Robert Stevens: I obviously come from a blockchain publication, so my interest is in your thoughts on how government can be decentralized. Also, what you think that blockchain plays in governments. if it indeed does? Does that sound good?

Audrey Tang: That’s a excellent angle. Just a clarification, I usually say DLT, as in distributor ledgers, because we work with many technologies like IOTA, which is not strictly speaking blockchains. Feel free to continue saying blockchain. My preferred term is just ledgers or distributed ledgers.

Audrey Tang: Ledgers is very promising. It is a cheap way to build accountability and some sort of legitimacy across sectors. The sectors are such like public sector, social sector, and the government public sector because they have different structures of normativity of legitimacy.

Audrey Tang: Through shared ledgers people can nevertheless agree on something that previously would require expensive auditing like professional accounting like PwC or KPMG to do. They still do very valuable work, but they tend to be slow and costly. Who bears the cost has become the main problem. Ledgers provide a way for people to very easily share the burden in a good way.

Audrey Tang: I also think that’s where in my radio exchange has a lot of governance experiments currently going on in the ledgers community. For example, the Gitcoin experiment, the first round, which just concluded, offers very valuable insights for governments mechanism design as well.

Audrey Tang: People, when they see a real market actually working to redistribute their priorities, there is a inspiration that if the Ethereum community can do that why can’t Taiwan do that. That service inspiration as well. That’s the two. One is more utility, instrumental value across sectors, and one is of a more inspirational kind of idea value.

Robert Stevens: Your interest is in decentralizing government. Stepping back a little bit, why might we want to do that in the first place?

Audrey Tang: My first foray into governance, non-necessary government, is in the center-making working groups of the Internet Engineering Task Force of the World Wide Consortium unit at the old Internet, like pre-Bitcoin technologies.

Audrey Tang: Even there, it is very clear that this kind of collaborative governance where, they used to call it Internet governance, but I just say co-gov now, collaborative governance offers a drastically new way of legitimacy that does not require an army, a navy, or a police force to enforce.

Audrey Tang: Essentially the IETF or the Internet Society in general doesn’t really have any kind of monopolized violence for it, but yet people join like the domain name system voluntarily.

Audrey Tang: This shows that decentralized governance, when designed properly, can incentivize a lot more inclusive participation in the sense that anyone with an email address that can have something to share can just do so in a working group without being elected as a representative.

Audrey Tang: To me, because I encountered that governance system when I was 14 back in 1995 when I quit high school and started my first company, that’s actually the first political system that I encountered. It’s not like that, I shifted my mindset from representative to collaborative governance. Yet, I’m well versed in collaborative governance for five years before I even get to right to vote.

Audrey Tang: For me, that’s my native governance system, which is enabled, of course, by this idea of listening at scale, which was not possible if you only have telephones, telegrams, or even televisions and broadcasting devices. The motivating factor is first about inclusion like anyone who is a 14 years old and have no voting right but have something to contribute can never less help setting the agenda.

Audrey Tang: The second is accountability in the sense that the legitimacy is built through radical transparency instead of through a monopoly of violence.

Robert Stevens: Is this fair to say that your first encounter with the state was one that was coercive and then you felt the need for more inclusive governance?

Audrey Tang: At that time, I quit high school, junior high. I was 14, 15 years old. Indeed, there is state violence mandating compulsory education so that if I don’t stay into the school system until I was 16 or something, which is called mandatory education system, yes, I will keep getting fined.

Audrey Tang: Even my parents, I don’t know, put to, probably not prison but some sort of penalties if I don’t go to school physically. My principal actually read through the email printouts of my interaction with the online open access community, namely the archive.org, which is still around, and I still publish on social archive, community, and she said, “Oh, I really don’t think you need to go to school anymore.”

Audrey Tang: She actually faked the records for me so that I don’t become a subject for state violence and coercion. That really informed first what you said about the state being sometimes not catching up with times, but also the second, that bureaucracy doesn’t have to be reactionary. The bureaucracy can be part of the innovation as my teachers and principal did at the time.

Robert Stevens: At the moment am I right to guess that one of your main interests is in quadratic voting, right?

Audrey Tang: Mm-hmm.

Robert Stevens: Which is also a form of decentralized government that lets anyone take part although it does give weight to those people who have more money slightly. How does this feed into what you were just saying?

Audrey Tang: QV, which we use in our Presidential Hackathon, to me is a legitimacy-building device. The core idea is that in traditional 1p1v or even 1pnv, which is very popular in online votes, ends up actually dividing the society, at least the part of society that participate in such online systems exactly because there’s usually only one winner.

Audrey Tang: The contrasting example is there was an online vote saying for the redesign of the national identity card. There’s a lot of very creative designs, but because of the 1p1v system, people just mobilized on two particular ideologically-opposing designs of the ID card, the new ID card. There’s a lot of animosity as the voting goes on.

Audrey Tang: The voting anyway usually result in one side of the people, half of population almost feeling they have lost. In that particular case because the voting, the top one only goes into this jury-selection panel of professional designers and so on. In other words, is agenda-setting power instead of decision power, eventually the most popular one will lose to one with very little votes.

Audrey Tang: Literally everybody, almost everybody feel they have lost, having participated in the 1p1v system. The point here is that with quadratic voting, people take much more time to give more nuanced feedback. The bandwidth of uploading their social preference is higher.

Audrey Tang: Based on our real experience, most people feel they have won actually because they may vote for four projects, five projects, or something like that, and once the top 20 gets announced, it includes aggregate preferences so nobody feel that they have lost, or almost nobody.

Robert Stevens: How does this interact with ledger technology? I know this is something you spoke about at Devcon. I spoke to Zoë Hitzig, who also is working on something similar. She was also at Devcon. Devcon’s about Ethereum, which is a as you said a ledger or a blockchain.

Audrey Tang: There’s two links, and I briefly mentioned them. One is in the instrumental sense. Whenever we have a Presidential Hackathon team that want to do cross-sectoral-data governance, for example, last year there was a Water Box team that measures the top three pollutants in water through this cheap device that’s solar powered.

Audrey Tang: That communicates through Zero-G, through MBIOT, or LoRa, and communicates the water measurements to a ledger, which is modeled on the air box where people, thousands of different stations, many in primary schools or people’s balconies do the same with ledger technology.

Audrey Tang: The key point here is that the water box tries to solve a governance problem because industrial plants, agri lands or farm lands can get their electricity and water cut if people realize that they’re actually polluting the waterways for the downstream farmlands. First, it’s difficult to make a systemic inspection. Second, there’s a lot of unknowns.

Audrey Tang: It’s not like all the illegal industrial plants will register themselves. The third, whenever people make an accusation like that, people in the industrial plants always say that “It’s our upstream that pollutes the water, not us,” which renders enforcement very difficult. This is something that the state cannot really solve with state-based technologies because of legitimacy issues.

Audrey Tang: The water box is designed such that any farmer can just very easily purchase a bunch of these things and just put into the waterways. Then the industrial plants that want to prove that upstream is actually polluting can also do the same and so on. They can correlate their values and make sure that this person use a machine learning model.

Audrey Tang: It’s because waterways are much easier to predict than air dissipation anyway and to calibrate the various devices. Because it’s cheap enough and because the Zero-G communication doesn’t require much of a bandwidth, it makes it possible for all different sectors, including academic, journalisms, and so on to invest in putting all those notes.

Audrey Tang: The idea of a shared ledger that held everybody accountable so that nobody can go back in time to modify the numbers the day before election or something like that is key to get this cross-sectoral buy-in so that people can live with each other, contributing to the same shared reliable database without actually worrying too much about adversarial scenarios where people can modify their numbers.

Robert Stevens: Thanks. A key feature of the blockchain or indeed any ledger is that the proof of work line at least in a bunch of blockchains has to pay for the upkeep of the network. Pu together, the state tends to be such that the state would pay for the upkeep of the network or database. Do you think distributed cost to citizens makes sense? What would be the logic behind that?

Audrey Tang: That was the first angle, the first link I just mentioned, which is about cross-sectoral. Indeed, as you said, some proof of work or stake need to happen for that to really work. In the second scenario where you already know the player, the classic example is the SWIFT system between banks. You really don’t have to go all the way to the proof of work.

Audrey Tang: You can instead use any ledger technology in a closed or at least everybody knows anyone who enters system. In that, you have more flexibility in choosing the kind of legitimacy mechanisms that hold each other accountable. I would argue that that kind of ledger is just a replica of centralized databases.

Audrey Tang: It’s just, instead of trusting a single one, we are making sure that single one centralized database cannot easily fake its records because it’s replicated and accountable to all the other players within that closed ecosystem.

Audrey Tang: That private chain politically is aligned with a centralized state, actually the centralized state love that private chains. I would say that is another link. This is interesting because it can then be used also to promote “transparency” but in another direction.

Audrey Tang: Whereas, the public chain makes the state or at least the environment or the measurable data around the shared commons transparent to the citizenry across sectors. A state-owned private chain can actually make citizenry transparent to the state, but not the other way around.

Audrey Tang: You can easily imagine the social credit system built between the so-called local government, the national government, and all the participating panels, but without having citizenry participation in that chain. That will be the so-called backbone of the social credit system.

Robert Stevens: Obviously, blockchain and decentralization is just one of many, many government solutions. Is this going to be what you’re pushing for in government?

Audrey Tang: I’m not a proponent of any particular technology per se, because my firm belief is that instead of asking people to adapt or conform to technology, we need to adopt technology and bring them to people. There’s a very old idea called appropriate technology where the people work out the social norm together as the air box and water box data collusions that I just mentioned.

Audrey Tang: I don’t quite believe in asking people to change their behavior to adapt to new governance technologies with no civic tech link or no civic tech legitimacy of co-governance, which would be the other kind of transparency that I just mentioned. I think it is the value choice after all.

Audrey Tang: If people think that in a diverse democracy, the more people participate in the governance, the better the governance mechanism becomes, then they will actually, through social innovation, demonstrate viable prototypes. The government’s role is just to make sure to amplify those viable prototypes so that people can voluntarily join.

Audrey Tang: In the second case where it’s like the top-down intentional design from the government, that’s like smart cities without smart citizens. That, of course, is a more instrumental use of ledger technology that is not popular in Taiwan, but maybe popular elsewhere.

Robert Stevens: The government is still very centralized at the moment. Do you see a lot of resistance towards decentralization or maybe adoption of this social technology? Do you think that some of the government will…?

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, we have a different social configuration because our democracy is so new. The first presidential election was 1996. People see which is after the wide web. This is very important. People see democracy as something of a new social technology itself.

Audrey Tang: In many other parts of the world, democracy is part of their culture, part of their tradition. To change it, you have to learn about hundreds of years of proud republican tradition or something like that. In Taiwan, this is important. This is designed and the people who designed the democracy systems are all still around and very active.

Audrey Tang: We are here, instead of fixating on representative democracy in a game theory fashion like gerrymandering and things like that, we are looking to re-present, not to represent, re-present the various new social innovations around democratic governance, including but not limited to quadratic voting. We have participatory budgeting, which would work well with quadratic funding.

Audrey Tang: We have the petition system, the Sandbox system, Presidential Hackathon itself, and so on. That all complements that representative democracy system. I wouldn’t argue that in Taiwan, the government is very centralized because, certainly in the martial law, in the dictatorship, it was very centralized.

Audrey Tang: There is a strong social norm to not go back to the authoritarian days and strong social push to make Taiwan a democracy that is inclusive and not just a ritualistic voting.

Robert Stevens: What else do you think the blockchain has to overcome perhaps to become fit to purpose for governance purposes?

Audrey Tang: I think Vitalik made analysis on the latest round of Gitcoin. First of all, I think the community, through these new governance mechanisms, need to work out a kind of expectation management issue because in Gitcoin, for example, someone who runs a popular Twitter account automatically gets more people in.

Audrey Tang: QV mitigates against that because in 1p1v, if you mobilize someone, they vote that single vote and they don’t look at any other project. At least we can say, like in Presidential Hackathon also, actually the one with the highest QV votes is a popular app that reports illegal parking across different municipalities.

Audrey Tang: Because they are essentially a media, they have a way to do a push notification to us people to vote for them. They have a default advantage just by being a media that reaches out. Of course, through QV and QF, it seems people still don’t vote everything to that project. They still distribute some of their social preference to other project.

Audrey Tang: It still stands that without a negative vote, whether Gitcoin, the Presidential Hackathon, or Colorado Experiment, there’s no negative voting. We do have negative voting in the rhetoric exchange board by the way. Without negative voting, we’ll only look at the positive square root, not the negative root, but both square roots are valid mathematically to your credits used.

Audrey Tang: I think this cross-amplification, the echo chamber effect, the effect of key online influencers and so on is a interesting problem that democracy is facing, especially around precision targeting. I don’t think blockchain governance is immune to that.

Audrey Tang: Blockchain governance, if anything, may actually co-amplify that because it’s a pure online system. People have a lot of skills to make arguments online. Unless we can get a more deliberative agenda setting before we go to the QV or the QF, I don’t really think negative voting alone can solve this effect that Vitalik highlighted in this latest round of Gitcoin.

Robert Stevens: What would a more deliberative agenda setting look like?

Audrey Tang: For one, we can have through augmented reality a real discussion that imitates or is even better than face to face, so that people immerse in a real social setting before they type out toxic Twitter comments, because a lot of the psychological effect of outrage online is because we feel relatively helpless if you see someone on Twitter attacking something you believe dearly.

Audrey Tang: If it’s interpersonal setting, there’s all non-verbal way to non-violently communicate your position across. In a pure, two-dimensional, asynchronous media, there really is no way to vent that anger. If people feel angry because they’re, I don’t know, a provocative Ethereum classic post, and then the easiest way to vent the anger is not deliberation, it’s rather outrage.

Audrey Tang: That is to say you share it and add some emotion outburst to it, and mobilize other people to attack that person or to lower that person’s social status. The mechanism of anger to outrage is inherent if you don’t have sufficient interaction bandwidth.

Audrey Tang: In a more immersive setting, like the one that I have been doing for the past couple of years where I go into rural places, indigenous lands, and through broadband as human right to connect with people in Taipei and other municipalities. We even use wall-size projections so we can feel that we’re in the same connected room.

Audrey Tang: There is far more nonverbal cues that a facilitator can use to make it deliberative. I really think that it is key to engage each other in a situation where the latency is small. This includes the Skype call, by the way, because our micro expressions are not very visible to one another. I have to guess a lot of your emotional state.

Audrey Tang: In a lower latency, high-resolution situation, that automatically become more deliberative. In Taiwan, we say meeting face to face build 30 percent of trust. If the resolution is bad, if it’s purely asynchronous, and we haven’t met each other and had food together before, it’s actually sometimes 30 percent of trust through online interaction.

Robert Stevens: You also did something called, I think it was called vTaiwan, wasn’t it?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, and that one experiment.

Robert Stevens: It moves discourse away from just outrage and it was more about consensus. It didn’t use face-to-face session at all.

Audrey Tang: We do do face-to-face consultation meetings at the end of the vTaiwan pol.is system. The idea always is that pol.is sets the agenda, so that in the face-to-face multi-stakeholder forum, we talk about those rough consensus agenda and only those were bound by the pol.is part. These two are both essential to one another.

Audrey Tang: Without a face to face consultation, there’s no binding power to the online agenda setting. Without this online agenda setting, there is no legitimacy to this face-to-face consultation cross-sectors item.

Robert Stevens: They have to work together.

Audrey Tang: That’s exactly the case, yes.

Robert Stevens: I suppose moving different subject a little bit, when I was talking to Zoë Hitzig, she also mentioned that quadratic voting could be used to put forward new form of taxation. Instead of the government just deciding how budgets are spent, taxpayers could also do that as well. Is that something you’re…?

Audrey Tang: That’s quadratic funding then.

Robert Stevens: Sorry, quadratic funding.

Audrey Tang: That will be QF. I think it’s a brilliant idea. This is actually one of what we call social financing innovations that we’re looking at. The other one, which is I think has been working in the UK in limited cases for some time is called Pay for Success. These two, again, need to work together.

Audrey Tang: In Pay for Success, there must be evidence that there really is some common good being generated usually in the form of saving the whole population money. The classical example is that if you work on rehabilitation and social integration of prisoners, they don’t commit crimes as often again.

Audrey Tang: It preventatively reduce social cost. It makes sense for the society to invest on this kind of preventative systems and mechanisms. Quadratic funding on the other hand talks about each person’s forecasting of the issue at hand.

Audrey Tang: QF when done in a less informed way will resemble a lot, not participatory budgeting, but more like crowdfunding, because crowdfunding is all about making a good case, mobilizing a lot of people, and things like that, The GoGo Kickstarter. That mechanism is firmly in the social innovation part and not the state matching fund part.

Audrey Tang: It’s in the governance fund because, obviously, only the stakeholders participate in the crowdfunding, and to the same extent, to quadratic funding. I think only when the QF can link to the actual evidence-based performances of certain projects and be done in a milestone-wise fashion can it truly become a governance mechanism, where the government feels safe to participate with.

Audrey Tang: Because then we have evidence that we sustain taxpaying dollar, instead of government deciding the procurement and the strategy, certain innovative people in the society do a better job than the government. For the administration, I think it’s important to see that there is a social preference, like crowdfunding, but it’s not sufficient.

Audrey Tang: Another necessary component is that the track record can be compared orange to orange to what the government’s KPI system has been already measuring to. I think these two need to work together before they can get adopted. We are intensely thinking about ways to make them work together.

Robert Stevens: A lot of these ideas tend to rely on the idea of democratic participation. That’s not always the case. How can you incentivize that to make sure these ideas actually come to fruition?

Audrey Tang: It’s just like participation in free software and open-source communities. Mostly, people participate to learn something and to enjoy the solidarity. That’s the two main intrinsic motivation, one of curiosity.

Audrey Tang: About the curiosity, really, if you frame a public policy matter as something that’s very blunt than just raw numbers, then of course, people would not be curious about it because it seems like work and proof of mental work. The other points that I always make is that humor, in addition to turn anger to outrage, there is another possible pathway in the mind, which is from anger to humor.

Audrey Tang: Once you vent your anger in a humorous way, then there really is no energy left to make outrage a personal attack. It’s called sublimation. A lot of work that I’m doing also is working with professional comedians who, they actually made a new political party called Can’t Stop This Party, or literally the Unstoppable Happy Party.

Audrey Tang: If you can take a look, I have a transcript here, maybe after our conversation, of my conversation with one of the very happy party members, Brian Tseng where you can see that I reframed a lot of policy-making issues as something humorous, something fun. That incentivizes participation.

Audrey Tang: I think there is more than one million views in the past week now, and talking about very serious policy matters but in a fun way. That is one incentive. The other incentive, which is about the solidarity, the idea of common purpose, or let’s just call it after the Mars rover, I guess. The rover after curiosity. Insight, yes. Let’s call it insight.

Audrey Tang: A community can offer insight that no one particular perspective can offer. To enjoy in what I call trans-cultural setting is to look at your upbringing, the culture that you were brought up and believe in from a perspective from a different culture like the Internet governance culture.

Audrey Tang: You look back to your democracy and see from the perspective of Internet governance and discover that it’s actually a very low-bit-rate upload system. Without the advantage of another perspective from other community members inspired by other community members, no one single person can achieve trans-culturalism by themselves.

Audrey Tang: Another participation opportunity is just to meet people who think very differently, take very different positions, but nevertheless build a shared value out of those different positions for the few that we have matured and achieve, I don’t know, Ubuntu or something.

Audrey Tang: This mutual insight offered by the diverse cultures is a longer-term intrinsic reward and idea of curiosity and fun is an instant gratification. A good mechanism design needs to include both short-term and long-term rewards so that people can climb this learning curve willingly and voluntarily.

Robert Stevens: Do you think that’s one of the reasons why comedians are so popular all over the world? Like in America, the chat shows like John Oliver are incredibly popular, probably because they make politics fun. Do you think that’s probably the way to get people involved in politics? Also, what other medias do you think are good?

Robert Stevens: I know in England, for instance, in a recent general election was run by memes in some way, and a lot of…

Audrey Tang: That’s exactly right. Memetic engineering, yes.

Robert Stevens: Yeah. Do you think that’s something you can incorporate into your government as well?

Audrey Tang: Our previous election is as you described, whenever there is a disinformation package now, each of our public-facing ministries can produce memes as many remixes, but also some original ones, within a couple of hours in the form of packages that just goes – I hesitate to use the word viral now, anyway – that goes very popular on the Internet.

Audrey Tang: It’s not only about democracy. It is about making the public forum more public minded instead of making it more about ad hominem or personal attacks, which tend to dominate elections. Memetic engineering toward fun, toward joy, toward humor, as I said, is inoculation.

Audrey Tang: It’s not as effective as a full-on insight for deliberation, which inoculates any participant against any future propaganda and one-sided sower-of-discord campaigns, because one would have the entire policy context of different positions contained in one’s mind around that particular issue.

Audrey Tang: Memes, while they work only temporarily, can at least incentivize people to get into the mindset required for informed deliberation to happen. It’s a gateway mechanism.

Robert Stevens: You think that memes can turn information or viewpoints that you might disagree with into at least a way of getting people involved within the political process.

Audrey Tang: Right, because if it’s not memetically packaged, it tends to make people even more divided and only reinforces people’s already very firm ideological beliefs anyway, because you will see it as something that you would not share. That is authoring the clarification package.

Audrey Tang: By making it self-contained and memetically fun, even though you may disagree with it, you would be at least curious to learn about it and share it to your friends and writing, “I don’t disagree, but this is really funny.”

Robert Stevens: Do you not think that also it could backfire in such a way that, for instance, in the UK, one of the most popular figures is someone called Nigel Farage. He is very, very funny, but also brought along Brexit, which many, many people disagree with. It can be attributed to the division of the country right now.

Audrey Tang: I make a distinction between humor, which is more about making fun of oneself or making fun of a situation, and satire, which is usually making fun of other people. Although there are considerable overlap – in English, you use the same word, funny, to describe those – I think the kind of militant funnyless like irony, sarcasm, and so on.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, there is very different words for those two. It’s hard for us to confuse those two. Humor is literally translated as yōumò. Yōu means deep and mò means tacit. Tacit deep understanding. It’s not just a homophonic translation, but it actually precludes the other kind of making fun of others or more aggressive way of militant fun.

Audrey Tang: What I have just said is just about the humor part of it and less about those more militant, aggressive part of it, which tend to, as you said, backfire and reinforce stereotypical images.

Robert Stevens: Would that also mean to ban certain types of fun? I guess not to ban, but to avoid certain types of jokes. A lot of people frown off subversive jokes, jokes that shouldn’t be said, and they use that as a tool to start a conversation which they might have otherwise find difficult to start.

Robert Stevens: Topics of race or gender tend to be discussed more for jokes than they do in real life, because it’s a very difficult subject to talk about, and even though they often can involve satire, irony, or as you say, more militant forms of humor, they are nevertheless a way of actually talking about interesting issues.

Audrey Tang: I think this is a cultural thing. What’s highbrow humor in one culture may be seen as attacking the sanctity of privileged classes in other cultures. This is why trans-culturalism is important. If I tweet something to someone in London, that’s like three cultures right there. There’s the culture of the Twitter moderator. There’s the culture of the sender.

Audrey Tang: There’s the culture of the recipient. That’s a trans-cultural situation without us even having to think about it. This whole movement of code of conduct is important because not of the code itself, but the code-making process where we turn a social script, like a pre-configured way of what is culturally acceptable.

Audrey Tang: When looked at in a cross-cultural setting like in most international communities around free software, and open-source, and open innovation, we collectively code a new social program with intention instead of just reactionary. This is necessary because in communities like Bitcoin or Ethereum, there really is no one strong, dominant physical community culture.

Audrey Tang: Rather, the communities have to make their own cultures. There is no limit of those cultures, because if those cultures diverge, they just fork the project. As I said, because the territorial limitation is lifted in the online spaces and the online communities, this process of making together a code of conduct identifying microaggressions.

Audrey Tang: One of my favorite examples if the Open Tech Fund community, which has the COC saying that unsolicited grammatical correction is a micro aggression in their code of conduct. For us professional software engineers, unbalanced parentheses, not to mention typos and grammatical mistakes really aggravate us.

Audrey Tang: Then this code-of-conduct-making process lets us see it is actually a microaggression perceived by people from other cultures, and so we changed our behavior. This process is more important than what you said as abandoning a priori, certain classes of fun, but rather to work out what that word makes more fun in a trans-cultural setting.

Robert Stevens: Thanks. More probably, this conversation is about how can you both decentralize politics in a way to get more people included, but also make it more inclusive to everyone involved.

Audrey Tang: Stop offering unsolicited grammatical mistakes suggestions is one good point to begin with. More seriously, one of the more powerful ways to include, I wouldn’t say more people, more diverse cultures, more diverse viewpoints, is to, as I said, brand appropriate technology not as a top-down way like we consider this appropriate for the Tao Nation in the Orchid Island aside from their local population.

Audrey Tang: It would be kind of colonizing, even though we may consider it “appropriate” for them to issue their cryptocurrency coin, the Tao coin. Rather, what has always worked better is for the local community builders to appropriate the technology, appropriate being a verb, not adjective in this time.

Audrey Tang: You see existing local associations, local cooperatives, and so on looking at ledger technology and fit that into their local community building context without any intervention from the state over there in the main Taiwan island.

Audrey Tang: Without exception, this kind of technology appropriation from the local community builders is more inclusive, because they have to also speak at some level the language of the ledger technologist they’re using, but they bring the technologist to Orchid Island instead of the technologist colonize the Orchid Island with their newly-fangled whatever mechanisms.

Robert Stevens: A lot of this seems to follow in the premise that the government in which you work would indeed let you do this and use these new technologies. How has it been trying to convince the government in which you work to use these new ideas?

Audrey Tang: As Glen often points out, our constitution here in Taiwan from Dr. Sun Yat-Sen’s vision is very Henry Georgian. There’s a lot of mechanism design like the Single Tax was a Henry George thought adopted by Sun Yat-Sen and written in the constitution. Similar things like the constitutional recommendation of cooperatives against over-privatization and things like that.

Audrey Tang: All the cutting edge like 19th century to early 20th century technologies were part of this social innovator, Dr. Sun Yat-Sen’s vision, which then informed the norm in Taiwan. Without accepting all the constitutional narratives, we nevertheless see in our constitution an idea that mechanism design should be participative and constitutive to a country.

Audrey Tang: I read that some Nordic countries take a very similar stance. In these cultures, it’s not about working through the bureaucracy or the existing administration system, because this idea of continued participators mechanism design is baked in in the constitution.

Robert Stevens: You don’t feel like you’re already extending the constitution.

Audrey Tang: Right, because the constitution already said that direct democracy, good. Representative democracy, kind of a compromise. The people should have agenda-setting power. The people should have recall power, and so on and so forth.

Audrey Tang: That was a very imaginative sense of constitution many years ago, but now that we actually start to realize it, as I mentioned, there’s no opposition or no resistance as such, because that vision was actually drawn out as a resistance against over-concentration of power in capitalism and in the state. This kind of resistance in a “Star Wars” sense is part of the core ideology in the constitution.

Robert Stevens: Who else are you looking to around the world for inspiration?

Audrey Tang: Like our petition system, the Join platform – 10 million visitors out of 23 million – incorporates pieces of Better Reykjavik, the pro and con columns without the ability to reply. Taking away the reply button is the main Icelandic insight that we deployed to the full effect. The CONSUL⁄ and Decidim communities, we also learn a lot, especially around participatory budgeting in Madrid and Barcelona.

Audrey Tang: Also, there’s a lot of innovations in the UK that is on the periphery of the government, for example, Policy Lab from the DCMS, where I think the GDS is also at, at the moment. We look a lot in the GDS and Policy Lab playbooks. In fact, there is a Taiwanese consultant of Policy Lab that then become one of the very early members of my office.

Audrey Tang: She is now back to London to work with the Dark Matter Lab, but still remaining a consultant to our office. These kind of fellows or even wearing multiple hats – I myself wear three international NGO board member hats – is something that we encourage here. That is how we continuously interact and build a common value with people with similar ideas around the world.

Robert Stevens: Just to make sure I’ve got the right end of the stick from this conversation, is it correct to say that you’re thinking about incorporating blockchain into your governance?

Audrey Tang: If you could be so kind, then I would say distributed ledgers, but yes.

Robert Stevens: Have you got any concrete plans to introduce them? The water thing you were talking about, is that just an example, or is that something that’s in practice?

Audrey Tang: The air box is already in practice. The water box is out of research stage. It’s now in proof-of-concept stage. It would be a good example maybe one year from now. There’s also quite a few intra-government use of blockchains. I’m just pasting you a link so that you can see how the National Development Council is building this kind of what we call the Taiwan Blockchain Alliance.

Audrey Tang: We use the term blockchain there because it’s what the private sector prefers and it is what the private sector leads anyway. If you look at that link, you will see various cases where it’s already being used and key players within that alliance, and various ways that is used, and within the government. I think it’s also present there.

Audrey Tang: If you want a gov.taiwan website, which instead of org.tw website, this is an NDC presentation. I don’t there is an English version for it. Let me very quickly search that for you. The NDC is all about building a bilingual environment. If any department or any ministry can make a bilingual blockchain advocacy piece, that would be them. Let’s see.

Audrey Tang: Department of Economic Development and Regulatory Reform Center. No, I don’t think they…At least, I wasn’t able to find that. It’s only a press release, but it’s better than nothing. Here is the English version.

Robert Stevens: Thanks. Is it fair to say that blockchain is going to be a major part of governance, or is it just one of many things, do you think?

Audrey Tang: It’s one of many things. Just from the NDC priority, there is also about linking Asia to the Silicon Valley, the idea that it’s not Silicon Valley solving Asian problems. It’s sometimes innovators in Asia solving Silicon-Valley-caused problems. That’s one key idea as well.

Audrey Tang: Mobile payments, startups, social innovation, and things like that, these are all, roughly speaking, part of the SDG 17, the 17th goal of open innovation and reliable data. We look at from the perspective of the 17th goal in the decade of action in the next 10 years.

Audrey Tang: Blockchain or distributed ledgers works quite well for the reliable data part, sometimes well at effective partnership part, and is certainly one of the inspiration of open innovation, though it’s probably not the end all and be all of open innovation.

Robert Stevens: Would you say this is a focus for you right now? Is this as revolutionary as my editors would like me to believe, or is this…? I’m trying to get a sense of how important it is to you and how important you think it is.

Audrey Tang: The idea that the blockchain governance technologies, which is evolving very quickly, as prototypes of what we can look as inspiration to deploy in so-called the real world. That is as important as any evolution in Internet governance.

Audrey Tang: This is, for me, a top priority, just to look at all the new collaborative governance systems, which, by its nature, evolves quicker and forks more easily in cyberspace. That, really, cyberspace-inspired governance mechanism design, I would say, is the top priority. There’s no other higher priority for me.

Audrey Tang: The technology itself, the current generations of distributor ledger technologies, we use them only when appropriate. We welcome the social innovators to appropriate them, like in fintech sandboxes.

Robert Stevens: On one side, the government just one election, it’s the Democratic Party who won. I’m guessing what’s on the cards for 2020 at least when it comes to your job?

Audrey Tang: It’s very interesting that during presidential election both leading presidential candidates promised a dedicated digital council or ministry. They’re like sharing campaign platforms. If you look at the core supporters of the two leading presidential candidates, despite all their ideological differences, there’s two things that they agree.

Audrey Tang: One is that we need to renew our democracy, make our democracy more relevant, more participative, and just building more the liberal democracy. That digital ministry or council must have its utmost mission to respond to this social will from the core supporters of both leading political parties.

Audrey Tang: Second, both of them also want us to build more meaningful international lengths to help other liberal democracies and work together with the slogan, Taiwan Can Help, to make sure that liberal democracies are seen as not only flyable against this populism, authoritarianism rush, but rather that liberal democracy by itself is evolving.

Audrey Tang: It’s not ritualistic. It’s fun, actually, to think about new opportunities together with our international partners. Democratic innovation domestically and democratic diplomacy internationally, these are the two focal points for me. I’m actually traveling to DC in a couple of weeks just to work on that and to the Digital Future Society meeting in Barcelona.

Audrey Tang: Very quickly after that, end of March, to travel to Berlin and maybe Amsterdam and The Hague, again on very similar missions. I feel fortunate that my work space is entirely virtual. Anywhere that I am in the world, as long as there is a fiber optic backbone link back to Taiwan, I can still work in this very virtual public digital innovation space. That’s going to be the focus for this year.

Robert Stevens: Obviously, the interview is coming to an end now. Do you think you’ve missed anything? Do you think you’ve discussed everything that you think conveys or at least gives me a sense of who you are and what you’re about?

Audrey Tang: Yeah. I would highly recommend the timed transcript, which is translated by myself, [laughs] actually, to the Brian Tseng show, “The Night Night Show,” because it captures how comedians are essentially politicians now, and how me, as a poetician, also works humor into policy making.

Audrey Tang: That show is a really example of how a curiosity and insight collaboration would look like without getting caught up on particular solutionism aspects.

Robert Stevens: I’ll definitely watch that. In fact those were all my questions for today. Thanks very much for talking to me about this.

Audrey Tang: Thank you and have a good local time.

Robert Stevens: Thank you, you too.

Audrey Tang: Cheers.

Robert Stevens: Bye-bye.

Audrey Tang: Bye.