My system with the career public service was entirely the opposite. I publicly said in 2016 that I entered as a servant <em> to </em> the public service. At the end of the day, I wanted this to be a self-driving car. I wanted the bureaucracy to be able to ...

Yeah. It’s always packed back to back. And I think for the career bureaucrats, which I keep going back to, it is also a matter of upward management. Like, how much do you want the minister to process? It’s like you have to really pay attention to the traffic when ...

In a sense, right, there’s this expression, “a minister’s schedule.”

It’s really amazing. I now see very clearly near, middle, and far fields, which is a little bit transhuman because naturally, eyes don’t grow like this. But at the end of the day, this is not replacing this experience with your avatar uploaded to the cloud and projected into my ...

Exactly. To me, assistive technologies should be first and foremost like eyeglasses that improve human-to-human connection. Or they could be augmentative. I got laser-blending vision now, so the eyeglasses are etched into my eyes.

Yes. Pro-sociality. I think for people who are like me, who are bitroverts, we have a choice, right? We can get energy from focusing; we can get energy from uplifting conversations. How to balance the diet, like nutrition labels for interaction—I think that is an important skill to have. Indeed, ...

Okay.

I have no idea.

Right, exactly. And the healing of the social fabric. I think that excites me more and more. Especially now, I think many people feel… It’s like jury duty. You enter feeling very difficult, you have to set aside a lot of time, but you sometimes come out of it feeling ...

Well, so I have a recent preprint paper with Deb Roy and Larry Lessig about Conversation Networks. Part of the idea here is not an infrastructure-level play, as we just talked about, but rather just to enable more small group conversations—not necessarily in a binding way, but making it kind ...

Yes, yes. I think for anyone who wants to run for re-election, this really is a net plus. There is nothing to lose because you have to handle all those citizens’ campaigns and petitions anyway.

It was in Tokyo. Yeah.

Yeah, in some neighborhoods, not all, but certainly more than any other country that I know of. So I’m very excited about Japan right now.

The other enabling condition is a little bit like the UK. Japan has the most amazing small community-level citizen participation governance, like community practice. About a decade or so ago, the idea of mini-publics and citizen assemblies took root in Japan. So now you can find, not a majority, but ...

Well, there are many things inspiring me now. I do think that Tokyo and Japan in particular—Japan generally, and Tokyo specifically—is going through a remarkable phase of renewal because they have all the enabling conditions. Their young people are thoroughly non-partisan. Because they have a shrinking population, like a reverse ...

Yeah, and I’m surprised that you would use the “risk-taking” frame. I mean, 10 years ago, certainly you were taking on some risks if you tried broad listening. I think in this day and age, certainly the way we sold it in California, it is sold as purely a risk-reducing ...

Yeah, it really is.

So I thought GDS is a good story, but maybe that’s too long ago?

And without which, I don’t think it’d be felt as urgent. People would just say, “Oh, let’s put some of those extra resources into some vertical thing.” But if you say, “We simply don’t have the resources to do all that, and now we have to work across sectors,” I ...

Like just because, you know, post-financial crisis, nobody had the budget to build their new IT infrastructures. So they trusted GDS to do the design systems and everything. So I think some sort of frugal innovation frame is good as an enabling condition.

It’s always been like that. I mean, TSMC wasn’t state-owned, right? But the state created the conditions for its success. And so I think this… So in the UK, like the widely studied GDS (Government Digital Service) movement, I think it was also like that, but that was in a ...

Yeah, I hear you. And I think part of the reason why Taiwan works this way was that, first of all, we collect, I think, one of the least taxed percentages of GDP in all OECD countries. So we simply don’t have that sort of top-down vertical resource. Everything we ...

Levers.

So there is less bridging. And there’s also internal polarization. If a person whose spiritual community, professional community, family community, and so on, only have this person in common, then in this person, there’s also a fragmentation, a balkanization of the spirit, so to speak. That is what we also ...

So I mean it in the bridging-as-opposed-to-bonding term. And also I mean bridging algorithms like Community Notes that compute the diverse groups with diverse voting patterns, like the left wing and the right wing. Then the bridging system discovers the uncommon ground—the things that are upvoted by both sides. That ...

Right, exactly. And by building <em> across </em> the Fediverse this kind of pro-social bridging, then you can have your community, you can have your safe space. But then when the surprising validator comes, you also won’t miss it. So we’re building an alternate relay for Bluesky at the moment ...

That’s right. And yeah, kind of horizontal leadership, right? Also, I think fundamentally there’s something in the MAGA movement, which says we need to address this “unnewsed” phenomenon, not by moderating speech that offends, but by giving voice back to local communities. Instead of simply saying, “You’re unnewsed, so we’re ...

I think in a sense, yes, <em> with </em> Taiwan, not necessarily <em> for </em> Taiwan.

I think that also shows it’s not limited to Taiwan. If Taiwan by itself goes even more frontier, and the rest of the world kind of backslides, then we’re in a very dangerous place. Because then democratic innovation and renewal would be seen as something odd, and antisocial extremism would ...

I think we’re at a point where referendum and recall, informed by sensemaking, are already very close to direct democracy. I think we’re at a point where MPs in Taiwan do know that they kind of have to work with these horizontal power centers. We had a strategy of introducing ...

Oh, yeah, definitely.

Yeah, epistemic inclusion, like financial inclusion.

Yeah, That.

It’s very vertical, elitist.

That is really good. And it connects to the idea of epistemic injustice and how to correct that, which is, I think, a very good theoretical idea because it’s like lay governance, right? Just because people lack certain training and certain use of language doesn’t mean that they don’t have ...

Yes, in the Minderoo context.

This is what Google Jigsaw is now doing in Bowling Green, Kentucky, WhatCouldBGBe.com. That used this idea of committed listeners to the people’s wish in Bowling Green without a single triggering condition.

But I think this continuous horizon scanning is another model that we really like because then it doesn’t need to be urgent issue after urgent issue. Rather, exactly as you said, it could be part of the deliberative system that enables, for example, their city councils to just read what ...

When they ran their nationwide “What do you think, Finland?” consultation, that enabled them to very easily do a horizontal scan on upcoming polarization points. For example, I remember the most polarized point was older generations feeling that the language they were taught and used throughout their lives was now ...

Well, I think the World Happiness Report. We’ve been the happiest in East Asia for two years now. That was also why when I was in Finland, Sitra (Finnish Innovation Fund) people really wanted this connection, because Finland is, of course, the happiest overall. They also want their process to ...

Chapter 2-2. Economically, we’ve also done very well, and the Youth Development Administration within the Ministry of Education tackles issues like social housing, mental health, and many other things that young people feel are worthy of national agenda-setting. The young people themselves are the facilitators who conduct the broad listening ...

Yeah, so the Plurality book cites rigorous data on all these, especially affective polarization.

So in 2022, according to the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS), Taiwanese 15-year-olds were top of the world when it comes to the feeling of agency, belonging, and care they feel around planetary and people issues. This horizontal trust, I think, was the most enduring legacy. The other ...

The point here is that instead of saying, “The young people have demands and the government should please them,” it flipped it on its head and said, “The young people have directions and the senior people should follow them and provide them with resources.” That turned out to be the ...

Yeah, I think one big part of it is the intergenerational pact. I was introduced as a young reverse mentor to the cabinet when I was 33. At the time, the central government institutionalized this idea of people under 35 mentoring cabinet ministers about where young people want to go. ...

It’s like the Tokyo Olympics 2020. They changed the Olympic slogan, which used to be “Faster, Higher, Stronger,” to “Faster, Higher, Stronger – Together.”

Yeah. That’s interesting. I think broad listening, of all those memes, has the most political potential to me, maybe not just in Japan and California, because that speaks to a real pain point of anyone working in politics today. Because the petitions, the people’s ideas, are now all AI-assisted or ...

Exactly. It’s all about broadcasting.

I think five years ago, around 2019-20, was the time that we really figured out scaling laws really work. So I visited OpenAI before the Anthropic fork. Jack Clark and others were writing very publicly about that, I think around 2019. So that’s when I realized that, oh, we’re eventually ...

No, not at all. Not at all.