James Chater: Thank you so much for sparing a bit of time today. I’m really appreciative. I’ll just give a bit of kind of a background about the publication and stuff like that.

James Chater: So “The Wire China” it’s a publication, a digital magazine set up by David Barboza who’s the former Shanghai Bureau chief of “The New York Times.” They particularly look at China obviously, and from the perspective of kind of business technology, geopolitics.

James Chater: But as I’m a kind of journalist based in Taiwan, they were looking to kind of get more stories and get more voices from Taiwan as it was of important dimension or that kind.

Audrey Tang: OK. Who else from Taiwan do you plan or have you already included?

James Chater: That was from Taiwan. This is the first one I’ve done from Taiwan. I’ve done a couple more. Because I’m from the UK, I’ve done one with a couple of experts on EU China Relations. Now, I just got back to Taiwan, and we came back out of quarantine about a couple of week ago now.

Audrey Tang: I hope they treated you well.

James Chater: It was perfect. Luckily, I had a kind friend who let me stay at his house for two weeks, so it was good. Do you have any questions before we start?

Audrey Tang: None at all. If you’re happy with the quarantine process, I’m happy. [laughs]

James Chater: I was very happy with it. I mean, I experienced both. I was in Australia in January, so that was a bit more…I thought the quarantine process, it was very smooth, got to call every day and it’s all well organized. No complaints at all. [laughs]

James Chater: Let’s jump in. It’d be great to hear a bit about your background, specifically your background in getting into technology. As a lot of people known, and you’ve spoken about before, you left school at 15, at a very young age, to pursue self education in technology and on the digital world. How did you come to that awareness of the power of technology at such a young age?

Audrey Tang: I did get into the Internet when I was 12, originally working on for example, the text based multi user dungeons, so games.

Audrey Tang: The games that involves a lot of programming, [laughs] and it turns out that all the knowledge that is required to be a good programmer is online. Very few of them is captured in books, especially textbooks, and that’s true not just about computer programming languages, but about pretty much any cutting edge study.

Audrey Tang: I get acquaintance with the arXiv the preprint server. I wrote through email to the researchers and they wrote back. That’s especially true for my two science fair projects when I was 13 or 14 respectively. The researchers didn’t know I was just 13 or 14 anyway, [laughs] we started collaborating in no time.

Audrey Tang: It feels like my textbooks were 10 years out of date or at least. I talked to the head of my school, my principal, and she listened to my story and said, “OK tomorrow you don’t have to go to middle school anymore.”

James Chater: What year was that? Was that 1995 so the Internet was still…

Audrey Tang: The Internet was quite well-established. The World Wide Web was new.

James Chater: Do you think you’re entering that world on the cost of the World Wide Web becoming more?

Audrey Tang: That’s correct. Before the World Wide Web, almost nobody used hyperlinks. There’s spill for, there’s Archie but they remain niche. The system organization of the Internet services, or dial-up BBS in the sense that there’s a central host… it’s a little bit symbolic of the Taiwan’s democratization.

Audrey Tang: The freedom to allow for cross sector or horizontal social sector link, that is. The freedom of press was just being lifted.

Audrey Tang: Martial law was just being lifted, at the time we had no presidential election. Well, no direct election I mean. The first election in ‘96, is also the first campaign that I participated in because my dad worked a spokesperson for one of the candidates who lost the election.

Audrey Tang: By thinking about websites, thinking about what to link together, it was very liberating. It doesn’t feel like because I’m young, I must grow old, be adult before contributing to the society. I’m like, just with a few hyperlinks people actually organize together and this feels quite magical.

James Chater: Was that a very personal development and realization you made? Were there any people in your family perhaps who had a background in technology that helped you to that realization or was it a bunch of a personal experience?

Audrey Tang: I think it is an entire generation because the personal computers was Taiwan’s thing when I was young. Pretty much everyone had access to not very expensive Internet access. Internet as a human right even in the very low resource areas actually date all the way back to the public phone booth.

Audrey Tang: There are special regulations that gives the… not broadband at the time, but just Internet and telephone services to the least developed places in Taiwan. I think it’s really Taiwan thing to make sure that education, house, communication and so on is universally accessible.

Audrey Tang: Because I was studying math, studying cognitive science, artificial intelligence, computational linguistics, all these were developed literally on the Internet itself or the developers basically used Internet as a way to find the researchers of common interests. I think my parents and my extended family, mostly didn’t try too hard to push me back to school.

Audrey Tang: I think that’s the major contribution… it is very, very essential, because I wasn’t an adult, I would require a signature to basically do anything. [laughs] I think with the blessing of the head of the school, we gradually convinced my parents who then convinced my extended family, and then I was given free rein of 16 hours, not just, seven hours a day for research.

James Chater: With that kind of decision, what was the real motivation for that decision? As you just mentioned, you had a…

Audrey Tang: …intellectual curiosity and a sense of contribution to the contribution to the society…

James Chater: …especially, that was one of the main motivational factors…

James Chater: Moving on to your role as a Digital Minister for Taiwan, I’m very interested in your…you said previously that you have anarchist worldview. How does that fit in with your role within a government? Because for some that might serve as an oxymoron?

Audrey Tang: I don’t give orders and don’t take orders, either.

Audrey Tang: As you have witnessed, I do the extension cord wiring myself.

Audrey Tang: This is certainly not opposed to where I usually come on orders. I’m more like a hyperlink between the public sector and the social and private sectors. This role of voluntary association, not giving or taking orders, has been the way that I think about politics, ever since I got engaged to the Internet’s governance communities when I was 15 or so.

Audrey Tang: I participated in the Perl community, it was the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network, the various… IETF, Internet Engineering Task Force, where I worked with the Atom working group to develop the next alternative to the RSS, the Really Simple Syndication, through rough consensus and running code.

Audrey Tang: Nobody can coerce other people to do anything. We must always develop arguments based on the shared values. These are just bread and butters, in Internet governance. That’s my native culture. It will be another six years, since I was 14, for me to even cast my first vote.

Audrey Tang: …and represent a democratic system. I already, by then, considered the bit rate to be too slow compared to…

Audrey Tang: …entry governance that we were able to do on the Internet. I would say in that sense, a digital democracy native.

James Chater: Is that the kind of ideal form of governance you see for the rest of the world in the future? What does the ideal form of governance look like for you across the world in the future?

Audrey Tang: I think what matters is that we do not foreclose possibilities for our descendants for the next generations. Anything that’s unsustainable, anything that makes gains for the current generation at the expense of future generations, that’s, by definition, unsustainable. To flip that around, anything that opens more possibilities for future generations to work on, that’s better.

Audrey Tang: I think governance model is continuously evolving based on the underlying communication technologies and digital technologies. If we make sure that anyone who receive these models suffers because of it can actually contribute in a way that assess the agenda for how the model can change something that’s as flexible as possible, which implies democracy, actually, I think that is for the better.

James Chater: In the description of your position, which I think is on the government website. There’s this very great phrase about where we see in Internet of Things that I see in Internet of Beings. I think that that’s something that it’s like a very evident thread in the work that you do this idea of humanizing technology and digitizing democracy.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

James Chater: How do you — because I think it’s a very unique way of looking at technology I think for a lot of people now — how do you catalyze that change in perception within people to see technology as this power, which has human potential and the humanization of technology?

Audrey Tang: First point is, democracy itself is a piece of technology is a kind of social technology. All this voting, uploading three bits every four years per person, this is technology. We can actually increase the bid rate. Everyone now sees that citizen’s initiative, sandboxes referenda. Each of these designs increase the bit rate a little bit without, of course, taking away the voting system.

Audrey Tang: Also, I will point out that the Open Space Technology and the way that movements such as gov0 organize themselves around as a social sector, that’s also technology. well, the Open Space Technology people call themselves technologists. The T you know is T stands for technology. Obviously, it’s technology, as well as nonviolent communication, dynamic facilitations, and so on.

Audrey Tang: Just as social science is also science, social tech is also tech. This is the example that I will use to make sure that people when they hear about tech, not just think about natural science and industrial tech.

James Chater: We talked a little bit about already the kind of some of the early experiences you have with technology. With this kind of experiences with technology, will they always in some way related to governance? Was there it an politics, I guess? Is that always been the running thread in your kind of understanding of the role of technology?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, definitely, as I mentioned, the question I asked is whether it empowers people closest to the suffering? If it takes the power from the center to the edges, like the Wide Web vis à vis the earlier authoritarian model, then that’s an empowering sort of technology. That’s appropriate technology because people can appropriate it like they want.

Audrey Tang: On the other hand, if this technology is the other way around, rather than assistive intelligence of its authoritarian intelligence based on centralized surveillance and things like that, then is taking power. One little power that was in the edges, and then toward the center, right? That would be authoritarian.

Audrey Tang: It’s still a technology that is developing to the direction. In a sense, we benefit from having a very different jurisdiction nearby that demonstrate the same sort of underlying principles, can be applied indirectly opposite ways. That helps us to quickly form a consensus around let’s not do that, this is that.

James Chater: OK. We can definitely come on to some of the risks later on, because I already put some of those in the questions. It would be great to just delve a little bit deeper into digital democracy and the ideas you’ve put forth in relation to this.

James Chater: The three key ones, it seems that this idea of radical transparency, civic participation, and rough consensus, I mentioned some of those already.

James Chater: I find the civic participation in particular quite interesting because some people might in the first instance say clashes with a more traditional sense of idea of democracy, which is this idea of the public sphere and going somewhere to vote and seeing other people participating in democratic exercise…

Audrey Tang: This is still pretty good, but the bit rate is too low.

Audrey Tang: It means not just the information convenient age valid, but also the time interval, that just too long.

James Chater: What are some other ways you can translate that idea of civic participation into a digital democracy?

Audrey Tang: Of course, it always starts with universal broadband, because if you don’t, you’re essentially saying these are not people that you’re excluding, but in Taiwan as I mentioned, we do deliver on universal broadband so that’s a check.

Audrey Tang: Then the next thing is about a what we call media and data competence. This is different from media literacy, which is, of course the last century’s main idea about people viewing the radio or television broadcast materials was a critical or creative thinking, right? That was media literacy.

Audrey Tang: It still posits the user, the consumer [laughs] of media of information in a powerless, comparatively powerless situation vis à vis producers and other nation. But broadband as human right doesn’t mean broadband download as human rights, it’s also broadband upload.

Audrey Tang: Anyone in Taiwan are free to start a video conference at any given point at no more marginal cost, literally no marginal cost, because people just pay all you can eat plans, and very inexpensive one, like 16 US dollars or something. Because of that, then it means that everyone is the producer of media, producer of narratives.

Audrey Tang: Once the both lifelong education and the basic education centers around the idea that anyone is a media producer and data producer now, we can instead of teach just co create.

Audrey Tang: For example, fact checking the three presidential candidates during their debates in real time, by the middle schoolers, or contributing to climate science by maintaining the air boxes which is PM 2.5 and other good quality sensor as part of the environmental education in primary schools and so on.

Audrey Tang: Once you had a experience in doing so just as a journalist who once was working in a newsroom, and in the fact checking, then one takes a more holistic view on things. Therefore would not be captured by this simple reduction to one bit thing, which is called polarization…

Audrey Tang: …in democratic narratives, and then, of course, true civic participation become possible, because this is about people contributing their personal experiences in the way that still maintains that listening attitudes towards new ideas, instead of just reducing thing to one bit, which is not conductive to civic participation.

James Chater: The idea of participation comes across very strongly as well and we can talk about it but I have a few more questions like that. Could you talk a little bit more about some of the examples that you’ve been initiating within government? I know that you have an office hours in Taipei, and then you also travel around Taiwan to various regions and [laughs] prepractice to the word…

James Chater: …exactly, yeah, could you just describe a little bit about those policies?

Audrey Tang: The social innovation tours the office hours and interview where we publish the entire transcript. These are the bread and butter because when people understand that the next generations are also checking the transcript and recording, it tends to be that none of the people in the room will make short sighted arguments that benefits only the people in the room and at the expense of future generations, this is essential.

Audrey Tang: Also important is the idea of a Participation Officer network, or a PO network. Within each ministry 32 of them, around 100 people, are trained in the art of listening skill, facilitation of making sure that hashtags are engaged in the here and now [laughs] is much like in the previous century, how media officers react to journalists and how a Parliamentary Officer react to the MPs.

Audrey Tang: The Participation Officers need to react to, for example, some designers starting a petition saying textile systems are explosively hostile. Now, this is not something that you can actually solve it by a press release. The real solution is obviously inviting anyone who complained and co creating a tax filling experience together.

Audrey Tang: We got, last year, a 98 percent approval rate, which is unheard of in digital service. That’s because a lot of people has participated in the co design. That includes participation offices in other ministries.

Audrey Tang: When we hold workshops and collaborative meetings, the facilitators at each table are public servants, but they are not reporting to the competent authority of the issue at hand. When we talk about tax filling, for example, the facilitator may be a public servant from the Ocean Affairs Council or from the National Palace Museum. Totally unrelated to tax.

James Chater: It’s a pooling responsibility, in a sense?

Audrey Tang: That’s the case. Also, because it’s the multi stakeholder forum, the facilitator automatically take the citizen’s side, because when they are off work, they also have to file the tax.

Audrey Tang: They wouldn’t be perceived by the citizens as being in a silo…

James Chater: It’s external forces or something like that.

Audrey Tang: …which is being defensive because they firmly are on the tax filer’s side, not on the Ministry of Finance side. When we do talk about Ocean Affairs — there was collaborative meeting on that too — then maybe it’s the Ministry of Finance or the Ministry of Health, which is unrelated to Ocean Affairs. Maybe they are surfers in their spare time. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: The idea is that public service is both a skill, as in public administration skills, but also as an attitude. If we are from the angle of the perspective citizens, how much more effective if we can listen a skill and get some shared values, else out of those very different positions and then this rough consensus emerges always as a part of the collaborative meeting.

Audrey Tang: While this is my personal demonstration as a demo [laughs] for the first few years as digital minister, by now each participation officer more or less just work as a team, and often, actually almost always, without my direct intervention, because they already understood how to work like that, and we do biweekly collaborative meetings across sectors.

James Chater: It sounds like this is also an element of accountability as well, and that’s pooling interest. It lessens the potential for polarization, it sounds like as well.

Audrey Tang: That’s right. It increases the possibility for a co creation that is basically everyone can live with. When people went through this deliberation and resulting in something we can all live with, it won’t become vaccinated.

Audrey Tang: This is fresh on my mind, because I’ve got the chance. That’s…

James Chater: That’s a good idea. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: We become vaccinated against polarization conspiracy theories, because we already have antibodies within our minds that can actually argue from all the sides. You can take all the sides, and that neutralizes the sense of outrage that polarization depends on this other ring of the other camp.

James Chater: Yeah, it’s a very powerful way of just cultivating a very participatory way in the public sphere and so other people they had participation officers, POs. This is something that you’ve been leading specifically.

Audrey Tang: Yes, we institutionalized further regulation and municipalities are also adopting it now.

James Chater: The various city governments also trying to adopt?

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

James Chater: It’s not something that this will hopefully just continue now.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, definitely. I don’t run it personally. The POs in each ministry also oversee the POs in each agency reporting to that ministry and all the way to the fourth or fifth level. It became like a fractal. It’s more of a culture rather than any specific policy, but a regulation that enables it is already there.

James Chater: People can come to these participation officers on any issue essentially the…

Audrey Tang: Definitely, well, anything that administration deals with, within the enabling regulation for the joint platform.

Audrey Tang: For example, the presidential issues, that is to say the national defense and diplomacy, these are out of bounds, but pretty much anything domestic is fine.

James Chater: Is there any political theories to any other political theory that inspired these views for you? Because I’m might thinking of some myself now, as I’m talking to you, I know this is slightly different from what I planned but were there any political theories you will take these ideas from or inspire these ideas for you?

Audrey Tang: Well. I take my inspirations from my previous experience in different self aware community. I would think of my mentors, Larry Wall, Lawrence Lassek, Richard Stallman, Eric Raymond and so, in a sense, I guess, political theories…

Audrey Tang: …working a very different political realm, I would say. In the mutual political sense, I also learn a lot from Kojin Karatani, the Japanese anarchistic thinker whose work has been translated to English and Mandarin, because he envisions this idea of non rival non exclusive exchange mode.

Audrey Tang: It’s a good, almost economic formulation of the core principles of the of the commons of the Internet and so on. I find his work to be quite inspiring and also quite pragmatically useful when I want to translate something from say, the Ethereum community into everyday political language.

James Chater: That’s something that also you’ve talked about as well in this idea of seeing, I guess there’s not seeing beyond the conflict, it’s just recognizing that there is always going to be some form of trying to arrive at consensus in issues like the conflict between the economy and the environment, for example.

Audrey Tang: That’s right. The conflict of course is there, but that’s because each side of a conflict have common needs and the idea of turning something of scarcity based mindset into co creation, which is almost by definition there could be more for everyone.

Audrey Tang: That is only the case. If each of us are committed to discover that, for example when we legalized marriage equality.

James Chater: Sure.

Audrey Tang: The idea was very simply put to legalize the person to person relationship bylaws, but not the family to family, not in laws. When two same sex people wed there’s no father in law mother in law and so on.

Audrey Tang: The family to family tradition in this country of 20 national languages, each one has a different idea about kinship, some of them are matriarchies… some of them, doesn’t care about gender in their indigenous leadership selection traditions. If we leave kinship alone from marriage equality then most cultures are happy.

Audrey Tang: People who care about the democratic rights of participation, equal participation by same sex married people, usually care about individual to individual basis.

James Chater: Sure.

Audrey Tang: When we made a hyperlink act following the two referendum, one constitutional interpretation, it’s what everybody can live with, and we can prove via posing so on. Actually, most people feel that it’s something new, something they did think it as a zero sum or even negative sum, if you just look at the conflict.

Audrey Tang: What the result is, is actually a positive sum. Everybody feel they have gained a little bit, or at least didn’t lose, improvement and all of the that. I think that’s a good example.

James Chater: I guess, because I just want to ask again about the…It sounds like it, the way that you get people to recognize this, I guess, inherent part of society necessarily and that you arrive at a common good and they’re working together. You can’t necessarily eradicate conflict, which I think is probably somewhat written into the ideal we have of democracy that we can arrive at this perfect consensus.

James Chater: The central way you think of getting people to realize that there’s another way of constituting democracy is by recognizing that working together we can create something that works for all eventually.

Audrey Tang: That’s right. That’s right. That doesn’t leave anyone behind it. That doesn’t leave our future generations worse off.

James Chater: Absolutely. OK. That’s really fascinating. [laughs] It’d be great to go on to talk about perhaps some of the risks associated with digital democracy.

Audrey Tang: Sure, sure.

James Chater: Do you have…If you could summarize what you think some of the central risks are of this transition that you hope to capitalize digital democracy.

Audrey Tang: During the pandemic, as well as the infodemic, there was a popular theory that democracy is at odds with good public health response, including mental health when we talk about infodemic. Democracy bad for mental health so what’s the theory? [laughs]

Audrey Tang: To solve that, we need to be less democratic. Many jurisdictions use that as an excuse to encroach on the freedom of the press, on the freedom of assembly. There’s a global decline in the degree of democracy during the pandemic and infodemic. That’s not the threat, that’s something that’s already happened.

James Chater: We’re dealing with it now.

Audrey Tang: In the aftermath, Taiwan is quite unique in solving the infodemic and pandemic, not just without declining on the democracy. We became more democratic as a result of social sector participation. If you ask random people on the street who is responsible for fighting the pandemic, they’re like “We are.”

Audrey Tang: It’s the people who come up with noble ideas of brilliant, beautiful mask designs for people who are there all day [laughs] that’s the symbol of pride.

James Chater: I want to get one or two…

Audrey Tang: More other things…

Audrey Tang: Social gesture…

James Chater: I didn’t know you had so many of that…

Audrey Tang: When we had a pride parade, for example, these were absolutely trendy, and that’s the pink masks, [laughs] things like that builds a renewed sense of democratic politics and solidarity, public participation that made a difference in the Taiwanese society.

Audrey Tang: Since we are the resistance where we’re resisting the idea that you need to make a zero sum choice between democracy and human rights on one side, and public health encountering pandemic on the other.

James Chater: That is the criticism that came up for example, from the UK. There’s a balance to be struck between privacy and public health. This goes back to one of your central concepts, this idea of the radical transparency.

James Chater: How would you explain arriving at that kind of more, a better sense of equilibrium between transparency and protecting people’s privacy on the other hand which is also another important side of democracy?

Audrey Tang: Well, now you had your firsthand experience…

Audrey Tang: …in the 14 days. To be able to quarantine at the place of your own choosing provides a psychological safety. Within that safety also equally important is that you don’t need to install anything.

Audrey Tang: You don’t need to learn any new data collection points because if something that was not around during the pandemic gets introduced during the pandemic, naturally people will ask about its privacy and cybersecurity, the trade offs you mentioned and so on. If it’s just literally SMS, location based SMS, and we have those. I don’t know whether you received the earthquake SMS?

James Chater: Yeah.

Audrey Tang: Exactly as that technology, it knows roughly which block area and then sends you earthquake warnings or flood warnings, evacuation warnings. If you break out of the quarantine it sends SMS first to you, then a local health worker, and then to the police.

Audrey Tang: I can’t explain it in one sentence. People understand, it’s the telecoms doing that you’re not handing this off to some third party data…

Audrey Tang: There’s no way that’s you will get unsolicited advertisement…

Audrey Tang: …because of you used app or something. It cannot interfere with your WhatsApp or any other apps on your phone because you can turn off the 5G or NFC or WiFi, and it will still work because it’s just SMS.

Audrey Tang: The point here is that if people already had a norm of data collection use that and familiarity both in the place you quarantine and also in a way that we communicate at quarantine earns trustworthiness. These two together enable us to be on a better equilibrium.

James Chater: That data, for example, that someone from the UK might say is too invasive, how would you characterize that data that’s not being stored by any central…

Audrey Tang: The telecoms in any case, already know where you are. What we are doing is essentially saying, well you should be in this block. If you’re not, send an SMS and that’s it. I wouldn’t say it’s not invasive, is explained clearly with close equity.

Audrey Tang: People understand after 14 plus seven, or usually remember as utmost four weeks is gone. There’s no constitutional basis for the telecom to keep that data. The log is rotated and the point here is that because we never declared a state of emergency, anything we do need extra Congressional approval anyway.

Audrey Tang: What we did is, we just reused whatever authorization Congress already had to us. Then because of that, we did not need for example to invent a new app.

James Chater: I’m not sure this would happen because Taiwan’s managed that very well, in the future when Taiwan had to initiate that lockdown situation, is that something that then would have to go through a Congressional approval to ensure that the…

Audrey Tang: The Central Epidemic Command Center is a structure that was designed after the unannounced lockdown at the Hoping Hospital when SARS first hit 2003. In each stage what is the CECC is allowed to do is already coded in the act for fighting Communicable Diseases CDCA.

Audrey Tang: Communicable Disease Control Act spells the conditions else so that the commander of the CECC can ask all the municipalities and all the ministries to work with the CECC but only on these specific circumstances for these specific things.

Audrey Tang: We cannot expand outside of the CDCA. It’s not a state of emergency where the administration gets to do whatever required and then later on the legislature approved that.

Audrey Tang: Instead the legislator constantly holds interpolations and hearings to provide an account to the citizens, for example, the digital quarantine. The CECC had 91 percent approval rate, but after departments, every security explains exactly how digital quarantine works, it grew to 94.

James Chater: Have there been any other countries which have come to sought to copy this model or take…

Audrey Tang: Many countries are now evaluating the Taiwan model for the SARS 3.0.

James Chater: The UK might be first on our list serving. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: We had a lot of talks to the both current MPs and previous MPs about how the Taiwan 2004 experience of codifying the CDCA worked when the memory of SARS was still fresh.

Audrey Tang: This institutional memory once it’s coded in law and regulation, constitutional interpretations, it’s nearly drill and everything just became part of the culture, so that people will not have to relearn everything again with SARS 3.0 including the UK I believe, and how the health service and so on need to restructure itself and modernize itself in response to the sudden spike of demands and so on.

Audrey Tang: That is currently in the works. There’s a lot of conversation about how Taiwan model may be applied there. Once people are vaccinated, such talks will even increase.

James Chater: Are you aware of any other countries that were…after SARS, for example, or after any other pandemic that initiated these…I would say the annual drill that the CECC was implementing?

Audrey Tang: Taiwan is quite special in that this is all society approach, so that the social sector, the volunteer group, CSR are all in, but if you talk only about the government side, then I believe South Korea, also had a very similar construction, and which is why they perform quite well.

James Chater: Could you just explain how that in Taiwan, it’s a whole society tradition, some of those numbers in terms of…?

Audrey Tang: Of course. For example, at the beginning of the COVID 19, this time last year, in last January 31st, a group of public health experts, too often visit the administration here and share their mathematical model about the R value of the COVID 19 using HANA and other European data. They discovered that unless we can get three quarters of people wearing masks and washing hands, there is simply no way to avoid a lockdown.

Audrey Tang: Once that is known, the convenience stores, the pharmacies, specific technologist, the existing manufacturer of mask, the precision industries, smart machinery, who did not make the masks but are very good at repurposing their skill sets and to make masks or help try to not merely ramp up the production from 2 million a day to 20 million a day, but also distribute in the most efficient way as possible, and eventually also dedicating for international humanitarian aid.

Audrey Tang: This whole of society approach isn’t really popped out in any sense of that word. It’s because we all know that we’re racing against time, unless we can get to the point where it’s 75 percent and that means that in every district, in every small township still three quarters of people need to have access to masks and wash their hands.

Audrey Tang: Then there’s societal inputs, the social sector, the professor that called in saying, using traditional rice cookers without adding water, you can cook the mask to kill the virus and not kill the mask [laughs] and the administration actually demonstrated that.

Audrey Tang: This is evidently…

Audrey Tang: …actually planned that and certainly, it’s not envisioned by the Traditional Rice Cooker Foundation.

James Chater: Yeah, as you say this a whole of society approach, it goes back to these central ideas of participation. It sounds like Taiwan has already made great steps into initiating these types of programs.

James Chater: Shifting in a sense, this idea of people in a democracy as private citizens, do you think that’s important keystone of changing relationship with democracy is changing our self perceptions as people of private systems within a country. Firstly, back in the case of Taiwan, and then secondly, sorry go. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: I think private interest like self interest is still very important. When I took the job yesterday, my tweet was about protecting myself, and then protecting others. Well, we share about wearing masks, we say just protect your own face against your unwashed hand.

Audrey Tang: We didn’t actually appeal to altruism, we appealed [laughs] to rational self interest. That’s important because that makes the message go viral. It’s in our interest to share these messages of self protection to our friends and families so that they can offer to themselves.

Audrey Tang: If the message was about respecting the elderly or something, if I share it to my other friends, it looks condescending a little bit.

Audrey Tang: That message did not spread that easily. Taking private interest, and honoring this self interest, that’s still important, it’s very important. What’s important also is the idea of open innovation.

Audrey Tang: I figure out how to make myself better without hurting anyone. I might as well share it, so that everyone can improve. That part is the important part, the open innovation part. You see the same thing about the term open source, the term open source is a deliberate fork, free software. That’s the largest for profit companies, understand? Even though they’re for profits, they can do it with purpose.

Audrey Tang: The purpose is to make it easier for people to get into software engineering and programming. To make it easier for people to share the maintenance burdens to support your hardware and so and so. All these are good economic argument, but they’re not altruistic. They’re just self interest but enlightened in a way that makes sure that everybody gets access to these…

James Chater: It’s a spin on that kind of fundamental human interest.

Audrey Tang: That’s right, so…

James Chater: Human nature. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Human nature. The great thing about software or digital realm, is that it really is possible to build something that benefits oneself without taking anyone’s values away, right? Because it’s a world where copying doesn’t carry any inherent cost. What worked for me if I just copy it to you, then nobody is worth of.

Audrey Tang: I think this is one of the reasons why in Taiwan, we are really keen on this open API, open data. We understand that the collective understanding about what the situation really is including from investigative journalists, from students, and so on, makes the society better off because people then innovate on the same ground on the same platform.

Audrey Tang: No public servants will get the blame for revealing data bias or something previously design, the incentive such that is published upon collection anyway. Without a human review, nobody is at blame.

Audrey Tang: That is the sort of incentive structure that I had in mind that isn’t purely speaking advancing private interest, but it does reduce personal risk. It does save time. If it’s reduced rate and save time, sometimes it’s good or even better than advancing personal interest.

James Chater: Is that something that you see being translated into other countries internationally? Do you think the pandemic offers a good opportunity for countries to initiate that new relationship between democracy and technology?

Audrey Tang: The US is already considering now digital as part of public infrastructure. That’s the deliberation we had in 2016 when we included digital into the special act for looking infrastructure.

Audrey Tang: We definitely said at a time that even though it’s not made out of concrete, not concrete. As long as in the commons, it means everybody can actually use it to improve it and make it better, therefore qualify as infrastructure status.

Audrey Tang: It seems that US is — because of pandemic apparently   taking this idea and amplifying it so that universal profit is no longer a FCC only idea, but rather a idea about as I mentioned, media and digital competence and democratic participation and things like that.

Audrey Tang: I think the democratic policies are now definitely considering digital as infrastructure and with that the same sort of common space thinking that we’re discussing.

James Chater: How do we guard against those countries as you mentioned before, there’s the opposite impulses towards centralization…

Audrey Tang: It’s wrong.

James Chater: …towards authoritarianism and decentralization of data. How do we in the international environment safeguard against authoritarianism?

Audrey Tang: I think one of the key ideas here is that we need to continue to make the case that is not a trade off between civil liberties and public health, for example, right. The strong social sector automatically guard against that, because the social sector sets the norm.

Audrey Tang: When people understand, for example, that it is the norm to instead of taking anything down, offer real time fact checking materials, that becomes a very strong norm against the arguments made by the totalitarian authoritarian governments, that in order to achieve harmonies on press freedom need to…

James Chater: We need to have…

Audrey Tang: …decimated and right, literally cut by 10 percent.

Audrey Tang: That’s I think a strong social norm. It is the best defense because otherwise you also get into the shape of us versus them, this partisan politics. Which party is more authoritarian and McCarthyism and things like that, which are not always foreclosing future possibilities, but sometimes evolved in such a way that forecloses future possibilities.

Audrey Tang: I think just standing firm on a social sector and regardless of which party like in Taiwan. We have four major parties in the parliament, but all of them signed on the Open Parliament National Action Plan. Transparency, participation, and accountability, inclusion, these are the thing that all the four parties agree on.

Audrey Tang: They agree to compete on making these values more well known internationally, but they do not compete on accusing each other thinking about authoritarianism or about non participation because we were way past that. After the Sunflower Movement, everybody understood if you don’t stand for transparency and participating, you don’t get elected as a mayor or as any candidate.

James Chater: It sounds like institutionalizing these norms. These social norms is really…

Audrey Tang: The norms.

James Chater: Perhaps, if you could, in a hypothetical situation in another country that hasn’t reached this point of maturation, the Taiwanese democracy has reached, how would you investigate that same process happening?

Audrey Tang: For example, starting a fact checking community that gets the civic media on the same page as institutional media. That goes a long way. Even if that country is not particularly democratic, people can already work on for example, about masks and vaccines like the public health, like pharmacologists and epidemiologists. They all want to get their messages out.

Audrey Tang: Without fact checking the more political sensitive topics on public health and mental health alone, these social civic network organizations can prove its legitimacy. That’s exactly what Taiwan did in the ‘70s and ‘80s. Even before the lifting of the martial law, already strong charities, co ops and so on formed around peace, environmental, and social issues.

Audrey Tang: Even to this day, they have some higher legitimacy compared to the public sector because of this approach.

James Chater: I leave credit to civil society as well on this important process. That’s great. We have a little bit of time left. About your work in dialogue with the world, you’ve spoken with so many media organizations now. We talked a little bit about other countries taking up these ideas.

James Chater: Are there any particular countries, or any particular governments or parts that have been very interested in particular to this?

Audrey Tang: In Japan, it’s very exciting. I hold mostly talks to their special adviser to the cabinet in charge of digital ministry affairs. For them, it’s called digital agency, and they’re explicitly referring to the time when setting out the new digital agency with up to 100 people from the civil society joined the ranks in the central government working with the Covert Japan organization, the movement where each city has its own civic tech.

Audrey Tang: Haruseki-san of Covert Japan is now deputy CTO or something of the Japanese cabinets. There is a close relationship between Japan and our open government task forces. Moving beyond Japan and Korea, we also see that many people in Hong Kong are now in Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: In a sense, I remember back in the ‘80s when I was young. Sometimes, because both of my parents are journalists, we can’t report our news, and then we have to work with international correspondence in Hong Kong to get us to reach out to international community. Now it’s exactly reversed.

Audrey Tang: We do learn a lot from the idea of “be water,” from these leaderless movements, of the new way of organization that truly empowers each activist on the ground instead of awaiting for a centralized…

James Chater: Authority.

Audrey Tang: …center of coalitions, or things like that. This “be water” thing holds a lot of potential. It originated in Hong Kong, but it is already making the rounds in the world when it comes to new forms of leaderless social movements.

James Chater: I like very much what you said before. If you’re seeing something that wants to be improved, be that the change that was it about where nobody that can do something about it, and is it like… [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Be the change. Be the nobody.

James Chater: Finally, I wanted to talk a little bit about the project you are involved with “Commonwealth Magazine,” which is particularly looking at how does one build upon the reputation of this developed over the last year during…

Audrey Tang: How did you learn about that project?

James Chater: It was in November last year. I was in Taiwan at that time. It came upon my Facebook.

Audrey Tang: Truly organic, then. [laughs]

James Chater: Exactly. One of my inner PR who works in the French, he’s someone I know, I think he was involved with. What was the most… of getting involved in that project?

Audrey Tang: Currently, I am writing mostly columns on Commonwealth, Storm Media, and Business Weekly. The unifying idea is that the telemodel is not about one or two measures.

Audrey Tang: Even though some measures are well understood, it is about the idea of all of society, social sector first, People-Public-Private Partnership approach, to tackle what people in UK call “wicked problems”.

James Chater: [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Issues that do not move unless all of us understand exactly what is going on, and then are willing to coordinate and move. My columns are witness to show that for each incoming emerging issue. For example, my latest issue on Commonwealth. I sent it out today, literally a couple of hours ago.

James Chater: Off the press. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: It’s about netting zero carbon emissions from the Asia Pacific partners. I talked about Sunny Founder. Is there a way to crowdfund solar panels for charities? I also talked about how a South Korean company helped Nepal and other developing countries to switch from a coal based brick firing mechanism into something that’s much more sustainable.

Audrey Tang: We honor these ideas through the Asia Pacific Social Innovation Partnership Award, which is a weird award. It doesn’t give to any specific company or group or organization. It gives to unlikely partnership between sectors.

James Chater: [laughs]

Audrey Tang: It is unlikely that these sectors will collaborate in such a way but once they did, it gets replicated but with different constituents in different jurisdictions.

Audrey Tang: When we say “Made in Taiwan,” it used to mean that the product is made in Taiwan but now, more and more that we mean that this innovation model to make the cross sectoral link possible started in Taiwan. You don’t have to buy anything. It’s not an export product.

Audrey Tang: It’s just, “Oh, you can do this.”

James Chater: It’s all a commodity.

Audrey Tang: It’s open innovation. “You can do this.” Then, it prompts action.

James Chater: Is that the innovation and the innovative model becomes what Taiwan is known for?

Audrey Tang: That’s right. Exactly.

James Chater: Is that the role that you have Taiwan play in the future?

Audrey Tang: Exactly. The WEF already constantly already called Taiwan super innovator…

James Chater: Yeah.

Audrey Tang: …we might as well to capitalize on that.

James Chater: That’s great. I think we can, we are about an hour, thank you so much for your time. I’m appreciative.

Audrey Tang: Thank you.

James Chater: So interesting to chat with me. [laughs] I love it. Just so you know, I don’t know if you had a chance to look at some of the previous interviews, but it’s essentially the word limits it’s only about 3,000, we’ll edit some of it down and maybe just tighten up sentences for publication.

James Chater: But if there’s anything, any other questions you have before then just let me know. I can also send some of the, any bits I might just add instructions as slightly if you wanted to have a look before that.

Audrey Tang: Sure. Our foreign service secondment Frances I’ll introduce she to you. Then you can just send email…

James Chater: Liaise with her.

Audrey Tang: Frances will also send you the transcript for co editing. We can time this so that we release right after you do.

James Chater: That’s wonderful. Well, thank you so much once again.

Audrey Tang: Thank you so much. [laughs] Really enjoyable. I hope you enjoy the masks.