Audrey Tang: Homeschooler, 1st digital minister 🇹🇼 & 1st 🏳️‍⚧️ minister in 🌐 CoFounder Plurality.net

When we see Internet of things, let's make it an 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. And whenever we hear that a singularity is near, let us always, always remember the plurality is here.

Hi everyone. I'm Manisha, the founder of Modulo and I am so honored and delighted and excited to have Audrey Tong here with me today. Welcome, Audrey.

Hello. Hi everybody. Good local time, everyone.

So Audrey, if you haven't heard of her, is co author with Glenn Weil. Yes. The author of Plurality, which you can see in my background, the future of collaborative technology and democracy. Audrey was the first Minister of Digital affairs of Taiwan from August 2022 to just recently May 2024, during which time Taiwan thrived with incredibly promising digital and technological efforts to improve democracy, which I have just been learning about. Audrey is a hacker, I think it's hard to say.

And also civic hacker. Civic hacker. Not the malicious black hat ones. No.

Yes, she's a civic hacker and also a homeschooler and named one of the times top 100 people in AI and just has such a beautiful vision for democracy that really inspired me and I wanted to share with all of you and also just learn more about this vision, how it involved, how it evolved, and how we can all get involved with the future that you're co creating with so many amazing people. So really happy to have you here.

Yeah, that's awesome. And I really thank you for talking about this to a more like parents and teachers and younger generation. I think they are the most important target audiences for the idea of plurality because many people already thought technology is something that's a given, something that's given to us. But I think the main thing that we as homeschoolers, as educators want to show is, is that no, actually anyone can be a maker, can be a fellow co creator to technology to further democracy.

Absolutely. And you know, I was just reflecting, you talk in your book about learning being a collaborative lifelong process. And in many schools, as we're all keenly aware, there's a much more rigid model where children are obligated to learn in a certain way at a certain time, at a certain pace. And there's this kind of opposite extreme that essentially is democracy, where we're all co learning and evolving together. So it's very intertwined. So I thought perhaps maybe if it's all right, we could start with your own Childhood and how that led you to be with the person you are today. I know you were born with a heart condition and you face bullying and lots of different.

Literally a hole in my heart that wasn't fixed until I was 12. Yes.

Amazing. And so how can you just share a little bit about growing up, how you got started homeschooling and what that looked like for you?

Sure, certainly. And happily, I attended three kindergartens, six primary schools, one year of junior high, and then switched to homeschooling. But I became a homeschooler because of the blessing of the head of my junior high school, principal Du Huiping. She actually convinced my parents because at that time, I won the top place in the national Science fair. But she tried to convince me I still have to finish college education because she said that my research is best done with, you know, top PhDs and in the foreign lab and somewhere in the US maybe. And then I showed her a printout of the email to that I had in exchange on the World Web, which was very new at that time, to talk about such artificial intelligence and things like that with those professors, because across the Internet, they didn't know I was just 15. So we're already collaborating together. And after reading the email printout, she's like, yeah, from tomorrow, you don't have to go to my school anymore. And I was like, oh, what about the compulsory education? Because at that time it was, you know, know, a state obligation for the students to go to school until they're 18. Right. We will get fined every day if we don't. And she's like, okay, I'll just make the records up. So I think that's promoted this idea of public sector innovation in me. It's like there are bureaucrats that are so much willing to support innovative measures if it actually fits the reality. So then my parents become advocates of the homeschooling, or as in Taiwan, we call it experimental education movement. And so a few years after me, everybody can in Taiwan apply for homeschooling. Up to 10% of students can now do that legally. But I was like, Generation Zero of doing this.

And I'm so happy you pointed that out because in so many countries, homeschooling is still illegal. Or even in a country where it's legal, parents might feel discomfort. And even if homeschooling is officially illegal, there are always ways that you can be creative through an independent study or starting your own school of one. In Germany, I know there's a public support for small kindergarten co ops formed by parents so it's always good to try to look around and see what's possible. So I'm curious, I mean, you already had this incredible knowledge of AI at age 15 and published papers. Where was your interest in computing born?

Yeah, I started when I was 8 and without a computer. Both of my uncles on my father's and mother's side work on then budding personal computer industry in Taiwan, which was born the same year as I was born in 81. And so there's a lot of programming books in my house and I read them. I loved mathematics, but I didn't love calculations, I didn't love math. I love the idea of mathematics, the abstract concepts. But doing calculations by hand or by calculator always felt very boring to me. So when I saw that there is now this like bicycle of the mind that I can just teach it mathematics, but it does the math for me, I was immediately hooked. So I talked to my parents, but they don't want to buy me a personal computer saying, you know, you're too young for video games because that's their association of computers. And so I just used a A4 paper and drew with a pen the QWERTY keyboard and drew with a pencil what the computer would output. And every morning I would just wake up and erase. I would type cls, enter and then erase and simulate what output? Right. So it's a paper computer. Of course, after a few weeks, my mom was like, yeah, if this is what you want to do. It doesn't seem like video gaming actually looks like homework to me. And so she relented and bought me a personal computer. So to me, from the very beginning, computer is a way to program in. It is to transfer what I learned into computer games or computer ideas, computer environment that other people may learn from. So it is not something that I receive from other creators. It is something that I create in order to share. I believe my first game that I wrote is one that helps my younger brother learn fractions. So there's a lot of balloons on the screen. You have to guess whether it is in the three quarter position. So you type three quarter and then a pin floats to that place, but it doesn't quite hit the bubble. So you have to guess again where the fraction is. So that was one of the first games I wrote when I was 8.

How wonderful. And I love that that includes both you learning something through experimentation, but also helping someone else learn something in socially. It combines so many different important elements of the learning process.

Exactly.

Wow. So apparently, as you were growing up there were a lot of interesting people passing through your house regularly. Could you share a little bit more about the people you encountered and how that influenced you?

Yes, certainly. So when I went to Germany for one year, my dad was studying in Zaporican university for his PhD which is about the democracy movement in 1989 around Tiananmen in Beijing. He was there as a journalist to report until 1st of June. And then he also covered the fall of the Berlin Wall as a journalist. So that got into him this passion to learn about the democratization wave and interview the people involved in both democratization movements. And so of course when I was in Germany, many people, the research subjects of my dad in exile from Beijing to Luxembourg or Paris or Germany just passed by. And then in the living room they talk about democratization. They talk about the communication technology that then very new technology like fax machines that helps them to get the messages out, like digital photography that help them to get a message out. So there's a lot of combinations of technology and democracy in the conversation in the living room, in Zapor, in Dudway to be very precise. And when I went back to Taiwan, Taiwan had a budding scene of dial up bbs where people just install a modem next to their home phone line. And with those, you know, sounds you can connect to each other's personal computers. And so I run into a lot of people that are very interested in the democratization of Taiwan itself because at that point in 93 we didn't have presidential elections, the martial law was just lifted. And so people were organizing to talk about what should our constitution look like. Should it just be about voting but. Or should it also be about referenda? Should it be about these. But also about participatory budget? There's tons and tons of ideas being exchanged in those dial up bbs. So I just, you know, spend a lot of telephone line fees to talk about these things with people who are self organizing. And so some of them are from the Jianguo High School senior high and they told us it would be a waste of time if I go to their senior high. And instead they would recommend that I just learn from the Gutenberg Project, the Internet Archive, the various different resources that are starting on the Internet.

That's so amazing. I mean it kind of feeds into another question that I had for you, which was why this passion for democracy? And I also feel this passion in my heart. But you know, there are kind of utopian authoritarian regimes and so I am curious why this is so deeply personal. To you, your love for democracy and where it comes from and why you. You feel it's so essential if that's true for you.

Yeah, I mean, because I was born into martial law, right? So my parents, as journalists at the beginning, when I was young, they had very little freedom to start their own magazines or their new newspapers. That was not allowed. So for Taiwan, Internet and democracy are not two things. They literally started at the same year, at the same demonstration. And when I say demonstration, I don't just mean protest like going to the streets, holding up signs and so on. Of course these are important. But demonstration, as in demo, as in showing people that if you get people together on an online forum, if you design an online forum in such a way that the bridge making things like the Twitter's community notes, if things that appeal to both sides floats to the top instead of the most polarizing ideas flow to the top, then very quickly you can build bridges across people who initially hold different ideas or different ideologies. And so this potential for Internet to serve as a bridge, I experienced it firsthand in the first few social movements on the Internet, like the Blue Ribbon campaign by the EFF and so on. I was all part of it as a very young person. And I feel respected because I was just what, 13, right? 14 When Internet Archive started, I was 15. So I had no right to vote in the face to face politics. I did not have the right to participate in the local city council. But yet on the Internet, with just a email address, I can already be included even in the policy making process, the policy development process within the Internet governance. So I feel treated like a adult, which is why later on, when I become in 2016, the minister in charge of social media innovation and entrepreneurship, I always stressed that we need to include people younger than 18, because if they can become petitioners or demonstrators or facilitators and so on, and if the state supports that, then they are already part of democracy before they turn 18. They don't just, you know, magically care when they turn 18 if we don't give them a chance before they were 18 to be part of the democratic process. So it stem from my personal experience to participate online.

And I think teenagers and young people have such extraordinary ideas. They have this capacity to think outside of the box that I think sometimes.

We lose as we grow up exactly as adults. Yes. In Taiwan in 2016, we had this idea of reverse mentorship. So all the cabinet members who are above the age of 35 need to have people under the age of 35 to advise them of such matters. So I was at that time 33, a young reverse mentor. Now of course, after I become Minister I was 35, so I'm already old. I'm 43 now, very old as a for reverse mentors. So I have, I had my own reverse mentor under 35 when I was Minister of Digital affairs who teach me that I should write web3 in lowercase with ls base. I cannot add 0 after it because it means a different thing and things like that. So I think the great thing of that is that the young people are not interns. They are the people who are on the steering wheel that tells the people that are older where the world is coming. And it's our job as senior people now to support them with the resources to support them with the means of. But the vision, the vision of horizon scanning, that belongs to the younger people.

So you started learning about tech and advancing in your career. And clearly, I mean this technology benefited you as an adolescent. Why was your impulse to share this with others rather than hog it for yourself and collect Sunrise?

I mean, if the Gutenberg Project doesn't exist, if the Archive Arxiv project didn't exist when I drop out of junior high, then there is no way I can do research, right? And my principal would probably then not support me in homeschooling. So the very reason why I can homeschool and do research is because there are people who don't care about copyrights. Well, in the sense of Project Gutenberg is already expired. But in Arxiv or in Wikipedia or in other projects, that's because people made a gift to the wider community so that any random 14 or 15 year old can benefit from their knowledge. And so without this gift, my entire trajectory would be impossible. So it is only logical that I give back so that other 14 and 15 years olds can continue the work. And as I said, I strive to be a what's got good enough ancestor, so not over prescribing for the future. I would not want to foreclose the future teenagers ideas or their canvas because they're going to be brighter than me. They're going to be with even more freedom than we have in this generation. Less scarcity, more abundance. So it makes total sense that whatever I produce is just materials for them instead of asking them to sign an NDA or pay a license fee.

Yeah, for sure. I'd like to dig in a little deeper to how your parents were involved in your education. I would guess that perhaps they were involved before you became an official experimental learner and what their approach was in helping to guide your education.

Yeah, so my mom introduced to Taiwan the idea of Oregon style debate, the modern debate format, when she was just a undergrad. So she would always debate me. It's very nice because it shows that everything has two or more sides, everything has many different interpretations and it helps me to see things in a non binary way. Because part of the debate game is that sometimes you don't know which side you will be debating before the actual debate happens. So you have to prepare for the arguments for the both sides. And so I guess it instilled in me this idea of non binary. And I don't just mean gender, but also political affiliation, but also, you know, the closeness of peoples. If I feel that half of the people is closer to me and half are farther away from me, maybe I should spend more time then with the other half people until the balance is restored in me. It's a very Taoist idea of yin and yang, you know, completing each other. And my dad is very much into Socrates method, so he will just keep listening to me and he never instructs me to obey any authority, not even his authority, but he will just keep fact checking me saying that. Oh, you say everything is like that, but two paragraphs ago you just said something that doesn't quite bode well actually for that top down declaration. Or you say that it is the causation of this, but it sounds to me more like a correlation. Can you have a causation example or things like that? So he never criticizes me or to fight me or debate me, but he always supports me with more questions than that. Let me see then. Actually, each road toward truth or fact or beauty or whatever, there's a lot of different forks in the road. Maybe they merge together at the end of the horizon, but we should not say that only this road is correct and those roads are not correct. So I think through the Socrates method he instilled in me this value of pluralism and also taking all the sides, taking the sides that other people that take that I may feel as a detour, but may actually fuse into similar horizons.

Beautiful. I think, you know, you touch upon something which feels very intimate and raw to me right now, which is, I feel a growing frustration with, I mean, I'm American and the increasing, really racism and in our country and subjugation of minorities and it just when, you know, children were locked up at our borders just really hurt me and broke my heart. And. And so, you know, just last week well, maybe give you a little more background as a child. I also, I grew up a lot of Buddhist philosophy, influenced by the Dalai Lama, and really teaching about compassionate listen, listening and, like, really dear to my heart to meet anybody where they are, even if that's full of rage. And I found that by listening and listening and listening, sometimes even their opinion changed. And last week, I was having a conversation with two people I had never met before, and one of the people started going off about different ethnic groups, and I was not in the mood to engage mindfully. I was in the mood to enjoy dinner, and I found myself getting very, very sick to my stomach. And I just felt like I don't have the energy for this. I just don't like this, and I don't want to be around this person. And I just really put my foot down in an emphatic way that I didn't want to hear him talk about groups of people in that way. And I find actually, as I've gotten older, that it seems like there's a moment to say, no, I don't agree with you, and I don't like this. And especially when it comes to protecting people who have less power in our society. And so I don't know if there's a question there, Audrey, but perhaps, yeah.

Yeah, I can totally relate to that. I mean, I, as a Minister for Social Innovation, held office hours. So every Wednesday, anyone can book my time to talk to me for 45 minutes. And as long as they agree to be on the record. Now, because it's on the record, some people who were initially lobbyists know it's going to be on the record, so their behavior also change, right? They lobby for the next generation, for sustainability and so on, because they know the descendants are listening. So that's the good thing. But there are also people who see it as a platform because it's going to be on the record. And so they just go off and just say things that exactly, as you said, are prejudiced or stereotype or things like that, because they want everyone to know that they think this way. And the ministry's platform is going to amplify that, Right? So sometimes I also find it tiring at the end of 45 minutes. But I think there are two good things. One is the time structure, right? So I never had to tolerate this more than 45 minutes. So usually for the first 30 minutes or so, I would listen, I would ask clarifying questions, I would do a more Socrates method thing. And then I, at the end of that 45 minutes, I would also then ask some very innocent sounding questions, like, but do you also think, you know, among people working on technology, maybe in Taiwan we have some spirituality, Taoism or things like that, but in the west, maybe the religious people are the minority there. Right. Maybe the diversity should be increased not just on that and that grounds, but also on the religious or spirituality grounds. It is also a diversity angle, don't you think so? And so on. So I would just take their argument, spin it 90 degrees into an orthogonal way and, and then so it is a creative interpretation. And because it's already toward the end of the session, sometimes they would say, oh yeah, maybe, maybe that makes sense. I'll have to think about it. Oh, now I have to go. But yeah, I'll think about it. Right, so those, those interventions, they always only work when there is a fixed time structure. Because if there's not five minutes left, but rather 15 minutes left, they will probably start arguing or debating and so on. But as a parting thought, they're like, yeah, maybe I should think about it more. Right, So I think a time structure that protects, just like our safe space around our bodies, the safe space around our time is equally important.

Yes. And it occurs to me too that within that meeting, you establish trust through listening. So that person can feel safe to express their views, but also question their views. Because our views are so connected to our identity. And it can feel terrifying to release that identity. But by giving those people a safe space, you, you increase their capacity to feel at ease with questioning themselves and the people who they surround themselves with. And this idea of recording all the meetings is simply brilliant. I mean, I think it really provides people with that opportunity to be self reflective that they might not have had otherwise.

Yeah, exactly. It's like holding up a mirror, right? A snapshot of where we are. And I, in Mandarin we say ching ting. So to listen is ting, to hear is tin. But ching ting is deep listening. And literally it means tilting. Like as you say things, I'm tilting my head, I'm being persuaded into your viewpoint, I'm fusing into you. But because there is of course stereotype, injustice or whatever that I heard, I then restored back to where I was. But this restoring back is always with compassion, deliberate. And also starting from where they are, right? Meeting them where they are. So this restoration itself is also healing to them because they can then see how starting from their position, I restore my balance. So this tilting and then tilting back, I think it's quite interesting. It's almost like, you know, aikido or jiu jitsu or tai chi or something like that, only done in a very slow and compassionate way.

I love this tilting and, and it's. It's valuable for us as well to question our own beliefs and identity and why we've come to think the way we have, because a force for good can become a very harmful force without us even seeing it if we don't stay in that spirit of questioning and collaboration and reflection. And. And it strikes me that this way of speaking, it's something that I enjoy and find meaningful, but it appears to be quite different from the way people engage on Twitter X or Facebook. And, you know, you talked when you were at the conference about the harmfulness of what social media has become. You know, it's been very linked to teen depression and suicide.

And so, yeah, I call it antisocial media, by the way.

Antisocial media, yes. And I find, you know, I felt like when I first Facebook came out, it was so fun and I was connecting with all these people I had seen. And so as kind of a skeptic, I want there to be a way for people to connect online that's meaningful and exciting and fuels democracy. But at the same time, I wonder, can that be as addictive as these kind of mean debates that are happening now and these ploys for attention and, and is it possible to build a kind of system without it having those addictive mechanisms? I mean, whenever I post a video that has someone saying something very strong and negative, it seems to get more views, you know, and so how do we really grow a movement that's. That's different?

Yeah, well, I mean, the media we're on at the moment, video conferencing with pretty good definition of audio and video with beautiful sunlight. That seems much better. Right?

Agreed.

Any anti social media and the positive vibes that we have here transmitted through podcast also give people freedom because they can enjoy it in the platform of their choice as long as it is indexed somewhere they can listen with, I don't know, Apple podcasts, Spotify, or in Taiwan, we have KK Box. It really doesn't matter. Right. So that the point I'm making is that the choice of the way to enjoy, to listen when it's free, when it's interoperable, like podcast, it then give people their safe space, their most enjoyable way to interact with each other. Now, the problem with Twitter is that it used to be that there can be many different ways to enjoy Twitter. There was a tweet deck, there was many different ways to get to Twitter and you can choose your own, you know, recommendation algorithms and sorting filters, habits and so on. But gradually Twitter closed down so that only the official Twitter app can actually interact with the post with other Twitter posts. And therein lies the problem. Of course they overlaid a jewelry system on top of it called Community Notes. But again, Community Notes isn't the primary interface. If I want an app that is just Community Notes and not Twitter, it's currently very hard to build that as an alternate way to consume Twitter content. But there are people who are working on interoperable way of Twitter like systems like Mestodon, people like people in the so called Fediverse. And recently Threads net from Meta started to interoperate with the Fediverse so that if you don't like the app, you can switch to a different app that surface your bridges more, that prioritizes the posts with more nuance, with more affinity, with more compassion. You don't have to be dictated by the primary sorting algorithm that is Twitter. We can then see a different future where people prioritizes the algorithms that sorts for bridge making, for affinity, for plurality, for mutual understanding. And because people will gravitate toward those viewing sorting mechanisms, and because the posting platform will have no control over which way you consume it, it would be just like email or podcasts. So this interoperable plural technology for the broadcasting social media, this is something that we're now working toward, not just technically, but also with policymakers as well.

Beautiful. So I'm trying to really dive deep into the heart of how this came to be. And what I hear kind of in your words, between your words is that it's not just human nature to be drawn towards division, it's something that's being caused by the way that the apps are being designed. And why are they being designed this way? Is it because the apps are focused on profits and it what, what is, how did it come?

Because they were focused on advertisement profits.

Right.

So the idea that engagement means something means different things. If you are a media primarily supported by subscribers, or a public media supported by taxpayer or charity money, because in these cases, like the BBCs and NHK and public radios of the world, the people paying you judges your performance based on how much service you make to democracy, to the community. But if your primary incoming source is advertisers that want people to impulse buy, then you're judged in a different metric. You're judged in how much fear of missing out you can get people in. And the fear of missing out, or FOMO is an Unnatural state. It is a state of people impulsively being drawn to something. And that rush can be manufactured by feeding people polarized information that is catered to their specific not need, but impulse. Right. So on one hand we have public charity, community funded public media and then on the other hand we have this impulse buy media and so the funding source determines the algorithm.

So. Interesting. So I'm, I'm, I'm building a tech startup. It serves homeschooling families and right now we are not making very much money, but the revenue sources are a paid community. And also sometimes if I write a review of a program, I get a commission if someone buys it, but it doesn't impact. I try not to make it impact what I choose to review. And I have thought, well, maybe if we grow large, I will allow advertising opportunities. Do you recommend me not doing that to preserve?

Well, I mean it depends on whether the advertising is about impulse buying. Right.

Okay.

If it is about getting people into an impulse and if we as we talk suddenly something pops up, right. Then that not just a distraction, but also it is antisocial social fabric. Right. But if the advertisement is pro social in the sense that it suggests you, not just you into something that builds more personal connections, then that's just fine. Because it's not impulse, it is the slow thinking system that you're engaging. It is not the fast thinking system that you're engaged in. And that will be totally fine.

That is so cool. It makes me think of Seth Godin's book Permissionless Marketing, where permission marketing, I think where people are actually opting into BE to hear your message. You don't force a message. It's inherently non violent. Yeah, it's.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And it's autonomous. Right. So it is actually the advertisers signing on the terms and conditions set by the listeners instead of the listeners signing on the terms and condition, the end user license set by the advertisers.

Yeah, And I know so many education entrepreneurs who are building curriculum and they're all telling me the same thing, which is that they just despise the social media part of it. They feel obligated to be constantly on social media. They don't enjoy it. And I really look forward to more authentic ways to.

Yeah, I would say a mailing list even. It's a very old technology. There are still new startups like Substack that just built around this technology and it's entirely opt in. Right. There's no recommendation algorithm in the substack that pushes things my way it still recommends me to subscribe to mailing list, but it is my conscious choice to read a few and decide to subscribe. So that is what I mean by the terms of condition are set by the viewer, reader or listener instead of the other way around.

That is so cool. So do you think that Substack will be able to maintain its integrity? What are the challenges as a company grows?

Yeah, I think mailing list by its very nature is interoperable. Right. It's portable. So if Substack someday, you know, deviates from its mission, you can take the list of email subscribers and go elsewhere. Right. So that is what I mean by interoperability. This interoperability. Both keep Substack honest and also it makes you, as a creator, you know, the main driver of engagement. If you want to interact with your subscribers in some other ways, there's nothing Substack can stop you.

Yeah, it's cool. I have a substack, so I'm definitely enjoying that method of communicating. So in your book, which I really hope everyone will read, you do quote Alexis de Tocqueville, who wrote Democracy in America. And I think you talked about how the exact quote is that democracy depends on deep and diverse, non market, decentralized social and civil connections to thrive. And since we're on this topic, could you dive into a little more what he means by non market and why those are really crucial for building a thriving democracy?

Yeah, definitely. The main point is that the local value, the trust, cannot be measured in the transactional amount of dollars. Somebody may pay me a million dollars, but they cannot win my trust simply by paying me a million dollars. These two are incommensurate because one is relational and the other is transactional. So my point in that part of the book is that to make decisions together, we need a bunch of people that always goes back to the town square, to the town hall, that it could be every week, it could be every month, if you're talking about voting every two years or four years. But you always go back. So it's always relational. There's no immediate winner takes all and everybody's close forever because if things go wrong, we can always go back to our next gathering and set things right a little bit. Now, of course, I prefer it to be more frequent than every four years, but the idea remains the same. But if we're not measured by, you know, the voting or the conversation or the rough consensus where we poll people on things we can live with, if we simply say that Anyone with the 51% of shares can determine everything, then there is nothing to return to. Right. That's 51. Takeover sells the company, sells the jurisdiction, and that's the end of that. It's called an exit. Right. So the idea of exit if it's not exiting to community, but exiting to whomever that has the most million dollars is fundamental, clearly antithetical to democratic governance.

Wow. So I imagine you've thought about what your utopia looks like. What is, what is a world that has a thriving democracy resemble? And perhaps you could also speak about, you're right now doing a tour and meeting a lot of government officials. What kind of initiatives are you suggesting to move towards future that you have so boldly envisioned?

Yeah, I. I don't actually think about utopia that much because the title of my biopic and documentary is called Good Enough Ancestor. It's not called the Perfect Ancestor because to be perfect, to be in the utopia is also to be hopeless. Right? Because there's no room for hope anymore if you achieve perfection. But the truth is that just as a parent cannot anticipate the environment that their kid is going to be when the kid becomes an adult, so we cannot fully predict what the future will be like and prescribe a utopic solution as solutionism. As an ancestor, the most we can do is to be good enough. Meaning that we make sure the world is in a better place, a place with more possibilities for descendants when we log out of the world compared when we log in into the world. But that's the best we can do. So the idea of plurality is not utopic. It is the idea that people with their differences should celebrate those differences instead of one side of difference dominating everybody else. And say you now have to all look like I do say the language that I speak, think the ideologies that I do now, we need to maintain, preserve, even create even of more that diversity, but do not let those impulses of polarization capture us. Instead, by celebrating diversity, we can then co create solutions that are not solving one part of the society's problem by causing pain on the other part of the society, but rather really solving those what we call wicked problems within wiki solutions with ideas that everybody can chime in. So that's good enough for me. But just like a wiki, it's never perfect for sure.

So one of the examples you used when, when I heard you speak that you is you were able to use technology to do very specific surveys in Taiwan about what all the needs were. And so maybe you could share that and what you've Been recommending to the governments that you've been speaking to about.

Yes, the wiki surveys we call them. Yeah. So one survey tool is called polis. And in that tool it's not just the government writing the survey or the posters, is the people themselves sharing their feelings. So in 2015 when we first deploy it, it was Uber drivers versus taxi drivers. Now people have strong feelings about this situation. But instead of asking people to vote on one referendum topic whether we should allow Uber no, we say, okay, here is the new situation where people with driver license, but not professional driver license pick up random strangers on their way to work and charging them for it over an app. How do you feel about this situation? So everybody can chime in. It is not a sharing economy analysis class. It is, oh, I feel insurance is important. I feel it may be fair to have surge pricing when the demand is high, but I feel uncomfortable if it's undercutting meters when the demand was low. I feel and I feel and I feel. So all these feelings are then put to your fellow citizens who can upvote or downvote each feeling whether they resonate with not or not. But there is no reply button. So you cannot get into an argument or flame war. The most you can do is to share your new feelings.

How dare you think that way. Right?

Exactly, exactly. So it is pro social in a sense that it surfaces the ideas that build bridges between people who are pro taxi and pro Uber. One of the early ideas say, how about let's make the rural areas not so legal. Drivers also unionize and as a co op enjoy Uber like status. Oh, that's a very good idea. Right. So there are such statements that unifies the differences and also causes new possibilities to be explored. So at the end of the three weeks we get like 10 tops ideas that everybody, regardless of whether they're taxi driver or Uber driver or passengers, agree on and then we just check with the stakeholders that they're technically feasible and then it's put into regulation and finally into law. So now Uber is a taxi fleet Q taxi in Taiwan. But we have search pricing, we have dynamic pricing, we have relaxed a little bit of how taxi should look like. And there's a lot of rural places where the co ops and the unions form Uber like fleets thanks to app based dispatching that is supported by the local government and social entrepreneur. So it become a win, win, win situation. But had we started with a referendum, we cannot get to this place. Right. So this is one of the uses of wiki survey.

Yeah. So in Essence, the democracy that you're describing in the book, and that's being co created, the vision is being co created with everyone involved in your discourse. Discord Channel involves a lot more getting user feedback really on a micro level. I mean it seems almost similar to the process of a good product designer will be constantly observing users, surveying users.

Yes, yeah, we use design thinking all the time. So what we just described is on the very beginning of the double diamond, it is a collaborative discovery process. And what POLIS does it is, it offers a little bit of the defining the first convergence so that we know how might we live together. And it's not a perfect agreement, it's just something that we can live with and then we move to the second diamond, which is to develop together and then finally deliver. But the first diamond should be much larger than the second diamond. That's our core argument.

So on your tour of Europe and America, have, have government officials come to you and asked how can I bring more democracy?

Yeah, definitely, yeah.

Say to them what, what kind of efforts do you recommend?

Yeah, I mean I'm in Finland right now and I'm working with Citra, their national innovation fund. And it's a neutral politically institution because it's not part of any ministry. It reports directly to the parliament, like public radio. It is a public institution. And so Citra does a lot of long planning of data rights, data economy, digital transformation, sustainability. But even Citra itself is now thinking, maybe we're too far away from the ordinary citizens. Maybe as this long term thinking think tank, we need to use police to listen to the people. What do they think are important as long term trends that we might have missed or what are some of the short term issues like, I don't know, information polarization. As you just mentioned, that those thinkers in Citra can also contribute actively too. So it is not about asking the people to trust institutions, it is about how the institutions can trust the people more with wiki surveys, with tools that we describe in plurality. And that's very powerful because to give no trust is to get no trust. So instead of saying how should we make the people trust us more? No, we should ask ourselves how we as a institution with good reputation be closer to the people and trust people more in their inputs.

Wonderful. It's so exciting the impact that you're having. How can I get more involved in supporting the efforts? And how can people listening of any age become involved in co creating what you're building?

Yeah, the plurality book is free of copyright, so if you just take a few paragraphs and say it's your work or to make a manga or anime or whatever based on it, you're entirely free. This is permissionless innovation. And so check out the book. But also if any part resonates with you, make something new based on it. Even if you just like the logo, if you just like the color palette or the word plurality or anything that we describe. Enjoy. Right? Share and enjoy. That is what the call to action. The button on the website shows. It's right behind you. It says enjoy.

I love that. It brings me to another question which I hope is relevant, which is how can people who have expertise, perhaps are very extroverted and have a lot of networking capacity, but might not have technical skills connect with civic hackers, with developers who really want to help build the technology to support new decentralized society systems?

Yeah, I mean like in Wikipedia, I bet most editors are not technical people. And so the, the main way to engage with these technical systems is just to begin co creating. If you haven't edited on Wikipedia, if you haven't contributed yet to Open Street Map to map out things of interest around your vicinity, then by all means go ahead and do it. There are people co creating art, music on hit record and you know many places, right? And so just start co creating. It doesn't need to be technology based. It can't entirely be culture and art based. It's just that when you're selecting the platform for collaboration, choose the ones like Wikipedia that uses a Creative Commons license. When you publish your work, think about Creative Commons. And creating Common doesn't just mean to relinquish copyright as we do on the public domain. That's a little bit radical. You can also say, you know, enjoy my work, but just for non commercial uses. If you want to sell it, talk to me or my agent. That's fine too. There's a Creative Commons license that says use my work freely and modify it, but only if you reciprocate, only if you contribute back. This called share alike, that's the license Wikipedia uses. So yeah, search for Creative Commons and you can see the cultural spaces that you can then network into and share your co creation. Your ideas.

I love that. And a lot of people with good ideas have difficulties connecting with technical people who can build those ideas. Do you have any advice maybe for someone like me who's looking for a technical co founder? How, how what? Where do I go to start meeting and connecting with these. These?

Well, the, the plurality, the plurality discord channel is a good one.

There you go. Easy.

Yeah, it's a easy answer, but it is actually true. And I would also recommend, just as I mentioned, to participate more in those intersectional communities that are intentionally between creators and technologists. Creative Commons is of course one Wikimedia community, of course is one the Open Knowledge Foundation. The ideas that people can make a creative festival together in a co creative way. I was just at Berlin. The Republica community is also part of that community as well. In the US there is of course Code for America and things like that. So there are many cultural institutions that are already working with the civic tech people. And so just find a like radical exchange chapter near you find if you're in the uk, Serpentine Gallery. So it's all very connected. So I wouldn't just say that anyone is better than the other because it's like a rhizome. As soon as you start somewhere, you will connect to other routes. We scale not out, but deeply. So whenever you reach one of those rhizome routes, you will get connections of people to people, ties even across the Atlantic or Pacific to very similar ideas, like of zero in Taiwan.

Beautiful. With even all the things that worry of us, there's just so much opportunity and hope and beauty to to explore. Is there anything in your heart or mind today that I haven't given you the opportunity to explain, express that you might want to share?

Yeah, I would like to read my job description. Even if I'm not a minister anymore, the job description that I wrote in 2016, anticipating my job as a digital minister, I think still resonates. And maybe there are listeners who will become future digital ministers and I would like it to inspire them. It goes like this. When we see Internet of things, let's make it an 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. And whenever we hear that a singularity is near, let us always, always remember the plurality is here. Thank you so much for this podcast.

Beautiful. Thank you, Audrey. I really appreciate this time with you and I'm so enthusiastic about becoming immersed in this world that you have helped build with others and joining the Discord Channel and using these teachings in what I'm trying to build. And just being in your presence is really calming and makes me feel really happy and energized. So thank you so much. I'm so happy to be connected with you and excited about now and the future.

Definitely. Let's free the future together and live long and prosper.

Yay. So we will have the resources in the show notes. And please read the book. You know, if you're able, please make a donation. And if you're not able to right now, you can read it for free and help grow the movement. It's really important work and really inspiring work.

Thank you so much.

Thank you, Audrey.

Bye bye for now. Bye.

Wonderful. Oh, thank you so much. Really.