Reactive vs. Co-Creative Democracy

The essay below is by Martin Rausch, with Tom Atlee and Jenna Büchy, co-authors of Finding Light Through the Cracks: Reinventing Democracy with Audrey Tang — a short, accessible book distilling the principles behind Taiwan’s experiments in co-creative governance, with contributions from Audrey Tang herself.

The book reads as a natural companion to Plurality by Glen Weyl, Audrey Tang, and the ⿻ community. Where Plurality maps the full architecture of collaborative technology and democracy, Finding Light zooms in on the democracy field, making its principles legible through vivid stories and frameworks. In his endorsement, Glen Weyl calls it “a ray of hope to be treasured in the hearts of every person who yearns for their voice to be heard and every institution that seeks the common good and common sense.”

In the post that follows, Martin uses the contrast of Uber regulation across Taiwan, Switzerland, and the United States to ask: what does each democracy’s design assume about its citizens, and what does it tell them in return?

Finding Light Through the Cracks is available in English and German on Amazon, and freely downloadable under a Creative Commons license at co-intelligence.institute/book-audrey.

A few days ago, I was listening to a lecture while doing some manual work. The talk was humorous, self-deprecating, and surprisingly moving. Partway through I realized: I love this style and know this voice. It was David Brooks, in a recent Yale lecture titled How America Recovers from All This.

What caught me was the historical arc he traced so elegantly. Later, while the content of this post was forming in the back of my mind, I noticed a connection I hadn’t expected. The same paradigm shifts Brooks traces in American culture are embedded, invisibly, in the architecture of democratic governance itself. The pathway a democracy uses to make policy and regulation is not a neutral procedure. It encodes a theory of human nature — and that theory has consequences we can now observe.

Brooks traced how the assumptions underlying American culture have shifted over the past seventy years. In the 1940s and '50s, the dominant paradigm was one of institutional deference. Shaped by two world wars and a deep awareness of human capacity for destruction, the prevailing view was that individuals are flawed and institutions exist to contain that frailty. Brooks reaches for an unlikely illustration: Bing Crosby, the most popular entertainer of the era, whose response to the Allied victory was not triumphalist but somber. In a 1944 radio broadcast, having lived and traveled with the troops, Crosby reflected: “My own thoughts are a lot humbler than they were last year. I’ve talked and lived and chowed with these boys... courage and faith is something that beggars description.” The message was simple: humility is the only answer. We didn’t win because destiny made us better. The appropriate response is gratitude, not pride.

Brooks contrasts this with the modern victory dance a football player performs when celebrating his touchdown. But his more pointed illustration is George H.W. Bush, whose mother called after hearing him read a passage of his own campaign speech. You’re talking about yourself again. Self-effacement was a civic virtue. Trust flowed upward, toward authority, toward institutions designed to make us less selfish than we might otherwise be.

Then came the shift. Carl Rogers and the human potential movement gave voice to the opposite: we are basically good, and the task is liberation rather than restraint. Don’t conform — be true to yourself. Brooks reflects this by sharing — admittedly overshooting — the title of Joe Namath’s memoir: I Can’t Wait Until Tomorrow… 'Cause I Get Better-Looking Every Day. What had been vice became vitality. Authenticity displaced self-effacement. The individual, properly liberated, was the agent of progress.

This was not just a cultural mood — it was a new theory of how human flourishing worked.

The Paradigm Gets Encoded

That was the insight that stopped me. Each paradigm shift doesn’t just change personal values — it gets encoded into institutions. The assumptions of an era become the architecture of its governance. And that architecture persists long after the cultural mood has moved on.

What both paradigms share is a surprisingly thin theory of what citizens are actually capable of. One trusts them to obey. The other trusts them to challenge and resist. Neither trusts them to co-author. In both eras, an elite circle of decision-makers defines which problems matter and organizes the solutions. Elections cement this arrangement rather than challenge it — every few years, the populace chooses between candidates others have selected. Audrey Tang calls this a “one-bit democracy”: a binary signal at long intervals, low bandwidth, low frequency.

The systems themselves create incentives that pull in a particular direction. Leaders who rise within them tend toward self-assurance. What the incentives never prompt — and rarely reward — is the humility to say: we don’t have the answers, and we need to consult those who live with the consequences. As that distance grows, a dangerous dynamic takes hold. Those who don’t conform to the dominant sentiment get pushed out. Groupthink replaces collective intelligence. Tom has a name for the opposite of collective intelligence: co-stupidity — when a system’s structure actively prevents it from accessing the distributed wisdom it needs, and compounds error rather than correcting it.

Meanwhile, those at the top of these systems face a structural problem of their own: distance. Few people carry enormous responsibility, wield much power under intense pressure, with limited time. Decisions lose their consequences — for those making them. Citizens become statistics. The distance between the governed and those governing grows — and as it grows, both sides disengage. Citizens stop believing their voice matters. Decision-makers stop hearing what life actually feels like on the ground.

And the world keeps accelerating, widening that gap further. Technology moves at a pace that governance was never designed to match. As systems thinker Daniel Schmachtenberger puts it: “The iterative pace of governance must match the iterative pace of developments in what we seek to govern.” We are watching this phenomenon in real time and citizens are left reacting to consequences rather than shaping outcomes.

What the Political Pathways Actually Signal

To make this point more vividly, we traced what happens when democracies want to regulate a genuinely contested new technology. Uber is a useful test case precisely because it wasn’t straightforward. It disrupted a licensed industry, raised genuine questions about worker rights, insurance, safety, and fair competition — and arrived faster than any existing regulatory framework could handle. Taiwan, Switzerland, the United States. Three jurisdictions. Same problem. Radically different processes and outcomes.

Taiwan took roughly a year. The vTaiwan deliberation launched in 2015, and the government ratified the consensus in May 2016. The process ran through vTaiwan — a structured online deliberation using the open-source software Polis to surface bridging ideas, followed by in-person working sessions to reach rough consensus, followed by executive action. The result had high legitimacy across stakeholder groups. No litigation followed. This is co-creative governance in practice: citizens and stakeholders shaped the outcome from the start. Behind the technology was an equally important piece of human infrastructure: Taiwan’s Participation Officer Network — civil servants embedded in every ministry whose job was to facilitate open regulation- and policy-making, and to coordinate across agency boundaries. Legal scholar Yu-Tang Hsiao called this “the missing half” of open government: not just citizen-government communication, but the internal coordination that allows government to actually respond. The POs prepared for 1-2 months before the deliberation launched. The technology provided the tools. The POs provided the institutional capacity to use and act on them.

Switzerland: Uber arrived in 2014. Geneva first classified it as an employer in 2019. The Federal Supreme Court confirmed that ruling in 2022. Further rulings followed in 2025. The question remains unevenly resolved across cantons — over a decade later, and still without a nationally coherent outcome. No comparable cost figures are publicly available, but the institutional architecture tells the story: cantonal variation, multiple court levels, ongoing litigation. Switzerland’s democracy deserves its reputation in many respects. Swiss citizens have real and meaningful power. They can launch a popular initiative with 100,000 signatures to propose constitutional change, or challenge any law through referendum with 50,000 signatures. This is genuine democratic muscle — and rare in the world. But it is the power to propose and to veto, not to co-create. The Vernehmlassung, Switzerland’s formal consultation process, collects written opinions from cantons, parties, and associations. It doesn’t help them build solutions together. What Swiss democracy does brilliantly is channel opposition. What it rarely does is channel collaboration.

The United States followed a similar pattern of fragmentation — regulatory battles moving through federal agencies, courts, and fifty separate state legislatures simultaneously. Uber spent millions on federal lobbying and built an extensive state-and-local lobbying operation. Courts froze rules pending review. Costs were passed on to passengers as surcharges. The process produced low legitimacy, very high latency, and ongoing litigation by whichever side lost each round. Like Switzerland, the United States is a reactive democracy. But where Switzerland channels opposition through referendums, the US channels it through courts — with correspondingly higher costs and lower legitimacy.

Same issue. Entirely different pathways. They are structural. And surprisingly few people have mapped them side by side.

One clarification matters here. Taiwan’s Uber outcome didn’t require new legislation or a parliamentary majority. Because ministers in Taiwan are more often appointed professionals rather than elected politicians, they can implement regulatory decisions that emerge from genuine citizen consensus through executive action — without surviving coalition negotiations or a floor vote — provided the outcome stays within the bounds of existing law. That structural difference is part of what makes the roughly one-year timeline possible. The bottleneck in most Western democracies isn’t always the deliberation itself — it’s the institutional architecture surrounding it.

Decoding the Assumptions

Let’s do what Brooks did with cultural history — decode the mindset embedded in each pathway. Because every regulatory process encodes a theory of human nature. We rarely notice this because the pathway feels like neutral procedure — the way things have always been done. But underneath the process is always a set of assumptions about whether people can be trusted, whether conflict leads somewhere useful, whether citizens are capable of handling complexity or whether they need to be protected from it.

The US pathway reflects adversarial individualism: truth emerges from competition between opposing interests, courts are the ultimate arena, and winners and losers are the natural outcome. Switzerland reflects elite consensus with citizen veto: citizens are trusted to block but not to build; stability is the highest democratic value. Taiwan reflects something rarer — a genuine belief that collective intelligence is real, that deliberation across difference produces better outcomes no single party could have reached alone, that conflict is fuel rather than endpoint.

Audrey Tang distills this into a formula: uniqueness × relationship = collective intelligence. We are intelligent together not despite our differences, but through them. Each variable without the other produces what we can observe all around us today: uniqueness without relationship creates fragmentation; relationship without uniqueness creates groupthink — where dissenting from your own side marks you as a traitor.

A word on what we mean by collective intelligence — because the term is easily misread. Some will argue: of course, put intelligent people together and you get collective intelligence. That is not wrong, but it misses something. A room full of brilliant people can be extraordinarily effective at pursuing narrow goals — including getting in each other’s way — while externalizing harm onto others, onto the environment, onto future generations. Just because a group consists of intelligent people doesn’t mean they’re doing good. Intelligence, in other words, is not morally neutral. History and current events offer no shortage of examples.

What Audrey means — and what Tom has spent decades developing through the Co-Intelligence Institute — is something closer to what Daniel Schmachtenberger calls broad intelligence, as distinct from narrow intelligence. Narrow intelligence is good at reaching its goals. Broad intelligence asks: which goals, for whom, and at what cost to the larger whole? It is co-intelligence that includes and serves the common wellbeing — present and future. The collective intelligence Taiwan’s processes aim to surface is not just the aggregated cleverness of participants. It is wisdom — the capacity to act well in a complex world on behalf of more than just ourselves. Confucius would have recognized it immediately.

Next Inflection Point?

Brooks argues we are at another inflection point. The institutional deference paradigm suppressed the distributed intelligence that actually exists in populations. The individualist liberation paradigm atomized people — and institutions learned to reward it. Organized interests, lobbying, litigation, party competition: each system found its own way to channel individual and group advocacy against collective problem-solving. Complex problems — the ones that genuinely require working across difference — became harder to govern, for different yet related reasons depending on the system. Both paradigms reached their structural limits. A shift is becoming necessary — and, looking at what Taiwan has built, increasingly possible. But the direction is not determined.

One version — increasingly influential — is the conclusion that government itself is the obstacle, and technology the liberator. If democratic institutions can’t match the pace of emerging challenges, route around them. This is not a fringe position. It shapes significant flows of capital, talent, and political energy.

There is another possibility — less visible, less funded, but no longer merely theoretical. Taiwan’s experience shows that wisdom is distributed. It exists in latent form throughout the population, and can emerge between and among citizens, stakeholders, and decision-makers in well-designed interactions — including among people without credentials or platforms. Good process can surface it.

But this requires a particular kind of diversity — not just diversity of background on paper, but diversity of lived reality. Many of those we consider our brightest and most qualified have followed similar paths: the same elite universities, the same professional networks, the same opportunities that money and connections make available — especially in the United States. Their differences are real, but their range of experience is narrow. They have rarely had to navigate systems that don’t work, or make decisions under genuine scarcity, or live with consequences they had no hand in shaping. That knowledge — the knowledge of what life actually feels like across different contexts — is precisely what reactive democracy leaves out of the room. And it is precisely what co-creative processes are designed to bring in.

Taiwan’s example shows: citizens, given real stakes and honest infrastructure, can handle complexity. The goal is neither institutional deference nor individual liberation but something that has rarely been tried at scale: genuine co-creation among people with different life experiences.

That is the paradigm shift Taiwan has been quietly building.

The Design of Co-Creation Is the Design of Trust

What these comparisons surface is a distinction that rarely gets named directly: most democratic systems are designed for reaction, not co-creation. Citizens can petition, comment, vote, challenge, obstruct, or file a lawsuit. But the infrastructure for genuinely shaping outcomes — for being a co-author of policy or regulation rather than a respondent to it — is thin, intermittent, and almost nowhere institutionally embedded. Where it exists at all — outside a handful of notable exceptions like East Belgium’s permanent citizens’ assembly or Ireland’s constitutional conventions — it is starved of resources and treated as a checkbox rather than a genuine function.

When people encounter a system that consults them after decisions are substantially pre-formed, they learn a sad lesson. They learn that participation is largely performative. That learning accumulates. It shows up as declining engagement, rising cynicism, and eventually the kind of inner withdrawal that Brooks describes as the precondition for resentment. The system hasn’t just failed to solve a policy problem. It has told citizens, repeatedly and structurally, that their involvement isn’t really needed. Brooks has a poignant image for this progression: inner pain moves to outer hostility.

The spiral runs in both directions. Less genuine participation generates less trust. Less trust generates more pressure on decision-makers to protect themselves — more technocratic management, more closed-door processing, more decisions made by those who can afford to be in the room. This generates even less trust. Taiwan in 2014 had government approval ratings at 9%. That is what the endpoint of this downward spiral of metastasizing mistrust looks like — and that is precisely where Taiwan stood before it began building the co-creative infrastructure. Fortunately, the civic tech community around g0v had already been quietly laying the groundwork for years.

The Demand for Technological Rescue

As mentioned above, one problematic response to this downward spiral is increasingly showing up in the public discourse: government is the problem, and technology is the solution. Peter Thiel has made this argument in its sharpest form — that regulation and democratic process obstruct the progress that technology alone can deliver, that the dynamism of markets and innovation is being strangled by the slow, captured machinery of the state. On this view, the answer to democratic failure is less democracy, not more — accelerate past the institutions that can’t keep up, and let the outcomes speak for themselves.

The frustration driving this argument is real. Yes, democratic institutions are slow, but the logic of the argument has a structural flaw. Technology does not arrive in a political vacuum. It arrives in a world where the rules of its deployment, the distribution of its benefits, and the assignment of its costs are decided somewhere — by someone. When democratic institutions step back, those decisions don’t disappear — they get made by whoever moves fastest and can absorb the legal risk, or play the system — with costs externalized to anyone without a seat at the table. What looks like technology escaping government is usually technology capturing it by other means.

The platforms that now mediate most of our public discourse are the clearest illustration. Built to maximize engagement, they did not set out to destroy deliberative culture. But engagement means time-on-site, and what keeps people on-site triggers our more reactive instincts — outrage, conflict, the reassuring simplicity of us versus them. Deliberation requires the opposite: patience, complexity, genuine openness to being wrong. The technology didn’t rescue us from political dysfunction. It monetized it.

Plurality, authored by E. Glen Weyl, Audrey Tang, and the ⿻ community, names this clearly and argues for a fundamentally different approach: technology designed not to route around democratic governance but to make it work better — tools for collaboration rather than dysfunctional engagement, for surfacing novel, useful agreement rather than amplifying fruitless conflict. The answer to governance that can’t keep up is not less, but better infrastructure for collective intelligence — keeping humans, and citizens specifically, genuinely in the loop.

What Co-Creative Design Actually Requires

Taiwan’s experience suggests that moving from reactive to co-creative governance is not primarily a technology problem. The tools are open-source and freely available. What’s harder to transfer is the trust that makes them work — and trust of that kind can’t be installed. It has to be built through repeated acts of genuine power-sharing, over time, with visible real-life outcomes.

The pre-commitment at the center of Taiwan’s model is simple in principle and demanding in practice: if citizens deliberate in good faith and reach rough consensus, the government implements it. Not as a suggestion, but as a binding commitment. Over many deliberations, the Taiwanese government kept that promise. Each time it did, the baseline of trust for the next deliberation was higher. From 9% to more than 60% approval over eight years — not by becoming more competent, but by becoming more honest about limits and more genuinely open to citizens helping to extend them.

Taiwan is not a template to copy. It is something more useful: a proof that the structure we assumed was fixed is not. The roughly one-year timeline, the legitimacy without litigation, the trust rebuilt from near-zero — these are demonstrable results. They change what’s considered possible.

Our book Finding Light Through the Cracks tries to distill what that practice looks like — the principles that emerged from Taiwan’s experiment, the stories that make them legible, and the questions they open for every democracy trying to find its own version of this path. Not a blueprint. An invitation to take co-creation seriously as infrastructure rather than as an occasional experiment.

The Taiwan / Switzerland / US pathway comparison is, in the end, not mainly about efficiency. It is about what democratic design tells citizens about whether they matter. The distributed wisdom, lived experience, and problem-solving capacity that exists across any population are real. Neglecting it not only contributes to resentment — it leaves decision-makers progressively more disconnected from the reality they are meant to govern.

Brooks ended his lecture with a question: does a country — does a culture — have the vitality for one more paradigm shift? His answer was cautious but hopeful. Cultural change doesn’t come from the top. It comes from communities and institutions and individuals who decide to embody something different before it becomes dominant. They don’t argue people out of resentment. They demonstrate that something better is possible.

Taiwan has been doing exactly that for a decade. Not through revolution or ideology, but through the patient, iterative work of building infrastructure that tells citizens, in practice rather than in rhetoric, that their involvement is genuinely needed. That is the antidote Brooks is pointing toward — and it already exists. The cracks are already everywhere around us. The question is whether we build toward the light.

Finding Light Through the Cracks – Reinventing Democracy with Audrey Tang is authored by Martin Rausch, with the support of Tom Atlee and Jenna Büchy, with contributions from Audrey Tang. Available in English and German editions on Amazon, and freely downloadable at co-intelligence.institute/book-audrey under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-SA).