Rula Jebreal: I am so inspired by your story. I will start directly to the core. My main question is we’ve seen, for years and years, regimes using technology to protect their authoritarianism. For the first time in my life, I see a leader, like yourself, who is using technology to protect democracy and advance democracy.

Rula Jebreal: How did this journey and you embracing technology as a fundamental tool to make democracy even a more perfect system and more transparent system?

Audrey Tang: Certainly. It started with journalism. Both of my parents are journalists working, from I had memory, maybe ‘85 and so. They are already working as frontline journalists covering Taiwan’s democratization. You see, at that time, Taiwan was very much a authoritarian society.

Audrey Tang: We’re still under martial law at that point, even though it would be lifted pretty quickly around the end of the ‘80s. Their work was interfered by the political censorship and so on. My dad would eventually, in 1989, visit the Tiananmen Square around May and June. You know what happened there. Fortunately for our family, he returned to Taiwan on the 1st of June.

Audrey Tang: We’ve seen how technology shaped that particular movement, how the first use for journalism, digital camera and digital transmission, how the real-time or at least semi-real-time broadcasting shaped the international conversations, how the images such as someone stopping the tanks and so on shaped the international reactions to that event.

Audrey Tang: My dad was so motivated by that experience. He was then moved to Germany for a few years, also was there to cover the fall of the Berlin Wall as well as completing his studies at Saarland University, studying under dynamics of how such modern social technologies of organization shaped the Tiananmen movement.

Audrey Tang: Interviewing many people who have fled Beijing and visited Germany and France. I remember meeting them [laughs] in our living room, and they’re still very young. They’re in their early 20s, still studying, but they feel very passionately about the possibility of especially communication technology, and how it could advance democratization. I would say, it started very early in my life.

Rula Jebreal: Amazing. Your generation is the first generation to live post that era of authoritarianism, where you have free speech. You have access technology, so you can see the possibilities. What is against you is, regimes that are using this technology for more surveillance, more oppression.

Rula Jebreal: One of my friends was Jamal Khashoggi, who the regime killed him through technology. They bought Pegasus. They spied on his phone. They hunted him, captured. What you’re up against is powerful regimes. How can technology counter these regimes? How do you think we can together counter and win?

Audrey Tang: I believe that journalism like how public health as a profession is our counter against the virus of the mind. I believe journalism that is to say, the art and craft of getting the truth out to the public in a way that perfectly comprehends with perspectives, with investigation and so on. Should itself be democratized.

Audrey Tang: That is to say, anyone in Taiwan at least we strive for our basic education to include what we call, media competence, not just media literacy. You see literacy, is when you’re a consumer of media, of narratives, of stories, of flowcharts, ad statistics, but competence is when you are a producer.

Audrey Tang: You’re someone in the field, and you can make your own narrative, even if you are one of the most disadvantaged group in the frontline. Competence enable you to amplify the stories so that more people who care about this cause can join together and highlight the inequality, the injustice.

Audrey Tang: Which is why in Taiwan, after we’ve seen that the foreign interference, propaganda and so on, they were not trying to advance one cause or the other, rather, they’re trying to destabilize people’s trust in the democratic process.

Audrey Tang: What they are ultimately after is to shape their narrative so that people would prefer to live under authoritarian rule because it’s more effective or it has a longer time span for caring or whatever. They have their narratives, and the best way to counter those narratives, in our experience is that the people can join democratic process way before they are 18.

Audrey Tang: The primary schoolers if they can measure air quality and inform their family whether they should go out for a walk or drive. The air pollution level participate, distribute ledgers and data stewardship.

Audrey Tang: If the middle schoolers can fact check the three presidential candidates in real-time so that you’re in their debate and forum. If they say something that’s against the facts, the middle schooler’s name and their contribution appear on public television and streaming.

Audrey Tang: Then that increases the bandwidth of democracy of people’s input and also reduce the latency, the time delay before someone who surface a injustice into someone thinking of a innovation to address that. Then the entire society is, “Oh, yeah. We can actually make something better together.” That’s in my knowledge and experience is the best defense against the authoritarian narrative.

Rula Jebreal: You want mass participation as a very young age. Engagement, listening. You’re talking about active involvement, meaning holding these people in power accountable through transparency?

Audrey Tang: Yes, exactly.

Rula Jebreal: There’s something that I…While I was preparing for this interview, I saw that you pointed out to multiple things. One of the things that I love, and you pointed out to is other movements around the world. Obviously, you are not only a Taiwanese leader. At this point, you are a global leader.

Rula Jebreal: Sorry.

Audrey Tang: It’s OK.

Rula Jebreal: Sorry. Oh, my God. I don’t know what’s happened here. Apologies.

Audrey Tang: That’s pretty good music.

Rula Jebreal: The Wall Street, I want to show you three global movements that did not lead, but inspired the world. Occupy Wall Street 2010, Arab Spring 2011, where a million of people rose up demanding democracy, dignity, global change, and more representation. Then you have 2011, the anti-austerity movement in Europe.

Rula Jebreal: Then we have the Sunflower Movement, which is maybe the only movement in my lifetime that’s succeeded. Why do you think these other movement failed versus yours that succeeded?

Audrey Tang: I think the main difference is in the situation or applications, the sit-ups that we co-created during the Sunflower Movement. Learning fully from the scholars such as Manuel Castells, who analyzed very deeply why these previous movements did not reach its original goal.

Audrey Tang: In these movements that we have studied, what people have expressed is a kind of outrage, but a energy that is the outrage could not reliably turn into co-creation, or to good enough consensus that half a million people on the street would readily agree on.

Audrey Tang: Indeed, as time goes on, there’s this information, rumors, violence escalation that turned initial utterly non-violent movement into something that even the organizers themselves could not converge on any coherent demands. Of course, for some people, that was the point of exposing the way that the powers work, how the structure work and the structure lessness to them is a feature. It’s not a bug.

Audrey Tang: In the Sunflower Movement, because the Occupy was very specific, people gathered around the parliament to deliberate, demonstrate the Cross-Strait Service and Trade Agreement. From the very beginning to three weeks after what where the Occupy – as you said – was a triumph. People focused on the good enough consensus. Data Society could agree on all aspects of the CSSTA.

Audrey Tang: Here, social technology enters play because it allows us to distill the CSSTA into just the aspect that affects the individual going on the street. If you work in a particular track, for example, if you’re a journalist, we have tools that can show you how exactly would CSSTA affect the publishing industry, journalism business, and the sector.

Audrey Tang: You can then deliberate on the part that you feel comfortable deliberating about.

Audrey Tang: Of course, you can still go into other places around the occupied parliament and for example, listen into how people deliberated of our 4G infrastructure and how so-called private sector found the Beijing regime, if we allow them into the core infrastructure of communication, what will happen from the separate security measure, and so on.

Audrey Tang: It allowed cross pollination in a learning society, but it also most crucially allow people who know from their first-hand experience about the things that we are deliberate about, not be sidetracked into polarization, into hate speech, into attacking each other.

Audrey Tang: Focus on demonstration as in demo on how we can look at CSTA, and to make coherent points that would then eventually be adopted by the head of department.

Rula Jebreal: Audrey, you’re the first minister of technology. This is the first time in our lifetime. We used technology as a fundamental tool. It’s been used as a weapon for a long time, but now it’s a tool. In this, I would like to understand your vision for the future for this digital world. I’m not sure I can call it post COVID.

Rula Jebreal: During COVID, we learned how our entire life functioned around technology. We don’t need to travel anymore. We can do everything through technology, and via technology. I don’t think the world still can assemble a true vision around what is a future technological digital world. In your view, what is that world would look like?

Audrey Tang: As Taiwan’s first digital minister, I outlined my job description, and my vision if you will, in a poem, when I first become digital minister in 2016. It’s very short, so I might as well recite it first. It goes like this.

Audrey Tang: “When we see the Internet of things, let’s make it Internet of beings. When we see virtual reality, let’s make it a shared reality. When we see machine learning, let’s make it collaborative learning. When we see user experience, let’s make it about human experience. Whenever we hear that singularity is near, let’s always remember that plurality is here.”

Audrey Tang: Plurality, I believe, is the vision that I have, but not just me, it’s pretty much everyone who don’t want their values to be hijacked by technology, who want technology to adapt to the societal norms, to the communities that we already trust.

Rula Jebreal: Very often you talk about we, and most leaders I interviewed are I, I, I, ego, ego, ego. You’re talking about the collective human effort, a collective union. That’s what I read in the poem. Can I ask you where this came from?

Audrey Tang: I think one of the very influences of our family [laughs] is Taiwan’s transcultural background. In my family, people speak different languages. My father’s father came from Sichuan speaking Sichuanese. My father’s mother speaks Holo Taiwanese Taigi, and Japanese quite fluently.

Audrey Tang: It’s a story of people who don’t readily converse with each other. They share the kanji, writing the ideographic characters, so they can, I don’t know, send love letters to one another. The point here is that, they come from very different backgrounds. Very, very different cultures, indeed, in war too, in different sides of the war.

Audrey Tang: That it defines more than anything the Taiwanese capability to look at ideological rifts and gaps, and then build a we, a common ground around, for example, democratic practice, and contribution to the world sustainability and prosperity. As the common values despite very, very different ideological and ethnic and cultural backgrounds that’s in the society.

Audrey Tang: We have 20 national languages, more than 16 of which are indigenous. This is my background as being raised in Taiwan, from families that comes from four very different places in the world and speaking various different languages.

Rula Jebreal: You talked very often about reaching consensus quicker, faster. We live in a polarized world, within nations, there is a deep rift, ideological, racial, social. It seems like the forces of regimes are pointing out to those weaknesses to undermine the nations from within.

Rula Jebreal: You’re telling me that in Taiwan, you’re strengthening your nation through the process of consolidating and validating and celebrating these diversities and create a better consensus. Is that where technology plays a role?

Audrey Tang: Yes. The very beginning of the Internet centers around this fundamental idea of rough consensus, or good-enough consensus, or consensus that we can live with. It’s not perfect. It’s not in the sense that everyone’s signed agreement, a contract, a treaty or things like that.

Audrey Tang: It’s this broad values that people agree to honor despite their differences in achieving those values. I believe this vision, the Inter in Internet, is what allowed the Internet to talk to people to various different jurisdictions, different backgrounds.

Audrey Tang: People want to be connected to other people who share their feelings, who can understand each other’s situation, despite that we’re raised in different places on earth. This rough consensus of connectivity, not just connectivity of machines, but of human communities to human communities, powers the early Internet.

Audrey Tang: That’s what convinced the pretty monolithic, pretty hierarchical, pretty closed silos of local telecommunication carriers to eventually become a global Internet. I do believe that this is not Taiwan, but rather anywhere the Internet touches.

Audrey Tang: The internetworking protocol, it’s imbues in itself, this idea of good enough consensus of steering toward common values and innovations that can amplify those values.

Rula Jebreal: Audrey, how did entry into politics materialized? You came from the private sector. You build basically a career in that direction. When did you decide to enter into politics and what was the driver?

Audrey Tang: I would say, I come from the social sector at a time that I entered a cabinet in 2016. I’m still independent contractor, consultant to many large companies. The most of my time is already part of the social sector, or the civil society or the voluntary sector, many different names.

Audrey Tang: The social sector in Taiwan have slightly higher legitimacy than the public sector and definitely the private sector [laughs] for most of my life. That was partly because the public sector would not start democratization before the lifting of martial law. Even during the martial law era still, the local charities to co-ops especially consumer co-ops, are already striving.

Audrey Tang: So, people get their taste on democracy – on voting the leaders – not voting for president, which would not happen until ‘96, but voting for their local co-op chapter leader or things like that.

Audrey Tang: This community-building movement and especially that we have lots of earthquakes and natural disasters, typhoons so in the recovery and the resilience against such natural disasters, build their social solidarity, despite people in those charities having very different religions, for example.

Audrey Tang: It’s they work very closely together in order to rebuild after earthquake and ameliorate their negative impact on the community that they care. When I say that I come from the social sector, I mean specifically the g0v or Gov Zero movement, which looks at the not-for-profit, purpose-oriented sector and then look at digital services from our government that did not answer the need of those sectors.

Audrey Tang: My first project in 2013 was people who want to learn Mandarin, or Taigi, or any of those languages. They felt that the Ministry of Education is very siloed. Those languages are kept in different websites. They’re websites that are all copyright reserved. You can’t redistribute that.

Audrey Tang: The problem is that the website does not catch up with mobile apps. You can’t use it with the phone. Then you can’t easily share whatever you’ve looked up. This very real need by the teachers who want to teach whatever language they want to teach to the children is not answered by the Ministry of Education. Instead of going on the street to protest, we copied everything.

Audrey Tang: Then we say, “We’re not violating the copyright. It’s fair use because we are not saying that we profit from it. We do it entirely voluntarily.” We crowdsource. We ask everyone, students and teachers, to point out the mistakes, the typos, and so on in the national language database within those dictionaries.

Audrey Tang: We’re also contributing to the culture and the newest ideas and words that did not get encoded into the Taiwanese dictionary, the Taigi. We also crowdsourced that like Urban Dictionary from the people who care about our language.

Audrey Tang: What I’m trying to say is that the social sector can fill in the public sector’s gaps. When we’re going that, we’re very much doing politics. It’s just not politics in the cabinet or in the legislature. It is politics as in getting people together, crowdsourcing their energies, and improving their welfare, the public good. I took those ideas.

Audrey Tang: Then I joined the cabinets because people have seen how those technologies, those pro-social social media, can play a part in the Sunflower Occupy in getting the good enough consensus. It’s not just making dictionary together. It could also be making treaties together. This crowdsourcing has broad applications.

Audrey Tang: At the end of 2014, I was recruited as a reverse mentor as a young advisor to a cabinet minister. Two years after, I got promoted from intern to a full-time still in the office of the minister.

Rula Jebreal: Audrey, that’s inspiring. It went very fast. Clearly, your activism became crucial to the legitimacy of this new government post-revolution. I want to read you a data. I was looking at it.

Rula Jebreal: It’s 2019 and 20 percent of Hong Kong’s population of 7.4 million people protested, went to the street. By propulsion, these are the largest protests in modern history in any nation. It’s not the end game obviously, because Hong Kong government and Beijing government managed to turn a whole generation of students from citizens to dissidents.

Audrey Tang: Many of them are in Taiwan now.

Rula Jebreal: Exactly. You did the reverse. You protested. Those citizens who were very angry became even more active citizens. Can we say that?

Audrey Tang: Yes, definitely. That is the difference between a democratic regime and a authoritarian regime.

Rula Jebreal: They turned their citizen into dissidents. What we see now in Ukraine in other period, they’re turning groups of people trying to erase the identity of these people.

Rula Jebreal: How can we look at Taiwan as a successful model? Any of the advice of how can some of your steps that you are implementing to better your democracy can be implemented and can become global?

Audrey Tang: I don’t have much of a ego even in the name Taiwan. I was just talking to the new local conference, public servants and social sector people from the UK. I said, “If you think Taiwan is too unique, too strange in counter-pandemic, just call it the New Zealand model.” New Zealand adapted the Taiwan playbook in counter-pandemic. It doesn’t need to be called the Taiwan Model.

Audrey Tang: That said, there is a couple of things that are broadly applicable. The first thing is trusting your fellow citizens. In liberal democracies, many people in the career public service see 5,000 counter signature, 50,000 countersignatures. Then they immediately think of pressure, that these people are here to make demands, to hold us accountable, and so on.

Audrey Tang: The beauty of digital technology is that it’s no longer one-way. If all you have is radio and television, then, of course, your citizens can only protest and cannot, during their way of protest, to demonstrate a better way of doing things. The Internet is symmetrical. You can make a very fair counter question to the protestors. That’s what we do.

Audrey Tang: We say, “OK, so you call our counter-pandemic mask distribution as biased. It’s probably biased. We initially thought that the pharmacies where we distributed aligned perfectly with population centers, which is true, but as you pointed out by the opposition party and the protestors, not everyone own a helicopter.”

Audrey Tang: The same distance on the map doesn’t mean anything when the rural areas people have to wait for an hour to take a bus. By the time they got into those distribution points, they’re already done for the day. We’re being deeply unequal while the numbers look somewhat equal. It’s our fault. If we only say that, it doesn’t improve the matter because we don’t know how to do better.

Audrey Tang: Because we trust the citizens, we publish every 30 seconds like a distributor ledger, the real-time inventory so that protestors, the counter expertise, know exactly the same data as we do. The fair question would then be asked, and our minister did ask, “So, Legislator, teach us. You were VP of data analytics at Foxconn. You should actually lecture us on how to make the distribution more fair.”

Audrey Tang: That’s what she did. 24 hours afterward, we implemented a much more fair rationing way. We also introduced a preregistration and so on by popular demand. Nothing about this is magical or Taiwan-specific. Any government, any jurisdiction at any level, even local governments can publish real-time data evidence if it’s not about privacy or trade secret, which is a lot.

Audrey Tang: Most of it is not around privacy and trade secret. Then ask the people, “How would you do better if you are in the digital minister’s place?” That’s the first thing I would advise everyone to do, to trust your citizens.

Audrey Tang: The second thing, of course, is also to amplify those innovations by reducing the latency. Every week, I hold office hours to amplify the best ideas from the social innovators to the entire country and beyond.

Audrey Tang: In the counter-pandemic, every 24 hours at 2:00 PM every day, the Center for Epidemic Command Center broadcasted and answered question from all the journalists until they ran out of questions so that we can amplify the innovation that happened in the past 24 hours into national awareness.

Audrey Tang: The other thing you can do is to reduce the latency of democracy. Improve the powers by trusting the citizens and then reduce the latency by responding faster in the here and now.

Rula Jebreal: I love that. I love also what you did to counter the pressure from China to exclude and erase Taiwan, especially from the consciences of the international community.

Rula Jebreal: You advised your government to participate at international meetings, UN meetings, and other meetings digitally combined with some kind of diplomacy. It’s brilliant. During COVID, everything went digital, everything went online. You were ahead of your time to bypass censorship and pressure from government.

Audrey Tang: Yeah. When I did that, the first time the media became aware is in the Internet Governance Forum in the UN Geneva building in 2017. I was doing that for quite some time but because the IGF…

Rula Jebreal: Three years before the pandemic. Three years before it.

Audrey Tang: Yes. I did early in 2015, ‘16 too. In 2017, because the UN meeting was live streamed because it’s Internet Governance Forum, they can’t erase the live streaming or the recording. It became popular knowledge. The main reason why they would previously be successful in excluding me is on a technicality.

Audrey Tang: To enter a UN building or whatever building that is hosting a UN conference, you have to present a passport that belongs to one of the UN member states, member nations. Because we’re not at that moment we used to be, a founding member, [laughs] we’re not yet a nation within the UN. I could not enter the passports.

Audrey Tang: On the other hand, a robot needs no passport. A robot is a piece of machine. Then the meeting was watching a movie, I guess, together, [laughs] even though the movie was recorded half a second ago from Taiwan. That’s me. I think this avatar of sorts, although the PRC regime’s delegates protested. They did not leave the room.

Audrey Tang: That sets the precedent, because previously, if their protest was not successful, they have to leave the room, because otherwise it’s dual representation. It sets a new norm that it’s not representation. It’s a re-presentation [laughs] of like a TV or something. That enabled me to attend much more meetings that is affiliated by the UN in the coming years.

Rula Jebreal: This is brilliant, I must say. Way before, you bypassed all this censorship and blockade. You talked about majority rule in democracy, and also how to find ways for minority to exercise their influence. We see around the world, the whole minorities are, whether they are segregated, crushed, demonized, criminalized.

Rula Jebreal: How can minorities take an example from what you’re doing and some of the examples of your movement for social justice, for global justice. What do you think the lesson number one? I live in the United States. We had all kinds of protests connected to minorities, whether the Women March or Black Lives Matters and any other minorities. What do you advise them to do?

Audrey Tang: I think having a safe space where you can form movement around globally, people who are in your place in their own jurisdictions. That’s very important. Look at the climate movement, it started from people who would be adversely affected by climate change.

Audrey Tang: Maybe they live in such habitats, but because their jurisdiction has a large landmass. Maybe they do not get a sufficient amount of votes, so that the legislators care. What they did is that they bonded together. I attended some of their summits again, through videoconference because we don’t want to cause carbon emissions.

Audrey Tang: Then each island sends their own representative. From our country, Taiwan and Penghu, [laughs] is actually, two people. That’s a very different view, because if you vote within our jurisdiction, then the population of Penghu is dwarfed by the population in Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: If you say, each island indeed, each habitat that suffers from climate change, must have their voices heard. Smaller islands like Tuvalu and so on, because the emergency is higher for them, they deserve higher place on the agenda. Then that flips the agenda-setting power.

Audrey Tang: The people closest to the pain, they must have the higher agenda-setting power in such safe spaces and movements. The Internet provides new mechanisms to reconfigure democracy so that it’s prioritized not by whether you’re 18 years old, or things like that, but rather prioritized as I mentioned during the Sunflower Occupy, how adversely you would be affected by CSSTA.

Audrey Tang: The more adversely you will be affected, you will be given more voice. My suggestion is to form such spaces, pro-social social media, the civic infrastructure on the digital realm, and then organize. That’s probably [laughs] the one call to action: To organize globally.

Rula Jebreal: Organize globally. Beautiful. We’re seeing for example, now with a war with Ukraine, how a smaller country, less militarized, winning in the court of the public opinion because of social media, because of technology, because of the exposés of everything the other side is doing.

Rula Jebreal: Also, we’re seeing here in the United States an aggressive movement against minorities, especially the LGBTQ. Laws after laws, after laws too. In Florida, where I teach, the governor said, you’re not even allowed to say that you’re gay or transgender. You’re not even allowed to say it. You decided as gender to put if I’m not wrong…

Audrey Tang: Whatever, that is my gender.

Rula Jebreal: Whatever, exactly. That was seen by the young people as a brilliant act of non-binary. I don’t want the world to define me, I want to be what I am, what I want to be. How can you reconcile that with what’s happening around the world globally, in terms of real bigotry and oppression?

Audrey Tang: Sorry, I have to turn off that alarm thing. I don’t have anything else, but I have to turn off that. Just a second.

Rula Jebreal: Of course.

Audrey Tang: We’re back.

Rula Jebreal: Welcome back. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Sorry for disrupting the flow. [laughs]

Rula Jebreal: No. If you feel comfortable about your personal identification, but also about what’s happening around us globally when it comes to our identities, whether it’s a racial, religious. Whether we belong to minority or not.

Rula Jebreal: Even sexual identities, and how there’s a wave of conservatism that is waging a war on all of us in the name of, that we have to be part of their world that is either black or white.

Audrey Tang: That is defined by existing institutional labels.

Rula Jebreal: Exactly.

Audrey Tang: First of all, I do use those labels, but I don’t use it in a way that associates my identity with it. I would say, for example, that I experienced a male puberty when I was 13, 14 years old. That’s when I discovered that my development path isn’t quite the same [laughs] with other boys.

Audrey Tang: Later on, I would get my testosterone level measured, and then somewhere between an average human male and an average human female, anyway. Then I would say I had another puberty for a couple of years when I was 24, 25, the female puberty and through hormonal replacement.

Audrey Tang: As you have seen, I’ve not said that I was something and I became something I identify as something. I said, I had this experience and then I discovered that. Then I had another experience. This difference is intentional because this is the intersectional way of talking about these labels.

Audrey Tang: This is like, “OK. I learned English, then I moved, so I spoke Taigi or Mandarin for a couple years, then I moved back, and I spoke English too, but nowadays I speak Mandarin to these people.”

Audrey Tang: This point is that I don’t have in my mind this labeling effect where half a population is closer to me and half population is farther away from me. Or that half of population is my people and half the population is not my people.

Audrey Tang: I’m like, I take all the sides, and there are people who I don’t yet have a lot of shared experience with, but that’s my problem. I can always spend some time hanging out, spending time together so that I can also see the world from their experience.

Audrey Tang: I can experience more experiences than I have already experienced. This is a positive way of looking at those labels in that they’re not mutually exclusive. They’re like hashtags. We’re not constrained how many hashtags that we can experience.

Audrey Tang: I do believe that both concepts are the existing labels which, of course, unites community together but stays open so that new hashtags may form and old hashtags cannot cancel new hashtags.

Rula Jebreal: How do you cope, if I may humbly suggest, with this wave of conservatives and macho way of trying to impose or trying to create fear and suspicion around people who don’t want to be identified with old stereotypes?

Audrey Tang: It’s not a projection of strength. It’s a psychological projection of insecurity, of vulnerability from the people who want their identities to matter. If they identify as macho or conservative, what they’re feeling is that their once-secure ideas are being muddled, canceled, confused, and so on.

Audrey Tang: They project this insecurity into acting out, [laughs] and then create a more and more violence conversation around such matters. The thing is, I take all the sides, so I also take their side.

Audrey Tang: I’m like, when Taiwan passed marriage equality, we didn’t redefine the civil code or reinterpret through constitutional interpretation, the way that many jurisdiction did. We invented a new relationship. Then this new relationship is a wedding between two homosexual individuals, or people who identify as such or whatever.

Audrey Tang: When they are wed this way, their families don’t. Unlike the civil code where the kinship relationship is formed through the heterosexual marriage lineage, this new relationship does not carry this kinship connotation.

Audrey Tang: Paradoxically, it made this new relationship preferable, if you look at the burdens [laughs] that you have to care for the other side’s parents. It’s equal rights, slightly better privilege [laughs] for this kind of new relationships. That’s why we said, “We have legalized marriage equality.” The bylaws are exactly the same or slightly better.

Audrey Tang: In-laws as in father-in-law, mother-in-law, we didn’t legalize that. We legalized the bylaws without touching the in-laws. Then the conservative people who are after all respecting their lineage, the in-law relationship, I wouldn’t say they’re happy, but they lived with it. They can live with it. That’s how we get marriage equality across the board. People love that.

Rula Jebreal: It’s amazing. Two days ago, I was watching Vladimir Putin give the speech. Behind him there’s these big, big missiles. Here’s a man standing in front of these big missiles as if he needed to stand there. I thought, how insecure a man should be to put these big giant missiles as you give a speech.

Rula Jebreal: I think somebody was tweeting all over the Internet, how insecure a man that he needs huge missiles. I remember the joke between Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump. “My missiles are bigger than your missiles.” I thought, these are the same people who want to use majority rule to control minorities and excluding them from any benefits, basically.

Rula Jebreal: Exclusion from benefits but control your life. What you’re suggesting is the other way around. Sharing the privileges without control of your life. Live a life that is free enough tolerant of others and respectful of the thee, and tolerating and embracing and respecting all of others.

Rula Jebreal: That I could see clearly through COVID. The management of the crisis in Taiwan, made Taiwan and obviously, Australia, a leader. You played a major role in that success. Can you tell us please more about that? If you would say, what are the main point of success that made Taiwan an example of success? Unlike other countries around you.

Audrey Tang: So far in the country of 24 million, there’s less than 1,000 people died of COVID. We’ve never had a single day of lockdown. The economy has prospered during the COVID. Actually, the only one [laughs] around our region that prospered in all these years. That probably counts as success.

Audrey Tang: The main reason why is that, we trust the citizens. The citizens come up with good ideas. Then we amplify those ideas, is not anything top down. In the COVID, virus mutates so quickly. There is no expert panel that can catch up. You have to rely on the collective intelligence.

Audrey Tang: You have to rely on 10-year-old boy [laughs] that called this toll free number 1922 and met with someone full of empathy at the call center, staffed by the very charities that help people on the earthquakes and so on.

Audrey Tang: Who listened to the young boy who said, “You’re rationing out mask which is great, but all the boys in my class got blue ones, but I got pink ones. I don’t want to wear pink to school. I don’t want to wear a mask now. I’ll do something about it.” Then the very next day, 24 hours later, the next 2:00 PM, Minister Chen Shih-chung along with other medical officers wore pink.

Audrey Tang: Minister Chen he even said that Pink Panther was his childhood hero. Pink became the color of heroes, [laughs] and heroes, heroes, I guess. Then all the fashion brands, turned pink, [laughs] for quite a few weeks. Then after that, the mask adoption rate skyrocketed, because suddenly mask become a way to express ourselves. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: It’s not just a way to signal that you protect your own mouth against your own unwashed hands, which is very practical. After that, people wear intentionally rainbow mask or whatever mask as a sign of expression. That undoubtedly fought off the original strain, the 2020 strain of the Coronavirus.

Rula Jebreal: You relied on trusting citizens and social responsibility. That you gave them enough trust that you knew that they will protect themselves and each other. That was the formula.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, of course. [clears throat]

Audrey Tang: To refrain from doing the top-down, shut down, takedowns lockdowns. The first time you do such a top-down lockdown thing, it decimates. You reduce by 10 percent the agency of the people, and then people would not want to think of new measures when they know those measures may be turned around and canceled anytime, if the jurisdiction leaders feel like it. We very clearly said in the very beginning, that we trust the citizens.

Audrey Tang: They see their new ways of visualizing mask distribution, of visualizing vaccine distribution, of reminding each other to wear a mask of contact tracing. All these essential services, which in other jurisdictions are either built by the government’s technology units, or by Google and Apple, and then translated by the governments.

Audrey Tang: Here in Taiwan is built by g0v, G-0-V, the civic technologist that design with privacy, with care, with caring about people who don’t use a smartphone, people who don’t use a phone at all. People who care about how they want to reverse audits, the contact tracer accessing their records to hold them into account.

Audrey Tang: People who care that this must never be used for advertisement or criminal investigation. It’s designed with democracy baked in, is not bolted on. When the democracy technologists design such systems, the state take a step back.

Audrey Tang: Then we say, “Yeah, we amplify those very good ideas and trusting your citizens pay dividends in situations like the Coronavirus where the experts in the government could not possibly catch up as quickly as the virus mutation.”

Rula Jebreal: You see with the Coronavirus for example, you can see next door your neighbors. You see what’s happening in Shanghai. It’s where people are committing suicide. The lockdown is becoming even…

Rula Jebreal: Seems like a police state, in a reality where this is the wealthiest city and yet their wealth didn’t matter, because with matter it became like a regime. It was all as a regime, but it slipped totally into an authoritarian rule that became so oppressive.

Audrey Tang: The thing is that there are civic technologists in Shanghai. They have some of the most brilliant Internet entrepreneurs. Some of them did help. Some of them did create the dashboards for people to help each other. To visualize the rationing of goods. Exactly as the Taiwanese people did in 2020.

Audrey Tang: The difference is that the Beijing regime and the Shanghai Government shut those websites down. They would not allow the civic technologists to gain legitimacy through this kind of democratic self-help assembly. That’s the crucial difference.

Rula Jebreal: They shot themselves in the foot, and now they have to run from one crisis to another because they could not trust and empower their citizens to help them solve the issue. Unbelievable.

Rula Jebreal: In Italy, for example, which is a democratic country, but there is a huge movement that was anti-vax. There was a huge propaganda that basically exploited all those rules about lockdown and COVID to instill distrust from government.

Rula Jebreal: Then you have people protesting in the street saying, “This is a dictatorship. I don’t want lockdown. I don’t want the vaccine. I don’t want anything.” Because there was a deep distrust of democracy. Your model shows a democratic country and an autocratic country. What can work best?

Audrey Tang: Instead of democracy backsliding, all you need is more democracy.

Rula Jebreal: Thank you. Regarding democracy, I know…Tell me if it’s right, but I read somewhere that on Wednesday, your office is open to the public from 10:00 AM to 10:00 PM, and anyone who have any proposal for you or for the government, regardless of age, occupation, social status can come and discuss it. Is that right?

Audrey Tang: That’s right, but it needs to fit one of the sustainable development goals. That is to say, it needs to be a public good. If they come and say that they want me to lend them some money or something. [laughs] Like purely personal requests, that wouldn’t work.

Audrey Tang: Yes, all the social innovators as defined by people innovating to a public good, conforming to the global goals is eligible.

Rula Jebreal: How do you feel about the fact that you’re…In 2016, obviously, became a minister. You’re the only in the world that identify as transgender. 2020, you have Petra – the suitor. In the whole world, we have only two people. How is that possible in the 21st century? What kind of responsibility this puts on your shoulder?

Audrey Tang: I always say I’m the first openly transgender minister because, for all we know, everybody else may be transgender too, except they’re not…

Rula Jebreal: [laughs]

Audrey Tang: …open about it.

Rula Jebreal: You are right.

Audrey Tang: That’s my intersectional view. I’m sure that when Minister Chen Shih-chung put on the pink mask he became a little bit more transgender. He defied the mainstreaming stereotypes. I think this is not a binary thing. This nonbinary thing is not itself binary. It’s not you’re binary or nonbinary. Everybody can become a little bit more nonbinary.

Audrey Tang: What I’m trying to say is that around the world, we’re seeing people embracing a different kind of doing politics instead of politicians being someone who is at a distance from the people. The traditional ideas of leadership across radio, television, and persona.

Audrey Tang: Nowadays, in democratic countries, people are looking for politicians that interacts with them in real-time so that their ideas can amplify through this politician. I call myself a “poetician” because I take good ideas then write poems about it and contribute to the art world by relinquishing my copyrights into the commons.

Audrey Tang: There’s also people in Japan that remix our interviews. Like this one was a journalist into rap songs and things like that. [laughs] One can be nonbinary, not just in gender, but in the kind of work that you do. Whenever people stereotype as someone who worked for the government or for the civic movement, I’m like, “Why not both?”

Audrey Tang: This is a wider phenomenon that we’re seeing around the world that it’s not this or that. This is this and that. I believe gender is just one of the dimensions that these more inclusive ideas can take hold.

Rula Jebreal: My final question. You talked about government and civil society, and obviously, your identity and all of it. We’re looking at all these big tech giants, whether Apple, Twitter, or Google. All of these guys.

Rula Jebreal: I know you consulted with Apple, and you were involved in high-level artificial intelligent projects and also in the development of Siri, but we’re seeing less and less transparency from these groups and more – how can I say – hijacking of certain platforms.

Rula Jebreal: Also, regimes are exploiting the commercial model to tell them, “OK. We will sell you money, but you sell us basically the secret so we can monitor or spy on our citizen, etc.” How can we make these platforms and companies more socially responsible? Or force them to become socially responsible?

Audrey Tang: There’s two things going on here. One is – as you said – surveillance capitalism. There are large companies whose only business model is to sell the attention of their users to the highest bidder, and they want to turn their users into users in the drug industry sense, addicts. So, selling manufactured addiction. That’s one problem.

Audrey Tang: I don’t think Siri does that, but I am not working for Apple anymore, so I don’t know. [laughs] During the time that I worked with Apple, one of the things that we don’t do is things like this.

Audrey Tang: People pay for the service or product upfront, and then whatever, face ID or things that you give to the device they are on the device is supposed to be personal computer as in personal to you. Of course, I’ve not worked with Apple for many years. I don’t know. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Some ethics like that in the business model that those companies do need to be identified as socially acceptable patterns and socially unacceptable patterns need to be identified as such as dark patterns, then treat it exactly the same way that we treat other addictive substances.

Audrey Tang: I often compare, and I’ll just call out Facebook as a nightclub, where of course, people can be social in nightclub, but they have to shout to be heard as very loud noise fill the room. Actually, smoke fill the room. Too addictive smoke and that.

Audrey Tang: Addictive drinks being served. Private bouncers escorting you out. All these are the norm of the entertainment sector within that particular nightclub. Maybe with some gambling on the side, but we don’t do our town halls in those places.

Audrey Tang: If a mayor [laughs] say, “Oh, let’s have a town hall. Let’s have a conversation to set the social expectation or a new development instead. When on how to be more inclusive.” Then they choose the local nightclub as the place to have a deliberation. You won’t have a deliberation. You will be having a polarization – a rare router – at a shouting match.

Audrey Tang: Which is why the city governments invest in places like town halls or public libraries, museums, parks, and so on, those public infrastructures that is worth people’s investment to maintain exactly because we want pro-social social conversations around social issues in those places.

Audrey Tang: That brings me to my second point. In addition to identifying the dark patterns and do social sanction, just stop using those patterns, calling that out, boycotting them, we also need pro-social alternatives that is maintained by the pro-social, purpose-oriented communities, the social innovators. The state may prototype some of it.

Audrey Tang: We must also embrace the OpenAPI, open source, open data ethics so when the social sector can do better, we can take a step back and say, “OK, now the Wikipedia community runs our public library better. Maybe we don’t bother running a state-sponsored public library.”

Audrey Tang: We also want this curational oversight by our democratically elected panels on how the cultures are being misrepresented or represented on the Wikipedia community and so on, a, more frankly relationship. I call this a people-public-private partnership. The people sets the agenda, the norm. The public sector amplify it. The private sector must conform to the agenda that is set by the people.

Rula Jebreal: Amazing. They need rules and they need to respect those rules. You’re one of the few people that is engaged on the forefront in changing the world and making it more transparent, democracy that protects the citizenry and not works against it. If you have to identify your inspirational leaders, who would you identify? Who would you point out in the past or present?

Audrey Tang: The Internet community, that’s my first and foremost inspiration, the early Internet pioneers. Nowadays, all the people who are connected to the Internet. Also inspired by people who are not yet connected to the Internet, whose voice are not yet heard.

Audrey Tang: The community leaders that give them voice, that unmute themselves, that shares the voice, that is enabled by the Internet. I’m thinking of the peer-to-peer networks that has started as grassroots in communication, especially in disaster areas. Also in places suffering censorship, because the Internet become a censorship tool by their authoritarian regimes.

Audrey Tang: There are people who are working on the protocols and so on to protect the anonymity of the journalistic sources. Indeed, the communication of journalists themselves. Then enable the people whose voice was either taken away, or not yet taken care of by the Internet community, and connect them to as I mentioned, the global organization of movements.

Audrey Tang: Not a global organization of the big corporations that wants to set the norm through code or through data. We want the people who set the norms locally, and then amplify those norms so that we can produce code and data that is a service of those norms.

Rula Jebreal: I love it. I am so grateful. Is there anything else I skipped? Forgive me if there’s anything else that we did not touch up on.

Audrey Tang: Everything, but [laughs] this is the beginning of a conversation. For the record, for the transparent record, we’ll make a transcript and feel free to co-edit for 10 days, and then we publish. I understand that my nonverbal expressions, you want to publish on a later date, which is fine. I can do an embargo.

Audrey Tang: If you publish the video later on, then I publish a video on my site with my image, but also your voice.

Rula Jebreal: You can publish it already. What I will do is, as I told Alessandra, the three things I will do. Alessandra will use it to send it I believe to some people in Hollywood, because they’re interested in making a feature movie about you, which I absolutely would think is important for America.

Rula Jebreal: It’s important for the world, for our next generation, and above all, it’s a story that will inspire the world. I have no doubt about it. After you publish the video, I’d love to publish it as well once you give me the permission.

Rula Jebreal: I would love also because I’m writing this book about women and human who are transforming the world, changing the world. Rebels I call them. Those rebels are women and transgender, obviously. For me, you are one of my rebels who are transforming the world. I have no doubt about that.

Rula Jebreal: You’re my third interview in that. The first was President Ellen Johnson of Liberia, who ended the Civil War, and used sex strike, she and Leymah Gbowee, basically, to create a movement where they mobilized, galvanized, organized, ended the Civil War and elected the first woman African president. I love her story. I think it’s incredible.

Rula Jebreal: Obviously, you’re one of those amazing rebels who are changing our world. It will be included in this book that will come out in a couple of months.

Audrey Tang: That’s excellent. Permission is hereby given. [laughs] I’ll paste you the YouTube link. I’ll put Creative Commons on it. Just do whatever. Yes.

Rula Jebreal: Absolutely. With great pleasure. I thank you so much. Please know that you have allies in the United States.

Rula Jebreal: You have people in the media that whenever you ever need to promote anything in the media, you have real allies who believe in your mission and would love to import some of the tools to the rest of the world, especially for the people who have no voice. The people who are crushed under dictatorship. Thank you.

Audrey Tang: Thank you. Let’s work on this together. Live long and prosper.

Rula Jebreal: Yes. Absolutely. If you don’t mind, I will send you my movie. I made a movie. I wrote it. It was released. It’s about women in war zones, but how they can thrive regardless. One of them raised me, built an orphanage for children, built a school and a university, and raised thousands of girls. I’ll send you the movie.

Audrey Tang: Will be my honor to watch it.

Rula Jebreal: Thank you. Have a wonderful evening. Thank you. Please thank your assistant. She was so grateful and graceful.

Audrey Tang: Thank you. Bye.

Rula Jebreal: Thank you. Bye.