Audrey Tang: Would you like me to go through the question sequentially?

Maaike Okano-Heijmans: Not particularly, no. The thing is I’m working on a project now on EU digital connectivity, which is why there’s the emphasis on the foreign policy element. I wasn’t quite sure to what extent that is also your domain, where you’re giving input.

Audrey Tang: It’s my hobby. I wouldn’t say it’s my domain.

Maaike Okano-Heijmans: Oh, it’s your hobby. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: I’m doing this for fun. [laughs]

Maaike Okano-Heijmans: This has to be in the notes then also, right?

Audrey Tang: “If the minister is not enjoying it, don’t push them too hard.”

Maaike Okano-Heijmans: Excellent. No, the order obviously doesn’t matter.

Audrey Tang: From your outline, I would first say that it’s not about figuring out how to copy g0v. Every place has its own social solidarity movement. In Netherlands, when I visited, I’m very interested in how everybody is using a very matter-of-the-fact cost-benefit analysis trade negotiation way, even the laypeople for social issues.

Audrey Tang: That is a great civil society, the social sector that has a common language as the economic sector. Basically, even the activists that I meet use economic sector language, which is interesting from our perspective. It also facilitates a common language in your activities. The importance is to build a shared value using common language.

Audrey Tang: Whether that common language is like g0v, which is mostly about memetic engineering, about something that’s very funny, that’s very humorous, that catches people’s imagination, that promotes action, whether it needs to be that, I don’t think so. As long as there’s a shared cultural language for cross-sectoral collaboration, that’s good.

Maaike Okano-Heijmans: In most countries, government officials are not on top of things as compared especially to activists on digital issues, which makes your position so particular, that you are actually assisting government, which then has much bigger reach than many other social movement that you could think of.

Audrey Tang: That’s what g0v means. It’s a meme that you can change a O to a zero. Then you can get into the people’s imagination of the government. It’s not particular to Taiwan. If you go to g0v.it, you see the Italian imagination. Of course, they had very similar social movements before. You see the same in Madrid, in Spain, and so on.

Audrey Tang: Every place in Europe has in its grassroots the same solidarity component that enables Taiwan to have such a civic sector. The only difference is that we are, after the occupy of the Parliament, purposefully saying that we cannot beat the social sector, so we just join the social sector.

Audrey Tang: It’s the public sector ceding its diplomacy to the social sector. That’s where we see a lot of European. Maybe the exception is Iceland, where the Best Party used to run the Reykjavík government. That’s very similar to what we’re doing. In the European continent, it’s less usual.

Maaike Okano-Heijmans: Many democracies in Europe are struggling, obviously. This is also why your experiment, although I shouldn’t call it experiment because it’s already…

Audrey Tang: It is a experiment. As I said, humor over rumor. It’s because rumor is very powerful now with the emotion of outrage. Even Netherlands is not totally immune to the outrage of divisiveness in the society, either across ethnicities or across generations, across age.

Audrey Tang: A lot of my work is to make sure that people can laugh about whatever I do. Whether it’s using a electric rice cooker to revitalize a mask or something, I make sure that within 30 minutes people laughed about it.

Audrey Tang: Once people laughed about it, people can then discuss things in a very rational, participatory fashion because they’ve already used up the psychic energy that could be channeled to outrage even if we do not have a comedic relief.

Maaike Okano-Heijmans: So interesting. How about this point of digital human rights? I would love to hear your thoughts on that.

Audrey Tang: In the digital age, a lot of it is what Isaiah Berlin said negative liberty. Freedom from something, not freedom to something only. We all understand Internet is built for a pandemic or for a global war. It’s designed to be resilient. That’s what Internet is for.

Audrey Tang: We know Internet is good for access, for connectivity, for a multi-stakeholder conversation because that’s in the DNA of the Internet. That’s what inter means in the Internet. On the other hand, Internet also facilitate many things, such as censorship, such as passive surveillance, such as a lot of encroachment of human right that isn’t the default in the physical space.

Audrey Tang: I think a lot of what my take on the digital right is the negative liberties, that is to say, freedom from surveillance, freedom from censorship, freedom from coercion, because without good design, these are the default that comes with the Internet occupations.

Maaike Okano-Heijmans: How do you see that, the impact of other people, other countries doing different on foreign spaces, is I think increasing in this digital age, right? That’s what I meant with national sovereignty in the digital age, and how this is changing with your particular…

Audrey Tang: You’re asking a conservative anarchist what’s sovereignty.

Maaike Okano-Heijmans: [laughs]

Audrey Tang: It’s a little bit oxymoronic. [laughs]

Maaike Okano-Heijmans: I should, therefore, all the more ask you, right?

Audrey Tang: Right, of course. I don’t think states are particularly useful illusions. It’s somewhat useful, I guess, if it’s only human beings that travels, but carbon dioxides and virus now also travels, and the state boundary isn’t very useful an obstruction to prevent either CO2 or the coronavirus from traveling.

Audrey Tang: I think it’s a useful illusion that we use it when it’s useful, but when it cease to be useful, we shouldn’t keep using the same metaphors because frankly, virus and CO2 doesn’t negotiate on human terms.

Maaike Okano-Heijmans: You’re talking to somebody in the Netherlands. We have been willing, more than some other regions, of course, in Europe, to give up some of that sovereignty, so I think you’re talking to a sensible person in this sense.

Audrey Tang: To the right head. [laughs]

Maaike Okano-Heijmans: You live in a part of the world where national borders are still much more important, and where there’s countries emphasizing that others cannot say anything about what’s happening within their national borders, and then they are bearing the consequences.

Maaike Okano-Heijmans: I’ve heard people say that you should bring China to account for all that’s happened with this coronavirus, and I don’t think that’s going to be in any way feasible.

Audrey Tang: First, they’ll have to have journalists to bring them to account. If you don’t have journalists, I’m not sure who holds who to account. If there is no freedom of the press or even freedom of speech, all the traditional accountability measures just falls down.

Audrey Tang: I think without journalism, even the people who are in the so-called ruling party’s higher echelon doesn’t really know what’s going on because simply there is no transmission of facts and the fact-checking apparatus, that is journalism.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, that’s why we always say we counter disinformation, but we never say the word fake news because we don’t want to alienate journalists. On the other hand, we want to democratize journalism so that everybody can become a journalist.

Maaike Okano-Heijmans: Still, within a certain country, you can never hold people accountable, but the question is, are we going to have a discussion?

Maaike Okano-Heijmans: In Europe, for example, because of the coronavirus, governments are now reconsidering industrial policy because we’ve become so entangled with a country that, on a certain policy, is now impacting us in a way that we have never imagined it could.

Audrey Tang: That’s right. People, they talk. [laughs]

Maaike Okano-Heijmans: This talking has to do with this lack of freedom of speech, or lack of digital human rights. Do you think that in Taiwan, people are…

Audrey Tang: It’s a large debate. That’s exactly why we occupied the Parliament. That’s exactly the debate we had in 2014, except it’s about 4G, not 5G, but otherwise, it’s the same debate. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: The debate came out very forcefully, that we do not want PRC components in our 4G infrastructure, that we do not think that there is a difference between market player and state players from the PRC.

Audrey Tang: It’s not a cultural antagonism. It’s a very matter-of-fact assessments by people who’d conduct business with the PRC. That’s even before they start taking over private sector leadership from the parties, but that’s also around the time that they start embedding CCP chapters within all the major enterprises.

Audrey Tang: It’s crowd intelligence, I guess, when we deliberated with half a million people on the street, and many more online. In 2014, the clear consensus is that there is no difference between market players and state players from the PRC.

Maaike Okano-Heijmans: This is actually similar. That’s an interesting comparison, actually. I never thought of that. Thank you for that. Then perhaps if I can still invite you then to talk about what you say is your hobby. Foreign policy elements…

Audrey Tang: Yeah, of course. Hacking random people online and just start chiming in on Twitter. It’s my hobby. It’s called troll hugging. I make sure that everyone who make personal attack against me and things like that, I ignore all the emotional parts and then respond only to the factual parts and demonstrating effective communication à la Habermas.

Audrey Tang: It makes sure that people understand that it’s only with sharing their authentic experience can they receive response from me. Anything that attempt to provoke me into outrage, it doesn’t work because I just have a cup of tea or whatever and associate this visual stimuli with a non-verbal positive stimuli.

Audrey Tang: If I sleep enough that day, next time I see or hear those personal insults, I just think of some very nice tea or music. Internet, for me, I guess I’m immunizing, inoculating – I think it’s inoculating – myself against the outrage part of the Internet, but it also won me many friends. Many people who attack me personally eventually start visiting me and we become good friends.

Audrey Tang: They attack our policies because they care. If they don’t care, they have a lot of time to spend elsewhere. Sometimes, they are our main contributors. If they complain about the tax filing experience being explosively hostile, we eventually invited them to design our tax filing experience, which is 98 percent approval rate now.

Audrey Tang: If people complain about the plastic straws in our bubble tea chokes sea turtles, we just invite them. 5,000 people that sign their signature. Now we ban plastic straws for takeout bubble tea and so on.

Audrey Tang: All the activists that are most toxic, if you show that you can respond within a couple hours, usually within an hour, that you really want to engage them but only on the factual parts, their authentic experiences, sometimes they become your best assistants.

Maaike Okano-Heijmans: That’s how your ministry grows big.

Audrey Tang: Exactly. It’s just by hugging the trolls, one troll at a time.

Maaike Okano-Heijmans: [laughs] I had a friend in United States. He did hugging the trees.

Maaike Okano-Heijmans: Trolls, yes. Then about the foreign policy element. I see many of the examples you give and where you come from, of course, is Taiwan domestic. That’s a huge agenda already. I wonder are you also involved in some of the foreign policy challenges that now also involve a digital element.

Audrey Tang: Yeah. A couple of things. I liaison with those – I don’t know how to call them – semi-sovereign political entities, and doing, I guess, semi-diplomacy on issues such as political advertisement transparency or on counter-disinformation and things like that.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, we have three members of the Executive Yuan of the cabinet. We have Minister Lo in charge of the law part, Kolas Yotaka, our spokesperson, in charge of the mimetic response and the very funny memes that all the ministries are now very equipped to do on social media.

Audrey Tang: I’m more in charge of liaison with the semi-sovereign entities, the global platforms, to make sure that our social norm is their social norm when they’re operating within Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: For example, we have a separate branch of the government called the control branch that publishes all the campaign expense and donations in raw data form, open data for everybody to use.

Audrey Tang: Facebook, while they resist in some other jurisdictions the publishing of the fine-grain details, what they call advertisements during election, in Taiwan, we say, “You know what? This is the norm. If you don’t do this, you face social sanction. It’s not a law punishing you. It’s people refusing to buy your advertisements.”

Audrey Tang: It actually works. Facebook publishes down to, I think, every minute political advertisements, and so people don’t do microtargeting or some other dark operations on Facebook during our previous election because of this. There’s many other examples. This is just one, and I think it’s somewhat diplomatic.

Maaike Okano-Heijmans: I think all these GAFAs, the platform companies, they have a bigger GDP than some countries.

Audrey Tang: Some of them are even issuing their currencies, I don’t know how successful.

Maaike Okano-Heijmans: Yes, indeed. What other examples would you give in the foreign policy domain?

Audrey Tang: Some of my work has to do with branding Taiwan. There is a popular hashtag called #TaiwanCanHelp. Now, of course, we also say #TaiwanIsHelping, but #TaiwanCanHelp is a new direction as far as our foreign policy goes.

Audrey Tang: Previously, in WHA, in UN, in many other points, our main idea was, “Taiwan needs help. It needs your help in supporting us engaging,” but my name card, which I’m showing you right now, is interesting because every year, we choose different SDGs. For example, this one was around life above land, circular economy. This one is about climate change, life under water, and so on.

Audrey Tang: This is literally my name card, and so it says, “Taiwan Can Help.” As you can see, this is a name card that has no sovereignty. It doesn’t say any country. It has no country name on it.

Maaike Okano-Heijmans: It has the .tw, but that’s it.

Audrey Tang: It’s a Internet domain. It’s a cyberspace domain. It is not in a physical domain, and then we didn’t specify which country it is, and even the digital minister title is in lower case, meaning that I’m just someone who preach about digital.

Maaike Okano-Heijmans: Creative… working against hierarchy.

Audrey Tang: A lower-case minister, so it just means I enjoy giving sermons about the digital transformation.

Audrey Tang: What this means is that it’s fundamentally different. It’s not even second-track. It’s a social sector-first way of doing diplomacy, is that we have social innovations. We solve some problems here very well. We solve the inter-generational problem about same-sex marriage by legalizing the by-laws, but not the in-laws.

Audrey Tang: Even in the East Asian context, we say that the same-sex couple, they wed, but their families don’t. It’s a social innovation, and it pleased both generations. That’s something we can export. Through the mask use, mask rationing, and things like that, we successfully fended off COVID, and that’s something we can export, and things like that.

Audrey Tang: It’s about each specific SDG, which contribution will have it, and we put a pelican help tag on it, and then we make small – like 30 seconds – clips, and then we make sure that they trend on social media. That’s something of my hobby. Nobody pays me to do this. It’s just what I do for fun.

Maaike Okano-Heijmans: But with that tag of digital minister?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, but lowercase.

Maaike Okano-Heijmans: It’s powerful.

Audrey Tang: I enjoy.

Maaike Okano-Heijmans: That’s why you said it’s a hobby?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, it’s a hobby.

Maaike Okano-Heijmans: Yeah, OK. Of course, we know that in the policy domains that you did not invent, because from all the examples you gave, it’s obvious that you’re inventing many new things, but this new Southbound Policy is something that the Foreign Ministry, I suppose, invented. There is a digital element to it. Are you involved in that as well, or is that too regular establishment for you?

Audrey Tang: A little bit. In Thailand, we held workshops twice, once with the PBS and once with the Chulalongkorn University. It’s an interesting format where we invite cross-sectoral people like the National Development Council, but also private sector like the companies that enable open data digital economy, and also social sector like people who developed Cofacts, the first rapid-response bot that you can forward a rumor to it and it forwards back clarifications to you.

Audrey Tang: We show how the ecosystem works. We show why the government makes sure that the social sector sets the norm, the private sector sets the incentives, and the government only holds everything accountable and transparent. The dynamic is evident only if you invite all the three sectors to the same table.

Audrey Tang: In the Chulalongkorn University, which is academic, they’re above the three sectors. They also invite our counterparts into the workshop so that we can have an apple-to-apple, orange-to-orange, and I don’t know, whatever, rice-cooker-to-rice-cooker conversation between the different cultures and to figure out, for example, if they want to adopt Cofacts, what kind of social configuration is needed.

Audrey Tang: You cannot copy g0v, as I said, but they can, for example, for pharmacies or drug-based disinformation, that’s something all their consumer organizations. It’s less political, and health is very important.

Audrey Tang: Right after we held a workshop with Chulalongkorn University, they made Cofact.org. If you click on it, there’s a Thai version of the Cofacts ecosystem but with the Thai characteristics.

Audrey Tang: That is how we make this…I wouldn’t say it’s new Southbound per se. It’s more a series of bilateral multi-stakeholder forums. It’s mini-lateral in nature and bilateral in its implementation.

Maaike Okano-Heijmans: That’s, as you say, the social sector that you’re engaging. What about foreign governments? Are you in touch with them as well? Again, the examples you gave are very much the social sector, but I’m quite sure that there’s many governments around the world who are quite jealous that the Taiwanese government has someone like you working for and with them.

Audrey Tang: Yes. When we attended the Tokyo workshop, which is, again, organized by g0v and cross-sectoral, of course, there are public servants in their cabinet office that just attended on their personal time. Of course, we had many unplanned discussions. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: As I say, it’s not second track, because we’re identifying an SDG, and we’re saying that we’re achieving that SDG down to the targets. When I, for example, give a talk around digital connectivity in Internet Governance Forum in Geneva, again, I spoke through a telepresence robot and specifically about SDG 9.c and 16. That’s the title.

Audrey Tang: Even when PRC representatives are in the same room, they did not retreat from that room. By diplomatic protocol, that means that they don’t consider me a counter-representative. They consider my robot a movie-playing device or something like that, but it’s not breaching the diplomatic protocol. That allows us to coexist.

Audrey Tang: For example, when we’re using video conferencing now, there is no difference between the membership seat and observer seat, or between the public sector seat and the social sector seat, because of diplomatic necessity.

Audrey Tang: I’m also on the board of the Digital Future Society in Barcelona. That’s the Mobile World Capital think tank, and also Consul Democracy Foundation in Amsterdam, and also RadicalxChange in New York.

Audrey Tang: In all the international settings, I can appear from the board member position of these international NGOs. That is because of necessity, as you see, but I also enjoy wearing four hats. I’m working with Taiwan and for Taiwan.

Maaike Okano-Heijmans: That’s clearly also your ambition, to contribute to your country then in other countries.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Maaike Okano-Heijmans: The question on China’s Digital Silk policy as Digital Silk Road, I still would love to have your views on that. What is it, first of all, that you can talk about for three hours or three days, but…

Audrey Tang: Of course, it’s a seminar topic. I’ve been working with the prototype of the Great Firewall since early 2000, at least. I was the international collaboration of Freenet, which is way before Tor. It’s an anti-censorship tool that was first released 2000, I think March 2000, and I was in charge of, for example, translating it to Taiwanese Mandarin, and also making sure that people who are human right activists use it the right way, and things like that.

Audrey Tang: Back then, the Great Firewall isn’t great. It’s very ridiculously easy to circumvent, but I guess it’s generated adversarial network. As we get better, they also get better, and because they invest in it a lot of budget, I think more than their defense budget, and in total, for social harmonization.

Audrey Tang: It turns out that all this experience is very helpful because it shows us how much more fragile than the advertisement turned out to be. If you work very closely with the Great Firewall, you come to understand it is actually not some great AI machine.

Audrey Tang: It is actually extremely labor-intensive. Some, I guess, incarcerated people in their prisons also contribute to the human staff resources of the commentators and moderators, and a lot of it is very human-intensive.

Audrey Tang: That’s why I think when they try to export this functionality to other more pro-authoritarian regimes, they often meet with failure because other regimes do not have the same capital or human resource investments as much as the PRC does, to maintain such a system.

Audrey Tang: This system, without this intensive human intervention, doesn’t quite work by its own. It’s not the turnkey solution, and so I’m cautiously optimistic about staving off their exporting their new norm of sovereignty within their intranet-like government system.

Maaike Okano-Heijmans: You’re optimistic about the extreme use of the data that you might be able to gather, but of course, in societies that are less developed, that perhaps also don’t have the big broadband access as China does but still depend on other elements of this, it would be ceding the potential for exporting this, or do you also not see that as a risk?

Audrey Tang: I think it’s very clear. That’s why Taiwan work with OPIC, with the Japan equivalent, JBIC or something, to build a kind of mutually certificated cyber security.

Audrey Tang: Secure, and not sending anything mistakenly to Beijing software and infrastructure stack, so that when people are choosing their infrastructures, they can rest assured that it is being mutually certified by the cyber security departments of many jurisdictions.

Audrey Tang: You don’t have to trust only Taiwan, but if Taiwan and an east, or the Japan equivalent mutually assert that we trust each other’s lab to guard against cyber security threats, then I think that’s really powerful.

Audrey Tang: A recent move by the State Department in the US, their GEC, Global Engagement Center, they ran a US-Taiwan Tech Challenge in Taipei to identify the best rapid response assistive technology against online propaganda and disinformation, and with Israeli, I think, and also Australian international participants.

Audrey Tang: The winner is Trend Micro. It’s a very popular antivirus company in Taiwan. They developed Dr. Message, a dog bot that makes sure that anybody can very easily identify even video and image disinformation on the end-to-end encrypted channels.

Audrey Tang: Just by inviting this bot to your chat room, they scan each incoming message, as antivirus does, and shows you the real-time clarifications.

Audrey Tang: Again, this is basically taking the Cofacts social sector innovation and industrializing it, and putting together the antivirus company’s resources, and developing into acute mass-applicable application that still has the same privacy guarantee of not keeping logs and things like that.

Audrey Tang: They won the GEC award, and the State Department of the US gave them a lot of R&D money.

Maaike Okano-Heijmans: That’s amazing. What was the name, you said, of the JBIC, OPIC, from Taiwan?

Audrey Tang: It’s, I think, Blue Dot or something like that.

Maaike Okano-Heijmans: The Blue Dot Network?

Audrey Tang: Yeah.

Maaike Okano-Heijmans: It’s part of that.

Audrey Tang: Yeah. It’s the Blue Dot Network. I’m not in the diplomatic level of that conversation. I’m more of just at advisory role.

Maaike Okano-Heijmans: That’s interesting. Sorry to be jumping from one topic to the other.

Audrey Tang: That’s fine.

Maaike Okano-Heijmans: I would love to discuss all of this in much, much more detail, but for now, it’s great having sort of an…

Audrey Tang: Table of content. [laughs]

Maaike Okano-Heijmans: …a bird’s eye overview, yes, about international institutions, and of course, this is difficult for Taiwan because you cannot participate in many of them…

Audrey Tang: I don’t know. I participate just fine. [laughs]

Maaike Okano-Heijmans: …because of your status. [laughs] Well, your colleagues at the ministries of foreign affairs at least.

Audrey Tang: That’s right. It’s not just me. We convinced, a couple of years ago, the minister of civil academy to relax the rule. Now, all public servants, not just me, can become board members of international NGOs, and it’s a big change.

Audrey Tang: That basically authorizes public sector officials to use second-track diplomacy, and so hopefully I’m just a pioneer, and many other will follow suit.

Maaike Okano-Heijmans: That’s an amazing new initiative, then. I didn’t realize, I have to admit. That’s valuable information also. What are the key international institutions that you think are most valuable for Taiwan in this field to be participating in?

Audrey Tang: In digital, obviously, the multi-stakeholder organizations are the one that we engage the most, the Internet Governance Forum, obviously, with the Taiwan chapter, the Open Government Partnership, obviously. To enter as a state representative, you have to pass a deliberative democracy value check.

Audrey Tang: These are the largest, I guess, hybrid organization of half multi-sectoral and the other more multilateral. There’s a multilateral component in it. For example, IGF work with the IDU, or the Open Government partnerships still work with the UN. On the other hand, it has a strong multi-sectoral multi-stakeholder feel, because half of their steering committee are civil society.

Audrey Tang: This shape is best for Taiwan because then I can sit at the civil society seat while talking to the other ministers on the multilateral seat.

Audrey Tang: Without these hybrid organizations, which admittedly are a few at the moment, we also work with many laterals. For example, the global cooperation and training framework around circular economy to you, but sustainable material management to the US people.

Audrey Tang: We have to switch friends all the time but around some of these things. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Marine debris management. I think that’s a new torture. We work concurrently with your government, and Japan, and the US, and of course, as a four-parties, to host a global training session.

Audrey Tang: Now, with the Coronavirus, we have spared air ticket fares and also spared carbon emission quota, to run many more virtual GCFs. We’ll hold many more of these minilaterals, with maybe four or five participants, each as a multilateral, but also then engage the private and the social sector through this shape. That’s again, something that we do, I think more than 10 times this year.

Maaike Okano-Heijmans: What kind of topics would you be most interested in discussing then?

Audrey Tang: Personally?

Maaike Okano-Heijmans: Maybe of the international importance rather than what people say.

Audrey Tang: I’m interested in all the SDGs. I’m very open to learn about all the 169 SDGs. In the Presidential Hackathon, we identify all the top 20 teams down to specific targets. That’s why I can say that as digital minister, I’m just working on 17-17, 17-6, and things like that.

Audrey Tang: It’s like the Dewey Decimal numbers. It’s already embedded in my head. That’s my main interest. In Taiwan, I think, this year at least, we’re probably focusing on SDG 3, that’s health and well being, for obvious reasons.

Maaike Okano-Heijmans: You pick the topic based on this SDG and then you have hackathon identifying targets you say?

Audrey Tang: Yeah. For example around SDG 3, we’re going to launch very soon CoHack, which is a short for Coronavirus Hackathon. We think CoHack is easier to remember and also easier to spread to people who already know CoFact. As you can see, it’s a series.

Audrey Tang: Anyway, CoHack is a collaborative hackathon around the coronavirus, that we ask everybody in the world, what are the most pressing problems that they think digital can help, and then identify the top three or so issues based on Polis, a real-time visualization tool.

Audrey Tang: The National Computing Center donates for free all the computation power and connectivity to basically anyone who want to contribute, need to contribute their source code and their open source license. Our National Computing Center hosts that application for free so that people can fork and improve on those technologies.

Audrey Tang: We also have a regulatory impact assessment team, to make sure that it fits our constitution. We don’t need emergency powers to use those ideas and things like that, because we’re still under normal law. Now, we don’t have an emergency situation here.

Maaike Okano-Heijmans: He’s already declared it yet? I didn’t check, but he was supposed to in Japan.

Audrey Tang: That’s right. That’s right. In Taiwan, we’re still in normal law, and we expect to remain normal law for quite some time. While other countries’ components may contain things that only work with a legal piece of basis, under emergency situations, it has to work with everyday law in Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: That’s why we have regulatory impact assessments seen to put a green light, yellow light, and red light on each of those incoming ideas and so on.

Audrey Tang: That’s CoHack. We do international hackathons. We also do bilateral engagements.

Maaike Okano-Heijmans: Wow. That’s amazing. While it’s coming up soon, can an outsider see some of that? Sorry, I’m a real…

Audrey Tang: We’re still working on it. I think it’s to be announced in a week from now or something like that. Because it’s prototype, it’s basically a faster-paced presidential hackathon. If you just look at a presidential hackathon, you can see where we’re coming from. You can see all the 17 SDGs right here.

Maaike Okano-Heijmans: I’ll have a look at them there. Thanks for sharing that.

Maaike Okano-Heijmans: I realize that you have to go elsewhere soon. I don’t want to be keeping you. I understand also you’re going to be speaking in another public European forum, of course, at the University of Copenhagen.

Maaike Okano-Heijmans: The final question that I had in the list is to what extend are you familiar with the EU European approach. I suppose that’s really not of your main interest. From what you know, what strikes you as what are we doing well? Where could we do much better?

Audrey Tang: Connectivity, attention to accessibility and inclusion is great. It used to be that Taiwan talks about digital developments. We center on innovation and governance without considering inclusion. I personally put inclusion in as important as innovation back in 2016. That is a very European thing as well.

Audrey Tang: If we don’t do inclusion, then artificial intelligence becomes a nightmare for social equality. I personally rebrand that to assistive intelligence to make sure that it always assist what the society wants instead of just disrupting the social norms.

Maaike Okano-Heijmans: Sorry. What intelligence?

Audrey Tang: Assistive intelligence. I never say artificial intelligence. I just say assistive intelligence. I refuse to say artificial intelligence. Again, it’s a hack. It’s a linguistic hack. We do that all the time. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: In any case, what I’m trying to say is that inclusion and assistive intelligence – what used to be called appropriate technology but nobody use that word now – is very important. That is sometimes missing from the digital connectivity narratives or white papers. Sometimes because people take it for granted.

Audrey Tang: If you’re in Canada, that’s for granted, you don’t have to mention it. In Europe, I’m not sure that’s uniformly the case. Maybe it is still important to emphasizing inlusion alongside innovation.

Audrey Tang: Our digital development roadmap, we call it DIGI+, D-I-G-I. It stands for development, innovation, governance, and inclusion. They’re equally important. They’re the four pillars. We think with only the first three pillars, things fall very quickly.

Maaike Okano-Heijmans: I’ve been in a debate with Japanese officials. The interesting thing is even the ‘human centered’ and ‘human centric’, the difference between them. The Japanese made a really big point out of this. Some of the European representatives were talking human-centric. The Japanese were very meticulous saying, “No, this should be human-centered…

Audrey Tang: That’s right. When you’re typing, your cursor is centered, but it’s not centric to the words that you type. I understand it’s a very nuanced point, but there is a point here. The point is that we’re making not just user experience but human experience.

Audrey Tang: Human experience represent not only the human who are of voting age but actually human who are just born or not born yet. They, although they don’t have voting rights, are the main stakeholders of the digital transformation.

Maaike Okano-Heijmans: Thank you so much. That’s a powerful way to close the chat, I think. Well, as I told your colleague, Joel, when he was bringing the phone to you, next time when you do visit the Netherlands, also consider The Hague, not just Groningen, which is far off, close to Germany. Also a beautiful place, but The Hague is also nice.

Audrey Tang: I was at The Hague.

Maaike Okano-Heijmans: I’d love to have you there for further conversation.

Audrey Tang: Of course. Thank you.

Maaike Okano-Heijmans: Thank you. Bye.