Jeff Wilser: This is a condensed and lightly edited interview. If we speak for 30 minutes, that might be 8,000 words, and we wouldn’t run verbatim.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, but my website will run the whole transcript. If you want to edit things out, that’s entirely fine.

Jeff Wilser: Yes. It might be that there’s the Q&A we run is 2,000 words, that’s full of transcripts, 10,000 ends. Obviously, we’ll all be in sync, picking up things here.

Audrey Tang: You can link to the full one if you wish so. Many podcasts to do that too.

Jeff Wilser: Perfect. That’s sounds great. Well, it’s great to talk to you. I spoke to Glenn a while ago, last year, and she just raved about you and your work at Radicalxchange. You’ve been on my radar for a while as someone super interesting and wildly intelligent space, I loved to get to know a little better. Thanks for your time. I appreciate it.

Audrey Tang: I’m working together with Glenn on my book, to make this a little bit more structured and formal. I’m also happy to keep this ongoing relationship with the wider Web3 community.

Jeff Wilser: I’m going to apologize in advance because I’m sure many of these questions you have answered time and time again. I think though, a lot of the audience here might not be as familiar with your story. I’ll have to make sure I have the facts straight and understand correctly. I’d love to start with some of your early day’s origin story.

Audrey Tang: Sure. We’ve got 50 minutes. Take your time.

Jeff Wilser: Tell me a bit about you. I’ve read that you’ve learned 37 languages by the time you were three. I’m exaggerating a bit, but not too much early. Explain sites you’re using exactly. Tell me a bit about your going days of constant learning, soaking in knowledge, and teaching yourself things.

Audrey Tang: It’s more like three languages when I was 37. Natural language that is, not counting computer language. I was born with a congenital heart defect that prevented me from not just sports in general, but actually feeling upset. Basically, not a lot of joy. Not a lot of outrage, which is ideal for computer science work.

Audrey Tang: I began programming very early when I was eight, first on a piece of paper. Then later on, of course, was personal computer, also when I was eight. That’s also my first time quitting school, the second semester of my second grade, I wasn’t attending the school at all. Then just focusing on personal computers.

Audrey Tang: My first programming language is LOGO, afterwards many others like BASIC, Perl, and so on.

Audrey Tang: At a time, the lure, the incentive for me, was that it’s like a musical instrument. Instead of explaining things over and over again, I can actually program an interactive space — so that people playing the game — most of my first programming constructs were all interactive games designed for education.

Audrey Tang: When other kids played those games that I made, they get to essentially pause and replay me instead of the real me. Then we can — much easier, actually — get to an interactive space that is a pro social norm where people collaborate to learn things together, rather than the physical one that I encountered in the first semester.

Audrey Tang: In school, when I was eight, which is a lot of bullying, person to person competition. The second place in the class literally said that, if I had died — meaning me — then he would be the first in class and so on. Which doesn’t sound very pro social, is rather anti social.

Audrey Tang: A Class A environment — I guess it’s a personal wish to — through interactive design in gaming, nowadays, we call it mechanism designed for people to compete for the public good, for the common good, instead of who compete to gain nothing.

Audrey Tang: If I had quit school, and I did, of course, the bully became the first in class, but he doesn’t actually increase anything. It’s a relative status thing.

Audrey Tang: That’s my first foray into programming, is just to improve the well being, I guess, of the entire learning environment. Of course, I will, later on joined the curriculum committee to actually put it in practice, but that would be 30 years into the future.

Jeff Wilser: This is fascinating. Can you give an example or two, some of the interactive games you built when you were eight years old?

Audrey Tang: Eight. Yeah, there’s one that’s quite popular, at least around the kids that I know, which is learning fractionals. Basically, there’s a number line from one to zero, and then you put balloons on it without marking its position. You had to start to guess, “Is that one quarter? “Is that two fifths”, and things like that. Then the darts will start to shoot on the number line, and you re adjust.

Audrey Tang: That’s easy for an eight year old to use that game to learn things about fractionals, about multiplying, and basic math. It is really quite basic.

Audrey Tang: By the time I was 9, I was quite into computer generated music, and then by 10, into the automatic deduction stuff. My science fair project, when I was 13, was compression method. When I was 14, was automatic inference and reasoning, machine learning.

Jeff Wilser: Sorry, I didn’t catch the second one that you said, you said Russian algorithm?

Audrey Tang: No, a compression algorithm. The algorithm make a compression. The idea was to explore the various compression methods, and to build context aware ones of compression, so to speak.

Jeff Wilser: Got it. When you first dropped out of school, were you tinkering and coding at home, or do you have chores to do? What was your day like when you were not in school?

Audrey Tang: I spent a lot of time at a personal computer at home. Also, because both of my uncles work on the…mother’s side, working first for Acer,then as a peripheral, and then became BenQ, and so on.

Audrey Tang: Jeff, as the uncle’s name eventually became VP of investment of BenQ or something. He showed me this entire startup scene, and how the startup scene works.

Audrey Tang: My other uncle, on the father’s side, work at the Institute for Information Industry as the more interested in this nascent, arc y, and later on, of course, the world web, things that connects people together.

Audrey Tang: There’s the startup side, and there’s also the connecting people for the common purpose, preserving culture, Internet Archive, and things like that. That size.

Audrey Tang: I was quite influenced by my two uncles. I would visit professors and attend seminars, and then generally absorb from the latest startup scene, and also the Internet community.

Jeff Wilser: You were dabbling the startup scene at age 10? Am I getting that right?

Audrey Tang: My first startup with me as the co founder was when I was 14, 15.

Jeff Wilser: Can you connect me to from today’s…I forget it. What was your first project you completed at 15?

Audrey Tang: The first project is actually Taiwan’s first large scale investment from Intel at the time, leading up to the dotcom boom. The name is called…if you search for “Inforian,” you can still find it.

Jeff Wilser: Can you spell it for us?

Audrey Tang: I N F O R I A N.

Jeff Wilser: Thank you.

Audrey Tang: Later on, it’s rebranded to PAsia. By the time it’s rebranded, I’ve quit a startup. The thing that got us the investments from Intel was the idea of Taiwan’s first consumer to consumer auction site, kind of like eBay.

Audrey Tang: We add to that a search engine, and also the eBay like thing is called CoolBid, and also the social network part, later on CICQ, which is an instant message system. By the time they roll out the instant message, I’ve already moved on to open source, which was a new thing back then.

Jeff Wilser: Got it. If you didn’t told me, can you connect the dots between that phase of your life, and becoming a digital minister?

Audrey Tang: Yeah. I run many startups. I worked not directly for the government, always with the government. As I mentioned, with the Institute of Information Industries, with Academia Sinica, which is our National Academy, which around the turn of century, 2002, to be precise, have helped prototyping.

Audrey Tang: Builds the first version of open foundry, which is pre GitHub hosted by our National Academy. I got acquainted with this fabulous Internet community that runs with this crazy idea of rough consensus and running code.

Audrey Tang: My own project working with Larry Wall of Perl, nowadays, Raku, back then Perl 6, was the highest followed repository on Open Foundry around 2005, 2006, where we use Haskell to write Perl. That got me into this idea of community organization and consensus building. Plurality is actually a Larry Wall term that I learned from IRC, from Relay Chat.

Audrey Tang: When he saw that the book of singularity was published, he instinctively said, typed plurality is already here. I got it from Larry.

Audrey Tang: The idea of this quick consensus and powered by the CRDTs, conflict free replicable data types, the collaborative documents of that day, which was a real breakthrough around 2005, 2006 instilled in me this idea that democracy is a thing of bandwidth and latency.

Audrey Tang: If we analyze it from the angle of bandwidth and latency, we can see that democracy feels farther away from people, not because democracy doesn’t work, but because there’s not enough democracy, meaningful democracy, and so on. That connects me in 2008. I got…

Jeff Wilser: Sorry. Fascinating. Can you elaborate a little more on the thing with latency? Folks like me are so innocent.

Audrey Tang: If you vote for your president out of a ballot of four people once every four years, that’s two bits in bandwidth upload. Latency is once every four years. If you think about yearly referenda, that’s slightly better, is a one year latency. You have a ballot of say, 16 yes or no questions, but still, that 16 bits uploaded into the collective decision making.

Audrey Tang: Sometimes people do a little bit more. People do small scale town halls, which is good, low latency settings, especially before the pandemic in Western countries, like juries. The thing is that it doesn’t have a lot of bandwidth to the rest of the communities.

Audrey Tang: It’s focusing if it’s jury on one specific case, if it’s a citizen assembly on the town hall, maybe on one specific project, but it doesn’t change the way the public servants work in general in a high bandwidth with low latency fashion.

Audrey Tang: Now compare, in Taiwan, anyone can pick up the phone and call the toll free number 1922. Someone with a lot of empathy in a call center, from the charity, or professional will listen to anything they say about our counter epidemic efforts, and the things that are…there’s a crack in everything. Cracks in our counter pandemic strategies.

Audrey Tang: We’ll get a real time response by our CECC commands administrator Chen, in the next two PMs afternoon’s live stream, where all the journalists, guests who ask any questions. There’s a lot of crowdsourcing going on. Our pro social Reddit equivalents that crowdsources that next iteration, so the iteration cycle has been shortened to 24 hours. The latency is now 24 hours.

Audrey Tang: The bandwidth is extremely high because anyone, even the very senior people, or very young people can call the toll free number 1922 to get a full explanation of the newest counter epidemic strategies and tactics, and also propose meaningful changes or even forks of the existing counter pandemic infrastructure.

Audrey Tang: That’s how we build the mask rationing, the contact tracing, the vaccine, and reservation, you name it. Our system is not a government idea, it literally crowdsources people.

Jeff Wilser: Incredible. I can’t wait to get to your COVID response team, and how that worked out. That’s incredible. I’m sorry to cut you off. You were helping bridge me to now?

Audrey Tang: In 2008, I joined Socialtext, which is interesting because, at the same day, I got another very similar job offer from Facebook. It’s a fork in the road. Socialtext was predicated on the idea that we can take Wiki software, Twitter, anything you name it, but to improve the slogan was in the flow of work. Not social network, but rather, enterprise social was the idea.

Audrey Tang: I only visit Palo Alto, by that time, twice a year or something or even longer. Mostly, we drink our own champagne, so to speak. To build collaboration software systems, for example, EtherCalc, which still nowadays people use it as a very quick collaborative spreadsheet with Dan Bricklin, inventor of spreadsheets. That was one of my early Socialtext projects and many other more.

Audrey Tang: The idea of the workspace transformation. Firstly, we took a lot of the ideas from the Facebook side. Easily connecting employees together, but soon it turns out, it’s not like that. We can’t move fast and break things, especially not within Fortune 500 companies.

Audrey Tang: We need to instead build it, and build it as something that retains institutional knowledge within a collaborative setting that enable teleworkers like me to contribute in a way that is meaningful, and also feels personally satisfying. The virtual water cooler, so to speak, and many other things.

Audrey Tang: That led me to start to think data ideas of the public service, the bureaucracy, being inflexible to emerging changes, may be just a hallucination. Out of the existing workflow software that are used, it’s not about the people, it’s about the silos that you put them into.

Audrey Tang: If the silos can horizontally connect to each other, for example, through open API and open data, as we build in social texts. We’ve seen a lot of large nonprofits and profit oriented companies transform internally in their culture by deploying the tools that we build in Social Text.

Audrey Tang: In 2014, when people occupy the parliaments in Taiwan peacefully, completely peacefully — very important for an American audience — for three weeks, then I told my Social Text colleagues on the internal messaging system signal, and not related to that signal.

Audrey Tang: I said, “I have to take leave for a couple of weeks because democracy needs me here.” I help deploy with the g0v community, pretty much all the tools that we have collaborated in Social Text into the Occupy scene.

Audrey Tang: With half a million people on the stream online, we did get consensus broadcasted, deliberated, and ended in very concrete demands, which was accepted by the parliaments. The head of Parliament anyway at the end of that Occupy.

Audrey Tang: Then, after that, of course, Taiwan’s political scene changed from people not trusting the government at all — below 10 percent — to people actually taking matters to their own hands. All the mayors that supported open government gets elected, all the mayors that didn’t, didn’t.

Audrey Tang: At the end of that year, I was invited as a reverse mentor, as an intern ish person to a minister in the cabinet along with many others from the Occupy scene. To work with the 300 people in the career public service or in leadership positions, to the highest ranked public servants in Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: To introduce them in the art of cooperation across diversity was the explicit aim. That’s when the next controversy happens, we said, “Oh, wait. Before it blows up so the parliament doesn’t end up getting Occupy again.” [laughs] I served as reverse mentor intern for a couple of years.

Audrey Tang: Then I got promoted, I guess when Dr. Sanguine took the presidential seat in 2016. At that year, I was still in the same physical office, but promoted to a full time — a full minister.

Jeff Wilser: Incredible. Couple of clarifying questions there to make sure.

Audrey Tang: Sure, sure.

Jeff Wilser: You mentioned that at one point, there was a 10 percent trusting government, then that changed. After, of course, the change, I didn’t quite catch what you said on that. What was the dynamic in the wake of the protest, and there’s trusting government?

Audrey Tang: Yeah. Before that, I think 9.2 percent, not very high, to put it mildly. The flip side of that, though, is that people are willing to take matter into their own hands.

Audrey Tang: That is to say, there’s 90 ish percent people who felt that the neighbors, the communities, the people they deal with on a day to day basis, the people who went to Occupy together with them to deliberate about important public policy matters, like whether to allow PRC made, so called private sector components in our then new 4G infrastructure.

Audrey Tang: That’s one of the very popular topics on the street. People who just had a conversation with then people who they barely knew, they actually trust each other more than they trust the national government.

Audrey Tang: The political opportunity at that time was that the mayors, there’s many mayors that’s proposed open governments like crowdsourcing, crowdfunding also which was very hip back then as their essentially mayoral agenda. Instead of any specific mayoral agenda, they would crowdsource the mayoral agenda.

Audrey Tang: That’s what got Dr. Ko Wen ja, or Ko P, as an independent non partisan, into the Mayor of Taipei City, our capital city, at the end of 2014, for the eighth year now for him. Our current Vice President, William Lai, who also worked as a Tainan City Mayor for eight years, also proposed an open government agenda and got re elected on that in 2014.

Audrey Tang: They’re not alone in this. When a mayor candidate say, “No,” those Occupiers are monsters, whatever. They don’t get re elected, period. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: The idea at the end of that year was that there was a new premier. The outgoing premier couldn’t stay after the election at the end of 2014. Then the national agenda became open data and crowdsourcing, things like that. It became the national direction, which is what I’m saying.

Jeff Wilser: Understood. Thank you. If I heard you correctly, the tools you helped put in place during that process, what was…left to their own devices, the crowd might be talking to each other, but not in the most efficient or optimized way.

Jeff Wilser: Your tools helped organize the flow of conversation, helped people come to consensus, helped people prioritize items, helped personalize what they wanted. That led to actual demands that were…

Audrey Tang: Convergent, yes.

Jeff Wilser: Eventually became mainstream. Became components of that, were put in the place of a new Taiwan government. Am I getting that right?

Audrey Tang: That’s correct. Two clarifications. One is that you call it a protest, but I call it a demonstration, in a sense a demo. We’re not against something, we’re for something else. Very important distinction. It’s not the tools by themselves. We’re the facilitators of the facilitators.

Audrey Tang: We build facilitation tools for the facilitators of the 20 or so NGOs who run actually the Occupy together. It’s not like the tools is a direct thing that we ask everybody attending the Occupy to go to our website, or to install our app although we do some of that. We provide free WiFi.

Audrey Tang: Mostly, it’s not the bulk of our work. The bulk of our work is to set up the live streaming, the document keeping, translation, and all supporting infrastructure for the professional facilitator trained in nonviolent communication, open space technology, to put that to work.

Jeff Wilser: Got it. Thank you for that incredible overview of your arc. I don’t know if there any analog in human history. It’s an interesting career you’ve had. Let’s talk now about your role as a minister. What have been your most important goals as you assume the role? How have you tried to achieve those goals?

Audrey Tang: I’m a lowercase digital minister, meaning that I don’t give orders, I don’t take orders either. The entire idea is that what matters is to work with the people, not for the people. For the people means that maybe you know better than people do. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: With the people means that we need to constantly build the mechanisms, the spaces, as I mentioned, the toll free numbers, and a daily press conference, and many other things that makes sure that people know exactly what’s going on, without having to invest a lot of research by themselves.

Audrey Tang: To build a ladder of expertise on anything that might be controversial or require public input. Of course, the pandemic is the most known in the world. Only we, in Taiwan, are still doing this COVID Zero thing with omicron. I don’t think anyone else is doing that now. That is because we’ve not instilled a single day of lockdown.

Audrey Tang: It’s literally based on people voluntarily participating in data collaboratives, such as contact tracing, because they know that when they scan the QR code, their phone number or nothing about them will go to the venue owner, so it’s privacy preserving.

Audrey Tang: Even their telecom doesn’t know which venues they’ve been to, because it’s random code, secure multi party arrangement. These are very abstract concepts. A lot of it actually came from the ZK based research from the Web3 field.

Audrey Tang: I learned about fully homomorphic encryption, by reading that latest research that came from the distributed ledger community. Then, we put it into use. People understand that if it saves their time, and make them feel safer, then they are willing to participate and also contribute to make a better QR code scanner that rejects any other QR code.

Audrey Tang: All the components in contact tracing, and gets a lot of input from not just the social sector, but also the private sector, like our leading antivirus company, Trend Micro or LINE, which is our equivalent of WhatsApp in Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: They all got into this ecosystem of shortening contact tracing from 24 hours to 24 minutes, and people can reverse audit in the past four weeks, which contact tracing, which municipality look at your data. There’s a reverse accountability to ensure that it’s deleted after four weeks, and many things.

Audrey Tang: This is a microcosm. We’ve built a similar relationships with the data collaboratives, encounter infodemic as well, which is less widely reported, but essentially have the same shape. My hope is to keep this with the people paradigm going strong.

Audrey Tang: So that around the world people don’t have to give up when seeing this seeming dilemma of preserving privacy and human rights on one side, and tackling structural wicked problems, like the pandemic or infodemic.

Audrey Tang: On the other side, too often, it’s phrased as a zero-sum game. There’s the dial here or somewhere. Taiwan is proving that, no, you can have both if you work with the people, not just for the people.

Jeff Wilser: Incredible stuff. I didn’t quite catch what you said, the exact word after COVID was that…

Audrey Tang: Infodemic. Parallel to the pandemic, there’s also the infodemic, which is the thing that reduce the effective of MPIs of counter pandemic measures in many other jurisdictions.

Audrey Tang: If the people believe that there is a 5G antenna in the mask, then they’re less likely to wear a mask. Intentional disinformation, in Taiwan, we also got that a lot. Information manipulation and stuff, leading up to elections, and so on. Of course, US being advanced democracy doesn’t have that, but Taiwan has that.

Jeff Wilser: We need you. Let’s unpack a little more. Clearly, the US has an infodemic. I love the word. Amazing. US has a big problem there. Can you elaborate more on tools you put in place to help combat infodemic in Taiwan?

Audrey Tang: Sure. We call it humor over rumor. It’s very simple. It’s the idea of how some vaccines are made, is that you take a trending viral virus variants, take its mRNA strands, put it into a different spike protein configuration, and then release it.

Audrey Tang: It gets even more viral than the virus itself, and some people are calling omicron the viral booster with this theory, but it’s not fair because unless you’re twice or triple vaccinated, omicron doesn’t actually serve as a booster, but suppose there is a non toxic viral booster, like a viral vaccine. I think XKCD codes COVID plus 19, or something like that.

Audrey Tang: That will be something that is a very neat description of the Taiwan playbook of humor over rumor countering disinformation of the patient. The idea very simply, is that we have this trending scoreboard of which virus of the mind are getting the highest R value like people spread it.

Audrey Tang: We do so because like counter respond, we have flagged as junk mail in our instant messages, like lying, and so on. People can report in a myriad of ways that doesn’t re identify themselves. Suppose we now know this has a R value of 10, like on average 1 person spread out this information to 10 other people.

Audrey Tang: We focus on that, and we take some mRNA strands. Then we put out a funny meme. For example, before the pandemic, there was a viral disinformation that said, “The state is going to fine you one million US dollars if you perm your hair twice or more a week.” OK, hard to believe, but it’s actually viral. It’s trending.

Audrey Tang: Then our premier, within two hours, I believe, on average we do 60 minutes now. At that time, our premier after two hours wrote this extremely funny meme where we quote, “This information is not true.”

Audrey Tang: Then the premier, who is in his 70s now, post a photo of him as a young man with a lot of hair. The young man said, “So it’s not true. I used to have hair. I will not punish people who look like my youth.”

Audrey Tang: In the fine print, it says, “What you’ve seen in the rumors are actually a labeling requirements for the warnings that the labels of the manufacturer of those hair products, they must be printed on that bottle.” The fine goes to the manufacturer or the bottler if they don’t put in the warning label.

Audrey Tang: The viral payload is the premier as he looks now almost no hair, and then with the hair blower and said, “But if you perm you hair many times a week, it will not damage your bank account. It will damage your hair, your hairstyle may become my hairstyle.” [laughs]

Audrey Tang: He makes fun of himself, and it’s very convincing. I guess it serves as a health public service announcement. In any case, that went absolutely viral, much more viral than the disinformation, and the people who laughed about it, who vent their outrage literally became immune when they see the original disinformation.

Audrey Tang: They don’t spread it anymore because they have already vented the incredulity, the outrage.

Jeff Wilser: You’re giving the outlet for conspiracy theories, absurdest rumors. You’re giving a safe, healthy innocent outlet. Once that their thirst has been slaked, that is likely to fall prey to the actual. Your team are intentionally creating fantastical, funny rumors. Like not…

Audrey Tang: Exactly, meme etic engineering. Yes.

Jeff Wilser: Hoping they go viral… that you’re tracking both real rumors and also the fake humor, the engineered…

Audrey Tang: Yeah, the vaccines.

Jeff Wilser: Do you think that would work in the US?

Audrey Tang: Yes, definitely. All it takes a self deprecating humor from the leadership.

Jeff Wilser: Have you heard of the campaign, “Birds Aren’t Real” in the US?

Audrey Tang: Yes.

Jeff Wilser: OK. Seems like it is a similar kind of technology. Can you tell me a little more about the…I know that your COVID strategy has certainly been more reported, but I want to straight to the source. I want to hear a little more about that, and why it’s worked so well.

Audrey Tang: Yeah. The cute spokesdog is all over the news. The Shiba Inu “Zongchai”. I will spare you the cute dog theory, but the cute dog is really important. I think what made it work is, as I mentioned, that people are free to identify the biases, the loopholes, the issues with our counter epidemic strategy.

Audrey Tang: Most importantly, instead of protesting, they can demonstrate better versions by building essentially, for example, early on, when we ration out the medical grade mask, the OpenStreetMap team builds this visualization to let people identify very easily.

Audrey Tang: That there is a real data bias going on, because we thought pharmacies overlap directly with population distribution so just by distributing into the pharmacies will be fair. Each person on the map is on average, the same distance from next available mask, which is what we optimized for.

Audrey Tang: OpenStreetMap analyzed the transportation because they have the transportation records of the public transportation, and concluded along with a MP, concluded that is not the same because not everyone own a helicopter.

Audrey Tang: If you have to take public transportation, especially in more rural places by the time you get to the pharmacy, it’s already closed so, there’s a gaping hole in the state’s algorithm for distribution.

Audrey Tang: They can build a visualization because we publish the real time inventory of all pharmacies every 30 seconds, and it’s replicated to more than 100 different apps. We can’t censor anyone from analyzing this data, or the stream of data. Indeed, we see the same analysis as the people see.

Audrey Tang: In any other dynamic, like if we publish daily or freedom information requests we publish every week, then that wouldn’t work because it wouldn’t show the real time dynamic during the day. How exactly does the purchasing behavior and the public transportation works.

Audrey Tang: It only works with the maximally trusted people, with real time open API. When Minister Chen Shih-chung got the interpellation from that MP, who used to be a VP — name is Ann Kao — used to be a VP of data analytics at Foxconn. She knows something about data.

Audrey Tang: Then she said, “Obviously, you should switch to a different refill algorithm, you should definitely do pre registration and things like that.”

Audrey Tang: Then Minister Chen, without defending any of our existing policies, simply said, and I quote, “Legislator, teach us.” Then 24 hours after that, next 2 PM, we announced the new distribution mechanism along with pre registration. That turned into what used to be a partisan bickering into true co creation.

Audrey Tang: She won credit, of course, by proposing that, but it’s pro social, it’s no longer individual to individual competition, and so on.

Audrey Tang: I think this turns it into a large scale gamification of people thinking of better counter epidemic measures together because they know chances are if they work really well then the next week, if not the next day, it will become the new national policy. That’s my answer to your question.

Jeff Wilser: Amazing. I’m glad you went there because embedded in that is the importance of radical transparency, and it’s real time as possible. From what I understand, that’s clearly a foundational value of yours. Can you talk about why radical transparency is so important to you, and how it can benefit society?

Audrey Tang: Because it enables timely consensus, and the ledger community of all communities understand this. If you don’t get a high that was in terms of transaction per second and the low latency for consensus, there really is no reason why people should invest in the governance equations because whatever they propose would take forever to be ratified.

Audrey Tang: Of course, in open source you can always fork, but that’s not feasible for many community.

Audrey Tang: You can’t fork the community relationships with you. If it’s that easy, Facebook would have been forked like a trillion times by now.

Audrey Tang: The right to fork while fundamental, and I respect this over freedoms, which is essentially the right to fork, is just to the right to exit.

Audrey Tang: What we’re building was that timely, real time, radical transparency is the right to voice, to matter in governance settings in a way that doesn’t squander your own cognitive resources, and can ripple through the consent of the government, and the right to build consensus of the government, so to speak.

Audrey Tang: In the epidemic setting, this is even more important. If the mask distribution or contact tracing or vaccination only works in some pockets of population or some pockets of CDs, or as I mentioned, example, only in urban areas, but not in rural areas. Then, it creates internal division that drives the polity apart.

Audrey Tang: We’ve seen many other jurisdictions where the national and the municipal governments were on complete different sides. If you do that a couple of times, people lose all trust in the country epidemic measures, because their mayor say a different thing from the chancellor or the premier.

Audrey Tang: Through this real time open API, the cabinet minister can very easily say, “Yeah, the municipal version is correct. It’s been proven by the OpenStreetMap community. There’s no qualms about that.”

Audrey Tang: Then, 24 hours later, we integrate that into the consensus. It’s always a backward compatible soft fork. There is always a right to fork in democratic policies. The fork is soft, meaning that is backward compatible.

Audrey Tang: The mainline has a timely way to integrate, meaning that we abandon our original errors of our ways, and simply say that the soft fork is now the new reality, maybe we call it London or something. [laughs]

Jeff Wilser: I think I got much of that. I’m a little fuzzy in a couple things which I’m trying to summarize now. It’s the extremely efficient, real time communication that you have that still allows a constant sense of what people want.

Jeff Wilser: It’s not that the people by having a voice…They don’t necessarily have governance, not like one person says, “If 80 percent Taiwanese say this, it’s law.” It’s not a direct democracy like that.

Audrey Tang: It’s agenda setting power.

Jeff Wilser: I got that part. I’m a little fuzzy on the software development side.

Audrey Tang: Once the agenda is known not just to the premier or the minister, but a crowdsource agenda is known for everyone. Then, instead of the government and its contractors delivering solutions, everyone is free to experiment in their vicinity on solutions. At that time, last May when we had our real first wave and only wave so far actually, of alpha and delta.

Audrey Tang: There’s literally more than 20 contact tracing solutions going on in just three days, but most of the implementers are on the g0v, G zero V, which is the community that powered the original Occupy. A lot of public trust, and on g0v, alike, too.

Audrey Tang: Pretty much all the contact tracing makers are on the same channel. We’re just working very diligently so that within a couple of days, we converged on the SMS based open standard QR code contact tracing where everyone can implement their own QR code scanner, but nobody keep personal data.

Audrey Tang: That was the consensus of the contact tracing tool makers. I didn’t program the tool myself, but I did do what we call a reverse procurements.

Audrey Tang: The specification as defined by the Internet civic tech community is taken as national standard so that we then take that to ask our vendors and contractors in the private sector to build to the spec that those small scale experiments have already validated as pretty much the only working way.

Audrey Tang: Crowdsource agenda setting is one, but open innovation, co creation is the other and these two working together is a double diamond where you get to diverge, converge, diverge, converge very quickly.

Jeff Wilser: How do you feel knowing that frankly you saved a lot of lives? You are, as I understand, the key figure motivating this open source massive experiment on governmental scale. No other had country done this, that I’m aware of. You guys have just trounced COVID, thanks to this. How would you feel knowing that?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, I think we call it the “Taiwan model” so the “you” is definitely plural. You, it’s not just me. I’m just the face, right? The spokesperson of a huge community of civic tech and government tech. I think it is a model. It’s not just for the pandemic and the infodemic as we talk about.

Audrey Tang: It could also be used to fight climate change, for all sort of inequity and injustice that people previously thought must result in the loss of one side or the other. After they got introduced into this way of thinking, then they can actually design solutions that works for the true betterment of next generations, and so on.

Audrey Tang: It’s much easier to take the plurality into account if you know as the fact that 1,000 people starting a movement online with a popular hashtag is actually a force of good instead of a force to disrupt.

Audrey Tang: To replace the career public service or any other institution that also serves the social good if you see them as natural allies, the ledger community in particular, as natural allies instead of someone who will put through automation or the public service out of business, right?

Audrey Tang: It’s a good thing that we can show those concrete solutions, as I say, that saved people life because then people think, “Oh, if we can actually get the COVID and especially omicron to net zero, then maybe it’s not hard to tackle the carbon dioxide thing to get it to net zero and so on.” It instills a optimism into all the sectors.

Jeff Wilser: Amazing. Last few minutes we have here, and then I’ll let you go. That extent it was…make sure I have this right. Was watching technology part of the COVID solution? Then, more generally, I’m curious, what most excites you? What do you think is most interesting of watching the current two worlds going forward?

Audrey Tang: As I mentioned the privacy enhancing technologies. I’m really interested in that. Our national center for high speed computation, and partnered with me to get some videos and memes. There was a viral one with me deepfaking myself, an actual deepfaking meme makes me look younger. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: That went viral, but there’s many other things that can educate people on how to take the technology in a way that is as a mission pro social, instead of people adapting to technology like the bad old days of so called big data, where everyone wants to come to surveillance, otherwise the national competitiveness suffers because other people are doing the same AI thing.

Audrey Tang: It is like a race to build grizzly bears with machine guns. There was a meme about that. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Basically, instead of those zero, some battle days, actually negative sum.

Audrey Tang: I’m excited that the ledger community have now seen that public goods has a wider definition, and free from the surveillance, the privacy use, actually one of the fundamental things that makes sure that people want to invest their time and energy, and their real identity into the ledger space instead of seeing it as a purely transactional thing.

Audrey Tang: The National Center of high speed computation also contributed with post quantum cryptography, also, by running their own ledgers of air boxes, the air pollution measurement across those networks, and also doing fully homomorphic encryptions that doesn’t suffer from losses of resolution after many steps and so and so.

Audrey Tang: These are kind of fundamental insights in research that will then let us have the kind of building blocks, as architects of democracy, as a form of pleural technology. We can then build things without compromising our building materials and ledger space, by its very nature have nothing to hide.

Audrey Tang: Basically, they are kind of the swarm like the 20, or more contact tracing tools that we see at the height of the pandemic last year. We are now seeing to tackle this privacy preserving mandate.

Audrey Tang: There’s many many different ledgers trying all sorts of different new mathematical constructs, and there’s bound to be a few that can actually work also in a governance setting in the institution that really must start from this conversation.

Jeff Wilser: If you’ll indulge me, one last question. Am I right that you describe yourself as a conservative…

Audrey Tang: Small c, But yes, lowercase.

Jeff Wilser: I think a lot of American readers might get confused by that. Can you elaborate on…

Audrey Tang: Sure, sure.

Jeff Wilser: What one view describes does not jive with what might people think that means…

Audrey Tang: To be a small c conservative is to respect the 20 or so national languages in many cultures, many indigenous.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, with their social institutions, we’ve got Amis matriarchy, we’ve got at Taiwan gender doesn’t matter archy, and many other things and the indigenous nations and also for the later coaches, the ethnic Han coaches, the Catholics, my own grandparents are Catholics, and on churches, the Muslim community in Taiwan, many other communities in Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: To be a conservative is to work on technology to empower instead of taking anything away from the legitimacy of those institutions. I believe that’s the textbook definition of conservative. I’m conservative in a sense of small c of Postel’s Law.

Audrey Tang: I am conservative in what I do, but I’m liberal in what I accept. Whatever you do, I will not denounce you, I will not make it hard for you to start new traditions, new religions, new institutions. I think that’s the thing that’s uppercase conservative, that turns people off.

Audrey Tang: People are generally OK if people say respect your elderly, but if people say just because you respect the young people, even more, I’m going to denounce you. That’s what puts people off. I am a small case conservative in that respect, but do not exclude people.

Audrey Tang: Of course, an anarchist is the old term. Nowadays, I think in the US, the term is left libertarian or something like that. The idea is, as I mentioned in the very beginning, I don’t take or give orders.

Jeff Wilser: Got it. Anarchy implies chaos, but you are bringing order to the world, Clearly, your work has helped people understand…Consensus is the opposite of…

Audrey Tang: I think this thing is that if people diverge without a way to converge back to consensus. Of course, it will lead to chaos. Internet is an anarchist place. It’s permissionless innovation. It’s built into the protocol end to end innovation.

Audrey Tang: The Internet Engineering Task Force and the Internet communities largely work, because we’ve figured out ways to converge out of those permissionless innovations to consensus.

Audrey Tang: If anything, we figure out a way to put anarchy into a motor, to convert anarchic electricity inputs into real actionable and direct actions, for the benefit of everyone for the common good. I think on the underlying layer of the Internet that anarchy is what I have in mind.

Jeff Wilser: Amazing, we’re over time. You’re very generous and wildly thoughtful as I imagined you would be in your responses. I enjoyed this, and congrats on your success, both personally and for your country. It’s an incredible success story. Thank you for taking the time to share your story. Appreciate that.

Audrey Tang: Thank you. Live long and prosper.

Jeff Wilser: Take care. Goodbye. Thank you.