Junichi Kagaya: Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, everyone. Welcome to the Future of Capitalism, Session Nine, Future of Democracy. We are in the middle of the second half of this course, and today is also an open session where each school has invited our broader community of each school.

Junichi Kagaya: Let me briefly mention about the house rules. Participants, students, please include your school affiliation in your Zoom name so we can identify you are a student of this course. Please always turn on your camera, but mute yourself for the courtesy for speakers and colleagues.

Junichi Kagaya: I see many observers. Kindly please mute yourself and turn off your camera. That would be very appreciated. Thank you very much, observers.

Junichi Kagaya: Today’s facilitator is my colleague in this project organization, Dr. Mina Konishi, Chief of Staff, Shizenkan University. She’s also Japan representative of IISS, International Institute for Strategy Studies. She has been attending all sessions together with me, and worked on this organization last year and this year.

Junichi Kagaya: I think this is the first time you appear, and speak to the students, so maybe you can introduce yourself first, but let me give the floor to you, Mina.

Mina Konishi: Thank you. Minister Tang, thank you so much for joining us today. We are so honored to have you with us today. Hello. Dear participants, I’m extremely privileged and humbled to introduce you to today’s guest speaker, Digital Minister of Taiwan, Audrey Tang.

Mina Konishi: Please allow me to use 60 seconds just to introduce us and explain who we are to the minister first. Kagaya-san, would you be able to show us the logo again?

Mina Konishi: Thank you. Minister, we are a group of 12 like-minded business schools led by IESE Business School in Barcelona and Shizenkan University in Tokyo as initiators. We initiated schools to jointly develop this initiative called the Future of Capitalism. We are from Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia, India, Switzerland, Spain, Nigeria, Brazil, and Mexico.

Mina Konishi: We are aspiring to create a global MBA platform for social change by exploring the roles and responsibilities of businesses and leaders. Today’s participants are students, alumni, and faculty members from 15 countries who have gathered to learn, think, and discuss about the issues concerning future of capitalism.

Mina Konishi: Before we start – Kagaya-san, thank you – let me show you all today’s agenda.

Mina Konishi: Sorry. I’m not very good at this. Today’s agenda, Part I, About Audrey Tang. We plan to spend about 60 minutes each on Part I and II. In Part I, we will ask Minister Tang about her activities in Taiwan, and some of her personal thoughts. Part II, we will move on to look at the world, ask the minister about her views on current situation and future of the world.

Mina Konishi: Let’s begin. Let me show you a one-page profile of Minister that I made. As you can see at the bottom, she has been the engine of Taiwan’s technology-driven COVID-19 response. I think this has also made her known to a broader population around the world.

Mina Konishi: Minister, participants have listened and read the “Harvard Business Review” podcast. How Taiwan is using technology to foster democracy. “The Economist” article, the recent article on Audrey Tang and how technology strengthen democracy, and your profile which we had from your office.

Mina Konishi: Could you explain how we read your profile to begin with, because it’s not orthodox style, it’s rather unique? Could you explain how we should read? Hold on, let me share.

Audrey Tang: While you’re sharing, I’m checking that this sound is working for you. I’m speaking at an OK speed, the microphone is working. Is it?

Mina Konishi: Yes. Thank you.

Audrey Tang: That’s fine.

Mina Konishi: This is your profile?

Audrey Tang: Yes, it is my profile. It’s my bio. Actually, if you change the abstract on the URL to bio as in B-I-O.txt, you will see a more traditional profile like audreyt.org and then bio.txt. B-I-O. Of course. That was correct. This is the more traditional one. It’s not a poem. It doesn’t rhyme. The good thing is, it’s in three languages.

Audrey Tang: It’s not 15 languages, but if you want to contribute more translations, I’m always happy to post it here. Now, the action word here is the last word, the fork, the government.

Audrey Tang: In the last line, when I said, “In the social sector, Audrey actively contributes to g0v or “gov-zero,” a vibrant community focusing on creating tools for the civil society was a call to fork, the governments.” The operative word is “fork.” Fork means like a fork in the road. In software development, you can fork a project without writing it off.

Audrey Tang: It’s fundamentally different from individual to individual competition. In a competition, you’re filling the same niche, but with a very different approach. To fork, means to inherit everything that there is, but take it to a different direction.

Audrey Tang: If you do not like, for example, how the government presents our budgets, or how the government handles regulatory discussions, or how the government handles the pandemic. You’re free to fork whatever service there is, in a way that does not violate copyright, because we do not hold any copyright restrictions.

Audrey Tang: Then take it to a different road and innovate from the grassroots, from what we call the social sector.

Audrey Tang: Then my role as digital minister is to merge the fork, meaning that whenever the citizens have a better idea of how to distribute a mask, how to vaccinate people, how to do contact tracing, they’re local approaches of maybe 500 people who tried it can be scaled to five million people, and then 20 million people in a matter of a week or two.

Audrey Tang: My role is to make this scaling out the innovation, scaling up the innovation as smooth as possible to facilitate the fork and merge. I hope that answer your question about how to read my bio.

Mina Konishi: Yes, thank you. Perfect. Thank you. Then, let’s begin Part I. Could you start by telling us what you’ve been doing in Taiwan?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, certainly. I’m Digital Minister in charge of social innovation, youth engagement and open government. I have a job description that I pin on my Twitter that you have probably already read, but it’s very short anyway, so I will read it again.

Audrey Tang: My job description goes like this. “When we see the Internet of Things, let’s make it an Internet of beings. When we see virtual reality, let’s make it a shared reality. When we see machine learning, let’s make it collaborative learning.

Audrey Tang: “When we see user experience, let’s make it about human experience. Whenever we hear that a singularity is near, let’s always remember that plurality is here.” My role as the Digital Minister is to connect the people to the people, which is to me what digital means, and not just IT, which is connecting machines to machines.

Audrey Tang: Whenever there is a emerging situation in Taiwan, it could be the legalization of Uber and ride sharing. It could be countering the infodemic that disinformation causes, the pandemic, and so on.

Audrey Tang: I make sure that all the stakeholders who enjoy the freedom of speech and assembly, and so on, can bend together, meet together face-to-face, or across the Internet to discover the facts together, share their feelings together and then develop pro-social social media where those feelings instead of polarizing, converge together into workable ideas that we then regulate into a co-created agenda.

Audrey Tang: This agenda, for example, how Uber should be legalized. We gather this into the public digital innovation space, which is my office and using the principles of radical transparency, posting all the lobbyist and journalists’ ideas online. A shared infrastructure of cybersecurity and co-creation across the different silos in the government.

Audrey Tang: We make sure that we work with the people, not just for the people. Those innovations that take care of the most people’s feelings can become public policy, again, in a matter of weeks. I hope that answers your question.

Mina Kinoshi: Thank you. What are you aspiring to do in the future, in 2 years’ time and in 10 years’ time and probably in 50 years?

Audrey Tang: Certainly. In the near term, my role at the moment is to set up the Ministry of Digital Affairs or MODA, which would be set up in Q3 this year. In MODA we bring together what’s previously belonging to different ministries in Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: For example, the Commission of Communication, National Development Council, National Economic Affairs Ministry, and the Department of Cybersecurity, Ministry of Transportation and Communication. Anything digital, instead of this post within different ministries and connected together in horizontal ways.

Audrey Tang: We will also now have a ministry of beginning around 300, and soon to be almost a thousand people connecting those previous silos together into any ministry. That’s my role for this year, is to set up this ministry.

Audrey Tang: Then the ministry is preparing us to enhance two things. One, is the resilience of our infrastructure. As you can see during the pandemic, we have set up extremely efficient infrastructures.

Audrey Tang: For example, as the mass-based contact tracing where people do not have to download any app, they just point their phone to a QR code, self-service printed. Then, without compromising their privacy, the random code is stored in the telecoms.

Audrey Tang: Then the contact tracing people can restore this whereabouts for the past four weeks without compromising individuals’ privacy. Because for the telecoms, venues, and so on, they do not actually have the access to the complete picture. For them it’s just random code, just gibberish.

Audrey Tang: This kind of privacy enhancing technology has paved the way of the kind of data altruism, data coalition, the kind of data sharing that we must enable in times of emergency like the pandemic. In Taiwan we have a lot of emergencies, earthquake, typhoons, not to mention other geopolitical ones.

Audrey Tang: We need to make sure that this kind of reliable, resilient infrastructure is there, no matter what incoming situation that we are faced with. This is for the, maybe next two or three years. The other thing is that this democratic model of co-creation, we want to scale it up and out so that it serves as a model, what we call The Taiwan Model.

Audrey Tang: So that we can use it to also work on climate issues, work on other issues requiring international coordination, and then establish this as a new norm, not necessarily best practice, but certainly sometimes a better practice to counter the emergent situation that requires more multi-stakeholder and multi-lateral communications.

Audrey Tang: My contribution to this for democracy, is largely the idea that we need to build the digital public infrastructures together in the international community. That’s also for the next three to five years horizon.

Audrey Tang: Then, for the next 8 to 10 years, of course, the sustainable development goals, meeting those goals is our shared priority. Then after that, I think I do not pretend to predict the future, so I just want to be good enough, and leave more room for the future generations to improvise. That is to say, we do not over-design things so as to foreclose possibility for next generations.

Audrey Tang: We want plurality, that is to say the people who are closer to the future to enjoy the full freedom of innovating using the laid on blocks that we’re building now, the infrastructure that we’re building now, instead of over-concentrating decision making power to just a few algorithm rule makers, or to for example, go for social harmony.

Audrey Tang: That makes it less likely for people to innovate, because there’s this one size fits all top-down approach, and so on. We want to enable as many co-creators as possible and also empower their communities. That’s for the next, about 20 or so years.

Mina Konishi: Thank you. One of the reasons why I wanted to invite you today, was to spread this Taiwan Model, to let as many people as possible to know about this model because I believe in it. Please, speak to us about it today.

Mina Konishi: On more personal side, what does make you happy or happiest in social life and in private life? Also, what are the things that disgusts you, or dislike, distaste? What makes you most frustrated and sad?

Audrey Tang: That’s a really good question. What makes me happy is, as I’ve mentioned, a good-enough consensus. It’s not perfect. To aim for a perfect consensus often means that people with the most time or the most privilege dominate the discussion, and take away the spontaneity of the newcomers or future generations.

Audrey Tang: I’m at my happiest when everyone in the room, although of different positions, after gathering, to get and share this feeling that we can all live with it, this feeling of just good enough, we can live with it, that is when I am the happiest.

Audrey Tang: Conversely, I am least happy when people have to obey the top-down dictates without understanding why, when people only follow the orders, the “what” of policies, without any way hold the powers to account, unable to speak truth to power. When people are muted, that means that I’m the least happy.

Audrey Tang: I’m happiest when we unmute our self and preferably share our host rights.

Mina Konishi: I read about Taoist approach. Would you be able to explain a bit about how Taoist thinking and approach influenced what you’ve been doing and the way you live?

Audrey Tang: Certainly. My understanding…

Mina Konishi: Sorry. Before that, please explain very briefly what Taoism is.

Audrey Tang: That’s a trick question.

Mina Konishi: I know.

Audrey Tang: The “Tao Te Ching” literally says that, “The way you can go is not the real way. The name you can say is not the real name.” I can’t define Taoism, but I can make sure that I share a part of the Taoism that I feel the most authentic to my daily practition. Here is chapter 11. It uses the not. It goes like this, it’s very short.

Audrey Tang: It says, “Thirty spokes meet in a hub,” like a wheel. “Where the wheel isn’t is where it’s useful. Hollowed out clay makes a pot. Where the pot’s not is where it’s useful. Cut doors and windows to make a room. Where the room isn’t, there’s room for you. The profit in what is, is in the use of what isn’t.”

Audrey Tang: For me, Taoism is focusing on the space, not the project, focusing on the collaboration, on the gathering, not the violence, focusing on the possibilities, focusing on making sure the people share those possibilities instead of any definite answer to anything.

Audrey Tang: Very shortly put, it’s to cohabit with problems, and be humble so that the solutions, for now, may come from surprising places instead of from a brilliant individual genius. That’s my understanding of Taoism.

Mina Konishi: Thank you. Some of our schools have curriculum. Most of our curriculums are business school, MBA curriculum, but some of us study philosophy, Eastern and Western thinking, and so forth. How does this Taoist approach influenced your thinking and your policies or your projects?

Audrey Tang: Again, to quote stanza 17, “To give no trust is to get no trust. When the work is done right, there’s no first, no boasting. Ordinary people say, ‘Oh, we did it.’” That’s collective intelligence.

Audrey Tang: In my opinion, when ordinary people can say, “It’s the ordinary Taiwanese people that came up with all the counter-pandemic measures,” that’s really the only way so the fatigue of counter-pandemic do not set in, because people always are creative, they create their own counter-pandemic measures after each variants.

Audrey Tang: If we have imposed, as I mentioned, top-down ways without explaining why, then even the most strict lockdowns result in fatigue. People simply cannot maintain that for a very long time. From my experience in countering the pandemic, and infodemic, what we are doing in the public service is just to trust the citizens, because to give no trust is to get no trust.

Audrey Tang: When citizens see all the real time data or the API’s or the context of policymaking, then we do not need to first or boast. The citizens come up with very effective, ingenious methods by themselves, and ordinary people indeed say, “We did it.”

Mina Konishi: I see. Thank you. Trusting part is the most difficult, I suppose in every society. Let’s take questions from the audience, students. Please raise your hands.

Audrey Tang: Unmute yourself. That’s the operative word.

Audience Member: Hello, thank you for being with us today. I’m also a fellow programmer. I wanted to ask you about parties, specifically, this part of you being also a software engineer and a programmer, and then moving on to the government policy parts. How did you choose to take this path?

Audience Member: What would you recommend to another software engineer? What would you recommend they do if they wanted to take that path as well? Thank you.

Audrey Tang: Thank you. That’s a great question. I did give a keynote at an international conference on functional programming for this particular question, and that’s entire keynote. I’ll try to condense my answer, but the full program is online, Creative Commons.

Audrey Tang: To me, in Taiwan, we call software engineers instead, program designers, 程式設計師. Programming, to us, is a designer profession, not necessarily engineering profession. Designers work with people, with society, whereas engineering discipline work with, I guess engines. That part is more and more being taken over by Co-Pilot and other assistive intelligences.

Audrey Tang: I believe in the future, computer programmers will move more and more to the design part. My field in computer science is programming language design. In language design, what we’re doing is to provide a set of thinking tools or abstractions.

Audrey Tang: The most important thing is to enable the people closest to the pain, the frontline programmers to really find a language the way they see fit, instead of prescribing for the foreseeable future how programs will look like.

Audrey Tang: The languages that work on Haskell, Roku, Previous Pro6, and so on, all stretch the limits of the domain specific languages and programmers liberty in defining and sharing their own visions of the world, and sharing it with the programming community. To me, this is exactly the same as politics.

Audrey Tang: I call myself a poetician, meaning that my job description as you just heard is a poem, where I aim to provide a set of abstractions that when followed, do not take opportunities away from the people, the public service, and so on, who use those concepts, but rather, makes new concepts easier to generate.

Audrey Tang: That is to say, if we say, “The singularity is near,” everybody is student, AI will terminate everybody’s job. Then it prescribes a very narrow set of possible futures. When we say no, the plurality is here, we must assist the society with technology, not the other way around. We must hold like eyeglasses or assistive intelligences accountable, and so on.

Audrey Tang: This by itself does not prescribe anything certain, but rather it liberates the public service toward more ways of collaborating with people.

Audrey Tang: Exactly like a good set of abstractions and core libraries do in programming language design. I would encourage fellow program designers to think on the design patterns, especially from a language design angle. Then more often than not, you can take the kind of trainings that you are already very familiar with, and share it with the public service community.

Audience Member: Thank you so much, Audrey, for your talk so far. Very interesting. I have so many questions I want to ask you, but I’ll limit to two. You mentioned the word politics. I presume that if you’re a minister, you’re a member of the cabinet and you’re a politician.

Audience Member: In a situation where COVID policy has become so politicized in so many countries. How have you managed to keep politics separate? Maybe you haven’t succeeded. I’m imagining it. How have you tried to keep politics separated from COVID policy in trying to do what you said you’d like doing is creating a rough consensus.

Audience Member: Also, if you could tell us a little bit about how you became a politician in the first place? It seems an unusual career trajectory for you?

Audrey Tang: Certainly. The second question is easier, so I’ll answer it right away. That was in 2014, where we literally occupied parliament. Nobody invited us in. We did invite ourselves in. Then, at the time, the Taiwanese legislature were fast tracking without substantial deliberation across trade service and trade agreement with Beijing.

Audrey Tang: Because of that, people were very worried about this process, so they went into the parliament. The theory was that legislator were on strike. They didn’t do their job in deliberating, so that people will go there and deliberate for them. Now, my role here is assistive one.

Audrey Tang: I and the g0v people, the Cable-Power-Radio people, helped to ensure that all the corners of the occupied parliament and the streets were livestreamed, transcribed, translated, and basically, facilitated by more than 20 NGOs. This quelled the fear, uncertainty and doubt during the Occupy. For the three weeks, it was thoroughly non-violent, unlike other Occupies.

Audrey Tang: The point here is that, when people get into this co-creative mood, even the more complex aspects of the CSTA, for example, whether we want to allow 4G infrastructure from the PRC regime into our infrastructure of telecommunication. That’s a very hot topic a few years down the line.

Audrey Tang: At that time, Taiwan was the only jurisdiction seriously deliberating it on the street. Instead of politicizing that, we can imagine it’s very easy to politicize that.

Audrey Tang: People did a very down to earth systemic risk analysis of how much it will cost to continuously assess whether the so-called private sector actors from the PRC regime are being captured by non-market forces from that regime.

Audrey Tang: The environment of livestreaming of every argument captured, and then posted online made it easier for millions of people to listen to each other. Whereas before, it’s only easy for one person to speak to millions of people, but not the other way around.

Audrey Tang: By scaling this listening experience, we proved that demonstration does not need only to be protesting. It could also be a demonstration of demo, of showing that it’s possible to get a set of coherent good-enough consensus, which were then ratified by the head of the parliament at the end of that Occupy. It was a victory.

Audrey Tang: At the end of 2014, all the mayoral candidates that supported this deliberation gets elected, sometimes surprisingly, and who didn’t, didn’t. I was invited along with other Occupy activists, as reverse mentors to the cabinet where I interned in the cabinet for a couple years before being promoted to full time in the same office as a minister.

Audrey Tang: That’s the story. Going back to your question. Exactly the same process. Every day at 2:00 PM the Taiwanese center for epidemic command, go on livestream posting all the data. The past few weeks, we’ve seen omicron down to low single digits per day in local confirmed cases.

Audrey Tang: People feel reasonably happy about that. All the journalists, and indeed anyone with a landline can call 1922, our toll free phone number to ask to their heart’s content of the shortcomings that they see on this CECC.

Audrey Tang: When the science spreads faster than rumors exactly as we discovered during the Sunflower Occupy, there was simply no room for disinformation and polarization to spread. In this pro-social environment, it’s easy then to treat it as ball out against the pandemic, instead of one party against the other. I hope I answered your question.

Audience Member: Yes, thank you very much. It’s a remarkable story. If I may be permitted just one more on, China has tried very much to bar Taiwan’s participation from any international health forum including the WHO. In this environment, how easy has it been for you to share information and best practice with other countries?

Audrey Tang: As you can see, my title is digitalminister.tw. This domain happens to resolve no matter which jurisdiction you’re in. As long as this takes place in cyberspace, that is to say, on Internet norms, we enjoy equal participation.

Audrey Tang: Indeed during the Internet Governance Forum in Geneva a few years back, even though if I visit in person, I would not be able to enter with my passport due to well-known reasons. I did send a telepresence robot to speak on my behalf. Well, not representing, re-presenting me, I guess. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Indeed, that worked. I went on the record as far as I know the first one on the record since ‘71 or something on official UN meeting. The past couple of years, the pandemic made it not a weird thing to do, but rather even a general assembly itself a couple of years back, were conducted over video presence.

Audrey Tang: I think video conference in general and the Internet multi-stakeholderism in particular, enabled us to share our learnings in a much more equal-footed approach. Hope that answered your question.

Audience Member: Thanks very much. It’s wonderful. Thanks.

Audience Member: Thank you, Audrey, for spending time today with us. I listened to an interview from you in 2020, and you mentioned two questions that you were looking for. One was that, if people have very different positions and backgrounds, how may we arrive to common values?

Audience Member: The second one is related to that one, is given those common values that we have, how can we innovate without leaving anyone behind? It’s a subject that I’m interested. I’m wondering if you made any progress or any projects that are aiming to fulfill those two questions.

Audrey Tang: Indeed, that is the central design criteria for the kind of listening at-scale. As I shared, the Polis conversation where we pioneered its use in public survey in 2015 is now a digital public infrastructure.

Audrey Tang: All the public servants can launch their own, like a Google Form questionnaire, a weekly survey to discover the shared feelings among all in a way that’s consistently controlling the trolls. That is to say, trolling doesn’t pay on this pro-social social media.

Audrey Tang: For example, right now, I believe the join.gov.tw platform, which enjoys around 30 million visits per year in a jurisdiction with 23 million people so that’s a lot, we’re now asking people what they feel about how to make a more safe and more friendly water sport and enjoy our rivers, dams, and things like that.

Audrey Tang: It’s posted a couple of days back. People are already posting their different feelings. We happen to be able to automatically discover their shared values despite their very different initial positions. This is very new. This is literally just out. People can see their participation, how those four different sets of people nevertheless share something in common.

Audrey Tang: Just by making sure that people see this as just something that they can do from day to day, we see this picture of democracy very clearly, that the ideological statements that divides people apart, people do not then spend calories on it. People agree to disagree. For example, some people think Uber is sharing economy, and some people think it’s gig economy.

Audrey Tang: Actually, for more practical, overlapping consensus, most people agree with most other of their neighbors most of the time, because it’s sounds so mundane. It’s not newsworthy, so you simply do not see on the news. This pro-social platform, including Polis and Join, people can see it very clearly that we actually have a lot more in common than the antisocial corner of social media would lead us think.

Audrey Tang: Just by sharing pictures after pictures of the common values, it enabled innovators to very easily identify the positive sum parts to innovate without leaving anyone behind. Hope that answered question.

Audience Member: Definitely. Thank you very much.

Audience Member: Hi Audrey. I actually watched your TED talk, and you mentioned that every Wednesday you will meet communities and and probably individuals. My question is, is there a way for you to identify which ideas are the good or the best one that you might come up with? How do you deal with ideas that are not very ideal? How do you lay the news to people that actually gave those ideas?

Audrey Tang: This is an excellent question. This is a social innovation lab, where I meet people, the social innovators every week. Also, many of them are remote too. Whether it’s remote, or whether it’s in person, I make sure that it’s on the record, and it’s in the Creative Commons, and it’s not necessarily just Wednesday.

Audrey Tang: Like yesterday, I had a meeting for a couple hours with Steve Chen, the co founder of YouTube, who returned to Taiwan to start his new startups. He had a lot to say about a startup ecosystem and his thoughts on the algorithmic recommendations in YouTube changed when he started to have kids and when he became a parent. It’s a very nice conversation.

Audrey Tang: Now, whether his ideas are good or not, it’s not for me to judge. Rather, my role is to ask the questions that I think that are pertinent to the issues at hand, for example, algorithmic transparency. Then those ideas are posted as transcripts or YouTube videos, and so on for the entire society to have a real conversation around.

Audrey Tang: That is to say, I share my agenda setting power, but not necessarily decision making power. It’s important because the lobbyists, or the journalists, and so on, who visit me know, that they are talking to the future generations. They will be on permanent record.

Audrey Tang: On this particular setting, it’s very unlikely for them to speak anything selfish, because it would look bad for the descendants. The future generations. People tend to speak pro-socially.

Audrey Tang: Again, that’s the Taoism approach to make sure that the space itself is creative, not that me in particular is good in judgment. It’s the crowd that makes the judgment. Of course, we can use voting systems, and Polis as a kind of a voting system, to ensure that people can collaborate without explicit coordination.

Audrey Tang: There’s technical details. The main idea is that it should be crowdsourced and shared.

Audience Member: Thank you very much.

Audrey Tang: Thank you.

Audience Member: Yeah, thank you. Thank you, Audrey, for joining us today. I have, I would say maybe an open question. I think that there are people who think that technology will be the one thing which will save us from climate change, I think of Bill Gates, for example.

Audience Member: I believe personally, that we should use all the solutions available, including technologies which could help us to gather data or whatever. At the same time, I also think that we should achieve some sobriety in consumption. I’m thinking of 5G, which is very much energy consuming.

Audience Member: My question could be a little bit vague, but what would you say to people who are reluctant to relying on technology, when it comes to sustainability issues?

Audrey Tang: For the record, I’m on fiber-optic line, not 5G at this moment. Even if I am on 5G, this is less carbon footprint compared to all of us flying somewhere. Everything is in perspective of what kind of habits people turn into.

Audrey Tang: If you turn a habit like everybody flying to the same spot, into something that is less carbon intensive, even though that by itself is still energy consuming, it is a net-win. Now, your point is valid in that we form new habits that simply weren’t there before, and we become addicted to it, and it happens to be energy consuming.

Audrey Tang: For example, burning energy for non-fungible tokens, my favorite example, then it does actually carries a real environmental risk. My answer is very simple.

Audrey Tang: When we make sure that the carbon footprint, the externalities cannot be hidden, cannot be shoved somewhere, and other jurisdictions are committed to at least make it accountable, then the jurisdictions or the practitioners that do not make it accountable, will be violating the norm, violating the default.

Audrey Tang: People will assume that they’re hiding something, and social sanctions may ensue. This is exactly the same model that we applied to other externalities, for example, tobacco control and things like that.

Audrey Tang: What I’m trying to get at is that nowadays, we need to keep giving out accounts, not just for the large public-listed companies, but small and medium enterprises too. We also want to make sure that when they do so, they get actually rewarded. In Taiwan, we have this program called Buying Power.

Audrey Tang: Even small, medium enterprise is committed to review their carbon footprints or other GRI-like disclosure, that they’re not by law required to do. Only the public-listed large companies are required. If they conform to the same standards, then we do preferential procurement.

Audrey Tang: The supply chain that procures such goods and services get award from me personally or from their respective ministers, and so on. When everybody gets this norm out, then it also rewards individuals to also look at their habits and then remind each other to be more proper in our addictions, habits, and so on. I think I’m net optimistic on the technology of social change.

Audrey Tang: I see that the open space technology, nonviolent communication, whether incarnated digitally as Polis, or whether it’s face to face in a scenario workshop. These are also technologies. These are habit-making social technologies that are equally important as compared to the other industrial use of digital technologies to facilitate change. I hope that answers your question.

Audience Member: Yes. Thank you.

Audience Member: Thank you very much for giving this opportunity to interact with you. It’s a great honor for all of us. My question might be a little bit broad. There’s this concept of surveillance capitalism, coined by Professor Zuboff from Harvard University.

Audience Member: For the people who might not know, very briefly, she’s mentioning that we’re entering a new era of capitalism, which is mostly controlled by a few mega IT companies, which use our behavioral data as a raw material to influence our behavior, to influence what we like, and when do we purchase, etc. In a way, her hypothesis is saying that this is eroding democracy.

Audience Member: Compared to that, and based on what I know about you, it seems that you’re doing the opposite of that. You’re trying to use technology IT as a way to empower people, to strengthen democracy. My question would be, how do you see her hypotheses? What do you think about the increasing power of, I won’t say names, but of these mega IT corporations?

Audrey Tang: I can say names. Facebook is really what I had in mind when I say antisocial corner of social media because it’s maximizing “engagement” in terms of click-throughs on advertisements, and so on. Granted, I’ve talked many times to the Civic integrity team within Facebook.

Audrey Tang: There are people within the Facebook machine that wants to steer it toward purpose, but as a profit-seeking entity, with some purpose, when those two different bottom lines compete with each other, the easier route is always that profit motive wins, even at the danger of their users, just like some other industry, which also has users.

Audrey Tang: What I’m trying to say is that when we make sure that these, I think the jargon is “dark patterns,” those habit-forming patterns are revealed as harmful to mental health, to societal health, and so on, we basically treat them as the night clubs of the digital sphere. With all due respect, we’re not shutting down the nightclubs. Again, we’re not steering our young people to it to conduct town halls.

Audrey Tang: We have dedicated places for town halls. It’s called a town hall. We have public parks, we have campuses, we have parks and national parks. These also take infrastructure and money to build.

Audrey Tang: In 2016, in Taiwan, for the first time, we said that even the infrastructure made out of bits, not out of concrete, even is intangible, it qualifies as infrastructure money of a special budget.

Audrey Tang: This is very important because previously, the state only sponsors the infrastructure for things that you can see, you can touch, like a public park, or a town hall construction.

Audrey Tang: Now, we say things like Join, things like the civil IOT response platform, and so on, all the digital places where people eat, along with civic infrastructure like our equivalent of Reddit, the PTT, where people discovered the COVID in 2019 actually, and triaged that message simply because PTT is not for profits. It has no shareholders or advertisers. It’s for purpose.

Audrey Tang: Those for purpose, civic infrastructure and those publics service, public infrastructure, if they received the same kind of funding, as the state does for science and research and public sector and maintained, then people understand, for my kids, maybe in the weekend, we’ll take them to a museum, we will not take them to a nightclub to do a mayor conversation.

Audrey Tang: Mayors would not be forced to give their public consultations in a nightclub where the smoke fills the room, you have to shout to get heard, people serve addictive drinks, there’s private bouncers, and so on. At the end of the day, we’re not shutting down the entertainment sector, we are just saying that there should be a plurality of sectors within the digital realm.

Audience Member: Thank you very much.

Audience Member: Thank you very much. I’m from India. Thank you for your presence and time. Governments and their corporate partners are broadly using technology to create a surveillance state, like keeping every citizen under observation, monitoring their every action.

Audience Member: This can only happen in a society that cannot be bothered about perfect liberty. How will it serve democratic polls or achieve greater outcomes that we see the future of capitalism?

Audrey Tang: I’m in charge, as I mentioned, for social innovation. I personally incubate the social entrepreneurs. The social entrepreneurs are there for a purpose, but with profit. Purpose first, before profit.

Audrey Tang: The idea of social entrepreneurship, as I mentioned, actually is only possible if the state is willing to entertain the idea that for some of the public services, the civil society and social entrepreneurs may actually do better. As one very concrete example, as you can see here, in 1I22 SMS example, here, the 15 digits are entirely random.

Audrey Tang: When you go into, I think this is a 711, your phone transmits just 15 digits posted by 711 into your telecom. 711 doesn’t know anything about you, not even your phone number. Your telecom does not know what those 15 digits mean.

Audrey Tang: It’s what we call a multi-party oblivious storage and your telecom, and many other people’s telecom, and so on, they store them in a federated fashion, they do not aggregate it anywhere, and the only person that can aggregate it is the epidemic control, contact tracing people.

Audrey Tang: They must do so by leaving a complete record, so anyone can just go to sms.1922 and look at exactly which municipalities, which contact tracer have accessed your whereabouts in the past 28 days. We delete everything after 28 days, and it’s never used for any other purpose.

Audrey Tang: In many jurisdictions, Singapore comes to mind, but also Korea, the crime investigator try to get their hands on this data, but because in our case, the system is designed by g0v, by the social sector, by the civil society people, there’s already surveillance resistance built-in.

Audrey Tang: Because we adopted this civil society innovation, we honored their original intent. We interpreted it saying that it should never be used for criminal investigation.

Audrey Tang: Actually, it should not be wiretapped at all. We did that interpretation very quickly after a judge turned down the first search warrant, and then went public about whistleblowing. That is to cite. Again, this is a virtuous cycle when we take the civil society inputs with privacy-enhancing technologies. It sets a better norm.

Audrey Tang: It encourages the whistleblowers within the public service, including judges, to go to the media. Then, it enabled the media to crowdsource for even better, more private, enhancing solutions which were then taken into the government. The government must begin first. We must trust citizens first.

Audrey Tang: I hope that answered your question.

Audience Member: Thank you.

Audience Member: Audrey, first of all, congratulations for sourcing inspiration, and for doing the kind of things that you do. I am from the School of Inspired Leadership in India. I have a question. You are both an insider and an outsider. You’re working inside the government, but you don’t have the baggage of the typical politician or the bureaucrat.

Audience Member: How easy or difficult is it for you to bring about change from inside the system by working with the bureaucrats, working with the politicians? What are the challenges? How are you overcoming those?

Audrey Tang: It’s actually very easy. The way we work is always swift and safe. I spent a year, when I was 11, in Germany. My mom used to drive me around on the highway, the autobahn in Germany. It’s very well-known for having no speed limits. I was fascinated by this concept of having no speed limits.

Audrey Tang: I asked my mom, “Would it not cause accidents?” She explained that if you have good infrastructure, not just the road, but also the car, not just the car, but also the requirement it takes on the drivers, and so on, if everyone is in line, then actually the faster you are, the safer you are. This phrase stuck with me.

Audrey Tang: Basically, I would not trade efficiency with security. I would never introduce something that make the bureaucrats feel less safe, just make the politicians feel that it’s more effective. Conversely, I would not do anything just to make people feel safe, like a security theater, but actually increase the workload for everyone.

Audrey Tang: You need to be Pareto improvement, things that are at least as safe and as swift as the status quo. Then, we very gradually do incremental delivery so that at every given time of the day, the bureaucrats and the politicians that look at our solutions can simply say, “It’s harmless.” It’s mostly harmless, a harmless co-existence. That is the trick.

Audrey Tang: Instead of doing any top-down planning as I mentioned, this is entirely crowdsourced. I’m always ready to say, “Yeah, my idea is a bad one. You have a better idea. Here’s the blueprint. Go and fork my work.” By co-creating with the people, not just for the people, in a sense, we are the resistance, so we do not encounter any resistance.

Audience Member: You mentioned Open Space Technology. I was in one of the first Open Space a very long time back with dear friend Harrison Owen who invented it. That’s a fascinating way to co-create and to bring the community together. Thank you.

Audrey Tang: Thank you. I am very inspired by Tom Atlee. I worked with him face-to-face also in the dynamic as facilitators. I see myself assisting the facilitators, not taking over.

Audience Member: Wonderful. Thank you very much. Thank you for your attention.

Audience Member: Thank you very much, Audrey. My apologies for having the camera closed. I’m a little down on my cell phone, because my system is not working somehow. Anyway, thank you very much for such a very insightful, very innovative way of looking at things.

Audience Member: It has been illuminating for me. One question that always bothers me is about inequality. You see around the world that big companies are becoming increasingly powerful, big and dominant. Do you see that the wider participation that you are providing in Taiwan can change the trend for growing inequality?

Audience Member: If so, how can do this? Or are you achieving this among companies or among people in Taiwan?

Audrey Tang: Yeah. In Taiwan, we say the more rural you are, the more advanced you should enjoy the technologies. When we allocated, for example, the 5G-spectrum auction, we make sure that for the universal health care in Taiwan’s a very socialist, like single payer covering even dentist visits, healthcare service.

Audrey Tang: The same for education services including homeschooling community, which enjoy exactly the same right as the basic school community, as well as the communication and democracy, and things like that.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, we have a very strong socialist core, a parallel core to the small and medium enterprise and the TSMCs of the world that are in parallel to each other.

Audrey Tang: We always make sure that the latest technological innovations even before they find a market fit in a profit-based capitalist world can actually find its pilots in one of the more rural areas to prove that, for example, drones delivering drugs is a good idea or not.

Audrey Tang: Making sure that telemedicine visits enabling local nurses and general practitioners to do even more complicated diagnosis with the help of their telecare workers, and so on. Again, we bring all of them first to the places where it’s more unequal, which requires the justice to restore their equal opportunity.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, we have 20 national languages, many of which indigenous. In our latest AI, Assistive Intelligence Research in natural language processing, is applied to ensure that the legislators and city councilors can interpolate with their native language in any of those 20 national languages. I can go on.

Audrey Tang: As you can see, those startups that solve those social inequality issues, enjoy the first mover advantage, because if we compete on purely for-profit motive, the market is simply not there yet. We foster this social entrepreneurship market as a pilot tester, almost like a sandbox.

Audrey Tang: They gain exclusive access of a set of interpretation as long as they can prove it’s for public benefit for six months, or one year, and so on, technically exclusive. If we discovered that this interpretation is actually a bad one, then we thank them for their contribution and everybody, no harm done. The risk is not that much anyway.

Audrey Tang: Then people learn to approach the problem in a very different way. If it does work, after three months or six months, then through mechanisms such as Presidential Hackathon.

Audrey Tang: Five teams each year receive a presidential trophy shape of Taiwan with a micro projector underneath that you can turn on, and it projects Dr. Tsai Ing-wen giving you the trophy.

Audrey Tang: It’s very meta, and Dr. Tsai Ing-wen promises you on that video recording within the trophy, saying that, “You embody the plural values of Taiwan. I will make sure that your idea become public policy within the next fiscal year with all the personnel and regulation and budget support.”

Audrey Tang: It’s like scaling out immediately to a national level if it proved to have a societal value. A parallel track for innovation that drives the innovation on the enterprise side.

Audrey Tang: I think this is not that particular to Taiwan. For example, Japan with Society 5.0 with strategic sounds, and so on, are trying quite successfully from what I understand the regional revitalization based on the same idea of social innovation driving industrial innovation. I do believe it’s a model that is worth spreading.

Audience Member: Thank you very much.

Audience Member: Thank you. Thank you very much for this very inspirating talk about how you do democracy with the use of digital tools in Taiwan. I’m living in Denmark, which is very…We have democracy for a very long time. We have tried also to – what could you say? – push more innovative solutions into the political discussion.

Audience Member: It’s not only Denmark, it’s also other Scandinavian countries and European countries. I think you should be respected a lot. When a figure like you comes into the political process, usually it’s very, very difficult to survive. Politics is about lining up different views.

Audience Member: Out of that, comes conflict, not physical conflict but strong arguments. Then, people have to choose either the one or the only. It seems as you have been able to keep out the conflict, and instead, talk about creating consensus.

Audience Member: I have a hard time finding out what is it that makes you survive in the political landscape in Taiwan? I would like to know because then, we could copy it in Europe. Is it understandable this question?

Audrey Tang: Yes. The answer is that I’m non-binary, and not just in gender, in everything. This is important, because binary thinking, that is to say, friend or foe thinking, dominates the politics that leads to zeros and answers, and is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, we’re enjoying very different constitutional design. I’m a double appointee, meaning that people elect the president directly. Then, the president nominates the Premier, the prime minister. Then, the Premier nominates the ministers.

Audrey Tang: In the cabinet at the moment, we have nine ministers with our portfolio, meaning large ministers. Seven of us are non-partisan. Within all the ministries, there are more non-partisan independent members than members of any party. That’s not true in the parliament, not in the legislative branch.

Audrey Tang: Of course, there’s the usual party politics going on there. Having the executive branch staffed by mostly non-partisans, enable us to work in a politically neutral zone. Unlike most other designs of constitution, most of the drafting of the law are proposed by the executive branch, not by the legislators.

Audrey Tang: Then, the legislator, of course, do the amendments and the changes, in their usual way. The structure, the formulation of the laws, 90 percent or so, are from the cabinet, which is non-partisan, by and large.

Audrey Tang: This is something that we see in other jurisdictions, that’s only possible if you have a citizens assembly, a citizens jury, or things like that. That are a attendant to the parliamentary politics, but by nature, then it becomes competitive in representative power.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, because that executive branch serves as the buffer zone between the civil society, on one hand, the movements, and the legislature’s partisan politics, so we get a lot more room to maneuver. That’s quite fortunate that we have this double appointee designed free from the party politics.

Audience Member: Adding a small question, is there somewhere on some home page, maybe yours, that describes the system on slides or written?

Audrey Tang: Sure. My website, easy to remember, it’s digitalministry.tw. There’s a lot of blogs, and so on, on this particular matter. Also, feel free to – and don’t attack me on Twitter – send me an email. It’s very easy to find.

Audience Member: Thank you so much. Very, very interesting.

Mina Konishi: Like to move on to the sixth, Part II, on social innovation. We’d like to ask your vision of the world and humanity. In more broader terms than before, please speak about the present and future of the world, not limited to Taiwan.

Mina Konishi: How do you see the current state of the world? How do you see the future? We are facing serious global challenges such as SDGs, economic disparities, and social divides. We had a pandemic, and on top of that, we had a war. The war broke out. The war, which is brutal, is like prehistoric type of war, that we didn’t expect to happen in the century.

Mina Konishi: In such a complex, current world, what is your view of the world? How does this world look like in your eyes?

Audrey Tang: As I mentioned, I see Internet of beings, not of things. I see collaborative learning, not just machine learning. In all of the events that you mentioned, I see plurality, not singularities. That is to say, when I say plurality, I mean allowing even empowering groups to reach rough consensus with proliferating and persistent difference.

Audrey Tang: This is a very different, I would say, is a distinctly Taoist view on things. If you’re following a set of traditions or a set of dogmas, then diversity or tensions or conflicts can feel like setbacks if you’re aiming for a particular direction of change.

Audrey Tang: As I often say, in Taiwan, we’re hit by earthquakes all the time with Eurasian Plate on one side and Philippine Sea plate on the other. The Japanese people know what I’m talking about. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Then, whenever there’s a earthquake, the tip of Taiwan, the Jade Mountain, also grew. Every year, we grow by about three centimeters.

Audrey Tang: I see tension, conflict, and so on, as necessary for people to feel their co-presence and the in-fear togetherness. Without such shared urgency, people’s energy will not be able to contribute to co-creation from a plurality. People just discuss, and do whatever they’re doing.

Audrey Tang: With this shared urgency, we now see people believing that democracy is not on the backslide after all, that it means something to be part of the democratic network. That it means something for liberal democracy to hold its own values and that it’s not out-of-date.

Audrey Tang: Rather, it can create innovative ways of not just spreading the worst about any particular war, but about discovering new ways to counter even the most urgent pressures, such as net zero, together.

Audrey Tang: The wind is changing. Democracy, instead of being seen as relatively less efficient or effective or simply out-of-date, are now being renewed. People are asking a different set of questions like, how can we make it more timely? How can we respond to each other’s needs in the here and now? All this because of the urgency, especially the war that you just mentioned.

Mina Konishi: That’s so true. How will digital contribute to creating a better future? Would it bring us a better future? What are the difficulties, problems, or hurdles that we have to overcome to make the best use of technology and digital?

Audrey Tang: There’s the trap of trying to maximize automation of trying to extrapolate the volitions of the current generation, and make a single optimizing paperclip stuff out of it. It’s a very strong solutionism spirit in some part of the tech, not necessarily technology sector.

Audrey Tang: I think we’re now, because faced with real urgency, orders simple optimizing visions pales in comparison with the complexity of a pandemic, infodemic, and a war. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Within the past couple years, we’ve seen that is dominating singularities here. A conversation is losing its potency a lot in everyday people’s conversations and even terms like surveillance capitalism seems to be a purely academic thing.

Audrey Tang: People are weaving this into their daily conversations. Also, thanks to the social dilemma and many other popular videos about this particular topic. This optimizing mindset, whereas many years ago, seven or eight years ago, I would say it’s the main trap is no longer as insurmountable as it is now.

Audrey Tang: I genuinely think that people are now really looking at plurality as a preferable outcome to singularity. I do remain cautiously optimistic that we will be able to use digital to connect or register or in digitalization as to leave no one behind.

Mina Konishi: Thank you. Well, looking at the situation in Russia, we, who’ve been enjoying democracy in rather advanced countries, thought the information and control by regime wasn’t that easy.

Mina Konishi: Looking at Russia, and looking at the survey of Russians, who actually believe in what government is telling people and not having access to other source of information, we were quite shocked and surprised.

Mina Konishi: Just wondering what we could have done or could do to prepare or help those people in that authoritarian regime to have better access to information or fair information now.

Audrey Tang: In addition to randomly sending SMS to Russian telephone numbers. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: What I’m trying to say is that 40 years ago, when I was born, Taiwan was still in the martial law. It’s very much a authoritarian continuation of a dictatorship in Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: I can say, because my parents are both journalists, during the martial law era, my earliest memories are around censorship, political control, surveillance, and things like that. I can say with quite some confidence that in a authoritarian regime, what people say to the pollsters may not be what they believe.

Audrey Tang: Take those poll numbers with a heavy grain of salt because people just say that to be safe. Even with that in mind, in Taiwan, we do rely…At that time, for example, our international correspondents in Hong Kong, who are paying a lot of attention to the human rights situation in Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: Many underground reporters, journalists, have to go a very roundabout way of sending their reports and testimonies to Hong Kong, in order to get the Amnesty International and other international correspondents, to actually see what’s happening in Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: Then, it goes back as a foreign report to the Taiwanese population. Hong Kong played a very important role in the democratization in Taiwan. It seems the roles are reversed. Then, we are, of course, hosting a lot of journalists, which are previously based in Hong Kong international or Hongkongese journalists.

Audrey Tang: We do need to double down on journalism, on independent reporting, and media, ensuring that the underground activists are equipped with not just journalistic training, but also journalistic technologies. Things like end-to-end encryption that can protect themselves against that cohesive forces in a hostile environment.

Audrey Tang: With sufficient practitioners on journalism, I do believe that the truth will get out, not just to the international community, but also to the people living in authoritarian regime themselves. It may look soft, like a soft power, but I do believe that at the end of the day, truth speaks louder.

Mina Konishi: Thank you. Sorry, what skills, technology should a journalist acquire? Sorry, I missed that part.

Audrey Tang: Basically, to communicate safely, we have the Electronic Frontier Foundation, along with many others, who are working very closely to make sure that they can get their voice out.

Audrey Tang: It goes to some details. Not just encrypting your disk in a full-disk encryption, but also have a separate set of password, the rubber-hose password. That if you’re under violent coercion, you type in that password, and it erases everything and presents a safe environment.

Audrey Tang: There’s many technologies for people working in journalism, in reporting in a hostile environment. In my previous life around the turn of century, I collaborated with the free-net community to work on those technologies.

Mina Konishi: I see. May I take questions from the floor?

Audience Member: Since you mentioned, basically, you’re trying to do democracy through technology and to try to reach as many people as possible, I’m thinking that approach would mostly work with people who are young, people who are more technologically inclined, and they know their way around technologies.

Audience Member: Have you found any pushback maybe from people who are older, people who might not be so well-versed in technologies? For those people, do you have any recommendations? How to reach them, how to make sure that they are included in your vision of the new democracies.

Audrey Tang: Prior to entering the cabinet, my previous day job was with the Siri team, working on cloud service localization in Apple for six years. We’re an assistive community, assistive intelligence community. Whenever the people who cannot use Siri to their liking, it’s always the designer’s fault. It’s never the people’s fault. That’s the nature of assistive technologies.

Audrey Tang: I am a fervent believer in the assistive paradigm, in the sense of technology fitting the people, not the other way around. I design my public service projects always with input with my parents who are around 70s, and my grandmas who are around 90s, and so on.

Audrey Tang: I would say, they are very familiar and comfortable and not because they’re my parents and grandparents, but because we design with their input in mind. It’s not that it’s about old or young, it’s about how many hours do they spend as fellow designers, as fellow participants and contributors, as makers, essentially.

Audrey Tang: If you get them involved in the design of digital services as early as possible, they have very much a lot to say, and a lot more time on their hands since they’re are retired to try out different things. My grandma, 90 years old for example, suggested a bunch of her younger friends around 80 years old, to try out our mask ration in preregistration system.

Audrey Tang: We designed initially to use debit card in the ATMs within all the convenience stores. You can enter your debit card, type your password. It will wire a trivial amount of money to prove that you are you, and with the receipt you can redeem for the preregistered mask. It all works very quickly.

Audrey Tang: Now the Grandma Yang, one of around 80-year-old friends who to my grandma is a young friend, tested that, and said, she will never do that, because she used an ATM to withdraw cash. To wire anything out, she always resort to pen and paper, because she don’t want her typos to end up wiring out her entire savings. She feel less safe.

Audrey Tang: Although it’s swift, it’s quick, it’s not safe. With her input, I always say, “OK, if you’re the digital minister, what would you do?” Grandma Yung said, “Oh, use our universal health card without entering passwords.” Because it has no accounts associated with it, so she knows that it’s safe.

Audrey Tang: If you need to pay, she will count in coins around the corner in the counter. The point here being, that nobody imagined ATM-like kiosk can insert a health card. It’s there, all typically IC cards. The IC chips are in the same position. With some firmware and server changes, it actually can be done.

Audrey Tang: That’s exactly what we have done. Then Grandma Yung convinced all her younger friends around 70 and 60 years old in the community, because she came up with that idea. By amplifying the wisdom of the elderly, we ensure that they become the early adopters.

Audrey Tang: Once they do that, they are very influential in the community, when they convince their younger generations. They carry still this family authority. To involve the elderly as much as possible early on, so they log in more hours into the co-design, co-creative mood. I guarantee you that they will be as comfortable as the young people.

Audience Member: OK. Thank you very much.

Audrey Tang: Thank you.

Audience Member: Good evening, Minister Tang. Thank you for the very refreshing talk. Listening to you gives me the impression that the politicians in Taiwan are very kind and generous, patriotic. Your citizens are very well informed. I’m thinking, what could be the conditions that are making this possible for Taiwan?

Audience Member: What they’re doing now to be successful? Also, for countries like the Philippines for instance where I come from, where there’s a lot of misinformation, and a lot of not so well-informed citizens.

Audience Member: Open-source platform, like listening to all their voices might not necessarily work, and there might be a tendency for democracy to turn into a mobocracy. What can you say about those two things?

Audrey Tang: Of course, I always emphasize Taiwan’s liberal democratic tradition. The liberty according to the freedom in the world and freedom on the net survey in Freedom House, we’re doing pretty well in terms of civics space. Having this civics space in the first place is a condition.

Audrey Tang: The liberty, the freedom is like a operating system on top of which democracy flourish. If you do not have this underlying operating system, then indeed as you said, that if you try to run the software, there’s simply no RAM for it. The working capacity is not there to support this upper-level application.

Audrey Tang: When I was a child at a time, there was essentially not so much political freedom. Certainly, no freedom to form opposition parties in Taiwan. My mom worked instead to get the co-ops movement on the way. She co-founded this Homemakers Union to popularize the idea of now what they will call a circular economy.

Audrey Tang: Then to contract the farming produces, and so on, in a consumer co-op fashion. By focusing on the consumer rights, by focusing on getting the messages out around the correct labeling, no pollutants, organic farming, and things like that. She possesses no harm, no threat to the dictator, to the authoritarian regime.

Audrey Tang: It’s very much possible to amass social legitimacy this way. Indeed a largest Taiwanese charities like Tzu Chi, and so on, all began even before our first presidential election. Still today, if you have a local earthquake and the charity’s published a number, the municipalities published number, people still believe the social sectors number.

Audrey Tang: This legitimacy focusing on not politically controversial, but rather, nobody can argue against consumer protection right. Then using the same techniques of voluntary association of nonviolent communication, one can get a legitimacy in exactly the same way as we practice now in digital democracy.

Audrey Tang: Digital democracy is not a public-sector-only thing. People can do that in social sector as well. In time, that will also power the digital democracy that we’ve been talking about, but this time powered by the social sector.

Audience Member: Thank you very much.

Audience Member: Thanks a lot. First of all, Minister Tang, thanks a lot for your presence here today. At least for me, it was an eye-opening session until now. I thought before this session that if I wanted to contribute in any way into society, I had either to pay taxes or actually elect our leaders.

Audience Member: What you’re demonstrating today is the involvement. Indeed, empowerment can be given to the people through these information technology tools, that you are, I would say, surfing the wave of the revolution. That was great. Thanks a lot for that. It’s an education for me.

Audience Member: My question goes back to the war topic that Dr. Konishi just asked you. I have two questions related with that. First, what would be your opinion of certain active groups, for instance the Anonymous? Apparently, a couple of weeks ago they published that they will actually be taking sides in this war, in this case, against Russia.

Audience Member: When I read that, of course a bunch of conspiracy theories goes around my head. For instance, if today they are against Russia, tomorrow, another group can be pro-Russia. If there’s another conflict somewhere else, these groups might start popping up.

Audience Member: They are, I would say, replacing what we call democracy because these people are not traceable. You cannot retaliate against them. They are definitely not representing one country, one nation. This would be at least the way I see it. I would love to hear your opinion about it.

Audience Member: The second question is consequential. I am completely uneducated about IT and everything else. What actually these folks can do from a distance in their computers? Can they shut down a refinery in Russia? Can they actually press the red button on someone’s behalf? Is this something that is reality or is this science fiction?

Audrey Tang: It’s science fiction, but reality sometimes are even more imaginative than science fictions. To answer your question, a website to a refinery is not the same as the refinery itself. It’s very easy to shut down a website to a refinery, but it’s very rare for a refinery to be powered by its website.

Audrey Tang: In technical terms, the information technology and the operation technology, the IT/OT, are not necessarily tightly coupled. Meaning that, to deface a website does not translate automatically to the red button access. On the other hand, getting the website access can enable people to get insider information, maybe there’s contact addresses or whatever, internal emails and so on.

Audrey Tang: That can then enable what we call social engineering, the more regular person-to-person way to con your way into getting access. That is not just by running programs alone. This is just making sure that people can get the kind of insider information that are prerequisites of starting such person-to-person operations by themselves.

Audrey Tang: One, I alluded to. There was a leaked SMS contact database of Russian people. There’s a website that enabled pretty much anyone, through a mobile phone, to send random anti-war messages to a mobile phone number in Russia set up by the sort of people that you mentioned.

Audrey Tang: To me, in a neutral term, it’s direct action. Not waiting for anyone to go to a multilateral setting and say anything, but rather, it takes some of the matter to their own hands. Most of what you read on science fiction are not currently possible, but reality has a way to be more imaginative so I wouldn’t say it’s never possible.

Audrey Tang: Thank you for the question.

Audience Member: Thanks for that.

Audience Member: Sorry. It’s me again. Thank you very much for everything so far. It’s been, for me also, very illuminating.

Audience Member: In terms of the question that was asked previously about age, old age and digitalization, how do you prevent a situation of increasing economic inequality as a result of increasing digitalization? In other words, people who have been well-versed in digitalization will have the skills and the facilities to do so much more than those who don’t.

Audience Member: I’m a member of a golf club in Japan, where the membership is quite old. They refuse to send out emails to members because it disadvantages the people who don’t do email. Everyone has to receive letters from the golf club. That’s just a small example.

Audience Member: In a rapidly aging society, how do you prevent this economic inequality from taking place through increased digitalization? How do you keep everyone in the same boat?

Audrey Tang: I didn’t get the examples. They sent out paper postcards because the post office ensure everybody received them in the same day?

Audience Member: Say at the same time. If you send an email to the members, some of the members are too old to do email. If they want to participate in a competition, they have to…It’s only a small example. I’m sorry.

Audrey Tang: That’s a great example. One can, for example, say that we ask a post office to deliver the snail mail, the paper mail to all the recipients at this Sunday, for example, and then, you send an email that Sunday afternoon and problem solved.

Audrey Tang: For me, a harmless coexistence means that it’s swift and safe. If it disadvantaged people, we can always turn it into a advantage.

Audrey Tang: I have a anecdote about postcards. In Taiwan, we used to require the people who apply for the reimbursements for COVID-related sufferings, if they’re low or mid-income or their income gets impacted by the COVID, they can redeem NT$10,000 by proving that their income is being harmed by the COVID.

Audrey Tang: The first time we did that in 2020, people lined up at the desks of the local health and welfare offices. Workers are simply overwhelmed. The new type of city even transported boxes and boxes of forms to the central government and say, “You design this form, you must type it in because we’re simply overwhelmed.”

Audrey Tang: I’m sure Japanese people know what I’m talking about. After this initial foray of paper-based forms, which switched very quickly to postcards, and by last year, 2021, we switched entirely to postcards.

Audrey Tang: If you’re a low or median-income person, and you don’t want to file your application online, all it takes is to ask your local district office or any of those self-service printers in all those 12,000 convenience stores to print a postcard with the postage stamp already prepaid.

Audrey Tang: Then, you fold the A4 paper two times, and with the photocopy of the envelope of your bank accounts and sign your name, and presto, you just put it into a nearby post box. Then, something magical happens. It’s aggregated into a post office.

Audrey Tang: The people who are suffering from handicaps of movement are pretty good typers gain employments by typing in those postcards. Very quickly, they get aggregated into the digital websites, as if these small or medium-income people have filed those website applications themselves.

Audrey Tang: If they have a debit card, and if you’re a parent, for example, they can also use a ATM and type their health insurance number and withdraw cash. What I’m trying to get at, is that digitalization doesn’t mean paperless, it means to make the possibilities swift and safe.

Audrey Tang: People feel safer when they don’t have to queue in line, especially during times of COVID. People feel that it’s safer when they can count the bills at a ATM. If they don’t have a debit card at all, if they don’t have a bank account, then, at least a check is mailed right back to whichever address they write on the postcard.

Audrey Tang: The desks on their local welfare office is no longer swamped because they’re not even open to receive applications. The point I’m trying to make is that digital transformation enables all the touchpoints to innovate, empowering the people closest to the pain.

Audrey Tang: They get the freedom to innovate, to solve the issue at hand, instead of waiting for somebody at a central government to type in their forms.

Audrey Tang: Only by making sure that the underlying bedrock systems are secure and resilient, and offer instead of APIs, like wall sockets, can those startups, those innovations, and some plugins safely and to basically deliver the service in a way that’s more pro-social and social, whichever the emergent situation is.

Audrey Tang: That’s my anecdote about postcard and about reducing inequality. My grandparents, for example, very much appreciate that my digitalization strategy doesn’t involve abolishing paper forms and post offices.

Audience Member: I see what you mean. Here in New…I’m joining from the UK at the moment.

Audience Member: During COVID, the bottom 25, 30 percent of the school children who don’t have computers at home or who have to share them with their brothers and sisters or their parents, who simply didn’t have the kinds of facilities to join school when school was happening remotely as the richer kids who were able to supplement their education through tutorials, and so on.

Audience Member: This has caused a huge problem here in the UK. I still suspect that digitalization is not a total 100 percent blessing on the world for the people who live in the bottom 10, 20, 30 percent.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, but that’s forced digitization, right? The root cause is definitely the virus, not the bits. In Taiwan, even at the height of our only real wave, the alpha variant, the school never closed to the disadvantaged children.

Audrey Tang: Even when we moved some of the classes online just for a couple of months, the disadvantaged children can always go to the school and participate using the computers and facilities there with proper precautions and support, of course.

Audrey Tang: It also prompted us to begin this September, this semester to adopt a way for the disadvantaged children to also bring those iPads and laptops home. Previously, they have to go to school because our zero-trust cybersecurity wasn’t all the way there. We rely on an internal network to keep them safe.

Audrey Tang: We’ve doubled down on investing in the cybersecurity arrangement so that we are now pretty sure that they’re safe around the edges whereas, of course, all children enjoy the use of laptops and iPads. If the teachers see them as complimentary, we’re not replacing paper-based textbooks if the teachers and parents are not comfortable with it.

Audrey Tang: The disadvantaged children, including medium-income family with five children, they can all take those laptops and iPads home, I think, beginning this September.

Audience Member: Well, I think the bottom line is I wish we had a ministry of education like you have in Taiwan in the UK. Thank you.

Audrey Tang: Taking this as a compliment.

Audience Member: Yes, it is.

Mina Konishi: May I take others who’ve never asked a question?

Audience Member: Go ahead.

Audience Member: Hi. Good morning. I’m in Brazil, so good morning. This has been very enlightening. I’m not even quite sure what my question is because there’s so many things going on right now. Thank you for sharing with us.

Audience Member: I am a public administration student, but I have a class in business administration. This has been very different from other lectures that we’ve heard so far. You kind of indirectly talked a lot about diversity. You mentioned being non-binary, and Asian, and age-related topics, and things like that.

Audience Member: Public administration and from the public point of view, you have to be very inclusive. You have to design policies for everyone. That also has a lot to do with democracy. I think the private logic though is very different. We’ve been thinking about this course. We have some people approaching in a very different way, like with the private logic and public logic.

Audience Member: I’d like to know what is your take on it? What is the government’s role in all of this? What’s the role of business? What’s the role of government? Also, I’ve been thinking a lot of it, about diversity, and how we’re biased. How can we have a different capitalistic…? The same people who feel disempowered.

Audience Member: I don’t know if I’m being clear. I want to know your thoughts on that.

Audrey Tang: Yes, it’s very clear. It’s a really deep, philosophical question. That is to say, how can we design a public service such that people who want to maximize their private profits nevertheless ends up maximizing purpose. It’s like the holy grail, isn’t it? If we solve that, we pretty much solve everything.

Audrey Tang: I do have some contributions, but I would say it’s better practices, not best practices. I don’t think anyone claimed to have best practices in this regard. I’ve consistently discovered that if the business community are operating under a very clearly defined social norm, then they would not even attempt regulatory capture because it does not pay.

Audrey Tang: When the social norm is being hidden by the polarization and party politics, then it creates opportunities for the private logic to dominate the public one. I call the model that I’m building in Taiwan a people-public-private partnership that began with the people.

Audrey Tang: For example, people occupying the Parliament nonviolently to set a norm around the 4G infrastructure adoption from the PRC regime components or people occupying the National Auditing Office to do direct action and bring out Xerox copies of the campaign donation and finance record, which used to be kept on paper only.

Audrey Tang: The g0v people, the activists, made a game where people can solve CAPTCHA to turn individual cells in the huge spreadsheet back to structural data so that the campaign donation and finance can be republished to investigative journalism as public-open data.

Audrey Tang: Now, the National Auditing Office, of course, protested this, saying, “You can’t be sure it’s a correct character recognition,” in which g0v responded, “That is why you should publish and structure data yourself.”

Audrey Tang: That creates such a strong social norm that the National Auditing Office actually had to publish as open data. Once they do in 2018, the investigative journalism community discovered that Facebook advertisements were not filed by two, pretty much any candidates in that year’s election as a donation or expense in that record.

Audrey Tang: Which is to say, you can actually pay from outside of our jurisdiction to bypass fact checks through advertisement, to influence the election without being captured by our National Auditing Office.

Audrey Tang: Then we went to Facebook and other large platforms saying, “OK, our domestic platforms all agreed to conform to this national auditing norm, and it’s not a government ask, it’s the social occupier’s ask. So, if you do not conform to our local norm, you may face social sanction.”

Audrey Tang: Chances are, people will socially sanction Facebook because people already know that it’s a problem, thanks to the media-journalism community.

Audrey Tang: There was a whistleblower who quit Facebook. I think she was in the civic integrity team, who said Facebook had to take selected jurisdictions very seriously because the social backlash threat is cogent. It’s true. They did reveal as open data in real time all the social and political advertisements during the next election period leading to 2020.

Audrey Tang: Also, they launched all the campaign donations outside of our jurisdiction as well, at a loss of their advertisement revenue. This is one very small anecdote, but it shows that the government is much stronger when negotiating with a profit-seeking entity.

Audrey Tang: When the trade negotiation has the people on their side, you can say, “It’s our people forcing me to do this trade negotiation.” That’s what I mean by people-public-private partnerships. Thank you.

Audience Member: Good morning, for me. My name is Adriana. I am from Brazil, FGV. It’s a pleasure to listen your opinions about the future. We are living in the fourth revolution. We have a new reality with the artificial intelligence. I want to listen your opinion about the future of jobs in this world so unique in terms access of education and technological education.

Audrey Tang: Thank you. It’s a great question.

Audrey Tang: I see AI as “assistive intelligence”. By assistive, I mean aligned and accountable. By aligned, I mean that this glass is aligned to my personal interest of wanting to see you better, more clearly. Its job is not to replace my eyes. It’s accountable in a sense that if it’s biased or broken, I can fix it myself. I can take it to the local repair person down the street.

Audrey Tang: I do not have to pay three million dollars of licensing fee or spend three years to reverse engineer it just so that it does not project advertisement to my retina, which will not be aligned to me, it will be aligned to the advertisers.

Audrey Tang: A very simple example of a eyeglass as assistive technology showed that we need to treat AI, hold them accountable and aligned, exactly as any other from of assistive technology. If we do so, so that it protects the dignity of the citizens instead of treating them just as users, then it will enhance the possibility of creating better jobs.

Audrey Tang: That leads to more satisfaction because you can then delegate the part of the mundane task, that nobody want to do anyway, to those assistants. If you do not have the local tweaking control, if the innovation is not open, is not aligned to you, then actually it’s the other way around.

Audrey Tang: It becomes authoritarian intelligence where individuals become replaceable as soon as their data is surveilled, gathered, and their pattern of repetition being learned by the algorithms. All the creativity from the person doing the job disappear, and then become entirely automated.

Audrey Tang: It’s a conscious choice that all the jurisdictions can do. I believe that, for example, GPAI, many international organization around AI, are now converging on such pro-social data coalitions, data altruism organizations, and so on, that has a very specific purpose-based direction for AI-based research and funding.

Audrey Tang: If we collectively decide to stop funding the dark patterns of authoritarian intelligence, then I’m not worried about it making the jobs even less welcome, and even less enjoyable for human beings. Hope that answers your question.

Audience Member: Thank you.

Tomo Noda: Thank you so much for your participation. I am Tomo Noda from Shizenkan. I’m one of the two initial initiators of the project. We are so privileged to have you. Thank you so much.

Tomo Noda: I have a question with regard to metaverse or the future of our digital world. The reason I’m asking this is I sometimes feel digitalization helps us a lot, impact people a lot.

Tomo Noda: In the meantime, as a community, Internet is somehow partial, because we connect to the Internet and digital when we want to do. Sometimes if I am bored, if I do not want to hear what I wanted to hear, I can disconnect from the digital world. To some extent, I believe that human relationship in the digital world is partial, not comprehensive enough.

Tomo Noda: The more we rely on digital world, Internet world, and network, our relationships, human relationships quality may be deteriorated. It is not the same relationship as we used to have in earlier community.

Tomo Noda: If we live in metaverse so that our human relationships become more partial, sometimes functional, how do you view that as a huge human relationship when we have metaverse spreads, and we have dominated by the Internet?

Audrey Tang: I think there’s a real danger when we speak of the meta-verse or a metaverse, because that, to me is the singularity mindset, that we will have to conform to whatever social norms set by Zuckerberg or some other metaverse-making person.

Audrey Tang: I think the real danger is in the spontaneity of social interactions being dominated by the prescribed interaction patterns by whichever person creates the rule on top of which the so-called metaverse operates. Indeed, that’s what the novel’s no crash is about. It’s no crash where the word “metaverse” happened. The reality is so bad. It’s entirely dystopian.

Audrey Tang: Nobody wants reality anymore. It’s very violent, very fragmented, so people escape to the metaverse because the reality was very bad. People escaped to the metaverse. Then, the rule-makers like hero protagonists who know how to make those rules, gain a distinct, unalterable advantage by being a, what I call OG, original gangster, in the making of the metaverse.

Audrey Tang: This is a really advanced utopia novel. I don’t know why nowadays, people are selling a utopian vision. What I’m trying to say is that the vision of plurality that I have is co-creational and inclusive, which means that is an extension to the plural relationship that we already have, that we can then shape however we want.

Audrey Tang: We can build our own microcosm, for example, I use shared reality in 2016, to talk from Paris with a bunch of middle and primary schools students in Taiwan. My avatar is an entirely open-source platform.

Audrey Tang: I shrank my avatar to the same height as they are and towards the schoolyard or whatever, wisdom, and then don’t have to look up to me, because I became the same height as they are in a kind of familiar avatar. Then, they can treat me as more like a peer-to-peer relationship. I put myself in their shoes, so to speak.

Audrey Tang: There was another project where we work with the elderly in Kaohsiung, and then we made their avatar resemble their youth. Then, in the shared reality, they traveled down literally in memory lane and served as guides to the local young people on how the streets looked like during the Japanese era, in Taiwan, and so on.

Audrey Tang: What I’m trying to say is that it is a shared reality that’s defined, including interaction norms by the people who want to share their reality, their ambiance. Then, it’s conductive to more face-to-face sharing and more connection between groups of people.

Audrey Tang: If both sides, instead of end-to-end innovation, need to conform to the norm of intermediary, that, exactly, the same problem of surveillance, capitalism happens, except, of course, maybe tenfold as more serious.

Audrey Tang: We need to actively resist any singularitarian vision of metaverse and embrace instead a plurality, or as some of my friends say, a Pluribus. Hope that answer your question.

Tomo Noda: Thank you so much. Thank you.

Mina Konishi: Thank you. We are approaching to the closing time. Minister, would you be able to…

Audrey Tang: There was a last question?

Mina Konishi: We only have two minutes. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Make it quick.

Mina Konishi: Thank you.

Audience Member: I will do it fast. This is a course about the future of capitalism. I guess you cannot discuss the future of capitalism without discussing the United States. Maybe you’ve done some thoughts about what the problem is in the United States, and more interesting, what is the solution.

Audience Member: What are we doing with the US? They are hollowing out their democracy, and 6th of January last year, and so forth. Have you thought about what could they do?

Audrey Tang: Yeah. All my civic tech friends, people who work on democracy affirming technology, see that urgency as a wake-up call. They’re now much more energized. Frankly speaking, receive more funding, because of that event.

Audrey Tang: I’m still very optimistic in the US being a open experiment, admitting to its mistakes and correcting them in the open, at least it does that. In the more authoritarian or closed countries, they do not admit mistakes. Even after they do, they try to stop the people who bring those news instead of the problem itself.

Audrey Tang: I do think there is every opportunity for the people who work on democracy enhancing technologies and privacy-enhancing technologies, to thrive in the US. Not because US leads the world in terms of democracy and liberty, but because it has a self-correcting, in the open culture that we are seeing unfolding right now. I’m still pretty optimistic. Let’s work with them together.

Mina Konishi: Thank you. Minister, could you give us a message to the future leaders who are attending today?

Audrey Tang: Yeah. I always quote Leonard Cohen. I’ll do that now again. “Ring the bells that still can ring. Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack, a crack in everything. That is how the light gets in.” Thank you for the great questions. Live long and prosper.

Mina Konishi: Thank you. Thank you very much.

Junichi Kagaya: Thank you very much, Minister Tang and office for the arrangement. Thank you, Mina, for the facilitation. Let me stay through a few minutes to announce the next upcoming sessions. I’m aware of the time.

Junichi Kagaya: Upcoming sessions, this Saturday, we have optional session connecting to Nigeria. We’ve got four wonderful speakers coming from Nigeria’s energy sector as well as fintech unicorn.

Junichi Kagaya: Please, try to join as much as possible to this session, although it’s optional. It will be hosted by our fellow Professor Henrietta from Lagos Business School. In this weekend, after the optional session on Saturday, Europe changes the time. They shift from wintertime to summertime.

Junichi Kagaya: If you are based in Europe, there is no change in the session time. If you are outside of Europe, meaning Asia or Americas or in Africa, depending on which side you are, please double-check the time difference between Europe and your time zone, and adjust the session time accordingly.

Junichi Kagaya: If you are outside of Europe, your time difference between Europe and your time zone will change after the weekend. Please, be mindful with this change. After that time change next week, next Tuesday, we connect to Denmark, have discussion with these three guest speakers on business enterprise in realizing sustainability.

Junichi Kagaya: Also, by email, I have announced that we’ve confirmed the date of the optional Session Four on Islamic finance and the perspective of Islam on future of capitalism, with these two excellent speakers as well. This will be, April 9, Saturday, at 2:00 PM, Central European Time.

Junichi Kagaya: With that said, I hope to see as much as possible many of you students on Saturday optional session, otherwise, next Tuesday. Thank you very much. Good evening, and have a nice day.