Ezra Klein: Let me tell you what this piece is about, and then we can go from there. This is turning on a lot of upheaval across a lot of social platforms. Weird things are happening at Twitter, some weird stuff is happening at TikTok, obviously Meta is having its own issues. It made me think about, if we had an opportunity to build anew, what would we build?

Ezra Klein: In particular, one of things in my mind is that we’ve talked forever about how social media democratizes communication, but we know it’s not run very democratically. You’ve had much more experience than most with trying to create true digital democracy – democracy in the way people participate, but also in the way that things are governed.

Ezra Klein: I was curious to hear if you have reflections on that? What might a truly democratic social sphere look like? What would the principles be or what have we learned about it?

Audrey Tang: Yes, I think broadband as a human right, that is the very good beginning, so that anyone can switch to high definition audiovisual connections as opposed to just textual and vocational pneumatic pictures.

Audrey Tang: That is absolutely the first step. Also thinking that you used the word democratize, but only in the sense of made accessible, which is not what democratization means around this corner of the world, because Taiwan democratized around 1996, but people had access to information, to the press freedom, to everything in the ‘80s.

Audrey Tang: There’s like 10 years that shows us real difference between simply having the freedom of the press, of speech and so on, and actual democratization, where people can directly elect the president, of course, but also on all levels of the democratic engagement including participatory budgets, referenda, presidential hackathon, e petition, you name it, that people can design the democratic systems themselves to treat democracy itself as a social technology that people can improve on a bandwidth.

Audrey Tang: Again, this is a recursive public, meaning that if people don’t like the way that participation works, or that it’s less inclusive, there’s freedom to innovate on the system level, not just within the existing system of free press and free speech.

Audrey Tang: I want to delineate this new democratization as, generally speaking, exists for freedom vis à vis a democratic governance or community governance system. That’s the top level picture. Feel free to start something new.

Ezra Klein: I’d like to hear you talk more about that. That’s very much what I’m thinking about here, too. People are skeptical you can govern these social spheres truly democratically, that it will be too unwieldy. It’s fine to let everybody talk, but not everybody can make decisions. Tell me what you’ve seen about that, or what you think about that.

Audrey Tang: It’s about symmetry. When we’re having this conversation, I’m quite conscious of the time that we each spend on speaking and listening. That’s how conversations are. If we call something conversational, it is implied that it is not a prepared, pre recorded lecture. There is symmetry between the…

Audrey Tang: Everybody can talk — scalable speech — and everybody can listen — scalable listening. A lot of the interface decisions that we make in our participation systems ensures that people get the opportunity to listen. When people engage in listening, there’s as much gratification as people do receive when they’re speaking, or being retweeted, and things like that.

Audrey Tang: Making sure that this viralness, this ability to reach previously unconnected people, is coupled with a meaningful feedback loop, that is the most important. If people spend time in the asymmetry for too long, then it become like radio and television, just listen a lot more channels and the same helplessness. You can’t really change all the shows on TV. That kicks back in. That’s because people already have a reference frame, and that’s radio and television.

Ezra Klein: Tell me about what comprises a meaningful feedback loop.

Audrey Tang: The kind of question you’re asking, you can ask clarifying question. People have the opportunity to contextualize within their conversation, or recontextualize.

Audrey Tang: Meaning that, taking a conversation interpreted in their own frame, and also carry this ambient frame into the conversation to share meaningful references so the other people within the conversation can gradually fuse the horizon with the other interlocutors. Gadamau or Habermas have written all about it. [laughs] I don’t need to repeat their theories.

Audrey Tang: A lot of the interface designers…People talk about dark patterns, but it depends on what…

Ezra Klein: They speak about what, you said?

Audrey Tang: Dark patterns, things that consumes people’s attention without giving them equal attention or care in return. If you use these patterns in physical architecture…These are social objects. People can actually see this antagonistic design. It would become a social object around which the people can propose meaningful changes.

Audrey Tang: In the radio and television frame of reference we talk about media literacy. Literacy, the word, means that you can maybe comprehend the narrative frame. It doesn’t mean that you can co create. It doesn’t mean that you can, as I mentioned, innovate on the meta level — no pun intended — to recourse on their design.

Audrey Tang: As to say, “I think this way of reporting, this way of revising materials, needs such and such context, and so I should provide the context to other listeners.” Radio and television simply don’t have that mode.

Audrey Tang: The key here is to ensure that online, as well as offline, there are social objects around which the people can meaningfully, in Taiwan we call it competency, to express their co production, co creation capabilities. Literacy is when you read, and competence is when you also write.

Ezra Klein: Do you think it’s possible for these kinds of communicative platforms to be run truly publicly? I speak from the United States context. You will hear people say…Even Jack Dorsey has said, I think he says, “Twitter wants to be public. It doesn’t want to be private.”

Ezra Klein: On the other hand, in a highly polarized political system — even putting aside polarization — the idea that the government would have the competence here to run it, and to keep the system up, running, and doing really well, people are skeptical of that. Is that just an American context thing, or do you think these projects do have to be private, or at least not fully public to be constructed well?

Audrey Tang: Just to check my understanding, does the social in social media…? I used to work in social techs, enterprise social. Does the social sector mean anything in the American context?

Ezra Klein: If I understand what you’re saying, you mean, if you say the term social sector, is that a term that…?

Ezra Klein: We usually call it the civic sector, if I’m right about what you’re talking about.

Audrey Tang: Then let’s call it the civic sector.

Ezra Klein: The mediating layer in between government and the private market, things like organizations and churches and associations.

Audrey Tang: Yes, temples, churches, and I also mean social entrepreneurs in the form of coops or credit unions or things like that. I’m sure these organizations exist in the US, but they’re seen as a sector is another matter altogether. Like in civic tech used to mean that the civic sector owning the coproduction of such technologies.

Audrey Tang: It was strongly associated with the free liberal open source movement and so on. I really like this free liberal open thing because it talks about three different aspects of technology. Freedom is of course under citizens. The person wielding the technology, they have the freedom.

Audrey Tang: Open source means that as a coproduction participant, they have capability to remix, to fork the technology. The liberty idea says that we need to not converge too quickly, we need to be aware that there is multiple forks going on at any given time without resorting to top down, take down, shutdown, lockdown things, to keep the future open for the future.

Audrey Tang: These ideas that was in mainstream, but at least people who could understand these ideas around the 20th century and more in the 2010. When you said that it’s either the public sector, meaning the government or the state or the private sector because for profit logic produces, I guess, more people learning about interaction design while leaving out this civic sector.

Audrey Tang: It’s quite telling. It means that in the US context it’s not a true sector, it’s more like a buffer zone, an intermediation stage, a place where people go to, I don’t know, donate their time for some pro bono community service before returning to work, in their work hours in the private sector. Did I hear you correctly or interpret you correctly?

Ezra Klein: That’s right. When you had asked this, I was thinking about…even as I said it, I was thinking about how we have a term for the civic sector, but I don’t think it is consciously a sector. It used to be the associational sector. Unions are much stronger in this country at another time. You had…

Audrey Tang: …voluntary sector.

Ezra Klein: It was there, but I don’t know that it is now. The closest thing to that in American technology metaphors would be Wikipedia as owned by the Wikimedia nonprofit. That’s the foundation, I’m sorry.

Ezra Klein: That’s the best analogy of something where you have a piece of Internet architecture that is central, that is not controlled by the government, it is not controlled by a for profit group.

Audrey Tang: Maybe we call it a foundational sector with the analytics foundations. No matter which word we use to describe it, you need to end up inspiring people to reimagine the relationship between people to technology. In the Mandarin context here in Taiwan, when we say 公益 public benefit, people don’t think about the state.

Audrey Tang: The state government is 政府, it’s completely different thing. The org domain suffix means public benefit in the Taiwanese Mandarin context. From what you’re saying is essentially that .org is like a afterthought, [laughs] something that like .coop or .museum, this subject exists, but it doesn’t carry the same weight as the .gov and .com counterparts.

Ezra Klein: In the Taiwanese context or in any other context you’re familiar with, what would surprise somebody who is used to the American social Internet? What is run for the public benefit or run by the state that here we understand as a private for profit concern?

Audrey Tang: I said run by the community or run by the civil society, but I don’t mean that the state doesn’t fund it. That’s the main thing that’s different. Although it’s not so different, you do have National Public Radio. For example, in Taiwan, the Reddit equivalent would be the PTT.

Audrey Tang: The PTT was and still is run by a student club, the bulletin board system association club in the National Taiwan University for more than 25 years now. It doesn’t have any single shareholder advertiser. It’s entirely within the .edu, Taiwan academic network. It’s entirely open source community governed, enjoying the freedom of thought and speech as you would a campus.

Audrey Tang: Again, people can freely join it and become moderators. You see 25 years. That means that from the very beginning of the wide Web, it’s part of what people will nowadays call a public digital space. Then the space because of its longevity become part of the societal infrastructure.

Audrey Tang: No political parties in the parliament would say that we should nationalize the PTT or we should, I don’t know, turn it into investors, because the National Taiwan University is also the university most politicians attend to in addition to National Chengchi University.

Audrey Tang: They have a very strong status in the society that lends the civic sector a higher legitimacy when the state and for profit companies are in clash about anything like Uber. The social sector is seen as much as intermediator but also a mediator with a higher legitimacy. That will surprise a lot of people from the US context.

Ezra Klein: That’s really interesting. How widely used this PTT? Is that something that most people in Taiwan are familiar with?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, if you see Taiwan mainstream media news, especially the online pods, every day you see hundreds of those news just citing PTT. [laughs] Basically, the journalists do some fact checking or some curation, but you would see the PTT discussions being summarized in everyday news media.

Audrey Tang: There’s even a term for it, 鄉民. It means netizens, I guess. If you see “civic tech”, 公民科技, it often means 鄉民 co-creates this innovation. 鄉民 discovered that there’s SARS like virus in Wuhan at the end of 2019. That’s the PTT during the first event reporting, which has been collected by the professional journalists.

Ezra Klein: Tell me a bit about…I know you’ve worked very hard on different projects where there’s a space for citizen input that actually lathers up to certain government decision making consideration. What did you learn about how to run those in a way that is credible to people?

Audrey Tang: Two main learnings. The first is, one must pre commit to symmetrical attention and care. Meaning, if for example, on the impartation side, anyone they may be under 18, they may be 17, they may be 70, age doesn’t matter.

Audrey Tang: If they successfully collect more than 5,000 signatures, there must be administrative level response. If it’s interagency, chances are that there will be an actual collaborative meeting between those agencies and inviting the stakeholders and so on.

Audrey Tang: If people have spent so much attention to provide us with input, and if the software reliably just surfaces the good enough consensus, or at least the potential of good enough consensus, then we need to treat it as seriously as a parliamentary interpolation, or even more serious than parliamentary interpolation. That’s the first thing, equality of attention.

Audrey Tang: The second thing, is that the space itself need to be, I want to say, troll proof. Anyway, need to be troll proof, meaning that people who mobilize by outrage or by other personal opinions or by bots [laughs] need to have absolutely no effect on the outcome of such conversations.

Audrey Tang: Becoming clump proof, for example, is very easy. In Taiwan, in order to get SIM cards from telecoms, you have to present two photo IDs. They serve as a root of trust.

Audrey Tang: To register a new account in PTT if you’re not a National Taiwan University student, you need to manually send a authenticating SMS to PTT to prove that you are a SIM card holder. If someone creates 5,000 SIM cards out of thin air, the anti money laundering office will be after them very quickly. People understood that, although it’s all pseudonyms, there’s no bots or clones behind the scenes.

Audrey Tang: Then, the interface, instead of spiraling out of control with personal attacks, swords, and so on, sometimes our design is to take away their reply to individual capabilities. You can reply to this general idea, this rough consensus, this entire pro or contra column of thoughts, but you cannot name names. There’s no individual reply. That also helps to render the trolls not useful.

Audrey Tang: When counting for rough consensus, we count collaboration across diversity. If you invite a lot of people who think exactly like you in such a interface, it may let you feel good, I guess, but it doesn’t increase the chance of your ideas being put into the agenda of the collaborative meeting.

Audrey Tang: We only count the degree in which you convince people who hold very different views from your own — collaboration across diversity. That is the second thing, CAD, collaboration…

Ezra Klein: I’m sorry, tell me more about that. You’re saying that, when you’ve done some of these, instead of simply counting how many people are on one side or the other, you’re counting how many people shift sides?

Audrey Tang: No, it’s more than that.

Ezra Klein: I’m sorry.

Audrey Tang: When we’re talking about sides, we think about this political position quadrant, right? That’s ultimately a very low dimensional view. People imagine, on any issue, if there’s three divisive thoughts, maybe people are grouped into one of the eight groups, but that’s very crude. The way Netflix recommends movies have millions, if I’m not mistaken, of dimensions.

Audrey Tang: The difference between this high dimensional space — hundreds or thousands of dimensions — vis à vis just two or three dimensions, is that it’s difficult to distinguish bots or people who automatically follow a script versus real human. It’s hard to tell the difference if you only have two or three dimensions because the bandwidth is not sufficient.

Audrey Tang: If you have hundreds or thousands of dimensions, it’s very easy to tell the difference because it’s almost impossible in such a high dimension space for two points to not be worlds apart, to have a long distance in such a space. Every point, by definition, has a very long distance toward each other, unless they are puppets. That is the first thing.

Audrey Tang: The second thing is that we can then measure what kind of opinion, what kind of dimension, allows for the clustering in these dimensions. When projected in that way, that renders the prior divisions coherent in some issue. Usually, for example, in the Uber cases, it was people saying that insurance is important, registration of vehicles is important.

Audrey Tang: We need to allow for surge pricing, but not undercutting wages. We need to allow for local temples and churches to run their own Uber fleet instead of restricting it to for profit companies. These dimensions are the dimensions that unites people despite their vicious or some toxic ideas in other dimensions. These are the statement that reliably brings people together so they don’t switch sides.

Audrey Tang: If you only look at the original sides — like people who insist that this is a gig economy, not a sharing economy, this is exploitation, not employment, and so on — they’re not changing their positions on these things. It’s just that the space reliably discovers, through the pol.is algorithm, the potential for collaboration across diversity.

Ezra Klein: That’s really interesting, definitely not something we do very often here.

Ezra Klein: One thing I’ve been thinking about in this whole area is whether or not we should understand the era in which we grouped communication socially, where social is the important descriptor of what media was like, where we followed people and were followed by them, as the right way to think about communication, particularly algorithmic communication and content.

Ezra Klein: TikTok is much less social than some of the things that came before it. Before the rise of social media, you would go to home pages and you’d choose things. Netflix is not really social media. At one point, it tried to be a little bit more like that. Spotify is not really social media in the way it once was.

Ezra Klein: I recognize this is a more philosophical question, but do you think the experiment with trying to structure things through the social graph has been a good one, and we should build on it? Maybe, it went to far, and it is worth rethinking if that’s the right way to order our very important communicative spaces.

Audrey Tang: When I was working in Socialtext on the enterprise social sector, Salesforce tried to trademark the words social enterprise. The Social Enterprise World Forum and all the social entrepreneurs, think Patagonia, don’t like that Salesforce wants to use the term social enterprise to describe what they’re doing.

Audrey Tang: It’s also a philosophical thing. To the civic sector, social enterprise and social entrepreneurship means that you work toward a civic benefit, a public benefit, as connected to one or more of the areas where existing impact investors or the people doing impact work, impact oriented organizations, you’re trying to amplify their fan financing, their outreach, their CRM, and so on.

Audrey Tang: At the end of the day, they serve on a public benefit mission. It’s mission first and then market and then measurement.

Audrey Tang: The way Salesforce or even social techs provides the measurement is fine, but you should not confuse the measurement or the market with the mission [laughs] because for the social entrepreneurs the mission comes first. It’s a useful philosophical distinction to ask like if somebody is socially minded, what kind of society benefit what some impact investors call social return of investment?

Audrey Tang: Is there a theory of change that you can present to your stakeholders, not just your shareholders, that each extra dime in investment can cause more than a dime of positive impact in a way that is generally recognized by the civic sector.

Audrey Tang: If that can be done, maybe we call it a social enterprise. If that cannot, then it’s mechanism. It’s a branding of the social and it’s a branding that’s misleading exactly as how the provincial citizen turning citizens into scoreboard less subject system in some provincial places in the People’s Republic of China regime call the Social Credit.

Audrey Tang: There’s credit unions which may build upon existing social relationship and infrastructures but a credit system that is decoupled from the existing social relationships and entirely from a scoreboard by the provincial government, that is not a social enterprise by any means, but yet it calls itself the Social Credit System.

Audrey Tang: Whichever way you use, which is probably not social anymore, we need to avoid the mistake that led to Social Credit calling itself social or the social graph you mentioned that’s employed in decidedly antisocial ways to call itself social.

Ezra Klein: That’s interesting. In a way you’re saying that we have diminished the word social. By calling these things social media, we have come to such a thin definition of what it means for something to be social that we’re actually doing some violence to what the concept could be?

Audrey Tang: That’s exactly true. When I was a young child, because I study Laozi, the “Tao Te Ching.” The “Te” in Tao Te Ching, in the old English around 19th century or something was translated as “virtue”. Nowadays, virtue doesn’t mean that any more, [laughs] The word itself loses its potency.

Audrey Tang: So that Ursula K. Le Guin have to translate it as “power”. Something like that is happening to the word “social”, even more than the way that the word “democratization” nowadays just means inexpensively accessible.

Ezra Klein: One of the things I’ve been exploring in this. In my industry media, there is a tendency to go through cycles of bundling. You make a newspaper and it’s got a sports section and classified and so on, and then unbundling. You get blogs and you get individual websites and then you bundle again.

Ezra Klein: People buy up the bloggers and the “New York Times” buys the Athletic, which is a sports website [laughs] and then you get unbundling again. One of the things that I’ve been thinking about with this era, is whether or not we might be entering into an unbundling phase. These platforms, they have been doing too many things.

Ezra Klein: It’s a marketplace and also the central political communication square and also a place for you to connect with your friends and have baby pictures, and then there is unbundling. At this point, the weight of so many things become contradictions and the places cannot really survive under that many contradiction.

Ezra Klein: When you think of what might unbundle, what might be the things that the civic sector, the public benefit side, what might be the functions that you’d unbundle into that part of society. What comes to mind first because some things might be fine in the for profit sector like entertainment, but others might not.

Ezra Klein: What would you unbundle into there or what have you unbundled I guess, also into the social side?

Audrey Tang: The PTT is a prime example of mainstream media agenda setting power. The PTT has enormous agenda setting power when it comes to the topic of the day. In a way that with all due respect, National Public Radio [laughs] may not have. That is the first thing that’s come to my mind.

Audrey Tang: I can also add one more thing. These ideas of very young people or very old people associating themselves online to a public benefit in the US context I often seen it dramatized by portraying them as, I don’t know, climate strike or the human right abuses that led to people expressing their defund the police, things like that.

Audrey Tang: It’s a demonstration of course of counterpower of raising the important topics and that’s good. I don’t think the competence part of co creation part of making meaningful alternate systems for people to experience in, I don’t think that part has been balanced into this conversation.

Audrey Tang: You see very reliably that people portray the protesters as simply that protesters. You don’t see much use of the Buckminster Fuller Aryan language of essentially seeing them not as protesters but as demonstrators in the demo scène sense providing alternative systems without tearing apart the old one and rendering the old one slightly obsolete with time.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, people look to the civic sector for this kind of innovations. If the state cannot make a good privacy preserving contact tracing system. The civic sector they have zero goes and invent one. My role is just to convince the five telecoms to join the civic sector in implementing SMS based contact tracing of business privacy. The same goes for mask ratio and visibility, rapid testing ratio, and pre registration of vaccines.

Audrey Tang: Vaccine preference score boards that turns anti vaxx conspiracies into a friendly competition between favorite brands. The list goes on. I think around the world, the civil society is already doing a lot of these altruistic things during the pandemic especially, but whether they’re elevated into national level consciousness is another matter altogether.

Ezra Klein: That makes sense. Is there anything I should ask you here that I haven’t or anything you would like to talk about that I wouldn’t know to ask you about? You obviously know your digital world much better than I do, so the things you think should be in my head that I wouldn’t know to pull out?

Audrey Tang: Yeah. When I was having a conversation around g0v was quite a while. Glenn said that I need to be aware that many people in the US context confuses the East Asian context with the…I don’t know, Confucian worshiping religion or some Confucius robots so that we’re ultimately all the same in starting harmony or our ancestral spirit brings us together and things like that.

Audrey Tang: Glenn always reminds me that, first of all, Taiwan is not that sort of place. During our conversation around marriage equality and everything, we see at play Taiwan’s 20 national languages, many different cultures, indigenous and ethnic cultures, Japanese influence, everything, playing a collaborative role.

Audrey Tang: This diversity is not always rosy. In 2014, the public trust to the administration was below 10 percent and just a few years prior in 2008 and so on, there was like two presidential elections that led to half of this society saying that the person who got elected didn’t actually get elected. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Here we have a lot of quite vicious, toxic online conversations around these election related topic, and many more. We are, at times, a deeply divided society.

Audrey Tang: The people who truly cannot endure with this kind of diversity, are people who found that earthquakes happen too often in Taiwan, have moved abroad. Certainly, in 1996, the first presidential election and a military drill, but all these important divisions left.

Audrey Tang: People who stayed, especially around the turn of the century, they saw the large earthquake, quite literally, brought people of different faith and different ethnicities together in the recovery process.

Audrey Tang: These cleavages on our society, these traumas, these things, brought into the public consciousness that maybe we should pay more attention to the public benefit, and to grow the civic sector, despite our fundamentally different ideological positions. Maybe we’re not that different from the US context.

Audrey Tang: Certainly, circa 2009, or circa 2013, it’s general empathy of how people can make meaningful change to the bipartisan system. People certainly wouldn’t imagine four meaningful parties in the parliament back in 2014. Maybe we’re not that different, is what we’re saying. Maybe we’re not in the far future, maybe we’re just in the future for a couple of years.

Ezra Klein: I like that. It is great to get to talk to you. I really appreciate you giving me much time, Audrey.

Audrey Tang: Sure. I’ll make a transcript and send to you. We co edit, and we publish under Creative Commons Zero after you publish.

Ezra Klein: That sounds wonderful. I look forward to it.

Audrey Tang: Awesome, thank you. Live long and prosper.

Ezra Klein: Have a great day.

Audrey Tang: Bye.