Cynthia Wang: I’m here on a Fulbright. The research I’m doing is looking into negotiations. I’m a negotiations instructor in a business school, but what I’m interested in is how people negotiate within social movements. That’s what we’re here for. We’re very thankful [laughs] that you can provide your insight.

Cynthia Wang: In terms of the questions, should I?

Audrey Tang: I’ve reviewed the questions, but feel free to ask unstructured questions. Feel free to chime in. We’ve been at many social movements together.

Cynthia Wang: He’s my host, so I’ve learned a lot.

Tyng-Ruey Chuang: The reason why we are here is that she will do research with Academia Sinica until end of June. I’m her host, arrange things.

Audrey Tang: I, literally, was incubated by the Information Institute of our national academy…

Tyng-Ruey Chuang: Oh, you are so modest.

Audrey Tang: I was the initial coder for Open Foundry, the first version.

Tyng-Ruey Chuang: The first version.

Audrey Tang: I was the contractor. [laughs]

Cynthia Wang: Oh, really? You really were incubated then.

Audrey Tang: It provided the seed revenue for my startup. [laughs]

Cynthia Wang: That’s wonderful. I know we’re recording, but we were hope also to record via our device.

Audrey Tang: Of course. The more the merrier. I can record too. [laughs]

Cynthia Wang: That way we’ll have many backups also. I might… [laughs]

Audrey Tang: It’s called resilience. High availability.

Cynthia Wang: We’ll get started, and learn about your…As I said, we’re interested in social movements and being an activist. The first set of questions we want to talk about is how you negotiate with people on the other side of the table.

Audrey Tang: There’s no other side.

Cynthia Wang: There’s no other side.

Audrey Tang: I take all the sides. [laughs]

Cynthia Wang: I like that. Looking from all the sides, and the people that you negotiate with, just recall a time you’ve taken part of these negotiations. What was your goal? Describe the situation. It can be any situation. We’re looking a lot at the Sunflower Movement, but it can also be related to your current experiences too, whatever you feel like is most compelling.

Cynthia Wang: Overall, we’re looking to see how did you navigate these discussions? How did you convince the other side to do…?

Audrey Tang: There’s no other side. [laughs] Everyone, convince everyone.

Cynthia Wang: Exactly. Convince everyone.

Audrey Tang: Leading up to the Sunflower, we’re all part of this broad movement of freedom of information access, Aaron Swartz and all that. Just around the same time as Sunflower Movement, a little bit before, we were engaged with the Ministry of Education to open up the most prized datasets, the revised dictionary of Mandarin, and later on, Taigi and also Hakka and other dictionaries.

Audrey Tang: At the time, everything is all copyright reserved. There’s no way to even improve so that it displays on the mobile phone. The reason was very obscure. I don’t think even the public service itself understand the reason they gave for not giving free access to a dictionary. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: We did, as I mentioned, something like emerge wise would do, which is civil disobedience, by getting dozens of people downloading parts of the dictionary, each saying that we’re doing fair use, relinquishing the copyrights of the entire data pipeline, so that even one of us ends up in jail, everyone can just pick up and do it.

Audrey Tang: We got thousands of people contributing to proofread, to perfect this data pipeline. Because we used the Creative Commons Zero framework, we said that we are deriving no commercial interest in this endeavor. The MOE finds it very difficult to say that we’re plagiarizing or whatever. [laughs] Without the CC0 framework, it would be much harder.

Cynthia Wang: Why you think they were so obscure with their reasoning? Did you ever find out what their reasoning was?

Audrey Tang: The reasoning was, the case they present was always that if we open up this description, then people can just change it to simplified characters, or something like that, and spread something that’s definitely not the orthography of the national standardized writing system and the official definition of things.

Cynthia Wang: How were you able to find that out? Was that, you had to ask questions, or was it just over time?

Audrey Tang: No, there’s just people who work as contractors in the public service attending our g0v hackathons, as not quite public servants and asking to be anonymous, [laughs] who just tells us that they would like, to the extent of law, to cooperate with us, because it’s also their mission to make sure that more people get access to educational material.

Audrey Tang: This is not a trade secret motive, there’s no trade secret dictionaries.

Audrey Tang: What they wanted, just a guarantee that we will not abuse the access, because, at the same time, they’re also negotiating with Oxford University Press and Apple, because at the time, there’s only Simplified Chinese dictionaries on Apple devices, and that they would like to be on there as well.

Audrey Tang: To do that, they have to give up a little bit of stylistic control of how it is presented, and so on. There’s this public private negotiation going on, but there’s also this public people negotiation going on. I’m also the contractor for Apple.

Cynthia Wang: You are?

Audrey Tang: At the side.

Cynthia Wang: At that time?

Audrey Tang: At Apple, yeah.

Audrey Tang: Also, I’m a contractor of Oxford University Press, which prepares the MOE data for Apple. I’m literally taking all the sides.

Cynthia Wang: You’re a connector.

Cynthia Wang: I’m wondering, in general, or in this particular situation. You talked about the issue that was negotiated. Were there other issues that you were negotiating at that time? How did you navigate these discussions?

Audrey Tang: At the time, there’s a comprehensive re look at how public information from the state should be handled. Before 2013, the norm was for people who want dictionaries or whatever other information, to write a written submission and for the government to evaluate and redact some parts, like the usual Freedom of Information Act style.

Audrey Tang: Around that time, there’s a social movement called Open Government Data that says, as the government is switching from manual processing based on paper to automated processing based on data pipelines, anything that’s not a trade secret, nothing related to privacy, should just give a copy proactively to the civil society at no cost, beyond, of course, the bandwidth fees and so on.

Audrey Tang: That is a new paradigm because the previous paradigm says that handling paper, using public servants’ time, and so on, is a very costly endeavor. You have to recover at least those costs. Open Data says, “No, the net marginal cost is now almost zero, so giving us a copy of the latest dictionary doesn’t cost you anything.”

Audrey Tang: That is the wider movement that the MOE dictionary is just a part of.

Cynthia Wang: I see. In general, during this movement, what were the strategies you used? You talked about civil disobedience…What did you call it? Civil…

Audrey Tang: Civil disobedience.

Cynthia Wang: Disobedience. Have you used different types of strategies, and what do you use more? For example, in the academic research, we talk about boycotting, suing, or more of these harder strategies, but there’s also, you try to set up meetings, asking a lot about the other side’s interests, things like that. How do you navigate those and what do you use more?

Audrey Tang: We just use social media, so that our dictionary copy, the MOE dictionary, went viral. We made it very easy. It was around the time of the first marriage equality serious proposal, the 972 movement.

Audrey Tang: Many people in the movement used the MOE dictionary as a very easy way, on Facebook and other social media, to generate these banners, because if you just post some text, it’s not very visible in social media. MoeDict allows you to just type in whatever your advocacy message is, and then you use dictionary definition in beautiful calligraphy [laughs] to amplify your message.

Audrey Tang: You get to choose the font, and you can deliver your message banner in Taigi or something. It became a very easy way for any activist online to turn, what used to be just a handful of people in face to face setting, into a larger social movement online that goes viral with hundreds and thousands of people, that starts a real petition, and so on.

Audrey Tang: We successfully enabled many activists using the MOE dictionary as their advocacy tool. First, it builds solidarity among the advocacy group, and second, it allows us to rethink what the dictionary and its relevance in the contemporary world. It is a way for the words themselves to carry a activism message. It’s not something that only teachers use.

Cynthia Wang: That’s very interesting, and I think that’s something that research hasn’t talked a lot about, it’s social media and technology and how that’s influenced the most use.

Audrey Tang: To shape a new norm.

Cynthia Wang: This particularly, I know a lot of your work, you also hope to spread it on the international stage. With these strategies or with social media, how do you think you’ve been able to get support all around the world?

Audrey Tang: Around the world, there are many people who are in what we call low resource language communities. It’s part of my work with the Oxford University Press, we work on a global language movements, that includes later on the Common Voice from Mozilla, which I also participated.

Audrey Tang: What they are doing, essentially is this idea called data altruism. We contribute data by reading, for example, Taigi to the recorder of the Common Voice website. If you go to Common Voice website, you can click record and it will just give you a few prompts and then you just start speaking Taigi.

Audrey Tang: Then you can also click listen, in which case you listen to people speaking Taigi, and you say it sounds right or not right. We call it crowdsourced lexicography. Projects like this, the g0v (gov-zero), starting from MoeDict, did also the optical character recognition for Amis dictionaries based on that.

Audrey Tang: Amis, Taigi, many low resource languages can benefit from this shared common infrastructure to enable, not just dictionaries digitization, but also speech recognition. Which I think this is automatic translation, many AI technologies.

Audrey Tang: We call it data altruism because nobody participate to get a commercial gain. We participate just so that our cultural heritage can reach more people. By contributing to this infrastructure, people who are very far away, who don’t share a similar linguistic route nevertheless benefit from this common infrastructure.

Cynthia Wang: Very interesting. Fingers crossed. [laughs] My next question goes to when you are negotiating. Sometimes you have to give up certain things to get something, like the concessions. Is there anything you’ve had to do or the other side has had to do in order to…?

Audrey Tang: The beauty of Creative Commons Zero, is that I give up also attribution rights.

Cynthia Wang: Yeah.

Audrey Tang: Everyone can just set up their own MoeDict without crediting me or anyone who participate in the movement, not Yeh Ping or KC Wu or anyone. We did that because we see ourselves as an extension of the public service work the ministry of education is doing.

Audrey Tang: The MOE publish as public work. If we do a derivative and then put our name on it, in a sense, we’re freewriting on the work, the public work, and get all the credit. Whereas actually, it’s the dictionary makers are putting in most of the efforts, we just do the data streamlining and presentation.

Audrey Tang: By giving up attribution, it doesn’t really matter. The Ministry of Education can add anytime edit afterward to merge back our work and then say, “This is a new revised dictionary website,” without crediting any of us. This is something that we give up.

Cynthia Wang: The other side, do they feel that they’ve gained something?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, of course. They gain higher quality dictionary with actual feedback. We run a crowdsource contest to find all the discrepancies in the dictionary definitions. They got thousands and thousands of typo corrections for free.

Cynthia Wang: That’s a collective system.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, it’s co-creation.

Cynthia Wang: I also am interested once again in this cross cultural negotiation styles. Do you think this could work in the US, for example? Is this something that you see you’d have to negotiate differently in the US?

Audrey Tang: I don’t think it’s national. I think it concerns to the nature of the resources. The nature of copyright is such that the scarcity is entirely artificial. There’s no real scarcity, they’re not here. It’s imposed scarcity.

Audrey Tang: Our movement, which is lifting this artificial scarcity doesn’t really cost anyone to lose anything. When you are in this abundance resource situation, this style of co-creation taking other sites naturally emerges as part of Elianor Ostrom’s work.

Audrey Tang: This common governance can work if the larger society delegates some devolution or something to the persons using the commons to regulate for themselves. In this kind of multi holistic governance, the more the resource is abundant, the more likely style negotiation lacks. The more the resource is scarce, the less likely.

Cynthia Wang: In negotiations, there’s always this perception that we’re always opposed and resources are always scarce. I think for you it’s almost reframing it saying, “Hey, we’re not in scarcity…”

Audrey Tang: The scarcity is in our minds.

Cynthia Wang: It’s in our minds. Once they start seeing the changes is that you think…

Audrey Tang: Once you stop suing people for copyright violation…

Cynthia Wang: Then people understand.

Audrey Tang: Then people understand.

Cynthia Wang: That it’s not a scarce resource. How have you convinced people that it’s not a scarce resource? Is it like this, just talk to them or you just show them?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, I think mostly it’s the Ministry of Education, people. They also saw on social media the free reuse of their dictionary has a real cultural impact. That’s what they’re after. They’re after pedagogy of course, but also cultural impact. They put in tens of thousands of hours into the dictionary and now everyone is looking at it.

Cynthia Wang: Rather than just one person or two people. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Rather than just a few people or a few teachers in a few classrooms.

Cynthia Wang: Very interesting. You might tell me whether this question is relevant or not. Have you ever gotten to a point where you’re like, “This is the minimum we’re willing to settle for?” In negotiations, we talk about, a bottom line…

Audrey Tang: By not putting us to jail, of course.

Cynthia Wang: The place to walk away.

Audrey Tang: Because at the time, cover of our relation of that sort is criminal. I think we relax that in follow up amendments, but at the time it’s criminal. It’s not a joke when we say that we’re risking going to jail, freeing up the national dictionary.

Audrey Tang: Also, because at the time we’re hosting the MoeDict website in Tokyo. We also run into a proposed draft law that will block message copyright violations from outside of the jurisdiction. We also risk getting our machines banned from Internet access. Of course, that law didn’t get passed.

Audrey Tang: There’s a lot of, I would say, undercurrent and the example of Aaron Swartz was very fresh on everyone’s mind. We’re quite at a minimum saying that, “OK, now everyone can do it. If you put all of us in jail, you’re going to put everyone in jail.” This is the minimum.

Cynthia Wang: Interesting. What do you think were the key elements of success of the negotiation? You might have touched upon this already, but…

Audrey Tang: As I mentioned, the key is truly that this is co-creative, that we’re giving up also our control of our side. We’re not just demanding the government giving up copyright control, we’re also giving up our own copyright control. By aligning the values such that it is a universal value, rather than decide when the other side makes concessions, that was the key.

Cynthia Wang: Very interesting. Let me see how we’re doing on time. All right, I’m going to keep moving on.

Cynthia Wang: Once these negotiations start to gain traction and more social media, more people buy into it, how do you keep the momentum going? Sometimes, in certain social movements — we were talking to some people from the Sunflower Movement — you get exhausted or tired. Within your movement, how do you keep the momentum going?

Audrey Tang: It’s just to build solidarity so that people in other areas can learn from the MoeDict success, and then start demanding, for example, air quality data or water quality data and things like that, because just like dictionaries, they have no trade secret or privacy concerns. Just like dictionary, it’s only useful if all the stakeholders get easy access to it.

Audrey Tang: By building solidarities, again, the National Academy was the AirBox initiative and many other initiatives. We don’t have to keep fighting the dictionary, because it’s already done.

Audrey Tang: Then we’re setting up, writing up our example. It was written in TAHR-PAS, Quarterly of the Taiwan Association of Human Rights 台灣人權促進會季刊, how we did this MoeDict negotiation, and then many people took that to other open data movements.

Cynthia Wang: It has been spreading this way.

Cynthia Wang: Now, we’re going to start talking about your negotiation experiences with your colleagues that are a part of your movement. Can you recall and describe a successful negotiation experience? How did you come to develop this strategy that you’ve been talking about, internally?

Audrey Tang: The thing, though, is that the negotiation mostly took place on the public chat channel, and public collaborative documents, and with people already relinquishing the copyright using Creative Commons Attribution or similar licenses.

Audrey Tang: What characterizes this kind of negotiation is that people are negotiating with not just the people in the room but also, potentially, everybody in the future, who discover this document and also have something to sign.

Audrey Tang: This shapes the arguments into public good arguments because if we conspire and make, we both gain something at the cost of future generations. The future generation will look at this document and blame us. [laughs] I would characterize this style as a public good only negotiation style because it all took place on public documents.

Cynthia Wang: How do you get people to focus on the future, because if everybody’s focused on the…

Audrey Tang: On the here now.

Cynthia Wang: Here now everything falls apart.

Audrey Tang: It has everything to do with Yeh Ping’s initial framing, because Yeh Ping, at the time, just moved to the US, and his children is trying to learn Mandarin. As someone who grow up in one culture and become a trans cultural person, it’s very important to keep your roots.

Audrey Tang: This motivation, again, looks to the future. If his child, using a mobile phone, cannot open the national dictionary website, he has a problem. The problem is not about him or his quarterly earnings. This is about losing a root to our culture. It naturally appeals to people’s forward looking, future looking instincts.

Audrey Tang: Also, because education is such a public good that nobody lose anything if Yeh Ping’s child learns a little bit more Mandarin.

Cynthia Wang: I need to learn more too.

Cynthia Wang: Once again, because you’re looking at working with the public, how did you resolve the different priorities? How does that work? When you disagree about how to pursue something, how does that all…?

Audrey Tang: I had a most difficult time when the MoeDict started adding Taigi in addition to Mandarin. It was consistently five star on Google Play Store. Once I added Taigi, it started to drop. There are many people who left comment, saying that, “I don’t want to bog down my phone, holding a dialect that I don’t use,” [laughs] and many other not very friendly messages.

Audrey Tang: Even within the Taigi community, there’s the Pe̍h-ōe-jī, there’s the Tongyong pinyin, there’s the Tai lo, there’s people who don’t agree on kanji as orthography, there’s people who don’t use kanji at all, there’s people who think you use kanji for everything except for these prepositions.

Audrey Tang: Even within the Taigi movement, there’s many people who simply don’t agree with each other. That was the main tension.

Cynthia Wang: How do you manage that?

Cynthia Wang: Because we’re always saying you have to manage, and you get so much public feedback. You still have to pick a course eventually.

Audrey Tang: What we did is that we held monthly, and later on bimonthly, MoeDict hackathons, where we invite the people of all these different schools to come together. Also, because it’s software, so I wrote some programs that automatically turned the Taiwan romanization form to Tongyong or Peh oe ji or whatever form that people prefer.

Audrey Tang: We relinquished copyright, so if they want a version that doesn’t have any of those heretic presentations, they are free to do so themselves. We actively helped them to set up, what we call, forks of this.

Audrey Tang: One fork eventually got really popular called iTaigi, which allows adding new vocabulary into the dictionary, because this is a contemporary bunch, [laughs] that feels they have to add all the Pokemons or whatever to the dictionary.

Cynthia Wang: I like my Pokemon too.

Audrey Tang: The Taigi board of the Ministry of Education would take forever to add all the Pokemons as vocabulary, so they resolved the tension by simply forking the dictionary.

Audrey Tang: The possibility of working and the encouragement of a hackathon dedicated to help people fork it, resolved the tension by saying, there’s no one way to do it, but we can figure out how all the possible ways collaborate.

Cynthia Wang: It’s almost like everybody gets a choice, in a sense.

Audrey Tang: Exactly.

Cynthia Wang: Very interesting. We talk about the short term and long term goals in a negotiation. How have you managed those, because they aren’t always the same thing?

Audrey Tang: That’s right. We always strive for forkability. Meaning that, if any of the project leaders move on to do other things…Yeh Ping is a pretty busy person. He has quantum mechanics, or whatever, to take care of. I would later on getting sidetracked by joining the cabinet.

Audrey Tang: Not many people stay full time. We meticulously document it, each step of how we built our, not just the data pipeline, the technical part, but also the social part, with articles, presentations, and so on. People who join later on can pick up where we left off. That is the most important.

Audrey Tang: While we focus on the short term benefits, by meticulously documenting it, we’re also taking care of the long term reproducibility.

Cynthia Wang: Thank you.

Cynthia Wang: In our final section, we’re just going to talk a little bit more about your emotions and also the names and memories of these movements. One thing I want to do before I get into that is understanding if you’ve ever had an experience where you’ve been a little less successful.

Cynthia Wang: You’ve been talking about these successful movements, what you’ve done. What have you done that and a less successful experience that maybe you wish would’ve done differently?

Audrey Tang: In terms of the MoeDict movement, at the time, people were clamoring to pass a law that will coerce, will force the Minister of Education to use a truly open license. Still to this day, they use a license Creative Commons non derivative, meaning that you’re free to reuse the dictionary, but you’re not free to change the definition.

Audrey Tang: If it says that rain is two strokes, you cannot change it to say rain is three strokes.

Cynthia Wang: That’s a new language.

Audrey Tang: They have their reasons. The orthography is a good reason. On the other hand, it caused many difficulties, with not just Apple. Apple would eventually switch to the WuNan dictionary because of that licensing requirement. Also Pleco and many other language learning tools.

Audrey Tang: Later on, the MOE relaxed a little bit, saying, stylistic changes and also omitting some fields is fine, as long as you don’t change the stroke number and order, definition, which makes it OK for Pleco many of our uses.

Audrey Tang: Around the time there’s always a function within the g0v (gov-zero) open data movement that says the government should simply pass a law, so that it becomes illegal for the Ministry of Education to not use the fully permissive license, so at least attribution share like, but preferably attribution or CC Zero.

Audrey Tang: That movement didn’t at the time go anywhere, perhaps because the Ministry of Education would really feel if there’s a forked dictionary that still says the source comes from the MOE, the MOE would take all the blame while the forks gained all the credit. This is not a good calculus for the MOE.

Audrey Tang: The MOE would appeal to the national development council at the time in charge of open data. The NDC didn’t end up passing the required open data law.

Cynthia Wang: Do you think you would have done anything differently?

Audrey Tang: No, I’m in charge of this now.

Cynthia Wang: I know, right?

Audrey Tang: Starting last year. No, I think we do need a law for data altruism. Better than the current European notion of data altruism section in the data governance act. Because the European version is entirely voluntary. If the MOE or anyone don’t want a data altruism batch, they simply don’t participate. It’s entirely voluntary.

Audrey Tang: The EU is now considering a not so voluntary law, the Data Act, based on the experience during the pandemic. Because during the pandemic there were many useful data that if you just prepare the privacy enhancing technology, so it can be reused and formed that is zero knowledge, meaning it cannot be re identifiable to the personal information.

Audrey Tang: It’s going to be very useful by saying, “Oh, this place is overcrowded,” and things like that. Because they did not have a legal framework for it, they don’t get to use that data. Of course, Taiwan on the other side, we didn’t have a legal framework to protect the user.

Audrey Tang: It got used a lot. Something imbalance that says, only probably zero knowledge reuse of such data for the public good is allowed. If that is clearly a public good, then maybe there’s compensation where you cannot refuse to participate in data altruism arrangements. Now data in the computing authority for it and we’re going that direction.

Cynthia Wang: Maybe we’ll see that in a couple of years.

Audrey Tang: Maybe we’ll see that. It requires a independent data protection authority, which is another movement altogether.

Cynthia Wang: We could have a whole other interview for that.

Audrey Tang: Yes.

Cynthia Wang: Our final questions are related to some of the emotions that you have, maybe. We’ve talked to some activists that are more even keel, some are more emotional. Also, within social movements, you often feel both positive emotions and negative emotions.

Cynthia Wang: First, I’m curious what positive and negative emotions you felt. Second, how have you managed these emotions?

Audrey Tang: Because of my heart condition, I cannot feel upset.

Cynthia Wang: It’s a necessity?

Audrey Tang: It’s a necessity, there was a faint. The milder emotions that I feel. When people from, I think it was Penghu or Kinmen children who wrote me email and also on the Google Play and App Store comments because they did not have dedicated teachers for Taigi or other low resource languages.

Audrey Tang: The dictionary was the only way that they can interactively learn such languages. They thank us for help. I think that’s truly heartwarming. I used to get a lot of such emails from teachers and also autodidacts, people who were not part of the school system and therefore rely on those open resources to teach themselves as I once used to.

Audrey Tang: These I would say contribute to the sense of shared enjoyment and it’s a very positive emotion.

Cynthia Wang: What do you do when somebody comes with very angry or negative emotions?

Audrey Tang: I am like, “How can I help?” Because as I mentioned, there’s no scarcity. If they feel wronged because their culture is being treated not according to their will, then I usually just say, “How can we do better? How can we help you to do better?”

Audrey Tang: There’s no limit of how many languages can we take care of. We should take care of all languages, including artificial ones. Then I never say no, and by always taking on the sides and always empowering people closest to the pain. It was easier than to turn those negative emotions into something co-creative.

Cynthia Wang: I like that. The final questions are related to the names and memories of these movements. You’ve talked a little bit about…

Audrey Tang: About Yeh Ping, Casey Wu, and many people.

Cynthia Wang: Yeah, and also the names of these movements. The ones that struck me when I was in the US, was here we see things like the sunflower movement, lily or strawberry, many wild what can we say?

Tyng-Ruey Chuang: Brand?

Cynthia Wang: Produce, [laughs] and flowers. In the US it’s very more literally being Black Lives Matter, me too. I’m curious how you think these names have influenced any type of negotiations, even within your own movements that you’ve been part of.

Cynthia Wang: Also to your point, you were talking about calligraphy and making things through art. How does that influence movements?

Audrey Tang: I think in Taiwan, we’re all very transcultural, in the sense that, inter sectionally we have parts of us that has privilege and parts of us that doesn’t. Even in different regions in Taiwan also, because Taiwan started as a multi layer transcultural forced co-existence community.

Audrey Tang: The ideas of communicating through shared experience rather than identity is part and parcel of Taiwanese social movement. Because if I say I identify as a user of this language, I speak Chinese, I’m in Taipei so I belong to Chinese Taipei. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: That’s going to be so exclusionary. A vast majority, people will just frown as you just did by hearing this identity movement. You can replicate it with any other identity altering by any activist.

Audrey Tang: Instead of saying I identify as this or that, I will simply say I had this experience and that experience. It’s the same for example, in pre and post gender. I don’t say that when I was 12, I identify as a boy, or when I was 25, I identify as a woman.

Audrey Tang: I would say, I had a male puberty, I had another female puberty. I had this experience, I had that experience. Because by saying so, we build common experience, no matter who you are.

Audrey Tang: If I said I identify as this, implicitly said, I identify as not that, so the hashtags you mentioned on the US has these delineating aspect, which we already learned that it’s not very useful in Taiwan.

Cynthia Wang: Draws lines. Very interesting. Do you keep any, it might be digital artifacts or any physical artifacts, to think about and keep these memories of the events?

Audrey Tang: You mean NFTs?

Cynthia Wang: Yeah, maybe NFTs.

Audrey Tang: Domain names, I still keep many domain names that was used around those times.

Cynthia Wang: You do?

Audrey Tang: For example, g0v.io, … Domain names for us is these simple non fungible tokens of memory.

Cynthia Wang: Do you also?

Tyng-Ruey Chuang: Yeah, I have some.

Cynthia Wang: You have some also.

Tyng-Ruey Chuang: I have one dedicated to my wife.

Audrey Tang: That’s great.

Cynthia Wang: That’s wonderful.

Audrey Tang: We have to keep paying monthly for it.

Cynthia Wang: It’s a tribute.

Cynthia Wang: The last question we have is, what are your thoughts about preserving and keeping alive the memories of these events for future generations, as you continue to pass that down these? What the society has done and what these movements have done?

Audrey Tang: There’s the technical aspect, which I worked with Tyng-Ruey on, just to ensure that those technical artifacts keeps running [laughs] when the operating systems are long gone. Digital preservation, it’s a technical problem that can be solved in a technical way.

Audrey Tang: Socially speaking, it’s important to continue this exercise of empowering even more people closest to the pain, because while at the beginning of g0v movement, we said that we are fully center, we’re decentralized, truth is that the participation is directly proportional to the physical distance you have to the National Academy.

Audrey Tang: If you’re in Nangang, you participate all the time…

Audrey Tang: If you’re in Tainan, maybe not as much. To extend from this Nangang-based movement, [laughs] we need to think about, as I mentioned, the solidarities with low resource languages all around the world, their cultures all around the world, which is why a lot of our work is just to present a gist of what happened in g0v in accessible English.

Audrey Tang: Which, of course, has its drawbacks, because the readers without this full immersion in Taiwanese cultures, sometimes see it as a fairytale. We cannot replicate here, it’s too confrontational here.

Audrey Tang: There is individual struggles as uncovered by, I’m sure, your research and many other research, that does carry a set of commensurability to other jurisdictions, to empower more people across the different cultures.

Cynthia Wang: Very interesting.

Cynthia Wang: Do you have any more questions?

Tyng-Ruey Chuang: No.

Cynthia Wang: You’re good?

Tyng-Ruey Chuang: Good.

Audrey Tang: You can get the same answer from interviewing Tyng-Ruey…

Cynthia Wang: I said I needed to interview, but it’s improper for a co-author to also be an interviewee.

Audrey Tang: We’ve still got 15 minutes, so if you have any unstructured questions, fire away.

Cynthia Wang: In general, I’m very interested in the memories. I’m also, just because you’ve been on the international stage, curious about what you think is different between the US and Taiwan, the strategies in negotiations, because I’m looking at the LGBTQ movement, and I want to interview people here and do cross cultural interviews in the US.

Cynthia Wang: I want to compare the strategies, but I’m curious if you have any insight into things like that.

Audrey Tang: The difference?

Cynthia Wang: Yeah.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, we have a working personal tax filing system… [laughs]

Cynthia Wang: What do you mean by that?

Audrey Tang: …the Taiwanese personal tax filing system, was a co-creation with civil society petitioners, back in 2017. The old interface was really bad. Petitioners, including 卓志遠 and many other people, helped redesign it. Now we can just finish it within a couple of minutes on the phone.

Audrey Tang: This is in stark contrast with the US, which has signed a pact or something, with TurboTax and other private sector companies, to never develop a tax filing software in the commons for people to easily use. By seeding the civic requirements and the state capacity to satisfy the requirements entirely to the private sector in the name of public/private partnership.

Audrey Tang: When new technologies come that could actually simplify the process, there is no easy way for the state to simply say, “Oh, now the civic society can take care more of these things.”

Audrey Tang: The private sector should adhere to the new norms, as we’ve just shown by the MoeDict thing, which is, essentially, the Minister of Education telling the private sectors, “Now, you’ll listen to whatever our people have said.” A similar dynamic’s much harder to occur in the US.

Audrey Tang: As a result of that, there is a gap between people who know a lot about technologies, especially advanced, transformative technologies, like AI, and so on, and the people who care deeply about empowering marginalized groups, LGBTQ, and many other communities. These people, who are natural allies, don’t see themselves as such.

Audrey Tang: Whereas, in Taiwan, we can easily point at the MOE dictionary, the text filing system, and things like that, and say it’s natural for these people to work together. Technology, of course, should impart democracy. That sentence, that utterance, much harder to make in the US.

Audrey Tang: In the US, think about decontextualized anti-social social media that builds addiction and polarization. Think about controlling authoritarian use in surveillance capitalism, and so on. Then the big tech, it doesn’t carry the same notion in Taiwan. They can’t co-prosper with the marginalized communities, especially not in the last few years.

Cynthia Wang: Very interesting. Do you have any other questions?

Tyng-Ruey Chuang: No, that’s it.

Cynthia Wang: We’re going to stop recording for now.