whose members share a common fate, with information that allows dissent and democratic accountability built in from the start. The other discussant, Nate (only his first name appears in the captions; since he describes himself as a law professor who runs Stanford's Cyber Policy Center, presumably Nathaniel Persily), supported the book's ideas but said that the lesson of the past 10 to 15 years is that, in some ways, the most democratic aspects of technology (its speed, reach and scale) are precisely what threaten democracy, and asked how the roughly 100 million Trump supporters in the United States could be persuaded to take this path [10].

Weyl replied on the spot that mobilization is the subject of the book's last two chapters, and that the way the book itself is made is a new, non-financialized form of DAO (an online collective organization), so anyone who thinks it has errors should help fix them. On Trump supporters, he said that anti-China people on the right like Tang's story (both are spoken remarks in the video) [10].

Against steering people through health insurance payments (Hiroki Azuma, July 2025). On July 20, 2025, in a YouTube livestream in which he talked while watching the results of the House of Councillors election, Hiroki Azuma called very dangerous a proposal that, he said, Takahiro Anno had posted on X: to steer people toward health by manipulating the amounts paid for health insurance. Saying that the same idea is written in Plurality too, he stated his opposition. His reason was that people do not act rationally, so perhaps the only way is the slow work of enlightenment and education rather than manipulation through market mechanisms. He also said that this did not mean he would stop supporting Anno (based on the video's automatic captions) [11].

However, that post by Anno has not been found in this site's material. The health insurance section of the book's chapter 6-2 takes as its cue the pattern of "social health insurance", in which communities of solidarity care for those in need, and reimagines health insurance as a way to finance the conditions required for health itself; it is not written as a proposal to steer behavior by manipulating individuals' premiums [12]. What appears here is Azuma's summary of the book. In his March 2026 dialogue with Tang, Azuma said that he is absolutely in favor of Plurality, but that once one enters the realm of politics, the distinction between friend and enemy cannot be avoided [13].

Criticisms of practice in Taiwan

vTaiwan as a huge flop (The Daily Beast, November 2023). vTaiwan is a Taiwanese platform where citizens, government and experts discuss policy online. Nick Aspinwall wrote that vTaiwan lost its momentum years ago and has not been used for any major decision since 2018. The article does not name the book, but it is a criticism of the book's flagship example [14].

In the article, Jason Hsu, a co-founder of vTaiwan and a former legislator, gave as reasons its difficulty of use, waning interest, and the fact that because the government has no obligation to adopt recommendations, legislators do not take them seriously. Tiago Peixoto of the World Bank said that technology has made it easier for governments to gather opinions but not to respond to them. The article also mentions that its scope was limited to digital matters, and that when Join was created, vTaiwan became redundant [14].

Technological Metamodernism (January 2026) also treats the government's lack of any obligation to respond as a structural limit, and writes that participant burnout may be the biggest practical limit [15]. In interviews in Taiwan by Japan's Digital Democracy Research Unit (February 2025), Yu-Tsang Lin (林雨蒼), formerly of PDIS, the team Tang set up directly under the Executive Yuan (the cabinet), said that proposals were reflected in policy only thanks to strong backing from the minister of the time, and that it is now a place for trying things out. Jia-Wei (Peter) Cui (崔家瑋; written 崔嘉偉 in the report), who now keeps vTaiwan going, gave as reasons for the slowdown the government's shift of effort to Join and other channels from 2019, the departure of the minister who had driven it, the loss of core members, and COVID-19 [16].

Responses. Chapter 2-2 of the book itself writes that engagement with vTaiwan "experienced a downturn following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic", and names as challenges "the intensive volunteering effort required, the absence of mandates for governmental responses, and its somewhat narrow focus", before describing attempts to revive it, such as working with OpenAI's "Democratic Inputs to AI" in 2023 [17]. In an interview with CoinDesk, Tang acknowledged that use really did fall during the pandemic, but asked people to read chapter 2-2. She also noted that Join has more than 11,000 visitors a day, and that because g0v projects are open source, anyone reviving them does not have to start from zero [18]. Cui also said that because the information was public, new participants were able to take over [16].

Nobody understands the Plurality section (September 2022). Taiwan's newly created Ministry of Digital Affairs (moda) set up a "多元宇宙科" (Plurality section). At a press conference, Ann Kao (高虹安), a legislator of the Taiwan People's Party, criticized Minister Tang's explanation as something nobody could understand, and asked for less jargon. According to the same article, Tang had explained the day before that "Plurality" is a counterpart to "Singularity" (the technological singularity) [19].

Criticisms of practice in Japan

Excellent, but it may turn into dogma (Kazuki Ichida, August 2025). Kazuki Ichida (一田和樹) praised the Japanese edition as comprehensive and a must-have, but questioned its treatment of Japan's QC activities (quality control circles) and the Deming Prize as almost unqualified success stories. Drawing on experience in quality control, Ichida writes that QC activities also had the harmful side effects of becoming a formality and turning into dogma. Ichida senses the same danger in the people in Japan who have embraced the book, giving as an example proposals to Team Mirai's policy repository, and recommends that supporters be ready to explain how the book writes about human rights [20]. Chapter 3-3 of the book has a section describing how, in 1950, "the Union of Japanese Scientists and Engineers (JUSE) asked W. Edwards Deming" to lecture on quality control, and the founding of the Deming Prize [21].

Will Team Mirai's Plurality end up as just a slogan? (October 2025). A note.com writer going by 一般人 ("an ordinary person") argued three points in the free portion of a post [22]:

  1. Even if people can technically collaborate, it is unclear who decides and who bears responsibility. The ideals come first, and the institutional design is blank.
  2. In open-source-style democracy, it is unclear who handles quality control, accountability and maintenance; as with Idobata and Kouchou AI, the effectiveness of citizen participation is not guaranteed.
  3. The party effectively discards the manifesto change proposals it collects from users, so the process works less to overcome division than to hide it.

The writer says Plurality should first be defined in the language of law and institutions [22]. As for the numbers, according to a GitHub count as of September 24, 2026, Team Mirai's policy repository had received 9,686 change proposals, of which 194 had been merged [23]. Team Mirai states as its criteria for adoption that a proposal fits its mission and vision, is consistent with the overall direction of the manifesto, and is feasible, and explains that AI is used to organize proposals but people decide whether to adopt them [24].

Broad listening is skewed toward people used to voicing opinions (2025). Broad listening is a way of using AI to organize large numbers of opinions and see the overall picture. The Tokyo Metropolitan Government used it in drafting its long-term strategy, the 2050 Tokyo Strategy (broad listening for Tokyo's 2050 strategy). The public comments on that draft (January to March 2025) included views such as this: the input is a collection of voices from people used to expressing opinions, and leaves out those who are not, those who are skeptical and those who find the internet hard to use, so it should not be used to back up policy evaluation. The metropolitan government answered that it was done as a reference for drawing up the strategy, that it had adjusted the ways and period for submitting, and that the opinions were analyzed with AI and used in organizing policies [25].

There is also self-criticism from the practitioners' side. The practitioners' book Broad Listening (in Japanese: 『政治・自治体・企業に広がるブロードリスニング』) writes of Tokyo's announcement that it had revised its policy framework through AI analysis that most of the changes came from changing times and updates to existing policies, and that talking big about broad listening having changed things risks fueling excessive expectations of the technology or after-the-fact justification. It also states that the voices gathered tend to be skewed toward a noisy minority and must not be read as statistical public opinion [26].

Criticisms of individual tools

Reporting and research also point out the limits of the tools the book promotes. The details are left to the individual articles.

Among the material for this article, no direct responses have been found to Hiroki Azuma, Kazuki Ichida, 一般人, Project Aequitas, Reading Monkey or Newland.

Where it fits in Plurality

How does the book itself treat opposing views?

Chapter 3-1 writes that "The Technocratic and Libertarian perspectives are rooted in a science, namely the monist atomism we described in the previous chapter: the belief that a universal set of laws operating on an fundamental set of atoms is the best way to understand the world" [31]. The map that places these two alongside Plurality is explained in the article on the three paths. → Monist atomism

On scientific analogies, chapter 3-1 says that "⿻ is thus heavy with analogies to the last century of natural sciences", and that it draws on them "without taking any too literally or universally" [31]. Reading Monkey's criticism is aimed precisely at the point that, even with this caveat, the metaphors do political work [7].

The Japanese QC activities and Deming Prize that Kazuki Ichida questioned are portrayed positively in chapter 3-3 as part of the lineage of The Lost Dao [21].

Further reading

  1. Plurality, chapter 2-2 "The Life of a Digital Democracy" (English, book) — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/2-2/eng/
  2. Nick Aspinwall, "Taiwan Tried to Digitize Democracy With vTaiwan. It Was a Huge Flop" (English, article) — https://www.thedailybeast.com/taiwan-tried-to-digitize-democracy-with-vtaiwan-it-was-a-huge-flop/
  3. Ralf Grötker, "Why Technology Can't 'Fix' Democracy" (English, review) — https://www.netopia.eu/why-technology-cant-fix-democracy/
  4. Vitalik Buterin, "Plurality philosophy in an incredibly oversized nutshell" (English, review) — https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/08/21/plurality.html
  5. Digital Democracy Research Unit, "現場取材からみえた台湾デジタル民主主義の理想と課題" (Ideals and challenges of Taiwan's digital democracy as seen from on-the-ground interviews) (in Japanese, article) — https://note.com/digitaldemocracy/n/naaa818d919c7
  6. Kazuki Ichida, "『PLURALITY』を読んだ。すばらしいが、教条化しないか心配。" (I read PLURALITY. Excellent, but I worry it will become dogma.) (in Japanese, article) — https://note.com/ichi_twnovel/n/n1a945d0925da
  7. Broad Listening (『政治・自治体・企業に広がるブロードリスニング』) (in Japanese, book) — https://github.com/digitaldemocracy2030/broad-listening-book

Sources

  1. Ralf Grötker, "Why Technology Can't 'Fix' Democracy", Netopia (2026-08-16) — https://www.netopia.eu/why-technology-cant-fix-democracy/
  2. Audrey Tang, "Interview with Nikkei Asia" (2025-07-22) — https://archive.tw/2025-07-22-interview-with-nikkei-asia ［CC0］
  3. Transcript of "Designing for Plurality", Funding the Commons Tokyo 2024 (2024-07-25, day 2 of the event) — https://scrapbox.io/plurality-japanese/Designing%20for%20Plurality ; video of the same Q&A — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjwyCt9LZvI
  4. Will Henshall, "Inside Audrey Tang's Plan to Align Technology with Democracy", TIME (2024-05-20) — https://time.com/6979012/audrey-tang-interview-plurality-democracy/
  5. syumi_data, "読書022_テクノ専制とコモンへの道（李舜志）" (2026-01-03, in Japanese) — https://note.com/syumi_data1230/n/n5d4a2c2115e0
  6. Vitalik Buterin, "Plurality philosophy in an incredibly oversized nutshell" (2024-08-21) — https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/08/21/plurality.html
  7. Reading Monkey, "政治における量子比喩の政治性" (The politics of quantum metaphors in politics) (2026-07-19, in Japanese) — https://note.com/reading_monkey/n/n97b65c6a9d3b
  8. Project Aequitas, "民主主義をアップデートしようとした三人と、その共通のバグ" (Three people who tried to update democracy, and their common bug) (2026-07-11, in Japanese) — https://note.com/glossy_lemur5728/n/n75e891a7f46b
  9. LessWrong, comments on "⿻ Plurality & 6pack.care" (2025-09) — https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/anoK4akwe8PKjtzkL/plurality-and-6pack-care
  10. Glen Weyl, "Plurality: The Future of Collaborative Technology and Democracy", video of a Stanford Digital Economy Lab seminar (2024-03-11, automatic captions) — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKaGZqqQGCg
  11. Genron, "東浩紀が参院選の結果を見つつひとりクダを巻くだけの限界雑談特番" (Hiroki Azuma grumbles on his own while watching the House of Councillors election results: a no-limits chat special), YouTube livestream (2025-07-20, automatic captions, in Japanese) — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ij-BNriNR9A
  12. Plurality, 6-2 "Health" — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/6-2/eng/ ［CC0］
  13. Audrey Tang, "A Dialogue with Hiroki Azuma" (2026-03-15) — https://archive.tw/2026-03-15-a-dialogue-with-hiroki-azuma ［CC0］
  14. Nick Aspinwall, "Taiwan Tried to Digitize Democracy With vTaiwan. It Was a Huge Flop", The Daily Beast (2023-11-01) — https://www.thedailybeast.com/taiwan-tried-to-digitize-democracy-with-vtaiwan-it-was-a-huge-flop/
  15. Hilma Church-Turing and Stephen Reid, "Plurality ⿻", Technological Metamodernism (2026-01-04) — https://technologicalmetamodernism.substack.com/p/plurality
  16. Digital Democracy Research Unit, "現場取材からみえた台湾デジタル民主主義の理想と課題、そして日本発『デジタル民主主義2030』への指針" (2025-02-19, in Japanese) — https://note.com/digitaldemocracy/n/naaa818d919c7
  17. Plurality, 2-2 "The Life of a Digital Democracy" — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/2-2/eng/ ［CC0］
  18. Daniel Kuhn, "Audrey Tang: Learning From Taiwan's Digital Civic Experimentation", CoinDesk (2024-05-22) — https://www.coindesk.com/consensus-magazine/2024/05/22/audrey-tang-learning-from-taiwans-digital-civic-experimentation
  19. 林至柔, "唐鳳解釋數位部「多元宇宙科」 高虹安：沒人聽得懂", TVBS (2022-09, in Chinese) — https://news.tvbs.com.tw/politics/1895042
  20. Kazuki Ichida, "『PLURALITY』を読んだ。すばらしいが、教条化しないか心配。" (2025-08-01, in Japanese) — https://note.com/ichi_twnovel/n/n1a945d0925da
  21. Plurality, 3-3 "The Lost Dao" — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/3-3/eng/ ［CC0］
  22. 一般人, "「チームみらい」が唱える「Plurality」は看板だけにならないか" (Will the "Plurality" Team Mirai advocates end up as just a slogan?) (2025-10-11, free portion, in Japanese) — https://note.com/ippanjin_2025/n/n299555fb4908
  23. Team Mirai's public repositories on GitHub (counted with the GitHub API on 2026-09-24) — https://github.com/team-mirai
  24. team-mirai/policy, "改善提案の反映方針" (Policy on reflecting improvement proposals) (in Japanese) — https://github.com/team-mirai/policy/blob/HEAD/60_改善提案の反映方針.md
  25. Tokyo Metropolitan Government, Office for Policy Planning, results of the public comment on the draft 2050 Tokyo Strategy (2025-03, in Japanese) — https://www.seisakukikaku.metro.tokyo.lg.jp/documents/d/seisakukikaku/2050tokyo_public_comment
  26. Digital Democracy 2030 community, Broad Listening (『政治・自治体・企業に広がるブロードリスニング』), chapters 0, 2 and 5 (in Japanese) — https://github.com/digitaldemocracy2030/broad-listening-book ［CC BY-NC 4.0］
  27. Poynter, "Why Community Notes mostly fails to combat misinformation" (2023-06-30) — https://www.poynter.org/fact-checking/2023/why-twitters-community-notes-feature-mostly-fails-to-combat-misinformation/
  28. Paul Bouchaud and Pedro Ramaciotti, "Community Notes undermoderate polarizing content by design creating risks in electoral processes" (2025) — https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.15168 ［CC BY-NC-ND 4.0］
  29. Nikil Roashan Selvam and others, "Gaming Consensus: Coordinated Manipulation in Crowdsourced Fact-Checking" (2026) — https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.01824 ［CC BY 4.0］
  30. pluralitybook/plurality issue #1071, "I have no viable way to join this community on github" (2025-03-14) — https://github.com/pluralitybook/plurality/issues/1071
  31. Plurality, 3-1 "Living in a ⿻ World" — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/3-1/eng/ ［CC0］
Related: What is ⿻ Plurality? ・ What is vTaiwan? ・ What is Polis? ・ What is Broad Listening? ・ What is Team Mirai? ・ What are Community Notes? ・ What is Quadratic Voting? ・ What are the "three paths"?

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