Julie Zaugg: Can I also access it afterwards if I need go over something?

Shuyang Lin: Yeah, sure. You can access the transcript also if you want to modify anything, in 10 days, and then we’ll publish them.

Julie Zaugg: Cool. It’s good to be...

Audrey Tang: Thank you.

Audrey Tang: This is Shuyang Lin, our design architect.

Julie Zaugg: Thank you...

Audrey Tang: All right, set.

Julie Zaugg: Great. Thanks for taking the time to talk to me. This is a profile that’s going to be published in a French magazine called "Causette." It’s a women’s magazine in France that’s interested in gender issues. I’m going to be asking you questions very generally about your life.

Julie Zaugg: Maybe we can start with you telling me a bit about your childhood, where did you grow up? Can you tell me a bit about that?

Audrey Tang: Sure. I grew up on Earth, still remaining on Earth. I was born in Taipei City. I moved quite a few times. I went to Germany for a year, when I was 11. I went back to Taiwan and then visited Silicon Valley for a while. That was when I was 17 or so...18, actually.

Audrey Tang: I mostly just traveled a lot in the early ’20s, about 20 countries. That’s pretty much it. Otherwise, I’ve lived mostly in Taiwan.

Julie Zaugg: Would you say Taiwan is a place you call home, it feels the most like...?

Audrey Tang: No.

Julie Zaugg: No? [laughs]

Audrey Tang: I’ve migrated to the Internet around 12. Anywhere that has an Internet connection is home.

Julie Zaugg: [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Anywhere that doesn’t have an Internet connection feels strange.

Julie Zaugg: As a child you lived in Europe for how many years was that? As a child, when you were in Europe, how many years?

Audrey Tang: It was one year. Slightly more than one year. I think it was one year and a few months.

Julie Zaugg: That was in Germany?

Audrey Tang: That was in Germany.

Julie Zaugg: Why were you in Europe?

Audrey Tang: My dad went earlier to Germany for a year pursing PhD studies. Then we moved, because I was finishing primary school education at the time, two years in advance. In Taiwan there’s no way for the high school student to jump two grades. I was left without education.

Audrey Tang: My teachers, they all suggested that I went somewhere else to experience different education systems.

Julie Zaugg: I heard that you decided to stop school at 12, is that right? Why, what was the...?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, I toyed with the idea of stopping school at 12. As to why, it’s just that I got really into this Internet thing, and discovered that anything I wanted to learn, there’s a much larger community. The time that I spend in school is holding me back. It was stale in college. I didn’t actually drop out until I was 14.

Julie Zaugg: How did you first start getting interested in coding? Did you remember the first time you really found out about it?

Audrey Tang: Sure, when I was eight I was reading a programming language book. For me, it was a time saver because I was very interested in mathematics at the time. Computer was a tool to save time and to make what I’ve learned, like formula visible and easy to learn. It was something else, it was great.

Audrey Tang: I didn’t have access to an actual machine at the time but I simulated with paper.

Julie Zaugg: Yes, I read about that. You actually drew everything, like all the formulas and what the outcomes would be on paper?

Audrey Tang: That’s right, and all the components that they could be. An acquaintance of mine, Linda Liukas, did a children’s learning book called, "Hello Ruby."

Audrey Tang: She’s been spreading this in all different languages around the globe, taking this idea and having the children having those Paper Mate components computers, and connecting them, and simulating key press and writing where the computer would draw.

Audrey Tang: It is a very tangible way because for eight‑year‑olds, anything that you can touch is much more familiar with the abstractions that you can feel creates a much more intimate relationship between machines and humans.

Julie Zaugg: Do you remember what actually drew you to coding initially? What was the appeal for you?

Audrey Tang: It’s a time saver as I said. I don’t have to do arithmetics by hand. That’s what computer means. It’s something that computes for you, and then it also makes it much more visible.

Julie Zaugg: How did you first put into practice, what were first things you created basically?

Audrey Tang: My first program is "Hello World" as any other programmers are. My first non‑trivial program was an educational game that shows only a line between zero and one, some balloons, and then the user would guess the position of those balloons. For example, this would be one half.

Audrey Tang: Maybe you would guess that this is one quarter, but then if you type in one quarter, it will show that no one quarter is actually here. You have to guess higher. Bit by bit, you would learn the entire fractional number. This is for my younger brother who’s four at the time.

Julie Zaugg: How old were you when you did it?

Audrey Tang: Eight.

Julie Zaugg: After that, how did you move on from that? You created a startup, right?

Audrey Tang: Mm‑hmm. I was going to.

Julie Zaugg: What kind of startup was it?

Audrey Tang: It was a publishing house, and I wasn’t involved at the beginning. I was the author. They were curating this, nowaday, we would call it a blog. It’s basically people writing about their journey towards cyberspace.

Audrey Tang: The book is called "Roads to Cyberspace". It was on the bulletin board system, which is an online forum. People just pseudonymously submitted their journeys. The curational team at the publishing house, Informationist was the name, curates that into a book.

Audrey Tang: After the book was published, I look at the website of the publisher and saw that it was not very appealing and so took a week to code up unofficial web page. It was so appealing that the publishing house decided can we just use this as an official page.

Audrey Tang: Gradually, bit by bit, I become the CTO of the publishing house. By the time I was 15, the publishing house decided to pivot to change into a software publishing house, publishing a few pieces of software that I’ve written throughout the years. That’s when I’ve become the shareholder, started running the company.

Julie Zaugg: How long did you stay with that startup?

Audrey Tang: That was since ’95 to ’97, I think.

Julie Zaugg: After that, what was the next step?

Audrey Tang: After that, I went back to university and attended for a year‑and‑half. A lot of graduate student school studies, trying to understand through humanities and philosophy, and other disciplines, cognitive science helps you understand complex behavior that we’ve seen.

Audrey Tang: I’m also a consultant for the BenQ Company. At the time BenQ, it was not yet known as BenQ, when I joined. It was known as Acer Peripherals, which means it was a peripheral company to Acer Corporation.

Audrey Tang: I went to mainland China as well as Silicon Valley as part of the consultant work. Eventually we started a startup in Silicon Valley and then in Taiwan around the turn of the century. That was ’99, 2000.

Julie Zaugg: Come back to something you were saying when you went back to university. What sorts of insights that that provide you on the behaviors we see online? What did you understand...?

Audrey Tang: I had a lot of conversations, a mentor relationship with a cognitive scientist and philosopher in a nearby university. His interest at the time was what we call consilience, which means an anti‑disciplinary approach studying a problem without any constraints of any academic fields.

Audrey Tang: Around the time, these were very vague ideas, like complex systems and anti‑disciplinary research was in its very early days. We had some philosophic predecessors like Feyerabend and so on, but there’s no methodologies, so to speak, in this pursuit. That was when I started charting my research agenda.

Audrey Tang: That was very helpful, in that that my first mentors there was Tim Lane, as I said, the philosopher of cognitive science, also another philosopher studying Gadamer, the German philosopher the hermeneutic tradition, and around phenomenology and Kant, and a lot of other philosophers of science and around science.

Audrey Tang: I also studied from the traditional Chinese thought‑process. There are as a classical Chinese teacher, Yu T’ien-ts’ung who was very instrumental in Taiwan’s, what we call the Nativist Literature, the regional grass‑root literature identity. That was also where I drew from.

Audrey Tang: Of course, computational linguistics and anything I can find locally. That was the main inspirations that I drew from.

Julie Zaugg: What did it lead you to understand about how people behave online?

Audrey Tang: A few things. Online, we are all handicapped in some way. It’s as if we entered a world of people on the autism spectrum. We are forced to be immensely vocal, because other non‑verbal signals, either get dropped, reduced, or somehow changes meaning through this asynchronous communication.

Audrey Tang: Most people see the cyberspace as something that transcends space, which is true, but psychologically, the most important part, it transcends time. It makes a lot of time‑delayed conversations. It is self‑selecting thing. People who are very good at verbal expressions get disproportionate representation.

Audrey Tang: On the internet, culture evolve much more quickly. People tend to trust other people much more quickly, because they use the same words that they tend to use. This is something we do not see in face‑to‑face conversations. It is compressed, but also in a way expanded.

Audrey Tang: The collaboration is much easier, because across the Internet you cannot harm the other person, except psychologically. We work with that, too. In addition, people become fused in a subconscious way. One person’s emotion, even though the emotion is over, it affects other people when they see, after time delay, this kind of emotional utterances.

Audrey Tang: Basically it’s like an ecosystem where people post sentiments and affects evolve and compete for the scarcity of attention. We see a lot of emotions that are not dominant in the face‑to face world become easier to dominate in this online world, in particular sentiments of outrage. That’s fascinating to me.

Julie Zaugg: To get back to the second startup with Acer, how did it move on from that?

Audrey Tang: I created my own startup as the president of a small company, trying to figure out how open‑source, which was invented around ’98, this moniker, trying to reconcile the traditional free software world and the commercial software world, by creating something that’s a value both to the commercial side and to the civil society. It was fun.

Audrey Tang: It went from 2000, we wrote a manifesto called, "Cyberspace Anarchy," trying to figure out all the infrastructures it would take for a self‑governing anarchist community to thrive online, and tried to work piecemeal to make it happen.

Audrey Tang: Around 2002, we started working on this open foundry project which would be sponsored by Academia Sinica from Taiwan, and become the bedrock of the open source community in Taiwan. That took me a little bit out of the private sector and into the academic and the public sector.

Audrey Tang: Around 2005, I started leading this international effort of hundreds of computer scientists trying to reinvent the programming language that we use to respond to the new hardware situation, which is that the CPUs stopped getting faster, we get more CPUs and get GPUs, and the programming language need to change because of that.

Audrey Tang: It’s like a rewriting of a constitution. It’s recreating language. That took me to dozens of countries. That took from 2005 to 2008. I joined some Silicon Valley companies around 2008.

Julie Zaugg: Like which ones?

Audrey Tang: Socialtext was the first one and then quite a few startups as consultants or as shareholders.

Audrey Tang: Two years later an old friend of mine ‑‑ we’ve been working together for 11 years, and he’s at Apple working on computational linguistics on Siri ‑‑ and he wanted to pursue his PhD study, so he invited me to help him take care of his department while he went to do his PhD research. I helped him carry that team for six years.

Julie Zaugg: When did that start you said?

Audrey Tang: 2010.

Julie Zaugg: 2010. I’ve heard that from 2011 or so, you decided to retire and in brackets. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Mm‑hmm. That was 2014.

Julie Zaugg: 2014.

Audrey Tang: Yeah. We got Socialtext acquired in 2013 by a very large company, the Bedford Group. People fluent with the HR company, they bought Socialtext. That left me some instant cash. My income was very steady at the time. I was like, "OK, I don’t have to wait for any company’s bottom line anymore."

Audrey Tang: Mostly, the people I gave my time to are the public sector and civil society.

Julie Zaugg: Could you tell me a bit about that? When was the first time you got involved with the civil society and public sector?

Audrey Tang: As I said, back in ’96 or so, I was very interested already in the online civil right movement. Free speech and freedom of assembly online is as much as a movement as is an education because, mostly, people who didn’t have first‑time experience didn’t really know what this is about.

Audrey Tang: That’s what I, mostly, worked on is on education and awareness campaigns and then the free software movement, of course, moved into the what we call the free culture movement, which is trying to get more creators to relinquish most of their copyright, so that people who they don’t know can carry on their work.

Audrey Tang: I was involved very, very early on. There was less entry stuff. There’s no clear point, in which, that I got involved of or of...

Julie Zaugg: When the ‑‑ I don’t know how to say it ‑‑ gov‑zero.

Audrey Tang: Gov‑zero, g‑0‑v.

Julie Zaugg: G0v. Can you tell me a bit about that? How did that start?

Audrey Tang: It started by the co‑author of the Cyberspace Anarchy Manifesto, and my co‑founder, in 2000. Chia-Liang Kao, he was attending a hacker film by Yahoo! And they were originally trained to write some ecommerce site, which is very generic as a topic.

Audrey Tang: Then, at the time the Italian’s government ran an advertisement as to whom I had already read. They said, "Economic boosting applying is too complicated. Ordinary citizens doesn’t have a chance to understand it, such as, ’Follow whatever the government says and trust the government, pliantly.’’ It’s not a very popular advertisement.

Audrey Tang: It was with outrage that he and three of his friends who would eventually change their hackathon topic to put a visualization of the total national budget, proving that, actually, it’s not an ordinary citizen’s not able to understand a part of budget that concerns them, but that the translation work, the government really haven’t done.

Audrey Tang: This is, basically, what they call forking the government, meaning, taking what the government has to offer but taking it to a different direction. I joined a couple months later, working on the dictionary project. It was early 2013, January.

Julie Zaugg: The aim here is, really, to take the information that’s there and make it understandable.

Audrey Tang: Yes, and once it’s understandable, also create a venue for participation under the original national budget visualization platform, budget.g0v.tw. There’s already for each budget item a conversation for it, where you can write in your opinions and click whether you want this budget item to increase or decrease or to be cut.

Audrey Tang: This creates a bidirectional mechanism. It’s around specific budget items. People don’t talk vaguely about international budgeting, talk about one thing. It’s also a way for participation to happen.

Julie Zaugg: Has it had some affects? Has the government taken into account some...?

Audrey Tang: Of course. By 2014, end of 2014, after the occupy, a lot of mayors won by appealing to this kind of bidirectional Internet‑mediated conversation.

Audrey Tang: The budget platform became Taipei’s City budget platform, officially, budget Taipei, which the mayor read before the participatory budget effort, because people really have to understand what a budget is about before proposing PB. Then, it’s been spreading to six or seven, I think seven now, different cities, and Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: As for the national budget, itself, starting, I think early March, all our presidential promises was there translated into budget items that will be visible in a pretty similar way. That’s a direct result of me being in this ministry, is that we take those proven engagement modes and try to maintain it, so that they become part of the national government’s mechanism.

Julie Zaugg: Is it focused on the budget, or has there also been other types of policies and things that would explain in this way?

Audrey Tang: It’s not just budgets and their execution and their every month or every quarter reviews, we’re publishing this online, making it foreign. We’re also publishing online all the regulations and all the trade‑related laws 60 days before they become in effect for public discussion and maybe changing the directions.

Audrey Tang: Also, we have a national petition system where 5,000 people can countersign a petition and make sure that the government makes a timely and useful substantial dialogue. We’re introducing mechanisms, basically, all around a policy cycle, whether it’s early, whether it’s proactive or reactive, whether it was government initiated or people initiated, we’re trying to make sure that all these are possible.

Julie Zaugg: Do you have an example within the budgets of one point that was discussed very strongly and then something has changed?

Audrey Tang: For the Taipei City budget, there was a lot of conversation around the construction of sports‑related facilities, people wanted to make sure that it’s useful and multipurpose. There was a very large public conversation around the so‑called large Taipei dome, and it would benefit a lot from this hyper‑radical transparency.

Audrey Tang: I should note that after the budget of Taipei launched, people got into this conversation online, just like the national budget visualization. For a national budget, because it was a community effort, people just chatted among themselves.

Audrey Tang: Before the Taipei City won three weeks after this free‑chat thing, people were very surprised to find that every single bureau in Taipei City came and responded to every single topic posted.

Audrey Tang: It’s creating a direct line between professional public servants and citizens, circumventing, so to speak, the proxies that usually were between them when they were presenting this thing. We hold to that as a sign, a very authentic goodwill from the city government.

Julie Zaugg: How do people in Taiwan react to this? Are they very receptive? Just that do they really want to take part or has there been a lot of...?

Audrey Tang: We are very unique in that. The first generation that got access to the Internet was also the first generation that had democracy, because the martial law was lifted at early ’90s, in ’89, actually, which is also when the personal computer revolution happened, so we have the same generation growing up on the Internet as well as in democracy.

Julie Zaugg: To what extent do you feel that the philosophy that problems on the Internet is being translated in civic or political affairs through all these kinds of initiatives? Is it the same philosophy that...?

Audrey Tang: On the Internet, what we call this is what we call an open multistakeholder governance model, meaning, that we try to get everyone who would be affected by a policy to come and discuss. Of course, this is not entirely applicable, as I said at the very beginning.

Audrey Tang: The Internet community was able to make this happen, because in the early days everybody who had participation was very good at reading and writing and at imagining things, building castles just by reading words. This is by necessity, because that’s what programmers do. That’s what code makers and lawmakers do.

Audrey Tang: It’s also exclusive. People who did not have this skill but have other very useful inputs are excluded from the multistakeholder process.

Audrey Tang: For things like the national regional policy, of course, it affects not only people who are good at reading and writing, but also people who are good at number book communication and body language, and also, it’s the children, even, who prefers tangible stuff.

Audrey Tang: To do a good multistakeholder processes now, our duty is to make it multimodal, meaning, that we not only need to translate the abstractions to graphical interactive, or all the visual ways that people can relate to that also take as input all those non‑writing sources and make sure that everybody can understand everybody across the different cognitive functions.

Audrey Tang: It was very expensive to do things this way but, nowadays, with artificial intelligence it’s much easier.

Julie Zaugg: How can you use artificial intelligence to take inputs that are not verbal? How does that work?

Audrey Tang: For example, the words that we’re speaking into this recorder, we’re feeding it to an artificial intelligence that transcribes this into words. This technology was only mature this year, really. If people who don’t speak English, another artificial intelligence can take this and translate it into English, approximating already human translators, that is another thing.

Audrey Tang: Once it is translated into Chinese, another artificial intelligence can take it and create real‑time visualizations of all the topics that we have been discussing, and showing relevant information that may fill in people who are not versed in what the multistakeholderism is.

Audrey Tang: They could create a translation on memory or lexicon, and then yet another artificial intelligence can take that and try to create some 3D models, pictures and try to find relevant images that corresponds to what we worked on.

Audrey Tang: Every step needs human curation. However, the mundane work is carried by automated mechanisms.

Julie Zaugg: What about taking into account people’s non‑verbal expressions?

Audrey Tang: If you take a transcript and recording, whether it’s visual and audio, and you subtract the verbal message from it, what you are left, the remainder is the style, the expression. It’s already possible to take a picture of Van Gogh and then a photo of something that Van Gogh has never seen, and ask an artificial intelligence to apply the Van Gogh style to this painting and then create a similar style of painting.

Audrey Tang: Not only we can transfer concepts, we can also transfer the remainder, which is style. Artificial intelligence at the moment can assign emotional weight to tell irony, to tell the impact of a fact of what people are stressing or putting into words.

Audrey Tang: Yet, other artificial intelligence may direct a facilitator’s attention, if you have 10 people or 20 people in another room, a virtual, maybe, and get emotional assessment. A good facilitator needs to be in tune to everybody’s psychological state, which is very difficult across the Internet.

Audrey Tang: Even if you have to get the best video conference and stuff, still something is lost. We are trying to get that back. Of course, the facilitator would need to either have a panorama, a view of every other participants, or we can use the cheaper technology, called virtual reality, which is mature maybe later this year.

Audrey Tang: We are trying all kinds of modalities to bring the number of those signals back to our cognitive systems.

Julie Zaugg: What about your current post, how did that come about? How were you approached, what was the process?

Audrey Tang: There was this presidential campaign from Tsai, and I voted for her platform — radical progressive by Asian standards, somewhat progressive by European standards. In any case, one part of the platform was called, Asia Silicon Valley plan. Due to an unfortunate grammatical fact of Chinese, when people see "Asia Silicon Valley," they see "Asian Silicon Valley."

Audrey Tang: A Silicon Valley in Asia, which is something that’s offensive to people who actually work in Silicon Valley in knowing that you can’t duplicate it here. It is also unfair to Taiwanese culture, which I think have a lot to comment that it is not a part of Silicon Valley, which thrives because of this.

Audrey Tang: It’s doing an injustice to both Taiwan and Silicon Valley. There is a lot of resistance, especially around the startups circle to this policy. The Premier at the time, Lin Chuan ‑‑ is still the premier ‑ said, "Put a hold to this platform." Saying that we need to readjust and try a different communication strategy so that people will think that we’re building a science park around the digital economy in the Taoyuan city for no purpose whatsoever.

Audrey Tang: I was part of that redefinition meeting, and suggested we put a dot between Asia and Silicon Valley, so people would understand that we’re just connecting, we’re linking with Asia and connecting to Silicon Valley, but we’re not trying to be Silicon Valley of Asia. It doesn’t work. It does seem to work, the startup circle seems to understand us.

Audrey Tang: I did some communication work, and the premier seems impressed, and asked me to try to find a minister for digital affairs to play a similar role, to make sure the misunderstandings like this don’t happen again.

Audrey Tang: I asked around, I asked a lot of my friends. I think around 10 people. About five of them are more suited to this job than I am. They all refused, each with their own reason, but mostly saying that they would not enjoy this work. They all think I would. At least while I may not be the best fit, at least I enjoy this work, which is kind of important. They all recommended me.

Audrey Tang: I said to the premier that I cannot find anyone else, but I’m willing to give it a try it. That’s how I got it.

Julie Zaugg: When did you start?

Audrey Tang: First of October.

Julie Zaugg: What are you main tasks?

Audrey Tang: Open government that is the main mandate. Reporting, also the use console, which is like an open government, especially for young people and social enterprise, which is mostly around young people and startups, but also carries this social impact and sustainability with mission.

Audrey Tang: However, open government is the main one.

Julie Zaugg: What are your main projects for the next few months? What are you planning to do?

Audrey Tang: As I said, there’s this systematic establishment of open government principles around all parts of policy cycle. We are trying to make this happen through regulations, through by‑laws. We are trying passing this Digital Telecommunication Act, which is a fundamental law for Internet. It’s like the Digital Republic law in France.

Audrey Tang: It establishes this basic engagement rules between existing legal systems and the Internet. An important part of that law is a multistakeholder mechanism. This public commentary period, this public forum for all the policies for us to understand, it was in the original draft of the French Digital Republic law. It was removed by the senate.

Audrey Tang: We thought we would just look up to France to their implementation details, but it did not happen. Therefore, we’re trying to make this happen. Getting government public servants to trust strangers, to trust us more, and maybe the citizen will trust more in return.

Julie Zaugg: What is the situation in Taiwan? There was the Sunflower Movement. How is that working out? Is it still ongoing?

Audrey Tang: The Sunflower Movement was the demonstration, extended for 22 days. The main appeal was this kind of demonstration that people can work with strangers, a million strangers on the street. Help with professional facilitators, fact like fact checkers, translators, and also a way for recording to appear.

Audrey Tang: All three skills taken together creates a deliberative reflective space, where people in this occupy, converge every day to work towards consensus gradually. The final consensus that was agreed by occupiers, but also by the head of parliament at the time, was that this is a rethink of the constitutional organization of the society.

Audrey Tang: That all political decisions from here, ours need to take all the stakeholders into account, not just ordinary associations and their representatives, and that the tool that we developed during those 22 days were all open‑source, and free culture.

Audrey Tang: They are taking the seats all around Taiwan and the globe to make sure all people understand that it is now that there is another way for strangers in the real space to converge, if they put attention to it.

Audrey Tang: This is the promise of any occupier. Taiwan is radically non‑violent. We did this in a very systematic fashion, almost like a case study. I wouldn’t say it’s just in Taiwan. Whatever we did was one model, a contribution for all the occupiers afterwards, which then improved our technologies as we did building on the Occupy Wall Street occupiers.

Julie Zaugg: Back in Hong Kong, do you feel they are inspired by it?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, they took exactly the same programming and their supported logistics and it’s really an export of the Sunflower technologies to Hong Kong.

Julie Zaugg: Is this situation still quite tense with some people from the movement and the new government or are they very much behind the new government?

Audrey Tang: It is a little bit of both. The Sunflower Occupiers would eventually form two parties, the Social Democrats and the New Powers.

Audrey Tang: The New Powers became the third largest party in the parliament. The Social Democrats still remains mostly on the street. In addition, in the city governments, they got a lot of people into the city governments.

Audrey Tang: As a political worker, not as mayors, but then we get people who are independent, like non‑partisans into mayors, like the Taipei mayor, but also into the cabinet. In this cabinet, there is more independents than members of any party, which is kind of rare.

Audrey Tang: There is a new political climate of independence. The parliament is still partisan, but at least there is this one dominating party, the Democratic Progressives. The New Powers has been vocal, but I wouldn’t say they are behind the Democratic Progressives.

Julie Zaugg: Could you talk a bit about your decision to change gender? When did you decide that? How did you know that was something you wanted to do?

Audrey Tang: I never changed genders. My gender is whatever.

Audrey Tang: When I encounter people of when I was 12 or so, especially people from the US, in these communities, my online interactions, they perceive as decisively feminine. I wouldn’t mind, it does not matter.

Audrey Tang: For many communities, starting from ’93, I have just lived as a woman, but for other communities, sometimes I am perceived as a man, sometimes it doesn’t matter. For my startup friends were all LGBTQ people. It doesn’t really matter ‑‑ that isn’t fair, there is one straight person. We are very diverse.

Audrey Tang: I was raised essentially from adolescence in environments that didn’t care about gender. It’s gender blind, which I think made me gender blind afterwards. It is not really useful, especially online, but also offline to stigmatize people, desperate measures.

Julie Zaugg: Did you feel that more and more young people think like that? I was living in America before and it feels like it’s a big movement, now. There are lot of people who just decide that gender is not relevant. Is that like that, here in Taiwan?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, Taiwan is unique in Asia in that we have a huge LGBTQ community, very vocal. It was tied to Taiwan’s quest for absolute freedom of expression. It would be a slogan in other countries, especially European countries, but our people took it very seriously.

Audrey Tang: Any time the government even had an incline to censor speech, people got very outraged, and that never happened. We took as the core of the community building that everybody, no matter of gender or other status must have an equal say. I think that country contributes to this huge explosion of LGBTQ communities.

Julie Zaugg: This radical demand for free expression, is that something that started after ’89? That’s when it really started to not go back?

Audrey Tang: It’s a reaction formation. It was a dictatorship and people died as martyrs as in the quest of absolute expression of freedom.

Julie Zaugg: What’s the role of China in all of this? How does it try to influence Taiwan and go against this free expression? I know in Hong Kong they are not really allowed to do what they want.

Audrey Tang: Hong Kong is a very different place. Mainland China — as opposed to Hong Kong, China — is doing a lot of interesting social experiments. At the beginning of the great firewall project, The Golden Shield, Taiwan was very much caught in it.

Audrey Tang: There was also during the years, where there was a lot of commercial flow between Mainland and Taiwan. Post ’89 there was a period when foreign investors didn’t want to deal with China. Taiwan was supplying a lot of talents and ICT technologies in the China’s modernization project.

Audrey Tang: The Golden Shield is something that affects everyone who travels to China. We were acutely aware of every step of its evolution. We had our Snowden moments, years before it became an international phenomena, knowing that the same technologies that enables opening Internet can also do something more, something very different.

Audrey Tang: We live with that technology as a neighbor, and the most severe stakeholder outside mainland China for a very long time. It worked out technologies that circumvents the great firewall, technologies that works inside the firewall for a very long time. It’s just an experiment they are running there.

Julie Zaugg: One last thing. You described yourself in some articles as a conservative anarchist. Could you explain what you mean by that? Why conservative?

Audrey Tang: "Conservative" has two meanings. One is that I have some values I want to preserve as in conservancy, as in conserving a tradition. A tradition is the tradition that I have been living in for more than 20 years now, the anarchistic tradition of Internet, code making.

Audrey Tang: The Internet community is the first political system that I encountered. It was run by rough consensus and not by building, not by presidents, not by kings. It was a tradition I was raised in. It’s something I want to conserve. I also mean conservative in the other part which is the approach.

Audrey Tang: A conservative is rather than a progressive, wants people to see that they can work with some new innovations, gradually, rather than changing, mandating, or commanding people to change overnight. Everyone who works with me joins on a voluntary basis. They say that goes on a voluntary basis. I try to facilitate it, but I do not give commands.

Audrey Tang: That was true before I was a digital minister, and it is still true now. I am a conservative in the sense that it’s a very gradual change. Nobody is forced to change if they don’t want.

Julie Zaugg: Did that create a bit of a clash of culture here? I can imagine there’s some very established ways of working in government.

Audrey Tang: I think so far it’s just fine. It’s just fine because if I had a ministry, that would be very difficult because there would already be a hierarchical organization. I have an office. I don’t have a ministry.

Audrey Tang: From the very beginning, I said this is not really an office. It’s a space. It’s an open space where people are welcome to join. What I said is people are welcome to join, and then some folks like the one over there decided it’s better called a space.

Shuyang Lin: We’re all volunteers.

Audrey Tang: Yeah. Basically, it’s a space where people volunteer to join. We’re all like strangers really. I don’t know most of my staff. I suddenly happen to work with any of my staff except over the Internet for just a few months at most.

Audrey Tang: It’s really like any other ad hoc group. We started with very simple coordination forums like chat rooms and Kanban boards. Gradually, we had an alignment of compasses, but we don’t have a map. Everybody has their own map, and that’s the culture we’re trying to do here.

Audrey Tang: The reason why this is possible at all is that it’s not a ministry and I’m not forced to give commands. Of the 15 people, 16 now in this space, and of the 30 to 50 people as our participation offices bring in all the ministries, and of the 25 youth councilors, we’re holding the same interaction engagement pattern. This is because none of them are here because they are commanded to.

Julie Zaugg: Great. Thank you so much. Can I just ask you your age?

Audrey Tang: My age?

Julie Zaugg: Yes.

Audrey Tang: 35 solar years.

Julie Zaugg: I take it now you’re based full time in Taiwan or just still travel all over?

Audrey Tang: I try to reduce carbon emission...

Audrey Tang: Before I become digital minister, I was working on tele‑presence technology. I would send robots like in Spain, and also in Boston, and other places. I still travel but virtually. I also invite my friends to here through robotic means. I think by next year, at most, that will become much more appealing. It costs around the same as air travel, but you can reuse it. It’s much more carbon neutral.

Julie Zaugg: I’d like to take a few pictures of you if that works.

Audrey Tang: Sure.

Julie Zaugg: OK, great.