Holly Herndon: Hi everyone, this is Holly Herndon.

Mat Dryhurst: I’m Mat Dryhurst.

Holly Herndon: You’re listening to, Interdependence.

Holly Herndon: Hi.

Mat Dryhurst: Hi, Audrey?

Mat Dryhurst: We are very casual.

Audrey Tang: OK, I see this is a capella version of the sound effect.

Mat Dryhurst: Yes, exactly.

Holly Herndon: Hi Audrey, how are you?

Audrey Tang: Hi, how are you doing? Pretty good. Good local time, everyone listening in.

Holly Herndon: Normally, when we have a guest on, we ask them to introduce themselves. Today, I was hoping that you might be willing to recite or read the job description that you wrote for yourself in the form of a poem or prayer. Is that possible?

Audrey Tang: Sure. I’m a poetician. The most of the things that I do is reciting poems.

Audrey Tang: Here is my job description. Goes like this, “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 that the singularity is near, there’s always remember the plurality is here.”

Mat Dryhurst: Beautiful.

Holly Herndon: Wonderful. Thank you.

Mat Dryhurst: Thank you. We also later want to ask you some questions specifically about your poetry practice because it’s something that’s been coming up quite a lot recently. It has been a really nice departure. We had a few people last week reciting poems on the podcast.

Holly Herndon: Unexpectedly.

Mat Dryhurst: Yeah. It’s really nice. For people who are completely unfamiliar with what you do, would you mind giving, maybe a little introduction to yourself and a loose introduction to your background?

Audrey Tang: My background is very transparent. There’s no opacity whatsoever. [laughs] I’m born in 1981, so makes me almost 40 years old now. I’m currently Digital Minister of Taiwan in charge of social innovation, open government, and youth engagement.

Audrey Tang: Through the use of digital social innovation, the ideas of fast, fair, and fun response to the pandemic, Taiwan has had single digit of COVID related deaths this time, and we’ve never had a lockdown. Just as we countered the pandemic with no lockdown, we encountered the infodemic that this information crisis was no takedown either.

Audrey Tang: This is a [laughs] story of the citizens working with the government, and the government working with, but not for, the citizens in co creation.

Holly Herndon: Incredible.

Mat Dryhurst: I can’t wait to talk more about that. We have so many questions.

Holly Herndon: We’re going to get into that…

Holly Herndon: …but to fill in a little bit more of your background. You were active in the Sunflower Movement in 2014, where groups organized to occupy the legislature protesting a trade agreement with China that was done in an opaque manner.

Audrey Tang: We called it a demonstration not quite protesting.

Holly Herndon: OK, demonstration.

Audrey Tang: There’s a little bit of protesting the day before they occupied. Once we occupied the parliament, it’s demonstration in the sense of a demo that’s working with more than 20 NGOs.

Audrey Tang: We demonstrated to the country that with half a million people on the street and many more online, we can get rough consensus going on using listening and scaled civic technologies, facilitated deliberation, open space technology, and so on.

Audrey Tang: After three weeks of very peaceful nonviolent occupy, we did get a coherent set of demands which were then ratified.

Holly Herndon: Amazing. Was this your introduction to politics or the first time you were active in politics?

Audrey Tang: I’m always involved in politics one way or another because when I was young I still remember the part of the martial law played on the media landscape of the censorship. Both my parents are journalists who care a lot about social reform, democratization, and nature preservation sustainability, and so on.

Audrey Tang: They had many struggles within the then one ruling party system and not at all democratic election. In my youth, I participated in the co-op Movement, the Homemakers Union, people who voluntarily protect the environment and building the so called social sector in Taiwan even before the martial law was lifted.

Audrey Tang: Then, after the martial law was lifted, I was also involved in the first presidential campaign, which happened after the World Wide Web in 1996 and helped campaigning because my dad was a spokesperson for one of the presidential candidates who lost by the way.

Holly Herndon: Wow, that’s fascinating. It’s much more complex than I realized through researching a little bit. I’m wondering how specifically your participation in the Sunflower Movement. I believed I read somewhere that you helped organize some communication networks.

Holly Herndon: You set up some of the IT infrastructure. I’m wondering how that experience may be shaped some of your current politics.

Audrey Tang: That’s definitely a plural “you” there.

Audrey Tang: While I did contribute Ethernet cables, Cat 6 lines, 350 meters long, I wasn’t the main ICT crew which wired together, quite literally, the Parliament with the 20 or so NGOs who was occupying the street.

Audrey Tang: We were operating under the broad umbrella term of g0v or gov zero, the civic tech initiative to the community. My main work is mostly on maintaining the back end, the EtherCalc.

Audrey Tang: That’s a collaborative no sign required spreadsheet that coordinates logistics of the supply chain that literally deliver lunch boxes and essential supplies in the Occupy Movement and so on, and also coordinating the back end that powers the 20 or so live streams with real time captioning and multi language translation and things like that.

Audrey Tang: A lot of that, we’ll see more use in Hong Kong later on. It was prototyped during the Sunflower Occupy. That was around the time where mobile communication as well as live streaming became widely accessible. It’s a product of its time.

Mat Dryhurst: I’ve read about you recently, you described yourself as a conservative anarchist.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Mat Dryhurst: You often talk about principles of radical transparency. I wonder if we could maybe explore both of those concepts because both of them sound somewhat familiar. I think you have a very specific take on them and explore those concepts and maybe a dipper toes into how some of those principles are practiced in your government.

Audrey Tang: Sure. I call myself a lowercase minister, meaning that I don’t ever give orders or take orders. I work with the government, not for the government, for the record. That is the anarchist part. This is about voluntary association and so on. Before anyone thinks me a bomb throwing anarchist, the conservative part…

Mat Dryhurst: We’ll get there.

Audrey Tang: That’s right. I don’t even answer fork bombs, not even software ones.

Audrey Tang: Anyway, the conservative part means that we respect the more than 20 national languages in Taiwan, the various traditions of the Austronesian indigenous, the ethnic Han. That includes Taiwanese Holo, Hakka, and many other Mandarin speaking communities.

Audrey Tang: That is a transcultural setting where we make progress only by including all the 20 or more different cultural perspectives instead of making progress on one particular culture to the expense or to the detriment of the other culture. It’s a transcultural take on conservativism. That includes the Internet culture.

Holly Herndon: A transcultural take on conservatism, that’s a new phrase for me. That’s…

Mat Dryhurst: What is this? It seems like it’s very much emphasizing the conservation component of conservatism. Obviously, in any European or American context, that term has very, very different…

Audrey Tang: I guess they share the same route, right? Meaning that the traditions are there for a reason. Elderly people, they respect certain values and must continue for those values to continue to matter. In that sense, we do share that route.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, the 20 or so different cultures probably differ a lot with the dominant Western cultures. What we’re saying is, for example, here’s a matriarchy in Taiwan, the Taiwanese Amis in business nation. There is the Taiwan nation where gender simply doesn’t matter when choosing leadership. These are the coaches to be conserved.

Mat Dryhurst: That’s wonderful. It’s funny in a sense because given your framing of that role — correct me if I’m wrong here — where maybe describing your Tuesdays and your Wednesdays where the Tuesdays could be considered…I remember hearing something about on the Tuesday, you would travel around the country…

Audrey Tang: That’s right. Today is Wednesday. It’s my office hour.

Mat Dryhurst: Exactly. For those who don’t know, in Taiwan, you can travel with high speed rail pretty much all over the country in about an hour and a half. Is that correct?

Audrey Tang: That’s right. Yes.

Mat Dryhurst: Tuesday is often traveling to different communities outside of Taipei.

Audrey Tang: That’s right. Yesterday I was in Hsinchu.

Audrey Tang: Wednesday, which is today, is people visiting me in the Social Innovation Lab.

Mat Dryhurst: Exactly. This would be the radical transparency part, right? Can we talk a little bit about that radical transparency? What does your Wednesday look like?

Audrey Tang: Sure. Like today, right?

Mat Dryhurst: Exactly.

Mat Dryhurst: We’re here, so days don’t mean anything, just for the record. It could be any day.

Audrey Tang: That’s right. Today is a Wednesday, so I first enjoy a conversation with fellowship of the RadicalxChange, which I’m a board member. I’m official administrator TW/board member in three, soon to be seven, International Association of Innovation organizations.

Audrey Tang: We talked about how to build additional public infrastructure together, how we move public elevation using market incentives, outside of the private infrastructure like Facebook, that has more anti social corners, of social media, like private nightclubs with private bouncers and toxic — or at least addictive — drinks, and move them into the digital equivalent of public parks and town halls.

Audrey Tang: We talked about that. Then, I attended First Canadian Women only Business Mission to Taiwan, which is virtual. I was in the TICC, the Convention Center, and talking with the Canadian equivalent and many business people. I remember [Mandarin], so CEO, but with women leaders.

Audrey Tang: We talk about how to make social innovation work to, not just digital transform, but also sustainably transform the business landscape by using SROI, stakeholder capitalism and things like that. Then there are four visitors. There’s one, Kerrick Staley, who visited me to talk about the Gold Card experience.

Audrey Tang: We hand out Gold Cards to anyone with the potential to contribute to science or technology in Taiwan, which is pretty much anyone. You can get one to three years of residency, health care, including your family, and in a very, very safe place in the world. There’s a record number, more than 2,000 people, doing this Gold Card Visa and they really want to contribute.

Audrey Tang: They also want to know how to make more contributions to the local, not just entrepreneurship scene, but also about, for example, GovTech. How to digitize helping the bilingualization of our Web services and government services. The next one, Meck, works with the Internet Archive, archive.org. They happen to know that I have this domain archived at TW.

Audrey Tang: We brainstormed on how to make Internet Archive work in Taiwanese cultural fashion, and how Internet Archive, more properly speaking, can help fight disinformation during the COVID pandemic by systemically backing up the health related records. It’s a fun discussion.

Audrey Tang: Another one talks about how to use non fungible tokens to record the fact that people are planting trees for carbon offsets. Another one after that talks about how to start a start up that focuses on getting people to recycle more. It’s people with business ideas, but it’s not necessarily business for profit. Sometimes it’s for purpose with profit and so on.

Mat Dryhurst: Wonderful. We’ll have to, at some point in this conversation, hopefully, touch on the topic of NFTs, because it seems like…

Mat Dryhurst: …the world is exploding with interest in this particular topic.

Audrey Tang: Exactly.

Holly Herndon: It’s nice to hear an environmental.

Mat Dryhurst: It’s nice to hear the opposite.

Audrey Tang: The cap and trade use of NFTs. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: All of the conversations are already on YouTube. We took video recording of all the visitors’ exchanges. They can choose either YouTube, which is usually the case when they are looking for new friends, or they can choose a transcript which we allow 10 days of co editing to remove, for example, anecdotes about their friends which are not cleared for publishing. My part is always published.

Mat Dryhurst: Yeah, exactly. That’s what I wanted to make clear. On the Wednesdays, basically, people are free to come and speak with you, under the condition that…

Audrey Tang: That it will be made public.

Mat Dryhurst: …that stuff is being made public, which I think is such a wonderful experiment in having an open policy system. I’ve noticed before, as well, when you discuss government and you talk about open data policies, we’ll talk about the implications of that and some of the successes of that in relation to COVID afterwards.

Mat Dryhurst: You often use language that is more common among the software development community. You discuss things like forking. It occurs to me that you’re talking about democracy, or the state generally, like an open GitHub roof.

Audrey Tang: Democracy is a type of technology, social technology, increasing the bitrate of democracy.

Mat Dryhurst: Wonderful.

Mat Dryhurst: OK. We’ve got that covered. Audrey wants to talk COVID, because in terms of some of these open data policies, it’s our understanding, at least, that some of the experiments that you’ve been piloting in Taiwan maybe helped with the detection.

Holly Herndon: Yeah. We were thinking about some of the successes of this kind of radical transparent policy was the early COVID 19 detection. Taiwan’s received so much acclaim, rightly so, for the handling of the pandemic. You all never had to impose a lockdown, and like you mentioned, you avoided so many casualties, which is really incredible.

Holly Herndon: Some of these successes in handling the pandemic were, perhaps, due to systems that you already had in place. Maybe we could talk about some of those, like the natural disaster alarm on the phone, or already the strong public trust through transparency that we touched on a little bit.

Holly Herndon: Also, maybe we could touch on your ability to limit fake news through community moderation. I found that really fascinating.

Audrey Tang: We were able to detect the COVID 19 in 2019, in December, when [laughs] Dr. Li Wenliang from Wuhan, who shared on social media there that there’s, and I quote, “seven new SARS cases in the Wuhan wet seafood market,” end of quote.

Audrey Tang: Of course, it didn’t quite reach the people in Wuhan, but Dr. Li did save the Taiwanese people because a very young doctor with the nickname [Mandarin] shared Dr. Li’s message on PTT, the Taiwanese equivalent of Reddit. Throughout the early mornings of December 31st, people triaged, uploaded it.

Audrey Tang: At the end of the day, literally, in the first of January, starting at 0:00 AM, every flight coming in from Wuhan to Taiwan gets health inspections. People were able to crowdsource on that so fast because PTT, even though I call it a Reddit equivalent, is really not an equivalent. [laughs] Reddit is in the private sector, and the PTT is social sector.

Audrey Tang: They show public infrastructure, literally a pet project by National Taiwan University students, that’s been running for decades. Because of the lack of advertisements interests, lack of shareholders’ interests, PTT is entirely open source and co governed by its participants, like a platform co op.

Audrey Tang: People focus their energy on the issues that actually have a social impact, without being derailed into advertisement or surveillance capitalism tricks. That actually made the early warnings far more reliable.

Audrey Tang: Later on when there’s this information or conspiracy theories around mask efficacy, around mass distribution, around the effectiveness of vaccines which we are now seeing there’s always a reliable crowd sourced community where people can participate in the fact checking, in the essentially journalism work by themselves without having to trap ourselves into the more addicted places, the more intense social corners of social media.

Holly Herndon: That’s fascinating. You’re mentioning that PTT was already in wide public use for a while when that’s happened to you, already had those rails. How long has it been in use publicly?

Audrey Tang: It’s rolled out as in 25 years ago, 1995. It’s been a while when we say infrastructure [laughs] we really mean infrastructure. [laughs] It’s been running in the Taiwan Academic Network, the TANet, which also has been around before the turn of the century like very veritable part of the Internet stats.

Audrey Tang: People really associate a lot of the social contribution and the Samsara movement also was prompted by PTT posts calling people to counter surround the police, so there would be no violence.

Holly Herndon: Wow. Was PTT also part of the infrastructure in the surgical mask data success that you all had getting people to pharmacies and showing people exactly how many surgical masks were available at any time?

Audrey Tang: It’s good to spread the news about the availability of such masks. That’s the more pro social use of social media. Equally important is the g0v or the gov zero community, which was the umbrella term that we used during the occupy and now has also evolved into the idea of — you just mentioned it — forking the governments.

Audrey Tang: It’s very simple. For example, take the national participation portal, join that gov.tw. You can change the O to a zero so join the g0v.tw and you get into the shadow government, which is more fun.

Audrey Tang: It’s like 8,000 people on the telegram/irc/slackchannel and people can just start discussions. For example, how Huddah named of the civic tech people who invented the mask availability map in the first place.

Audrey Tang: He is the head of the local Google Developer group. He just prototyped along with the GDG folks the first map that showed Google Map, where are the places that still have some masks, so people don’t have to queue in vain.

Audrey Tang: He used Google API, the Places API, the more expensive one, not the map. API only. He owed Google 20k US dollars, after just a day or so, after being exposed on national media. I also contribute to his bill. He went to the g0v Slack channel to ask for help. Of course, people talk about caching the results, making sure the OpenStreetMap could be used for things like that.

Audrey Tang: I was also part of the discussion, so I just took his idea to the head of cabinet to our premier, saying that we need to trust these people with real time open data or open API because they already have far more reach than anything that our government run websites would do.

Audrey Tang: The premier gave a green light, and literally the next day, we started this three day sprint to make all the pharmacies, more than six thousands of them in Taiwan, report real time selling data of the ration medical mask so that people can see when they are queuing, that people came before them, swipe their national health card and stand the real time stock deplete by two by two, every time I see cards swapped.

Audrey Tang: It builds public trustworthiness because people can verify them using participatory accountability. They don’t have to use a map because the same API also powers a chatbot or voice assistance for people with seeing difficulties. At the end of it more than one hundred different applications.

Holly Herndon: My mind is blown how fast things can move in Taiwan?

Mat Dryhurst: For context too, we’re in Germany, currently at the moment, and there’s a big scandal. As people have learned. Holly, you actually know more about this…

Holly Herndon: It’s OK. We don’t want to go into…

Mat Dryhurst: There’s a whole scandal about the fact that the vaccine delivery is being delayed because the official state offices, the dealing with the matters, are communicating via fax machine.

Mat Dryhurst: The idea that you could deploy this kind of idea within a week, and particularly, not just deploy an idea, but field an idea that somebody independently came up with, and then help them realize that and bring that to more people, it’s just mind blowing.

Holly Herndon: It’s kind of grassroots, but inclusion is really amazing.

Mat Dryhurst: It’s mind blowing. Would you mind explaining? There’s so much to get through, because obviously, you’re in a scenario where you can make a difference in a week to the way a state runs, which again, it’s very difficult to get your head around, but as a result…

Holly Herndon: I think Audrey would argue and please, if I say this wrong, I don’t want to put words in your mouth. I think that they’ve set up a system where anyone in Taiwan can make a difference in a week and that’s what’s so beautiful about it.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, definitely. How we didn’t ask for our permission…

Audrey Tang: …before rolling it out mask availability map all I did was to talk to Google saying that, “Hey, I’m going to make a portal of the white Hunter mask availability applications, and would you please wave his map and place us API usage fees if I place you on top of the OpenStreetMap point.” Google CSR team said, Yes.

Audrey Tang: I hope that’s my only contribution.

Mat Dryhurst: That’s wonderful, but as I said, there’s so many small interventions that could be discussed, because everything seems to be working in such a beautiful fluid way. One thing I’m particularly interested in is the humor over rumor, policy that you’ve been discussing, would you mind, please explaining how that came together, what its utility is because it’s wonderful.

Audrey Tang: Yeah. Just as we find a pandemic was no lockdown, we need to find infodemic was no takedown. That’s because people above 40 years old, all remember the martial law and nobody want to go back to the martial laws.

Audrey Tang: Anything that begins with censorship, even for hate speech or information manipulation by foreign actors, which tend to be the justification for censorship in other parts of the world still, they face a lot of resistance when anything that looks like a takedown or censorship as proposed by any legislator is just a non starter.

Audrey Tang: Because of that, we need to think of ways to outrun, outrace the conspiracy theories and disinformation campaigns, which is not easy, because most of them build upon outrage, which is one of the most viral emotions. It has a very high R value, as compared to, for example, sadness, which has a very low R value people don’t tend to share.

Audrey Tang: Outrage goes to revenge, discrimination, the beginning of a hate speech, that renders people’s empathy, null and void and when people gets into mindlessly sharing their stories, then we have a real problem of infodemic. Because of that, we need to work on vaccination against the virus of the mind, the conspiracy theories and disinformation.

Audrey Tang: We stumbled upon joy, our humor for this is a one way street. If you have left about something, it’s very difficult to go back and feel a sense of vengefulness or a sense of discrimination.

Audrey Tang: The best comedians do this. If you feel like discrimination or vengefulness, is very much able for a well placed comedic effect to channel that into laughter and into joy. One case in point was in last April, we’ve had a conspiracy theory detected by people who volunteer to a long press on their enter encrypted channels called Line, but it’s like WhatsApp, to fly things as spawn essentially.

Audrey Tang: People voluntarily dedicate those misinformation as they were first starting to trend. We can see on the dashboard that there is an ongoing disinformation about, “The tissue papers materials are being confiscated by the state to make medical grade mask. We’ll run out of tissue papers soon,” which is really quite bad. This information is intentional. It started by tissue paper rich sellers, who will later find out.

Audrey Tang: People do go out and panic buy. Within the same news cycle within two hours, we wrote out the vaccine, the inoculation and vaccine reads, “Each of us only have one pair of bottoms. Then with the premier, the head of cabinet as showing his bottom weakling it a little bit.”

Audrey Tang: It’s a wordplay, because in Mandarin to stockpile twin sounds the same, is a homonym with bottoms twin. Basically it’s saying does stockpiling does you no good because there’s only a certain rate, you can use tissue papers.

Audrey Tang: Then, once it’s really says in a payload in a large table, is that tissue papers are made out of South American materials, and medical grade masks being plastic products are actually made from domestic materials. There’s no way data nationalizing mass production could hurt the tissue paper production.

Audrey Tang: If we only said that as a public service announcement, nobody will share it, but a premier weakling his bottom is so hilarious so people shared that and very soon it has a higher R value than the conspiracy [laughs] theory. Just after a weekend, nobody shared the conspiracy theory anymore, and everyone is laughing about the bottom, like making himself literally the butt of the joke.

Mat Dryhurst: [laughs]

Holly Herndon: That’s amazing. A two hour turnaround.

Mat Dryhurst: It’s remarkable also because it is jumping out in front of me…Actually, we have some very close friends, some Dutch artist called Metahaven who wrote a book. This was five or six years ago. The title of the book was “Can Jokes Bring Down Governments.”

Mat Dryhurst: It was very much looking at ascendant meme warfare. It’s so interesting and incredibly progressive for you all to identify that issue of meme warfare and jump ahead of it, present exactly this vision of jokes, augmenting government function and dispelling disinformation. It’s remarkable…

Mat Dryhurst: Do you see that approach scaling to other contexts? Because this is obviously a clear issue on Twitter where the incentive is to provoke outrage. Have you heard of anybody else learning from your piloting of this post? [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Definitely, the Thai people, we run a couple of workshops together. I visited Chulalongkorn University before the pandemic, and still very interested in running a fact checking organization based on this principle of the fun of bringing comic relief [laughs] almost from the leading journalists and to health workers and so on, to fact check the ongoing rumors about the medicines, that simply doesn’t work.

Audrey Tang: There’s a large need for this kind of fact checking that is also fun because it makes the journalists and the fact checkers work much more worthwhile because they know that they can reach far more people in an idea of notice and public notice or even notice in public performance, rather than notice and picked out because it would take things down, people don’t learn from it.

Audrey Tang: If you shared this as a notice in public, notice media competence material, then everybody can remix it for fun, for the littlest.

Holly Herndon: I love that you’re working with professional comedians as well because I feel sometimes, officials try to introduce comedy, and then it falls flat. It doesn’t work at all and then that becomes the joke in and of itself, but the fact that you’re actually utilizing people’s well honed skills is amazing.

Audrey Tang: That’s right. We have professionals like the participation officer team in each ministry is basically people who work on this full time to engage the public, especially the hashtag. Sometimes I call them hashtag officers.

Audrey Tang: …Ministry of Health and Welfare, for example, their participation officer literally lives with this dog Shiba Inu, very cute.

Holly Herndon: [laughs]

Audrey Tang: …and in taking photos from certain angles. Looks like the dog at a meme.

Audrey Tang: Their job, literally, after each 2:00 PM. live press conference about this intrepid command center is to go home and take a fresh picture of the dog.

Holly Herndon: [laughs]

Audrey Tang: …and introduce a physical distancing when you’re indoors, keep three Shiba Inus away from one another and when you’re out or keep two of those dogs away from one another or wear a mask. Putting the dog’s foot into the dog’s mouth and then taking photos.

Mat Dryhurst: [laughs]

Audrey Tang: The dog is telling you, “Wear a mask to protect your own face against your own unwashed hand.”

Audrey Tang: Which is brilliant because it appeals to rational self interest. It doesn’t say, “Respect your elderly.” [laughs] It’s funny, you laugh about it. You probably get vaccinated and the next time you hear about the ineffectiveness mask or whatever you say, “But it protects me against my own unwashed hand,” which links mask use to sanitation.

Mat Dryhurst: Social dog distance thing.

Holly Herndon: [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Exactly, yes.

Mat Dryhurst: Wonderful. I do want to say actually when you’re talking about this particular period, it related to COVID 19. Incidentally, Holly and I were in Taiwan for the only time in our life, from the first of January, 2020.

Holly Herndon: For a couple of weeks. We were there during the election.

Mat Dryhurst: To the 14th. Anecdotally, we obviously, read a little bit, and actually, we’re familiar with you before of that, mostly through the RadicalxChange movement. The experience of witnessing the open democratic polling, this public…

Audrey Tang: That’s happening on the recounting of each ballot, YouTubers, live streaming the counting process.

Mat Dryhurst: For context, and I hope I don’t misrepresent this. You’re walking through the City of Taipei and on every corner, there’s restaurants or laundry services, there’s people counting ballots openly, and people observing the process and counting.

Holly Herndon: Anyone can say there’s a mistake or anyone can complain about it.

Audrey Tang: It’s YouTuber frankly, the leading candidates all have their own apps. The YouTubers can join the counting ballots and press on their apps and so on. This is, again, something the mask availability map where people can report anything that looks wrong in real time through an open API. You do see it in all walks of life.

Mat Dryhurst: I can say as someone who has never had an intimate research interest in the practice of democracy, I felt I was walking in the future. It was such a remarkable experience.

Holly Herndon: The lead up to the vote, there was so much energy and participation in the public square. We were walking through different places. We would end up in a celebratory where there would be thousands of middle aged people, like excited, super strong.

Mat Dryhurst: We were handed a lot of different flags at some point.

Mat Dryhurst: Then we realized we were inadvertently attending a pro China rally.

Holly Herndon: [laughs]

Audrey Tang: That’s fine. You take all the signs.

Audrey Tang: …of the democracy.

Mat Dryhurst: This is cool, but they are sticking flags in our shirts, I’m like, “OK.”

Mat Dryhurst: I don’t know what I’m representing right now, but still, in terms of active participation, I feel you’re such a practical person, such an optimist on these issues.

Mat Dryhurst: I’ve been trained in many ways to view the merging of new technological concepts and democracy as being somewhat a technocratic imposition, something to be jaded by, and to be in an environment where it felt this was a very active and the real thing was…As I said, I felt I’d arrived on a different planet. It was Star Trek or something.

Audrey Tang: The future. We’re literally in the future, seven hours in the future.

Holly Herndon: Indeed.

Mat Dryhurst: That’s true. On that principle, we had a Glenville on the podcast quite early. We’ve been contributors also to the RadicalxChange movement. For those who aren’t familiar, I understand that you’ve been testing a pilot in quadratic voting in Taiwan. I wonder if you might be able to explain for people loosely what quadratic voting is and maybe how are experimenting with implementing it.

Audrey Tang: Sure, it’s no longer a pilot. It’s a part of our public [laughs] infrastructure because in the past couple of years of Presidential Hackathon, we’ve used quadratic voting to really good effect. This is the third year this year that we’re continuing the use of QV. QV is a very simple idea that increase the bitrate of democracy.

Audrey Tang: In our concrete case, the Presidential Hackathon, we have more than 200 different project ideas, each realizing one or more of the global goals of the sustainable goals. Any professional jury probably wouldn’t have the expertise to look through them all, let alone seen the synergies.

Audrey Tang: We turn voting to our national preservation platform, The Joint Platform. In each person, there’s, I think, 10 million visitors to The Joint Platform. Each of them, if they want, can participate in the QV and get 99 tokens.

Audrey Tang: Each token can be spent a variety of voting strategies. One very simple strategy is to pick 99 projects you like and give them one vote each. Very few people do that. People often, as with Internet polls, really want to put everything into one single project that brought them here, which is just natural.

Audrey Tang: When they do that, they discovered very quickly, it’s quadratic. Meaning that if they want to vote two votes, that costs 4 tokens in total, three votes will cost you 9 and four…16. It’s quadratic.

Audrey Tang: With 99 points the most they can vote on any single project is just nine votes, which costs 81, and they still have 18 left. They’re motivated not to squander the vote, to look around to some other case.

Audrey Tang: Maybe they vote initially to the water box which is a crowd sourced water pollution measurement project. That has the arable lands and industrial plans on its building a IOT network of sensing water pollution, which is pretty cool.

Audrey Tang: They can’t vote everything to it. They have to look around and maybe they see another case. They use the Pokémon Go like game to encourage people to go to refill their bottles instead of buying new plastic bottle. That sounds cool. You can vote four votes now, with 16, and you still have 2 points left.

Audrey Tang: You’re then motivated to look into at least two other projects — like using smart meters to reduce the energy use, or to get push notifications when there’s potential heat damage, because we do feel the climate change a lot.

Audrey Tang: Maybe you see the synergy between the heat damage thing and refilling your water bottle thing because when you’re outdoors and you get into the potential of the hazardous zone, this tool works really good together. Maybe you take away some of the previous votes you spent on the nine vote mark, and maybe you do us then in seven.

Audrey Tang: The point is that each additional vote costs the marginal cost exactly the same as the potential impact that it has on the likelihood that this project will be selected into the top 24.

Audrey Tang: When we do select the top 24, a vast majority of people feel they have won because at least one project they support, end up meeting the cut, and to making sure that we are getting them to cross sectoral incubation that they need.

Audrey Tang: The five winners, of course, get a presidential trophy which is a projector that projects the President promising them that whatever they did, will become public infrastructure within the next year. There’s presidential power as Hackathon Awards.

Audrey Tang: The QV helps first to build legitimacy. Second, to make people think about this synergies. Third, leave people with a really good feeling that everybody have won.

Mat Dryhurst: It relates specifically to the process of quadratic voting. Do you see those techniques ever being able to scale to elections in which people are voting for people, rather than projects? What are the implications of that, I wonder?

Audrey Tang: We try in our board meetings also, for more than a year now, to have our quarterly balance using QV and it’s a mixture. We can move to, for example, change the logo for RadicalxChange. [laughs] That’s one of the QV topic. We can move to, I don’t know, reappoint Audrey Tang as a board member. That’s another QV ballots.

Audrey Tang: We don’t separate them into two buckets. We use the same [laughs] QV ballot for this. It’s quite helpful, and it helps people to frame a high dimensional issue into many binary choices and without potential synergies in the solution space become more apparent. Because of the requirement of QV, basically no collusion. Vote trading is a big problem with QV.

Audrey Tang: It does rely on people who are motivated more or less by shared values. Otherwise, as has been pointed out, the idea of collusion, especially if we get into the negative square root thing, like casting negative votes, which we also have that in our board meetings, that will probably disrupt the dynamic.

Audrey Tang: I guess we’re not quite yet at a place where we use QV to choose say, legislators or presidents. Because that’s the place with exponential return. You only have to game at once. [laughs] Then you get regulatory control. We first to use it for budgets. Presidential Hackathon is agenda setting again, it’s like participatory budget.

Holly Herndon: How would you prevent collusion and that kind of scenario?

Audrey Tang: We don’t.

Holly Herndon: OK.

Audrey Tang: In Presidential Hackathon, we do have projects cross promoting. [laughs] If you look at a GitCoin experiment, they do it a lot as well. It’s healthy to a degree as long as they have synergy.

Holly Herndon: OK, that makes sense.

Mat Dryhurst: We want to have Kevin from GitCoin on the on the podcast soon.

Audrey Tang: Cool.

Holly Herndon: I wanted to touch back on your office hours just for a minute. Mat and I have been working pretty extensively with machine learning for a while. We often note that as soon as something’s recorded, it can become part of a machine legible training canon.

Holly Herndon: With these office hours that you hold that are openly broadcast and archive, I’ve heard you say that this documentation allows current conversations to also include the people of the future, which is such an incredible way of framing a conversation.

Holly Herndon: Such a beautiful way of thinking. I was wondering how the conversations shift? How does the tone of the conversation change when people are addressing not only the present in the people in the room, but also the remote people listening, and also the people of the future?

Audrey Tang: Of the four topics of today’s office hour, you’ll note that they all work pretty well, for the generations to come. People don’t tend to propose, [laughs] short term gain by the current generation at the expense of the young children, or next generations.

Audrey Tang: People don’t tend to bring up ideas that only benefit their sector to the expense of other sectors, simply because it will look quite bad. [laughs] It will age really unwell when it’s on public record.

Holly Herndon: I love this idea of it not being a short term thinking that you’re having to…Because whether we want to acknowledge it or not, the conversations and the decisions that we’re making today do have a radical impact on the future.

Holly Herndon: Keeping that in mind and thinking about this kind of conversation being with people of the future, I think is a nice way to remind oneself that one’s behavior has those kind of impacts.

Audrey Tang: I often joke about because for transcripts, specifically, we relinquish all copyrights like using Creative Zero, the Creative Commons CC0, a public domain marker. Because of that, we fast travel to the future of 50 years, or 70 years after my demise.

Audrey Tang: This the overview effect of people going to the International Space Station and see the Earth from the outer space lands back to become better people, [laughs] because they see it in a more holistic way. There is a similar effect going on, but chronologically, not spatially.

Mat Dryhurst: It makes a lot of sense. When I was stumbling earlier, I was trying to create some kind of correlation between this kind of awareness of potential future machinic interpretation of human affairs, and also your poetry practice.

Mat Dryhurst: Because I’ve seen reference in the past that you write poetry, not only in human language, but also in machine language. You’re quite a brilliant Perl developer, and I’m sure quite well versed in many other languages in that context.

Mat Dryhurst: I wonder if we could talk a little bit about your poetry and specifically, this idea of communicating with machines. To make my intentions fully transparent, this is the point where we’re going to try and get a little bit psychedelic.

Mat Dryhurst: We have some unusual, increasingly unusual questions to follow after this.

Audrey Tang: [laughs]

Mat Dryhurst: I think that the transition to speak about your history and your interest in poetry would be a beautiful segue.

Audrey Tang: Sure. As I describe my job description in poetry, and if you navigate to my home page, which is audreyt.org, you’ll see nothing but poetry. It’s literally just one specific poetry translated by yours truly, by me, and by a Taiwanese poet with the name Chen Yi wen.

Audrey Tang: A poem, if you have it up, is called “Like a Larva Holding on for Transformation.” I just read that poem last week to people in Fukushima, very young people in Fukushima, some of them just primary school or middle school.

Audrey Tang: 10 years ago, there’s a big earthquake, the nuclear plant disaster that affected their work. I shared with them this poem because it’s also point of transformation. They were forced to live in places other than the place that they remembered.

Audrey Tang: Sometimes they’re part of the evacuated teams. Then later on, they returned to Fukushima and rebuilt that place but with this headwind because the international community still remember it as a disaster zone of sorts.

Audrey Tang: What I’m trying to get at is that this poem, to me, speaks of the continuity between generation and future generations, and about invariance to things that do not change. That’s throughout this transcultural journey of conservativism, like conserving the things that matter and pretty much ignoring things that didn’t matter.

Audrey Tang: When you talk about connecting via machines — like time machines, time capsules, being a time machine — with future generations, I think about those invariants, about the things that we do that are going to still make sense seven generations down the line.

Audrey Tang: Whether they are cyborgs or anything, but without too much focus on the things that are fleeting, that are just for the moment and probably wouldn’t matter one generation level or seven down the line. That poetry is something that we recommend the listener to this podcast to check out. It’s at audreyt.org.

Mat Dryhurst: Wonderful. I’m going to publish that because even the presentation of it on the website, the bilingual presentation is very beautiful.

Holly Herndon: What you said reminds me of the conversation we had last week with our friend, David Rudnick. He recited a few stanzas from Shelley’s “Mont Blanc.” It was uncanny because I believe that was written in the late 1800s. It felt like it was written about our online experience.

Mat Dryhurst: His argument is that Shelley was writing about Internet protocols was the first maybe.

Holly Herndon: [laughs] Let’s just say early.

Mat Dryhurst: Early. His framing, of course, it’s just this idea that poetry as a technology is resilient generationally. There’s something about…It’s funny. It reminds me. Have you ever interacted with Birgitta Jónsdóttir?

Audrey Tang: On Twitter, yes. A fellow poetician.

Mat Dryhurst: Poetician. Did you just say poetician?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, I’m a poetician. Apparently, she is too.

Holly Herndon: [laughs]

Mat Dryhurst: We performed with her a few years ago. She stood up and recited a poem.

Holly Herndon: That’s right. I’ve heard about them.

Mat Dryhurst: She was also part of the free Citizens’ Movement in Iceland about that time. It would be nice to see a book of all the poetician.

Holly Herndon: One thing that you touched on a little bit earlier was this hot topic of NFTs. We’ve spoken about it at length on this podcast. It’s been such a hot topic in the news lately.

Holly Herndon: One project that it reminded me of is there seems to be this consistent thread in your thinking where there’s a sensitivity not only to humans of the now, humans of the future but also nonhumans.

Holly Herndon: It reminded me of this project here in Berlin called terra0 where they’re attempting to use decentralized sensor systems to allow a forest to track its own health and negotiate various things. People want to maybe chop down a tree or whatnot, it can negotiate on its own behalf.

Holly Herndon: We’ve also had conversations with the indigenous protocol and artificial intelligence working group about the need to respect the nonhuman. Along those lines, I was wondering, what are your ideas for how to bring the nonhuman entities into the democratic process?

Audrey Tang: First of all, getting them votes that would be [laughs] a good first step. In a sense, we are expanding in a much more inclusive way to future adults. That is to say, the National Participation platform in Taiwan, the Joint Platform, already counts more than a quarter of the citizen initiatives by people who are not 18 years old.

Audrey Tang: Meaning that people in the middle school, even in the primary school, they can set an agenda for policy making for the country. They don’t have to think that, “People will start to care about my voice, politician will care about my voice when I become an adult.”

Audrey Tang: They don’t have to take a strike every Friday either. Something between participating in Friday strikes and waiting to be a adult lies a third way, which is just organizing to get the natural allies in the young people’s case, usually the very old people, like the people in their 70s or in the late 60s.

Audrey Tang: We have anecdotal evidence that shows that age groups of around 17 and 70 are the most active in looking at those sustainability related themes in citizens’ initiatives. They care about future generations equally and pretty much more than any other age group.

Holly Herndon: That’s fantastic.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, to find that intergenerational spokesperson, solidarity across generations, that’s a good first step, because then the very young people who naturally are at the business end went here, say, like sustainability crisis can then find people who care more about their grandchildren or great grandchildren’s destinies.

Audrey Tang: Then piggybacking on that, we can give the voice to the…I think the terra0 nomenclature is this cybernetic ecology where people who care a lot about a large forest can then speak as a avatar or spokesperson with that forest.

Audrey Tang: This is related to the idea of natural personhood, which is already in practice with legal fictions in New Zealand, I believe, in other jurisdictions as well, where a river or a mountain…

Audrey Tang: …can speak through this intergenerational solidarity spokespersons through evidence based science and participate just like a corporate seat on the boards could and join and the votes.

Audrey Tang: They can also sue for damage and so on. Give them the same kind of vote that corporate entities do. That’s one very fruitful direction to think.

Holly Herndon: Is this something that Taiwan is considering?

Audrey Tang: Oh, definitely, which is why people come to my office hour to talk about NFTs for planting forest. For people’s continuous investing of their attention to look after the forest after it’s been planted for a tree plant is just the beginning with a relationship with the Earth.

Audrey Tang: It’s not just about advocating for the Earth but also somehow gets the Earth away to advocate through us. We already hand out, for example, our Civil IoT data application championship. The second place last year is a art project, that paints virtual trees on E Ink papers and so on, that reflects the real trees’ health, but in a way that put visibility into large streets, and banners, and so on.

Audrey Tang: They even have installations in the apartment complex, where they remind people to turn off unnecessary air conditioning, because they portray the polar bear [laughs] with the shrinking ice, and things like that.

Audrey Tang: Through art, I think that’s one of the easier channels through which that we can get the real hard scientists backed numbers into something that people feel a lot toward, and then that collectively change the habits.

Holly Herndon: How can we find more about this NFT tree project?

Audrey Tang: Well, I can introduce you to the person who just made a visit.

Holly Herndon: That would be great.

Mat Dryhurst: That would be wonderful, yeah. It’s really great, we’ve actually in various capacities been involved and there is, of course, such an underwhelming minority of projects that we’re thinking about applications for governance or for state based applications I should say, or environmental applications.

Mat Dryhurst: Any more information on where that stuff might be happening it really, really welcome.

Audrey Tang: It’s got a good point exchange and I just pasted the link to the chat here.

Mat Dryhurst: Thank you.

Holly Herndon: Thank you.

Mat Dryhurst: This is where maybe I start getting a bit too psychedelic but…

Holly Herndon: [laughs]

Mat Dryhurst: …I noticed there quite a great segue when we are talking about the idea of a kind of the avatar representative for the natural system like a forest. That’s a really cool intro to something I’ve been thinking about great deal.

Mat Dryhurst: I was reminded off from seeing for example that you’ve been known to present quite often telematically through a hologram, which is very interesting, very pression, and obviously with COVID and remote work and remote presentation lightly becoming a reality.

Audrey Tang: A norm. Yes.

Mat Dryhurst: It would become the norm so I applaud you for piloting that very early. One of things that occurs to me, are you all familiar with zero knowledge proofs?

Audrey Tang: Yes.

Mat Dryhurst: I’m personally quite interested in the idea of integrating zero knowledge proofs or working around identity systems. One of the things that your hologram presentation avatar reminded me of, or made me think of, is in a sense, one, the potential of decoupling a digital identity from our corporeal form.

Mat Dryhurst: Also, it raises in my mind, the potential in some senses of digital politicians or avatar of politicians. Now, of course, traditionally when that specter or that concept is raised, for those who are familiar with “Black Mirror,” there’s a very dystopian episode.

Audrey Tang: Yes. I remember that.

Mat Dryhurst: Somebody creates a cartoon character, and it’s this populist evil, unaccountable figure, and to the whole idea of a digital political being is very much framed as being a dystopian kind of unaccountable, farcical…

Audrey Tang: “Ghost in the Shell” had it out first, but yes.

Mat Dryhurst: Exactly, yes. Thank you.

Holly Herndon: You’re right. Thank you. [laughs]

Mat Dryhurst: Fair point. Also, way better music.

Mat Dryhurst: I wonder, we were last year in Mexico for a period of time, and we’re speaking to a friend there who interacts with the government quite a lot. The issue came up, for example of, we were talking about issues with corruption in the state, issues, obviously, in mitigating the complications of cartels, so on and so forth.

Holly Herndon: How often ministers are people who are in charge of mitigating the cartel issue become targets and are assassinated, obviously.

Mat Dryhurst: Exactly. My first question was like, “Well, who would want that job?” Then my second question was, “Is there a way potentially through using zero knowledge proofs, to…”

Mat Dryhurst: Which for those who don’t know what that is, it’s basically an advanced cryptographic technique that allows you to verify information without disclosing information. We could probably talk about it for an hour, but that would be too off topic.

Mat Dryhurst: If something like a zero knowledge proof could allow us to verify credibility without disclosing identity, could there be advantages to digital politicians? In some cases, they are, maybe, optimistic, because what I love about you is, you have such an optimistic framing about things, and in a sense confirmed this very dystopian perspective of an unaccountable avatar politician.

Holly Herndon: [laughs]

Mat Dryhurst: Sorry. I hope my question’s not too much of a…

Holly Herndon: Of a weird question. [laughs]

Mat Dryhurst: I was like, “Who in the world would I want to talk to about an avatar politician?” I’m like, “It is Audrey Tang.” Please…

Audrey Tang: It’s not very psychedelic.

Audrey Tang: It’s little bit of hip hop, maybe.

Holly Herndon: The shade.

Audrey Tang: I mean hip hop quite literally. There’s a Japanese hip hop band called Dos Monos. They visually sampled my interview and select this podcast because it’s in the Creative Commons. They don’t have to ask me, they just notified me that they sampled my interview with a journalist and into their hip hop, like lyrics.

Audrey Tang: This is interesting, because they didn’t distort my meaning. I was talking about the civic sector, social sector, the need to build such sectors that’s left out in traditional so called public, private partnerships, and so on.

Audrey Tang: They add to it so much interesting hip hop lyrics, and also the tempo, and MV that’s generated by GAN, Generative Adversarial Network, that looks like it comes out from those initial episode. It became their memes imbued in the MV, music, and altogether without my participation. All I did is relinquishing the copyright to my likeness.

Audrey Tang: People make memes, hip hop raps, and make art, based on whatever things, materials that I publish into the Commons. This is really nice, because this is assassination proof, even more so than zero knowledge is because in a sense this became a meme.

Audrey Tang: The original Doge meme is not mortal, it’s nothing [laughs] more to a Doge. People reuse it in pretty much any context that is useful. It’s even used for cryptocurrency, was the Doge coin. The idea that one turns oneself into a meme is far more survivable than anything that might limit it.

Audrey Tang: Output bandwidth could have control on ZK, because with a ZK scheme, I’ll have to manually verify my intent, vis à vis any application of any statement that I want to make. By relinquishing the copyright and to the attribution rise that couldn’t be relinquished and relinquished it anyway inalienable person or rights.

Audrey Tang: People are free to say that Audrey Tang said this just like people say, Albert Einstein said this, or something said this. It became amplifier.

Audrey Tang: My current take as a poetician, like all the good poets, I’m totally fine with whatever I said being remixed into popular culture and maybe resurface centuries down the line. By looking at the political output as just poems, things that are artistic innocence, that invokes a sense of alternate possibilities. It’s settled with a psychedelic after all.

Audrey Tang: We don’t need to worry about the message integrity of the traditional statement that we need to prove using ZK, because after, it’s inspiration. This is to the fundamental difference between art and design, whereas design always conform to a spec or a brief of some sort. Art works on the other way around, it provokes alternate ambitions on existing material.

Holly Herndon: To dig in a little bit, if they’re in contrast, can we think of any application? The cartel application is an interesting one. Can you think of in your own scenario, any application where anonymity would actually be beneficial?

Audrey Tang: Anonymity is beneficial when there is a power imbalance. For example, a whistleblower like Dr. LI Wenliang would probably benefit from pseudonymity. If he was in a place where there’s a lot of power imbalance between him and surveillance state, which didn’t at first want the idea of source resurfacing being distributed to the community.

Audrey Tang: No more pipe which is a student name on PTT enjoys that particular protection. We know she is a young doctor because she said as much, but we didn’t know who she is.

Mat Dryhurst: In those circumstances, that’s more what I mean with this is, in certain circumstances where one would need to establish some credibility, some assurances that, for example, this report coming out of this hospital is coming from the right person.

Mat Dryhurst: The way we would normally arbitrate that, but sadly seems to be in some decline is through journalists. You would have journalistic institutions with integrity, who can protect a whistleblower, but in the case of…

Holly Herndon: You don’t have journalistic protections everywhere, so…

Mat Dryhurst: Exactly and also this attention between journalistic protections and protecting the state. If you have people in official state positions, who are, for example, investigating corruption related to drug cartels.

Mat Dryhurst: I just wonder if there’s some potential there, using zero knowledge proofs, to be able to have…there be an avatar and parallel to the world that you’re describing, which actually subscribe to in the broader sense, give people the ability to trust that this avatar is someone who knows what they’re talking about, and someone that they can…

Audrey Tang: Which is why I say pseudonyms rather than anonyms. [laughs] Pseudonyms presume a continuous identity and is the foundation of trustworthiness. I’m not saying that each publication need to be totally randomized, because there’s no journalism to be done that way.

Audrey Tang: What we’re talking about is essentially still journalism, and maybe citizen journalists and/or civic journalism, but at a source, checking parts at narrative framing part at the balanced reporting parts, that’s still pure journalism. We don’t need to invent new words, this is media work, and if you do media work to build common knowledge so that people can benefit from it, you’re doing journalism.

Holly Herndon: I have one…This is a random question. If it’s not interesting, we can always leave it out. Along these lines, I’ve heard you speak about the importance of people being able to communicate privately in specific ways using cryptographic methods and whatnot.

Holly Herndon: I’m wondering if you have any thoughts on the recent surge in cryptocurrency into the public conversation, and how that’s changed the public view on the ideas around cryptographic encoding in a way?

Audrey Tang: It’s a really good question and very interesting, I assure you. [laughs] I get a lot of people asking me this because I made it very public. That’s around 2012, ‘13. I start publicly saying that my consulting rate is one Bitcoin per hour, which was just…

Audrey Tang: It was just €100 at that point [laughs] and then subsequently, €200, 300, around €500. I enter the cabinet, and therefore deleted even the private key to my wallet.

Audrey Tang: Anyway, [laughs] the point I’m trying to make is that, the awareness of people who look at Bitcoin and think about that, “Hey, this is a brand new way of people who previously couldn’t at all trust each other, to gain some trust.”

Audrey Tang: For its inspiration of purposes, it works really, really well, especially in places where the fiat or the Central Bank isn’t doing all that well. It serves that important inspirational purpose.

Audrey Tang: With that said, I do think people…if they think of it in purely financial or monetary, transactional ways, instead of thinking more about the applications, as we just talked about NFT for trees, or things like that, and it’s missing a lot more.

Audrey Tang: It’s missing all the applications where the values to the society cannot be monetized, to be turned into dollar values, which is the vast majority of poly [laughs] goods. It’s a good first step is a good entry draft, to the idea of socially recognized, mutually recognized by you.

Audrey Tang: Then I think there need to be more applications to storing dollar values for people to realize, “Hey, this actually works for other applications as well.”

Mat Dryhurst: It’s true. It’s a great source of frustration for me. I’ve been very, very interested in participating in the theory community for a very long time and the asymmetry between the public perception of projects built on top of a theory as mostly being speculative financialization projects.

Mat Dryhurst: The emphasis of people you mentioned earlier, like Vitalik, focusing a great deal of his time and energy and thinking about specifically mechanisms for the support of public goods.

Mat Dryhurst: That asymmetry in public perception is really frustrating, because generally speaking, also, there’s a lot of marketing language, there’s a lot of marketing spend on promoting the aspects of that world. They’re purely speculative and scummy.

Holly Herndon: To use tech terms, was it the array?

Mat Dryhurst: Exactly, the array. The array of bad stuff always seems to somehow overpower the array of good stuff, which is a great shame. I’m completely with you and it’s nice to hear the sober enthusiasm on the topic.

Audrey Tang: Definitely, it’s a phase, it will probably pass. The initial gold rush thing, we’ve seen this with open source movement, which is specifically forked out of the free software movement, so that we can also enjoy the economic argument marketing, if you will, from the commercial, proprietary software vendors, but to or to free software and more free software in general.

Audrey Tang: Open source chose such a marketing friendly term, and by necessity almost earlier, especially around the IPO of Red Hat, and so on. The conversations necessarily centers around a lot of things that simply makes no sense long term, but makes a lot of sense, hype cycle ish.

Audrey Tang: Hype cycle, I’ve been through a lot of them. [laughs] Enjoy while your last, but at the end of the day, it’s the public utility that matters.

Mat Dryhurst: One thing I did want to add. Just to reiterate, again, we’re a mate, we’re big fans of Taiwan. I want to share it out right now, Final Club, which is a place where you can go and have a nice drink and listen to music.

Mat Dryhurst: I wonder specifically speaking about these technologies or other things, do you have any recommendations for other things happening within Taiwan that we should be familiar with, and other people should be familiar with?

Mat Dryhurst: Maybe projects in the space we were discussing, or something else optimistic, because it genuinely did feel for the two weeks I was there that I was stepping into the future, and maybe there’s 100 things that more I need to know about and we should maybe pursue with this podcast?

Audrey Tang: There’s a podcast that I’ve been just on, called “The Ghost Island Media.” It covers the interesting things that’s going on in the islands of Taiwan. That’s the podcast that I would recommend you to check out. The podcast was talking about when I joined the episode about the life and times of Audrey Tang.

Audrey Tang: They asked me what language do I dream in. I said and I quote myself, “JavaScript, and Haskell and Perl, a little bit Python,” and things like that.

Audrey Tang: It’s a bit of a wacky, [laughs] but they really get into the layers of the onion, the history of the martial law, the history of Taiwan’s democratization process, why we use the term democratization. It’s original meaning which means populaces to control and definitely not very affordable everywhere, and so on.

Audrey Tang: We talk about public policy [laughs] and things like that, so it’s a pretty good take on things. In addition to the g0v online community, I would also suggest you to check out the social innovation portal si.taiwan.gov.tw, which talks about how the social impact oriented organizations are doing in Taiwan and their stories and their challenges, and whatever you can contribute internationally as well. The Presidential Hackathon is also worth checking out.

Holly Herndon: Yeah, we really hope to get to visit again. I was blown away by the natural beauty and how much of that you can find in Taipei itself and so close surrounding the city, how much natural beauty there is and also the kindness of the people Mat, and I got lost outside of Taipei.

Holly Herndon: We were kind of wandering around on some tea farms. Got completely lost and all of a sudden, this white Tesla SUV drove up, pulled up and the door is kind of opened really sci fi…

Mat Dryhurst: It’s like the back to the future car, you know, like the…

Holly Herndon: They said. Are you guys clearly lost and we are like, yeah, we hop in and is this really sweet couple drove us all the way back to the city. I was just really blown away by the kindness of the people there. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Feel free to get a couple of Gold Cards so you don’t have to apply visa for the next year or three.

Holly Herndon: Oh, that’s a good suggestion.

Mat Dryhurst: Certainly that’s not a bad suggestion.

Mat Dryhurst: Audrey, we have one final question that we ask all our guests, and we don’t tell them in advance obviously, because it’s fun to hear your spontaneous response. We named this podcast interdependence, and we’d like to ask people what that word or term means to them.

Audrey Tang: Sure, it reminds me to the declaration of Interdependence of Cyberspace because there was a declaration of Independence of Cyberspace and it started a lot of…including the cypherpunk ideas, around communities which actually cryptocurrency grew up from.

Audrey Tang: But nowadays we realize that the core of the Internet is a sense of interdependence, that without each sector depending on the other sectors, other things that those sectors are good at, we don’t have a norm, we would just have balkanized nets, and there’s no inter in the Internet anymore. To me, the inter in Internet now stands for interdependence.

Holly Herndon: Beautiful definition.

Mat Dryhurst: I love it. Is there actually a declaration for the Interdependence of Cyberspace because I didn’t know about that?

Holly Herndon: You thought she was my mom, the Barlow.

Audrey Tang: It’s a United Nation, top level experts recommendation arguments, and things like that. I pasted the link here. The Age of Digital Interdependence is a full report of the UN Secretary General’s high level panel on digital cooperation.

Holly Herndon: Wow, from last year.

Audrey Tang: Who knew?

Holly Herndon: Very cool. Thanks so much for sharing that.

Mat Dryhurst: That’s wonderful. Because we’re coming at it from a music perspective, where we come from an independent music background. The conclusion that we came to was that everything that people liked about independent music was the interdependent parts.

Mat Dryhurst: Emphasizing the individual too much was actually the promotional strategy of the interdependent music industry. Those new kinds of cooperative organizations, the individual wouldn’t have thrived at all.

Audrey Tang: Definitely. The term I used is from a UN report hat defines the interdependence in the Internet. Our inclusive respect, human centeredness, human flourishing, transparency collaboration, accessibility, sustainability, and harmony. That sounds something that will agree with your description. Value in the music.

Mat Dryhurst: Absolutely. We’ll have to have the UN on next week. Thank you.

Audrey Tang: Harmony part.

Holly Herndon: Exactly.

Mat Dryhurst: Thank you so much for your time. I don’t know if there’s anything else that you would like to cover that maybe we haven’t touched on?

Audrey Tang: Maybe I can conclude by reciting the poem of Chen Yi wen.

Holly Herndon: I would love that.

Mat Dryhurst: That would beautiful, please do.

Audrey Tang: Like a Larva Holding On for Transformation, a poem by Chen Yi wen, translated by yours truly.

Audrey Tang: “I would like you to firmly resist to your weakness, like a chrysalis holding back a butterfly, the maple leaf resisting the autumn, a newly splashed droplet resisting breakup.

Audrey Tang: “I would like you to balance your inner beauty, like the structure of a snowflake, the four paddles, a finger tree flower, a quatrain on a yellowed paper scroll, a still night, an empty spring mountain.

Audrey Tang: “I would like you to tolerate the secrets of a narcissus, forgive the twists of a moonlit river. Look straight at the murky sky as rain falls down just like listening to a naked prayer, like the ocean embracing the absolution of a storm.

Audrey Tang: “Then maybe you would be willing to walk through a declining border town, through a prosperous metropolis. See life, see death. See all the personal and transients dignity and code lifelessness.

Audrey Tang: “Sometimes life is as quietly beautiful as a poem as desolate as a vine as intense as a soaring eagle, as lonely as a dust covered steel. And so time passes, places alter, faces change. It has been a long journey. We returned to the room we set off from. Origin and destination curl into a perfect ring. I sure recognized the look in your eyes after a calibration.

Audrey Tang: “Clear, unswerving like steel beads that do not rust, roundly in the darkroom, reflecting pure light.”

Audrey Tang: Thank you for listening. Live long and prosper.

Holly Herndon: Thank you.

Mat Dryhurst: Thank you for reciting two poems to bookend this episode. I hope we get to say hello in person at some point in future. Audrey, thank you. It’s very inspiring and wonderful to talk with you.

Holly Herndon: Thank you for being…

Audrey Tang: Looking forward to meet face to face and looking forward to your future episodes with hopefully a high poem-to-prose ratio.

Holly Herndon: [laughs]

Mat Dryhurst: Definitely. We’re definitely getting there.

Holly Herndon: [laughs] It’s getting that way.

Mat Dryhurst: Very surprisingly, it’s definitely getting there. Audrey, again, thank you so much. Hope to see you in Taiwan sometime. Have a wonderful week.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, definitely. Get some Gold Cards, and till then live long and prosper.

Holly Herndon: Bye.

Mat Dryhurst: Thank you. See you there.