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 you say among friends, at work and to your family is a little different in each case, because each setting has its own understandings and shared assumptions. On social media, though, a casual remark can be seen by people you never expected, and be misunderstood. ⿻ publics (plural publics) is the idea, from the book ⿻ Plurality, of letting many different groups keep their own "space" online as well.

In short

People belong to many groups: clubs, workplaces, families, neighborhood associations. ⿻ publics is the idea of letting many groups exist side by side online, each of which can easily reach a state where everyone inside knows the same thing, while what is shared there does not easily leak out [1].

The starting point is the realization that a single scale running from "public" to "secret" is not enough [1].

For example

Where's Waldo? and the Manhattan Project. The book sets two examples side by side [1]:

Waldo, hidden in a picture, is there for anyone to see, yet nobody notices him.
The project to build the atomic bomb during the Second World War was known to roughly 100,000 people, yet sharply hidden from the rest of the world.

On the scale from public to secret, both sit somewhere near the middle. But the book says they sit at opposite ends of another scale: whether one group firmly shares an understanding, or information is merely scattered about. In the book's words, they are at opposite ends of a spectrum "of concentrated common understanding v. diffuse availability" [1].

The Emperor's New Clothes and #MeToo. In the tale, everyone can see that the emperor is naked, yet nobody says so until a child laughs. The book uses this as an example of how acting together requires a state in which everyone knows, and everyone knows that everyone knows, and so on (common knowledge). The book explains that official reassurances that stop bank runs, the flood of accusations of sexual misconduct in #MeToo, and protests that bring down governments all work the same way [2].

Posting online is like handing out pamphlets. Social networks that do not depend on a single company (such as Mastodon and Bluesky) have spread. But someone who sees a post cannot tell who else, or how many others, have seen the same thing. The book writes that "Posting online resembles much more the distribution of a pamphlet than the holding of a public protest", which makes it hard to create a state in which "everyone knows" among a group of peers [3].

In more detail

Groups need context

According to chapter 4-2 of the book, forming a group (an association) requires establishing a background of shared beliefs, values and interests, that is, a context. That context must also be protected from outside surveillance. If people think outsiders are watching, they fear being misunderstood and can no longer speak using the assumptions they share with their group [4].

The book sees the internet as having widened the possibilities for association while making both the establishment and the protection of context harder [4].

Technologies that establish, and technologies that protect

On the establishing side, the book points to social networks that do not depend on a single company, and to blockchains, in which machines keep copies of the same record. It cautions, though, that agreement on a blockchain is agreement among machines, and does not in itself mean a community among the people who run them [3].

On the protecting side there are privacy technologies, such as cryptographic techniques that prove a condition without revealing the underlying data. But according to the book, most of them guard against snooping from outside, and cannot stop insiders leaking information [5].

So the book introduces, as brakes on over-sharing, disappearing messages and a kind of signature called "designated verifier proofs" (DVPs). A DVP proves authenticity to the single recipient, but to anyone else it looks as though it might be forged. So even if the content is carried outside, it will not be believed to be genuine [5].

What ⿻ publics are

The book defines it this way: "⿻ publics is the aspiration to create information standards that allow a diverse range of communities with strong internal common beliefs shielded from the outside world to coexist" [1].

Achieving this, the book writes, requires maintaining what researchers have called "contextual confidence", "where participants in a system can easily establish and protect the context of their communications" [1]. In a note, the book cites the essay "Plural Publics" (2023), where the idea was discussed earlier [6].

What it might look like

The book introduces efforts to build close-knit, self-governing communities on open standards, among other things. For example, if members of a community kept a shared record among themselves using DVPs, it would "create a record of information that is common knowledge to this community and ensure this information (and its status as common knowledge) could not be credibly shared outside this community." If such standards settled on a technical definition of an "association", the book concludes, a right to digital freedom of association might be firmly established [7].

What is debated

A tension with whistleblowing (the book's own point). Chapter 6-3 of the book acknowledges that most of the tools for protecting ⿻ publics "could be applied by organizations to reduce the credibility of documents shared outside their intended social context." That puts them at odds with people who pass information about wrongdoing inside an organization to the press. Left alone, this could become an "arms race" in cryptography, so the book argues for seeking a reconciliation by drawing distinctions [8].
Limits of the technology. The book itself notes that DVPs do not work for information that a third party can check on the spot (such as a community's password) [5].

Common misunderstandings

A common misunderstanding. ⿻ publics does not mean secrecy. The book holds that association needs both open spaces, like a protest in a public square, and closed spaces out of view of outsiders. The aim, the book writes, is to go beyond a single scale of privacy versus publicity [9][1].

Where it fits in Plurality

⿻ publics is the subject of the second of the specific chapters in Part 4 of the book (chapter 4-2, "Association and ⿻ Publics"). The book's chapter summary puts it this way: "The complement to personhood is freedom of association, which in the digital world is instantiated in protocols of publicity and privacy that allow a diversity of social groups to achieve common understanding shielded from external surveillance" [10].

In the picture of the rights operating system, Identity and Personhood stands for people (the points), while ⿻ publics correspond to the "clusters" (groups) that surround the points. The book calls associations "the Yin to the Yang of personhood" [4]. The book also writes that "if it is our entanglement in a diversity of social groups that creates our separateness as a person, it is only by protecting the integrity of that diversity that separate personhood is possible", so freedom of association and personhood cannot be separated [11].

Later chapters apply the idea to health, the environment and the media [12][8].

Audrey Tang, Taiwan's former Minister of Digital Affairs, said in a 2023 conversation that individuals are never a good unit for eliciting values; people exist in intersecting groups, in plural publics, and these are the basic units of analysis. She also said that much of the tragedy of Facebook was about decontextualization, words being cut off from their context [13]. The paper "Community by Design" by Weyl, Tang and others likewise lists, as one of its main goals, enabling many overlapping communities each to achieve contextual confidence [14].

Sources

Plurality, 4-2 "⿻ publics", paragraphs 1–3 — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/4-2/eng/ ［CC0］
Plurality, 4-2 "Associations" — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/4-2/eng/ ［CC0］
Plurality, 4-2 "Establishing context" — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/4-2/eng/ ［CC0］
Plurality, 4-2, introduction — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/4-2/eng/ ［CC0］
Plurality, 4-2 "Protecting context" — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/4-2/eng/ ［CC0］
Plurality, 4-2, note (Jain, Siddarth and Weyl, "Plural Publics") — https://web.archive.org/web/20231204162840/https://gettingplurality.org/2023/03/18/plural-publics/
Plurality, 4-2 "⿻ publics", paragraphs 4–6 — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/4-2/eng/ ［CC0］
Plurality, 6-3 "Media" — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/6-3/eng/ ［CC0］
Plurality, 4-2 "Associations", second half — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/4-2/eng/ ［CC0］
Plurality, chapter summaries (Chapter 4-2) — https://github.com/pluralitybook/plurality/blob/86158859464aee75633acd854c656928121a7fd8/contents/english/8-blurb.md ［CC0］
Plurality, 4-2 "Association, identity and commerce" — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/4-2/eng/ ［CC0］
Plurality, 6-2 "Health" and 6-4 "Environment" — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/6-2/eng/ and https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/6-4/eng/ ［CC0］
Audrey Tang, "Conversation with AI Objectives Institute" (2023-10-25) — https://github.com/audreyt/transcript/blob/main/2023-10-25-Conversation-with-AI-Objectives-Institute.md ［CC0］
Weyl, Tang and others, "Community by Design" — https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.10834

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