The world is moving faster than most of us can properly understand.
Geopolitically, technologically, and economically, it feels like everything is accelerating at the same time.
Even if you are involved in work that supports the future, you may find it more humbling than you imagine. The future begins to feel like something that happens to us, rather than something that we shape.
With this in mind, I recently attended a Wisdom and Action conference on “Trust in the Age of AI,” expecting to be even more disappointed than when I arrived. I didn’t. The meeting began with a rebuttal.
Audrey Tan, Taiwan’s first digital minister, wrote her job description as a poem. She is one of the world’s most thoughtful voices on how technology can contribute to public participation, rather than replace it, and she then spent the next 40 minutes making the case for why the people in the room had more power than they imagined.
In 2014, Taiwan’s parliament tried to push through a trade deal with China, ignoring the scrutiny that much of the country thought it deserved. Half a million people took to the streets and students occupied the parliament for three weeks. “We’re not protesting, we’re demonstrating,” Audrey said.
The movement, known as the Sunflower Movement, was organized around small group conversations, where people could actually talk to people, even those who deeply disagreed with them, rather than just passing them by loudly. Audrey described the difference as being like a campfire and a wildfire. Small enough to gather together, but not big enough to burn everyone down.
Three weeks later, the occupiers rallied around a consistent demand, which the Speaker of Parliament accepted. “The people’s version is better,” he said. It was one of the few Occupy-style movements in modern history to end in consensus rather than exhaustion.
According to Audrey, the design principles that run through this directly contradict the logic of any platform that most of us use every day. Social media wasn’t built for people to understand each other. It’s designed to get attention, and the things that get attention the most are emotions like anger and fear.
The more people join the system, the further apart they become. There are no campfires. We are very good at creating the impression that we don’t agree on anything, that the most extreme positions represent the whole, and that to unite is naive.
ask the person closest to the problem
When Taiwan was hit by a wave of deepfake fraudulent ads in 2024, the government again resisted the instinct to respond from the top down. Instead, it sent 200,000 text messages to randomly selected citizens asking them what they should do. From these responses, 447 people were selected to represent the nation and were seated at a table of 10.
For your idea to become part of the national agenda, you had to convince nine other people at the table, including some who arrived with very different views. This one condition has changed what people are optimizing for. You weren’t motivated to take the typical politician approach of performing for the crowd or looking for the most shareable framework. You were trying to find something that would hold up when you were tested face-to-face with someone who disagreed with you. The ideas that survived were not the most emotional ones, but the ones that were actually the most effective.
The resulting policy was enacted within two months. These policies have changed incentives. For example, if Meta publishes a fraudulent ad that causes someone to lose $5 million, Meta will be liable for that $5 million. As a result, deepfake ad spoofing has reportedly decreased by more than 94%.
The underlying beliefs were all the same. People are more capable than organizations tend to assume. “We the people are already superintelligent,” Audrey said.
Her story continues to prove that those closest to the problem, living inside the problem and feeling its friction, will always produce better solutions than those making decisions for them from a distance. Algorithms are great at pattern matching, but they can’t sense the urgency of when a system breaks or the specific shape of the gap that needs to be filled. This principle extends beyond civil governance. That’s why we support founders who have lived through problems. Proximity to pain is a form of expertise that cannot be outsourced, simulated, or calculated. We call this founder-market fit.
The determinism that many of us currently feel is created, in part, by the pace, complexity, and overwhelm of a set of narratives that center those with the most power while minimizing the agency of everyone else.
However, the future is not set in stone.
- Rachel Yang is a partner at Giant Leap, Australia’s first venture capital fund focused on impact.
