Audrey Tang: I’m in my residence today. I’m a teleworking minister.

Emil Elo: OK. How big is Taipei? I have no idea how many people are living there.

Audrey Tang: Around two or three million people, in about 200 or 300 square kilometers.

Emil Elo: OK. Thank you so much for doing this. I saw a documentary about you, or about Taiwan. You were instituting that about…It was about three months ago. I was like, “Oh shit, I have to do this interview” because what you said in the documentary was very interesting. How you saw government, modern world and so on. So thank you so much for doing this.

Emil Elo: My first question is the Taiwanese government has collaborated with the Taiwanese people a lot on battling COVID-19. Can you talk about that in more detail? What kind of things have you done?

Audrey Tang: Sure. I’ve talked, at length, about our collaborations with people for countering the pandemic and infodemic as well. There’s the TED Talk. There’s many videos in my YouTube channel. I will provide the outline.

Audrey Tang: Then if you want, you can ask maybe deeper questions. We can drill down to specific cases. The idea is always the same. It’s about co-creating with the people, not just for the people. That’s the most important principle.

Audrey Tang: Let me share my camera in a presentation if you can see it. Can you see the camera? No?

Emil Elo: No.

Audrey Tang: Maybe I just have to turn it on. Do you see it now?

Emil Elo: Yeah.

Audrey Tang: Cool. For example, the counter epidemic efforts we did with the people, the 1922, which is a toll-free number, where anyone can call to suggest new counter epidemic measures.

Audrey Tang: For example, a young boy last April called saying, “You’re rationing out mask. Like it was pink ones. I don’t want to wear pink to school. The boys in my class has navy blue ones.” At the very next day, everybody wore pink in the daily press conference. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: It’s not just about mask color. It’s also about availability, co-created mask inventory, maps, chatbots, and so on by the gov-zero or g0v community. Again, not a government technology project, a civic-tech project. All we did was to provide them with real-time updated inventory data straight from the National Health Insurance Service, every 30 seconds.

Audrey Tang: There’s also the SMS-based contact tracing system. You do not have to install any app or download any Apple ads or visit any specific special website. On your last screen of your phone, scan the QR code, it pops out, sends 1922 SMS something, and you’re done. It’s very transparent. The 15-digit random code, it’s stored only in your telecom carrier for 28 days.

Audrey Tang: If a contact tracer looks at that information of the quarter billion or so sent, since May, only about 11 million have been looked upon. The audit record is available for everyone to do a mutual accountability audit to make sure that it only goes for epidemic control usages. There’s also the remixing of memes like humor over rumor to explain physical distancing, mask use.

Audrey Tang: Actually, most of our models of presidential office and other cultural assets are an official manner in dictionary. My own photos are all shared that way in Creative Commons. You can find pretty much all my previous interviews including this month when we’re making it a transcript.

Audrey Tang: We’ll post it on “Say It,” which is in the public domain that outlines which and where did those innovation occur, who suggested it. In this radical transparent, where people usually suggest things that are good for everyone and future generations, they don’t tend to suggest things that are only beneficial to them at the expense of other people.

Audrey Tang: We’ve also worked with AI-based e-Rulemaking, listening about people’s feelings around the same facts. This is the real case in 2015 when we talked about UberX. This design of prosocial social media successfully rallied people around a set of good enough consensus so we can regulate Uber without leaving anyone behind the local temples and churches, and so on.

Audrey Tang: That’s a whirlwind tour of the Flagship Collective Intelligence Project we did to counter the infodemic and the pandemic. Feel free to draw it down to pretty much anyone. I’m happy to talk more details.

Emil Elo: My next question is the things you’ve done during the COVID-19 and how you have collaborated with the people. Do you think it has built trust between the Taiwanese and the government?

Audrey Tang: Definitely. As I mentioned, to give no trust is to get no trust. By offering any inventory data published as soon as we collect it, it’s not the Freedom of Information Act style where we only publish READ Act when people request for it, rather whatever I see the people always also see.

Audrey Tang: This fast iteration and accountability builds trust to all the citizens. Citizens feel trusted by the governments. Some people trust back. Some people don’t, which is all fine. The people who trust back offered to check in, for example, in the venues using their phone.

Audrey Tang: If they don’t, there is still paper-based registration method. There’s all sorts of method. We’re not dictating any particular method. All these innovations are strictly incremental on top of existing ones.

Emil Elo: How big of an issue is COVID denialism in Taiwan? In Finland, about 20 percent of the people, they don’t want to get vaccinated, for example. There’s a lot of people who don’t believe in this COVID-19. Do you think what you did tackled that denial?

Audrey Tang: It’s almost impossible to deny. If you’re in Taiwan and you’re above 30 years old, then you would remember SARS in 2003. Many people died. Because of that, we’ve had a societal inoculation.

Audrey Tang: We know how bad SARS was. Taiwan was the country hit most seriously by SARS and without protection from the WHO community around that time. We have to figure out how to counter it alone.

Audrey Tang: If people deny acute respiratory coronavirus diseases, they must be under 30. Fortunately, I don’t think many people under 30 deny COVID. It’s virtually not a problem in Taiwan, but that’s mostly because we’ve had a very serious experience in 2003.

Emil Elo: What you did with the COVID-19 technology way was something what Finland might have or could have done.

Emil Elo: Do you think small nations like Finland – we have five million people – utilize their possibilities enough to operate environment where you can test different kind of things in society? We can test things quicker. We can use technology and in a way that the United States could not do.

Audrey Tang: Definitely if you are in a jurisdiction where digital broadband access is treated as a human right, for essential educational health reasons, as I’m aware that Finland is among those nations that consider things this way, then it becomes essentially skill-free.

Audrey Tang: The reason why we can connect pharmacies into almost like a distributed ledger to visualize their inventories in real time was because we invested heavily. More than 90 percent of them have fiber optic connection directly with each other in a VPN and with the National Health Insurance Service.

Audrey Tang: I don’t think it’s about the size of jurisdiction, but it is about the availability and also the digital inclusion. That is to say, even the elderly people, rural areas, indigenous nations are comfortable enough using SMS for contact tracing purposes, for example. That builds on broadband availability, but also builds on digital competence in lifelong and basic education.

Emil Elo: Next question. You have said that you believe in radical transparency. How would you describe radical transparency? What my real question is, is complete radical transparency impossible?

Audrey Tang: Radical means root, transparency at the root. It means that, for example, our interview, we make a transcript. We publish it by default into the public domain. We’re not here to outcompete journalism. We usually embargo. After you publish, we publish.

Audrey Tang: Then if you’re not comfortable with the questions you ask and so on, you will have the co-editing opportunities to clarify the question, as for example, or to provide extra references as you wish until we publish it.

Audrey Tang: Radical transparency does not mean that, for example, we live-stream this particular interview. It does mean that you have to take extra effort to change, to redact out the parts concerning privacy, or trade secret or whatever, reasonable issues. If you do nothing, then it goes to public domain by default.

Emil Elo: Have I understood correct that you sometimes live-streamed your data live also?

Audrey Tang: Not at all. We only live-stream our meetings if the participant asked for it, and everybody is aware of it. Sometimes people talk about, “Where should we put the 360 camera?” so everybody get an equally good angle. In two dimensions, it’s very easy to create a power imbalance.

Audrey Tang: Being closer to the camera and outside of the camera frame carries a world of difference. We do live-streaming, but not as a rule. Mostly, we publish transcripts and also sometimes recordings, and only after the approval, the consent by everybody in it.

Emil Elo: Why do you think radical transparency is much needed in today’s politics?

Emil Elo: First of all, radical transparency saves me the time to have to manually respond to each question.

Emil Elo: If I publish a number, as soon as I get the numbers, then most of the time, the journalists in Taiwan are not competing, racing to get a scoop, so to speak, but rather can spend our time better in finding the angle, the interpretation to take that is based on the same facts, compared to the administration style of nonradical transparency.

Emil Elo: Then each and every journalist, especially investigative ones, make it a different subset of facts. That confuses people, because then it will make conversations around which person got, which piece of puzzles dominate the part of conversation, rather than the societal interpretation of how to interpret or how to apply those numbers.

Emil Elo: I do believe that radical transparency at the root is beneficial, not just for the public administration saving time. It’s also essential for the journalism sector to work in a way that is at a speed of the Internet, but also with depth and angles, perspectives that’s offered by journalists, not just spending your time on getting the scoop.

Emil Elo: Your government – It’s not your government. It’s Taiwanese government – has opened up many data sources for the citizens to use. What have you learned from this act? What types of databases have you opened up?

Audrey Tang: Well, all sort of databases. In addition to the mass inventory, people are interested in the climate, of course. The PM2.5 pollution data set is very popular. The real transaction land price is very popular.

Audrey Tang: There’s all sort of data sets that people use on day-to-day planning, for example, “How crowded are the tourist areas?” so that they can prepare themselves to try a different route or go to another destination so they don’t have to wear a mask for the gathered areas that are so crowded.

Audrey Tang: It’s hard to say which data sets are most popular. A better metric is that as soon as somebody discovered there’s a societal need, how quickly do we start to offer such data?

Audrey Tang: If the government doesn’t have the entire puzzle pieces, for example, PM2.5, we used to have only around 100 stations in Taiwan to measure those, which is far from sufficient. Then we work with the academic and educational sectors.

Audrey Tang: We enlist the primary school and middle school teachers to offer air boxes as part of science education, data competence education so that those young people, children, can contribute also to climate science and to air pollution detection by running these air boxes as part of their data competence education, their schools, in their balconies, and so on.

Emil Elo: Is this opening to databases something that you would like to see around the world more often?

Audrey Tang: Definitely. Previously, it used to take a lot of time to see which database items are needed by the society, and also if there’s personal data, privacy-related issues in each data set. It followed for a while a similar process as the Freedom of Information Act, which could be time-consuming.

Audrey Tang: That’s the real reason why many jurisdictions around the world did not place that much priority on open data, because they see it as a process comparable to FOIA and, therefore, a burden to the administration.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, we make sure that in our contracts with IT vendors, just like, I’m sure in Finland you also have the accessibility requirements if a vendor makes a website, but only people with eyesight can see it. People who are without eyesight cannot use it at all.

Audrey Tang: The vendor may be disqualified from bidding public projects in the future because they fail to serve a universal access. Similarly, starting 2016, as I became Digital Minister, one of my first act is to amend that procurement contract to add a very similar clause that says, “Machines are also people.

Audrey Tang: “If you provide for human read and write interfaces but do not provide open API as required by the procuring agency at negligible cost, where the vendor could also be disqualified in the future for discriminating against robots.” We don’t quite say that, but that’s the result.

Audrey Tang: Because of that, they have to determine the parameter of public and open access data without personal and privacy issues at the very beginning of the procurements. Then after that, the open API will then enable automatic data pipelines.

Audrey Tang: I believe, as more and more jurisdictions are looking to advance their procurements this way, the bedrock, large IT vendors will be able to keep their back-end businesses. The open API will also open up possibilities for the startups to offer, as I mentioned, maps, chatbots, VR experiences, and so on.

Emil Elo: What are the common pitfalls governments have when it comes to building societies with technology?

Audrey Tang: It’s chasing buzzwords, of course. If you chase buzzwords, then you risk adopting technology for technology’s sake, and demands the people to adapt to technology, whereas social innovation always require, we, the technologists, to adapt to people’s needs.

Audrey Tang: My job description talks about this very point. My job description is a small poem that says, ‘’When we see Internet of Things, we should make it an Internet of beings, or we see virtual reality, let’s make it a shared reality. When we see machine learning, let’s make it collaborative learning.

Audrey Tang: “When we see user experience, let’s make it human experience. And whenever we hear the singularity is near, let’s always remember the plurality here.” So, the singularity is the pitfall and the plurality is the way for it.

Emil Elo: OK. Have I understood it right? You have, at some point, described yourself as an anarchist.

Audrey Tang: Conservative, small c, conservative anarchist. Yes.

Emil Elo: You’ve also operated in politics or in government and held a position for five years. Would you say your own trust in governance has increased in this time?

Audrey Tang: I would say that I continue to work with the government and not for the government. I would say that I’ve never issued a single top-down order, or taken one during my five years working with the government. I’m still operating in a Lagrange point, the gravity-free point between, say, earth and the moon.

Audrey Tang: I’m not hold into the hierarchical thinking of the bureaucracy in a government, but neither am I being captured by special interest in the private sector and so on.

Audrey Tang: I’m in this middle-social sector midpoint that communicates with both bodies, but without being captured by the logic of anyone, of either one. Yeah, I would say that I now see that the public servants are every bit as innovative as their private-sector counterparts. It’s just not very well known because of the culture of anonymous public service.

Audrey Tang: My work has been, so far, just to make sure that innovators within public service can collaborate freely with innovators in the civil society, so that they deliver the services in the way that are swift and safe and it’s in time without me having to order anyone to do anything.

Emil Elo: You used to be a hacker or still?

Audrey Tang: Still I’m.

Emil Elo: You still are? [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Yes.

Emil Elo: As a 100 percent hacker who don’t work with the government, do you think you would probably have more chances to change things?

Emil Elo: Could you talk about your decision to embark into politics? Why that route?

Audrey Tang: We literally invited our self in when we occupied the parliament [laughs] non-violently in 2014 for three weeks demanding a public conversation deliberation around the Cross-Strait Service and Trade Agreement, that’s the CSSTA, with Beijing.

Audrey Tang: With half a million people on the street and many more online, we worked something like the listening and skill-facilitated conversation that I just mentioned. You can imagine these points as being the ideological statements on the right, but most practical points around the CSSTA, while people agree with their neighbors most of the time, on most of the issues.

Audrey Tang: For example, we dealt with whether to allow PRC, People’s Republic of China, reaching components in our then-new 4G infrastructure. It is, of course, a complex topic.

Audrey Tang: After three weeks of conversations online and in the street, while people understood the systemic risk assessments that’s required.

Audrey Tang: Whenever we upgrade anyone’s equipment, we have to re-do a analysis to see whether it has been defect or taken over by the PRC. Whereas, if we went with, for example, Nokia or Qualcomm or whatever, [laughs] there’s less of this state capture risk.

Audrey Tang: These complex topics actually are not that complex if you have a good pro-social digital public infrastructure to suss out the good enough consensus. In a sense, this is hacking politics. This is turning politics from a representational style to a re-presentational style.

Audrey Tang: That is to say, people present their own feelings but we re-present them to show the camaraderie, the solidarity, the mutual support that would enable those innovations to happen, instead of being taken hostage by the representative in 2014.

Emil Elo: Your personal IQ is 180. Do you ever feel bored amongst people?

Audrey Tang: That’s my height, 180 centimeters, and it’s not particularly high, anyway. Essentially, not by Nordic standards. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: What I’m trying to get at is that I’m not here to outsmart anyone. Rather, I’m designing this space where people can take care of themselves while taking care of future generation’s interest.

Audrey Tang: Whereas most of the shorter term design, linear GDP, and so one, are a fundamentally anti-social design that let people prioritize growth in the short-term at the expense of the environment and society and lonesome economy for the future generations.

Audrey Tang: I seen as if not as individual-to-individual competing with any person currently alive, but I’m rather trying to make a space so that people do not have to think in competitive terms vis-a-vis future generations.

Emil Elo: You’ve also said that you work during your sleep.

Audrey Tang: Yes.

Emil Elo: What does it mean?

Audrey Tang: It’s like a batch process machine learning. I scan incoming documents before I go to sleep. I don’t make a sound in my mind and neither do I pass any judgment. I just scan it, lead some visual memories. Then I sleep for eight, four hours or longer. Then I always wake up with something like a mind map that connects those ideas that looks like something like this, with a few key words.

Audrey Tang: No, I don’t have photographic memory. I don’t quite recall the exact wording in those texts. Because I read almost 99 percent electronic text, as soon as I need something, I just do a full text search and look it up.

Emil Elo: Thank you so much.

Audrey Tang: Thank you.

Emil Elo: Actually I was visiting Taiwan Embassy, or I don’t know if it’s embassy or what’s the word in English. I said, “I have an interview with Audrey Tang,” and they were star struck about that.

Audrey Tang: [laughs]

Emil Elo: They said that you are very well-known in Taiwan. Do you feel well-known?

Audrey Tang: I believe so. Really, to many people, because they know they can freely use my name, all my interviews and so on. I become a pop icon, I guess. My interviews like this one was…Interviewers, like a kind of interview we’re doing now, are sound towed and remixed both by Taiwanese artists and also by Japanese artists.

Audrey Tang: There’s a band called Dos Monos, that did a civil rap song with me, sound towed, just rapping to their rhythms. They didn’t have to ask my permission because in Creative Commons, you’re free to make commercial uses of whatever video or audio that I published in the public domain.

Emil Elo: Thank you.