Audrey Tang: Let’s get started then.

Pascal Gauthier: Very nice of you to take the time Audrey, we really appreciate it. For this meeting, actually I asked Joachim to set it up. It came from something that I saw of you on French television, they were presenting you as a Minister in Taiwan and you start some technology and how you went to public sector.

Pascal Gauthier: I was very intrigued and also I know that you have an engineer background and you’ve been very involved into free software communities. I was super excited to meet with you, I asked around, everyone around me who knew you and who could make an introduction.

Pascal Gauthier: Really the purpose of this call for me, is to…first, maybe, we’ll tell you a little bit about Ledger and what we do, to give you context of what we think about these topics.

Pascal Gauthier: The topic of this meeting, for me, is to understand your view on Web3 blockchain technologies, and the impact that it’s going to have on public lives, and whether you feel that it is a technology for making public lives more transparent in the future. If so, what do you see as the prime applications, like when do you see is the future and what do you see as prime applications?

Pascal Gauthier: That’s to frame the meeting.

Audrey Tang: To clarify, is it OK if I make a transcript of our conversation, and after all of you edit it for ten days, and then we publish? Not a distributed ledger, but on GitHub, which is also a ledger, and say it’s in Creative Commons, as your license, if that’s OK with you.

Pascal Gauthier: Perfectly OK.

Audrey Tang: All right. Then, let’s get started. Yes.

Pascal Gauthier: I will give you a little tour of who’s on the call on our side. Here is Joachim. Introduce, Joachim.

Joachim Son Forget: Hello, everyone.

Audrey Tang: Hi.

Pascal Gauthier: We’ll give you a little tour on who’s on the call on our side from Ledger. I’ll start with a quick introduction of myself. I’m Pascal Gauthier. I’m the CEO at Ledger, and I’ve been in tech all my life, but Ledger is by far my wildest adventure. In a nutshell, Ledger is a security company in blockchain technologies. We do something that’s called a hardware wallet.

Pascal Gauthier: The hardware wallet helps to secure your private keys and we have a software companion that comes with the hardware wallet that help you use your private keys. Our vision is that blockchain technologies or…there’s something that’s coming to the world that we call critical digital assets.

Pascal Gauthier: Those unique assets online that are dear to you, and it started with Bitcoin, has been supplied instead of everything that runs on the blockchain. We believe that they need security and ease of use, if they want to become mainstream and method object. I’ll shut up. I’ll give it to Ian, and then Jean.

Ian Rogers: Hey, Audrey. Great to meet you. Ian Rogers. At some point when we have more time, maybe we can talk about the history of Perl and Larry Wall. That was my weapon of choice in the early to mid ‘90s. I studied computer science in the early ‘90s. I dropped out of grad school in 1995 to go on tour with Beastie Boys, and then I just did digital music for 20 years.

Ian Rogers: We had an MP3 player in the late ‘90s called Winamp. I ran Yahoo! Music for a period of time, did Beats Music, and then Apple Music. Then, came here to France to look after digital for LVMH in Arnault family, which is when I met Pascal. Over a lot of years, through a friendship with Pascal, l went down the rabbit hole, on crypto generally, but specifically on Ledger.

Ian Rogers: Realizing that to believe in Ledger, you only need to believe that we will have digital assets, and that security will be a key concern within that ecosystem. Hard not to believe those two things, and so when I had the opportunity to throw my lot in with Pascal and the team, I did. I’ve been here for a year now, looking after the consumer business for Pascal and Ledger.

Jean Michel Pailhon: Hello. Jean Michel Pailhon. I am Chief of Staff of to the CEO of Ledger. I’ve been in Ledger for five years now. Actually, I’m a former traditional finance guy, because I spent 15 years in some price finance at the New York Stock Exchange and Euronext, two exchanges. I jumped into the decentralized world six years ago, full time.

Jean Michel Pailhon: Obviously, everything we’re getting, NFTs and GIOs, all my bread and butter of those days, and my passion of life. Ledger is my work. I like what I do, because I see that we can probably drive the change from within. That’s all about myself. Thank you.

Joachim Son Forget: Hello. I’m Joachim. I’m honored, minister, that you give us your time. It was a dream for Pascal and me to meet you, to have this moment together. We are honored, blessed. I’m Joachim Son Forget. I was adopted from Korea when I was a baby. I have several citizenships. I’m French, I’m Swiss and I have also citizenship from Kosovo, where I did work a lot.

Joachim Son Forget: My background is a medical doctor. I’m a radiologist. I’m specialized in brain MRI. I also did cognitive science. I was working during my PhD about consciousness. Consciousness work reading and how the brain integrates the different perceptions to create the body image, the body representation.

Joachim Son Forget: I drifted very far away from that to politics. It is now five years, almost five years, I’m elected as an MP. I represent the French expats that are living in Switzerland. We have a lot of French expats in this area. Actually my concern is not about my expats, because my expats live greatly.

Joachim Son Forget: My concern and where I need your insights of all, is about the…We had some protest movements like yellow vests, so called yellow vests in the streets.

Joachim Son Forget: Even though they didn’t express sometimes rationally what they need, it seems that we are in a very big turn where we need to move on from the previous models that were used in the old democracies towards something else.

Joachim Son Forget: This is something else we discussed with Pascal the new way of governance that could be coming from Davos, that could be coming from the blockchain itself. Even if Pioneer work with blockchain was to make money to create currencies, I think it’s not the end of the world.

Joachim Son Forget: The next step would be this upcoming Web 3.0, where we would have some power state companies that could impose to the states to…The citizens could use that to impose to their executive to govern differently, to make consultation, referendum and so on.

Joachim Son Forget: We do have a little bit in Switzerland, but they’re very centralized and top down model to be probably updated. I guess, we have something that we know all of us, but that the rest of the people should start to understand. It should be vulgarized. They should get further. Yeah. I’ll stop here for now, and I’m happy to hear your opinion.

Audrey Tang: Really happy to meet you all. I’m Audrey Tang, digital minister in charge of social innovation. I’m working with the government really not for the government and with the citizens, not for the citizens. A lot of our work in Taiwan is precisely to build what I call public digital infrastructures.

Audrey Tang: The fabric that allows the cross sectoral, co creation to happen. That’s by and large how we counter the pandemic with no lockdowns through the mask availability network. Through the contact tracing tool that’s co invented by the civil liberties group and things like that.

Audrey Tang: They shortened the contact tracing from 24 hours to less than 24 minutes without sacrificing privacy. We learned a lot of those techniques. Multi party computation and also related PETs, like zero knowledge proofs, federated learning, homomorphic encryption and so on.

Audrey Tang: With the blockchain community, I also serve as a fellow board member with Vitalik Buterin RadicalxChange, which is exactly about popularizing the co governance that started from the Internet governance community, but amplified with modern cryptography and Web3 vision.

Audrey Tang: Also apply those new idea like quadratic voting and so on, in Taiwan’s presidential hackathon, the president culture awards and many other newer democratic institutions with the call to increase the bandwidth of democracy and reduce its latency.

Pascal Gauthier: That’s super impressive. In terms of you listed a bunch of technologies that were inspired by blockchain technologies such as MP3, Zero technology and so on.

Pascal Gauthier: In your recent experience, have you used a subset of technology to run all the projects that you just listed or you directly used public blockchain and the token in the work that you’ve done?

Audrey Tang: Well, the thing is that, for example, the multi party computation. This is not my design. They are exactly the designs of g0v, or G zero V. The group of people who look at something that gov.tw, our public digital service by the state, and make forks of these services at something that g0v.tw said.

Audrey Tang: They’re like a shadow government that always try to improve for the better. The idea is that is always in open source and Creative Common licenses. Anytime the state feel that the legitimacy is being threatened from the social sector side, then we can simply merge that into the mainline, so to speak, by saying these g0v designs, are now sponsored by the state.

Audrey Tang: I call this the reverse procurement because the state become like a vendor of a decentralized community. For example, the contact tracing tool was a prime design, the states design was pen and paper. Of course, that’s insufficient, because of the variants.

Audrey Tang: The civil society came up with the design of, basically, the venue owner knows what 15 entirely random digits correspond to that venue, and they post this QR code, that anyone without downloading an app, scan it with their building camera triggers an SMS that’s sent to 1922, a shortcode for the central epidemic command center.

Audrey Tang: It’s not stored in any aggregated fashion in any state agency, but rather within those telecom carriers, which already knows the telephone number anyway.

Audrey Tang: For the citizen, is simply point an incentive, there’s no typing involved, and the venue knows nothing about the phone or any contact detail whatsoever of their patrons, but a patron’s telecom provider knows nothing about how those code maps to the venue.

Audrey Tang: In a classical, federated, and multi party way, is like the multi signature. The contact tracer would need the consent of all the players involved, in order to piece together this whereabouts for contact tracing.

Audrey Tang: When, for example, the police wiretapped part of that communication records, they couldn’t actually discover what those venues were, and they filed a search warrant, one of the police filed a search warrant, which was turned down.

Audrey Tang: Then, we got the interpretation that says, because the design is not from the state, it’s from the citizens. We already said in each SMS, “This must be for pandemic control use only.” It has a specific purpose. We explicitly swear if the telecom provider do not provide such SMS records to the wiretappers, that’s actually illegal and as intended by the original designers.

Audrey Tang: This is a social norm that’s developed in the decentralized community, which we amplified, but do not control as a state, and the private sector simply implement that. I call this a people public private partnership. That’s one of the example but there are many.

Pascal Gauthier: I think that’s incredibly interesting, that relationship between public private, and, I don’t know, I guess, open…

Audrey Tang: I call it the social sector, like the people.

Pascal Gauthier: Is there any relationship at all between g0v and the government?

Audrey Tang: Well, I’m part of g0v first, and then part of the government’s. There’s many public servants that also work in g0v as well.

Audrey Tang: The beauty of g0v is that, because it’s modeled after Internet governance, so as long as we declare where we’re coming from, we do have the architects of pretty much all the leading contact tracing related companies joining as stakeholders in the g0v Slack channel, like around 10,000 different people in constant conversation.

Audrey Tang: Basically, g0v is not a register organization, is more like the special interest groups and working groups that can branch off at any given point on any particular government digital service. It’s a more classical Internet, multistakeholder community configuration. There’s many public servants within those channels.

Ian Rogers: I have a ton of questions. I have more questions than we have time for. My question is, what would you, if you’re looking at other countries, what’s the transferable lesson?

Ian Rogers: That’s obviously a longer conversation, but I think that there must be something special about the people you’re describing, the position of Taiwan, and the global landscape, etc., that makes it suited for this, and I’m wondering what of it is transferable.

Audrey Tang: There’s two designs that I believe are broadly applicable, the first, to trust our citizens. In each and every ministry, there’s a team that we call participation officers, that are explicitly designed as part of their job to engage the public on such multistakeholder forums, and they support each other.

Audrey Tang: When we talk about truly interagency issues every month, we convene an interagency meeting like today, we just convened one and choose two topics per month to have true multistakeholder conversations.

Audrey Tang: It both regularizes these engagements and also make sure that its citizens see those participation officers on their side. We intentionally designed, so that when we co create, for example, the tax service in 2017, the breakout groups were facilitated, say, by the coastal guard participation officer.

Audrey Tang: When we talk about the ocean affairs, maybe it’s facilitated by presentation officer in the tax agency or something like that, deliberatively, outside of their own silo.

Audrey Tang: Of course, the coastal guard also have to file their own tax, and tax agency person also serves or is an amateur official. It means that when they facilitate such discussions, they automatically take the citizen side and also represent not the constituents, because they don’t have constituent in this particular case, but also familiarize themselves with multistakeholderism. That’s one design.

Audrey Tang: If you’re interested, you can find it in the Participation Officers website and Collaborative Meeting website, and that is a lot of lessons are there. A lot of the design that is transferable also relies on the executive branch, pre commitment, to amplify whatever design that comes out of it.

Audrey Tang: We have a design called presidential hackathon, that draws its inspiration from say, the Prototype Fund. From the, I think it was Germany and many other presidential level hackathons.

Audrey Tang: I remember actually, when I was in Paris, 2016. There’s also one in the president’s office as part of the Open Government Partnership week. A difference is that in Taiwan, we commit saying that using the quadratic voting method, the citizens choose 20 teams out of 200 or so proposals, each of them must correspond to a global goal.

Audrey Tang: Then, out of those 20, they try these ideas out on this local smaller scale for three months or more. Then, every year the top five winners from a cross sectoral panel receive a trophy from our president, Dr. Tsai Ing wen, that is a macro projector.

Audrey Tang: If you project it, it projects Dr. Tsai giving you the trophy which is very meta, as it carries a promise that whatever you did locally will in the next fiscal year become country wide policy, with all the budget level and personnel and regulatory requirements that is allowed. Again, this is to familiarize the career public service in a way that is very methodological.

Audrey Tang: We see a lot of proposals started from the mid level career public servant, but they do not have the political will or the budget to fight for that particular reform. They work through g0v or many other social sector organization to bring this to the hackathon, but once they win the trophy, they will come out and say, “Oh, that was my idea all along.”

Audrey Tang: Which is great, this is what facilitated cross sectoral partnerships. These are the two designs that, I think, are broadly applicable. Indeed, we’ve seen in Japan and many other countries they are now — for the past couple years, already — to look at these design. I believe Italy also adopted something like participation officer.

Joachim Son Forget: Audrey! Somehow it looks all amazing and fascinating but how come you manage to impose as mostly as societies to radically differ from you as the government is wonderful.

Joachim Son Forget: There are also classical politicians, you have an administration, you have a different layer that usually make a country paralyzed when it needs to reform, to create, to find new…

Joachim Son Forget: You’ve shown me their convergence of interests between different agencies, to add one topic, we are more classically used to it that the people fight within their same political party or they fight between two different administration, two different ministries for their own interest especially for budget.

Joachim Son Forget: Of course when it’s a smaller country, sometimes it’s easier to conduct experiments. How come you ensure that because you have an eye on the different organizations, all ministries or…I need to understand more…

Audrey Tang: Definitel.! Well, I’m a minister at large, one of nine that is working cross ministrially in the 32 ministries, each of them have a participation officer team.

Audrey Tang: There’s a vertical minister which of course for budget issues and regulation issues have a lot of silo mentality in it but there are issues that are fundamentally new. It could be e sport, actually this could be Ledger itself right! Many things that do not have a fixed per view that’s already fixed within any particular home ministry or agency.

Audrey Tang: For such emerging topics, it’s natural for the career public service to trust the expertise of their citizens. It’s just that they do not, previously, have a way to listen and scale.

Audrey Tang: Previously, they could only run some surveys, but with the problem that the survey ideas are not wikified, they come from a few experts in the focus group and/or things like that. It was because previous generations of democratic technologies do not have a way to form shared goals easily.

Audrey Tang: To form shared goals like rough consensus is exactly what Internet governance and ledger governance is all about. Once we demonstrated that there is a way using quadratic voting, using polis, using many tools to quickly get some form of shared goals, then it’s a win win situation for the ministries when we tackle such emerging topics, instead of existing zero sum topics.

Audrey Tang: Now, what topics qualify as emerging or positive sound? Of course, the participation officer as career public servants know best. Every month we vote. We actually ask them of all the petitions in the past months, of all the ideas that came from the ranks within the ministries, what cases are fit for this positive sound, collaborative governance, and what does not.

Audrey Tang: We always pre commit ourselves to be bound by the vote of the participation officers.

Pascal Gauthier: I’m very curious to one fundamental question that resonates with us because we are developing new technologies and education is a big piece of what we’re trying to do at Ledger. We’re building a lot of educational contents, is actually one of our main, let’s call it marketing activity. We feel that, if people aren’t educated enough on the topics, then they put everything at risk.

Pascal Gauthier: Education is key towards moving your assets to Web3 and controlling your life. You can be free with Web3, but it comes with responsibility. Education is key. I wonder in your situation, and when you have a country, and you do all of this work for a country, how do you deal with this education paramount’s?

Pascal Gauthier: If yes, I’m assuming yes. How do you deal with education, and how do you deal with some kind of the educational gap that you have between generations? Everything that we’re describing here is highly technological.

Pascal Gauthier: Does it mean that it works on societies where citizens are extremely technology educated, or you feel that technology being at the service of the user, technology has to be sort of dumbed down to the point where anyone can use it? I’m curious to how you think about education in the process that you’re describing.

Audrey Tang: None of the ideas that are brought forward is, strictly speaking, high tech. QR code, SMS, are not high tech. They’re from the last entry last I checked. Basically, what we’re doing is not in Olympic moto terms, is not faster, higher, but rather together which is added to Olympic moto this year.

Audrey Tang: I think the idea is not treating technology as something that’s industrial technology, high tech, faster tech and things like that, unicorns. We’re not using those ideas, but rather, acquire assistive intelligence. Not AI as authoritarian, but AI as assistive, and they must be aligned

Audrey Tang: Meaning, like my eyeglass which is assistive technology aligned to the will of me getting an eyesight that’s better instead of replacing my eyeballs or pushing advertisement to my eyeballs.

Audrey Tang: It must be accountable in the sense that if there’s bias, like it’s blurred, or something like that, I can take it down. It’s not sticky. I’m not addicted to it. Also, I can repair it myself, or bring it to the repair person down the street without reverse engineering the black box, or paying tens of thousands, millions of license fees.

Audrey Tang: We work on a social technology, meaning, what’s novel, what’s innovative is done combination of the collective and connective intelligence not on its individual parts.

Audrey Tang: For example, when the primary schoolers in their data competence classes contribute to climate science by measuring PM 2.5 levels and write it to a distributed ledger.

Audrey Tang: They learn about these in the context of working with their parents, and to decide whether they want to go for a job by the citizen science, that is part of their school’s assignments, to measure the climate together and they learn about data stewardship and have bias and so on, without being taught.

Audrey Tang: That is to say they participate as full members in a distributed ledger even before they were taught those abstract principles. This is exactly how we teach, for example, the safe ethical use of fire by arranging cooking classes very early on and sharing the recipes and things like that.

Audrey Tang: I believe in competence in education not literacy, because literacy already assume a few people that elites making the tech and the other people must adapt to that tech. That’s literacy.

Audrey Tang: Competence is the other way around, is the ability to remix the well understood principles and components on whatever the local that’s needed to empower the people, especially young people, but also very senior people closest to the pain.

Joachim Son Forget: What I heard about the role of technology Europe, putting in the society is very interesting. I think it’s very silly against what is the sentiment from fundamental view of what technology could be like.

Joachim Son Forget: If you look at sci fi, and some people wish secretly to replace humans by machines like this, you don’t have to take care of the environment, because very wrong environment can be populated by robots instead of humans.

Joachim Son Forget: I summarize a bit but you cannot explain that AI or technologies will be more supportive of humanity and more likely not TVs or proceeding some other things, too, that they have to keep them together best of themselves.

Joachim Son Forget: Also you explain that about referring objects and that you can detach from IoT objects and it’s very linked. I mean, coming from a psychology and biology neuroscience is this kind of idea, but there’s a French philosopher called [indecipherable 27:09] .

Joachim Son Forget: He has the same idea where you cannot transmit the only architecture you infringe savoir faire. He returned me the way to return his knowledge and no hope. Humans are maintenance where they transmit to their children, no hope and some knowledge. Every generation is a new layer. Is that ready?

Joachim Son Forget: It’s like a [indecipherable 27:34], they’re doing maintenance of the awful global knowledge. Progress is, of course, about technology and science, but this progress and technology is here to help us to fulfill all different weaknesses but not to replace a well being that ingenuity for a very long evolution.

Joachim Son Forget: The place you seem to keep for science and technology within the society is very interesting the way you express it, that seem more people truly express it like this. It could avoid people would see technology as danger if we all agree on the comfort, the technology is here to get the best of ourselves.

Audrey Tang: Yes. The other assistive technology I’m using now, in addition to the eyeglass, is the fact that I’m not wearing earphones, so there’s massive amount of noise cancellation that’s going on that allows you to speak freely and not hearing a lot of echo.

Audrey Tang: That’s probably a lot of machine learning involved in that particular piece of technology but it doesn’t replace anyone. It’s not here to be autonomous. It doesn’t matter to use that technology, or if it doesn’t work, I’ll just switch to an earphone. It’s not trying to pass the Turing test. I think that is the view of technology that I’m trying to convey.

Audrey Tang: There’s a recent paper, a few friends of mine also in RadicalxChange wrote, called “How AI Fails” as that talks about some of those points. I think a more comprehensive survey was done by Drexler called “Comprehensive AI Services” and that’s also linked in that article.

Ian Rogers: I find that link didn’t seem to work but that…I’ll search for it. I completely agree with the way that you frame the use of technology, and what technology will actually bring us in practice.

Ian Rogers: I’ve got the burning $1 million question, I guess, but then everything you say is music to our ears as you can see, but where I’m very curious is how do you see the future of money and the impact of Bitcoin and distributed ledger technologies will have? Especially what do you think that from a government standpoint?

Ian Rogers: We hear about the dollar and the fear that Bitcoin could replace the dollar, the impact that it could have on people, and you’re talking about technology enhancing people and supporting them. The fact that, if I dumbed down what I heard, technology needs to be easy to use to, appeal to the larger number…

Audrey Tang: …to remix. Yeah, that’s the competence angle because we cannot anticipate all the emerging requirements and to sustain and to prosper together. We need to be, what I call, good enough ancestors, not perfect ancestors. Therefore, closest possibilities to our descendants, but not bad ancestor that destroyed the infrastructure altogether.

Audrey Tang: There’s a very fine balance that’s going on here because if we foreclose possibilities, we risk coming to a place where it’s more like singularity, like their posthuman vision but it turns out that the emergent threats is not friendly to that lack of biodiversity, so we just reached extinction.

Audrey Tang: If we converge toward any singularities, I call it plurality, that’s to say to maintain sufficient diversity by allowing for indeed, encouraging remixes on the fundamental technological fabric. This includes, of course, currency.

Audrey Tang: I think the new Taiwan dollar is one of, if not the strongest currency in Asia right now, so we’re not at risk of being replaced by Bitcoin at any time soon. Not to mention that it needs to solve the sustainability test in order to be adopted on the massive scale.

Audrey Tang: I think we’re still open, we have the FinTech sandbox, and so on, so for each new idea that challenges the new Taiwan dollar. It could be legal for up to around 1000, 10,000 people, for half a year, a year, and so on to prove its merits. If it’s proven, it’s just like a autonomous vehicle in a testing drive on the elevator, which is autonomous, and MRT Metro, which is almost autonomous now.

Audrey Tang: We need to establish the social norms around those challenges so that it becomes assistive technology rather than disruptive technology. It could be exactly the same technology but it is the societal response to those technology that makes it assistive or disruptive.

Joachim Son Forget: When people think about autonomous vehicle and we are in competence with some people call the explanatory gap when you create something looking like a human brain bottom up, and it would just be conscious out of nowhere, there’s a dream of the singularity people. I really have doubt that this machine was very high or brains are difficult to copy somehow.

Joachim Son Forget: Finally, I don’t believe in the ultimate target of transhumans because at the moment, it always failed. What you can do is that you can have some machine that reproduce a human behavior without getting the insights of the phenomenology of the human, the robot. Somehow, it create confusion and this confusion is big enough to train sociology it will be challenging.

Audrey Tang: Yeah. I think this is a fundamental problem with words like artificial intelligence, because then artificial is just objective and it’s describing intelligence and people under intelligence in human terms. This is like saying human resource, which is the kind of the other perversion, which is treating human beings as machines.

Audrey Tang: My job description is literally trying to use the words to describe not smart cities but smart citizens, not Internet of things but Internet of beings, not machine learning but collaborative learning, not virtual reality but shared reality, not singularity but plurality and so on.

Audrey Tang: I believe, once we get the metaphors right, I think there will be less confusion, but if we start with the metaphor of the Turing test, or overcommitment to individualistic view on human beings and not intelligence then there really is no way out.

Joachim Son Forget: Is there any room we can speak to a politic because it is very interesting that Taiwan, as what I hear from you, is going to grow the model that is radically different from your neighbors. I don’t speak only about China, actually, because when I look at, I know very well, South Korea, Japan, and some other model is still extremely traditional in the way they use technology. I mean, the tools are here but the philosophy is not even there.

Joachim Son Forget: When I see the Chinese, I mean some of the create a rival network, instead of being made of blockchain and decentralized elements across the world, they do that but with humans with hands. They use their citizens as hands and [indecipherable 35:21] .

Joachim Son Forget: I don’t want to be insulting at all, but with the Belt and Road Initiative, I’ve been traveling in a lot of warrior in the world and I’ve always find Chinese people. It’s very interesting in a way they kick out all of farming system for cryptos and they get rid of the usual global system to create an alternate model. It’s very…I don’t know.

Joachim Son Forget: When I look also at the [indecipherable 35:53] and very recent permanent CCTV everywhere. I think it’s not only in China, it’s like this absent consent is also everywhere.

Joachim Son Forget: In Korea, you have CCTVs checking people in their own cars everywhere in the street. In Japan is the same way. And somehow, one famous anthropologist recently coined the concept of the use of eusociality to compare the society of insects like ants and bees to humans. We self organize in a way that [indecipherable 36:28] .

Joachim Son Forget: He said that to save biodiversity somewhere, we should live in one part of the world and let the rest of the world quiet without human activity. Some people said, “Yeah, we could do this.”

Joachim Son Forget: Then you need a super organization in that sense that the society and the cities where we live, then will be very authoritarian, and we will lose freedom. I think the tricky thing is that, how can we manage to live a part of the world in a very organized way in concentrated areas, even in big cities? Also, how can keep our usual human freedom in this condition? I think that’s all the treatment.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, definitely. Taiwan has the world’s second highest or third highest population density. We know something about this. I think I do totally agree. The same technologies could be making the people transparent to the state, and it’s still called transparency, as opposed to making a state transparent to the people.

Audrey Tang: As I mentioned, it’s not about technology, per se, is about societal model of who sets the norm around the technologies. Of course, I believe that the civic sector, the social sector should always set the norm and never the state because for the state to set the norm, it’s quite natural for the state to concentrate power even in best of their days with a lot of goodwill.

Audrey Tang: It’s very difficult to re decentralized those power that is centralized. One of my colleagues have recently written the radical civics manifesto. I paste it there because it has a few links to the blockchain ideas as well.

Pascal Gauthier: Did you have any knowledge before this call, of Ledger? Did you know about us or the tech that we’re developing or not at all?

Audrey Tang: Not at all. I literally just checked this invitation yesterday. I did not have time to do my homework.

Pascal Gauthier: That’s OK. We are blasting you with questions. Thank you for answering so openly. Do you have questions for us? If not, it’s perfectly fine. Since you discovered this last night, but if you have any questions, also, we are here to answer those that you might have.

Audrey Tang: I literally just checked your website. The communication material was very clear. At the point, I do not have any questions.

Pascal Gauthier: That’s good. Maybe, I let Ian, I thought Ian had a question. I’ll post a few things from the website on the educational part while Ian is speaking. This is probably the most interesting piece, I guess, then Ian, oh, Audrey.

Joachim Son Forget: Prior to Ian. Speaking of this conversation to Audrey, that I didn’t bring my friends to make advertisement for Ledger. They’re fillers of these very important…We share views on the next step for the world and what we’ve discussed with us too.

Joachim Son Forget: That’s the point for me if that’s all right.They gave me some very good influence for what I could see for my future political life from here. We were very sorry. That’s why I wanted to bring all of us here.

Audrey Tang: Definitely. I’m not here to sell, “Taiwan can help.” All the other links that I provided are…I’m working again with Taiwan, but not necessarily just for Taiwan. At one time I was digital minister, but also a board member of around seven — none of which are based in Taiwan — international social innovation organizations.

Audrey Tang: I believe that my role in the governance kind of a tentacle from this tribe, and whatever we think of has broad applicability. The Internet governance is a kind of research arm. In Taiwan, of course, where one of the implementers of those multistakeholderism ideas, but it’s not confined to the territories of Taiwan.

Ian Rogers: That’s actually a nice segue to my question. I’m an American living in Paris and I think that through my career in digital music, what I have become as a student of the way that technology changes culture, the things that interest me are things like Tim Wu writing about the attention merchants and these kinds of things, because human inventions have impact on humanity.

Ian Rogers: We live in denial of that sometimes, but it’s so painfully obvious. What strikes me about what’s going on first with the Internet, and now with digital assets you have whomever all the way to Mark Zuckerberg renaming his company talking about the metaverse, but my belief is, we’re already living in a Metaverse because of where we spend our attention.

Ian Rogers: Anybody who looks at screentime on their phone can see that they spend the majority of their attention in a borderless world. We’re in, I believe, three different countries right now on this call with five people, that’s immaterial to our conversation. Yet politically, we live inside of a fundamentally geographic world.

Audrey Tang: The Westphalian system?

Ian Rogers: We draw a line around human beings on the planet, and then we ask them to elect somebody who represents their ideals. I’m curious where you see this going because I would certainly see that one to two logical outcomes would be, we either all relocate to represent our ideals, or we become more and more globally governed.

Ian Rogers: I see the fact that we spend our attention in a borderless world, yet we vote in a bordered world to be fundamentally at odds with one another. I’m curious how you see that evolving and what role nationalism plays in our future lives?

Audrey Tang: If it’s about governing a small pond within one district, the Westphalian system works fine but if it’s the Amazon, and I don’t mean that Amazon, but that Amazon, then it’s not fine because it literally spots jurisdictions, and classical tragedy of the commons is at play.

Audrey Tang: We can see exactly the same on vaccine distribution on pandemic response in general, on the infodemic, on cybersecurity internationally, and on many other, the climate change, of course.

Audrey Tang: I would even argue cost by the Westphalian order. Instead of being tackled by it, it actually reinforces the dynamic. That makes the negative externality hard to account and therefore not accounted.

Audrey Tang: My response is simply that I agree with your assessment for emerging issues and it includes all the issues that comes from the metaverse, so to speak, from the shared presence in the digital plurality then people will gradually find and forward in our next generations.

Audrey Tang: They naturally find that early multistakeholderism on the global or even interplanetary scale in the future, is the answer to those emergent issues that will become more and more clear. We’re here to ease the transition, to use a foundation metaphor.

Ian Rogers: I’m curious how we ease the transition. It seems like this transition won’t happen without some skirmishes at the very least.

Audrey Tang: Yeah. I know. We start by pre recording a few videos and play them at set intervals or something. We don’t know. I think that the point here is to admit that we don’t know and then open to the possibilities as argued from the radical civics paper to open to the possibilities.

Audrey Tang: All that we know, the regulations and code that builds our current reality can be amended by the people who are closer to those emergent phenomenas than we are.

Audrey Tang: By being open and humble to those possibilities, I believe is one large step toward true plurality, because if we foreclose possibilities, saying essentially like in some authoritarian regimes that only the predefined use of Internet or crypto are allowed use of Internet or crypto, then we lose the possibility of responding to emergent threats.

Audrey Tang: I often use one example of Dr Li Wenliang from Wuhan reporting SARS cases in Taiwan where we do have investment into a digital public infrastructure that resulted in health inspections for all fly passengers coming in from Wuhan to Taiwan the very next day, which is the first day of 2020, but the same message because of the configuration of social media there.

Audrey Tang: They never reached the people of Wuhan, and that is one very clear difference between the kind of plurality oriented digital infrastructure and the one that’s based on the authoritarian configurations.

Joachim Son Forget: When a totalitarian model wants to get rid of a distributed world in the end. That’s exactly like when the heart doesn’t have haptics. The reality has haptics, so the reality can kill someone, can surprise someone. You can remove him, remove her. And the biggest threat — I mean to the localism — is its localism is bad.

Joachim Son Forget: I don’t know. It might have some very good aspects or [indecipherable 46:55] or stay down to earth to also have a very localist way of life at the same time. I don’t want to make some [indecipherable 47:05] , but there is a worse thing. It’s localism, and the best also for our life, and we want to have a healthy life in the nature, being down to earth elements, things around us. But we don’t want to create new fear [indecipherable 47:20].

Joachim Son Forget: But at the same time, the cultural distribution of virtual toxic with the Web2 that we have now create violent behaviors. You’re coming out of Twitter fight. I was a victim of the system as well, even if I use it involuntarily.

Joachim Son Forget: So I mean you have the best and the worse with the metaverse and the entire localism to how we articulate that. I don’t know as well. We have many opposites, but it can be manipulated if it’s not that distributed. It’s again the power of several people.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, sure. But I think that always I ask what if a primary schooler or a middle schooler out of nowhere has a better innovation? What kind of arrangement makes the common goals around that innovation easier to form and how easy it makes those truly great innovations spread?

Audrey Tang: So I’m not just talking about end to end principle where the innovation is allowed to spread, but rather how it effectively spread itself. That’s what I mean by social technology, and I believe, of course, Web3 by bringing code to data allows for it.

Audrey Tang: It’s just like the earlier Internet vision of end to end permissionless innovation. These are the necessary conditions to make it happen, but it’s very clear to all of us, it’s not the sufficient condition. We need to work on it ourselves.

Ian Rogers: What I think is inspiring about your approach — and I thank you for taking the time, I realize that we’re at the end of it — is that you’re fully aware of the possibilities of the current technological landscape. But you are using them for kind of citizen empowerment at the moment, and not just sort of projecting 5 to 15 years in the future,

Ian Rogers: But it seems to me that you’re asking what can we build right now that will — as you said — ease that transition or answer some of these key questions for our citizenry to make our our citizens more in power?

Audrey Tang: Yep, that’s a very fair summarization. I’m also   as is the norm — typing my contact and so on, and I think I’m happy to to continue the conversation, really. So I am aware that we can’t afford Twitter right now. It has not completed its Web3 transition, but still, I think it’s one of the places that’s at least open to such possibilities.

Audrey Tang: Twitter publicly said it is also willing to entertain such truly decentralized configurations and so on. So I’m not seeing Web3 as a kind of completely taking down the Web2 giants, just like Web2wasn’t about taking out with the Web1 giants.

Audrey Tang: It’s about making sure that abuses are not self perpetuating and that genuinely better configurations can emerge on a quicker time frame, and I believe that is really essential. So, yeah, I’m really happy to explore together on this space, and I see some Web2 giants.

Audrey Tang: I just had a conversation with Cloudflare a few weeks ago, and they have this research arm. They just productionalize IPFS Gateway, Ethereum Gateway and so on, which is interesting because arguably Cloudflare is what enable all this hyper centralized Web2 apparatus to protect them from cybersecurity attacks and things like that.

Audrey Tang: But I think there’s sufficient amount of rough consensus in those Web2 configurations, that it’s not tenable on the intergenerational levels, that everybody is willing to try out some migration, so to speak.

Pascal Gauthier: Wonderful, Audrey, thank you so much. My last question would be, is it OK to to send you as a as a gift one of our devices so you can play with it, open it, and see what it’s like?

Audrey Tang: Well, if it exceeds 500 dollars NTD, then of course I can’t accept. But if it’s less than that, I still prefer to buy it myself. But anyway, this is our kind of ethics guidelines I just iterated to you so we can figure it out again.

Pascal Gauthier: I understand. it’s a lot less than than 500. It’s actually under $60, so it’s a really a small thing, and it’s always best to use the technology to understand what it does. Our product is better understood when used. But now you get the website Ledger that comes…

Audrey Tang: Well, $60 USD is around 2000 NT dollars. So that’s above our ethics guidelines. So I prefer to buy it myself, if possible. We can figure it out over email.

Pascal Gauthier: That’s no problem. Well, thank you very much. I’ve got no further questions. Thank you very much for today. It’s everything I hoped for and more. I think what you’re presenting is clear. It’s bold. It’s advanced. It’s what tech should look like in the future and how it should help people in our quest to freedom. So thank you very much for today.

Audrey Tang: Thank you, Thank you. Live long and prosper.

Jean Michel: Audrey thank you very much. Ian and I will do… Actually I will do also a quick follow up, because there is a lot of future in common for the vision for next world. France is a nice museum, but sometimes it needs to get past and create new models of Liberland. We’ll be very happy that we can continue to share at another time.

Audrey Tang: Definitely. I am only one ping away, one email away. email is one of the few things that stays decentralized after all these decades. Let’s keep that spirit open.

Jean Michel: Thank you so much.

Pascal Gauthier: Thank you.

Ian Rogers: Good. Merci beaucoup. Au revoir.

Audrey Tang: Bye.