The world is moving faster than most of us can properly comprehend.
Geopolitically, technologically, economically, everything feels simultaneously accelerated and unstable.
Even those of us whose work involves backing the future for a living can find ourselves bracing rather than imagining. The future is beginning to feel less like something we shape and more like something that happens to us.
With this in mind, I recently attended the Wisdom and Action conference on the topic Trust in the Age of AI, expecting to leave more despondent than I arrived. I didn’t. The conference opened with a rebuttal.
Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s first digital minister, wrote her own job description as a poem. She is one of the most thoughtful voices in the world on how technology can serve public participation rather than replace it, and she spent the next forty minutes making a case for why the people in that room had more power than they assumed.
In 2014, Taiwan’s parliament tried to push through a trade agreement with Beijing without the scrutiny most 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.
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The occupation, known as the Sunflower Movement, was organised around small group conversations, where someone who profoundly disagreed with you was someone you could still actually talk to rather than shout past. Audrey described the difference as a campfire versus a wildfire: small enough to gather around, not large enough to consume everyone.
After three weeks, the occupiers converged on a coherent set of demands, and the Speaker of Parliament accepted them. “The people’s version is better,” he said. It became one of the very few Occupy-style movements in modern history that ended in agreement rather than exhaustion.
The design principle running through this, Audrey said, runs directly against the logic of every platform most of us use every day. Social media is not built to help people understand each other. It is built to hold attention, and what holds attention best is emotions like outrage and fear.
The more people participate in that system, the further apart they move. It does not create campfires. It is very good at manufacturing the impression that we agree on nothing, that the most extreme position represents the whole, and that coming together is naive.
Ask people closest to a problem
When Taiwan was hit by a wave of deepfake scam ads in 2024, the government again resisted the instinct to respond from the top down. Instead, they sent 200,000 text messages to randomly selected citizens asking what should be done. From those responses, 447 people were chosen as a representative cross-section of the country and seated at tables of ten.
For your idea to become part of the national agenda, you had to convince the other nine people at your table, including people who had arrived with a completely different view. That single condition changed what people optimised for. You were not incentivised to take the typical politician approach of performing for a crowd or looking for the most shareable framing. You were trying to find something that held up when tested against someone who disagreed with you, face to face. The ideas that survived were the ones that were actually going to be the most effective rather than the most emotive ones.
The resulting policies became law within two months. These policies changed the incentives, for example, if Meta published a scam advertisement where someone lost $5 million, then Meta would be liable for that $5 million. As a result, deepfake ad impersonation reportedly fell by more than 94%.
The conviction underneath all of it was the same: people are more capable than institutions tend to assume. “We the people are already the superintelligence,” Audrey said.
What her examples keep demonstrating is that the people closest to a problem, living inside it and feeling its friction, consistently produce better solutions than those deciding on their behalf from a distance. Algorithms are excellent at pattern matching, but they cannot feel the urgency of a broken system or the specific shape of a gap that needs filling. That principle doesn’t stop at civic governance. It’s why we back founders who have lived inside a problem. Proximity to pain is a form of expertise that cannot be outsourced, simulated, or calculated. We call it founder-market fit.
The determinism many of us feel right now is partly manufactured by overwhelm: by pace, by complexity, and by a set of stories that centre the people with the most power while minimising the agency of everyone else.
But the future is not decided.
- Rachel Yang is a partner of Giant Leap, Australia’s first venture capital fund dedicated to impact.
