Interviewer: What was your part of it?

Audrey Tang: Back in 2020, people did not expect that it’s actually very easy, once that we have 5G network, to have people understand that, even though we have different positions, we can very easily build common values if there is a mechanism to do so.

Audrey Tang: My part is like a digital peacekeeper. We made a space where everybody can share their reflections on what the problem is, and instead of talking about how to fix it, we first have people share what they mean by fixing it, what they feel about fixing it, and so on, so that we have a common map of the issues at hand.

Audrey Tang: Very quickly, people understood that there are certain pathways that are very thin, that are very difficult, but that’s the only way out of the weighty problem.

Interviewer: If you look at it more universal, is there an idea how people connect that, incorporate it on this level?

Audrey Tang: Certainly. Back in the ‘20s, people had this idea that we have direct democracy on one side and representative democracy on the other, and they’re fighting each other, instead of complementing each other.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, starting from the 2010s, we’re starting to prototype a new political system where, instead of these two systems competing on fixed resources like budget and things like that, we have them work in conjunction with one another, with participatory democracy set the agenda.

Audrey Tang: It’s like the first diamond in design thinking, which is, by the way, required reading for everybody educated in the ‘20s. For the first diamond, it’s participatory democracy. For the implementation – that’s the development and delivery – that’s representative democracy.

Audrey Tang: Once we fix on the same structure, and everybody understood that this is a “how might we” question, that is the thing that democracy is supposed to produce, it became very easy for all the different democratic systems.

Audrey Tang: It could be liberal democracy. It could central democracies. It could be authoritarianism, to converge on this new political system.

Interviewer: When you say direct democracy, did the digital help us? Did it help us?

Audrey Tang: The digital helped us a little bit by making sure that people, when we are having face-to-face understanding, listening, and so on, these could be amplified, so that people can enter the same empathy space.

Audrey Tang: Previously, before digital, it’s easy for a room with 20 people to end up, if you have good facilitation, agree on each other’s values. These 20 people cannot bring that feeling back to their comrades, back to their communities, and so on.

Audrey Tang: Digital helped a little bit by putting us in each other’s shoes when we’re forming the common understanding. Around the year 2025, quantum really helped a lot more.

Audrey Tang: With quantum, we can now have people enter the space adjusted, tailor-made to their personal feelings, so that they can voice all their fears, or their doubts, or their misunderstandings, or their uncertainties and participate in a tailor-made virtual conversation.

Audrey Tang: With everybody trying to not convince them, but also, just listen to them and provide a good overview effect, feedback, so that people can feel that the Earth itself is talking to them. That became only possible after quantum computation.

Interviewer: These different kinds of democracies you were talking about, are they upscaled? The values might be more communal, and then but they are everywhere, in a way.

Audrey Tang: Yes. Around 2020, we introduced this idea of Internet of Beings. It is not just people, like adults, humans, that participate in the democracy, but gradually, all around the world, people starting including rivers, mountains, animals, and so on.

Audrey Tang: All the different species capable of sentience, as well of collection of environment that could be translated into an avatar that speaks on behalf of them. All these were included in the participatory deliberations that we talk about.

Audrey Tang: Of course, on the final decision and implementation in the ‘20s, because of technological restrictions, these are still mostly human, but including the environment, the social, and future generations in the first diamond is already helping a lot in the ‘20s.

Audrey Tang: Of course, by the ‘30s, we now have pretty good sentient quantum simulations of future generations, as well as of the environment, so that they can also participate in the second diamond, although this is somewhat experimental at this point.

Interviewer: Wow. The democracies, are they still based on a market-orientated economy?

Audrey Tang: The market has been expanded, so that it is not just about trading services or products, and so on. We use this simple idea called quadratic voting, making sure that people understand that each of our strength of preferences is best if we just share our private assessments of common issues with the community, because that ends up resulting in the best possible outcome.

Audrey Tang: This solved the old election paradox, the arrow paradox, because that was built on the idea that a person only have a limited number of votes, and one vote per candidate. That was because the bits were insufficient.

Audrey Tang: The uploaded information is not sufficient, and that is the cause of the paradox. When everybody switched to quadratic voting, people discovered that they can save their voting points. They can save their voice credit, and everybody understand that it is the best for everybody if they evaluate only the parts that they actually have an idea about.

Audrey Tang: Also, learn from the other analysis from other people that they care about, and just almost magically, because each increasing return from each vote is the same as the increasing expectation of the cost. Because the cost and the return are the same in this voting game, people are motivated to disclose their true feelings.

Audrey Tang: Without a top-down, authoritarian distribution of political budget and so on, a good, fair, sustainable distribution just emerged because of this market of votes.

Interviewer: There is no price system, as we know it, in a way? There is not this thing, people make prices and compete. There’s less competition. It’s not competition-oriented.

Audrey Tang: In a zero-sum world, which is the bad, ol’ days – I think it was last century, it’s so long ago, I didn’t remember – people had this idea there’s limited resources, and we have to compete on a win-lose mechanism.

Audrey Tang: People who have lost make it a lose-lose mechanism to basically get revenge because of the systemic imbalances. Using quadratic funding, quadratic voting, and other methods designed from the RadicalxChange movement, we discovered that, if we, instead of playing game theory on zero-sum games, we can do reverse game theory, which is mechanism design.

Audrey Tang: Once you turn mechanism design into a participatory game, everybody start devising games that are truly win-win for everybody involved. Because of that, people now engage in a lot more creative pursuits, when it comes to poll politics.

Audrey Tang: If people detect that there is a win-lose dynamic going on, people will say, “Hey, let’s just have jam, a hackathon, and come up with a better mechanism,” instead of focusing their energy on winning the game and making other people lose.

Interviewer: This Serenity from Ethereum. It came out in 2020. Was that part of the solution?

Audrey Tang: Yes, the Serenity fork actually prompted people to have a new imagination about what a rough consensus-based governance can do, because previously, people understood blockchain or Bitcoin in a very fixed term, like they are here to provide a public ledger that are self-funding.

Audrey Tang: Which sounds OK, but it doesn’t really expand to other part of the society. With the Serenity, people now understand that the Ethereum naming system, for example, it could be adapted and used for legal identities.

Audrey Tang: Those legal identities don’t have to come from a top-down government, bureaucracy, or a bank, but rather can be gamified so that people – or authorizes – authenticates each other using what we call, at that time, a distributed identity system or social identity system.

Audrey Tang: Nowadays, we just call it the identity system, because the old, top-down, fixed, single point of failure identity system has just rendered obsolete after the new Serenity system came about. That became of the key points that enabled people to have multiple jurisdictions, cross-jurisdictional identities.

Audrey Tang: The imagination of an alternate governance system become not something that you have to rent an island, but can do right away in your existing communities and are compatible with existing contract law, and so on.

Interviewer: Wow.

Curator: Fantastic.

Curator: Thank you so much.

Audrey Tang: OK.

Interviewer: Very convincing.

Curator: Brilliant.