What Is Plurality? Rose Bloomin on Cooperation Across Difference

Bloomin opens with what they describe as something the audience already knows: democracy is broken and barely keeping up, and polarized media and society make the dysfunction worse. They stress that this is not only an American problem. According to the talk, more than half of the world's countries are experiencing some form of democratic backsliding.

Bloomin argues that a new factor is now in play before society has even figured out how to govern social media: AI. They call AI systems the most powerful tools since the atomic bomb, able to both help and hurt, and say we need to figure them out quickly "before democracy falls apart." They then say they are not there to be a doomer, but to explain why plurality gives them hope.

Bloomin defines plurality as an emerging field focused on human cooperation at scale. It spans a social movement, a science, and a set of tools, technologies, and cultural practices that help people connect across their differences.

They draw an analogy from biology, where they say plurality is the norm. Healthy ecosystems are one example, and so is the human body, which they describe as trillions of human, bacterial, and fungal cells working together. Their point is that this kind of cooperation among different parts can also be cultivated intentionally in social systems.

On governance, Bloomin describes a historical shift from top-down systems to democracy built around "one person per vote." Plurality, they argue, can upgrade that model so people can agree more and disagree more productively.

Most of the talk walks through concrete examples.

Voting methods. Bloomin mentions ranked-choice and approval voting, which let voters support more than one candidate. They say these methods help elect politicians that more people actually want and reduce polarization in elections.

Quadratic funding. Standard matching gives dollar-for-dollar support. Bloomin explains that quadratic funding instead favors projects backed by many small donors over projects backed by a few large ones.

Pol.is. Bloomin shows output from Pol.is, a tool that lets hundreds or thousands of people take part in one large, society-wide conversation. They say it steers that conversation toward rough consensus.

Citizens' assemblies. Bloomin presents these as the in-person counterpart to Pol.is. A representative group of people is brought together and helped past polarized debate so they can shape policy.

Community Notes. Bloomin expects many in the audience have seen this tool on Twitter. It promotes notes that users from groups that usually disagree with each other rate favorably. In their account, this reduces online polarization by elevating unifying content.

Bloomin names what the examples share: each helps reach "deeper layers of agreement" that already exist between large groups of very different people. In this framing, the tools do not manufacture consensus. They reveal common ground that polarized debate hides.

Bloomin then argues that plurality is beginning to play out on the world stage, using Audrey Tang as the example. Tang became involved in politics during Taiwan's 2014 Sunflower Movement, where she helped protesters organize and broadcast their message. The Taiwanese government later made her Digital Minister, a role in which Bloomin says she brought transparency and citizen engagement across the country.

Tang helped launch vTaiwan, which Bloomin says incorporates tools such as Pol.is and Talk to the City so that citizens can petition the government directly. Bloomin reports that more than half of Taiwanese citizens are registered on the platform and a quarter are active users. They call this "amazing" and ask what it would take for other societies to get there.

Bloomin says plurality extends well beyond politics, into areas they couldn't fit into five minutes. They name three:

• using language models for moderation
• social identity systems
• collaborative creation events such as Burning Man

They point to a new book on the subject written by Audrey Tang and Bloomin's collaborator Glen Weyl, together with about 500 other contributors. They say people can read it and join in at plurality.net.

To explain why this matters, Bloomin argues that a movement toward plurality will be needed for a planet-sized society to actually function. In their view, that functioning is a precondition for tackling the largest problems, such as global poverty and climate change.

For that reason, Bloomin helped launch a nonprofit called the Plurality Institute. They describe it as a hub for researchers across disciplines and for practitioners building tools and technologies for plurality. They invite the audience to visit the institute's site and contact them there. They close by asking listeners to make plurality their "North Star" and join the effort, leaving open the question they raised earlier: what it would take for other democracies to reach the kind of participation they describe in Taiwan.