Shiroma Silva: All right. We might move the light somewhere, but let’s just go because…

Carl Miller: OK. What was your first foray into the Internet?

Audrey Tang: Didn’t you ask that? [laughs]

Carl Miller: Yeah, we’re going to repeat some of the questions as before, basically just shorter and simpler.

Audrey Tang: All right.

Carl Miller: Although we would love all the viewers of “Click” to know what the Unix kernel was.

Audrey Tang: There was a transcript anyway. You can link to it. Sorry, let’s go again.

Carl Miller: What was your first foray onto the…This is going to be quite a lot of repeating, sorry. What was your first foray onto the Internet?

Audrey Tang: I first got into Internet when I was 12. I used a National Taiwan University friend’s account. At that time, the Internet was before the World Wide Web, the browsers, and so on. It’s mostly a textual Internet.

Carl Miller: What did you feel like when you went onto the Internet for the first time? Was it liberation? Did you see that there was this world opening up on computers?

Audrey Tang: The first time I went onto the Internet I remember going to the bulletin board systems in Taiwan. There’s one that were still very active and still is very active then. It’s called PTT. PTT is incidentally run by the National Taiwan University.

Audrey Tang: It’s very exciting to see tens of thousands of people online at the same time talking about public matters in a way that is very free, as well as people making very good arguments.

Carl Miller: Even back then, did you think that the Internet was, at some point, of course, going to change politics and even democracy at some point.

Audrey Tang: Compared to my previous experience with BBS, bulletin board systems that requires a telephone to dial in, at that time, depending on how many telephone lines the system has, maybe, at most, four people can be online at the same time, exchanging their ideas in real time on those dial-up BBS systems.

Audrey Tang: With the PTT and the Internet, suddenly tens of thousand people can get almost a sense of being in the same room. That really feels democratic.

Carl Miller: Following on that idea, then, of everyone can be in the same room, did you, at the very beginning, have this sense that politics has to change now that we can all be in the same room with each other?

Audrey Tang: I didn’t have any participation into the representative politics when I was 12 years old. It will be another eight years before I get my voting rights. That was actually my native try. That was my first exposure to anything like a political system.

Audrey Tang: The bulletin board system already have its own court of appeals, its own way to set up rules and policies based on consensus. All this is new to me, but then, I don’t have anything to compare it to.

Carl Miller: You mentioned briefly last time we spoke about your parents both being journalists. Can you talk a bit more about that kind of values and the things that they instilled in you, which were really important to you then and have remained so up until now?

Audrey Tang: Yes. They were both practicing journalism…

Shiroma Silva: If you can start the sentence this way saying my parents were, yeah?

Audrey Tang: My parents both practiced journalism before the lifting of the martial law, and they really cared about the empowerment. That is to say making sure the social sector, the civil society knows what’s going on in the government systems. This idea of a social sector that can determine what we, together, move forward, I think is very much immersed into me when I was very young.

Shiroma Silva: OK.

Shiroma Silva: What vTaiwan influenced…

Carl Miller: What does vTaiwan allow that conventional politics doesn’t allow?

Shiroma Silva: That’s right, yes.

Carl Miller: What does vTaiwan and also vTaiwan-inspired things that you’re doing across government and in the social sector? What do they allow people to do politically that normal conventional politics doesn’t in a kind of nutshell?

Audrey Tang: In a nutshell, it allows the government to yield to the social sector. I’m thinking how am I…Sorry.

Shiroma Silva: Yeah, I mean, if you could just say something like for instance, that it is something that allows individuals to act at a grassroots level.

Audrey Tang: OK. I’ll say something along that line.

Carl Miller: Yeah, or it could just transfer power in this new way.

Audrey Tang: OK, all right.

Shiroma Silva: Yeah. I think also, you said previously it means that people could find out for themselves, and it doesn’t assume that people are ignorant or foolish or stupid. That it allows people their own mind in a way to exercise their own mind.

Audrey Tang: VTaiwan and the processes inspired by vTaiwan makes the first assumption that it’s the people who knows more about what to do when there is an emergent technology, when there is an emergent social issues. It doesn’t presume that the government knows the best and should set an agenda. Rather, people sets agenda for the government to listen and to listen at each other at scale.

Carl Miller: In conventional politics, is it the government rather than the people that usually set the agenda and then in vTaiwan, it’s the opposite?

Audrey Tang: Yes. In the vTaiwan-inspired process, the government only responds to the social sector when the people who participated have already resonated with one another in a kind of a shared value or a common vision. The government responds to that vision.

Audrey Tang: That is not the same at all with traditional representative politics where the politicians set an agenda and the citizens are only supposed to say yes or no on it.

Carl Miller: Would you say that, at its very core and crux, that agenda setting power or the transfer of it, is that really…If we were to cut all the other complexity away, is that what really vTaiwan and its inspired processes are about?

Audrey Tang: Yes. It is about making sure the agenda setting power is not concentrated in the public sector.

Shiroma Silva: Yeah, that’s brilliant, yes.

Carl Miller: Brilliant.

Shiroma Silva: Good, good. Just hold this one second. I just want to get my headphones on.

Carl Miller: Really, shorthand, it’s like your speaking another language.

Shiroma Silva: K, let’s see.

Shiroma Silva: Oh, on the night of…

Carl Miller: This is also fleshing a bit your history and the journey to vTaiwan. Could you tell us what it was like the few days at the beginning of Sunflower? How you felt, what people were feeling around you? If you could, almost paint the scene a bit about what was happening and your reactions to everything that was happening. Was it exciting, scary, thrilling, liberating?

Audrey Tang: The first few days of Sunflower Occupy, people wondered a lot about whether the police will forcibly evacuate the students in the Parliament. When it transpired, the head of the Parliament didn’t really want the police to intervene. It’s given a room of collaborative conversation around one very specific topic, which is the Cross-Straits Service and Trade Agreement.

Audrey Tang: We found 20 different NGOs. Each have a very different take into this CSSTA. It could be from a human right perspective, from a labor movement perspective, from a ecological perspective, and all these perspectives are given the room not only to deliberate that aspect but also cross-pollinate because people moved from one booth to another.

Audrey Tang: People read the context of the transcript from one day to another. People feel, gradually, that we are one polity, and it’s possible even for half a million people on the street to gradually converge into rough consensus around CSSTA. It’s a feeling of empowerment.

Carl Miller: Did you begin kind of angry with the government? What was your emotional journey through all of this? You must not have known it was going to work at some point, that it might not be possible to do open policy-making in the way that Sunflower eventually produced.

Audrey Tang: I always refer to Sunflower as a demonstration but not as a protest. It’s a demo meaning that we’re showing the society that the traditions that we hold in Internet governance has this propensity of getting people into rough consensus without people already knowing each other. It’s a way to build a polity with almost strangers to begin with.

Audrey Tang: I always thought that it’s a really good idea to demonstrate instead of going to refute or to attack the status quo because that was the best technology and the best design they could do using pens and pencils and telephones whereas we, with the Internet technologies, can show a new system that works better without destroying the old. It just gradually makes the old obsolete.

Carl Miller: Were you thrilled throughout all of it? Did you feel more joined to people as you were there doing open policy-making during Sunflower? What was the emotional journey for you?

Audrey Tang: I’m mostly in charge of maintaining along with g0V folks, the communication apparatus. I found that as time goes by, it’s easier and easier for me to take over sites.

Audrey Tang: The same issue, I find myself equipped now with sufficient context to argue for any of the 20 sites of the occupy as well as from the counter-protesters. I found myself with more empathy as compared to the first night where it was mostly about a showdown.

Carl Miller: You went through that process gaining more empathy as well?

Audrey Tang: Yes.

Carl Miller: We lost the light there. The light’s gone off.

Shiroma Silva: Have we?

Audrey Tang: Is it deliberate?

Shiroma Silva: No, not at all.

Audrey Tang: Deliberative…

Shiroma Silva: Just come and hold this as the light has gone off.

Carl Miller: If you couldn’t see that in the camera though, maybe that’s…

Shiroma Silva: Yeah.

Audrey Tang: That’s fine. Meanwhile, maybe I’ll grab some water.

Shiroma Silva: Sure.

Carl Miller: Yeah, thank you. Ready? Again, sorry, some of these are going to be the same questions, all consistent.

Audrey Tang: It’s OK.

Carl Miller: Just when we get back to the UK, we won’t have a chance of asking you…

Shiroma Silva: Unless you do a Skype with us…

Carl Miller: So we’d just like…We like having a couple copies of the answer.

Audrey Tang: OK. Or you just record enough footage so you can deepfake me.

Shiroma Silva: So we can do what?

Carl Miller: Deepfake, deepfake Audrey. We’ve probably got enough, actually.

Shiroma Silva: Deepfake, shall we? That should be our next project.

Carl Miller: I think it’s like deepfake within the movie industry, they’ve been doing it for ages.

Audrey Tang: Exactly.

Carl Miller: All the CGI people, what’s the problem? Somebody just called it deepfake and it goes viral as the next kind of massive social panic. Anyway, ready?

Shiroma Silva: Yeah, recording.

Carl Miller: All right. Sorry for the opposition. What kind of decisions is vTaiwan good at deciding and what decisions are they not good at deciding?

Audrey Tang: The original design of vTaiwan is meant to ask people who don’t have yet a union or association to speak for themselves over the Internet. Because of that, it’s particularly good at emerging technologies such as self-driving vehicles or teleworking that the government have no idea how to regulate and indeed, there is no associations or unions around it. That was the original design.

Carl Miller: We’ll do that one again just slightly shorter. Just say…Maybe begin with the emerging technologies.

Audrey Tang: Sure, OK. As originally envisioned, it’s particularly good at emerging technologies, which government doesn’t have any firsthand experience and any idea of how to regulate. We ask the people to speak about their own experience not through associations or unions because there’s no associations or unions at that stage.

Carl Miller: Could you see vTaiwan being used on an issue of genuine national discord? I’ve been speaking to a lot of the gov people, and they were like OK…Sorry?

Audrey Tang: G0v?

Carl Miller: G0v, yeah. They were like, “It’s great, but we need it being used on a big issue where people are genuinely massively divided.” Can you see that in the future for vTaiwan? Do you think that is indeed what’s going to happen?

Audrey Tang: In vTaiwan, what we make sure is that the social sector decides what to talk about. However, in the national referendum-like issues such as marriage equality, there is no clear indication that online part of the same-sex marriage actually is more important or reaches more people as compared to traditional offline organizations.

Audrey Tang: In those cases, it’s perhaps better if the organization that have more traditional mobility also have a say in the agenda setting. In that case, we wouldn’t call it vTaiwan, but it’s still vTaiwan-inspired in the process.

Carl Miller: Another way of saying it or thinking about it is vTaiwan is good at deciding decisions whether stakeholders are not conventionally as organized and where most of them have a significant online presence and have it.

Audrey Tang: Yes, that is true. When we have, for example, for marriage equality, many traditional organizations, maybe it’s good to have the Ministry of Justice, the Ministry of Interior, and so on to essentially play the same role as vTaiwan facilitators because then, they have better connections to the traditional organizations.

Audrey Tang: We can take parts of the vTaiwan like the radical transparency, the live streaming, the agenda setting, as well as the use of pol.is but then it wouldn’t be the entirely social sector-run conversation.

Carl Miller: What gives either vTaiwan or its inspired offspring teeth? We’ve spoken to lots of people, almost all of whom when you actually talk to them think that some way of using technology to give more voice and power to people is a good idea.

Carl Miller: If you’re cynical about government as some of these people indeed are…They say, “Well, the legislators are just going to kind of decide to do what they decide to do anyway and it’ll basically be on the same interests, which they’ve always had.”

Carl Miller: What’s the moral weight that vTaiwan brings that can actually cause legislators to change their behavior and to vote for things, which they otherwise wouldn’t?

Audrey Tang: Mostly, vTaiwan talks about policy and regulations, not necessarily law. Also, sometimes after a vTaiwan conversation, like the one on cyber-bullying, it is the private sector making commitments to the social sector and not results in laws and regulations.

Audrey Tang: This kind of commitments from different stakeholders give it legitimacy because it’s like completing a puzzle. If everybody agrees to do something to solve this wicked problem, people can be rest assured that things go better a little bit. It’s this mutual commitment, mutual convincing process that gives the moral weight.

Audrey Tang: The government, including ministers, in this process is here to provide moral support, to endorse the support from the public sector without taking control and saying, “OK, everything will be implemented as laws and regulations.” It’s not the product that gives it the moral weight. It is the process of building mutual support.

Carl Miller: OK. Is that kind of like it’s not the point of vTaiwan to force anyone to do something which they don’t want to do, it’s to get everyone who was kind of genuinely committed to finding a solution seeing everyone else moving towards the middle and they do so at the same time?

Audrey Tang: Yes. The main contribution vTaiwan provides, especially through pol.is, is it lets people see beyond the artificial divisions that people generally see the things with common values and that people can be assured that other sides of the aisle feel actually more or less the same way. This is what together gives the vTaiwan process legitimacy.

Carl Miller: Could you do that one more time just with it’s not the point of vTaiwan to force anyone to do what they don’t want to do, it’s like completing a puzzle as you said? That was brilliant.

Audrey Tang: OK.

Carl Miller: Thank you. I’m sorry for the imposition.

Audrey Tang: No, it’s good. The point of vTaiwan is like completing a puzzle together. It is not about forcing anyone to pass laws or regulations of the shape that are not fit to the puzzle. Rather, it is letting everybody see what a wicked problem is and which pieces each party holds. That gives vTaiwan legitimacy.

Carl Miller: Everyone can see everyone else putting a piece into the puzzle until it’s filled.

Audrey Tang: Everyone can see each other what kind of piece of puzzle we have and that we totally commit to act, and it is on public record so we really have to act.

Shiroma Silva: OK, sorry. Just do that once again. Our light has gone off again.

Audrey Tang: Of course.

Shiroma Silva: That’s exactly the kind of answer because that’s a sort of simple answer that non-specialist people can understand.

Audrey Tang: Sure.

Carl Miller: OK.

Shiroma Silva: Sounds good. OK.

Audrey Tang: OK.

Shiroma Silva: Sorry, yes.

Audrey Tang: The point of vTaiwan is like completing a puzzle together. It is not about forcing anyone to pass laws or regulations that they don’t want to. Rather, it is everybody seeing the same problem in its whole picture, discovering that we each hold part of the solution, and that we commit on public record to move a little bit toward the common solution.

Audrey Tang: That’s what gives vTaiwan power.

Shiroma Silva: OK.

Carl Miller: What type of decisions?

Shiroma Silva: Yeah, we’ve done that, yes.

Carl Miller: Explain what it means…

Shiroma Silva: Explain vTaiwan works with government and in a way, the process gets people to trust government and government to trust people.

Carl Miller: What we want to try and capture from you is kind of a description of the difference between vTaiwan as a social sector thing and vTaiwan-inspired processes like co-gov, which are happening within government.

Carl Miller: Is there any way, again, in a fairly self-contained answer, you could explain the kind of process, how it rose up and remains something, a property of the social sector if you will, how when you went into government and created PDIS the same ideas began to be spread?

Carl Miller: One of the things we’re actually grappling with is there’s actually so many different things happening but how to kind of package them in a way that we can really understand because, clearly, we can’t just focus on vTaiwan. We have to also focus on other things as well.

Audrey Tang: Sure.

Carl Miller: Can I grab the drink?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, sure. Would you like red, white, or black beans?

Carl Miller: What’s the sweetest?

Audrey Tang: The sweetest, that’s probably…

Carl Miller: White bean.

Audrey Tang: It’s probably the black.

Carl Miller: Black bean, thanks.

Shiroma Silva: Can I just have a sip of yours?

Carl Miller: Mm-hmm.

Audrey Tang: All right.

Carl Miller: Ready?

Shiroma Silva: Mm-hmm. I’m recording.

Audrey Tang: VTaiwan was the original experiment that shows that the social sector can own this place of facilitated conversation and agenda setting after proving much to the…Let’s just try again.

Audrey Tang: VTaiwan was the original place where the social sector proved that people can own the facilitation process and it still can produce consensus or at least rough consensus. After that, a lot of fear, uncertainty, and doubt went down from the government sector and for many government agencies including the judicial, the legislative, and the administration.

Audrey Tang: People started imitating the same process because the original tools are all open-source, meaning that everybody can take parts of it and begin using it.

Audrey Tang: My work with the government in PDIS is introducing the core concepts and train the trainers in each ministry so they can coach their own ministry to adapt part of the process to have a more fruitful conversation, but this time in a government facilitated process.

Carl Miller: This is about dragging vTaiwan into government to change what government actually is and what it’s like.

Audrey Tang: This is about showing the government an alternate way of having a public conversation that’s more real-time and that’s more responsive and change the culture from within.

Carl Miller: Is this transformation very hard about making government, about essentially dissolving many of the walls and barriers that block both light and power between government and people kind of almost trying to make government and people more one in the same thing?

Audrey Tang: This experiment is about linking together existing hierarchies meaning agencies and ministries with their own command structure but letting their guard down enough to trust the people to understand the mission that they’re working toward is toward the common value as the people has.

Audrey Tang: Previously, the misunderstandings are mostly because people only communicate using votes, three bits every four years. Now, with this kind of real-time conversation, people begin to realize that a public and a social sector cares more or less about the same values.

Shiroma Silva: Those are really great answers. I like the first bit you said was about the consensus and the process, how people understand that they have a part to play in it. Could you just say that once again? Rather than using consensus and process, just say that common people have come to understand that they have a part to play in the decision-making process.

Audrey Tang: Sure, OK.

Shiroma Silva: That would just be very…

Audrey Tang: OK, sure.

Shiroma Silva: Thanks.

Audrey Tang: Every citizen, even before they are of the legal voting age, can understand through this process that they have a part to play in the decision-making, that they, themselves, hold a piece to solve the puzzle.

Carl Miller: What do you mean by three bits every four years? Why isn’t it good enough for democracy?

Audrey Tang: Three bits means that each time you go to the voting booth to choose legislators or indeed a president, you only have maybe one choice out of eight possible choices and that is what I mean by three bits.

Audrey Tang: It’s important to have more bandwidth meaning that to represent our ideas in a more holistic fashion because otherwise, people really don’t have any way of saying I voted this way because of my priorities, because of my values, because of my own plan in our community.

Audrey Tang: Having a way to make these ideas more apparent and become the agenda for the government system increases trust because people can see that the public sector is really talking about what the social sector wants them to talk about.

Carl Miller: Do you think just an election every four years is simply enough information for a government to know what its people thinks?

Audrey Tang: I think an election every four years provides stability in terms of personnel, but when it comes to issues and agenda and things that requires many people to talk about specifics, there’s currently no sufficient way to express that even through referendums, which is often just one bit.

Shiroma Silva: What you’re saying, I suppose, is that you only get binary choices in referendums.

Audrey Tang: Or somewhat binary choices, yeah.

Shiroma Silva: Yeah, but just very clear-cut choices whereas what this does is provide more subtle options.

Audrey Tang: OK, I can say that.

Shiroma Silva: That might sort of be…

Audrey Tang: With referendums at the end of it, it’s a binary choice. It’s pro or it’s against. What’s important is what’s written on the ticket of the referendum, the agenda of the referendum.

Audrey Tang: If people have more way of shaping that agenda, then a referendum is very useful. However, if people didn’t have a way to have an input or didn’t fully understand the repercussions of the result of the referendum, then it actually can make people feel disempowered.

Audrey Tang: I’m not really saying any other…

Carl Miller: That was brilliant. That was…

Audrey Tang: I’m not referring to any other…

Shiroma Silva: You’re fine. We may need to…

Audrey Tang: Yeah, I’m sure. ‘m sure everybody understands what president means, yeah.

Carl Miller: Do you see yourself as reinventing or hacking, in the original sense of the word, democracy?

Audrey Tang: I see my work as part of the Internet governance tradition because people on the Internet can listen much more clearly and also at higher scale than traditional ways. It leads to a political system that is much more continuous and much more in the here and now. I’m more of introducing this kind of governance into existing representative democracy.

Audrey Tang: I wouldn’t necessarily say I’m reinventing anything. I’m just carrying the tradition of my tribe.

Carl Miller: Is carrying the tradition of your tribe into conventional politics inevitably going to transform more conventional politics?

Audrey Tang: Yes. When I say tribe, I don’t mean tribalism. This is more about people who participate in this kind of consensual policy-making. In Internet governance, we call it a protoco. A protoco is somebody who voluntarily invent and follow and other people can follow or not depending whether they like the idea or not.

Audrey Tang: This is very different from a one-size fits all design where all the municipalities have to follow the same set of rules. This kind of protoco-based design lets a hundred different experiments, vTaiwan-inspired or not, to concurrently discuss a hundred or so issues. The one that’s most fitting to that issue end up getting adopted into the norm, that is to say into people’s habit.

Carl Miller: Why is experimenting with democracy so important to you? Why do you think we need to do it? Why can’t we just settle for the representative democracy that we have?

Audrey Tang: It would be fine if not for the…

Carl Miller: Could you just self-contain your answer? Sorry.

Audrey Tang: Sure. Sticking with the old way of representative democracy would be fine if not for hashtags and other ways that makes people feel that they’re already much closer to each other using the same keywords and hash tags and groups and pages.

Audrey Tang: People feel closer to each other means that people feel the government in a democracy is farther away. It’s not that this distance has actually changed. It’s that, subjectively, people’s expectations of governance have changed.

Audrey Tang: If the democracy doesn’t revamp itself to be as responsive as the other things that are going on on the Internet, then the democracy will feel so slow as to not worth attention by people who can spend their time on other venues online.

Carl Miller: The Internet and social media has changed people, changed their expectations, changed what they need and want, and that, actually, has caused democracy to recede further and further away from their normal lives and now, it needs to rebuild itself using technology. Is that the broader…

Audrey Tang: I would say that social media made a different kind of crowd, a different kind of…Sorry. The social media made a different kind of crowd that very quickly come to trust each other and to produce culture, produce content in a, literally, day-by-day fashion.

Audrey Tang: If the democratic institutions do not take that into account and hold ourselves accountable to this new culture, then we risk being rendered irrelevant as considered by people who participate in this culture. Then, people will think that the government is following a very different value than the people and the legitimacy of institutional democracy will go further down.

Carl Miller: How big is the risk? How big is the danger?

Audrey Tang: The risk is always proportional to how people are civic-minded. If people care about public matters a lot, as we see here in Taiwan, then the risk is real and imminent. If people are generally not that willing to care about common issues or public issues, or they were forbidden to do that because of Internet censorship and so on, then the risk can be contained.

Audrey Tang: That is, indeed, why some governments are adopting some of the authoritarian technologies. It’s because they don’t want this risk of their legitimacy being challenged.

Carl Miller: Could we say that both for the UK and Taiwan, places where there’s open Internet, strong civic culture, are these the areas that are actually at greatest risk to democracy if democracy doesn’t transform itself?

Audrey Tang: Yes. I use the metaphor of Taiwan, literally, growing five centimeters every year. Our highest mountain, the Jade Mountain, grows five centimeters every year because we’re caught between the two plates.

Audrey Tang: The two plates cause a lot of earthquakes but as long as our social resilience is good enough, then all these ideological debates, all those people’s powers contesting each other on public matters actually results in innovations in democracy. The same as in the UK.

Audrey Tang: You can find people very eager to talk about public matters on public forums. All that needs is a way for people to become resilient to the kind of earthquake that this kind of ideological debate leads to and that people can then see at a higher level, a higher vantage point, of a rough consensus.

Carl Miller: In a nutshell then, is the choice facing democracies quite stark? Either this new, radical transparency and participatory governance or a swing towards authoritarianism or cynicism or sheer irrelevance? Are democracies going to travel in one of those two directions, largely, and in a nutshell?

Audrey Tang: If you do nothing, that’s irrelevance. There’s always the zero option. If you want to move, yes, the move to authoritarianism or a movement to open and free governance, they’re diametrically opposing directions. Each democracy needs to make a choice of remaining liberal in the classical sense or becoming authoritarian.

Carl Miller: Again, just to boil this down. At a moment when the Internet is changing so much, if liberal democracies do not, in one way or another, reform themselves, the danger of them becoming more irrelevant is very great. Is that what you’re saying?

Audrey Tang: It will become more and more obsolete in people’s minds if they don’t catch up to the same radical transparency and participation that’s enabled by the Internet.

Carl Miller: You, your colleagues, in the Pirate Party in Iceland, in France, and elsewhere, are you a new generation of politician that is trying to change not only what government is but what it actually…

Audrey Tang: Is?

Carl Miller: …yeah, what it actually is? Sorry, I’ll ask that one again. Are you and your colleagues elsewhere in the world a new kind of generation of politicians trying to change not what government does but what it is?

Audrey Tang: I call myself, just as the Icelandic Pirate Party leader, a poetician. Meaning that my main work is to use the power of poetry to bring together people who consider each other enemies to the same table and continue the conversation no matter what. This is a different take on politics compared to, as you said, the vertical one, the old one, the representative one.

Audrey Tang: I’m the facilitator. I’m not representing anyone, but I would love to help each other to represent themselves on the table. In this sense, I would like to say that we’re bringing a new culture to politics.

Carl Miller: Are poeticians a new kind of politician because I’ve never heard another politician say they don’t represent a constituency, nor have I heard a minister say…

Audrey Tang: The Icelandic one.

Shiroma Silva: Just give us that, about being a poetician, just don’t refer to Iceland. Just talk about yourself.

Audrey Tang: My job description is, literally, a poem, so I call myself a poetician. A poetician, instead of giving or receiving orders, uses the power of poetry to let each other know that we are, after all, sharing common values that brings people who were against each other to the same table and continue the conversation. In this way, I would say, that we’re bringing a different culture to politics.

Shiroma Silva: Brilliant. Well done. Why is this really possible only post-Internet? Summarize why it’s only possible after the Internet. It wasn’t possible before.

Audrey Tang: Before the Internet, it’s almost too easy for one person to speak to millions of people through radio, through television but there was no way for people to listen to millions of people. Internet not only enables this but also enables millions of people to listen to one another.

Audrey Tang: This kind of horizontal culture is only possible, and indeed, easier when the Internet technologies become democratized. That is to say, everybody has a broadband connection. Before that, it is either infeasible or only possible in a very small scale.

Shiroma Silva: That was brilliant, but the plane was still going. Sorry.

Audrey Tang: I can say the same thing again.

Shiroma Silva: Thank you, even shorter, if you can.

Audrey Tang: Before the Internet, anyone can speak to millions of people through radio and television but there was no way to listen to millions of people. Internet not only enables that but also enables millions of people to listen to one another. That leads to this horizontal culture of Internet governance that wasn’t possible at all before the Internet appeared.

Carl Miller: Is it only possible to transform government in the way that you want to now using digital technologies that can listen as well as speak to millions of people?

Audrey Tang: Yes.

Shiroma Silva: What about something about the mechanism of pol.is propagating resonance through dialog rather than these tribal instincts?

Carl Miller: What’s resonance through dialog?

Shiroma Silva: Finding common ground through dialog, things that people commonly share with each other rather than reverting to the tribal instincts.

Audrey Tang: Pol.is, by design, shows everybody that participates that we actually have much more common ground with each other than we previously thought. It identifies both the two or three things that were divided but the 20 or 30 things that people actually all agreed on.

Audrey Tang: It’s just it doesn’t get enough airtime, so people forgot about that. This common ground is the main product of pol.is conversation. Through dialog, we can discover that we have much more in common than we have in difference.

Carl Miller: Is that one of the main differences between pol.is and the other social media platforms where people discuss politics? It gives airtime to consensus rather than division, grandstanding, playing to the home crowd?

Audrey Tang: In other forums in social media, people usually have the reply button. Once you have that, people with the most time win the argument by default. However, pol.is doesn’t have a reply button.

Audrey Tang: Therefore, people can share their authentic feelings and experiences for other people to have a common ground, or not, with. Because of that, people spend far more time discovering their commonalities rather than just going down a rabbit hole on a particular issue that lets everybody reply but forget about the whole picture.

Shiroma Silva: How will it be in five years’ time?

Carl Miller: How will it be in five years’ time?

Audrey Tang: In five years’ time, Taiwan will have risen 25 centimeters.

Shiroma Silva: What about pol.is and vTaiwan?

Audrey Tang: In five years’ time, I expect that this process will no longer be experimental, that people educated on our new curriculum starting this year about critical and creative thinking, about e-petition, about this kind of real-time democracy will have grown to 20 years old. They will expect a democracy just as they participated when they were five…Sorry.

Audrey Tang: The fifteen-year-olds today, after five years, will become of the legal age of voting. Nowadays, they’re already very well-versed in e-petition, in real-time democracy, in critical and creative thinking. Five years later, this will become the norm of what people come to expect of democratic institutions.

Shiroma Silva: What you’re saying is that young people, the expectations of young people…

Audrey Tang: Specifically, 15-year-olds, but yes.

Carl Miller: The UK is really hurting at the moment. It’s so divided. Brexit’s been just this huge wedge that’s driven across so many demographic and age-dividing lines. Do you have a message for the UK? Is there a message of hope or uplifting or something to do with technologies can heal democracies as well as destroy it?

Carl Miller: This will be so surprising to people in Britain, that there is anything that’s possible to do with technology other than to kill democracy because that’s where all the narrative is. Any message that you can give people, one of, perhaps, slight hope or an example that there is another way of doing things? It would be brilliant if you want to.

Audrey Tang: My message is, don’t panic. The current divisions are, actually, mostly harmless if you only introduce the ideas of listening at scale.

Shiroma Silva: What about using technology to do that? That’s not what most people in the UK would think about technology. They really wouldn’t have a clue that technology could be used in this way. They think about mobile phones.

Carl Miller: Or Facebook.

Shiroma Silva: Make their life easier.

Audrey Tang: My message is, don’t panic. The social media, at this generation, mostly divides people and diverges people into tribes but the same technology can also be designed in a way to promote people to converge and form a polity. Deploy that digital technology and you can see that the current controversies are actually mostly harmless.

Carl Miller: That’s brilliant. I’ve got one more question.

Audrey Tang: Sure.

Carl Miller: Just to extend the message potentially, is it important to always to see democracy as a social technology which we can continue to improve? That’s actually been one of the most exciting things for me being here, is to simply see people that think that democracy is something that you can actually change.

Carl Miller: Is there something there as well, that democracy shouldn’t be fossilized and just finished but actually should remain something in which we constantly improve…?

Shiroma Silva: It’s got constant momentum in a way.

Audrey Tang: My message is that democracy is alive. It is a social technology invented thousands of years ago and still being honed. There’s lots of people innovating around that. Any social technology risks of becoming obsolete if there’s no social innovators revamping it. As long as there are people in social science and in other sciences revamping the technology of democracy, it can stay relevant with time.

Carl Miller: Amazing.

Shiroma Silva: This might seem like a weird thing to say but you know when we were in the joint housing thing…

Audrey Tang: Yes.

Shiroma Silva: Just tell Carl what you were seeing there. It’s just that we need a voice over from you to say, “We’re here at the platform we’re been discussing, and we’re just using some technology to help us do that.”

Audrey Tang: We’re at a collaborative meeting as hosted by the Ministry of Finance and a PO Network.

Shiroma Silva: We won’t know what a PO Network is.

Audrey Tang: Sorry. Here, we’re in a collaboration meeting as hosted by the Ministry of Finance to talk about how to release more vacant housing into the housing market. Here, you can see four people who joined the e-petition as well as the stakeholders, including the Taoyuan city, the Taipei city, and other municipalities.

Shiroma Silva: Are they using that to come to a conclusion?

Audrey Tang: Yes. Here, we’re seeing the IMI, the issue mapping technology and here, we’re seeing the real-time projection of the posit notes that represent people’s ideas.

Audrey Tang: Through these technologies, people are coming to common understanding of what vacancy is caused by, what vacancy affects the market, and how to make adjustments to our policies so that people can have more affordable housing.

Shiroma Silva: Brilliant. Well done. Thank you. You’ve got to go anyway, haven’t you?

Carl Miller: Amazing. Thank you so much.

Shiroma Silva: We’ll let you go, Audrey, because I think you have another meeting or something.

Carl Miller: I really appreciate it.