Dan Xin Huang: There’s a stark contrast, obviously, between Taiwan and China right now, the different directions they’re moving when it comes to technology and governance. From an American perspective, it’s a case study and how technology has gone wrong when it comes to elections and the damage that technological tools can have on a democracy.

Dan Xin Huang: It looks like in Taiwan, it’s a case study to maybe show things that have been going right…

Audrey Tang: Tools, not weapons.

Dan Xin Huang: Exactly. That’s what I’m thinking. Does that sound OK to you?

Audrey Tang: Of course. The second aspect, the intellectual development, the main journalists that covered this was Carl Miller from BBC.

Dan Xin Huang: I’ve read some of his stuff. He had a piece in the Wired UK.

Audrey Tang: That’s right. There’s, of course, much more that could be said. The new development of COVID wasn’t covered because the interview with Carl Miller was done last year.

Dan Xin Huang: That’s right.

Audrey Tang: I’ve sent Joel the five transcript I had. Three with Carl Miller and two with Gideon Lewis-Kraus. He will send all five to you. Maybe you can refer to them a little bit. It’s a surface material, so that we can go much deeper

Dan Xin Huang: Perfect. Thank you. I’ve already read Carl Miller’s work. He had a piece in the Wired UK. He had a piece in the BBC. I know that this is his research focus himself.

Audrey Tang: That’s right. He wrote a book, actually.

Dan Xin Huang: Embarrassingly, I haven’t read Gideon’s piece yet.

Audrey Tang: It’s fine.

Dan Xin Huang: I wonder, just from your perspective, having talked to him and having seen the piece that he wrote, what you felt he captured really well and then also of things that maybe you had discussed or that are on your mind that he didn’t get into.

Audrey Tang: Gideon’s piece was really good. The focus is not on me, but rather on dispelling the myth that Taiwan was able to counter the infodemic and the pandemic, because from the West, they’re saying like, “Oh, we’re Confucian collectivists,” just lumping together East Asian compliance thing. That’s the main thing that he seeks to dispel.

Audrey Tang: This is a mechanism designed. This is actually very rational. Liberal democracy is not hurt, but rather deepened because of this counter-coronavirus issue. There’s no abstract social trust. There’s a series of micro steps that each earns trustworthiness. It’s a more analytical, political, economy analysis viewpoint.

Audrey Tang: It’s less about my personal development or my ideas. It’s more about what’s considered norm in Taiwan, which is not easily categorized as Confucian or as liberal democracy, but something else like earned trustworthiness. That’s the main angle. That’s pretty good, actually.

Dan Xin Huang: It looks at Taiwan’s political culture, basically, in this moment and how it developed up until this point.

Audrey Tang: Exactly.

Dan Xin Huang: What does he take as a starting point? How far back into Taiwan’s history does he go [inaudible 9:03] ?

Audrey Tang: That’s a really good question. In 2014, he didn’t go back to ‘89, ‘96, or the lifting of the martial law.

Dan Xin Huang: You felt like he captured…

Audrey Tang: The new Taiwan, the post-Sunflower Taiwan.

Dan Xin Huang: How much of what he writes about is focused on particular…It sounds like he’s maybe grafting this more abstract political culture into specific policies.

Audrey Tang: That’s exactly right.

Dan Xin Huang: That’s interesting.

Audrey Tang: It’s a strictly COVID piece. If you’re aiming for something broader, then there’s no overlapping scope.

Dan Xin Huang: There’s an opportunity to go broader, and I’d be interested to. Just right off the bat, I’d like to go deeper.

Audrey Tang: Go ahead.

Dan Xin Huang: Maybe something that we can talk about later is I’d love to just hear you narrate your own story. To respond to maybe Gideon, maybe what we can do, it seems like there is a larger conversation happening right now in the whole world about liberal democracies and their ability to respond to something like the COVID pandemic or, just in general, technology.

Dan Xin Huang: Again, I go back to the 2016 US election as a major referendum, almost, on the Facebooks of the world. This is something that you’ve spoken about and thought really deeply about.

Dan Xin Huang: Like you said, how do we take these things that have a lot of potential to help but we’ve seen left unchecked will actually do more harm and how do we harness them again so that they’re tools not weapons?

Dan Xin Huang: Just broaden it out beyond Taiwan. A lot of countries, a lot of smart people all over the place are also looking to Taiwan right now because they’re trying to figure this stuff out for themselves.

Audrey Tang: That’s right. Maybe we focus this conversation on this topic. Then we can work…Can you read materials in traditional Chinese? Maybe with Google Translate?

Dan Xin Huang: Yes, with Google Translate and a lot of time, I can get through it, yeah.

Audrey Tang: I think in English. Anyway, the primary materials…Like I just had a conversation with Yuval Noah Harari, the historian. That’s primarily in English, but I also make other materials such as the conversations with Brian Tseng, one of the stand-up comedians here. I translate that to English too. I’ll try to get you relevant source materials either translated or [inaudible 12:02] .

Dan Xin Huang: I really appreciate that.

Audrey Tang: Sure. Let’s get started.

Dan Xin Huang: Maybe we can start with just the personal then. Something that I think is really compelling is you’ve talked about 1996 as a personal awakening for yourself and also obviously…

Audrey Tang: The first presidential election.

Dan Xin Huang: I wonder if you can talk through that. To the extent that it did feel like an awakening, what was that experience like for you?

Audrey Tang: There’s a saying, anything that I’m born with is human nature, and anything that’s introduced after I’m born is technology. Because presidential election is introduced when I was already 15 years old, that’s technology.

Audrey Tang: Democracy, like voting, for me, is technology because it wasn’t natural. I was born within the martial law era and remember the martial law era. At that time, my dad was a spokesperson of Mr. Chen Li-an, one of the presidential candidates.

Audrey Tang: I was helping, I guess, to communicate their positions, which is a very inclusive Buddhist position of politics, like a Buddhist take of equal of all kinds, as his main presidential platform. He didn’t win the election, by the way…

Dan Xin Huang: Was it a formal position…

Audrey Tang: It was a formal position. He did a literal walk across Taiwan as a way of campaigning, just like a monk. They commissioned pop songs and art and things like that that basically said…I still remember some of his election songs, like… “No matter whether we’re new immigrants or old immigrants, let’s just build a big family together” or something like that. That’s like his platform.

Audrey Tang: I was digitizing it and building web pages and communication materials.

Dan Xin Huang: Was your role in the campaign…

Audrey Tang: I was just volunteering. I guess it’s quite an interesting experience. I learned HTML maybe one year prior. The World Wide Web was just beginning at that point. It’s the first time that I get to see that the World Wide Web is not just for communicating knowledge, but it’s also for mobilizing. It’s also for bringing people together.

Audrey Tang: There’s many social enterprises, at that point, aiming to do pretty much the same thing. There’s Yam Digital Technology, they are still around, I think. That began as a portal to connect all the placemaking organizations together and making a place for them online. At that time, I was also working on my startup called Inforist, later Inforian.

Dan Xin Huang: In 1996 already?

Audrey Tang: Right. Inforian. We would build our own metasearch engine. It’s the very beginning of the dotcom bubble. Everything feels liberating. Everything that was top-down seems interconnected now, hyper-connected even.

Audrey Tang: It coincides really with the idea of the direct election of the president. Instead of waiting for people representing each provinces to represent the citizens’ assembly, the citizens ourselves are citizens’ assembly. We get to decide together where the country is going and things like that.

Audrey Tang: I guess these two really played into each other. Before the World Wide Web, of course there’s a lot of top-down silos of information storage. With hyperlinks, everything feels like one big, globosphere or whatever, new sphere.

Audrey Tang: Again, with the presidential election, what used to seem like a siloed community, siloed co-chairs, and siloed ideologies, there’s a catalyst of thinking. One of the main thing about direct democracy, like referenda and things like that, is that people can reflect on the social positions of the entire people, the entire population, not just the representatives.

Audrey Tang: The reflection brought a light to that end. People would work in waves after waves to change the constitution, I think amended for five times or something, and steering toward a more participatory direction. It all feels very liberating.

Dan Xin Huang: Can you help me understand that idea a little bit more?

Audrey Tang: Sure.

Dan Xin Huang: You were just saying that in 1996, with the presidential election, the fact that people could go and vote and they felt like they had a direct link to something that was happening on such a massive…

Audrey Tang: That’s right… Instead of through multiple layers of representatives.

Dan Xin Huang: Exactly. You said that that’s an opportunity. It helps and forces people to…What was it that you said? Reflect more on…

Audrey Tang: Yeah, to reflect back our own positions as individuals but also as communities. It’s a beginning of a…I would now call it a transcultural norm in Taiwan, instead of a top-down martial law era.

Audrey Tang: Back then, the ruling party determined the ruling ideology, which determines the ruling norm that people can work within or against, but they couldn’t quite get around. You don’t have to look far to know, like in contemporary culture, other jurisdictions are still there. In any case, that was actually remarkably close to where PRC was. In ‘96, we collectively said that we’re going to build a transcultural vision. Instead of a one ruling ideology, there’s going to be many.

Audrey Tang: Through direct democracy and participatory democracy, people blended into more eclectic, nuanced positions that instead of taking down opposing ideologies, we would instead build a more eclectic — everybody can live with it — meta-ideology. That’s the beginning of Taiwan’s democracy. From the very beginning, it was powered by the Web.

Audrey Tang: Of course, before, there’s various lower level elections and things like that. That concentrates on maybe one city, one municipality, at a sub-national level. It feels still a little bit like under a overarching top-down architecture. You allow bits and pieces of self-determination, but never on the whole country level. ‘96 is really the first time that it’s a whole country level of democracy.

Dan Xin Huang: How do you qualify that, from the beginning, it was powered by the Web?

Audrey Tang: The Web was in ‘95. Yeah. When the presidential election came in ‘96, all the presidential candidates leveraged the Web to build their positions to connect to the various, as I mentioned, social movements and grassroot placemaking places that debated publicly.

Audrey Tang: Already, the BBS culture which, of course, nowadays the PTT is still around and a public forum that also helped people to post pro-social media instead of anti-social media as they inform debate, because the interaction space is designed such that it maximizes informed debate rather than exposure to advertisement.

Dan Xin Huang: This was already back in 1996…

Audrey Tang: Yeah. I was also very active on the BBS culture, as well as PTT being, of course, the prime example there, but there’s many already in ‘96. I would also say BBS with this design of real-time social interaction, instant messaging, and self-regulation of the board.

Audrey Tang: Basically, everything that you see in Reddit was already quite well developed in ‘96 and also informed a different imagination of democracy in the sense that instead of relying on the elites to set the rules, people can amend the rules based on the norms in a co-governance way.

Audrey Tang: Because there’s just a huge selection of BBS communities, those regulate themselves well tend to attract a more informed debate. Those who didn’t regulate themselves well tend to wither. It’s a swarm of exploration of governance already in the BBS culture and, later on, we would carry that into the Web era.

Dan Xin Huang: How would you define your communities? Was that your primary, the swarm that you just described…

Audrey Tang: Yeah, the BBS community and also the MUD, the multi-user dungeons, the MOOs. Basically, the idea is that we write code not as a abstract for the people way, but rather with the people.

Audrey Tang: Any player of that BBS, MUD, or other coaches with a little bit of programming knowledge will be able to co-determine the laws of physics that people live by. It’s very enabling. That’s the main idea I want to get across.

Dan Xin Huang: That sounds phenomenal. Something that I find myself responding a little bit to that is, the past couple years, something that I’ve gotten to do is report in Afghanistan on democracy there and the elections in Afghanistan. 20 years after it was first constructed or brought in by the US, you can see that there are a lot of fractures, a lot of fissures. It’s very problematic.

Dan Xin Huang: There are a lot of reasons for this. A lot of it also goes back to from the very beginning. It was very elite-driven. It was very top-down-driven and, to a certain extent, foreign-imposed, democracy in a box. That idea versus a groundswell of people trying to learn this political system that they’ve never used before, engaging with it, what does it mean, asking questions.

Dan Xin Huang: It sounds like it was like the polar opposite experience, in a way, in Taiwan because the Web had enabled these spaces to…

Audrey Tang: That’s right. The Web also helped right after the election when President Lee Teng-hui gets elected. There’s a conscious focus on placemaking in his first term. Within his first term as a directly elected president, there was a Jiji earthquake of ‘99, the September 21 earthquake.

Audrey Tang: That earthquake not only mobilized the Web communities for disaster reduction and mitigation, but also banded together pretty much all the placemaking organizations in a way to revitalize and heal the trauma of that earthquake. The earthquake, comparable to the presidential election, really did a solidarity building between the various social organizations.

Audrey Tang: Many large, purpose-driven organizations that we’re working with now can trace back their roots of their original solidarity and expansion during the earthquake, because there’s just so much to do. People realized that we cannot do this alone, and we certainly cannot wait for the government, and so people just take it upon themselves, which is a real grassroots spirit.

Audrey Tang: Without that spirit, democracy doesn’t work, because otherwise it would just become a set of rituals by the elites, as you said, democracy in a black box. If you have grassroots placemaking initiatives, then those NGOs, NPOs, social enterprises, co-ops, they’re around for a long time. Certainly longer than any presidential term. That then forms the backbone of democracy.

Dan Xin Huang: I wonder if we could switch tracks and just focus on your own journey through all of this.

Audrey Tang: Sure, of course.

Dan Xin Huang: In 1996, you were helping out on this presidential campaign. You said you learned your first code the year before? How was…

Audrey Tang: The first HTML.

Dan Xin Huang: How was it that you got into computer programming, coding, and that whole ecosystem?

Audrey Tang: I learned programming when I was eight. I was interested in mathematics, but not in math per se. I don’t do hand calculations willingly. A computer for me computes, I guess. It’s very time-saving for me, I guess, and also makes sure that I can share whatever I learned much more easily as interactive games and things like that.

Audrey Tang: I began programming without a computer actually for a while on paper, because I just read this GW-BASIC manual somewhere in my home. It was one of my uncle’s. He was working at the Institute of Information Industry, the III, at that point. Of course, he would have programming books.

Audrey Tang: I just learned programming as a time-saver and also as a sharing device. I would then, in ‘93, start to get a modem and dial up to the dial-up BBS culture, where I met many interesting people setting up their own BBS out of their own home phones. We collectively switched to the Internet when the affordable Internet came in ‘93, ‘94.

Audrey Tang: Throughout, my uncle just kept providing me ample opportunities of connecting with first graphic browser, the NCSA Mosaic, when it was introduced. I was visiting III at the time and just talked to one of his colleagues there to talk about the possibility of digitizing the classical poetry or things like that, and how to make it more searchable.

Audrey Tang: I was interested in building search engines right there because it was glaring omission of the early Web, that there’s no fully working search engines. I guess it’s a little bit like in early days of Bitcoin or Ethereum, where you see this is a very imperfect thing. A lot of the applications just doesn’t work. I was motivated to learn more programming to weave more of the Web together.

Audrey Tang: I learned then the Perl language, which was really the super glue of the early Web. At that time, pretty much all the dynamic Web pages were built using the Perl language. I got into the Perl culture and just started a few communities, like the Usenet group, the news group, Taiwan Computer Science Bureau back then, and really motivated me to learn English because I didn’t speak English back then.

Audrey Tang: With that Perl community, I gradually found out that most of the programs that I wanted to write, that I needed to write is already written. At that time, they were sharing these ready-to-use programs in a place called CPAN, the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network, which is first of its kind for a programming language.

Audrey Tang: It’s not the first thing of its kind, though. Before, it was the Comprehensive Tech Archive Network of the typesetting language, like LaTeX. CPAN was really early. It was introduced in ‘95. I become a contributor right away and just joined this worldwide community that builds on the ideas of rough consensus and running code.

Audrey Tang: These early Internet cultures are really defining to me, because I wasn’t having voting rights till five years later, because I was just 15. By the time I was able to vote politically, I would already be immersed in the multi-stakeholder Internet governance model for five years. For me, that’s what I would refer to as my tribe, like my indigenous people tribe.

Dan Xin Huang: It had these inherent democratic tendencies in a sense.

Audrey Tang: Exactly. Anyone who shows up with a more compelling way to run code gets their ideas merged right away. You don’t have to wait for four years. You don’t have to wait for a constitutional amendment. Basically, the constitution, I guess, is the TCP/IP.

Audrey Tang: The RFC culture, the Internet Engineering Task Force, and we, the people working on the Web, worked on the application layer, which was very fast moving. We are blessed with a core of the early Internet that is end-to-end innovation.

Audrey Tang: The idea is that if you think of a better way, you don’t have to ask for anyone’s approval before other people started joining your new network, like people who invent Ethereum doesn’t have to ask Bitcoin’s permission. Bitcoin doesn’t have to ask for Bitcoin’s permission, and things like that. We all build on each other.

Dan Xin Huang: I’m going to flag that as something to come back into, just some of these formative experiences that you had in these Internet communities. I’ve come across multiple instances where you announced a metaphor or an analogy that’s very striking. Just recently, I heard a podcast interview where you talked about how voting is…

Audrey Tang: Three bits every four years.

Dan Xin Huang: Exactly. The way that we interface with our technology, it’s constant. It’s fluid. It never stops.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Dan Xin Huang: It sounds like a lot of that really goes back to the way that you came up.

Audrey Tang: It’s not a new idea. It’s just participatory democracy. Previously, using paper which is a technology, too, or counting sticks or ropes, it really wasn’t easy for more than 100 or so people to make decisions together. The closest approximation was the Athenian democracy, where people just go to this really large square, the Acropolis.

Audrey Tang: The thing is that the Acropolis, even if it’s very well-designed, doesn’t truly scale to the current populations that we have. The Internet is like a enabler that enables people to listen at scale. Whereas previously, the communication technology, like radio and so on, mostly enabled speaking at scale.

Audrey Tang: Listening at scale is truly where the participatory democracy is at. The early Internet workers really understood what they’re building is not another radio or another television, but rather something that enable people to feel closer to each other, despite the inherent limitation of the Dunbar’s number.

Audrey Tang: People can only track 150 people together. If you change that to 150 hashtags, then you can have weak links and swift trust with so many other people as well. It’s a different norm.

Dan Xin Huang: To jump out of your personal narrative for a minute and engage with this idea, that’s a really interesting way to put it. One or two generations ago with the radio and mass media, television, that sort of thing, it’s speaking at scale.

Dan Xin Huang: I can understand what you mean by that. That’s when you have gatekeepers. You have editors. You have producers. Those people, they dominate the discussion. With the Internet and social media, everyone gets to have a platform. Everyone gets to have a voice.

Dan Xin Huang: I wonder, it feels like there’s a capacity for listening at scale, but it doesn’t seem like, in practice, at least in the US or a lot of places, that what’s happening is that people speak.

Audrey Tang: Or shout.

Dan Xin Huang: Exactly. A few years ago, I was logging onto Facebook during the elections. It was just people that I knew from college or whatever posting novel-length rants about Trump, against Trump, or against Hillary.

Dan Xin Huang: People saying, “All right, if you’re going to vote for Trump, then you might as well defriend me.” It doesn’t sound like a harmonious listening soundscape. I wonder how you would square that.

Audrey Tang: The thing is just like when you’re building a physical space like the Acropolis, that there’s a lot of choices that one can do to do attenuation. Attenuation, meaning the sound is getting weaker. If you have a soundproof echo chamber material, then, of course, that’s very much attenuated because the other side of the chamber doesn’t hear you at all.

Audrey Tang: If you have a place where the soundscape is more conductive to listening, then people are prompted to speak less and listen more, because they learn by listening. That’s where I draw the spectrum of anti-social media, like mediascapes that promotes antisocial behavior to track people better to sell them more advertisements.

Audrey Tang: In any case, we can all read the book, “Surveillance Capitalism.” It’s thousands of words. That serves primarily the interest of people who want to hypertarget other people and basically elicit automated subconscious responses on one side, and pro-social media which elicits more nuanced deliberative responses on the other side.

Audrey Tang: The places that we built, like the Polis system, is deliberately constructed so that you can’t really defriend anyone. You can’t really post long rants. There’s just one succinct argument showing whether people resonated with it or not. There’s not even a reply button. You cannot do name-calling.

Audrey Tang: It always results in this reflection of the agree to disagree points, but also, more importantly, the other things that people agree with each other, which is always much more if you design a space this way.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, the main rift in the previous national referendum day, which was the marriage equality, which is also a very polarizing topic in the US as well, super polarizing.

Audrey Tang: What we did, though, was taking the results of the two referenda. One talking about the civic code, and one talks about the rights and duties of individuals when they marry, as well as their constitutional court ruling, and fused it into a social innovation that I call to [non-English speech] , legalizing the bylaws, but not the in-laws.

Audrey Tang: It’s basically saying that we hear both sides. We take both sides. They bump into each other, and the Jade Mountain rises again. Then we deliver an innovation that guarantees all the rights, duties, and protections of individuals when they wed.

Audrey Tang: It doesn’t hyperlink back to the part of civic code that talks about kinship. The families don’t wed. We don’t have to invent another eight pronouns, eight nouns or proper nouns for family relationships, which could be very stretched.

Audrey Tang: The generation that think about marriage as families wed together is happier, because same-sex marriage [inaudible 38:27] families. The people who care about the registration and the protection of rights and so on are also happier, because it’s exactly the same as heterosexual families.

Audrey Tang: It’s eclectic, nuanced, deliberative space results directly in after the referendum a year now. After that referendum, people generally all feel much better about this marriage equality issue as compared to just before the referendum.

Dan Xin Huang: How was it that Polis enabled you to arrive at a compromise?

Audrey Tang: Because it makes it easier for people to propose ideas that they can reflect back to the community in a more nuanced fashion. We run formal conversations with the AIT US de facto embassy here, talk about the various aspects of the Taiwan-US relationship, like promoting closer people to people ties.

Audrey Tang: Polis allowed us to see both the group informed consensus, divisive statements, as well as consensus statements as usual. The most divisive statement was, “Taiwan should make English their primary language for work.” Even France has done this. We know it’s controversial if we reflect back.

Audrey Tang: There was one more nuanced idea that says, “Taiwan need to quickly move towards becoming a bilingual nation,” like people speak their mother tongue and also English. Quickly move towards means maybe in 2030 or something. You will see that this most controversial statement and the most consensual statements are actually the same thin, just with a different timescale.

Audrey Tang: One says that we need to do this now. One says we need to quickly move toward this direction. Everybody agrees on this, but exactly half of the population disagree on this. This is not your traditional compromise. This is more like a step back, nuanced rereading of the original advocacy position.

Audrey Tang: The advocates are also happy to find that if they frame it a little bit differently in a different timescale, then actually everybody agree on the values. It’s just people have different positions with regard to the speed of implementation. This decouples the values from the positions.

Audrey Tang: We won’t have positions, ideologies blind ourselves to our common values, which is what often happens in those novel instruments.

Dan Xin Huang: There’s going to be more to dig into there, too, so I’ll flag it. I want to be mindful of your time. We have until 10 o’clock, right?

Audrey Tang: We can exceed a little bit after that.

Dan Xin Huang: Great. I want to bring us back to your story now. We’re at 1995, 1996. You’ve been pretty involved, pretty engaged, embedded in these online communities that you’re a contributing member. You do a lot of them. 1996, first direct presidential election in Taiwan. You’re pretty involved in that on the campaign.

Dan Xin Huang: It sounds like that’s the moment that actually you’re taking a lot of the culture, the governance, and the way that these digital communities are operating, and you’re already applying that onto the way that you’re understanding and interacting with democracy here in Taiwan as it’s being executed via the presidential election.

Audrey Tang: Being reimagined, but building on the roots of more than a decade of grassroots placemaking communities, just as the Wide Web, while brand-new at the time, were built upon decades of the core Internet community. These are the staple bedrocks that enabled the swarm-like experimentation on the application level.

Dan Xin Huang: That makes sense to me in terms of how you’re personally interacting with these things. I have to imagine that in 1996, as Taiwan embarked on this present democratic, would you call it an experiment or…?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, the great Taiwanese experiment, actually.

Dan Xin Huang: Now in 2020, especially with you as digital minister, there’s a lot of validation, a lot of credibility that you’ve been able to bring to this civic hacker culture, which I also want to talk to you more about.

Audrey Tang: Sure, of course.

Dan Xin Huang: In 1996, I’d imagine it was just as top-driven, elite-driven as anything else. How did you negotiate these things at the time? What was it like and what was your own headspace at the time?

Audrey Tang: A couple of things. One is this permissionless innovation thing, because back in martial law days, anything that one do, cultural poetry, journalism, whatever, everything requires a permit. It’s by far not permissionless innovation.

Dan Xin Huang: Yeah, quite the opposite.

Audrey Tang: Quite the opposite. Whether the permits are handed out or not is quite arbitrary as well. There often was no reason at all. It’s not only top-down, it’s also a black box, as in no accountability.

Dan Xin Huang: I’m familiar with that sort of stuff.

Audrey Tang: You’re quite familiar with that. We don’t have to look far. This arbitrary news, of course, frustrates a lot of people. Then comes the lifting of the martial law and lifting of the ban on political parties, and the freedom of the press came and things like that.

Audrey Tang: Suddenly, it’s a lot of repressed innovation energy that suddenly just erupted. It seems like everything was possible. You can advocate for pretty much anything. The slogan then was 100 percent of speech freedom, 百分之百的言論自由.

Audrey Tang: That’s the first feeling. Just as with the World Wide Web, it seems instead of having to code alone for years in order to invent something like Ethereum, or rather a metasearch engine like Google. FusionSearch, which I wrote, was also a metasearch engine. It doesn’t seem like that it’s a solo work. It’s a large amount of work. Certainly, because of the World Wide Web, we have access and often not trademark patent or copyright restricted to a lot of other people’s work, who are all swarming together to solve the same problem.

Audrey Tang: The second thing is it’s a open innovation, not just innovation. Innovation could mean that people compete against each other addressing those social issues and inventing noble social organizations.

Audrey Tang: An open innovation landscape means that people are willing to share both their working and failed experiments, and the source code, the blueprints of these to allow for second, third, fourth wave of innovation. That continue until today. The latest innovations in AI or in the whole GitHub thing was actually what we were advocating for.

Audrey Tang: At that time, of course, Microsoft was the arch-enemy of this permission-siloed work on innovation. Now, GitHub is Microsoft. They have done a real turnaround and saying that open source really is good and not cancer.

Audrey Tang: I was referring to Microsoft because, at the time, they were the elites that says, “We’re building for the people and we know better than those swarms of Linux users.”

Audrey Tang: Now, of course, they are at peace with this. It’s quite representative. If you look at the administration’s working of the martial law era, the same civil service workforce carried over after the direct presidential election. There was no bloody revolution or anything like that.

Audrey Tang: It’s the same machinery, but now have to work for democratic legitimacy instead of authoritarian legitimacy. The tools of accountability, of transparency, and so on, the open part in open innovation are very important.

Audrey Tang: I would argue even more important than if democracy is a black box that was given by foreign intervention, because the local authoritarian state need to prove that we’re actually changing directions, just as Microsoft have to prove that they’re not just embracing and extending open-source but truly changed their minds.

Dan Xin Huang: That was something that it sounds like they were sufficiently mindful of, that they really had to not just talk the talk, but walk the walk and show that they were changing, had changed in this way.

Audrey Tang: The civil society banded together, as I mentioned, after the September 21 earthquake of ‘99. There’s always a outside gain, in the sense of people would just refer to the Wild Lily. If the constitutional amendment doesn’t work toward a truly participatory democracy, people can always do another Wild Lily movement.

Audrey Tang: Wild Lily was a movement in 1990 that, basically, people occupied the ZhongZheng Memorial Hall, the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall. At that time, it was not the Liberty Square. It would later become the Liberty Square. More than 20,000 demonstrators and calling for direct election, of course. Probably an election for the National Assembly and became the legitimacy of the ‘96 direct election.

Audrey Tang: The point here is that if the institution doesn’t reform the way the people want it, people can always go back to the street, as they did multiple times after that. The Sunflower Movement was also interesting in the sense that it referred to the flower of the sun. The Wild Lily was also a flower. It’s a very flowery tradition.

Dan Xin Huang: Very ornate.

Audrey Tang: The implicit thread was that if the institution doesn’t truly reform, people will just go back to the streets and occupy again. That’s what kept the institution honest.

Dan Xin Huang: I wonder if you could, in your mind, what are some of the major inflection points? I’d love to talk to you a lot more about the 2014 Sunflower Movement. It seems this is definitely a reductive arc that I’m going to draw. Please add to it and tell me if I’m misunderstanding it.

Dan Xin Huang: It seem like in 1996, originating from this Wild Lily 1990 movement, you had the practice, the implementation of presidential elections. From the way that you’re describing, it seems like they did a really good job.

Dan Xin Huang: This is really almost like a miracle, if you step back, for a country, for a government, authoritarian government to decide that we’re going to transform ourselves into a democracy. It’s absolutely remarkable.

Audrey Tang: To refactor.

Dan Xin Huang: Exactly. It seems like they did a lot of an earnest effort, and they largely succeeded. Would it be fair to say that in the ensuing years, certain tendencies may be crept back or maybe they weren’t as open as they had wanted to be originally?

Dan Xin Huang: Whatever the case, in my reductive understanding, by 2014, things had moved far enough away from the vision or what a lot of people thought should be the way the government behaved, that there is another.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, I think it’s a symbiotic relationship between decision movements on one side and decision media on the other. I mean, the Wild Strawberries Movement also pioneered the use of a lot of live streaming media and things like that and was live streaming.

Audrey Tang: People will feel much closer to each other, even if they’re physically far away. People even at their homes feels that they care about what’s happening right down in the demonstration side. Much more allowing the demonstration to become another protest, but a demo, like a demo scene, a scene of demonstration that shows people watching live stream, a different imagination of how democracy could work.

Audrey Tang: I mean, that’s true for most of the Occupy movements anyway in the waves after Occupy Wall Street. I think Taiwan is quite unique in that, because it takes place directly in the legislative chambers.

Audrey Tang: The demonstration is even stronger than many other Occupy movement, because it’s literally people taking the issues to their own hands. Literally, like the legitimacy theory was the MPs were on strike, so people had to do their work themselves.

Audrey Tang: It’s not that the institutions have drifted away, it’s that the social media promoted a different closeness that people enjoy between the social sector organizations. They would love if the administration view as close like they now feel close to each other with the same technologies.

Audrey Tang: The administration at the time still work on telephone era technologies. Although, it’s not like they drifted away. People are much more close to each other subconsciously. While maintaining the same distance, the government feels like it’s drifting farther away.

Audrey Tang: Before, we had the Internet like three bits every four years. It was a pretty good invention, people have to ride horses to vote. Now, of course, it seems very quaint. That’s not because voting by itself has drifted away. It’s just that a social organization has learned to leverage symbiotic relationship with new technologies to allow for much closer gathering.

Audrey Tang: It’s not as a drifting from the original vision, but rather the original vision has always been a grassroots trustworthiness-based polity. The technologies back in Wild Lily days or back in ‘96 was not sufficient to realize enough of that. It’s mostly text-based and occasionally photo-based.

Audrey Tang: With live streaming, it could be like the co-presencing. People were calling for the same co-presencing with the administration. The administration wasn’t ready for that.

Audrey Tang: That was the Sunflower Movement’s goal, is to demonstrate that even with half a million people in the street and many more online, we can still come to rough consensus with regard to the Cross-Strait Services Trade Agreement.

Audrey Tang: It was largely a success which was then ratified by the head of the parliament. At the end of that year, the entire cabinet was like, “OK, we need to learn from the Occupiers.” That’s how I got in here as a representative.

Dan Xin Huang: The primary goal of Occupy in 2014, it sounds like it wasn’t political. It wasn’t in opposition to what the government was doing. Obviously, in the press, there was a fair amount written about the trade bill with China as one of the drivers. You’re saying that even more important than that, actually, was this more meta governance critique.

Audrey Tang: Like relearning how to live together in a real democracy.

Dan Xin Huang: With the technology in the 21st century.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Dan Xin Huang: Interesting.

Audrey Tang: A couple of colleagues of mine were also direct participants in the Sunflower Movement, one in the outside covering the movement, one of the most trusted media at that time, the eForum.

Audrey Tang: Another colleague in my office was also one of the main facilitators of the occupy the parliament for deliberation. Maybe you can talk to them. I was referring to ST Peng and En-En Hsu respectively. Joel has their contact.

Dan Xin Huang: They’re here in…

Audrey Tang: They’re here full-time.

Dan Xin Huang: The Digital Ministry?

Audrey Tang: We occupy this place together.

Dan Xin Huang: You guys have occupied.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Dan Xin Huang: That’d be great. I know that we’re coming up against the time that I have. Zach and I, we talked about possibly taking a look at your schedule and figuring out more opportunities where I can watch you in action, so to speak, and maybe do future interviews as well.

Audrey Tang: Sure, but I would encourage, if you’re taking the Sunflower Movement and the social movement before that, I think ST and En-En have at least as much to contribute as I do. They both did their graduate-level work…

Dan Xin Huang: Oh, wow.

Audrey Tang: …on the effects of Sunflower Movement in the Taiwanese nation-building, reimagination of society, connection between social sector movements, and so on.

Audrey Tang: I’m more like a spokesbot — a spokesperson of this collective intelligence. A lot of the real work is done in the social sector. I’m more like a bridge that amplifies social sector’s work, but it is social sector’s work.

Dan Xin Huang: How do you qualify social sector?

Audrey Tang: Social sector is any organization that’s designed with social purpose in mind, so purpose-first organizations as opposed to the economic or private sector, which was mainly designed for profit.

Audrey Tang: Of course, nowadays, we talk about the triple bottom line and things like that, but there’s still a priority that is about shareholder responsibility and so on, whereas social sector prioritize stakeholder responsibility. It includes traditional not-for-profit organizations, cooperatives, social entrepreneurs, and so on.