Anything I can help with or talk about?
Thanks for seeing me. I looked over a lot of the background, so hopefully we don’t have to go over every detail of the biography but can talk in some specific follow‑ups to some of that. There were a couple of biographical things that I wanted to check to make sure I get right.
You’re just fact checking.
Exactly. What was your title? I’ve seen it as "Digital Minister."
That’s right.
Is that the best title?
Let me get my...
I’ve also seen it as "minister without portfolio." I just wanted to clarify what the...
This is a very interesting part. Thank you so much. Here it says "minister without portfolio," but if you flip it around, it says "Digital Minister."
Digital Minister. Is there one that you prefer over the other, or that’s more accurate?
There were nine ministers without portfolio. If you write "Digital Minister," everybody knows it’s me. Otherwise it’s one of nine. That is accurate.
Birthday, I saw you say. I just wanted to make sure I get the age right. April 18th, 1981.
That’s right. 35, turning 36.
I don’t know if you saw this, in "The Economist," around a couple of months ago, President Tsai did an article. She mentioned you.
I did see that. Ex‑hacker.
She said, "A 35‑year‑old former computer hacker." When I read that, it got me thinking. There are different definitions of the word hacker, and I wanted to make sure I understood that. When she says "hacker," which definition is she using?
Someone who will immerse themself into a system and making creative use of it. If you immerse yourself into a system, you tend to see the loopholes. Now, a white‑hat hacker will inform the person and patch, fix the system.
A black hat will use it for nefarious purposes. I’m a hacker without a hat, meaning that I tend to create new systems that doesn’t suffer as much as the old systems was, so a creative hacker, the Richard Tomlinsons.
Have you also, in the past, done black hat hacking, if that’s the correct term?
No. I have basic understanding of info security, but it’s not my special field.
Why would President Tsai say "a former computer hacker"?
You’re still a part of hacking culture.
I am. I don’t get to program as much after being the Digital Minister. That’s one of the things that I miss. [laughs] I still engage in coding jams, hackathons, and hacking sessions, maybe once a week for an afternoon or so, but I wouldn’t say that I’m a career hacker or a professional hacker nowadays. I’m still having a connection with the hacker culture.
I’m much more active in the regulations, the policy‑making, and so on.
Just so I’m clear, she’s not using that term in the...
In the Kevin Mitnick sense? No.
Yeah, in the Wikileaks sense or whatever.
The line’s very blur now. What Julian is doing is not black‑hat hacking either.
There’s this Aaron Swartz, Snowden, Julian spectrum. There’s no clear line where criminal activity begins. It’s all a very gray area. But I’m firmly on the Aaron Swartz end of the spectrum.
No, she doesn’t mean that I was convicted or anything.
What about Snowden, hero or villain?
It’s hard to say. I haven’t went through the entire Snowden revelations. For Taiwan, many of the things that he revealed are not news. Around 2001, 2002, when the Golden Shield project begins in Mainland China, we became acutely aware of surveillance, Internet censorship, and all these things that Snowden later revealed as possible and so close to us also, we being the first stakeholders.
To me, it’s not that much a shock of what Snowden has revealed. Being part of the early cypherpunks, seeing and participating in Freenet and P2P cultures, none of this is news. I do think Snowden makes it much more apparent, and he makes the arguments convincing in a way that our previous communications were not that...
There’s always this tinfoil part of the previous conversation around Database Nation, and so on, but after Snowden the argument shifted so that the privacy and all the values that we upheld as the early hacker culture are now mainstream.
Snowden is instrumental in mainstreaming concerns in early hacker culture. Some of the concerns, anyway.
Would you be comfortable if a hacker in Taiwan revealed Taiwanese government intelligence secrets? You would be comfortable with that, or encourage that?
When I went into the Cabinet, one of the conditions of me joining is that I will look at no confidential information. No national secrets, not even things marked as confidential, secret, or top secret will ever be seen by me.
I don’t mean you, personally. I’m not asking whether you, personally, are revealing. I’m saying, in general, theoretically speaking, you would be...?
That is a question about journalism, isn’t it? There’s always leaks or stories that you would not like to indicate or confirm in journalism. You have to balance it with this wider impact on the society, versus whether it’s a temporary causing people to lose face, or if the upside of the society knowing this outweighs the temporary embarrassment.
I don’t think there’s a blanket way to answer that question. It always depends case by case on what exactly is being leaked.
It depends on the content?
And on the mechanism. For example, Snowden claims that he went through all the materials to make sure that it doesn’t harm innocent parties, and so on. I haven’t checked that myself, so I couldn’t really validate his claim or invalidate his claim. At least thinking about this or doing this is part of the journalistic integrity.
One more question on this, and then we can move on. I’m curious, as we’re talking about it, theoretically, if there were a local Taiwanese hacker who revealed information about a controversial weapon system being developed here, or something like that, you’re saying you would have to judge the merits of the leak, based on what was being...
Yes, based on its utilitarian values on the society as a whole.
Moving on, one more biographical question that I wanted to ask. You talked about you were born here in Taipei. Can you talk a little bit about your parents? Were they born here? When did they come here? That background.
They were both born in mid‑Taiwan. They went to the same university, married while they were graduate students there, and settled down near the National Chengchi University, which is where I grew up.
Where in mid‑Taiwan?
That was in Taichung. Dadu ‑‑ That was where my father’s born.
Puli ‑‑ which is part of Nantou, the only inland county, that is to say it’s not nearby any of the shores ‑‑ that is where my mom’s born.
They were journalists, you were saying, at one point, and your father was an academic?
In graduate studies my father majored in political science, and my mom in law. Then they both went to the same news publisher. It’s called "China Times", Zhōngguó Shíbào. That was before the martial law was lifted. There was no press freedom, so there’s only three newspapers or so.
They both worked there and participated during the initial wave of democratization of the lifting of the martial law, press freedom, and everything. Then my dad, after participating in that demonstration, decided to pursue further his studies to do a PhD around the student movement.
I thought maybe we could talk a little bit about your political values. You’ve talked a little bit about this. Again, I have some follow‑ups about it. You’re an advocate of, you say, radical openness. Is that a way to...?
Radical transparency.
If you could name a few of the intellectual godfathers of this movement, who would they be?
First of all, I learned this idea from IETF, the Internet Engineering Task Force. Later on, it also influenced ICANN unit inside Internet government. There’s no one or two person. There’s Clark. There’s Vint Cerf. There’s Tim Berners‑Lee.
You can look all these up. These are the earlier pioneers of the Internet and the open Web. I don’t think any one person defined how this works. This is entirely a consensus‑making mechanism borne out of the necessity of operators of very heterogeneous telecoms and technologies who has to talk to each other for Internet to work.
That’s the inter part in Internet. Everybody can set up a network, but taking networks into an Internet requires collaboration between people who have barely met each other.
What about seminal texts? If you were giving somebody a syllabus or three or four books to read.
There’s one document called "The Tao of IETF." That’s a very good read. The thing is that there’s, of course, the canonical text around hyperculture. There’s the Jargon file. There’s the anthropologic observations from Larry Wall, from Eric Raymond, from Linus Torvalds himself with Pekka Himanen and Manuel Castells, and Lawrence Lessig, of course.
All these are distillations of decades of culture. I don’t think any text can capture the immersiveness of...No matter how anthropologically inclined are the hacker themselves, I don’t think these accounts make sense unless you have participated in this kind of community.
Fortunately, with Wikipedia, the entry barrier is much lower. If you just spend a month being a Wikipedia editor, a lot of these will suddenly make sense without having to go through canonical text. Maybe the Wikipedia beginners manual, I guess, is a pretty good text.
Would you say, is it a Silicon Valley ethos? Is it something that came out of Silicon Valley, or did it come out of somewhere?
Most people trace it back to the Railroad Club in the MIT, which is not part of Silicon Valley. In Europe, it’s traced back to the original hacker spaces in Vienna and in the Chaos Computing Club.
In Taiwan, there is also a few early pioneers around this radical transparency, and we would say the intellectual commons, like Chu Bong‑Foo, the inventor of the Cangjie input method, and so on.
It’s just part of science. With the personal computer, suddenly everybody is a "scientist" in the sense that we can replicate people’s experiments, and make additions and publish what you see.
It’s iterative in a way, as opposed to month‑long journal cycle. It’s iterated by the minute. It evolves much more quickly than the original scientific community based on paper publishing. Otherwise, I would say it’s just the same peer review science, open sharing attitude, which is now being fed back into the scientific community as the open access movement.
The counter value to this is privacy, right?
No? How not?
It’s only a counter value if your private thoughts or your private moments are being published against your will, but before I turned the recording on, you clearly consented to it. It’s not at all a counter value. The whole idea of radical transparency is to make account of things. That’s where accountability comes from. It doesn’t say that you have to be 24 hours accountable.
You can have your private moments where you sketch your thoughts and so on, but only when you’re ready, we engage in some kind of dialog, and keep this on the record so that people who are not here in the room, but they are stakeholders, anyway, can participate in this discussion. It doesn’t mean that any of your private thoughts must be published.
In one of the interviews you did, I saw somebody ask you a question like that ‑‑ about thoughts being published ‑‑ and you said, "Well, not yet, but hopefully someday," or something to that account. Were you joking about that?
Not at all. It’s being worked on, actually, but it would still requires a press of button. It’s not like thoughts is being published all the time against my will. It’s just I would like to probably, in a few years, have a much more direct way to publish my thoughts when I feel like to.
You do feel like there is a role for privacy, even in the governmental sphere?
Right. Unconditional publishing, I think, is a bug. It’s turned into something that wasn’t ready for the public, and published it to the public. The whole idea of open government is saying that we only do binding decisions in the public sphere, not in the private sphere, where a lot of colluding, or lobbying, or whatever can happen.
It doesn’t mean elimination of private sphere. That’s not possible.
For instance, in diplomacy, there’s a lot of occasions where it might be desirable to have private negotiations, and then...
Yeah, but when you sign a treaty, it better be in the public sphere.
Does President Tsai share your views about this entirely? Are there points of difference between the two of you on aspects of this, or do you feel like you’re basically on the same page about it?
We’re on the same page. President Tsai is pretty unique in that her values around, for example, marriage equality or aborigine rights and so on, she adopted these views before her party took that as majority views.
She is pretty radical, actually, by Asian politicians’ standards. Slightly progressive by European standards. The idea is that she’s not waiting for her party to be ready for these values. She put those values very clearly on her presidential campaign, and actually, the campaign four years before that.
Let’s talk a little bit about, you’ve talked in some of the interviews you’ve done about the state system and states. In one of them, you referred to states or the state system as a useful illusion. That seems to imply to me a teleological notion of progress, that the world is moving toward a better place, where illusions vanish.
Not necessarily.
How not necessarily? How so?
It’s a useful illusion when you want the state to do something for you. You can say, "I want universal healthcare, and I want the state system to do that for you," for example.
It ceased to be a useful illusion. When you say, for example, "I want to collect environmental pollution information, and I want the state to do that for you."
Because there are certain things that a civil society does that’s much more effective if the civil society look at available tools and then gather around those tools in the Wikipedia kind of way, instead of waiting for a hierarchical system to do that.
Because, by definition, these kind of crowdsourcing is ineffective inside the hierarchical organization. If you expect the state to do that, the state will do that, but in a ineffective way. At these kind of times, where the civil society is actually better, but they may have not realized it yet, it’s useful to do away with the state as a construction in those endeavours.
I’m trying to imagine what does your ideal system look like. What’s the utopia in your view? I know you’ve called yourself a conservative anarchist. You’ve explained that a little bit. What would the ideal political system look like?
The current one is pretty good.
That doesn’t sound anarchical to me.
That’s what "conservative" means.
Right, but it’s not what anarchical means.
But it is. Anarchy means that I don’t issue commands ‑‑ I ask for your permission before pressing the record button ‑‑ and then I don’t take commands.
It’s entirely personal. If I’m a progressive anarchist, I will want to inflict my values on you. I’m conservative, meaning that I know this way works, but I harbor no ambition to inflict it to other people.
For instance, somebody like Stephen Bannon, President Trump’s new advisor, he said, "I’m a Leninist..." I’m paraphrasing him, "...because I want to tear down the state." He was an active...
That’s pretty progressive.
Being a conservative anarchist, you don’t share the desire to necessarily further the elimination of the state system or...?
Not at all, until it’s ready. When it’s ready, it will happen naturally.
Fair enough. We could talk about modern Taiwanese politics or world politics a little bit.
Go ahead.
How would you evaluate President Tsai’s performance in office so far?
She’s not afraid to tackle huge controversial issues. That’s what distinguished her with pretty much every other President so far in Taiwanese history, by this willingness to communicate and learning.
However, open government isn’t something that a government can do by itself. It requires trust between the public sector, the private sector, and civil society.
Trust is something that can’t be commanded. The government need to trust the citizens, whereas before, the government doesn’t trust at all, saying it would be populism, or something.
Once the citizens get used to the idea and the practice of the government actually trusting their input, maybe some of the citizens will trust back, but this takes time.
Taiwan was a authoritarian system during the martial law for the longest period in the world. It’s literally generations of authoritarian rule.
To undo those psychological issues requires not only the de‑authoritarian mind process of everybody in the Cabinet and President, but also by demonstration, once they’re in, that we’re willing to engage in dialogue, even with people who don’t trust us, can we earn the trust back. That takes time.
That’s my main assessment, is that she’s willing to take the time.
Are there things that you think she should be pressing harder on, or that she isn’t?
If I have this kind of view I would be progressive.
You’re essentially satisfied with her performance so far, and that she’s exceeded your...?
And everybody else. I only work with volunteers, so if people come to me voluntarily and say, "Let’s do something." If it’s something that I like, they will form a syndicate, or something.
For people who don’t yet see the idea of an open government, there are still a lot of pockets, especially around, for example, Minister of Defense, or diplomacy, as you’ve said, and so on, who don’t yet see a lot of those values in this, which is fine, because they have their own concerns. I don’t try to change them.
As the President, she...
You don’t try to change them?
No, I don’t. I don’t.
Or enlighten them?
No, not at all. I keep doing whatever I do to lower the cost of the tools of the process, because that’s what we modern anarchists do, David Graeber, Noam Chomsky, and so on. Everybody focus on the effective tools, especially low‑cost, effective tools, that allow people to self‑organize.
Our experience, not belief. Our experience is that what is this achieving if suddenly there is a face change and the people adopt those tools in a self‑organizing way? If people are not ready, it means that either the tools are not easy enough, or there’s no obvious incentives for them to use it. We can change these by a cultural or educational way, but not in a way that’s enlightenment.
I don’t think there’s sudden enlightenment going on.
Isn’t that what education is?
I don’t think so. My view on education, because I wasn’t schooled, I wouldn’t say that I have teachers or professors who taught me. For me, they’re fellow learners and they share their learning process. Not necessarily why they’ve learned, but how they learned.
My own pedagogical approach is like this. Through radical transparency, we share how we’re learning things, how we’re building things, and then maybe some of the people will tag along. That’s the entirety of my teaching.
You mentioned defense, for instance. Whether you’re advocating for it or not, but what do you think, in the defense sphere, they could be doing with these tools to be more effective?
There are petitions toward the Ministry of Defense. For example, there was a huge petition about the gender inequality of conscription.
That’s, obviously, also a defense issue, and that’s something that the Ministry of Defense may gain, actually, in furthering this dialogue with citizens, and so on, on the basic principles. Not building weapons, not their daily business, but why they’re doing their and how they’re doing their daily business.
There are aspects where these tools are useful.
I’m also interested in history. I write history. In terms of historical research, do you work with Academia Historica at all on digitizing archives, and things that they could be doing?
There’s a huge archive project that’s gone on for some years now, primarily Academia Sinica. What we call [non‑English speech] , the digital archive of ‑‑ what’s the name? ‑‑ the No‑Material Heritage, or something like that.
All sorts of, not just National Palace Museum things, but also oral history, performance, memories of tribal, or whatever, that the heritage is.
I do think, due to the limitation of the previous technology, we tend to capture some narratives and some photos, like tiny slices of these kind of things. I do think the modern technology with VR, with 360 reconstruction we can capture the immersive experience, not just as a outsider’s view, but as a insider’s view of all these kind of things.
I’m very interested in that, and also think that it’s one of the many ways to build empathy for people to debate meaningfully on a public construction, for example, by being its inhabitants. Being, maybe, children in this new space, being cast in this new space, and seeing the new space in all triangles.
I know some friends who are historians have complained. They said they’ve been somewhat disappointed about ‑‑ they’re talking about writing about transitional justice issues ‑‑ getting access to some of the early materials. They haven’t had the access that they’ve wished.
The current law isn’t exactly very friendly to that, but there is a transitional acceleration law, or something like that, that will make their job easier. It’s in the works. I’m not part of that thing, but it should be in the Parliament sometime this session.
You think if that passes, that will make things easier?
Yeah, a little bit easier.
I’m not an expert on this particular issue, but as I understand it the counter worry is that it would affect the privacy of victims, the privacy of, maybe, former security officials, or things like that.
It’s a matter of cost. To usefully redact people’s names from these records, and only the people who are innocent or unrelated to the case, requires advanced natural language processing. That’s currently done by human beings in a few passes. Because of the sheer number of documents, the process is slow.
That’s the main complaint of the historians who have talked to you, is that it’s a very lengthy process, but that’s something machine learning can help, at least on the first pass.
In terms of redacting the names?
Right, in terms of redacting. Very concretely speaking, only this year that machine still has humans in turning speech into text. Maybe in a year or two, optical character recognition will also catch up, even on historical everything, documents.
Once we have these two technologies, then they’re text. Once we have them in text form, then the data mining, the text mining community can step in and produce much better algorithms than three passes with a visual reading, which will greatly speed up the process.
I wanted to ask a little bit more about politics and diplomacy. What did you make of President Tsai’s call with Trump during the transition period?
I read it on Twitter.
[laughs]
I think Twitter’s fine. Twitter is a very innovative way to do diplomacy. I do that myself.
Tsai set up a English Twitter account shortly after that, because perhaps she saw that Trump was very effective in using Twitter to announce the Taiwan‑US telephone call. Twitter’s great.
What do you think about the call itself and the reaction to the call? Was it successful diplomacy, do you think?
I wasn’t part of the team who arranged it.
I mean as a citizen, as a person.
No, as a person I only watched the Twitter‑sphere. I’m telling you the Twitter‑sphere takes it in a very explosive ‑‑ what we call "go viral" ‑‑ fashion. What I mean is that the call itself ‑‑whatever they have talked during the call, I don’t know of that part ‑‑ but the Twitter part is very well announced, and talk about, and give Taiwan a lot of awareness around the international community.
My international friends and acquaintances who will mistake us for Thailand sharply declined after it went viral on the Twitter‑sphere.
(laughter)
That’s what I have observed.
In the wake of the reaffirmation of the One China Policy from President Trump, among people that you talk to here, has that felt like a betrayal?
I haven’t talked to anybody about this.
You don’t talk to anybody about it?
As an anarchist, I officially don’t care.
You don’t care about...?
States.
As a conservative anarchist you care about the existing system, right?
Only when it’s useful. The One China Policy doesn’t have anything useful one way or another without the government work that I’m doing.
As a citizen, as an observer of politics in general, you don’t care one way or another?
Not any more than if you name a random South Asian or African country. I care in the abstract sense, but not in the personal investment sense.
In an abstract sense you’d care?
In an abstract sense I know there’s a call because I happen to read them on Twitter or there is a One China Policy, or something, because I read it on Twitter. I care inasmuch as I will read the description of it and I remember.
But your friends care, and you’re talking to people. You’re out to dinner with people.
No, we never talk about this.
You never talk about politics?
No, we never talk about the One China Policy, or something like that. We do talk about politics.
We talk about, for example, the We the People petition and how Obama has archived everything that’s in the middle of the petition because, theoretically, you’re not the same administration anymore.
Far as I know, China is still keeping this. Even though the first few petitions are about him releasing tax returns, or something, after the first wave, the other follow‑ups, and the final resolutions of the petition, and so on, largely resume the normal process.
It’s great. It means that the channel itself work independent of any particular president. We do talk about that kind of politics.
What do you think about Trump in general? What are your impressions of him? Supporter, not supporter?
He’s very good at using Twitter.
[laughs] He’s good at using Twitter. You think he’s an effective communicator?
I learn a lot of how Twitter can be used, thanks to Trump.
You did? Like what?
The thing with Twitter is that it very easily, because of the limitation of the characters, to use every shorthand, to use emoji, even, because that’s the ideograms that saves the most character.
It’s one or two forms. You either write part one of three, two, and then three. Use three tweets to make a micro‑micro blog [laughs] of your thoughts. Or you try to pack, using jargons, and your technical, or whatever things that you knew your friends will understand, and try to express the meaning very succinctly, maybe as a picture.
Trump’s great in using everyday language, and express one very simple sentiment. Not connect it, not even caring about making the complete picture, but just making that one sentiment very succinctly using Twitter.
That’s how Twitter is used when it was first invented. All those long form packed into short form afterwards is we writers trying to cram something into the form that was not invented for things like this.
I really relearned a lot of the early microblogging techniques, reading how Trump is tweeting.
You think he’ s a good communicator. What about policy? What about policymaker?
I don’t quite know what exactly is the policy that’s being enacted. I see a lot of white papers and a lot of calls to enact this and that, but as of what’s actually transpired, I admit that I haven’t studied at length that way what’s being discussed.
Because you feel it hasn’t been clearly articulated, or because you haven’t...?
No, it doesn’t intersect with my mission.
I see what you’re saying.
I only study the things that intersect with my mission here.
Maybe we can talk a little bit about a couple of biographical follow‑ups from some of this. You said at age eight you’ve talked about how you were doing programming on paper. You’ve talked about this in a bunch of interviews.
Can you walk me through a little bit of the specifics of what that involve, what that means? I can’t quite picture about what you mean when you’re talking about programming.
It means that I drew something like this on paper, and then pressed keys on paper. If I press, say, C, L, S, and then I would write CLS here. Then also write a cursor here.
I will then press Enter. Because it means clear screen, I would take a eraser to erase it here, and so on. Clear enough?
Yeah, I see what you’re saying. At 11, you’re in Germany. Can you talk a little bit more? I wanted to get a little bit more detail about the process of listening to the exiles that your father was interviewing from Tiananmen.
Where did these conversations take place? Is this at home?
In the living room.
In the living room, and people came in and talked...
We would watch TV sometimes. In Germany there is endless TVs about the Berlin Wall, because it was fresh at the time, and the eventual democratization of the East Germany systems, and how would that even go. Will everybody go into deep debt ‑‑ they didn’t ‑‑ and so on.
Because of the democratization, there’s a lot of documentaries about Berlin, about the World War, about the Holocaust, and so on. We sometimes watched those things on TV and had a lot of conversations between the exiles.
How formative an experience was that, listening to the exiles?
Very formative.
In what way? What were the lessons that you took away from it or the things that you learned from it?
Mostly that no matter what your field is ‑‑ because they come from the humanities, the hard science, the soft sciences, all kinds of fields ‑‑ you can have a contribution on the democratization process, on deepening the deliberation or the conversation.
That the arbitrary lines that divides those views disappear when you’re in a real movement, because everybody is connecting to everybody, and forced, even, by the contingencies to make one’s self understood as much as possible by people who don’t share the same field or same profession. Which is not at all what usually happens in university, especially around the ’80s.
That’s the main thing, is that disciplines is a illusion. That’s...
Which is a illusion?
The economic disciplines, fields, are a illusion. That’s almost never useful to have.
Is that the thing that struck you most about their stories, or was there something else?
That’s the thing that struck the most about the stories.
Let’s talk about school a little bit more. Any regrets about not finishing high school or that process of dropping out of school? Do you feel like it was a good way for you to learn?
Yeah, that’s where my learning begins, when the schooling ends. I dropped out of junior high school to join a startup, and then to graduate school. It’s just no diploma.
I still attended the graduate school classes, and work with professors on projects, and so on.
You don’t have a diploma from either one?
Exactly, but I never participated in a situation where that diploma is required, so it doesn’t really matter.
If there was somebody, let’s say there was a kid, a 12‑, 13‑year‑old kid said, "I want to do what Minister Tang’s doing," you would recommend the same path?
It’s legal now. It’s legal now. For quite a few years Taiwan has the most advanced ‑‑ what we call experimental education laws ‑‑ that allows anywhere from the whole K12, anyone can write a proposal saying, "I want to go to school only two times a week," or three times a week, or not at all.
"This is my schedule, my own hand‑designed, handcrafted curriculum." If it pass a review board, it’s entirely legal.
I always encourage, of course, people to try alternative education system, even for the experience, even for a few days a week.
You were 15, right? I wanted to double‑check the age when you started the search engine for Mandarin lyrics.
I don’t even know where the lyrics part came from. It was a general‑purpose search engine. You can certainly do lyrics.
[laughs] Got you. Of the startups that you were involved in, which was the most lucrative? Was it Socialtext, in the end?
I worked as independent consultant contractor with Apple. It’s certainly the most lucrative, either as a consultant or as a...I didn’t participate in Apple’s startup days, obviously, but it was a startup.
I read you got paid a Bitcoin an hour. Is that true?
Yeah, but it’s converted to USD at the time of signing. The same happened with Oxford University Press and Socialtext, because none of the three organizations has a ledger that can do Bitcoin.
I wouldn’t say any of these are particularly lucrative, because I’m always paid by the hour. Socialtext did give me some stocks, but I didn’t ask for them. There’s no particularly lucrative job that I participated. I said a arbitrary hourly rate of one Bitcoin per hour for years.
In one of the interviews somebody said something about you being a millionaire. You said, "Well, not if you calculate it in Europe. If you calculate it in dollars."
If you calculate that, I’m never a millionaire, but if you calculate it in Taiwan dollars, then maybe before I was 20.
(laughter)
Not in US dollars?
No, not in US dollars.
On the publishing house that you’re involved in from ’95 to ’97, you mentioned it started with publishing books, and then became publishers for software.
Then became the first C2C auction site, like eBay.
What was the name of it?
It was called Informationist, [non‑English speech] . It was then renamed to Inforist. It was renamed to Inforian, and then renamed to P‑Asia. It’s a company that likes renaming a lot.
Each of those four iterations it was a social media, like the Chinese version of ICQ. It was the Messenger kind of thing. It was a auction site, and it was also a search engine. It was also an online community. It was also a lot of other things.
You said you wrote some pieces of software for them for...
For most of the things. The back‑ends for the auction site, the community, social media website.
I wasn’t part of the CICQ team, but Chia-Liang Kao, one of the g0v founders was. Of course, the search engine, also. I wrote a lot of the back‑ends, the basic code infrastructure thing.
Would you ever start another business after you get through? I read somewhere it said you consider yourself retired, but could you see yourself going back into consulting? You don’t do any consulting right at this moment, do you?
The law forbids a public servant from doing consulting work. [laughs]
After your stint in public sectors?
I think the law’s silly, by the way. [laughs]
You do?
I do. I still do consulting pro bono according to the current law, in any case.
Why do you think the law is silly?
It was designed almost a hundred years ago, many, many decades ago, when there is a huge worry that doing consulting work as a public servant, there’s a conflict of interest, or there will be lobbying, or improper handling of confidential information, or whatever.
All these concerns have their separate laws now. I don’t really know whether the original motivation of that particular law in the public service law still holds its merits.
Maybe it does. I haven’t studied it very deeply from a legal perspective. By my personal understanding of these concerns, they’re all addressed by independent laws. It’s, therefore, a little bit silly, but I’m willing to be corrected.
In any case, I think that I will probably still do consulting, pro bono or not. I’m still active in the open source community, writing more English and Chinese than programming at this moment.
I do enjoy programming a lot, and I do consider myself, still, a coder and a hacker. I will probably still do that as part of public service, not necessarily for any bottom line of a private sector company.
What program is this that you’re using?
This is Goodnet’s. It’s pretty good.
Back to Germany for a second. You’ve said that you began to get involved in hacking culture there, in Germany, among exiles. Can you talk a little bit...?
I became aware of it. I wasn’t active in it. I write a lot of programs by that time, mainly around Chinese text processing, and so on.
My German’s not good enough to connect to a local hacker space at the time, is what I’m saying. By reading magazines, the university bulletins, and how my dad and his classmates are talking about, I became aware that there is a hacking scene going on.
It’s contemporaneous with the period that you’re in Germany. It’s not necessarily something you’re learning from the people that you’re father’s interviewing?
Osmosis, perhaps. [laughs] I became aware that there is this open sharing culture. That there is this movement in the world that is generally pushing towards non‑rival goods, and so on.
People, because of the successful Berlin Wall thing, talk a lot about non‑zero‑sum games, and things like that. That it’s possible to not forever be antagonistic. That, also, is being enabled by this new thing called the Internet, and academic net, or CPU, or whatever.
I probably read books about that, but I haven’t talked with people actually in that culture. That’s when I was 12, in Taiwan.
Let me just save that. Let me ask a little bit about the US political system a little bit more. How long did you spend in the US?
I lived in Boston for three months, in San Jose for maybe five months, six months, and Portland for a month at a time for a couple times. That’s pretty much it.
Total sounds like a year?
Yeah, and I visited, of course, Palo Alto and Silicon Valley area, San Francisco, but for weeks at a time. I was never a permanent resident there.
Americans like to think of themselves ‑‑ historically there’s this notion of the "City on the Hill" ‑‑ as an example for the world to emulate. What do you think of that notion? Is there any validity, in your view, to that notion?
It’s a useful motivator.
A useful motivator for...?
For people who believe in that.
You’re talking about as a tool of nationalism?
Or whatever. Anyone who wants to be a example of somebody else, of course, is holding themselves to a integrity standard. It’s a good thing, psychologically speaking.
It’s a good thing for Americans?
For people who believe in that. There’s very similar things of being chosen people in, also, the Chinese culture.
We see this kind of sentiments around the world in different periods of history. In pretty much all these types of cultures it has a unifying effect, of course, but it also enable much more sophisticated morality to ensue.
It’s a formative thing. I wouldn’t say it’s the only way to achieve this higher, more integrated thing, but it’s one of the very valid ways.
What do you think about it in an absolute sense? Is the US, in your view, a model to emulate? Obviously not in everything, but in some things? What do you think?
The United part is pretty good. The States part, I’m not so sure. [laughs]
What do you mean by that?
My education is from the Project Gutenberg, which is mostly writings before the First World War, when humanity was largely optimistic. That’s my early readings.
I don’t have access to public domain work that’s written after the First World War, because it’s still in copyright.
No matter which culture you’re on, because of this very successful enlightenment project, the world will one day see the same light, generally just from a different perspective.
The united part, I refer to this as the united part, meaning that, despite the different origin, the different states’ interests, the different around position and other relationships for example, the early founding of the US was built on these ideas that people can resolve their different views over time, through a proper procedure and not escalated violence.
It’s a pretty enlightened view of the united part. I don’t know that much about individual states around the US formation, so I wouldn’t comment on that.
Have you read Benedict Anderson?
I read it, yeah.
The reason I ask is because I’ve seen some of the interviews you’ve done. You’ve talked about the concept of time, and how the Internet affects the concept of time.
One of Benedict Anderson’s statements, and he was talking about nationalism as a product of the industrial revolution, and a product of the newspaper revolution, he talked about the changes in time that helped to bring about national consciousness, this notion that people were living simultaneously in what he called "homogeneous, empty time."
That’s right. I remember that.
I’m just curious. You’re a shrewd student of the effect of the Internet on the concept of time. Can you just talk a little bit more about the concept of time, how it’s devolving in the Internet age, and what effect you think that’s likely to have on the state system?
Internet is not just a way for bi‑directional communications to occur synchronously. It’s like many‑to‑many television or many‑to‑many radio. In a sense, this is why we call it digital convergence. The Internet is also a space.
The thing with the Internet is that copying something is the only way to transmit that on the Internet. On a border between two networks that speak different protocol, that has to interact through the Internet protocol, the only way for me to still carry your message forward is to convert your format into my format and keep this local storing forward, and then forward it to the other hubs down the line.
Copying becomes the norm. Then transmission, actually it’s very hard to imagine transmission without copying. You have to put a lot of DRM or whatever to artificially reduce it to the idea of transmission.
This also means that, traditionally, humans ‑‑ I don’t know about other animals ‑‑ could perceive being in the same space by seeing that we have the same tangible objects around us. That we’re in between the same space, meaning that we can look at the same table, and then we can share the coexistence, the part of space.
Even though, through telephone or through the other communication technologies, we can say, "OK, we’re on the same time." We wouldn’t say we’re in the same room or we’re in the same space.
But because the Internet forces pretty much the copying of everything that’s being brought on, people get this feeling that they’re in the same space, by having the same copy of social objects on their personal computers.
For example, when we’re typing in the same pool of documents, it’s technically, actually a copy on your side and a copy on my side. But because I see a representation of your cursor and you mine, we very easily fall into the illusion that we are in the same space and, literally, on the same page.
That’s something that’s unique, I think, around Internet. It gives the idea of belonging to the same space, even if we are apart in time. I join the Google document and I leave it, and you join one hour after. You will still see that it’s in the same space, and then live across the asynchronicity as if we’re still on the same time, because you will read through what I have written, what we have dialogued and commented, and so on.
Basically continue the time line, personally, and there reflect your inputs into this space.
It’s a dynamic that allows people to build communities that gives the feeling of being in the same time and in the same space but without having actually to be in the same time or in the same physical space. It was at this coexistence the main application of Internet. It’s a state in itself I would say.
It’s a new governance system that allows people to make collective decisions but without a intermediary system. Of course, Google Docs is itself an intermediary, but we also have ways to make it entirely decentralized. That’s the main effect.
It’s showing that collective action is possible and collective distribution of resources ‑‑ cognitive or not ‑‑ can happen without a hierarchical structure to back it up.
Even the states or the largest private sector companies are also saying that, which is why internal collaboration, a startup, or what we call the refactoring or reformation of visible service is happening around the world because even internally this is also in a much more effective way to break out a silo system.
Tell me if I’m remembering this wrong but I think in one of the interviews you were saying you’d be an advocate of direct democracy in most cases. Is that...?
I wouldn’t say that. What I’ve said is that it’s a more palatable, the more acceptable term for anarchy in this century. People tend to not think you’re weird if you say direct democracy...
(laughter)
Anarchism in this course much more than direct democracy. I, of course, work on direct‑democracy tools, process, playbooks, and so on. To build a anarchistic collective or so, it requires not just the decision‑making part, which is the direct democracy, but also the transparency, the accountability, the general inclusion, and diversity.
It’s an entire link and the participation that direct democracy is just one link of at least four aspects.
Let’s see. This is just going back to the strengths and weaknesses of the American system as you see it. We never quite got that far. What do you think are the strengths and weaknesses?
Of the American system?
Like constitutionally?
Well I can quote a few observations from Kurt Gödel. I don’t think that would be very productive, though.
Anyway, I think the strengths as I see it is that it’s pretty adaptive. It’s not something that the Constitution itself was seen for much of the history in the US as a living document. There’s a lot of adaptability in each state and even sub‑state governments.
A lot of autonomy, a lot of room for experiments, and a lot of ways for the best experiment to be seen by the other units and by the states so that the federal government plays a role of highlighting the innovations that have been going on in the states and so on. I think that’s a pretty good system.
The weakness?
I don’t know actually. I haven’t participated a lot in the daily level of political activism in the US. I voted in the Paris participation budget, but I haven’t voted in an US one.
After the advent of Internet and even before it had television or radio, there’s a danger of people stereotyping each other and not going through the roots of those values by the symptoms of each other’s values and fragments the public discourse.
I read that because of the gerrymandering, and even in the Twitter sphere, people tend to choose their messages so that it creates a bubble effect so that gradually people...
Confirmation bias.
Right. People reinforce their confirmation bias, which is part of the normal private sphere. Among families there’s always confirmation bias. That’s how families are formed, but because the social media and popular media before that used much of the same words that we use for private‑sphere things like our friends or [laughs] favorites.
These were words that originally only has a meaning on the private sphere and not a public sphere. We then turn it into something of a semi‑public sphere. A lot of those fears gets conflated. Then people tend to take a us‑versus‑them attitude in many of those dimensions. That’s very useful on the private sphere, but then this is actually a private sphere now.
It’s a confusion that’s going on not necessarily just in the US. In the US, I think the polarization and advancement of technology tend to happen first [laughs] just on the virtue of a lot of those new innovations being first introduced by US commons.
We see its most interesting form [laughs] first around US politics and so on before it reaches the rest of the world. I wouldn’t say it’s a weakness. I would say that it’s just a phase in development.
Which governments do you think are best at the kind of openness that you want to bring to the Taiwanese government? Are there governments that are much better you feel than what Taiwan is doing right now, or do you feel like Taiwan is at the forefront of this?
The Taiwan is the forefront of being Taiwan.
I’m sorry. My question is which government do you think is currently employing the openness that you would want to see?
That’s a fair question. I still look at the ICANN and IETF as a small dose. I understand that they’re a government only in the sense of a modest stakeholder governance more around how Internet is working. It does work on a radical, transparent, and fully accountable agenda that makes it having on par or even more legitimacy than, say, the United Nations.
It does this by including as much as they could as possible and being radically transparent and being fully participatory. There are people who say this is because that the Internet society only deal with techies, but it’s not true because we have activists. We have journalists. We have a lot of governments’ representatives and so on in the Internet community now.
We can’t just say it’s for techies anymore, but still its integrity is still somewhat high. There’s no sign of whether we can make this model work in the everyday politics just building a park thing which includes children and other stakeholders who would not necessarily be a part of Internet society’s decision‑making.
I still look toward that, but it’s not a straight adaptation.
We take bits and pieces that we know that works in this model and then try to work in the current political system around a different set of stakeholders. This is pretty much what every other similar units around the world is doing.
The GDS in Singapore, in UK the GDS and the PolicyLabs, in France the ETALab, and pretty much everybody that I know who are in this community of bringing the Internet society’s values into traditional governance systems. This loose coalition, I would say, is I think in itself a model stakeholder community. We share stories, tools, and personnel even a lot.
How does the value of direct democracy or an anarchical worldview differ from just majority rule? Is it the same or is there...?
No, we don’t vote. We don’t ever vote. There’s no majority rule.
You don’t vote?
We deliberate. If we vote, it’s just straw votes to make people rank the priority of the agenda like which need to be talked first. We don’t vote in the...
You vote in political elections?
Yeah. A referendum, of course, is one example. If you had a referendum, it is the idea that the ultimate implementation of majority rule of the common system. It’s not what I mean by direct democracy. It’s certainly one part of direct democracy, but as I said it’s just a voting by itself.
A full democratic direct‑or‑not system entails a complete understanding of the positions, a nuanced convergence of people’s views, that takes anywhere from probably a year to 30 years if you look at Switzerland before every referendum and without implementation of these transparency accountable and inclusive dialog that the referendum itself means nothing.
I would say it’s a mock democracy if you just do this referendum without all this preparation and current teamwork before and after them.
A referendum or direct voting on issues or even political leaders isn’t always desirable if you haven’t done the prep work. Is that what you’re saying?
Yeah, and then even in parts victory budgeting. The whole idea is for people to understand each other’s concerns and not just ranking of where the policy must be made. I admit that it’s much easier to implement the whole circle if it’s voting about policies or about priorities.
It’s very hard if you are voting about people because to make one person fully understood by millions of people is no easy task. The person changes every day, but it about policies or priorities of budget spending. It’s much easier because it’s much more concrete, and we can use a lot more data‑model spending.
I think we’ve been talking for a little more than an hour or so.
No, it’s fine.
You’re OK? OK. Let me ask a little bit about marriage equality. I know President Tsai has spoken of it. Have you been satisfied with...obviously there’s judicial and legislative efforts working...
No, we first need to make sure it’s constitutional. Otherwise [laughs] we’ll have to change the Constitution. There’s this process in the Supreme Court, and there’s a process in the legislation. It’s largely out of the administration branch and that kind of work.
Largely out of...?
Out of our work because the Ministry of Justice has already finished commissioning their study, and there’s no agenda on our plate, at least before the Supreme Court and the legislative have completed their proceedings.
There was something last week. Somebody was telling me that President Tsai said something to a visitor that it’s not...what did she say exactly? That it may not happen in our lifetime...
The activist was quoted as saying "but my life cannot wait." President Tsai said, "Even if that’s the case, let’s think about the future of other people." That’s the conversation. It’s very clear from the context that the first part of Tsai’s speech was just quoting hypothetically. "But we need to plan for the future," is the general statement.
The activists took this quote as a reaffirmation of his worst nightmare, saying that "President Tsai said marriage equality probably will not pass in your lifetime." He mis‑remembered the quote. But it’s entirely subjective.
If he said a very charged statement without declaring the subtext, there’s no way for Tsai to know that he has this subtext going on. Just by quoting him, of course, the activists feel that he’s being told...
You think she’s still not only committed to the policy in theory, but also committed to, in practice, trying to...
What she said is the same message as has already been saying for quite some time. She also said that during her election. Actually, a lot of Supreme Court judges said, in the US, that the notion of family value being important. It’s the common ground on which the conservative Christians and the marriage equality activists can both agree on.
If we do something upon this foundation, and in a wording that doesn’t offend each other’s sensibilities we can get this to work. A lot of other countries have gotten this to work. What we need is to find a unique formulation in our current legal system.
People used to argue that it needs a separate act, and now people are arguing that it needs a separate section in the same act. Now, at this current moment, the parliamentarians are agreeing that all we need is an additional clause in a paragraph in the act.
A lot of the conservative people will be happy, as long as it’s not the same word describing the two kinds of relationships, but there is a special line that nevertheless enjoy much of the same rights. A lot of them are OK with that, as long as they don’t feel taken away.
Practically speaking, this still enables the other marriage equality couples to have the same rights. There’s really nothing lost, except, of course, nomenclature. It’s important to find exactly the right wording, so that neither of those two sides feel that they’ve been slighted. That just might be it.
You think that’s something that’s likely to happen in the next couple of years?
I have no idea.
I remember in one interview I read that you said, and I might be misquoting you, I don’t have it right in front of me, but something to the effect that it’s impossible to have a Silicon Valley in Asia. Why is that?
Totally impossible. Silicon Valley is a tradition. It’s a culture. You don’t transplant cultures overnight. Moreover, Taiwan has its own SMEs, its own startup, its electronics, and a digitally‑enabled culture.
By saying, "We want to make Taiwan Silicon Valley," it’s absurd. It means both the impossibility of porting a foreign culture here, and also meaning destroying or absorbing the culture that’s already working pretty well here.
What are the aspects of the Silicon Valley culture that you think wouldn’t work particularly well here?
Just look at the current composition of the Taiwan working force. We don’t have that many foreign talents working here. You can still just speak English, and then everybody understands you, or just speak Mandarin, and everybody understands you.
It’s pretty homogeneous in the social media, which is, by the way, also why Facebook has the highest penetration in Taiwan. You don’t get pockets people of using different instant message tools and social media tools.
On top of this, we have a long history of building the components of electronics, anywhere from the mother board to the displays. Software tends to go into these tools or into these things, instead of existing by itself as an abstract thing. What Microsoft did was pretty unimaginable back in the day, that you can sell software independent of hardware.
We don’t have a very long culture of software existing independent of hardware here. I could say a lot more, but these are fundamental things.
You’re not a member of the DPP, or are you?
No, I’ve never been part of any party.
No party at all.
I don’t see the point.
You don’t see the point? Why not?
I have to pay monthly fees.
[laughs]
For what?
To be involved in political life.
I’m pretty involved in political life.
What’s your position on independence? Do you have a position?
Financial independence?
(laughter)
It’s a good thing.
No, you know what I mean.
No, you have to spell it out, sorry.
I mean Taiwanese independence.
The thing is that independence, just like financial independence, it’s not something that one can just magically say and it happens. It’s a relationship between you and Bitcoin...sorry, the financial community [laughs] that makes you independent.
You have to be recognized as having good credit or having something that people recognize as wealth, and have a maybe steady, passive income out of a market that guarantees this kind of income, which is a long‑term relationship with you. I’m talking about financial independence.
It’s the same with Taiwanese independence. Independence is a relationship with the international community. While I understand a lot of people in Taiwan are building that kind of relationship, it is a very good thing in my book.
Book, sorry?
Building this kind of relationship, internationally, which is a very good thing. These people from MoFA are working at it. [laughs] That’s their job.
It’s a good thing, but there is no point in saying a position on this kind of thing. One is either financially independent when it feels ready and their surrounding environmental things feel ready. You have it to earn it somehow or win the lottery. [laughs]
The same with international de jure independence.
But the political action, depending on whether you feel like it’s useful to have closer ties with the mainland. The actions you take are based on your views on the issue, no?
Yeah, but that’s not my department.
I’m just asking you, as a person.
The thing is that even after being the Digital Minister, I still taught classes in Hangzhou, China. Anyone who wants to learn from me, I wouldn’t turn them down. Of course my travel is somewhat limited.
(laughter)
I have to file any amount of papers to get anywhere outside Taiwan, which I also find intriguing. [laughs] But I have ways around that. I send my digital double. I send my avatars. I send robots.
I’m made a virtual reality space and connected a classroom in Hangzhou with a classroom in Kaohsiung, and sent digital doubles to the students, who put out those VIVE devices to have seen my lecturing. There are ways around that, and I see those as inconveniences.
The whole thing is that my work is for the enjoyment of anyone who happens to run across it and understand it. I don’t see a paradox between my work and closer tie to anyone, any person. It’s a very individual‑to‑individual world view. In this kind of sharing, state is a harmful illusion.
How so?
If, just based on state, you refuse to share knowledge. We have never seen a license, an open source, an open culture license like that. We’ve never seen a part Wikipedia that says, "Unless you’re from this country, you can’t access it," or, "Everybody can access it but people from this country." It’s counterproductive. We, of course, want to include contributions from everybody.
Give me just one minute to scan my notes and make sure I didn’t miss something important.
Anything that you think is really important that we haven’t talked about that hasn’t been covered in the other background interview, or things that you would like to say? I always ask that.
What’s the word you used? Teleological? That’s a very interesting view. Have you see the movie "Arrival?"
No, I almost watched it on the plane, but I didn’t see it.
I make a lot of my presentations using just emojis and not writing. That’s my default mode of making slides. This is actually usually how I do my slides. Making slides this way, you have to see the movie to understand what I’m saying. [laughs] The idea is that it’s not particular to cause and effect, writing order, or any particular culture.
These logograms are supposed to present the world as I see it, or as my perspective of it, not what happens so as to further some agenda, or some action to be taken, as to further some ideology. A lot of questions asked are based on this very linear cause‑and‑effect analysis.
The important thing is I don’t think in these terms, which is why I have to un‑ask a bunch of your questions, not out of debating. It’s just not that way.
No, I’m just trying to understand where you’re coming from. I’m not sure I quite understand the point about the emojis.
The emojis are independent of culture. Everybody sees the same shapes and understands more or less the meanings. Everybody would pronounce it differently. Interpretations like this, for example, means facts, feelings, and ideas but it combines them in a way that everybody can give a different interpretation.
In my mind it just says that facts, feelings, and idea need to be considered at the same time. There’s no jumping to idea without facts and feelings and so‑on. Saying linear things like this doesn’t really convey my idea. The idea is in a much more visual form, is what I’m saying.
Thanks very much. I appreciate you taking the time to do the interview. As I’m writing this, if I have follow‑up questions, which I always do and will, can I email you?
Or just post on the ask.pdis.tw site. It’s this public forum that I sent you a link to where other journalists also...
Is that the one that you sent two days ago that you can post...?
OK, great, I will. Thanks very much.
Take care.