Techno-ideologies of the Twenty-first Century
by Mona Hamdy, Johnnie Moore, and E. Glen Weyl (1)
The authors advocate for an inclusive, participatory framework that integrates diverse perspectives and fosters collaboration between technology and human society. They emphasize the importance of ecological and religious considerations in shaping a balanced future, offering an alternative to the dominant techno-ideologies of Libertarianism and Technocracy.
Silicon Valley is working hard to paint a picture of the world that technologies like AI and crypto are destined to create, visions that have primarily been developed by, and appeal to, secular, wealthy, tech-focused white men, a group that together constitutes a small fraction of a percent of world population. We assert that these visions are generally unattractive to most people: they present either a world with material abundance largely devoid of meaning, or a world of further social fragmentation. Ultimately, what is proposed are new ways of living, but there are ways of living that are left entirely out of the conversation.
This pairing of the monumental challenges arising from new technologies with often juvenile responses from those charged with developing them makes clear that we simply cannot leave planet-altering events to technologists or commercialists. Transformative changes require a multi-epistemic approach that draws upon wide-ranging facets of human society and invites conversations convened around difference first, not similarity. This approach welcomes those least represented in the corridors of innovation: the religious, the poor, and the remote, as well as the natural world around us. Ours is not a vision of total social cohesion; social cohesion is far from correlated with good decision-making. But we are concerned that key data are missing from the decision process because key facets of society are being ignored or left behind.
While we cannot directly include all such stakeholders in this essay, we have attempted to mirror at least some of their diversity: we are one Muslim, one Christian, and one Jew; one left, one right, one center; one humanistic theology PhD, one clergy with a PhD in public policy, and one agnostic mathematical economics PhD. While much divides us on the many political, social, and disciplinary topics of the day, we are united in the belief that we must harness the power of plurality; if not, one of history’s most promising moments may be despoiled by the prejudices of a narrow clique of technical elites. But to first challenge the perspectives prevailing among technologists, we must understand them, something we now briefly attempt by describing the two dominant such worldviews, or “techno-ideologies,” which we label “Technocracy” and1 “Libertarianism.” (2)
Incumbent Techno-Ideologies Technocracy and AI
It is little surprise that the most prominent techno-ideology of today puts a story about AI at the center. OpenAI founder Sam Altman labels his vision “Moore’s Law for Everything.” (3) His goal is to use the idea of “Artificial General Intelligence” (AGI), or AI that exceeds human capabilities, to, theoretically, improve our quality of life and productivity and abolish material scarcity. Altman focuses on ensuring that such abundance is equally distributed through a “universal basic income” (UBI). Yet this concept of AGI devalues human individual or collective cognition, and the great questions of the future are not so much what share of material resources people receive, but what will be left of the society in which those resources will be consumed.
A key concern for those promoting this technoideology is an existential one: humans losing control over AIs, posing a serious threat to humanity’s actual survival. Their response is a call for centralized control of access to the technology, and model design that ensures the AI will perform according to humans’ wishes. This is consistent with historical visions of socialist utopias and labeled by some recent thinkers as “Fully Automated Luxury Communism.” (4) However, because many forms of “socialism” and even “communism” reject this centralized and technocratic vision, we refer to this ideology as “Technocracy.”
Elements of this perspective have long appeared in science fiction and speculative philosophy by authors such as Isaac Asimov, Ray Kurzweil, and Ian Banks. (5) A particularly clear representation of this view is in Nicholas Bostrom’s latest book, Deep Utopia: Life and Meaning in a Solved World. (6) Leading advocates include some of Altman’s fellow tech “titans” of Silicon Valley, as well as organizations like OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and the so-called “Effective Altruism movement.” (7) Technocracy is also advanced by those nations, particularly China, and economists who promote the Marxist idea of “central planning.” (8) It has moved into the political mainstream in the United States through the campaigns of candidates such as Andrew Yang, and versions of Technocratic ideas appear in the “tech left.”
Libertarianism and Crypto
The most common technologist alternative to this centralized view embraces cryptography and cryptocurrencies to imagine the liberation of technology and economic development from the constraints of the social fabric of trust, government “coercion,” and regulation. Though mainstream media has spent less attention on this techno-ideology, it is prevalent in communities related to Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. These groups imagine human collective organization and politics supplanted by cryptography and networking protocols. While not all adherents of this school would use the term, the simplest common phrase to describe this position is “Libertarianism.”
Like Technocracy, Libertarianism has taken cues from fiction, including Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon. (9) Despite being intended as dystopian warnings, Stephenson’s books have served as blueprints for some Libertarians, who have embraced the technologies detailed within: “metaverses”; ungoverned and private sovereignties such as floating cities; and cryptography used to evade control or the law.
Libertarian thinkers also take their lead from the ideas propounded in James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg’s The Sovereign Individual, Balaji Srinivasan’s The Network State, BAP’s Bronze Age Mindset, and works by Curtis Yarvin (aka Mencius Moldbug). (10) These authors are funded by some of the leaders of the movement, such as venture capitalists Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen.
While Libertarianism is peripheral to mainstream political discussions, it has had an intermittent flirtation with nationalists and the right in democratic countries. Thiel has funded protégés Blake Masters and J.D. Vance, as well Donald Trump. Tucker Carlson hosts Libertarian figures on his political talk show (which is only growing in views after its ejection from Fox News). Rees-Mogg’s son became a leading right-wing British politician. There are divisions within the community: some Libertarians dismiss right-wing nationalist, religious, and cultural values. Yet this contradiction may be addressed by the “accelerationist” view: the idea that nationalist backlash to these technologies will support and accelerate the collapse of the nation-state.
“At the heart of a critique of both the Technocratic and Libertarian views is a very simple and profoundly democratic question: ‘What do people actually want’”
Dissent
At the heart of a critique of both the Technocratic and Libertarian views is a very simple and profoundly democratic question: “What do people actually want?” If most people understood the significant change coming to our collective future, would they have their own opinions about what is reasonable and acceptable? Would they have ideas about a future potentially being foisted upon them and its profound social, economic, and political impact?
Of course, there are countless views of the future, but two case studies stand as an example of the relevance of these questions. We’ll look at two of the world’s most expansive constituencies, whose ideas are likely disproportionately underrepresented among both the Technocrats and the Libertarians: those who are religious and those who care for ecological considerations. One community is disproportionately represented by the right, the other by the left, and each has considerable constituencies.
Religion
Despite a decline in religious affiliation and practice in the wealthiest countries, the world continues to be profoundly religious. Pew Research notes that by 2050 only 13% of the world’s population will have no religious affiliation, and the countries with the greatest population growth are the world’s most religious. (11)
Many religious traditions question the possibility, and even more so the desirability, of a “solved world” without struggle or scarcity, as envisioned by Technocrats, and they reject the removal of socio-legal guardrails promoted by Libertarians. Most of the world’s major religions, in various ways, attribute dignity, self-worth, and freedom to people precisely because of the “sweat of the brow.”
“The centralization of power in the hands of a Technocratic elite also runs counter to beliefs in the fundamental equality and dignity of all people as children of God in a Judeo-Christian, or even deist, sense.”
These religions consider suffering and overcoming challenges as essential to spiritual growth. A world of pure abundance may be materially comfortable but spiritually and existentially hollow. The Dalai Lama says, “The purpose of our lives is to be happy,” (12) but happiness comes from within, not just from external material conditions. Buddhism teaches detachment from the self and the absolute impossibility of satisfaction from material abundance, contradicting at its source the Technocratic and Libertarian visions. Centuries of Christian tradition and practice have similarly celebrated various degrees of aestheticism. As the Apostle Paul wrote to an early congregation in Corinth, “contentment is great gain.” (13)
The centralization of power in the hands of a Technocratic elite also runs counter to beliefs in the fundamental equality and dignity of all people as children of God in a Judeo-Christian, or even deist, sense. At the very least, it challenges the premise of people as universally equal. Even with a UBI, concentrating control over advanced AI in a small group seems to inevitably set up a two-tiered society, and it contradicts Catholicism’s emphasis on subsidiarity—keeping decision-making as local as possible.
In the Rome Call for AI Ethics, signed by Muslim, Jewish, and Christian participants on January 10, 2023, the theologian scholars called for AI to focus on ethics, education, and rights. The participants suggested six guiding principles: transparency, inclusion, accountability, impartiality, reliability, security, and privacy. (14) What’s absent is also interesting: no focus on either material prosperity or on commercial rights/freedoms. In short, the focus of this diverse group of faith leaders is orthogonal to the leading preoccupations of both techno-ideologies. And this is reflected in the composition of the dominant technology companies’ leadership: to the (limited) extent they incorporate any ethical experts, they are overwhelmingly secular—even though, as Henry Farrell points out, the language emerging from the AI fiefdom sounds quite religious. (15) Farrell notes that the Techno-Optimist Manifesto even uses the phrase “we believe.” We counted it: the phrase occurs 113 times. (16) This trend wouldn’t surprise Meghan O’Gieblyn and Linda Kinstler, prolific observers of this phenomenon. (17)
And what of humans abdicating too much individual agency and autonomy to AI systems? Does AI profoundly, expeditiously change what it means to be human and, therefore, deny future humans the compounded value of centuries of wisdom? This is sociologically relevant even if one is not religious; human cloning was banned because of similar questions about the nature of human existence. Why is AI’s impact any less critical a conversation?
If AGI can “solve” all our problems for us, will people lose motivation and essential capacities of reason, choice, and self-determination that are central to human dignity? Whether or not one believes in the concept of a human soul, it could be that AI superimposes upon society a way of living that is substantially soulless. For Christians and many other faith traditions that reject the construction of God-like entities, the rhetoric around AGI may sound arrogant, if not idolatrous, recalling centuries of warnings about people playing God.
Religious people are also skeptical of Libertarianism. The Libertarian vision of atomized individuals interacting through cryptographic protocols feels like a recipe for spiritual alienation, the erosion of human bonds, and the eradication of moral obligations to one another. This is not freedom to the many religious people whose faith includes religious law and the idea of God’s design. This is even more a feature of non-Western than Western religious traditions. The African Ubuntu philosophy teaches us, “I am because we are.” Buddhism denies the reality of the self. Shinto denies the quest for mastery of nature, as it sees spirits everywhere and measures us by the respect we pay to them. Libertarianism, as well as Technocracy, instead alienates humans from one another.
The Libertarian fantasy of escaping to private sovereign enclaves may be a kind of techno-secession from the hard work of building inclusive, just societies. It may be a loophole for the rich to self-select their preferences, without interference, in aquatic nations or exclusive bunker communities. For many religious people, a Technocratic future that robs humans of hard work or a Libertarian one that makes life all about what one can create for oneself seem to be an affront to centuries of religious wisdom.
Ecology
Ecologist Johanna Macey writes, “The self is a metaphor for all of life, an education in the vaster processes that are the very nature of our being.” (18) Ecological traditions teach us that intelligence is distributed across diverse species and ecosystems. Nature itself comprises a vast web of intelligences, defying the meaningfulness of a singular, autonomous general intelligence constructed by humans. Intelligence in the natural world is thus pluralistic, diverse, distributed, and anything but artificial. Yet it is precisely this dissection of worlds, the cold bifurcation of the organic elements of life from the worldly spoils of progress, that has threatened the balance and harmony of the natural world and everything on it—including AGI—like no other time on earth.
That’s quite a problem for our species: disrupting the ecological balance of the world that gives us life might result in the only existential risk we truly face—the threat of ruining the sole known place in the vast universe where our species is able to survive. Perhaps our actions of late have made permaculture co-founder David Holmgren’s words never more true: “The greatest and most endangered species on Earth is the human species.” (19) To ecologists, confronting such dangers requires embracing natural diverse, rather than artificial general, intelligence. Canadian ecologist Suzanne Simard, for example, has famously documented how the subterranean networks of mycorrhizal fungi connecting trees in a forest act as a kind of superintelligence, guiding the development and equilibrium of the whole ecosystem. (20) This beggars the notion that surpassing humans on some set of tasks valued by a particular late-industrial capitalist society has anything to do with “general” intelligence, if such is even a meaningful concept.
Furthermore, any attempt to “align” AI solely with human preference ignores our fundamental interdependence on other species and on the Earth’s ecosystems, and in the process disrupting our interdependence on each other. As Indian ecofeminist philosopher and anti-globalization activist Vandana Shiva argues, the capitalist paradigm of endless growth and extraction is inherently destructive: “The violence to nature, which seems intrinsic to the dominant development model, is also associated with violence to women who depend on nature for drawing sustenance for themselves, their families, their societies.” (21)
A truly sustainable approach to AI, then, must challenge these underlying logics of domination and exploitation. Silicon-based computing represents just one substrate among many in the natural composite of the world. As Professor Saskia Sassen notes, “The more digital we become, the more we use rare earth elements.” (22) An overemphasis on machine intelligence risks perpetuating destructive extractive practices. This form of “machine worship” disregards the vital importance of biological and ecological diversity– the very source of the raw materials of its existence.
Jussi Parikka observes in A Geology of Media, “The materiality of media starts much before media becomes media. It starts in the mines, the fossil fuels, the minerals, the chemicals, and the environments where they are extracted from.” (23) Nature thrives through mutualism, symbiosis, and cooperative networks, not through a narrow “survival of the fittest” paradigm that Libertarians have mistakenly drawn from natural analogies. As biologist Lynn Margulis famously demonstrated, even the evolution of complex cells relied on the symbiotic merger of simpler bacterial cells. (24) Thus, to any true permaculturist, the Libertarian emphasis on individual self-interest and unrestrained competition is fundamentally misaligned with the principles that sustain life. Technology grows from nature. Developing AI in harmony with nature requires recognizing— at minimum—the interdependence of technological and ecological systems. Humans will only be able to flourish in a world that recognizes the balancing and harmony of these two spheres.
Religious and ecological worldviews have often been seen as conflicting: one requires proselytizing to spread belief in supernatural salvation, while the other tends to attribute near divinity to natural formations. Yet they ultimately share a profound attention to the value of life beyond human utility. As eco-theologian Thomas Berry argues, “The universe is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects.” (25) Both perspectives challenge the reductionism and anthropocentrism of Technocratic and Libertarian visions, pointing instead to the sacredness and interconnectedness of all beings. And both, at their best, agree that humans should cultivate their talents and invest their precious time on this earth. “The plain fact is that the planet does not need more successful people,” says David Orr. “But it does desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every kind.” (26)
The cultivation of these roles and capacities should be central to any vision of a flourishing future, including and especially those hyperconnected technological futures written at the digital forefront of the rest of human history. A natural place to look, then, is to a place teeming with cultural plurality and democracy, an island forged by the intersection of ancient Polynesian, Chinese, and Japanese cultures that is home to one of the world’s most technological societies: Taiwan, a true digital democracy.
Taiwan: A Proof of Concept for Digital Democracy
A decade ago, students opposed to a trade deal with the mainland stormed Taiwan’s national parliament, occupying it for three weeks. Yet rather than sowing the seeds of discord, that occupation was resolved through peaceful compromise and ushered in a decade in which Taiwan has become the world’s exemplar of digital democracy. (27)
Taiwan has achieved the world’s best performance on many of both the chronic and emergent challenges we face. Despite being the second most religiously diverse country in the world and having a profound political divide over the very nature of the country, Taiwan has achieved one of the lowest levels of “affective polarization” (the degree of negative feelings across sociopolitical groups) in the world. Despite having the most technology-intensive economy in the world, it has seen flat or declining inequality in the last decade. Despite having the highest median income in the world adjusted for purchasing power of any jurisdiction with more than 10 million inhabitants, it has consistently had higher growth, lower inflation, lower unemployment, and lower crime and substance abuse than almost any other developed country. Despite facing the highest level of incoming disinformation and cyberattacks, its recent election was widely seen as one of the most consensual, inclusive, and legitimate in this global year of elections. (28)
How has Taiwan made these achievements? One factor is the development of new consensus-building, AI-based technologies under the leadership of its previous Digital Minister, Audrey Tang. Taiwan’s vTaiwan and Join platforms help guide policy by harnessing microblogging to provide citizens a balanced perspective on hot-button public policy topics and find points of overlapping consensus. Rather than dissipating citizens’ efforts on outrage, Taiwan’s g0v movement and Presidential Hackathon “forked the government,” encouraging citizens to improve public services and highlight the services they want governments to adopt. (29) Rather than having professionals talk down to citizens about “fake news,” Taiwan encouraged citizens to help one another navigate complex questions of truth with the CoFacts platform, putting public officials instead in the position of comedians, using the power of self-deprecation and “humor over rumor” to “prebunk” the harmful potential of deepfakes. (30)
As we have articulated in our collaboration with Tang on a recent book, the philosophy behind Taiwan’s achievements is to focus on the symbiotic relationship between human collaboration and technology. On the one hand, technology can power us to collaborate as never before; on the other, it will only succeed in doing so, rather than erasing or weaponizing our differences, if we can welcome broad publics into the act of shaping that future. This perspective is not particularly novel—it was at the core of the ideas that created what became the internet: its founding father, J. C. R. Licklider, envisioned a “man-computer symbiosis” and “the computer as a communication device,” and he insisted that technology be developed not only “in the public interest” but “in the interest of giving the public itself the means to enter into the decisionmaking processes that will shape their future.” (31) This has been lost and must be rediscovered. Taiwan shows us what is possible.
Conclusion
Presently, large language models mainly provide strategic advice for humans, and decentralized systems are common but are outside the mainstream. The foundational questions raised here are also not entirely unknown. Some of them align with other debates of the last century (we think especially of the work of Elinor and Vincent Ostrom comparing polycentric to monocentric systems (32)).
This paper asserts that we are more than our economic needs and wants. If we see technology as supplying only these, we will lose its greatest potential and fall prey to its worst blind spots. Instead, we must approach these tools sacramentally, spiritually, and naturalistically, as a collective pathway for a new era of human and natural existence. There’s still time to embrace these technologies as tools for human and social flourishing in the deepest, broadest, and most universal sense. At this digital frontier, we are convinced we will only find our way if the rest of humanity and our natural surroundings are welcomed into the evolution unfolding in front of our eyes. This requires plurality: inclusive dialogue, empowered by technology, to steer our future together.
Footnotes
(1)The authors thank the supportive team at Stanford’s Digital Economy Lab: Erik Brynjolfsson, Angela Aristidou, and Susan Young. Thanks also go to every other contributor: your insights made us much better. Special thanks to Audrey Tang, whose brilliance gives us hope.
(2) For a broader discussion of the ideas below, see E. Glen Weyl, Audrey Tang, and Community, 數位Plurality: The Future of Collaborative Technology and Democracy (2024), https://plurality.net.
(3) Sam Altman, Moore’s Law for Everything, March 16, 2021, https://moores.samaltman.com.
(4) See, e.g., Aaron Bastani, “The World Is a Mess. We Need Fully Automated Luxury Communism,” New York Times, June 11, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/11/opinion/fully-automated-luxury-communism.html.
(5) Isaac Asimov, I, Robot (New York: Gnome Press, 1950); Ian M. Banks, Consider Phlebas (London: Orbit Books, 1987); Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (New York: Viking Press, 1999).
(6) Nick Bostrom, Deep Utopia: Life and Meaning in a Solved World (Washington, DC: Ideapress, 2024).
(7) See Emily Washburn, “What to Know about Effective Altruism—Championed by Musk, Bankman-Fried and Silicon Valley Giants,” Forbes, March 8, 2023, https://www.forbes.com/sites/emilywashburn/2023/03/08/what-to-know-about-effective-altruism-championed-by-musk-bankman-fried-and-silicon-valley-giants/.
(8) State Council of the People’s Republic of China, A Next Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan (July 8, 2017), trans. New America Foundation, https://d1y8sb8igg2f8e.cloudfront.net/documents/translation-fulltext-8.1.17.pdf.
(9) Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (New York: Random House, 1957); Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash (New York: Bantam Books, 1992) and Cryptonomicon (New York: Avon, 1999).
(10) James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg, The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age (Simon & Schuster, 1997); see Andrew Prokop, “Curtis Marvin Wants American Democracy Toppled. He Has Some Prominent Republican Fans,” Vox, October 24, 2022, https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/23373795/curtis-yarvin-neoreaction-redpill-moldbug; Balaji Srinivasan, The Network State: How to Start a New Country (1729, 2024); Bronze Age Pervert (Costin Alamariu), Bronze Age Mindset (Amazon, 2018).
(11) “Religiously Unaffiliated,” in Future of World Religions: Population Growth Projections, 2010-2050 (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, 2015), https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2015/04/02/religiously-unaffiliated/.
(12) The Dalai Lama [Tenzin Gyatso], “The Purpose of Life Is to Be Happy,” His 14th Holiness the Dalai Lama of Tibet, originally published by India Today September 30, 2021, https://www.dalailama.com/messages/transcripts-and-interviews/the-purpose-oflife-is-to-be-happy.
(13) 1 Tim. 6:6.
(14) “The Abrahamic Commitment to the Rome Call for AI Ethics, 20th January, 2023,” RenAIssance Foundation, January 27, 2023, https://www.romecall.org/the-abrahamiccommitment-to-the-rome-call-for-ai-ethics-10th-january-2023/.
(15) Henry Farrell, “AI’s Big Rift Is Like a Religious Schism, Says Henry Farrell,” Economist, December 12, 2023, https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2023/12/12/ais-big-riftis-like-a-religious-schism-says-henry-farrell.
(16) Marc Andreessen, “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” Andreessen Horowitz, October 16, 2023, https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/.
(17) See, e.g., Meghan O’Gieblyn, Interior States (Palatine, IL: Anchor Book Press, 2018) and Linda Kintsler, “Can Silicon Valley Find God?,” New York Times, July 18, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/07/16/opinion/ai-ethics-religion.html.
(18) Joanna Macy, World as Lover, World as Self: Courage for Global Justice and Ecological Renewal (Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press, 2007).
(19) David Holmgren, Permaculture: Principles & Pathways Beyond Sustainability (Melbourne, Australia: Holmgren Design Services, 2002).
(20) Suzanne Simard, Finding the Mother Tree (New York: Knopf, 2021).
(21) Vandana Shiva, Staying Alive: Women, Ecology, and Survival in India (New York: Women Unlimited, 2009).
(22) Sakia Sassen, “Predatory Formations Dressed in Wall Street Suits and Algorithmic Math,” Science, Technology, & Society 22, no. 1 (2017): 6-20, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/315678914_Predatory_Formations_Dressed_in_Wall_Street_Suits_and_Algorithmic_Math_SASKIA_SASSEN.
(23) Jussi Parikka, A Geology of Media (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2015). These themes are expanded on and developed more extensively for AI in Kate Crawford, Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2021).
(24) Lynn Margulis, Symbiosis in Cell Evolution: Life and its Environment on the Early Earth (Boston, MA: Boston University Press, 1981).
(25) Thomas Berry, The Dream of the Earth (San Francisco, CA: Sierra Club Books, 1990).
(26) David W. Orr, Earth in Mind: On Education, Environment, and the Human Prospect (Washington, DC: Island Press, 20024).
(27) For a more detailed discussion, see Weyl et al., Plurality.
(28) For statistics given in this paragraph, originally cited in Weyl et al., Plurality, see “GDP per Capita, Current Prices,” International Monetary Fund, n.d., https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/ngdpdpc@weo/advec/weoworld/twn/chn; “Exports,” Trading Economics, n.d., https://tradingeconomics.com/country-list/exports; “Key Indicators Database,” Asian Development Bank, n.d., https://kidb.adb.org/economies/taipeichina; “Revenue Statistics 2015 - the United States,” OECD, 2015, https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/taxation/revenue-statistics-2015_rev_stats-2015-en-fr; “Index of Economic Freedom,” The Heritage Foundation, 2023, https://www.heritage.org/index/; “GDP Growth (Annual %),” World Bank, 2023, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/ny.gdp.mktp.kd.zg; “NCDAS: Substance Abuse and Addiction Statistics [2020],” National Center for Drug Abuse Statistics, 2020, https://drugabusestatistics. org/; Ling-Yi Feng and Jih-Heng Li, “New Psychoactive Substances in Taiwan,” Current Opinion in Psychiatry 33, no. 4 (March 2020), https://journals.lww.com/co-psychiatry/fulltext/2020/07000/new_psychoactive_substances_in_taiwan__challenges.4.aspx; “2022 Report on International Religious Freedom: Taiwan,” American Institute in Taiwan, June 8, 2023, https://www.ait.org.tw/2022-report-on-international-religiousfreedom-taiwan/; “Religion in Taiwan,” Wikipedia, Wikipedia Foundation, January 12, 2020, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Taiwan; “Democracy Index 2023, Economist Intelligence Unit, n.d., https://www.eiu.com/n/campaigns/democracyindex-2023; Laura Silver, Janell Fetterolf, and Aidan Connaughton, “Diversity and Division in Advanced Economies,” Pew Research Center, October 13, 2021, https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2021/10/13/diversity-and-division-in-advanced-economies/;Adrian Rauchfleisch, Tzu-Hsuan Tseng, Jo-Ju Kao, and Yi-Ting Liu, “Taiwan’s Public Discourse about Disinformation: The Role of Journalism, Academia, and Politics, Journalism Practice 17, no. 10 (August 18, 2022): 1–21, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17512786.2022.2110928; Fin Bauer and Kimberly Wilson, “Reactions to China-Linked Fake News: Experimental Evidence from Taiwan,” The China Quarterly 249(March 2022), 1–26, doi:10.1017/S030574102100134x; “Taiwan: Crime Rate,” Statista, n.d., https://www.statista.com/statistics/319861/taiwan-crime-rate/.
(29) Kate O’Flaherty, “Taiwan’s Revolutionary Hackers Are Forking the Government,” Wired, May 4, 2018, https://www.wired.com/story/taiwan-sunflower-revolution-audrey-tangg0v/.
(30) Andy Zhao, and Mor Naaman, “Insights from a Comparative Study on the Variety, Velocity, Veracity, and Viability of Crowdsourced and Professional Fact-Checking Services,” Journal of Online Trust and Safety 2, no. 1. https://doi.org/10.54501/jots. v2i1.118.
(31) J.C.R. Licklider, “Man-Computer Symbiosis,” IRE Transactions on Human Factors in Electronics 1, no. 1 (1960): 4–11, doi: 10.1109/THFE2.1960.4503259, and “Computers and Government,” in The Computer Age: A Twenty-Year View, eds. Michael L. Dertouzos and Joel Moses (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1980); J.C.R. Licklider and Robert Taylor, “The Computer as a Communication Device,” Science and Technology 76, no. 2 (1967), https://internetat50.com/references/Licklider_Taylor_The-Computer-As-A-Communications-Device.pdf.
(32) Paul D. Aligica and Vlad Tarko, “Polycentricity: From Polanyi to Ostrom, and Beyond,” Governance: An International Journal of Policy, Administration and Institutions. 25, no. 2 (April 2012): 237–262, DOI:10.1111/j.1468-0491.2011.01550.x.