Adam Yasmin: Great. Thank you so much, and good morning. I’m here with Audrey Tang calling in from Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: Hello. Good local time, everyone.

Adam Yasmin: How are you this morning?

Audrey Tang: Pretty good. I just woke up, returned from the Taoyuan City back to the Taipei City. Now, I’m back in the Cabinet Office.

Adam Yasmin: Wow. I’m just going to jump into it and just ponder out loud that I imagine that politically speaking, we may look like as much of a circus as we probably project out to the world, but I just want to know how your week. [laughs] How’s your week been unfolding so far? [laughs]

Audrey Tang: My week so far, like the past four days?

Adam Yasmin: Mm-hmm.

Audrey Tang: It’s been an interesting experience. Just yesterday, around 24 hours ago, I was in the Confronting Disinformation, a Harvard Kennedy School conversation, and it was really interesting to look back at our counter-disinformation strategy.

Audrey Tang: It’s called humor over rumor, with a cute spokesdog and things like that, and just reflect how this…No takedown, no lockdown premise, because in Taiwan, we remember the martial law, so we wouldn’t do administrative takedown. We remember how bad SARS 1.0 and the lockdown was, so we wouldn’t do a lockdown, and how that has really informed our strategy of cross-sectoral collaboration.

Audrey Tang: How this society at large, the worldwide society, now, most of the countries have some experience with lockdowns, how that may motivate them into working into a more resilient way of working with the virus, both of the mind and of the body.

Adam Yasmin: From this perspective here in the States, everything I read about the response having come from Taiwan, as well as your background, and having listened to interviews you’ve given in the last six, seven, eight months regarding this topic.

Adam Yasmin: The people that I have shared the story of Taiwan with as it pertains to not just, as you mentioned, the pandemic, but the infodemic, from here, looks like science fiction.

Adam Yasmin: Everyone that I had shared the story with and shared relevant current information regarding it, there is a moment in which people are temporarily able to almost see clearly, if you will, what is possible and what is happening elsewhere in this world that we share.

Adam Yasmin: Yet, I don’t know how to respond to people when they share that it is seemingly science fiction, given not just the citizens perspective on the pandemic but also the government’s response. I wonder if you could speak a little bit to how that transparent governance, that two-way system is doing.

Audrey Tang: When I was a child, I read mostly evidence-based science fiction, literally, the short-story evidence from Asimov. Not all science fiction are fantasies, like the amazing stories. [laughs] There are also stories based on scientific rigor.

Audrey Tang: Social science is a kind of science too. One of the most rigorous findings of the social sciences, at least, around our corner of the world is that the more the government trusts its citizens, the more citizens become worthy of trust. It’s called the Pygmalion effect. It’s been studied by social scientists.

Audrey Tang: Because very early on, we understood that if we get three quarters of people wearing masks and washing your hands regularly, then the R0 value will be under one. That’s, again science. It’s a modeling by our top epidemiologist who literally wrote a textbook, also actually our Vice President at a time.

Audrey Tang: At a time, we all learned from the CECC that there is just this three-quarters goal to be met. The thing is that we can ramp up mass production. We can even deliver it to people’s homes, but it doesn’t ensure necessarily proper use. It doesn’t ensure necessarily that people, combined with hand sanitation and later on physical distancing, as to how to make it work.

Audrey Tang: I think the Pygmalion effect is the strongest when the people think that when the CECC – that’s the Central Epidemic Command Center – tells us to wear masks where we wear a mask.

Audrey Tang: Even when CECC for 48 hours said that, in well-ventilated places on the metro when the metro is running, and if you are healthy, you don’t need to wear a mask, well, people wear masks, anyway. The idea is that there’s a strong social sector demand for the economic sector to work with the government to deliver as much masks as there are in the citizenry each day.

Audrey Tang: People are not satisfied until they can get to that number, so becoming popular demand, so comes along the social innovation. For example, using traditional rice cookers, one can disinfect the mask, kill the virus, but not destroy the PPE material, and reuse the medical mask.

Audrey Tang: Even though it’s designed as one-time use, but you can reuse it three to five times. Now, that’s social innovation, because rice cookers wasn’t invented for that purpose. Neither is medical mask, by the way, but our Food and Drug Administration repeated the experiment as scientifically required and found that it’s exactly the case.

Audrey Tang: We invited Professor Lai Chane-yu, the social innovator, to explain the science in our daily CECC press conference while the Minister of Health and Welfare, Chen Shih-chung, literally cooked a mask in front of the nation.

Audrey Tang: That’s social innovation. That’s promoting social innovators and amplifying their new ideas so that we can hit that three-quarters goal, and people would actually understand that it’s their idea, their innovation that makes it happen sooner, not a top-down government approach.

Adam Yasmin: I wonder if, given the predominant culture of “I, me, mine” here in the United States, how can anyone – not even just as a citizen here, but how can anyone – begin to speak to the larger society here to explain the difference between protecting yourself, and in doing so, you’re able to protect other people by wearing masks?

Adam Yasmin: It seems as though the notion of masks as some kind of a personal infringement or censorship issue, it’s as crazy as wildfire here, quite literally.

Audrey Tang: I think one of the things that we get right from the beginning was taking an entirely rational self-interest message when it comes to mask use. The spokesdog literally said that you wear masks to protect yourself from your own unwashed hands.

Audrey Tang: There’s nothing altruistic in this use, and it combines mask use and hand sanitation. I bet that this message will also have a higher R-value than, “You wear a mask to show respect,” or, “You wear a mask to protect other people,” in your country as well.

Audrey Tang: I think appealing to self-interest is bound to have a higher R-value. I don’t think there is much of a cultural difference here.

Adam Yasmin: Right, interesting. That’s good to point out. I appreciate that. I have so many questions all simultaneous at the same time. Are you drinking tea or coffee right now?

Audrey Tang: I just had some coffee early in the morning.

Adam Yasmin: Are you a tea drinker, by chance?

Audrey Tang: Yes.

Adam Yasmin: Are you familiar, by chance, with the Taoist practice of tea ceremony, also known as Cha Tao?

Audrey Tang: Yes, of course.

Adam Yasmin: It’s something that I have been studying and practicing, through mentorship with actually an expatriate who was based in Miaoli, and I guess close to Taipei.

Adam Yasmin: That’s a community called Global Tea Hut, and I find it not only just something that, tea as an immersive experience is something that also touches on notions of hygiene, sanitation, cleansing not just physically speaking, but also spiritually speaking.

Adam Yasmin: I wonder if those notions, given the fabric of society in Taiwan, how…This is maybe too complex of a question at this moment.

Audrey Tang: We first started this whole open source, open publication blogging movement in Taipei. We meet weekly – that was in the early 2000s – in the Wistaria Tea House. Wistaria Tea House is one of the main places. It’s a historical building where many of Taiwan’s democratic struggles and movements were born out of.

Audrey Tang: I think it’s right that around the turn of the century the Internet-based blogging culture, that’s also one of the major part of it. The current steward of the Wistaria Tea House, Chow Yu, at the time was proposing that the four words, 正靜清圓, to be rigorous, to be calm, to be clear, and to be circular. We all learned quite a bit from that in our blogging circle. Also very circular.

Adam Yasmin: Beautiful. I’ve heard of Wistaria, and I look forward one day to visiting. I also read that you touch on Taoism as a resource for how you develop your philosophies and how you operate as a digital minister. I wonder if you could touch on that as well.

Audrey Tang: Usually, I use the Ursula Le Guin translation because I think it’s more poetic. It’s the idea, the wholeness. I translated that a moment ago, the 正, as rigor, but you can also translate it as wholeness or integrity for lack of a better term.

Audrey Tang: The idea is, to quote Tao Te Ching, the 39th chapter, “Heaven through its wholeness is pure; earth through its wholeness is steady; spirit through its wholeness is potent. The valley through its wholeness flows with rivers; the ten thousand things through their wholeness live. Rulers through their wholeness have authority; their wholeness makes them what they are.”

Audrey Tang: A very interesting thing is, to me, the quotation, the line in it that says, “The valley through its wholeness flows with rivers.” Not for the rivers, not by the rivers, [laughs] not of the rivers, but with the rivers. This is the very Taoist notion of making a space, not a object. The space contains objects, but does not belong to any particular object.

Audrey Tang: The potentials can realize themselves, actualize themselves without being foreclosed by whichever object was in the valley, so to speak. It could be, of course, a real valley in a face-to-face setting for carbon-based life forms, or it could be a silicon valley for digital forms of expressions.

Adam Yasmin: [laughs] Excellent. I’ve been ruminating on a question leading up to this conversation, again, to go back into the seemingly stark differences, culturally speaking, between the States and Taiwan.

Adam Yasmin: I wonder, given that here in the States we are an amalgamation of so many different cultures, races, languages, and ideologies, if there is a lack of social cohesion compared to a citizenry like Taiwan, which is predominantly Han Chinese, as I understand.

Audrey Tang: With 20 national languages.

Adam Yasmin: With 20 national languages?

Audrey Tang: Even the Han Chinese have three dominant languages, the Hakka, the Taiwanese Holo, and Mandarin.

Adam Yasmin: I was curious if you could speak to the potential of, at some point, diversity in ideologies not purely about races or backgrounds in terms of places of origin. In terms of ideologies or religious differences, is there a point at which perhaps here there isn’t a possibility of real social cohesion?

Adam Yasmin: Does the perceived lack of cohesion bring us beyond a point of being able to unify together as a culture here?

Audrey Tang: I think cohesion is overrated. It’s one of those ideas like harmonization of society. We don’t quite believe in harmonization of the society. That’s a nearby jurisdiction that’s more into it.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, I usually translate the official country name of the cabinet office, government that I’m currently in, which is in Mandarin 中華民國, as a Transcultural Republic of Citizens -- republic of citizens as in 公民之國, a country with its citizens as its foundation, and transcultural as in 在花之中, literally in the middle of various flowers. It’s a transcultural view.

Audrey Tang: It’s not, “Let’s plant the same kind of flower and have it dominate the garden.” That idea was first developed by Sun Yat-Sen and his revolutionary friends to explain how to not entirely write off the Manchurian culture while having the ethnic Han working with the Manchurian culture that was the Qing dynasty, among other cultures, in a transcultural way, not in a assimilation kind of way.

Audrey Tang: That idea is universal. It doesn’t need to be Han and Manchurian. [laughs] It could be between any cultures. If one learned that, from different cultures, there are pieces of a puzzle that one offers to complete one another’s perspectives. One does not actualize one’s own upbringing unless you can actually view it from a very different culture than the one of your upbringing.

Audrey Tang: That’s also something like Ubuntu, the African equivalent, at work here. One actually actualizes through a larger community as opposed to the smaller community, and by contributing to it. Ubuntu, by the way, is also a very familiar term in Silicon Valley. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Anyway, my point here is that transculturalism is the main thing that we’re having a perspective of the dialogue, and as long as the dialogue is around common values, I don’t think the different or varying positions is necessarily a bad thing. I think it actually contributes to the potential of the dialogue.

Adam Yasmin: Which is actually a really good lead-in into…Perhaps it’s a better framing. Instead of focusing on cohesion, it’s really focusing on common values.

Audrey Tang: Mm-hmm.

Adam Yasmin: I wonder if, here, we are just having a…Not to simplify it too much, but we may just be suffering from a framing issue, to not see common values but to just see pure division by way of how we navigate through social media, how we navigate through adverts and political wills, and just seemingly this fracturing of society.

Adam Yasmin: I feel like I’m speaking about it in a kind of, sort of a dramatic way, but I’m saying that just from my perspective of being in here and being surrounded by it. I wonder if you could speak to how you’re viewing this process that we’re going through here.

Audrey Tang: Yeah. That’s part of the takedown/lockdown side effect, the negative externality that it has on the society, and it’s not a new thing. Since ancient times, the way to combat either a pandemic or infodemic has been physical distancing, the closing of borders, lockdown of cities, suspensions of civic assembly, and mutual distrust seems to be inevitable.

Audrey Tang: There’s a sense of inevitableness if you do this kind of lockdown/takedown. Also, in such a more isolated mood, people are eager to blame the spread of the virus of the body or of the mind on outsiders, those of different races, different nationalities, different beliefs.

Audrey Tang: That leads then to an even more divisive virus of the mind, the us versus them kind of binary thinking that only grows with the pandemic and infodemic. It really is a self-reinforcing circle, but the circle can be broken.

Audrey Tang: Just like the physical vaccine protects oneself from one’s own unwashed hands, maybe with the virus that has lived on the surface of the table for days, with SARS 2.0 that is, the current virus we’re dealing with.

Audrey Tang: Knowing for sure that a physical vaccine protects yourself from your own hands gives people a sense of calm and assurance that this will pass, and this will pass with us in it together, because mask is a social signal. Something like the medical mask use in Taiwan, which has already been a fashion statement, as you can clearly see here. [laughs]

Adam Yasmin: I want one.

Audrey Tang: That’s right. [laughs] It’s rainbow-colored, for the people who listen. I think, just turn it into a sense of self-expression, and through the self-expression, you can also signal that, “My focus is on the common values.”

Audrey Tang: It could be for example around intergenerational solidarity among, for example, Taiwan’s most controversial referenda. There was two referenda around marriage. The people who are older see marriage predominantly as something between two families, with each young person only acting as representative of their families.

Audrey Tang: The younger generations see marriage more as an individual to individual thing, which they now do by registration, and their family may or may not wed. That’s entirely up to the families themselves. I call these two views the in-laws view, and a by-laws view of marriage. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: I signify during that hot debate and two referenda that you see there’s a common value in both sides. Both sides want the institution of marriage to mean something. Both, they want maybe the divorce rate to decline instead of keep going up and up. Both sides want something meaningful, a family that’s going on in their lives. Otherwise, they would not debate marriage in the first place.

Audrey Tang: Ultimately, our so-called hyperlink act to legalize marriage equality is to rule that homosexual people, when they wed, they wed as individuals, hyperlinking to all the rights and duties, the parts in the civic code, but it hyperlinks to none of the codes in the in-law relationships, so their families do not become in-laws to one another on the legal code, and so on.

Audrey Tang: This is not a compromise, compromise. This is a innovation that, just like Taiwan is caught between the Eurasian Plate on one side and the Philippines Sea Plate on the other, after earthquakes, grows.

Audrey Tang: Literally, the tip of Taiwan grows two or three centimeters every year because of this tension, this earthquake, and the idea that, “I’m going to innovate no matter what the left-wing says or the right-wing says. I’m determinedly going up-wing.” I think this is something any individual can say to become a force of common value out of the divisiveness and tension.

Adam Yasmin: It’s wonderful, the nature of, really the reality of innovation, or the presence of innovation, given what I’m able to view, and read about, and research, as I study Taiwan, the innovation seems exponential, at least from my kind of far away perspective.

Adam Yasmin: As I understand it, there’s a phone number set up, there’s one phone number that people can call in to ask questions, to raise grievances, all these.

Adam Yasmin: It seems like, on those terms, there are some basic simple technologies set up that people can interface with all day, every day, and then there is the more sort of DIY aspects of more…

Audrey Tang: Civic tech, yes.

Adam Yasmin: Civic tech, exactly. [laughs] I keep coming up against this, like, how do we even begin to innovate here? There seems to be so much here that is beyond an expiration date, or beyond a certain level of decay.

Adam Yasmin: There’s also something beautiful in that decay itself, maybe from a Taoist perspective, but given where we are now, and that we are several weeks away from an impending election that I truly hope will be happening, if you have any thoughts on how we can begin to innovate, given the size of the mountain we need to climb.

Audrey Tang: There’s a saying, although it’s, I think, a Zen saying and not strictly a Taoist saying, but in Taiwan, as you know, they are very much intertwined. The Zen saying says, whenever there’s anything like chaos or whatever, emerging, the Sheng-yen Zen master would say, you face it, accept it, deal with it, and let go of it. In Mandarin: 面對它、接受它、處理它、放下它.

Audrey Tang: I think it’s very relevant, especially around the time of the election, that one really needs to face whatever really is that is going to happen in each and every election, that people are going to sow discord, are going to paint the other side as inhuman. It’s like a frenzy, and we go through that too in our presidential election. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Facing that and accepting that is very important, but also deal with that.

Audrey Tang: I have a bunch of friends who, very interestingly, in the height of the rally for the KMT president Han Kuo-yu and DPP president candidate Tsai Ing-wen, on the height of their rallies where they are saying not very calm, singing words.

Audrey Tang: They did a poll, a survey of the most important values for those two rallies and the most hardcore of their fans, and they published the result. Surprisingly, to sustain and innovate the democratic institution themselves, to link with the world and help in a humanitarian way, help on global issues.

Audrey Tang: These two are high both of the two most ardent fervor supporters, except of course each sizing the other side of candidate isn’t doing anything about those two things. However, the values are so apparent that they’re common.

Audrey Tang: It’s interesting how you can get even…I think that survey was done literally like two weeks before the election day, in the height of the campaigns, but it’s also a way to deal with it, to show that no matter which side “wins,” they’re going to work on the same two values that people value the most. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: I think that’s a really neat intervention that can let some of the partisanship go once the result is known.

Adam Yasmin: It’s interesting to hear what you describe as both parties can get…Actually, the value system was so close to each other and yet it gets so granular in this sort of level of refraction of light in which the granular levels are a little bit different. That’s fascinating.

Adam Yasmin: It seems here, our value systems, at least as portrayed in our media, seem continents or universes apart, and yet, as you say, to accept it as it is and to deal with it.

Adam Yasmin: I wonder if you can speak to a little bit of a timeline from the revolution, moving forward, and how those blocks of time have maybe led into a smoother state of innovation, given the challenges we’re facing every day.

Audrey Tang: Sure. Which revolution again? The industrial revolution?

Adam Yasmin: Sunflower.

Audrey Tang: Sunflower was in 2014, March. For three weeks, the occupiers demonstrated as a demo, not as a protest, but a little bit of protest, but most of it is a demo of how to listen to scale and come to rough consensus on the street.

Audrey Tang: For example, the rough consensus on the street at that time the major telecoms bidding for the spectrums to do the 4G infrastructure for wireless connections. The occupiers use WiMAX, by the way, which went nowhere, and so we had to do the 4G infrastructure over again.

Audrey Tang: People were wondering whether as part of the cross street service trade agreement, at that time being deliberated on the street because the MPs refused to delegate it, we would allow Beijing-based components in the 4G infrastructure. Interestingly, the rough consensus or the common value was one of an economic argument.

Audrey Tang: The argument goes that because it’s heavily state subsidized and may appear inexpensive at the beginning, but because we all know that the 党, the ruling party of the Chinese Communist Party regime can through this party branches to replace leadership for all the so-called private sector corporations that provides those 4G infrastructure equipments.

Audrey Tang: At each and every upgrade, we have to do another system risk assessment, to see whether this is now de facto state-owned or whether there are still some autonomy left in that company. It’s amortized. It’s a much higher business cost than just working with Nokia or Ericsson, and so on, which doesn’t have that problem of being taken over [laughs] by their state at any given moment in time.

Audrey Tang: People broadly come to consensus. The magic thing is that the head of Parliament eventually agreed with the occupiers and basically said, “OK. Let’s put a CSSTA on hold and start in national wide conversation around economic and trade as the occupiers demanded.” Out of it comes the e-participation platform, and so on.

Audrey Tang: I think the lessons learned then is that any mayoral candidate that support these consensus on the street gets elected at the end of that year. Sometime without an inauguration speech prepared, it’s surprising even to them. The mayor candidate no matter which party that did not support open governance didn’t get elected.

Audrey Tang: It’s a very clear signal around the end of that year that the national direction from this point onwards is going to be more transparent in one participation, there’s no going back.

Audrey Tang: Then that’s how the two common values of making democracy work more into here and now, and also connect to the world and sharing the Taiwan model to be as important to the KMT supporters, as well as to the DPP supporters, and non-partisan, by the way.

Audrey Tang: In this point in time in 2019, the most important thing is around the turn of the 2014 election at the end of that year.

Audrey Tang: By the presidential election of 2016, it became also quite apparent that after two years of experimenting with participatory budgeting of citizens initiatives, I-voting and whatever, and mayors who has these as that campaign promise, including the Tainan’s mayor, Lai Ching-te, now our vice-president, previously our premier.

Audrey Tang: Also, Dr. Ko Wen-je of Taipei City, still mayor of Taipei City, and also the party head of the new party the 民眾黨, the Taiwan’s People’s Party.

Audrey Tang: The point here is that if people form a consensus as strong as this, then of course the parliamentarians will say, “OK. We’re going to disclose the campaign donation and expand it here. We’re going to live stream or the debate sessions in our committees and the party to party negotiations and things like that.”

Audrey Tang: It forms a social norm and give the social sector a higher legitimacy than the government, but the government can have a very clear roadmap of the kind of low hanging fruit to do in order to win back their legitimacy they were sorely lacking during the Sunflower Movement, which was at its lowest below 10 percent.

Audrey Tang: As you said, there is something beautiful in that decay of public trust. [laughs] Then it paves the way of new systems, new organizations. The new organization did not have to prove a lot. It only have to prove it is worth more than 10 percent of people’s trust.

Adam Yasmin: I don’t know where to go from here at this moment. I think there’s something to be said. Maybe to speak to be in a self reflective moment, just for a second. It’s interesting to having heard many conversations, podcasts, interviews that you’ve been on in this instance to allow for a little bit of space and contemplation, and then to maybe lead into whatever the next topic or next question may be.

Adam Yasmin: At the beginning of this conversation, you were mentioning a recent disinformation campaign that you were working on or you were helping to respond to. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Audrey Tang: Sure. That disinformation campaign during our pandemic…We’re post-pandemic now.

Audrey Tang: That during the pandemic that the most recent…Our baseball games are tens of thousands of people, concerts too.

Audrey Tang: They all wear masks, of course, but we are a post-pandemic for quite a while now. During the pandemic, people do feel anxious that humor over rumor playbook is still worth sharing.

Audrey Tang: I remember a instance, where there was a panic buying of instant noodles. There was a conspiracy theory that says that the instant noodles aren’t going to run us then, and we all need to stockpile it, and so on. Then the premier, using the humor over rumor playbook immediately rolled out this huge cute scene banner.

Audrey Tang: Basically, him showing a display of a huge storage of food, and says that there’s plenty of them and buy as much as you want. Just go out and buy. Basically, it’s kind of paradoxical prescription. People buy because they fear that there will be a shortage and the premier is saying that buy as much instant noodle as you want. We have plenty more.

Audrey Tang: We have years of reserve, in fact, but then he added to it, the next picture. He said, “Remember to also get vegetables because a balanced diet is important for the fiber.” Then all the agricultural counties and cities mayor’s came to basically post their own pictures and their favorite agricultural product from their production facilities. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: It could be a local seafood. [laughs] It could be local fruit and things like that. Before long, it become a kind of festival. A big agricultural [laughs] display. It’s so much fun. People shared because of the joy of participating in a virtual festival of celebration of our agricultural goods.

Audrey Tang: People don’t feel obsessed with the scarcity and the outrage of the original message anymore because it’s a one-way street. If you start from anger and outrage and then you get into a festive mood, that already through creative means used up the tension in one’s head. The one now feel celebratory that we’re so plenty [laughs] when it comes to agricultural.

Audrey Tang: If you see those very funny memes with instant noodles mixed with the premier and various mayors heads and their favorite dish, [laughs] , then you literally are vaccinated against conspiracy theories. You cannot feel outrage when a conspiracy theory come, and so the humor has a higher R-value than the rumor.

Audrey Tang: The point here is that it has to be on the same day because if a person goes into sleep with outrage, then that form a long-term association. The next time that person sees that word, outrage is evoked and no amount of cute dogs or interesting looking dishes is going to change that.

Audrey Tang: It actually takes a good food. [laughs] Maybe some co-creation sessions [laughs] to build new associations once it’s fixed in long-term memory. If the humor is rolled out literally one hour or two after that disinformation campaign, and it’s still firmly within the same day.

Audrey Tang: If within the same day before the midnight, it reaches more people and reaches people quicker because it’s more fun, the whole country goes to sleep in a much more joyful manner and wake up forming long-term association of the word instant noodle, [laughs] with this funny looking picture of people mixing vegetables and whatever local agricultural dishes or whatever [laughs] with it or a hot pot. There’s many pictures in my mind right now.

Audrey Tang: Whatever conspiracy theories will not form long-term association. In fact, I cannot recall any [laughs] at the moment.

Adam Yasmin: Given the topic of conspiracy theories, up until this recently, I’ve been fairly uninformed regarding some of the bigger, longer-term ones that we seem to be living with here. Especially, the seemingly expansive universe of QAnon.

Adam Yasmin: I wonder if you have any familiarity with what you can see having the distance [laughs] across the Pacific Ocean with this kind of level of conspiracy thinking that had its root at some point in the last several years and has grown into such a cross border situation?

Audrey Tang: There’s a couple things. One is as I mentioned, this lockdown/takedown that fosters mutual distrust, I think that’s really the root. Whatever conspiracy theory and misinformation we see is just a symptom. Disinformation does to say intentional misinformation is just opportunists making the full opportunity of the crack in trust that’s already there in a society.

Audrey Tang: To solve that is just to make social media pro-social again. [laughs] The social media is now taken to mean something very anti-social in parts of the world. In Taiwan, we’re seeing this as this height around the 18th election/referenda, where the social media is at its peak anti-socialism.

Audrey Tang: With the light of, as I mentioned, the campaign donation and expenditure being published as raw data for analysis, we can see that the social media platforms channel a lot of foreign money into micro-targeted messages during the mayoral/referendum election.

Audrey Tang: None of that need to be disclosed because it was not classified as campaign donation, which is something ridiculous now that we have the hindsight of 2020 literally.

Audrey Tang: At this time, they were saying we’re a mere country, we don’t need things like that. Anyway, the point here is that there’s a strong social norm after the public sector agree with the social sector norm of radical transparency when it comes to campaign finance, and the investigative journalists highlighted the lack of transparency.

Audrey Tang: Also, in Taiwan campaign donation can only be donated by citizens and certainly not by foreign citizens or foreign governments for that matter. There’s a strong backlash against Facebook in particular, but also other global social media platforms.

Audrey Tang: I basically did a trade negotiation with them. It was very interesting because I see them as semi-soverign -- well they were at a time considering printing their own money, so semi-soverign is just right -- entities, or at least governors.

Audrey Tang: When I understand that we present the societal norm and not represent my own interest, it does puts me in a very strong negotiation position because my BATNA or my best alternative to a failure of negotiation is just social sanction. In Taiwan social sanction works much more powerfully than any legal action that could be done by the government.

Audrey Tang: Facebook is basically faced with the choice of either conforming to the emerging social norm that any advertisements during elections/referenda need to be published as raw open data for independent people to analyze in real-time or they can decline from publishing these advertisements altogether during the election/referenda seasons.

Audrey Tang: They eventually chose the format and publish the ads library at a time in 2020, and end of 2019. The most transparent and real-time they’ve done anywhere in any other jurisdiction they were not deploying this kind of tailor-made code, but they understand the alternative would be strong social sanction.

Audrey Tang: That’s one way to repair the anti-social social media seem to be more pro-socialized with this social mandate.

Adam Yasmin: That’s amazing. I hadn’t heard of that until you just mentioned it. I wonder if I have to look at any articles or news regarding that, so I can point people to that.

Adam Yasmin: There is one more question I like to ask you while we have just a few more minutes. Maybe it’s a bit of a smaller [laughs] conspiracy theory inquiry. It has to do with people’s trust with technology as it pertains to contact tracing and digital fence.

Adam Yasmin: It seems as though I had been naively hoping that there would be some contact tracing consensus here, if not in the US, at least maybe in California or on the West Coast, or something. It seems as though people’s immediate jump into our state and federal governments cannot be trusted with our data. There’s going to be a central database.

Adam Yasmin: There’s this kind of high tide, low tide wave crashing of clashing bits of information. There’s a very luke warm, barely any sort of contact tracing, as I understand it happening here. What is it that Taiwan was able to set up and in what kind of timeframe in terms of contact tracing, and how people took to that?

Audrey Tang: The timeframe is around a month work. When the CECC first set up, around mid-January, actually, the day before we even have a local confirmed case, and started their daily live-streaming the idea of contact tracers, who are always humans in Taiwan, by the way, [laughs] and not computers. Other computers used to be human too.

Audrey Tang: Anyway, [laughs] computer like edit are used to recruiting those. Contact tracers in Taiwan are always medical offices and the staff that work with medical offices. As a rule, we do not collect new data in the name of that pandemic. I think that’s the consensus both within the CECC and also on the street.

Audrey Tang: The reason is one of frugal innovation because the property of each new line of code is not to be trusted even by the cybersecurity auditors. It takes precious time to audit its cybersecurity and privacy implications.

Audrey Tang: On the other hand, there are already existing mechanisms for data collection, they’re just not very granular. For example, all the five major telecoms already know your phones whereabouts, but it’s not for tracking you, so it’s very rough. Even in the most densely packed urban areas is just 50 meter or so in radius.

Audrey Tang: It doesn’t know which block you’re in basically. It knows which part of district you’re in because they need this information to do roaming service to transfer from one telecom tower to another telecom tower while you’re moving fast by car to continue your call. They already collect that data. We already send out short text messages, seconds before a earthquake or minutes before a flood.

Audrey Tang: People are already getting this norm of they being in a wide area and not because we know precisely through GPS tracking or anything but just out of caution, sent a broadcast message to people roughly based on the telecom tower strength. They’re associated with a kind of one-way signal that tells them that there is danger in this area.

Audrey Tang: The Digital Fence which you described is built out entirely with these two existing mechanisms. There’s zero new data being collected. When you go back to Taiwan at a border, you can choose to go to a physical quarantine hotel, or you can stay at home if you have your own bathroom for 14 days.

Audrey Tang: If you don’t have a phone, we lend you a phone for 14 days. Otherwise, you can register your phone number and that’s all we need. If the phone moves out of that 50-meter-or-so radius, a SMS is sent to the local medical and police institutions to check your whereabouts. If you stay within that digital fence for 14 days, we pay you $100 a day as a stipend.

Audrey Tang: Of course, you can always leave your phone there, but if it doesn’t move for too long, a while, we send a SMS too, checking your temperature and so on. You’re required to respond to that SMS.

Audrey Tang: Anyway, if you break out of the quarantine, the fine is 1,000 times that daily stipend. You can fund 1,000 times most people in current scene. There’s a very few people break out of quarantine. We all understand at the end of the 14 days, there is no constitutional basis to continue to deploy this SMS notification.

Audrey Tang: People understand because it’s not an app. There’s no way that this could, for example, interact with your WhatsApp or Instagram usage. That’s 91 percent of people’s approval rate, and the other 9 percent, we thank them for it because we’ve never declared state of emergency. We have to answer to the parliamentary interpolation.

Audrey Tang: When the Department of Cybersecurity’s head, Howard Jyan, explained exactly how the digital fence works, how he partners with the five telecoms, how we do not collect new data, how they lock rotation is still in effect, so after 14 days, we know nothing about your cell phone signal strength, and so on, the approval rate grew to 94 percent, and of course we still thank the other 6 percent because they keep us honest and accountable.

Adam Yasmin: I really appreciate the explanation of, there’s really no innovation going on in that regard of, I’ll use the word lightly, just enforcing the digital fence.

Adam Yasmin: I guess it really speaks to people’s sheer lack of trust, maybe not even just with each other, but just with local municipality, or state government, or maybe even our medical system, which, as we now know, by today, as of this week, we passed the really grim milestone of 200,000 deaths related to COVID here.

Adam Yasmin: Just take a breath for that, for the moment.

Adam Yasmin: One final thought I’d love to hear from you just for posterity, so that people can hear this in the future, is, if you could speak to the, I’ve heard you say it’s really not about the singularity, it’s about plurality. If you could speak to that.

Audrey Tang: Sure. That’s literally in my job description. [laughs] Back in 2016, when I first become digital minister, people keep confusing digital with IT. I keep saying that IT is machine talking to machines, and digital is how people talk to people.

Audrey Tang: Still, there’s a strong IT culture in Taiwan, so that it makes sense to delineate how digital of course is dependent on the ICT infrastructure, but it’s something else entirely.

Audrey Tang: I wrote my own job description in a form of a prayer when I was visiting New Zealand and the news of me becoming the digital minister breaks out. This is my job description. It goes like this.

Audrey Tang: When we see the Internet of Things, let’s make it the Internet of Beings. When we see virtual reality, let’s make it a shared reality. When we see machine learning, let’s make it collaborative learning. When we see user experience, let’s make it about human experience, and whenever we hear that the singularity is near, let us always remember, the plurality is here.

Adam Yasmin: It’s beautiful. Audrey, I want to be respectful of the time allowance. I really, really appreciate wholeheartedly the time you spent with me this morning. There’s nothing but gratitude for this moment, this conversation.

Adam Yasmin: I appreciate the opportunity to continue to absorb what it is that you have done, what it is that you are doing over there, and to see what’s going on in Taiwan as a beacon of hope in a humanitarian sense. Thank you so much.

Audrey Tang: Thank you. Live long and prosper.

Adam Yasmin: [laughs] Bye.

Audrey Tang: Bye.