Audrey Tang: Hello. Really happy to be here. Good local time, everyone. I’m Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s Digital Minister in charge of social innovation, of open government, and of youth engagement. This year, working with international democratic partners, Taiwan has countered not only the pandemic with no lockdown, but also countered the infodemic – the disinformation crisis – with no take-down.

Audrey Tang: The idea is to use the social innovation three pillars, fast, fair, and fun, especially the fun part, called humor over rumor, to make sure that everybody can build common understanding and values out of initially different positions. That’s my job.

Audrey Tang: Well, we know how bad it could be, because back in 2003, we also had our SARS 1.0. When SARS 1.0 was released [laughs] in the Taiwan, the municipal government was saying very different thing from the central government. People were buying N95 masks for no good reason. It’s panic buying. We had to lock down an entire hospital unannounced, so we had it pretty bad.

Audrey Tang: Then, back in 2003, only the small island of Penghu of the Pescadores Island have a pilot test of the IC card, of the universal healthcare card. The rest of Taiwan, the main island, is still user paper-based health records. What a contrast it is to look at the IC card in Penghu and then the rest of the country.

Audrey Tang: In 2004, not only did we redesign our Center for Disease Control to have the idea of the Central Epidemic Command Center, which takes care of the communications, the toll-free numbers, and everything, but also, making sure that the universal healthcare card, the IC card, is available not only to citizens, but also for residents as well. It covers more than 99.99 percent of the population.

Audrey Tang: My main suggestion is that, once a vaccine is available for SARS 2.0, and before the release of SARS 3.0, everyone need to do what Taiwan did in 2004, which is to have a systemic risk analysis and retrospective and find out how can we improve the system for the better, just as we did in 2004.

Audrey Tang: Broadband as a human right, single-payer, universal healthcare IC card, these are such fundamental elements that I think the societal inoculation, this time in the pandemic, will bring the new innovations for the next year or so.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, and this is a real issue. What we are seeing now is more and more people are seeing broadband as a human right during the COVID, especially if they have lockdowns. If they are under lockdown, people who don’t have broadband don’t even have education. They cannot access the essential services provided by the society.

Audrey Tang: Broadband was seen as something that was a luxury for people to watch YouTube, Netflix, or whatever. Suddenly, during the lockdown, broadband become an essential human right thing.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, because President Tsai Ing-wen four years ago already promised broadband as a human right as her campaign promise, that’s what enabled us to essentially make the response entirely fair across the country. Of course, I look forward to work with more countries now post-COVID to reconsider this broad idea of broadband as human right.

Interviewer: Thank you. How do you see the future? I think you are very famous as the digitalization, DX. How do you see the future, our future, with DX?

Audrey Tang: By the way, I’m already connected to the interpreters, so feel free to speak in Japanese. My idea is that digital transformation need to take care of the least-empowered people in the society. That is to say, to empower people closest to the pain, adapt technology to be assistive to the society rather than asking society to adapt to the technology.

Audrey Tang: This is the same direction, for example, the Society 5.0 that Japan has, because Industry 4.0, Society 5.0 meaning that society need to lead the way for that industry to follow. This idea is also important, because when we transform our everyday work, it is essential that we still keep what makes people feel secure and safe, and sometimes it is something physical that they can hold.

Audrey Tang: A physical IC Card going into a physical pharmacy to get some physical vaccine, that’s the mask, by the way, which could be [laughs] made very fashionable by physical colors, not only the rainbow color, but all sorts of colors, you name it. This is very important.

Audrey Tang: That is not just about digital, the digital is just connecting people and people closer together. Anyone can call 1922 and be connected to the call center. Everybody can watch the livestream of the Central Epidemic Command Center press conference, and so on.

Audrey Tang: At the end of it, the call of action is still for the people to connect better with other people as we are connecting now through interpretation, through live streaming and things like that so that our attention’s on each other instead of isolated cells or silos or virtual realities. I always say, when we see virtual reality, let’s make it a shared reality. That’s the direction of transformation.

Interviewer: Do you believe with all the countries that could be connected with more fun?

Audrey Tang: Yes, definitely. Fun is the one thing [laughs] that is actually more viral than the outrage, than the conspiracy theories. If we understand that on the Internet, the social media is not always pro-social, it’s also sometimes antisocial. The antisocial takes the outrage and channel it into revenge or to discrimination, negative antisocial impulses.

Audrey Tang: On the other hand, if you laugh about it, and then channel it into co-creation, like how can we make sure that we make everybody understand people wear a mask not to respect each other, actually, but to protect oneself from one’s own unwashed hand so that they will wear a mask even when there is nobody nearby?

Audrey Tang: The reason why we need to spread this idea is because there’s a lot of anxiety and even outrage around mask use. Our spokesdog, the Zongchai, a very cute Shiba Inu is now illustrating what not to do, putting your own hand to your own mouth.

Audrey Tang: This is hilarious, [laughs] and people understand that you wear a mask to protect oneself against one’s own unwashed hand. That idea went more viral than the conspiracy theories around masks.

Interviewer: Very interesting and thank you. Can you a little bit speak about you are originally the programmer. You started programming when you are very young. Can you tell us a story about your experience in programming?

Audrey Tang: Definitely. I learned programming by drawing on a piece of paper, because I did not have a personal computer, I just have some books about personal computers. I was very interested in mathematics, but I’m quite bad at making manual calculations. What I did is that I brought a piece of paper, I took a pen, and then started drawing keyboards on it writing Q-W-E-R-T-Y and things like that.

Audrey Tang: Then, every beginning of the day I would just type CLS here, and then take a eraser to erase the screen, and then type a something and then print “Hello, World!” or something like that. After programming on this paper-based terminal [laughs] for a while, it shows that one can learn computational thinking without a computer.

Audrey Tang: It’s just a way to approach a problem, to decompose it into independent functions, and to compose those functions together. This is the kind of thinking that anyone can master. Computer programming is just one of the ways to master it. Of course, later on I would have a personal computer, and then I started programming.

Audrey Tang: Then I joined this fabulous Internet community, the second largest community around co-creation called CPAN, the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network back in 1994-95. It’s modeled after the Comprehensive T-E-X, TEX Archive Network by Donald Knuth and friends.

Audrey Tang: The idea is that everybody in the beginning of the World Web instead of just working our own silos, we make the fragments of our CGI scripts. That is to say the handlers for dynamic web pages add those components freely in the open for everyone to share so our work can link together, just like how web pages can hyperlink to one another.

Audrey Tang: That is the community around rough consensus, about radical transparency. I learned about the community governance back then, when I was just 15 years old. It would not be another few years until I have my first vote. Representative voting is a lower bandwidth system.

Audrey Tang: It’s just five bit every two years or four years [laughs] compared to the high bandwidth democratic system that I experienced online.

Audrey Tang: Yes. I’m at the moment still an entrepreneur. I’m not only a digital minister at .tw, which is more like intrapreneurship. I’m also making new startups with, say, Vitalik Buterin, who is the co-creator of the Ethereum blockchain distributed ledger technology.

Audrey Tang: We work together on this startup called RadicalxChange to develop ways to vote more fairly, like quadratic voting as proposed by Glen Weyl, quadratic funding, and many mechanism design that takes what has been proven to work in the Ethereum community, and then translate it into everyday politics like the Presidential Hackathon, which also uses quadratic voting. That’s intrapreneurship.

Audrey Tang: I’m also working on, for example, the Pol.is, which is a listening skill tool to let people see each other’s feelings and resonate with it instead of attacking each other on the antisocial media. It’s a pro-social media. Again, it is a startup that I’m involved in. We’re running cybersecurity tests on that particular technology.

Audrey Tang: I’m also working [laughs] on the Digital Future Society, which is this Annual Barcelona Mobile World Capital Think Tank about the future of digital and things like that. I’m not only a serial entrepreneur, I’m a parallel entrepreneur as well.

Interviewer: [laughs] Amazing. We have lots of business people and CEOs today. Do you have any recommendation to the companies? Especially in the digital area, Japan, we have a traditional business which is still struggling to go digital. How do you see about the company in the future, and if you have any suggestion or advice to the company management, if you can describe?

Audrey Tang: Yes. I had a long discussion over dinner with a Japanese management expert, Professor Ikujiro Nonaka-san, the person who proposed the model about the tacit knowledge and is at that point working on a book called “The Wise Company,” and it’s been published.

Audrey Tang: In The Wise Company, the main argument that Ikujiro Nonaka-san is arguing is that to manage high-velocity change and to continuously innovate, we need to make sure that everyone in the company understand the common value, the common future that they envision.

Audrey Tang: They cannot do so in a traditional like the top, make the top-down decisions, and like the bottom of the ladder only implement the decisions without knowing why. Indeed, the continuous feedback loop needs to be part of the culture. There’s a lot of the wisdom in The Wise Company idea that I applied to my own work. For example, in my office, I have secondments from 12 different ministries.

Audrey Tang: We never have more than one secondment from each ministry so that together the diversity can map the different values, because each ministry’s a different value on a shared structural problem, but nobody dominate the discussion. It’s not just about diversity, but also about co-creation. During this co-creation, everybody contributes more than what they take back to their ministry.

Audrey Tang: It creates a culture of working out loud. Working out loud meaning that there’s less of the face problem, and indeed people will just risk bringing very risky ideas out, because they know I will absorb the risk if it doesn’t work out. They are much more free to innovate and so on.

Audrey Tang: I sincerely recommend this continuous innovation idea from The Wise Company, from Ikujiro Nonaka-san and also Hirotaka Takeuchi-san.

Interviewer: Thank you, it’s a very nice advice. You’ve mentioned a little bit about the negativity of the IT. We are very sad to say that there’s still in Japan many young people committing suicide because of that technology and social media. Do you have any comment, especially to young people who’s a little bit worried or always looking at the negative part of digitalization?

Audrey Tang: Yes. I will share my personal experience. I always interact with my phone through a stylus, and not through my fingers, except when I’m zooming in or out. Then I have to use the fingers, but otherwise, [laughs] it’s through a stylus. It’s the same for the iPad. I interact with my iPad, again, through either the keyboard or through the Apple Pencil.

Audrey Tang: It’s like that since 20 years ago, since the days of PalmPilot and then the Sharp Zaurus, and other personal devices that I carry. I interact with them through a stylus or a keyboard. The reason is if I interact with a touch screen, my brain is fooled into thinking that the phone is part of my body, and then all the stimuli that it receives is like pains or scratches in my body.

Audrey Tang: It’s not me swiping the screen. It becomes like a screen-swiping me. If I limit the bandwidth of the communication between me and the device, then of course, it’s me and that’s the device. I’m free to take a break from this screen at any given time, drink some tea, and so on.

Audrey Tang: Limiting the neural-screen bandwidth is very important. You can do so through the limitation of the stylus or keyboard, as I am doing, or if you’re already touchscreen-addicted, then you can at least take a break every 25 minutes. It’s called the Pomodoro method. There’s many methods to do that.

Interviewer: Wow, so you never touch the screen?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, it’s the pencil that touches the screen.

Interviewer: [laughs] Very interesting. I think we asked…Oh, yeah, another question. What is your relationship with Japan? How do you see Japan from Taiwan, like personally?

Audrey Tang: Personally, I’ve been to Japan many times. I told the, I think, Governor of Okinawa that my idea about this Civil IoT system that became the earthquake warning, flood warning, and then eventually, the digital fence, the quarantine and things like that, all this system, was inspired by a time when I visited Okinawa and there was a really big typhoon.

Audrey Tang: Nobody panicked, and there is real-time updated system for all the different measurements of the typhoon. I think we are both island countries, and we are very resilient. Unlike many other jurisdictions, we don’t harbor this hallucination or illusion that we can somehow control the nature. It’s not like that. The nature will always have the final say.

Audrey Tang: What the human society can do, though, is to be resilient. After each typhoon or every earthquake, Taiwan grows by another few centimeter. Every year, it grows by three centimeter. Just last night, maybe it grew a few millimeters, because we had an earthquake here.

Audrey Tang: The point here is that, to be resilient rather than dominating, to work on the common values rather than on the win-lose situation. It must be a rough consensus, which means nobody is perfectly happy, but everybody can accept it. This, I think, has a lot in common with the Japanese culture.

Interviewer: Thank you, thank you, very happy to hear that. I think from now we are going to move with, we have a high guests. Each of them have questions we want you to answer. Maybe now, we can start with Mr. Tatsumo, the CEO of the company called the Uniblend. Tatsumo-san.

Interviewer: Hi. Hello, Audrey.

Audrey Tang: Hello.

Interviewer: Very honored to talk with you. Let me tell my question in Japanese first to the audience first, and then I will ask you in English.

Audrey Tang: OK, but we have interpretation going on, too.

Interviewer: Yeah, but the staff said that I need to say it in Japanese first. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: OK.

Interviewer: [Japanese] . OK, so I’ll explain in English. Let me see what I wrote in. As in the COVID-19 situation, it is difficult to visit to the other countries, each other. For business perspective, there are no international exhibitions, that means no opportunities for international business launching.

Interviewer: When Taiwan and the Japan companies are willing to find a new business partner from each other? what kind of IT problem, or events, or any other actions can government side provide in the future, do you think?

Audrey Tang: Of course, we are now having an international business meeting, [laughs] so obviously, there are still some international business meetings going on. Indeed, a lot of business people have a different communication style. When we’re sharing food together, sharing drink together, and so on, that’s one casual communication style.

Audrey Tang: This conversation is much more knowledge-based communication that is like a formal meeting. Of course, it’s good for you to introduce one another as friends in this particular setting. Of course, to discover opportunities without any mutual trusted friends become a little bit difficult over a screen-only experience. That is certainly true.

Audrey Tang: For that, actually, we have so-called the economic bot bubble, or the application so that, even if it takes 14 days for quarantine, those 14 days, if it’s for important business meeting, you can still, in a carefully-guarded way, to move this bubble in a place that is dedicated for business matchmaking. That is to say, for business conversations and so on.

Audrey Tang: All we are asking is that the physical space does not overlap with other people. We are not saying that the physical space has to be in any particular hotel or something. What I’m trying to say is that, even during the 14-day quarantine where you have to be at one particular place, you can choose that particular place strategically, and then have business conversations around that particular place.

Audrey Tang: Of course, it’s a little bit of a hassle for everyone to move that way. What we usually see is that one or two person move that way, and the rest of the team serves as a backup through international video conference. For that, I often used the double robotics, which is a great robot that is a self-driving vehicle.

Audrey Tang: You can just point which place in the factory that it should move to, and then it just navigate by itself to it, while carrying an iPad of me, and looking and seeing, and having a real conversation with other people. I even used that robot to visit the UN Geneva building as a Taiwanese Digital Minister, because they don’t check passports for robots.

Audrey Tang: It’s that sort of telepresence, combined with strategic placement of quarantine, places, I think, can still resume some sort of international communication.

Interviewer: I believe you said you became an entrepreneur at the age of 15. What would you recommend for the younger kids and the students, what they should do in the childhood in order to be an entrepreneur like you?

Audrey Tang: That’s a great question. Indeed, I quit middle school, not because my principal, the head of school, doesn’t like me, but because she likes me too much. I talked to her, saying that, “I want to start businesses. I’m already collaborating with professors online. I have only 16 hours of waking hours per day. I don’t want to spend half of them on the school.”

Audrey Tang: The head of school said, “OK, from tomorrow on, you don’t have to go to school anymore, and I will cover for you,” she said. By covering for me, it means that she faked the records so I don’t get fined for not showing up to school. We need educators who understand the value of entrepreneurship.

Audrey Tang: We need educators that can form curriculum without the restriction of the physical space of the school. If that is the case, and indeed, in Taiwan for the past 10 years, we already have experimental education.

Audrey Tang: Nowadays, it’s also part of the basic education, that the schools and the teachers can determine that if the child is actually willing to start up something as part of the course, they can choose something that corresponds to the global goals and actually count that toward their capstone project, their learning portfolio, and so on, without quitting school, as I did when I was 15 years old.

Audrey Tang: Today’s 15-years-old in Taiwan, from 15 to 17, when they’re in senior high school, they have a lot of options to essentially select their own curriculum, their own places of creation, while still maintaining compatibility with the graduation, if they choose to go to an undergrad.

Audrey Tang: I think looking at the Basic Education Act, looking at how credits are handed out, and model senior high schools as universities, so that they can choose their own curriculum, this is very important in Taiwan. Just like in Japan, we’re now changing our adulthood to be 18 years old. Once they finish senior high, it would be like them finishing undergrad a decade ago.

Audrey Tang: They don’t have to go to a college. They can then just advance on their entrepreneurship track. Once they need, for example, management skills, international negotiation skills, or whatever, they can go back to school with something in their mind, a problem already forming in their mind. That will lead to a much more satisfying undergraduate experience.

Interviewer: Thank you so much. It’s very encouraging, and I will apply it to my work. Thank you so much. OK.

Interviewer: [Japanese] Next question is from Sakata-san.

Interviewer: Hello, Audrey. I am so happy to be here. I’m so honored to talk with you. Thank you so much. My name is Akiko Sakata, and I’m a director of a new business. I’m in charge of a policy proposal committee. Also, I’m a president of a logistic company in Tokyo. While I would like to ask you a few questions, but we don’t have enough time to ask it.

Interviewer: One question was forgiven, so I would like to ask you about radical transparency. You have a vision that the people would be able to become a massive nation, with all the information available on the Internet that can be made public like government broadcasts, and the minister are doing what doing.

Interviewer: Then radical transparency, this word reminds me movie named “The Circle,” and Emma Watson and Tom Hank. This is a very interesting movie, because it raises various issue, such as Japan and importance of Internet and bystanders and the privacy as well. How far you think we need transparency in the Internet?

Audrey Tang: I must say that when I say radical transparency, I mean the state transparent to the citizen, not the citizen transparent to the state. Two very different directions. By making the policymaking transparent to the citizens, it means that people who have good ideas can just take what we have still brainstorming and then just start implementing it without waiting for approval by a government.

Audrey Tang: For example, when we were still discussing whether we are rationing out masks in pharmacies or in convenience stores and so on, Howard Wu Jian-wei from Tainan City already started implementing the mask availability map. He is not discriminated against because he is young, or because he lives in Tainan instead of Taipei, or because he is not a public servant. He has a good idea.

Audrey Tang: He has the absolute liberty, a positive liberty, to do whatever he wants without asking for permission. Then we made ourselves transparent to him to update every 30 seconds the National Health Insurance numbers to him so that he and more than 100 civic innovators can display the real-time availability to everyone in Taiwan and beyond.

Audrey Tang: They eventually helped the Korean people as well. The point here is that, only by making state transparent to the citizens, can truly the citizens choose for themselves how best to use the information provided by the state. That is called positive liberty.

Audrey Tang: We are not asking, as in some dystopian movies, everyone to be live-streaming their lives all the time, or that the citizens made their privacy transparent to the state. It’s not what I mean by radical transparency.

Interviewer: Thank you. It is going good in Taiwan?

Audrey Tang: Yes.

Interviewer: Thank you so much. I’ll never forget this time for my life. Thank you so much.

Audrey Tang: Thank you.

Interviewer: The next question is from Araki-san.

Interviewer: Hello, thank you for the great speech. My name is Ana Araki. I own and run a real estate industry in Japan and Cambodia. It’s a really great honor to meet you today. Let me speak Japanese.

Interviewer: I would like to ask you about the digital transformation for real estate sector. Unfortunately, it is very slow to make a step forward in Japan.

Interviewer: In this year, Japanese start-up Property Technology company has established the first PropTech community in Taiwan. They aim for development of the global PropTech Eco-system to cooperate with world-wide PropTech Community.

Interviewer: Currently, transformation of business model and strong relationship with end-users through the digital transformation have been required in many ways.

Interviewer: How do you expect the promotion of adoption for IT for real estate sector in Taiwan and Japan?

Audrey Tang: That’s a great question. Indeed, in Taiwan, we have seen a lot of development since the 2013-14 publication of all the real estate transactions, the so-called Real Price Open Dataset. That is actually one of the most downloaded dataset in the entire government open data.

Audrey Tang: People eventually is not only satisfied about the transaction price, but also, about how many area of that is for the public, for the commons, how many of them is counted toward private, those details. They also enabled us to increase the resolution, the betterment of the datasets. Then based on that, they would also then ask how likely is this house to be impacted by a nearby flood?

Audrey Tang: What is the vulnerability for it against landslides and things like that? Then, like about the traffic simulations and so on. Once you have a base dataset, the importance of the relevant joint dataset just keeps growing and growing.

Audrey Tang: So much so that we’ve built an entire system called the Civil IoT system in Taiwan at ci.taiwan.gov.tw that empowers the real estate sector to evaluate the likelihood of not only disasters, but also, how to make the life experience better for their customers. What kind of insurances or what kind of risk factors are involved in making such purchase choices in a well-informed way?

Audrey Tang: Everybody have a different take when it comes to the risk and cost effectiveness. Of course, that also enabled the smart buildings to then serve as, for example, temporary flood control zones and things like that to ameliorate the flood, so builds resilience and so on. That required the building to essentially talk to the road. That’s Internet of beings, Internet of things. That’s another area.

Audrey Tang: It’s not just about the mobility and the data correctness, but it’s also about building themselves being interactable counterparts and so on. I think this is a really exciting sector for digital transformation. Again, I call AI assistive intelligence. As long as it’s used to assist human beings to make better decisions together, I think there’s a lot of potential there.

Audrey Tang: I don’t want it to turn into smart city, but dumb citizens, smart buildings, but dumb tenants. That’s not what we want. AI doesn’t enslave people. People enslave people over AI. That’s authoritarian intelligence, and we must take all the precaution for our assistive intelligence not to turn authoritarian.

Interviewer: Thank you very much.

Interviewer: Thank you very much. Thank you. Probably, this is going to be the last question from Tagami-san.

Interviewer: Tagami-san.

Interviewer: Hello.

Audrey Tang: Hello.

Audrey Tang: My name is Mutsumi Tagami. Let me ask you a question right away. I agree with your assertion that digitization leads to democracy, and I am concerned about it. Will governments everywhere be able to shut down the Internet in the event of an emergency? Is there a mechanism that allows an individual to have direct access to another individual and information? Hypothetically, I am concerned about whether we will be able to send out information to our friends around the world via email and social networking sites before the Japanese government takes control of our speech.

Audrey Tang: Yes, it is an excellent question. That question has been explored in Hong Kong over the past year.

Audrey Tang: Nowadays, [laughs] we have a very long list of tools, not just Bridgefy, but also Briar, Tango and so on, all designed for our phones to work in a mesh network, like through Bluetooth or through personal hotspots and so on, so that we can be connected to each other. There’s also the Secure Scuttlebutt.

Audrey Tang: There’s many technologies that works on this principle of a decentralized, mesh-based networking, even when all the telecoms have shut down. This, of course, is only limited by the battery of your phone. Also, prepare a lot of batteries if that configuration ever happens.

Audrey Tang: Yes, there is such a technology. Internet technology still works pretty well, even if it’s just an everybody holding their phones and be in proximity of one another. This is actually one of the scenarios that Internet was designed for.

Audrey Tang: It was designed for when the major telecommunications over phone networks are shut down because of a global war, and people with only walkie-talkies can still resume Internet packet exchange. Internet is built for this.

Interviewer: Thank you. Thank you very much, Minister Tang.

Interviewer: Now, we have Mr. Ikawa back, and also, we have a couple of questions from the audience.

Audrey Tang: I don’t think convenience is the goal of my work on digitalization. I often say there’s four pillars, the DIGI, D-I-G-I pillars. They are digitization, making sure that broadband, for example, is a human right. Innovation, to make sure there are new ways to tackle the structural issues like pandemic, infodemic, and climate change.

Audrey Tang: Governance, making sure that people have a fair and equitable access. Also, inclusion, making sure that people who don’t have the age to vote, when I was 15 or so, I wasn’t at a voting age.

Audrey Tang: Making sure that young people, people who were previously disenfranchised, immigrant workers, rivers and trees, people who have not been born – all these people – need to have their ideas also somehow reflected in the collective decision-making that’s called inclusion.

Audrey Tang: It’s innovation, governance, and inclusion that is the goal of digitalization. Convenience is just a way for us to use it in an instrumental fashion to make sure that people can take some time to learn about new ways of doing things, because we say, “Hey, let’s just video conference each other.” It’s more convenient, but the video conference need also to lead to, for example, collective action.

Audrey Tang: That need to lead to this culture of deliberation, of listening at scale, a pro-social behavior, and not just this very empty idea of us spending more time with screens, just because it’s convenient. To answer the question directly, the more inclusive it is, the more sustainable the innovation becomes.

Audrey Tang: We, as co-governors, we need to make this experience point toward making the world a better place when we log out of the world than when we log in the world. Not only can this maybe decrease the likelihood of premature log out by young people, but also, it will point to a common direction for sustainability of our entire society.

Audrey Tang: If we make improvement like linear GDP growth at the expense of the next generation, then, of course, it may sound convenient, fast, and maybe sometimes even economically rewarding for shareholders, but at the end of the day, it’s not sustainable and will not result in successful digitalization.

Interviewer: The next question from the audience is, I think people and we believe that there be, that that new world would be some mix of virtual and reality. In this century, I think this person is a little bit concerned that the young people now studying the conversations through the games, like the Fortnite game, online gaming.

Interviewer: They started to make a conversation within the games, and how do you see those? I think there was a movie like that, like communicating in the game. How do you this type of world?

Audrey Tang: Of course, I’m quite familiar with that. Indeed, I learned my English playing the game Magic – The Gathering both offline and online, so I know how this is like. [laughs] I think the name, Magic – The Gathering, I think it means something. It means that it is a game that brings people together, rather than divide people apart.

Audrey Tang: It’s like Magic – The Gathering, eventually, the company called Wizards of the Coast eventually also acquired the Dungeons & Dragons, D&D, which is again a role-playing game, a tabletop game that’s turned also video. Again, this is about bringing people together. This is not about dividing people apart. I think games, just like technologies, I’ve said AI could be assistive or authoritarian.

Audrey Tang: Games can also be pro-social or antisocial. The work of the parents, for example, is to also personally acquaint yourself to the pro-social games, the games that facilitate intergenerational conversation, like Pokémon Go, a very good example. That lead to more people-to-people interaction among the people who may be unfamiliar to you because of cultural, ethnic, or location distances.

Audrey Tang: If the game is like that, like the kind of game that we are now playing – it’s called Microsoft Team – then it’s a good game. Otherwise, it is antisocial and therefore is discouraged.

Audrey Tang: Of course, but it is not like the mentor that I work day-to-day on the personal basis. Rather, I share with them my work, and they share with me their work. For example, I work for a while very closely with Dankogai-san on previously of, I think, Livedoor Japan on the Perl language, which eventually became the language called Raku, and the code is called Rakuto, which means actually joy or fun.

Audrey Tang: It’s a Japanese idea. When we work on the what we call optimize for fun together, what we are trying to do is to turn something that is traditionally reserved for the experts to do programming language design into essentially massive multiplayer game that everybody can be spending just 5 minute, 10 minute, or something, interact and have fun with the language community.

Audrey Tang: The culture of optimizing for fun, or Rakudo, to have fun first, this is the cultural idea that I learned from not only Dankogai-san, but also at the time, Larry Wall of Perl fame, who is also a linguist and very much into Japanese culture, and I think, practices aikido and things like that.

Audrey Tang: We all learned something from the idea of this joy, fun, or positive affect-based management and leadership style, rather than the very draconian, Tylerism kind of management style.

Audrey Tang: I think this is truly enabling for me back then, as just a barely adult, in my early 20-something, to be associated with these very wise people, so that I can develop my own idea and philosophy about optimizing for fun and a joy-based leadership style.

Interviewer: Thank you much. I think we won’t ask more questions, but since I think we almost something. Maybe we can conclude by Ikawa-san.

Audrey Tang: Live long and prosper, and see you face-to-face after the vaccine. Bye.