Jo Swinson: Good morning, Audrey. How are you?

Audrey Tang: Hello. How are you doing? Can you see and hear me?

Jo Swinson: I can see and hear you. Likewise?

Audrey Tang: Likewise. Let’s get started.

Jo Swinson: I’m so sorry. I thought we were on Zoom.

Audrey Tang: I had received two links here.

Jo Swinson: I went on to my Zoom, but it said no Zoom meeting. I don’t know what was wrong with the link-up with the software. Anyway, it’s very good to talk with you. Thank you so much for taking the time. Really, really appreciate that this morning.

Jo Swinson: To put in context a little bit, I lead a philanthropic fund which is trying to change the way the economic system works particularly, to make sure that it values people and nature. As part of that process, one of the organizations that we are considering making a grant to is Dark Matter Labs for their radicle civics project.

Jo Swinson: Obviously, I understand that you’re involved in that. I’m speaking to a few people to get their take on what their strengths and, potentially, development needs are for the project. Anything that we would need to be aware of.

Jo Swinson: To kick off with it would be possible, first of all, to ask you how you came to know Dark Matter Labs and Indy Johar? What your experience has been with them to date.

Audrey Tang: Sure. As Taiwan’s digital minister in charge of social innovation since 2016, ‘17, I maintain very close contact with, for example, the Impact Hub global network, and other social innovator organizations. The Social Enterprise World Forum, I led the Taiwanese delegation quite a few times.

Audrey Tang: I was very much already involved in this purpose-led…You can call it the social sector or the civic sector – there’s many different names – trying to essentially deliver outcomes, the scales. Not just on the community level, but on a global level for the traditional voluntary sector.

Audrey Tang: That is something that’s literally unimaginable until the Internet, so that’s part of my work. Through that, I have a colleague named Fang-Jui Chang. Fang-Jui, who worked on introducing her previous experience in the UK Policy Labs in collaborative and participatory policy-making into the Taiwanese Cabinet.

Audrey Tang: In the system that she co-designed with me and other people in the Cabinet Office, we’ve run more than 100 such civics-oriented meetings for multi-stakeholder conversation to determine policy. It was in that context that Indy Johar invited us to share our regulatory sandbox experiences with the international audience.

Audrey Tang: Now, Fang-Jui eventually moved to the UK because of family reasons. She’s still part of my office as a consultant, but she also does her day job [laughs] in Dark Matter Labs because of that connection. She’s, as I understand, one of the principal strategic designer behind the radicle civics vision.

Audrey Tang: She brought a lot of our learnings from Taiwan including working with the indigenous community, the people too young to vote, the youth and children communities, immigrants, residents-not-citizens communities, and so on, in the hope to empower them regardless of whether they hold the right to vote in Taiwan.

Jo Swinson: Thank you so much. One of the things that you were talking about there is the ability for the imagined project to scale due to the Internet.

Audrey Tang: Yes.

Jo Swinson: I was interested in what do you think are requirements for projects in order to scale? Perhaps, more interestingly, what are the barriers? What are the things that could make it difficult, and what are the things that smooth that path?

Audrey Tang: In my experience, I basically distill it to three pillars. That’s fast, fair, and fun. Meaning, a high-bandwidth communication – at least the kind of video conferencing we’re having now – which is why broadband is a human right in Taiwan. That’s the fast part.

Audrey Tang: The fair part requires participation that is fair, meaning that, well, nothing about us without us, of course. Also, people who have a stake in it can participate even not being the original gangsters, [laughs] the OGs of the systems.

Audrey Tang: We see in some extractive or speculative use of, for example, distributed ledgers like cryptocurrency. There’s a very strong unfairness, power imbalance between the people who were there when the organization was first formed, and the people who joined later as part of the decentralized autonomous organizations.

Audrey Tang: Whenever that fairness is not guaranteed, then you suffer from vampire attacks, civil attacks, all sort of attacks very quickly. There’s an inherent gap between the legitimacy of the structure that you participated in when it was founded, vis-a-vis, like you joined after the revolution. [laughs] Fairness in governance, that’s very important.

Audrey Tang: Finally, it needs to be fun. For a imagined communities to become real, there needs to be something that people enjoy intrinsically. Any extrinsic so-called incentives decimate that intrinsic motivation. All the long-running social movements such as open-source, and so on, continuously renew on itself using this appeal to intrinsic motivations such as fun, joy, and solidarity.

Jo Swinson: That’s interesting about the Web-culture forums in communities within societies.

Jo Swinson: I’m interested in the point you made about the resilience and the participation. Could you say a little bit more? From what you’re saying, you’re basically arguing that participation is good not just from a morality perspective, but also because it provides resilience. Is that right? Are there other examples that you have?

Audrey Tang: That is correct, basically, [laughs] or even more than resilience. Antifragility. This kind of participation is what allows people to find a clarity of purpose of a shared urgency whenever there is a emergency.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, we countered the pandemic without a single day of lockdown. We countered the infodemic, the disinformation crisis without any administrative takedown.

Audrey Tang: Not because our government is particularly technologically advanced – if I may say so myself [laughs] – but because our civic sector is technologically advanced. They were able to set the norm via command participation so that they can first hold the state to account. For example, publishing the campaign donation expanded to a machine-readable format.

Audrey Tang: Also then, along with the state capacity, we tell Facebook, for example, “In our jurisdiction, you have to publish sponsored advertisement back in 2018, ‘19 as real-time open data. Otherwise, you’ll face civic sanction. It’s not a law against you. It’s the participatory nature of the norm shaping against you.”

Audrey Tang: Facebook, according to their whistleblowers in 2019, only a couple of jurisdictions had the deployment of the civic-integrity team, because they faced backlash here if they don’t. They don’t face such a consequence, because there was no participation by the people in other jurisdiction.

Audrey Tang: It was the state asking for the right open algorithm, and so on, which is all very noble. If there’s not participatory, there’s 1,000 ways that Facebook can circumnavigate it.

Jo Swinson: That’s brilliant, thank you. Then, going back to the specifics of Dark Matter Labs, how across the radicle civics project are you in terms of what they’re planning to do?

Audrey Tang: I maintain almost weekly conversations over messages and video with Fang-Jui, but in the context of our upcoming Ministry for Digital Affairs. Ministry of Digital Affairs, not radicle civics in particular.

Audrey Tang: We have specific departments for democracy networks, for plural innovations, for civic tech section and resilience division, and think business department, and so on. It’s very intersectional in a sense that our concerns from Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: Taiwan, very interestingly, is viewed as a very large civics group like that Malta, NICE, or whatever, in many parts of the world. We actually share the same like post-Westphalian view that needs to go beyond the so-called public sector and so-called private sector.

Audrey Tang: Obviously, Taiwan, as a jurisdiction is neither considered a country nor a corporation, by many other jurisdictions. Civics is the people-to-people diplomacy is easier than state-to-state diplomacy in Taiwan. That intersection nature of radicle civics appeals a lot to also the Ministry of Digital Affairs people in Taiwan that works on democracy networks.

Jo Swinson: Maybe I’m going off-piece here, but I’m really quite intrigued about these issues about what enables participation, what enables a strong culture, and the trust that isn’t a prerequisite for that kind of strong civics. Do you think that Taiwan’s particular situation which I don’t know how it feels, but includes significant feeling of threat?

Jo Swinson: Do you think that that is important also as one of the motivators for there being that kind of strong culture? I suppose, maybe it’s an impossible question, but how much do you think it’s partly because of that specific situation versus could this work anywhere?

Audrey Tang: I was in, I believe, Lisbon, and they talked about long, long ago, there was this earthquake that flattened the city and how people from very different backgrounds, different cultures, different languages, and religions, almost had to work together in a impossible situation of having to rebuild the city.

Audrey Tang: When I was in Christchurch also, for Social Enterprise World Forum, and they also tell a very similar story much more recent about the earthquake. There’s something about earthquakes that unites people and in Taiwan, indeed, both in our turn of the century, September 21st earthquake, and also in helping the Japanese people in their tsunami/earthquake about 10 years ago now.

Audrey Tang: We saw a lot of, not just domestic, but also international civic sector bonding together, inventing new things like the Line end-to-end encrypted messenger was invented because of the earthquake in Japan. All that increased the solidarity and in a sense, the Occupy movement that I participated in back in 2014, is like that too. We occupied — thoroughly peacefully — our parliament for three weeks that is also like a earthquake in the sense that half a million people supported us on the street and many more online.

Audrey Tang: I would say that those peak experiences, is indeed essential in fostering a culture that can renew itself because one do not have to talk anything abstract.

Audrey Tang: One can just talk about the food stand around the occupied corner of the street and so on, and people who have been to the occupy naturally just get it. We retain a lot of that open space technology and mobile communication facilitation. In our work, we don’t have to explain to each other that OSD is also technology, because people have experienced that as a technology.

Audrey Tang: I wouldn’t say that it requires a military or geopolitical threat, but it does require a sense of urgency. I don’t think anywhere on earth people have escaped the urgency that is the pandemic. In democratic jurisdictions, the divisiveness polarization of the infodemic also is similarly urgent.

Audrey Tang: I don’t think we have a shortage of urgency now. Therefore, I believe that this model can spread to more places.

Jo Swinson: Absolutely. I think that’s why these moments are, as well as sometimes being incredibly challenging, potential opportunities for transformation.

Jo Swinson: I’m very conscious of your time and you’re…

Audrey Tang: It’s fine.

Jo Swinson: Finally, on the specifics that they’re imagining these six different projects that they would pilot from free houses to food forests, provisioning cities. I don’t know to what extent you know about these specific projects? In which case, that would be great to hear what you think, but if not, then obviously appreciate that.

Jo Swinson: In terms of how these pilots, if you like, or points of shared imagining, the translation of them from something that is very much still existing in the imagination to something which can have a momentum and steps towards it becoming more normalized.

Jo Swinson: Do you have anything to say about what is needed to make that transition?

Audrey Tang: Certainly games. It’s all fun and games. [laughs] A lot of people did not get the so-called Metaverse instant crash before they engaged, for example, Second Life community. Second Life was arguably the game that instantiated a lot of those things that previously was only seen in science fictions.

Audrey Tang: A generation later, of course, Minecraft, and many other games instantiated those feelings of co-creating things, regardless of the time zone where you’re in. In a sense, Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap are also games that people built genuine games on top of which OpenStreetMap powers Pokémon Go. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Pokémon Go is the game that led a lot of people understand there’s a way to collaboratively imbue meanings upon landmarks. Then that led to many people discovering the OpenStreetMap community and discover that they can too, participate in humanitarian aid and many other creative uses of Crowdsourced mapping and so on.

Audrey Tang: One of the focus that I have been doing is so-called humor over rumor or out-memeing the disinformation. Because disinformation spreads because there are a kind of vacuum in narratives that people want to fill in. People want to make sense of the vaccines, the masks, the 5G antennas, and things like that.

Audrey Tang: If there are prosocial instead of antisocial ways, to not make fun of, but make fun with the people who buy in into those conspiracies. Then it actually increases what you call digital competence or media competence, not just literacy of everyone involved.

Audrey Tang: For example, in Taiwan, many young students actually, or primary schools, if I understand correctly, measure their own PM 2.5 air quality and upload it to distributed ledger. It’s like people gardening. [laughs] They have a Raspberry Pi. They garden its air quality sensor. They learn about data stewardship, about bias, about responsibility.

Audrey Tang: Without that game that people play that state, the students go back to inform their parents. Whether you want to go out for a walk this morning depends on my contribution and my friend’s contribution in nearby schools. That lets you understand the real-time air pollution level that you cannot easily see with your naked eyes.

Audrey Tang: Then, that increases everybody’s incentive intrinsically to participate. If you don’t have that and instead use examination, or whatever, to make sure that students memorize the concept of data stewardship and bias, and so on, that’s of no use. There is no way that state can out-meme [laughs] the others. There’s nothing that organically spreads.

Audrey Tang: I don’t think the specific pilots or experiments are meant to be case studies that’s taught on undergrad-level courses. Rather, it’s meant to be games that people play, and then change their outlook on the possibility of things.

Jo Swinson: Thank you very much, indeed. Then, I suppose the final question, and it’s very straightforwardly. In working with Indy Johar and Dark Matter Labs, how would you describe them as an organization to work with? What adjectives would you use?

Audrey Tang: I would say they’re a network of networks. This goes back to this Tribe, Institution, Market, Network, TIMN, model.

Audrey Tang: To me, they always seem especially optimizing for what Manu Castell would call the network-making power. The power to make/enforce true collaboration between networks rather than the networked power. That’s to say the institutional top-down hierarchical power.

Audrey Tang: As I understand that they are moving more and more toward a commons — community-owned vision, like a co-op — instead of like many other social impact organizations, a community-minded corporation vision. Each individual members in the co-op similarly connects to more cooperative-minded networks. I would say it’s a network of networks.

Jo Swinson: Fantastic. Thank you so much for your time, Audrey. Really, really appreciate it. I wish you a good rest of your day. It’s been wonderful to meet you.

Audrey Tang: Thank you. We’ll make a transcript I’ll send you for co-editing for around 10 days before we publish to the Commons.

Jo Swinson: No problem. Thank you so much. Take care then.

Audrey Tang: Cheers then. Live long and prosper.

Jo Swinson: Bye-bye.

Audrey Tang: Bye.

Jo Swinson: Bye.