Audrey Tang: …in three, two, one, the local recording is on. We don’t have to clap or something, right? It would be…

Hanako Zhang: OK. Can we all start? We’ll talk a bit about the situation in Taiwan now. You’ve already said that Taiwan is in this post-pandemic situation, but what is it like today or currently in… could you talk a bit about it?

Audrey Tang: We’re having a pride parade today. People wear masks, I guess, and a rainbow colored at that. Otherwise, life is normal. It’s been more than 200 days with no local transmissions. We never had a lockdown in the first place. We did temporarily have, like large gatherings were discouraged, but it’s been more than 200 days since the last local transmission.

Audrey Tang: We’ve relaxed all the gathering rules and so on. Life is normal. If you want a glimpse of what a post-COVID society looks like, Taiwan is a pretty safe bet.

Hanako Zhang: How do you see Taiwan progressing from this current state — both socially and culturally, because it’s a very different situation compared to some other countries?

Audrey Tang: I think there’s two things we learned during the pandemic. The first is that we really trusted the citizens. Not only just about the civic technologies, which you probably have already heard about, but also about the resilience, about how the local people, even in the nightclubs, and the intimate drinking bars, and so on.

Audrey Tang: They all want to contribute to fighting the pandemic and keep the real contact system, the physical distancing really well without any pop down, shutdown, take down, lockdown measurements.

Audrey Tang: Previously, it’s actually very easy for people to associate stigma to people working in such a night life for being potentially against the need of contact tracing, but they really innovated and kept, for example, a shredable piece of paper that people just writes, throw away email address and SIM card numbers in.

Audrey Tang: They keep that as a burner SIM card for a few weeks. If they do not get the contact from the place they frequent, then they know that the visit was safe, and they will just discard that SIM card. Then the business here will just shred the paper as the central government doesn’t need to know anything.

Audrey Tang: Through innovations such as this, we kept the pandemic at bay, even in the night lives without driving them underground, as we have seen in some nearby countries. This is one example out of many, but I think this trust between the social sectors and also from the government to the citizens that will stay on with us on a certain sense of social solidarity.

Victor Leclercq: Did this trust started thanks to digital technology at the beginning?

Audrey Tang: I think digital technology really  helps this trust, because in the digital technology, all the footprints are for the record. If I published pharmacies mask availability every 30 seconds, then people queuing before me and after me can check that I’m working with the system and on this fashion.

Audrey Tang: If I get nine masks, but a stock deplete by 90, or rather increased by 90, [laughs] they will call 1922 right there, the toll free number and report something is wrong. I think digital technology helps in three ways. It helps people to have a shared reliable data. It helps cross-sectoral partnership by mutual accountability.

Audrey Tang: Also, it helps open innovation by sharing the mask map to Korea, or help translating the staff COVID dashboards on Tokyo, and so on. It’s truly made in the world.

Victor Leclercq: Those digital initiative have influenced other countries, you think?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, of course, definitely. We call it the Taiwan model. You can search for Taiwan model or Taiwan can help and see some really concrete results.

Hanako Zhang: How do you think the Taiwan can help…How can these be adapted for different countries or different ways of life? I’m sure it’s a little different depending on what community it’s used in?

Audrey Tang: A few things. The Taiwan playbook to counter the pandemic is broadly based on a playbook of countering the infodemic, which was this information crisis right before our presidential election this January, which turns out to be the same points as the coronavirus.

Audrey Tang: At any point in time, we did not issue any takedown from the administration to the social media companies and so on, even at a height of their anti-social behavior. This is a good lesson for other jurisdiction to learn because if you resort to takedowns, it may seem easy, but just like driving the nightlife underground, people will cease to trust each other.

Audrey Tang: It’s actually even more divisive because people lose the chance to have a real dialogue around this controversial content. Rather, by taking it down, you not only alienate all the people who supported it in the first place, but also people who could contribute fact checking and who could contribute their own contribution to the knowledge institution that is the Internet.

Audrey Tang: The open Internet failed to do so because whatever they contributed is taken down also with the takedown order. That resonated really well with many other jurisdictions we shared with. For example, I was in Chulalongkorn University and shared that with the people in Thailand.

Audrey Tang: They actually formulated their own what they call cofact.org, a collaborative fact checking initiative based on the Line end-to-end encrypted chatbots. You can forward a piece of this information to the chatbot to be crowd checked. That’s straight adaptation from the gov 0, g0v Cofacts with an extra s .org initiative.

Audrey Tang: This kind of process replicates really well. Of course, the Thailand people did not start fact checking politics. They started fact checking food and drug administration issues like microwaving the food.

Audrey Tang: Whether it’s safe if you put this juice with that fruit, does it cause cancer or things like that, but still, it’s a beginning. It boosts the kind of solidarity that could really turn into street demonstrations that we have seen.

Victor Leclercq: Some countries have tracking apps already, like in the UK or in France with coronavirus, but it seems all those apps bring a lot of criticism. French citizens or British citizens are more skeptical about those technology. Why do you think it’s so and why those governments don’t realize the advantage of being transparent?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, I think they’re trying to be transparent, but it was new data collection methods. The justifiability requirement is really high because for each and everything that was not there before the pandemic, the government really have to justify the reason to collect those new data in the first place.

Audrey Tang: One of the main guiding idea in the Taiwanese playbook is to never collect new data in the name of the pandemic. Anything that we do is based on the data collection apparatus that’s already in place before the pandemic.

Audrey Tang: That is why people feel more comfortable because the privacy perimeter is much more well-understood. We’ve had years to understand those data collection methods, but we do not invent new ones.

Hanako Zhang: You’re working with what you have. Yeah, I guess for other countries, there’s many cases where there’s already a mistrust towards the government, so it’s hard for citizens to accept any new forms of…

Audrey Tang: Of data collection. That’s the same in Taiwan. If we introduce new data collection, people will be wary of that, and that’s why we do not collect new data. It’s not because our citizens are obedient. It’s because we understand this, and so we do not collect new data.

Victor Leclercq: Was the Sunflower Movement in 2014 a big start for this attitude towards digital technology? Was it a change? Was it a big change?

Audrey Tang: Definitely. The Sunflower Movement demonstrated as a demo not as a protest that was half a million people on the street, many more online, we can get into a set of rough consensus when it comes to the Cross-Strait Service Trade Agreement or CSSTA.

Audrey Tang: Each of the 20 or so NGOs that occupy the parliament’s different side of the parliament deliberated their particular aspect about the labor rights, human rights, telecommunications, cybersecurity. There was one group that deliberated about whether we want to have the Beijing components in our 4G infrastructure at the time it’s still being built.

Audrey Tang: The consensus was no, because there was no private sector company in the PRC. If they want, they can swap leadership at any given time, at any of their companies. We said no to the 4G infrastructure. Of course, all the other countries now are having the same debate except on 5G, but we lead the discussion by six years.

Audrey Tang: My point is that, before that, each NGO with each of their followers and people who care about these things are considering themselves as a niche, and not at all mainstream. When 20 of them banded together, formed as the leader, suddenly it becomes cool, becomes mainstream to talk about any of those 20 issues.

Audrey Tang: An entire generation discovered that with the listening scale technologies, we’re not just media literate, we’re a media competent. Meaning that we can produce our own media, and narratives, and that is a collective awakening.

Hanako Zhang: How did that solidarity form? How did you communicate between these different diverse groups?

Audrey Tang: Think of them like flowers. Each of them planted in a place near the occupied parliament. Literally, four streets across the parliament, and a couple alleys, and then picture half a million people on the street as birds and bees that frequent those flowers. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: They may attend to one deliberation for a couple hours, and then move on to another booth, and then move on to another booth, and so on. It’s totally non-violent, it feels like a market.

Audrey Tang: Because of that people just cross-pollinated the ideas. Those ideas fused into one another in a transcultural fashion and reach a very high – weird to say that – basic transmission rate across all the people who participate in the movement.

Hanako Zhang: Was that structure pre-planned? I think…

Audrey Tang: Yeah, it was pre-planned. The 20 NGOs work together in a collective decision-making. It’s not entirely leaderless. It’s not like the Hong Kong anti-ELA. It is actually leader-ful by its policy center, like 20 or so leadership organizations.

Hanako Zhang: Do you think this pre-planning is what makes a successful demonstration? I think you’ve said that securing communication is key in the movement, but in many cases, when landlines, mobile phones, or the Internet is disrupted by the government everything goes the other way. What would you say makes a successful demonstration?

Audrey Tang: Two factors. One is that the people who volunteered to occupy the parliament really wanted to make decisions collectively. They’re not there to damage the public property. They’re not there to discredit the parliament.

Audrey Tang: Rather, the legitimacy theory was something like, “OK, the MPs were refusing to deliberate substantially. So we elect them.” It’s like they’re on strike. We go to where they work and do their work that we voted them to do. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: It’s direct citizen control of the agenda-setting power, because it’s not destructive. This urge is turned into co-creation, and not revenge or discrimination, which is what was damaging about many other Occupy movements that went nowhere. Co-creation, very important.

Audrey Tang: The second thing that’s important is because people understand everything is being live streamed. They don’t do behaviors that would be considered criminal or even just threatening to their future careers. People behaved, it’s like “The Truman Show.”

Audrey Tang: Understanding that this is extending the live stream parliament even to the street across the street, all the different cameras, and so on. It’s live streaming all the time, and because of that people behave in a public forum. They understand they’re being watched by many millions of people, real time translators. They acted parliamentarian. That’s another psychological effect.

Victor Leclercq: It was more a reclamation of their rights more than they actually revolt?

Audrey Tang: That’s exactly right, yes.

Victor Leclercq: We’ve seen around the world, when revolts actually happen, either with the Arab Spring, either it was at the moment in Belarus, we’ve seen that some government might be tempted to cut off the Internet, or to control the Internet.

Victor Leclercq: It seems to be more effort from them to control to stop the Internet than actually let it go and make it a free space. Is that more effort from government to control it or to let it free?

Audrey Tang: That’s the formulation the Taiwan model tries to reformulate, because the way you formulate it, and we hear it again and again from some young democracies, but also more established democracy, it’s a zero sum game.

Audrey Tang: The more laissez-faire the Internet is, the more end-to-end encryption it’s used, the more permission less innovation that it’s used and so on, the less control we have. Therefore, it will threaten democracy, you will threaten the social solidarity, people will become divided and hate each other.

Audrey Tang: At the end, we don’t have a society anymore. We have many echo-chambers and therefore, we have to put some control to the Internet. That is a very tried and true and tired formulation.

Audrey Tang: This is like saying, “This is a very serious virus. It will infect a lot of people, it is asymptomatic. You can’t even say whether you’re contagious or not, because of that we have to lock everybody down.

Audrey Tang: “We have to shut down entire cities. Otherwise, it’s to the benefit of people that we do this. We don’t want to do this, but we must lock down people and we understand the human rights will suffer, but it’s for the greater good.”

Audrey Tang: You understand these two formulations are isomorphic. They’re exactly the same shape. They’re proposing a dilemma where there is no dilemma. Taiwan model is simply that if people understand epidemiology, nobody wants to get sick and set out their rational self-interest.

Audrey Tang: They will wear a mask to protect themself against their own unwashed hands. Because it’s natural to do so, there’s no need to act collectively or in a way that’s top-down or whatever Confucian obedience, piety, whatever. Those concept doesn’t even need to enter the play.

Audrey Tang: If people understand that if three-quarter of people wear the mask and wash their hands, protect themself against their own unwashed hands, then the virus will go away. It’s as simple as that. Then people will act in a very creative fashion doing whatever that’s needed to make this virus go away.

Audrey Tang: The same goes for the democracy part of the argument. If people say that social media is antisocial because they enable foreign interference during elections, to put a lot of money into targeted advertisement, fake human rights groups that will sow discord, the Russian playbook, we’ve all heard that.

Audrey Tang: The response should be, “Look at our own domestic social media.” In Taiwan, it’s PTT. It’s in the not-for-profit sector, maintained by people in the National Taiwan University. It has no shareholders and no advertisers.

Audrey Tang: They can prototype a lot of prosocial ways of communication and promise then to disallow not only foreign meddling in terms of paid advertisements, but also do a radical transparency to get all the supposed-to-run advertisement but may have a social or political targeting for it to just publish radically open, as are campaign donation and expenditure.

Audrey Tang: Because we use open data for our community donation and expenditure, we then can talk to Facebook and say, “Look, you have two choices. You either publish all your advertisement during our election season as open data for investigative journalism, or you can face social sanction.”

Audrey Tang: We don’t have jurisprudence toward Facebook, we understand that, but the people can boycott Facebook. In Taiwan, when there is a strong social norm, if they boycott a company, that company goes down to flames.

Audrey Tang: Because of that, last November, Facebook rolled out the advertisement library in Taiwan, at that time, the only jurisdiction that they roll out with a real-time radical transparency that will ban all the foreign payment of the election-related campaign, but also the domestic donors need to be radically open, like submitting their own national ID or company ID.

Audrey Tang: It’s all structured data so that anyone who want to try any dark pattern will be discovered and shamed immediately. The way to go out of this “control the Internet” force dilemma is for the social sector to establish a norm, just like wearing the mask, and then enforcing the norm for the business sector.

Victor Leclercq: Are there a lot of local other social media in Taiwan at the moment? Do you reckon it’s something that should be developed, local social media, for each region of the world or each country?

Audrey Tang: Definitely. If everything is open-source, it enabled the same sort of system to be replicated all across different jurisdictional norms. You see, for example, the Mastodon system, the Secure Scuttlebutt system, many of those, like the PTT, was a bulletin board system that was actually before the Internet. It was part of dial-up BBS.

Audrey Tang: Because they are open source, PTT is entirely open source, and the governance is open too, it enable people to fork, meaning to take a copy of it, but run in their local jurisdiction with the local norm. That’s free software. It’s the freedom to use for a different purpose, to share, to modify, and then to fork.

Audrey Tang: These four software freedoms virtually guarantee what you call domestic social network, but the development may be shared. It could be a shared system just like Linux, but it’s configured differently in different jurisdictions.

Victor Leclercq: Is this all those issues we’re sharing at the moment are giving an awareness of the need of a global government do you think?

Audrey Tang: I would say it’s about global governance, but not necessarily global government. The term government is a very singular term. It has this Westphalian state association so that if you have a state government here, you probably don’t have another state government claiming the same territory, except for Taiwan and PRC. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Anyway, the norm is that the states are mutually exclusionary in their territorial claims. The abnormal case is called the Taiwan solution. What we are trying to get at is that in Internet governance, we recognize the overlapping jurisdiction.

Audrey Tang: We recognize, as I mention, Facebook. When I negotiate with them, I treat them as co-governors. They have not, of course, yet issued Libra, so they are not yet sovereign. They have not printed their own money, but they were getting quite close to it at that time.

Audrey Tang: Even if they’re not sovereign, they are co-governor. When we have overlapping jurisdictions, the multi-stakeholder governance model, or COGOV, is a United Nations thing, if you call it co-governance, then people understand intuitively that it’s worldwide.

Audrey Tang: It concerns worldwide stakeholders, and it’s what’s required if we are to deal with truly global issues, the pandemic, the infodemic, the climate crisis. If you say government, then the states feel like they are being threatened in their sovereigncy, and then you get nowhere.

Hanako Zhang: That’s for sure.

Victor Leclercq: It’s more an idea of a global community than a global government.

Audrey Tang: Internet was always like this. The Internet itself is governed in a global fashion. Anyone with a email can join the Internet Society, the Internet Engineering Taskforce, the ICANN, and so on, without having to go through a state representative. In a sense, Internet governance is the prototype of the kind of global governance that we’re looking at at the moment.

Hanako Zhang: The initial idea, the formation of the Internet is that, but there’s a lot of growing suspicion…

Audrey Tang: Definitely.

Hanako Zhang: …on privacy and how data is used. What makes you stay hopeful about this model of…

Victor Leclercq: This utopia.

Audrey Tang: Because we’re living in it. [laughs]

Victor Leclercq: Taiwan seems to be living in it more than other countries.

Hanako Zhang: [laughs] Than other places.

Audrey Tang: I know, so we like to share. It’s called “Taiwan can help.” [laughs] I think it was William Gibson who spoke when he first encountered virtual reality. At the time VR was not very well-developed, so anyone can use VR, but only for a few seconds, at most, a few minutes. Then you get very dizzy. They get a glimpse of the future.

Audrey Tang: The quote was, “The future is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed.” Just like that glimpse, in modern-day Taiwan, you do have a glimpse of not only the post-pandemic future, but a post-infodemic culture, and also what a democracy that responds in the here and now rather than uploading three bits every four years. It’s called voting.

Audrey Tang: Not ritualized and fossilized, but rather a living technology that people see democracy, and rightly so, as a technology that they contribute and send poll requests, even to the kernel. It’s called a constitution, and so on. We’re working on constitutional amendment right now.

Audrey Tang: The point here is that it’s a living lab of the kind of co-governance that I just mentioned. I truly understand that it’s not that easy to copy because not all the jurisdictions can get the idea of random people occupying the Parliament non-violently, with the blessing of the head of the Parliament, resulting in the cabinet saying, “OK, so crowdsourcing, future direction is fine.”

Audrey Tang: It sounds utopic, but that’s really what happened. Instead of just copying the preconditions of change in Taiwan, maybe you can look at the idea that we iterate so quickly and see democracy itself as a technology, and invite young people to be reverse mentors to show the direction of the future to the elderly and so on.

Audrey Tang: Japan has recently done just so. There was a new minister for the reform of the cabinet. There was a planned ministry for digital transformation. All these are really good directions to go, and you probably don’t need your parliament to be occupied for these to happen.

Victor Leclercq: Will that take, do you think, a lot of education as well from young people and education at school? How can we educate people on this awareness of open source, about using the Internet in a good way? Is there anything already…

Audrey Tang: It’s all about co-creation. Instead of literacy where you teach people things, talk about competence, which is they make things, and then you amplify them.

Audrey Tang: For example, during the presidential debate and forum last December and earlier this January, a lot of middle-schoolers, even primary-schoolers, contributed to the fact-checking of each and every word that a presidential candidate has said and fact-checked all of it.

Audrey Tang: Of course, with the coaching and mentorship by professional fact-checkers in institutional and social media. That gave those middle-schoolers and some primary-schoolers a taste into their influence on democracy, their impact, positively, on democracy.

Audrey Tang: When they grow older and actually have the right to vote, they already know what democracy looks like without getting over-hyped into particular populism that are exclusionary. I’m fine with inclusive populism. They wouldn’t attack each other, revenge, or discriminate against each other in the name of democracy.

Audrey Tang: They will also participate as YouTubers, for example, that broadcasts the counting process. In Taiwan, when you count the ballots of the presidential ticket, you take it out and show it to all people holding, I don’t know, GoPro cams, so that it’s radically transparent.

Audrey Tang: People in each major political party have their own tallying app. Just like the mask rationing app, where people queuing in line can keep the situation honest, our counters also keep the situation honest because we count only in paper ballots, and also very publicly, subject to real-time recording.

Audrey Tang: Again, it becomes festive. I guess that’s how we maintain a more than three-quarter voting rate. That shows the engagement into the democratic process.

Hanako Zhang: There’s a lot of encouragement of people participating and doing than just taking in information, which I guess you can encourage from a very young age, but as we’re all learning as we get older. How would you encourage people who are maybe in the older generation to participate more?

Audrey Tang: To make a difference. First off, I need to correct myself. Our presidential election has a turnout of 74.9 percent, so about 75 percent. [laughs] I was wrong by 0.1 percent. For the elderly, one of the most important things is when they share the wisdom, for it to matter.

Audrey Tang: For many elderly people, they feel marginalized by the digital communication tools. If these tools are designed to be not accessible by requiring them to change their habits and so on, then they will feel not included in the decision-making process.

Audrey Tang: Which is why I always consult my own grandma, my father’s mother, 88 years old now, [laughs] when it comes to designing digital services, and including actually the rationing system of mask on pharmacy and convenience store.

Audrey Tang: She would tell me that her young friend, 77 years old, her young friend, but not my young friend, her young friend has a lot of upset emotions when it comes to queuing at pharmacies.

Audrey Tang: When we designed for these convenience store to be able to preorder the masks, we initially said, “OK. Every convenience store has a ATM. You just insert your debit card, and then you type your password, and then you pay like about two USD, and then the very next week you can go back and collect nine medical masks.”

Audrey Tang: It all sounds very good, but grandma Yang, that’s 77 years old has told me that she would never do that, because she said she will type her debit card password, and she will be afraid that people would just see those password or just to siphon away her savings, her lifelong savings, because of this process.

Audrey Tang: She said, “Why can’t you just use the same health insurance IC card and without having to type a password?” because she associates password to transfer of money, and she is not wrong. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: We redesigned the process so that she can use the IC card on the kiosk with no password but paying by cash, coins, two US dollars at a counter, so that she can rest assured that there’s no money being siphoned away. That’s wisdom. Once we designed according to her wish, she can teach her younger friends, like 60 years old. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Then, they can teach their younger friends at 50, and then their younger friend at 40. I’m sure 30-somethings can learn it by themselves. [laughs] Anyway, the point is that it if you design with the maximum accessibility in mind, then it just ripples through the society much more easily.

Hanako Zhang: Very inclusive.

Victor Leclercq: How about the people you actually work with at the minister? Do you have a team of younger or older people?

Audrey Tang: It’s very intergenerational. The original cofounders are in their 60s, 50s, 40s, 30s, 20s, and teens, respectively, [laughs] so pretty broad. Every year, we have interns, 30 of them, who are all around 20 years old. It’s a truly intergenerational team.

Hanako Zhang: Going back to the idea of world governance…

Victor Leclercq: Or community.

Hanako Zhang: Or community, let’s say world community…

Audrey Tang: Governance is fine, thank you.

Hanako Zhang: I want to ask your thoughts on some existing transnational organizations. What are your thoughts on the WHO or the United Nations, and what you think of their current role, and what you think, how they might evolve in the future?

Audrey Tang: The UN, I participated through a robot to the Internet Governance Forum at the UN Geneva. It’s truly unique experience, because it’s the first time since 1971 that you get the representative from the PRC and our representative – re-presentative really, because it’s a robot just shows my face, [laughs] so it’s not representing, it’s just presenting. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Anyway, as in the projector projecting me in the same room. Even when the PRC Ambassador to the UN Geneva protested, eventually he stayed in the room, and that’s the first. According to the UN resolution that they often cite, they cannot be in the same room as our representatives.

Audrey Tang: One side needs to leave the room, because it’s a multilateral system, and the seat – actually one of the founding seats – can only be seated by one representative. By sending a robotic tuple, this norm is disrupted. For our purposes they’re just watching a movie, but movie is of course mounted on the robot, and it’s recorded one second ago, but it’s still a movie. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Whatever I said ended up in the official records, and it’s a legitimate conversation, but that’s because IGF operates on a Internet governance norm. At the end of the day, while the UN building of course check passports at the entry, and that’s a multilateral rule, within the building it operates under multistakeholder rules of the Internet society.

Audrey Tang: This is really symbolic, because the robot doesn’t need a passport, so the robot just enters. I’m sure Sophia doesn’t need a passport either. [laughs] When the robot enters the UN building, it transcends the multilateral rules, and then it enters the multistakeholder norm.

Audrey Tang: As long as we can prove that we are a stakeholder in Internet governance – which is very easy to prove, you just type something.tw, like                                                       www.gov.tw                                                  , and then you get into our machines, not the Beijing machine, [laughs] obviously we’re a stakeholder. Then, of course, we have the right to speak like any other stakeholders.

Audrey Tang: It’s a evolution into a more hybrid model of multilateral on one side, but also multistakeholder on the other, of the major groups in the sustainable development goals, people who are impacted by climate change.

Audrey Tang: They can go through either their country representatives on the multilateral side, or they can go through the social sector organizations, the CSOs on the major group side, which is the multistakeholder side.

Audrey Tang: More and more international organizations, like the open government partnership, the OGP and so on, are set up with the deliberate rule of half the seat being multilateral and half the seat being civil society multistakeholder. That is a really interesting model, and I would recommend that hybrid model for the evolution and transition from multilateral to a multistakeholder world.

Hanako Zhang: How about for the WHO? Any thoughts on that?

Audrey Tang: With the WHO, we had a pre-assembly assembly online with 14 countries and economies, and we held it. It’s very interesting because it’s all rectangles, just like we are having a rectangular [laughs] conversation now. You can’t tell the membership seat with the observer seat or the expert seat.

Audrey Tang: These words mean nothing if you’re all rectangles on a telecommunication [laughs] setting. Everybody are free to choose their own nickname. It all went very well.

Audrey Tang: It actually has a extra sense of intimacy, because we get to see many of the senior leadership’s homes, just like I’m showing you my home right now. [laughs] It’s a extra layer of intimacy that you couldn’t get if you meet in Geneva.

Audrey Tang: It’s better for solidarity, and it transcends the multilateral norms. We really look forward to have more engagement like this in the ministerial level, not just a limited scientific access that we currently get through the WHO system now.

Victor Leclercq: What could be the negative side of this world community or this world governance?

Audrey Tang: There could be two main drawbacks. One is that unless you have broadband as a human right, which we do have in Taiwan…

Audrey Tang: Unless you have broadband as a human right, then it constitutes a epistemic injustice, because people who cannot connect to the Internet, or if they can, but they have to pay a lot, or if they can, but they can download a lot but they cannot upload a lot, in all these forms, their presentation, their representation is dwindled.

Audrey Tang: Even if they have a lot of innovation to say, they cannot contribute to the world’s knowledge. Then, it’s very likely that this multistakeholder governance system will make decisions that sacrifice them, not out of malice, simply because we did not know that they will be negatively impacted. Unless we have broadband as a human right, there will be epistemic injustice, so that’s the first thing.

Audrey Tang: The second thing is about future generations. A truly global multistakeholder system may, nevertheless, make decisions that benefit the current generation at the expense of future generations, simply because…I’m sure the future generations cannot connect to the Internet. They have not been born. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: In order to achieve truly intergenerational solidarity including people in future generations, we need to look beyond the individual model and adopt something like the Indigenous Taiwanese people’s view like the top mountain of Taiwan, Saviah or Pendukunan, as a long-life spirit to which we are just stewards.

Audrey Tang: Then, just like in the movie “Avatar,” if we can anthromorphy those long-living beings as stakeholders in our multistakeholder system…People are trying. In New Zealand there’s rivers and national parks being given seats like companies in the chair of the board meetings. It’s chaired by one person from the Crown and one person from the Maori Nation.

Audrey Tang: Canada are also trying something, it’s called natural personhood. It’s not unimaginable, but unless we do it systemically, future generation are still sacrificed when we do world governance.

Hanako Zhang: Climate change is a pressing issue, now and very much into the future.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, if there is going to be a future.

Hanako Zhang: Like you just mentioned, but the big question is how our democracy can consider other living beings or our planet, and how that can be included in the democracy? How do you think that can happen? It’s a very abstract thought to many people.

Hanako Zhang: Even while other countries are trying to do things, too, like you said, like rivers, how would that work? How can this be part of people’s understanding of how the democracy could work?

Audrey Tang: There’s two things going on here. One is that our imagination of commons was quite limited. We think of commons, we think of parks maybe. We think of a baseball court that we can share maybe, but actually not only the mountains and rivers are the commons.

Audrey Tang: The digital future, when you put a lot of restriction via copyright or via patents, that’s innovation being sacrificed. In a sense you’re taking away things from the commons and to, of course, benefit of one individual, one generation, but at the expense of future generations.

Audrey Tang: If you take a creative commons, which is a thing, by the way, [laughs] if you take a creative commons worldview, then it’s much more easy to imagine even if you are not into the movie Avatar, if you’re not into the anthromorphying natural personhood, you can still imagine the future remixers of the Wikipedia articles or the Flickr photos or the Creative Common YouTube movies.

Audrey Tang: You can still dedicate part of your work into the unforeseeable future, who may actually just take your work and remix it in unimaginable ways, like our conversation, for example. We make a transcript, but I’ve also had people who take this transcript and make art, or take my video interview recording and make rap songs, like the dolph MONO band from Japan. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: These are in a sense my gift to the future. If you do this more about pre-announcing that you will not sue future creators, then you can get in your mind the idea of a digital commons in a much more firm fashion, instead of thinking in very abstract ways, like 5G spectrums or things like that.

Audrey Tang: You can think in very concrete ways, like publishing my photo under creative common, and people take it and make movies and make me look like Doraemon. That is very imaginable, that’s not abstract at all.

Victor Leclercq: Is this a way at all that the digital technology or this implementation of the digital system could damage the environment?

Audrey Tang: There’s two things. One is the environment as in carbon emissions and things like that, of which I’m less worried about, because we’re getting pretty good in calculating the amount of impact that each of those actions have under carbon emission.

Audrey Tang: Once we can account for it, then we can internalize all those external tasks, and you can even build carbon trade systems based on those. I’m less worried, because if we can count, if we can measure, then we can manage.

Audrey Tang: I’m more worried, not about carbon emission or anything that we can count, but about the relationship that people have vis-a-vis the environment. For example, I will use a social sector example, like human resource, HR. To me this word makes no sense. It conjures in my mind “Soylent Green,” [laughs] unless you’re making food out of people.

Audrey Tang: You’re not calling human resource resource, because it’s not something you can allocate. Each of us have our autonomy. It’s a perversion in the neoliberal vocabulary to say human resource, but then they would say corporate incentives, which is really weird, because a corporate is a fictional being. It’s even more fictional than natural personhood.

Audrey Tang: There could be no incentive for a non-being, for a fiction, but they say it, anyway, and pretend that it happens, and because of that, it causes of course alienation, ratification, all those Marxist critiques. That is the symptom. I don’t think this struggle is at the root of things, I think it’s the symptom of this perversion of vocabularies.

Audrey Tang: Similarly, if we only talk about carbon emissions and so on, as if that we are the manager of us, that us has no mystery, and we manage it just like SimCity and so on, then to me, it also makes it potentially falling into a dungeon of all-knowingness. It’s actually not true.

Audrey Tang: The way that a complex system, a emerging system behaves itself is very hard to predict. If we can predict, just based on satellite images and so on, how the planet works, we wouldn’t have coronavirus in the first place. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: It shows the limits of our epistemic enterprise, and it’s very easy to fall into the illusion of we’re counting so many things, everything must be countable. A sense of mystery is still very important.

Victor Leclercq: What is your relationship to physical space as when you’re governing with this digital minister? You meet a lot of people, you organize…

Audrey Tang: Yeah, definitely.

Victor Leclercq: How does this happen? Is there a specific place where you meet people? Is there in different places in the city? Do you go to different places in the country to meet people?

Audrey Tang: Yes, definitely. The less connected this place is to the capital, to Taipei City, the more likely that I will visit. This is very simple rule of thumb. If you’re very easily connected, like by high speed rails to Taipei City, chances are your city looks just like Taipei City, [laughs] because it’s called globalization, it’s a real thing.

Audrey Tang: If it’s hard for your transportation, like it takes four hours or more from the Indigenous mountains to the Taipei City, then chances are your life there is very different from the City of Taipei.

Audrey Tang: It makes more sense of me to spend a couple of days or a couple of weeks in that place, in a anthromorphic paying-out ethnographic work, and to make sure that I can see the world from that particular point of view. There really is no shortcut – of course, I can take a helicopter, but I really have to live there. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: The transportation there is shortcut, but lived experience there is not shortcut. This is my having gone through two puberties, going through the second puberty through estrogen and so on.

Audrey Tang: When I was in my early 20s, I can read everything about puberty development for women, but unless I go through this process myself, none of those words sound true when I say it, because I don’t have the phenomena. It’s like I can have the descriptive knowledge, but I don’t have the phenomenal knowledge.

Audrey Tang: Really, there is no shortcut around this. I really have to be in the shoes of people walking the road that they walk, but then, I can take that point of view back to Taipei City and share it with the world.

Victor Leclercq: When you do travel, do you organize meetings and everybody share their ideas, or do you go there more as the observer?

Audrey Tang: Both. I first go there as a observer, so I can listen to what they have to say and understand it on a deeper intuitive fashion, and then we have a real face-to-face town hall, and then I facilitate and try my best translating their ideas into the idea of bureaucracy, that’s the 12 ministries in Taipei can understand.

Hanako Zhang: I guess your relationship with the digital and the physical is very fast and there’s not much of a lag between them, which you say, you meet people and go there and talk to them and also act as observer, but you implement their ideas very quickly. How do you keep this balance and relationship between the two, the physical and the digital?

Audrey Tang: By sleeping eight hours a day at least.

Hanako Zhang: [laughs]

Audrey Tang: That’s called neuroplasticity by the way. Even if I expose myself to a lot of strange and weird phenomenon during the day, as long as I get eight hours of sleep I can process all those different ideas without passing judgment to it during the day and emerge from the sleep a more integrated, holistic vision.

Audrey Tang: If I don’t sleep that day or sleep only four hours or so, I may remember the facts, but I lose the integrated feelings. That’s not particular to my mind. I’m sure it’s true for you too. Eight hours of sleep very important.

Hanako Zhang: Would you say everyone should take eight hours of sleep for society to function better? [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Definitely. Yeah, we should advocate for that. If I need to take many, many sides in a complicated town hall or argument, then I can see maybe five different sides, each having their own world view, then I may have to work more. I have to sleep nine hours in order to integrate those viewpoints.

Audrey Tang: After I watched the movie “Tenet”, I slept for 10 hours, and then I wake up and understand everything [laughs] in the movie. [laughs]

Victor Leclercq: We actually went to watch it recently. We need to sleep 10 hours to understand this.

Hanako Zhang: Sleep is the balancing factor for everything maybe.

Victor Leclercq: What else keeps you going? I feel talking to you there’s such an optimism for the future and openness for new ideas. What else keeps you going? What’s your secret for this enthusiasm apart from sleeping?

Audrey Tang: In addition to sleep, I keep thinking that this eight-eight-eight hours, it should be a motto or something, eight hours physical, eight hours digital, eight hours sleep. [laughs] Anyway, I digress.

Audrey Tang: The other thing that keeps me going is this idea of hugging the trolls or just troll hugging. It’s my hobby. It’s been my long-time hobby. If you search for troll hugging, I talk about it as early as 2009 or something, so more than 10 years.

Audrey Tang: The idea very simply put is that when people troll me online, I embrace the trolls by responding only to the constructive part of their argument and ignoring anything that’s a personal attack. I enjoy actually their creative use of the language when they construct those ad hominem, personal attacks. It’s very funny to me.

Audrey Tang: If I see something that upset me, instead of feeling upset or flame back, I would take a deep breath and go to my kitchen, and of course there’s more than 20 different sort of drinks, mostly tea bags, and then I will just take two random tea bag that I have not mixed before and then mix it in hot water.

Audrey Tang: Then I go back to the computer, looking at the word that makes me upset, drink this new mixed tea, and then enjoy this new sensation, this fragrance, and then when I respond carefully only to the constructive part, and then I go to sleep and sleep for eight hours.

Audrey Tang: By the time I wake up, my long-term memory, my associative memory will already have been reprogrammed so the next time I see those ad hominem attacks or those toxic words I will think about the beautiful smell of the tea. Then I will feel very calm and optimistic and indeed appreciate the creativity of the troll basically.

Audrey Tang: The troll either gets bored because they cannot anger me or they become co-creators. Sometimes the troll just become good friends and they visit me at a social innovation lab.

Victor Leclercq: It happened?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, it does happen. They troll because they care. Chances are they care. They have the proficiency to make real changes.

Hanako Zhang: Do you use the same method not just for personal attacks, but for instance, you read something very negative on the news, or you’re feeling the negative effects of the damage that’s happening to the environment, or about climate change?

Audrey Tang: Definitely, yes. You can take the same attitude. It’s probably easier, because it doesn’t have your name on it, but the spirit is the same, yes.

Hanako Zhang: How do you stay proactive about it? What do you do about it? You can calm your thoughts, but do you do anything to take action?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, definitely. Basically, I think of call to actions like hashtags. I will make new hashtags, or reuse existing hashtags. The STGs are very useful for that particular regard, because we can almost repurpose anything [laughs] into the STG hashtags. It doesn’t need to be STGs, it could be anything.

Audrey Tang: For example, before we had this conversation, literally just a few minutes before, I posted on Instagram a simple hashtag called “Fratelli Tutti,” the solidary, the fraternity, the Comment Solidarité. It’s cyclical, published recently by the Pope, so by the Catholic Church.

Audrey Tang: It talks about a lot of the same themes that we talk about, how global solidarity is needed, the fraternity and social friendship is needed. The global community is needed to replace the existing metaphor about this multilateral competition, short-termness, and things like that.

Audrey Tang: Why would I start a hashtag or join a hashtag by the Pope? [laughs] It’s because today is the Pride Parade, so I submitted a picture of me wearing the rainbow colored-mask and talking about dialogue is the most important thing.

Audrey Tang: I quote, “In a pluralistic society, dialogue is the best way to realize what are always to be reaffirmed and respected, apart from any ephemeral consensus. Such dialogue will need to be enriched, illuminated by clear-thinking, rational arguments, a variety of perspectives and contribution of the different views of knowledge and points of view.”

Audrey Tang: That’s what the Pope wrote. It’s literally a letter from the Catholic Church, talking about the importance of plurality, dialogue and so on. It’s more like a bridge between the ideas that are considered holy in the Catholic community, and by the ideas that are considered in a secular world as foundational, especially when it comes to LBGTIQ movement.

Audrey Tang: They both hinge on dialogue across different positions to form common values. These creative views that hashtag encourages LTBTIQ people to read some Pope [laughs] that encourages some Catholic people to read something that the LTBTIQ operate at the Pride. This is a conscious move to call action on both sides.

Victor Leclercq: What is the place of religion? Is there a place for religion in the digital world?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, definitely. The Comment Solidarité, actually it’s a word play because in Taiwan the gay and gay pride, it’s literalized as [Taiwanese] but it also means “comrade.” Camaraderie is the same word as gay people. It’s a word play particular to Mandarin. In English, you would make a different play between gay and joyful, because “gay” also means “joyful.” [laughs]

Audrey Tang: The point here is that religion is such a set of associations ripe with meaning. If you can work with that meaning, association system, it gets you in a much more intuitive fashion faster into a sense of common value. In a sense, the SDGs, the 17 tenets, are like religions for a secular world.

Audrey Tang: These are also 17 tenets [laughs] – I related to the movie – 17 tenets that we commonly identify. The same way the SDGs work, we can work with the religions with different pillars but with many overlaps.

Hanako Zhang: Going back to the relationship between the digital and the physical, how do you think…We see your vision of how the digital would develop or even how religion has a place in digital world. How do you see the physical world developing alongside in the future? Kind of also in relation to our environment, and the ecological factor?

Audrey Tang: First of all, because of the imminent near future use of low-Earth orbit satellites, the no reception zones currently outside of broadband access will soon be something in the past, like the dial-up modems. Maybe, we will remember that there was a time where we still rely on fiber optics to get broadband access. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Soon, it will be replaced by LEO satellites, by drones and balloons, and whatever. As long as you can see the sky, you can connect to the cloud. [laughs] That’s the likelihood of the future where any distinction that we may now make between the cyber and the physical may lose its meaning because anything that’s physical has a digital twin.

Audrey Tang: Anything that’s digital can be projected and re-presented on the physical realm. This twin relationship will make their reality truly shared. Currently, because of the limitation of our connectivity, the virtual reality are often just so low realities where only you is real, and everything else is NPC or really low-quality characters, which is why we’re still using two-dimensional Skype instead of VR.

Audrey Tang: It’s because we can see each other more clearly than if we both wear glasses that transport us to diverge from reality, but that’s going to change soon. Previously, you rely on fiber optics. It’s always in the rooms.

Audrey Tang: Once we’re in the room, we use the laptop. In the 5G and post-5G era, even in outdoor places like into nature, in the sea side, on the mountains, and so on, you always have fiber optic, low-latency connectivity. You can bring people easily into your surroundings and share the same landscape of nature but with people who are physically quite far away.

Audrey Tang: This illusion of the border between the cyber and the physical is especially important, because then the sense of co-presence would be real. Nowadays, we understand that we are in a knowledge domain. We can share our ideas very easily. Read each other expression is the one, but we can’t talk about weather, and we can’t enjoy the music together.

Audrey Tang: The environment that both we are in are artificial. We’re not in nature. Soon, we will be able to meet in camaraderie, in the nature and enjoy the natural settings in a way that feels natural to us.

Hanako Zhang: I guess right now there’s a detachment between the physical and the digital. But like you said, if that becomes much more together, and you don’t see this detachment anymore, I think many people would also be very scared of this because there’s a anti for new technology or developing technology.

Hanako Zhang: It’s hard to see what’s real and what’s not real. What would you say to people like this? Both of us were a bit skeptical on that.

Victor Leclercq: So far, maybe the basic application of this technology haven’t seen. I don’t know. We’re talking about mixing digital and real. What comes to my mind is something very basic, but it’s the Pokémon GO app, where people can see all the things and mix it digital and the real. I don’t see it as an amazing use.

Audrey Tang: It’s not amazing at all… and that’s because the cyber part is almost just like stickers. It’s still mostly physical. It’s just barely cyber. That’s not the kind of imagination. I recently had a conversation called 7x7, so 7x7.no. We had conversations with curators at New York and a artist who’s the name Yngve Holen. I invited the curator and artist to the Matterhorn Mountain.

Audrey Tang: It sounds fair. [laughs] We are in Switzerland. The Matterhorn is a really high mountain, very dangerous to climb, even for seasoned climbers. What we did is that we all put on XRSpace glasses, which are very lightweight. It doesn’t have a controller. We just control using our hand gestures. It has its own built-in 5G chip and can scan the environment.

Audrey Tang: In that way, it’s much more in real time. Then I just invited them to Matterhorn. We just coasted along a helicopter ride to Matterhorn Mountains and then have our artistic discussions back then. That experience is almost all virtual and just a little bit physical. That is truly a transforming experience.

Audrey Tang: I think it brings us closer to the Matterhorn even if we didn’t climb it. We probably could not anyway. It’s very difficult. Not Everest but similar. Still, it brings us more in all of that particular mountain. If I’m asked to then study the ecosystem, the ecology of Switzerland, I would care more about that place than ever before that this is out-of-first-person feeling and observation.

Victor Leclercq: It probably brings you closer together with the people because you’re sharing this experience, even though it’s a virtual experience.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, and it’s a very new experience. Not many people have been to Matterhorn. I had a similar conversation with Saskia Sassen of the book “Explusions,” the sociologist and philosopher.

Audrey Tang: The idea, very simply put, is that before we went to a radio show together around the new Desi Day – I was in Paris at that time – I invited her to go to the moon. [laughs] I bring with myself the virtual reality headset.

Audrey Tang: We just look at us together from the moon and experience the overview effect, the kind of effect that astronauts become better people after landing back to Earth because they see something transcending the artificial boundaries that our jurisdictions make.

Audrey Tang: Even just exposing ourselves in the International Space Station or the moon for a few minutes, not more than two minutes, still it has a really qualitative change in the radio show, of which we have a transcript. It enables us to think beyond the here and now, but still think the world as a community.

Audrey Tang: Which may sound abstract, but when you’re looking at this Earth as a thing that you can hold in your hand, suddenly, it becomes very easy to imagine.

Victor Leclercq: Almost sounds like the same experience of a out-of-body experience from meditation.

Hanako Zhang: That experience, does that translate back to daily life?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, definitely, because I’m not looking at some fictional world. I’m not looking at a fictional planet. I’m looking at this planet. In a sense, I’m looking at myself, just from a different vantage point. It’s not about just a overview and the here-and-now but about the zooming effect.

Audrey Tang: If, through virtual reality, you can share all the different levels of zooming with the people that you care and you want them to care too about the environment, then this zooming experience is very enriching and empowering. If it’s just about the top level of zoom and the here-and-now level, and it’s not shared, it’s a solo experience, then, of course, it’s as fictional as anything.

Victor Leclercq: It’s almost like art, which offers a sublimation of life and make us…

Audrey Tang: Exactly like that, yes.

Hanako Zhang: Are there other instances where these kind of experiences can be shared?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, many. [laughs]

Hanako Zhang: …as many people won’t be able to experience this shared virtual world.

Audrey Tang: My first interview in virtual reality was with middle-schoolers and one primary-schooler. At that point, I’m 180 centimeters high, and they probably are not. If we meet face-to-face, they will look up to me, quite literally.

Audrey Tang: In virtual reality, I did a 3D scan of myself and shrank my body to be the same height as they are. I can join their community, and they can look at me eye-to-eye. Like in indigenous culture, you will sit on the floor and meet each other eye-to-eye, but it’s hard to explore when you’re all sitting. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: In virtual reality, we can explore all we want, but they still see me as someone at the same height as they are. For example, we can all shrink to the same height as a leopard cat and have a conversation about how to make constructions that are friendly in a ecosystem that includes the almost-extinct leopard cats.

Audrey Tang: It’s realized in many entertainment facilities. There was a experience like that in Disneyland Paris, the Ratatouille immersive experience. Nowadays, it’s inexpensive to make such experiences too. Just by shrinking oneself to fit leopard cats or small kids, that, by itself, is also quite transformative.

Victor Leclercq: So far, it sounds like all those technologies apply to entertainment more than human experience. Do you think it will merge together? Are we going to lose the entertainment part or are we going to merge them together, the social and entertainment?

Audrey Tang: Like any platforms that happened before on the Internet, it’s first used for porn, and then for cute cats. It’s a law [laughs] of the Internet.

Audrey Tang: I’m sorry, but that’s true. Like anything, this shared reality technology will be used for porn and for cute cats, or maybe porn with cute cats. I don’t want to imagine that.

Audrey Tang: Anyway, the point is that it’s the kind of intimacy that people want. Once you encounter that sort of intimacy of a trusting relationship, then you will look for deeper and longer, more relational, less transactional commitments and connections. That’s when this kind of empathy can build on.

Audrey Tang: Of course, you still have to have the kind of intimacy that would enable the cute cat and the porn. Otherwise, this tech is not working.

Hanako Zhang: How do you build that intimacy?

Audrey Tang: Very carefully.

Audrey Tang: I think open innovation really is key. If people can shape the world the way that they want in a way that feels comfortable with all the personal spaces, the communication norms, and things like that, then you can trust each and every citizen to come up with the kind of intimacy that they’re comfortable with.

Audrey Tang: On the other hand, if the designer is not humble, but rather is full of hubris, like, “I know people better than they know themselves because I have,” I don’t know, “authoritarian intelligence, AI, or whatever,” of course, that’s guaranteed to not work as with any planned economy.

Audrey Tang: I still don’t think with any AI that we have the kind of computational power that can predict people’s preferences in a truly intimate way better than people themselves. I believe, instead, assistive intelligence, so also AI, but just like a hearing aid.

Audrey Tang: You wouldn’t want a hearing aid or a eyeglass to sell what you have heard to advertisers because it runs counter to the idea of assistive technology, which is restoring or empowering human dignity. If the AI is assistive, then the space co-designed by those assistive intelligences will be humble, participatory, accountable, and aligned.

Audrey Tang: If you start with authoritarian, “The state knows everything” or “The capitalist knows everything,” perspective, then that will go horribly wrong.

Victor Leclercq: I think this authoritarian attitude is applied already with our phone, with the apps we use and the way we use our phone. We use it without thinking so much and we use apps that are already built-in. We don’t question the function, we don’t question how to use them. We don’t question how the data is going to be used.

Victor Leclercq: I wonder if there will be an alternative eventually to this, either it come from communication or either it will come from new apps or fair apps.

Audrey Tang: One of the things is about addiction. We talked about manufactured experiences like Pokémon Go that keeps people addicted even when it’s way past something that’s to their best benefit. A lot of it, I think, is attributable to touch screens.

Audrey Tang: I was reaching for my stylus. [laughs] That’s my iPad Pro stylus, and this is my phone. It also has a stylus. I always use computation devices with keyboard or a stylus, that is to say, through intermediation. This intermediation reminds me that they’re just a assistive tool, it’s not a extension of my body so that when I lose it, I will not physical pain.

Audrey Tang: This is, to me, all the way from Palm Pilot and then Sharp Zaurus, all those different PDAs with a stylus. I make sure that I think of them just as paper, as surfaces that I can write on. In this case, I wouldn’t get addicted because there’s nothing new. It’s all coming from me.

Audrey Tang: If I want to search something, I go and look for it. If I want to start a hashtag, I start a hashtag, but I will not keep scrolling in a fear of missing out. I will not get stuck, quite literally, thinking that the phone is an extension of my fingers. This kind of attention management is of utmost importance if we are going to live a dignified life with the AI being assistive rather than authoritarian.

Hanako Zhang: That’s interesting because the way our devices are developing, they are going more to be an extension of ourselves, and it’s becoming closer and closer. Maybe it would be very in touch with our bodies. Right now, we can touch the screen or not touch the screen, but people are exploring putting devices in their eyes or chips in our bodies, and that’s already a reality. What do we do about this? [laughs]

Audrey Tang: I’m fine with that as long as they are assistive. I have personal experience of a heart surgery. For a while, I’m sure that when they are doing surgery on my heart, I rely on an ECMO, which is a kind of assistive technology that assists the blood circulation, without which I’m probably dead. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: The idea is that this assistiveness does not take over my agency. The ECMO or for people who have artificial heart regulators or artificial hearing aids and so on, they are there so that we can live a human life. They are not there so we can live a super-human life.

Audrey Tang: My heart surgeons never told me, “Once I perform the operation, you’ll be a superhuman.” [laughs] If we stick to the human level, then we’re fine with it. If it is about a false promise to trans-humanity, that is where the real danger lies.

Audrey Tang: Evolution, if it can give you some superpower without sacrificing anything, probably evolution will already give you that. To have that superpower probably means some sacrifice that could not be foreseen. It’s called the Algernon effect.

Victor Leclercq: Back to this idea of addiction, it’s true that all the main app that we’re using are on the receiving end, scrolling through a feed, or receiving things, even though we’re sharing content, in the end, we’re sharing content to receive other content that is not so meaningful. I wonder…

Audrey Tang: …you’re using Skype in a truly multi-modal fashion.

Victor Leclercq: That’s true.

Victor Leclercq: I wonder if all those apps, I’m thinking especially of how we could change this mentality of sharing, being able to do changing to the app or contributing app, or sharing, being educated on the importance of what we’re sharing, of sharing valuable content.

Victor Leclercq: We’re sharing on an everyday basis…you probably know that better than me in terms of numbers. The content created and shared online is insane, and it’s growing and growing. It seems like most of it is pretty meaningless. It’s pictures that have not much information in it.

Victor Leclercq: I wonder how we could change this. How can we educate people on the importance of what they share?

Audrey Tang: Always share a call to action that are more meaningful than the previous interaction. For example, you wrote me a email. I wrote back, which lead to a Skype conversation. Maybe we’ll meet face-to-face someday. In any case, this leads to more meaningful relational engagements.

Audrey Tang: When you produce the magazine, I’m sure that sometimes people will only briefly skim it, but the next call to action is still something deeper, something more meaningful. The thing about those vacuous pseudo-interaction is that it doesn’t lead to anything meaningful. It’s interaction with NPCs, with non-player characters.

Audrey Tang: Making sure that we’re not just blindly connecting machine to machines, like my bot having a conversation with your bot, but connecting people to people. That’s where the term IT, we already stretch it to its limit to mean information technology connects machines, but digital connects people.

Audrey Tang: Once you make this distinction and focus on the people-to-people connection, then the compass is very clear. You just lead toward more and more meaningful people-to-people interactions.

Victor Leclercq: What are the next project you’re working on at the moment?

Audrey Tang: Why do you ask? [laughs] At the moment, I’m working with the Presidential Hackathon team, which is a interesting design. Every year, our president give five trophy to five social innovation teams, promising, in the next 12 months, to turn their idea into policies, so that presidential power as hackathon prize.

Audrey Tang: We’re now planning not only give domestic awards, but also give international awards, which will need a lot of coordination. Not all presidents are happy to give their [laughs] presidential power as hackathon awards.

Audrey Tang: Maybe it doesn’t need to be implemented in the host country. I could easily see that, in a foreign aid scenario, the people receiving the foreign aid co-create a package they want to receive, and it could be designed by another country, so truly a multi-sectoral and transcultural interaction.

Audrey Tang: We recently gave the Social Innovation Partnership Award to the Singaporean company called BeamAndGo. They design a experience for migrant workers from Philippine to many other countries. In their country where they work, sometime they send money back.

Audrey Tang: Those money are spent on luxury, status goods, or gambling, and not on education, groceries, and the medical or whatever basic needs. The BeamAndGo folks design, essentially, a shopping app so that the migrant workers, when they send back money, it’s not really money but rather vouchers.

Audrey Tang: Those digital vouchers are the shopping carts that they have already allocated to the partnering grocery stores and supermarkets so their family can pick up the care package that their family member who work as a migrant worker have sent home without worrying about it being spent on gambling or luxury. Then it can extend to micro-financing and many other applications.

Audrey Tang: Drawing inspiration from this cross-border collaboration, we can probably do Presidential Hackathon with only the Taiwanese president committing the full political power, but nevertheless benefit many other countries as well. We’re planning on it.

Victor Leclercq: That’s great.

Hanako Zhang: Do you have a date set, or are you still coordinating…

Audrey Tang: We already run two pilots around open contracting because procurement is something that comes across all jurisdictions. The easier work of international track, thanks to the contribution of the Open Contracting Partnership, is already in place. If you check out the Presidential Hackathon website, there’s a international track for the past couple years, and you can check out the winning team.

Hanako Zhang: Wow. How do you see these initiatives expanding in the future? What do you imagine and wwhat do you wish for?

Audrey Tang: In a couple ways. First, internationally, people will realize it’s easier and less risk if you consult people what’s the social norm before you implement any top-down policy. That’s why we’re running cybersecurity audits and all that to our pol.is instance, which is a open-source tool developed initially in Seattle. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: The website is still at pol.is, which is a open-source home, but we have our own instance. Responding to your domestic social media, this is our domestic pro-social media of pol.is, like input crowd, output meaning is a collaborative meaning creation tool at polis.gov.tw. Really, it’s like a ministry, something.gov.tw, but it’s entirely open source.

Audrey Tang: Once we run the cybersecurity audit, we can extend it to the international relationship. We already had conversations with the American in Taiwan Institute, the de facto embassy, on the coronavirus norms, on the digital dialogs when it comes to people-to-people ties, trade relationships, security cooperations, and making Taiwan more uniquely seen in the world.

Audrey Tang: We look forward to extend that to other multinational conversations as well. That’s one part, just to make sure that people understand this is easier and cheaper than the previous ways of consultation. You can include foreign people without paying too much money about it. Then we can relax the idea about foreign people and enjoy the idea of a world citizenship. That’s one part of the extension.

Audrey Tang: The other part, as I mentioned, is integrating more future generations, natural personhood, and things like that into the decision-making process of Presidential Hackathon. Currently, we already use quadratic voting, which is a way for people to express synergies when they see those Sustainable Development Goals.

Audrey Tang: Maybe we can do the funding part too through the quadratic funding, which is a balance between the grants decided by the few people on one hand and crowdfunding, which is dominated by people with a lot of money on the other side. It can find a good balance between those two sides. That’s another way, just to improve the mechanism itself.

Hanako Zhang: With these hackathons, it’s working very well in Taiwan because these ideas are actually implemented.

Audrey Tang: Yes, as presidential policy.

Hanako Zhang: When this is extended to other countries, how do you think governments can…

Audrey Tang: …with Japan because Japan is going to have a digital ministry anyway, and also a reform minister. We already had pretty good relationship with the Tokyo metropolitan area who implemented this Code for Japan civic tech dashboard for COVID and so on.

Audrey Tang: I’m sure that some prefectures, like the Okinawa prefecture…I just talk with their governor right before our meeting. [laughs] I think they’ll be very interested in hosting this kind of hackathon. We held a hackathon by the civic tech communities of Japan, Taiwan, Korea, and some people in Hong Kong, in Okinawa because it’s the midpoint between all those jurisdictions.

Audrey Tang: Maybe we begin with Okinawa. We’ll see.

Hanako Zhang: [laughs] That’d be more positive.

Victor Leclercq: What are the countries responding quite well to this?

Audrey Tang: I mentioned Japan. Japan, I think, is responding really, really well to this, which I think led to our interview. Also, the Czech Republic, who visited Taiwan, and the head of their Senate say, “ [Mandarin] . I am Taiwanese.” [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Because they also understand that both the temptation of authoritarianism in the name of communism but also how communistic feelings could only be fostered by a vibrant democracy and not authoritarianism. They went through a very similar period as Taiwan, so they understand it.

Audrey Tang: I found people in Barcelona, in Madrid, people who have essentially the same struggle can understand us much more easily. Or Estonia, who literally founded after the Internet, of course, understand the digital part very well. The Icelandic people, with their constitutional co-creation and so on. There’s many friends many places.

Victor Leclercq: One more questions. How can you define yourself as an anarchist and still work in a government?

Audrey Tang: I don’t work for the government. I work with the government.

Victor Leclercq: OK.

Audrey Tang: I don’t work for the people. I work with the people. I give no orders, take no orders, which is the kind of definition of anarchist.

Victor Leclercq: I see.

Hanako Zhang: Do you think there shouldn’t be any borders in the future?

Audrey Tang: If you look at my glasses, they have no borders, [laughs] so you already know my position on this particular article matter. Of course, sometimes borders are necessary in order for people to feel secure. This is like people having a personal border, the personal space that we ask other people to recognize and respect our boundaries.

Audrey Tang: Once people do respect each other’s boundaries, then these boundaries do not need to be spelled out because it become a social norm. Digital is particularly easy because you can’t punch me across the Skype screen anyway, [laughs] so we feel safer around each other.

Audrey Tang: I’m not even wearing a mask because there’s no way for a biological virus to transmit through the camera. I don’t know about the computer virus. [laughs] The point here is that when we are in a safe place, then we don’t need to spell out the boundaries.

Audrey Tang: The boundaries are still there. It’s either internalized in the sense of we’re all very civil people, or it must be externalized if we don’t feel secure around each other.

Hanako Zhang: This idea of borders, it’s amplified during this time because of the shutting of borders, that’s something that happened this year.

Audrey Tang: For the physical space only. On the digital realm, we see a dissolution of borders. That’s something that’s very interesting. It distanced us away from our friends and family. I have a good friend currently in quarantine, but I just chat with her for more than an hour maybe yesterday.

Audrey Tang: Because it’s really good connectivity in her quarantine hotel, it actually feels more intimate than our previous face-to-face talk. I certainly wasn’t in her room [laughs] the previous time when I talked. Now, suddenly, I’m in her quarantine hotel room, and she can see this place too.

Audrey Tang: The point is that, on the digital space, we’ve become much more close. The concept of national borders make no dent on our communication. When you are calling in from Skype, I don’t even know what jurisdiction you are in. I don’t care either. All I care is the speed of light and maybe the time zone, but that’s it.

Hanako Zhang: At one point, that bringing closer digitally and our physical space, they do need to come together.

Audrey Tang: That’s where the low earth orbit sunrise comes to play.

Hanako Zhang: That will be soon?

Audrey Tang: Uh-huh.

Hanako Zhang: What will be happening in the coming year? What do you think?

Audrey Tang: For example, people are now making a distinction between people who read on glass screens and people who read on paper books. I say this because I see a lot of paper book in the shelf behind you. [laughs]

Victor Leclercq: Yeah.

Audrey Tang: Obviously, you are one of those paper culture people.

Victor Leclercq: Japan as well. Japan loves print.

Hanako Zhang: Yes, Japan, paper, paper, paper.

Audrey Tang: [laughs] I know. This seem like two worlds at the moment, but imagine with the outdoor, always-on connectivity, and with the latest display technology, each of us can just bring one book, and it’s paper, but with a click, it can become any other book. Then you can flip it, and you can even write on it. Whatever you write will also get a digital twin immediately.

Audrey Tang: With that, then the reading habit of the paper culture and the reading habit of the screen culture will be one. There will be no meaningful distinction between a screen and a paper. Everybody will read the Harry Potter movies, I’m sure, [laughs] where the newspapers can animate.

Audrey Tang: That is one concrete imagination of taking the two cultures that seem very far apart, but with the right technology, in this case beyond 5G and display technology, they fuse into the new culture.

Victor Leclercq: Hanako was reading the book that was published about you in Japan recently.

Audrey Tang: Yes, the Bungeishunjū book.

Victor Leclercq: Yes.

Audrey Tang: Not sponsored by the telecom operator, no. [laughs] Those are lowercase AU. [laughs]

Hanako Zhang: Oh, it’s a lowercase AU?

Audrey Tang: No, the telecom operator in Japan is lowercase AU, and my signature is uppercase A, so not the same thing. [laughs]

Victor Leclercq: At the end of the book, there’s a list of books that you enjoy. Is there any more recently that you’ve read that inspired you and that you’ve enjoyed…?

Audrey Tang: The Ted Chiang science fictions. I very much enjoyed the “Story of Your Life,” which made into a movie, “Arrival,” where these aliens with emoji communication. His latest book, “Exhalation,” is really, really good as well.

Hanako Zhang: Should we go to the last question?

Victor Leclercq: Yes, sure.

Hanako Zhang: We have one last question for you.

Victor Leclercq: It’s a general question. It will be maybe a good way to conclude this talk.

Hanako Zhang: How can we work to become whole-earth citizens? What can we do in our local environment and work towards a shared vision?

Audrey Tang: You already know my job description. My job description is written to answer this very question. It’s almost like, “Whenever you see IT that connects machines, make it digital so it connects people.” I don’t have better answers than my job description. Otherwise, I will change my job description. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: It’s the same thing. “When we see the Internet of Things, make it a Internet of beings. When we see virtual reality, make it shared reality. With machine learning, make it collaborative learning. When we see user experience, make it about human experience. Whenever we hear the singularity is near, let is always remember the plurality is here.”

Victor Leclercq: That was a great conclusion.

Hanako Zhang: Yeah.

Victor Leclercq: Thank you so much.

Audrey Tang: Thank you, ありがとうございます.

Hanako Zhang: ありがとうございます.

Victor Leclercq: It was really nice to chat.

Hanako Zhang: Thank you.

Audrey Tang: Very enjoyable for me too. Until we meet face to face, live long and prosper.

Victor Leclercq: [laughs] Definitely. Bye-bye. Have a good weekend.

Audrey Tang: You, too. Bye.

Victor Leclercq: Bye-bye.

Hanako Zhang: Bye.