Audrey Tang on the Technology of Democracy | Conversations with Tyler

Hello everyone, welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. Tonight I'm chatting with the amazing Audrey Tang, who is also Digital Minister of Taiwan. Audrey, welcome.

Hello, good local time everyone.

What software that doesn't exist yet would be most helpful for coordinating future anti-authoritarian movements?

Well, of course, a quantum-resistant cryptographic channel will really help that enable true secure conversation that once someone try to intercept it, you will know immediately.

There are encrypted channels now such as WhatsApp. Do they not serve that function?

If the makers of the software decide to eavesdrop themselves, then there's no physical property, only mathematical property that stops the conversation being eavesdropped. Now those, what we call the public key cryptography mathematics, is at this very real danger of being broken within a decade or so, or two decades if you're optimistic, by the quantum computer themselves.

What kind of software do we need to make the democracy of the future work?

Well, first of all, I think democracy is an ongoing process. So definitely something that makes the listening at scale work, that makes co-presence work, presence work that enables people who are closest to the suffering amplify their experiences and so that people with various different backgrounds can empathize with that experience. So in short, software that enables listening and feeling skills.

And does virtual reality help in that regard or does virtual reality give us experiences so intense that we become less empathetic to suffering because that VR vacation in Paris is just so amazing?

That's right. Only if it's shared reality, though. I hear you talking about your amazing VR Paris vacation, but unless I can enter the same space and make it an extended reality that contains both of us, it would not become a social reality and just an individual reality. That may, of course, have some therapeutic effects or overview effect. I'm not denying that, but I would say that this is pro-social but not necessarily democratic.

Do you think at the margin people with virtual reality will be more interested in visiting the slums of Mumbai or going to Sun Moon Lake in Taiwan, which is very beautiful of course?

Well, why not do both? I mean, you can definitely take the Sun and Moon Lake and just in the Sun and Moon Lake have a conversation and watch together how it works in Mumbai and vice versa. I mean, we just had an Asia-Pacific Social Innovation Partnership Award and in the summit we hear designers in Singapore working for an app that enabled the foreign workers, the offshore workers from Philippines in, say, Taiwan, to take care of their loved ones. Instead of sending cash home, they can do grocery shopping to make sure that their money is not spent on luxury goods and so on. So that's like 3 different countries and cultures right there.

Let's say we had a service, a better version of AI, and anyone in the world could ask it any question in any language, it would mostly give pretty good answers. Would that increase empathy or lower it?

Well, of course, that depends on what you mean by pretty good. Does it make satisfying-sounding answers? Does it make answers that seem real? Does it make mostly factual but not empathetic answers? Does it make mostly empathetic but factually untrue answers? What does good enough mean to you?

Say it's mostly factual answers. It's as good as a computer chess program, not perfect, but quite good relative to human knowledge. And anyone can ask anything, like a supercharged Google plus a better functioning Siri with real answers. Okay. What do we do with that knowledge?

Well, first of all, that's the value alignment part. What you're saying is that it more or less agree with the epistemic norms, that is to say the norm around knowledge that a society it already has. The other part to ask is about the accountability, like when it makes mistakes, who gets to correct those mistakes? When it's biased, who gets to participate in overcoming the bias? Is the source code, is the API, is the data that it uses participatory, or is it known to only a few?

What's the innovation that would do the most to boost empathy?

Definitely open innovation. That is to say, innovation that is co-created to bring technology to people rather than asking people to adapt to technology.

Do you think the United States today has more empathy than 20 years ago?

I'm not sure that the States is a useful abstraction when you talk about empathy. Empathy are between human beings, or at least animals.

Do we have more empathy toward animals than 100 years ago? There's much more factory farming, right?

There's much more factory farming. That's exactly right. On the other hand, of course, people understand how animals suffer more, and so that leads to more people understand understanding the animal welfare and animal rights angles. It also leads to innovations such as the Impossible Burger, the future of meat, and things like that. Maybe people eat it only because it actually tastes better and is free of the possible industrial farming side effects, specifically on carbon emissions. But whatever reason you approach those new kind of meat, I think they are superior in almost every regard than cost. And that part, the scientists are working on it too.

What's your view of that old, I think Stalin quotation, that one death is a tragedy, a million deaths are a statistic? Could it be that the evolution of open source technology, it directs our attention toward the whole and the telling of a single story becomes somewhat diminished and therefore we're less empathetic?

Well, of course, between one and one million, there's many, many zooming levels. I mean, if you look at an OpenStreetMap, but you can only zoom to the zoom to a globe or zoom to an individual block in a city or even just to an individual level, then that map is not very useful at all. What's useful is in the transitional zoom levels that makes sure that people can build the context in their head and connect their experiences with people who are slightly different but not at all that different. That builds common values so that a transition between the zooming levels is much more important at the one and the million level.

Would it be better if smartphones did not have touchscreens?

I use, of course, stylus like all the time, and so the touchscreens are useful when I don't have the stylus and keyboard handy as a kind of fallback. But if the touchscreen is the primary interaction button, then of course it builds addiction.

But say we could magically revert to the days of BlackBerry and somehow that would stick. Would society be better off, do you think?

I'm sure that people will still invent a touchscreen.

But say we could avoid the touchscreen, right? And we just stop at BlackBerry. Do we use social media in better ways?

But why? Do we jump to Neuralink directly from the BlackBerry then?

It would take several decades at least, right? So we have 30, 40 years of BlackBerry and people are on social media less. Is that a better outcome? Do we have better discourse, more empathy?

Well, that may be the case because in Taiwan the most popular Reddit equivalent is PTT, and it's still terminal-based. It's like a late '90s version of the bulletin board system. And we do see that it leads to better discourse qualities.

How bullish are you on work from a distance? This is pandemic time. There's a lot of data. What do you think?

Well, working from a distance does not mean that you don't meet people face-to-face. It only means that we transcend space boundaries when we're talking to each other. And so if it is something that you can opt into, then of course there are places and ways of work that improve the work quality, and I'm quite bullish on that. But if it's a must and you have to work from a distance, even for the kind of work that doesn't quite suit this working from distance, then of course it's going to hurt the quality of work.

But take the major tech companies— Apple, where you've worked, Facebook, Google— so 7 years from now when the pandemic is clearly over say in the United States, how much of the current work-from-distance practices will persist, or do you think it would all just have gone back to how it was in 2019?

I've never been to Cupertino, so all my work with Apple for 6 years were telework, so I'm biased. I think it's pretty smooth, and if we don't like the tools that we're using for telework, we just make the tools better. And that's the main idea about open innovation, in that if people don't like the particular way that a tool is limiting our imaginations, they can always improve on it. I think, again, this is not about excluding people from participating in the work. It's about expanding the idea of face-to-face meetings and the kind of empathy and rough consensus that we can form and scale it to the more remote places. It's not a replacement. It is an augmentation to the face-to-face form.

How should the United States handle the regulation of major Chinese tech companies, the service TikTok, or say the service of WeChat? Should we allow major Chinese tech companies to own them?

Well, take a systemic risk system approach. Do what the Taiwanese people did in 2014, which is people on the street deliberated with their own experience working with people who are from the PRC, coming to a consensus on the street that there's no pure private sector companies in the PRC, and the party or the state— really the same thing— can just replace and swap leadership as they like through the party branches. So we decided eventually that making the infrastructure components in the PRC, while their state subsidy looks quite lucrative, amortized is actually a higher overall cost of ownership because you have to reassess for each upgrade, whether the state have already taken over that so-called private venture.

So the U.S. government should block TikTok or make sure it's sold to Oracle or Microsoft? Or what, what concretely would that mean?

I'm saying that, I'm saying that, uh, a all-of-society deliberation, the style of the 2014 Sunflower, need to happen for the society had come to a common value about these sort of things.— and this is what we call data norm. Do you think it is normal for facial recognitions and such data that you are just filming yourself singing and dancing to be aggregated to a single state, of which there is no jurisdictional accountability of using such data? If you think it's great as a country, well, more powers. But if you think it's not great as a country, then maybe you collectively can find something to do.

Given your position on democracy, are you concerned about the de facto extraterritoriality of European privacy regulation? That web services marketing to the EU have to meet GDPR, say. So there's not an actual democratic deliberation, but it's handed down by the European Union.

Right. Theoretically, it's even extraterrestrial, right? So if there's European astronauts and so on, there's still regulated by the GDPR. So I think there's two things going on here. One is about the data norm, uh, and, uh, for the EU citizens, it extends, uh, by the framework of human rights and therefore, of course, travels, uh, with the individual, not within the territorial jurisdiction. And the other view, of course, is based on the infrastructure where the data is collected, where the data under the name of data localization and even sovereignty. We have heard that word too when used on data borders. Just like the example I mentioned of the Singaporean app with Filipino workers in Taiwan buying groceries for their families, it's by its very nature 3 different overlapping jurisdictions and all have a governing interest in it. It's a reality. And GDPR is part of that reality.

Why is Finnegans Wake your favorite book?

Uh, well, because it's very complex and complicated, and I can enjoy it without understanding it, just treating it as lyrics, like a notebook, literally a book of notes.

Has it influenced your approach to tech at all?

Uh, yeah, I think so, because when I was 20 years old, I would wake up, log into the Perl IRC channel, that's Internet Relay Chat, and type "river run" and then a bot will just paste a random paragraph, literally a random paragraph from Finnegans Wake which would begin "My day's work." That's social too. Everybody in the chat channel sees it. I'm sure that it has influenced our work on Perl which is full with haiku and poetry and things like that.

Have you written poems in Perl?

Oh yeah, of course.

Are they good?

Uh, I don't know. You can check the bugs, uh, .hs repository to see them.

Now, your ideal of radical transparency and communications, do you think this is appropriate for all organizations and personality types, or just something that's good for you?

What's a personality type at all?

People who are very balanced and moderate, I think, can do better with radical transparency. People who say might have very high levels of testosterone. If they see and hear everything being said about them, they might go into a rage or overreact, right?

Well, going into a rage may also be cathartic.

It might be, but rages can be dangerous, right? Countries going into a rage, people going into a rage.

I don't know, because outrage is the beginning of social movement. The thing is, where do you direct the outrage?

To.

If it's directed to revenge, that is to say hurting imaginary or real people, or if it's directed to, I don't know, discrimination, which is lowering other people's social status without elevating one's own, of course those could be destructive, as you said. But it could also be directed into co-creation, that is to say make new institutions so that the old problems that provoked 'What prompted your rage in the first place? Do not have it again.' And that's how democracy grows. And so I'm all for outrage, actually.

What do you think of creative ambiguity as a way of postponing disputes? So the European Union often does this. They write a complicated document. It means something a bit different to each country. They don't agree. They don't have to agree. It's never radically transparent, but they revisit it 7 or 8 years later and do another tweak and just keep on moving down that road. Does that offend your sense of radical transparency?

Well, these two are certainly orthogonal. I mean, I can imagine being radically transparent but deliberately moving in a very slow fashion and only act on the lowest of the lower-hanging fruits. I can see merits in that too. I can also see, of course, this slow-moving part being non-radically transparent, and then the main The repercussions would probably be that people cease to feel that it's relevant to their lives and will not devote their energy to it.

Given your own radical transparency, do you think people speak to you differently, always being aware that it's being recorded or transcribed, or do you think they just forget about it and become their normal selves?

Well, I think the better parts of themselves are shown much more visibly. That is to say, if they have an agenda that benefits humankind or the planet or the cosmos, they're much more likely to share it because it's also performative. They understand that people from the future will see it. But the parts of themselves that think for the next quarter only of linear individual growth or GDP growth at a cost or expense of future generations, that part doesn't seem to share.

Larry Wall once said that Pearl is designed around laziness, hubris, and impatience. That's right. Which of those qualities do you think most appealed to you?

Laziness.

Why? You don't seem lazy. You've done a tremendous amount. Uh-huh.

Well, first of all, I've done a tremendous amount precisely because I designed the spaces for the people who care about things to make things happen. So certainly not me personally that have done those things. I just hold the space. And the second is that laziness Laziness also means that you do not overscare yourself. You evaluate. This is called lazy evaluation. Evaluate the parameters, the input, and so on as the situation calls it. That also enables a much more balanced work-life balance, I guess.

What is a way the world could use the incentive of fun more productively?

Use humor over rumor.

What does that mean specifically?

In Taiwan, whenever there's a trending on even end-to-end encrypted channels disinformation campaign, the people who voluntarily report that, just like flagging email as spam, dedicated not to the government certainly, but to the social sector with the crowdsourced fact-checking mechanism called COVID Facts and also the Taiwan Fact Check Center, Michael Pan and so on, part of it. International Fact-Checking Network. And so the trending rumors are met with fact-checkers almost immediately. And our ministries, uh, who has teams of participation officers who talk to hashtags, um, like the Ministry of Health and Welfare's participation officer literally lives with this dog, uh, and so can meet the rumors, uh, within a couple hours and roll out very funny dog memes, um, that just responds to those misinformation. And so, for example, this one is about masks, and this says, why do you wear a mask? Well, to protect yourself from your own unwashed hands. Say, that's a very individualistic incentive. Or why do you observe social distancing, but you find it hard to measure? We measure it in terms of dogs. When you're outdoor, 2 dogs away. Indoor, 3 shiba inus away, and so on. The idea is that before people go to sleep, even if they see both the conspiracy theory, they also see this humor because it travels very quickly, go viral. And so by the time that they go to sleep and form long-term associations in their minds with the keywords such as masks or social distancing, they think of something fun, and that enables more prosocial behavior.

Arguably, contemporary Taiwanese culture is really quite gentle in a nice way. But say you were in one of the less liberal parts of Eastern Europe or the Balkans. And the slogan was humor over rumor. Do you think it would work as well as it has in Taiwan? Well, jokes would be nastier and less empathetic.

Sure, we know that humor is not the same as sarcasm, for example, or as, you know, toxic attacks that makes fun of someone, right? The humor is makes fun of oneself or makes fun with someone, but it's never a kind of aggression. So when I say humor, I mean specifically humor and not any kind of comedic style. Of course, there are comedic styles that doesn't work, and that will very quickly actually reinforce conspiracy theory thinking.

How much of humor do you think is at someone else's expense? So say you watch Seinfeld, they're quite brutal to each other, right? Even though they're friends.

I don't think that's humor, by the way.

What is it?

Well, It is, of course, comedic, right? It makes fun of people. But to me, humor is makes fun with someone or makes fun of oneself.

What is the future of blockchain in Taiwan?

Well, it would just keep growing, I guess.

But used for what purposes? What's the killer app for blockchain 10 years from now? What will I be doing with it?

What's the killer app for relational database again?

Well, there are many kinds of relational databases. It's not clear that blockchain is the one emerging from markets as the preferred solution. Visa has databases, right? Those work well. It's a huge company. What's the competitor from blockchain?

That's exactly right. Blockchain is just one implementation of a broad swath of technology known as distributed ledgers or DLTs. Traditional databases, again, could be distributed. If people want easy accountability or auditability, they can use some of the technologies originated from blockchain. In that sense, Git is a blockchain because it's a chain of blocks. Of course, Git is the killer app of open-source decentralized working. If you think only of the cryptocurrency, applications, I don't think that it will overtake central bank anytime soon in Taiwan. I think it only is of value in the cryptocurrency sense if the people have very low trust in the fiat, in the central bank. But if you mean it's like a ledger technology to keep people accountable and honest across jurisdictions among multiple writers for things like environmental science and things like smart contracts for labor like for migrant workers, as I mentioned on the very beginning, those can see useful work of distributed ledger technologies, and blockchain is just one implementation detail.

How do you think it mattered for Taiwan that democracy and information technology came to the country at more or less the same time?

Well, of course, that means that we see democracy as a set of technologies, social technologies. To us, technologies are not always industrial. It could also be be social. The set of constitutional amendments, of which another one or few is going on right now, shows that even the Constitution, the kernel of democracy, is technology that people can contribute to, just like sending pull requests to the Linux kernel.

How did Taiwan become such a nice country so quickly?

Um, well, maybe, uh, the food is good and bubble tea helps too.

What's the best food in Taiwan and where do you find it?

Huh, uh, well, I think the rough consensus, uh, is that, uh, you can consult the Michelin Guide, uh, which operates in Taiwan in a lot of municipalities. But of course, being an oyster vegetarian, uh, the majority of which, uh, is— I, I don't really pursue. So you have to be your own guide.

How do you think your politics have been influenced by Taiwan's Aboriginal communities?

Yeah, um, the indigenous communities that I'm more familiar with is the Atayal and the Amis. The former, because I spent quite a few months, actually, if not a year, right after dropping out of the middle school, because my mom was co-founding an experimental primary school in the Atayal Mountains in collaboration with the indigenous So actually the students there also learn the Indigenous perspective and really feel liberated from a written culture, that this orally preserved culture really takes me out of this human-centric point of view in a view that the mountains and rivers are long long-lived spirits and we're just transient stewards that work with them. I think that really have influenced my politics a lot to be less human-centric. The Amis, because I think they're a matriarchy, and so quite useful to remind people that in Taiwan with more than 20 national languages, there's various different gender stereotypes going on. Once you have 20 different stereotypes It becomes a rainbow and it helps people to break out of the binary kind of thinking when it comes to gender but also to other categories.

How useful a way is it of conceptualizing your politics to think of it as a mix of some Taiwanese Aboriginal traditions mixed in with Taoism, experience and programming, and then your own theory of humor and fun? And if you put all of that together The result is Audrey Tang's politics. Correct or not?

Well, as of now, of course, but of course I'm also growing like a distributed legend.

At the margin, what's the new influence on your thought in addition to those sources?

I just read again the Mandarin translation of Ted Chiang's novel collection, Exhalation. I already read the English one, but translation book just arrived, so I read that again. And so that's on the margins. I learned about the life cycle of software projects and so on. I think that one is really good.

What else from Chinese literature has influenced you?

Of course, there's not only the Tao Te Ching, there's this whole literary tradition that began with Laozi, but Zhuangzi, of course, is of a lot of influence to me. The collection of poems, the Shi Jing, also. Then of course also the I Ching, the original binary thinking. But of course the thing about the Book of Change is that it teaches about the only thing that is immobile, that would not change, is change itself, and how to work with the change, to face, to accept, to deal with it, and let go of of it, I think, is a core of a teaching of the I Ching.

And how about contemporary Chinese fiction, or is that somehow too anti-empathetic? I don't know.

I mean, I enjoy the Three-Body Problem trilogy. That's contemporary Chinese fiction, isn't it?

From Taiwanese culture, what has influenced you most? So Taiwanese cinema from the 1990s. Does that matter for you, or that's orthogonal?

Well, of course I, I watch, um, the, the artworks done by the Taiwanese Renaissance of filmmakers and books and so on, but I wouldn't say that any of them influenced me to such a high degree as the classics has. So I'll probably have to say the that. Of course I'm influenced one way or another, but not in a major part of my thought.

And which Western anarchists, if any, have shaped your thought?

Well, that's a really good question, isn't it? Um, well, I, I don't, I don't know. I mean, I've read, of course, the, the Anarchist FAQ, the anarchist, um, like handbook, uh, online, right? Uh, and also the The Illuminatus Trilogy, which may or may not count as anarchist, that of course has really left an impression to me. But no, I think the main source of inspiration I draw, and that's why I call myself a conservative anarchist, is from the more Eastern traditions, the Taoist tradition, the Zhuangzi tradition, and more recently from Kojin, a Japanese anarchist thinker.

To what extent do you understand Daoism as standing in opposition to a more hierarchical Confucian view, or do you think it's simply a separate doctrine? By being a Daoist, do you view yourself as opposed to Confucianism?

Well, the Daoist isn't quite opposed to anything. That's the thing with Daoists, right? We're always making space so that opposition can grow into common values and innovation. And I think that's something that a Confucian approach works too, except for the Confucianism, that is by coding essentially the, the rights, right, the norms of practice, the best practices of norms. And for a Taoist, of course, that there's no best practice, there's just practices, and the best best practice is maybe just to share and let go of your practices and be humble.

How do you think Singapore differs in this regard? Is there a different understanding of Taoism there, more emphasis on Confucianism?

I haven't been to Singapore, I can't answer that.

Never? I'm surprised. Oh, what would improve Taiwanese education the most?

Um, that's an interesting thought, right? Well, maybe Neuralink. But I don't know, right? In the meantime, in the meantime, well, I think that the shift from a literacy-based, like, standardized answer, wrote memory, standardized test, the teachers knows the best, into a competence-based education, which is the people are producers of data and media and narratives, that really helps. On the other hand, I'm I'm biased because I'm part of the K-12 curriculum committee that put this into action starting last year.

Do you have any sense how that's going? I know it's only a year, but yeah, I think it's different quite well.

Uh, the, the cram schools, uh, for example, instead of putting people into like, uh, long hours trying to memorize standardized answers, are now offering cram schools on hiking maybe kayaking and all sorts of outdoor group activities, and also help on the humanitarian aid overseas. Even though travel is restricted now, we can still help through teleconference and so on. And so yeah, there's a lot more emphasis on social responsibility starting from a more tender age rather than just individualistic competition between people and people.

You're working of course, in Taiwanese government. What's the biggest thing wrong with economists?

Mm-hmm. You mean the magazine?

No, no, the people, economists as thinkers. What's their biggest defect or flaw?

I don't know. I haven't met an economist that I didn't like, so I don't think there's any particular personality flaws there.

A few questions about the pandemic. How much of Taiwan's success do you think was due to government's openness And how much do you think was due to the fact that in Taiwan standards for privacy are different than in the West and there's a certain acceptance of government?

Higher, I'm sure, yes, and more clearly spelled out. And so first of all, I think, yeah, having a clearly spelled out perimeter in Taiwan when it comes to privacy and a strong civil rights movement that literally fought for those freedoms and memories are still fresh really helps the conversation because anything that tries to encroach on the basic freedoms is immediately met with the counterargument, "Do you want to go back to the martial law? Do you want to go back to the White Terror?" Of course, the argument would be very strong, and so the people who advocate for less privacy would that argument, their argument would be a non-starter. And so I think it really helps to conserve the societal energy to work with the data that's already being collected, just use it in a way creatively to counter the pandemic instead of inventing new ways to collect data, which always has uncertain privacy properties. So I think of course that helps.

Now my country, the United States, has made many, many mistakes at an almost metaphysical level, what is it in the United States that those mistakes have come from? What's our deeper failing behind all those mistakes?

I don't know. I mean, isn't America this grand experiment to keep making mistakes and correcting them in the open and share it with the world? That's the American experiment.

Have we started correcting them yet?

I'm sure that you have.

Okay, I'm delighted to hear that. How much did Taiwan rely on privately written apps to combat the pandemic?

Um, actually, uh, Civic Tech, which is— I guess could also qualify as privately coded, um, is different in the sense that how it works is open for anyone who wants to fork, that is to say, to take it to a different direction. So while it's true that the original Mask of Mask Availability Map wasn't open source. The API was open and open source clones and derivatives from the OpenStreetMap community, from various other community, very quickly sprouted. We have more than 140, a majority of which are open innovations. Even the original Mask Availability Map became open source after a couple months. If you keep working in the open, working out loud, even the most privately held corporations such as Google eventually agreed to make the parts of the counter-pandemic, the mass availability and so on, and develop them in the open.

Given Taiwan's remarkable success with the pandemic, its amazing success with high-quality semiconductor chips, why are there in relative terms so few successful Taiwanese software companies? And to what features of the Taiwanese psyche do you attribute that?

I don't know. TSMC writes a lot of software. So I think it's just consumer software, like 2C software. It's true. I mean, Taiwan has a unicorn now, although I don't usually use that word, company Appia that basically is entirely 2B. They enable business businesses to deliver insights from the interactions and refactor the online experiences and so on. But I'm sure that Pizza Hut or any company that deploy Appear technology would not probably feature a "powered by Appear" kind of way as the, you know, "powered by Intel" or "powered by ARM" kind of marker in their websites. And so there are successful Taiwanese software companies. They are known in the software world. Trend Micro is another one, but because these are less directly to users, to customers, and so maybe they are less well-known. That's a fact. And so the Taiwanese psyche, I think, is mostly about being okay with that. I guess the hashtag #TaiwanCanHelp, Taiwan is helping, really says it on the tin, that we don't quite do this egoism. You don't have to thank Taiwan every 20 seconds if our innovations have helped you. We really just want the world to be better.

Do you ever worry that Taiwan has had so much success against COVID-19 that now the country is painted into a kind of corner, unwilling to give up its grand prize, and it just won't be able to open to other places for a long time? Or do you think testing—

I'm sure that once the vaccine is here around the turn of the year, I'm sure that by Q1 next year when people are vaccinated, it will open. That is what the scientists are saying.

If you're recommending for a visitor an ideal trip to Taiwan, obviously they fly into Taipei, there's plenty to do and see in Taipei, National Museum, but where else should they go for you?

Well, the Pescador, the Penghu Islands is great too. I mean, Taiwan is beautiful islands, and it's plural, so it's not only the mainland of Taiwan but also the Pescador Islands, the Orchid Islands. There's many other islands other than the mainland of Taiwan for you to enjoy.

What's your favorite Chinese dynasty and why?

Um, I don't know, I don't have a favorite Chinese dynasty. Do you have a favorite GPS location?

Uh, my home, but The Tang Dynasty, I thought, would be your answer. There's this— I don't know, I haven't— right, Xi'an is the capital.

I haven't lived in the Tang Dynasty. I read about the Tang Dynasty, and although my family name, I guess, is the same character as the Tang Dynasty, it never really brought me closer to any particular dynasties.

As a Taiwanese, how do you think you understand earlier Chinese history in maybe a different way than Chinese mainlanders would?

Well, I don't know. I mean, I identify mostly as Homo sapiens, and so I don't— I mean, we're all descendants of some East African common ancestor. And so when you say your home, I immediately think of Lucy, which was strictly speaking isn't Homo sapiens, but the GPS location would be quite similar. Uh, so, so yeah, that's the view that I take, that, uh, of course, uh, uh, on the land of the Eurasian plate, there's many, uh, cultures and civilizations. Uh, whether you call it Chinese or not, uh, is quite besides the point. The main interest for me is how those cultures, uh, transfer, uh, and learn from each other and make cultural innovations such as Zen, which is a transcultural conversation between the Buddhist tradition and the Taoist tradition. And that interests me more than whether you call a particular dynasty Chinese or not. I mean, for the Qing Dynasty and the Yuan Dynasty, that's a very interesting way to call it a dynasty.

I believe no Chinese person from the mainland would have given me that answer. Another historical question: when you read about the Taiping Rebellion, for whom are you rooting? The rebels or the government?

Uh-huh. Well, um, yeah, the Taiping Rebellion, the, the Jesus, uh, worshiping, uh, religion.

There's a millenarian sense to it that's a bit like some of tech utopianism, right? That the world should become an open place.

There was a document, uh, I think it was Taiping Yao Shu or something, uh, that has a lot of tech utopianism in it, but I don't think it's ever put into practice. So if you view it from a kind of admiring a science fiction novel kind of way, I think you can definitely root for it. But I don't think the Taiping Tianguo actually deployed what's described in the Taiping Yaozhu to any significant degree.

Which are the most important remnants of Japanese influence remaining in Taiwan? Mm-hmm.

Well, um, the emphasis on public health, the, the fact that, uh, people see that, uh, working in the medical and public health professions as the high and noble cause of calling, um, I think that, um, was introduced by the Japanese colonial rule, uh, and it's— well, of course there's a political part of it because the Japanese really didn't like Taiwanese, uh, going into politics, or law for that matter. Uh, and but yeah, the emphasis on public health and on medicine and Medicare, I think that really is one of the legacies.

The organization of streets and shops in Taiwan, especially Taipei, feels quite Japanese to me. Do you have the same impression?

There are parts of Taipei that feels quite Japanese, of course. Um, the, the cabinet office, the executive yuan, and the presidential office were both buildings of that era. Of course, they were also learning from European architects, so it's also very transcultural.

In both Japan and Taiwan, baseball is fairly popular, as it is in the United States, but most countries reject baseball altogether. Do you have a sense of why Taiwanese have welcomed baseball? Is it just historical accident or revealing of something deeper?

I haven't considered that question, maybe because when I was young I couldn't participate any kind of sport, baseball included. And so I've never thought too much about sports. Esports, of course, I've thought about quite a bit, but of course we are not here to talk about Magic: The Gathering, which I can talk for hours.

What's the most popular esports in Taiwan?

Well, that's a really good question. I think by the current definition of esports, it will probably be, be Go, which is an intellectual game that's played on stones and large boards, and of which AlphaGo, of course, showed that machines can play it too. But it's still very popular in Taiwan, as with Gomoku, also known as Renju, and Xiangci, the elephant chess. I don't know how to translate that, actually. So various board games and these are—

Shogi, right?

Yeah, yeah, that's right. Well, shogi is a slightly different rule and play in Japan. But yeah, board games that are turn-based and moved, of course, nowadays all into the electronic realm remain of the lowest threshold to join and therefore very popular.

And what's your favorite esport?

As I mentioned, Magic: The Gathering, but I don't play it much anymore. I used to play a lot.

Because of addiction, so it's like the touchscreen smartphone?

No, because I was making the software that enabled people to play Magic: The Gathering without paying Wizard of the Coast. It was a real software project that I was working on, the Magic Suitcase., and also working with the, the Apprentice with the drafting, um, uh, mechanism so that people don't have to be locked in to Wizard of the Coast and so on. So to me, it also feels liberating, I guess, so that people even with no money and who are living very modest means and so on can enjoy the game and essentially creating their own rules.

Why is it you that Taiwan has been so much more open and accepting of LGBTQ than most or maybe all other parts of Asia?

Well, first of all, I think that's because, as I mentioned, there's more than one norm going on, right? Even in the ethnic Han, there is the Taiwanese Holau, Taiwanese Hakka, and many traditions, some of which is actually quite natural to have, I think, um I, I don't know how to translate that, that term, uh, like a contractual union, um, brother, uh, whatever that means, uh, and in the Taoist holy tradition, uh, and there's also the indigenous nations, um, and with, for example, the Paiwan Nation that doesn't quite make a distinction between genders when, um, electing their, uh, leaders, uh, of the indigenous nation and so on, uh, and so because of with the transculturalism in Taiwan and the open and democratic culture, we eventually see that even though there is a part of the country, maybe the majority at some point, that sees marriage as between families and the individual that wed are just representatives of their families, eventually other more individual-to-individual norms prevail. And in 2008, because the only form of recognized marriage, which is by registration. And that, in addition to the feminist movement that fought for the equal rights for women to not having to, you know, relinquish her family name when they marry and things like that, all led to the feeling of intersectionality, so that the earliest feminist activists would then be the most ardent allies to the LGBTQ+ community. I think early successes and also the way to work themselves into the gender equality committee and 12 years of gender mainstreaming work, the gender impact assessment in the public sector and so on, all of these mechanism designs help to make a more liberal culture out of the existing culture of family-to-family relationship, which we did not actually disrupt with the marriage equality law, it only hyperlinks to the individual parts, the bylaws, but not the in-law relationships, the family, between family relationships.

For our final segment of this conversation, I'll turn to what I call the Audrey Chang production function. At ages 5 to 6, you read a lot of classical literature. What did you read and how did it shape you?

Yeah, I read the Shi Jing, the collection of poems, and it shaped me to to view things always from cultures, from various different cultures, because each chapter in the Shijing is literally one slice of culture, of a very different culture. And it's a kind of collection of poems that shows how the same thing may be interpreted and narrated in completely different ways from two different cultures when they view the same historical event. And of course, the Tao Te Ching that showed me that we We are merely spaces of which thoughts may pass through us, but we don't own the thoughts. The thoughts own us briefly.

How did having a heart problem until age 12 shape your life?

Well, I guess it made me less interested in outdoor sports. It also made me less prone to anger or really any passion, right? I can't feel very joyful either. Because of the heart condition. So I'm more calm and collected. I learned Taoist breathing exercises and they're with me like a survival instinct still now.

Do you think there's any cognitive disadvantage to being more objective and arguably more detached?

I'm not sure that I'm currently detached to you and I'm not sure that I'm sharing things from objective point of view. I mean, I'm sharing my feelings and personal memories when I was a young child, and these are only verifiable as phenomena in my own mind. And so I'm not sure that the term objective is the right term to use here.

What was your family discussion table like?

Um, it was very lively, uh, and because both my parents were journalists that works with the political and law training, and so democratization is on the forefront of their minds, and also because they were censored by the single party a lot at the time. I would read their drafts and the drafts being censored, and they will debate the censor, taking the case to the owner of the press if needed be. For environmental justice and social justice and and so on. Uh, and so a lot of discussion was around censorship and the freedom of press when I was really young.

Are there cognitive advantages to being transgender?

Well, uh, of course. I think it makes it easier to empathize with people, right? Because I've gone through some parts of your puberty, no matter the gender of you. And so I wouldn't feel that half a population is different from me. I would feel that I'm just part of Homo sapiens. This is a large community.

Do you think there are cognitive disadvantages of being transgender?

Um, no, I think people can be more transgender. I mean, when our Minister Chen Shih-chung, the commander of the Central Epidemic Command Center, put on the medical mask to show solidarity to the young boy, who called to say that he doesn't want to go to school because pink masks being rationed makes him look like he'll be bullied. I think Minister Chen and the medical officers became a little bit more transgender on that very moment. And so it's a practice like translation and transculturalism.

What's the biggest misconception about transgender life and existence amongst intelligent, educated people?

I have no idea. I have not done a qualitative survey.

Now, you didn't go through the cycle of being educated in the United States the way many Taiwanese do. Uh, do you think that's given you a different perspective? I don't know.

I mean, I mean, the IETF and the internet itself maybe is really the, the American experiment's value, the United States value, the value of the the states, uh, written, uh, in a like '70s, '80s, um, kind of view, uh, in, in code. Uh, and so by working with internet technologies, by working with the implicit assumption of freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and the press, uh, end-to-end, um, innovation and permissionless innovation, um, and things like that, I think, um, I'm more, uh, imbued in the internet, seeing more imbued American value in the internet than a traditional education in the States would, I think. Now, of course, nowadays the internet governance is multicultural and there's multicultural internet domain names, but we're still using ASCII, which is the A in ASCII, it's American, and the idea that, uh, the American values imbued in the internet are somehow universal, of course, are now being challenged, but it's not lost. I think the core internet is still very much the values that unites the States.

Now, in 2014, you were part of a group of activists that occupied Taiwan's Parliament building. What was your thinking behind participation in that activity? What were you hoping to accomplish? What did you see as the trade-offs?

Yeah, I've read and actually translated Manuel Castells' ideas in the books Network of Outrage and Hope and earlier in Communication Powers. We have to benefit, I guess, from learning from previous occupies such as Occupy Wall Street, of course, but also the 15M and other movements. I started understanding understanding that the more that you can make humor travel faster than rumor, the more you can get people interested in a kind of night market fun-ish kind of way, the less likely that the more divisive and the more revenge-seeking part of an Occupy movement will grow. That is to say, the conservative part in anarchism has a chance to thrive and people have chance to arrive to rough consensus and running code, legal code in this case, when they can literally hum in the street. My main work there is just with a bunch of people in the gov0 community to set up communication infrastructure so that people can understand what's really going on with their own eyes and participating in the journalism-making., without being derailed by the rumors and, uh, uh, disinformation campaigns that's bound to come with any Occupy.

How important is the skill of translation for becoming a better thinker?

Um, I think it's very, very important, but so also important is the skills of rotation and scaling.

Were you afraid that working in government would ruin or corrupt you?

No, not at all. I'm working with the government, I'm not working for the government.

What are your skills of rotation and scaling, and how do you use them in the government?

Yeah, scaling means that taking something that used to only happen between 2 people or 3 people, uh, that's listening intently, and scaling it using technology to make sure that when I tour around Taiwan, I can still listen intently, uh, to people who are such innovators in their indigenous this nation or the remote island or rural areas. But at the same time, through the modern technology, which seems like magic at times, people from 5 municipalities, from 12 central government ministries, can also listen as intently as I am to the stories and the innovations of the local people. That scales the listening idea. By rotation, I'm I mean taking all the sides. Whenever there are people of differing positions on an emerging topic, it could be Uber, it could be esports, it could be 5G, self-driving vehicles, you name it. If I find that I cannot argue from any particular viewpoint, I will book a couple of days to spend time with the community on Ethnographic, just hanging out until I rotate my worldview and until I can argue from there. Viewpoint. That's called taking all the sides.

Why aren't there more Audrey Tangs in the other governments of the world?

I don't know. That's a question for the other governments. Maybe I think people were limited by the imagination of the government being a single thing. We said internet governance. We didn't say internet government. If the IETF or ICANN started calling themselves internet government, I'm sure that there will be a lot more limitation in thinking in the multi-stakeholder approach. But no, we call it governance. We don't call it government. So maybe just the word government itself limits people's imaginations.

And if rotation is fundamental to your thought, it seems that most governments in the literal sense of that term are not always so interested in rotation, right? They want to push through a particular set of policies to serve interest groups and constituencies toward the end of being reelected.

Well, but election is a kind of rotation. It's just temporal, right? It rotates a little bit every 4 years.

Sure, but any particular government is not interested in rotation per se. In fact, they would prefer its opposite over time.

Yeah, but I'm talking about democratic cultures and democratic norms. So if we shorten iteration to not 4 years but actually maybe 60 days, as is the standard iteration in Taiwanese Citizens Initiative, the e-petition platform, then we can iterate more. Each particular generation, of course, in that 60 days are interested from their point of view. If you rotate quickly, then even a still picture, when rotated quickly, looks like any animation. Actually, that's where the word "animate" came from. It's just quickly animated frames.

If you think about your own life and career over the next few years, if you wish to increase your own empathy at the margin, what do you feel that calls for from you? Mm-hmm.

Yeah, I think a couple more things, right? I need to learn more languages, and now with the help of a Assistive intelligence such as machine learning and translation is becoming much easier. I take a stab doing that, translating how to use the traditional rice cooker that you see right here to disinfect the masks so that it kills the virus but doesn't destroy the PP material. I translated it and narrated it in, I think, a dozen languages. And so it's a beginning, but I look forward to learn more languages and communicate in more languages. The other thing is also synthesize more of the cultures that I have come across into a more transcultural way of living, transcultural way of thinking. That includes up to the name of the country itself, Taiwan. The name of country is officially Zhōnghuà Mínguó, which I translate as a transcultural republic of citizens. And, and now that's a— I wouldn't say universal, but at least a world globally applicable view. Anyone can be part of the transcultural republic citizens.

And which languages do you know now already?

JavaScript pretty well. Yes, well, Perl, Haskell, and Python, not very fluently. Ruby Ruby, of course, and so on. There's—

but English, right?

C++, C#. Not really C#, OCaml, and also C. Anyway, yes, sorry, OCaml is F#. Yeah, English, of course. But I think—

I think Taiwanese.

Yeah, I think in English mostly nowadays if you talk about natural language. And for me, Mandarin or along with Mandarin, Taiwanese, Holok, which are my two native languages. I reserve them for more poetic expressions, but my work language is now definitely English.

Audrey Tang, thank you very much. It's been a great pleasure.