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.

Public debate quickly splits into "for or against", "friend or enemy". Yet real people are for one thing and against another, or torn inside. The "Nameraka Society" ("nameraka" means "smooth" in Japanese) is a vision of using technology to support a society that values such in-between positions and does not split cleanly in two.

In short

The Nameraka Society is a vision of a future society conceived by Ken Suzuki, a Japanese researcher and entrepreneur. It is a society in which people do not divide into "friend or enemy", but move among many in-between positions and can live in a complex world with its complexity intact [1].

As tools for this, Suzuki designed concrete systems for money (PICSY) and for voting (dividual democracy, which the book also calls "divicracy") [1][7]. The book Plurality presents this vision as "another lost dao" [2].

For example

The 2013 book. Suzuki set out the vision in なめらかな社会とその敵 (The Nameraka Society and Its Enemies, Keiso Shobo, January 2013). It was an academic book with mathematical formulas, but it found many general readers, and an expanded edition came out in 2022 in the Chikuma Gakugei Bunko paperback series [1].

2002: building a "propagating currency" at Mitou. In Mitou (fiscal 2002), a talent development program of the government agency IPA, Suzuki built demonstration software for a "propagating currency". He was then recognized as an outstanding creator, a "Super Creator" [3]. This corresponds to an implementation of PICSY.

Commentary on the Japanese edition of PLURALITY (2025). Suzuki wrote the commentary for the Japanese edition of PLURALITY, published in May 2025. There he says that this book and The Nameraka Society and Its Enemies have so much in common that it would be no exaggeration to call them twin books [4].

In more detail

Three societies

According to the summary on Suzuki's official website, societies can be drawn in three shapes [1].

A "Flat Society" — a society that is the same everywhere, with no diversity.
A "Step Society" — a society with diversity, but where groups do not mix and instead stand opposed.
A Nameraka Society — a society with many in-between states, through which one can move smoothly to another state.

Because it has many in-between people, the summary explains, a Nameraka Society can also be called a society in which everyone is a minority [1]. Suzuki argues that unless society's tendency to divide into friend and enemy is corrected, any progress in institutions will be a castle built on sand. That is why he thinks the core systems of society — money, voting, law and the military — should be rebuilt with technology [1].

Membranes and nuclei

Why does society split apart? Suzuki explains it from the origin of life. Cells build membranes that separate inside from outside, and enclose resources inside. A "nucleus" also arises, like DNA, that controls the whole with little information [5].

His view is that in society, these "membranes" and "nuclei" become national membership (who is inside) and power [5][2]. Chapter 3-3 of Plurality also presents this explanation, and writes: "Through technology, his vision attempts to resolve such membranes and nuclei structures, and make our lives a more network-like structure" [2].

PICSY — a currency whose value flows back

Around 2000, Suzuki took inspiration from how AI learns (the backpropagation method of neural networks) and came up with a currency whose value flows back along the chain of transactions. This is PICSY (Propagational Investment Currency SYstem) [1].

PICSY treats every transaction as a kind of "investment". It represents all transactions as a mathematical table (a matrix), and from it calculates each person's contribution to society. The mechanism is close to how Google calculates search rankings, but Suzuki reportedly came up with it independently [1].

In a lecture, he explains it with this example: a doctor treats a patient, and when that patient later recovers and earns money by working, part of that income flows back to the doctor too [5]. Chapter 5-7 of Plurality cites PICSY in a footnote as "a notable example of inter-temporal economic systems", ones that exchange value across time [6].

Dividual democracy — splitting and entrusting your vote

Even within one person there is wavering: different opinions compete and change over time. Suzuki expressed this with the philosopher Gilles Deleuze's word "dividual" [1].

He then proposed a voting system in which you can split one vote and cast its parts for several policies or people, have a person you entrusted your vote to entrust it further to someone else, and change your vote at any time. This is dividual democracy [1]. A footnote in chapter 5-6 of the book explains: "Unlike LQ, divicracy includes not only delegation of one's vote to others but also splitting one's vote to multiple political issues" (LQ here refers to liquid democracy, in which you entrust your vote to someone) [7].

A language for building law

In 2005, Suzuki presented a vision of a legal language that both humans and machines can read, and of using it to build society's agreements (the social contract) themselves. Plurality writes that "this vision preceded the 2014 invention of Ethereum" (a blockchain with a mechanism for contracts that run automatically) [2][1].

A time span of 300 years

Suzuki points out that it took roughly 300 years to get from movable-type printing to the Reformation and the civil revolutions. Because some things, like the human lifespan, cannot be sped up by technology, he says, rebuilding society's systems in earnest will probably also take about 300 years [5].

What is debated

Was the vision ever actually used? Around April 2023, Shunsuke Takagi, on the organizing side of the event "Plurality Tokyo", posted critically on X, asking whether Suzuki had turned PICSY into something society could actually use, and why Suzuki was not taking part in Plurality events. Takagi later reported that they had made up [8]. It was a question from a younger generation about a vision that had long gone unimplemented.
A problem even the author calls "unsolved". The summary on the official website admits that even if law is made smooth, the problem of dividing into friends and enemies and fighting remains. It says the book does not offer a concrete way to handle the military and violence smoothly, and that this is an unsolved problem [1].
The same chapter's treatment of Japanese quality control. Kazuki Ichida, drawing on experience in the field, questioned the way Plurality treats Japan's QC activities (workplace quality-improvement activities) as an almost unqualified success. Ichida points out that such activities also tend to become mere formality or dogma [9]. This is not a criticism of the Nameraka Society itself, but of the context in which the book places it.
It is not the source Plurality was based on. The book presents the Nameraka Society as a line of development that occurred "largely in parallel to and separate from the internet evolution" [2]. Suzuki himself has said, in effect, that there is no need to stress the differences, and that what matters is building cooperation [10].

Where it fits in Plurality

The Nameraka Society appears in chapter 3-3, "The Lost Dao", in the section "Quality Control and Nameraka Society" [2][11]. The book describes how Wiener's cybernetics (the study of control and communication in machines and living things) took root in Japan along a different path from the internet: a line running through Deming's quality control (the PDCA cycle and Kaizen) and research on complex systems and artificial life, to Suzuki's social theory. The book calls this "a project to rediscover and reconstruct 'another lost dao'" [2].

Suzuki's "dividual" is compared with one of the book's central ideas, Georg Simmel's intersectional identity (the view that people belong to many groups at once). A note in the Japanese edition explains that Simmel thought in terms of social relationships, while Suzuki took his inspiration from Deleuze's more biological "dividual" [11].

Dividual democracy appears in a footnote in chapter 5-6, "⿻ Voting", and PICSY in a footnote in chapter 5-7, "Social Markets" [7][6]. In his endorsement of the English edition, Suzuki called Plurality "a social philosophy of the technological era...a third way beyond Libertarianism and Technocracy" [12].

On the practical side, in 2025 Suzuki started "Digital Democracy 2030" with Takahiro Anno [4]. How the book has spread in Japan is covered in the article on the Plurality movement in Japan.

Sources

Ken Suzuki, "BOOK SUMMARY" of Nameraka (Smooth) Society and Its Enemies — https://nameteki.kensuzuki.org/book-summary-enjazh-tw
Plurality, 3-3 "The Lost Dao" — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/3-3/eng/ ［CC0］
IPA, fiscal 2002 Mitou Software Creation Project, Super Creator materials (in Japanese) — https://www.ipa.go.jp/jinzai/mitou/it/qv6pgp000000js0d-att/000050657.pdf
Ken Suzuki, commentary on the Japanese edition of PLURALITY (in Japanese) — https://note.com/digitaldemocracy/n/nb8b59a6b775d
Ken Suzuki, "300年後の読者に向けて" (To readers 300 years from now) (lecture for the 20th anniversary of Hirosaki University Press, 2024-06-28, in Japanese) — https://hupress.hirosaki-u.ac.jp/special-page/hupress-20th
Plurality, 5-7 "Social Markets" — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/5-7/eng/ ［CC0］
Plurality, 5-6 "⿻ Voting" — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/5-6/eng/ ［CC0］
Hirokazu Nishio, "tkgshnの鈴木健批判と和解" (tkgshn's criticism of Ken Suzuki and their reconciliation) (record of X posts, in Japanese) — https://scrapbox.io/nishio/tkgshnの鈴木健批判と和解
Kazuki Ichida, note.com article (in Japanese) — https://note.com/ichi_twnovel/n/n1a945d0925da
Hirokazu Nishio, "Pluralityと鈴木健" (Plurality and Ken Suzuki) (live notes from a Namera conference, in Japanese) — https://scrapbox.io/nishio/Pluralityと鈴木健
PLURALITY, Japanese edition, 3-3 "失われた道" (The Lost Dao) (in Japanese) — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/3-3/jpn/ ［CC0］
Plurality, endorsements (Ken Suzuki) — https://www.plurality.net/

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