Merge branch 'main' into main

.github/workflows/main.yml

@@ -19,15 +19,6 @@ jobs:
     - name: Generate book files (zh-tw)
       run: |
         perl scripts/make-book-zh-tw.pl
-    - name: Upload artifacts
-      uses: actions/upload-artifact@v2
-      with:
-        name: book-files
-        path: |
-          Plurality-english.pdf
-          Plurality-english.epub
-          Plurality-traditional-mandarin.pdf
-          Plurality-traditional-mandarin.epub
     - uses: ncipollo/release-action@v1
       with:
         artifacts: "*.pdf,*.epub"

contents/english/02-00-information-technology-and-democracy-a-widening-gulf.md

@@ -116,7 +116,9 @@ This reflects, with an extensive lag, the shift in investments made by public se
 
 ### Geopolitics and the Evolution of Technology and Democracy
 
-There is a definite geopolitical context to the disposition of democracies to technology. Research on the evolution of innovation over history and time suggests that the changing attitudes of Western democracies to public technology investment have been moderated by geopolitical competitive pressures from eastward autocratic rivals[^NavigatingtheGeopoliticsofInnovation]. In the United States, for instance, the first and second phases of the innovation age (Industry 1.0 and Industry 2.0 respectively) which featured the emergence of such technologies as the steam engine, rail transport, the telegraph, and the assembly line were driven by the private sector in a relatively less intense geopolitical context in the pre-War era, an era of relative American isolation from global politics. However, the third phase (Industry 3.0), enabled by such technologies as semiconductors and the Internet, occurred in the context of intense geopolitics – the Cold War. Thus, driven by geopolitical exigencies, the 20th-century innovations were led by the government through such national institutional frameworks as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) as well as regional alliances of democracies such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). With the end of the Cold War and the subsequent collapse of an autocratic adversary, the geopolitical drivers of innovation waned in intensity, leading to a reduction in incentives for public investments in technology. About three decades later, the rise of China as a formidable challenger to the West’s innovation leadership and the resurgence of an empire-seeking Russia have reawakened the United States and other Western democracies to the urgency of innovation leadership in an era of exponential technologies loosely described as the fourth industrial revolution or Industry 4.0. Hence, we see such recent, somewhat corrective, public spending by the United States government through such institutional mechanisms as the National Science Foundation to bolster America's leadership in emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence [^WhiteHouse2024Budget]. This geopolitically driven attitude of the United States towards technology investment - an attitude that is reactive or proactive to the presence or otherwise of a rising or formidable adversary - leans towards what was described by Robert Atkinson as “digital realpolitik”[[^RobertAtkinson]]([url](https://www2.itif.org/2021-us-grand-strategy-global-digital-economy.pdf)). 
+There is a definite geopolitical context to the disposition of democracies to technology. Research on the evolution of innovation over history and time suggests that the changing attitudes of Western democracies to public technology investment have been moderated by geopolitical competitive pressures from eastward autocratic rivals[^NavigatingtheGeopoliticsofInnovation]. In the United States, for instance, the first and second phases of the innovation age (Industry 1.0 and Industry 2.0 respectively) which featured the emergence of such technologies as the steam engine, rail transport, the telegraph, and the assembly line were driven by the private sector in a relatively less intense geopolitical context in the pre-War era, an era of relative American isolation from global politics. However, the third phase (Industry 3.0), enabled by such technologies as semiconductors and the Internet, occurred in the context of intense geopolitics – the Cold War. Thus, driven by geopolitical exigencies, the 20th-century innovations were led by the government through such national institutional frameworks as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) as well as regional alliances of democracies such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). With the end of the Cold War and the subsequent collapse of an autocratic adversary, the geopolitical drivers of innovation waned in intensity, leading to a reduction in incentives for public investments in technology. About three decades later, the rise of China as a formidable challenger to the West’s innovation leadership and the resurgence of an empire-seeking Russia have reawakened the United States and other Western democracies to the urgency of innovation leadership in an era of exponential technologies loosely described as the fourth industrial revolution or Industry 4.0. Hence, we see such recent, somewhat corrective, public spending by the United States government through such institutional mechanisms as the National Science Foundation to bolster America's leadership in emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence [^WhiteHouse2024Budget]. This geopolitically driven attitude of the United States towards technology investment - an attitude that is reactive or proactive to the presence or otherwise of a rising or formidable adversary - leans towards what was described by Robert Atkinson as “digital realpolitik”[^RobertAtkinson].
+
+[^RobertAtkinson]: [url](https://www2.itif.org/2021-us-grand-strategy-global-digital-economy.pdf).
 
 ### Ideologies of the Twenty-First Century
 
@@ -237,7 +239,6 @@ OECD. “OECD Main Science and Technology Indicators,” March 2022. https://web
 [^LickliderReflection]:  Dertouzos, Michael L, and Joel Moses. The Computer Age: A Twenty-Year View. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1980.
 [^NavigatingtheGeopoliticsofInnovation]: Omoakhalen, Omoaholo. “Navigating the Geopolitics of Innovation: Policy and Strategy Imperatives for the 21st Century Africa.” Remake Africa Consulting, 2023. https://remakeafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Navigating_the_Geopolitics_of_Innovation.pdf.
 [^WhiteHouse2024Budget]: The White House. “Fact Sheet: President Biden’s 2024 Budget Invests in American Science, Technology, and Innovation to Achieve Our Nation’s Greatest Aspirations.” OSTP, March 13, 2023. https://www.whitehouse.gov/ostp/news-updates/2023/03/13/fy24-budget-fact-sheet-rd-innovation/.
-
 Robert Atkinson. “A U.S. Grand Strategy for the Global Digital Economy.” Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, 2021, as cited in Omoakhalen, Omoaholo. “Navigating the Geopolitics of Innovation: Policy and Strategy Imperatives for the 21st Century Africa.” Remake Africa Consulting, 2023. https://remakeafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Navigating_the_Geopolitics_of_Innovation.pdf.
 [^AcemogluRestrepoStudy]: Acemoglu, Daron, and Pascual Restrepo. “Automation and New Tasks: How Technology Displaces and Reinstates Labor.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 33, no. 2 (May 2019): 3–30. https://doi.org/10.1257/jep.33.2.3.  Note that the precise Golden Age-Digital Stagnation cutoff differs across these studies, but it is always somewhere during the 1970s or 1980s.
 [^PosnerWeylBook]: Posner, Eric A, E  Glen Weyl, and Vitalik Buterin. Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019.

contents/english/02-02-the-life-of-a-digital-democracy.md

@@ -38,13 +38,13 @@ During this process of institutionalization of g0v, there was growing demand to
 
 vTaiwan was deliberately intended as an experimental, high-touch, intensive platform for committed participants.  It had about 200,000 users or about 1% of Taiwan's population at its peak and held detailed deliberations on 28 issues, 80% of which led to legislative action.  These focused mostly on questions around technology regulation, such as the regulation of ride sharing, responses to non-consensual intimate images, regulatory experimentation with financial technology and regulation of AI.  While these were generally viewed as successful by all parties, the intensive effort required, the lack of mandates for government to respond and the somewhat narrow scope has led to a relative decline of the platform recently. 
 
-The Public Digital Innovation Space (PDIS) that one of us established in 2016 to oversee vTaiwan and other projects we discuss below in the ministerial role therefore supported a second, related platform Join. While Join also sometime used Polis, it has a lighter-weight user interface and focuses primarily on soliciting input, suggestions and initatives from a broader public, and has an enforcement mechanism where government officials must respond if a proposal receives sufficient support. Unlike vTaiwan, furthermore, Join addresses a range of policy issues, including controversial non-technological issues such as high school's start time, and has strong continuing usage today of roughly half of the population over its lifetime and an average of 11,000 unique daily visitors.
+The Public Digital Innovation Space (PDIS) that one of us established in 2016 to work with vTaiwan and other projects we discuss below in the ministerial role therefore supported a second, related platform Join. While Join also sometime used Polis, it has a lighter-weight user interface and focuses primarily on soliciting input, suggestions and initatives from a broader public, and has an enforcement mechanism where government officials must respond if a proposal receives sufficient support. Unlike vTaiwan, furthermore, Join addresses a range of policy issues, including controversial non-technological issues such as high school's start time, and has strong continuing usage today of roughly half of the population over its lifetime and an average of 11,000 unique daily visitors.
 
 ### Hackathons, coalitions and quadratic signals
 
 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 PDIS-supported program of "data coalitions" to address civic problems.  Examples have included the monitoring of air quality or 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 05-06 ⿻ Voting 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 holographic representation of the President of Taiwan giving the hologram 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 PDIS-supported program of "data coalitions" to address civic problems.  Examples have included the monitoring of air quality or 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 05-06 ⿻ Voting 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.
 
 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 chapter.
 
@@ -53,7 +53,7 @@ More recently, this practice has been extended beyond developing technical solut
 
 These diverse approaches to empowering government to more agilely leverage civil participation most dramatically came to a head during the Covid-19 pandemic.  Taiwan is widely believed (based on statistics we will discuss in the next section of this chapter) to have had one of the world's most effective responses to the pandemic. Notably, it achieved among the lowest global death rates from the disease without using lockdowns and while maintaining among the fastest rates of economic growth in the world.  While being an island, having as Taiwan did an epidemiologist ready for an instant response as Vice-President and restricting travel clearly played a key role, a range of technological interventions played an important role as well.
 
-The best documented example and the one most consistent with the previous examples was the "Mask App". Given previous experience with SARS, masks in Taiwan were beginning to run into shortages by late January, when little of the world had even heard of Covid-19.  Frustrated,  Google engineer Howard Wu developed an app that harnessed data that the government, following open and transparent data practices harnessed and reinforced by the g0v movement, to map mask availability.  This allowed Taiwan to achieve widespread mask adoption by mid-February, even as mask supplies remained extremely tight given the lack of a global production response at this early stage.
+The best documented example and the one most consistent with the previous examples was the "Mask App". Given previous experience with SARS, masks in Taiwan were beginning to run into shortages by late January, when little of the world had even heard of Covid-19.  Frustrated, civic hackers led by Howard Wu developed an app that harnessed data that the government, following open and transparent data practices harnessed and reinforced by the g0v movement, to map mask availability.  This allowed Taiwan to achieve widespread mask adoption by mid-February, even as mask supplies remained extremely tight given the lack of a global production response at this early stage.
 
 Another critical aspect of the Taiwanese response was the rigorous use of testing, tracing and supported isolation to avoid community spread of the disease. While most tracing occurred by more traditional means, Taiwan was among the only place that was able to reach the prevalence of adoption of phone-based social distancing and tracing systems necessary to make these an important and effective part of their response. This was, in turn, largely because of the close cooperation facilitated by PDIS between government health officials and members of the g0v community deeply concerned about privacy, especially given the lack in Taiwan of an independent privacy protection regime, a point we return to below. This led to the design of systems with strong anonymization and decentralization features that received broad acceptance.
 
@@ -117,7 +117,7 @@ Taiwan is also marked by a unique experience with religion among rich countires,
 
 #### Political
 
-Taiwan is widely recognized both for the quality of its democracy and its resilience against technology-driven information manipulation.  Several indices, published by organizations such as Freedom House, the Economist Intelligence Unit, the Bertelsmann Foundation and V-Dem, consistently rank Taiwan as among the freest and most effective democracies on earth.[^demrank]  While Taiwan's precise ranking differs across these indices (ranging from first to merely in the top 15%), it nearly always stands out as the strongest democracy in Asia and the strongest democracy younger than 30 years old; even if one includes the wave of post-Soviety democracies immediately before this, almost all are less than half Taiwan's size, typically an order of magnitude smaller.  Thus Taiwan is at least regarded as Asia's strongest democracy and the strongest young democracy of reasonable size and by many as the world's strongest.  Furthermore, while democracy has generally declined in every region of the world in the last decade according to these indices, Taiwan's democratic scores have substantially increased.
+Taiwan is widely recognized both for the quality of its democracy and its resilience against technology-driven information manipulation.  Several indices, published by organizations such as Freedom House[^Freedom], the Economist Intelligence Unit[^EIU], the Bertelsmann Foundation and V-Dem, consistently rank Taiwan as among the freest and most effective democracies on earth.[^demrank]  While Taiwan's precise ranking differs across these indices (ranging from first to merely in the top 15%), it nearly always stands out as the strongest democracy in Asia and the strongest democracy younger than 30 years old; even if one includes the wave of post-Soviety democracies immediately before this, almost all are less than half Taiwan's size, typically an order of magnitude smaller.  Thus Taiwan is at least regarded as Asia's strongest democracy and the strongest young democracy of reasonable size and by many as the world's strongest.  Furthermore, while democracy has generally declined in every region of the world in the last decade according to these indices, Taiwan's democratic scores have substantially increased.
 
 In addition to this overall strength, Taiwan is noted for its resistance to polarization and threats to information integrity. A variety of studies using a range of methodologies have found that Taiwan is one of the least politically, socially and religiously polarized developed countries in the world, though some have found a slight upward trend in political polarization since the Sunflower movement.[^polarization]  This is especially true in *affective polarization*, the holding of negative or hostile personal attitudes towards political opponents, with Taiwan consistently among the 5 least affectively polarized countries. 
 
@@ -172,5 +172,5 @@ It will doubtless take decades of study to understand the precise causal connect
 [^Disinfo]:https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/655F8D3BBD3B48FC2B0F474B8D4B7457/S030574102100134Xa.pdf/reactions_to_chinalinked_fake_news_experimental_evidence_from_taiwan.pdf
 [^crime]: https://www.numbeo.com/crime/rankings_by_country.jsp
 [^crimevus]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/319861/taiwan-crime-rate/#:~:text=In%202022%2C%20around%201%2C139%20crimes,people%20in%20the%20previous%20year, https://counciloncj.org/year-end-2023-crime-trends/#:~:text=Most%20violent%20offenses%20remained%20elevated,by%2093%25%20during%20that%20period.
-[^Freedom]:https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world
-[^EIU]:https://www.eiu.com/n/campaigns/democracy-index-2023
+[^Freedom]: https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world
+[^EIU]: https://www.eiu.com/n/campaigns/democracy-index-2023