Interviewer: You work intensively with Ukraine on digital resilience and education. Can you please tell us more about this cooperation?

Audrey Tang: So we believe schools will become centers of digital resilience, especially following the revitalization after war. So we think that equipping teachers and students with the know-how of how to thrive in the digital era is sowing the seeds of inclusive prosperity.

Audrey Tang: And so because my own education starts on the Internet and then I dropped out of middle school, so the Internet enabled me to work with the entire world of fellow colleagues. And I think politics should not stand in the way of real cooperation. And so I think it’s very logical because we understand from our own experience that digital education is the basis for this digital democracy resilience.

Audrey Tang: And so in January we sent a delegation to the Lviv. And so it’s not just us, it’s also our MOFA, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, also Acer, which is a very famous Taiwanese computer brand, and also the Ukrainian Catholic University. And so together we sent electricity, like this small portable device and digital equipment. So generators, laptops, tablets, robot components, and so on, first to the local Grono High School. But that sends a message that we are willing to help them because we are also at the forefront at a struggle against authoritarian expansionism. So we learn also from Ukraine a lot.

Audrey Tang: For example, do you know that last August, right before we found it, there was a lot of cyber attacks following Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan. You were in Taiwan at the time.

Interviewer: Unfortunately, I was just here for three months. Too short.

Audrey Tang: I see. Okay. Right. So basically at the time there was a single day in which there’s 23 times more attacks in the DDoS compared to the previous peak. So the likes have never been seen before in Taiwan. And so we learned from the Ukrainian experience.

Audrey Tang: In fact, I was visiting Italy last June with around a dozen digital leaders, including Ukrainian one, so that we planned together how to counter such an asymmetric attack, where the attacker has tens or even hundreds of times more resource in a single campaign than we have in defense.

Audrey Tang: So we worked out a few strategies. And one strategy is just to join this global backbone. So, for example, our own website online at the same hour as the military drill did not even go down for a second. And I publicly say so to the press, after which we got even more free testing. But we didn’t go down because we joined the international peer-to-peer network, Anycast network, also Web3 network, like interplanetary file system. So that everybody helps us defend more than 200,000 computers together.

Audrey Tang: So you will have to take down all the NFT pictures like Bored Ape Yacht Club, which is on the same peer-to-peer network as long as there’s one still going on. And that one doesn’t even need to be in democratic countries. It could be in autocracy, maybe a journalist running this node to protect against censorship and tampering. So by joining this Web3 network, we enjoyed resilience, even though our resource is comparatively fewer than that of our attackers.

Interviewer: And could you do that permanently or would that be something like that is quite temporary?

Audrey Tang: No, no, we do that permanently. So ever since last August, moda.gov.tw, which is our website, can be connected over HTTPS or IPNS, which is the interplanetary system.So even if, for example, a large earthquake destroys all our submarine cables, then still through a little bit of satellite connection and so on, everybody around the world can still access our website.

Interviewer: And would that be possible to connect the whole Taiwanese system to this system?

Audrey Tang: Yes. So basically, interplanetary file system works for any content that is not interactive. Basically, if it’s about broadcasting, like every visitor sees the same thing, then it’s good to… it’s like a bit torrent, you know.Like if I download a copy on my browser, the Brave browser, then I can serve the same content to people near me.

Audrey Tang: So the attacker would have to take down all the 200,000 computers at once around the world, which is not easy, right? Right.But it’s not as suitable if this is about personalized service, like filing tags and so on.But because all our website is non-interactive content, it’s broadcasting. So our entire website is on IPNS.

Interviewer: There is one… I’ve just been to INDSR, and you spoke as well about the satellite, about Starlink 2.0, and the question how to actually prevent that the underground cables will be cut, even if it’s highly improbable that all of them will be cut because they’re international also.

Interviewer: But what are your plans so far? Like they also told me that they might even… because right now I think Taiwan is using some channels on a Singaporean satellite.So if the Chinese attack it, they will actually attack a Singaporean one and a Taiwanese one?

Audrey Tang: A few things, right? One is that, for example, when we video conference with one another between domestic actors in Taiwan, like in MODA in our ministry, we use several things, including say Google Meet.And we ensure with Google Meet that the compute center is in Zhanghua as domestic. And also the infrastructure itself is maintained by Google’s partners in Taiwan that has a Taiwanese nationality.

Audrey Tang: And so because of that, we are reasonably sure even when all the submarine cables are cut, the international ones, the domestic communication, video conferencing, will still work. Compare that to if we use a foreign compute center for a video conference, which would be basically I call you, but the call is routed to other countries and then back. Then if the submarine cables are cut, then we cannot contact each other anymore, right? So we are working with all the three cloud providers, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, to ensure that they have similar arrangements of local resilience so that we can keep the communications open.

Audrey Tang: But of course, you’re a journalist, so your report will eventually find its way to international audience. And so just for international journalism and other emergency response communications, we work again with multiple satellite service providers.

Audrey Tang: What you have described is asynchronous satellite, a very limited bandwidth. But we’re also working with non-synchronous, asynchronous satellites. So throughout this year and next, we will have more than 700 spots in Taiwan equipped with non-geosynchronous satellite receivers.

Audrey Tang: I think the TTC, the Telecom Tech Center, has already tested one in Mazu recently, successfully, because Mazu, as you know, recently suffered from this “accidental” submarine cable cut, right? It’s not repaired, but during those times that it wasn’t repaired, TTC, in addition to the microwave fallback, we also tested the non-geo stationaries.

Interviewer: And you’re also developing LEO, right? Low Earth Orbiting.

Audrey Tang: So yeah, non-synchronous includes middle Earth and low Earth orbits. There’s a little bit of trade-off. Middle Earth is fast, but slightly higher latency, meaning you have to wait a little bit before the other end transmits. But it requires fewer satellites. But LEO requires a lot of satellites, but it’s even faster in terms of latency.

Interviewer: And these are all steps you actually took as a lesson from the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Audrey Tang: Exactly. And we work with a plurality of providers. As I mentioned, three local cloud providers and three or more satellite providers. Because we also saw from Ukraine. If you over-trust one single provider, then that provider becomes a bottleneck.

Interviewer: Oh yes. That could still happen. What else did you learn from Ukraine?

Audrey Tang: Yeah. The other thing is we really wanted to ensure that our journalism sector can thrive. As for disinformation management, Ukraine uses a very new playbook in which instead of just the intelligence unit working on its own, they work with collective intelligence, or open-source intelligence, meaning that everyone with the VR app is a node to first understand what’s actually going on in the context, but also contribute intelligence.

Audrey Tang: So this is a little bit like civic journalism. And I think during the initial days of Russia’s unprovoked and brutal aggression in the war to Kiev, I stayed up all night, just refreshing Kiev Independent and other correspondents on the ground.

Audrey Tang: Which means the Russian propaganda did not have an upper hand when it comes to international information here. But if the journalists did not have sufficient bandwidth, or if the journalists did not have up-to-date information, then obviously the Russian propaganda, synthetic media and so on, defects, will win the day.

Audrey Tang: So in addition to providing bandwidth to journalists, we also need to make sure that they’re given a proper platform to work with Google, YouTube, or Facebook Meta and so on, so that in times like this they already know each other and can provide a platform for journalism, including civic journalism, instead of for propaganda or synthetic media.

Interviewer: How does that work on a practical level? For example, I access WeChat, for example, I see there’s fake information, what do I do? I’m a journalist, do I have a special forum or post?

Audrey Tang: So in Taiwan, we have several organizations, part of the International Fact-Checking Network, or IFCN. They are the first line of defense to basically provide up-to-date fact-check on the trending viral disinformation of the day.

Audrey Tang: But how do we know it is viral? Especially, as you said, instead of on the public platform, maybe it’s on the LINE platform, which is the most popular in Taiwan, and LINE is encrypted end-to-end. So we do not have visibility of what people are sending. So we work with several organizations, and they’re all in a civil society, so it’s not us, it’s not state surveillance.

Audrey Tang: But we ensure, for example, that if you long tap a message on LINE that you received, you can flag it as a scam or a spam.So it’s like email, right? Email is private to you, but if you receive spam, you can flag that as junk mail and share the signal of that email or the incoming message to this clearinghouse that let us know, and everybody knows really, what are the trending disinformation?

Audrey Tang: So there are many organizations. There’s a grassroots one called Cofacts for collaborative fact-checking. There’s the antivirus company Trend Micro. There’s another startup, no longer a startup, but a unicorn now, called WhosCall from GoGoLook, which is already finding a market in Japan for blocking and soliciting scams and so on.

Audrey Tang: So basically antivirus, counter-scam and counter-disinformation are the same ecosystem, and they work very closely together to surface the most viral disinformation of the day so that professional fact-checkers can focus their energy on the ones that are actually trending.

Interviewer: How is it..because we also talked to Puma Shen, and he said he’s not really troubled about fake news, because that’s easy, but he’s really troubled about conspiracy theories, because there’s not really something you can do about it.

Interviewer: Often they are so wild that you can’t, I mean, it doesn’t really, even if you say this is not true, people will think you say it’s not true because you’re part of the circle, blah, blah, blah. So how can you actually counter these?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, during the pandemic, we found many cases like Puma said. Around the world there was this anti-vax conspiracy that says there’s microchips in the vaccines. You probably have seen that.

Interviewer: We had them all.

Audrey Tang: You had them all?

Interviewer: They were so strong in Germany.

Audrey Tang: I know, Yeah, and Taiwan has one of the highest vaccination rates because we didn’t really have an anti-vax political faction. No political faction actually bought into anti-vax. And the reason why is that we tapped into collective intelligence. We announced publicly that how many people of what age bracket are preferring AstraZeneca or Moderna or Pfizer BNT or Medigen and later on Novavax.So there’s this squabble.

Audrey Tang: So we turned this zero-sum, Vax anti-vax sentiment into a my-vax-seem-better-than-yours competition. And so even so, when back then, when the elderly people did not want AstraZeneca because of the side-effect reports from Europe, they still see that the younger people, 50 years old, 40 years old, 30 years old, got AstraZeneca and they seem fine.

Audrey Tang: And then, of course, some of them still feel very strongly. There are people who think Medigen is like water. And there are people who only want Medigen. And just to make a point, I got five shots of four different brands. Just to make a point.

Interviewer: A super guinea pig. (laughter)

Audrey Tang: Exactly. So because of that, the entire society turned what would be a polarized conspiracy theory fueled conversation into like everybody is fine with being vaccinated. It’s just my vaccine is better than yours.

Audrey Tang: So collective intelligence, again, I think is the most important because we reflect in real time what’s actually happening to the entire society.

Interviewer: So it means you’re just kind of creating a different narrative. So you’re using the collective intelligence.

Audrey Tang: Yes.

Interviewer: Like on a practical, could you explain on a practical level how that works? So people have the information.

Audrey Tang: Sure. Right. So people would go to this website, 1922.gov.tw. 1922 is this toll-free number you can call to ask any question about pandemic and get that answered in real time.

Audrey Tang: So that is already collective intelligence because when people are worried about something, they have someone to talk to. And that someone is usually an intercall center, someone who’s working in disaster relief, maybe from a charity with a lot of empathy and so on. So that will bring the polarization back.

Interviewer: So it’s not a government official who answers the phone, but somebody from civil society.

Audrey Tang: So I think it’s both from the Chunghwa Telecom and also from Tzu Chi our leading charity. So they learn from each other.So by picking up a phone, real time feedbacks, for example, in March 2020, we started rationing our masks.

Audrey Tang: And there was a young boy who called 1922 who said, you’re rationing pink mask to me. I don’t want to wear pink to school. My classmates will laugh at me. So do something. Right. Ration blue mask to me, which is difficult because we don’t have sufficient supply at that point.

Audrey Tang: But the very next day at a 2 p.m. press conference, all the medical officers wore pink masks. And Minister Chen even said that the Pink Panther is his childhood hero. And so it’s very funny. He said in a very funny way, like serious and funny way.

Audrey Tang: And because of that, there was a suggestion from the participation officer of his ministry. We have such people in each ministry in charge of connecting to collective intelligence. And so after that, the boy became the most hit boy in the class because all the ministry social media turned pink and all the leading brands.And the boy become like the only boy in his class that has the color of the heroes and the hero of the hero, the Pink Panther. So this is already collective intelligence.

Audrey Tang: Now, as I mentioned, if you call 1922 and say, how do I get a vaccine? And so on, they would direct you to the 1922 website, which allows you to tick like out of the four or so vaccines, which one are you are acceptable to you?By default, it’s all ticked.

Audrey Tang: But you can take something out and leave only the ones you want.And then when that supply comes, you will receive a SMS telling you that it’s your turn. And please feel free to start registering. And then you go back to the same website and it lists nearby clinics and so on. And then so you can get a vaccine in time.So this is very efficient in the sense that even when the vaccine are just undergoing inspection for a week after landing in Taiwan, we already know each and everyone’s destination. We already know who will get them.

Audrey Tang: And the second thing is that like a week or more in advance, we already publish like this batch of like half a million or a million AstraZeneca, you know, the 40 years old want them, the 30 years old want them and so on.And so because the conspiracy theory was always counting on like people refusing to get vaccines.

Audrey Tang: But now that we have real numbers, so the elderly people who skip AstraZeneca can just ask their children or grandchildren what it feels like to get AstraZeneca and maybe revise their decision. Maybe they still stick to Moderna. Some people only want BNT Pfizer. But that is fine as long as they are vaccinated.

Interviewer: So did you have a big bracket of society that was really anti-vax or refused that? Because this is what happened in Germany, for example. I think we were, I mean, as you know, Russian disinformation is very strong in Germany. And they actually sponsor a lot of French groups. So this became really huge. And I think after COVID, we have a huge fatigue in democracy, actually. So people, you know, they said it’s a COVID dictatorship and so on. Is this something you experienced?

Audrey Tang: No, not at all. As I mentioned, we successfully turned anti-vax conspiracy into just anti-AstraZeneca, but pro-Moderna. And it’s no longer a conspiracy because it’s just personal preference.

Interviewer: But do you generally have a problem with fatigue in democracy or is this nothing that troubles Taiwan?

Audrey Tang: Well, yes and no. Right? Back in 2014, before the sunflower movement, there was a real fatigue. Like people did not believe they can effect a real change.And right after the sunflower movement, the trust in institutions was really low, like 9% or something of the administration from the people.

Audrey Tang: And so we were at that point where the career public service really wanted to engage the public in a new way, digitally, so that they don’t do a controversial thing and people go on and occupy the parliament. I mean, although it was nonviolent, it is not a way for the democracy to just go on and on with just nonviolent communications that involves occupiers.

Audrey Tang: And so we, the people who supported the occupiers with like facilitation, deliberative democracy, digital tools and so on, were asked to join the cabinet as reverse mentors, as people who advise the cabinet members. So I started working with the career public service around the end of 2014.

Audrey Tang: And so then the trust in institutions grew gradually because of the reason being that we open new spaces so that people don’t have to wait for this once every four years, once every two years, to vote only, but rather can continuously start petitions, participatory budgeting, many other things.

Interviewer: And how do you, because you often speak also about that in the digital sphere you need to have something like town halls and meeting rooms. And this is, I mean, this is the big problem about polarization and filter bubbles and so on.

Interviewer: So how can you actually build up something in a space that also in Taiwan is already carved out, right? Most of the people are on Facebook and it is quite partisan and quite heated discussion.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, I think one point is that we need to have credibly neutral institutions. So like in Taiwan, we have say the National Academy or the PTT, which is run by students of National Taiwan University. It has been open source for 25 years.

Audrey Tang: And the great thing about these credibly neutral institutions is that they are not responding to the advertiser or the shareholders’ wing, but nor are they controlled by a minister. So they avoid capture by the private sector or by the state.

Audrey Tang: And because they exist for a very long time, people can see that when there is a town hall in the digital realm established by these institutions, it is non-partisan or rather it is all partisan in the sense that all parties want their platform in it.

Audrey Tang: So I think this is really, really crucial when we say social infrastructure. It needs to be operated by the social sector or civil society and trying to repurpose a private sector digital realm for social sector purposes will always lead to conflict of interest.

Audrey Tang: Like if I don’t want to single out Facebook, but for example Facebook, they have an incentive to keep you addicted, to keep the advertisers doing precision persuasion targeting and so on. Those environments, it becomes like in a very noisy nightclub trying to have a town hall debate.

Interviewer: Exactly.

Audrey Tang: Right. Exactly. With private bouncers always ready to escort you out, with alcoholic drinks always served and so on. And then people say, oh, maybe democracy doesn’t work, but that’s because you’re doing democracy in a place that’s not the social sector.

Interviewer: But how could you actually, I mean it would really need also cooperation among countriesto make these civil social spaces bigger than Facebook because right now it’s great that you have that in Taiwan but this should be much bigger. Is there any, or is this something you want to bring forward?

Audrey Tang: Oh yeah, definitely.

Audrey Tang: People around the world actually in the open source communities have experienced what I call pro-social media. So unlike the social media that are anti-social, which means people become more polarized or isolated as they engage in it, pro-social media lets people see the common values, shared values hidden in plain sight.

Audrey Tang: So one of such pro-social media tool is called POLIS. It is a survey tool that lets you see at a glance what’s actually happening when polarized people manage to agree on each other. So at the moment there is a, because you say international, an international POLIS conversation that I started at Summit for Democracy right now about AI.

Audrey Tang: So because there are many polarized views, you can see some people think AI development should be slowed by governments. Maybe you agree, maybe you don’t agree, right? And a lie is halfway around the world before the truth has got its boots on. And it can move faster and help prevent the spread of lies. It can be a fact checking tool. Maybe you agree, maybe you disagree.

Audrey Tang: Now the great thing about POLIS is that it shows you really people are only divided on one thing. But they agree with pretty much everything else. But if you’re on anti-social media, everybody spends time on this one thing.

Interviewer: Exactly, yeah

Audrey Tang: And what is this thing? This thing says, and I quote, this thought says, “People worried about AI safety and talking about how AI is going to, for example, kill everyone.” But talking this way just contributes to the AI hype and it’s damaging. But some people believe it’s, we’re actually doomed soon. So we should say now.

Audrey Tang: And some people said, no, this decrease coordination ability because everybody panicked. So even if it’s probably somewhat true, you shouldn’t say things like that, but instead should focus on working with each other. And if you look at, including Twitter or Facebook, there’s this endless debate back and forth on just this one single point.

Interviewer: Exactly.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Audrey Tang: Exactly.But actually, you know the POLIS, pro-social media has this idea of group informed consensus. So we can see everybody agree that actually generative AI will already change many industries. So we need civil society led initiative to tackle, for example, the believable misinformation and skill issue.

Audrey Tang: And maybe we should build on our experience solving those issues to become stronger as democracies before going into this long term existential risk. Maybe we should focus on solving a few things at the moment.

Audrey Tang: And this actually, no matter which side you’re on, you all agree. Literally everybody agree. So pro-social media is something that can surface those common values that are often neglected in the anti-social media.

Interviewer: And I mean, isn’t this totally crucial as you just mentioned AI? Because we don’t really have this data sharing agreement among democracies. But as China has such a huge pool of AI information, and we don’t really share the information they will always have, or they will have more access to information, better AI probably.

Interviewer: So isn’t it a big problem that most of the governments, I mean, you have always been into this your whole life, but most of governments, they’re not really informed. So they take decisions too late, and they’re still not being taken. So what should be done about that?

Audrey Tang: Yeah. And indeed, what Taiwan’s experience was always what we call People First PPP. So People Public-Private Partnership. So before going into a long debate about the state should regulate more, the private sector should innovate more, and so on.

Audrey Tang: Maybe what really is needed is, as we did starting 2015, when UberX first came to Taiwan, we asked everyone, including taxi unions, Uber drivers, and passengers, what do we do if someone with no professional driver license drives to earn a living picking up strangers and say, I’m just carpooling, right?

Audrey Tang: (laughter)

Audrey Tang: What do we do, right? And then overwhelmingly, the consensus was that actually, you probably need to get a professional driver’s license for that, and the insurance registration, and so on. But Uber also had a point in saying surge pricing helps the drivers. But then the people said, but you cannot undercut existing meters, right?

Audrey Tang: So it’s a very nuanced consensus. And once the people has this consensus, what the public sector does, what the private sector does, it’s obvious. And so we resolved that issue of emerging technology. We’ve used Polis for many things, Airbnb, privacy preserving, contact tracing, many things.

Audrey Tang: And so I think, like Finland recently decided that they want to also invest in Polis following Taiwan and Canada and New Zealand and so on, to be part of the democratic infrastructure. Because the free software is open source, that means that each country’s investment is of benefit to the next country that uses this.

Interviewer: I mean, for you, being really into the topics and going to the summit for democracy and so on, you know about these trends. You’ve always worked in that, but at the same time, you’re limited because of the international status of Taiwan, right? You can’t have these government discussions, ministries. Yeah, you have ministry discussions.

Audrey Tang: Now I have, right? And that’s thanks to the summit for democracy. Because the summit for democracy, as well as the declaration for the future of the internet, BFI, are this new type of international collaboration in which Taiwan is a full participant. We’re referred to as a partner or a democracy.

Interviewer: And China does not want to chase you out of that, there’s no such attempts so far?

Audrey Tang: Exactly. So out of this more than 60 now signatories of the declaration for the future of the internet, each and everyone recognizes us as a full democracy, a full partner.

Audrey Tang: So we refer to each other as partners. So there’s no this oh, I don’t know, observer, country/area/territory. (laughter) Or whatever, right? And it’s summit for democracy. It’s not summit of democracies. So this is not the exclusive club. This is just a bunch of partners working together to advance democracy.

Audrey Tang: So I think this new type of conversation in which we participate as a full democracy is a really creative way out of the traditional more Westphalian point of view.

Interviewer: And what do you think, why hasn’t China chased you there so far? I mean, whenever Taiwan has too much leverage in international relations, they would always find a way to get you out. Why haven’t they done so, so far?

Audrey Tang: Well, first of all, I think to democratize, that is to say to give people a say, requires a different kind of thinking. A request, for example, trusting journalists in bringing up both the good news and the bad news so everybody can learn and so on.But at the moment, I don’t see PRC fully committing to this course of action. You probably had first-hand experience?

Interviewer: Yeah. (laughter)

Audrey Tang: Right? So, I mean, theoretically, right? If they, I don’t know, sincerely invite you back to help them have a real civil society and journalism and so on, they would be, of course, also contributing to the Declaration of the Future of Internet, and the Summit for Democracy. But at this point in history, it doesn’t seem like they’re totally committed to that.

Interviewer: Oh, yeah, yeah. That is very much the case. So they just want to, they’re not part of the club, so they don’t, yeah, that’s a very good way.

Audrey Tang: My personal wish is that they see the light and join the democratization.

Interviewer: That would be nice.

Audrey Tang: It would be really nice.

Interviewer: I’d like to go, if you allow, go back to your personal history because you lived in Germany also.

Audrey Tang: Yes, in Saarbrücken.

Interviewer: Exactly. I guess you even speak, maybe you still speak German.

Audrey Tang: Ein bißchen.

Interviewer: Sounds good. So I think this is something that our readers would be really interested in, like your experiences there, and I think that was a year that really shaped you also, right?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, definitely, definitely. Yeah, because at the time I was 11, but because I don’t speak Deutsch at all when I joined, so I was joining this Gunschule, the Albert-Schweitzer-Grundschule in Dudweiler, Saarland.

Interviewer: Your pronunciation is top.

Audrey Tang: Thank you. Right. And so my classmates were then one year younger than I am. And before going to Sachland, I was 10 years old, but I’m attending the sixth grade in Taiwan, so my classmates were two years my senior. However, in my own experience, my classmates in Germany being 10 years old are much more mature than those 12 years old that were my classmates.

Audrey Tang: And because it’s like a Pygmalion, in fact, because the adults treated the children as adults, right? They can actually schedule their own rest of the day instead of just spending a very long time in the class and in cram schools, yes. And if they’re on time, like a privileged time, right? If they’re punctual, then they have a certain sense of pride, right, of being punctual. But it is entirely within the kids themselves. It is not because they will be subject to corporal punishment or things like that.

Audrey Tang: So there’s a lot of intrinsic motivation instead of just extrinsic control in the German system. So I think it had a big influence on me because I always thought that education is in the way of learning because that was always my experience before going to Deutschland. But now, when I was in Deutschland, even for just a year, I saw that actually the educator’s role can be like a facilitator’s role instead of just cramming more and more standardized answers to students. So even today, when I start meetings, I sometimes say, so we’re going to start right on time, because I take pride in being punctual.

Interviewer: Okay. That’s nice. Probably better than most Germans.

Interviewer: But when did you, because I think what is quite interesting about your CV is also that you very much follow your own path, right? So when did you, do you think that was something that your parents gave you or that you always had or was it something you developed over time?

Audrey Tang: Well, of course, my parents are very liberal folks. That really helped. And also that I encountered the internet really early when I was 12. I went back to Taiwan, got my heart surgery for a year and just connected with this world of researchers and people who don’t mind that I was just 12 or 13 or 14. Because of course the internet, you can’t really see my age. So I started doing research.

Interviewer: About your condition. About your heart

Audrey Tang: Right. About everything.

Audrey Tang: And then like when I was 14, I decided to quit middle school. Not because the head of school is bad to me. Actually, the contrary. She was really, really good to me. But she always wanted me to get the top grades, to get the best high school, to go to the US, to get a PhD, to do research. But I simply told her, it was an email printout, that I already started doing research with people in foreign universities who didn’t know I was just 14.

Audrey Tang: So maybe we can just bypass all that. And maybe I can spend 16 hours a day on research. And she said, yeah, you don’t have to go to my school anymore. And I was like, okay, but this is compulsory education. And she’s like, I’ll just fake the records for you.

Interviewer: Oh really? Well, that’s nice.

Audrey Tang: So the head of school is really good to me. Because then I can take her promise to my parents and say that I don’t have to wait until the end of my ninth grade, end of compulsory education. I can just start a startup, start a company together with my friends, even though I was just in the eighth grade.

Interviewer: Wow. And this one year when you had your heart disease, it meant that you had to stay at home for a year and then just emerge in the internet?

Audrey Tang: Well, yeah. So yes and no. I mean, I still attended school, but not in a high energy way. Certainly not sports classes. And so my heart condition was diagnosed when I was just 40 days old. And when I was four, I overheard doctors telling my family that I only had a 50% chance of living to such an age that they can get a surgery.

Interviewer: Oh wow.

Audrey Tang: Right. So I always lived in an existential risk until I got my surgery in 12. So it’s the entire eight years, which is quite sufficient to form my core personality, where I always try to write down what I learned in a day, publish it to the internet when there’s internet, and so that I can sleep easier knowing that even if I don’t wake up, it’s fine because I’ve already published.

Interviewer: Oh wow. So you knew about your condition as a child?

Audrey Tang: Right. When I was four.

Interviewer: Oh, your parents told you?

Audrey Tang: Well, I overheard the doctors. And my parents didn’t deny that. I don’t remember anything before four anyway. It’s like my earliest memory.

Interviewer: Wow. And that is probably also why they were probably super liberal, but that probably made them more liberal.

Audrey Tang: Right. Exactly.

Interviewer: Because when you know you have a kid like that, you just wanted to be happy.

Audrey Tang: Exactly. To cherish that time we have together.

Interviewer: Exactly. Wow. Okay. How is it for you now having a ministry because you’ve been such a freewheeling minister flying around? How is that?

Audrey Tang: Well, I’m still flying around. (laughter) Yeah. I think back in 2016, when I first got, I guess, promoted from a reverse mentor, really an intern in a cabinet position for two years to the full minister still in the same office, I said quite publicly that I work with the government, not for the government.

Audrey Tang: So meaning that I work through voluntary association with all the ministries and departments and agency that want to work with me, but I’m not giving orders to them because as I said, I was a minister at large with a portfolio. I don’t have my own ministry.

Audrey Tang: But during the pandemic, the three years, I worked very closely with many, many agencies. For the vaccination, for example, we had to work closely with the part of the National Development Council that does e-services and data. We had to work closely with the part of the Ministry of Economic Affairs that does digital transformation and platform economy, part of the National Communication Commission when it comes to counter-infodemic, and also the part of the Department of Cybersecurity when it comes to ensure the safety of the information transmitted.

Audrey Tang: So all these different units that worked very closely with me for a couple of years after the pandemic, we just put them together and it became a new ministry. So it’s not that life suddenly got these teams of people. These teams of people were already very close to me because of pandemic.

Interviewer: I see. And how is this? Is this somehow affecting also your time? Because I knew that before you always had this, I think Tuesday where you met with the…

Audrey Tang: Wednesday.

Interviewer: Wednesday, sorry, where you met with citizens. Can you still do that?

Audrey Tang: That was because I had another portfolio, which is social innovation. So like social entrepreneurship. But that portfolio is now Minister Li Yongde. And so because I transferred the portfolio to him, so the social entrepreneurs now reach Minister Li Yongde instead when they want to go to the social enterprise, the World Foreign or things like that. It’s Minister Li. So there is still such a job, it’s just no longer my job.

Interviewer: Okay. And are you missing that? I mean, having this, you know, because you always work in also civil rights.

Audrey Tang: I definitely still work with civil rights.

Interviewer: Yeah. Is this something you’re missing?

Audrey Tang: When the civil rights groups ask for a meeting, I still dedicate a lot of time and it’s still the same radical transparency principle. So you can still see the transcripts of, for example, civil society groups asking for broadband as a human right for overseas fishing. People who don’t have citizenship here, but nevertheless should probably enjoy broadband as a human right.

Audrey Tang: And so I still meet them to make a full report. It’s just not on the 空總 previously the Air Force HQ anymore. It’s usually just that meeting room over there. Yeah. So I still meet people both online and face to face, same radical transparency, but no longer social entrepreneurs.

Interviewer: I see. And there was one thing that surprised me because a lot of my friends, Jonas, has been talking to you and they said it’s all very free and stuff. And when I asked for this interview, I sent in my question and twice they were actually half of them were raised.

Audrey Tang: Oh, really? Yeah. I didn’t know.

Interviewer: Yeah. And then I was kind of surprised to ask myself, does this come with high administration?

Audrey Tang: If you specifically ask for, for example, social entrepreneurship or internet broadcasting policy and so on nowadays, because I’m no longer minister at large. These are specifically other ministries’ portfolio.

Interviewer: I wasn’t allowed to ask a question, for example, because you said you’re a conservative anarchist. And I wanted to ask how that goes together, like being a minister of a full ministry or any conservative…

Audrey Tang: I’m fine answering that actually. So, yeah, because that’s definitely not a minister question. Right. But OK, I can answer that.

Audrey Tang: So I believe in voluntary association. That is to say, not coercing people to do things. And fortunately, the Ministry of Digital Affairs, even in our role as the administration for cybersecurity or in my role of chair of National Cybersecurity Institute, it only currently has this, I would say, top down power over fellow public servants.

Audrey Tang: Our current Civil Cybersecurity Act does not extend outside of the critical infrastructure and the public service. So it is true that after becoming the head of the National Cybersecurity, I gained a little bit of top down power over how the public service use their devices and so on. But it does not mean that I now have coercive power to convenience stores or any other private sector stores. So there’s some change, but not a lot of change when it comes to this voluntary association.

Audrey Tang: And I’m still, you know, working to conserve traditions. So in Taiwan, we’ve got 20 national languages, including the sign language. And if you’re making progress on one of the cultures to sacrifice the other, then that would be optimizing too soon. So always, for example, we just talked about AI. I always put an emphasis on conserving the existing 20 national languages, even in a way that can enable trans cultural translations, to make sure that people can still interface with those language models without suffering linguistic injustice.

Audrey Tang: At this moment, if you try to interact with those large models, it doesn’t actually speak Taiwanese languages. It speaks a little bit Mandarin, but pretty much nothing else. But that creates a problem, because if you speak Taiwanese Holo or any of the indigenous languages, you will have to rephrase whatever you thought to English or Mandarin and get back again, something that is not part of your tradition and that doesn’t respect your cultural norms.

Audrey Tang: I mean, it doesn’t even respect English cultural norms, but it does a better job respecting it. And so my ministry, the National Institute of Cyber Security, is now working on aligning AI so that it is more just epistemically with those different cultures. And that speaks to the conservative side of my politics.

Interviewer: I see. Okay, that’s interesting.

Audrey Tang: Just honoring traditions, but without coercing.

Interviewer: Do we still have time?

Assisitant: It’s 4.52.

Interviewer: Okay, okay. Maybe you have your last question. Okay, I have my last question. There’s only one last question, because there’s something I don’t know about Taiwan, I think or don’t understand about Taiwan. I think you would be a great person to answer that.

Interviewer: Because on one hand, I see Taiwan is super progressive, but on the other hand, people are always complaining that it’s still a very conservative society. So how do you see that?

Audrey Tang: Taiwan is a trans-cultural republic, right? So trans-culturalism means that, for example, on marriage equality, you are always going to have people who are pro, who are against that.

Audrey Tang: But there was an image from the Taiwan Pride Parade last year, in which you can see that there’s someone holding a banner saying that I’m a normal person against gay marriage, but with these gay couples.

Interviewer: Sweet.

Audrey Tang: Right, and they’re fine with each other, actually in close proximity.

Interviewer: That’s very sweet.

Audrey Tang: That’s very sweet for both sides, actually, of them. So that is to say, even in the traditional polarized topics in Western jurisdictions, in Taiwan, we still manage to collaborate across differences.

Audrey Tang: And so, of course, one side would see each other as maybe progressive, the other maybe as conservative. But the beauty of Taiwan is that we’re committed on just trans-cultural democracy that let us work out those common values in plain sight.

Interviewer: Okay, I could go on forever, but I think our…

Audrey Tang: of course. Yeah, we agree to leave time for the photographer.

Photographer: Alright, Thank you.

Audrey Tang: Thank you.

Interviewer: Thank you.