Merge branch 'main' into patch-11

contents/english/4-2-association-and-⿻-publics.md

@@ -53,7 +53,7 @@ While the common beliefs of a group of people are obviously related to the actua
 
 In game theory and other formal social science disciplines, it is common to model individuals as collections of intentions/preferences and beliefs.  This notion of community gives a way to think about groups similarly and distinctly from the individuals that make them up, given that common beliefs and intentions need not be the same as those of the individuals that are part of that group: group beliefs and goals are common beliefs and goals of that group.  In this sense, the freedom to create associations can be understood as the freedom to create common beliefs and goals.  Yet creating associations is not enough.  Just as we argued in the previous chapter that protecting secrets is critical to maintaining individual identity, so too associations must be able to protect themselves from surveillance, as should their common beliefs become simply the beliefs of everyone, they cease to be a separate association.  As such privacy from external surveillance or internal over-sharing is just as critical as is establishing associations to their freedom.
 
-It is little surprise, then, that many of the historical technologies and spaces that come to mind when we think of the freedom of association are precisely geared to achieving common beliefs and shielding common beliefs from external beliefs from outsiders. Searching for "freedom of association" typically yields images of protests in public spaces, meetings in public spaces like parks and squares and group discussions in private clubs.  As illustrated above, group meetings and statements made openly in front of group members are crucial to achieving common beliefs and understanding among that group.  Private pamphlets may achieve individual persuasion, but given the lack of common observation, game theorists have argued that they struggle to create public beliefs in the same way a shared declaration, like the child's public laughter, can.
+It is little surprise, then, that many of the historical technologies and spaces that come to mind when we think of the freedom of association are precisely geared to achieving common beliefs and shielding common beliefs from external beliefs from outsiders. Searching for "freedom of association" typically yields images of protests in public spaces, meetings in public spaces like parks and squares and group discussions in private clubs.[^PrivateClubs]  As illustrated above, group meetings and statements made openly in front of group members are crucial to achieving common beliefs and understanding among that group.  Private pamphlets may achieve individual persuasion, but given the lack of common observation, game theorists have argued that they struggle to create public beliefs in the same way a shared declaration, like the child's public laughter, can.
 
 But purely public spaces have important limitations: they do not allow groups to form their views and coordinate their actions outside the broader public eye.  This may undermine their cohesion, their ability to present a united face externally and their ability to communicate effectively harnessing an internal context.  This is why associations so often have enclosed gathering places open only to members: to allow the secrecy that Simmel emphasized as critical to group efficacy and cohesion.[^SimSec] The crucial question we thus face is how systems of network communication can offer the the brave new world of "communities of interest" these same or even more effective affordances to create protected common beliefs.
 
@@ -112,6 +112,8 @@ Yet most types of information are harder to independently and immediately verify
 
 If properly combined in a new generation of networking standards, a combination of these tools could give us the capacity to move beyond the superficial traditional divide between "publicity" and "privacy" to empower true freedom of association online.  While we usually think of publicity and privacy as a one-dimensional spectrum, it is easy to see that another dimension is equally important.  
 
+Japanese philosopher Kojin Karatani explores this concept in his book "The Principle of NAM."[^NAMPrinciple] Karatani argues that individuals belong not only to geographical regions but also to global "regions" based on their interests. He calls this the "rhizomatic association" and depicts it as a network formation system consisting of diverse "regions." This concept resembles the network structure where small, closely-knit communities are interconnected.
+
 Consider first information "hidden in plain sight", lost in a pile of irrelevant facts, available to all but reaching the awareness of no one.  Contrast this with the secret of the existence of the Manhattan Project, which was shared among roughly 100,000 people but was sharply hidden from the rest of the world.  Both are near the midpoint of the "privacy" v. "publicity" spectrum, as both are in important ways broadly shared and also obscure.  But they sit at opposite ends of another spectrum: of concentrated common understanding v. diffuse availability.
 
 This example illustrates why "privacy" and "publicity" are far too simplistic concepts to describe the patterns of co-knowledge that underpin free association.  While any simple descriptor will fall short of the richness we should continue to investigate, a more relevant model may be what elsewhere we have called "⿻ publics".  ⿻ 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.  Achieving this requires maintaining what Shrey Jain, Zoë Hitzig and Pamela Mishkin have called "contextual confidence", where participants in a system can easily establish and protect the context of their communications.[^ContextualConfidence]
@@ -142,3 +144,5 @@ Furthermore, the right of free association is the foundation on which commerce a
 [^Spritely]: Spritely Project. https://spritelyproject.org/
 [^ZKCanon]: Elena Burger, Bryan Chiang, Sonal Chokshi, Eddy Lazzarin, Justin Thaler, Ali Yahya. Zero Knowledge Canon. https://a16zcrypto.com/posts/article/zero-knowledge-canon/
 [^BowlingAlone]: Putnam, R.D. (1995). "Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital". *Journal of Democracy*. https://doi.org/10.1353/jod.1995.0002.
+[^NAMPrinciple]: Kojin Karatani (2000). "NAM原理" *太田出版* (Published in Japanese. Not translated in English). In this year Karatani founded the New Associationist Movement in Japan. It was an anti-capitalist, anti-nation-state association inspired by experiments with Local Exchange Trading Systems.
+[^PrivateClubs]: Richard Rorty wrote "We can urge the construction of a world order whose model is a bazaar surrounded by lots and lots of exclusive private clubs." in Rorty, R. (1986). "On ethnocentrism: A reply to Clifford Geertz". University of Michigan. He suggests we need not only public spaces but also a variety of small communities.

contents/english/6-1-workplace.md

@@ -14,7 +14,7 @@ The Covid-19 pandemic transformed the world of work, bringing changes expected f
 
 Yet there is little question that remote work has real downsides.  Some of these, such as ensuring work-life balance, avoiding distractions and unhealthy at-home working conditions, are not easily addressed through remote collaboration tools.  But many others are: lack of organic interactions with colleagues, missing opportunities for feedback or to form deeper personal connections with colleagues, etc. [^remote-shift-impact] While ⿻ can be used to address most of these, we will focus on one in particular: the building of strong and deeply trusting teams.
 
-In-person teams often engage in a variety of joint learnings or other not-directly-productive activities to build team trust, connection and spirit.  These range from casual lunches to various kinds of extreme team sports, such as "trust falls", simulated military exercises, ropes courses, etc.  What nearly all these have in common is that they create a shared activity that benefits from and thus helps develop trust among members, in a similar manner to the way we discussed shared military service developing strong and lasting cooperative bonds in the "Post-Symbolic Communication" chapter.  
+In-person teams often engage in a variety of joint learnings or other not-directly-productive activities to build team trust, connection and spirit.  These range from casual lunches to various kinds of extreme team sports, such as "trust falls"[^TrustFall], simulated military exercises, ropes courses, etc.  What nearly all these have in common is that they create a shared activity that benefits from and thus helps develop trust among members, in a similar manner to the way we discussed shared military service developing strong and lasting cooperative bonds in the "Post-Symbolic Communication" chapter.  
 
 Obviously most such activities currently rely heavily on being in person, thus many hybrid and fully remote teams, especially those that have many members who started as remote employees, miss the team-building benefits created by such activities or can achieve them only at considerable travel expense.  Remote shared reality offers significant potential for overcoming this challenge.  Lunches among sufficiently realistic avatars, ones reflecting detailed facial expressions for example, may soon help bring the rich connections achieved in the office within the reach of remote teams.  While it would seem impossible to achieve the vivid connections of parties or extreme sports in remote shared reality, there is increasingly strong evidence that real experiences of fear and trust can develop in sufficiently realistic simulated environments.  As "e-sports" begin to rival the popularity and, in the right remote shared reality environments, physical intensity of in-person physical sports, the benefits of "campus athletics" may increasingly make their way to remote work.
 
@@ -91,3 +91,4 @@ Huet, Ellen. “Basecamp Follows Coinbase In Banning Politics Talk at Work.” B
 [^remote-shift-impact]: Yang, Longqi, David Holtz, Sonia Jaffe, Siddharth Suri, Shilpi Sinha, Jeffrey Weston, Connor Joyce, et al. “The Effects of Remote Work on Collaboration among Information Workers.” Nature Human Behaviour 6, no. 1 (September 9, 2021): 43–54. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-021-01196-4.
 [^meeting-stats]: Krueger, Alyson. “Fewer Work Meetings? Corporate America Is Trying.” The New York Times, April 10, 2023. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/07/business/office-meetings-time.html.
 [^meeting-stats2]: Brooks, Arthur C. “Why Meetings Are Terrible for Happiness.” The Atlantic, December 15, 2022. https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2022/11/why-meetings-are-terrible-happiness/672144/.
+[^TrustFall]: A "trust fall" is an exercise where a person falls backward, counting on others to catch them. This activity is used to build trust and teamwork, as it requires relying on others to prevent injury. From the mid-2010s, the trust fall became less popular due to the potential for traumatic brain injuries if catchers fail.

documentation/contributing to the project/Style Guide.md

@@ -1,11 +1,12 @@
 # Style Guide
 
-This document provides brief stylistic guidance on markdown documents that are part of *⿻數位 Plurality*.  
+This document provides brief stylistic guidance on markdown documents that are part of *⿻數位 Plurality*.
+
 1. Structure
-	a. Terminology: The largest division within the book (of which there are 7 in the core, plus prefatory material and blurb, are referred to as "Parts".  Within these, there are usually several "Chapters"; within each chapter there are "Sections" and ocassionally there may be "Subsections" within sections, though these should be avoided except where absolutely necessary.
-	b. Numeration: Both parts and chapters number from 0, with 0 denoting prefatory material to the core elements of whatever level.
-	c. Demarcation: Titles of Chapters are set off by a singled "#" symbol; titles of sections are set off by a triple "###" symbol; titles of subsections are set off by a quadrupule"####".
-	d. Capitalization: Chapter titles are fully capitalized; only the first letter of sections are titled.
+	- Terminology: The largest division within the book (of which there are 7 in the core), plus prefatory material and blurb, are referred to as "Parts".  Within these, there are usually several "Chapters"; within each chapter there are "Sections" and ocassionally there may be "Subsections" within sections, though these should be avoided except where absolutely necessary.
+	- Numeration: Both parts and chapters number from 0, with 0 denoting prefatory material to the core elements of whatever level.
+	- Demarcation: Titles of Chapters are set off by a single "#" symbol; titles of sections are set off by a triple "###" symbol; titles of subsections are set off by a quadrupule "####".
+	- Capitalization: Chapter titles are fully capitalized; only the first letter of sections are titled.
 2. Justification: Paragraphs are not indented.
 3. Divisions: Chapters in Parts 2-7 all begin with some sort of introductory material before the main substances of the chapter which is homogeneous in a Part and varies across Parts (e.g. Part 4 chapters all begin with an illustration of a currently deployed technology illustrating the idea of the chapter).  This opening material should be separated from the rest of the text by "---".
 4. Internal referencing: When referencing Parts, Sections or Chapters, use their titles in quotes such as "In the Part of the book on 'Freedom'" or "In our chapter 'The Lost Dao'".