Noah Swartz: Nice to meet you.

Audrey Tang: Greetings.

Noah Swartz: I had some friends come into your office hours before.

Audrey Tang: Talking about Internet archive, open innovations, all sorts of things.

Noah Swartz: I listened to some other office hours and to podcasts, your honor. I’m curious about some things. One thing I heard you talked about was…Some of what you focus on is digital infrastructure.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Noah Swartz: I’m curious to hear your thoughts about digital infrastructure specifically around social media or replacing social media.

Audrey Tang: Not really replacing. National parks or town halls doesn’t really replace nightlife district.

Noah Swartz: I guess that’s true. Then what do you think is the role of public social media?

Audrey Tang: Basically, what I think is that there is a place, just like there is a place for people serving to adults, I hope, addictive, toxic drinks, private bouncers, very loud music. People having a good time, I hope, but certainly not talking about public policy.

Audrey Tang: Currently, there is a mismatch in that people are forced to use private sector infrastructure, the antisocial corners of social media, that are designed for purposes were outside public deliberation, to do de facto public deliberation to very bad results.

Audrey Tang: My idea is not to replace them any more than a public library or national parks replaced the knowledge district, but rather to create a norm that says if you’re having a town hall, go to a town hall, not to a nightclub.

Audrey Tang: If you want a public deliberation, the state have allocated funds for that public space for deliberation, where people propose things that will be responded to in the hearing now, but not by advertisers or by other people. It was interesting to capture the emotions that came out from these conversations.

Audrey Tang: One concrete example I use is the PTT, which is telling me is equivalent of Reddit. While Reddit, of course, is partly governed by the participants, PTT is entirely governed by the participants because it’s open source. It’s on GitHub.

Audrey Tang: The governance principle basically said that anyone who’s not a user of PTT can’t really touch the PTT. They are able to do so because their entire list is subsidized. It’s a National Taiwan University student pet project. It’s a public university.

Audrey Tang: By extension, just like the university campus, the PTT is a campus in the digital space. NTU is liberal enough in that they allow the civic sector, the social sector to take de facto control.

Audrey Tang: The PTT doesn’t have to pay for the legal support or things like that in order to establish itself as a freedom of speech space. The MTU subsidized that without making any demands to the PTT. It’s a patronage initiative.

Audrey Tang: We can talk about why that came about, but the gist is that the bedrock of Taiwanese social sector is founded upon such principles that public deliberation should belong to the civic or the social sector. Our digital infrastructure, including the laws interpretations, are made to match that reality.

Noah Swartz: Then what aspects of Reddit or other social media platforms do you think that this replaces again?

Audrey Tang: Reddit is for purpose with profit. The PTT or the NTU is for purpose only. It doesn’t care about profit. It doesn’t earn the profit. There’s no advertisement and shareholders.

Noah Swartz: What activities do you think that people currently do on places like Reddit that you think would be better suited by…?

Audrey Tang: By a civic infrastructure? A lot of it boils down to the governance rules for the governance rules that depends on the underlying code. Still, the people who can code the Reddit back end wields power over the ones that cannot touch its code base. Last I checked, it’s not Ethereum.

Audrey Tang: It’s not like people can fork Reddit the way that people can work Wikipedia and has indeed forked Wikipedia before. This forkability is the main thing. Everything else follows from that.

Noah Swartz: For any specific purpose, someone could make their own version of it.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, that’s exactly right. If they have a sub community that want a certain structure, that depends on a user experience. That’s the Reddit maintainer too, and I want to maintain for a book compatibility or whatever. Then the usual way in the Free Software Community is just to fork the old version if they’re in classic or whatever.

Noah Swartz: I feel like the issue with these private companies in the social space is partially that they’re closed source, but also partially that they have locked in all of these users. This is where the community is.

Noah Swartz: It’s not that there are other things that don’t do what Facebook does because there are things that do what Facebook does, everyone is on Facebook. With public platforms, how do you solve the problem of getting people to rely on them as opposed to the private platforms?

Audrey Tang: Basically, we go to the voting booth. It’s a public space, but we don’t linger there. We don’t spend hours and hours every day in the voting booth. It doesn’t even make sense.

Audrey Tang: Old Greek people do not spend all their days on the acropolis either. [laughs] They spend some more time in the agora maybe. The point here is that if it’s for a public purpose, then it’s part of a public infrastructures process.

Audrey Tang: That is to say, at this agenda setting stage, we go to these places. At the reflective deliberative stage, we go to these places. When it comes to the voting and decisions, we go to these places. That each specific, as part of the social norm, serve a purpose.

Audrey Tang: But this purposeless wondering of this fear of missing out and things like that, that’s simply absent from the classical analog civic infrastructures. We don’t linger there. What’s the point of getting the same addictiveness cycle to the civic infrastructure? I don’t think that makes sense.

Audrey Tang: If people just went through this public deliberation and raised, for example, Dr. Li Wenliang’s message about SARS happening in Wuhan, getting circulating PTT, triaging it, uploading it, and within 24 hours, the medical team in the Center for Disease Control say, “OK, we heard you.” We start health inspections for all flights coming in from Wuhan, and that’s done.

Audrey Tang: People do not linger on that thread any more than they linger on the post voting, maybe just for a day or two, the post election results. That’s a more healthy view because then it enables us to take our cognitive surplus toward new emergent issues instead of lingering on old ones.

Noah Swartz: I think the concept of use is different from the concept of addictiveness.

Audrey Tang: Due to me, they’re the same thing. Only one other industry call its customers users and that industry certainly is addictive.

Noah Swartz: I can understand that.

Audrey Tang: To me, the public infrastructure users are religious citizens, and I call them citizens.

Noah Swartz: What do you view as the civic goods or services, civic infrastructure?

Audrey Tang: Ones that do not make a host user distinction. That’s quite important. It’s great that GitHub and friends have switched away from the master slave [laughs] synonyms. They’re now using, I don’t know, replica, mainline, or whatever. That’s ultimately a good thing. Except, of course, people still use user and do not think it as slave, but I think them as the same thing.

Audrey Tang: Because if we say that users use, and makers make, or the designers design, or the hosts host, that’s basically saying we know better and we make a space that other people just used. If we design a civic infrastructure for citizens, I’m just a citizen who can design. There are bound to be other citizens when they also design.

Audrey Tang: We symbolize here physically by tearing down the walls around this Social Innovation Lab. When there were walls, we’re basically saying, “OK, the Air Force knows best how to arrange things here. You may visit, but you remain a civilian. This is just for the Air Force elites.”

Audrey Tang: Now, we’re tearing down the walls. This is no longer Air Force headquarters. It used to be. Now, we call it Social Innovation Lab, which means that anyone and their dog — there’s many people walking dogs — can experiment with new ways of rearranging the space. There’s no right or wrong.

Audrey Tang: Anyone who happens to be here can be part of the designer for this space. This is the spirit of open space technology. People who happen to be around are the right people. Any infrastructure that takes this approach, I’ll call it a civic or public infrastructure.

Noah Swartz: Are you concerned about how large of a monopoly on attention private social media has?

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, not really, because they don’t really have much of a monopoly.

Noah Swartz: You don’t think that Facebook, for example?

Audrey Tang: No. Actually, it’s declining quite rapidly.

Noah Swartz: The users of Facebook?

Audrey Tang: The time they spend on Facebook.

Noah Swartz: The time they spend on Facebook. One thing I notice is many businesses don’t have websites, so they have Facebook pages.

Audrey Tang: Yes, because Facebook pages take less time to maintain, and it’s less of a cybersecurity concern.

Noah Swartz: That is our reliance on Facebook.

Audrey Tang: As a commercial infrastructure, yes, but our government agencies and public sector people, they all have websites. All due process run on this entire stack that’s hosted, not just by our cybersecurity team ordered to stack, but also the key components of it are also open source or at least open API. When we run public live, we don’t depend on private infrastructure.

Noah Swartz: Are there other public infrastructure projects in the future?

Audrey Tang: Quite a few. We recently, just a couple of years ago, defined our national languages to be around 20 languages, most of which are indigenous.

Audrey Tang: We are now building, for example, language databases for automated speech recognition and speech synthesis so that we can have the legal documents automatically translated or vocalized in the indigenous languages.

Audrey Tang: That corpus, that a crowdsourced lexicon and so on is civic commons that is jointly maintained by the people who care about the tradition and heritage. It’s AI assist of intelligence because it assists those cultures to communicate with other cultures within the national language landscape.

Audrey Tang: Similarly, the national heritage sites are also being digitized using photogrammetry and drones to build 3D scans, biometric scans so that anyone can use them in their interactive games or whatever, using Creative Commons without having to travel to do that space or film in a way that runs the danger of damaging that space.

Audrey Tang: That digital twin, digital double of heritage sites, there’s also the digital commons. We also have that memory.culture.tw enables people to contribute their own digitized memory snippets into the Creative Commons unless they’ve hosted a database and infrastructure.

Audrey Tang: There’s also a similar project going on with the National Palace Museum. I could go on, but there’s many cultural endeavors that aim to create the digital doubles in a way that’s still within the Commons and, therefore, part of the common good.

Noah Swartz: Interesting. I had a question, then I thought about art. Then I forgot my question.

Audrey Tang: Art does that to people. [laughs]

Noah Swartz: I’ve always thought that museums should digitize a lot of their things, especially 3D scans of objects. There’s no reason not to. They are obviously…

Audrey Tang: They have nothing to lose.

Noah Swartz: …beyond copyright. None of them do at all in any way. I’ve always been very confused by it.

Audrey Tang: Our minister of culture and the National Palace Museum, which is its own ministry of sorts due to various historical reasons representing the Qi Dynasty, they are all very much in the open data and visualization and Creative Commons.

Audrey Tang: In fact, for the animals cross inking, the National Palace Museum in a special digitalized version so that you can create levels of debt in your island or something.

Noah Swartz: It seems like open Creative Commons stuff is very important to you to have Taiwan contribute more to the Commons.

Audrey Tang: It’s the foundation, the legal bedrock.

Noah Swartz: Has there been any work to Catholic scholarly work contributed to the Commons through the universities here?

Audrey Tang: The GRD, Government Research Database, already collects such publications for open access. This year, we’re working on two things. The first, that we reclassified the Ministry of Science and Technology sponsored projects, so that if the researcher wants to release also the artifacts, like the data or the model, into the Commons.

Audrey Tang: Previously, they have to get approval from the head of their school, or university, or something justifying it for public benefit, which is quite cumbersome, to be frank.

Audrey Tang: The Minister of Science and Technology, just a couple of months ago, said if you choose Creative Commons, if you choose something that fits the open definition, that is open data — which I guess doesn’t include the noncommercial part — the liberal part of the Creative Commons, then you automatically qualify for the public benefit provision.”

Audrey Tang: You don’t have to have approval. You can just release the artifact to the wild, to the Commons, which is great. The other thing that we’re working on is to make sure that also in the basic education, not just higher education, we prefer the open source and open data sources so that the students do not get locked in by vendors.

Audrey Tang: Also, they can understand that they can too fork whatever models they’re learning with and participate in the open RCP because AI is like fire, [laughs] of sharing your solutions with the people without fearing about not just vendor lock in but also copyright, or patent, or other cumbersome things. That’s also a large part of our basic education work now.

Noah Swartz: Do you find that many people doing scholarly research to just release things into Commons?

Audrey Tang: Depends on their discipline. In things like data science, where in order to replicate you probably have to have the artifacts, at least in some form, of course, before adopting it.

Audrey Tang: The traditional ACM certified artifact are available [laughs] for disciplines. These are the ones that adopted first, but I wouldn’t say that the geologists or other natural sciences are adopting as intros.

Audrey Tang: It’s probably not like that. We merely provide the bedrock of the legal and the technical expertise, so that if they need to upload their data, they can upload it to the National Center for High Speed Computation, which hosts them essentially for free and allow people to with a single click launch some Jupyter Notebooks to the independent analysis.

Audrey Tang: These data in they bringing code to data and not downloading data to fit your code fashion. While all this Commons infrastructure are there, the various different disciplines do not use equal distribution.

Noah Swartz: Why not?

Audrey Tang: Why not? It’s their norm. [laughs] Many researchers in certain disciplines do prefer printed or written paper.

Noah Swartz: Is there not a way for them to do both, submit to journals but retain copyright?

Audrey Tang: Definitely. It depends on, for example, whether they are reputable or relay journals, interesting ways that you can issue for them to consider that they can make an impact through open access. There needs to be impactful scholars in their field that endorse open access.

Audrey Tang: It’s all a nowhere effect thing. If there is no effect in certain form, then people will suddenly like a catalyst, make a C change in that particular field. If not, then maybe we have to wait for that moment. I certainly have thought about how to create incentives for people to embrace more open access.

Audrey Tang: The legal underpinning at the moment is that is encouraged, but it’s not mandatory. That’s the fact here now.

Noah Swartz: Do you think that there is a role of government in encouraging it?

Audrey Tang: Maybe from business, why not. If you do more open access, that also means that there’s more small and medium enterprises that could not pay such large patent fees or whatever license fee that they have required to appropriate those innovations, and appropriate them in a appropriate way, appropriate technology, and so on.

Audrey Tang: If then this means the very micro and medium and small enterprises all can pull together and fund some sort of open source innovation that enable them to simplify their everyday work to enable that we’re going to have digital transformation, that will be one of the main economic incentives to publish as open access with the artifacts because that will link you much more easily to such SMEs.

Audrey Tang: We were seeing some SMEs in Thailand, especially around a manufacturing sector that uses a lot of joint research quality assurance, especially on the computer vision field, and so on.

Audrey Tang: There’s some alliance like that forming, that’s jointly funded open access research on computer vision, but it’s hit and miss thing, like I can cite any number of anecdotes, but for each one, I said, I also know that two or more fields that are still not seeing such alliances for me.

Noah Swartz: Yeah. What about in things that don’t have a direct business application?

Audrey Tang: That’s up to the academic norms, right? People think it’s normal to publish in open access without effects. If people who don’t do so don’t get tenure over them, [laughs] that will be a good mindset..

Noah Swartz: It has always been the academics want people to read their research. They’re proud of it, and they do that to be cited and read by people…

Audrey Tang: By their peers, but not necessarily by random people on the Internet.

Noah Swartz: Yeah, I don’t know. Journalist writing about some research that is done is still effective, and useful for that academic. Maybe they wouldn’t, by default, have access, much like a peer in a different university.

Audrey Tang: Yeah.

Noah Swartz: Maybe they don’t do it, because they don’t know that this is an option.

Audrey Tang: Exactly. Which is why we’re designing the GRP in very large phones and very easy to notice place that you can just provide a URL here about your data set, and we’ll just mirror it in a way that everybody can download it and just click here for the creative teams to come on licensed.

Audrey Tang: We assure you that this will fit the benefit purpose, even if the majority of your brand comes from the Ministry of Science and Technology here.

Audrey Tang: We’re doing all this underpinning work, but whether to click that button, it’s still up to the individual researcher. If there are language that you think we can put on the GRB that will encourage people, think of the children or whatever, please do. We are always open to amend.

Noah Swartz: I’m thinking more of reach or of help negotiating contractual obligations with paper publishers.

Audrey Tang: OK. Do you have any particular example?

Noah Swartz: I don’t know how it would work. I know of other academics who say, all of my work is going to be published under Creative Commons license, and then later, if people want to include it in journals, they can. The issue that many academics run into is that they first submit to a journal, they sign an exclusive contract with that journal, that journal then say they can’t go back on it.

Noah Swartz: Some way to incentivize people or inform people that they can do this other way. First they…

Audrey Tang: Yeah, because our GRB system is state funded, subsidized. The grants are made directly to the universities and both public and private universities have their own publishing channels, and they don’t, as a rule are exclusively licensing just to particular publishers. We are in a better bargaining position than the one you described.

Audrey Tang: I take your point in the sense that if there are individual publishers that are already secured for a certain discipline, maybe that’s part of the reason why we’re not seeing so much open access adoption from there.

Audrey Tang: Maybe it makes sense to tally a little bit and see where there are pockets of issues that we need to spend some state resources to help them to negotiate back their right to publish this open access. This is well taken.

Noah Swartz: What else are you focusing on or working on?

Audrey Tang: Nowadays, one of the main things is the upcoming digital ministry. By hopefully a year from now, there will be a dedicated competent authority for digital ministry, foreign digital minister, but there’s currently no ministry for digital affairs. My office is literally six continents from 12, or seven ministries, and external staff as well.

Audrey Tang: It remains a very much not a implementing a ministry, but rather a coordinating and strategizing office, or as we call it, a space, the public visual innovation space depicts.

Audrey Tang: This is probably still remains, which is great, because we do have the various different ministering councils sending people after people on a rotating basis and bringing back opening innovation and the idea of free software and powering the public sector by reducing, for example, the cyber security costs, because it’s publicly audited by multiple government agencies into one.

Audrey Tang: They wouldn’t succumb to the FUD that free software is less secure and things like that. It makes sense to have rotating compliments from ministries.

Audrey Tang: From next year, I’ll hopefully with the ministry of digital affairs, we also have dedicated personnel and budgets to support external people who want to work on a more fellowship position up to 100 people within the ministry of digital affairs in a way that enables them to carry out the implementation jobs, not just strategy important innovation. That will enable more direct action.

Noah Swartz: What do you think that they would implement?

Audrey Tang: I don’t know. Depends on the ministry.

Noah Swartz: That sounds very exciting.

Audrey Tang: It’s very exciting. Especially we’re now doing this in tandem with Japan. They’re doing exactly the same thing.

Noah Swartz: Reminds me a little bit of some of the projects from Code for America.

Audrey Tang: That’s right. Yeah, the civic tech and gov tech in Taiwan are in a very different configuration compared to the US, because our gov tech is essentially just civic tech with warranties, I guess [laughs] and cybersecurity and testing and so on.

Audrey Tang: Essentially it’s civic tech and mean governance is still done by the civic sector and more like Lagrange point between the gov tech and civic tech communities, but if you look at the code that’s running into gov tech stack, it’s also civic tech stuff.

Audrey Tang: It’s probably not the case in the US. The US has its own procurement rules, its own system integrator, and so on. The USA DS, of course, writes its own Python code but they are not current civic tech infrastructure and neither the other way around.

Noah Swartz: Do you think that some of the civic tech goods made for Taiwan can be applicable outside of it?

Audrey Tang: Definitely. The Pol.is infrastructure is a great example, but it’s maintained by Math & Democracy foundation, a US foundation.

Audrey Tang: The main spelling examples in early experiments starting from Uber X, all the way to the US, and digital dialogues and co hack counter current various hackathon, are all things that are even diplomats in the IT or in tech crowd. They’re all aware of how Pol.is can get shared values out of very different positions from different polities.

Audrey Tang: The Canadian federal government also used it that way because they contributed the automated French English translation in the first place, as we did with the Mandarin and English translation.

Audrey Tang: This cross cultural thing, in the US, you can run the English, Spanish or whatever consultations and that will probably be quite popular to set the agenda together on a smaller scale, maybe a small state or a municipality and so on. It holds a lot of potential. There’s many more, but Pol.is is the one that I’m excited about.

Noah Swartz: That’s cool, to see benefits become across country. I don’t know how much time you have.

Audrey Tang: I don’t have anything afterward, so I can go on.

Noah Swartz: I’m curious if you have any questions for me?

Audrey Tang: Why Taiwan? Why are you here?

Noah Swartz: Why am I here? I, like my friends as well, have a Gold Card Visa. I have a good friend who’s been living here for quite some time, so I visited him before and he convinced me to come here.

Noah Swartz: One of the main draws obviously is Taiwan’s handling of coronavirus, which makes it a much more pleasant place to be than the US currently. The ability to be able to do so through the Gold Card Visa.

Audrey Tang: Cool. You’re holding an economy to your Gold Card or science and technology?

Noah Swartz: I have an economic one because of the time it felt…

Audrey Tang: …the older one, the one that just looks at your income or whatever it is easy to prove one.

Noah Swartz: I was worried that it would be. I’m sure that I could.

Audrey Tang: Get science and tech one as well.

Noah Swartz: …in technology, but it seemed more complicated.

Audrey Tang: Last Christmas Day, relaxed rules so that now you only have to prove, you have the potential to contribute to science and technology.

Audrey Tang: …just literally everyone. [laughs]

Noah Swartz: I definitely…

Audrey Tang: …have the potential first. You are coming back to the US after vaccination?

Noah Swartz: I’m actually going to go back soon to get a vaccine. Then maybe I’ll return. I have a lot of time left on the visa.

Audrey Tang: You got one year? Three years?

Noah Swartz: I have a three year.

Audrey Tang: You have the three year, just come and enjoy healthcare. [laughs]

Noah Swartz: I still don’t understand healthcare. That’s why I’m here.

Audrey Tang: What are your next plans after this year? Hopefully, the pandemic is over and everyone can travel anywhere.

Noah Swartz: I don’t know.

Audrey Tang: You don’t know.

Noah Swartz: Still seems very…

Audrey Tang: Distant, but what would you prefer to work on?

Noah Swartz: I’m currently employed. I have a job but still refer to do new things.

Audrey Tang: Which is about…

Noah Swartz: Previously I worked at the EFF.

Noah Swartz: Now, I work at Google. I work as a privacy engineer.

Audrey Tang: Privacy engineer?

Noah Swartz: I think of my job as like harm reduction for Google, like people have to use Google. People do use Google.

Audrey Tang: It’s a public car. What do you do with that car? [laughs]

Noah Swartz: It could be harm to it, because any company that stores your data for you has the potential to cause harm to you. A lot of my job is to try to minimize the potential for that harm or ensure that harm doesn’t happen.

Audrey Tang: You work on the technology stuff for privacy enhancing.

Noah Swartz: I work with engineers at Google to ensure that they have taken privacy into account when they design and build.

Audrey Tang: On the earlier stage, not just so you’re to handle and not just prevent, making sure it doesn’t happen in the first place.

Noah Swartz: It ranges from like, “OK, people will rely on this database. Let’s make sure that this database has very strong access control. So random engineer can’t read people’s data in the database.”

Noah Swartz: To like, “Oh, we’re building a feature that tells you if there was an earthquake nearby, let’s do it in such a way that we don’t accidentally track your location while you use this feature.”

Audrey Tang: It’s a really good job.

Noah Swartz: It’s a surprisingly good job. I feel very lucky to be able to do it.

Audrey Tang: It’s excellent. You can be anywhere.

Noah Swartz: It depends. That’s true, I can be of places I’ve been able to work from here, which has been very nice Google policy at some point, post vaccination, will be I am in some office.

Audrey Tang: We have Asia’s largest Google office anyway in Taiwan.

Noah Swartz: It’s possible. There will be a lot more flexibility to travel.

Audrey Tang: What do you think about this public digital civic infrastructure conversation? I understand we’re having this conversation not just because of Ethan Zuckerman and friends, but that also because Shoshana Zuboff and friends. [laughs] They’re now having this conversation.

Audrey Tang: To me very much like a déjà vu, because we had that in 2016. When we’re deliberating the forward looking infrastructure bill, we carved out a section that’s entirely non concrete, like not made out of concrete, and call it infrastructure and convinced the national auditing and budgeting office that even though you can’t really put a finger on anything in this budget item, it still is infrastructure.

Noah Swartz: I don’t know much about what’s currently happening in the Biden Administration. I have friends who work in civic tech in the US. Some people work at USDS or 18F or various other things.

Audrey Tang: Or Jigsaw?

Noah Swartz: Sure.

Noah Swartz: I would like to see something more radical. I think that the civic tech stuff that people do in the US is useful but there’s just so much work to do. Code for America does useful things. I’ve had friends who’ve worked there and done something very great for a city, but it’s very hard. There’s so much to do.

Noah Swartz: America’s very big cities solve lots of individual problems, you don’t see very much.

Audrey Tang: They inspire in a random time, it just needs to be scale down. [laughs]

Noah Swartz: That’s wonderful. I alluded to this. What I worry about is that private companies will take over more and more core functionalities for people…

Audrey Tang: Well they probably would.

Noah Swartz: They are. I would love to see open infrastructure replace some of those things. I mentioned Facebook business pages. That is in some ways a harm waiting to happen.

Audrey Tang: Even if they are JSON-LD and compatible of discoverability. Even if they are all Semantic Web and stuff, even so?

Noah Swartz: One thing that I’ve heard about and I don’t know exactly how true or exactly how this works, for example, a lot of people in the US rely on Yelp for business. There’s been accusations or situations where Yelp will make it harder to find certain businesses that don’t subscribe to some premium model for Yelp, which is extortion.

Noah Swartz: There’s no reason per se why Facebook can’t do the same thing. Even just a benign UI change could negatively affect businesses if Facebook were to change some aspect of their websites.

Noah Swartz: Certain businesses might have a harder time, or Facebook implemented policies about what can be posted, certain businesses wouldn’t be able to post on Facebook. It’s not a true public platform that serves everyone equally. These companies have a lot of sway on our attention. They are very addictive. One of the reasons they’re very addictive is because everything is there.

Audrey Tang: If a group of people exercise that GDPR data portability rights and migrate to some other platform, and then there’s a strong state agency that basically force Facebook to delete the records, to remove them for good.

Audrey Tang: The ones that those people who did the exodus, do not want to start at their old copies on Facebook, and then mandate them to maintain the semantic Web or JSON-LD semantic links to make sure that not just read the rights but also that interoperability are made. That is to say, if Facebook is made into such a co-op by its participants, a lot of the core work that Facebook is doing could remain.

Audrey Tang: Then this addictiveness plus locking in is no more, at which point I would consider it more neutral, not just malign influence on citizens’ data control.

Noah Swartz: That would be wonderful. That would be a great change. I would think that the GDPR does allow something like this, but no one has done it. That shouldn’t be a reason why people can’t get their data out of Facebook, but there just isn’t a new place for people to go to use these things.

Audrey Tang: The current GDPR design is like individual workers surely have the right to hire a lawyer and negotiate with the employer on better working conditions.

Audrey Tang: There’s no data union law. [laughs] Because of that, unlike the original invention of both labor union, and failing down to the social sector alternative to co ops, the labor co ops between social innovations of unions and co ops basically means that we have a bet now.

Audrey Tang: We have a plan B. If we form a union negotiating fail, we’ll just make a co op. Neither option is easy, legally speaking, for data unions and data co ops on the producer side and also on the monopsony negotiations side.

Audrey Tang: These legal frameworks probably are a logical extension to the GDPR. When this happens, we’re collectively in a much better bargaining position vis à vis Facebook.

Noah Swartz: Are the laws much different here than in the US?

Audrey Tang: We have a Personal Data Protection Act that is modeled after the European one right before the GDPR passed and we’re seeking GDPR adequacy. We’re much more European than American, but we’re not quite part of the EU.

Audrey Tang: One of the main points here, and we’re going to have a National Strategy Review Board on data economy and its governance soon, I guess in a few months about this very point, like we do have data coalitions, collaborative social sector data producers, data competence in basic education and so on.

Audrey Tang: Is it OK if the state moves a step further and says that the economic sector can only negotiate, which they have producers on the terms of such unions or coalitions? If we say so, then you would create a precedent for also the EU folks.

Audrey Tang: There are EU MEPs that try to introduce similar data intermediary laws, and the union laws not very successfully. I don’t think they’re now high on the legislative agenda in the MEPs at the moment, but in Taiwan, we do stand a chance of introducing some sort of that.

Noah Swartz: What would data union log be like?

Audrey Tang: A couple of things. Just modeling after the traditional union law. If data producers associate themselves into a coalition or a union, then legally a data platform can only negotiate with this coalition.

Audrey Tang: This solves a power imbalance problem in that if I get addicted to Instagram and I take a selfie with you, I take away your bargaining chip [laughs] because I just told you about whether you want to or not.

Audrey Tang: Your data is in an Instagram database and it will take a lot of work for you to take that photo out, but if we are both of a data union, that’s damned by law that Instagram must negotiate purely with that, then we can argue for, for example, collective control. We can argue for financial compensation. We can argue for…

Audrey Tang: It must only be used for good not for evil or whatever other terms we want to determine. This forced negotiation is key. We’re seeing in Australia, the journalists are starting some things like that. Of course, they don’t produce content. They produce journalism. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: That’s basically, essentially, the same thing that Facebook or other online advertising powered aggregation platform is required to deliberate and negotiate with the media as a coalition on what share and fraction of advertising fees are paid back to the original contributors to the story.

Audrey Tang: Which way, if they cannot settle on a negotiated price, then the state has a role to play here to ensure fair trade and negotiation, and so on.

Audrey Tang: That already is the case, but of course, journalism doesn’t produce text just as data scientists don’t really produce just data. They produce research artifacts. The norm will differ. It’s like co ops differ in various different co op or consumer is different from co op production, which is different from of labor and so on.

Audrey Tang: Based on a text or data discipline, there will be different negotiating norms for those. That goes back really well to the academics and papers they produce, which is a form of text as well, and the publishers in this case would be subject to the same group negotiation rules.

Noah Swartz: That’s very interesting. I don’t know what is currently happening in Australia but I thought Facebook just gave up on publishing these articles there.

Audrey Tang: No. I think they agreed to a truce.

Noah Swartz: Interesting.

Audrey Tang: They agreed to pay it, I believe.

Noah Swartz: OK.

Audrey Tang: But exactly how I don’t know. I think Hugo has agreed but exactly how much we don’t know.

Noah Swartz: Interesting. I wonder how this will play out for everywhere else. I think…

Audrey Tang: It’s very interesting, right? Because this is, essentially a legitimacy game in the places where traditional journalism has highest legitimacy. Then they can, essentially force a trade negotiation. It was semi sovereign, with all due respect, and if he’s like Hugo, who, essentially is a co governor with overlapping jurisdictions.

Audrey Tang: When the threat of social sanction led by legitimacy venues, like traditional journalist is feasible then Facebook and Hugo, eventually say, “OK, let’s negotiate a ton.” But say, in places where journalism isn’t held at that much regard, then some other legitimacy giving, social sanction players need to lead this.

Noah Swartz: It’s hard to conceptualize because Facebook governs so many parts of connectivity, it’s not just news articles and it’s not just political discourse. It’s so many other things.

Audrey Tang: I know. Of course, certainly part of the discussion about breaking it up to two Facebooks.

Noah Swartz: I don’t know about that.

Audrey Tang: Yeah. Anyway, I do think that for each discipline that produce certain text or data, not as text for data, but as a norm oriented papers, journalism, things like that, there could be a consensus in that discipline, even before the other parts.

Audrey Tang: In a sense, I don’t think talking about a data norm even makes sense, just as we don’t talk about text norm. We talk about academic norm, journalistic norm and so we don’t talk about text norm even though they are all text. It doesn’t make sense to talk about text. Maybe, instead of data, we would say, “health record norms” and that makes much more sense now.

Noah Swartz: Sure.

Noah Swartz: I’ll have to think about this. This is an exciting thought.

Audrey Tang: Yeah. Thank you. [laughs]

Noah Swartz: I guess I have not thought too much about that. OK, there’s a lot to think about. I don’t know if I have other questions.

Audrey Tang: Sure. You have my email.

Noah Swartz: That’s right.

Noah Swartz: The future of digital civics in Taiwan sounds very exciting.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, very much so. We’re a bright new democracy.

Noah Swartz: [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Even democracy itself is seen as their technology. We’re still in this phase of figuring out how Constitution should change? Should we have referendums with elections or intervening with elections? Things like this. We are in very early days.

Noah Swartz: Yeah. It’s just exciting to see any amount of radicalness in government. That’s very rare and nice.

Audrey Tang: Thank you. We’re like this Social Innovation Lab, I guess.

Noah Swartz: I guess you mentioned Ethan Zuckerman. Do you feel a lot of connection to his work?

Audrey Tang: Oh yeah. Definitely. [laughs] I’m certainly part of this wider movement of building public digital infrastructure, that’s for sure. I happen to believe that this infrastructure depends on this idea of digital competence.

Audrey Tang: There is many people still, in the media study circles and so on, still talk about literacy. To me, literacy carries the same connotation as a publisher, reader, binary thinking. Just like I talked about this host, user, binary thinking, which is, I think, actively harmful because it says that users are readers or whatever, need to be only literate enough to read but not to remix, not to create, not to produce.

Audrey Tang: Competence, to me, is, the designers are competent enough to not overrate their competence and to leave it to the actual people using the design to co-design and make something better for their own ways appropriately.

Audrey Tang: That almost implicitly say that Creative Commons need to be there because otherwise it’s illegal for them to remix. It says much more, it says that they are the producers of their narratives, of their story.

Audrey Tang: Because I worked on the basic education curriculum I take a lot of this…this would come to fruition two decades from now. Very long view.

Audrey Tang: I was saying that, if we make digital competence part of primary school education, then we leave the society the betterment of the democracy, to the people 20 years younger than me and I trust they’ll be much more suitable than I would to take the democracy forward.

Audrey Tang: That’s, definitely not the mainstream view in the US, specially in the tech, even civic tech community that we design for the people 20 years younger than us to, one day, design that.

Noah Swartz: I’m just having something in the open so I study on actually democratize access to…

Audrey Tang: That’s right. Only means it’s accessible, doesn’t mean it’s democratic.

Noah Swartz: Even thinking about Wikipedia, it’s still very biased in terms of…

Audrey Tang: Oh yeah. The cabal. [laughs]

Noah Swartz: Sure. One of my friend’s did a lot of research on sort of user communities of these websites and found that it’s not as equitable…

Audrey Tang: Yeah. It’s gender and location and language and culture lens, a lot of those lens.

Noah Swartz: Besides education, do you think there are ways to provide better access to…?

Audrey Tang: I think education, if we take a longer view including lifelong education and so on, that’s the real solution. Everything else that we’re doing, including this humor over rumor, counter disinformation, or whatever, are just alleviating the symptoms caused by a lack of competence education. It’s stocked out.

Audrey Tang: We do something that makes the disinformation unlikely to spread, which is great. How to make sure that people actually care about your creating the fact finding in the first place, that takes education.

Noah Swartz: Yeah.

Noah Swartz: It’s hard.

Audrey Tang: It’s hard. It’s fun also.

Noah Swartz: Yeah?

Audrey Tang: Lots of fun.

Noah Swartz: Definitely fun. Is there a future project you’re most excited about?

Audrey Tang: The Presidential Hackathon. It’s a annual thing. Every year, it’s very exciting. Last year, it was almost all about climate change, climate crisis mitigation and awareness. I wonder what this year will be about. It will begin in a month or so from now.

Audrey Tang: The top five teams get a presidential trophy that basically said whatever you did in the past three months will become national policy, like a presidential agenda, in the next year. That is presidential power as Hackathon prize.

Noah Swartz: That’s really cool. Do people who participate in that go on to do other civic projects?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, definitely. Definitely. Each winning team must be tri sector. It must at least have one social sector, one economic sector, and one public sector staff. It means that it’s truly an improvement in all the three sectors.

Noah Swartz: That’s very cool. I guess I’ll look forward to seeing what people do.

Audrey Tang: Definitely. Cool.

Noah Swartz: Cool.

Audrey Tang: Happy that you’re happy with Gold Card. [laughs]

Noah Swartz: I’m happy to have gotten to spend a lot of time already in Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: Awesome. Do come back.

Noah Swartz: I will, for sure.

Audrey Tang: Cool.

Noah Swartz: Cool.

Audrey Tang: All right. Live long and prosper.

Noah Swartz: Live long and prosper.