Martina Larkin: Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be connected. I know you had interactions with my colleagues at Unfinished before, so I’m very pleased to be connected.

Audrey Tang: Excellent. And we’ve got a full hour. We’ll make a transcript, we’ll co-edit for 10 days, and we’ll publish to the comments.

Martina Larkin: Perfect. Yes, I saw the process of radical transparency. I like it.

Audrey Tang: Excellent. So how shall we proceed?

Martina Larkin: Well, I wanted to maybe give you a quick update on where we stand on the Project Liberty side, and would love to hear a little bit from your side. What is your current focus? What is it that you work on, particularly obviously when it relates to the issues that are kind of synergetic to us around tech, democracy, social media, but also now generative AI which is obviously sort of an additional point.

Martina Larkin: And then, I just wanted to see how we can collaborate and involve you going forward. I would love to have you join our board of stewards, which is a new advisory group that we’re putting together, a global advisory group. But we can talk about this a little bit later after we discuss what’s going on in our respective work, maybe.

Audrey Tang: Okay. Please proceed. I’ve read your website which seems like pretty detailed. But as you mentioned, like generative AI, these are new topics so I would welcome any updates.

Martina Larkin: Yes. And actually, we’ve sort of evolved even from the website’s current kind of status, because obviously this field, as you know, is moving very quickly. But essentially, Project Liberty is a non‑profit organization, as you know. It’s an American 501C3, so we’re very much focused on providing, basically building a new generation of the Internet, right… which is serving the common good and helping to save democracy, not destroy it, then to fix the way that technology has been built in the Web 2.0 kind of iteration. So, if we can move into a new iteration, whether that’s Web 3.0 or whatever we call it, we want to help build that infrastructure, that world, in a better way.

Martina Larkin: So, you probably have seen that this includes building the foundational infrastructure, which is, of course, related to a protocol. We have one of those protocols that we have built, which is called DSNP. And that is really one of the foundational technology solutions that we’re putting forward. I would say one of the things that is unique about the Project Liberty is that we’re focusing on solutions, not just on the things that are going wrong, and, you know, the harms that are being created, but really putting forward some solutions, which, of course, others are working on as well.

Martina Larkin: And that leads to the second point, which is the sort of unique point of Project Liberty, which is that we’re working as an alliance of organizations that are like minded. So, we want to bring on board partners in this endeavor, whether it’s technologists or social scientists or academics, or, you know, even tech business of course, and policy makers to really help us build this new ecosystem, which is hopefully serving democracies and people better, safer, and healthier environments.

Martina Larkin: So, yeah, and the way that we work really is… and this is very much still the foundations on our website, which is we’re working across four tracks. One is the technology that I just described. So, we’re building this new ecosystem. We’re incorporating various, you know, startup Web3 players into this and trying to build kind of this alternative world. But at the same time, of course, we’re working with Web2 companies. So, we’re just launching this week I think, it is a collaboration with MeWe, or the integration of DSNP on MeWe, the social media platform in the U.S., which is our first biggest use case on DSNP on a Web2 platform.

Martina Larkin: And then the second kind of big track is around governance. So, we have an institute in Paris that is hosted at Sciences Po the university, and it’s also in collaboration with Georgetown University and we’re about to announce a number of new academic partnerships in the U.S. mainly, but we want to expand globally around those partnerships. But the idea is building new civic architecture around the governance and ethical frameworks of this technology. And, of course, the DAOs, how do we govern DAOs, how do we govern these decentralized organizations in a way that is participatory, that is much more open, but also, you know, allows for those attributes that we want to achieve, which is the ownership and particularly, control of data, and a safer and healthier environment when it comes to the digital ecosystem. So, that’s kind of the pillar number two.

Martina Larkin: And then pillar number three is all around policy and engaging with policymakers, regulators, because one of the things, of course, is to create the ecosystem around this which fosters innovation from a regulatory policy environment, which I know you know very well and you’re sort of at the forefront of this, of course, but we are working also with the EU and policymakers in the U.K. and France and also the U.S. to help them understand what this looks like, this new environment, how do we get there in the best possible way, what kind of rail guards do we need to put in place.

Martina Larkin: And, of course, this is now particularly relevant also for AI and generative AI but without killing off innovation, of course, which is, I think, an important sort of path to take. And then the last one is creating a movement. You know, all of those parts are, you know, very important and they build foundations for this and they, you know, are the sort of cornerstones of some of this stuff, but it won’t come alive until we actually get the people engaged into this.

Martina Larkin: So, for us, at the heart of this really lies this movement and various campaigns that we’re creating around helping people understand why this is important and raising the awareness and education, but also getting them involved. Getting them involved in all of those work tracks, getting them involved in the technology and in the policy shaping and, of course, in the wider kind of governance and ethical frameworks. And we work with a number of organizations here and there’s various ways to do this, including citizen assemblies and other things.

Martina Larkin: So, you know, if there’s anything we can do together on this front also, I’d love to explore that. But to us, it is critical that we essentially touch people’s hearts and get them really bought into this and not just observe it from the sidelines or just, you know, receive all the products at the end like we did with Web2, when they had no choices, they weren’t involved in the shaping of this or creating of this. And this, of course, involves both the systems and the kind of architecture as well as the technology itself.

Martina Larkin: So, those are the kind of four tracks that we have. In the movement campaign or the movement track, we’re about to launch a campaign around children’s mental health and social media, which we want to work on raising more awareness and really getting people to understand what we can do around it. So, it’s not just a conversation about “oh, everything is bad” and you know, “there’s a raise in suicide and anxiety levels”, but also, here are some solutions. We’re not stuck in the world that we are living in right now. So, this kind of shift from understanding the problems to providing a solution is a critical one for us.

Martina Larkin: Yeah, and then I would say, you know, putting this all together, of course, there’s the need to really think about how we get this out to the world. So, there’s a big, you know, communication campaign we want to do. The second campaign that we want to do is maybe later this year around the year of democracy in 24. I mean, every year should be a year of democracy but the reason why I’m saying this is because we want to put specific effort around 2024 where there are more elections than we’ve ever had in the history of humanity, and a critical conjunction with the rise of technology and how that impacts these elections and democracies overall.

Martina Larkin: So, obviously, this will have a longer-term effect if we don’t preserve some of these democracies in that process. So, we’re going to launch a campaign around elections and democracies at the end of this year. And this can include, you know, policy toolkits and how to run elections with the use of social media, but in a safe way, in a healthy way. And a number of other things that we would sort of plan also in terms of engagement of citizens and things like that.

Martina Larkin: Those are kind of the broad work tracks. Because we started with AI, so I end with AI. You know, our initial effort was very much… I mean, generally, we are talking about technology, of course, as a big bucket, right? But we figured that we need to meet the people where they are, so we want to start with social media, because social media is here now. People use it every day. They can touch it and feel it. They know what it means to them. So, it’s less abstract and kind of technology as a whole. But, of course, with the rise of AI, particularly generative AI, which now also has become more of a kind of household name and household sort of technology for many people, we’re also starting to work on and trying to incorporate the generative AI aspect into the work that we’re doing.

Martina Larkin: So, we’re starting to think through how does that generative aspect affect social networks? And think through, you know, is there something like a generative social network, network concept which takes the technology from AI and the generative aspect of it and replicates that in the social network sphere? And what would that look like? What does that mean when you can do these generative things in the social media space and the social network space?

Martina Larkin: So, yeah. Those are some of the things that we’re working on and we would love to involve you in this, not just a one-off thing. The thing that we would love to work together on with you is to provide us with kind of strategic guidance as we move along. It’s important that we have a global perspective as well and that we involve people not just transatlantically in Europe and America, but also the global south, Asia. To us, it’s very important to expand, and so we would be absolutely thrilled and honored to have you participate in our advisory board.

Martina Larkin: But maybe we’ll discuss a little bit what it means also before you give any answers on that.

Audrey Tang: Okay. Great. So, I have two clarifying questions. One, you mentioned that MeWe switched to DSNP, but I read that it wouldn’t do so before December. So, is it like accelerating its schedule to switch to DSNP? If I sign up to MeWe, am I already using DSNP?

Martina Larkin: It is in the beta version. It’s going to be launched in the beta version, I think in a couple of weeks. So, it is in better, but not yet fully, fully, fully transitioned. So, it’s kind of in this process but it is now the first real use case that we point to in terms of it’s being built as we speak, and it is incorporated into the better version.

Audrey Tang: Okay. And the second question is, when you talk about like a general idea around generative social, it’s difficult to imagine based on that description, right? Because it could mean two things. It could either mean a sort of chatbot-ish thing that serves as one of the facilitators in a group chat, like a space itself that talks to you. Or it could mean things like a group of people leveraging generative AI in creating their own contents, as many groups already do, as kind of a digital double thing which the generative AI belongs as an assistant to each person instead of to the space itself.

Audrey Tang: And I don’t quite know in the DSNP idea, whether the generative AI would belong in the space itself, like part of the structure, or it would be like just the assistive bots to each user.

Martina Larkin: Yeah. So, when I speak about generative social networks, I mean more about the concept than the application through the SNP. It’s important to highlight that we’re not saying that DSNP is using generative AI in its sort of application. What I mean is more the concept of generative social networking - What does it mean if you can retrieve these kinds of requests from social networks in the same way that we do with ChatGPT, for example? What if you could ask Facebook, “oh, can you put together a dinner party of the seven most influential tech experts in my network and give me a list of those seven, right?” So, it’s more about applying the sort of the concept of generative AI and the learning aspect of this into the social network world instead of just the kind of the search or the generative AI applications that we have seen now, whether it’s on language or visuals or search or whatever it is.

Audrey Tang: Okay. So, it’s the example you gave, which is more a personal assistant will basically interact with their social circle on behalf of you, basically. And that’s the kind of my second interpretation, my assistive intelligence, so to speak. But still, you make the call, you have the dignity, it’s not the previous generation of Web2 AI that manipulates people’s emotions and things like that.

Martina Larkin: Yup.

Audrey Tang: Okay. Excellent. So, I don’t have any questions. It looks really aligned with what we’re doing in Taiwan. In particular, we’re working with many Web3 innovators. For example, quadratic voting has been used in Taiwan for quite a few years and in the presidential hackathon quadratic funding starting this year as well, we’re experimenting with impact certificates, you know, all these things built on immutable common knowledge, which is really the foundation, I believe, for people to still trust each other more or less, even the ability for generative AI to interactively deepfake all the digital communication.

Audrey Tang: So, this fabric of trust is what we’re focusing on. And in addition to grants and hackathons and so on, we’re working closely with the W3C on decentralized identifiers, verifiable credentials, which is blockchain agnostic. We don’t say that you have to use Ethereum or Polkadot, but there must be some way to anchor the kind of cross-jurisdictional identities. And we’re also working with people in Japan on recognizing DAOs as a special form of limited liability, legal entity, which is another part in just harmonizing our digital signature infrastructure with the DAO governance stuff.

Audrey Tang: So, I think all of this is quite aligned with the DSNP vision of this immutable common knowledge blockchain-ish thing as the anchor of trust based on this tamper-proof societal resilience network. So, I think we’re going to naturally align with each other and produce compatible components anyway on the technological track.

Martina Larkin: Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, one of the things I would love to get your perspective on is we’re now building the, you know… we’re sort of bringing DSNP now out to the world really in a major way, which, you know, has been more of a conceptual idea. I mean, it has been built obviously as a protocol, but it hasn’t been really applied and scaled in the way that it needs to be scaled to really be relevant and, you know, sort of making a difference out there. And of course, one of the things is that the interoperability with the protocol and others like say IPFS or others that are aligned in our mission and what we’re trying to achieve.

Martina Larkin: And so, one of the things I was curious is your thoughts on how does a protocol like that really achieve, like true scale? Is it through, you know, standardization, making it the standard and making sure international standardization bodies accept it and recognize it as such which is one of the tracks we’re working on. Is it building use cases? Is it building use cases in the Web2 world like MeWe? Should we… Is the roadmap really to bring many, many of these Web2 companies on board as a key aspect? Is it really to work with almost like with the Web3 community to build all of the new technology on DSNP? Is it a combination of all? And if it is a combination, then where should the priority lie in your view in making this really critical?

And then the other question I have is: From a government perspective, how do we incorporate this as a kind of ubiquitous tool into a government process?

Audrey Tang: Okay, those are really good questions. So, our first large-scale use of IPFS was in last August and it was as a cybersecurity solution. Because last August, after US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan, we’ve seen in a single day 23 times more DDoS distributed in our service compared to the previous peak, in terms of volumes of DDoS attacked our societal infrastructure, including governmental websites. And so, with the Web2 stuff, you know, look really good and smooth and so on, but on this huge amount of DDoS, it begins to fall down. And our ministry’s website, which is based on IPFS, can still be accessed on ipns://moda.gov.tw without even suffering a second of slowdown.

Audrey Tang: And we actually publicly said that people around the world, even journalists in autocracies, can donate their bandwidth and their hard disk by pinning us and helping us stay afloat. So, it’s a strong message to the democratic alignments. So, I think usually Web3 isn’t, on a user experience perspective, like miles better than Web2. Actually, people strive to just match the parity of the Web2 social network experience. But when it comes to truly adverse situations, be it massive denial of service, be it survival in a censorship regime in autocracies, be it to anticipate the interactive deepfakes that’s coming by generative AI and so on, you can easily build such tamper-proof infrastructure as essentially security products that will let people still retain a sense of trust, a fabric of trust online.

Audrey Tang: And that is the main angle I’m working with nowadays. Of course, I’m also head of national cybersecurity, so I think in security terms, but especially for governments. The ubiquity you mentioned in the second question is not by a cost-effective analysis or cost benefit analysis, but rather by whether it justifies the investments to keep things safe. And so, I think a lot of people see that the blockchain space, because it is already maximally adversarial anyway, people invented like zero knowledge proofs and things like that, that protects the integrity of the information not due to any trust on any particular point, which may be DDoS or hijack or social engineering to oblivion, but rather into the resiliency of the protocol itself.

Audrey Tang: So, yeah, if it helps, I think it will help to outline the specific harms from interactive deepfakes, from censorship and things like that, that this technology is mitigating against. And it’s actually very difficult for Web2 competitors to defend their attack surface when viewed on this particular perspective, because they’re by nature centralized and therefore can be captured by cyber-attacks.

Martina Larkin: Exactly. And also… I mean, I do think through generative AI, we now have much more of a clear need for decentralization, which maybe before, wasn’t nice to have. And like, you know, people saw the benefit of it but it wasn’t as strong a need I would say, as we have seen now with generative AI, which puts it all in real perspective because you can’t have these runaway technologies and generative AI in a completely centralized, or I would argue, autocratic tech system because that benefits not the democracies but autocratic societies.

Audrey Tang: Exactly, exactly. And I only trust the language model that I can run on my Macbook.

Martina Larkin: Exactly.

Audrey Tang: That’s the point we need to get across.

Martina Larkin: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And what do you think are the main challenges that are holding back the scaling of decentralized technologies and protocols such as DSNP, apart from the obvious kind of like switch over costs and things like that, that people don’t understand why they should do that?

Audrey Tang: I mean, people already use decentralized protocol like email or podcast or things like that. So, there are certain places where decentralization is the default. Now, as for why social media, you know, has this weird default of centralization, certainly that’s because of the previous generation of narrow AI, which is persuasive technology run by advertisement-fueled addictive technologies.

Martina Larkin: Yes. Yeah.

Audrey Tang: So, I think there really is no technological way out of this because it was really engineered to be highly addictive. I’m not affected because I never touch my touch screen. I always interact with a stylus or a mouse or a keyboard.

Martina Larkin: Oh. Really?

Audrey Tang: I refrain from touching the touchscreen for a prolonged time. Otherwise, the persuasive AI gets to me every time. So…

Martina Larkin: That’s interesting. Is that your like really tactical way to avoid it is by not even touching the screen?

Audrey Tang: Exactly. I only very briefly like to do some things in and out, but otherwise I always interact through a stylus. Yeah so, I mean… and I think mostly I think it will require a truly coordinated effort between the two, the first the civil society like consumer protection and reporting organizations and the government to have this information diet, right, and nutrition level, a little thing to highlight the addictiveness of the manipulation, and then with some way to clearly communicate it to the citizens in order to just make sure that, you know, if you’re under a certain age, if you’re suspected to addiction of manipulative AI and things like that, then there’s everything that people did to hard liquor or even harder drugs need to apply.

Audrey Tang: So, yeah, to your question, I don’t think this is a technological problem. It’s a technological solution.

Martina Larkin: No, exactly. It’s…  Yeah, I mean, it can be obviously like… I think… I guess it’s an interesting question because you have to… Say smoking for example, right, where you have age limits on it. There is clarity that they provide like that it is harmful and it has all the sort of labeling and all of those things. At the same time, at least in Europe and the U.S., the alternative product was vaping. That came up, right? And now, it’s becoming a huge thing. I don’t know how it is in Taiwan or in Asia, but it is now, at least in the UK and in France actually, a huge thing. And it’s not healthier. I mean, it’s healthier.

Audrey Tang: Well, it harms the people around you less, right?

Martina Larkin: Exactly. Exactly. But it’s still not harmless, so it’s maybe a little bit reduced, but it’s not like nothing. So, I guess the idea is also we don’t want to go from kind of the Web2 to the Web3 by then introducing different types of harms that we’re not thinking about.

Martina Larkin: So, one of the things that I want to make sure that we have these unintended consequences that we have conversations around, those unintended consequences also as we design a new ecosystem, because it’s not just by designing something healthier that we think is healthier that we’re absolutely sure that we’re avoiding all of the unintended consequences. And we will never avoid them all, but we should be mindful of it and reduce those and be thoughtful how this will impact society, regardless of democracies.

Audrey Tang: There is a critical difference between Web2 and Web3, though. In Web2, the platform you post is going to be the platform you consume. But in Web3, the platform you post actually doesn’t dictate the platform you consume because it’s based on this immutable distributed common knowledge layer. So, anyone who don’t think the platform interaction is beneficial to their mental health is absolutely free to fork their own particular way to interact with the ecosystem. So, I think this is already a big thing.

Audrey Tang: And also, I think the more examples we can point people to… Actually, your example, vaping, is really good. Like Twitter posted its recommendation algorithm including community notes, which they think, of course, is more prosocial than it’s antisocial, and so on. And maybe it doesn’t solve all the problem. Maybe it’s only slightly better.

Audrey Tang: But it gives an algorithmic account so that people can actually measure how much it’s better in a prosocial versus antisocial way. But prior to this kind of algorithmic accountability, there is really no way to compare the Facebook recommendation algorithm as of this month versus previous months except by people working with Facebook within the company itself.

Martina Larkin: Yeah, exactly. And I get the distinction between Web2 and Web3, but it’s still… like a lot of the ownership and responsibility remains with the individual.

Audrey Tang: Or communities built by individuals, right?

Martina Larkin: Yeah.

Audrey Tang: Because like in IPFS, people just, I don’t know, launch a Brave browser, and then they already run a node. So, it’s not like they have to do anything extra except by switching a different browser. And that’s a very easy gateway, so to speak. The same goes to, I don’t know, people using Signal, right, and contributing to the foundation instead of any of those intermediate centralized communication platforms.

Audrey Tang: My point is that it only requires a couple of minutes of every person’s time, but these things are incremental, like it builds a better habit over time.

Martina Larkin: Yeah, and sort of building the habit and changing the mindset is critical.

Martina Larkin: And what’s your experience around online communities in the Web2 and Web3 space?

Martina Larkin: How do they differ? And I don’t mean technologically, I mean more philosophically, actually, or psychologically. What is the difference really in those communities in your view?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, I think one of the main things in Taiwan is that our largest social network that has a political and media impact is not owned by for-profit companies. Rather, it is owned by and operated by, for example, PTT, it’s by the National Taiwan University students for the past 25 years. It’s always been open source, free software with community governance and so on. So, you can call it Web1, 2, or 3, it doesn’t really matter. But the point is that the governance is accountable, it’s distributed, and it’s at arm’s length with the government. So, we, of course, subsidize the National Taiwan University, but as a university, it enjoys freedom of thought and everything so that the PTT is neither captured by the shareholders or advertisers, nor by the state. And it lends to the PTT or any other project from our National Academy and so on, what I call credible neutrality. And I think that’s the main difference between Web3 and Web2 community.

Audrey Tang: Web2 communities never have credible neutrality. There’s always a non-neutral party that is actually dictating how the algorithm works, but Polkadot or Ethereum, Polygon, or whatever, can actually claim credible neutrality with regard to whatever protocol you’re running on top of.

Martina Larkin: Yeah, yeah. And what do you… What is ultimately going to be the business model in Web3? Is it really the tokenized world? Is that what the business model is? Because obviously… And how does the advertising piece fit into that?

Audrey Tang: The business model of email or IPFS or podcast really is just, you know, each creator’s absorbing the cost instead of having advertisers subsidizing it, right? So, it’s one of the oldest business models called co-op. And the co-op business model may not be lucrative for VCs but it’s proven to work. Many of Taiwan’s people are part of the Homemakers Union and so on, which are very large co-ops that take care of a sizable chunk of our economy and in many other jurisdictions. The supermarkets, the largest chain may be a co-op and so on.

Audrey Tang: So, I would think basically just using the cooperatives as the main idea in which all participant members get a democratic vote and enjoy the fruits of their labor together, and then adding on top of that some sort of impact certificate so they can also earn grants and things like that from the government that are willing to subsidize their contribution to the mental health of all, right? And coupled with, I don’t know, maybe some sort of universal service fund where people take money from the largest advertisement that causes mental harm and divert a certain percentage of profit to the research and development of alternatives, right? That is actually a popular model if you think in a kind of tobacco and hard liquor perspective. So yeah, I think that’s three, right, co-ops in general, university and governmental funding, and then also some sort of service fund or like the Australian way of forced negotiation between the largest social media platforms and journalists.

Martina Larkin: Yeah, exactly. Sorry, I’m just taking notes. Um… Going back to the sort of generative social networks idea around like generating new UXs and new capabilities and sort of requesting, you know, using generative AI functionalities to query and make sure that social networks basically are heading or starting with some underlying elements but now are powered by generative AI that actively creates healthy social connectivity, content, events… Like you could, you know, to the point I made before, but you could also say like, ask LinkedIn to find me the best eight candidates to introduce for like the job of like a chief operating officer at my organization or, you know, Facebook, any ghost writes and publish some posts about lesser-known sort of art work…

Audrey Tang: Yes, and really the only feasible way economically to run it is to inference on the edge, that’s to say, in a Web3 model, I have the people participating to run their own generative AI companions on the device. And it’s a simple matter of economy because unless you happen to be Microsoft Bang or Google Bar, you’re not going to be able to afford the kind of inference hardware for millions of users to run language models at the same time.

Martina Larkin: No, of course not. And so how does that then translate also to the Global South where, you know, many people are still working on mobile devices that might not have the same sort of capabilities? How do you see that work out there?

Audrey Tang: Yeah. So, of course many of them do not have the way to get into this full-size GPU which is of course very expensive, also energy intensive, but I’m quite happy that recently the language model and other community generative communities on Hugging Face and with Stanford Alpaca, RedPajama, and many other teams have now worked on a state called quantized form that can actually easily run on Raspberry Pi or similar size hardware, which is much more affordable to people in the Global South. That’s also one part where Taiwan can help because we can also produce chips that are inexpensive and it’s dedicated to run this kind of generative models in an energy efficient way.

Audrey Tang: So, I’m quite positive that while, of course the collaborative training, the federated learning of sci-fi tuning and so on, still takes some work, just inferencing actually is no longer a difficult problem now. So, my MacBook runs quantized forms quite easily of the Vicuna, the language model and many people on their phones now can run what they call web LLM, which is in a browser a GPT 2-ish assistance. So, if you’re not aiming for this GPT-4 level intelligence but just a general level assistance that helps you plan out social networking, then I think today’s technology is actually already quite sufficient and with hardware acceleration even better in the future.

Martina Larkin: Yeah, I know. I think that’s an important point about the hardware acceleration, of course, which I assume kind of like follow the hockey stick trajectory.

Martina Larkin: Can we just go back to DSNP and the protocol itself, the sort of qualities of this?

Audrey Tang: Of course.

Martina Larkin: Is there a way that we can collaborate because we strongly believe and I strongly believe that this acceleration into the Web3 world needs to happen quickly, and those of us who believe in that transition should work together and collaborate to ultimately save democracies and society and humanity in a way. But it starts with just building the basics around it, and of course, as we discussed, the movement is critical. And I would love to maybe get some ideas also of civil society organizations that you think we should work with around the globe, that if you have any organizations you think would be good to join our alliance and to work with us.

Martina Larkin: But specifically on the protocol itself, is there ways that we could work together and there’s a way that we could run the protocol on particular things that you’re doing on a government level, and that we could pilot it or test it and apply it essentially in a real way?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, I’ve been thinking about this. Yeah, so, of course, as I mentioned, in Taiwan, PTT and other credibly neutral social networks are the natural allies of you. As I understand, they’re also now working to revamp their terminal-based interface with an actual app-based interface, and so that’s a community that’s worth tapping into.

Audrey Tang: And another thing that I’m thinking about is like, every year we run this presidential hackathon which is just open, like, now, for the best ideas. We call it Open Digital and Green, which means that it needs to be enabling for democracy, for a healthier digital ecosystem, and also save the planet. It doesn’t need to do all three, but at least two out of three, and the best two ideas are given the presidential platform, not just the president giving the trophy, but also introduced to the stakeholders in the ministries and so on, so that we can make them part of the digital public infrastructure.

Audrey Tang: This is essentially how we choose the next year’s fiscal planning when it comes to emerging technologies, so there are domestic teams and there are also international teams. I just pasted you the invitation for the international part of it.

Martina Larkin: Yeah.

Audrey Tang: And more than that, I think, just generally, the g0v collective community for the past decade or so has been experimenting with this sort of decentralized technologies. And recently, there’s this thing called da0 that is a project within g0v that is interfacing with the latest Web3, like, impact certificates and things like that, with the existing civic tech community. So, maybe because you begin with this immutable distributed ledger assumption, da0 would be a good bridge between your project and the other civic technologies that the Taiwanese communities are building. So, that’s just the three things that just occurred to my mind.

Martina Larkin: Yeah, that’s very interesting. So, who’s running the da0?

Audrey Tang: It’s the people in the g0v. So, if you scroll down to that page, there’s Slack, HackMD, Substack, everything. So, you can easily reach out to people. And there are people from my ministry because we have a dedicated democracy network department, and within it, the plurality section that focuses on Web3 and da0. So, there are also public servants in my ministry that nevertheless is part of the da0.

Martina Larkin: Yeah. Can I ask another philosophical question about that because we’re talking about decentralization? What’s your view on centralization within this decentralized organization?

Audrey Tang: Well, I think as long as the emerging institutions do not foreclose possible even newer in the future institutions, then it doesn’t matter how decentralized it is at this particular point. But if it forecloses, like there’s only three branches in the government, that’s in the constitution, it’s difficult to change… then it becomes less likely for experiments of the sort that we’re talking about of essentially forking the way democracy is run, is governed, and so on. So, I’m totally fine with certain kind of centralization of a decentralized project as long as the centralized part does not prevent new forks from happening.

Martina Larkin: Yeah. Exactly. And the centralization piece of the decentralization… Is that mostly around the governance?

Audrey Tang: Hm… There are two things, right? One is certainly the governance, which means that it should be run like a democracy instead of like autocracy. And this is the easy part. The other part, I think, is to make sure that the interoperability is possible between implementations.

Audrey Tang: Often, we can see a few projects running in a democratic way and so on, but because technologically they made early choices that makes interoperability very, very difficult, technically impossible even, so that when an even better idea comes, people will have to switch entirely to that new implementation without a good migration path. But if we design with interoperability in mind, like the extensible activity of activity content and things like that, then when new better ideas come along, like the DSNP, right, they can just subset an activity pub or activity pub content and then contribute to the wider ecosystem.

Martina Larkin: And what about the treasuries themselves, the da0s, the tokens?

Audrey Tang: Well, I think the treasury itself is just an excuse for people to build social capital, right? g0v has been running as a decentralized community for a decade, more than a decade now without any tokens or any meaningful treasury. There are, of course, not-for-profits around the ecosystem that provide some of the infrastructure and so on, but it’s never about collective token issuing. So yeah, I think philosophically, anything that can get people in the mood of coordinating and collaborating is good. A shared bank account, of course, is one way of doing so, and that’s how the co-op movement is made. But it can also be any assets, any social object that is symbolic, like co-creating an important document, a constitution for the AI to interact with us, for example, or creating the constitution, the constitutional AI. That may be more important for people who are in a certain linguistic community than the treasury. So, anything that plays that part is good.

Martina Larkin: And what are you most excited about and least excited about when it comes to generative AI?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, so I’m mostly excited about the fact that it’s now possible for people of different cultures to build this kind of transcultural bridges by machine translation, translating not just across languages, but across, say, political ideologies, political divides, people of different backgrounds and so on. What used to take a lot of efforts in just building the basic rapport, right, basic trust between people of very different ideologies and lived experiences, suddenly can be entirely almost assistive intelligence automated by people investing enough in this kind of bridge making mechanisms.

Audrey Tang: So, my friends at the computational democracy project at pol.is has been working for that idea with anthropic and GPT language model providers so that you can go to this virtual town hall, express what you feel and so on. And after a while, the consensus of the community is read back to you in a way that actually you can see the points of people of different ideologies, but this bridging narrative is made automatically and tailored to you. I think this is very powerful and enabled coalitions that previously wouldn’t even be possible to imagine.

Audrey Tang: The least exciting thing, of course, is that this will be run in a centralized instead of a decentralized way. And centralizing autocracies will be able to fake intimacy because that’s what autocrats love to do most, right? It’s just fake intimacy so that people lose the will to assemble or associate and then, you know, people get even more addicted than the previous generation of social media.

Martina Larkin: Yeah, and that’s a big worry. How much time do you think we have?

Audrey Tang: You mean before this total addiction takeover?

Martina Larkin: Yeah.

Audrey Tang: I think the interactive deep fake thing, the scam thing will probably come first. You mentioned the U.S. presidential election. I think that will be a huge part of it, like Cambridge Analytica except entirely automated. So, it’s going to be a fun ride.

Audrey Tang: And if we survive through that, retaining some coordinating capability, then I do believe that we have another like four years or so to figure out how to solve for this cross-cultural understanding of system intelligence without fake intimacy issue.

Martina Larkin: And what do we need to do on the U.S. elections? And then I do want to ask you about the board. What do you think is the priority from an outside perspective to ensure that the U.S. remains a democracy? And I don’t mean just like the actual government kind of process and the elections themselves. I mean the country and its society.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, I think really this information, the propaganda, the cyber-attacks and whatever we’ve seen in Taiwan, they’re not pro any ideology. They’re not anti any ideology. We saw it just amplifying the extremes, right? So, it would amplify the extreme anti-vax and the extreme vax. It doesn’t really…It’s entirely opportunistic, which is why I say it could be automated because it’s entirely opportunistic and just wants to extremify, right, the polarization.

Audrey Tang: And so, the most important measurement is definitely how well people can still coordinate and cooperate despite these ideological differences. How much is the algorithms of social media contributing to depolarize people and recontextualize people?

Audrey Tang: Of course, things like community notes are a good start, but we need more of these, so that it’s steered toward pro-sociality instead of anti-sociality. That would be the main thing that I watch because not just the U.S., Taiwan also has a presidential election coming up next January.

Martina Larkin: Yeah, Taiwan, India, you name it. There’s so many of them. Exactly.

Martina Larkin: Good. So, I wanted to just… I know we’re almost out of time, but I wanted to come back to my question around the advisory group or the advisory board for Public Liberty. And whether we can involve you in this because we need essentially, you know, all the sort of voices that are out there to support some of these things.

Martina Larkin: And we see ourselves very much like, first of all, solutions driven, as I said but also like an alliance. We want to be not just another organization out there. We want to help all of the organizations that are already doing work, all of the communities that are doing work already. So, we have about 100 partners from the Unfinished Network but that’s like a growing list. And obviously, we partner with a lot of the Web3 organizations including, of course, Polkadot, Filecoin and others which is an important factor, because we talk about, you know, just like we’re not going to win essentially this kind of battle if we just approach it as another organization.

Audrey Tang: Yeah. So, my roles as board members were all during my previous job as a minister at large. Now that I’m the minister of digital affairs and head of cybersecurity, it would take a National Security Council clearance for me to join any new jobs. And that easily takes a few months.

Audrey Tang: So, I would encourage you to maybe reach out to the organization that I’m already board of, or member of, so that it’s easier to build alliances from that point of view instead of just me joining a new organization, which is very costly in terms of time. So, I’m already on the board of Radical Exchange, of the Foundation for Public Code, of the GovLab - the governance lab, I’m one of their international advisors. And these are the three that are maybe closest. And also, I’m on the strategic investment board of Reset.tech which is also very aligned, I think, with your mission. So, these four, I think, are kind of natural coordinating partners.

Audrey Tang: And anything more than that — new positions — you will have to wait until the next presidential election of Taiwan, which is next January.

Martina Larkin: Okay. What was the second one after Radical Exchange?

Audrey Tang: Right. So, Radical Exchange, Foundation for Public Code.

Martina Larkin: Okay. Great. So, we already… Yes, I actually met with Reset yesterday. They are a partner of ours. We’re working very closely with them, so I think, you know, they’re part of our alliance already. And so, with Radical Exchange, of course, you probably know that they’re very closely aligned with us. And so, the GovLab, I don’t think they’re formally part of the alliance, but we’re in conversations with them.

Martina Larkin: So, absolutely, these are all already part of our ecosystem except for the Foundation for Public Code. So, I will definitely reach out to them and see what we can do. And then I would, I would still like to proceed with the kind of more formal, longer-term process. So, we’ll make sure we’ll send you all the things and see what needs to happen for that.

Audrey Tang: Okay. The Foundation for Public Code is notable because it’s very specifically designed for public servants. If you want to be ubiquitous, because like, we’re in Taiwan, we’re also starting to adopt standard for public code. It is just for, you notice public money, public code.

Martina Larkin: Yes.

Audrey Tang: So, in order to qualify as digital public infrastructure, you probably need to have public servants to see the most value in their daily work. And the Foundation for Public Code is specifically designed for that angle.

Martina Larkin: Perfect. Okay. We’ll definitely make sure that we talk to those. That’s a really good suggestion. Thank you.

Martina Larkin: Good. Excellent. Well, thank you very much. That has been very good. So, in general, if we would like to invite you to speak at sort of something that we do or interview you for some work, that’s fine, right?

Audrey Tang: Just send me an email, but I may delegate it to the people in the democracy network or my deputies.

Martina Larkin: Of course, of course, of course. That makes sense. Thank you. Well, I really enjoyed our conversation. I found it very interesting and loved your perspective. So, thank you for this. And yeah, I hope we can support each other in whatever way to move in that right direction to save democracies around the world.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, exactly. Let’s just get through the next crisis in the institutional phase that people have on democracy as an institution. But I do think if we keep coordinating globally instead of being, you know, the fabric of trust between countries being affected by deepfakes like the CFCs, Freons, and we heal the ozone, so to speak, through the international coordination, then that will lead the democracy to be much, much stronger because assistive language models running a decentralized way is actually very, very potent against autocracies. No autocracies like that.

Audrey Tang: So, I think this is very important to keep in mind that it’s not just democracies that are threatened by this technology and democracies can actually coordinate much better.

Martina Larkin: Yeah, exactly. I’m an optimist. I remain hopeful that we do have… and we want to be hopeful about that there are chances and options here. And that’s why this approach to solutions is also very important, that we’re not stuck in this kind of like terrible way right now.

Audrey Tang: Definitely. Live long and prosper.

Martina Larkin: See ya. Thank you. Bye!