 Today, in many places around the world, technology and democracy are at war. Technology boasters authoritarian surveillance, and they corrode democratic institutions, while democracies are fighting back with more and more regulation. However, this conflict is not inevitable. It is a choice made by investing in technologies that instantiate anti-democratic values. In Taiwan, we have instead focused on investing in social technologies that empower diverse collaboration, and we have seen those technologies flourish together with our democracy. And we are not alone. Across the world, every technologist, every policymaker, business leaders and activists alike can harness the idea of plurality to build collaborative diversity toward a democratic world. Where Uber arrived in Taiwan in 2015, its presence was divisive just as it had been in much of the world. But rather than social media pouring fuel on this flame, the Wiedauern Project adopted POLIS, now maintained by the Computational Democracy Project, to empower citizens sharing their feelings on the issue, to have a thoughtful and deliberative conversation with thousands of online participants on how right-hailing should be regulated. This social technology visualized K-Means clustering, principal component analysis, to cluster opinions allowing every participant to quickly digest the clearest articulation of the viewpoints of their fellow citizens, and also contribute back their own thoughts. And the views that drew support from across the initial lines of division rose to the top, forming an agenda of rough consensus that ensured the benefit of the new right-hailing tools while also protecting the workers' rights, and it was swiftly implemented by our government. This process has been used to resolve dozens of contentious issues in Taiwan, and POLIS is rapidly spreading around the world, to governments, to cooperatives, and to decentralize autonomous communities. Yet V-Taiwan just scratches the surface of how technology can be designed to perceive, to honor, and to bridge social differences for collaboration. We have new voting and financing rules, such as quadratic or plural voting and funding emerging from the Ethereum ecosystem, and they can reshape how we govern the public, the private, and the social sectors. We have immersive virtual worlds, empowering empathetic connections that cross the lines of social exclusion. We have pro-social social networks and newsfeeds, and they can be engineered to build new social cohesion and share sense making rather than driving us apart. As our experience in Taiwan has shown, the potential social benefits are vast. Indeed, that's what enabled us to counter the pandemic without a single day of lockdown, and that's exactly how we overcame the infodemic without any administrative takedowns. While a few countries and ecosystems have collectively helped to put tens of millions of dollars into social technologies, the rest of the world has yet to pour a similar amount. Instead, hundreds of billions are invested into, for example, automating away human participation, into centralizing power and strengthening surveillance, or into speculative cryptocurrencies, or addictive anti-social social media, or escapist so-called metaverses, and so on. And they have undermined the social fabric. They have reinforced social divisions, spread the infodemic, and proliferated criminality. It is little surprise that the countries have invested in these technologies they see democracy and technology as at odds. But it is not too late to change path. We can invest in social technologies that establish digital human rights, empower the plurality, and flourish in democratic societies, making sure that democratic societies can outperform authoritarianism and hyper capitalism. We can invest to give every person an inalienable right to digital personhood, to the right to assemble. A new generation of decentralized identity technologies can empower every person to travel, transact, conduct a business, and participate in civic affairs free from centralized surveillance. We can make freedom of association real in the digital world, with community-managed and accountable social networks that form the town halls of the future while bridging the growing divides between those different groups. Also, we can work together to secure digital property rights by creating the public markets and the ministries of the future with secure and privacy-preserving sharing of data or data altruism, sharing computation or citizen science, and storage, too, across peers, free from the control of the current platform monopolies. We can secure the right to commus with government-supported privacy-preserving, internationally interoperable digital payment systems, and we can enable every citizen to access those rights by making sure that high-speed internet is a human right, and also digital competence, not just literacy, is core of education in every school curriculum. Securing these fundamental digital human rights makes the plurality in the digital world not just possible, but natural. In Taiwan, the ideographic characters for digital and plural are the same, Shu Wei. And the Shu Wei experience in similar ecosystems to Taiwan has shown how these foundations, even in the very beginning in a very nascent form, promotes flourishing democracy. The secure and private identities allows our citizens to participate in thoughtful deliberations and reasoned compromise, as we have seen in V-Taiwan and Polis, without facing attacks from the trolls and bots. Privacy-enhancing data sharing allows our neighborhoods and communities to provide services from pollution monitoring to mask availability for themselves, rather than relying on any lock-in of preparatory platforms. Open and reliable payment systems allows new and creative forms of crowdfunding to support public goods without heavy-handed bureaucracies, and our peer-to-peer reputation systems empower civil society to combat misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation, often with humor. The humor-over-rumor approach maintains vibrant open speech. However, these successes early against scratch the surface of what would be possible if the human and financial resources of the global high-tech innovation machine were focused on empowering deliberation, compromise, and plurality and scale. One recent concept to enable peer-to-peer reputation is soulbound tokens. The core of the paper Decentralized Society, Finding Web 3 Soul, or DSOC, in which Vitalik Buterin co-authored with the radical exchange founder Glenn Weil and flashbots strategist Pooja Ohave this past May. The term soulbound, proposed by Vitalik earlier this year, was inspired by the unlike game World of Warcraft. In the game, certain items with special powers such as a sword cannot be transferred or so to others, once they have been collected by a player. And this is called a soulbound item. And the benefit of soulbinding is that it avoids speculation on the item while increasing participation. Players cannot obtain such items while hiding. They must make full use of such soulbound items to face genuine challenges and tasks. Well, games offer rich metaphors for the journey of life. While earning souls offer a player advantage, winning in the game requires a massive coordination among larger groups such as a guild where the sum is greater than the pot. So, when we're building the plurality on the future of the Internet, can we follow the same rules? As the authors note, soulbound tokens are also community-bound tokens as they represent participation in groups. And in the recent past, speculative wholly-transferable virtual assets are moored to community coordination, such as the various coins and the NFTs. They have been the focus of attention. However, transactions based solely on anonymity and unilateral transferability is essentially a cynical conduit for human greed. As we have seen, rug-pulling, vampire attacks, civil attacks, so-called air drops and fishing scams are some of the most notorious examples. Now, solutions to these problems are floated in Vitalik and his co-authors' paper. One idea is that a soul represents a pseudonymous account tied to a person or an identity. So, this identity may be not a natural person but a legal person, but the idea is that the SBTs, the tokens, are the badges collected in the account. These badges represent non-transferable membership to communities. So in other words, once you mint an SBT, you cannot give it to others. Communities can issue SBTs to each other. For example, my office in the Social Innovation Lab in Taipei City can be a soul distributing SBTs to various resident organizations. Likewise, a university can distribute SBTs to its affiliated schools. Through giving and receiving in various social relationships, SBTs act as mutual authentications. And as a result of their ongoing public interactions, parties increase authenticity and mutual trust. Many online games offer not just source, which you can unilaterally wield, but also voting rights on how to steward your guild's gold. Similarly, souls accumulate SBTs that reflect their solidarities and arise to participate. While such social advantages may become the source of inequities, SBTs allow participants to see and adjust to such advantages, encouraging social diversity and cooperation across these differences. And what if you lose your account, or if the soul is hijacked? Well, it's easy to recover the SBTs by asking the issuers to revoke and reissue. And the authors also propose a more sophisticated security mechanism called community recovery, where you can ask a diverse set of connections represented in your SBT communities to recover your entire account together. After my dialogue with Vitalik on the Innovative Minds with OJITAN podcast, I believe two avenues are now open. First, SBTs have the potential to supplement the shortcomings of cross-border public participation. Case in point, currently no universal authentication mechanism exists for those wishing to take part in the Polish-like civic conversations remotely. And why? Well, because the individual has never been to our country and does not have a local mobile phone number or a visa or identity certificate. SBTs can bridge this authentication gap in such cases by leveraging shared community bonds. Moreover, while identity authentication is often done on an individual basis worldwide, SBTs view communities as first-class citizens. And this approach can alleviate headcount competition in our decision-making. It reminds me of POTUS, this popular tool when used in Taiwan for gathering opinions. It treats individual with very closely related preferences as a community, as a unit. And anyone wishing to place an issue on the top agenda must persuade all other communities. And this is in direct contrast to the 51% takes-all approach. So it goes without saying that I am very pleased to see SBTs following suit by rewarding collaboration across diverse communities and also building intersectional identities from the overlapping groups. In this way, we can ensure truly inclusive co-creation even for very large-scale referendums. And this is critical in guaranteeing that the voice of all are heard clearly and fairly. The concept of SBTs shows how innovative mechanisms in social technologies can create new avenues for our democracies. And while these tools can transform our public sector around the world, they are not early relevant or even primarily relevant to national-level democracies. Instead, I believe they offer a way for every organization, from churches to temples to corporations, townships, municipalities, to foster more productive and dynamic cooperation. The social technologies can empower companies to cut out layers of bureaucracy that hold back intrapreneurship and cross-divisional infrastructure. The social technologies can allow data sharing that contains and cures disease like never before while protecting individual privacy and community control. The social technologies can create a new media landscape that is trustworthy, empowers marginalized voices, and also surfaces content that creates through social consensus on the key facts facing the common challenges of today. So, plurality is not just for politics and governments alone anymore than the internet was for military and universities that first built it. Instead, plurality is a new social technological paradigm that can transform every sector and the life of every individual for the better if we learn how to work on it together. But just like the internet and other transformative technologies, plurality will only thrive to the extent we invest in it. The internet began as a network established by the United States Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency, or the ARPANET, to experiment with new decentralized interface designs. However, the vision of ARPANET's founders such as JCR League Leica, on which the plurality vision is closely modeled, was early very partially realized today because it never mobilized the public and international support and multi-sectoral investment needed to follow it through. And today, we have the chance to correct that mistake. We have the chance to together build a future where our technologies express and empower our highest ideals rather than degrading those ideals. And again, every activist, every artist, every technologist, every citizen and policymaker in their organizations has a key role to play in the struggle for the future. Thank you for listening. I'd like to conclude now with my job description in the form of a prayer that I wrote in 2016. When we see internet of things, let's make it an internet of beings. When we see virtual reality, let's make it a shared reality. When we see machine learning, let's make it collaborative learning. When we see user experience, let's make it about human experience. And whenever we hear that a singularity is near, let's always remember the plurality is here. Thank you again for listening. Live long and prosper.