Tracey Follows: I’m interested to know, obviously your approach is very much open governance, collaborative governance, co-creating all these tools. Do you feel that, with that in Taiwan, you’re giving citizens a sense of identity? I wonder if you could just talk to me a bit around the psychology of that.

Audrey Tang: Certainly. I would first say that, in Taiwan, we’re a very new democracy. We only had our first presidential election in 1996, and to us, democracy – even the constitution itself – is new.

Audrey Tang: There’s a saying that says, “Anything that I am born with is human nature. Anything that’s introduced after I’m born is technology.” For us, democracy is on the democracy side, because we see it as just a set of social technology that we’re able to improve. There’s no hundreds of years of proud tradition.

Audrey Tang: Because of that, I would say that part of the identity of being a Taiwanese is to make constant innovations about technology with the democratic mindset. That is to say, always yielding to the possibility of future novel innovations.

Audrey Tang: The identity in this sense is a verb. We stay identical to our predecessors, who fought and struggled for the freedom of assembly, of the press, of speech, and so on, so that our descendants can enjoy an even more wider ways to create.

Audrey Tang: To me, that identity thing is not pertaining to only individual, but rather individualistic, freedom as a collective value.

Tracey Follows: You’re linking the history with the future there.

Audrey Tang: Exactly, yes.

Tracey Follows: Continuity of identity.

Audrey Tang: Yes, exactly. What I’m trying to say is that identity is often taken as something that is within a human lifespan, but if you view it historically, then it is actually just a window within a larger continuity.

Tracey Follows: Do you think that the citizens feel a real sense of Taiwanese identity, or do they feel like global citizens in this very open, democratic approach?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, we just have the head of the Czech senate in our parliament today. He said, “I am Taiwanese.” This is, of course, an homage to the “ich bin ein Berliner” speech. In that sense, saying, “I am Taiwanese,” or, “I am also Taiwanese,” is synonym of, “I stand for liberal democracy. I stand for freedom in the face of adversity.” There is something global, something universal in this, of course.

Tracey Follows: Are you surprised that other so-called open liberal democracies chose to lock down their citizens and go a completely different, more authoritarian route to coping with the virus than anything like you did in Taiwan?

Audrey Tang: It’s interesting you used the words “choose to,” because what I’ve heard is always that there was no choice. Like they were left with “no other choice than lockdown.”

Audrey Tang: It’s as if that the liberal democracy, which is predicated, of course, on human right and freedom of movement and speech on one side, need to yield to the public safety and public health on the other side, which, of course, is important.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, what the Taiwan model is doing, I guess, is to show that you can make democracy grow deeper while countering the coronavirus. You can protect the human right while ensuring the public safety.

Audrey Tang: We were able to do this because we had a very unpleasant lockdown in 2003 with SARS 1.0. The Constitutional Court said that the lockdown is barely constitutional. It charged our legislature to find any alternative that is more predictable, has more due process, and doesn’t result in an unpredictable lockdown.

Audrey Tang: That’s why we’ve been doing the yearly drills since 2004. I wouldn’t say I’m surprised, because when SARS 1.0 came, we were not prepared, either. It’s normal for a democracy to be not prepared the first time when the virus hits.

Audrey Tang: Because of that, we learned about it, and then we built our Taiwan model of countering the pandemic. When SARS 2.0 came – that is, this year’s coronavirus – we were ready.

Tracey Follows: Interesting. Do you see your system of community collaboration and participation as a decentralized notion? One of the things we were just talking about, as I said, the so-called open democracies, they went to quite an authoritarian lockdown.

Tracey Follows: Everything became centralized. Everything from lab testing to track and trace, everything. It didn’t quite work, because it was too centralized. Do you see – or maybe you don’t – the Taiwanese approach as a decentralized one?

Audrey Tang: I would say certainly that it has multiple centers, like it is polycentered. Of course, there is still the Central Epidemic Command Center, which has the name center in it. [laughs] There is, of course, also the g0v Slack channel, where thousands of civic technologists share their open recipes in countering the coronavirus.

Audrey Tang: There’s, of course, also the business sector contributing their time, research, and so on in a way that transcends existing industrial boundaries and things like that. Of course, there are still centers, research centers, R centers.

Audrey Tang: G0v, for all its decentralization, is polycenter, centered around specific projects. The mask map has its own channel called “mask”, and then later renamed “covid19”. That’s one center. When you have hundreds of centers, you begin to feel decentralized, but it’s not really decentralization.

Audrey Tang: It’s just, when there’s over 150 centers over Dunbar’s number, our mind cannot grasp with so many centers. It feels decentralized, like atomized, to us, but it’s actually just a small world network.

Tracey Follows: Interesting. Do you think you’ll ever allow any of us outside of Taiwan to be part of this? I’m thinking systems like Estonia, with e-residency.

Audrey Tang: We offer dual citizenship, actually. If you check out taiwangoldcard.com, you can get three years, including National Health Insurance, work permit, and so on, without having to work with a Taiwanese employer.

Audrey Tang: If you’re a foreign professional, you don’t have to give up your passport if you decide you like Taiwan. After a while, you can apply for a dual citizenship. This is even more real [laughs] than the Estonia one.

Audrey Tang: Estonia one maybe allows you to do banking and not much more, but in Taiwan, it entitles you to the single-payer universal health system, as well as many other social welfare systems.

Tracey Follows: You’ve got actual rights that come along with that.

Audrey Tang: That’s right, exactly.

Tracey Follows: What about, you’ve talked a lot about the crowdsourcing on policy, upvoting, and downvoting ideas. Can I just ask you, on which of the platforms does that happen? Is it on vTaiwan, or is it another?

Audrey Tang: VTaiwan was the g0v-started deliberation platform, but after I become Digital Minister, the social sector runs it. Now, I am mostly working on the Join platform, or join.gov.tw. That has a petition part.

Audrey Tang: Also, for the consultation part, the petition part, the citizens set the agenda. The consultation part, the government ministries set the agenda. What’s common in those two interfaces is that there’s just upvote and downvote.

Audrey Tang: There is no way to reply directly to a person. That controls the trolls, basically. We also use Slido, which is a real-time town hall interaction format, which again, has upvote, downvote, and other polling mechanisms, but it doesn’t by default have replies and so on. The consistency is without reply button, but we use many other platforms for it.

Tracey Follows: What about people who may be less used to using digital technologies? Maybe they’re older, or maybe they just don’t find it that accessible. How do you…?

Audrey Tang: We bring technology to them. We are not asking them to come to the website. We tour around Taiwan. I tour every other week or so with either our youth advisers – that’s the reverse mentors of the cabinet – or with the ministries that participate in the Social Innovation Action Plan.

Audrey Tang: In either case, I will go to the more rural places – remote islands, or very high mountains, and so on – and just work with a regular town hall. People just speak their mind. Except, of course, using telepresence, we bring the five municipalities and the central government employees to this very large, projected white wall, connecting the rooms together.

Audrey Tang: So that, for them, it’s just a town hall facilitated by yours truly, but it’s only me who travels, and the people on the other side, from the great beyond, can then see the people where they are and listen more completely than just through text.

Audrey Tang: I think text only works if people have already seen eye-to-eye and built a rapport, like an affect, that is about respecting each other’s life stories, basically. Before you can build that kind of mutual support, text may be good to get the ideas out, but not that good to converge the idea into common values.

Tracey Follows: Am I right in thinking that you said something before about the keeping a distance between yourself and your avatar?

Audrey Tang: Mm-hmm.

Tracey Follows: Do you think that’s important in terms of identity? What you just said about initializing a conversation has to be face-to-face, or in a…

Audrey Tang: In a very high-resolution way.

Tracey Follows: Yes. Is that a problem with social media, that people have got avatars that they are hiding behind?

Audrey Tang: There’s a few things. If people are encouraging people meeting each other…Note that I said meeting face-to-face in airy quotes, because it’s just a projector projecting on a large wall. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: It’s face-to-face, but it’s not three-dimensional. It’s a two-dimensional face. What’s important is that it’s synchronized. Like as I say these words, I see you nodding. Even though we’re physically, I guess, in very different places with very different weather, we feel as if we are in the same place.

Audrey Tang: That is the real-time synchronous communication mode. That is what is needed to build a rapport, to build a common feeling. When I say face-to-face, I don’t mean necessarily in the same physical space.

Audrey Tang: As you pointed out, if people work on the asynchronous mode – that is to say, I take a selfie, I no longer feel that way, and then five hours later, you look at my selfie, you feel the way I feel five hours ago – then that, of course, is a problem, because I’m no longer the same feeling anymore.

Audrey Tang: Even though I may identify as the same person across five hours, but my feeling is not the same. When you reply, I will be then summoned back to how I feel five hours ago, except I can’t quite feel that anymore.

Audrey Tang: The affective states are out of sync. What I meant is that synchronized modes are necessarily to build the mutual trust that is necessary for asynchronous modes to work.

Tracey Follows: I want to ask you quickly about education, if I might. You have really disrupted the education curriculum. Again, looking at that through the lens of identity, correct me if I’m wrong, but it feels like you’re trying to enable students’ own identity, expression, and interest to really come through. Can you talk a bit about what you’ve done?

Audrey Tang: Of course, sure. We made a new curriculum together, making sure that we focus on the competence of the student as a lifelong learner around the autonomy interaction, as well as achieving the common good.

Audrey Tang: Notably lacking is any individual-to-individual competition. Notably lacking is any top-down, standardized answer that only the teacher holds. These were very popular East Asian doctrine-ish, rote learning ideas.

Audrey Tang: Because I grew up in that environment, I drop out of junior high school, because I can’t see the benefit of that value when I’m already swapping research papers with people on the Internet. For me, creating knowledge is much more interesting than competing to see whether someone can memorize more of that already-created knowledge. It doesn’t make sense to me.

Audrey Tang: Because of that, I think in our new curriculum, we emphasize that the children – especially when they’re seven or eight years old – are natural curious beings, that can find the direction of their learning through just being curious and asking a lot of actually very hard questions about the structural issues concerning our environment, our society, and our economy.

Audrey Tang: By having their curiosity leading their favorite problems into problem-based learning, they will be able to then find their own direction of learning, free of individual-to-individual competition, because everybody is choosing a different problem.

Audrey Tang: There’s only collaboration and no individualistic competition. I think that is the key, because identity is built upon something that is intrinsic in oneself, and not built in relation, like I am ranked the second, the third, or the fourth on some particular examination.

Audrey Tang: If you build one’s identity alongside individual ranking and competition, then that identity really is false, is inauthentic, because it came from the outside. If you build it from your innate curiosity and the capability to collaborate, then that belongs truly to this person. That is what enables them to be a lifelong learner.

Tracey Follows: Yes, very much it’s the relationship you have with yourself, isn’t it?

Audrey Tang: Exactly.

Tracey Follows: I know I’ve got to let you go. You’ve generously given me your time. Just before you do go, can I ask you, where do you see digital democracy in 2050? What is the one thing you would like to have seen happen over the next 30 years?

Audrey Tang: I think two things will happen. First is that we will bring democratic participation to previously people who are disenfranchised. By people, I mean children who are 12 years old or 14 years old, who used to have no voting rights, but are every bit as a stakeholder – maybe more, when it comes to climate change – than adults.

Audrey Tang: I mean trees, rivers, and the nature who are living stakeholders, but previously have no say in the democratic process. I mean the future generations that currently has no voting power, because we don’t know how to delegate that vote, but [laughs] they also have a stake in the repercussions that we make.

Audrey Tang: I think we’ll figure out how to essentially re-present the stakes and interest of the currently disenfranchised people – I use people in a very, very liberal sense – and bring them into our democratic process.

Audrey Tang: I think that’s definitely one part that I would like to see. Also, I would like to see that we don’t make an arbitrary distinction between liberal democracy, which favors market power, and social democracy, which favors the social representative power.

Audrey Tang: We would see that the market and the society bump into each other and grow into something that has the effectiveness of resource allocation and signaling that market has. Also, the sense of fairness and solidarity that the social sector has.

Audrey Tang: Since I’m in charge of social enterprise and social entrepreneurship in Taiwan, we already saw that large publicly listed companies need to have environmental and social purpose. It’s not like they can opt out of it. Even for small and medium enterprises, they are learning to think more like how cooperatives think and how NPOs think.

Audrey Tang: When you view things in the long term, their business return is aligned with the social and environment return. It’s only if you look only at the current quarter do these values — the profit and the purpose — seems to be at odds.

Audrey Tang: If you take a long enough view, as I imagine people will in 2050, [laughs] then you will see that their, actually the triple bottom lines are pointing to the same horizon.

Tracey Follows: What makes you such a brilliant communicator? You’ve got the engineering. You’ve got the poetry, and you can communicate really complex thoughts in a simple way. What is it about you that makes you able to do that?

Audrey Tang: I think I take all the sides. If I find that I cannot get my message across to someone, I make a point, just do an ethnographic, or just hanging out with people like that someone, until that I can make the point from their point of view, reflecting their feelings.

Audrey Tang: I think just consistently take all the sides really is the key of becoming an effective communicator.

Tracey Follows: You really are. Thank you. It’s been a privilege to speak to you.

Audrey Tang: Thank you, cheers. Live long and prosper, bye.

Tracey Follows: [laughs] Bye.