Organizer: There is an argument that democracy is messy and time-consuming, while authoritarianism is top-down and efficient. Taiwan has made difference. It has dealt with COVID-19 very effectively by empowering its citizens with digital technology.

Organizer: Taiwan’s experience has given hope to the world by demonstrating that democracy is the system that allows people to learn together to improve society and deliver results. We are keen to learn from Taiwan’s success.

Audrey Tang: Certainly. Very honored to be here to talk with you all, and I will now recite as a poem or a prayer, my job description that I wrote when I became the digital minister in 2016. It is pinned on my Twitter.

Audrey Tang: And in lieu of any remark, I believe this describes my imagination of digital democracy, which will inform our subsequent conversations and my job description goes like this:

Audrey Tang: When we see the Internet of Things, let’s make it an Internet of Beings.When we see virtual reality, let’s make it a shared reality.When we see machine learning, let’s make it collaborative learning.When we see user experience let’s make it about human experience.Whenever we hear that Singularity is near, let us always remember the Plurality is here.

Audrey Tang: So while singularity connects machines, plurality connects people.  Thank you.

Audience Member: Thank you. I’m working at the manufacturer mainly doing business in healthcare sector. My name is Shu Do. Thank you for your valuable time. Without further ado, let me ask you a question.

Audience Member: If you want to have people really reflected more directly in politics, utilizing digital technology, we support that active participation of each citizen is a prerequisite. I wonder if you agree on that point.

Audience Member: In Japan the voter turnout is declining, and the young people are disengaged from politics. I wonder where the system like Taiwan’s drawing would work well in Japan, or introduction of such a system here in Taiwan would help raise public awareness for the need for participation in democracy.

Audience Member: What do you do to make it join a real function, the system in Taiwan? If you can give us any advice for Japan I’ll be grateful. Thank you very much.

Audrey Tang: Thank you. This is an excellent question.

Audrey Tang: What we have introduced in Taiwan, in addition to the Join platform, is the idea of collaborative meetings and participation officer network, both of which I just pasted on the chat.

Audrey Tang: Now, the idea of the collaboration meetings and participation network is very simple. We make sure that people participate from the beginning of their policy lifecycle instead of just at the decisional stage as would a referendum or a voting for mayors, right?

Audrey Tang: The idea, very simply put, is that anyone can surface things that are worth discussion, but instead of other petition platforms in other countries and jurisdictions, ours is not there just to explain the issue. Ours is there to get the 5000 people actually brainstorming together to map out the solution space even before we devote any budget or energy to actually solving that problem.

Audrey Tang: So, moving from the decisional stage to the mutual informing stage allows people to talk across the discipline boundaries, specialty boundaries, expertise boundaries, and so on. And we make out breakout groups facilitated by dedicated civil service members in unrelated ministries. So, when we deliberate about say the tax filing system reform, maybe the Coast Guard from the Ocean Affairs Council hosts that breakout discussion, but when we talk about fishing and surfing issues, then maybe it’s the tax agency, hosting the conversation.

Audrey Tang: We, just a few days ago, talked about how to reform a historical prison building - now it’s a heritage site - into something that’s more active, where people can participate in human rights education, among others, with immersive experiences, but it’s facilitated by the participation officer totally unrelated to justice and law. Maybe by the Tourism Bureau, or things like that.

Audrey Tang: So, the idea is that people will then listen to those civil service people because they take the side of citizens. The idea is that the tax agency people also fish and surf on their spare time, and the Coast Guard also file their own tax. So, naturally, they take the citizens side and work naturally across silos without recruiting outside dedicated facilitators. We empower the public servants to step out of their assigned roles so that each conversation becomes an open-ended discussion instead of a zero-sum type of defense in existing solution spaces.

Audrey Tang: So, I do believe that if you have this kind of learning circle, learning organization, where people are encouraged to play outside of their defined silos, then you will make the response quality higher the bandwidth higher and will also shorten the latency, shorten the time it takes before a good idea is discovered and implemented. And increasing bandwidth and reducing latency are at the core of digital democracy.

Audience Member: I’m a certified public accountant. I would like to ask about radical transparency that is at the foundation of Taiwan’s initiatives. Government functions include diplomacy, defense and policy that cannot be made public.

Audience Member: In some cases, there may be occasions where government will conduct surveillance of people in order to protect them. How does Taiwan handle the issue of this limitation to transparency? How do you obtain the consent of people with regards to this limitation and secure trust of the people towards the government?

Audrey Tang: Thank you, especially in COVID, this is not a theoretical question. This is of enormous practical consequence. Yesterday, I believe, Taiwan’s numbers show that all of our confirmed cases are during quarantine. There’s no reported cases outside of quarantine and even of those in quarantine, I think it was just five confirmed cases of Omicron. So obviously, we’ve done something right when it comes to contact tracing and surveillance because we’ve reduced the time it takes for exposure notification from used to take more than 24 hours last May when we faced our first in-real wave of alpha and but later on when we faced Delta and Omicron, our surveillance, contact tracing, is now less than 24 minutes before we can send out exposure notifications.

Audrey Tang: However, this is done in a way using a novel method called multi-party or federated computation and this is one of those privacy enhancing technologies that are just recently theoretically turned into commercially available. Similar technologies include federated learning, homomorphic encryption, differential privacy, and many other toolkits. Now, this may sound very alien, but at root, it solves a paradox. The paradox was, if I trust my clinic, my doctor, because I trust them to act in my best interest, and my doctor trust the national health care system because they trust they’re acting in the citizens best interest and the National Healthcare System trust telecom carriers or the National Center for high-speed computation, because they’re aligned in its values. The trust is not transitive. It doesn’t mean that I automatically trust our supercomputer, trust cluster because I know nothing about how it works. So, when many trusting relationship gets built this way, actually, everyone’s trust loose a little bit.

Audrey Tang: We do see in many jurisdictions including ours, when some civil service people endorsed the use of exposure notification based on Bluetooth technology, namely the exposure notification built by Google and Apple, I believe in Japan is called COCOA, here is called the Taiwan Social Distancing app, we have good mathematical reasons to trust its privacy enhancing properties. But because it’s not transitive, average citizen doesn’t actually trust that and it takes forever for that trust to be communicated.

Audrey Tang: And these cases, what we have done instead is to make the surveillance mutually accountable with this idea of citizen oversight. So, in Taiwan, when you check in a venue using the QR code, you’re not using an app, there’s no app required. It just triggers your own phones SMS app, and it sends to a toll-free number 1922 which is stored in your telecom for four weeks, and you can reverse look up any contact tracer’s access to your records in the past four weeks on a dedicated website.

Audrey Tang: And because it’s QR code and SMS and not Bluetooth, it’s not mystical. Everybody can see very clearly what’s happening. And if you don’t want to scan a QR code, you can manually tweet, send that SMS the 15 digits to your telecom to a equal result.

Audrey Tang: So, because of radical transparency of how the mechanism works, everybody can verify that is only going to the site that they actually trust and if you don’t trust any of the telecommunication carriers, you can use the Taipei city municipal government’s app scanner. So, there are the six telecom and if you don’t trust any of the six players, you can still stamp or write your way in if you trust the venue more than you trust the telecom but at the end of the day, it will all go back to the same contact tracing system so it allows you to elect which federated party to trust the most. And you don’t have to trust anyone else then. The venue, if you scan the QR code, learns nothing about your phone number. Your phone company doesn’t learn anything about how those 15 digits map to the venue.

Audrey Tang: So, through a secure multi-party configuration, only the contact tracer get access to the whole piece of the puzzle. And we respond to, for example, a police filing search warrants because they also want to piece it together. We’ve seen this in Singapore and Korea and Australia. We very simply said, “Because every SMS is for pandemic control only, it’s not legal interpretation of the private communication wiretapping law because the law was not designed to intercept such Post-it Notes, right? It’s not a private communication between two people. It’s just a Post-it Note to remind oneself where have you been in the past four weeks, so it should not be wiretapped.” And so after we did this explanation, again, the public trust of the system increased especially because people do see that within 24 hours, we do send out automatic exposure notifications that people can then quarantine themselves, and so on. So radical transparency refers to the entire configuration, not just one or two players in it. It’s only if everyone is mutually accountable, can we actually do this large-scale surveillance very effectively against the highly transmissible variants while preserving privacy.

Audience Member: Thank you very much. Yes, in the responses you’ve given just now, that people and contact tracing system within that framework. People trust the system with their own information and information will not be conveyed any further beyond a necessary boundary. It is not used for police or other purposes I understand.

Audience Member: Though, that in the high assistance, the question, he said the diplomacy, defense, and public security, maybe they are not very good for transparency purposes. They should be sometimes excluded for those limitations.

Audience Member: People in Taiwan think that they can trust the government and I wonder how people have nurtured such a trust based relationship. However, based on the specific examples that you cited, they are able to learn that government can be trusted based on such specific cases. May I understand in that way?

Audrey Tang: Definitely, but also because the Taiwanese people know they can always work through petitions. And then finally through referenda for two years, to call to a stop to any diplomatic actions taken by the governments. Of course, during the recent referenda, we have learned that even in previously quite controversial topics such as the pork import, the people can actually have informed conversations and finally make a decision, which is binding for the next couple of years. And riding on that conversation, of course, I now will enjoy the persimmons from Fukushima, I hope very quickly, actually, as of yesterday, it’s now legal to import. So, we do trust our citizens to also understand diplomatic and trade negotiation issues by being radically transparent of the functions and the factors that are involved in such conversations.

Audience Member: Thank you very much. I placed him on a lot of vitamins. I think that’s good for your immunity in your body system. [inaudible 21:48] is our next questionnaire. I’m a certified public accountant. Thank you very much, Minister Tang. You argue that in order to live in a digital society, we need social competence to avoid being misled by close information.

Audience Member: You cited examples of air books in elementary schools are factor checking during the elections by junior high school students. [inaudible 22:09] is effective according to you. What can we do as adults to acquire such skills? What roles can business play in order to make this democracy function more effectively? Those are the questions. Thank you.

Audrey Tang: Excellent questions. So, I think Edimax, a company built the first commercialization of those AirBoxes. And of course, we need people in the private sector to make it affordable if each school has to pool their resource to even buy one sensor as the original weather bureau’s, professional air quality sensor costs, then there will be no competence education, so make it affordable and make it easy to approach of course, that is the private sectors products and services contribution.

Audrey Tang: But even more than that, I believe Edimax designed the product with a lot of feedback from environmental groups and educators and people from our National Academy, which collaboratively built the prototype of the distributed ledger that hosts the air quality measurements so that it can be mutually accountable, similar to what I outlined for the 1922 SMS contact tracing system. So, it’s open innovation. It’s not working for a monopoly. Rather, it encourages better forks, that is to say, alternate visions of the same system to piggyback on the same standard, which is a good move.

Audrey Tang: If you are working with the society so quickly, because then you essentially outsource your R&D. Especially the research part. It is a crowd collective intelligence acting to inform you which direction to take your product next. And this horizon scanning is very effective for any product or service company, I guess, especially for service companies but products too. So, I believe the collective intelligence through crowdfunding, crowdsourcing and many other collective intelligence methods is also what adults in private sector can endorse.

Audrey Tang: And indeed, in many companies, it’s easier to adopt such techniques than what we do in the government because the government is made out of checks and balances from multiple branches. So, you have to get all the political parties or the branches together in order to truly implement things like the participatory officer. But if you are in a leadership position, in a company, getting your HR, and your CRM, and your PR, and your R&D, and so on, to work across silos is not that difficult, as compared to what we do in the central government. But the same idea of thinking across silos and working with your customers, not just for your customers also apply.

Audience Member: In Taiwan, the people trust the government. The government trust the people and the people trust the government because of that. First, the government trust the people, and people started trusting the government. According to your experience, when did you feel people started trusting the government?

Audrey Tang: I believe it is when we actually invited the people who occupied the parliament peacefully, I must add that, peacefully, into the cabinet as reverse mentors, right? So, I was one of the civic technologist who helped the facilitators in the occupied Parliament. But when we received invitation first to attend a national trade and economic forum, where the consensus was that we need to move the Occupy conversation online, so that the parliament doesn’t get occupied all the time where there’s a controversial international issue. Then, we get invited like personally by cabinet members. So, the office that I am in, which belong to Minister Jaclyn Tsai, I was here also in 2014-2015, as her reverse mentor, a young intern of sorts, working on the crowd-sourced agenda setting and regulation meeting. It was not until 2016 when I got, I guess, promoted from a part time intern to a full time Minister still working on the same things. But it does show that the Cabinet members are willing to get the agenda from the people who are more digital natives, who are more connected to the citizens. And to me that means trusting the people, because you’re yielding your most important power, which is agenda setting power to the people.

Audience Member: I provide support to corporations as a lawyer. Thank you so much for your time today. I would like to ask about the regulation. How the regulation should be vis à vis innovation.

Audience Member: The project I worked on involved AI for inference of emotion. This technology has the potential to lead to profiling of the people. Because of that regulation governing, this area was a hurdle for usage of this technology.

Audience Member: Innovative technologies and services, including transactions of cryptocurrency or drones always involve unknown risks and dangers. Because of that, they tend to be regulated more by doing so towards those regulations. What is your take on that? What is your view about those regulations?

Audrey Tang: I believe the society should demand the technology to work for the society and not the other way around. This is the essence of my prayer in the beginning. And mostly for emerging technologies, what we have seen from the society is that these technologies need to harmlessly coexist with the social norms. Now harmlessly co-exist. If you’re thinking about, say a vaccine, this should be natural, right? This is what we expect of a vaccine. No matter what the vaccine does, to counter the pandemic, if it’s made future vaccination impossible, that is to say, it doesn’t co-exist, or if it causes bodily harm, that is to say, it has bad side effects, we can’t imagine the Food and Drug Administration even considering its application, right? So, only when it’s shown that it can coexist with whatever medications or vaccinations that society is already taking, and it doesn’t cause significant harm, do the FDA in Taiwan, called TFDA, actually look at the application that goes, kind of, without saying.

Audrey Tang: But in digital technologies, there is this idea of a hype curve, and at the height of the hype curve, the conversation changes. For example, when in 2015, UberX first entered Taiwan working with unlicensed or nonprofessional licensed drivers, the argument for sharing economy was not about harmless coexistence, is about efficiency. It says the law, the existing law, ends up ineffectively dispatching costs. And because road is a public utility, and pollution must be controlled, this takes the imperative over whatever the individual harmless coexistence preference. We should let the AI take control of dispatching cars and even the drivers are just training the AI. At some point the cars will drive themselves and Uber will be human-less. That was the argument back in 2015. It may look strange now a little bit after we’ve learned about the limits of self driving vehicle technologies. But that was the real arguments when UberX entered Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: And the argument spread from drivers to passengers to more drivers just like a virus but of a mind. And once you get fixed into that optimization, or “optimization ideology,” then everything about harmless coexistence may not even make sense because the ideology blinds us to the people-to-people interface because we get this kind of doomed feeling, destiny feeling of the direction of the technology.

Audrey Tang: So, most of my work, including the prayer is to dispel the myths the whatever technology at the height of the hype curve and say essentially, that okay, the Singularity is Near, but a plurality is already here. And we already know how to figure out together how to make things harmless and co exist.

Audrey Tang: That’s by small scale experiments, with stakeholders participating. This is exactly why, for example, we don’t allow e-voting for presidents and mayors. But we’re completely fine using new quadratic voting when choosing SDG priorities for the Presidential Hackathon because we know the risk is very low in the Presidential Hackathon. But a vote fraud for the president or the mayor, the risk is very high. So, in low-risk places, invite stakeholders, make sure that people can participate to suss out the limits, so that we very quickly move beyond the hype curve and into the small, angled slope of growing, right? So, once we are there, then we know exactly how to, as the FDA analogy, to tame the virus of the mind, to make vaccines of the mind so to speak, through deliberation and co-creation. So, my job again is to help the lawmakers and technologists to very quickly move beyond the hype cycle so we’re not captured in false local optimums, captured by the optimizing mindset. I hope that answered the question.

Audience Member: I am a lawyer. Thank you for this opportunity. The one possible solution is to involve companies seeking to provide innovative technologies and services which know about those technologies more than anybody else, to be involved in the rulemaking process in collaboration with other stakeholders, including the government.

Audience Member: How can companies play a leading role in this rulemaking process? What do you think companies should do specifically, in order to speed up that rulemaking process? Thank you very much. Those are the questions.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, when the company is in it for money, a business, we call it a 企業. But when a company is in it for also the purpose, we call it 事業. So, it’s two different words, actually. Of course, when you’re in it for charity, for a purpose only ends with no profit motivation, sometimes we call it 志業, right? So, there’s a spectrum of entirely for profits and with no specific purpose, only the minimal ESG responsibility, and all the way to charities which is purpose only, with no profit motive. But, more and more, the idea of social entrepreneurship and innovation with the social sector, not just for the society, with the society, gains trend, I believe, not just in Taiwan, in Japan, across the world as well, especially because of the pandemic and the climate crisis.

Audrey Tang: So, people start to think, “Okay, what if, instead of working for our customers, we work with them and in my company, have a dedicated department for not just advocacy, which many companies do, but also the other side, which is listening,” right? So, this is communication or engagement, but with the intention to listen more than you advocate. And once you introduce that, then you become structured still as a company, but you now have the more democratic attitude as a co-op, or a credit union would have. It doesn’t mean that you literally have to become a co-op or a credit union, but it does mean that you take in those democratic voices and empower them by working on technologies that affirm democracy instead of just take advantage of existing democratic institutions.

Audrey Tang: And so, once you do that, then you become a pioneer in the truest sense because then, as I mentioned, Edimax and many other manufacturers does know before the government does that people will care very much about PM 2.5, that people will care very much about civil IoT, that people will turn IoT into the idea of AIoT and use it primarily for flood and typhoon and earthquake evacuation and many other disaster response scenarios. And they will have a much tighter relationship with educators instead of previously through just treating them as customers and all this shapes policy.

Audrey Tang: So, what I’m trying to say is that, think about the purpose as you would think about profits, instead of just a purpose as a kind of dollar amounts, think of it as its own accounting. And this kind of impact accounting, and so on, then motivates you to become a kind of co-governor and once you become a co-governor, you automatically enroll in policymaking process.

Audience Member: I work in public affairs department at an auditing firm. Thank you so much for this opportunity. Corporations are generally passive to social implementation or role making unless they have economic incentives. For example, in Japan, some people hope for a wider use of private online dispute resolution services.

Audience Member: However, because it is very costly for corporations to take security counter measures. Audrey san, you talked about the secure environment for using the QR code but for corporations, it’s very costly to take security counter measures and because of that, online dispute resolution services have not spread so much in Japan.

Audience Member: What kind of methodology is possible to incentivize these corporations to participate in such socially meaningful project and make the project sustainable as a business? I think that the private corporations need more practice in doing this, but how do you think would make it more smoothly to make this happen? If you could give Taiwanese examples, I would appreciate it.

Audrey Tang: I use a globally recognized example first. I think everybody knew that Google builds upon the Linux movement. If Google has to pay for the operating system license for each and every computer core in their computation center, there will be no Google, right? So, what’s profitable for the operation system industry makes things like Google or cloud computing in general, impossible. And the way to make Google or any other large scale clouds commerce happen is to instead of design applications at that level, to incentivize investment into something like Google, it’s no doubt, right? Everybody knows that it’s investing in the commons that is the Linux or other FreeBSD and many open-source operating systems in which the cost benefit scenario is flipped. The more Google contributes to the commons of Linux, the less maintenance cost it has to absorb itself. And so, because of that, it maximizes contribution to the ecosystem. And that leads to more Linux applications, such as the Chrome Book and the Chrome OS and Android operating system and many more, right? So, that play, that playbook is, I think, globally known by everyone.

Audrey Tang: So, my point here is that we need to think about the online rights. That’s to say human rights as the underlying operation system. That is to say, in Taiwan, for example, we have broadband access as human rights. Anywhere, if you don’t have broadband, that’s my fault, like literally my fault. You can email me and people did actually email me saying that their human rights being violated because they’re in a quarantine place and they cannot watch streaming video. And within two weeks, we set up a new repeating tower, fixed that, and the person actually made a point because at that time, they’re already outside of the quarantine, drove back, measured the speed, posted on social media, to allow me to account.

Audrey Tang: So, when you have this kind of commitments to the underlying broadband access as human rights, digital competence as human rights, online identification, we just roll out the e-signature system as a FIDO compliance app, right? So, during the COVID, we already have the authentication mechanism using national health care and many other things, but it doesn’t yet carry the electronic signature capability in a phone. But just last week, we roll out that as a phone application compliant to FIDO, and so on.

Audrey Tang: So, these are kind of the underlying operating systems. Once you absorb all the cost of these things to zero, or even negative like the more you contribute to the commons, the more you gain, then the incentive doesn’t need a top-down regulatory design. The entrepreneurs are more creative than we are, and they will find out ways to figure out online dispute resolution.

Audrey Tang: So, my suggestion is to look at the cost centers, the risks and so on, and find out if you introduce universal fabrics of such human rights, the rights to move, to be identified, to hold assets, and things like that, like the physical rights but online, and absorb all the costs for the entrepreneurs and innovators, then I’m not worried about the incentive on the application layer.

Audience Member: Thank you very much. I am working at the life insurance company. I am in charge of business development. I am Tsudzumi. Thank you very much for this valuable opportunity, Audrey.

Audience Member: As a person who is seeking innovation at company, I have been receiving a lot of stimulus from you. From my part, as we have discussed with several examples already in agile collaborative governance, horizontal dialogue with government is very important.

Audience Member: If companies want to participate in governance, and also building of trusts through, that dialogue is very important. On the other hand, since I am working at the financial institution, I feel that there is a certain hurdle or obstacle to horizontal dialogue between the government and business because the relation between the two is, in a sense, one between the supervisor and the supervised.

Audience Member: Therefore, I think there’s a certain hurdle, an obstacle to create truly equal fitting relationship between the government and companies. That is I feel. Now, based on that, the government and businesses in order for them to have a fitting horizontal dialogue, what would be the key for that to happen? In Taiwan, what’s the relation between government and business?

Audience Member: If you can cite some examples to illustrate the relationship between the two, I would appreciate it. Thank you very much.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, certainly. I will.

Audrey Tang: Of course, you probably already know the examples I’m going to cite, right? Taiwan got our vaccines for young people. For adults, I thank the Japanese people for the kind donation. I myself got AstraZeneca from Japan, but at the time Moderna from U.S. and AstraZeneca from Japan do not apply for young people. So, for young people, we were totally kind of locked in a geopolitical situation, as you probably already know. But it’s the combination of the companies, namely, the Taiwan Semiconductor company, Foxconn group and the charity, Tzu Chi group, the three of them, completed the negotiation with Pfizer BNT, actually no Pfizer, just BNT on Germany and negotiated the donation of those vaccines to Taiwan. So, the young people in Taiwan understand that it’s thanks to the private sector and the social sector because Tzu Chi is a charity that they got the vaccines from.

Audrey Tang: So, I use this example because in cases like this, it’s very clear that it’s a co-governing relationship instead of a supervising and a supervised relationship.

Audrey Tang: And they independently also have other track records that can convince people in specific circumstances. Maybe there was more trust than the government. Tzu Chi in particular has a lot of track record in earthquake and many other relief responses. So, when an earthquake happens and people in Tzu Chi are already there before the governments and their numbers are more accurate than the local municipal governments, and you repeat that for more than 10 years, then people learn in these matters, they trust these social innovators more than they trust the government and the government learns to have a co-governing relationship with such organizations.

Audrey Tang: So, I’m not saying that it’s always like this, but many social entrepreneurs in Taiwan have this explicit part of their mission to be an agenda setter, to be a co-governor for a town or a municipality, and so on. And when it’s for a town, I believe it works exactly the same as the regional revitalization idea in Japan, where a few consortiums of businesses essentially take over the revitalization policymaking for a small town to make it more famous and more attractive to the young people, and things like that. So obviously, there are prior art in sharing agenda setting power and governing power in this way.

Audrey Tang: What’s harder to imagine, of course, is national scale. After all, Japan is much larger than Taiwan. But what I’m trying to say is that it’s okay to focus on a local community, because for example, I use a startup service instead of Uber Eats and FoodPanda simply because they commit to lower or eliminate the carbon footprints, right? They ride bicycles, they use recycled boxes, I have to send back the box when I receive the newest kind of boxes, and so on. And so, they’re proven that they are social entrepreneurs and I trust their mission.

Audrey Tang: And, at some point, the Vegetarian Society, and so on, when they advocate for more carbon reduction efforts and so on, these are the people who petitioned for the banning of plastic straws from Bubble Tea, these are the people who already sent the lunchboxes in a upcycled way to you every every morning or every lunch. These people are going to be the organizers of these kinds of policymaking discussions.

Audrey Tang: So, many reverse mentors in the cabinet also have their own businesses. They may work in a crowdfunding platform or a local tourism platform, and so on. But the virtue of their local community shines through the various different configuration of municipalities, so their ideas spread faster than their products and services. And once you get into that mode, then you become a co-governor. So, it’s okay to prove your concept in a local town or community. Actually, it’s maybe the best way because then you have people spreading by word of mouth, your ideas.

Audience Member: Thank you so much. There’s one question I would like to ask from Tang. We talked about the governments’ role, the cooperation’s role, but at the foundation is each individual by cost. In the digital society, what kind of mindsets should each individual have when we talk about the politics?

Audience Member: Because we are so busy with our daily lives, we think that it’s cumbersome to think about politics. We don’t spend so much time thinking about politics. Then on the Internet, it’s anonymous, so we pretend to be release our stress and we may make very bad comments. That has become a problem online, but there are some negative cycles.

Audience Member: We need to break away from the negative cycle. We should be accountable for participating in the governance. In order to do so, what kind of mindsets should we have? How should we change our mindset? Do you have any advice?

Audrey Tang: Yes, I see the more antisocial corners of social media. Of course, everybody likes to blame Facebook. I would not say it’s just Facebook. I would say it’s everyone who built platforms that maximize attention for advertisement or commercial purposes. Surveillance capitalism, I believe that’s the words most people use now.

Audrey Tang: The surveillance capitalists in the digital world, obviously, they built a social place. But I liken it to the nightclub, that is to say, the entertainment sector meant only for adults. So, maybe it’s a smoke-filled room. Maybe you have to shout to get heard. As you said, people go there to vent some of the bad emotions to relax by shouting at each other. There are addictive drinks, maybe some gambling. There are private bouncers that can escort you out if you do something wrong, right?

Audrey Tang: So, all in all, not a place where we think we will invite our mayors to hold a town hall conversation or answer to citizens questions. But if, on the digital world, the only social places are those nightclubs and the mayor want to hold a digital Town Hall, maybe they don’t have the choice. And then they make the children go to a place where the children are not supposed to go. And they make the adults to succumb to the addictive drinks and a smoke-filled room. And then, they think, oh, maybe social media is entirely antisocial.

Audrey Tang: Now, I don’t have anything against the entertainment sector. But I do think that we need the civic infrastructure and public infrastructure. That is to say, the digital equivalent of university campus or public park on one side and town halls on the other side, maintained by the academic and social sector and the public sector respectively, so that people can find these places when they go online. I mean, in Japan, there are also social entrepreneurs. I learned of the PoliPoli platform, by way of Digital Agency, where they’re tackling exactly the same problem by building first a civic infrastructure now a public infrastructure.

Audrey Tang: The challenge as I see it, is that nobody would see something as a public infrastructure, unless like a highway, a significant amount of people use it day to day. Because otherwise, it’s indistinguishable in day-to-day conversation to another entertainment shop if you have not been to either one, right? But if it is really a highway like place where people do frequent and that’s the reason why public parks are all over the community, right? You can see a public park if you just walk a couple blocks, so you can’t avoid the idea that there are public parks in the society. So, if we make it as easy to access and as popular as that, based on those common experiences, then people will say, oh, let’s go there instead of the entertainment sector when we have civic and public discussions.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, of course, we’re blessed to have PTT, which is subsidized by the academic network for the past 25 years. And it’s not never captured by advertisers or any commercial interest. So, you retain the university campus. And during the COVID we understand that a toll-free number the 1922, the Join platform, the participation officers, and the local pharmacist, and so on, all together play a public infrastructure role. So, if you have checked in a venue by scanning the QR code, if you have looked at the mask availability, if you have reserved your vaccines using your local civic technologies chatbot, and so on, you know, there are such a thing as digital civic and public infrastructures. And once you have this experience, there’s no going back. And then your energy will be put more on the co-creative amounts, of your time and energy on those online places. I hope that answered the question.

Audience Member: Yes, as you explained as a mechanism of framework. Through that framework, we are able to have a discussion purely for the benefit of society. That is ideal. That is very good, but the toxic network environment we are in, the society is already polarized sometimes, in some cases.Once society is polarized, that has to be united. Is that possible? If we want to unite the country, where could we start? That is a question.

Audrey Tang: I think it’s easier if we start small. If we think about uniting a small town, the kind of digital democracy tools like Pol.is, which we didn’t get to today, has proven time and time again, if you are in a town of maybe 200,000 people, it’s very easy to hold townhalls based on the vTaiwan method, using participation officer like method, and the same, if you work in a company of around 10s of 1000s of people or hundreds of 1000s of people, again it’s very easy to introduce such mechanisms.

Audrey Tang: So, the polarization can be thought of a kind of a map with broken zooming levels, only the individual level and the entire country or entire globe level. And if you have a map that only works on those two levels, you may feel hopeless, because it’s either a Sovereign Individual and nobody trusts anybody, very, you know, Bitcoin-ish future or it is state or capitalist surveillance that works on the top level.

Audrey Tang: But many of our work is to work on this zooming slider, so that you can see a plurality of configurations. It’s not just UberX versus the government. It’s also the local temples, local churches, the people who drive each other to work, the people who are also skirting the law a little bit but for their local benefit, and so on. And when a conversation centers around how to empower the local drivers, co-ops, temples, and churches to make the hard-to-reach public transportation places better, then Uber has something to say of course, but it’s just one of the many stakeholders, instead of a top-down profit seeking optimizer. And if you can make the people who concentrate on the two ends of the slider, concentrate a little bit on the bunches of 1000s of people level, then you already created proof of existence of such possibilities.

Audrey Tang: And then, like Taiwan does, what we do is that we gradually scale up, scale up, scale up the conversation and very democratic because the participation officers vote twice a month, what cases they have the capability to tackle. So, we don’t work on like the abolishing the death penalty, at the very beginning, or things that we know will be polarizing. We work to scale up the conversations. First, just 10s of 1000s of people and then hundreds of 1000s and then have a million and then maybe millions if we face things such as the pandemic.

Audrey Tang: I really have to run but I really enjoyed this conversation.

Audrey Tang: I will just leave you with the thought: We need to unmute ourselves.

Audrey Tang: Thank you. Live long and prosper.