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Citizen Infrastructure

Uncommon ground

When two sides are stuck, the usual advice is to “find common ground.” But the truly common ground — the things everyone already agrees on — is often bland and gets you nowhere. Audrey Tang points instead at the uncommon ground: the rare point that surprises both sides, the agreement neither expected to find. Discovering it is what actually shifts a conflict, because it forces people to see the situation in a new shape.

Surprising validators

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A related idea is the surprising validator: “I don’t like your politics, but that suggestion makes sense to me.” When a point is endorsed by someone you’d expect to oppose it, it carries weight that no amount of argument from your own side can. Tools like Polis are built to surface exactly these — statements that win agreement across clusters, not within them — which is also the logic behind bridging feeds and Community Notes.

Blending vision

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Tang offers a vivid metaphor from her own eye surgery. “Laser blending vision” sets one eye for near and one for far; in the overlap, the brain fuses the two images and you see the middle range extra clearly. Seeing only the conflict — “there are differences and we can’t do much about it” — is draining and flat, two poles on a line. Finding the uncommon ground adds a third dimension: the whole picture changes.

And it takes practice. Tang’s discipline is telling: if she can’t yet find the blended view, she treats that as her problem, not the other side’s — a cue to move closer, spend time, even hang out ethnographically, until she can blend with their horizon. Our minds resist this (tribalism, in-group and out-group instincts), but it can be trained, much like civic love.

It regenerates difference

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Finding uncommon ground is not compromise — it isn’t the arithmetic average of everyone’s preferences. It offers a new vocabulary, a fresh group picture, and people then regroup around it into unlikely allies. That’s why plurality treats a bridge as something that creates new and more interesting differences rather than erasing them. Assistive civic AI can help: a real-time summary can offer a first draft of the uncommon ground for a busy person who hasn’t the hours to find it alone, as in the Taiwan Alignment Assemblies.

Sources

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