Audrey Tang: Would you prefer tea, coffee or water?

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: Coffee. Coffee would be great.

Audrey Tang: OK.

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: Coffee, wonderful.

Audrey Tang: We happen to have pretty good coffee here.

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: Oh, wonderful.

Audrey Tang: Would you mind some?

David Kibler: That would be wonderful.

Audrey Tang: We have a kitchen and a resident chef here.

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: A resident chef, wow!

David Kibler: Well, that sounds nice.

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: I’m going to introduce a little bit myself. I’m a professor of political philosophy in Paris at the National Conservatory of Arts and Craft. I’m the holder of a chair called Humanities and Health. To my principal work focuses on democratic regulation.

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: I was also -- I know you were -- at the Open Partnership Government Summit. It was maybe one year ago or that.

Audrey Tang: That’s right. In Paris City.

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: I was also there.

Audrey Tang: In the Hôtel de Ville.

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: Exactly. One of my great friends is Henri Verdier. Maybe you know him...

Audrey Tang: Yes, sure.

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: He’s really a main figure to work about participatory democracy, open government, democracies.

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: Me, I’m working on the citizens’ tools of democratic regulation. Not especially related to civic tech, but also related to civic tech. I work on the reform of institution and the reform of citizen behaviors.

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: I’m working on a specific notion which is called the entropy, with an E, the entropy dimension of democracy. That means working on the pervert effects of adult democracies, especially French modern, American modern, UK modern -- not Taiwan modern, but I think Taiwan is a wonderful case study.

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: It’s a laboratory of democracy, I think, because it is quite wonderful. I read a few things on the Sunflower, of course, Revolution, but I’m very interested to hear you about and maybe to hear you also on the needs you need.

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: What -- not me -- can I do for you, but what can French professors, colleagues, can do with you as a collaboration or whatever. This is important regarding democratic regulation. Another thing, which is another field -- I think not totally related to you but just to explain it to you.

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: I created the first philosophical chairs in hospitals in France. Those philosophical chairs are related to universities of patients. France is the first country to graduate expert patients. This is really important.

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: The third step of this sociotherapeutic ecosystem is that we have a structure dedicated to experimentation, to proof of concept, and we work with designers and engineers to build some specific solution for the healthcare, for example.

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: We won a project to reorganize the emergency service in a hospital, for example. The chair is doing all the continuum -- the teaching, the research, or the theoretical approach, the graduation, and [makes swishing sound] up to the experimentation so we can go between practice and theory very quickly, and to test and to transform of course the governance of a system, of a hospital.

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: Not only that. I think we try to have an holistic approach of what is health and what is care. That’s what I do. I’m also a member of the National French Committee of Ethics, and in that committee I did several reports as a co-rapporteur, as co-writer -- a report about editing of the genome...

Audrey Tang: CRISPR/Cas9.

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: Yeah, and something about the political aspect of artificial intelligence, of course, and things also related to the place of oldness.

David Kibler: Aging people.

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: Aging people, sorry, and the place of aging people in the society and how democracy treats aging people. That’s it. I’m a political philosopher and moral philosopher and a psychoanalyst.

Audrey Tang: You’re practicing?

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: Yes. I have patients every day, even here with a portal called Skype.

Audrey Tang: I did that with a French analyst...

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: Oh, great.

Audrey Tang: ...for five years, actually.

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: So you know perfectly what I’m talking about. You did that, because, me, I have a lot of patients that are in China, in Morocco, Tunisia, Greece, El Salvador...

Audrey Tang: Yeah, my APF analyst said that the APF had a long discussion about psychoanalysis over the internet.

Audrey Tang: We agreed that I have to travel to Paris for a month every half a year, in that modality, but otherwise over videoconference.

Audrey Tang: At the end of the it, after I had become the Digital Minister, the dynamic changed because I’m no longer... When I travel to Paris, I cannot travel in an individual capacity anymore, so we terminated the analysis.

Audrey Tang: Those five years were really helpful.

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: OK, very interesting. Just to say, the link between my practice of psychoanalysis and my teaching in the political philosophy, I’m working about the purpose effect of new liberal democracies and the impacts on the subject, the question of a subject, and how this subject is feeling sick because there is réification...

David Kibler: Transforming a person into a thing.

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: Yeah.

Audrey Tang: Reification.

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: Reification is the term, yeah, because...It is reification. This is the term related to Adorno, to Axel Honneth... I’m working on that, on that suffering process. I’m also working on the contrary.

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: That means that this person who thinks that she’s replaceable, and this is why I wrote a book called, "The Irreplaceable" and why this person who thinks she’s replaceable feels sick. At that time, she’s no longer in the possibility to protect the democracy.

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: You see, I do this thing. The main topic of my philosophy is to say that the concern for the self is not antagonistic with the concern of public commitment.

Audrey Tang: It’s one and the same.

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: I think so. There is the same matrix.

Audrey Tang: It is the one and the same.

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: Oh, yeah, I totally agree. I’m working about the principle of individuation and not the question of individualism.

Audrey Tang: What do you think about the idea of transindividuation?

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: For me, it’s also related to the construct of singularity.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: Because I have patients, of course, who have an adventure with their identity, or who are questioning themselves a lot about that, sometimes with suffering, sometimes without no suffering because there is absolutely no story written already with that kind of thing.

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: For me, the construction of the self is absolutely necessary to protect the mental health. The construction of the self is the protection of mental health. After, it is the protection of, I think, the health of the democracy.

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: Because when you are feeling depressed, replaceable, not in your identity, despised, or not recognized, etc., how do you not? Or you are going on the side, and you don’t want to commit yourself into public affairs because you are too tired to do that, and too depressed. Or you go there, but with resentment, with an aggressive, acting out...

Audrey Tang: ...a paranoid-schizoid position.

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: Exactly. I’m really working on that, how we can prevent individuals to go psychotic behaviors, because we do that today. I can tell you that in analytic sessions today, there is less neurosis than psychosis.

Audrey Tang: Ah, certainly.

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: It’s terrible.

Audrey Tang: I was just reading this. I’m halfway through this book, called...

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: Oh yeah, I know it. It’s...

Audrey Tang: "The Neganthropocene."

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: It’s a colleague of mine and a friend of mine.

Audrey Tang: Oh, really?

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: Yeah, Bernard. I did several things with him, because we have the same approach about what is technology. We are not in the illusion of the neutrality of technology, but our focus is to have a technology who is going to empower citizens and not to reduce or to place the human decision, for example, and he is also very attracted by the question of art, the question of culture.

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: We did a lot of things together. He’s also attracted to the same question, the entropic question.

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: He is talking about the neganthropene. The neganthropene is how you fight anthropocene. We are totally matched.

Audrey Tang: That’s awesome.

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: I will tell him. He will be very honored to know that you are...

Audrey Tang: I’m really a fan of his work.

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: Oh really? Great. I will tell him, because he’s a great, great person.

Audrey Tang: When we frame AI discussions in Taiwan, I always expand AI to "assistive intelligence."

Audrey Tang: By "assistive," I mean more in the sense of restoring one to a wholesome being, taking out the replaceable part and enabling us to feel irreplaceable.

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: Exactly.

Audrey Tang: It’s a clear demarcation, certainly, that the machines don’t yet have subjectivity.

Audrey Tang: That counters the current reification theme that takes human beings and treats them as "human resource" and takes neoliberal constructions -- companies -- and "incentivize" them or "encourage" them, which are terms intended for subjects. It is a perversion.

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: Totally.

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: What do you do specifically regarding democratic regulation, and what is for you the main issues?

Audrey Tang: The main issue, and I would also like to know your opinion...

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: Of course.

Audrey Tang: ...around, say, Le grand débat national, which is starting right now. [laughs]

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: I will tell you everything.

Audrey Tang: Yes, OK.

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: That is very interesting.

Audrey Tang: It is very interesting.

Audrey Tang: Prior to the Sunflower Movement, there is already waves after waves of large protests. The Sunflower, of course, at its high is half a million people on the street. Before that, in the past one year before The Sunflower, every couple months or so, there were large demonstrations, and continuing ones too after The Sunflower.

Audrey Tang: It is, I think, comparable to the magnitude to the current one in France, and much more than, say, the Nuit debout. There is a collective, from my point of view, overlapping of subconscious dynamic of people who feel much closer to one another through the identification of memes, hashtags, popular slogans, and so on.

Audrey Tang: So much so that the existing distance between the democratic institutional apparatus, between these and the people, the distance actually stayed the same, but subjectively, it became very distant.

Audrey Tang: Previously, taking seven days to apply and receive a response to a letter to the minister, or taking a couple months to receive a freedom of information request, or 60 days to receive a response to a petition is considered sufficient.

Audrey Tang: Now because the clock of the social media operates on a different scale, through a different modality, it creates what we call a empathy gap. If we are in a upset, immediate-response modality...

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: It’s emotional.

Audrey Tang: ...yes, of a shorter expectation of response.

Audrey Tang: Through this synchronous mode, this creates a empathy gap to what we call the depressive position in psychoanalysis, the more considered mode.

Audrey Tang: It is well known that the two psychic positions do not co-exist at the same time in the mind. This actually forecloses the empathic mode of communication. Renders it irrelevant, not just ineffective. It renders it irrelevant.

Audrey Tang: From my point of view, in Sunflower, our contribution was to use the same technologies that caused this fragmentation, but use it for consensus to re-establish a norm. I have some pictures that might illustrate...

Audrey Tang: In a synchronous mode, everything is perceived as a zero-sum trade-off. If we create a space where people feel that they can only add to it, and not subtract from it, then it becomes a sandbox, a transitional space in which anything goes, up to a limit.

Audrey Tang: As the risk is bounded, the deliberative space in the Occupy Parliament is primarily in the streets nearby, the 20 NGOs each deliberates one specific aspect; there is no harm of talking about anything.

Audrey Tang: It is a space carved out as a safe space by the will of the parliament, and also of the people. Through telecommunication that we capture, people eventually paint this picture together. This picture really is key because if you only look at the fragmenting social media, you will find that these incendiary ideas are disproportionally popular.

Audrey Tang: Some popular social media platforms at the time maximized division, anger and outrage simply because outrage is the most effective motivator to share a message on social media publicly.

Audrey Tang: However, although it powers people individually, it doesn’t actually empower the collective.

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: No, it’s divisive.

Audrey Tang: Exactly, it’s divisive. Through the same technologies, and taking away the ability to attack, taking away the idea of diversion of replies, the threaded mode that interfers communication, we create new spaces in which one person only reacts to a single considered subjective opinion of another subject at a time.

Audrey Tang: You are free to agree or disagree but it is not among a flood of messages. You only consider this one on your phone perhaps, which has screen only sufficient to show one idea anyway and have one single reaction, which is agree or disagree or pass. Once you do so, your avatar moves among the people you know and another sentiment comes.

Audrey Tang: After a while, of course, you would like to share your own authentic experience or feeling for people to agree or disagree. It doesn’t carry the notion of judgment, meaning that there’s nothing wrong with being group A or group B. It only shows that there is different groups with different feelings on the same facts.

Audrey Tang: At the end of the conversation, we also publish a report. Actually, during the conversation, people can always already see that among the different groups, there are commonalities. Actually, people agree violently on most of the things. It’s just they didn’t know about this. Then, we commit ourselves to take these, as the agenda, of the democratic institution.

Audrey Tang: Basically, it’s agenda setting power, meaning what we talk about is collectively crowdsourced by what people find that can resonate with the most number of people. This really is the core idea. It is innovations that doesn’t sacrifice anyone that resonates with people.

Audrey Tang: We observed outrage in those mobile communication tools but we channel them additively rather than destructively, toward the notion of rough consensus.

Audrey Tang: People are always surprised when they see this picture. They are not that different from their neighbors. The few differences they have are the individual contributions they can make. Based on a solid foundation of empathy, we co-create a reflection of the totality, that’s the core idea.

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: OK. Right now, you continue that?

Audrey Tang: Yes.

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: Of course.

Audrey Tang: In this space, every Wednesday from 10:00 AM to 10:00 PM -- you saw my schedule -- everyone can come and talk to me for 40 minutes.

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: OK, and there is a lot of persons?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, of course.

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Just yesterday, there was like 10 different appointments. In the afternoon, it’s pre-booked time. Not unlike the psychoanalysts... [laughs]

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: But kind of. It’s very interesting. It is a little bit related, though.

Audrey Tang: It is related, because this inscription device exteriorizes our conversations into public social objects. While it’s not classical psychoanalysis because nobody really comes here for more than... I think the most came like five or six times. Subsequently, people took the transcripts of previous conversations and continued to develop them here.

Audrey Tang: We have many recurring themes here, and anyone who wants to develop these themes through a public event, as long as they can identify with any of the 17 global goals, they get free use of this space to run anything -- as long as there is a public event and they agree to align to one of the goals.

Audrey Tang: One of the innovations that we do is the idea of regional social innovation meetings. That’s in addition to those Wednesday office hours which mostly reaches people who are in Northern Taiwan or closer to one of the large cities that have high speed rail stations.

Audrey Tang: Instead, I go to the rural, the indigenous places which the aging and shrinking population and sit down and actually live maybe two nights with the local elders, co-ops, and social entrepreneurs.

Audrey Tang: We hold a collective meeting where they brainstorm about what they have to do and also what they want from the government usually to relax some policy or to make clear some policy.

Audrey Tang: As I do that, here in the Social Innovational Lab, the same 12 ministries under my social innovation plan gather here to listen, to hear the local people through the Internet. It’s a huge Skype session with two connected rooms.

Audrey Tang: The 12 ministries previously working in their silos, they would say previously that, "The Ministry of Interior cannot answer all of your questions. We need to ask the Ministry of Transportation or the Ministry of Health and Welfare." And so on.

Audrey Tang: By the time this event was complete, the immediacy is lost because it’s five weeks afterwards and also they received the talk not as a full immersive experience, not as a réalité virtuelle, but as maybe five pages of reports. They lose sympathy with the habitat. It’s not their fault because they never had life experience.

Audrey Tang: With this arrangement, first it’s the synchronous immediacy. People raise questions and other people in all of the ministries, they need to answer. They would not say, "I have to consult the Ministry of Interior," because it’s sitting next to them.

Audrey Tang: It’s collective consciousness that kind of flips the old model of democratic institution because previously, the minister is the face of this cross ministry of policy. If anything goes right, it’s the minister’s credit. If anything goes wrong, the minister can always go back to the citizen and blame the Korea Public Service for not implementing the policy well.

Audrey Tang: It is what we see in most of the democratic institutions. Here, it’s exactly the other way around because these people, they all have names, they all see each other eye to eye, and the conversation with their names is all on the public Internet 10 working days after some editing.

Audrey Tang: In the transcripts, the public servants are professional, and they are real people too. You can always have a continuing conversation with them. If there’s any credit, there’s hundreds of cases of things solved, it’s their credit. If they innovate into something that may have risks, it is always me that says, "You can always blame Audrey if it doesn’t work out."

Audrey Tang: We institutionalized this system of experimentation, also as specific laws that say you can choose a region, run with some self driving vehicles, run with some AI banking, or run with some platform economy ideas.

Audrey Tang: We don’t know all the ethical boundaries. We don’t have the norms yet — the society received this for the first time but we allow these PEVs that evolve with people. They used to be cyclops but now they’re two eyes and can make eye contact. [laughs] Through the Sandbox Acts, it can break existing laws for one year.

Audrey Tang: The society needs to collaborate and supervise that it is ethical and indeed establish ethical boundaries together. After one year, we have this kind of consultation that you just saw. If people don’t think it’s a good idea, we thank the innovator for their contribution to open innovation.

Audrey Tang: If they do think it’s a good idea and all the ministries are committed to just use this new version of the regulation as the national regulation. It’s led by the citizen innovators, and if it requires a law change, of course, the MPs may take, say, four years or three years to do a full deliberation.

Audrey Tang: During those three or four years, the experiment including the business model is allowed to continue so in effect, a monopoly in that region. It makes the innovators more sure about the continuation of their idea.

Audrey Tang: Of course, by the time the MPs pass it, a competitor will enter the market but they have a lead time to build rapport with the local people. We’re seeing, starting this year, hundreds of regions starting those regional revitalization collective imagination scenarios through deliberative workshops.

Audrey Tang: Literally, hundreds of them are being concurrently discussed on the topics of what is the vision of this county or this district but not about, for example, whether citizens should initiative referendums, which is what happens now in France. I’m very interested. [laughs]

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: Yeah. You know that we had this big movement of the yellow vest. The sociology of the yellow vest, I think you already know, because there is some...

David Kibler: Far-right people.

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: ...far-right people and far-left people both. There is some persons who have a big past on the militancy and there is persons who are totally political. There is a lot of mono parental families. At the beginning, the women were...

David Kibler: Single mothers.

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: ...white, single mothers. We have persons that are really attached to transform the institution, and we have persons that are totally attached just about the economical problems.

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: The sociology is quite diverse but the sociology is common on the fact that it is the periphery kind of way of life that is in and the periphery, the rural persons and older persons that are left on the side and the public services has left, maternity, the post, everything has left the village. They are far from the attractive pool of everything.

Audrey Tang: It’s exactly the same constituents as the regional revitalization strategy.

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: Exactly. This is the sociology. After now, for the solution of the proposition of the government, actually, the national debate, I think it’s a premiere... It’s...

David Kibler: Unheard of.

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: ...unheard of.

Audrey Tang: ...since the revolution. [laughs]

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: Yeah because...I think you followed the performance. I don’t know how to call that of the president because he launched the grand debate two days ago.

Audrey Tang: I saw that, yeah.

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: You saw that, and with 600 mayors and at the beginning he said, "I’m not here to talk." He said, "But, I’m OK to answer some questions." He stayed there seven hours, and with a huge technical and political mastering of the subject.

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: I hope it’s not just communicational. I hope. I’m not sure of that because instrumentalization is always possible. I think he’s now aware that people in France, as I think in Taiwan, they want what we call continuous democracy.

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: That means that we don’t want intermittent democracy. They don’t want just a representative of the democracy, which is felt too delegative and confiscatory. This is the point. We have to invent. We have to create the tools that will permit us to articulate a representative democracy, which is what you are doing with co-creation of regulation. Really, it’s about this.

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: The good combination between representative democracy and participatory democracy. When we mean participatory democracy, it is of course an access to decision making and not only audits, not only consultations, and...

Audrey Tang: ...agenda setting and delivery.

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: Exactly, and doing experimentation also. There is a right to experimentation in France. The right exists but in fact...

Audrey Tang: It’s not fully used.

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: No, not totally used. This is terrible because you know that democracy is a regime of knowledge, of science. We need to do the scientific protocols like we do in social science or in science. We have to experiment. We have to evaluate. We have to try things. We have to say no. We don’t do that in...

Audrey Tang: Otherwise, it’s an epistemic deficiency.

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: Exactly, yes. Totally that. There is an epistemic deficiency in the conception of democracy. This is now the age of asking what is democratic epistemology, what is this? I think the grand debate, the national debate maybe, I hope, it will be the time for that.

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: My concern is about the transparency of the protocol. It’s not well. We have polemic...How do you say that? Polemic?

Audrey Tang: The polemic, yeah.

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: We had polemic. We have the president of the NCPD, the National Commission for Public Debate...

Audrey Tang: Yeah, for public constructions, they are the experts.

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: ...because, actually, it’s normal that the grand debate should be organized by this independent authority. A letter was sent to the president in December. She said, "OK, I agree to do that if there is some condition and because I want to be sure that there is not..."

Audrey Tang: Those conditions, they are very normal here. It’s considered just the norm.

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: I get that it’s totally normal but, actually, she didn’t say to the people, to the media that she had sent this letter. She said nothing. OK, why not? She said nothing. Now, she’s saying that she did that.

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: After, there was a polemic about wage, salary and she suddenly said, "OK, there is too much problem and I think there is not enough serenity so I will step away. I won’t do the national debate."

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: Nobody understands why. Now, she’s telling that it is not about salary but it is about the fact that the government didn’t give her the...

Audrey Tang: The mandate?

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: No. The mandate, yes, but not the condition, not the condition that she asked.

Audrey Tang: The conditions of...

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: Now, she put online a letter of...

Audrey Tang: I haven’t read it yet.

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: You can read it. It is a condition of how to collect the opinions, how to produce restitution of it, the representativeness of the thing. No more conditions. She said that the government didn’t give so this is why she’s...Now, it is not an independent expert that warrantied the whole protocol. It is the secretary of...

David Kibler: Two secretaries.

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: Two secretaries. It’s totally...

Audrey Tang: Administrative.

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: Totally. For me, it’s a pity. It’s a pity because we have all the qualified personalities, experts, academics, we have everything to put serenity on that, to construct the right protocols because now, actually, we don’t how we’re going to do that because 45 percent of the French people say, "We aren’t interested."

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: OK, but great, wonderful. That means that they are going to be a lot of debates, a lot of opinions, a lot of recommendations, and who is going to do the synthesis. How can we be sure that it is totally transparent and that it is a good synthesis? We don’t know.

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: This, I’m a little bit touchy about that. Some colleagues, we send some opinions in the media and some calls to the government. We said, "You know, please put a guarantee. Find maybe a college or a scientific board so we can be sure that the protocol will be good and it won’t be instrumentalized by you." Normal things.

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: Because here, there is a great, I think, opportunity to reconciliate.

Audrey Tang: It is.

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: For me, it’s so important. There is the question of reconciliation of the people, and there is after the great question of co-creation of democratic regulations, which is a huge step for other democracies.

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: We cannot do it without this but we have to be very exemplary because we are going maybe to create a tool, a protocol, which can be used by, of course, us later but also by other countries. It’s an opportunity. We have to really be serious with that.

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: For the moment, I’m not totally sure that it is enough scientifically constructed. This is my interrogation.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, mostly about the rigor, is what I hear too.

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: Yeah. It’s a pity. I’m not sure that it’s going to continue like this. I hope not. I hope the government would understand that we have to up level the expertise of everyone because it is too important to do that.

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: Because if the yellow vests and the French people -- because it’s not just about the yellow vests -- realize that this thing is only something to gain time, gosh, it’s going to be a fire. [laughs] It’s going to be terrible because, really, the situation in France with the question of resentment is really great, really.

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: You can see really the hate, the frustration. It will have a political translation, terrible, because when you...The political translation of resentment is far right parties. We know that. Populous parties, we know that. There is only one way.

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: Here, we have a great opportunity to calm down everything and to really construct what is a model, adult, reflexive, inclusive democracy. A big challenge, but I don’t know yet if all the government is totally aware of the stakes of that. I don’t know.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, ever since the end of 2014, the Year of Sunflower, every week, a group of people gathers from the g0v community. We call them the vTaiwan project. The vTaiwan project explicitly makes up for the deficiency of epistemic synthesis, a synthesis of people’s epistemic contributions.

Audrey Tang: For example, the Pol.is system I showed you was first used to collect taxi drivers and Uber drivers and their passengers and form what we call a blended volition that their command wants and that inform the regulations.

Audrey Tang: I think origin of the vTaiwan, which is a minister, Minister Jaclyn Tsai, who went to a bimonthly hackathon, a regularly hosted hackathon by a community called g0v.

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: Yeah.

Audrey Tang: You’ve heard of the idea.

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: Yes.

Audrey Tang: I think the idea that it is initiated...

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: Yeah, I saw the...I don’t remember the name but I saw one of the members of that yesterday.

Audrey Tang: Oh, that’s great.

Audrey Tang: That’s great.

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: Right, @ttcat.

Audrey Tang: You know the idea is that a minister can join a g0v gathering but always in the capacity as a citizen, not as a government representative. When Jaclyn proposed that vTaiwan is done, it is not by the legitimacy of her ministry or position in the sense that she didn’t ask the Premier. She didn’t ask anyone.

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: Yeah, she was a simple citizen.

Audrey Tang: We need a better way to listen to hundreds and thousands of people. We understand that it’s like the early days of reflective telescopes. In the early days of telescopes, people had a huge debate about is it really something on that planet or is it an artifact of the glass?

Audrey Tang: There was a tele-epistemic crisis -- we don’t really know, because the tools were so bad. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: It didn’t stop Galileo and friends to improve the tools, though. You cannot really write off the tools just because the initial ones are bad. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Eventually, the scientific community accepted that the telescopes and the microscopes are an extension of the human eye. Then, we have modern sciences of astronomy as distinct from astrology.

Audrey Tang: What I’m getting at is that I think the g0v name represents a right to experiment but not mandated by an existing institution. For example, the Italian people look at the g0v visualization of budget and communication and just put g0v.it. It’s just a website, the Italian g0v.

Audrey Tang: They didn’t ask for a trademark, permission, copyright, or anything because it’s just a name. It’s two letters and a digit, but they did exactly the same thing and made a legitimate but not by government mandate consultation idea. My thought is that as long as we are scientific about it, it is not really about a CNDP branding.

Audrey Tang: In my liminal month, when I was appointed Digital Minister but not yet started working, there was one month, September of 2016, and I was in Paris most of the time. The first week, I was in New Zealand but otherwise, I’m in Paris and I visited several intermediaries, the French Digital Council, the CNDP, the CGDD, and the CNIL that protects privacy.

Audrey Tang: It’s very interesting that they all are thinking of how to engage with a new generation of people who don’t trust something simply because a protocol; they trust because they had a part in the construction or the imagination of it. The spirit is always there but it was very difficult. Now, it’s very easy to be accountable to the ideas.

Audrey Tang: I think just by lowering the cost to be accountable, it is by itself a significant contribution.

Audrey Tang: Even if the telescope is still dusty, we’ll just keep making knew ones. [laughs].

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: You think you will come back during the national debate in Paris or no? You don’t know yet?

Audrey Tang: One of our interns, Fiorella Bourgeois...

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: She will go there to...

Audrey Tang: Yeah, that’s right.

David Kibler: She’s a PhD student in France...

Audrey Tang: That’s right, yeah.

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: You can have PhD students here? No, but maybe you’re related...

David Kibler: No, she’s a PhD student in France but she does some of her research in Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

David Kibler: We are in touch with her...

Audrey Tang: She’s doing ethnographic research as an intern of sorts.

Audrey Tang: She hangs out with our office and with pretty much every week’s vTaiwan meeting, and actually, two days ago, the meeting was mostly all about the grand debate.

Audrey Tang: People are very thirsty to know that after the CNDP position changed, what kind of...Because we saw the website, it’s built by the Cap Collectif. They built the république numérique consultation website so we know them well. We trust their execution of the online part, but we really don’t know about the social configuraiton.

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: We have to go?

David Kibler: I’m sorry to say we have 10 more minutes.

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: Just to tell you before leaving, first of all, it was a really great honor and pleasure to meet you and really, me, I’m very, very, very interested by collaborating, about democratic regulations, about partnership, an open government partnership, everything that you’re doing. I think it is totally absolutely indispensable for the continuous democracy.

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: Not today, we’re not going to find a collaboration today but if you come to Paris, of course, I’m there, if you want me to organize things or if I think about colleagues and whatever, if we can do a program together, everything, I am...

Audrey Tang: Do you travel to London?

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: Yes, of course.

Audrey Tang: Because by Eurostar, it’s just two hours. Well, one hour on the clock... [laughs]

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: It’s more easy for me than for you from here. London, it’s easy.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Audrey Tang: Starting this year, two of my colleagues, a principal designer of our processes and a co-founder of our office, both of them, are going to be based in the UK.

Audrey Tang: We are location independent. That’s one of the three conditions of me working as Digital Minister. My office is location independent; we work only by voluntary association -- meaning that we don’t take orders from others -- and we are radically transparent.

Audrey Tang: Two of them are going to be based in the UK, but still members of our office.

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: In London, yeah.

Audrey Tang: One in London and one in Bristol. I’m sure that...

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: Yeah, you will give me...

Audrey Tang: ...the links in between the two of them and you, because we already have had collaborations with, say, the Nesta, the Dark Matter Labs, the democratic innovators in UK, and we always are looking for more collaboration.

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: Yeah, because it is important, and actually, this year, we are going also to do the Biennale of Design.

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: It is in Saint-Étienne. It is a huge, huge thing. We have a day, which is totally dedicated to design of institution.

Audrey Tang: That is great.

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: And design of public policies. Please, give me the link because I think the organization can invite them to give a talk.

Audrey Tang: Yes, we held similar workshops in the NYC and in Canada.

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: Actually, you know that the great guest is China.

Audrey Tang: Nice.

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: It’s interesting.

Audrey Tang: The PRC agreed, as part of the sustainable goals, to be transparent, accountable, and held to constitutional justice standards by the year 2030.

Audrey Tang: Of course, that doesn’t say how to get there but, as I said in my name card: "Taiwan Can Help".

Audrey Tang: Within the scope of #SDG16, I’m ready to help.

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: Here there is an opportunity to meet us again with your collaborators and whatever. For the rest, if, in your different programs, one day you need a partnership with French colleagues or whatever...

Audrey Tang: I’ll write you.

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: ...you write to me. With Henri Verdier, of course, and with Stigler, it will be a great honor and pleasure to do that. For me, it is the huge issue for democracy for continuous democracy in the 21 century. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: We’re collectively going through this liminal stage.

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: Of course, I have your address. I will send you regularly news about the grand debate.

Audrey Tang: That’s great.

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: Don’t worry. You can ask me, and if I can do so, it will be great.

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: Can we do a photo?

Audrey Tang: Yes.

Cynthia Fleury-Perkins: Of course. [laughs]