Azeem Azhar: Hi there. I’m Azeem Azhar and you’re listening to my Exponential View podcast. Every week, I come together with a brilliant mind to discuss the intricate dance of technology and society in a rapidly changing world. My guest today is Taiwan’s first Digital Minister, Audrey Tang. As we grapple in the West with election interference, online misinformation and echo chambers, the internet may appear to be an enemy of a healthy democracy. But under Minister Tang’s digital leadership Taiwan, which only held its first general election in 1996, has had impressive success in using online tools to foster genuine civic engagement. How have they done it? How can Taiwan’s commitment to digital openness and radical transparency hold up in the face of geopolitical competition and friction from the People’s Republic of China?

Azeem Azhar: Minister Tang. Welcome to Exponential View.

Audrey Tang: Hello and good local time everyone.

Azeem Azhar: Well, I think it’s fair to say that your path to government has been somewhat unusual. In fact, you’ve said that as Taiwan’s first Digital Minister, you’re putting into practice, what you learned when you were couch surfing as a teenager. Can you tell us about your early experiences growing up in that internet community and how that helped evolve the values that you’ve brought to government?

Audrey Tang: Certainly. So, I understand that I have a very strange condition in that I think that public servants are the most innovative people and it’s this very strange condition that started when I was 15 years old and that was 1996. We just had our first presidential election. And around that time, I discovered this new thing called the world web and one particular website called arXiv with an X, A-R-X-I-V.

Azeem Azhar: Absolutely.

Audrey Tang: It’s still around… And so, I found that people offer their preprints for free. I don’t have to pay for any journals or anything, and I can write to the authors. And they’re all very eager to collaborate, not knowing I’m just 14 or 15 years old. Before long, we started working together and I told the head of my school I want to quit middle school and start my education on the world web.

Audrey Tang: And surprisingly, after reading the email printouts, the principal said, “Okay, go ahead with it. You don’t have to go to school anymore. Starting tomorrow. I will cover for you.” Meaning that she will fake the records. And so-

Azeem Azhar: Amazing.

Audrey Tang: That actually instilled in me this deep belief about the innovation capability of the public servants. A year later, I would find a startup working on web technologies. And I joined through the Perl community, the fabulous internet society that runs with this crazy idea, an open multi-stakeholder political system that still powers the internet today. And so, the one thing that I learned is that it doesn’t matter if I’m just 15 years old. It doesn’t matter that English is not my native language. All it matters is a good idea and an email address, and anyone can join any working group to make the internet for the better. So, this is not about who you are, it’s about the value that you hold and the value that you can contribute to the community. This resonates with our President, Dr. Tsai Ing-wen who said a very inspiring statement in her inauguration speech four years ago. She said, “Before we imagined democracy as a clash, a showdown between two opposing values. But nowadays democracy must be calm. A conversation between many diverse values.” And that explains the idea of rough consensus very well.

Azeem Azhar: It’s a fascinating story there, and there’s a lot to unpack within that. So, we have the bravery, the vision of your middle school principal. We also have this engagement with the open access movement of free information and free ideas, which is arXiv founded by Paul Ginsparg. We have your engagement with the open source software community through Perl which is for those who don’t know is that it’s a language that you can use to process text amongst other things, but do much more. And in fact, as an aside note, the first content management system I ever wrote on the web was written in Perl, MacPerl, in fact.

Audrey Tang: Oh, wow. Okay.

Azeem Azhar: Because we were using the Apple platform.

Audrey Tang: That’s great.

Azeem Azhar: And then you move on to this idea of essentially the marketplace of ideas, the notion that well-argued positions respectfully held can get us to better outcomes in a sense. Is that a fair summary of that part of your journey?

Audrey Tang: Yeah. And the quote by Dr. Tsai Ing-wen shows to me that democracy is a technology. Like any social technology, it gets better when more people strive to improve it. It’s not a tradition for hundreds of years in Taiwan. We actually amended our constitution five times during that short period of time when I was starting my first startup. And now we’re amending the constitution again to get the voting rights for 18-years-old. And so, it’s a living document. When a constitution is a living document, when the participatory tools such as presidential hackathon, sandboxes, participatory budgeting, and so on, are being invented literally every day. Quadratic voting, quadratic funding, and so on, being deployed in a very quick succession, it liberates us from the idea that democracy is just about each person uploading 3 bits every four years, which is called voting, by the way.

Azeem Azhar: Right. So, if we unpack that a little bit, Taiwan is a mid-sized country, 24 million people. It’s pretty wealthy, 55 to $60,000 per annum GDP, which is about as wealthy as America. Higher GDP per capita than the United Kingdom. And it also has, in a sense, a clear position in the sense that you are a couple of hundred miles away from the PRC… What kind of tensions did that create in the democratic functioning of Taiwan that has led to the conditions that have allowed you to do this? in 2014, there was the Sunflower Movement, which you were involved in. Help us understand what that movement was about and what your role in it was.

Audrey Tang: So, in 2014, we occupied the parliament for three weeks. The legitimacy theory of the occupiers at the time was that the parliament was rushing through without substantial deliberation, the Cross-Strait Service and Trade Agreement, or CSSTA that would open up, for example, the then new 4G service telecom industry to PRC operators. And so, people were very worried about that, reasonably…

Audrey Tang: And so, the people occupied the MPs seats… It’s not a protest in the usual sense, because more than 20 NGOs, each occupying one side of the parliament deliberated their favorite aspect respectively. So, there’s people who work on the human right angle, working on the labor right angle, the free trade versus protectionist angle and also of course, the cybersecurity angle. And consensus on the street was that there’s no purely privately held companies in the PRC. Anytime the PRC wants, they could, through its party branches, plug and play leadership positions for those so-called private sector enterprises.

Azeem Azhar: And that idea that every PRC technology company is only one or two steps away from being state controlled… is something that is now becoming a widely held belief in the United States and the United Kingdom, some five or six years later.

Audrey Tang: That’s right. So, we’re happy that people are doing the same economic assessment on whether it has been controlled by the party or not. And so we reached out to consensus on the street in 2014. And it has a happy ending.  the occupy was a success and people opened our collective imagination to the possibility of digital technologies to facilitate listening at scale because with radio and television, only one or a few people can speak, and millions listen.

Audrey Tang: But for the first time in Taiwan’s political history, millions of people talked to one another, but got rough consensus. And that got ratified. the reverse mentorship system was instated to basically recruit people who are under 35 years old, including yours truly, to serve as reverse mentors to cabinet ministers. And so, I was paired with Minister Jaclyn Tsaiat the time in charge of cyber regulatory reform. And we innovated on ways to listen and scale for issues such as teleworking or crowdfunding or Uber.

Azeem Azhar: You’ve done a couple of really interesting things around how you bring citizens together to engage them through the vTaiwan platform and the polis system as a means of generating consensus. Now, as I understand, the polis system is, is a tool that allows people to identify their specific perspectives of an issue and how far away they are from a consensus. It looks a little bit like a game in a way. Could you describe how it works and then perhaps give us an example where it’s been effective?

Audrey Tang: Sure. So, when in 2015, for example, when UberX become available in Taiwan, they were working with people with no professional drivers licenses and it reached a pretty controversial situation where some people will support it because it’s new, innovative, sharing economy and all that. And there’s also people who say, “Well, you’re not even carpooling. Is it really sharing economy?” And things like that. So, it gets ideological also. And to make sure that people can actually reflect on each other’s feelings, we designed the polis conversation, such that people can see in a pro-social social media landscape, where their friends and family stand on the issues of Uber.

Audrey Tang: And so, people would understand that these are not nameless trolls. These are not others. These are your friends and family. It’s just maybe you didn’t talk about Uber over dinner. And so we publish, of course, the facts crowdsourced and then ask — for three weeks — people’s feelings. And then we hold a face-to-face multi-stakeholder forum, inviting all the sides and everybody who contributed into it. And the best ideas are the one that take care of most people’s feelings. Then we turned it into legislation. So, the user interface, very simply put, is a fellow citizen sentiment. For example, I would share that liability insurance for passengers is very important. And you may agree. If you agree, you move closer to me. There’s a blue circle that represents your avatar, moving closer to people who hold similar feelings. If you disagree, you move farther away and then you see another sentiment that you can react on. But there is no reply button. So there is no room for troll to grow. And after answering a few questions, maybe you will share what you feel for other people to resonate.

Audrey Tang: And every time we run a polis discussion, we discover that the ideological differences around sharing economy and so on are just those very few points.

Azeem Azhar: They’re very few. Right.

Audrey Tang: But actually, most people agree with most of their neighbors’ points on most of the things, most of the time, and that’s regardless of their political inclination or whatever. And so, for example, on UberX, everybody agreed that a fair registration system, a fair insurance system, fair taxation and so on, are very important. So nowadays Uber is a taxi fleet in town, a Q taxi. It’s registered as a Taiwan company, but all the existing taxi fleets and co-ops also benefit from surge pricing, from this electronic meter.

Audrey Tang: So it proves that the social norm around UberX is actually very much reachable without the fanfare about the controversial definition of platform economy or sharing economy.

Azeem Azhar: That’s really fascinating. And the process that you’ve described, it reminds me a little bit of a citizens’ jury. So citizens’ jury, just as I understand it, is a way of bringing a representative group of the population together over a few days to have a discussion and deliberation over an issue, to flesh out what the real points of agreement and disagreement are, but policies that are similar to that, but perhaps asynchronous and virtual. Are there similarities with citizen juries, or things that are specifically different with Polis?

Audrey Tang: Yeah. I think there’s two things going on. One is that we do have a face-to-face, multi-stakeholder forum, not unlike the citizens’ juries. But instead of using sortition, we learn from internet culture… Anyone who shares anything that is resonating with other people gets an invitation to the multi-stakeholder forum.

Azeem Azhar: Right.

Audrey Tang: That’s the first difference.

Azeem Azhar: So that’s like an idea that comes out of open source governance, which is that if I’m contributing code to an open source project which people think is useful, my status within that project rises, and I might get included in more aspects of the governance of that project.

Audrey Tang: That’s exactly right. And also, by holding ourselves to account, setting this agenda of what people resonate with, this is called crowdsource agenda setting, unlike the citizens’ jury, where the agenda is sometimes already preset. We enable the citizens to essentially set the agenda and uncover the parts of the society that may be more nuanced, may be more eclectic, may be ignored when the anti-social media want to keep people addicted to those debates. A subject that could never get a consensus, it would resonate with those eclectic voices more, because they are more, well, viral, in the sense that it’s an idea that’s worth spreading, and it would resonate with more people.

Audrey Tang: And that’s coupled with the idea that you can very easily share a URL to any particular Polis conversation, makes it ideas worth spreading. Because in any citizen assembly or citizen jury, the final question is whether the people who were there can bring back to their community the rough consensus they have reached in a deliberative space. And Polis provided a simple, one-click URL that can just share this… “How divisive was this conversation?” Picture that’s in everyone’s mind.

Azeem Azhar: Right. But one of the things that strikes me that is different to the internet models, goes back to your original escape from middle school, where you said you just needed an email address and some bright ideas. One of the things I noticed in Polis is that it has a sort of physical avatar icon, which means that you can identify who somebody is. You can identify their gender; you can identify their age. And these are often things that skew our perception of an idea, whereas in the sort of purist, old form of internet culture, no one knew we were a dog, right? We were just the quality of our code, the quality of our postings, and some numeric ID.

Audrey Tang: Nowadays when we deploy Polis, it’s true that we do ask for some sort of ID. At this moment, we ask for an SMS number that we confirm that this SMS exists. But that’s it. So, if you have an SMS and you have an email address, that’s good enough. You may, of course, in addition to the login to join, also offer your Twitter or Facebook login, in which case we’ll helpfully paint the pictures in a way that reflects your Twitter and Facebook friends. But actually, most people participate using only the SMS and email option.

Azeem Azhar: Interesting. And what sort of proportion of the legislative agenda or the policy agenda is now influenced or directed by what goes on in Polis and the joint platform?

Audrey Tang: we use Polis, usually the cross ministerial issues, just like the original UberX issue, where for UberX, the ministries of transportation and communication, of finance, and of economy affairs were actually holding very different positions, even within the government.

Audrey Tang: And so, for things like opening up the oceans, opening up the mountains for mountaineering, of course, the environmental protection, the conservation, indigenous council, the tourism bureau, each one have a very different take on those broad policies. And so we use Polis for these issues and also for diplomatic issues, we run four Polis conversations with AIT, that’s the de facto US embassy, around security collaborations.

Azeem Azhar: I’m just curious about why you think you end up getting to consensus. When we look at open source projects, sometimes they don’t get to consensus and you get what’s known as the fork, right? The project goes in a different direction to the original. That’s certainly happened in cryptocurrencies with Bitcoin forks as well. That’s not so much of a choice on a sort of regular basis within a government or a nation state, but what do you think it is about the design of the system that takes people towards a consensus rather than a forking?

Audrey Tang: I think it makes sense to just define the word a little bit because in Mandarin, 共識 is literally common understanding or even common sense. Like it makes sense to us. And so I think it’s even more rough than what the internet community calls rough consensus. This is more like consent. “This, we can live with,” something like that. But in English, consensus is a very fine document that we can sign our names on. And so just by lowering the threshold from consensus to rough consensus, which is consent, you can very easily, develop common values out of different political positions… And that’s all we ask for, because it’s just agenda setting. This is not crowdsourcing the law proper; this is just setting what’s important.

Azeem Azhar: Right. It’s like product specification almost. So I’m curious about the other side of the public space in the digital world is the social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, and we’ve definitely seen across these platforms, and we should obviously include YouTube, real issues in many, many jurisdictions around polarization and extremification, radicalization, that emerges across those platforms. You’ve talked about the importance of needing algorithmic co-governance with social media platforms. What do you mean by algorithmic co-governance?

Audrey Tang: So, one thing is about a social sector, keeping the norm, keeping the social media in check. And by social sector, for example, the Taiwanese equivalent of Reddit is the PTT, and it’s run by the National Taiwan University.

Azeem Azhar: And this is the place where the first notion of the Coronavirus was identified. Is that correct?

Audrey Tang: Yeah. When Dr. Li Wenliang, the whistleblower from Wuhan, posted on their social media that there is, and I quote, “Seven new SARS cases in the Huanan Seafood Market,” unquote, it gets reposted immediately by an ID code @nomorepipe on PTT, I think around 2:00 AM in December 31st. And people upvoted it like crazy and people actually checked the credentials. And so, we immediately contacted WHO and, without a reply, of course, we then get the health inspections going from all the flights that comes from Wuhan to Taiwan the very next day, which is the first day of January. And so, this shows how important social sector owned social media is, because it’s not serving the whims of advertisers, it’s not serving the whim of the shareholders.

Audrey Tang: In a sense it only serves the whims of, I guess, people who study computer science at National Taiwan University, because these students maintain the space. And so they’re far more interested in getting the words out that looks like a public health crisis, than what will keep people’s attention and buy more consumer products, right? So there’s something that’s entirely social sector oriented in the PTT. And the PTT also helps to set social norms. For example, they were one of the first to sign on the voluntary counter-disinformation self regulatory norm, and they would refuse any influence operations by money or otherwise paid sponsor campaigns during elections…

Azeem Azhar: How do you propose taking that model of co-governance to a $700 billion company, like a Facebook…

Audrey Tang: Yeah. But that’s precisely what we said to Facebook. It’s like a trade negotiation, right? We have a beta, like if they don’t agree to adhere to the norm of publishing, what they call the advertisement library, that’s to say the precision targeting during the elections in an open data format that everybody can analyze, and ban foreign sponsors of such advertisements during the election season, then we say, “You may face social sanction.” So even though we may or may not have jurisdiction to the physical corporation, per se, in Taiwan, if people socially sanction companies, they always have a better alternative, or at least a working alternative that they can live with. And so very smartly Facebook actually, for our election, the season was last December. So, I think we’re the first jurisdiction that they opened up the entire raw data access to their advertisement library.

Azeem Azhar: does social sanction mean kind of a legal sanction? You instruct the ISPs to…

Audrey Tang: No, it’s just boycotting.

Azeem Azhar: Boycotting, right. But that I suppose is then contingent on you having sufficient trust from government through to individuals that the boycott would be, in some sense, effective, without the force of law behind it.

Audrey Tang: A trade negotiator is only as strong as the domestic support. So When the grassroots people fight for this transparency, of course they would also fight for the same transparency in the global social media as a co-governant.

Azeem Azhar: Right. That’s an interesting idea. One of the things that I’m curious about though, is it means that within Taiwan you’ve established and you’re starting to establish a new set of norms for governing applications on the internet, at the highest layer of the stack. Earlier on, you talked about how you were appreciative of the multi-stakeholder rough consensus governance model of the internet society. How do you reconcile Taiwan’s approach, saying to Facebook, “We have these local standards that you need to adhere to,” with your appreciation for a global multi-stakeholder consensus-driven model for the internet?

Audrey Tang: Yeah. First of all, I think even Facebook would admit that whatever social sanction they may face in Taiwan, we’re not the one to do any administrative takedown. Just like we countered the pandemic with no lockdown, we wouldn’t counter the infodemic with an administrative takedown. And so for Facebook this is of course like a trade negotiation, that this may not be the best scenario for them but publishing the advertisements in radical transparency in real time still beats an arbitrary takedown by a random minister in a cabinet.

Audrey Tang: And so, what I’m trying to get at is that, in multi-stakeholder forums, what’s important is this idea of running code. And running code shows people how a norm may actually be beneficial or not to people. But without a running code like a small pilot or a sandbox, the discussion would get nowhere… And so that’s where the Facebook angle is into this negotiation. It’s not exceptionalism for Taiwan, it’s Taiwan as a potential model for international covenant on this information management.

Azeem Azhar: Right. You’ve identified a couple of interesting ideas there, and let me try to play them back. So you talk about running code and you talk about sandboxes, and the observation being that in a technological system the theory is not as useful as the actual practice where you can see the data, you can see the results, and you can see the outcome. And the notion of having a sandbox is that it’s a small, somewhat constrained part of the environment where you can afford to take a little bit of a gamble because it doesn’t necessarily affect your entire business. In the case of Facebook, Taiwan is 20 million out of 2 billion users so it’s big enough to matter to do a good test, but it’s not big enough to take down the whole business.

Audrey Tang: That’s exactly right. And also because we don’t do administrative take-downs, the social sectors, the journalists actually have more room to work because in our K-12 curriculum we don’t teach media literacy anymore. We teach media competence, meaning that instead of being just readers and viewers of data and journalism, everybody is essentially a producer of data and narratives, and that too is enabled by the broadband as human rights policy. And that enabled, when people want to fact check, for example, the presidential debates, then they can recruit thousands of, I’m sure, middle schoolers. When I was 15 years old if there was such a crowdsourced fact checking I would have joined. And so basically the idea is that everybody learns a little bit on how to make memes like funny pictures and so on, that also doubles as clarifications and so on.

Azeem Azhar: I can’t let you say the word meme without seeing if this is true. Do you really have comedians working in your ministries?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, definitely. In each ministry.our participation offices, unlike the media officer that talk through the press, our participation officers talked through hashtags. And the difference between hashtags and traditional representatives is that a hashtag has no spokesperson. Maybe some spokesbots but no spokesperson. And so the only way to make the humor more exponential than the conspiracy theories is through the way people partake in sharing those memes. And so vaccinates people against the outrage.

Azeem Azhar: It’s a very clever idea. And the analogy is that, 60 years ago governments had to think about how they presented themselves on radio and then on television. And now we need to think about how we present ourselves in the meme-sphere, the hashtag, the comedy that pushes things around

Azeem Azhar: and of course the big meme platform today is TikTok That’s growing globally, it’s it’s getting quite engaging.. And of course Taiwan itself is a couple of hundred miles away from PRC. It is the unwilling recipient of a vast amount of cyberattack. This is a huge question. I almost feel unfair asking you this question, but-

Azeem Azhar: As somebody who comes from the similar internet culture background to myself, which was a free and open internet of permissionless innovation and multi-stakeholder governance, how do you look at the development of the internet over the coming 20 or 30 years?

Audrey Tang: that’s a great question. So the inter part of the internet is really what’s important to me. The idea of end to end innovation precisely as you put it, permissionless innovation, is really at a core of the “inter”ness of the internet, otherwise we might as well go back to the national ads. And so the point here is, when innovation happens it’s the innovators who work with the society to prove that innovation is of some value to the society while also changing the innovation that’s needed to work with not against the societal norm. But that presumes a certain sense of transparency and accountability of how the norm works. In Taiwan we say we have radical transparency because, on the Join platform you can see each and every budget item, each and every KPI. You can demand the administrator to give an account and even change the course of policy if you get 5,000 signatures.

Audrey Tang: But in PRC the word transparency means something entirely actually opposite, it means making the citizens transparent to the state. And in that sense the norm is dictated by the ruling party, and by making the citizens transparent, it’s the same word, different direction, they could then track public behaviors comprehensively, and each province in the PRC is now competing on their social credit pass to offer preferential treatment in education, employment, house registrations, and shame the people who violate the top-down set norms with disclosure of violators’ names, denying their travel on airplanes and high speed trains, and so on. And so for me that’s not the kind of the environment that the permissionless innovation that could occur simply because the permission to obtain to adhere to the norm is very concentrated.

Azeem Azhar: But it’s not just the PRC in a sense that is demanding particular constraints. The Indian government is starting to make claims about data localization, and the European Union is obviously starting to embed its own demands around citizen privacy. And in the US of course we’ve seen some moves that are really with respect to certain Chinese companies, but they would also apply to other companies, presumably. So you have this drive away from the heartland of the pulse of that open internet culture that we talked about at the beginning. And as you observe this, what do you think that format of that governance looks like? Is it that we end up with some trusted corridors between regions and some untrusted patches of the internet, or is it that we end up with a lot of closed national internets and you have to do some really close checking as data comes into your autonomous area? What do you think it ends up looking like over the next couple of decades?

Audrey Tang: Well, I think it’s a great amplifier, the technologies that powers the internet today., it could and is being used to amplify the totalitarian technologies.. for the open innovations to happen, the first thing is just to adopt what Taiwan did back in 2014, which is a claim pass., we simply say that for a project with sensitive and cybersecurity concerns, the tender documents must reject PRC suppliers. It’s as simple as that. But that is really the foundation, because when people are not sure of even whether the networks and devices will be betray their communications, there really is no room for innovation let alone end to end innovation. And so only when the end to end-ness of encryption, of course, but also…

Audrey Tang: the privacy protecting environments could be guaranteed. Then we’re talking about open innovation. I don’t think it’s a fracture or a balkanization, per se. I think the core internet has always been about working with the end users. In a sense there’s no end users, there’s only potential co-creators.

Azeem Azhar: Right.

Audrey Tang: If there are jurisdictions that take a not rule of law, by rule by a law approach, it’s like they drop the “inter-“ from the internet and go back to intranets, essentially. I still think the core internet will prevail and it’s our job to make sure that people understand the difference between a rule by law, instrumental use of the law and aphorisms, and the rule of law of the norm shaping that shapes the open internet.

Azeem Azhar: I’m curious from another historical perspective, how the Taiwanese government hacker community of which you were part reflected or responded when we had the Edward Snowden revelations and the greater awareness of the American National Security Agency’s, tactical operations, which involved trying to weaken thetrustworthiness of hardware coming out of other parts of the world, including the US. Does the same norms that you talk about, trustworthiness with respect to PRC, apply to other states, operators, and other countries?

Audrey Tang: Definitely, and that’s why, the preferred instant message tool in Taiwan has always been end-to-end encrypted.

Azeem Azhar: Right.

Audrey Tang: End-to-end encryption is not a “good to have.” It’s a must for the Taiwanese citizenry. We understand because there’s a lot of people who work in PRC jurisdictions, but they are Taiwanese and run Taiwanese companies. Ever since the great firewall wasn’t that great, in the very beginning, we understand what it’s like to be in an adversarial network environment. We’re very careful and aware of all this, long before Snowden. I would say that our Snowden moments came when the great firewall was first being built, and that was around the turn of century.

Azeem Azhar: One of the notions that comes out from you a lot, is this notion of social pressure. You talk about media competency, not media literacy. We’re talking about a highly digital level of skills, probably amongst the younger population, but increasingly across Taiwan as a whole.

Azeem Azhar: I’m curious about how that is changing the entrepreneurial environment within the Island. Taiwan has got some amazing technology companies, Pegatron and Hon Hai, which is Foxconn and TSMC, which is the major fab for the world’s semiconductors, but what it hasn’t got, to my knowledge is really, really exceptional software-based or internet service-based companies that are of the same global scale as a Hon Hai or a TSMC. Do you think that that is something that this move towards a better understanding of internet culture could start to support, or is there something else about the dynamics, either of the market or Taiwanese business culture that means you’ll stick on the hardware side?

Audrey Tang: Because the supply chain and production-based community in Taiwan is so strong, it’s very natural for a software designer or interaction designer to work with the hardware parts while of course, amplifying whatever innovations they have, like through virtual reality or extended reality, working with the hardware ecosystems. That’s no coincidence.

Audrey Tang: I would also say that there’s more and more, for example, Google and Resolve and other multinationals considering Taiwan to be not just the market, but actually the head culture of R&D in this part of the world. That’s certainly true for Google and Microsoft. Many people who think about the software innovation of those multinationals, chances are that they’re developed in Taiwan. I’m using this Nokia flip phone and running KaiOS and I’m reminded that KaiOS is based on the Firefox OS effort that booted Gecko. Actually, most of the software engineers there were Mozilla Taiwan. Even though we don’t print Taiwan on all the products that we make in the software world, actually, there’s a lot of contributions, especially in the free software world.

Azeem Azhar: On that note, you’ve talked a little bit about the importance of the digital commons in some of your other work. When I look at companies, the very big platform companies like Facebook is a good example. I do see a lot of what they operate as being what I would consider the digital commons. I’m someone who thinks that there’s a good question to be asked about the structural separation between applications that you build on top of common infrastructure. When I look at the social graph, for one example, but there are others, I think that’s the kind of thing that could reasonably be considered to live within a digital commons. Is that something that resonates with you? If so, how would you go about making it a reality?

Audrey Tang: Yeah. In a sense, just like any AI that’s assistive intelligence projects, the two question always to ask is that it’s value aligned, meaning that it is acting as the best interest to the person who use it, and also whether it’s accountable, meaning that if things go wrong, can we hold something or someone to account? If those two things are true, it’s certainly true for the more basic technologies like react coming from Facebook. Of course, it’s community governed, and of course, it’s quite accountable in their open source project governance. I wouldn’t say the same about a social graph, however, that it’s 100% value aligned and 100% accountable, mostly because the rules can change ahead of the norm. Taking a norm-first approach, only when the social norm in the social sector has a good-faith belief that if things go wrong, they can always fork and own the technology. Do I consider that to be in the commons? In theory, and for example, it would fit that bill, because if people don’t like the way Vitalik is running his show, they would just do a hard fork.

Azeem Azhar: I could spend hours on this topic, but unfortunately, we’re at the top of the time.

Audrey Tang: It’s a three days seminar topic.

Azeem Azhar: No, it’s amazing that there’s so much to talk about with you. Minister Tang, I’ve really enjoyed the discussion. You’ve identified yourself as a conservative anarchist. Can you briefly just put those two words together for us?

Audrey Tang: Well, conservative means someone who respects traditions and would not hurt existing traditions in the name of progress. Then anarchist is someone who takes no orders and gives no orders, but just facilitates conversation. To me, to conserve the culture of the internet, the core internet, the end-to-end principle, the open innovation, that is one of the most important thing to do, but also in Taiwan, because the official name of our state as translated by yours truly, is a Transcultural Republic of Citizens, it’s as important to conserve those cultures as with the internet culture.

Azeem Azhar: Audrey Tang, thank you so much for taking the time to speak to me today.

Audrey Tang: Thank you. Live long and prosper.

Azeem Azhar: And you. Live long and prosper. Bye-bye.