Alain Lewkowicz: All right. Do you make a test?

Joyce Huang: A sound test.

Alain Lewkowicz: Can you talk a little bit, please?

Audrey Tang: Just a second.

Audrey Tang: Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

Audrey Tang: Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

Audrey Tang: Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

Alain Lewkowicz: OK.

Joyce Huang: You’re ready to travel any time with your luggage and all this. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: That’s exactly right.

Joyce Huang: [laughs]

Alain Lewkowicz: My first question is, can you introduce yourself?

Audrey Tang: Hello, I’m Audrey Tang. I’m currently Taiwan’s Digital Minister.

Alain Lewkowicz: Why did you decide to get involved in this minister? Why did you accept to join the Tsai Ing-wen administration?

Audrey Tang: For fun.

Alain Lewkowicz: Can you say...?

Joyce Huang: Full sentence.

Audrey Tang: OK, sure.

Audrey Tang: I joined the cabinet because the premier at the time, Lin Chuan, asked me to find a cultural translator between the social innovation culture, between the Silicon Valley, and between the people in Asia, and find someone who can reconcile those different world views together in a democratic way.

Audrey Tang: I asked my friends, and they all have other business to do, so I’m like, "Yeah, maybe I can take a try myself." I joined not out of duty, out of mission, or anything.

Audrey Tang: I joined mostly for fun, to create a space that people can enjoy the process of democracy, and while enjoying the process, also make other people see that democratic values in today’s Internet world, it is not always just to get upset, protest, or things like that that are important. There’s also the joy of creation and of thinking and listening to each other together.

Alain Lewkowicz: You decided to create some new tools to improve the Taiwanese democracy. Can you explain to me what are those tools and why Taiwan administration felt that it was the time for Taiwan to improve the democracy?

Audrey Tang: I assembled those tools and put them to use, but just like any open source or free software project, I’m usually not a creator. In fact, the very idea of creator is questioned in the free software community. Who is the creator of any Wikipedia article? It is co created by anyone who can fix a word or a typo. They’re also creators. I’m not the sole creator of any tools.

Audrey Tang: The tools that I work with, there are many. For example, we have an e-petition platform that is, I think, the world’s best actively used e-petition platform. We have visualization of our budget, and have each individual project in every individual ministry be a social object that people can collaborate on and watch the progress together.

Audrey Tang: We have a AI powered conversation space called Pol.is that we use when there are a thousand people, all with different perspectives, and try to find consensus out of the dissent.

Audrey Tang: We also have employed many of what we call civilized discourse construction kit, which is a way for people to work on each other’s ideas more deeply, but without the capability of getting the trolls or getting other people who are not so willing to have a civilized discussion, to let them reform in this kind of collaborative space.

Audrey Tang: There is many others. There’s the Slido system, which we use for the public service, as well as people in the audience to use their phones not to distract each other, but to attract each other’s attention on the common public topics currently discussed in Slido.

Audrey Tang: We use the RealtimeBoard, which is also a tool that makes the mind map of a facilitator, projecting it publicly. Anyone who are even watching online can follow the current context of discussion.

Audrey Tang: We also use 360 Live streaming, so that people who are not here in the room can also feel like being in the room. We use many other telepresence tools, as well. We also use a lot what we call accountability tools, such as a shared bookmark called Hackfoldr that shows exactly the context and history of how and why a policy is made.

Audrey Tang: We use a platform called Sandstorm, which is a free software security tool that is within our cybersecurity infrastructure that let the public servants create new and novel applications, such ordering lunch boxes together without worrying about cybersecurity threats from other places.

Audrey Tang: There’s hundreds of tools. I can spend an hour just talking through each of them, but I understand this is a short interview.

Alain Lewkowicz: Why was it important to improve the Taiwanese democracy? Taiwan is a young democracy. What was wrong inside this democracy, according to you?

Audrey Tang: There’s nothing wrong... It is just, with the social media and with the Internet and a wider prevalent access to mobile devices, people already have better ways to organize among themselves rather than the existing representative democratic structure.

Audrey Tang: I wouldn’t say there’s anything wrong. It’s just, with times, the new advance of technology brings more efficient and, frankly speaking, easier to access forms of organization.

Audrey Tang: It is not really decision making in many public policies, so there’s a demos, but it’s not a " cracy." On the other hand, there is an old version of the representative democracy that works reasonably well, but because people feel closer to each other in the demos of the social media and of the Internet, they feel more distant to the existing administration, existing vehicles of democracy.

Audrey Tang: Regardless of being young or old, I think all democracies in the world have to now work with these new tools and work out innovative ways to engage people. Otherwise, they risk this game being not very interesting at all and lose the fun of it. This is what we call a democratic apathy or democratic recession.

Alain Lewkowicz: I guess that it was strange for the Taiwanese politicians to see you coming in this administration. Usually there are two major parties, the Kuomintang, the DPP, and now there is someone who is coming and...

Alain Lewkowicz: ...use new tools, new way of making politics.

Audrey Tang: I wouldn’t say that. Before Sunflower, that will be strange, but Sunflower was not the platform of any particular party. Of course, the DPP helps a little bit, but it’s not DPP’s idea to begin with. At the end of the Sunflower year, that’s end of 2014, for example, Mayor Ko Wen-je or Ko P, he’s also independent, not part of any major party.

Audrey Tang: In fact, even afterwards, the Prime Minister during the transition time, 2016, Simon Chang, is also independent. The prime minister of this cabinet, the first one, Lin Chuan, who transitioned from Simon Chang, is also independent. He also belongs to no parties. We have two prime ministers transitioning, and both are independent.

Audrey Tang: This is something that has never happened before in Taiwan’s political history. Simon Chang ordered all the ministries to upload their checkpoint documents, outlining where they’re going and how they’re going, into the public Internet and for the new cabinet to transition based on those public Internet documents, instead of being behind closed doors.

Audrey Tang: This is very useful to me, personally, because I get to follow the transition. I didn’t know that I would join the cabinet five months after the transition. But as you can see, this "not tied to any party" really frees them to do things like this. Otherwise, it would be seen as betrayal to their parties.

Audrey Tang: Because they have no party to betray, [laughs] they can transition entirely in the public, in a transparent way. I don’t think I’m the first independent person in the cabinet. There’s more independents in the cabinet than members of any party. We have a very balanced cabinet at this point.

Alain Lewkowicz: What is your reaction or what is your feeling when you see that Taiwanese try to improve its own democracy with the tools that you are using for it, and at the same time, the so called free world, the so called democratic world, don’t want to take risks to recognize Taiwan?

Audrey Tang: I think there’s many city level diplomacy going on. Usually, the tools that we use, they work best if it is around maybe 100,000 or 1,000,000 people of size, of a certain geography.

Audrey Tang: I think Taiwan is unique, because geographically we’re small, but population wise we’re a lot of people, 23 million. We can innovate a lot of democratic tools that are too costly because of the geography. We can reach a critical mass much easier than other cities.

Audrey Tang: We still share a lot of work that we do with other cities in the world, who are also working on democracy. Maybe they’re just past their own Occupy, like Madrid, Paris, [laughs] or other cities. I don’t think they have any trouble recognizing the work we’re doing, and we do work very closely, even operationally.

Alain Lewkowicz: For example, my country, my president, he won’t go to the United Nations and say, "Now, there is two China. There is a Republic of China and the People’s Republic of China." They won’t do that. They choose the People’s Republic of China and not the Republic of China.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, but that’s his decision.

Audrey Tang: When I think about Taiwan’s democracy, I think about Taiwan as a geographic platform and people on there as a cultural ecosystem. I don’t think about "The Republic of China" as a necessary condition, but that’s because I’m an anarchist. An anarchist is supposed to say that.

Audrey Tang: The idea is that if people think it takes a state to have a governance model to work, then people will naturally become much more obeying to bureaucratic commands and the top down system. My whole life I’ve been working on new ways of organizing that doesn’t depend on a state apparatus, letting people see that state is illusory.

Audrey Tang: It doesn’t really matter to me, personally, which name or the state or even the lack of a state that we’re operating in. As long as the governing system is transparent, it takes care of people’s feelings, includes people’s voices, and even not people, but also animals and the ecosystem, ecology, and future generations, that is important to me.

Audrey Tang: I think your president shares a lot of those same values, as well, on sustainable development, on ecology, and on an ethics based way to face technology. It is on those grounds, the sustainable development goals, that we have a dialogue, that we have a conversation. We even have operational alliance with the Etalab and other apparatus.

Audrey Tang: I don’t think it is necessary for the people to recognize first the state apparatus, and then the governance system. The governance system and the international solidarity around this kind of new democratic tools, they take much higher priority to me personally than any state apparatus.

Alain Lewkowicz: Do you mean that the debate between the fact that we have to be friends with China, we have to be independent, we have to be careful of China, we don’t care about China, this is all fashion. This all a way to make politics.

Audrey Tang: It is, of course, dangerous to confuse the territory with the map. [laughs] There’s a real land right here in Taiwan. We have the mountains, the ecology, the sea, the diversity of marine species. That existed as the physis. That is not the nomos. [laughs] That is not the name. This is the actuality.

Audrey Tang: If you work on a more state, or what we call multilateral, fashion, then of course the idea is that all this physical existings must be represented by a state apparatus, and for the state apparatus to represent itself in a multilateral relationship. The cyberspace or any other tools that we just talk about are just power projections of the individual states.

Audrey Tang: I think Internet was created as a I would even say counterculture to this kind of state based thinking. On Internet, people who are affected by climate change, people who are affected by other global phenomena, they unite together in their own network, even the blockchain. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: They unite together in a way that transcends those boundaries, but they still feel very much like a governance system themselves. They also make decisions together, but they don’t wait for their presidents or kings or whatever to make those decisions. They just make the decisions with any like minded people round the world.

Audrey Tang: I wouldn’t say this is irrelevant or obsolete. I’m just saying, personally, I’m focusing most of my energy to these new forms of organizations.

Alain Lewkowicz: Almost 20 years ago, I came for the first time here in Taiwan. I asked the people, "What does it mean to be Taiwanese?" They couldn’t answer to this question, because they felt that they were Chinese. The culture is a Chinese culture, but they thought they were not Chinese anymore because they choose democracy.

Alain Lewkowicz: 20 years after, if I ask you, "What does it mean to be Taiwanese?" what kind of definition will you give about the Taiwanese identity?

Audrey Tang: To be Taiwanese is to be working with Taiwan, with other people in Taiwan. It’s as simple as that, to me. Again, Taiwan is a geographic feature. On this geographic platform, there are many people who identify as Indonesian but also Taiwanese, Filipino but also Taiwanese, Japanese but also Taiwanese.

Audrey Tang: We are witnessing a sea change in how we admit people. Previously, there was this state apparatus. As I said, you have to be exclusively a state citizen, and to the exclusion of other identities.

Audrey Tang: First, our foreign talent law and other immigration law is changing, so that you can stay for just three years here and keep your original French citizenship, and then still join Taiwan in a kind of dual citizenship. 20 years ago, it’s unimaginable, but today it is the norm.

Audrey Tang: We’re trying to get more people who are also Taiwanese, instead of exclusively Taiwanese. If they identify not as a ethnic or as a race, but rather as a hobby, like, "I’m a Taiwanese hacker," or not. As I mentioned, the international cultures, they used to be subcultures 20 years ago.

Audrey Tang: Now if you ask people, maybe they really identify more with the kind of social cause or the kind of mission they want to see in the world. Maybe they say, "I’m a environmental activist," but that role is not dependent on being a Taiwanese or not. Maybe they will say, "I’m also a Taiwanese," but that’s not their primary identity.

Audrey Tang: What we’re trying to do is that those value systems that people bring to Taiwan, being a very open society, we try to have a democratic governance model that brings everybody’s voice together into something larger.

Audrey Tang: That is, people can agree on the common values and find some solutions that work for all those very different concerns, but it is not because they’re Taiwanese. [laughs] It is because they’re willing to participate in Taiwan’s democratic governance systems.

Audrey Tang: Maybe after a few years of participating, they will gradually start identifying as being Taiwanese, but as a byproduct. It is not a entry barrier. I think it is a very soft thing that people, just through osmosis, start to see the values of Taiwan, instead of one single value system.

Audrey Tang: 20 years ago, it’s all about the values fighting to be the dominant value system, but now we’re definitely a plurality. Nobody can dominate the discourse. It is through this plurality that we started to redefine the platform that is Taiwan and how those values cohere and de cohere together, and eventually becomes an assemblage that people can gradually identify with.