Peter Bloom: Hi, Audrey.

Audrey Tang: I can hear you fine. Can you hear me?

Peter Bloom: I can hear you fine, absolutely. One quick thing before we start. It’s fine either way. Are you all right with me recording this? It won’t be for public. It will just be for our records as we’re writing the book.

Audrey Tang: Are you OK with me recording this and publishing this on YouTube?

Peter Bloom: Yeah, if you would like to. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: OK, so let’s both record so that we have at least two copies, and I’ll release to YouTube at the end of the talk if you don’t have any part that you want to modify.

Peter Bloom: Excellent. OK. Let me start this. I apologize. I practiced with this yesterday. I usually use my Skype for work, not my personal one. I’m not used to using this one. Unfortunately, I’m not sure if it’s letting me record.

Audrey Tang: OK. I’m recording so...

Peter Bloom: Why don’t we just go with your recording. Is that all right?

Audrey Tang: Sure, of course.

Peter Bloom: Excellent. Thank you so much for agreeing to the interview. It’s a real honor. As I’ve mentioned in our original message, I think, for a variety of reasons, we’ve been very inspired by the work you’ve been doing.

Peter Bloom: We’re trying to find out a little bit more about it, particularly for our project that we’re working on in terms of our book, "Guerrilla Democracy," but also in terms of broader issues about how we can use technology as a disruptive and positive political force.

Peter Bloom: I guess, if it’s all right, and I know you’ve probably done this many, many times.

Audrey Tang: Yes.

Peter Bloom: If you want to take a couple minutes, just to give a little bit of your background and how you moved from the point of view of coding of free software into a more political domain.

Audrey Tang: Sure. My background is pretty transparent. I started coding when I was eight years old. That was 1989. I moved to basically start my own web based startup with a bunch of friends when I was 14 years. That was 1995. The wide web was just starting.

Audrey Tang: I dropped out of junior high school because of all the research that I can do on the worldwide web. It’s not free and all the researchers just wrote back to me instantly. I don’t have to go through the letters anymore. The principal actually supported me, which is very rare. That instilled in me a lot of hope in the flexibility of bureaucracy.

Audrey Tang: Because of the fact that most of the worldwide web at that time is things like Archive.org and things like IETF, the Worldwide Foundation, and so on, it’s very cutting edge. People put their cutting edge research on it.

Audrey Tang: I also worked with Alice, like the Gutenberg Project, and so on, which digitized a lot of early commons. That is to say works have fallen out of copyright, which we are just getting a new batch as of this year.

Audrey Tang: By the time that I dropped out of junior high, the Gutenberg Project is mostly work that has been written before the first World War. That is to say the classics, which, again, instilled in me reasonable optimism because I don’t have access to any depressing works.

Audrey Tang: That’s my self edited background more or less. Then, I worked in the free software movement, which then rebranded part of ourselves into the open source movement. To me, it’s always political. There is no coercion, of course, across the Internet.

Audrey Tang: You can’t beat someone or coercively take away their possessions but nevertheless, it is politics. It is how to figure out a rough consensus. It is how to set a standard setting agenda. It is how to moderate between the various different interests that way to take the Internet in various directions and so on.

Audrey Tang: That is the politics that I’m most familiar with, the IETF style politics that is anarchism, really, which I’m versed in and maybe four or five years before I get my first voting right in a representative democracy, which would be in 19...Actually, no, it would be in 2001.

Audrey Tang: For me, I think participative democracy over the Internet is my kind of native tribe. Representative democracy is kind of a new thing to me. That is not just to me alone because in Taiwan, we only got the first presidential election in 1996. That’s already almost a decade after lifting of the martial law.

Audrey Tang: I’m not that unique in the sense that people mostly experimented with a lot of community level or Internet level consensus making before we actually get to elect for our own president about 30 years ago.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan representative democracy’s a new overly, but people take a lot of consensus based participative decision making processes that they are already very versed in, and just overlay on top of it representative democracy.

Audrey Tang: Which is why many people, what we call the civic hackers in Taiwan, are at once technologists, but also people working on democracy, because in Taiwan there’s no 200 years of democratic, republican, or federal tradition. For us it’s all the very same generation that gets to experiment with all these things.

Audrey Tang: I formally began working in politics at end of 2014 as a advisor to the cabinet, at that time because of the Sunflower Occupy. Many people saw that over the course of three weeks it’s possible to use Internet to mediate half a million people on the street and many more online so that people gradually converge on consensus without the need of using traditional representative mechanisms, and which were on strike, anyway, because the MPs were refusing to deliberate the service and trade agreement.

Audrey Tang: People occupied the parliament and doing without the overlaid representative democracy, but actually going back to the communal participative democracy. It actually worked and delivered a pretty good set of consensus.

Audrey Tang: Many ministries at the end of that year really wanted to learn how to harness this kind of potential, as offered by Internet based participation. We built quite a few systems together. I was a understudy minister, kind of a reverse mentor to the minister Jaclyn Tsai, the Minister without Portfolio in charge of cyberspace law.

Audrey Tang: That continued for a couple of years, and then I became the Digital Minister, no longer understudy, but still running pretty much exactly the same thing as I started participating at the end of 2014. That’s the six minute version.

Peter Bloom: [laughs] No, that’s perfect. That’s a really background and foundation. It opens up a lot of really interesting ways in which we can explore this a bit further, theoretically and politically.

Peter Bloom: One of the first things that I was really interested in that you were saying and that’s some of the work that you’re doing is the fact that you come from a tradition, and I like how you said your native tribe, is free software movement, and also some of the anarchism that’s part of it that isn’t actually nationally based.

Peter Bloom: In fact, a lot of the original hacker politics was almost an alternative form of globalization, which is saying we don’t have to respect your non digital borders because we have different forms of communities.

Peter Bloom: I wanted to explore a little bit about, if it’s all right, how you see this creating transnational democratic communities, and then we can talk a little bit about how that relates to more local political struggles, and how they’re related to each other.

Audrey Tang: Certainly. My first experience with democratic processes includes, for example, the Debian Constitution.

Audrey Tang: The Debian Constitution explicitly says nobody forces anyone to do anything as a volunteer community, but as soon as you agree to play by the Debian rules it is actually very intricate relationship between proposals, between running for leaders, between a Condorcet voting system, very complex tiebreaking system, a lot of checks and balances, which is why it’s called a constitution.

Audrey Tang: It means that the process, itself, is in the commons. Everybody can amend the Debian Constitution, certainly easier than amending Taiwan’s Constitution.

Audrey Tang: It gives the constitution a life, in the sense that it stays relevant to everybody who participates in the Debian community. Even if no Debian developer would dedicate 100 percent of their time on the democratic process, I would say that on average they’re much more aware of a democratic process that is powering the community than a average citizen in any democratic community. That’s the first difference, I would say, of this transnational idea.

Audrey Tang: The second thing is that we see a lot of democracy bookkeeping as something that could be automated. Anything that doesn’t interfere with the judgment process, that doesn’t require a value judgment, basically, could potentially be automated. A lot of voting systems and a lot of opinion systems, a HackNotice notification, and things like that.

Audrey Tang: People experimented with a lot of bots, discussion boards, or loads of systems that lets people take care of more than, say, a hundred issues without completely getting lost. There’s also a lot of early experiments on the Slash community, on the Corrosion community, on many other communities that intentionally experiments about what I would call attention management issues.

Audrey Tang: Again, once you can take care of many dialog at once it opens the possibility of looking at one common issue from many different angles. That is to say, to take all the sides, or even, if not all the sides, more science than one side, which is what you get if you don’t have sufficient bandwidth, like if you only have three bits of upload per four years, which is a vote, basically, then it forces people to only take one side.

Audrey Tang: If you do attention management with good symmetrical bandwidth, then of course it enables people to listen to one another much easier and with what I call a scalable listening apparatus.

Audrey Tang: It’s two things. It’s one of the background awareness of a malleable, relevant constitutional system. The second is that the system itself using automated tools also lets people manage their attention much more efficiently, and so they can take more sides than one.

Peter Bloom: One of the things that we’ve seen in a lot of these movements that have used, before going to the more governance part of "E democracy," is the ability to use mobile technologies in the broadest sense of the term to mobilize support, to mobilize support across a large group of people, and focus it.

Peter Bloom: One of the aspects that we’re looking at is how much of a civic hacker mentality is informing this and how much is it just a tool. For example, a lot of the work that you’ve done, if I can be so bold, is trying an idea of open source, collaborative problem solving.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Peter Bloom: More than just voting, or more than just reading about issues. I’m wondering if you would talk a little bit about what you think are some of the civic hacker, and even anarchist values, that can inform this, and also what are some of the obstacles to getting people to think in this more expansive, democratic way.

Audrey Tang: Foremost, the difference is that in the agenda setting stage, that is to say long before voting anything, one need to agree that there is something wrong with the current social, environmental, or economic situation and/or that there is some potential to change. That is the initial call to action.

Audrey Tang: It’s interesting that you mentioned mobile technology because mobile, especially in terms of mobile phones, to me its main factor is that it’s operating on a slice of attention, meaning the screen is smaller, the engagement is shorter, and that it mostly motivates by people’s outrage or other viral emotions rather than a dedicated time to think about, to deliberate about any certain things.

Audrey Tang: Usually when we utilize mobile technologies we make sure that we use it only in the very front of the stage. That is to say, we make sure that it is to raise the awareness that something is wrong or that something needs talking about.

Audrey Tang: We actually don’t use mobile technologies to replace the face to face talking about or this one on one Skype session that we explicitly use a desktop form factor to make sure that we’re talking at each other with better attunement than those slice of conversation. I would distinguish between two, not really polar, but connected sides. One is the outrage part, and the second is the deliberation part.

Audrey Tang: There’s a psychological phenomenon called the empathy gap, meaning that if one is outraged it’s very hard to empathize a calm person, and vice versa. If you are very calm it’s very hard to empathize with a outraged person.

Audrey Tang: There’s both of these in all of us. What’s important is that we design the engagement principles so that we don’t confuse or mix those two modalities too much together.

Audrey Tang: We use the outrage part to spread the message and to invite people who are outraged two weeks after this initial call for complaints into a physical space and with good, safe design. The people can still participate over the Internet, but always with a much more dedicated synchronous, if not the same place, design. The asynchronous part is important, but it cannot replace the synchronous part.

Peter Bloom: Absolutely, and that’s a really interesting way, because what we’ve been looking at a little bit, as well, is how mobile technologies can serve as, like you said, a very nice upfront ability to not just do the outrage part, but also form connections through things like WhatsApp and create solidarity, but then the governance part.

Peter Bloom: Even if it’s something like creating a strike, you use WhatsApp to organize the strike, then what comes next? How do you engage in collective bargaining? How do you engage in a vibrant economic union, a co op, or on a more political sense?

Peter Bloom: One of the things that is really interesting, as well, is in terms of 21st century solidarity. Traditionally this would mean this almost Orwellian...he went down to the Spanish Civil War, he fought, and he got shot. If also means the common term.

Peter Bloom: One of the things that I found really interesting, again, if I can be so bold, is I’ve seen in some of your other interviews is that while you, yourself, work within Taiwan, you and others in the civil hacker movement, also in more technological politics, and certainly with the anarchism, see solidarity as more of a sharing of knowledge and information, and learning best practices and things.

Peter Bloom: I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit about that, in terms of we seem to have a lot of different progressive technological movements coming, like from Momentum in the UK to our revolution in the US.

Peter Bloom: How do you create solidarity in which you’re speaking to each other, recognizing their local issues, in that these are local struggles, but also sharing best practices and things, and creating a digital solidarity?

Audrey Tang: Three’s quite a few things. For example, when I first encountered the phenomena of free software it’s very interesting that people talk about all the fine details of free software license. There’s lots of flame wars being fought about the nitty gritties of free software/open source licensing, but there’s absolutely nobody putting into the license a limitation phase on countries.

Audrey Tang: When we get into this century, with open data license and so on, when it’s being pushed by the government we see sometimes a restriction based on borders, and so on. People in the open knowledge, people working on open definition were very quick to say you should not discriminate between people of different countries or jurisdictions.

Audrey Tang: It’s very taken for granted that anyone who participate in the digital commons is in its own tribe, because once you agree to the self ruling, Debian constitution that I alluded to, it’s a new jurisdiction.

Audrey Tang: A jurisdiction is not based on, of course, coercive police power, but it is based on some kind of power that is at once a norm, which means the hacker ethics and everything, but also, ultimately, tools, which delineates what’s easy and what’s not, what’s done and what’s not done.

Audrey Tang: Because of this jurisdictional view of the commons, it take partly from the scientific tradition in the sense that if you publish you donate your work into the commons, but it’s recursive, meaning that you also let other’s work co determine what you do next.

Audrey Tang: Because if I make our discussions, for example, on the discourse system or on the media wiki system, any software update is going to shape, actually, how I talk about these things with my fellow citizens.

Audrey Tang: On the technique level it doesn’t have to pass a vote, or anything like that. Just by improving the tools that each other use is a kind of solidarity.

Audrey Tang: I’m keenly aware that as the Digital Minister of Taiwan almost none of the tools that I’m using daily is from people who identify as Taiwanese. [laughs] The Sandstorm system that we use for collaborative editing, the SayIt system that we use for transcript keeping, basically they all came from the vocabulary that we use called Akoma Ntoso, which is African, and so on. The names, themselves, carry their local cultural traditions, like Ubuntu.

Audrey Tang: It reminds us there’s different philosophies in the world. In the course of translating these concepts into everyday conversation, or even to our local language, like Mandarin, Taiwanese, Tagalog, or whatever, we are forced to look back at the tradition that produced these ideas.

Audrey Tang: The traditions automatically are kin because we are using their products in a culture forming way, but not exclusively with these people, but rather with third work. They imbue their philosophy into those works.

Audrey Tang: I would argue it’s both ways. It’s the norms that’s created that creates a people to people solidarity, but there’s also people to object. Object shapes people, and people goes and create more objects. That more recursive kind of solidarity. Both are very important.

Peter Bloom: That’s really interesting because that goes to another issue that I wanted to speak about, which is the fact that sometimes the work that you’re doing, but also the work that others are doing, are spoken about as that it’s not really the E democracy effect, if I can be so bold, movement of the ’90s in that you’re not simply trying to create tools. You’re trying to show how technology’s not inevitable, if I can be so bold. A lot of the disruptive things.

Peter Bloom: The point you made about automation’s really interesting because most people view automation as a threat, particularly to jobs, but you’ve shown how automation can be something very positive.

Peter Bloom: I’m wondering if we could talk a little bit about how this is ideological in a sense of being more than just tools, but also showing people that they can have democratic control over technologies and its use.

Audrey Tang: For example, when I see AI I always pronounce it assistive intelligence. It is a ideological choice of words, because AI, unlike deep learning or whatever that has a fine scientific definition, AI is really anything that the humans choose not to do and the machines somehow does it, right?

Audrey Tang: It doesn’t prescribe anything. It doesn’t even have to be a computer. It could be any assistive intelligence. It could be animal intelligence. What I mean is that if we look at an assistive intelligence kind of view, it’s less threatening, just as in personal computer.

Audrey Tang: When the first personal computers were being forged, the IBM PC clones, or prior to that Apple II, or whatever, it promised the idea of a maker or a tinkering spirit in a sense that if you don’t like what your computer does there’s always a easy way for you to find some neighbor kid who hack the computer until the computer does things that you personally find more gratifying.

Audrey Tang: That’s what personal computing means. Prior to personal computing it means a terminal, which is just a screen and a keyboard, or a Teletype and a keyboard, that connects to a mainframe and have all the programs being determined or predetermined by the programmers in the mainframe.

Audrey Tang: Personal computing means you can do anything, and nobody can stop you from installing a new application on your personal computer because it’s personal.

Audrey Tang: That’s the same idea that we’re taking to, be it assistive intelligence, or to shared reality, augmented reality, and things like that, in the sense that if we start with a few axioms, like broadband as human right, which is a saying in Taiwan, K through 12 of education of equal access to the computing resources, and basic literacy that includes media literacy and digital literacy, it will start with these axioms.

Audrey Tang: We are basically saying the AI is co determined by the social norm because we expect the local people to tinker the self driving tricycles, or whatever, including the norms, parameters, and everything so that they are comfortable with it before releasing it to the public. If we don’t have that, then it’s mostly just a few people.

Audrey Tang: No matter how they design privacy by default, or whatever by default, it never works because it is not really a participatory design. The designer would be arrogant, just as in mainframes, and not humbled, as in personal computing.

Peter Bloom: No, that’s a really interesting thing about how we don’t do this enough, recognizing the continuous political democratization within digital and computerization in general.

Peter Bloom: I want to talk a little bit about when we think about democracy and moving it beyond traditional politics. One of the interesting things about your career, careers may be a big word, but trajectory is that, like you said, representative democracy was not where you started. You definitely, I would say, did not have the "West Wing" culture or background. In effect, from an entirely different, as you said, tribe and political tradition things.

Peter Bloom: I’m wondering how do we begin to think about this as more than just helping governments or working within a traditional political frame, and think about we can democratize workplaces, we can democratize the gig economy, these types of things, because that has been a difficult link. What you’ve then seen is the fact that workers have taken it upon themselves.

Peter Bloom: You saw in the US, for instance, the use of Facebook for teachers’ strikes. That was a little bit of a surprise to a lot of people working in this realm, particularly within even activist communities like Occupy. Then people working in good faith in the government, they say, "Oh, well, industrial democracy is something we hadn’t really thought about, and actually it’s something very important."

Peter Bloom: I’m wondering how we move beyond traditional realms of democracy to think about digital democratization more widely.

Audrey Tang: It’s much easier if you start with the small scale organizations. Think of a small community of maybe 50 people or a small co-op of maybe 30 people.

Audrey Tang: These are the places where we see the most inventions of self organization, mostly because if people already know each other they trust each other more to introduce more experimental digital apparatus, whereas if it’s 23 million people, of course you take a referendum or something to make a drastic change.

Audrey Tang: For example, the Loomio folks in New Zealand, they didn’t start from scratch. They started from Occupy Wellington. They started from a co op culture called Enspiral.

Audrey Tang: Their decision making apparatus, the so called democratizing the workplace product called Loomio, it is almost entirely driven by the real demand of maybe 30 people or 50 people who really want to keep track of who’s working on what together, and to do straw polls or conversations in a way that really empowers each individual person instead of some abstract ideal goal.

Audrey Tang: That’s really the most substantially creative thing that I can imagine, because we use a lot of tools in our civic tech community. We actually recycle through a lot of tools. As soon as new tools come up, we take new ones into our ecosystem.

Audrey Tang: We can do that because we have a firm understanding of what each stakeholder in the co op, or in the Social Innovation Lab, or whatever, what their real interests are, and where the tools are there to speed up some chores, or whether it’s there to capture some moments to make remote conversations possible.

Audrey Tang: To take a actual GovTech example, starting this year Taiwan is doing a regional revitalization plan where we identified a hundred or so counties that have a shrinking brain drain or aging population. We encouraged people who work in the national government to relocate back to their hometown, basically, and telework.

Audrey Tang: Because I entered the cabinet with a teleworking working condition, with such a simple thing as telework, where you have to do a lot of service design to look at the everyday work of paper pushing in any workplace, government being one, and to make them amicable to remote work, but once you do that, everything gets digitized automatically.

Audrey Tang: The analytics, the searching, the various network forming becomes much easier, because back in the days of paper and telephone once there’s an emergent issue, like people who want to talk about digital democracy, I can’t really pick up a phone and call each of my colleagues saying, "Do you have anything to say about digital democracy?"

Audrey Tang: If someone email everybody in their organization, government or not, saying, "Hey, do you have anything to say about digital democracy?" they probably get fired the next day. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Once you have reply optional, work out loud hubs for things like the activity stream we use Rocket.Chat, but it could be Slack then it’s actually very easy to type out something that’s reply optional. People who then reply automatically form a team, and things like that.

Audrey Tang: It enables a workflow that is only possible if people already get into the habit of working in the remote, but then that only becomes possible because people already have some comfortable experiences working in the same room.

Audrey Tang: For me, a lot of that is grown out of the organic need of small scale organizing needs. We don’t start thinking about five million people or anything like that. We just think about maybe 50 groups, and each of maybe 50 people, and how do we scale that.

Peter Bloom: That is a really interesting point as well, about what is the relationship between systematic change and the experimentation that is really implicit within any system, within itself.

Peter Bloom: I know that there is a bit of a discussion about how anti capitalist, for instance, you should be, and about are we, when we’re looking at things like innovation hubs, which are very interesting, are we just working around the edges, so to speak?

Peter Bloom: I want to say, very much of this, this has always been a bottom up movement. You create these local technological communities. I’m wondering, for yourself, how do you balance those things between having anti status quo agenda that does want a different type of world, with also recognizing that this has always been a local, bottom up movement?

Audrey Tang: I’m going to be a lot biased, because we had this debate when the term open source was coined.

Peter Bloom: That’s why I asked.

Audrey Tang: The term open source was coined because a bunch of people ESR and friends wanted to form a marketing campaign of a traditionally human rights based narrative. That is the free software movement.

Audrey Tang: Basically, it’s not selling human rights. It is telling the capitalist that the way that you’re making software using your capital is creating a challenge in solidarity let’s talk about it this way.

Audrey Tang: We can solve it, not because we want to do away with capitalism, but actually, we can shift the capital first from entirely harm causing capital into capital that avoids harm, like at least being honest of what kind of software stack you’re using.

Audrey Tang: Then generally turning into so called stakeholder benefiting capital, meaning that if there is things that you don’t want to maintain yourself, you just use an open source license and commit to share its maintenance cost.

Audrey Tang: Finally, you can have capital that contributes to solutions, for example, the Mozilla Corporation being the flagship example.

Audrey Tang: There’s capital and there’s capital. If you do the marketing and communication right, you can shift the color of the capital itself into at least benefit capital that is good for both bottom lines or triple bottom lines, as we call it nowadays.

Audrey Tang: If you really do the value alignment right, like for example, during the Mozilla Corporation’s rebranding and how they did the Firefox market communication, you can say we earn a lot of money, but 100 percent of which is going back to the open source community.

Audrey Tang: That creates a lot of interest in people using those grants or research money that Mozilla is putting forth into fundamental infrastructure work like Let’s Encrypt, like the Rust language, and things like that, things that traditionally would not get funded by the private sector, but it’s now nevertheless being funded by the private sector.

Audrey Tang: If you have a strategy that begins with scaling impact but without being too discriminating of what kind of early stage solutions that you’re looking at. You’re saying any early stage solution that shows promise, I’m happy to scale it up, and then it gives people who are traditionally trained in capitalist regime something more meaningful to do with their lives or something like that.

Peter Bloom: That’s a really interesting point. That takes then to...I have a couple of more questions, if that’s all right.

Audrey Tang: Sure, of course.

Peter Bloom: We mention a lot of the fact that there’s a lot of different types of communities, from, I would say, things that are happening like in Barcelona and parts of Europe, which is very much these urban labs. Then you have within, I would say, business schools, sometimes innovation hubs, which are much more about market based solutions.

Peter Bloom: Then you have really strong, often subversive hacker organizations that you sort of know and sort of don’t know. Then, like you said, you have a lot of gov tech and civ tech type of organizations.

Peter Bloom: How do you actually begin processes of bringing those together in open dialogue and discussions, and also saying that we’re not telling you how to, what your culture should be, but we do want to actually create mobile spaces for sharing information and changing, like you said, culture so that we can scale up good ideas that you find beyond your own place that you’re working in.

Audrey Tang: You start with saying open source license. That goes without saying. Without a good license management apparatus, we’re back to square one, where people only work with people who they already know.

Audrey Tang: It is the fact that you can go to a Microsoft website called GitHub and look at whatever creations that fits maybe 50 percent of whatever problem you’re working on, and start building an ad hoc community based on these offerings that creates an easy solidarity with anyone who puts forward their half finished work for people’s critique.

Audrey Tang: I’m not pretending that it’s completely open or it’s completely fine, but it begins a point of conversation around which, as I like to quote Leonard Cohen, is the crack where the light gets in.

Audrey Tang: Without this mismatch between cultures, between offerings and needs, between people’s expectations and the actual deliverings, there’s no chance of starting a conversation, because there’s no object that could be a social object. It could be just internal objects that people don’t get to form a social relationship. That’s always the first step.

Audrey Tang: Once you have those social objects, I would argue that a regular safe space that people can return to is the second thing. We have in various different communities. For example, for the World Economic Forum, there’s a synchronously done World Social Forum.

Audrey Tang: In other civic tech communities, there’s TICTeC in France, but in the gov tech community, we have the Open Government Partnership in France.

Audrey Tang: I think it is something predictable that you can always say one year ago or a quarter ago, it’s not quite good. We had a fight. Technologies don’t match or ideologies don’t match and whatever. You can always return a quarter later into this quarterly gathering and say, "Oh, by the way, there’s some new developments, and things have changed."

Audrey Tang: Without this regular, it could be every quarter, every year, or in the case of the vTaiwan project, it’s every week, every Wednesday. Without this kind of place where you can return to, there is no public that you can recourse.

Audrey Tang: To be a recursive public is to be a bunch of people that cares about how these people relate, not just one shot transactional stakes, but rather how we hold the stakes and how we collectively hold these stakes.

Audrey Tang: I would argue that a safe space, both temporal and spatial if possible, is the next step beyond the open license and open invitations for people to have a conversation.

Peter Bloom: Absolutely. That goes into my last question. I think you’re absolutely right. One of the projects that we’d like to do on the back of this book is create a global consortium that does create these kinds of temporal and spatial safe places.

Peter Bloom: One of the aspects of this is, if I again can be a bit provocative...

Audrey Tang: Sure, of course.

Peter Bloom: ...is the fact that sometimes I see a bit of a disjuncture between the narratives that emerge around these, particularly around people like yourself, and what is actually being said.

Peter Bloom: When I see articles about Audrey Tang, genius coder who’s now been able to do this. What you actually say is anyone can do this.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Peter Bloom: Some of the things that have come, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, she dropped out of school because she was so smart. It’s like, "No, I dropped out of school because I felt the information was already there and anyone can do this."

Peter Bloom: This brings to the forefront a really serious question about the fact that governments across the ideological spectrum are realizing that we need to redo education, particularly among young people, particularly even reeducating some older around coding and these types of things to make them more accessible language and use.

Peter Bloom: One of the critical questions is, what kinds of civic education do we need to be doing with this digital civic education? Ones that allow us to go beyond, if I can again be so bold, what I think is a very liberal capitalist notion of this individual genius, which is precisely what I think you and others, remember, are trying to do away with.

Peter Bloom: How do we create that narrative that this is a do it yourself, anyone can do this, this is democratic in its most pure sense? Then educational ways of thinking and agendas that say we have to combine digital education with civic education from a very young age.

Audrey Tang: First of all, I would like to address the genius thing. My first experience reading "The Cathedral and the Bazaar," which is ESR’s theme, I remember the quote that I think is in the chapter of the importance of having users. There’s really no users. There’s only co developers.

Audrey Tang: Linus Torvalds was quoted in that chapter. It’s not the exact quote. I think he says something like, "I’m a very lazy person who happens to get a credit for things other people want to do." That’s the structure of the Linux development.

Audrey Tang: People ascribe everything to Linus and Linus knows something about this dynamic. He is being lazy intentionally by saying if you really want something, do that yourself and maybe get it merged or something.

Audrey Tang: This philosophy of not the taking credit part, the creating possibilities part is most important. If Linus is very strict in the milestones or in the nitty gritty details that is if he micromanage then I don’t think the community will grow as we see today to the Linux community.

Audrey Tang: Always, being humble in one’s design is the most important thing. If that is something that could be learned, I think it could be learned only in a safe space, where people share their aspirations, where they’re not afraid to fail, where anything learned, good and bad, is treasured as a community asset, and things like that.

Audrey Tang: I can say now something about Linus’ home country and their culture. [laughs] I think that would be going a bit too far, but I do think that it really creates a different kind of non individualistic, certainly not "American Hero" kind of personality that is really required to start a very large project and still manage to make it work somehow.

Audrey Tang: All the leaders that I work with in the programing language community, it could be Matz from the Ruby community, Larry from the Perl community, they all have the same kind of humbleness in them. I think that is the most important thing.

Audrey Tang: I really don’t think this heroic narrative is helpful in the least, but some journalists want to write it that way, and I cannot edit my own Wikipedia article, and so, c’est la vie. That’s the first part.

Audrey Tang: The second part is how to make the civic education. When I did the Perl 6 work together with the Perl community, we had a rallying cry called optimized for fun or Ofun for short.

Audrey Tang: That means we optimize the subject of experience of a so called user becoming a so called co developer. We can use any number of social hacks to do so. It could be good food. It could be music. It could be shibboleth. It could be shared memes. It could be a bot that automatically hugs someone when someone gets a ++ or whatever.

Audrey Tang: Anything goes, but with the same end goal of turning the act of contribution into a very interesting one, a fun experience.

Audrey Tang: Once people get the intrinsic motivation, I don’t think we need to externally impose the so called civic, or civilized, or whatever regime that disciplines people being good citizens, because then they find joy in making other people’s experience better as they have been shown before.

Audrey Tang: A lot of techniques that I share like hugging the trolls and things like that all build on the same premise that is to make the newcomers or people who are contemplating a real contribution experience a really positive experience to the same degree as I myself was welcomed into the community in the first place.

Audrey Tang: There’s a lot of ubuntu or a lot of indigenous culture is predicated on that, before the transaction or industrial revolution view. I think some part of it is still very much alive in the free software and open communities, in the sense that if they don’t treasure their newcomers, they really don’t get very far.

Audrey Tang: All the large communities nowadays, Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap and so on, all nurtures their newcomers this way in a civic education but never indoctrinating education, but rather a co developing experience.

Audrey Tang: It’s also Darwinian, because if they don’t do that, they don’t exist after a couple of years. All the large communities we see are pretty good at doing this.

Peter Bloom: That goes to we can open up any questions that you may have we talk about these types of communities and these types of really dynamic and supportive culture. We are living in an age in which a lot of our politics isn’t so supportive like that.

Peter Bloom: I know that there are serious debates, and I imagine one that you’ve thought about ethically, about how much is one willing and on what basis is one willing to work with different government regimes?

Peter Bloom: I know, for instance, many people would find the Trump Administration, for instance, I said. We’re really interested in some of the things would you like to comment that a lot of people would say no, because even if I like this particular aspect, the discourses in general that you’re using are discriminatory and against an inclusive ethics.

Peter Bloom: Others have said you have to create space anywhere that you can. We’re not at a place where we can easily pick and choose what opportunities we take or not. They said you have to create any opportunities you can.

Peter Bloom: What are some of the ways in which do you think we should begin thinking about this as a kind of digital democratic radical community?

Audrey Tang: It reminds me of the old days of the Millennium Development Goals, where the UN took a very deontological position and said if you are a developed nation, no matter how much you don’t like the developing nations’ politics, military, infrastructure, human rights, you still have to help, because it is your burden as a developed nation.

Audrey Tang: There’s human suffering, and there’s no ideological dispute that can prevent the critical help that needs to put people out of poverty, and things like that. Of course, that worked, but I very much like the new narrative around Sustainable Development Goals, which I wear as a T shirt wherever I go.

Audrey Tang: The 17 colors for once doesn’t make a distinction purely based on developed versus developing, or the people who can help versus the people who needs help. Rather, it says can we understand that there are 169 different important things. We know this because we consulted more than one million people around the world.

Audrey Tang: We understand that these are not commeasurable, meaning that you can’t really trade one thing for another. We do understand that there are 17 roughly speaking communities worldwide that would consider one or two of these different goals as more important than the others. You choose to work on whatever you want to work on.

Audrey Tang: Regardless of whether you are developing or developed, you can still identify though the sustainable goals, one of the 17 tribes that you identify with. The shape of the 169 targets are shaped in the sense that it minimizes tradeoff and maximizes energy, in the sense that if you work on any of those goals, you automatically contribute to the other goals even if you don’t like their politics.

Audrey Tang: This kind of automatically synergistic accounting in the sense of accountability is the most important thing that we can work in the era of post GDP radical narrative. We all agree that GDP is bankrupt in terms of measuring social progress or any kind of progress, but not many people agree on what’s next.

Audrey Tang: The wellbeing index is not fine grained and flexible enough. The happiness index maybe doesn’t capture the different scales between communities and countries. The sustainable goals only talk about goals. It doesn’t talk about how to get there.

Audrey Tang: The radical community can really work well if we seize the term of measurement, and management, and accountability from the very capitalistic interpretations, and starting on working on being accountable to each other, meaning that we can answer much easier than before what kind of impact one’s having.

Audrey Tang: Without even agreeing on what kind of thing requires doing what kind of priority, because we accept that 17 different tribes have different priorities anyway.

Audrey Tang: If they keep each other accountable, then that’s the spirit of SDG17, is that if we have reliable data from all the different parties, it automatically creates opportunities of synergy and opportunities of collaboration. If you see that there’s no synergy, you just don’t.

Audrey Tang: I think it is the overview effect of a mapping of the impact that we are creating and being accountable first to ourself and then to the people we’re collaborating with. Not being afraid of working out loud in the sense of not being afraid of publishing all these things, even in this raw and very easy to challenge forum, to the public Internet.

Audrey Tang: I think it’s the first step of building a solidarity that is based on evidence, impact, and people’s self setting priorities rather than imagined common Utopian thoughts. People cannot agree on imagined Utopia, because we all have a lot of imaginative capabilities.

Peter Bloom: [laughs]

Audrey Tang: I’m sure that ours don’t really overlap, [laughs] but it doesn’t really matter because we’re not even there. What happens is what have I done in the past couple months? Am I happy enough to share it with anyone who asks? If I share it, do we upload it, everything, on YouTube? Things like that.

Audrey Tang: Gradually, based on those trails, I think we can form opportunistic synergies and collaborations without pre agreeing on the doctrines and ideologies.

Peter Bloom: I think that’s a very inspiring, powerful place. Like I said, a radically pragmatic place to end.

Audrey Tang: Very much so.

Peter Bloom: Those were the main things that we were interested in. Was there anything that you wanted to follow up on or discuss?

Audrey Tang: No, I think it’s the mobile democratic communities, I really like how you put it in air quotes because it really means different things to different people.

Audrey Tang: During the conversation, I had the idea that when you say mobile is kind of overlapping with what I call recursive public in the sense that it mobilize itself.

Audrey Tang: Why do you choose the term mobile, in the first place?

Peter Bloom: I think that’s a really good question. We chose it for three particular reasons. One is because we did see mobile technologies, as you say, dominate some of these discussions. In fact, they’re quite partial in what they can achieve. We were interested in why mobile phones and mobile technologies were taking such a strong political organizing role and what they were marginalizing, as well.

Peter Bloom: I think the second is the theoretical point about going from mobile neoliberalism or mobile technologies in the sense of flexibilities and the recursive aspects which we see within neoliberalism and which we see in dominant hegemonic ideologies, which being flexible and adaptive enough to operate and seeing that, then, being changed, actually. How can you make revolutions mobile?

Peter Bloom: I think the third was the ideas of resilient mobile communities. One of the aspects that I found most problematic is if you look at a lot of the discussions around community, it’s still very, I would say, 20th century location based. People are actually forming more than just communications. Mobile communities.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Peter Bloom: What does that mean? How do we create ones that are resilient, ones that have interesting cultures, ones that don’t try to apply particular past paradigms onto them but still, that they can draw from?

Peter Bloom: We were interested in that in terms of then saying, what does this mean for "mobile organizing"? I think the book project we’re working on, which we should have out next year, is we saw this as a type of guerilla democracy in terms of...In this interesting way of being flexible, mobile, revolutionary, but also, in many ways, willing to establish its own systems, its own cultures, its own paradigm.

Peter Bloom: I think, in the broader sense, you really hit perfectly, which is, how do you create mobile safe spaces that actually allow for people to make more sustained connections with each other that are radical about possibilities, as opposed to just resistance?

Audrey Tang: That’s right. How to tell you and make the safety move as you move, which is what mobile means, anyway.

Peter Bloom: Absolutely.

Peter Bloom: I think that was a lot of what we were looking at. One of the interesting points that it’s be worth following up on as we progress is, also, this relationship between traditional types of social movement politics, which certainly operates on its own, and some of the things you’re talking about, which is a broader epistemological and ontological approach.

Peter Bloom: People from users, consumers, the co developers and co creators. That’s a move that, I think, goes beyond just saying, "We’re against austerity," for instance, or, "We’re for this political party as opposed to that political party."

Peter Bloom: I do think that I found it interesting. We didn’t get to talk about it in this conversation, about this type of...If we’re being very literal, app culture. How does app culture, which, I think, started, in many ways, as something that was more co creating, become more consumptive?

Peter Bloom: What does that show about the dangers of some of this mobile organizing and these types of things, and what we need to do to look beyond immediate political struggles to, actually, what kinds of radical cultures are we creating?

Audrey Tang: I think mostly it’s suddenly a lot of people can, for example, get on the World Wide Web, but without the understanding that you can view source all the web page, but pretty much everybody on the early Web knows that you can view source on the web page.

Audrey Tang: It is something that is like the Usenet and the "summer that never ends" or something like that. [laughs] Once you hit a critical mass of newcomers who brings a different culture, it’s a phase change for the original culture. The thing to do is not to rediscover the old culture, because it’s gone, but rather to identify what’s important for the newcomers.

Audrey Tang: For a lot of people that I’m working with, especially school children because we’re teaching media literacy, AI, and whatever in K to 12 now, what we found is that what they are looking at is to make meaningful interpersonal connections.

Audrey Tang: If they want, for example, a Arduino or a Raspberry Pi project to make useful interpersonal connections, like showing their families how many steps they are from the phone, [laughs] so that they can predict where they go home, there’s much more motivation to look under the hood and to view source on even the apps or on any technologies that’s between them and the kind of interpersonal relationship that they are keen to do.

Audrey Tang: Otherwise, I would agree that it’s now much easier to browse through the scratch projects without modifying any of those scratch projects from people in kindergarten and so on. Certainly, I don’t think it’s a bad thing. I think it’s just a phase.

Audrey Tang: If you immerse yourself in the Wikipedia community for a couple years without editing one single article, that still prepares you better [laughs] to become an eventual editor. To have a community that lasts longer than a average lifetime of engagement, I think that’s the important thing, which is why sustainable is the keyword of the SDGs.

Peter Bloom: I think that also touches on another of the mobile aspects that we really are interested...it’d be good to also follow up some of this conversation. There’s so many aspects of the work that you’re doing and others are doing.

Peter Bloom: 20 years ago, you probably remember these conversations, people forget this, but one of the main arguments against some of this smart technology and mobile technology is that we can do it. We can make the processors, we can do it, but how are people going to learn to use it? It just takes too much effort. It was a real argument that people had.

Peter Bloom: What you saw was that actually if you make into something usable and fun, people, for both good and bad, will learn to use it. Yet, I still think, in many ways, we teach some of our more radical civic education in a traditional way. "Let’s have people in classrooms and just do it."

Peter Bloom: I would not necessarily want us to learn from Apple in terms of their ethics, but I would ask, "What can we learn about actual...from capitalism that they’ve actually had this kind of pervasive lifelong learning?"

Peter Bloom: They’re actually asking people to do huge amounts of learning in a short amount of time, and they’ve been successful at it. What can we learn from a different ethical framework from that?

Audrey Tang: I would like to conclude with a real example, which is a real civics class in a senior high school, the first grade of senior high. That’s, I think, the 10th grade. The teacher told the students to go to the e petition platform in Taiwan, join.g0v.tw, and find whatever cause you think can mobilize more than 500 people, and therefore demanding the ministries to give you a reasonable response.

Peter Bloom: Wow.

Audrey Tang: A young girl found this photo of a turtle being choked on a plastic straw or something like that. She mobilized to advocate to take out plastic straws everywhere, and certainly in indoor drinking, which is kind of controversial. In Taiwan, bubble tea is national identity drink, [laughs] and the straw always goes with it.

Audrey Tang: She’s really good at mobilizing that message. Lo and behold, there’s more than 5,000 people petitioning together. I, as the minister in charge of open government, have to do a collaborative workshop.

Audrey Tang: We met with the petitioners. They’re all young people. It’s very heartening to see that they were able to mobilize so well on the Internet, much better than I would have done were I that age.

Audrey Tang: What I think is most important is to let the young people be part of the civics. It’s not just the teacher teaching them how to be effective. It’s, rather, the teacher learning from them how to be effective because there’s a really open ended question out there.

Audrey Tang: By the way, starting this year, because of that e-petition, indoor plastic straw is banned. They really effected a social change. I think that’s one of the best ways to teach civics.

Peter Bloom: Absolutely. That’s fantastic. Like I said, I think that’s a really inspiring place to end. Thank you so much. This was fantastic and eye opening, as I expected. Some of these things, hopefully we can follow up further with.

Peter Bloom: Thank you, again. I think that people will be interested in this. Certainly, this is going to help with our research.

Audrey Tang: I’m going to publish this right away and send you the link. It will be under a Creative Commons attribution license.

Peter Bloom: [laughs] Thank you so much. Bye.