Lorenz Wagner: When I talked to people yesterday, I talked to a friend from the Gates Foundation. She said, “Oh, great. You’re going to talk to Audrey.” It’s really a pleasure for me and an honor. I’ve read that you’ve been in Dudweiler, near Saarbrücken. I was brought up there, really 10 kilometers away from Dudweiler.

Audrey Tang: Literally.

Lorenz Wagner: You know the background. We are talking about a cover story in “Süddeutsche Zeitung.” You know this, or you need some explanation for…

Audrey Tang: I understand the context.

Lorenz Wagner: That’s great. Thank you. Let’s start with your biography. That’s quite interesting. Your father was a postdoc or was…

Audrey Tang: Was a doctoral student. He was researching with Professor Jürgen Domes in the Universität des Saarlandes in Saarbrücken on the topic of the Tiananmen protest.

Lorenz Wagner: You were a kid, 11 years old at the time, I’ve read.

Audrey Tang: Yes. I was there for one year.

Lorenz Wagner: For one year. What do you remember? How were the Germans there? How was the country? What are your memories of Germany?

Audrey Tang: I remember being very surprised that even when I enroll in the primary school…Because I’m not at the proficiency to attend a Gymnasium, and so I attended a Grundschule. Technically, my classmates are one year my junior, but they are very mature. They are almost like little adults.

Audrey Tang: When contrasted with the East Asian education system, which at that time was all about standardized answers and not at all about making their own decisions, it’s a striking difference.

Audrey Tang: I also remember that when I enrolled in the primary school, the teachers emphasized the idea of accountability, of taking one’s responsibility to one’s own, and also of the virtue of Pünktlichkeit. Punctuality, I think that’s the English. I understand that Germans are less about punctuality now when they teach their child. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Back in 1992, that was one of the very important thing, like being able to plan one’s own schedule, to hold to one’s own schedule, to not waste anyone’s time, and also to make an account to what really happened if you happened to have a delay or who cannot fulfill your promise for any reason. That, I think is also very good.

Audrey Tang: Finally, I think many primary school classmates did not want to go to Gymnasium. They would go to a Hochschule. They would go to a skill development high school and so on. At the time, in Taiwan, that was unimaginable, that someone will have the skill development as their first choice.

Audrey Tang: Usually, in Taiwan, when people go to that, especially on a senior high level, they only go to the skill development path, the professional skills path, if they somehow cannot go into the academic path. There’s a strong social order.

Audrey Tang: In Germany, at least at that time, it’s almost reversed. It’s like people take pride into being able to contribute to the society on such a early age. People who are researching theory, of course, are respected, but they are not particularly high on the social rank when it comes to the primary school students. That’s also quite surprising to me.

Lorenz Wagner: You left school very early. Is this right? I’ve read that you were about 14 or 15 years old.

Audrey Tang: Yes. I drop out of the middle school at the second year of junior high.

Lorenz Wagner: It was mid of the ‘90s. You wanted to teach yourself via Internet. When I remember back to time, it was quite early. In the mid-‘90s, it was really the beginning in Germany and Europe.

Audrey Tang: The World Wide Web then was like Ethereum now.

Lorenz Wagner: How came your interest? You were even programming without having a computer at the time. It was triggered a little bit by your father, by your parents, or how did it come that you have taken this interest in technical things and to be so mature in thinking, “OK, I will leave school but not leave school to have fun but leave school to do something”?

Audrey Tang: First of all, I must protest because doing something is the most fun. It’s far more fun than consuming anything, so [laughs] first things first. That’s important to me because at the time, the Internet is really about this open innovation ethos. I get to read all the classical works at the Gutenberg Project.

Audrey Tang: I get to join the latest, most advanced research are the arXiv at the preprint server at Cornell University. They are still around, you know. All this and the Internet Archive, the Internet Society, the Internet Engineering Task Force, and later on the Perl community with the Comprehensive Archive Network and so on.

Audrey Tang: As you said, it’s a kind of social production. Let’s do things together. To me, it’s the most pure fun. That is the most pure joy. I learned programming when I was eight years old. On the piece of paper, that’s true. That was in ‘89.

Audrey Tang: By the time that I was 14, I’m already quite versed in programming and actually programmed not only compression methods but also reasoning. A national science fair, which I won the first place, is a inference engine – nowadays, it would be classified as machine learning – to learn about the heuristics through the logical understanding and things like that.

Audrey Tang: I was, in a sense, already doing research. All the researchers didn’t know I was just 14 years old. They just wrote back with email. That’s what I told the head of my school. She simply said, “OK, tomorrow on, you don’t have to go to school anymore. I will cover for you,” meaning that she will fake the record for me.

Lorenz Wagner: [laughs] When you think at the time, what were your most important…Later you convinced Apple, if I have seen it right. What…

Audrey Tang: Yeah, I work with Apple for six years, mostly on the Siri technology but also on many other language technologies.

Lorenz Wagner: When your look back to these times, what were your learnings? What were your learnings, personal learnings and technical learnings, that are important for you today?

Audrey Tang: The most important thing is that I learned a political system that’s based on the idea of rough consensus and running code. That’s the foundational values of the Internet, meaning that anyone with a email and a good idea can participate in the policymaking.

Audrey Tang: Instead of relying on representatives and instead of relying on uploading three bits of information every four years, which is called voting, anyone can just directly participate. This accountability culture, which, as I mentioned, I first encountered as a primary school student in Germany, is really the core of how the Internet gets its legitimacy.

Audrey Tang: The Internet has no army or navy. It cannot force any network operator or any sovereign country to connect to it. The whole reason why Internet works as it is is that it’s a truly open and accountable multi-stakeholder system.

Audrey Tang: I was versed in that political system for five years before I even cast my first vote. In a sense, I’m indigenously Internet when it comes to governance. That’s my main learning.

Lorenz Wagner: That’s quite interesting. When I see how you managed COVID, I have read a lot about you. I don’t ask at the moment the details how you were managing the masks and the idea of mask map, but maybe you could explain me what for you was the real success in this, if you could qualify it to me. What were your learnings from there?

Lorenz Wagner: As you know, Germany is acting differently. We have this problem with data protection. That’s not always a problem. Sometimes it’s a good thing. Sometimes it’s a bad thing. I think we have the problem that we talk too much about data protection to protect people there. At the same time, you have lockdowns, which are much more…

Audrey Tang: Restrictive, yes.

Lorenz Wagner: Yeah. Let’s start with the way you managed, and what was important for you in this process? You were so early and so good in it.

Audrey Tang: First of all, I would say that we managed the COVID with no lockdown, and also the infodemic with no takedown. These two are related, because in Taiwan, we are subject to a lot of disinformation. We manage that with no administrative encroachment to the human right of free expression.

Audrey Tang: This is very important to us that we don’t see this as a dilemma, because if you see this as a dilemma, then you invariably make the instrumental value sacrifices, like a little bit less speech freedom may be required if you want to fight the infodemic.

Audrey Tang: A little bit less privacy may be required if you want to fight a pandemic, and then it’s a slippery slope. I understand that’s actually the main German argument as well, because like Germany, Taiwan has a legal system of written law.

Audrey Tang: Everything that we do must be subject to congressional approval, and there must be an existing law that establishes the foundation for such administrative action. We’re a continental law system. Because of that, everything we do during the COVID was based on data that’s already been collected before the pandemic.

Audrey Tang: We simply do not collect new data in the name of the pandemic, because if we want to do so, we will have to go to the Congress and get their approval. They very correctly will say, “This is new data collection. We don’t know about its privacy property. We don’t know about its cybersecurity property, and we will need some time to try,” and so on.

Audrey Tang: Time is of essence. When we started responding early January, we have this very simple rule of thumb. No lockdown, no takedown, no new data collection.

Lorenz Wagner: I do understand. This is something that casts before in the parliament. Like in South Korea, they had a long time to prepare. You had this in mind in Taiwan also, or it was more the new movement that managed it, not the only movement? How was it? What’s the difference?

Audrey Tang: There are a mixture of old and new, because Taiwan was hit very badly by SARS in 2003. Everybody understood the importance of the chemical technology. That is soap and hand sanitizers. Everybody understand the physical vaccine. That is the medical mask.

Audrey Tang: These are, of course, old. It’s like a societal inoculation, but the digital part is new. Back in 2003, the mask rationing part of the social innovation was simply impossible because, back in the SARS 1.0 days, not everyone in Taiwan had a national IC health card. Only people in the Pescadore Islands – that is to say, Penghu – had it. We were doing limited-scale experiment there. It showed that the IC card has really helped that tiny island to manage SARS 1.0 for obvious reasons.

Audrey Tang: By the time that we have the SARS 2.0 this time, 99.99 percent of Taiwanese people do have an IC card. By law, it can only be used for public service purposes. All its service users need to register with the National Health Insurance Agency.

Audrey Tang: Then only qualified medical officers or medical practitioners, clinicians, and so on with their own identity card, when their card and the institutions authorizations, and the patients’ cards together can write any new data into that IC card.

Audrey Tang: It’s a very strong sense of protection. People do trust that, when they get their national IC card, it will not be harvested for, I don’t know, advertisement or something. That is new. This digital infrastructure is new. On top of it, we built, of course, the mask rationing, the clinics’ reporting system, a lot of other things, just based on this simple IC card.

Lorenz Wagner: Maybe talk about equality, but before, we have this COVID pandemia, and the world will be different after. You were talking about that is maybe the golden time for social change and social innovators.

Lorenz Wagner: Can you explain me a little bit what would be the chance that we could take off it, and what need to be changed, and what maybe are some risks of it?

Audrey Tang: Sure. I think one most important thing is the same sense of urgency across the planet about one common problem. We didn’t have that for climate crisis. The smaller islands feel it more strongly, the larger continents, less so, except in Germany. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Also, in disinformation. For example, the democracies at the frontlines feel it more. The democracies that are more established and doesn’t have a bordering authoritarian regime feel it less so, and so on. There are many global-scale problems, but it’s the first time that a problem is felt in the same urgency.

Audrey Tang: Because of this, it builds an international solidarity. People don’t care so much about the Westphalian system anymore, because the virus simply doesn’t negotiate as the diplomats. It’s in a different category. We all work across sectors and across national boundaries. This is great.

Audrey Tang: The second thing is that the cultural phenomenon, the excess, the showing off, the linear growth, status goods, things like that, it’s gone. When people are suffering this much, it really doesn’t look good to show off one’s excesses.

Audrey Tang: Even for fashion workers, for example, like I wear this thing, and I can explain that this is made out of recycled plastic bottles and the coffee bean wastes. It purifies the air, reduce their carbon footprint, and so on, in order to justify why I get to wear this very good-looking clothes.

Audrey Tang: This applies to all trades of life. This is called circular economy now. Again, this is a great chance for the idea of circular economy to not be something you opt in, but rather something that is the default.

Lorenz Wagner: Can you give me some more examples for this kind of economy? How it works, how it could evolve.

Audrey Tang: Certainly. For example, in Taiwan, we have the citizens measuring the air quality, and now also, water quality, by themselves.

Audrey Tang: Instead of a top-down authoritarian intelligence system that monitors the atmosphere, the water quality, agriculture, and so on, people can choose to work with organic farming cooperatives or the farmers that are farming in a much more sustainable fashion through participatory auditing, participatory accountability.

Audrey Tang: If there are pollutions in the water or in the air and so on, this decentralizes the many of which actually set up by the primary school teachers who are now teaching data stewardship, like GDPR-style concepts.

Audrey Tang: What’s controllership? What’s portability? These kind of ideas that are just impossible to teach, unless as a student you are a data curator and collector. Instead of media literacy or data literacy we now in Taiwan, starting last year, talk about media competence and data competence.

Audrey Tang: That is to say, instead of being a consumer, we become a producer, so that we can collectively make initiatives. Like there was a young person, only 16 years old, a couple years ago when she made a citizen’s initiative to ban all the plastic straws and other single-use utensils from our national identity drink, the bubble tea.

Audrey Tang: This is important, and she immediately collected more than 5,000 signatures. When we met her and asked, “Why did you start this?” she says, “It’s my civics teacher’s assignment.”

Audrey Tang: She really started a movement, and we really did ban the plastic straws for indoor drinking, and eventually for taking out as well, and worked on more circular materials that biodegrades and is carbon emission-friendly and things like that.

Audrey Tang: I can have many, many anecdotes, but this shows that, even before they have the right to vote, they already are having a very positive impact to the society.

Lorenz Wagner: What’s the name of this girl?

Audrey Tang: Wang Hsuan-ju is the name. She is now a councilmember of our Open Government National Action Plan Task Force, but she’s only 19 at the moment.

Lorenz Wagner: That’s great. You also have vTaiwan. I talked to a friend about this, and I found it fabulous. She said one thing to me. She loved it also, but she said, “But we have the problem. It’s all people who are not willing to do something.”

Lorenz Wagner: You know you have these ideas and this opportunities to do something. How do you make sure and how do you bring people to really take part in it?

Audrey Tang: I think one of the main contribution of vTaiwan is that it shows that, even in a hotly-debated topic, like Uber and so on, even with tens of thousands of people, some with very polarized ideas, with the right design, people can see the common value, despite their initially different positions.

Audrey Tang: VTaiwan was more like a research project. It’s still being run by the social sector. It’s currently being used to deliberate, for example, the Open Parliament Action Plan, and our National Action Plan may be also be deliberated on vTaiwan. That’s still being discussed.

Audrey Tang: More and more, this kind of crowdsourcing agenda, or just collective intelligence, or crowd law, or people-powered – many different names – are being picked up by professional public servants. We now, instead of vTaiwan showcasing one Polis conversation or the other, we have now polis.gov.tw, which is a government infrastructure.

Audrey Tang: We use it for the consultation on the ocean policy, on the open mountaineering policy, on all sort of cross-ministerial policy, even diplomatic. If you look for the digital dialog with the AIT, the American de facto embassy, then that we hold four dialogs on Polis, using the same method as vTaiwan, but extending beyond vTaiwan, because it’s now being run by professional diplomats.

Audrey Tang: I would say that vTaiwan serve as the inspiring model, but the action may not be only taken on vTaiwan, which remains in the social sector. The private sector, the public sector, we are also learning the same tools that vTaiwan pioneered.

Lorenz Wagner: When we talk about equality, I’m talking about great ideas and great innovators in the world, thinkers with new ideas that are really anchored in the reality. There’s one big idea about it, looking very much on equality. What is equality for you personally?

Audrey Tang: To me, equality means in Taiwan that anyone anywhere in Taiwan have the same right to communicate to health and to learn. These are the fundamental guarantees that the public sector makes to its people.

Audrey Tang: If anywhere in Taiwan you do not have the capacity to participate with this kind of live streaming or video conferencing that we’re having, then it’s my fault personally. The same applies to the healthcare, which covers 99.99 percent of not just citizen, but also residents.

Audrey Tang: It’s a single-payer system, so people who show any symptom, it is actually cheaper and easier for them to get a mask and go to a clinic than to pay for a test by themselves, which is unimaginable unless you have a truly socialist, single-payer healthcare system.

Audrey Tang: The same goes for learning as well. For distance learning, for the learning by doing, by community place-making, things like that, we must ensure that everywhere in Taiwan, people have the same right to learn.

Audrey Tang: Even in alternative, like Valdev-Schüler, the Montessori system, and things like that, they all have the equal opportunity to work out their own curriculum ideas. I think of equality meaning mainly in these three domains.

Lorenz Wagner: That’s a good way of thinking of it. Do you see, of course, there are limits of equality? If you have total equality, it’s maybe the same thing as control. Do you think also about this? There was a big idea of equality 100 years ago, and that wasn’t working.

Audrey Tang: Why I stressed learning, health, and communication is because they are all non-rivals relationships. If I am more healthy, if I’m more resistant to COVID, it also means that my neighbors are more resistant.

Audrey Tang: My being more healthy does not deprive my neighbors’ healthiness. Actually, it improves their healthiness. If I am more able to create Creative Commons material, or to write free software, it does not take away anything from my neighbor.

Audrey Tang: Actually, they can learn much more easily, because there’s more material to learn, like from OpenStreetMap and Wikipedia. If I have broadband access, then my neighbor actually can benefit from that as well, because it’s likely that I will speak out to represent my neighborhood, or to at least let other people from far away see what my neighborhood is like.

Audrey Tang: It also improves the participation rights for my community as well. In a sense, these three domains gets better when it’s more equal and more innovative, too. These are open innovation domains of non-rival is good.

Lorenz Wagner: That’s a very good explanation. When we bring it down a little bit, and when we talk about ideas that coming through, what are the ideas that you personally are the most invested in when you think about equality? What would your, if you had to rank it – it’s not easy, I know this, but – what would be, for you, the most important or the two most important?

Audrey Tang: I would say definitely it’s communication. Once you have broadband as a human right, once you have equal access to online digital democracy as a human right, even if the health situation or the learning situation is less equal in that neighborhood – maybe it’s indigenous, rural, or remote island – chances are, through a broadband, you can find an assistive intelligence, an AI that translates for you.

Audrey Tang: Chances are that you can join a learning group online. Chances are that you can receive tele-healthcare from an experienced doctor or nurse who lives physically far away. I think the communication right is the most fundamental of the three.

Lorenz Wagner: You’re working very close with Glen Weyl and RadicalxChange. What do you think about them? What do they contribute? What is the most important contribution of them to change and to equality?

Audrey Tang: I think what they their contribution is about striking a balance and then innovate based on that balance of something that’s not left-wing, not right-wing, but what I call as up-wing. That is to say, instead of accepting a zero-sum thing between state control on one side and surveillance capitalism on the other, RadicalxChange said, “Let’s design as a social sector a set of mechanism.”

Audrey Tang: Once we have the set of mechanism in place, such as quadratic voting, quadratic funding, data dignity, and so on, then we can have a new sector. Let’s call it the social sector or the plural sector, many different names.

Audrey Tang: This social sector would hold a legitimacy and actually will link the best part of capitalism, which is efficient allocation of resources, and the best part of social welfare, which is the equal opportunity and human right and dignity, and make them reinforce each other instead of canceling each other. This is the positive-sum relationship. That to me is the X in the RadicalxChange.

Lorenz Wagner: When we talk about data, there are very great terms that you use. You were talking about data competence. You talk about data dignity and this idea of data unions. I think you are very invested in them also. Can you explain me these three terms and talk a little about data union? Is this utopia, or is this something that really can work?

Audrey Tang: Sure. First of all, the AirBox, the air quality measurement thing, that’s a real thing. Thousands – actually, now tens of thousands – of Taiwanese people are voluntarily measuring their air quality and dedicating it to a distributed ledger.

Audrey Tang: People can account for any kind of micro weather, and even collectively form a coalition to bargain with the environment minister, saying, “Hey, our piece of puzzle is not complete without the industrial areas. As a primary school teacher or high school teacher, we really can’t break into industrial areas to measure the air quality there, so you do something.”

Audrey Tang: Then the environment minister says, “Sure, we own the lamp at the industrial park. Let’s use your design, but set up also tens of thousands of air quality sensors in those industrial parks to complete the puzzle together.”

Audrey Tang: In GDPR terms, that’s called joint data controllership. It’s not utopia. It’s even written in the GDPR. It’s just very few people actually use it. [laughs] This kind of practice is why we use quadratic voting in the Presidential Hackathon to promote five such data unions every year to make sure whatever they build as a prototype in the past three months, our president will give them a trophy saying, “Whatever you did in the past 3 months, we will do whatever it takes for it to be a national policy with all the budget regulation or personnel required in the next 12 months.”

Audrey Tang: The Presidential Hackathon is the main enabler of the utopian, because it carries…It’s basically the presidential power as a Hackathon prize. That is also a very important part, piece of the puzzle. Again, think of the labor conditions before unions were invented, before the cooperatives were invented.

Audrey Tang: Then each individual worker has very little bargaining power, vis-à-vis capitalists. Because of that, some sort of governmental promise saying that, “If you unionize, then if you go to strike, the police will protect you instead of beat you.”

Audrey Tang: Something like that needs to be said. That is what Presidential Hackathon is saying.

Lorenz Wagner: Yeah. Glen started a bit in a different way when he said to me, “OK,” or he brought up his idea, data unions, or it’s in terms of money. You give away your data, and you get no money for it. When you go together, you could give to Facebook, or to social media, to other…We need to talk about them, because you call them asocial, I think.

Audrey Tang: Antisocial media, yes.

Lorenz Wagner: Antisocial, yes. Before, just the idea to say, “OK, instead of giving them these kind of new labor for free,” to say, “OK, we’ll get better data, but we want to have money for it.” In the future, we’ll have many people without having work, like you had 50 or 100 years ago.

Lorenz Wagner: 100 years ago, the value under the success was built with really working people. Today, in future, the work will be few people that will program, and a lot of people that will not contribute to this new value that we created.

Lorenz Wagner: They will contribute – excuse my English – with data and things like this. They need to get money for this. That’s something that people are saying. What do you think about these idea, and is this something that should be pushed further?

Audrey Tang: I think the term “contribute” is a little bit vague here. What does it mean to contribute with data? In Taiwan, when we say data competence, we mean something like a producer, or a journalist. Why not?

Audrey Tang: A journalist is actually a very good example, because anyone can write, but not everyone can be journalists. To be a journalist is to have a set of ethics that cares about finding the fact, that cares about checking the fact and its sources, about aware of the framing effect, about being open to corrections, but also protect the people who correct you if they want to remain anonymous.

Audrey Tang: I can go on, but to be a journalist instead of a writer means a specific kind of work. It’s not just about me writing a tweet means I contribute to journalism. That’s a stretch of the term contribution. If you want to contribute to journalism, first, you accept the journalistic code.

Audrey Tang: Then you work according to the journalistic framework. That’s how other journalists can work with you, because otherwise, you are not a reliable source.

Audrey Tang: This is a very important distinction to make, because where this is like saying, “A journalist contribute with text, and more people are going to democratize journalism, because anyone can produce text. Journalists can receive many text from many people,” this is kind of true.

Audrey Tang: The kind of text, if it’s newsworthy, if it’s journalistic, that’s the kind of text we want. The true work is to make the quality of the text journalistic. It’s not just about the text. When you say contribute data, anyone can contribute data, but they may be noise.

Audrey Tang: They may not mean anything. They may be heavily biased, just like some text that purports to be news are actually very biased and not journalistic at all. It could actually contribute negative quality, not just zero quality.

Audrey Tang: When the data is useful to the society, then similar to how journalistic text is of a public value, then we are talking about data competence and data stewardship, just like an editor. An editor in for a journalist is like a steward of data.

Audrey Tang: Then, when the stewards and the contributors, like the editors and journalists, unionize, of course, it gives them better bargaining power, but this is first based on the idea of quality, accountability, alignment, dignity, and so on.

Lorenz Wagner: I do understand. Very good explanation. When we talk about vTaiwan and what you called antisocial…

Audrey Tang: Media.

Lorenz Wagner: …media, you have a different idea with vTaiwan. Can you explain me what’s antisocial about other social media, and what’s the idea of the algorithm that you have?

Audrey Tang: Sure. A social media simply means that it makes sure that each person can have a narrative that is seen or heard or experienced by other people. It’s a neutral term. When experienced this way, sometimes, it encourages the more distrusting part about rage and outrage.

Audrey Tang: Outrage that’s channeled to revenge and discrimination, and these are the destructive part of humanity. When a social media channels mostly these energies, I call it antisocial media.

Audrey Tang: If, on the other hand, the outrage around a social injustice is channeled into co-creation, channeled into journalistic work, channeled into policymaking to prevent future injustice from happening, and then this is turned into prosocial energies, in which case I call it prosocial media.

Audrey Tang: In vTaiwan, the product is the common value out of different positions, and the innovations based on the common values, that’s clearly prosocial. That’s why I call it prosocial media. Both antisocial media and prosocial media are social media, of course.

Lorenz Wagner: The vTaiwan, how many people are taking part using it and a part of the community?

Audrey Tang: VTaiwan was the initial experiment, and so each conversation have a varying number of people. Altogether, it’s maybe a few hundred thousand people. In the Join platform, which is like the deployment platform, if the vTaiwan is the research platform, then the join.gov.tw is maintained by the national government.

Audrey Tang: Then there’s, I think, more than 12 million people now using it. Considering we’re a country of 23 million people, that’s why we dropped the E from the e-participation platform when describing join.gov.tw. We simply say it’s the participation platform.

Audrey Tang: When more than half of people use your platform, you don’t need the E. It’s like I will say, “I will mail you the attachment,” and you understand it’s email. I don’t have to say E anymore.

Lorenz Wagner: Are you in discussions with the people running the classical networks, the antisocial networks? Are they looking what you are doing, and is there a kind of exchange?

Audrey Tang: Yes. There’s a team called Civic Integrity, and it’s Facebook. I am in contact with them. Specifically, for example, last autumn, that’s when we started to talk to Facebook, saying, “Look, our Control Yuan is a separate branch of government, audits all the expenditure and donation for election campaigns.”

Audrey Tang: They publish it as open data for the first time in 2018 for the mayor election, and so people can do independent analysis. It turns out that the social media advertisements were not filed as campaign expenditure, and so not subject to the campaign financing laws, which would determine, for example, the budget that each candidate has, a reasonable budget.

Audrey Tang: For example, it will ban any foreign people from donating to a domestic election campaign. It has conflict of interest rule, a lot of other rules. It seems that people could just pay Facebook and circumvent all these rules and all these norms.

Audrey Tang: We said to Facebook, “You either adopt the same data norm that we have here around campaign donation and expenditure when it comes to Election Day advertisements, or you may face social sanction.”

Audrey Tang: We understand we may not have jurisprudence over the Facebook company, but we do have a very strong democratic social norm. Democracy for us is like a technology. People understand this technology need to be prosocial.

Audrey Tang: If they don’t conform, they may face social sanction. Then, starting last November, Taiwan became, I think, the first jurisdiction that Facebook updated its advertisement library in real time in structured data, so that any dark patterns will be detected and shamed.

Audrey Tang: Nobody dare try that in the 2020 election of January. That is just one example out of many where we used the social sector norms as the public sector to make sure that the private sector play by the rules.

Lorenz Wagner: Thank you. When we talk about equality, it’s also, I think, important to talk about gender equality. It’s quite interesting to talk to you about, because you are in-between. How was your experience, your feeling concerning was there for you a kind of equality, a possibility that felt really good to change?

Lorenz Wagner: When you look at society today in Taiwan, but also maybe in Germany or other countries, what could you make better to have equality also in gender, and also for people that are not defining themselves as women or men?

Audrey Tang: Just last week, we have a very large Pride parade. Actually, the first transgender pride parade as part of that movement. I guess the unique part is not the transgender, it’s the parade, because a physical parade [laughs] is a privilege in this year.

Audrey Tang: Having a transgender pride parade really works pretty well in that Taiwan, because as I mentioned, in Taiwan, we see democracy as a technology that we can continuously improve. The improvement comes from many different cultures.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, there is more than 20 national languages, more than 16 of which are indigenous. The Amis, for example, indigenous nation, of which the presidential spokesperson, Kolas Yotaka, she was part of the Amis – well, still is, sorry – she is of the Amis nation, is a matriarchy, a true matriarchy.

Audrey Tang: The Paiwan nation, of which our president shares part of the lineage, doesn’t care about gender when selecting for leadership and so on. Many different cultures, and there’s also indigenous cultures that have more than one gender.

Audrey Tang: Even in indigenous cultures where there are gender role types, sometimes, they are flipped. Having a transcultural republic of citizens truly shows the rainbow variety of not just diversity, but also inclusion in the sense that anyone can contribute a different interpretation when it comes to gender.

Audrey Tang: I think Taiwan is uniquely blessed because of all these different gender ideas. This is not just equality about getting the same number of women in the parliament as men. I think we’re at 43 percent now, so it’s still some work there, but also about making sure that people do not feel that their destiny is somehow determined by their biology.

Lorenz Wagner: When we look at the idea of design thinking in politics, there was an interview with German platform, the home page called TN3. It was quite difficult for me to understand the idea behind this. There was novel trials for this kind of design thinking. Could you explain it a little bit for me how this could work also in democracy, if you have this kind of approach?

Audrey Tang: Certainly. Design thinking is a very simple idea that you need to first discover what the stakeholders, the people, really feel before defining the common values. Without the common values, you may do all the policymaking in a very professional way, but the people will not feel that they are a part of it.

Audrey Tang: Instead of the traditional way of just developing a policy and implementing the policy very well, design thinking adds an extra diamond before it that says, “Let’s first discover each other’s feelings,” or an ethnographic hanging out with each other to take all the sides, to feel the viewpoints of taxi drivers and Uber drivers,, of the indigenous elders, but also the younger people, who are more having an international identity with their indigenous upbringing and so on.

Audrey Tang: Once we discover various people’s common values, then we can solve the right problem with policymaking. I think design thinking is related not with the idea of equality, but with inclusion. Specifically, being more inclusive in setting the agenda, making sure that people care about the work that we collectively do, instead of saying, “Oh, let’s just delegate to the professional bureaucrats.”

Lorenz Wagner: When we talk about Glen, you know him personally. What do you think about him as a person, and what’s special about him?

Audrey Tang: I met Glen in person, of course, and I think he really is quite like the character Hamilton in the musical during the part that says, “Nonstop.” I think somewhere between Nonstop and “Dear Theodosia.” I don’t know whether you’ve watched the musical or whether this reference means anything to you. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Oh, you did? OK, that’s great. There’s a great line in Dear Theodosia that says, “You come of age with our young nation.” We’ll do everything to…”You will come of age with our young nation.” This is, I think, a great line, because it shows that Hamilton – or Burr, in that Dear Theodosia song – is really not doing the work for themselves.

Audrey Tang: It’s really preparing a nation for their child to blow them all away, to unleash the innovation and creativity. Glen, to me, has a lot of focus on enabling the collective intelligence. He is not that kind of designer that will do a planned economy, that plan out the five-year future for all his citizens.

Audrey Tang: We know that kind of economist, but rather a more humble kind of economist that says, “Let’s make a space for all the better innovations to spread faster and to make sure that the ideas worth spreading do spread, and to have a real social impact as quickly as possible to prepare the planet for the next generation.”

Lorenz Wagner: When you talk about this, the new nation, to prepare the planet, and new generations, you have this very famous movement, of course, FridaysForFuture. You have RadicalxChange. What do you see as further movement, and what does this mean for the world coming to us? What are the ideas in them that you found the most appalling and the most interesting?

Audrey Tang: I already talked about international intergenerational solidarity. I covered that, so I wouldn’t talk more about it. I already talk about the circular economy and the abolishment of excess and status consumerism. That’s, of course, all very good.

Audrey Tang: I now see something, I wouldn’t say appalling, but there’s a dialog between me and Yuval Harari in which we talk about the different futures of AI in very broad terms. To some people like me, AI stands for assistive intelligence, like the glass that we are wearing, like a hearing aid my grandma is wearing.

Audrey Tang: They are here to assist us and enhance our dignity. For some, AI stands for authoritarian intelligence, where the state gets to know everything about its citizens, especially people in concentration camps in Xinjiang. There’s different visions of AI. I would say even opposite visions of AI.

Audrey Tang: One puts more power to the edge, to individual citizens. The power is based on something affecting only oneself, empowering oneself but not delegating the power to the state, or to surveillance capitalists for that matter.

Audrey Tang: The appalling part, I guess, is that in the book, “Radical Markets,” Glen and Posner posited a future where a centralized instead of a market-mechanism-based or a social-relation-based super-intelligence could actually do planned economy in a more effective way and realize more good spirit, eudaimonia, for citizens than anything that we in the assistive intelligence vision could offer.

Audrey Tang: There’s science fiction novels that explores this. “The Culture” series from Iain M. Banks talks about such kind of superintelligence. If you think that sort of superintelligence is inevitable, then it matters less then to work on assistive intelligence, to work on accountability and social Innovation.

Audrey Tang: At the end, a super AI will watch over with the grace and the benevolence of value alignment. That is a little bit more appalling. That is my last line of my job description. When we hear the singularity is near, let’s remember the plurality is here. I’m not saying that the singularity will never happen, but let’s remember the plurality is here.

Audrey Tang: It’s just like people saying, “Hey, let’s go to Mars so we don’t have to care about climate crisis on Earth anymore.” They’re not technically wrong, but I’m still of the side that says, “Let’s still care about the climate crisis a little bit.”

Lorenz Wagner: [laughs] You’re very right. When we talk about community, we also could talk about generation. We have young generation, old generation. We also can look at it in terms of equality, but that’s not so necessary.

Lorenz Wagner: Me, I live here with four generations in one house, grandparents. That’s a model. What do you think when you hear this? How could come generations together in a little way, like I am doing here, and in a bigger way? Have you ever thought about this? Is this something…

Audrey Tang: Yes, of course. Earth is a generational spaceship. [laughs] It relies on the wisdom of the eldest to continue to make sense, to be transcultural. If you cannot even conserve the culture, what’s the beginning of transculturalism?

Audrey Tang: If people can destroy cultures by the mark of progress of one culture – in Taiwan, it’s more than 20 – then for the other 19 cultures’ elders this is catastrophe. This is not called progress.

Audrey Tang: The wisdom of the elders, both in the sense of the older people but also of the indigenous elders, is that what’s old, what’s truly generational, is this spaceship. The Bunun nation calls the top of Taiwan Saviah. The Tsou nation calls it Patungkuonʉ.

Audrey Tang: Different names, but the idea is that this high mountain, almost 4,000 meters, is a spirit. It’s a long-lived spirit. We are just ephemeral stewards to the spirit. It’s not quite the sustainable development goals, but it is a view of natural personhood, like in the movie “Avatar,” something like that.

Audrey Tang: When viewed this way, then the spaceship is of importance. Our different generational cultural knowledge is there so that we can care for the spaceship better so that it doesn’t suffer from a shipwreck or something. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: To me, I take it a seven-generation point of view for this particular thing so that each generation is learning, conserving the culture four generations ago and then passing on whatever we learned to the four generations down the line, so seven generations in total.

Lorenz Wagner: That’s very interesting. How did you came to this thinking? It was triggered by somebody thinking about this, or it was your personal way to approach? How this is come? It was first time that I hear something like this. It’s really interesting.

Audrey Tang: The seven generation, I think is a Canadian indigenous culture thing. The conservation of cultures and this transcultural dialogue, I learned these words from working with the open source Open Society people in New Zealand, where there’s a strong Maori component.

Audrey Tang: Their constitution [laughs] is a pact between the transcultural relationships. Their rivers and national parks have natural personhood and can sit on the board as a board member, exactly the same kind of thing I was referring to when talking about the Saviah or Patungkuonʉ.

Audrey Tang: The firsthand experience, maybe because right after I talk to my principal, head of the middle school, I went to the Atayal Mountains to live there.

Audrey Tang: Basically, the entire eastern side of Taiwan has their own oral tradition that’s most often passed from the grandparents’ generation to the grandchildren’s generation, while the middle generation, of course, performs the necessary work to sustain life.

Audrey Tang: The generations on the both side perform the cultural work. Often, their offspring will adopt the name of their parents. It’s this intergenerational bridge of cultural transmission of oral culture.

Audrey Tang: Of course, having gone through two puberties, I would also look into the Amis matriarchy tradition, the various different traditions that have words to describe my personal experience and so on. It’s very transcultural. There’s no single source of this thought, but I think of this in a way that gets influenced, I guess, by my community, which is homo sapiens. It’s a very large community.

Lorenz Wagner: When we talk persons…I don’t know. I was writing you about one hour to talk. If you have some more time, happy. If not, I don’t want to…

Audrey Tang: Yeah. Maybe 10 minutes more, I’m fine.

Lorenz Wagner: That’s very nice. Thank you. When we talk about people that influenced you and that you think should influence the world and maybe should know them already…

Audrey Tang: More obscure people?

Audrey Tang: So I wouldn’t say Laozi, who wrote the book about the way and the power of the way, the “Tao Te Ching,” because everybody knows about Taoism already. [laughs] Still, many people in Europe know Taoism as maybe a spiritual, meditational practice or as a folk religion.

Audrey Tang: To me, Taoism is a political philosophy. That’s where I get the idea of conservative, as in cultural lineage, anarchism, as in giving no order and receiving no order. That’s, for me, Taoism as political philosophy. If I say to fellow politicians in Europe that my political philosophy is Taoism, probably it’s not a very effective word.

Audrey Tang: That’s why I say conservative anarchism, but it conveys the same meaning. The whole Taoist lineage, from Laozi to Zhuangzi and so on, of course, I think are very important for contemporary people to know.

Lorenz Wagner: Great to hear this. When you do the transcript of our talk, will this be in English or in Taiwanese?

Audrey Tang: This will be in English. It will be in the language that we actually speak.

Lorenz Wagner: What are, for you, first just the context where you are now? Where are you sitting? What have you done? What will you do now? Just for the article.

Audrey Tang: I am in the cabinet office. This is more like a studio than anything. This is not my usual office. My usual office is at the Social Innovation Lab. It’s a park. We tore down the walls and all. Here is better for recording and a studio.

Audrey Tang: Just to prove it, we do have the VR equipments, quite professional video processing computers, quite professional camera and video-making instances, a huge screen which is just a wall that benefits from that projector out there, and so on.

Audrey Tang: This is where I can virtually immerse myself pretty much anywhere, and then have a telepresence coexistence setting. Of course, this is just Skype conversation, so we are just doing a fraction of the virtual and augmented reality power in this studio.

Lorenz Wagner: Yeah. Thank you for explaining. This evening, are you still working or having fun? It’s the same thing.

Audrey Tang: Right. This is actually my last meeting scheduled. After this, I will go back home, I guess, and I don’t know, hug some trolls. That’s my hobby. Now, there’s a lot of trolls to hug. Specifically, since a couple days ago, right?

Lorenz Wagner: [laughs] Why since a couple of days ago?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, in Taiwan, of course, people care a lot about distant states such as Georgia and Arizona.

Lorenz Wagner: Yeah, so I heard, yeah. [laughs] There are two lines that are coming in my head when I think about creating a different world, a better world, doing a change. There is one, “Imagine” from John Lennon. The other one is “I have a dream,” from Martin Luther King.

Lorenz Wagner: What for you? If you take Imagine, or if you take I have a dream, I don’t know which one of them, both, you would prefer. What are you dream, or what would you like to imagine to happen? We are not talking in 50 years, but in the next two, three, five years.

Audrey Tang: Sure. Of course, my usual quote is from Leonard Cohen, who says, “Ring the bells that still can ring. Forget your perfect offering. There’s a crack in everything, and that’s how the light gets in.” Currently, there’s cracks in our spaceship. The infodemic, the pandemic, the climate crisis, just to name three. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: In order to not have a complete shipwreck, what needs to happen is the light needs to get in. By the light, I mean the help that not only Taiwan offers – we have a hashtag, #TaiwanCanHelp – but also, the Taiwan model.

Audrey Tang: The idea that you can have the same kind of – actually, a better kind of – GDP growth. Not just for this quarter, but for this year, but for next year, too, in Taiwan, while countering the coronavirus. You can deepen the democracy and social sector’s trust and enlist the journalists simply by not using the word “fake news.”

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, journalism, 新聞業 or 新聞工作 is the same root of word as news, 新聞. So journalists are literally newsworkers. There’s no way to say the F-word – the fake news word – without offending journalism. Both of my parents are journalists, so out of filial piety, I simply cannot use the F-word.

Audrey Tang: Now that we describe it as infodemic and roll out creative ideas, humor over rumor, the cute Shiba Inu as the spokesdog, and things like that, we proved that you can advance democracy and free speech while fixing the infodemic by channeling people’s thoughts from outrage to revenge to outrage to co-creation, to joy and humor.

Audrey Tang: That is, I think, the kind of light that need to get in for the cracks of pandemic, infodemic, and climate crisis.

Lorenz Wagner: Thank you very much. It was such a nice talk, and I really enjoyed it. Yes, the cover story, that will be our first edition in 2021, so I think that in the year, to make, to give to people a bit hope, and to look on good ideas, doing a change. Thank you very much, and all the best for you.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, thank you, and live long and prosper.

Lorenz Wagner: Bye. [laughs]