Richard Pietro: Hello. Welcome to “Stories from the Open Gov,” a podcast dedicated to telling the stories about what open government and open data look like. My name is Richard Pietro. Today is part two of our interview with Audrey Tang. She is the digital minister for Taiwan.

Richard Pietro: In part one, we discussed her journey as a civic organizer, beginning with how she dropped out of school at the age of 14 to start an IT company and concluded with her involvement with g0v.

Richard Pietro: For those who didn’t get a chance to listen to part one, Audrey has a very rich international work history. Her influence ranges from coding to Silicon Valley startups, to research, and even grassroots activism that helped to transform her government. She was able to do all of this before she was 40.

Richard Pietro: To top it all off, even though she is currently the Digital Minister for Taiwan, she officially retired about five years ago. Hello, Audrey. Thanks for joining us again.

Audrey Tang: Hello. Happy to be back. Good local time everyone.

Richard Pietro: In part one, we left off with you reciting a beautiful poem that has deep meaning for you. Chronologically, we were about to discuss your role with the Sunflower Movement. That’s where we’re going to continue. First of all, tell us what is the Sunflower Movement?

Audrey Tang: The Sunflower Movement, which was started in the night of March 17 – and is also called the March 18 Movement – is a 2014 activity, where students and many civil society organizations occupied the parliament completely peacefully for three weeks in protest, at the very beginning, of this sudden ramming through the parliament of the Cross-Strait Service Trade Agreement with Beijing.

Audrey Tang: It very quickly turned into a demonstration as in a demo where people who occupy the parliament started deliberating each and every aspect of the CSSTA, including whether we need to allow Beijing components in our then-new 4G network, which is a deliberation everybody else is having nowadays, the clean path deliberation.

Audrey Tang: After three weeks, it was a success. People came to a set of rough consensus instead of demand. The head of parliament agree on all those demands. Then Taiwan’s politic norm really changed.

Richard Pietro: What was your personal involvement? From my understanding, you helped. You were not necessarily a lead organizer. Am I wrong in thinking this?

Audrey Tang: When it was still a protest near the parliament, at the streets, I helped providing HSDPA – that’s like pre-4G connectivity – with my phone, actually, and setting up the live-streaming gig with people from the Black Island Youth, who lent me the equipment. They are the main student group that did the occupy planning and also independent media such as Indie DaaDee and so on.

Audrey Tang: Basically, I was, I guess, part of the communication team, but very quickly after they occupy the parliament and start live-streaming from it, I also helped coordinating the logistics, including transcribing each and every NGO’s deliberation, live-streaming, getting them a bandwidth of a fiber optic line, and things like that, along with people from the g0v movement.

Richard Pietro: Were you inside parliament during that time?

Audrey Tang: Only once, to bring the Ethernet equipment necessary for the people inside to connect to the outside. Once they got the live-streaming set up, I would go there again, bringing with myself 350 meters of CAT 6 cables and so on. After that’s set up, I can safely watch the live stream behind screens.

Richard Pietro: One of the things when I was learning a little bit more about the Sunflower Movement and saw the footage, you guys had furniture up against the doors. There was hundreds of people there. You guys had really coordinated areas for food and sleep and things of that nature. But, I am shocked that there was no violence. There was no…

Audrey Tang: The streets are crystal clear and clean. People just washed the streets literally with water, not blood.

Audrey Tang: Then everything is kept very tidy. There’s even volunteer stations where people give free recharging stations, education classes on the street, because there’s many students joining from all sorts of basic education levels and so on.

Audrey Tang: At one point, it’s been described as a night market, because there are so many people offering free food. Yeah, it’s a very peaceful bunch.

Richard Pietro: With everything that’s going on in the world right now with Black Lives Matter, social discrimination especially in the West, there is a heavy presence of the police and the military. Is there a reason why the Taiwanese forces, we’ll call them, did not attack the protesters of the sit-in, especially since you were inside parliament, not just on the streets?

Audrey Tang: The parliament has its own police force. It’s not beholden to the administration. When some of the demonstrators did try to occupy the administration, there was violence. They were evicted from the administration building.

Audrey Tang: I think one of the reason is that the parliamentarians, including many from the DPP, basically told the parliamentarian police that all the occupiers were their guests. They invited them in, and so with the MPs’ immunity from police, and really, the civil disobedience is part of their agenda anyway, they kind of acted as a shield layer, because the police would not hurt the MPs. That’s also what the DPP MPs really helped at that point.

Richard Pietro: How long was the sit-in in total days?

Audrey Tang: Around 22 days, or 21 days and 22 nights to be precise.

Richard Pietro: What was the straw that broke the camel’s back for this transformational change for the government? Did they just acquiesce? “It’s been 21 days. We’re not going to be able to fix this,” or was it…?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, something like that. Something like that.

Richard Pietro: Was it really?

Audrey Tang: Yeah. We have to agree on all their demands, basically. Yes.

Richard Pietro: OK, so it was just as simple as that. What happened afterwards then?

Audrey Tang: Then we were hired as reverse mentors, that is to say, people who are under 35 years old, young people, who work with ministers day-to-day to give advice and future directions while learning how the government works.

Audrey Tang: Minister Jaclyn Tsai recruited me and also Tommy Kiu, another fellow occupier, as reverse mentors. We were both under 35 at that time.

Richard Pietro: Let’s continue there, with the prime minister approaching you to become the digital minister. At this stage in your career, you’re officially retired, from my understanding.

Audrey Tang: Yeah. I’m just making purpose-driven software, which is a fancy term for civic technology. At that point, I think I’ve been interned as a reverse mentor in Minister Jaclyn Tsai’s office for a year and a half at that point. Many people in the cabinet says, “Yeah, they just promoted the intern to a minister. Not a big deal.”

Richard Pietro: [laughs] Not a big deal perhaps there, but here, it would be groundbreaking news in Canada at the very least. I want to talk about your relationship between yourself and the prime minister at the time. Did you guys already have a relationship? Did she know you just by reputation? Can you talk to that a little bit?

Audrey Tang: Dr. Lin Chuan, he did not work with me before, but Lin Chuan, the premier, is well versed in conversation with civil society organizations. I think this is a really good point, because Lin Chuan is non-partisan. He is independent. He doesn’t belong to any party. The premier before him, Simon Chang, ex-Googler, Director of Google Engineering, Asia-Pacific, is also non-partisan and independent.

Audrey Tang: When they did the transition, Simon Chang asked all the ministries to upload checkpoint documents to the Internet for the next cabinet to preview before they actually get into the office, because there is a four-months gap between the election, which was in January, and the presidential inauguration, which would be in May 2016.

Audrey Tang: That’s how I learned about the ministerial works, not knowing that I will later on join the cabinet in October 2016. Lin Chuan did not know me, but he did know the vTaiwan work that we did with Minister Jaclyn Tsai. Both Simon Chang and Jaclyn Tsai spoke very persuasively and loudly, really, on continuing this nonpartisan tradition of civic consultation in technology.

Richard Pietro: Now, you hold the post, currently, as Digital Minister for Taiwan, but you’re not an elected officer. You’re an appointed one.

Audrey Tang: I’m twice appointed. The President, which is directly elected, appoints the Prime Minister, appoints me.

Richard Pietro: And, I think the way it was written when I was doing my research is that you’re a minister without a portfolio. Am I wrong?

Audrey Tang: That’s right. That means that I’m a horizontal minister. At the moment, there’s eight horizontal ministers in Taiwan and 32 ministers with a ministry. The Taiwan cabinet is shaped such that above or alongside. Let’s do alongside. Alongside the 32 ministers with ministries, we have eight ministers, including me, to tackle emergent issues that are cross-ministerial.

Audrey Tang: Whenever the ministers, which each represent a different value, cannot agree on something, the horizontal ministers will find a common value out of those very different positions.

Richard Pietro: So, in Part 1, when we were talking about how much civic values are very important for you and you were at the grassroots, now you’re part of the government all of a sudden. Talk about how either your mentality changed or perhaps your perception of government changed with this appointment.

Audrey Tang: I never knew that public servants, the career public servants, were so innovative. They’re the most innovative bunch I have ever met, and I’ve worked in quite a few Silicon Valley companies. It was just that they were anonymous.

Audrey Tang: They were hidden from the population because of anonymity of the career public service. The appointees, the elected politicians and so on do the talking. The career public service do the innovating.

Audrey Tang: Because my work is open government, I make sure that they can now directly communicate to the citizenry through, for example, the national participation platform. All the mid- to long-term project is there. There can have a real-time conversation between the civil service and the people who are interested in any of their work way before the decision is made.

Audrey Tang: That’s a break of norm, by the way. In the freedom of information acts pretty much anywhere, the publication is only after a decision is made. At the drafting stage, usually the consultation proceedings are not published, or if they are published, only the metadata, not the verbatim transcript is published.

Audrey Tang: All the meetings that I chair, I publish everything to the Internet, including the transcript of this very conversation. [laughs] That’s a key point. The civil service see this way of open government as aligning with their values.

Audrey Tang: They don’t have to work in the dark. They can talk directly with the civil society, learning about their stakeholder needs. In that way, they reduce their risk, saves their time, and increases trust.

Richard Pietro: At least in Canada and I know in many Western governments, you describe the relationship between the bureaucracy and the elected officials eloquently, in that the public service is typically in the background. They’re not meant to be in the foreground because that’s the politician’s job.

Richard Pietro: You and I both know, as you’ve been describing, that in the 21st century, that’s changing quite a bit. We need the public service in the foreground just as much. In Canada and other parts in the Western governments, that has been faced with a lot of resistance because of a thousand different reasons.

Richard Pietro: It’s not in their job description. It’s not something they’re comfortable doing. Resistance from politicians. My question for you is, how was it welcomed in Taiwan when you were bringing in this drastic change?

Richard Pietro: You’ve been in this post for about four or five years. At first, I can’t believe it was just puppy dogs and ice cream from the very beginning. There must have been some resistance to this concept.

Audrey Tang: What resistance? We are the resistance.

Richard Pietro: I’m talking about the career public service, the people that have been working in the bureaucracy in Taiwan for 20, 30 years, the old guard.

Audrey Tang: We occupy the parliament. Literally, we are the resistance. When I look into the mirror, I see resistance

Audrey Tang: But, yes, the old guard.

Audrey Tang: You see, for career public servants, our theory of change really is that of a Pareto improvement, meaning that I talked about reducing risk by early consultation, saving time by automation, and also increasing mutual trust by giving people credit when credit is due instead of asking them to remain anonymous forever. If things go wrong, it’s always my fault anyway.

Richard Pietro: [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Absorbing the risk personally. The important thing about the theory of change is that we never pursue one of the three goals of time-saving, risk-reducing, and mutual accountability by sacrificing the other two.

Audrey Tang: In many other jurisdictions, reformists fail because they impose something that is more transparent, increase more trust, saves time but increases political risk for the public servants.

Audrey Tang: Or they invent something that will spread a political risk through all the consultations, but it’s so tedious. So it doesn’t save time. It actually ask the public service to work overtime. So, If you make only Pareto improvements, the career public service is firmly on your side.

Richard Pietro: You mentioned a moment ago about political risks. I would assume that with your radical transparency mandate as a value system that you bring to the government, how do you balance the needs of the political elements of the government with your value system of transparency? Because I’m assuming you are part of meetings, whether it’s with your premier or other colleagues at your level, that can’t be shared with the public, or am I wrong in thinking this as well?

Audrey Tang: I do not see any confidential documents period. In my office, there’s a dedicated person with security clearance to handle these. Of course, I do hear about it in general terms. It’s just that I cannot get involved in cases that is, by national security law, a secret.

Audrey Tang: Because if it’s classified as top secret or secret in our national security law, and I’m sure elsewhere in the world as well, any system that has any of its input as classified as national secret has its entire system and output classified as well as a kind of osmosis [laughs] principle.

Audrey Tang: By building literally a gap between me and any national secret documents, I make sure that anything that I chair are actually open for people to know. That doesn’t mean that we live-stream everything. We publish usually the transcript. That’s only after 10 working days of co-editing.

Audrey Tang: If there are some anecdotes from a public servant’s friend or family that they use in the meeting but they have not cleared it for publication, they can just anonymize it. If they do say something that they think are actually a private joke or something that the public wouldn’t get it, they can switch into a more harmless joke, I guess.

Richard Pietro: [laughs]

Audrey Tang: The thing about radical transparency is that it means transparency at the root, meaning that if you don’t do anything, the default is transparent. If you do have to redact, you can do so in the 10 working days, but it takes effort.

Richard Pietro: This is where personally, I want to have the same conversation but bringing down a notch away from classified documents.

Richard Pietro: There’s a lot of, for example, in traditional governments in Western countries, just basic team meetings that are not necessarily made public, that even if you were to make an FOI request, which is not necessarily classified information, you would come back with some resistance from the government or having a redacted document.

Richard Pietro: Like For example, procurement. Procurement details in a contract, it’s not a classified matter. How are you able to share that or balance the need for transparency on something like that with the needs of the government’s requirement for…I’m going to say secrecy because I can’t think of a better term.

Audrey Tang: First of all, if the people who participate in the meeting meet in a face-to-face situation and with no court reporter or recorder or good microphone [laughs] equipment, then it’s actually a lot of work to reconstruct the meeting record. I don’t force it on people because that would violate the saving time axis of the Pareto improvement value.

Audrey Tang: On the other hand though, because that I’m a telecommuting minister, anywhere I am, I’m working. We can invest heavily in co-presence technologies. Actually, just like in our meeting at the moment, it doesn’t take us extra time to record.

Audrey Tang: It doesn’t take us extra time to make it into something we can index and search. If we put it on YouTube, it doesn’t take us extra time to come up with captions. YouTube takes care of that. Only when it’s at almost zero marginal cost can you get into the habit of radical transparency. That’s the first thing.

Audrey Tang: The second thing is that, for example, for procurement, for a while Taiwan’s procurement RFPs and all were only published to people who spend a little bit of money to get the documents. It’s not a lot of money. It’s just one US dollar or Canadian dollar, but it is a burden. It’s not entirely open data.

Audrey Tang: There’s always a outside game. The g0v people, Ronnie Wang, to be precise, from the g0v movement, paid that money and wrote a scraper to scrape everything [laughs] and then publish it on GitHub and something.

Audrey Tang: The point here is that because we are the resistance, there is always a outside game. If people do not publish, for example, the campaign donation expenditure for a while, the control branch only offers looking at it and then photocopying with a watermark.

Audrey Tang: The g0v people, what they did is that they scan everything and did a open CV, computer vision, splitting of it into individual cells and then ask people to play CAPTCHA and complete the OCR. They call it otaku character recognition. People would just type in all the digitization of the campaign expenditure and so on.

Audrey Tang: The control branch of course said, “You know, you can’t be sure that you’re completely, 100 percent correct in digitizing. I mean, you say each cell has three reviewers or whatever, but you can’t be sure. The g0v people is like, “Yeah, so that’s why you should publish the structured data yourself.”

Audrey Tang: When faced with the lesser of two evils [laughs] , either allowing this civil disobedience produce may or may not be correct date spreading around or having to work with the legislators to publish the campaign donation expenditure as structured raw data, which is actually a one-time investment only in getting the schema right and so on…

Audrey Tang: The career public service would inevitably chose the later, but they would not choose this without a outside game.

Richard Pietro: And it sounds as though, based on your answers, that the leadership…

Richard Pietro: For example, if you have a ministers meeting with your colleagues, they’re all on board with this radical transparency. There’s nothing from the meeting that’s not going to be recorded. You’re going to go through the process that you have outlined. You’re going to publish accordingly.

Audrey Tang: Because that’s my working condition. I literally negotiated that with Dr. Lin Chuan. The three conditions of me entering the cabinet is first, radical transparency for all the meeting that I chair.

Audrey Tang: If I was invited to listen to one of the meetings and there’s no decision made by me or with me, that’s fine. It doesn’t have to be radically transparent. If I chair or if a decision is made anywhere, including with lobbyists and journalists, of course that’s radical transparent.

Audrey Tang: The second is location independence. Anywhere I’m working, I’m working. The third, almost the most important one, is voluntary association, meaning that my team, which comprises of a dozen or so secondments, each from each ministry, their own ministry, they are posted here but still working for their ministry.

Audrey Tang: It’s just I’m asking them to work out loud in a location-independent and radically transparent way. I don’t give them orders. I don’t take orders either. Voluntary association is my third working condition. If these condition are not met, I just quit. Everybody knows about it.

Richard Pietro: Have other of your minister counterparts followed your lead when it comes to either one of those three?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, definitely. The radical transparency is becoming more and more of a culture. The large-scale deliberations like opening up the mountains, opening up the ocean, which is part of Ministry of Interior and the Ocean Council respectively, they all take such very early consultation.

Audrey Tang: When they have no idea what to do, they start the consultation. That’s easiest to be radically transparent because all you have to say is that “I have no idea. [laughs] Anyone have ideas?” It’s easier to be transparent at that beginning instead of toward the end of the process. That has really spread.

Audrey Tang: Because of COVID of course, location-independence is not just a good-to-have. It’s a must for a while. We’re post-pandemic for three months now. The voluntary association is also interesting because for the mask availability map and things like that, these are civic sector innovations that were then reverse-procured.

Audrey Tang: That is to say, we don’t give them orders. The people just build whatever applications they want, but they demand that we open API so that they can continue doing what they do, working with real-time information of mask availability. In that sense, it’s voluntary association because nobody signed a tender or something like that. Everybody is just in this for a multi-stakeholder collaboration.

Richard Pietro: Now, I want to move on to some of the more technical work you’ve been doing as Minister for Digital Government of Taiwan. vTaiwan, you mentioned earlier. A tool that you used I think to help create vTaiwan is something called Polis. Why don’t you take a few moments here for those who are not familiar with vTaiwan and Polis, what they are?

Audrey Tang: Sure vTaiwan Minister Jaclyn Tsai and g0v’s first collaboration. Minister Tsai, back in 2014, after Sunflower Movement, went to a g0v hackathon and proposed that we build something for people who have no clear representation.

Audrey Tang: The example being, for example, Taiwanese startups that register in Cayman Islands. There’s no association for those. Teleworkers, there’s no unions of those people. People who don’t have a top-down representation.

Audrey Tang: How can we make rules and regulations to make sure that these kind of teleworkers or people who register in Cayman Islands can voice their opinions and, even for emerging issues like Uber and Airbnb and things like that, can even include people outside of our jurisdiction, as Uber’s leadership was at that moment?

Audrey Tang: Uber is now a Taiwan company. Actually, Uber Eats, another Taiwan company, and Cubetaxi, the fleet, another Taiwan company. It wasn’t like that in 2015. At the time, this localization is seen as something that is at tension with globalization.

Audrey Tang: Algorithmic governance of cars and dispatch is seen as at tension with the proper use of roads according to the old guard’s transportation rules, so those dilemmas, those tensions. In the society, we developed a consultation process called vTaiwan that is groundbreaking in the sense that we ask people first to check each other’s feelings.

Audrey Tang: In the process, after we crowdsourced the facts and before we crowdsource the ideas, we crowdsource the feelings for three or four weeks. That feeling process is very important because it lets people see as a polity that after all we’re quite close to each other.

Audrey Tang: The user experience of Polis tool is such that people would log in. In the social media or national participation accounts, they will see one sentiment from a fellow citizen, like “I feel” – I don’t know – “passengers’ insurance very important.”

Audrey Tang: They can agree or disagree. As they do, their avatar would move toward the cluster of people who feel similar to them, but they also see their friends and families in all the different opinion clusters so that these are not nameless trolls. They are friends and families.

Audrey Tang: There is no reply button, so you can’t troll people. All you can do is to propose something else that’s your feeling for other people to resonate or not with. Feelings, there’s no right or wrong, but after three or four weeks, Polis always give us a report that shows most people agree on most of each other’s feelings on most points.

Audrey Tang: Only like two or three ideological points, like “What’s sharing economy” that people feels very differently about. We just table those divisions and focus on the consensus items and use only those as the agenda for a multi-stakeholder consultation on the ideation phase and invite everyone who participate in the Polis, who contributed, into the face-to-face live-streamed meeting.

Audrey Tang: The point here is that people would first confirm that we’re all in this together, build the common values, the common “how might we” questions. How might we, for example, ensure innovation on the road, like price surging or whatever, while ensuring that insurance registration and taxation remains fair?

Audrey Tang: Once we have that common “how might we” question, it’s much easier then to innovate and deliver the rules without leaving anyone behind.

Richard Pietro: It’s a fascinating approach because a lot of times, like you’re suggesting, feelings come afterwards. That’s where the debate happens, whether it’s through an election or a pundit on TV, which is putting the cart in front of the horses a lot of the times.

Richard Pietro: I’m an avid user of Reddit. I’m a huge fan of Reddit and what it represents. Maybe you have a better way of describing it. It’s almost as though you created a better Reddit. Am I wrong in thinking that way? You said yourself you’re trying to avoid the trolls, right?

Audrey Tang: That’s right. I created a better way to use Reddit.

Richard Pietro: [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Polis, you see, is open source technology from initially Seattle, now New York. It’s made in the world. If you’re interested, we just concluded a conversation, the open the ocean conversation at polis.gov.tw/ocean. That’s something, with some help from machine translation, that I’m sure that you can look at how we actually use Polis in five consultations on how to open up the ocean.

Audrey Tang: For something more English-friendly, I guess, there’s also the cohack, where we co-created, using Polis, the norms around how to deploy privacy-enhancing technologies to counter coronavirus with seven countries and 53 teams.

Richard Pietro: How’s it been received by Taiwanese?

Audrey Tang: Very well-received. It’s fun and games, literally.

Richard Pietro: What I mean more is, is it become ubiquitous in the nation. Has it become part of the language? Is it part of the culture, or is there still a bit of an adoption tipping point that you’re waiting for?

Audrey Tang: As you can see from the domain name, polis.gov.tw, it’s now just part of the governance structure. I would say…

Richard Pietro: …is a government website, but no one ever goes there in Canada unless you’re…

Audrey Tang: I know.

Richard Pietro: [laughs]

Audrey Tang: The Join platform, which in many ways a successor of the vTaiwan consultation mechanism but this time run by the career public service, not Occupiers, now registers more than 12 million unique visitors out of a country with 23 million people, so over half of the population.

Audrey Tang: That’s when we dropped the E from the e-participation website. We just call it participation website, just like we don’t say, “You would just e-text me, email me.” We just say, “Mail me.” [laughs] It’s becoming a norm in Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: Truth to be told, we only used Polis in the national government when there’s three or more ministries involved. You very seldom see a single ministerial use of Polis. That’s because when it’s a single ministry, they often already pretty much know where the stakeholders are.

Audrey Tang: They can do consultations in a more traditional way but always also with live-streaming and so on. It’s just that they don’t need to map out the stakeholders from this great unknown, the great beyond. When it is cross-ministerial, Polis remains a very useful tool.

Richard Pietro: This is a question for a common friend, Derek Alton.

Audrey Tang: Hi, Derek.

Richard Pietro: He’s going to appreciate the callout, I’m sure. He actually helped me quite a bit in preparing for this interview. One of the things that he was mentioning is we were talking about the algorithm that’s used by vTaiwan and Polis in creating this map, this report.

Richard Pietro: In the spirit of Reddit, explain like I’m five how this algorithm works in finding commonalities in feelings and action and policies.

Audrey Tang: In Polis, there are two main algorithms. That’s code. When I say code, think algorithm, because I’m explaining like you’re five.

Audrey Tang: There’s two different code in play. When you’re looking at a Polis screen, the screen shows where your friends’ and family’s position are in a conversation. The positions, as you can see here, are in those gray group areas.

Audrey Tang: These group areas are determined, are created by a code called k-means clustering, which means that it finds with people’s responses what sort of responses tend to cluster together, to occur together. Like if you agree on this sentiment, very likely you will also agree on that sentiment.

Audrey Tang: If you have, for example, used Amazon, when they recommend you the books you might also be interested, or if you watch Netflix, that they suggest that these are the film that you might also be interested, that is based on the commonality between people who prefer something and the likelihood that that person would prefer that something else. That’s the first code that we use.

Audrey Tang: The second code is this x- and y-axis, which is the horizontal and vertical line. These two lines are what we call dimensionality reduction. You can think people’s opinions in this large space. For each question that you resonate or not, you move upward or downward in one direction.

Audrey Tang: If you look into people’s clusters, like in this room, you can find something that is the most contested. You call that something most contested between the groups like a line that most neatly divides those groups into two parts, you call it the x-axis.

Audrey Tang: Then, once the group is divided, you try then to find another issue that will divide it not quite as much as the first one but another angle that will clearly partition the group in four, like four quadrants.

Audrey Tang: We cannot always find such a thing, which is why it’s not always four groups. It’s sometimes three or two or five, but the second, the y-axis, the vertical line, is as much as the machine can to identify another wedge issue that divides the population. That’s dimensionality reduction.

Richard Pietro: Are most of these dimensions politically motivated among the traditional spectrum of, say, liberal versus conservative, or have you found much more nuanced aspects of dimensions?

Audrey Tang: The divided ones are often ideological, of course, because these are the things that people feel very strongly about. On the other hand, the consensus ones, which is always more numerous, are commonplace, like you would think that it’s natural, but it doesn’t get much air time, meaning that it doesn’t get into the political agenda that much.

Audrey Tang: For example, there was a Bowling Green, Kentucky city civic assembly that you can read about online where they deploy Polis. There’s like five divisive statements more along the traditional lines of ideology, but the top consensus of people was, and I quote, “The arts are an important component of our K-12 education.”

Audrey Tang: That is to say the science, technology, engineering and math, STEM, classes need to have art in it, making it STEAM. Regardless of you identify as a Democrat or Republican, everybody is in favor of that, but it doesn’t get political priority or agenda. That’s why it haven’t happened at the time.

Audrey Tang: For the mayor, it’s a low-hanging fruit. Just implementing that, having a consultation with people who agree with that, will immediately raise the mayor’s re-election chance by maybe 0.1 percent or something. That’s what the software does. It lets us see the commonalities despite the ideological differences. We don’t spend calories on those ideological difference.

Richard Pietro: I love how you place that. Obviously, identity politics, especially in the West, has run rampant over the last few years. We only have about four minutes left before our time is up.

Richard Pietro: There is one thing I need to ask you about before you go, which is you use the term virus of the mind quite a bit in many of your writings and your presentations. I love how you talk about it. Much like how we ended it with a poem, I want you to talk about virus of the mind to finish off this podcast episode.

Audrey Tang: Certainly. The idea of virus of the mind, which [laughs] is just a way to talk about memes, is the idea that there are some prosocial memes, in the sense that If you spread those ideas [laughs], ideas worth spreading, people would be more receptive of different ideas.

Audrey Tang: For example, plurality is one such idea. Internet of beings, one such idea, and so on. On the other hand, there are also some more toxic ideas, which I would refer to as ideologies, that once you believe that and spread that, you tend to be blind then to people’s opinions and feelings that are different from those ideologies. They’re antisocial memes, virus of the mind.

Audrey Tang: The entire job description of mine is just on how to make vaccination so that we switch from linear thinking of technology to a more pluralistic thinking of technology. Once you hear about my job description, I hope you will also be vaccinated against this zero-sum us versus them thinking but rather see digital as a way to promote plurality.

Audrey Tang: Maybe I’ll just read my job description. It goes like this.

Richard Pietro: Yeah, by all means. Yeah, go for it.

Audrey Tang: When we see the Internet of things, let’s make it a 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. Whenever we hear the singularity is near, let us always remember the plurality is here.

Richard Pietro: This is something right out of “The Matrix,” the way you say it. [laughs] It’s wonderful. I want to thank you so much for giving so much of your time for these podcast episodes, Audrey. Is there anything that you want to say before we go?

Audrey Tang: Just have a good local time, live long, and prosper.

Richard Pietro: Thank you all for listening. As usual, please leave a rating or a comment on how to make the podcast better or if there’s any guests or any stories that you’d like to hear in the future. Until next time, let’s make it open.