Chiao-ning Su: Good afternoon, everybody. I just want first to thank Audrey. Is that OK to just call you Audrey?

Audrey Tang: Sure, just call me Audrey.

Chiao-ning Su: I would like to first thank Audrey for this opportunity to speak with you today. As you can see, we are all wearing your pin right now to show our appreciation for this opportunity and our support for your philosophy in terms of radical transparency.

Audrey Tang: It’s on my name card. [laughs]

Chiao-ning Su: We have everything. I have this here.

Audrey Tang: That’s right. “I don’t need therapy. I just need to go to Taiwan.” [laughs]

Chiao-ning Su: The spirit of Taiwan. Quick self-introduction, my name is Chiao-ning Su. Currently, I’m assistant professor at Oakland University in Michigan.

Chiao-ning Su: Here, we also have Dr. Hsin-I Cheng who is associate professor at Middle Tennessee State University. We have Chiao-chun with us today. Chiao-chun is the director of 23 Design Studio. She’s responsible for our technology and recording and everything today.

Chiao-ning Su: Just a quick overview of the purpose of the interview today. I believe that Audrey has already received our book proposal, but just a quick summary.

Chiao-ning Su: Since last year, Dr. Hsin-I Cheng has been working on this book project. It’s a collection, brings together different scholars to examine contentious political strategies used in both Hong Kong and Taiwan in the face of changing US-China relations. Specifically, they will talk about the intersection of technology, democracy, identity, and the nuances and complexities thereof.

Chiao-ning Su: That’s why we thought it would be a great idea to have this conversation with you and to bring your expertise into the book collection. Specifically, we want this interview to be the epilogue of the book. That’s why we requested the interview to be held in English, to simplify the process of transcription. Basically, that’s why.

Audrey Tang: The target audience would be someone who have just finished reading your book.

Chiao-ning Su: Yeah. This is just a quick introduction of the purpose of this interview and our book altogether. To respect your time, I will hand it over to Dr. Hsin-I Cheng to start our interview today.

Hsin-I Cheng: Great. Thank you, Chiao-ning, for that wonderful introduction. Also, again, thank you, Minister, for taking the time to meet with us. We would like to start our conversation by talking a little bit about your experience in technology before your position in the government.

Hsin-I Cheng: Taiwan is one of the most technologically prevalent nations in the world. It also has many challenges as a post-authoritarian society. Minister, you are well known for your technology, your talent and your experience in innovative technology even before you became Taiwan’s Digital Minister.

Hsin-I Cheng: Could you please share with us a little bit about what your original thoughts were when you first became involved in activities like…?

Audrey Tang: G0v.

Hsin-I Cheng: …g0v and Hackathon?

Audrey Tang: I joined the g0v Hackathons in early 2013. G0v itself started late 2012. By the time I joined the g0v, organizers already connected very well to the historically international, for example, the Creative Commons movement, the Open Source Initiative, and before that the Free Suffering movement and so on.

Audrey Tang: There’s a broad community and intellectual tradition that inform the g0v organizers. On the other hand, g0v started at a time where mobile social media became prevalent in Taiwan and there’s a lot of people – a lot more compared than before – that want to serve as what we call civic media people.

Audrey Tang: In Mandarin, we call them [Mandarin] or [Mandarin] , the self-media. With my training in social interaction design and Crowd Lexicography – that’s making a dictionary together – we speak that language. We quickly found out…

Audrey Tang: Although, previous social movements including Free Software have a way to engage people who are already communities of practice and people who have already shown their interest and form interest groups and so on.

Audrey Tang: We do not yet at a time have a methodology to engage people who are here for fun, who are engaging it for what we call clicktivism, meaning that I have only 1 second to maybe 60 seconds to engage a social idea.

Audrey Tang: There was no robust methodology in the traditions that we associated ourselves with, to engage in that lightweight, weakling kind of ways.

Audrey Tang: My main contribution is to help, to assist out now what we called Fast, Fair and Fun principles, to design engagements that are both pro-social and also democratic in the sense that anyone can participate in this governance.

Audrey Tang: We successfully launched, for example, the MoeDict Dictionary Project that caught the Taiwanese Holo, Taiwanese Hakka, Amis, and other national languages in Taiwan – although at the time not official national languages. That will come in 2017 – o make a dictionary together.

Hsin-I Cheng: That’s great. You mentioned about it was a way to just congregate people who are already having fun and doing this little clicktivism, that you’re mentioning. What are some of the goals that you had when you first got involved or in the beginning of that involvement?

Audrey Tang: First of all, it is to have fun. I wrote a blog essay, literally called “Optimizing for Fun,” meaning that in order to sustain the broad engagement with citizens, we really need to make it inclusive in a sense that is not just fun for a selected few elites or technologists, but rather it really need to be enjoyable to pretty much everybody.

Audrey Tang: Fun needs to be fair [laughs] in the sense that anyone who shows up, regardless of their training, their background, their age, their ethnicity and so on, they could show up at g0v Hackathon to have fun, to enjoy the food together, to bring food, and to enjoy listening to people’s stories and participate in their own story telling, and so on.

Audrey Tang: In that sense, it also draws a lot of lessons from the early community building or searching means of spirit where this is a maximally inclusive and fair design. That’s I think the second goal.

Audrey Tang: A longer-term goal is to democratize the thinking around democracy, because in many other established democracies, only very few people actively work on democracy. I include people who work on gerrymandering, for example. That’s also working on democracy [laughs] as a mechanism.

Audrey Tang: Citizens, by enlarge, they participate only maybe uploading three bits of information every four years. It’s called voting. The day-to-day life is not that involved with democracy.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, having the benefit of being a very new democracy, everything is malleable in the sense that if people think we need to have a referendum, then we design a referendum. The referendum mechanism by itself is currently undergoing another change, but we’re maybe at the fourth revision. The Constitution is at maybe the sixth or seventh amendment.

Audrey Tang: Democracy itself in Taiwan is this social object that everyone can contribute. People who advocate for a safe participatory budgeting or deliberative democracy or sandboxes, Presidential Hackathons, and so on, can all see that within their lifetime. There’s a real chance for their designs to be integrated into democracy proper.

Audrey Tang: I would say that in addition to fun and inclusion, I would also say innovation in democracy itself. Seeing democracy as a technology is also one of the broad goals.

Hsin-I Cheng: Wow, that’s wonderful. Would you consider yourself a community organizer?

Audrey Tang: Definitely. I’m also a meta-organizer in the sense that I design the mechanism that enables other people’s organization. For example, I work closely with the National Development Council on their Petition Platform joined the gov.tw.

Audrey Tang: It’s our contribution to merge it with the regulatory preannouncements, with the participatory budgeting, with the National Auditing Office’s data and things like that so that people can have a full lifecycle understanding of all the, not just budget, but also the regulatory changes that the government brings to the table.

Audrey Tang: Instead of just a what of policy, people can participate also in the how of policy making, the why of policy making, and that enable multiple community organizers to expand their outreach and empower their community because in this new Petition Platform there’s a real way for them to engage meaningfully with the ministries on one hand but also with other social sector organizers.

Audrey Tang: I would say I’m organizing primarily for the organizers.

Hsin-I Cheng: Maybe, we’ll now have Chiao-ning ask more questions and then we’ll continue that wonderful discussion.

Chiao-ning Su: This is great. This is really to showcase how technology can be fun. Democracy can be inclusive, participatory, and really, really fun. We can also see how technology can play a significant role in social movement or in a revolution. Ever since Arab Spring in 2010, people across the world talk about the role of technology played in social movement, or in radical political actions. We would like to hear from you specifically, how do you see the role of technology in social movements, specifically in the Asian context. We are thinking about Taiwan, Hong Kong, or even Southeast Asia, like Thailand.

Chiao-ning Su: What is the role of technology in these localities and during social movements at large? Do you see the differences or similarities in terms of how technology being used to achieve contentious political actions, in these different Asian localities?

Audrey Tang: Asia is a really big place [laughs] and it’s hard to make generalizations, but I will try anyway. First of all, in Asia, we see technology as not just something that’s in the natural sciences, and not something that’s only in the industrial use.

Audrey Tang: There’s a long tradition of what used to be called appropriate technology, meaning that people use existing technologies in a way that fits their local needs without asking for permission, or even understanding by the original designers of the technology.

Audrey Tang: During the COVID, a really good example is using the traditional rice cookers to clean the mask. To kill the virus, but doesn’t kill the mask. I’m sure that the rice cooker makers didn’t think about this particular use case, [laughs] when they made their technology to cook rice. Turns out that not having a steam vent — that’s why the top of the rice cooker goes clink-clink — is actually really good.

Audrey Tang: If you don’t add water, they make the temperature very predictable and it can actually be used to clean the masks. Now, that’s appropriate technology, because it’s something social, something people can contribute to, that everyone has good access to. That’s wildly outside of the original imagination of the designers.

Audrey Tang: Another good example, which follows from what I just talked about as a organizer for organizers, is the Open Space Technology tradition, or OST. In community organization, many people around Asia, and particularly in Taiwan, there’s workshops.

Audrey Tang: You can argue that g0v Hackathons are organized using Open Space Technology principles and the technology in OST specifically refer to social technology. It’s not digital at all. While we have digital equivalent of the OST, in the form of police and other online equivalent, it is not primarily about the natural sciences or in industrial applications.

Audrey Tang: It’s about social sciences and its organizational applications. Still, we call it technology, as in Open Space Technology.

Audrey Tang: The terminology in the east, and especially around Asia, is more fluid than other places in the world, where the label technocracy probably doesn’t mean Open Space Technology. [laughs] It means only specifically a very top-down way to design mechanisms and policies.

Audrey Tang: There is a built-in reuse, the participatory nature of re-appropriating technologies in an appropriate way, in Asia. You can see this, for example, in the Sunflower Movement and the Umbrella Movement.

Audrey Tang: In the same year, people repurposed the various communication technologies that were not designed for the streets, but then we use it on the streets anyway, and modulated those technologies so that it fits a street profile.

Audrey Tang: People who developed those technologies, for example, Hackpad, or Twitch, or really any other technologies, sometimes have to cater to those on-the-street people, just so that the sheer volume doesn’t negatively affect their other paying customers.

Audrey Tang: This way of using platforms outside of platformer’s original design, that is a common characteristics around the use of digital technology in Asia for social movements. Now, that’s the similarities.

Audrey Tang: The main difference is in Taiwan, because no matter we want to find new optical equipments, or new cameras, or new semiconductor designs in the hardware part, or whether we want a data center as someone who is versed in cloud deployment, scalability and cybersecurity, or on the social interaction side. We went on to find people who are versed in experience design, in interaction design.

Audrey Tang: There’s established groups of people in Taiwan that are very much into this. Whereas in other jurisdiction in Asia, they may lack the more hardware side, or the communication technology side, or the software and services side. In Taiwan, we’ve got it all.

Audrey Tang: The upshot is that during Sunflower, for example, what we call situational applications – the application that applies to the here and now – is literally co-created with the technologist on-site, and in real time.

Audrey Tang: When we need some understanding about how GitHub pages work, for example, because we use that to host the main communication of the Occupy. We have engineers on GitHub on-site, in the occupied area. That much more shortens the timespan it takes to iterate, from when the people on the street discover a new use case, and for the technologist to bring the tech to the people.

Audrey Tang: In the Taiwan’s case, it usually takes 24 hours, but in other jurisdictions, where the technologies, hardware, software services, or communication technology is not on-site, then they must wait for a week or more in order for the underlying technologies to change. Taiwan is much more iterative, is what I’m saying.

Chiao-ning Su: This really expands my understanding and my imagination of technology. I feel like, in a way, we conceive technology in a very narrow sense. We are thinking about data, or computer, or software. I didn’t really think about hardware or conventional technology.

Chiao-ning Su: When you were talking about rice cooker, I didn’t think about it at all. I feel like in academia, technology nowadays being used in such a narrow way…

Audrey Tang: It’s taken to mean ICT.

Chiao-ning Su: Yeah. It really limits our imagination of how technology being used and how do we even define technology.

Chiao-ning Su: What Audrey was saying is that you do see similarities around Asia, different localities, like how people repurpose technology, use innovative way to bring technology into their social advocacy or social movement. In Taiwan, because we do have a very healthy and robust environment, you can see how quickly hardware, software…

Audrey Tang: Communication, right?

Chiao-ning Su: Communication…

Audrey Tang: You can see the same to this technology. Mask is a technology. [laughs] From the production side to the marketing and communication side, to the distribution side, we have it all here.

Chiao-ning Su: That brings to my next question, which is more about the role of technology in government. Your role changed over the years from a community organizer, an outsider, outside of the institution, and now you are more inside of the institution.

Chiao-ning Su: Your role changed. This is also a good way to think about the intersection of technology and governance.

Chiao-ning Su: I want to start with a question that I read a few days ago that in your previous interview with “Harvard Business Review.” You stated that democracy is a technology.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Chiao-ning Su: Radical transparency helps decision making. Here are two very interesting concept that you are talking about. One is that democracy is a technology, and how radical transparency would enable the process of decision making. Can you explain these two concepts?

Audrey Tang: Sure.

Chiao-ning Su: Why do you call democracy a technology?

Audrey Tang: Technology as the broadened definition shows, it’s any applied science that [laughs] will have an impact, negative or positive, on our lives.

Audrey Tang: Democracy certainly is decision-making technology. Previously, in the Greek imagination of democracy, it’s mostly people who walk around [laughs] from the markets, the Agora, to the Acropolis and having a conversation among themselves and also using randomized devices to determine the positions and so on.

Audrey Tang: As you know, Wikipedia, there is this large flowchart of how the Athenian democracy works. You can see something very much like a flowchart for a semiconductor or a computer program board and things like that.

Audrey Tang: There is a very strong mechanism design view in the early Greek. When we design it correctly, then peoples’ ideas can add to each other. If we don’t design it correctly, then they detract from each other and polarize the polity. I mean it in the original sense.

Audrey Tang: Of course, many polities have standardized some sort of representational democracy, and it has become the dominant reference when people use the referent democracy. People nowadays think about the members of the parliament and the ministers. That’s not the only configuration.

Audrey Tang: Just like in semiconductor, we can try different layout from two-dimensional to three-dimensional layouts.

Audrey Tang: In a polity, we can try, as I mentioned, to various different ways for people in different positions to come to a general understanding without having to wait for four years. That’s what I mean by democracy as a technology that people can co-create, experiment, and improve.

Audrey Tang: Radical transparency means transparency at a root, meaning that, for example, this conversation is on the record. I have a recorder right here, and I will send you the transcript for co-editing for 10 days before we publish to the public domain.

Audrey Tang: The fact that it takes more effort to redact something, it’s not that we can’t redact anything, we can. For example, you talked about anecdote of your friend, and the friend have not clear it for public understanding or review. Of course, you can remove it, citing privacy or trade secret, or any other legitimate reasons.

Audrey Tang: It takes more effort to redact that out of our transcript than the default, which is if none of us do anything, the entire transcript is published to the public domain.

Audrey Tang: It flips the default because people then have a general understanding during our conversation that this is what you have in mind. This is what I have in mind, as opposed to if people only read the final edited form. That is a voice that it has already been streamlined.

Audrey Tang: Understanding the zigzag, the how, not just the product, the what of policy making is essential for people to have a more informed contextual understanding of democracy and policymaking.

Chiao-ning Su: This is really to conceptualize democracy as a process of decision making and to believe that absolute openness, that for everybody to have access to the information, would involve them in this decision-making process. This is the prime example of direct participation in democracy. Is that…

Audrey Tang: I think it’s a precondition for meaningful direct participation, but it’s not by itself participation. This is just the transparency part where we try as much as possible. Not absolute. We can redact after all, but as much as possible provide the context of policymaking.

Audrey Tang: Now, when people are interested in the policy, for example, around the policy of the design for the social movements, if they are interested, then chances are they will search on search engine and rediscover our transcript, and then this can be attributed to our names.

Audrey Tang: Maybe you get an email some weeks down the road saying they have a different take on a particular part. I get that all the time because I publish transcripts of the meetings that I chair. I get corrections and more input from the citizenry, but if I only publish the decisions, then I have no way to get such helpful ideas.

Audrey Tang: This is coupled with a general, inclusive attitude. In Mandarin, it’s called [Mandarin] , which is hard to translate. I guess, “Building cars behind open doors,” and, “If you can do it, go and do it. Come and do it.”

Audrey Tang: The idea is that if people think of a better idea after seeing the conversations that led to any particular policy, that put them in a much better position to suggest amendments or alternatives to the policy as opposed to if they have no context.

Chiao-ning Su: Do you do this with your every meeting?

Audrey Tang: Yes.

Chiao-ning Su: Even your meeting with other public official or governmental officials, every meeting that you’re a part of?

Audrey Tang: Only in the internal meetings, only if I am a chair, and if publishing it improves the public welfare. This is in our Freedom of Information Act [Mandarin] that says draft stage meetings, they can be published only if it serves a public purpose, but I do so for a vast majority of the internal meetings that I chair.

Audrey Tang: If I only join, then I don’t demand this to the other chairs of the meetings. For interviews with the media, with researchers, with lobbyists, and so on, that’s 100 percent the case. Interestingly, that means that lobbyists always lobby for the common good. No lobbyist who meet with me, lobby for something that’s only good for them, but therefore other people.

Chiao-ning Su: That’s [laughs] actually a wonderful strategy. We should push this to other political figures as well. I’m sure this will bring about a positive social change. This is actually very, very good.

Chiao-ning Su: Just to expand the idea of transparent radical…I’m sorry, radical transparency and then connect that with pandemic governance. We are still in the middle of this COVID-19 global pandemic, and Taiwan being described as such a successful experience using a democratic way to manage the pandemic.

Chiao-ning Su: Can you tell us a little more about the uniqueness of the Taiwanese way of managing this pandemic, and the role of technology, and your idea of radical transparency played in all this process?

Audrey Tang: Certainly. The most observable feature of the Taiwan model is that we counter the pandemic with no lockdown at all, and we counter the associate infodemic, which in some jurisdictions cause even more harm than pandemic itself.

Audrey Tang: We counter the infodemic with no administrative takedown. No lockdown and no takedown. That is the distinct feature of the Taiwan model.

Audrey Tang: Now, the radical transparency, I would argue, plays a central role here because if you cannot take anything down from the media, and if you cannot or try your best not to lockdown any buildings and so on, you must rely on the general population to understand the epidemiology, to understand the facts around this virus.

Audrey Tang: If there’s a significant amount of people, maybe 1/3 of people, who refuse to wear masks, then it’s gone. We can’t do anything. We can do our best to ramp up production to 20 million masks per day. We can do our best to distribute it evenly and fairly to the pharmacies and convenient stores.

Audrey Tang: If people get caught by the conspiracy theories or by other non-scientific views on the masks’ use, then none of our effort will work. We will probably have to lock down at some point. Getting the right communications to the people using a blend of fast, fair and fun become very important.

Audrey Tang: I often say that in our Ministry of Health and Welfare, of course Minister Chen Shih-chung is the most important spokesperson, but Shiba Inu Zongchai is the most important spokesdog. The participation officer, that’s a team of people in each ministry, in charge of engaging with emerging hashtags essentially.

Audrey Tang: The Ministry of Health and Welfare participation officer literally live with this dog. They just wait for Minister Chen to finish the daily press conference and go home and take new pictures of the dog and explain physical distancing in terms of three Shiba Inu indoors or two Shiba Inus outdoors.

Audrey Tang: They popularize mask use by taking a photo of the dog putting their foot to their mouth and saying that you wear a mask to prevent yourself from [Mandarin] which is hard to translate. [laughs] Put your hand in your mouth. The mask is there to protect your own face against your own unwashed hand.

Audrey Tang: All these communication strategies are very important because that enable people to remix the message. If it’s me or Minister Chen talking about wearing a mask, people may understand. They may even comply, but it’s unlikely they will share it that much. Because it’s such a cute dog, people will share it much more than the conspiracy theories.

Audrey Tang: We also made sure that there’s plenty of room literally in the picture for the people to translate it to their local language. This one has been translated to more than four or five different languages. That make sure that people receive these clarifications, these scientific information in a way that is conductive to social sharing.

Audrey Tang: That has a pro-social outcome. Because of this Fast, Fear, and Fun communication infrastructure, we made sure that none of the conspiracy theories are value stay above one for long. Like vaccines of the mind are very funny and reached a lot of people.

Chiao-ning Su: I too pay a lot of attention to that kind of social media messaging put forward by our public sectors. I personally found it super effective and also very entertaining. In the meantime, I saw a lot of critique from either KMT or other political parties. They stated that they didn’t appreciate this kind of strategy.

Chiao-ning Su: The government used the social media language on the one hand to simplify the policy and on the other hand to manipulate the public opinion. Do you share that kind of view? Do you agree with that kind of critique?

Audrey Tang: The main critique is when some of the social media messaging come at expense of specific people, specific business or specific groups. That makes it into what we call [Mandarin] . Again, hard to translate going on an expedition. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Turning the messaging instead of sharing by laughing about it, by a humorous messaging. It would encourage revenge or vengeful attitude toward each other. That is a valid critique.

Audrey Tang: I would say the public message from our ministries very rarely encourage vengeful behavior. However, there’s been certain cases, and so there are pitfalls that we need to be very wary of.

Audrey Tang: As public ministers, we do command a lot of trust. If we squander that trust, it’s not easy to earn it back. At some point when the trustworthy is reduced to a certain point, then all messages become essentially backfiring.

Audrey Tang: I was there in 2014, and I saw that when people’s general trust to the administration’s spokes people team dwindles, I think it was around 9.2 percent at that time there famously.

Audrey Tang: None of the messaging strategies would work at that point. Nowadays, we’re still enjoying a vastly majority around 60 percent of people who are very much willing to share the public messaging coming from our ministries.

Audrey Tang: Very few people are actively against it. It is a good reminder that we need to continue on this humorous but not fun, making fun in expense of other people way of delivering our public messages.

Chiao-ning Su: Very good. My last question in this category is to ask you how do you see yourself in this role for several years by now. You being serving as the digital minister and our very first digital minister in Taiwan.

Chiao-ning Su: From outside of the institution and now part of the institution, do you think this experience changed your view of technology, democracy altogether and what else would you like to achieve in this position?

Audrey Tang: What changed mostly to me is I’m much more optimistic. That stem from the innovative colleagues that I work with. There was a longstanding stereotype that the career bureaucrats in Taiwan are optimizing for stability and therefore less innovative is a very common stereotype.

Audrey Tang: On the other hand, the career public servant that I interacted with are all very innovative. It’s just that you mentioned earlier on that we’re a post-authoritarian society. Some of it still shows.

Audrey Tang: We still have a Public Services Act that prevents career public servants to comment on policy even in an individual, even as their private-citizen angle. It’s not allowed by the law.

Audrey Tang: On the other hand, you don’t find it in many other older liberal democracies. There’s no equivalent law that prohibits the public servants who essentially voice as individual citizens when they’re off work. We still have a long way to go before empowering the public service to take part in participatory democracy.

Audrey Tang: Experiments that we have done through Presidential Hackathon, through the co-collaborative meetings in Open Government and the National Action Plan around Open Government all showed that the career public service when empowered, they are very innovative, and see democracy and international link to other democratic polities, their passion.

Audrey Tang: Taiwan is in a very good place to innovate on democracy and also work with other democracies to democratize technology. This is what made me much more optimistic as compared to five years ago.

Chiao-ning Su: Is there anything that you would like to achieve…

Audrey Tang: As I mentioned, the National Action Plan Open Government promises that the transparency, the participation, the mechanism for accountability, and so on, applied in an inclusive way, will be part of at least 19 different government commitments in the next three-and-half years.

Audrey Tang: That shows our commitment to make open government not just something that the Executive Yuan, the cabinet itself promotes. Rather we work with all age groups in all social sector, business sector, academia, and make it one of our identities in the administration.

Audrey Tang: I’m very happy that the legislation chamber, the four major parties, have all signed on to the open parliament commitments. That means that no matter which open government commitment we deliver to the parliament for budget approval, or whatever, it means that all the four parties are for it and none of them are against it.

Chiao-ning Su: Thank you so much. You talk about identity of our government. Dr. Cheng has some questions about the Taiwanese identity. I will give it to Dr. Cheng to follow that question.

Hsin-I Cheng: Thank you, Chiao-ning. Thanks for sharing your view about the role technology plays in empowering people for this common social good. Researchers have been studying ways that technology, especially digital technology, shapes identity and vice versa.

Hsin-I Cheng: One example would be how social and national identities were impacted by social movements and that technologies facilitate that.

Hsin-I Cheng: From the recent year’s survey done by National Chengchi University, we’re seeing emerging trend of the Taiwanese national consciousness. What do you think might be technology’s roles in this trend?

Audrey Tang: With my broadened definition of technology, I would definitely place the national health care into the technology parts that enable such consciousness. The constitutional amendment very specifically stipulates that the country has a obligation to run universal health care with all its citizens.

Audrey Tang: People who have experience covered in the National Health Insurance, especially around the year of COVID, has shaped the people who are eligible for universal health care.

Audrey Tang: They may not be officially citizens. They may just be residents on work permits who have worked, for example, in the long-term care industry for a long time in Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: They’re considered Taiwanese people in terms of national health care and in terms of we should offer protection to them, too. I would argue it’s one of the factors that enable a more all-of-society strategy countering COVID as well.

Audrey Tang: In other jurisdictions, for example, we have seen the immigrant workers being excluded in their, who are citizens, dialogue and therefore tend to get less attention and therefore more likeliness to have a outbreak from the places where the immigrant workers are.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, all of us are protected by the universal health care. All of us are entitled to the medical mask rationing system and notification system and the quarantine system and these systems.

Audrey Tang: I would say all these systems are also technologies that layered on the National Health Insurance system that all-in-all shaped a stronger national identity of people who are protected by the health care system.

Hsin-I Cheng: In a sense, that’s really interesting. I never really thought about viewing policies such as…or let’s say social service as part of technology. It seems that, that’s what the Minister is suggesting. If we’re seeing policies such as National Health Care…

Audrey Tang: The IC card that goes with the health care.

Hsin-I Cheng: Are there any other examples where you see technology placed, such as good driving force in creating this collective consciousness we are trying to include?

Audrey Tang: In the NCCU survey, that you just mentioned, we see two peaks. One is last year during the year of COVID, and another one is around ‘14, the year of the Sunflower Movement.

Audrey Tang: I think that movement also pioneered the many uses of social technology specifically live streaming technology, so that people who are anywhere, who not necessarily are in Taiwan, they can be in any place on the planet, but they can tune in to a live stream and feel strongly connected to a real deliberation about what to do to the trade agreement.

Audrey Tang: Anyone who invests significant amount of time there, feel a stronger link to the Taiwanese identity, almost by definition, because when viewing a live stream, unlike watching it on TV, anyone feels that they have something to say. They can type it or really to share it on the media that is being shipped by live streams.

Audrey Tang: Join in as one of the voices that’s brought to the deliberations spaces around the parliaments. I think live streaming technology play a large role in 2014, and it’s not just in Taiwan. The Umbrella Movement also made COVID-issue use of that then new live streaming technology.

Hsin-I Cheng: I just also was reminded by Minister’s sharing with us about how this collective consciousness extends beyond the National Board of Taiwan. I’m curiously finally just interested in understanding your thoughts about Taiwan’s future.

Hsin-I Cheng: With all your experiences talking about open technology, radical transparency, and participation in both Taiwan and then we’re talking about abroad, what is your view toward Taiwan future under particularly, the US and China relations?

Audrey Tang: Often say that Taiwan’s future direction is upward and skyward. As anyone who’ve been to the Taroko Gorge can attest, we’re caught between the Eurasian plate on one side and the Philippine Sea Plate on the other. They bumped into each other all the time causing endless earthquakes.

Audrey Tang: We’re very resilient. It’s not like we can prevent the earthquake from happening, but we can prevent negative consequences of [laughs] earthquakes from happening.

Audrey Tang: On the upside, literally on the upside, the earthquakes each time pushes the top of Taiwan, the Saviah, or the Patungkuonu, or the Jade Mountain, the Yushan upward by a little bit. Every year on average, Yushan grows by two-and-a-half centimeters every year.

Audrey Tang: To me, it symbolizes Taiwan’s capability to foster rough consensus and common values out of seemingly zero sum fights. The social forces for example, for and against marriage equality, shaped the social innovation.

Audrey Tang: The truly pioneering social innovation of marrying the bylaws but not in-laws. [Mandarin] That’s uniquely Taiwanese social innovation [laughs] and that’s in direct response to the two referenda and the one Constitutional Court ruling.

Audrey Tang: I can go on with these examples, but the point is that because people who remember the martial law don’t want to go back to top down censorship. People who are aware of the information manipulation and disinformation crisis doesn’t want to sit there and do nothing. Again, we have to figure out a Taiwanese model of humor over rumor.

Audrey Tang: That is our counter to this information playbook, again, a unique innovation that are now of broad application to the world.

Audrey Tang: I guess we will keep doing so. We will keep doing innovations that melds, seemingly, in reconcilable positions and then deliver innovations that are truly good for everyone.

Hsin-I Cheng: I’m learning so much from talking and thinking about what you’re saying. What might be the role of technology, do you think, specifically, play in Taiwan’s future?

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, we have long considered communication as a human right. In the constitutional amendment, in the same clause that said universal health care is the government’s duty, it also said that learning, especially basic education, access to communication, and speech must also be universal in Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: That formed what I refer to as the socialist core. This is important. If you have a digital democracy, as we have, and if you leave out certain group of people, denying them access to broadband, then what you are essentially doing is excluding them from policy making. That is profoundly anti-democratic.

Audrey Tang: What we are now doing is building off the broadband as a human right promise, which is Dr. Tsai’s campaign promised in 2016. We did deliver it so that even on the top of Taiwan, on the Yushan that I just mentioned, you have 10 megabits per second and it’s both ways.

Audrey Tang: It’s probably faster than here because there’s less people using, but anywhere — literally anywhere — in Taiwan, if you don’t have access to broadband, and therefore digital democracy is my fault, literally. You can take me to account.

Audrey Tang: There were people, for example, doing group quarantine in Yangming Mountain a couple months ago that find their phone not able to connect to any of the telecom on one side of the quarantine place. They emailed me saying that you said, “If anywhere in Taiwan, we can’t get a telecom reception, it’s your fault.”

Audrey Tang: I’m like, “Yeah, I’m on it.” Within two weeks, we set a new telecom tower there. We fixed the broadband situation there so they can, I guess, be more mentally stable during their quarantines because they have live streams and tele-video conferences.

Audrey Tang: The point is that we are really serious about the universality of not just broadband access but also media competence, digital competence, all the requirements for each and every citizen to be included in the policy making.

Audrey Tang: For us, the digital inclusion is the true goal. Innovation, the governance, and so on are important instrumental values on our way to inclusion.

Hsin-I Cheng: Really appreciate, Minister Tang, for taking the time, especially during your busy schedule. Really appreciate your service for people in Taiwan and beyond.

Hsin-I Cheng: Your insight really will further our readers’ understanding, us, Chiao-ning and my understanding, thinking about technology and the way that it really provides space for empowerment.

Hsin-I Cheng: This book is going to be scheduled to be published by next fall. We plan to host promotional events and would love for Minister to join us if possible.

Audrey Tang: Certainly.

Hsin-I Cheng: Hopefully it’ll be OK for us to…

Audrey Tang: I can prerecord something. That’s the easiest way. If you have on-site promotions, I can fit that into my schedule if my schedule allows.

Hsin-I Cheng: That would be wonderful, really appreciate that. We’ll definitely keep you updated. Again, thank you, and also Zach from your office for setting this up and making this possible. Also, thanks, Chiao-chun for the technical support.

Chiao-chun Su: Sorry I cannot join you in the beginning. Hi.

Audrey Tang: Hey.

Chiao-chun Su: I’m the tech person.

Audrey Tang: High-five.

Chiao-ning Su: Even though she didn’t ask any questions, she’s probably the one who knows technology the best among the three of us.

Chiao-chun Su: Plus, too, I’m learning a lot.

Hsin-I Cheng: Would that be possible for us to take a screenshot together?

Audrey Tang: Sure, a group photo.

Chiao-chun Su: We’ll have this pose and smile. I will take the screenshot. One, two, three.