Ashfaq Ishaq: When did you realize that you had this immense creative potential?

Audrey Tang: I think that’s when I encountered the personal computer. When I was 8 years old, our home didn’t have a computer – that was 1989 – but I encountered some programming bugs.

Audrey Tang: I took a A4 paper and drew a keyboard on it with a pen, and then, every morning, I would practice programming on that paper, by typing on the written keyboard and I used a pencil to write the output that the computer would print.

Audrey Tang: That’s when I realized that I’m not only constrained by not having a personal computer, but rather, it’s the way of thinking. Now they would call it computational thinking. Of course, after a while, my parents finally got me a personal computer, but to me from day one, the personal computer is a device to amplify mathematics inquiry and for me not having to do the math part, is automated by a computer.

Ashfaq Ishaq: Absolutely, but surely you were reading classical literature when you’re very young. What inspired you to pick up these thick books at such a tender age?

Audrey Tang: Actually, it’s easier to read the classics like the Tao Te Ching as a young child as compared to more applied knowledge, because the philosophical books makes less assumptions about likelihood and its reader will already have exercised their application, the field and things like that, which will be too technical for me, at such a tender age.

Audrey Tang: Laozi, for example, talks about clay in a pot or a wheel and the spokes and so on. So all these are very easy metaphors. It’s very easy ideas for a young child to understand.

Ashfaq Ishaq: How was your schooling experience? Because young kids who are so creative, they find it very difficult to adjust to standard education.

Audrey Tang: It was the other way around. It’s the standard education that adjusted. I’ve had three kindergartens, six primary schools, and one year of middle school before I dropped out on my second year of middle school.

Audrey Tang: It’s fine to tour across different schools. It made a habit of me to very quickly accommodate myself to an environment and also to continue my study, regardless of the textbooks.

Ashfaq Ishaq: Basically, you are homeschooled, as what we would say in the US?

Audrey Tang: Yes, I’ve been homeschooled since when I was 14. The second year of middle school with the full blessing of the head of my school, my principal. Basically, I talked to her saying, “Here’s this new thing called a wide web.”

Audrey Tang: The researchers, they will say, I have to finish my study and maybe go to the US and study in a postdoc. But those professors already correspond to me via email, so I don’t really have to stay in your school, I want to spend 16 hours a day to do research.

Audrey Tang: After looking at those emails, my principal said, “OK, sure, why not? Tomorrow you don’t have to go to my school anymore, and I’ll cover for you.”

Ashfaq Ishaq: In your childhood, what was the first achievement that made you say, “Hey, yes, I can make some special contribution in my life”?

Audrey Tang: Definitely, that’s the talk with the head of my middle school principal. It’s not just me at the time, there was also a Go player, 周俊勳, and also a golf player, 曾雅妮, that made similar arrangements to their heads of school.

Audrey Tang: We were special cases because homeschooling was not legal at that time in Taiwan. Our success stories and our personal experience, I attended public hearing testimony, and so directly resulted into municipalities and later on national level…the Taiwan Experimental School Act.

Audrey Tang: It’s not only empowering to homeschool children, it’s also about alternative education institutions. To date, there could be up to 10 percent of Taiwanese students in country-wide, enjoying the same rights as student of the same age, but they could be enrolling alternative schools or just home school. We contributed directly to the legalization of the experimental education system.

Ashfaq Ishaq: One of the things that educators always point out is the socialization experience if their school provides. How were you meeting other kids your age and playing with them?

Audrey Tang: Well, I didn’t really care about the age of the other people that I meet. I meet with people much younger than me. I meet with people much older than me.

Audrey Tang: The point is that we had the same curiosity at a time when I was 14. I was interested in why could people trust each other so easily on the Internet as compared to face to face, and also distrust, polarized, so easily on the Internet with trust and distrust.

Audrey Tang: That research topic brings me to the university professors, but also to people my age, people younger than my age, who are all reserved to what’s called network sociology, Internet sociology at that particular branch in time.

Audrey Tang: That, of course, led to me starting a startup, co-founder with my friends, most of them 10 years my senior, but also some 20 years my senior. I look past the age very quickly since I started.

Ashfaq Ishaq: The first time that you were gainfully employed, is that the startup?

Audrey Tang: I employed myself in a sense. I joined as a chief technical officer to the startup when I was 15. That one year after I dropped out. I would continue to start maybe four…or co-found four different companies, serial entrepreneur. In that sense, yes. I begin working in the field as early as 15.

Ashfaq Ishaq: I see. What was the first startup about? What type of a company was there?

Audrey Tang: Before I joined, it used to be a publishing company. I also published…Co-wrote a book and published there. After I joined, it transformed into kind of a mixture between the early eBay for C2C auction , consumer-to-consumer auction website, and also a search engine.

Audrey Tang: Later on the company would also work on instant message, similar to WhatsApp that we’re using right now. That product rolled out after I quit the startup. It’s one of the earlier Taiwanese Internet startups, and it gained investment from Intel, along with many other investors.

Ashfaq Ishaq: Fascinating, Audrey. How was your experiences when you left Taiwan? First, when you went to Germany, and then, I know that you worked in Silicon Valley, how were those experiences for you?

Audrey Tang: When I visited Germany, for a year, I was 11 years old. Because of the German school system, I didn’t enter in the gymnasium, but rather I entered a primary school with kids one year my junior.

Audrey Tang: I very quickly discovered that the children there actually are much more mature than the schools of my age because when I was in Taiwan, the year prior, when I was 10, I jumped grade and studied with kids 12 years old.

Audrey Tang: German kids who are 10 years old are more mature than the Taiwanese kids of 12 years old by far. I wonder why. It very quickly became apparent to me that the German parents and the school system treated the kids as adults, they have to take responsibility of their own decisions.

Audrey Tang: They have much more choices to make, how to spend time after 3:00 PM, which work to do, which club to join, what kind of creative media to use, and so on.

Audrey Tang: Back in that time in Taiwan, the children are basically pretty much following the same standard test-based criteria of their curriculum, and also arranging their time with very little freedom.

Audrey Tang: This like the Pygmalion effect made an impression on me. When I returned to Taiwan, I vowed to also reform the Taiwanese curriculum system to be more autonomous, to be more interactive, more about achieving common good instead of individually competitive with one another.

Audrey Tang: I would later on join the Basic Education Curriculum Committee and how to steer the Taiwanese education, how their direction even on the basic education, not alternative or experimental school, which started in 2019, we switch to that new curriculum system.

Ashfaq Ishaq: Yeah. Audrey, you are the digital minister or how do you define your title in English?

Audrey Tang: I’m the digital minister in charge of social innovation, open government and youth engagement.

Ashfaq Ishaq: Youth engagement. Wonderful, wonderful. Have you found some other ministers in other countries who have the same type of a portfolio as you do?

Audrey Tang: Well, similar ones, certainly. I mean, the Japan, for example, recently started a digital agency in the Cabinet Office level. So that’s very similar to my work portfolio and minister, Karen, I believe, is also very much engaged with the young people.

Audrey Tang: I think there’s also digital ambassadors in charge of talking to the Silicon Valley, multinational companies, and so on. Like my acquaintance, Henri Verdier, is digital ambassador of France and so on. So my work is somewhat a hybrid between Karen’s work and Henri Verdier’s work.

Ashfaq Ishaq: I see, no wonder, before I do now proceed, I did want to ask you about your Silicon Valley experience.

Audrey Tang: Certainly. When I was 19, I believe. I first worked in a Silicon Valley, in San Jose, to be precise. When I was 18 to 19 on a start up, and later on, because of the advance of video telecommunication, I would work with certain companies, like Socialtext, but I didn’t physically travel to Silicon Valley to do that.

Audrey Tang: I would visit, say Palo Alto, every half a year on the all hands meeting but for the rest of time, I teleworked.

Audrey Tang: I’ve been doing that since 2008 so my impression was that really people are really took to telework much more easily in the Silicon Valley code shop because we focus on the rapid iteration.

Audrey Tang: So in a sense, having a developer team in Taiwan and quality assurance team in India and things like that is actually advantage because as the sun’s rolls around the Earth, wait, that’s the other way around, that’s the Earth rolls around the sun…

Audrey Tang: For example, I could complete my work and go to sleep and for the people in India, well, that’s still a few hours earlier, so they can continue to quality assure the work and then pass on the [indecipherable 13:24] to the people who are even back in the past…that’s a weird thing to say. Anyway, so that enables a 24-hour developer cycle.

Audrey Tang: I think it also made it much more easy to communicate in more kind of self sufficient terms in terms of documentation and artifacts and things like that, as compared to the office culture where everybody has to come to the same room for a meeting because I am much more focused on the common value that our products and services bring rather than just internal meetings

Audrey Tang: This way, the transparency, for example, the recording we’re making now, we’re going to make it a transcript will enable more further conversations instead of just three people in this areas.

Ashfaq Ishaq: Yes, absolutely. Now, coming back to the role and the position that you have right now, how does it change, government and governance?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, in two ways.

Audrey Tang: One is that in our open government work, make the consensus or good enough consensus around particular societal norms, like how to counter disinformation, the infodemic, how to counter the pandemic together, how to enable people having sufficient access to masks last year, and also to shorten contact tracing this year, fair distribution of vaccines and so on, are the norms.

Audrey Tang: The common values around those on the minister central government level are much more easily gathered if the radically transparent policy making process is available to all and the real time open data, the evidence to make such decisions is also independently obtained and analyzed by people around the whole society so it makes good enough consensus easier to gather.

Audrey Tang: That’s the first benefit.

Audrey Tang: Second, my social innovation work made sure that whenever there’s a system or innovation that works better than the governmental one, then it’s faster to adopt those ideas, as compared to the previous process where you have to essentially find a legislator to vouch for you via interpolation, or load someone in, which easily took months, if not years.

Audrey Tang: In the social innovation way, it takes on average, maybe just a week, for a truly good idea to be amplified throughout the society and equally around the country wide scale.

Ashfaq Ishaq: That is really, really a phenomenon. When you look into the future, how do you see the future?

Audrey Tang: I think the future is already here, right? It’s just not evenly distributed. In a sense that the Taiwanese work on democracy is a future, right?

Audrey Tang: We’re literally in the next day, anyway, but, we being in the future doesn’t mean that we have a monopoly on this particular future. There could be different futures, right? I talk about a digital democracy, pluralism, high bandwidth democracy and so on but exactly the same ideas of transparency could be also used in reverse.

Audrey Tang: So instead of making the state transparent to the citizens, it could be made to make the people transparent to their state, as some other jurisdictions are applying the same technology but in a reverse direction. So there’s multiple different futures and they’re all here already today.

Audrey Tang: Our way, I guess, is just to distribute the futures that not only we like but also opens up more possibility for our future generations. I think we need to be good enough ancestors, instead of kind of self-proclaimed perfect ancestors to close this off further innovations as would be in a totalitarian state to future generations.

Ashfaq Ishaq: Absolutely, absolutely. Audrey, what would your message be for children who are 10 to 12 year old, but they are looking into the future or trying to shape their own personal futures.

Audrey Tang: I think I’ll just share my favorite Leonard Cohen poem which goes like this, “Ring the bells that still can ring, forget your perfect offering, for there is a crack in everything, and that’s how the light gets in.”

Audrey Tang: Be the light. Be the light of the future, but not afraid of the cracks, of the shortcomings, of the imperfections because that’s exactly how we meet and trust each other.

Ashfaq Ishaq: Do you know, Audrey, such a pleasure, and such an honor. Thank you so much. Anything that you would like to add?

Audrey Tang: No, I think it’s a quite comprehensive interview. Thank you for the excellent questions. Yeah, maybe before we meet in person, I’ll just say “live long and prosper.”

Ashfaq Ishaq: Any plans for you to visit Washington?

Audrey Tang: I actually visited Washington at the very beginning of the pandemic, when the Taiwanese people were already out buying masks; the people in DC were less alert at that time. So I was spreading a message of mask and preparation and so on in DC. That was early last year. I think nowadays after the vaccination, and I would like to thank the US for sending us the Moderna vaccines, they are very helpful. I think we will resume travel next year.

Ashfaq Ishaq: I do look forward to the honor of meeting you face-to-face, in the near future. Perhaps we produce the World Children’s Festival at the Nashville Mall in Washington every four years, so the next one will be in 2024. I would love to extend an invitation for you to come and address the children.

Ashfaq Ishaq: They can learn so much, from the brilliance that you have. It would be such an honor. Thank you for the wonderful work that you do and thank you so much for your time.

Audrey Tang: Definitely, thank you for this interview.

Ashfaq Ishaq: Thank you so much, bye-bye.