My role in this, mostly, is to show that it’s natural. It’s like in marriage equality. People said that it’s unnatural for the family to family kinship relationship to be redefined because of marriage equality. When people are fighting for the equal rights, people care about the individual rights and ...
That led to our entire system being redesigned so that there’s a lot of the third choice — nonbinary choice — now in this form. All those forms are now also being revamped. Partly, I guess, because the pandemic.
Or none. “None of the above.” I don’t have to do that anymore on many of the forms because US also start issuing X passports now. During the pandemic, we’ve got a lot of new systems to do contact tracing, to do border quarantine. They also need to equally apply ...
You can take both. During the pandemic, especially now that…
Basically, any of those binary distinctions do not apply to me. It was very warmly welcomed because people do see the merit in not saying that half of the population is unlike me because that actually feels polarization does the basis of polarization.
In my mind, I don’t have this binary distinction. Half the population is more similar to me, and half population less similar to me. I’m nonbinary on pretty much anything, not just gender. People also learned about my nonbinary party affiliation because I wrote none as my gender in the ...
Anyway, [laughs] being open about it helped a lot because people are naturally curious. Then I’m like, “No.” I’m not saying that I identify with this, and then that. I said I had this experience with puberty and in that experience of puberty.
I’m the first openly transgender nonbinary. For what I know everybody else may also be nonbinary, just not open about it.
Some of the rhetoric’s use similar vocabularies.
In Taiwan, we have the typhoons and earthquakes. All those preparations, not necessarily just for our military escalations, all those preparations are equally useful when there’s a tie for nabs.
That has been a collective awareness, I believe, in the international community. Especially in Taiwan, a lot of people are now saying, “What can we do then during a escalation of tension?” We don’t need to wait for the Ministry of Defense or anyone to tell us what to do. ...
Nowadays, people don’t say that anymore. People will see that you do need a fully empowered democratic society in order to have resilience and a very efficient top down decision making process. Although it could be efficient on the right things, it could also be very efficiently doing the wrong ...
Internationally, I think people now understand that liberal democracy has its own advantage in conflicts like this, which is collective intelligence and resilience because a top down fully authoritarian decision making process were hailed as efficient not too long ago. Liberal democracies were written off as less efficient, just a ...
Yes. The old democratic systems suffer from the problem of lack of bandwidth, high latency – every four years – and not connecting to sufficient amount of people. Certainly not people younger than 18. What we’re doing is to improve the democratic system so that it has higher bandwidth, lower ...
What we’re doing, essentially, is to make sure that people identify with their urgency in furthering democracy. Democracy to us is not something static. Is like semiconductor or any computer code. It’s something that people can contribute, can improve, and share the innovation with the world.
We don’t have a democratic backslide. [laughs] We’re not centralizing state power to further some national…I think it’s called fascism. The old, last-century word. We’re not turning fascist. [laughs]
It’s my job to steal the startup energy which is already there. It’s not my credit. From startup in general answering to the shareholders into the startup that solve social issues and institute stakeholders.
There are many social innovators in Taiwan, and for a young person choosing to be a social entrepreneur rather than just any startup founder. They would then enjoy much better access to impact investments, loans, state grants.
What I mean by that is, for example, people crowdsourcing to build solar panels for the places least economically empowered to transition fully to green energy or people designing new systems so that the delivery boxes can be fully upcycled instead of being just blunt.
My portfolio is about social innovation, which means the impact investors need to put their money into not any start up, but start up that does not cause the negative social and environmental externalities and work actively to solve the common problems faced by the environment and society.
It doesn’t have to be a partisan opposition to serve as the source of urgency, as long as there is common urgency, the civil society thrives.
There’s a common urgency. On the mask, vaccines, and rapid tests, of course, there’s a common urgency. For climate change, there’s also a common urgency for the sea turtles choking on the plastic straws. That’s an urgency too. [laughs]
Or in the middle school, when they get to fact check the three presidential candidates during their platforms and debates, and senior high when they get to start movements like banning plastic straws. They feel fully democratic empowered the day they turn 18 instead of just learning about this democracy ...
They feel fully empowered when as primary school, they measured the air quality through PM2.5 airbox sensors to inform whether their parents should go out for a walk in the morning or the pollution is good or bad.
Yes. I think by young people, we mean people even younger than 18. Before they got the right to vote, already they can through e petition, start very popular petitions. For example, banning the plastic straws from our national drink. Bubble tea takeout’s.
Marriage equality it is.
All of these were small scale experiments on the smaller jurisdiction anonymous valleys or a town, but through a presidential hackathon accelerated their deployment today into our country.
That’s how we got, for example, the telemedicine support for the offshore islands and indigenous areas. That’s how we got the ambulance transmitting to the emergency centers, instead of people calling you Jada. We can now leverage 5G transmission to make sure that the ambulance service kind of mobile hospital.
When you turn it on, it projects President giving you the trophy. It’s self describing. Very mentor. Then through this, the President is committed to offer her support on the personnel and regulation on the budget to ton that small scale experiment into country wide innovation.
Every year out of the 200 or so local innovations, through a new way of voting called quadratic voting and a coaching process, which is five of those civic hacking teams…President Tsai Ing wen personally gave the awards to those five teams each year, which was shared with Taiwan was ...
Basically, if the civic hackers see something that’s not responding to the emergent situations, for example, on climate change or anything, they can develop new systems working with a local government, a local municipality, often.
In addition to the white hat hackers, we also have civic hackers. Civic hackers build new systems instead of testing the vulnerability of the existing system. The civic hackers are invited every year to the Presidential Hackathon. We posted this recruitment video on social media, so feel free to check ...
With policymaking, yes.
Exactly.
Of course, Zoom said that they’ve changed their ways, they’ve restructured. They got a lot of examinations by independent labs, and so on. What I’m trying to say is that it’s not about the state decree or a law, or anything like that. People saw the news, and they changed ...
We saw all that, but if in a society, if people do not generally pay attention and become aware of these things, then the state is very difficult to simply ban the use of a commercial software. The general population do pay attention to these things, they spontaneously switched to ...
The Ministry of Justice from the US even published the full investigation to basically say, “This actually happened as per the Justice Department.”
The schools, by and large, used other services, because in 2020, Zoom had multiple investigations about their management, about whether they shut down a certain meeting with people in Hong Kong, and things like that.
To use the information transmission services that are from trusted jurisdictions or domestically instead of, for example, one example, Zoom. They did not get the endorsement from our Ministry of Education for use during the classrooms that were digitally transformed by last year’s spike.
The second thing is about awareness on the cybersecurity because cybersecurity is a lot like counter epidemic. It relies on the good habits of each and every person. Also, just like countering pandemic, something very basic like handwashing and things like that, we need also to get the message out ...
Active engagement with the white hat community, I believe, is the lesson that we have been able to share. This is the first thing.
Before we roll out new cybersecurity services and so on, I often personally say let’s just have half a year and have the white hat test this infrastructure. This is something Estonia also does through a more open relationship with the cybersecurity research community. They’re like, “Yeah, just let us ...
A couple of things. The first is that we have a very vibrant white hat community. People who are not technically speaking civil servants, but just the civic tech people who did a mask rationing map, or the rapid testing map or the vaccination helpers, and so on, they’re very ...
The trade secrets.
They’re not necessarily the same group of people doing things. It’s also possible that the same group of people are acting on both political and economic incentives.
If through cybersecurity intrusions, other outside actors can learn about the trade secrets of the semiconductor layouts, and so on, there’s something real to be gained by that. They could save a lot of independent research and development time, and so on, so there’s also economic motive.
That’s the first, the reason, I believe. The second reason, I believe, is that a lot of people in Taiwan are seeing that this kind of cybersecurity attacks, and so on, as a way, not just politically motivated, but also economically motivated.
There’s a real incentive here to do this kind of information manipulation. That is…
If they can influence such that people do not, for example, believe the result of their votes, or do not believe the democratic possibility of reaching an innovation that everybody can live with. If the polarization goes to such an extreme that people do not even want to be a ...
I think a couple of reasons. First, there is something to be won if the information operators disrupt people’s faith and trust to each other and to the democratic process because that’s less expensive than a full assault, the traditional assault.