Jan Oberländer: Perfect. You’re visible perfectly and hearable as well, audible as well.

Audrey Tang: Excellent. We’ll make a transcript of our conversation but will not publish the audio or video. We can embargo the transcript only after you publish, we co edit and publish.

Jan Oberländer: That would be great, because that’s what we want to say we only record the audio because we don’t have use for the visual and edit for length and clarity because… maybe Cornelius could show the page we are aiming at. We’re working for Tagesspiegel, which is a major Berlin daily paper. Of course there will be an online version of the interview, but what Cornelius is showing is the print product we’re aiming at. We’ve prepared lots and lots of questions, of course, and we can’t address them all…

Audrey Tang: Of course. We’ve got 75 minutes, that’s the allocation.

Jan Oberländer: Right. And so we try to be as quick as possible. Just want to say that we’re also going to have to edit for length and clarity.

Audrey Tang: No, of course, that’s definitely why we publish the transcript. So that for people who are looking into this nitty gritty details of context, they can consult the transcript.

Jan Oberländer: Yeah, perfect. So I would say maybe we dive right in. Cornelius, you want to start?

Cornelius Dieckmann: Yes. Hi, it’s great to see you. Thank you for taking the time. Our first question is, “Why are we not allowed to use Zoom for this interview?”

Audrey Tang: Yeah, at the moment, we’re still having this idea of not allowing installation of Zoom software on public sector machines. This ban which has been instituted by multiple governments and jurisdictions last year, continued to this year.

Audrey Tang: We’ve been talking with Zoom about this. We’re glad, of course, that they introduced, for example, end to end encryption, although it’s not by default. But at the moment, for example, in a web based Zoom conversation, it’s still not supporting end to end encryption, meaning that we either have to use a device like iPad or a phone or something, or we have to trust its web interface on a non-end-to-end encrypted form.

Audrey Tang: So at the moment we’re in this stage, but there’s a e petition on the join.gov.tw platform, that calls for relaxing Zoom, joining Zoom conversations not just on necessary international like APEC or whatever meetings, But also for things that are meant to be public like this interview.

Audrey Tang: So we’ll see how the petition goes. That’s the long form answer to your very simple question.

Jan Oberländer: OK. So it’s security reasons.

Audrey Tang: It was because it was known that when people held conversations, for example, on the Tiananmen incident in Zoom, their accounts – even if they’re not PRC accounts – got terminated.

Audrey Tang: The US Department of Justice even did a public prosecution on this particular issue of the Zoom company, having somebody reporting directly to the PRC government on this issue, and Zoom, of course, has taken some actions to remedy this but this is a management issue, not a technical issue. So it’s not something that could be fixed by end-to-end encryption, that’s what I mean.

Jan Oberländer: Yeah, that’s what my question was aiming at.

Jan Oberländer: Maybe as a Digital Minister, could you try to give some context for readers at the beginning of this conversation, could you try to describe quite simply what exactly you do?

Audrey Tang: I’m one of the nine ministers at large in the Taiwanese cabinet. Our work is to work across ministries and each of the nine at-large ministers have specific mandates. My mandates are social innovation, open government, and youth engagement.

Audrey Tang: In brief, I work across different sectors to make sure that a social norm is amplified by the public sector instead of decimated by the top down authoritarian regimes and, when we amplify this, we then bring these norms to the private sector to make sure the economic sector implements something that brings technology to where people are instead of forcing people to adapt to technology.

Audrey Tang: That’s the very simple, high level overview of my work. It centers around reliable data, effective partnership, and open innovation.

Jan Oberländer: What would be a concrete example for this to make this a bit more tangible?

Audrey Tang: Sure. Of course. For example recently, just like literally a couple weeks ago, ten days ago actually, we introduced a check in system, check and trace system where on the venues people have to either leave their contact phone and a handle, not necessarily a name, using pen and paper, but people were afraid that they could contract the virus through the use of the pen together or something.

Audrey Tang: We rolled out a very successful QR code called 1922 SMS. This system, the special thing is that it doesn’t store data in any cloud provider or things like that.

Audrey Tang: All the QR code does, when you scan it with say your iPhone’s built in camera, is sending a SMS to a toll free number with a random number that’s on a poster. The random number is also written in legible print. So people can also manually text that location number to 1922 without paying for the SMS fee.

Audrey Tang: The SMS, if you scan, a QR code comes with this informed text that says, “This SMS content will only be used for contact tracing and not other purposes. Then you don’t have to type anything, scan and press send, and it goes to your telecom, not anywhere else and your telecom already knows your number anyway.

Audrey Tang: That alleviates the need of contracting a cloud provider to process the data, rather the telecom just keeps it for 28 days, and then it deletes it and only contact tracers and only under a audit trail, can get the SMS stored in that place of the five major telecoms in order to do contact tracing.

Audrey Tang: The beauty of this design is that it’s not done by government, it’s by gov zero, g0v, chat channel where the leading contact tracing system designers with all their incompatible apps and QR codes huddle together and design something that conforms to the privacy by default norm.

Audrey Tang: We designed the place code to be 15 digits. It’s impossible to guess a place code. When you issue for a place code, you don’t have to file a location or a street number. Indeed a QR coordinating authority doesn’t even know where did place that QR code and so on.

Audrey Tang: All this multi party computation privacy by default thing is a norm set by the civil society implemented by the governments and the private sector or really like it, because nobody wants to hold a scratchpad full of telephone numbers. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Then it was rolled out very quickly and achieved. I think the majority of public transportation…and so on in just implemented in 24 hours, tested in 24 hours and then rolled out in 24 hours, three days.

Cornelius Dieckmann: Something else that you’ve implemented is you often stress your principle of radical transparency.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Cornelius Dieckmann: You publish everything you do, the meetings, the interviews that you give, including this, you’re transcribing it. We’re wondering: this principle, surely some of your more traditional colleagues in the cabinet, for example, must at times find that annoying – that the Digital Minister wants to publish everything.

Audrey Tang: Strictly speaking we do get to co edit the transcript. If there are in jokes that could be taken out of context, or if somebody relates an anecdote from their friend, but that friend have not cleared it for publication and so on.

Audrey Tang: These things you are given 10 working days to co edit and just anonymize that, or to turn that anecdote into a harmless fable.

Audrey Tang: These are all required for people to spend some time to edit. Radical transparency doesn’t mean extreme transparency. It means transparency by default. If you do nothing for a 10 working days, then everything goes out, so that’s the default.

Audrey Tang: It’s not really annoying, because I only get the requirements for people who are not afraid to face the future. For the future to watch as we talk. Because it’s a… by voluntary association, my office has 12 different ministries secondments, but Taiwan has 32 ministries.

Audrey Tang: There are easily 20 or so ministries that do not engage in day to day level, but rather on an ad hoc level when the situation comes and they find, for example public diplomacy, they’re happy to talk about these particular thing.

Audrey Tang: But on the non public part of diplomacy where they simply don’t bring it to me, there are eight other ministries at large for trade agreements and diplomacy and things like that.

Audrey Tang: To date, the Minister of Defense never called me to send secondments or hold any meeting. I know nothing about defense.

Jan Oberländer: Does it bother you? Do you think all of these things should also be transparent?

Audrey Tang: What I’m trying to do here is to show that if, for example, the judicial branch wants to adopt a participatory judging system, a jury-ish system as we are now doing, context is very important.

Audrey Tang: If all people’s access to the judicial court is not by participation but only by the done deals of the judgments and so on, then it’s impossible to learn together and not easy to be an informed jury. Getting people to feel familiar with the context of policymaking, the how of policymaking, is my main goal. You can call it pedagogical.

Audrey Tang: I’m not saying that all the missile basis, or under sea submarines or whatever need to publish its GPS coordinates on open data website. That’s not what I’m advocating for.

Jan Oberländer: You once said that your approach is a reaction to China’s approach to make the citizens transparent…

Audrey Tang: …transparent to the state.

Jan Oberländer: …to the state.

Audrey Tang: Right.

Jan Oberländer: What you do is the opposite, right?

Audrey Tang: By making the state more transparent to the citizens, we get to innovate when the new situation comes. If citizen is transparent to the state, then the state, of course, has powerful tools to enforce whatever rules and regulations there already are.

Audrey Tang: When emergency situation comes, taking away the journalistic freedom, taking away the freedom of expression and assembly, it also harms the state’s ability to detect a new emerging situation. For example, Dr. Li Wenliang did save the Taiwanese people in early 2020, but he was unable to save the people in Wuhan in early 2020, exactly for this particular reason.

Cornelius Dieckmann: Maybe before we can talk for a second about COVID, and how Taiwan has handled COVID… So, obviously, we’re in Germany. I’m a German Taiwanese journalist [Mandarin:我會講一些中文可是我的中文不是很好所以必須用英文]. What our readers would find interesting is: do you know Dorothee Bär.

Audrey Tang: Not personally. I do hear her name brought up quite frequently when I attend German events.

Jan Oberländer: She’s the…I don’t know if you can call it the equivalent to your role, but she’s the Digital Minister.

Audrey Tang: I’m aware of that, yes.

Cornelius Dieckmann: If she gave you a call tomorrow, and asked you to name one thing that western countries could learn from Taiwan, what would you reply?

Audrey Tang: I would say something very predictable like universal broadband access. That really is the key because without universal broadband access as a human right — for 15 euros per month, you get unlimited 4G connection or fixed line cable connection in Taiwan — without it, whatever digital democracy efforts would do will be by definition excluding people. It will be illegitimate.

Audrey Tang: The only way we can get this sort of legitimacy is by saying anywhere in Taiwan, even the top of Taiwan, 4,000 meters, you guarantee to have broadband as a human right.

Audrey Tang: I do get emails. A couple of months ago, someone wrote me saying, “This email took me half an afternoon to send. I’m in this quarantine place near the Yang Ming Mountain. On this particular site, I don’t get very good cell signal. I can’t during the 14 day of quarantine watch streaming movies, and minister you said broadband is a human right. I’m suffering human right violation and do something about it.”

Audrey Tang: Then, after two weeks…

Cornelius Dieckmann: So that’s your job: to make sure that people on the 陽明山 (Yang Ming Mountain) can watch Netflix.

Audrey Tang: Exactly. [laughs] Well, I didn’t say Netflix. Any streaming service will do.

Audrey Tang: Then, of course, in two weeks, we had a new telecom tower there. The streaming works perfectly. By that time, he’s already out of quarantine. He made a point in driving back and speed test the bandwidth and post it on social media to hold me to account.

Audrey Tang: I’ll probably relay the story if a Digital Minister give me a call.

Jan Oberländer: [laughs] That’s a good story. We could use that. At the beginning, maybe we come back to COVID…

Audrey Tang: Sure.

Jan Oberländer: Now, at the beginning of the pandemic, Taiwan was lauded for its quick and digital response to the pandemic that led to very little COVID cases, without a national lockdown.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Jan Oberländer: A few months ago, you even said in an interview, “We’ve long beaten corona.” However…

Audrey Tang: We’re post pandemic. That’s what I said.

Jan Oberländer: Post pandemic. The numbers are rising again now, right? Why is that?

Audrey Tang: Yeah. We’re at 59 deaths, which is quite serious, yes.

Jan Oberländer: Do you have an explanation for what could have happened?

Audrey Tang: Certainly. The new version, the new release. In SARS 2.0, which is what I call the coronavirus of 2020, the R value was such that if we get 75 percent of people wearing masks and washing hands, we could make the R value to be below one, which is why we repeatedly had some community transmission, but it very quickly died down.

Audrey Tang: It never get to the community spread stage. At any given time, we’ve got three quarters of people in any jurisdiction like a small town or whatever, and the compliance rate was really high. This time, the new release, let’s call it SARS 2.0, 2.1 maybe or 2.2, is different. It has a higher degree of aerosol.

Audrey Tang: To the latest model, we calculated that it now requires 90 percent of people in any given space to wear a mask, and wash their hand, and socially distance in order for the R value to be under one. We simply did not have that norm. Our norm was always around 75 percent.

Audrey Tang: That’s why we are now facing a couple of weeks now for roughly 400, 500 cases a day confirmed.

Jan Oberländer: Are you thinking about installing a lockdown?

Audrey Tang: Not at the moment. We’re at a level of three, which means it’s not a lockdown, but very large gatherings are forbidden. Half of our public service telecommute and on a rotating basis sometimes. I, for the past week or so, also for three days, work at home.

Audrey Tang: Three days, I work in the Cabinet office, but I’ve been always doing that for the past five years. It don’t count. What was pioneering in 2016 is now the norm in the public service.

Audrey Tang: We’re finally getting a taste of the new normal. Finally, I’m having come on topics to discuss with my international friends. Previously, we’ve never even had a level three, a lockdown would be level four. At the moment, there’s no plan to go to level four.

Cornelius Dieckmann: You said you’ve always been working from home. Is that where we’re catching you right now as well?

Audrey Tang: Yeah. This is my residence.

Jan Oberländer: We’re all in the home office as well.

Audrey Tang: That’s right. It is the new normal.

Cornelius Dieckmann: Can we talk a little bit about your political background and your political career? Heads of state aside, you are probably the most prominent Asian or East Asian politician worldwide. How do you feel about being in the limelight like that?

Audrey Tang: Am I? [laughs] I didn’t know, you tell me. I think there’s a couple of things. One is that I’m a poetician of sorts. That means that my prayer, my likeness, which is Creative Commons license, and remix into Death Metal, and MTVs or whatever rap, hip hop bands, from Japan or whatever.

Audrey Tang: This is basically a more cultural role rather than a purely political role. My main work has always been, as I mentioned, pedagogical, meaning that whatever innovations that we do, we do it with the people not for the people because when we do it for the people, there’s very little to talk about.

Audrey Tang: When we do it with the people, it makes sense for all small innovations, like a pink mask or whatever to be spread, and remixed and just talked about on the globe or the TED.com or TEDx appearances that I did is all like spreading. The ideas was spreading so I would say simply that I’m a slash a poet slash politician, which makes me a poetician and that’s my response.

Cornelius Dieckmann: You gave us a very humble answer, you know: “Am I in the limelight?” We saw this video where you were part of the stage show by the extreme metal band Chthonic.

Audrey Tang: Oh, yeah. The Megaport festival. Yes.

Cornelius Dieckmann: Exactly. Where you are on the screen from another city, live. They sample your voice, your speaking voice as well as your singing voice, and 90,000 people are cheering you on. I mean, you are… In that situation, the Digital Minister is literally a rock star.

Audrey Tang: My appearance was not really live… I was watching from another city, that’s true, but it’s a sample, right? I was watching myself perform, yeah.

Cornelius Dieckmann: Nevertheless, I mean, in that moment a government member is a rock star. Was there something strange to that?

Audrey Tang: I’d ask the person on the stage, Freddy Lim… He is after all the lead vocal of that death metal band and he is member of our Parliament. I’ve known Freddy for a long time and I think both of us see this not as our hobby, but rather the culture or the music of the performance as a way to convey our politics and the other way round too.

Audrey Tang: It means that it’s not like our part time hobby, but rather this way of working with the people through culture, through music, poetry, and so on, is part of our work.

Jan Oberländer: What words or lyrics did you remember? What did you say on the screen? What words or text were sampled?

Audrey Tang: Sure. It was all from the existing lyrics, the repertoire of Chthonic. Some of them centers around, for example, the Japanese colonization times, the indigenous people’s struggle under the different colonial rule.

Audrey Tang: Some of them was from the Taiwan’s own martial law past. Some of them about human right violations during the imprisonment of democratic activist during the White terror and so on. These are all the stuff that I sang on the stage.

Jan Oberländer: Yeah, political lyrics.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, that’s what I mean by “doing politics”.

Cornelius Dieckmann: You’ve often famously referred to yourself as a conservative anarchist.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Cornelius Dieckmann: You were 35 when you became a minister in Taiwan, the youngest ever cabinet member in Taiwan. Isn’t it in a way quite risky for a government to give a miistry to someone who calls themselves an anarchist?

Audrey Tang: Fact check – when Cheng, Li-Chiun (鄭麗君) became the youth head counselor, she was 34, a few months younger than when I joined the cabinet.

Audrey Tang: Of course, she’s 10 years or so my senior, but she also joined the cabinet really, really young. I was fortunate enough to work with her.

Audrey Tang: When I just entered the cabinet, she was the Minister of Culture and we worked together to redefine the word infrastructure to also apply to digital ones and so on.

Audrey Tang: Anyway, so, fact checking aside, I think that the point here is that I always call myself a Taoist. Taoist in the sense of 為無為, doing by not forcing, right.

Audrey Tang: That’s the central Taoist thing. But when I talk with Western journalists or people and I say I practice Taoism, they think maybe I practice Chi-Kung (氣功) or maybe it’s a spiritual thing. Maybe it’s a religious thing, or folk Taoism, or things like that.

Audrey Tang: So I was trying to find a Western equivalent. Really the lower-c “conservative” means that in Taiwan’s 20 or so national languages with all very distinct and longtime cultures, we don’t make progress in the name of one culture, to the sacrifice of the other cultures.

Audrey Tang: It’s small c conservative, in a sense, that when we roll out Digital Measures, it connects existing cultures without leaving anyone behind. That’s like a conservancy. Right? That’s what lowercase c conservative originally means.

Audrey Tang: In that context, it also means that I never forced, say, the Minister of Defense to change their ways. I never force anyone and I don’t issue orders. I don’t take orders either. I work with the people with the government, but not for the government or for the people.

Audrey Tang: This is what I mean by the lowercase a anarchism and which is actually the textbook definition.

Jan Oberländer: What did you initially think when the premier offered you the job of Digital Minister? Was there any reservations or conditions you had?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, I was initially agreeing to ask my friends to, if anyone would like to, become such a minister, and all of them have work to do, I guess. So, I’m like, “Yeah, let’s try it myself.” I did negotiate three working conditions.

Audrey Tang: The teleworking condition, anywhere I’m working, I’m working.

Audrey Tang: A voluntary Association condition like I don’t issue or take orders.

Audrey Tang: Finally, the radical transparency condition. Anything that is interagency collaboration, or facing the other sectors, like journalists or lobbyists, we must publish either as a transcript or video.

Audrey Tang: The Premier Lin Chuan did agree on the three, which you can call it reservations, right? If those conditions are not met, I quit.

Cornelius Dieckmann: OK. So when you first started the job as Digital Minister a few years back, do you remember what the literal first thing was on your first day in office that you did?

Audrey Tang: Sure. Literally, the first thing I did in my office once I step into the office, was turning on the computer, and finding that it’s running Windows, and asking if I can get a Linux machine, or have access to a Linux workspace and discovered that they are running a rather old version of Fedora, Red Hat, that is to say, and asking to recompile the Linux kernel. That’s like literally the first thing I did.

Jan Oberländer: You did that yourself?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, of course, recompiling kernel, that’s of course, part of the things I do. That enabled the secure computation context for Linux.

Audrey Tang: That enabled me to bring in the civic tech tools, such as EtherCalc, the collaborative spreadsheet, I co developed with Dan Bricklin, inventor of spreadsheet, or nowadays CodiMD, which is based on HackMD, a startup in Taiwan that does collaborative editing, like Google Doc by Markdown.

Audrey Tang: Many other things — ordering lunch boxes together, whatever. Because of this secure Linux kernel and the contribution of penetration testers, both within and outside of the governments, we now enjoy one of the most secure interagency collaboration space, which is entirely powered by free software.

Audrey Tang: That’s both symbolic as in recompiling the kernel but also practical as in having access without having to pay a lot of software license fees.

Jan Oberländer: Another specific thing about your work is that, that’s what we read, every Wednesday between 10:00 AM and 10:00 PM, you meet who booked a 20 minute slot online…

Audrey Tang: 40 minutes, Yes.

Jan Oberländer: 40 minutes? OK. Do you still do it?

Audrey Tang: I do that too. Nowadays, it’s via telecommunication. The Social Innovation Lab, unfortunately, within 300 meters, there is a confirmed case. At the moment, I think they’re cleaning up the space.

Audrey Tang: We’ve switched to telecommunication but hopefully we’ll resume soon.

Jan Oberländer: What impulses from citizens have impressed or surprised you the most? Is there anything that had real impact…

Audrey Tang: A lot. It’s all on the record, right, but I’ll just highlight a few. For example, there was a visitor to the Social Innovation Lab that said: When we’re handing out the stimulus vouchers, it’s only done to people who are citizens, but not to residents.

Audrey Tang: Even though we would later on extend it to people with permanent residence certificate, still, that excludes pretty much all immigrant workers, and this is unlike the mass rationing, which includes the immigrant workers. Well, for very practical public health purposes.

Audrey Tang: A German journalist that visited me on social innovation, not just for interview, but for chatting really, who suggested he would like to help with the stimulus voucher design, by allowing people to instead of spending 3,000 NT dollars and get a 2,000 cash back, which was the original design, he would like to just enter the donation code for one of the immigrant workers helper group so that he would spent 3,000 NT dollars and then the state donates to the immigrant worker help fund that he appoints to, and then we just changed the code like that, because it was really good idea.

Audrey Tang: I personally then dedicated to 140, one of the immigrant worker education group, with my own stimulus voucher. I think small things like this also, because they just spread.

Audrey Tang: Then I get visits from other people who are not citizens, but are running into issues with their residential certificates.

Audrey Tang: Then the website owner of taiwangoldcard.com visited, after heard of the previous story, I’m sure, and talk about how to build a better Gold Card website so that the international community know about it, and during the conversation, I send a poor request, that is to say, I helped the website designed by the gold card holders, and then later on, he would be introduced to the National Development Council.

Audrey Tang: Actually the gold card if you Google for timecode.com the website now has his contribution, and I also wrote a recommendation letter so that one of his co workers is now a Taiwanese citizen, that is to say, he gained naturalization without abandoning his original passport, and that led to the reform to the rights of the people who held those residential certificate numbers, so they can now enjoy much better access to previously citizen only services.

Audrey Tang: I can go on. These things build upon one another, but it’s a continuous conversation with the expat community in Taiwan, and each small contribution promotes more people to go to the Social Innovation Lab office hour to offer more ideas.

Cornelius Dieckmann: We would love to speak a little bit about your personal background and how that blended into your political background. As far as we know, as an eight year old child, you started to teach yourself how to code using pen and paper. Was there the moment of epiphany that you remember where you went, “OK, this is it. This is my thing.”

Audrey Tang: Certainly, but it happened not when I was eight, but rather when I was 14, though. I was explaining to the head of my school why my research program, as I call it, of understanding swift trust – why people trust each other so quickly online, and also lose trust very quickly online, much more than face to face in person settings – and I was explaining to her how I wrote people on Archive – arXiv – which is this open access thing from Cornell, which is still around.

Audrey Tang: I wrote them, and they didn’t know I was just 14, my English is bad and so on. They just treated me as a co researcher, and shared their research with me, and we started doing research together. They swiftly trusted me, that is to say.

Audrey Tang: The head of my school, said, “OK, from tomorrow, you don’t have to go to school any more. Just do 16 hours of research every day. Why not?” And I’m like, “What about the compulsory education act?” And she’s like, “I’ll handle for you.”

Audrey Tang: So basically, this says to me, that joining the community where knowledge is being created is a good thing, is ratified by existing career public service and educated as a way to basically say, “Yeah, if the school is not for you, good for you!” And this is like an epiphany moment because had she said, “No, you have to still spend seven hours, eight hours every day in school,” there’s literally nothing I can do about it. So, it’s really a life at changing moment.

Jan Oberländer: Yeah. OK, but still, it’s interesting to read about this. Is it true though, that you started to learn coding with a pen and paper? Because that’s counterintuitive for me to hear.

Audrey Tang: Well, fact check – pencil and paper.

Audrey Tang: Because I would type CLS and then use that eraser to erase the screen. I did that, because at the moment of my learning programming, I learned entirely from the book. At that moment, there’s no personal computer in my residence, and I was interested in math, of course, in mathematics.

Audrey Tang: My parents already knew it, but they were not sure that they want to buy this very expensive calculator, when a second grader probably only need a maybe Casio calculator, that’s a lot. A personal computer is much more expensive.

Audrey Tang: But after writing pencil and paper programming for just a few weeks, they saw that I am really into this thing, and they eventually did get me a computer, but in the very beginning, I saw computer as a canvas to program in. So, I’m less interested in running existing games, or know what we call the CAI, computer assisted teaching of code.

Audrey Tang: I would some time play such a game and then just go back to home and just recreate that game using programming language that I know, and that’s how I learned programming just by duplicating existing videogames for education.

Jan Oberländer: Do you remember one specific videogame you recreated?

Audrey Tang: Many. There was one about teaching fractions. I think that’s one of the first programs I wrote where there is a line of numbers — well, two numbers, zero and one — and then random balloons appear on it, and then you would try to find a fraction of that correspond to the balloons position. So you will tie 3/5, and then it will go to this position and slightly missed a balloon, and then you will then guess again.

Audrey Tang: Maybe you do 4/9 or something like that, and so quickly learn about, for example, 4/8 is the same as 1/2 and such important concepts as fractionals. That’s one of the very first games I wrote.

Jan Oberländer: Yeah.

Cornelius Dieckmann: So you started very early. Edward Snowden describes that the first thing he ever hacked was bedtime. On his sixth birthday, he changed the clocks in his parents’ house so that he would be allowed to stay up longer.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Cornelius Dieckmann: What’s the first thing you ever hacked?

Audrey Tang: Well, I guess the school system, that’s probably what I hacked. I attended three kindergartens and six primary schools and one year of middle school before dropping out. In 10 years, I attended 10 schools.

Audrey Tang: It’s not hacking in a sense of computer security hacking, but it’s hacking in a sense of legal hacking I guess. To just try all sorts of different legal workarounds to get a kind of education that I need.

Audrey Tang: For example, when I was fourth grade, I actually attended sixth grade while registering in fourth grade. When I was fifth grade, I attended fourth grade but in Germany. And many other things right. Each year, there’s a different challenge.

Audrey Tang: This working around existing legal constraints and doing some of civil disobedience, some advocacy and so on. I think this has the spirit of hacking in it in a sense that we have to know the system in very fine detail and find the combinations that allows a not quite putting us to jail, but still working better for our unique situation solutions.

Cornelius Dieckmann: Do you remember one line in German, one sentence?

Audrey Tang: One sentence? Well, before we started class in the Saarbrücken-Dudweiler’s Albert-Schweitzer-Schule, we would, of course, recite the prayer: “Vater unser im Himmel, geheiligt sei dein Name…”

Cornelius Dieckmann: Oh OK, so it was a very Christian school then. I wanted to ask you, you said you switched kindergarten and schools many, many times. You’ve also talked about being bullied in primary school. Was that the reason why you switched schools so many times?

Audrey Tang: Just one time. Eight year to nine years old. Second to third grade was because of bullying. But every year was different. The first year in primary school, I switched to a gifted class, because in a math class, I was asking about binary and other non-base 10 number systems. They’re like, “Yes, maybe just put the student in a gifted class.”

Audrey Tang: Then that request switched into the school. Then that was the bullying, and then I switched to the third grade. I switched to fourth grade because we figured out a way so that we can register in fourth grade and then attend the sixth grade for real.

Audrey Tang: Then I switched to the German School because my dad was in Germany, and I could not go to middle school in Taiwan, because of the legal hurdles. I might as well go to Saarbrücken-Dudweiler.

Audrey Tang: I went back to Taiwan because I need to do a heart surgery. When I was 12 years old I did have surgery. Then a year of middle school, and then discovered the wide web. Then the rest is on the wide web.

Cornelius Dieckmann: When hearing you talk about your introduction to coding and the Internet, and what you told your principal when you wanted to drop out – it sounds like the first place you really felt at home was the World Wide Web?

Audrey Tang: Oh, yes, definitely. I would definitely say that. On the World Wide Web, there really is no marginalized community, no matter how niche one’s interests are, and even just one person in 10,000 is interested in that. Well, in Taiwan, that means 2,000 people on a chat group. That means that I am always at home and no matter how niche my interest may be.

Jan Oberländer: And no matter where geographically you are.

Audrey Tang: Exactly. That’s thanks to, of course, Internet as a human right already back then. We didn’t have broadband as a human right, but affordable Internet was always heavily subsidized in Taiwan.

Cornelius Dieckmann: When you say you definitely felt at home first on the Internet. So growing up on the Internet, were there things in your Internet social life that were hard to translate to real life?

Audrey Tang: Well, when it’s hard to translate, we just project it to real life. In a sense, you’re my Internet friends now. We are communicating over a screen.

Audrey Tang: The point I want to make is that on the Internet, the importance of a safe space, where people around the world who may have very different social norms, nevertheless can cocreate a norm of good enough consensus, or as we call it, rough consensus is really special in the sense that we get to construct the interaction space that the social norm schedule develop.

Audrey Tang: Of course, with the same tools, people can create more antisocial social media, but it also allows us to create more prosocial forms of social media, and that has been my research interest since I was 14 years old. Because of that, I would say, when it’s hard to translate, we just made sure that the people in the society enjoy universal access to these things as a human rights.

Audrey Tang: It’s not like they’re forced to go digital, but rather when they’re more interested in, for example, democratic participation between elections, there now exists the infrastructure that allow them to do so without learning a lot of computer languages or even touching a keyboard instantly.

Jan Oberländer: But on the other hand, speaking about the virtual home, you had a phase in 2004 and 2005 where you couchsurfed the world.

Audrey Tang: Oh, yeah, definitely. Yes. Like 20 different cities in two years.

Jan Oberländer: Is there anything you, like, any specific moment or scene or thing that you experienced that impressed you the most?

Audrey Tang: Well, a lot. That’s too many to say. I call it “Erdösing” because Paul Erdös used to do the same thing in the mathematical community.

Audrey Tang: I would simply say that this experience led me to trust strangers even more, because I discovered I don’t have to speak very good English. I don’t even have to make a lot of sense in the local language. Still, people are friendly. Generally speaking, people are friendly, and they do help me to find a next couch to surf, which I’m eternally grateful.

Audrey Tang: After this experience when people asked me what community you belong in, the question would be, I would always say, “I belong to the Homo sapiens community.” Because instead of being defined by one particular culture, or state, or nation or whatever, I found out Homo sapiens do share a lot in common.

Cornelius Dieckmann: Can you name some cities that you went to?

Audrey Tang: Sure, it’s on public record. I was in Vienna, I think the beginning was in Tokyo, actually, and then Vienna. Then I think also Estonia, Tallinn, and then Tel Aviv. Also, Sydney, I believe, and/or Melbourne, Vancouver, and Boston, and Portland. Actually, many others. I’m probably forgetting a dozen. But these are the kind of places that I went to.

Cornelius Dieckmann: So it was definitely a worldwide journey. I wanted to ask also about your, kind of, socialization on the Internet. Was the role the Internet played as a refuge for you growing up as a teenager – did that have something to do also with your situation of maybe figuring out what, for example, your gender identity was? How you fit into the social system?

Audrey Tang: Definitely. I mean, I went through two puberties and the Internet community supported me in both. I also believe this made me nonbinary in a sense that I don’t think half of the population is similar to me and half of population is farther away from me. This also enabled me to basically… instead of seeing this as identity, more as a experience. So you will note that I said I had two puberties instead of I become something or become something else.

Audrey Tang: This, I think, is also where the Internet shines at, because in the Internet, you can always have a new experience and then maybe find a new community to share these experiences without identifying with existing categories.

Jan Oberländer: Were there maybe specific people or, I don’t know, chat boards or something that specifically help with the second puberty, so to say?

Audrey Tang: Sure, quite a few. On the PTT, of course, there’s a lot of supportive people on the LGBTIQA plus community, PTT being Taiwan’s National Taiwan University subsidized student pet project that’s been running for 25 years with no advertisers or shareholders – and still going strong. So it’s…

Jan Oberländer: OK. So is it you chatting with maybe one friend online or…

Audrey Tang: No, it’s a bulletin board system, harkens back to the initial dial up days where people use a modem to send silver mails to one another or whatever. It’s actually harkens back to that system, it’s just adapted now, that also talk through SSH and HTTPS and so on, but it’s still the same system.

Audrey Tang: To me, it’s a continuity of experience all the way since I was 12 years old and listening to the modem, the “dadah dadah”..for the first time.

Audrey Tang: That interface is still with the PTT. It’s quite rare that we do have a civic infrastructure in the social sector that is now intergenerationally experienced for 25 years, meaning at least two or three generations of people had common experiences in that particular chat board. That’s not something like Reddit or Facebook, can simply say.

Jan Oberländer: You’ve described gender identities has being similar to the myriad of languages in the world. Are there any other commonalities in how you view gender and how you view coding? In a sense that you can hack gender?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, I used to come out to the computer science community. The blog title was “Runtime Typecasting.” Runtime means not compile time, meaning: after being born. Typecasting means that there’s just different social experience, different social scripts that I am happy to experience.

Audrey Tang: These are the puns really in the computer science jargon that makes it very easy for people to understand the transgender experience.

Audrey Tang: I would also say that the computer languages world in particular had a lot of people who are trans or gender nonbinary nonconforming already. It’s not that rare, and being not that rare is quite important when you’re starting out a new experience.

Audrey Tang: It’s just like migrating to a new culture. If you’re alone in your original culture than in a new culture you’ll probably be shy and less interacting. But if you feel that there is an expat community that supports you, well, that’s different.

Cornelius Dieckmann: Speaking about LGBTQ plus issues in Taiwan. On Sunday, there was a new government survey that was released that showed the Taiwanese people’s acceptance of same-sex marriage…

Audrey Tang: We are over 60 percent.

Cornelius Dieckmann: 60.4 percent in 2021, up from 37.4 in 2018, before same sex marriage was instituted in Taiwan. How do you explain why Taiwan, a relatively young democracy with a martial-law past, is seeing such social progressivism?

Audrey Tang: That’s because our Marriage Equality Act was small c conservative. We didn’t disrupt existing kinship or family-to-family weddings. Before 2007, in Taiwan, when you have a wedding ceremony where both families were invited, it’s a legal ceremony and maybe you register later. But the marriage was effective at the day of ceremony. It’s sometimes likened to the day the baby is born it’s born. The birth certificate comes later.

Audrey Tang: But in 2008, it changed so that the only legal marriage is by registration, the household registration desk. After that, there’s two norms around marriage. People who married before 2007 remember the old norm. And people who registered after 2008, so the younger people, I’m sure, remember the new norm.

Audrey Tang: When we legalized marriage equality, we said it legalized just the by-laws, the registration side. Not the in-laws, not a father in laws, mothers in laws. When two same sex persons wed, their families don’t. Because of that, we don’t have to invent like 16 new kinship terms to describe same sex marriage. When I speak Mandarin, you know what I’m talking about.

Audrey Tang: We don’t have to invent things like, I don’t know, [Mandarin: erxu] or [nüxi] or whatever that would correspond to those new kinship features.

Audrey Tang: Because we took this particular route through one constitutional court ruling and two referenda, then the older norm doesn’t feel threatened if you’re starting something new. But it’s not trying to redefine marriage for us in the civil code. That led to a much better small c conservative conversations.

Cornelius Dieckmann: I just mentioned martial law, which was lifted in the late ‘80s. So you would have been about six years old…

Audrey Tang: Seven, but yes.

Cornelius Dieckmann: Your parents were political journalists who before the liberalization had to censor themselves. And your father did work on Tiananmen, and was actually there in 1989. How did they explain to you as a child the limited political freedoms that you grew up in, that you all were living in back then?

Audrey Tang: They never really taught me politics. Rather, we debated and deliberated. My father was quite proud in his Socratic method, meaning that whenever I thought about something and I thought I’m self-consistent, he would challenge me on a kind of unsaid implied assumption and so on.

Audrey Tang: I remember when I… I must be five or six years old when the “Democratic Progressive Party” first formed, quite illegally at that time, and tried to run for political seats.

Audrey Tang: We were having a conversation about the name of the political party, and I would learn through this deliberation with my parents that progress mean very different things to many different people. My mother was working on the establishment of a act for “National Parks.” What progress used to mean in Taiwan, at a time very economic development heavy, is actually the lack of progress when seen from an environmentalist point of view.

Audrey Tang: The same would go, for example, on advocating for one particular linguistic group’s right, when viewed from, say, the indigenous linguistic point of view and so on.

Audrey Tang: What they did is basically imbued in me the sense of taking all the sides. When we talk about democratic progress, we don’t just mean progress in one culture. We must make sure that it’s not leaving anyone behind. I guess that’s the main thing that they showed if not taught me.

Cornelius Dieckmann: That’s quite a lot of political wisdom for a five year old. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Thank you.

Cornelius Dieckmann: After you left school and became an entrepreneur and became a professional coder, you went to work also for Apple and worked, for example, on Siri. I was wondering, does the original anarchist, almost libertarian ethos of the hacking community… isn’t that in opposition, somewhat, to going to join a big Silicon Valley tech giant?

Audrey Tang: My role at Apple, as an independent contractor or a open source community consultant, is a little bit like my current role as minister at large with open innovation as the mandate. That is to say I was at a Lagrange point with the community at one side and a huge corporation at the other, just like as my position now is between a civil society organization on one side and a huge state apparatus on the other. I always stress that I’m not working for either, I’m working with both.

Audrey Tang: Similarly in Apple’s work, I mostly work with existing open source communities at a time Apple is also having a conversation, although I’m not directly responsible for it but, open sourcing say Swift, the next generation computer language, or bringing in the FreeBSD community which I consider one of my home communities into the Apple developer ecosystem.

Audrey Tang: At the time, Apple was also figuring out how to work with the open source ecosystem – something that was not entirely in their DNA, as you observed, but they are willing to at least try.

Audrey Tang: At the same time, I think Microsoft was also struggling with something like that and eventually would end up in them, well, now running GitHub and apologizing quite publicly for the harm they’ve done to the open source community in the early ‘90s and so on.

Audrey Tang: At the time, it was that the hope and the concern was both that maybe it’s possible for the highly organized proprietary communities to see that open source could not only in practical terms, but also the human right argument, which means that it’s open for inspections and co creation, can win over to developers so that they would also internally push for such reforms. It’s both for rebels and reformists, to work together.

Audrey Tang: It does feel sometimes like that when I’m working with the Taiwanese government, at times. So that I talk both to the reformers within this career public service, but also with the rebels outside occupying the parliament.

Jan Oberländer: Did you think, at Apple, you succeeded in bringing forward these…?

Audrey Tang: I contributed to the places I can, and at least, for example, in Siri technologies, there’s much more concern about using the latest mathematical materials to enable more accountable privacy preserving code and the SMS design of multi party privacy by default design, that I just helped introduce a couple weeks ago also conforms to the same ethos.

Audrey Tang: I wouldn’t say that it’s any particular technological projects I did, but rather the ethos that we helped to co create. Of course, the marketing department in Apple would later sell that as the main selling point of Apple, at the time I’m already out of Apple.

Jan Oberländer: You left your part spontaneously at age 33. You quit your job at Apple to join the Sunflower Movement, saying, “I have to leave. Democracy needs me.” That quote..

Audrey Tang: That’s not entirely right, I took a absence. I’m like “Yeah, I can’t,” because I was teleworking anyway. It’s not like I boarded a plane. I actually wrote… I think it was Wired that said that I boarded a plane, and I fact checked them and they did go back to edit that part.

Audrey Tang: I wasn’t physically in Cupertino or Palo Alto. I was physically in Taipei just teleworking, and I said, “I need to take a few weeks off.” That’s the extent what I did.

Audrey Tang: After that, it’s true that I spent more and more time into social sector and I stopped entirely taking new for higher projects, but I did retain the retainer like job titles, just transferring knowledge to the younger people, in Apple, in social techs, and in the Oxford University Press, until 2016 when I joined the cabinet for good.

Cornelius Dieckmann: The Sunflower movement was such a defining movement for many young people who may not have been so involved politically before and then became very politically involved…

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Cornelius Dieckmann: It was about a China-friendly trade act that people wanted to protest against. Now, fast forward to 2021, a lot of people obviously are, again, looking at the China Taiwan relations. China has dismantled democracy in Hong Kong in the past three years.

Cornelius Dieckmann: Are you worried that because Taiwan is now on the top of that list, that a war could be coming?

Audrey Tang: I also work with the Hong Kong people, in 2014. Right after our movement, they have this umbrella movement. We’re quite tightly connected in personal links and so one. I would say… well, dismantling may be a good description. I’m certainly not contesting that.

Audrey Tang: But I would also say the leaderless, “Be Water” countermovement is still going on.

Audrey Tang: It’s still going on quite strongly, enabled by modern cryptography. I’m not yet lost hope on a more civil society oriented possible link between the democratic minded people in Hong Kong and democratic minded people elsewhere. Because we’re on the record. I’ll just say that.

Audrey Tang: Then, as for Taiwan itself, it’s not that we’re oblivious to campaigns and interference from the PRC. Quite a contrary, in 2014, many people went to the street because they understand already through cyber securities, through disinformation, through propaganda, through various other nowadays called hybrid operations - they already are looking at Beijing regime’s influence in Taiwan that’s very tangible.

Audrey Tang: That’s what motivated the Sunflower Movement in the 20 NGOs that liberated on the specific cases. For example, the 4G infrastructure where now market forces can take over. If we do risk assessment, every time there’s an upgrade, it’s much more costly to do so. So, there’s an economic argument as well during the Sunflower Movement.

Audrey Tang: I don’t know whether you’d describe it as a war or not, like trade war or standardization war, or nowadays people say 5G war. Whatever, but it’s certainly a intense competition, I would say that.

Jan Oberländer: But you’re not afraid of a physical annexation of Taiwan?

Cornelius Dieckmann: Military attack.

Audrey Tang: Because the minister of defense never send anyone to the office, I don’t think I know more about this than you guys. [laughs] I’m simply not part of the defense conversations. That’s quite natural because I say everything I see is Freedom of Information Act, so I obviously do not get invited to meetings where they talk about annexation. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: I’m not informed is what I’m saying.

Jan Oberländer: OK. You, like a lot of programmers of your generation, like Edward Snowden for example, you grew up with the early vision of a completely free and libertarian Internet. Would you say up until now this dream wasn’t real?

Audrey Tang: No, not at all. You can still invent a new Internet protocol without asking anyone’s permission but the other person who agreed to connect to you through their protocol. That’s the core Internet promise, nothing else and nothing less.

Audrey Tang: As long as this end to end innovation principle is upheld, and even the PRC currently do not Balkanize itself. It’s still part of the Internet. It still connects to GitHub the last time I checked.

Audrey Tang: That means that it’s – although somewhat weakly – but it’s still connected to the vision of the Internet. I don’t know what we would do without Internet when the coronavirus comes. The Internet was built for situations like this.

Audrey Tang: The original specification if you talk about the DARPA days, I’m sure it’s already met, and met quite well in flying colors. If you ask about, “What about the early World Wide Web days or the early Web 2.0 days,” that’s something else entirely. I would say that nowadays we see the potential of antisocial social media much more acutely. But also, we now see examples of pro social social media also much more vividly.

Audrey Tang: It’s now seen as a great amplifier. If you start with assistive intelligence, you get great assistive intelligence that connects people together to form collective intelligence. If you start with authoritarian intelligence, well, you get totalitarianism, compared to which the previous totalitarianism governments are just subtotal.

Cornelius Dieckmann: Is Facebook an anti social medium?

Audrey Tang: Not how I use it. I installed the Facebook feed eradicator. So I don’t have a Facebook feed. I use it much like the Wide Web browser. I search for a person’s name. I watch some movies. I search for hashtags. But I don’t have a feed where a parasitical or symbiotic – depending… – AI tries to predict my emotions. I simply don’t have that part.

Audrey Tang: Facebook is large. It has addiction-forming parts, and it has some other not so addictive forming parts. Trying to have a town hall conversation in a addiction forming part is like holding a physical town hall in a loud nightclub where you have to shout to get heard. Addictive drinks, private bouncers, smoke filled room.

Audrey Tang: I’m not saying nightclubs are antisocial. Nightclubs could be quite social, and has its role in a district. It’s just that we shouldn’t hold our town halls there.

Cornelius Dieckmann: It’s not necessarily an amplifier of democratic… of democracy.

Audrey Tang: I don’t think Facebook was viewed as a democratic institution, no.

Jan Oberländer: Speaking of addiction: when you take the MRT in Taipei, nearly every single passenger is staring at their phone. Would you say such a thing as over-digitization?

Audrey Tang: I don’t know. What’s wrong with that?

Cornelius Dieckmann: It seems somehow isolating, in a way, because it’s… It’s an isolating technology, to an extent. Everybody’s in their screen.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, but on their screen, they look at their friends and family who don’t have to wear a mask. But, if they look around, everybody is wearing a mask. [laughs] So I think the pandemic also has something to do with it.

Audrey Tang: It’s less easy to connect with strangers when people are afraid of the virus. This is true worldwide. We know over this Microsoft Teams conversation, we can’t infect each other. We’re now speaking quite intimately, really. I get to see your bookshelf.

Audrey Tang: So this rate increased during the pandemic, and I wouldn’t call it a simple thing as addiction. I would say it’s part of the new normal.

Cornelius Dieckmann: Where are your books? Your background is very bare.

Audrey Tang: I know, I know. I use digital books. I don’t really read paper books for quite a while now. If something is paper based, only sometimes I just scan it.

Jan Oberländer: You’re surrounded by improving technology all day and every day. Is there something - maybe an old school videogame or  an old console or something - that you’re emotionally attached to?

Audrey Tang: No, I don’t have anything like that. I think that the point here is I’m not attached to hardware devices. I’m attached to concepts. That is to say, for example, I’m quite attached to the idea of conflict free replicable data types, or CRDTs.

Audrey Tang: I can talk about that for hours, talking about how nonviolent communication, open space technologies, and so on, can be explained in CRDTs. Maybe you can say I’m attached to that.

Audrey Tang: I’m quite attached to the idea of natural transformation in category theory and many other things. But these things are not imbued in tangible ways, so I’m not able to show you that except by drawing.

Cornelius Dieckmann: You did start singing the modem sound earlier.

Audrey Tang: That’s like music. It could be vocalized. So thank you. I think the poetician part of my title says that for complex ideas, sometimes it’s easier if you just express in rhyme, or in music, or in things like that as compared to any tangible hardware construction, which always to me seems rather limiting to a confined immense concept in a small amount of room and space.

Jan Oberländer: Speaking of music, I think it was curious that you by all styles of music were part of this extreme metal music, CHTHONIC. Are you a metal fan, except from knowing Freddy personally, is it something…?

Audrey Tang: No, to be honest, I’m not. But my co founder, Chia-Laing, Kao (高嘉良), his brother worked as a drum player in CHTHONIC, still now after all these years. Back when I was 20, 21, when we’re co founding a company, he would just play the music all night long. I was in the next room, which is a safe distance away. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: It’s slightly less loud when I get to hear in my room, but it’s like a theme. It allows us to churn out code all night long without drinking too much caffeine. It’s also good for our body in a sense.

Audrey Tang: Other than CHTONIC, I don’t listen to metal. I mostly listened to things like hip hop, rap, or some classical music. I listened to a lot of Leonard Cohen and translated quite a few pieces.

Jan Oberländer: You listen to it while coding? You get around to coding these days much?

Audrey Tang: Oh, yes, still, of course. I usually prototype the services I would like to see implemented. Then those very quickly gets taken over by civic tech or gov tech contractors. But it’s easier for me to illustrate something in code.

Cornelius Dieckmann: You obviously have attended many, many hackathons and there’s such a thing as Presidential Hackathons these days. Something that programmers and coders liked a lot is programming-themed t shirts. Quick question, what’s the stupidest caption you’ve ever seen on a programming t shirt, and the cleverest?

Audrey Tang: Sorry, what was the last one?

Cornelius Dieckmann: Coding-themed t shirts. You always see these hacking t shirts that people like to wear.

Audrey Tang: I printed quite a few of those t shirts myself, so I’m quite biased in that. [laughs] Many of them are still worn by people in the Perl community. There’s one that says…It’s Perl 6 was the project we’re working on, nowadays it’s called Raku. You can still find a T shirt that says “Polymorphic Existential Recursive Lambda 6,” so Perl 6. There’s a mock cap that goes with it that says, “Powered by Ph.D.” rather than “Powered by PHP.”

Audrey Tang: There’s many silly things that we did get around at the time and it’s all in the name of Dash Big O Fun or Optimizing for Fun. If you’re interested in the T shirts and silly drawings that I did during that time, there was an interview with me 2015 that goes through the memory lane for many things of that sort.

Cornelius Dieckmann: I’ll definitely check that out. Please no diplomatic answers: If you could hack into any system in the world and have the guarantee that no one would ever find out, what would that be?

Audrey Tang: Any system?

Cornelius Dieckmann: Any system.

Audrey Tang: Certainly the solar system.

Cornelius Dieckmann: OK. What would you do?

Jan Oberländer: Solar or cellular? You mean cells, body cells?

Audrey Tang: No, the solar system! Maybe adjust the sun a little bit to solve climate change. That’s probably the first thing. Many more possibilities afterward.

Jan Oberländer: Yeah, that’s great. A little more follow up question on Facebook topic, the social media topic. Germany sees large elections in September and the campaigns are underway. How big a role does social media microtargeting play in your elections, or the setting of your political agenda?

Audrey Tang: In 2018, a lot. In 2020, not so much. That’s because in 2019, a concerted effort from the social sector sets the norm that says Facebook must treat political and social advertisement and microtargeting as campaign donations.

Audrey Tang: Meaning, only domestic people get to contribute. Meaning, just like our national auditing office all the microtargeting patterns must be published immediately by Facebook into open data, so investigative journalists can point out dark patterns immediately.

Audrey Tang: I believe Facebook first tried out in Taiwan. Taiwan is the first jurisdiction where they rolled out this new norm. There was a whistleblower a couple months ago from Facebook, civic integrity group that said only because in Taiwan, they will face a large PR backlash if they don’t do that.

Audrey Tang: But in other jurisdictions where there’s no social sanction implicitly threatened, they sometimes let it go. That was the whistle blowing. The social sector really set the norm in 2019 so that we don’t have to pass something like the NetzDG.

Audrey Tang: To date, we’ve not passed any law like that. So, Facebook complied because of social sector, not because of public sector pressure.

Jan Oberländer: Yeah, great.

Cornelius Dieckmann: One overarching thing that we’ve been talking about is that your vision of digital democracy is all about connecting people, connecting communities. If you think of the international scale, though, of Taiwan, for example, in the UN – or not in the UN – and its multi laterals: the WTO, the WHO… Taiwan is very isolated. It’s only recognized by 15 countries: Swaziland, The Marshall Islands, Tuvalu… It’s not very connected. It’s not recognized by a lot of countries. How do you deal with that paradox?

Audrey Tang: I deal with it by registering the domain name digitalminister.tw. When I appear at, say APEC, I just appear as digitalminister.tw. There’s really no international rule that prohibits resolving the .tw domain name.

Audrey Tang: Our neighbor, .tv in Tuvalu, certainly… – literally the neighbor, one alphabet next door [laughs] – of course resolved the tw. But if you are in Shanghai or in Hong Kong and you type .tw, you still go to our machines.

Audrey Tang: That means in the Internet governance stage, .tw — if not Taiwan — is recognized. I’m really taking this, for example, to the Internet governance forum in 2017 when I appeared as a telepresence robot. It was a UN meeting. Because it was a UN meeting, if I physically was there, I have to show my passport.

Audrey Tang: But if I appear as a 169, then no passport is needed and I just talk as digitalminister.tw and the PRC people there also spoke, and  we’re both on the record. And there was no problem. Nowadays, the UN meetings are all 16*9 anyway. [laughs] It’s all telecommunications as of last year. What was pioneering is now the norm is what I’m saying.

Jan Oberländer: In a way, you did hack the UN…

Audrey Tang: In a sense, in a sense.

Jan Oberländer: Your recipe to deal with spreading misinformation and fake news is this “humor over rumor”…

Audrey Tang: Rumor. That’s right.

Jan Oberländer: …Which we like. Could you give us a good tangible example of what you did or maybe doing right now?

Audrey Tang: Sure of course. I think the humor over rumor really shines when people are interested in learning about a context rather than interested in attacking one another.

Audrey Tang: It’s almost like a judo or aikido movement that turns this vengeful or discriminatory energy into fun and co creative energy. Instead of a recent example, I’ll use one of the first examples that we did.

Audrey Tang: Back in…I think when…Let me just quickly search for that. Let’s see the terms to use. Yeah. It’s still around.

Audrey Tang: When Su Tseng-chang was first appointed by Dr. Tsai Ing-wen as the premier, he brought a team that carries the humor over rumor to the premier office level instead of just at a ministerial level. In 2019, June, was I think one of the truly viral examples that was shared.

Audrey Tang: That was when Su Tseng chang posted a very young looking photo for himself to dispel a rumor that said, if you perm your hair multiple times a week, you could be fined a million dollars. Of course, that’s not true.

Audrey Tang: But he made sure that not only he said it’s not true, he said it in a very funny way, by showing a young photo of him saying, “Even I’m bald now, I used to have hair, so I will not punish people with hair.”

Audrey Tang: A small fine print that says: what we’re actually introducing is a labeling requirement for hair products starting July 2021. And the Premier’s photo as he looks now – completely bald – with a hair blower, saying: but if you perm your hair many times a week, you will not damage your bank account, but you’ll damage your hair. Just look at me for what will happen to you. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: I mean, this is, I think truly humorous because he’s not attacking anyone. It’s not about vengefulness or discrimination. This is not even satire. This is pure humor. This went much more viral.

Audrey Tang: I know. I know. This went much more… There’s nothing wrong about having hair and nothing wrong about not having hair, is what he’s saying.

Audrey Tang: By repackaging this information, this conspiracy theory kind of inactivated mRNA samples in a much funnier payload, this works as a kind of vaccine of the mind or inoculation of the mind. This example to date is still the best example I have because it really relates to people of all different cultural backgrounds.

Cornelius Dieckmann: Something else that just went viral is the actor John Cena. The American actor John Cena caused an outrage in China, after he had said in an interview that Taiwan was a country. He then posted this video where he, in Mandarin, was basically apologizing profusely and saying, “I’ve made a lot of mistakes, I have a lot to learn,” which then, in turn, provoked the hastag #taiwanisacountry.

Cornelius Dieckmann: This type of thing pops up every once in a while – this type of controversy and discussion where a famous figure will do such an alleged misstep? Is that something that frustrates you when it happens?

Audrey Tang: No, I don’t think so, because I think that the Internet is known for its memes. I think there’s a lot of co creational potential. When I feel frustrated — I don’t often feel frustrated — I just do what any The Onion readers would do which is take an Internet meme and make fun of myself. There’s quite a few people for making fun of me. I think it’s all in good fun.

Audrey Tang: There is popular VTubers. There’s a VTuber called Ina (イナニス), that really looks like me in likeness. People have a lot of jokes. There’s a character in “Hunter Hunter”, Melody (センリツ) that looks like me and people make a lot of jokes around that.

Audrey Tang: What I’m trying to say is that I see these creations as material for remixing, or as we say in computational linguistics: as corpus, meaning that it’s material for other people to work on.

Audrey Tang: Similarly, when I said to a German journalist who asked what do I feel about Beijing calling Taiwan a, quote, “breakaway province.” Of course, I’m like, “Oh, breakaway. That was Neolithic Age, wasn’t it.” [laughs]

Audrey Tang: In that answering, I’m using that as a corpus, as a way to creatively culture gem. A ongoing trope about breakaway. That’s what I mean about being a poetician, culture gemming such existing biases and stereotypes really is my thing, and I find joy in doing so.

Cornelius Dieckmann: So a lot of light-heartedness and humor and casually dealing with potentially frustrating things. What does frustrate you? When code doesn’t work?

Audrey Tang: Recently, when microphones fail. When we have to keep saying, “Unmute yourself.”…In large lecture halls, usually a failing microphone is what put people to sleep or to anxiety, almost immediately. Even if the camera stutters or if we don’t get video, as long as we have good audio we’re still in rapport, but if somebody start to hear a lot of echo, a lot of “beep,” we can’t really have any empathy after just five minutes.

Audrey Tang: Failing microphone, that’s probably the main source of my frustration.

Cornelius Dieckmann: Fair enough.

Jan Oberländer: We’re slowly wrapping up and asking questions we haven’t asked in the first couple of minutes. Your eldest grandparent I think is 103, 104 years old?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, something like that, but he passed away a couple of years ago. Both of my grandfathers passed away in very old age, one hundred and something and 90 something, respectively, but both of my grandmothers are still around.

Cornelius Dieckmann: You described how when one of your grandparents – I assume you were talking about one of your grandfathers – was using video calls at over a hundred years old.

Audrey Tang: Oh, yeah.

Cornelius Dieckmann: We were wondering, what was the more difficult, or maybe not difficult, thing to get used to for someone from such a different generation: Was it that their grandchild came out as trans or non binary, or that their grandchild is suddenly a government minister?

Audrey Tang: I’ve got five minutes, just to check on time. I think they took it with pride. They were very liberal people to begin with. Indeed, I would not go through two puberties if not for the fact that the gender stereotypes in our both my parents households — original households — were quite gender equal to begin with.

Audrey Tang: That is showing the beauty of trans cultural households. My father’s mother was from Lukang and my father’s father was from Sichuan, which came to Taiwan around the great retreat. Their marriage was slightly… just a few years, maybe not even a few years — maybe just one year or two — after the February 28 massacre, which was not a great moment for their backgrounds people to get married. My grandma’s family even threatened to disown her.

Audrey Tang: It’s specifically because of the tension between the culture communitie did they actually raise their family to be a really inclusive and diversity embracing one because initially they could only compose love letters to one another. Their language don’t even match.

Audrey Tang: My father’s father definitely didn’t speak Japanese, which was their native tongue — one of their native tongues for my father’s mother. There’s many trans cultural stories in our family. Trans cultural in a sense of gender, trans cultural in a sense of a cross sectoral partnerships. These are just accepted in the family.

Cornelius Dieckmann: I know we have to wrap up. Just two more questions. You came out as trans in a blog post in 2005, the one you talked about earlier.

Audrey Tang: “Runtime Typecasting.”

Cornelius Dieckmann: Yeah, exactly. Did you come out to your parents long before that?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, of course, of course. I think I mentioned it when I was 14, during my first puberty…and it’s in my mother’s book. When I was 24, I considered changing my name and I did consult with both of my parents on the new name, which is a very gender fluid name. Feng (鳳), which is feminine when paired with the dragon but masculine when paired with a Huang (凰). It’s hard to translate but you know what I mean.

Audrey Tang: This word play is also done through consultation with my family members.

Cornelius Dieckmann: Unless Jan doesn’t have an intervention…my last question is, do you really dream in JavaScript?

Audrey Tang: Sometimes in Perl too.

Audrey Tang: Yes, I do dream in code.

Jan Oberländer: How would a nightmare in code look like?

Audrey Tang: It would probably look like spaghetti monster. A flying spaghetti monster. [laughs]

Jan Oberländer: OK. Thank you very, very much for giving us even more time than we were scheduled.

Cornelius Dieckmann: Do you mind if I take a screen grab, just to remember the setting?

Audrey Tang: Sure.

Jan Oberländer: Why are you doing this hand signal?

Audrey Tang: This is my sign off gesture. Live long and prosper. Which seem a very good greeting in a time of pandemic. It’s just: live long and prosper.

Jan Oberländer: It’s true. We’re all hoping for that.

Cornelius Dieckmann: Yeah, likewise.

Audrey Tang: Thank you. OK. Cheers. Bye. Live long and prosper. Bye.

Jan Oberländer: Live long and prosper.