Merge branch 'pluralitybook:main' into main

Author: audreyt

ReadMe.md

@@ -75,7 +75,7 @@ We plan to pursue these approaches and to put any funds raised into the collecti
 
 We encourage different communities to help us translate the content in various languages for more accessibility around the world, anyone should feel free to fork the repository to initiate their translation work. We aim to allow communities to contribute in scalable and decentralized ways while granting official status upon approval.
 
-Here's a [simple onboarding guide](https://www.notion.so/Plurality-Translation-Contributor-Onboarding-8b21ee9cebab42b8b89f8f6a897f849a?pvs=21). Please feel free to join the [Discord](https://discord.gg/YWSDRqdW5n) to coordinate with the team on getting your fork approved and listed here, your translation work reflected on the website, and join our contributor community to give any feedback on how to improve the process!
+Here's a [simple onboarding guide](https://docs.plurality.net/contributing/Contributing%20translations/). Please feel free to join the [Discord](https://discord.gg/YWSDRqdW5n) to coordinate with the team on getting your fork approved and listed here, your translation work reflected on the website, and join our contributor community to give any feedback on how to improve the process!
 
 _Note: Note: Traditional Mandarin and English are both considered root languages and are hosted in this repository, while each fork is maintained by individual community members._
 

contents/english/2-0-information-technology-and-democracy-a-widening-gulf.md

@@ -122,11 +122,11 @@ How did we end up here? Are these conflicts the natural course of technology and
 
 A range of work suggests that technology and democracy could co-evolve in a diversity of ways and that the path most democracies are on is a result of collective choices they have made through policies, attitudes, expectations, and culture.  The range of possibilities can be seen through a variety of lenses, from science fiction to real-world cases.  
 
-Science fiction shows the astonishing range of futures the human mind is capable of imagining.  In many cases, these imaginings are the foundation of many of the technologies that researchers and entrepreneurs end up developing.  Some of these correspond to the directions we have seen technology take recently.  In his 1992 classic, [Snow Crash](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Crash), Neal Stephenson imagines a future where most people have retreated to live much of their lives in an immersive “metaverse”.[^Crash]  In the process they undermine the engagement necessary to support real-world communities, governments, and the like, making space for mafias and cult leaders to rule and develop weapons of mass destruction.  This future closely corresponds to elements of the “antisocial” threats to democracy from technology we discussed above. Stephenson and other writers further extend these possibilities, which have had a profound effect in shaping technology development; for example, Meta Platforms is named after Stephenson’s metaverse.  Similar examples are possible for the tendency of technology to concentrate power through creating “superintelligences” as in the fiction of [Isaac Asimov](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics) and [Ian Banks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_series), the predictive futurism of [Ray Kurzweil](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_Spiritual_Machines) and [Nicholas Bostrom](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superintelligence:_Paths,_Dangers,_Strategies), and films like [Terminator](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superintelligence:_Paths,_Dangers,_Strategies) and [Her](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Her_(film)).[^AISciFi]
+Science fiction shows the astonishing range of futures the human mind is capable of imagining.  In many cases, these imaginings are the foundation of many of the technologies that researchers and entrepreneurs end up developing.  Some of these correspond to the directions we have seen technology take recently.  In his 1992 classic, [Snow Crash](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Crash), Neal Stephenson imagines a future where most people have retreated to live much of their lives in an immersive “metaverse”.[^Crash]  In the process they undermine the engagement necessary to support real-world communities, governments, and the like, making space for mafias and cult leaders to rule and develop weapons of mass destruction.  This future closely corresponds to elements of the “antisocial” threats to democracy from technology we discussed above. Stephenson and other writers further extend these possibilities, which have had a profound effect in shaping technology development; for example, Meta Platforms is named after Stephenson’s metaverse.  Similar examples are possible for the tendency of technology to concentrate power through creating “superintelligences” as in the fiction of [Isaac Asimov](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics) and [Iain M. Banks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_series), the predictive futurism of [Ray Kurzweil](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_Spiritual_Machines) and [Nicholas Bostrom](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superintelligence:_Paths,_Dangers,_Strategies), and films like [Terminator](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superintelligence:_Paths,_Dangers,_Strategies) and [Her](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Her_(film)).[^AISciFi]
 
 [^Crash]: Neal Stephenson, *Snow Crash* (New York: Bantam, 1992).
 
-[^AISciFi]: Isaac Asimov, *I, Robot* (New York: Gnome Press: 1950). Ian Banks, *Consider Phlebas* (London: Macmillan, 1987). Ray Kurzweil, *The Age of Spiritual Machines* (New York: Viking, 1999). Nicholas Bostrom, *Superintelligence* (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2014).
+[^AISciFi]: Isaac Asimov, *I, Robot* (New York: Gnome Press: 1950). Iain M. Banks, *Consider Phlebas* (London: Macmillan, 1987). Ray Kurzweil, *The Age of Spiritual Machines* (New York: Viking, 1999). Nicholas Bostrom, *Superintelligence* (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2014).
 
 But these possibilities are both very different from each other and are far from the only visions of the technological future to be found in sci-fi.  In fact, some of the most prominent science fiction shows very different possibilities. Two of the most popular sci-fi television shows of all time, *The Jetsons* and *Star Trek*, show futures where, respectively, technology has largely reinforced the culture and institutions of 1950s America and one where it has enabled a post-capitalist world of diverse intersecting alien intelligences (on which more below).  But these are two among thousands of examples, from the post-gender and post-state imagination of Ursula Le Guin to the post-colonial futurism of Octavia Butler.  All suggest a dizzying range of ways technology could coevolve with society[^ScienceFiction].  
 

contents/english/2-1-a-view-from-yushan.md

@@ -7,7 +7,7 @@
 
 [^TROC]: This is an alternate interpretation of 中華民國 (lit. "amidst" "cultures" "citizens" "nation"), usually translated as "Republic of China".
 
-Standing at the summit of East Asia's highest peak, [Yushan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yu_Shan) (Jade Mountain), one can not only look down on Taiwan, but also feel how this small, mountainous island nation is a global crossroad. Located at the junction of the Eurasian and Pacific tectonic plates, Taiwan's geological fault line yearly pushes it up, even as it also regularly causes earthquakes against which rigorous building code protect inhabitants. In the same way, the clash of Taiwan's diverse culture, history and values has built a prosperous and innovative society, while pro-social digital innovation has managed to protect it from polarization.
+Standing at the summit of East Asia's highest peak, [Yushan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yu_Shan) (Jade Mountain), one can not only look down on Taiwan, but also feel how this small, mountainous island nation is a global crossroad. Located at the junction of the Eurasian and Pacific tectonic plates, Taiwan's geological fault line yearly pushes it up, even as it also regularly causes earthquakes against which rigorous building codes protect inhabitants. In the same way, the clash of Taiwan's diverse culture, history and values has built a prosperous and innovative society, while pro-social digital innovation has managed to protect it from polarization.
 
 Today, with a voter turnout rate over 70%[^twelectionv], second-highest religious diversity in the world[^ReligiousDiversityIndex], and 90% of global supply capacity for advanced chips, Taiwan has broken through geographic constraints and demonstrated the resilience of a democratic society to collaborate with its region and the world.
 
@@ -28,7 +28,7 @@ Two dramatic personal experiences of the lead authors of this book illustrate th
 
 Perhaps most importantly, the movement led to a deeper and more lasting shift in politics, as the government at the time gained respect for the movement and ministers invited younger "reverse mentors" to help them learn from youth and civil society. One particularly proactive such minister, one of the world's first ministers in charge of digital participation, Jaclyn Tsai recruited one of us to begin our journey of public service. Eventually this led to her taking that role in 2016 and in 2022 becoming the first Minister of Digital Affairs.
 
-Almost a decade after these events, the other primary author of this book visited to witness the general election held January 13, 2024, which launched a "year of elections" in which more people than in any previous year will vote and followed hot on the heels of the "year of AI", when generative models like GPT burst into the public consciousness. Many expect these models to turbocharge information manipulation and interference by authoritarian actors. This election seemed a test case, with a more concerted, better-funded adversary focused on a small population than anywhere in the world.[^VDemInfo] Walking the streets of Taipei on the eve of that election, he saw no shortage of divisions for such attacks to exploit. At the rally of the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) he found not a single official flag, only placards of the island, the party's signature green color and occasional rainbow flags 🏳️‍🌈. At the rally of the opposition Kuomintang (KMT or Nationalist) party, he saw only the flag of the Republic of China (ROC) 🇹🇼. It made him imagine how much more extreme the divisions of his American home would be if Democrats waved a historical British flag and Republicans the stars and stripes.
+Almost a decade after these events, the other primary author of this book visited to witness the general election held January 13, 2024, which launched a "year of elections" in which more people than in any previous year will vote and followed hot on the heels of the "year of AI", when generative models like GPT burst into the public consciousness. Many expect these models to turbocharge information manipulation and interference by authoritarian actors. This election seemed a test case, with a more concerted, better-funded adversary focused on a considerably smaller population.[^VDemInfo] Walking the streets of Taipei on the eve of that election, he saw no shortage of divisions for such attacks to exploit. At the rally of the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) he found not a single official flag, only placards of the island, the party's signature green color and occasional rainbow flags 🏳️‍🌈. At the rally of the opposition Kuomintang (KMT or Nationalist) party, he saw only the flag of the Republic of China (ROC) 🇹🇼. It made him imagine how much more extreme the divisions of his American home would be if Democrats waved a historical British flag and Republicans the stars and stripes.
 
 [^VDemInfo]: “Disinformation in Taiwan: International versus Domestic Perpetrators,” V-Dem, 2020. https://v-dem.net/weekly_graph/disinformation-in-taiwan-international-versus
 
@@ -109,7 +109,7 @@ The 1960s, parallel to the American Civil Rights movement, saw an outburst of de
 
 The United Nations was central to the ROC's early identity under the White Terror as it was not only one of the founding members of the UN, but also the only Asian permanent member of the Security Council. This prominent international role was the leading irritant to the People's Republic of China (PRC) regime, preventing it from participating in international affairs and leading the CCP to change its position from initially supporting Taiwanese independence to an ideological focus on conquering Taiwan. However, as the US sought to contain its failures in Vietnam, President Richard Nixon secretly pursued accommodation with the PRC, including supporting an Albanian-sponsored Resolution 2758 by the General Assembly on October 25, 1971 that transferred recognition of "China" from the ROC to the PRC, finally culminating in Nixon's visit to PRC in 1972. As a result, the ROC "withdrew" from the UN, transforming its identity and international standing.
 
-On the one hand, this withdrawal internationally greatly limited the scope of Taiwan's international activities and its ability to engage in economic and trade activities. It also led the US and much of the non-Communist world to shift from a position of unconditional alliance with the ROC to one of careful balancing of interests and ambiguity, seeking to prevent PRC's violence over Taiwan while also supporting a policy of acknowledging its "One China" position.
+On the one hand, this withdrawal internationally greatly limited the scope of Taiwan's international activities and its ability to engage in economic and trade activities. It also led the US and much of the non-Communist world to shift from a position of unconditional alliance with the ROC to one of careful balancing of interests and ambiguity, seeking to prevent PRC violence over Taiwan while also supporting a policy of acknowledging its "One China" position.
 
 Internally, this change in identity undermined much of the rationale for the White Terror, as the prospect of global support for a war to suppress the "Communist rebellion" withered and undermined the aspirational identity of "free China". The contradictions between the increasingly egalitarian, Third Sector-driven and highly progressively educated population, on the one hand, and an authoritarian repressive state on the other thus became increasingly overwhelming, especially with the development of labor unions and political civic associations and the death of Chiang all before the end of the 1970s. The lives of the parents of one of the authors of this book are a perfect illustration of these trends: as pioneers of community college and consumer cooperative movements, they benefited from the cooperative support in the ROC constitution. Yet, as journalists, they covered and helped support those repressed by the state, such as in the Kaohsiung Incident of 1979 when leaders of the political opposition were imprisoned, building the foundation for democratization.
 

contents/english/2-2-the-life-of-a-digital-democracy.md

@@ -63,7 +63,7 @@ The Public Digital Innovation Space (PDIS) that one of us established in 2016 to
 
 While such levels of digital civic engagement may seem surprising to many Westerners, they can be seen simply as the harnessing of a small portion of the energy typically wasted on conflict on (anti-)social media towards solving public problems.  Even more concentrated applications of this principle have come by placing the weight of government behind  the g0v practice of hackathons through the Presidential Hackathon (PH) and a variety of supporting institutions.
 
-The PH convened mixed teams of civil servants, academics, activists and technologists to propose tools, social practices and collective data custody arrangements that allowed them to "collectively bargain" with their data for cooperation with government and private actors supported by the government-supported program of "data coalitions" to address civic problems.  Examples have included the monitoring of air quality and early warning systems for wildfires.   Participants and broader citizens were asked to help select the winners using a voting system called Quadratic Voting that allows people to express the extent of their support across a range of projects and that we discuss in our [⿻ Voting](https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/5-6/eng/?mode=dark) chapter below.  This allowed a wide range of participants to be at least partial winners, by making it likely everyone would have supported some winner and that if someone felt very strongly in favor of one project they could give it a significant boost.  Winning project received a trophy -- a microprojector showing the President of Taiwan giving the award to the winners, leverage they could use to induce relevant government agencies or localities to cooperate in their mission, given the legitimacy g0v has gained as noted above.
+The PH convened mixed teams of civil servants, academics, activists and technologists to propose tools, social practices and collective data custody arrangements that allowed them to "collectively bargain" with their data for cooperation with government and private actors supported by the government-supported program of "data coalitions" to address civic problems.  Examples have included the monitoring of air quality and early warning systems for wildfires.   Participants and broader citizens were asked to help select the winners using a voting system called Quadratic Voting that allows people to express the extent of their support across a range of projects and that we discuss in our [⿻ Voting](https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/5-6/eng/?mode=dark) chapter below.  This allowed a wide range of participants to be at least partial winners, by making it likely everyone would have supported some winner and that if someone felt very strongly in favor of one project they could give it a significant boost.  Winning projects received a trophy -- a microprojector showing the President of Taiwan giving the award to the winners, leverage they could use to induce relevant government agencies or localities to cooperate in their mission, given the legitimacy g0v has gained as noted above.
 
 More recently, this practice has been extended beyond developing technical solutions to envisioning of alternative futures and production of media content to support this through "ideathons".  It has also gone beyond symbolic support to awarding real funding to valued projects (such as around agricultural and food safety inspections) using an extension of Quadratic Voting to Funding as we discuss in our [Social Markets](https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/5-7/eng/?mode=dark) chapter.
 

contents/english/3-1-living-in-a-⿻-world.md

@@ -112,7 +112,7 @@ Thus, even in understanding the very practice of science, a ⿻ perspective, gro
 **A future ⿻?**
 
 
-Yet the assumptions on which the Technocratic and Libertarian visions of the future discussed above diverge sharply from such ⿻ foundations.  
+Yet the assumptions on which the Technocratic and Libertarian visions of the future discussed above are founded diverge sharply from such ⿻ foundations.  
 
 In the Technocratic vision we discussed in the previous chapter, the “messiness” of existing administrative systems is to be replaced by a massive-scale, unified, rational, scientific, artificially intelligent planning system.  Transcending locality and social diversity, this unified agent is imagined to give “unbiased” answers to any economic and social problem, transcending social cleavages and differences.  As such, it seeks to at best paper over and at worst erase, rather than fostering and harnessing, the social diversity and heterogeneity that ⿻ social science sees as defining the very objects of interest, engagement, and value.