Kai Strittmatter: I was here now for two and a half weeks or three weeks. Actually, we met very briefly at the g0v...

Audrey Tang: Summit, that’s right.

Kai Strittmatter: ...conference. I listened to your speech.

Audrey Tang: Academia Sinica.

Kai Strittmatter: At the Academia Sinica, yeah. I don’t know what they’ve told you about. I’m from German Newspaper, "Süddeutsche Zeitung." We’re the largest national newspaper in Germany. I’m the Beijing correspondent.

Audrey Tang: You’re the Beijing correspondent?

Kai Strittmatter: I was the Beijing correspondent. Basically, I left Beijing two weeks ago.

Audrey Tang: OK if we’re on the record?

Kai Strittmatter: Yes. I’m going back to Europe. These are my last days.

Audrey Tang: How long you were in Beijing for?

Kai Strittmatter: On and off, 20 years.

Audrey Tang: Wow. Like...

Kai Strittmatter: From 1997.

Audrey Tang: [laughs] Wow.

Kai Strittmatter: I was in Istanbul in Turkey in between. Actually, one of the reason why I wanted to talk to you is also because of all the developments I’ve witnessed there in the last two years. I’m sure you follow it closely.

Audrey Tang: A very different track. [laughs]

Kai Strittmatter: Basically, the reinvention of dictatorship with digital means, right? For the last two years, it really drove me a lot. Trump was elected and the populists in our midst, in our societies. Suddenly I feel, we as Democrats and as Europeans, we’re witnessing something like a perfect storm. Trump, populism, Russian, China and the whole digital thing seems to be...

Audrey Tang: Unsettling. [laughs]

Kai Strittmatter: ...central [laughs] to many unsettling developments.

Audrey Tang: [laughs] That’s right.

Kai Strittmatter: Exactly. In the last one and a half years, what I did in China was I did a lot of research and I witnessed a lot of the artificial intelligence...

Kai Strittmatter: ...just to get a grip on what’s going on there. They’re reinventing dictatorship. I feel suddenly we have to reinvent democracy.

Audrey Tang: That’s right. When we look at the civil society space, the CIVICUS Monitor, [laughs] the region is getting very different in the past few years.

Kai Strittmatter: Who does this?

Audrey Tang: The CIVICUS Monitor. There’s a group called CIVICUS. They’ve been monitoring the speech freedom and...

Kai Strittmatter: I need the glasses for that.

Audrey Tang: C-I-V-I-C-U-S. They’ve been monitoring the freedom of speech, of assembly, of expression.

Audrey Tang: Now if you go to their website, click "Asia" and click "Fully Open" you only get Taiwan. [laughs] This is not to say that we’re not...have still some room to go and learn from New Zealand, Australia, and the European beacons of hope, but in this region, we’re perhaps the only one with a non-shrinking civil society space.

Kai Strittmatter: On the contrary. You have a very lively, dynamic, and maybe, I would say, even more... I’ve studied in Taiwan 30 years ago, so I’ve been following the whole democratic transformation of Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: It’s still blooming.

Kai Strittmatter: It seems to me one of the most lively and dynamic civil societies in the world. You’ve traveled a lot. What’s your impression?

Audrey Tang: I would say so myself, yes.

Kai Strittmatter: What do you think? Why is that? Because it’s so young as a democracy?

Audrey Tang: That’s certainly part of it, but also because the broadband as human right thing. It doesn’t leave anyone behind. We don’t have a large Luddite action that argues against technological progress because, whenever we roll out something, we make sure that all the senior high schools, all the indigenous nations, and all the rural areas, even the most remote of remote islands, they all enjoy the same technological progress. Digital inclusion is a part of DNA in Taiwan. I think that makes it possible for us to move fast, but also together. That is a geography advantage I would say.

Kai Strittmatter: Even though Taiwan was a little bit left behind by the whole software, artificial intelligence development in the past years now?

Audrey Tang: No. If you look at AI published papers, Taiwan has been the highest density of high-quality papers.

Kai Strittmatter: Yeah, in the universities. That’s true.

Audrey Tang: They mostly just went to Silicon Valley. [laughs]

Kai Strittmatter: I just spoke to Ethan Tu the other day. He said, basically, he’s coming back because he thought the universities are world-class, but they all went away then, right?

Audrey Tang: That’s right. Then they go back these couple years now and bring their friends back. Maybe they were just fishing hooks. I don’t know.

Kai Strittmatter: I listened to some of your speeches on YouTube also. Especially just this morning, I saw -- I think this is a very recent one -- the Asia Society speech.

Audrey Tang: That’s the one with Daniel Russel.

Kai Strittmatter: Exactly. I saw this, and you started that by saying, "I’m an optimist," so I’d look at you for optimism. [laughs] You’re the little green dot. How come you’re an optimist?

Audrey Tang: There’s just so much to do. [laughs] It’s not like we’re in a saturated space where the future is uncertain and that it’s linear, nothing like that. Every country at the moment is now facing the declining of legitimacy of the existing governance structures, and everyone is reinventing it in very different ways.

Audrey Tang: My optimism, I think, stems from I was like that when I dropped out of junior high. I had to serve and search the groups to work with, the research that I’m interested in.

Audrey Tang: At that time, it was the explosion of the World Web. Nobody knows how to do anything really on the World Web, so everybody is figuring it out by themselves.

Audrey Tang: Some of them of course are really bad, like spam email and revenge porn, and the usual hate speech and things like that, because the Internet makes them very easy to organize, but then beautiful things also happen, Wikipedia, the Free Software Movement, the Internet Society itself, and so on.

Audrey Tang: I think the optimism stems from that I’ve been working on it for 25 years now, and I’ve seen many waves...

Kai Strittmatter: You’ve seen many beautiful...

Audrey Tang: Many waves that iterates back to beautiful things, after initial swarm-like period of disorientation.

Kai Strittmatter: I think the main anxiety that we’re seeing in democratic societies at the moment stems from the fact that...You were talking about spam and all this, but what we’ve been talking about the last two years after the Trump election, and the whole Facebook scandals, and the Russian interference and the trolling.

Kai Strittmatter: That’s a much bigger thing than spams, right? That’s something that...

Audrey Tang: I think it’s more or less the same structure, is that the Internet is reaching the other half of the world population now, so it feels like a larger thing. It reaches more people.

Kai Strittmatter: Yeah, but the negative influence on our societies and the consequences that this kind of bad will behavior can have without us noticing. Trump was elected because of that basically. That what makes many people, like among my friends, very scared, also.

Audrey Tang: There is one thing, though, I learned from Trump’s use of social media in that I think he used Twitter the way Twitter is meant to be used — in the sense of self-contained messages — impossible to misunderstand — not a link to a larger write-up or a series of Tweets, but rather almost poetic.

Audrey Tang: In a sense that it’s a self-contained message that spreads by itself. It has all the right formula to go viral.

Audrey Tang: But exactly as you’ve said, this makes people feeling unsettled because then there is no context. It’s just one out of context message that can make people feel very anxious, or very upset, and so on, so it’s almost like...

Kai Strittmatter: Trump’s style of communication is one thing, but the Russian trolling and the rightwing trolling is another thing.

Kai Strittmatter: The use of these algorithms and the sort of bubbles that Facebook and Twitter created that in the end leads to this...

Kai Strittmatter: I mean, you’re an advocate for transparent, open communication, with listening to all sides, but what we have seen in the last two, three years, it’s the exact opposite, right?

Audrey Tang: I think it’s happening in different levels. We do see people who have, as you’ve said, harboring more fringe views are now much more vocal on the Internet because they think that they have found people who are sympathetic to them.

Audrey Tang: Automated tools also help them to spread their message of extremism, and there is extremists in every part of the spectrum. That is true, but then I also see that because of this, people are forced to start to learn critical thinking and media literacy and so on, just to stay sane in this era of partial information and segmented information...

Kai Strittmatter: Are they really forced? How many people feel they are forced? Many people just resign and become fatalistic.

Audrey Tang: ...and quit social media? I don’t think so. [laughs]

Kai Strittmatter: No, but they stay in their bubble. They continue to watch cat videos.

Audrey Tang: That’s why Taiwan maybe is on a summit...

Audrey Tang: ...because in our own society we’re also with many layers of culture... Half of Taiwan people maybe think Taiwan should go this way and half of people should go that way. You can find this on all the referendum subjects.

Audrey Tang: We don’t find actually the social media being polarized more over time, though. We find people working as a community by bringing the core parts of the messages together, and do analysis, and doing visualization, and doing reporting.

Audrey Tang: That actually finds an audience because in Taiwan we have a cultural backdrop that is more animist and folk religion, Daoism, that always see this yin and yang dialectic, dialog as part of the culture. It’s not quite harmony at that part.

Audrey Tang: The word gong shi (共識) meaning "common understanding", not "consensus" which is a very fine thing and very difficult to reach. Here, when we say gong shi, it means just a rough consensus. People have generally the same picture understanding that. I think that is treasured too. People who work on "common understanding" are supported generously. You see many of them in the g0v summits.

Kai Strittmatter: What about the two camps? There seems also to be a lot of ideological blindness.

Audrey Tang: In this election, we’re seeing less of that actually. This election, fewer people running for mayor or for city councilors focus on the old ideological splits. We’re seeing a much more diverse palette of policy goals.

Audrey Tang: Compared to previous mayoral elections, especially the immediately previous one where it’s post-Sunflower, and people have to take the occupy or non-occupy sides. This one, it feels pretty muted. People focus on the policy of the city. In a way, democracy is deepening. Of course, that could also be that the ideological people are all attracted to referendums...

Audrey Tang: ...and not taking it out in the city and mayor/councilors elections. That could be a part too. We don’t see as much polarization as the previous election.

Kai Strittmatter: Maybe also because it’s a local election, right?

Audrey Tang: The previous local election was very polarized.

Kai Strittmatter: What about influence operations?

Audrey Tang: Precision persuasion?

Kai Strittmatter: By China?

Audrey Tang: Yeah. Or by anyone, really.

Kai Strittmatter: Or by anyone?

Audrey Tang: Yeah.

Kai Strittmatter: Is that a big trend in Taiwan?

Audrey Tang: It is.

Kai Strittmatter: Is it dangerous?

Audrey Tang: Back in 2014, bots influencing election, that’s the year when the words 網軍 shifted its meaning from cybersecurity actors to automated trolls. That marks the first year...

Kai Strittmatter: China originated?

Audrey Tang: ...of whatever originated AI meddling in elections. In 2014, this was a new phenomenon. People studied it and generally prepared for it. By 2016, people generally saw disinformation as something that could be intentional and not just the old media misinformation by mistake. Concerted, intentional disinformation becomes generally recognized in 2016 in the presidential election.

Audrey Tang: By this election, people are taking to the task of... For example, the fact-checking agencies start to work independently this year. Social media platforms, they are all not taking a completely neutral, Manila, whatever stance. They’re actively engaging and clarifying as they can quickly. Also, the government is doing the same thing.

Audrey Tang: People are calling for more law enforcement of existing laws, especially around election. There is already laws in there that enforces people’s spreading disinformation in the hope of getting someone not elected. We see candidates suing each other more in this election to preemptively enter the justice process to do collective fact-finding through the justice process.

Audrey Tang: We see the three levels: (unintentional) misinformation, (intentional) disinformation, and (criminal law) enforcement.

Kai Strittmatter: Is it effective, the countermeasures against disinformation? Because there seems to be a certain imbalance often in these, you have a very big effect with a piece of misinformation with very little resources. It takes lots and lots of energy, resources, time...

Audrey Tang: Fact checkers, court process.

Kai Strittmatter: ...court cases, whatever to counter these kind of information.

Audrey Tang: I’m still using spam or junk mail as an analogy. The thing is not to measure the relative energy spent. Of course the spammers spend far less energy than anti-spam people. That’s a given.

Audrey Tang: The main measure we need to use is the expected reward of spammers. The spam stopped only when along each way of the pipeline the cost increased a little bit and the expected reward decreased a little bit until a point where it’s no longer profitable to send Nigerian prince spams. Then we don’t see them anymore.

Audrey Tang: This is the same for disinformation. At the moment, it’s still lucrative. People are still seeing a positive reward of computational propaganda. Our main work is not to make their things counterable by automated means but rather by the expected reward and decreasing it.

Kai Strittmatter: How do you do that?

Audrey Tang: By listening to people, by getting people into the habit of listening and waiting a couple of hours for the clarification to come out, for it not to be a real-time strategy game but a term-based game, if you will, by tuning the news cycle so that by the time of the afternoon news already have a balanced report from both sides to report.

Kai Strittmatter: Does it work?

Audrey Tang: Do you think it doesn’t work?

Kai Strittmatter: Does it work?

Audrey Tang: I think it does to a degree. Especially around election, people would want 100 percent work. In the election, I think it’s impossible because always things happen the night before the election. There’s no sufficient time no matter how we shorten the response cycle.

Audrey Tang: At least we can prepare for this kind of contingencies, and treat it like flu or something and inoculate people as much as we can. If it’s not around the election, I think it’s generally working.

Kai Strittmatter: Do you and your team engage in such efforts, also?

Audrey Tang: Yeah...

Kai Strittmatter: Like what...

Audrey Tang: The real-time clarification thing from all the ministries was initially proposed and designed about a year ago. All the ministries, instead of sending their own press conference or whatever, have a concentrated, syndicated newsfeed for the all the media workers, so that they can clarify misinformation and debunk disinformation.

Audrey Tang: Occasionally, ministries even sue people in this centralized place so everybody can consult that place. That feeds into the media and the fact checkers. That’s one concrete action we’re taking.

Audrey Tang: The other one, of course, is making sure that independent fact checkers, they can also correct the government when we make a mistake in our reporting, and thereby build a legitimacy that is even higher than the government’s legitimacy. That’s another thing. That results in Cofacts and Taiwan Fact Checking Center, and things like that.

Audrey Tang: That’s the two main things that I initially thought about and brainstormed with the cabinet about a year ago. I think they’re growing. I’m not saying that they’re totally effective against all kind of disinformation yet, but it raises awareness that there is intentional disinformation, and we can do something about it.

Kai Strittmatter: Of course, for all these kind of solutions, you need a very rational, well-meaning, non-ideological public.

Audrey Tang: No, it could be fun. On Cofacts, we see a lot of true facts, but packaged in a way that is very viral. The package and the content is two different layers. We have a lot of people also using machine learning to learn how to make facts spread faster than rumors. That is also a fascinating field study.

Kai Strittmatter: Do you have an example?

Audrey Tang: Sure, we can open Cofacts and just check their examples. I remember there’s one about food and about cancer... In Cofacts, you can always see those ones that are very viral that says a certain egg supplier enters into the supermarket that is called 全聯 which has been taken down. There’s a packaging, there’s a bite, a lead, and things like that... ( https://cofacts.g0v.tw/article/iynmaq46hruk )

Audrey Tang: It’s fact-checked as "true" because it’s really a thing and it does make sense for everybody to know it immediately. There’s a news about low blood sugar leading to, I don’t know, liver cancer or something like that.

Audrey Tang: These things get spread because they have a pretty picture. They have an initial short bite of...

Kai Strittmatter: This is like day-to-day life scientific stuff, but what about political stuff?

Audrey Tang: Political stuff. Let me check. There’s some political stuff that are nevertheless true. Let’s see. There’s one thing that says the European Council voted overwhelmingly to support the peace in the Taiwan Strait and encourage the Taiwanese people further the democratic values. ( https://cofacts.g0v.tw/reply/BP1JdmYBP8WrztivHWwv )

Audrey Tang: This gets viral, and that’s actually true.

Audrey Tang: European Parliament actually voted on that.

Kai Strittmatter: Was anybody disputing that?

Audrey Tang: Yeah. People would dispute on the ground of that runs counter to the One-China policy, or things like that. It’s controversial and people were trying to market as a rumor that people just pops up to support the democracy.

Kai Strittmatter: As we’re talking about a subject like this, what would you tell my readers, why should they care about Taiwan? Why is Taiwan important?

Audrey Tang: Why is Taiwan important? We can help. We’re developing those vaccines, just like Taiwan leads research on vaccines against the snake venom, because we have a high number of poisonous snake spieces, huge pile of diversity. [laughs] We’re doing vaccine research.

Audrey Tang: We’re happy to take this work from the predominant social media here, to WhatsApp or whatever thing the Europeans are using. So we’re research partners.

Kai Strittmatter: OK, so scientific research, and why should they care politically?

Audrey Tang: If politically Taiwan lose the freedom of speech, freedom of expression and the open innovation system that we’re currently having, then you don’t get this kind of partner anywhere in Asia. It would be very difficult to find another one.

Kai Strittmatter: You quit school when you were 14, right?

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Kai Strittmatter: Did you do some programming before that?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, I started coding when I was eight.

Kai Strittmatter: When you were eight you started coding?

Audrey Tang: Yes.

Kai Strittmatter: So early.

Audrey Tang: Sure. Yeah, I quitted school just so I can start some entrepreneurship work and co-found a company.

Kai Strittmatter: OK, so you were interested in computers and programming from a very early age. When did you start getting interested in the sort of human rights, civil society...?

Audrey Tang: When I was four years old.

Kai Strittmatter: So that came before the computers.

Audrey Tang: That’s right. My parents and my extended family, they worked, even before the martial law gets lifted, for example the right of the environment, against environmental pollution. They were also early advocates of education reform.

Audrey Tang: My mom was part of the homemakers union, I think one of the cofounders, which would later become one of the largest co-ops, so also a part of co-op movement.

Kai Strittmatter: Did they have to suffer? Did your family have to suffer at some point for their political views?

Audrey Tang: I think they were protected by a relative liberal employer, Mr. 余紀忠 from the "China Times." He was, of course, part of the KMT, but of the more liberal branch of the KMT.

Audrey Tang: He shielded them from the social repercussions just by having liberals and democrats working in his newspaper. That was a relative safe zone for them to voice their opinions.

Kai Strittmatter: They were both journalists.

Audrey Tang: They were both journalists.

Kai Strittmatter: They influenced you a lot?

Audrey Tang: Yes.

Kai Strittmatter: Did they have anything to do with computers or programming or was that your own thing, the programming thing?

Audrey Tang: They were all very supportive. When I was eight and I started writing programs on a paper, and they relented and bought me a present, a computer. They, very early on, learned typing and used computers for their line of work and things like that, but not programming.

Audrey Tang: Programming is something that I just saw it as a musical instrument.

Kai Strittmatter: Yeah, I was about to ask. What is the fun in programming for me as a complete layman? You saw it as a musical instrument?

Audrey Tang: Yeah. I learned very early on that has logic as its notes and the possibility of interaction it’s its melody, so it’s something that I can share, but not personally. When you write a program, it’s like writing a poem, especially a long large system, such as writing the "Faust." [laughs]

Audrey Tang: It has to rhyme. It has to agree with syntactic, grammatical categories or the metaphors must connect, otherwise it doesn’t compile. The end of it is something larger than the individual stanzas. It conveys a worldview.

Kai Strittmatter: Have you written your own Faust already?

Audrey Tang: [laughs] Well, collaboratively. There’s the Perl 6 language.

Kai Strittmatter: Goethe was something like 70 or 80 when he finished and he wrote his whole life.

Audrey Tang: That’s exactly right. That’s, by the way, part of my very early reading, when I was it...

Kai Strittmatter: You read it? How old were you when you read it?

Audrey Tang: I don’t know, eight years old, something like that. Around the same time as I learned programming.

Kai Strittmatter: Did you feel you understood it?

Audrey Tang: No. [laughs]

Kai Strittmatter: I don’t understand it.

Audrey Tang: The thing about Goethe is that there’s layers upon layers, upon layers of culture. It’s like a microcosm of culture embedded in those poems. It’s not quite "Finnegans Wake," which is its own thing, but it’s some of it like fractal-like nature, that the more you read into it, the more culture you absorb. It’s like a fractal embodiment of culture.

Audrey Tang: Working on computer language is also a lot like that, because it has to embed an entire thought process, a culture of people seeing the world as functions, as relations, as objects, as the anthology of the worldviews. They have to work with people with different worldviews and make their visions combine. That’s the work...

Kai Strittmatter: For you, it was always, from the start, also about sharing and collaborating.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, of course.

Kai Strittmatter: Some people at least have the image of these nerds, that it’s about isolating yourself.

Audrey Tang: When you write poetry, of course, there’s a lot of isolation, but a poet that doesn’t share is a very bad poet and don’t get remembered. There’s the writing point. There’s the performative point.

Kai Strittmatter: I remember in one of the interviews I saw with you, because you mentioned now twice things that you did when you were eight years old and in one of the interviews you said you were bullied a lot when you were eight years.

Audrey Tang: Yeah.

Kai Strittmatter: Bullied for what, about what?

Audrey Tang: I don’t know. I was enrolled for the first year in a gifted class and the individuals there were pretty competitive on the individual basis. I have no idea why people want to compete against each other.

Audrey Tang: That’s also because their parents are status pressured. That’s also because the social atmosphere at the time was like that. It’s a result of those because I’m like, I don’t know, get chosen as the head of the class, consistently took the top place in exam and while not actually caring about it.

Audrey Tang: All those makes the children feel that there is a non-child among the children.

Audrey Tang: There’s a lot of anxiety around that.

Audrey Tang: Basically, my parents took me away and placed me alongside 18 years old, and they feel much more at home with me.

Kai Strittmatter: What about you, did you feel much more at home with them?

Audrey Tang: Of course. Yeah.

Kai Strittmatter: Your love for animals, that also started back then?

Audrey Tang: Yeah...

Kai Strittmatter: Did you live with a lot of cats and dogs already at your parents’ house?

Audrey Tang: I think we adopted two dogs when I was 10. That was my first relationship. At the time, we were living in the Garden City, which is also where I officially live now. It’s just that I’m mostly working in the cabinet’s dormitory now. In Garden City, the slogan is...

Kai Strittmatter: The cabinet has a dormitory?

Audrey Tang: Well, I call it a dormitory. It’s a building where all the vice ministers and ministers live, so yeah, dormitory.

Audrey Tang: In any case, the Garden City, the slogan is that "it’s not a garden in your house, it’s your house in the garden." It’s a large place.

Kai Strittmatter: Where is that?

Audrey Tang: It’s in Xindian City, in New Taipei City. Many social reformers, anarchists and artists live there. It’s like a commune — they even issued its own community currency.

Kai Strittmatter: When was that founded?

Audrey Tang: It’s older than me. I don’t know precisely, but I think it’s in the ’70s.

Kai Strittmatter: You were born into it.

Audrey Tang: That’s right. What I want to mention is that there’s a lot dogs and cats in Garden City that the community co-live together. They don’t belong to anyone. It’s just people maintaining a stable relationship with the dogs and cats, just as with the other people, like... I say "people", but I mean rivers and fireflies and things like that in the community.

Audrey Tang: It’s deliberately built in a very ecofriendly way, and before learning about deep ecology or any of those very heady names and I already lived in that community since when I was 10 years old.

Kai Strittmatter: The anarchism, how did that inspire you?

Audrey Tang: When I discovered the Internet, I discovered that it doesn’t report to any government body. It’s sovereign in a sense, but it doesn’t have an army or navy, but it somehow managed to get everybody on board with only a process called request for comments.

Audrey Tang: This is very magical to a young child. When I was 12, I took a lot of time to learn about Internet governance. There’s many theorists and essayists at the time, chief among them, the Free Software Foundation, Eben Moglen is the one deliberately making the connection.

Audrey Tang: There’s an essay called "Anarchism Triumphant" that connects the old anarchist ideas with the new Internet governance ideas.

Kai Strittmatter: Did you also read the old anarchists like Kropotkin?

Audrey Tang: Yes. Bakunin and friends. But also Lao-Tzu and Chuang Tzu, let’s not forget the Eastern tradition.

Kai Strittmatter: The Taoists.

Audrey Tang: I read them. There’s an Internet library called "An Anarchist FAQ" — frequently asked questions. It summarizes and links to all the anarchist writings.

Kai Strittmatter: Sorry, I just interrupted you. The modern Internet governance seems... Isn’t that like that was the ideal some years ago, but doesn’t reality show something different? Haven’t hierarchies and commerce taken over?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, but on the upper layers. In the core layer, it only became more sovereign as times go. Like after the ITU -- the UN ITU -- tried to absorb the Internet governance, they just made a coalition, the UN Internet Governance Forum, which makes it clear that we’re still multi-stakeholders. We’re just talking with multilateral bodies.

Audrey Tang: UN itself is becoming more and more multi-stakeholder and hybrid anyway. After Snowden, the only link with the ministry of the economy of the US gets broken. The Internet Society does not having to respond to the US government anymore. Even the ceremonial link has been broken.

Audrey Tang: I think the Internet Society is at a place now that is more sovereign than any point previously.

Kai Strittmatter: The core is sovereign, but the core stands for potential, right?

Audrey Tang: Mm-hmm.

Kai Strittmatter: The upper layers, you are saying, is what governs everyday people’s lives. Isn’t it for normal people? Isn’t the upper layer more important than the core?

Audrey Tang: I don’t know. The core allows for possibilities. We see new efforts, like Tim Berners-Lee is from the core, reinventing social media. He is now with a startup called Inrupt, and working on Solid, which is the decentralized social thing. That’s Tim Berners-Lee.

Audrey Tang: It also allows the Mozilla people to work with Secure Scuttlebutt, which is another distributed social media thing. g0v runs a Mastodon instance.

Kai Strittmatter: I’m asking the question, of course, because I’ve spent most of my past 20 years in China.

Kai Strittmatter: I still remember the early days of optimists. I still remember the ’90s when we had people like Bill Gates, and Rupert Murdoch, and all of them making the prophecy that the new technologies, and especially the Internet -- and Bill Clinton, "Jello on the wall," -- most definitely will subvert authoritarian regimes and will bring freedom to the rest of the world.

Kai Strittmatter: What we’ve seen in China, and especially under Xi Jinping. Xi Jinping, I’m saying because they’ve controlled the Internet for much longer, but Xi Jinping made a brilliant job in taming social media in the summer of 2013. Maybe you’ve also watched the process. It only took him four weeks.

Kai Strittmatter: Now the Communist Party loves the Internet, and they love social media, and they love artificial intelligence. [laughs] Doesn’t that prove all our optimism wrong, that the new technologies, they benefit the most determined people with the most resources, with the most power?

Audrey Tang: First of all, I don’t think they have really proven it to other even authoritarian countries. That model is -- for all the language of exportable -- we don’t see a very clear export success story, yet.

Audrey Tang: There’s a lot of narrative that talks about exporting this authoritarian use of artificial intelligence and so on. It’s mostly narratives at the point. We cannot see one clear example for that. That’s the first thing.

Audrey Tang: The second thing is that sometimes I compare it to the call for democracy in the Chiang Kai-shek era in Taiwan. You were there.

Audrey Tang: In the Chiang Kai-shek era, there were people who put a lot of optimism in the so-called "lighthouse of freedom" message that the "Free China Review" press is sending out from the Chiang Kai-shek regime.

Audrey Tang: While the actual use of those technologies in Taiwan was pretty brutal also from the Chiang Kai-shek regime -- especially the early years of the occupation.

Audrey Tang: I think that nevertheless, for all their wrongdoings, the idea that there must be more to it, to this lauded but not practiced democracy. It does shape the kind of collective imagination as what Kant would call a regulative idea -- while you can’t reach there, but it regulates the thoughts.

Audrey Tang: When we now, like this year, when we actually have the people who work in lighthouse sing in the national day ceremony, it is a reprise of the old free China lighthouse metaphor, but this time, it’s for real.

Audrey Tang: People can see evidence that backs this narrative, but without this regulative idea, maybe the general people will not spend so much time fighting for freedom.

Kai Strittmatter: These ideas of freedom...

Audrey Tang: And rule of law, constitution.

Kai Strittmatter: ...democracy are very powerful, and in the end, maybe more powerful than the others.

Audrey Tang: Are regulative, is what I mean. In the short term, they may not constitute a force. Even the CCP, when they changed the constitution, it’s not just the indefinite terms thing, but also rule of law, and constitutional... like placing an oath to the constitution and generally, what the global goals would call SDG 16. They ratified that in the reverse constitution of peace and justice and strong institutions.

Audrey Tang: You can, of course, argue that it’s not implemented the same way as the SDG framers intended, or not to that degree, but they are a regulative force. That’s my main point. Taiwan can help on that, too.

Kai Strittmatter: To be an anarchist in government, how does that feel?

Audrey Tang: I just work "with" the government.

Audrey Tang: Actually, the room is much larger than I initially imagined. It’s to a lot of credit of the Taiwanese people. Generally, they are OK with people who are saying "the civil society should generally take more and more of the function of the government, until we don’t have a government anymore." They don’t find this as something alien.

Audrey Tang: This speaks a lot about early legitimacy of the non-profits — the human rights associations and so on — that’s working even during the martial law. They have more legitimacy even now compared to the executive branch.

Kai Strittmatter: What about the power people?

Audrey Tang: To the power people, I complement but not reinforce representative democracy. If they’re in a national level, this is basically what we can work as a coalition so that they get more insight of what the civil society is doing. Civil society has a much clearer view of what the national powers are doing. Transparency benefits both ways, is what I’m saying.

Audrey Tang: Admittedly, in the city council, and counties, and even lower levels, there’s a lot of non-transparency going on. Only the six municipalities have signed the open data charter. That means some cities and counties still have more way to go, but on the other hand, we are operating on the national level...

Kai Strittmatter: What is stopping them? What do you think?

Audrey Tang: Mostly fear. They know one way to organize power and information. It’s by asymmetry of information. There’s a lot of fear of just having a contextually correct or focused dialog, because they fear that the power that they hoarded through information asymmetry will be replaced by horizontal power.

Kai Strittmatter: Exactly.

Audrey Tang: The word I choose, such as the #TaiwanCanHelp message, connecting to sustainable goals, also is in horizontal power. It doesn’t have to immediately destroy vertical power. It’s building a viable new system, and you can do migration.

Audrey Tang: This is what people working in computer science maybe have the most experience of. We were all OK with having a new operating system migrating from an old operating system, we did that many, many times now.

Audrey Tang: Generally, the program that runs still continue to run, we don’t break backward compatibility. That’s the conservative part in conservative anarchism, in that we conserve the tradition and values, the people’s values. That is a soft landing to anarchism.

Kai Strittmatter: You always stress you don’t take orders. You don’t give orders. You’re just here to help to supplement...

Audrey Tang: To facilitate.

Kai Strittmatter: To facilitate. In your fellow ministries, do you see the will in most of them? There has to be a will, right?

Audrey Tang: Actually, to be facilitated.

Kai Strittmatter: To be facilitated, exactly.

Kai Strittmatter: Do you see that?

Audrey Tang: Yes. There’s 30 or so ministers and there’s 8 -- up to 9, but currently 8 -- horizontal ministers. As one of the eight, it’s already in the job description that I facilitate across ministries.

Audrey Tang: People generally come to me when it’s part of the three mandates that I have, open government, use engagement, and social innovation. The good thing about these three, which reinforce each other, is that there’s no clear owner of these issues. Social innovation means emergent things. That doesn’t have an owner.

Audrey Tang: The ministers generally think if the credit is fairly distributed, and the risk can be absorbed, they’ll voluntarily be facilitated, but if they think, "It’s my own domain. It’s my own turf. It’s something that I’m already working on for 30 years and it’s none of the other ministries’ business," of course, they don’t come to me.

Kai Strittmatter: It hasn’t been too long a time. Two years now. What would you say are your...Can you already see tangible successes?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, there’s many, of course.

Kai Strittmatter: Of course, I know the examples from your talks. What would you say is your biggest?

Audrey Tang: One of the success is the institutionalization of the horizontal network model. The peer network is not only a national regulation, but it’s also a municipal one now. Tainan City embraced it, and we just trained our first batch of PO’s.

Audrey Tang: It means that horizontal value facilitative leadership was recognized by law.

Kai Strittmatter: Does it go along party lines?

Audrey Tang: No, it’s entirely...

Kai Strittmatter: I mean, not from your side, I know. The people who accept it, are they...?

Audrey Tang: No.

Kai Strittmatter: Also the KMT?

Audrey Tang: Of course, they would stress the fact that the Join platform, the e-petition platform, all these things, were installed in 2015 when they are still in business. They like to stress the continuity of the post-Sunflower horizontalism. That’s the first thing.

Audrey Tang: The second thing is that because we work almost exclusively with career public servants, they’re not going anywhere, and they are required by law to be nonpartisan. There’s a strong nonpartisan culture. Even now in the cabinet, there is more independent ministers than ministers of any party. I can say the same with many municipalities’ small cabinets, as well.

Kai Strittmatter: In a way, you are also part of the legacy of the Sunflower Movement, right?

Audrey Tang: Mm-hmm, a small part, maybe a small petal.

Kai Strittmatter: I would say one of the most prominent maybe. I was also there. I was in the parliament for two days, amazing, really.

Audrey Tang: It’s fun, isn’t it?

Kai Strittmatter: Really fun, and the feeling of history in the making somehow. Like in Hong Kong a couple of months later. Of course, a lot of the passion is gone now, because you cannot sustain it for a long time, probably.

Kai Strittmatter: Would you say that the young people, the young generation, that they have a feeling of accomplishment now? I’m asking because I’m just coming from Hong Kong. I was in Hong Kong two weeks ago.

Audrey Tang: Maybe let’s ask the young people.

Audrey Tang: She literally run the e-forum during the occupy.

Kai Strittmatter: In Hong Kong, there is a lot of disappointment, and a lot of frustration and resignation.

Audrey Tang: Hong Kong and Taiwan makes a very good contrast, because it’s the same year, the same large-scale movement. Maybe Sheau-Tyng would like to share something about how young people perceive differently...

Sheau-Tyng Peng: What kind of difference?

Kai Strittmatter: Maybe I will ask her later after we finish this.

Audrey Tang: I always not presume to speak for or representing young people. I’m 37 now. I’m not young by any UN-recognized means.

Audrey Tang: Sheau-Tyng is actually young, so maybe talk to her after this.

Kai Strittmatter: Yes, and Freddy Lim. He is older than you and he still counts as a representative of the young.

Audrey Tang: I don’t know about that...

Audrey Tang: To be awfully honest, I would say that the young people feel that it’s far more OK and far more mainstream to be political post-Sunflower. That’s the main legacy. Young people were very afraid of being seen as political from their peers right before Sunflower. Being politically apathetic was the norm.

Audrey Tang: Now, being politically active is the norm, like spreading political message about marriage equality, human rights, whatever, is seen as cool. Back then, it was seen as fringe. That’s the one large change. That’s why I always raise the idea of regulative idea.

Audrey Tang: That’s the kind of change you see in an entire generation. It’s not one or two successes. It’s the different way the people conduct their daily lives and the social topics they choose.

Kai Strittmatter: Do you also see that in the reactions you get to yourself as a person, as a transgender woman?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, of course.

Kai Strittmatter: Has it changed?

Audrey Tang: People feel generally much more comfortable talking about it in the open. On LGBT rights, in Asia, Taiwan is the foremost — we certainly don’t get whipped here.

Audrey Tang: Please don’t quote me on that.

Audrey Tang: In any case, what I’m trying to get is that it’s already seen as part of normal life but, post-Sunflower, people are much more willing to express gender fluidity and talk about it in political terms like self-determination, body agency, body positivity. These are things that were considered very queer, very fringe, tolerated, but now, it’s kind of hip to talk about.

Kai Strittmatter: That is a big change. Taiwan society as a whole sometimes can be quite conservative in their values.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, that’s right.

Kai Strittmatter: What do you expect off the referendum, the same-sex marriage referendum?

Audrey Tang: I think the Constitutional Court already made the decision. The referendum now is people showing that there is votes in this issue...

Kai Strittmatter: It will only about the wording then in the end?

Audrey Tang: Exactly. It’s about whether the word 婚姻 belongs to the social domain or the legal domain.

Kai Strittmatter: Why did it take parliament so long after...You’re not a parliamentarian, so you’re not the one...

Audrey Tang: That’s a Freddy question. [laughs]

Kai Strittmatter: As an observer, why?

Kai Strittmatter: Because the constitutional court decision was already one and a half years ago. Why hasn’t there been concrete steps right afterwards?

Audrey Tang: To be perfectly honest, I think everybody is waiting for the referendum result.

Audrey Tang: If the referendum shows that one side has a very clear advantage, then everybody would know how to...

Kai Strittmatter: They were chickening out, basically. They were...

Audrey Tang: ...I’m not saying that...

Audrey Tang: ...I’m totally not saying that. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: I’m saying that the Referendum Act coincides with the Constitutional Court. In the administration, we actually already finished the review of all the relevant rules and regulations, but it’s the first time that people can meaningfully do the right democracy through a Referendum Act.

Audrey Tang: If we just push out something, that will immediately delegitimize one side of the referendum. That will be political suicide for the legislators. That’s my honest analysis.

Kai Strittmatter: You’ve also been to Europe and you’ve visited some of the states. I come from Germany. For me, this is very innovative. We are economically very strong but in this front, we are very weak in the digital, and especially with government.

Kai Strittmatter: You visited Estonia and the Scandinavian countries, who are much further than we are. If you compare Taiwan, where do you stand there? Are you on the forefront globally?

Audrey Tang: I think we’re on the forefront if you take both open innovation and social inclusion together. There are many other jurisdictions and economies that are better in the innovation front, sometimes on the track that we don’t go, but still very innovative. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: I’m referring to the cutting-edge use of AI in the jurisdictions you mentioned. They’re very innovative. You have to give them that.

Audrey Tang: Nobody would think to use the technologies that way...

Audrey Tang: ...so it qualifies as innovation.

Kai Strittmatter: The social credit system, for example, right?

Audrey Tang: Yeah. It’s detrimental to social inclusion though. It therefore will never happen in Taiwan — because in Taiwan, unless it’s inclusive, they don’t happen.

Kai Strittmatter: Let me rephrase the question and go back to the beginning. On the front of reinventing democracy digitally, are you on the forefront?

Audrey Tang: I would say so, definitely.

Kai Strittmatter: When you compared yourself, for example, to Estonia, which is always the model state in Europe, what are the differences there?

Audrey Tang: There’s two main differences. First is that Estonia doesn’t have the paperwork legacy. Our digital transformation includes the recipe of how to migrate from a paper-based system, which makes it actually much more exportable [laughs] to other countries, because there is very few countries that were founded after the Internet, Estonia being one.

Audrey Tang: This is not to say that they don’t play a role model kind of way. It could be like that, but actually together, they don’t have to experience either because there is no paper legacy. I think it’s more practical for out digital governance to be exported. That’s the first one.

Audrey Tang: The second is that Taiwan just has more verticals. In the digital transformation, it helps to have all the people working on agriculture, on environment, on sustainable agriculture, on all those different things to participate in digital transformation.

Audrey Tang: "Digital" really is just the thing that gets the data, the partnerships, the innovations together, but you still have to have all these verticals to participate in the digital transformation in order for the forces to combine.

Audrey Tang: In Estonia, or in Singapore, or in other countries where there’s maybe one or two strong verticals, you don’t see as much synergy from the different economic, and environment, and social innovations.

Audrey Tang: I think this whole-palette collaboration thing is also one of the unique part in Taiwan. Of course that gives more earthquakes and debates and things like that, but it’s part of life.

Kai Strittmatter: Of course. You do want to export. You do want to be able to role model, right?

Audrey Tang: Yes. That’s what we call the "warm power" now.

Kai Strittmatter: Warm power.

Audrey Tang: Warm. It’s a new word.

Kai Strittmatter: I’ve heard it for the first time. I’ve heard of soft and sharp power, but never warm power. What does that mean?

Audrey Tang: "Soft" and "hard"; "sharp" and "warm". [laughs]

Kai Strittmatter: Ahh.

Audrey Tang: Warm meaning that we use social innovation methods and use SDG as our common index to solve our economic, environment, and sustainable social development issues, use innovation airboxes, you’ve read the examples that I cite.

Audrey Tang: Then it can be exported easily to, say, New Zealand and so on where they don’t have to pay that much upfront cost, but by the nature of our open innovation can be co-creators in solving water leakage through machine learning or to do environmental climate change science together.

Audrey Tang: Basically, open innovation and social participation together create something that everybody around the world can join without signing a bilateral agreement. They download it off GitHub and build.

Kai Strittmatter: Have you had already a lot of interest?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, very much so.

Kai Strittmatter: From where?

Audrey Tang: Especially among the digital nations. It used to be called Digital 5, now Digital 7, now just digital nations.

Kai Strittmatter: Who are the Digital 7?

Audrey Tang: The Digital 7, let me see if I can recite that...

Audrey Tang: The UK started it, and then Estonia, South Korea, Israel, New Zealand, Uruguay, and Canada. That’s the seven.

Audrey Tang: They are an operational-level coalition. This is not ribbon cutting or anything. We are committed to open source the daily working software of our government structure and don’t reinvent the wheel if somebody else in the digital nations network decide to open source something that they already did very well.

Audrey Tang: It’s like a virtual government thing that we share the tools that we develop. Taiwan is invited in the online operation group though we’re not very loud about it.

Kai Strittmatter: It sounds great. I know my time is nearly finished.

Audrey Tang: No, it’s fine.

Kai Strittmatter: My last question. It’s great listening to you because you are so optimistic [laughs] and so energetic. I’m sure you’ve also had some challenges or frustrations.

Audrey Tang: No. In my formative years when I started reading those anarchist texts when I was 12, when I first encountered the Internet, I rely on the Gutenberg Project, which is all public domain texts. Because of copyright, which at the time is lifetime plus 50, it contains everything before the First World War.

Kai Strittmatter: Goethe would be in there.

Audrey Tang: Exactly. I don’t get access to anything that’s written during or after the First World War. It was the golden age of the European civilization. People were unbridled optimism. That’s my formative education. If not for that copyright law...

Audrey Tang: ...I would be reading a lot of very depressing texts during the two world wars. They were still copyrighted, though...

Audrey Tang: ...so I don’t get to read them.

Kai Strittmatter: That’s very good even though, I guess, there’s this one famous work by Oswald Spengler. It’s "Der Untergang des Abendlandes." What’s that? The decline of the...

Audrey Tang: ...of the West.

Kai Strittmatter: ...of the Occident.

Audrey Tang: "The Downfall of the Occident."

Kai Strittmatter: Exactly. There was some pessimism. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Yeah, but not to the level of the Second World War. [laughs]

Kai Strittmatter: No, you’re right. Thank you so much.

Audrey Tang: Thank you.

Kai Strittmatter: It’s been a pleasure, really wonderful.

Audrey Tang: Thank you. Cool. I’ll send you the transcript.

Kai Strittmatter: Can I maybe take one picture of you or...?

Audrey Tang: Of course.

Kai Strittmatter: Where do you usually take your pictures? Here in your office?

Audrey Tang: Outside, wherever it is.

Kai Strittmatter: No, outside. Outside is better.