Audrey Tang: All right. I think it’s working.

Audrey Tang: Previously, we were talking about, given all that’s been written about Pol.is, about vTaiwan, about g0v, about all the efforts, what is the non-yet-explored angle that we can make some contribution on, using WIRED as a platform, which is as you explained, a different platform from than WIRED UK, now with a more American audience?

Audrey Tang: I think there’s two things. One, as you correctly pointed out, I’m not just digital minister at Taiwan. I’m also a board member of Digital Future Society, which is convening next week in Barcelona, regardless that MWC just got canceled, and also board member of RadicalxChange, along with Vitalik Buterin, Glen Weyl, Cristina Caffarra and Danielle Allen.

Audrey Tang: Also, board member soon of CONSUL Foundation, with is the Madrid participation platform. After Madrid election, they moved to Amsterdam, trying to find a new home supporting civic participation software development and figuring out a financial model as a new social innovation organization.

Audrey Tang: Three very different international NGOs, one you would think well-funded, but now we don’t know. [laughs] The Digital Future Society, I mean. Then RadicalxChange which has, of course, the Ethereum backup as a experimental community.

Audrey Tang: CONSUL trying to project these ideas into the real world, and having gained some legitimacy, like winning a UN public service award, working with municipal governments worldwide.

Audrey Tang: None of my work in these international NGO boards are directly contradicting my mandate as digital minister, but then none of this duplicates the g0v/vTaiwan story because they are non-g0v ventures by definition. That may be one of the angles to write about.

Audrey Tang: That will require at least one big trip to one of these places, unless it’s New York. You’ll be based in New York, so it will be me making the trip to you. That’s my first thought.

Audrey Tang: The second thought is that even if we concentrate on listening-at-scale technologies, which is mostly Pol.is and its US applications, maybe instead of we determining what’s interesting, some sort of collective intelligence can be applied as part of this writing trip.

Audrey Tang: Maybe we produce some provocations for potential readership to crowdsource, certainly not crowdfund. I don’t know if WIRED crowdfund stories, [laughs] but crowdsource angles that people would like to see explored.

Audrey Tang: This is not just question that you hand to me but rather the angles, the perspective, the narratives that they would like to help building. It’s also commitment from the eventual readership. I don’t know whether you’ve done this interactive non-fiction before, and that would require some design.

Audrey Tang: That’s my two thoughts. You don’t have to do both.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: It’s a really interesting experiment. What I will say is it’s hard to imagine WIRED deciding to commit any resources to that. [laughs] If we had a way to use existing infrastructure to…

Audrey Tang: Pol.is is Free Software.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: I know, but…

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: We would essentially use Pol.is to do…

Audrey Tang: A story about Pol.is.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: …to find consensus questions?

Audrey Tang: Or consensus narratives, consensus concepts, and divisive ones. There’s nothing in the Pol.is playbook that says you can only account for the one with consensus. You can discover which one is the most divisive and then use that as the angle.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: It’s an interesting idea. We’d have to talk more about exactly how that would work. I would be game for that. I don’t know how WIRED would feel about it. My guess is that they would be interested in that as some component of it, maybe not the whole thing, but maybe. It’s a very interesting idea.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: I’m not sure we even have to decide between those two options.

Audrey Tang: We can do both.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: Yeah. Does doing something along these lines sound interesting, worthwhile, and worth your time?

Audrey Tang: As you said, the g0v/vTaiwan story is organic. The more that we focus on our personal dyad of journalistic output, the less that we do the due credit to the actual crowd that made these experiences possible.

Audrey Tang: I’m not even attending the weekly vTaiwan meet-ups that much anymore. We just make sure that the mechanism is there, that the government official shows up whenever there’s a need to bridge with the g0v community.

Audrey Tang: The Data Helper project of g0v won the Presidential Hackathon, so there’s plenty of legitimacy. [laughs] They’re super-legitimate already. The other international organizations are less legitimate in their stated goals.

Audrey Tang: The Digital Future Society, that would be my first face-to-face meeting with my fellow board members, previous videoconferencing and actions via delegates notwithstanding. This will be my first experience with the MWC folks.

Audrey Tang: It will be certainly interesting from my perspective to see how that interaction goes and how they’re out of the comfort zone of the population of Taiwan and post-occupy. What if we apply some of the similar philosophies in very different social configurations and see how that interacts with the people there?

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: One hope’s always that something real will unfold. The eventual story doesn’t feel like a static image of a moment in time of people talking about things, but that rather there’s at least some interval in which something happens.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: Granted, I understand that, for the most part, this stuff does not happen quickly. I would hope that there would be room for some follow through that went beyond something like a board meet-up.

Audrey Tang: Just to make sure I understand you correctly, what do you mean by relatively quickly? How long do a story take?

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: That’s a good question. Stuff that I work on tends to take anywhere from about a minimum of three months through there are times that I’ve spent a year on a story. In this particular case for a variety of extra-diegetic reasons, which is to say totally exogenous to this particular project, I have reasons that I wouldn’t want it to happen on the faster side of that.

Audrey Tang: By three or five months?

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: Yeah.

Audrey Tang: Then that make it difficult if we are going to cover these international NGO theme, because for MWC, certainly, nothing happens visibly until the MWC Barcelona, which is a year from now because of coronavirus.

Audrey Tang: Even if we plan something that really works well with Pol.is technology and so on, I don’t think it will happen within that time frame. It will easily like early next year. That just rules out…

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: One possibility, narratively, and of course I’m just speculating, is that we end up, I go with you to one of these conferences where it’s really the beginning of talking about something, as you said, in a new social context with different actors.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: That then maybe given that the current Pol.is experiments underway do have a relatively faster time frame, maybe there’s a narrative through line that’s about the experiment in Louisville, for example. The conversations that Digital Future Society or whatever is more about like forward-looking, speculating about what this stuff starts to look.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: As long as you have something that has the feeling of movement, that’s enough. There really probably needs to be one component that feels like something is moving.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: The combination of those two things might actually be interesting, because I like what you said about what will it mean for this stuff to be displaced from an origin that already feels like a mature project with real popular legitimacy and how to begin introducing that these processes into places where it is going to be a time consuming and resource-intensive project to build that legitimacy.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: There’s something that maybe then there’s the Taiwan element, instead of being focused on everything that happened in Taiwan between say 2014 and 2018, instead of retelling that story, you just use that as the example of here is what a mature or stable version.

Audrey Tang: As the fully bootstrapped version.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: Yeah.

Audrey Tang: I like the sound of it, but I will also say that if that is the case, like in the near horizon, of course we have the tech challenge which is a couple week from now in Taipei, where we work with across Indo-Pacific vendors selling or at least wokring on counter-disinformation tactics and strategies, of which civic participation is only just one aspect of many.

Audrey Tang: Then, we have various human right organizations and also state-sponsored organizations like NDI, IRI and the NED folks, all taking action in Taiwan and around Taiwan. You will have the Open Tech Fund, Oslo Freedom Forum for sure, maybe next year the RightsCon, and so on.

Audrey Tang: All this is basically saying that we’re sharing this ecosystem of civic hackers driving legitimacy in a complementary way with the governance model that is still heavily based on hierarchies and authorities, but then we offer Pol.is as just one tool out of a very large toolkit. Whatever the local civil society feel like, they can start adopting some of elements of that first.

Audrey Tang: Then the real story will be what the people at, for example, Thailand in the Chulalongkorn University, after our workshops with them, what kind of political angle are they interacting with the Thai government. What does the governor of Bangkok if there is a new government of Bangkok, think about the Taiwanese influence and things like that.

Audrey Tang: That would get something moving very quickly, but then it will not be about Pol.is, chances are Pol.is would not be used at all, or iit will use only a very minor version.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: I think that I’m certainly interested in which Pol.is is involved, I think for all sorts of obvious reasons. Especially given that we’re all so saturated with the narrative about social media and divisiveness and outrage. I think there is naturally a big appetite for what does it mean to…

Audrey Tang: …have a prosocial media, not antisocial media.

Audrey Tang: Maybe I’m more of a kind of just a resource to your story about Pol.is, then?

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: You know, it’s possible. It’s very hard to, I try to figure out as little in advance as possible, because then what’s the point of reporting the story. If I had an idea, all these ideas in advance, why bother? These things are only interesting if there’s an open-ended element to all of it. The question of what is the ultimate ratio of stuff that is about you and your work, versus what is about Pol.is and…

Audrey Tang: Prosocial media technologies.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: Who knows, really. That’s what I figure out over the course of the process. The process itself becomes an attempt to figure out the way that those things relate and what the right balance is. I think this international angle does sound really interesting to me. Do you think your partners in these organizations would mind if I showed up with you?

Audrey Tang: I don’t think they will mind, and in case of the RadicalxChange in particular, they are based in the NYC. I’m sure that Glen Weyl and Vitalik Buterin will not be shy talking about how our own board meetings using quadratic voting is advancing governance in board meetings.

Audrey Tang: There are RxC chapters around the world, of which there’s hundreds now, like the reason why I’m still going to Barcelona is partly Digital Future Society, but also partly just having dinner and hang out with RxC Barcelona, which just got established. There’s any number of RxCs local chapters now, just trying out these very Georgian idea of using market mechanisms for social good.

Audrey Tang: I would say then, maybe a general introduction of how did I encounter RxC, how RxC ideas are, and then you can actually comfortably do a lot of reporting in New York. That certainly is easier than if we choose the Amsterdam-based consult story.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: You said there’s a RadicalxChange board meeting?

Audrey Tang: We just had a board meeting, actually.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: Oh, you just had.

Audrey Tang: We have one every quarter, in which we vote through quadratic voting, voting points, the things from as minor as changing a logo to getting an internationally acclaimed artist as our new board member, and everything between that.

Audrey Tang: It’s really interesting, because one think about how well do I know about these proposals from other board members, it prompts us to be more deliberative, and how much do we want to save until next board meeting, because the unused tokens depreciating by a quarter can get reused in the next board meeting. There’s this whole reverse game theory thing going on, that maximizes our output into board meeting decisions.

Audrey Tang: You can kind of feel the hum across the board about whether we need more information about this issue as compared to a single kind of plurality vote, of which you can get very efficient, but less information about your fellow board members. Just this voting technology itself is interesting, much as why Pol.is is interesting for listening at scale.

Audrey Tang: We’re meeting on the board level every quarter, but at working level, like with Matt, the president, actions are happening leading up to the annual summit, I think this time in Brazil, in Sao Paolo. Again, there is that international vantage point of how these ideas apply in the Sao Paolo context.

Audrey Tang: This is the inaugural RxC Taipei meet up, so you have Jennifer of the staff of RxC, and Vitalik of course, and also the HTC person offering the centralized identity crypto phone, the HTC Exodus that you may have heard of, and offering it as one of the data dignity thing that RxC is fundamentally about. It is a platform that people can just piggyback on with their imaginations.

Audrey Tang: That may be something that you can easily find RxC chapters over the US, and that will maybe cater to a US audience more.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: That’s an interesting possibility, also. I sort of worry that maybe that becomes its own story, because even if this is an 8,000 or 10,000-word story, there’s only so much you can do.

Audrey Tang: I know, I know.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: Then what was the Berlin event?

Audrey Tang: The Berlin event, I think, begins end of March. It’s a whole week, actually. We still don’t have the full schedule of everything, but at least it will include, let’s see, yeah.

Audrey Tang: I think it’s at least two legs like the Berlin one and the Netherlands one, and the Netherlands one will coincide with this Odyssey Hackathon, which started in the distributed ledger community but now is just generally tech for sustainable development that I’ll probably interact with their winners, and try to see if they would like to apply some of that to our Presidential Hackathon.

Audrey Tang: I’ll get back to Taiwan on the 9th of April, which means that it’s actually not one week, it’s actually almost two weeks, like 11 days in the Berlin and the Netherlands. That’s a long trip.

Audrey Tang: If you would like to have interviews during that trip, that will probably be good because then you get to meet not only the people that I’m meeting, but also RxC Berlin, which is one of the most active RxC chapters.

Audrey Tang: You get to meet our embassy people, Professor Hsieh Chih-wei, the Taiwan Ambassador to Germany is a very interesting guy. Basically you can get a feel of how “Taiwan Can Help” act in the international context.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: The only problem with that is I have a scheduling conflict, because I have to be on a different trip from March 29th to the 11th. It’s possible if it’s starting before the 29th that I could come to Berlin en route, but I don’t know if that would work.

Audrey Tang: Or, I don’t know, there’s some stories to be done around September, I guess, which is the season…

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: It’s a little far.

Audrey Tang: Is a little far.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: Little far. What are the trips to Korea?

Audrey Tang: The Korea trips were around the IACC would be, let’s take a quick look, the IACC would be around June, June the 2nd.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: So later, yeah.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, and the one around social innovation would be mid-May, so mid-May to June I’ll visit Seoul at least twice, maybe more.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: When do you go to Barcelona?

Audrey Tang: Literally next week. I arrive to Barcelona 22nd of February, and stay only two days there, and then I fly back to Taiwan for the parliamentary inquiry.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: For what? The parliamentary what?

Audrey Tang: The parliamentary inquiry, the beginning of the parliament session, where the cabinet prepares for inquiry.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: The 22nd, which day is the 22nd?

Audrey Tang: It’s a Saturday.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: A Saturday. That would be challenging. Then what day to you get to Berlin, do you know?

Audrey Tang: March 29th.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: Ah, that’s tough too. Then you’re just in Taiwan, other those two trips, you’re in Taiwan for…

Audrey Tang: For April?

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: For the next, or for March, rather, end of February, March.

Audrey Tang: For March? Let’s see. I think I’m mostly…Actually I have to be in Taiwan, because it’s the parliamentary sessions, so every Tuesday and every Friday I have to go to the parliament during the initial inquiries. That’s why I’m based on Taiwan in March.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: Well, it might end up being that just does a timing issue, that it makes more sense for me just to come to Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: Welcome to Taiwan.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: If you have free time while you’re there.

Audrey Tang: Sure, and welcome to Taiwan. It’s not like Taiwan doesn’t have its events. There will be a lot of global training in collaboration frameworks. There will be any number of open government collaboration meetings. You’re saying you can’t make it to Barcelona, meaning that you’re visiting in Taiwan like earliest would be March 1st?

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: Yeah. The problem is that I have to be in New York for an event that I agreed to do on the evening of the 24th, so given that you’re only in Barcelona for two days…

Audrey Tang: A day and a half.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: I mean I suppose that I could just come for the 22nd and 23rd, not impossible if you think it’s worth it.

Audrey Tang: If you’re going to choose between Barcelona and Taiwan, I’ll of course say do Taiwan because you can stay longer. The background material would be a more rich, because you get to interview people who other journalists have not interviewed.

Audrey Tang: Otherwise, this Taiwan prelude, you’d entirely rely on Carl Miller’s materials. If you have to make a choice, I would say just skip Barcelona, because other interviews will take place there, and we’ll also make transcripts, so… [laughs]

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: That’s the idea of tens of thousands of pages of transcript reading is daunting.

Audrey Tang: I know, I know. I’m sure there’s AIs that help with that.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: I should…

Audrey Tang: Sorry for interrupting, but if we know that you’re coming to Taiwan somewhere in March…

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: That does seem likely.

Audrey Tang: We should start, for example, just letting Zach know because Zach manages my schedule, and just settling on kind of the pace of the interview that you would like. I’m fine in my working hours, which is likely 9 to 5, or 7 to 7 at most, being shadowed or things like that, but because we also have to let everybody else in the same room know that I’m being shadowed.

Audrey Tang: The logistic as early as possible letting Zach know will be better if he can just let everybody know.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: It all sounds very interesting to me. I have to go back to them to talk to them about what their instincts are.

Audrey Tang: Have you been to Taiwan?

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: I’ve never been to Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: That’s another good thing.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: It’s part of the incentive.

Audrey Tang: Excuse.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: Yeah. My sister-in-law’s mother is from there. My brother has spent a lot of time in Taiwan, he loves Taiwan, but I’ve never been.

Audrey Tang: Well that sounds like an idea. I think what’s from me is that I will keep your ideas in mind about less of a kind of personal heroic journey thing, but focusing on what’s emerging in my work, especially for American audience, that somehow connects to the Pol.is experiments concurrently going on.

Audrey Tang: I’ll think about that, and maybe you would talk to the editor about some sort of interactive non-fiction component in this trip. If you’re thinking it’s not a good idea right now, then we just don’t do that, but it may be interesting.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: I think it would be interesting. There’s this book, I can’t remember the guy’s name, this English professor at Brown, he used to be at Brown University, wrote this book called “Twisty Little Passages” that was all a study of Zork and all of the original text games?

Audrey Tang: Infocom.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: Yeah.

Audrey Tang: An approach to interactive fiction. Yeah.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: What is his name? I forget.

Audrey Tang: Twisty Little Passages? Nick Montfort.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: Right.

Audrey Tang: Interesting.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: It’s a cool idea. I have no idea how they would react to that. It’s the kind of thing that they could plausibly get very excited about, or just say like, no, that’s too far afield. I don’t know, it’s a very interesting idea.

Audrey Tang: Because for a Pol.is conversation to really take a root on its own, it requires around three weeks, that’s what we know by heuristics and experience. From now to the time that you’re actually in Taiwan is roughly three weeks. It may be a good thing to start thinking about this idea if you’re going to at least use some of the divisive, and/or consensual points from this crowdsource experiment as part of the journalistic entry.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: How would you suggest that we promote it?

Audrey Tang: It’s less of a problem, because if WIRED lends itself as a platform, it can attract easily a lot of people thinking about this very simple idea of what people’s reflections are, about you can focus on Taiwan, focus on civic tech, focus on social innovation, or whatever. You can choose something that resonates with both US and Taiwan people.

Audrey Tang: For the digital dialogues that we did with the AIT, we asked very specific questions like, for example, how to promote closer people-to-people ties between US and Taiwan. For that, Taiwan should make English a primary working language, that which is the most divisive.

Audrey Tang: And the most consensual one is, incidentally, Taiwan needs to quickly move towards becoming bilingual nation, which is a softer version of the most divisive statement.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: That’s so interesting.

Audrey Tang: Young generation of artists, world peace through culture, professional baseball teams, lifelong learning. Talent Circulation, don’t talk about brain drain, think about talent circulation and proactive marketing of Taiwan’s brand, bubble tea and all that, and things like that.

Audrey Tang: Basically, these are all conversation starters, because you know whether they are divisive or consensual that it makes sense for the people on both sides to think about this as a common topic. When I shared these top results of the four digital dialogues, and this is the most divisive of all of four dialogues.

Audrey Tang: It’s a conversation starter all by itself, which is called, “Every time the PRC closes an international door for Taiwan, the US should try to open one for Taiwan someplace else,” which neatly divide the entire population in half by that single statement.

Audrey Tang: If you will only look at the top consensus, these all make sense. These are literally all the things that we’re working on this year. That’s what we can show quantitatively that Pol.is flags these not as only important, but important across party, across ideologies, across people’s identities or self-assigned communities. This is truly the common will of the two peoples.

Audrey Tang: I think that is the narrative Pol.is tries to build, is that for an editor, it’s crowdsourcing the curational light of an editor. Your reader should really want to know about this, and things like that.

Audrey Tang: That will be the angle if I’m you and I’m going to talk to WIRED, is that to show this digital dialogue between the American and Taiwanese people and say, “Look, if the Foreign Service on both sides can hold themselves into account by sitting down and discussing those 40 topics, surely, a editor can do maybe 10.”

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: It’s a very interesting idea.

Audrey Tang: It’s worth a try.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: It is worth a try.

Audrey Tang: If they say, “No, we know,” it’s too far off or too far out.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: I think that there’s something here to work with.

Audrey Tang: Cool. Anything else you would like to explore?

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: I sometimes worry about getting into stuff too early, because then we’re just sitting here talking informally now. Then, invariably, we start talking about something and you express the perfectly precise crystalline formulation of something, and then you never quite say that again. [laughs]

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: I usually like to wait until it feels like, even though nothing ever feels formal, I don’t do anything formally, but until things feel like we’re going to really start the substantive conversation.

Audrey Tang: It’s good then.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: I have to go back and talk to them and see about how they feel about it. It would be useful if Zach could flag for me, like, “This is a particularly good stretch of five days to be in Taiwan or whatever.”

Audrey Tang: You will have to give him the start and end of the…

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: The window?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, the window. Then he can select five days.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: I think, basically, the month of March is the window more or less.

Audrey Tang: I’ll let him know.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: You guys can look at it together and think these are things that are worth being around for. I will run back to the bathroom. I’ll be right back in a second.

Audrey Tang: Sure.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: Sorry for keeping you waiting. You can still change your mind if you decide to have…

Audrey Tang: It’s OK.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: It’s just important to me that we find ways to make sure that this is also interesting for you, that it’s not just something that you’re doing because the publicity is nice or whatever it is.

Audrey Tang: Why?

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: Because, otherwise, it’s less interesting for me. To me, these things work best when they have at least some quality of coming together to work something out rather than just my coming to you to be a stenographer for what you have to say. That these things are most interesting when…

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: These things are most interesting when it feels like there has been meaningful conversation, and that there is engagement beyond the immediate transactional quality.

Audrey Tang: Meaning that you’re still keeping acquaintance relationship to everybody else you’ve interviewed?

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: Often, that also happens, under the best circumstances. The problem is that because I don’t really have a beat and because I go from one thing to the next and often they’re radically different, there’s not a whole lot of continuity in what I do.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: It’s not like I’m a beat reporter where I meet people on one story, and then those people are useful for the next story. Occasionally, that happens over time, but not all that frequently. I do, I keep up with a lot of the people that I’ve written about.

Audrey Tang: I’m trying to think of journalist that I’m keeping in touch after a profile is made.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: It seemed like you got along very well with the woman from Libération.

Audrey Tang: Claire or?

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: No. I think her name was Amaëlle?

Audrey Tang: Amaëlle Guiton. Claire was Rue89, I got along with her very well too.

Audrey Tang: Amaëlle, I think we did a conversation and that’s it. Of course, she is very knowledgeable and have written a book about the hacker culture.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: I really liked the second half of the interview when you turn it around and you say, “Wait, I’m not done. I have questions for you.” [laughs]

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: Is that a good book, her book?

Audrey Tang: Mm-hmm.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: Has it been translated into English or not?

Audrey Tang: I don’t know.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: What languages do you read and speak?

Audrey Tang: Just Mandarin, English, and a bit of Tâi-gí. Whenever I stay in Paris for three weeks, I begin to feel I speak French. Then I go back to Taiwan and I don’t speak French.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: [laughs] How long did you live in the States for?

Audrey Tang: Once in San Jose when I was 19 years old for maybe half a year. Then when I was around 24-ish in Boston and Portland, all together maybe another few months. That’s pretty much it.

Audrey Tang: My uncle is based in San Jose, my mother’s younger brother. Aside from the brief amount of time where we worked together in Silicon Valley, we don’t really have a lot of relatives in the US that I visit.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: At some point, I would like you to direct me, given that there’s so much there, to more of the interviews that you think were particularly interesting or useful interviews that I should be caught up on.

Audrey Tang: Sometimes it feels like a exercise in hermeneutics, in making sense of what I previously have said, because you bring up the very old French interviews. My perspective certainly changed since then. Just doing a “Yeah, that makes sense” exercise in that context is very interesting by itself.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: I can imagine.

Audrey Tang: Just today, I was talking to a Congressperson. I learned that they proposed that they change the hallway rules so that journalists cannot just randomly spring upon them with a video camera and wait for them to say one thing wrong and then capture, then edit, and amplify that. They say, “You can’t just do that within Congress.” I think they said it’s a recent thing.

Audrey Tang: So I was wondering, how many either appointed or elected politicians have you worked with in this kind of work?

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: Very, very, very few, because I try not to write about politicians. I try not to write about celebrities because I don’t like the experience of sitting down and knowing that someone is lying to my face.

Audrey Tang: I know. The party line, right?

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: Yeah. It’s boring, it’s not a real conversation. I have a very hard time remaining interested. I have met and interviewed politicians, and they’ve been perfectly fine experiences. It’s never interesting to talk to somebody who is necessarily going to be so cautious.

Audrey Tang: Maybe this hallway springing up on Congress people is just to catch them in their more authentic moments.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: I think it’s because, so often, they wouldn’t make themselves available.

Audrey Tang: I see.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: I think that’s why the people jump out to ask them questions because, otherwise, they don’t want to talk to us.

Audrey Tang: Or they talk through press secretary language, in which case you can read their press releases instead.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: This is one of the things that’s changed so much about journalism, is that the nature and the value of the exchange have changed because now they don’t need intermediaries. They feel like as long as they can speak directly to whoever they’re constituents…

Audrey Tang: Through social media, people can directly interview them. That’s what they do.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: I don’t tend to do those kinds of things. It’s very boring, because you sit down and you know exactly what somebody is going to say. You know they’re lying to you. They know that they’re lying to you. [laughs] What’s the point? It’s a waste of everyone’s time.

Audrey Tang: I make a clear delineation between blogging, which is the official office work. I do have a blogging account on Facebook with the blue check mark and all that. My personal account I’ve deleted for real some time ago with no chance of recovery, past 30 days and all that.

Audrey Tang: Every post you read on my Facebook timeline is either written by Zach or by ST. However, people know when I’m replying and/or direct messaging people, that’s always myself.

Audrey Tang: The blog, also on our website, is more of a collective work. In interviews, I sometimes just point out this fact and say that if you just want the official position of the digital minister on anything, just read the blog because otherwise I would just be quoting myself. I get what you say about the boringness of it, because I do feel bored, too, doing that.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: I can appreciate that. You can always tell when somebody is saying something that they’ve said 100 times before.

Audrey Tang: That’s right. I’m still trying to figure out the boundary between, of course, not boringly repeating myself on one hand, and not quite keeping up as acquaintances after this episode on the other. It feels, to me, there’s a large spectrum between the two poles.

Audrey Tang: You’re saying that my personal, I don’t know, investment of psychic energy [laughs] or motivation is somewhat necessary for this to be interesting?

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: I think so.

Audrey Tang: I feel interested for the interactive nonfiction part. Even if we don’t do this part, I think everything that would highlight the non-Taiwan narrative would also, by default, be interesting to me.

Audrey Tang: Also, when I think of a so-called American audience, maybe precisely as you said, the value of journalism in the age of social media as a conversational work is something that I care deeply myself, as both my parents being journalists. Something that can reflect the full process of what a journalism work is to make a pedagogy of that is…

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: To make what of them?

Audrey Tang: Pedagogy, educational material, for that is, by default, interesting to me personally. That is why I asked for this background material to be published at the time you publish, or you decide not to publish. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: That is because I sometimes hear from young people trying to get into politics, they have a much clearer view of the current media landscape, as well as what is going on in the cabinet based on just conversational material that I published on the transcript website.

Audrey Tang: To me, those demystifies the work of politicians and journalists, but it also adds some, I don’t know, warmth, personal value to it when people can say, “Oh, I can relate to that moment when you say that,” or, “You seem to be really bonding well with Amaelle Guiton,” and things like that. That brings me this interesting sparks that I’m feeling.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: I had a funny reaction in reading Carl Miller transcripts. It was funny to see because, obviously, when they’re doing something on camera, it’s a whole different kind of process. The way that they would ask you to, like, “Oh, could you repeat that in a shorter way?”

Audrey Tang: That’s right, “we need this in five seconds.” [laughs]

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: Obviously, I never have to do anything like that, but it was interesting, too. There are times when I will ask someone the same question over some period of days, weeks, or whatever because people answer in different ways. The stage managing of the whole thing is interesting.

Audrey Tang: The producers, which is always hidden when you look at the product.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: I enjoy doing that. In fact, it feels more like reading someone’s diary or something, reading it. It does have that aspect of intimacy.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: Along the way, I’ll ask you for other reading recommendations of things that aren’t necessarily even directly related, but stuff that’s been important to you in thinking about this. I was looking through the endnotes on the SocArXiv piece that you contribute to. A bunch of those things looked worth looking up.

Audrey Tang: It’s a very reflective footnote, that refers to the process of the footnote being made about a collaborative editor, this self aware in that way. There’s a lot of that.

Audrey Tang: Do you read or speak Mandarin? No? OK.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: Short things, I can certainly have…

Audrey Tang: Get people to translate.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: Get people to translate. Books would be harder.

Audrey Tang: Books would be harder. I think in English anyway nowadays, though not very fluently.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: No, your English is perfect, I feel so.

Audrey Tang: Thank you. [laughs] I know that I have room to improve, say in writing. Writing is something that if I keep getting edit, it’s just like a programming language. I can just whittle down the unnecessary parts and then until the meaning reveals itself. That’s something that I feel that if I give it time, it will work well.

Audrey Tang: For conversational English, I keep having this feeling that because English is my fifth acquired language and I acquire it through the vehicle of a certain card game called “Magic: The Gathering.”

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: Yeah, sure.

Audrey Tang: Yeah. My first vocabularies are very hard words like “abeyance” and “annul.” [laughs] It feels like a programming language to me, which feels good in writing but feels once-removed when speaking. When I speak in English or think in English, it’s as if that I’m writing. I would speak in say paragraphs. That would actually make a lot of sense even just looking at it in a transcript. I don’t tend to build midway sentence structures. Basically, it’s in batch mode. I don’t do that when I speak in Mandarin or some of the earlier language that I speak.

Audrey Tang: There was this interactive standup comedian, Brian Tseng. We had a conversation where he just kept chatting with me without even paying attention to his quite sizeable audience. That went quite viral.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: You did send me this.

Audrey Tang: The interesting thing is that his native language is English. When he tries to make puns or work in Mandarin, you can feel this once-removed thing from him, which is kind of embarrassing, and that’s what he is known for actually as a standup comedian.

Audrey Tang: I think in English. For most of his question, I have to translate mentally to Mandarin to say it. Basically the humor is in that we’re conversing in a language that is once removed from him and twice removed from me because my thoughts are translated to English and then re-translated back to Mandarin.

Audrey Tang: That’s what drives a lot of the tempo-based humor in that conversation. That is difficult to translate.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: I’ll send it to my brother’s mother-in-law. She can tell me her impression.

Audrey Tang: Yeah. That would be fun.

Audrey Tang: When you say you’re not technical, do you mean that you don’t write markdown?

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: I took some coding classes in college, so it’s not like I’ve never coded in my life, but not any time recently.

Audrey Tang: As I said, my first vocabularies are “Magic: The Gathering” cards and then just keywords from programming languages. I’m just trying to, because you asked me about the reference materials and everything that comes to my mind are actually programming language related.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: Try me.

Audrey Tang: You’re OK with that?

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: Sure. Why not?

Audrey Tang: OK, cool. OK, then I’ll do that. I think that’s pretty much it from me. Anything on your mind?

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: No, I have to give this a little more thought. I want to talk to Colin again about when it makes sense to go to Louisville. My gut instinct is that this is a good idea, that I think that there’s a lot here. For me, the most important criterion is always that there’s something that I feel like I’m going to learn out of it.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: Here, there’s so much stuff that I don’t know about. I’m much less interested in doing things that involve stuff that I know about.

Audrey Tang: OK, all right. I guess I’ll just send you some videos that I’m working on. I don’t really have the slides to go with it, but the basic idea is that there’s a New Museum – I don’t know whether you know these folks – that’s doing this IdeasCity exhibition in Singapore.

Audrey Tang: They asked to me to co-create an interactive dialog, where the audience can ask a holographic or gauze projection version of me of the future of cyberspace, the future of solidarity with nature, and the future of sovereignty.

Audrey Tang: To which that I, because they specified that the answer need to be shorter than three minutes. I recorded three answers, often self-contradicting, to each of the three questions.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: Oh, cool.

Audrey Tang: There’s nine very short videos in total, where I talk about things from the poet perspective, from the minister’s perspective, and from the hacktivist perspective. It’s very self-contradictory, and the audience will get a random interpretation on each try, which is what’s fun of this thing.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: Oh, that’s great.

Audrey Tang: I guess it’s art. It’s meant to be provocative, rather than educational. It’s inevitably also educational. Maybe you can help just review the material and maybe let me know what you think of it.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: Sure. Please, absolutely.

Audrey Tang: Let’s do that.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: Let’s do that. It’s very, very nice to meet you.

Audrey Tang: Yes, same here.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: Thank you so much for taking the time. I will talk to them, and you can talk to Zach and see what would make sense.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, on which week within March.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: Then we can continue to take it from there.

Audrey Tang: That’s right, OK.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: Thank you very much. Have a safe trip back.

Audrey Tang: You, too.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: We will be in touch.

Audrey Tang: Yes, have a safe… I guess Amtrak trip back.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: [laughs] Yes.

Audrey Tang: Take care.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: Tell Zach I said thank you also.