Ryan Heath: Great. Well, my first question is, I’d love you to give everyone listening a sense of what it’s like to work in the leadership of a nation that is under this constant threat from a huge neighbor.

Ryan Heath: Tell us, is it something you talk about with your colleagues every day? Is it something that just lurks in the background while you get on with the day-to-day job? What is the presence of China and how you govern?

Audrey Tang: Well, it’s within this larger mindset of being resilient against all sort of expected and unexpected natural or human-made disasters, right?

Audrey Tang: For example, in Taiwan we have to plan our buildings to be quite proved to earthquakes, because we’ve got pretty large earthquakes and also typhoons, that just one narrowly missed Taiwan, but would have caused a lot of damage had it landed. It’s just part of our public infrastructure.

Audrey Tang: The same goes for, for example, our cyber security infrastructure which has to withstand not just the run of the mill cyber security attacks, but also advanced persistent threats and so on. I would say, it’s on the background and also promises to be more resilient.

Ryan Heath: Does sort of this, I don’t want to give one word to it but does this attitude of Beijing let’s say, does it make your job harder? Whether that is how you keep the Internet running, dealing with misinformation, getting vaccines into the country. Do you feel like it affects how you complete your job?

Audrey Tang: As a digital minister in charge of social innovation, the hardest part of my job is to get the entire society aligned on common values. Once the society is aligned, then the innovation can happen that delivers on these common values without leaving anyone behind.

Audrey Tang: In a sense, the PRC regime’s digital authoritarianism serves as a way to remind people that we do not want to go there. That when we’re inventing new digital apparatuses we are committed to make the state transparent to the citizen and not the other way around.

Audrey Tang: In a sense it did make my life and work easier because we do not have to convince each other that we do not go to the way of authoritarianism because there’s a real counterpoints just very much nearby.

Ryan Heath: That is definitely standing contrast to some of our democracies today. You’ve mentioned resilience, and we obviously have the kind of counterfact of China or in its system. What would you say beyond that, the critical factors for Taiwan securing its autonomy in the coming years?

Audrey Tang: I think there are two. One, is that during the pandemic especially, we have developed this idea of Taiwan can help. First, it’s the mask dedication and donations to worldwide and international.

Audrey Tang: Humanitarian workers and now we’re working on our home crew, managing vaccine to help other countries in need. We’ve already joined the COVAX, but as a recipient. We are also looking to join as a donor, and so on.

Audrey Tang: All these raise Taiwan’s profile. From the bubble tea being the prime association and semi-conductor company, to a global force of good that can do a lot of humanitarian contributions. That’s one.

Audrey Tang: The other equally important is on the digital realm. If you type in digitalminister.tw, this resolves into my website. Regardless of where you are, even if you are within the PRC regime. This .tw goes to where we are.

Audrey Tang: In a sense, we’re already autonomous. Just by the virtue of this domain name alone. This is in a new era of what some people call polylateral. International relationships, is not just about Westphalian membership country style. It’s also about multi-stakeholder, think of the UN major groups on climate change.

Audrey Tang: Think of the Internet governments forum. Think of the open government partnership and so on. These are the new source of international organizations that could be configured to allow this polylateral existence or co-existence. That’s the stage where Taiwan is looking to shine.

Ryan Heath: That’s so interesting when you’re thinking about it. I don’t mean to prophesize this, but even if you imagine the worst case scenario, and the communist regime, does somehow invade Taiwan, Taiwan will continue to exist in this digital realm. That, obviously, that is not the goal, but they can never take that away from you because of the inventions of those spaces.

Audrey Tang: This has been explored, I think, by Estonia, who have backed up the entire household registry along with other records to friendly jurisdictions around the world in their digital embassies.

Audrey Tang: This is a useful metaphor to plan about things, but we’re still looking to recover and build back better after earthquakes.

Ryan Heath: [laughs] Sometimes there are more basic things to deal with. Who do you consider as your most important allies? Not just people. It could be ideas, people, government. Who are the allies that Taiwan most associates with and needs to ensure its success in the future?

Audrey Tang: People like you. [laughs]

Ryan Heath: Thank you.

Audrey Tang: People who are interested in exploring the advancement of democracy. That is to say, not democracy as a voting every four years uploading three bits per person as a ritual. But democracy as a common practice that could be done day-to-day to enhance decision making, and to enhance this idea that we share this global problem’s instructional issues together.

Audrey Tang: We need to expand democracy beyond single jurisdictions. People who identify with democracy, people who think democracy is something that is a social technology that gets better when people work to improve it. These are our natural allies.

Ryan Heath: That is a great jumping-off point into the philosophy of open source. I would love it if you could tell me what your dream Internet looks like? How does the spirit of open source inform that? How does that feed into the day job that you have?

Audrey Tang: My dream Internet is a Internet that is universally accessible to anyone. Not just people in this generation, but people in future generations. Not just people who use the Internet to consume information, but also people who use Internet to make productions, include podcasts. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: That is to say, Internet as a co-creative medium. A medium that does not make discriminations regardless of your economic capabilities and so on.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, we call this broadband as a human right. We call it digital competence in basic and lifelong educations. We’re already implementing the dream configuration of Internet within our jurisdiction.

Audrey Tang: The Open Source Movement, has forked off the original Free Software Movement. They still share a very important ethos, which is people who create things should not foreclose the potentials of their descendants, of the next generations, in the name of copyright, or patent, or “intellectual property.”

Audrey Tang: That means that, for example, whatever I’m saying now, I’m publishing as a transcript, under Creative Commons 0, meaning, it’s public domain. No rights reserved. You don’t have to wait for me to pass away for, I don’t know, 75 years or something, [laughs] in order to make use of those text. You can just start creating or co-creating using these as materials.

Audrey Tang: I would say, definitely, my idea of Internet as a co-creative medium is shaped by the free software and open source communities.

Ryan Heath: That is such a fascinating tension of values or world-views where I connect things like the Free Software Movement, and that kind of slightly hippie. Let’s say…

Audrey Tang: It’s very hippie.

Ryan Heath: Yeah.

Audrey Tang: It’s extremely hippie.

Ryan Heath: That was original Silicon Valley in some respect. It clashes now, with some of the business models of Silicon Valley. It certainly clashes with digital authoritarianism.

Ryan Heath: We’ve talked a little bit about what that spirit is, and how that infuses to Taiwan. How do you think that compares to China? Do you travel to China? How do you…the culture of technology there?

Audrey Tang: My virtual avatar has taught lectures to global students in virtual reality. In high fidelity that I owe back when it’s still running and submit a verse. I do have people from Hangzhou, and I guess Shanghai, and other people joining me in that pretty safe space in the virtual reality.

Audrey Tang: But no, by virtue of me working as digitalminister.tw, I do not have the clearance to travel to the PRC regime physically in the flesh. It doesn’t prevent me from, of course, having a lot of conferences, or lectures, or so on online. Now back to the question about the open source, free software ethos. Yes, I believe this is fundamentally about empowerment.

Audrey Tang: Whether technology is there to empower the people closest to the pain, to the suffering, or whether technology exists to take power away from them and centralized it, either in a surveillanced state or in some surveillanced capitalist.

Audrey Tang: Any direction where this is decentralized or at least empowering the poly-centered reality that we’re in, is compatible with our ethos. I do believe that in the Silicon Valley, people are also looking at the individual power growth works through tracking cookies [laughs] realizing that it’s these technological designs that shape our relationship with technology.

Audrey Tang: So that people get into the habit to adapt themselves to the technology, which is fundamentally a negative externality, socially. People are now asking the technologist, “No, we want you’re technology to adapt to our true needs.”

Ryan Heath: Now you’ve seen both sides, Taiwan and Silicon Valley, you worked there from a very young age in Silicon Valley, it’s my understanding. Do you feel like there are big differences in those two cultures?

Ryan Heath: Or is it nothing to do with geography and it’s the question of big versus small, profit motive versus Creative Commons. What do you think of the things that distinguish the two cultures?

Audrey Tang: Well there’s plenty of people in the Silicon Valley building not unicorns but zebras. Right?

Ryan Heath: Tell me about that.

Audrey Tang: Sure. Entities, ventures, that have the stripes of purpose and the stripes of profit. We may call them social entrepreneurs. There’s no shortage of social entrepreneurs in both Silicon Valley and in Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: I think the difference here is about a sense of disruption. In Silicon Valley, we still have the startups that build with this mentality of taking away everything that existed before them in a certain segment.

Audrey Tang: They say, “Move fast and break things” as if it’s somehow a virtue. In Taiwan, we do believe in being swift and safe at the same time. To move fast certainly by repairing things, fix things.

Ryan Heath: Is that where the conservative comes out in your philosophy?

Audrey Tang: Lowercase conservative.

Ryan Heath: Yes, lowercase conservative.

Audrey Tang: The point in Taiwan is that we already have more than 20 national languages. We have a lot of cultures and most of them indigenous. Also new immigrants from Indo-Pacific and other realms.

Audrey Tang: If you push a disruption that furthers one particular value of one semidominant culture and leave everyone behind and marginalize everyone else and introduce bias, so that people from a certain skin color do not pass face recognition and things like that.

Audrey Tang: This is obviously a no-no in Taiwan, because we’re built upon this transcultural identity in our polity. In Silicon Valley, as well as in some startup centers in the world, somehow that is tolerated by investors. I think that’s the main difference.

Ryan Heath: I think back on the time I’ve been involved in tech. I wasn’t a programmer, I wasn’t a startup founder, I didn’t invest in anything. I was involved in the regulatory side, and I worked for the European Union for seven years and ended up the spokesperson on tech issues.

Ryan Heath: One of the things I struggle with is the certainty that those companies just projected about everything that they did. I believed it a lot more in the beginning. I was much more of a tech optimist. Then I came to see more and more the dark sides of how technology could be misused, and how people like to misuse it for their own personal gain.

Ryan Heath: I wonder, what’s been your journey in dealing with the downsides of how technology is used. How much do you have to guard against that in your job?

Audrey Tang: I would like to focus on this word “optimist.” I’m also quite optimistic about the future of digital democracy. I wouldn’t call optimist the same mentality as a optimizer. I think, the kind of almost naïve unawareness of the negative externalities are not optimism.

Audrey Tang: They’re the result of a optimizing mindset. In the computer science world which I’m in, we have a saying, “Premature optimization is the root of all evil.”

Audrey Tang: Meaning that, if earlier in the journey, people already choose some utility function, and work tirelessly to optimize that, maximize that, and discard everything else. That’s what optimizing means in computer science. Then people, almost always, discard some very important other values worth consideration, which would be very important, even dominant, in the future.

Audrey Tang: But because people from a very early in the journey discard this, so it creates a massive harm without that optimizer themselves being aware of this harm.

Audrey Tang: We see a lot of that when people in early start up say we just want to optimize this value x where the value may stand for engagement and therefore, participation, identification, and work connectivity. It actually doesn’t lead that way. Engagement sometimes measure and it just clicks and nothing else and creates negative value for everyone involved.

Audrey Tang: I do believe that we are now looking at a point where the regulators, as we mentioned, as well as the social sector consumer protection groups, as well as people who, frankly speaking, are building better alternatives, are bringing this to people’s awareness. That yes, there are alternatives and the current status quo is a result of premature optimization.

Ryan Heath: You’re really correct. Optimization is a luxury in a way that a democracy can’t afford. If you have an optimizing mentality, instead of a democratic inclusion mentality, then you can’t function as a government because you’re leading behind the hardest to reach people, or the most expensive-reserved people.

Ryan Heath: Is that the sort of trade off and challenge that you face in dealing with your colleagues or in dealing with this companies and how they operate in Taiwan?

Audrey Tang: Definitely. Instead of seeing it as a trade off, I see it as a trade negotiation, right? [laughs] Negotiation with these…

Ryan Heath: Trading off…

Audrey Tang: That’s right, almost semi-sovereign entities now. For example, in Taiwan, back in 2019, we’ve got people from PTT, that’s a Taiwanese equivalent of Reddit, but no shareholders and no advertisers.

Audrey Tang: These open source hippies designed a counter disinformation self-regulation accord, which is not a law, not the act, just a norm package and they signed on it. Then we took it.

Ryan Heath: Did you do that when you…sorry if I…

Audrey Tang: Yeah sure, go ahead.

Ryan Heath: …interrupted you inefficiently. I did not optimize that interruption.

Audrey Tang: That’s fine.

Ryan Heath: You were first brought into government when the prime minister of Taiwan asked you to develop a media literacy program. Was it connected to that cooperative structure that was trying to deal with misinformation in this very flat, non-hierarchical way?

Audrey Tang: Definitely. We call it the media competence program, because literacy is when you read, but competence is when you fact-check, when you contribute [laughs] to media.

Audrey Tang: We want our kids being able to do that, but yes, the counter-disinformation accord is one active part of basic education around media competence, because it’s the middle schoolers, for example, fact-checking the presidential candidates in real time as they’re making their speech, and their debates, and so on. It’s very much intertwined.

Audrey Tang: Once the social sector understand the importance of this, they start making demands to say Facebook saying that during elections you have to ban the extra-jurisdictional, sponsored micro-precision advertisements, or that even for domestic sources they have to treat it like campaign donation.

Audrey Tang: Then believe Taiwan is one of, if not the first jurisdiction, where Facebook published in real time the open data of all the sponsored advertisement on social and political issues during 2019, leading up to the presidential election. This became, of course, very good material for both investigative journalism and media competence curriculum.

Ryan Heath: Wow, that sounds very impressive indeed. Thinking now, if you were creating that competence program now, is there a particular piece of advice or a must-read essay that you would direct people to or is it in fact just this massive collective effort and you send people back to the collective?

Audrey Tang: This is really good question. The Competence Program is not just one hour or two hour of exercise. It’s meant to inform education in all the different subject fields. In middle school, for example, when people teach about geography or the local configuration of geology, there is a lot of co-creative material, starting from the open streamer community, that the students can actively contribute.

Audrey Tang: When people teach things about the cultural heritage, for example, the Taiwan Digital Asset Library, the larger Wikipedia community and so on, have a lot to say and as kids can contribute meaningfully to these communities very quickly, to the national cultural heritage site. We have a website that capture the civil society memories of important historical events and things like that.

Audrey Tang: My point is that it’s about changing the practice of memorizing what’s there in the textbooks and standardized answers, into co-creating new materials for kids in other schools to work with.

Ryan Heath: I jump all over the place here but I read that you’re a fan of self-learning as well, and I feel like that’s a close cousin to what you’re talking about. Not just co-creating, or learning through creation instead of just receiving the material.

Audrey Tang: Yes, and that’s really how I learnt. After dropping out of the second year of middle high, when I was 14 years old, I found this Internet community. Indeed, the very beginning of the World Wide Web was the preprint servers, the comprehensive PERLE archive network of W3C, of IEPF, of these fiercely non-centralized organizations that are organized with this principle of end-to-end innovation.

Audrey Tang: I believe that corresponds real well with the self-learning, or learning through doing, because end-to-end innovation means that nobody need to get permission from the authority, from the author of the Internet, before inventing anything new. You can go ahead and invent a lot of new things without getting anyone’s permission but somebody else around the world that want to try it out with you.

Ryan Heath: Sorry. I was on mute for some reason. I didn’t realize you dropped out of the second year of high school. Can you tell me about that? I’m relying on Wikipedia here. I got the sense that you were a child prodigy.

Ryan Heath: Advance math at six. You were programming when you were still in the primary school. What led you to drop out? Is it that you couldn’t be extended? You didn’t feel included? What happened?

Audrey Tang: When I was 14, I participated in the National Science Fair, took the first place, get a guaranteed spot in a prestigious senior high and so on and so forth. I discovered as part of working on my Science Fair project, this community of co-creating publishing people.

Audrey Tang: I took some print-outs of my email exchanges with people on arXiv archive, the pre-print server out to the principal, to the head of the school saying, “Look, I can’t. Either you spend eight hours a day in your school and eight hours doing research, or I can spend 16 hours doing research, because I’m really fascinated by this phenomena of swift trust. Why people trust each other so easily and readily online, and also breakup very easily. I’m very interested in that. What would you say?”

Audrey Tang: The principal read through the emails and say, “OK, so what can I do for you?” I’m like, “Well, you can free me from having to attend to school. It is compulsory education. I can’t… [laughs] do too much without your approval.” After thinking for a couple of minutes, she’s like, “OK. Tomorrow you don’t have to go to school anymore.” I believe…

Ryan Heath: You must have been the first Taiwanese student to ever outsmart your principal in that way.

Ryan Heath: How did that…

Audrey Tang: That was a real encouragement, because I’ve got this whole tree of possible responses and banters, and things like that in my mind. She’s just, “OK. Tomorrow you don’t have to go to school anymore.”

Audrey Tang: I’m like “OK. What about the compulsory education?” She’s like, “I’ll cover for you.”

Ryan Heath: Wow.

Audrey Tang: [laughs] The point here is, it engrained in my very young mind, that Korean public servants are actually the most innovative people in the world if you can talk with them and to them in a pear-to-pear fashion.

Ryan Heath: That’s fascinating. I love that you are ground breaking in that way. I guess, I had two other personal questions about your journey. Then you went to Silicon Valley a couple of years after that, and that’s a thing that a lot of people spend half of their career working towards.

Ryan Heath: What did that feel like to just cross oceans when you were still a teenager, to do that sort of work? Then at the age of 24, you decided to transition to female.

Ryan Heath: More recently, you’ve identified as non-binary. It’s such an extraordinary journey. I wanted to hear about what that experience is and how you bring that to your work today.

Audrey Tang: Rather than saying that I identify as a Taiwanese or identify as a Californian, I guess? Or someone in the Silicon Valley, I would simply say that I have this experience and that experience.

Audrey Tang: Similarly, instead of saying, “Oh, I identify as a boy or identify as a girl,” I always say, “I experienced my first puberty when I was 13, and another puberty when I was like 23, 24.” This is not just rhetorics. This is something quite deep. When I say, “I identify with this, and not that.” It is quite exclusionary. It’s basically telling people that I’m this part of humanity and not that part of humanity.

Audrey Tang: By saying, “I’ve done this puberty, and I’ve got this experience and 10 years later, I’ve got another set of experience,” it’s something that’s very inclusive. No matter what kind of experience you had in your puberty. Probably, we can talk a little bit about it because we have something in common. We have something to share.

Audrey Tang: The point here I’m making is that, I wouldn’t say that I transitioned from Taiwan to Silicon Valley, whereas open source community’s free software tribe is really in the Internet.

Audrey Tang: I’m more like their ambassador or tentacle, if you will, into the projected, from the digital realm, from this Internet co-creative culture as an ambassador to more authoritarian or at least less democratic jurisdictions.

Audrey Tang: I believe I got my first vote in representative election system, six years after I joined this Internet governance system, and when I voted for the first time on the paper ballot, although it’s quite interesting.

Audrey Tang: This pales in comparison with the participatory democracy I’ve already experienced for six years. What I’m trying to say is that building upon common experiences has always been my attitude in facing these new experiences so that it adds to my shared experience pool, but it doesn’t take me away from anything that I used to experience.

Ryan Heath: That’s a beautiful way of seeing it. It requires that people see you, or the experience where everything that it is instead of reducing it down to the label or a shortcut that’s convenient for them.

Audrey Tang: That’s binary thinking. As a non-binary digital minister, I think some commentator on TELECO and splogs, isn’t that an oxymoron?

Audrey Tang: The digital world is the right binaries. You cannot be non-binary? I’m like, “No, I’m digital, and I’ve got 10 digits.” It’s decimal. As much as you want to add to the pool of experiences.

Ryan Heath: Well, how could they say…It’s a cute joke in a way, but to say that to you, like, you’re right in front of them. It’s a terrible way to react to. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: I hug the trolls. It’s my hobby.

Ryan Heath: Good. Well, that brings me to my very last question. You do all of this extremely serious work that impacts so many people. I wonder for your hobby, how do you use the Internet for fun? Is it shopping? Tetris? Tell me all about it.

Audrey Tang: I hug the trolls. If you search for a troll hugging, probably my blog will appear. My real hobby.

Ryan Heath: Free troll hugs.

Audrey Tang: That’s right. Free hugs for trolls. Indeed, as I said, there’s a lot of people on the Internet that just calls me by name and write mean things for 100 words or more.

Audrey Tang: If I can paraphrase or interpret 5 words within that 100 into something that’s constructive, something that by sharing their own experience, it actually results in innovation in policy or in the work that I do, then I ignore promptly the 95 words.

Audrey Tang: To thank them profusely for the five words, and started a productive jamming session, if you will, on social media for those ideas. It’s supposed pedagogical in the sense that people see that by sharing authentic co-creating materials.

Audrey Tang: They can engage with me very quickly, but also it’s a good hobby because I make friends. There’s a lot of trolls that become pretty good acquaintances, and even visit me on the social innovation lab.

Ryan Heath: That’s a really funny point. Not a funny point in that laugh-out-loud funny, but that resonates with me. I often find that I will clash on Twitter in particular with somebody, and then they find that when we have a little bit more of a discussion that actually there is a lot of common ground, or that I’m nicer in person than I’m online, which is true for most people.

Ryan Heath: I like that it’s an act of positive resistance. You’re just working with whatever threads are there to build something.

Audrey Tang: Definitely, yes.

Ryan Heath: That was all of my questions. Is there anything else we didn’t cover? Is there something you want to share, or something people need to hear about Taiwan?

Audrey Tang: Yes, check out taiwanplus.com, where there’s everything else that I haven’t shared about Taiwan. Especially, the geopolitical questions that we didn’t explore in today’s podcast. You can read all about it in taiwanplus.com.

Ryan Heath: Name one of them now. I’m going to be greedy. What is one of those geopolitical issues?

Audrey Tang: I’m reading taiwanplus.com, “Did the USA sign treaty with Taiwan 150 years ago with the Seqalu indigenous nation?” That’s one geopolitical issue 150 years ago.

Ryan Heath: Does sound like it’s a bit hard to dive into.

Ryan Heath: I know we’re not…

Audrey Tang: [laughs] It is quite important. It pertains to this TV series, and freely aired on YouTube, and through taiwanplus.com called “Seqalu.”

Audrey Tang: The color that unifies these transculture histories together and give us a transcultural perspective of what’s happening now with the perspective of indigenous nations in Hakka, and Minnan for 150 years ago.

Ryan Heath: This is truly, truly my last question. I know you will be frustrated, but my producer is dying to know how you designed your avatar.

Audrey Tang: I worked with HighFidelity.io. I 3D scanned myself in Paris. That’s a rough skin. I worked on the, I believe is the Mixamo acquired by Adobe, where it did muscles and joints and things like that, and sent that model to HighFidelity.io, which I guess put on some cosmetic changes. It works pretty well. It can be downloaded on my website for free. Anyone can wear my avatar.

Ryan Heath: I just hit my wedding ring on the table. We are not going to wear your avatar. We’re going to promote it. We’re going to make it part of this podcast episode.

Audrey Tang: Definitely, Frances can follow up with the link to that. I think early version of that is also on Sketchfab. There’s plenty of material to carry on.

Ryan Heath: The evolution of your avatar. We’re going to follow that closely.

Ryan Heath: Minister Tang, thank you so much for joining us on “Global Insider.” It’s sharing a fascinating conversation.

Audrey Tang: I’ll send you the local recordings right away. I also appreciate if you do the same because I only record single-sidedly. To make a transcript we need both sides.

Ryan Heath: I will make sure that happens. I’m not sure with this platform, whether we all hang up now or something has to be done to take a copy.

Audrey Tang: I believe we’re good now.

Ryan Heath: We’re good. OK. Excellent. Thank you for being so generous with your time.

Ryan Heath: Thank you Frances for being the intermediary in all of this, and we’ll let you know when the episode’s out, and you can share it online.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, definitely. I really enjoyed this conversation, first thing I did in the morning. Thank you.

Ryan Heath: Awesome. [laughs] Thank you.

Audrey Tang: All right. Bye for now. Live long and prosper. Bye.