How Reverse Game Theory Could Solve The Housing Shortage
"Designing For Plurality
The most successful mechanisms created space for people with different loyalties, interests and identities to cooperate on their own terms. That’s the terrain Weyl wants designers to pay attention to now — not idealized preference curves, but the messy social motivations people bring to public life.
Weyl’s latest project, “Plurality,” builds on work he’s done as cofounder of The Plurality Institute, a nonprofit that focuses on developing “plural” technologies that “upgrade democracy and support human cooperation at scale.” The new project is foremost a book developed with Audrey Tang, formerly Taiwan’s first Digital Minister, written through an open-source process that practices the same participatory principles it champions — that extends the logic of mechanism design into another arena where divides run deep: democracy. Here, the goal is to redesign voice — how people express themselves and how those expressions aggregate into power and influence.
Democracy today suffers from a problem of fidelity. In a simple vote, one person’s mild preference counts the same as another’s deepest conviction. It’s a blunt instrument flattening passion. To capture that lost signal, mechanisms like Quadratic Voting (QV) and Quadratic Funding (QF) build on the intuition that people don’t just have opinions; they have them with varying intensities.
Quadratic voting tries to refine the arithmetic. It provides citizens with a budget of “voice credits” to allocate across issues, allowing them to spend more on what matters most to them. But the cost is quadratic: Casting one vote on an issue costs one credit, casting two costs four, and casting 10 costs 100. The mathematical rule turns conviction into a trade-off: passion has a price, and so does indifference.
Imagine applying this logic in the built environment. In nearly every city, planning hearings collapse into binary choices: Build or don’t build. The loudest voices — often a small, entrenched minority — tend to monopolize the debate, creating a false impression that everyone feels the same.
But using QV lets locals express the strength of their preferences with voice credits. A community might collectively vote to accept higher density on a main road (spending few credits to oppose it) in exchange for preserving the park (spending many credits to protect it). Or they might allocate credits to amenities that make growth beneficial — a library or bicycle lanes. QV would surface what a simple vote doesn’t: that most communities are neither as opposed nor as united as the loudest voices suggest.
Governments are already moving from theory to practice. Since 2019, the Colorado State Legislature has used QV to set its internal budget priorities, capturing nuances that standard voting misses — though the experiment ended in 2024 when a court ruled the anonymous process violated the state’s open meetings law. Across the Pacific, Taiwan’s Presidential Hackathon uses QV as part of its process for letting citizens choose which of the submitted civic-tech proposals will receive backing. In both cases, the mechanism helps turn agenda-setting into a dialogue rather than a tally of factions.
The logic extends to money through quadratic funding. Traditional philanthropy often amplifies the interests of the wealthiest donors, but QF amplifies widespread support. A government or foundation pools matching funds and allocates them based on the number of unique contributors a project receives rather than just the total raised, turning strong social signals into financial power. So 1,000 people giving $10 each can unlock much more in matching funds than one person giving $10,000. The system has already distributed tens of millions of dollars through platforms like Gitcoin, helping fund projects that support open-source software, climate solutions and civic technology.
Mechanisms are also making their way into the governance models for digital systems and AI. Social media algorithms at times maximize engagement by maximizing conflict, but a new class of “bridging algorithms” — like X’s Community Notes or Taiwan’s use of Polis — flips the incentive. They surface agreement and boost content rated as helpful by people who usually disagree, rewarding bridge-building over polarization.
In 2023, Anthropic and the Collective Intelligence Project, a nonprofit research hub, ran an experiment in crowd-sourcing a constitution for large language models using Polis, asking a sampling of citizens to define the values chatbots should serve — a proof of concept for what plural, democratically shaped AI governance could look like, as Taiwan has already been using to some degree for about a decade. We can imagine going further still: using QV to choose which AI principles matter most, or QF to support open-source models as digital public goods, and encode those values into the systems themselves.
“Standard markets value scarcity, but these mechanisms value plurality.”
Standard markets value scarcity, but these mechanisms value plurality. They reward us, literally and algorithmically, for collaborating with people who are different from us.
Still, Weyl stressed to me that these tools are not a panacea. Their significance lies in what they reveal: Institutions are provisional, adjustable and generally capable of redesign. The design challenge here mirrors the one in land-use. Mechanisms must be rational and rewarding for diverse communities to cooperate. And if we accept that our rules can be rewritten, the new question becomes: Where do we need to apply this logic next?"
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Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Britain’s Rape Gangs and the Failure of Feminism
" the absence of a coordinated, unembarrassed, angered feminist response on the scale this scandal demands is impossible to ignore. The inquiry is explicit: “The country now knows the full truth. The country has been given the basis for justice. The country has the roadmap to ensure these crimes never happen again.” Yet the response of the major women’s movements has been silence.
The older British feminism that began with figures like Mary Wollstonecraft treated women’s subordination as a civilizational wrong, not a boutique grievance. Wollstonecraft insisted that women were rational, and entitled both to education and legal equality; the Langham Place circle translated those claims into public agitation; the suffrage movement turned them into a mass political demand. That tradition understood that women had been treated as property, as children, as moral auxiliaries to men, and as bodies for male use—and refused to accept any compromise in naming and resisting such treatment.
It was precisely this refusal to trim moral principle to fashionable alliances that gave British feminism its stature. The vote, access to education, and legal recognition of women as adults equal to men were framed as a civilizational correction, not a narrow lobby interest, and they inspired women across the West to make similar claims and secure similar rights.
If one asks, “what happened to feminism?” in Britain, and in the wider West, the report and the surrounding silence together suggest a brutal answer. A movement that began as a universalist moral revolt, insisting that women’s vulnerability was not “a cultural preference to be balanced against competing sensitivities, but a public wrong that had to be named plainly and confronted without apology”, has, in its dominant institutional forms, drifted into managed difference and coalition etiquette. It has become a movement that worries first about “community cohesion,” about not “inflaming ‘community tensions,’ ” about not disturbing the moral arrangements of the professional class, and only second—if at all—about the girls at the school gate."
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Kennisdatabank publieke landbouwgrond | Vlaanderen.be
"Over publieke landbouwgrond in Vlaanderen
53.000 hectare ofwel 7% van alle landbouwgrond in Vlaanderen is in handen van publieke instellingen.
De meeste publieke landbouwgronden hebben een eeuwenlange voorgeschiedenis.
Meer dan 3500 beroepslandbouwers maken vandaag gebruik van publieke grond. Eén op vijf is er erg afhankelijk van, omdat het een belangrijk deel van hun bedrijfsoppervlakte is.
Door de vergrijzing in de landbouwsector komt publieke landbouwgrond regelmatig vrij. Dit biedt kansen om nieuwe gebruikers te zoeken en maatschappelijke en beleidsdoelen te realiseren.
De afgelopen jaren werd veel publieke landbouwgrond geprivatiseerd. Met de resterende gronden hebben overheden nog steeds een belangrijk beleidsinstrument in handen."
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Crypto Commons Gathering · Luma
"The Crypto Commons Gathering (CCG) is an annual week-long retreat organised by the Crypto Commons Association in collaboration with the Commons Hub. To its growing community, it serves as a recurring temporary refuge from late-capitalism (or something worse) and as a convivium to reimagine how we organize value, care and meaning for a "post-capitalistist of many worlds".
2026 marks the 6th edition of the CCG — six years of bringing together commons builders, token tinkerers, speculative worldbuilders, artists, complex systems thinkers, degens turned regen, and everyone curious about the weird futures that emerge when crypto meets genuine international and intersectional postcapitalist desire.
read more at https://cryptocommonsgather.ing/"
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Public as More Than State - Indy Johar
"Proposition: The state is only one means through which a democracy organizes itself. It is not democracy itself. It is not the public itself. It is one institutional form among others: a mechanism for representation, law, administration, coercion, redistribution, and collective decision. But the danger of modern political life is that we allow this one form to stand in for the whole. We allow the state to assume the authority of the public as such."
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Why Human (Contributive) Labor remains the creative principle of human society
"The salvific and ex-tropic implications of the medieval Christian vision of human work as spiritual activity. Excerpts from the study: “From Modes of Production to the Resurrection of the Body""
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The impact of the My Farm Trees project
"Over the last three years, the My Farm Trees project has evolved from a bold idea into a transformative model for forest-landscape ecosystem restoration, socio-economic empowerment, climate action and improved livelihoods."
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