On Resolving Singularities

(Previous in the series: On Utopia for Public Action)

Civic hackers in the vTaiwan project — the deliberation process that solved the Uber policy issue — are volunteers working in our spare time, relying on free software and automated moderation tools.

The tools we used are proven to work well under massive scale. However, many national policies face the opposite problem.

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Uber and Airbnb are hot topics, but other public issues — such as judicial reform, land-use planning, and cultural policy — don’t get much coverage. The long-form explanations won’t fit into mainstream TV and newspapers, and there are no angle for sensational commentaries.

So by late 2015, ex-occupiers created new media channels, with the same non-profit, open-source, crowd-based techniques from the Sunflower movement.

To the left is The Reporter, a news website focused on investigative journalism and public issues. It received 300,000 euros in donations and 100,000 regular subscribers.

To the right is Talk to Taiwan, an interactive web TV-show broadcast every Thursday evening, with a guest specialising on one policy area — the Mayor of Taipei city on Medicare; the outgoing Premier on cyber-infrastructure; and this week, the new minister of culture.

The show’s content is crowd-sourced — every Monday begins with an interactive survey of audience’s reflections, followed by infographic briefs and articles. During the show, the guest takes 40 minutes to convey their vision, and 20 minutes on a rapid-fire Q&A session with the live chatroom — joined by 200,000 viewers to date.

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The show was filmed in immersive, high-quality 360 video. This reflective space changed the nature of dialogue. Instead of becoming a blurred talking head speaking to an imagined audience behind the camera, guests felt that they have the full attention from the room, and focused on getting their ideas across — If they tell a joke, viewers can virtually turn around and see if people in the room are laughing or not.

City-level deliberations also blossomed after the Sunflower movement. This February, Tainan city adopted the COP21 World Wide Views method at the Feiyan New Village, a controversial urban renovation site with escalating conflict between the construction company, archeologists, ecologists, and local residents.

Backed by open data and multi-stakeholder briefings, the deliberation successfully defused misunderstandings among hundreds of local residents; they agreed on a set of more moderate suggestions for the city.

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As we become more familiar with facilitated hearings and deliberations, large-scale public projects still pose a challenge for us.

Take Airports as an example — it’s often one architect’s expertise versus a counter-vision. Citizens may trust one architect over the other, but the diagrams and models are often too abstract for people to make informed choices.

With the national policy of “open data by default”, getting raw measurements published is not the problem — the problem is how to turn them into social objects, around which everyone can make meaningful conversations and contributions.

This January, when I visited Paris for a dialogue with Blaise Agüera y Arcas in la Nuit des Idées, we brainstormed on designing a deliberation process in virtual reality, entering the architect’s visions and interact with them in real time. The goal is to make it enjoyable to participate in the deliberative process — like watching and acting in a 3D IMAX movie.

Today, virtual desktop-sharing tools are already there for HTC Vive and Oculus. This September, as the more affordable “Daydream” headsets arrive, I’ll lead a class in the China Academy of Art to explore these tools.

Physically, I’ll be in Paris at that time, so I plan to transmit an animated 3D model of myself to Hangzhou. With the entire semester recorded in VR telepresence, everyone can revisit the virtual classroom in the future and contribute to it. If this works, we will scale out the experiment globally, so I can spend more time at home — with two dogs and eight cats.

Speaking of cats: This is a big cat, the Formosan Clouded Leopard that went extinct around the time I was born.

Taiwan is a small island — about the same size as La Normandie — but it hosts 1.5 percent of the world’s species, and one-tenth of the total marine species on earth.

However, over-exploitation destroyed the habitat of many animals, including the Leopard Cat pictured here — there’s less than 500 of them now.

Back in April 2014, after the head of parliament agreed to the occupiers’ demands, protesters moved out of parliament — they didn’t go back to their homes, but instead surrounded the environmental agency, putting a stop to a road construction that would have made Leopard Cats extinct, too.

I was deeply touched at the time of the massive scale of mobilisation. But let’s admit it — it’s because cats are really, really cute. What about stray dogs? What about other species that’s not as cute, but equally important for the biosphere?

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The answer came to me two months ago, when I visited Disneyland here in Paris.

Most of Disneyland attractions are based on physical hardware, such as roller coasters and falling elevators. There is one exception: The Ratatouille virtual reality ride is based on software. For five minutes, I shrunk down to the size of a rat, fell through a roof, chased by humans…

I remember thinking: This is it! Then I found several Minecraft-like VR apps that turns architecture plans into immersive environments, with shrink rays built in — so I’ll also explore these tools in the September workshop. Many of them are designed for gaming, but we can always turn them into games with a purpose.

Actually, I’d like to invite you to think of Democracy itself as a game with a purpose, with voting as its entry level, equivalent to clicking “Like” on social media.

Open data takes it a level further — when all budgets, laws and statistics have their place on the web, we can share their links together to get a bigger picture.

Forums are useful too — when questions are answered in a timely fashion, it bridges the gap between public servants and the civil society.

Then we can have meaningful discussions — where people talk about issues openly, discovering new facts and sharing each others’ feelings.

Deliberation takes it to a whole new level — when elected officials and private-sectors companies listen to the civil society and pledge their commitments in the open, the civil society can listen back, too.

The final level, true agenda-setting power, can never come from above, because it changes the rule of the game. It only emerges naturally, when we are ready to share the purposes of our lives, through authentic facts, feelings and ideas — not ideologies.

Splitting the world with ideologies and finding comfort in like-minded communities is too easy nowadays, with social technologies acting as filters. Labor and Capital, Religion and Science — you name it.

However, there is a sense that disruptive technologies — machine learning, virtual reality, self-driving cars — compress the communities, forcing violent clashes, with the ultimate clash in a so-called Singularity, where people lost all agency altogether.

If we subscribe to ideologies that define what an individual can do, then of course it makes us terrified when machines do it better. But it doesn’t need to be this way.

Mathematically, we can resolve many Singularities by plotting them with an extra dimension t, making it possible to meet at the origin, listen to each other, meet and listen again, and again.

Through deliberation, we can build together a Plurality among the multitude of people and animals, plants and rivers — and even more importantly, among our own past and future imaginations of ourselves.

The Singularity may be near, but the Plurality is here.

Dr. Tsai Ing-Wen put it well in her presidential inauguration speech:

Before, democracy was a showdown between two opposing values.
Now, democracy is a conversation between many diverse values.

To build a united democracy that is not hijacked by ideology;
To build an efficient democracy that responds to society and economy;
To build a pragmatic democracy that takes care of the people;

— — this is our experiment in reinventing democracy.

Let’s all keep listening to each other.

Thank you, for listening.