What would you like me to talk about?

I would like to talk about the g0v movement, what you think what are the changes after the Sunflower Movement. What is the place of g0v for Taiwanese society, about Internet and Internet liberty? After, I’m making a radio feature, and if you’re OK I will ask you in general one question about your position with China. It’s not for TV, but for the national radio.

I’m making a radio feature about the Taiwanese identity, and with what happens here now after the Sunflower Movement, and with China what happens now.

As a conservative anarchist, I’m probably the only public servant in the cabinet who doesn’t have a Taiwanese identity, so you’re going to have an incorrect sample...

...so not take that as representative. We don’t have that many anarchist Ministers around here.

You have two tablets, two computers...

You only used Mac or do you use Linux?

Here I use Ubuntu Linux on Windows 10.

That’s what I thought.

In here?

There’s six computing devices here. All right.

[laughs] Maybe let’s make a sound test first.

This is just for the sound test?

Just for the sound test. Can you make a short presentation of yourself?

A short presentation of myself?

Your name...

Hello. I’m Audrey Tang. I’m from the planet Earth. I hope that you’re hearing this also on the same planet, but if you happen to be elsewhere, good for you. In any case, I’m testing the sound. It’s like you can say whatever. I really like this microphone.

Your function here in Taiwan?

My function here, I’m the digital minister. As the digital minister, I talk to people and listen to people about everything around digital issues and instruments. It’s a channel between the private sector, the civil society, and the public sector.

One of the main reasons why the government wasn’t able to respond to the digital issues that quickly was that everybody was living a different subjective reality when it comes to this kind of issues. For words like "blockchain," everybody have different imaginations in their heads. If people do not take part in each others’ realities, we can’t do public discourse.

Actually, my main function is to get what everybody in all sectors all sharing what their imagination, what physical, psychological realities arise in response to this physical development, and then make sure that everybody else understands it. I’m a little bit like an investigative journalist working in the government, [laughs] trying to get a story, a narrative out of all the stakeholders.

Because I only see material that is freedom of information accessible, I don’t see any confidential material, I record and make a transcript of every meetings that I hold and have a discussion with people, the journalists actually have access to everything, all the meetings that I have, 10 days after every meeting.

It’s like I’m the frontline reporter who was recording raw material. The editors and investigative journalists then make better stories based on my preliminary work. It’s like I’m interviewing the government.

You’re the new digital minister here in Taiwan, a the new minister. It’s done after the Sunflower Movement. It was really an attempt from the Taiwanese society to have more freedom in Internet and in digital things?

Yes, this position started around late 2014, the year where the Sunflower Movement happened. One of the minister without portfolio around that time, Minister Jaclyn Tsai, started getting more assignments from the deputy premier around what they called the cyberspace issues.

For example, the human rights on the cyberspace, working across the cyberspace, or raising funds through the cyberspace, or any other healthcare and other things. That became her mandate. It’s just like a prototype of the digital ministry division. At that time I was working in g0v movement as a kind of technical advisor to Minister Tsai.

We called her the cyberspace minister, because that’s her mandate. On the other hand when I joined this cabinet, I was given a slightly wider mandate. It’s not just cyberspace and regulations and developments, it’s also an open government.

By which we mean, it’s not just this government’s relationship with the people around the Internet, but also using Internet technologies to transform the government itself so that we can work in a way that uses less paper, that is more efficient, and also respond to more stakeholders at the same time than the previous model where we tried to fit people into these public hearing rooms.

It’s about consultations. It’s also a more accountable arbitrator for all the policy‑making that we make. We’re digitally transforming not just the private sector and civil society as previously but also the government structure itself.

Did that work? There was a lot of people, for example, in the hackathon when you organized it with the g0v movement because there were a lot of people here.

In the g0v movement, we’re a loosely coupled anarchist movement, so nobody get to command anybody. Even the word "organized" itself is a little bit sloppy. We mostly just set up the dates, the places, and people show up and then determine their own agenda, whatever they want to do for that day or two days.

Then they become all participants and contributors and try to find each other, like playing music concertos and things like that, and then start to do something productive within the limit of one day or two. That’s how it all works.

In the government organization, that’s not usually how public servants work. Usually, they work from an agenda determined by the higher‑ups all the way to the premier and to the president. Now, after I joined the cabinet, I’ve tried to bring this kind of, "Everybody set your own objective, and I’m just the physical figure," this way of "leadership" into this office.

We’re a small office at the moment. We’re about 15 full‑time people and maybe 5 part‑time people. We’re still organizing, using a lot of online tools. We’re also trying to spread this culture to all the ministries. Every ministry has assigned one or two people to learn this kind of collaborative working with us so they can hold their own cross‑ministerial working groups.

The POs, the participation officers is now around 50 people.

When we see this in France, when we are looking for Taiwan and your new job, we think, oh my God, the young people is taking over. Everything is changing.

It is really the case. You can feel the change after two year after the Sunflower Movement?

Of course. The Sunflower Movement was a attempt of agenda setting by the civil society because they were tired that the government keeps using just the same logic of economic development, basically, to shape all the public policy agenda.

The civil society thinks that we should talk more about, perhaps, labor rights, human rights, education, LGBT rights, and that this right‑based narrative but also the traditionally more niche issues, such as freedom of Internet, then neutrality and so on.

These were considered trivial matters that didn’t show up on the higher‑up agenda, but the people who occupy the parliament consider this very important. They consider that the process itself, the transparency of the procedure, even more important than the result of the procedure.

The result could be 100 percent workable, but it is just five people making the decision, the rest of the society doesn’t get to hold them accountable, and it doesn’t get to respond. I think they found problem not with one or two policies, but how policies are being made.

That has changed completely. We are now regularly live streaming the multi-stakeholder meetings. We can, of course, do better in order to include more people in the participation, to raise awareness of the importance of proper process, the quality of output, how the text was written collaboratively — we’re looking at that. At least the format itself has changed to include as many stakeholders as possible.

For the next few years, after becoming the digital minister, wheat would you like for Taiwanese society?

I would like the professional public servants to trust the people more. Usually other governments in the world, they would ask the people to trust the government more. To me, trust is mutual. If you cannot really trust people more, it’s impossible for people to trust you back.

By trusting people I mean the things like the radical transparency that I’m practicing here, every meetings that I convene, every decision that I make, are published down to transcript level. Everybody who participate in the part of the process get to tell me what they think about my daily work.

I think that’s really good, the way that I’m showing the trust, that there’s nothing to hide for me. Based on this, we try to give more stakeholders to discover this way of working together with the government, and then input their ways and their own views.

Then we work based on these shared facts and their feelings. We work on these ideas, and work out the feasible ideas, because previously the ideas are good or bad there’s no arbitrary criteria. Now because we have a process to catalog all the facts and people’s feelings, we can now say the best idea is the idea that takes care of the most people’s feelings.

Now that we have a way to organize as a democracy, how good and bad ideas should rate each other.

OK. I just want to know how you feel with China in general, and you in particular with this movement that’s a little bit complicated. Do you feel Taiwan is after...

Do you say, "Hi, I’m Taiwanese."?

No, I say that I’m from Earth. [laughs] Did I not say that?

[laughs] OK. How do you feel about China?

I’m feeling OK, I guess.

Would you like it to be an independent country?

I don’t even care.

Do you feel the Taiwanese people cares about this?

Whether China is an independent country? I don’t think many people care about that.

Many people in Taiwan do care whether Taiwan is an independent country. Not a lot care about whether China is...

...no, but Taiwan...

About Taiwan, I think most people in Taiwan think that, one name or another, Taiwan is already a country. Whether a country that’s independent or not, that’s a more complicated question that I’m not equipped to answer.

Basically, it is an answer to be commonly determined by the whole international society, whether it’s independent or dependent. It’s not something that I can say and it magically happens.

Also, as an anarchist, I look for the contributions that every individual can make to the international community. If I make a contribution saying that only people in one country get to enjoy, to me it’s kind of exclusive.

A lot of my work here is around ensuring that international visitors, foreign people enjoy the same healthcare, the same labor rights, the same treatment to their families and their loved ones legally. It would be wrong for me to say that I want to build something that excludes people of a different country. All the work that I do is inclusive.

As a public servant, I try to extend the definition of "public" more than the usual members. I care deeply about animal welfare and animal rights, and also in the upcoming days, in the upcoming years, on ethic issues about artificial intelligences.

Animals and artificial intelligences, they know no countries. We can, of course, program some countries in, or have an electric fence or something around those drones, animals and so on, but what I’m saying is that they don’t share the same vocabulary, the same identity as you were asking about, as people educated in sovereign educational systems do.

I see myself as really an anarchist who identifies with more of the process of contribution itself and open sharing of the results of the contribution process, not around any particular nationality, statehood or whatever.

I understand this is a radical position, but I did make it very clear in writing before I joined the cabinet. The premier is OK with an anarchist minister, he’s OK with that. Note I’m not progressive — in the sense that I don’t try to inflict this idea on my fellow cabinet members or indeed to any individual that I meet.

I’m a conservative anarchist, meaning that I just want to conserve this way of doing things, this consensus‑based way that Internet gets built, instead of trying to say the whole society should work like this. I’m not sure that society is ready to work like this, and nor is this model ready to be deployed to the whole society yet.

I’m very much still in a phase of just listening, understanding and evolving this anarchist model in parallel, and also in collaboration with the world.

And about the gay marriage? Is it gay marriage? Will we have a date when the Parliament should debate about this?

Sure. I think what will happen first is the Supreme Court will make a decision. The Supreme Court will hear this March 21st. After the Supreme Court rule about its constitutionality, this is the pre‑requisite for the parliament to even debate this.

If they’ve ruled that marriage equality is unconstitutional, the parliament can’t do anything constitutionally without changing the constitution. That said, we pretty much are not expecting this worst case scenario. They will probably say it’s constitutional, with some provisions maybe.

I’m not a Supreme Court judge and I’m working in the executive branch, so it’s not my place to guess what provisions they might make. Afterwards I think parliament will then take the draft bill that was drafted in previous session and then start debating on it line by line.

They will be informed by the constitutionality provisions that the Supreme Court rules. The process of which will strongly depend on the exact wording that the Supreme Court uses. That will determine the process. It’s too early to tell.

What is your position about it?

Well I’m post‑gender, meaning that I don’t care about people’s gender... Of course, a lot of people care about the seriousness of marriage. Taiwan does have one of the highest divorce rates for a while in the world. I think it’s true that people want to care about that marriage still mean something.

I think those people who are for marriage equality and people who are for more conservative family lives, they both want marriage to mean something. That’s their common point.

Also, it’s very good news that the society is able to reason about this complicated issue, which is strongly reflecting the freedom of speech and equality that we’re now enjoying.

Just 20 years ago we wouldn’t even have a decision about this, not even a constitutional interpretation. It will be a landmark event one way or another. For me, I just want the whole process to be as inclusive and as transparent as possible, so that no matter what the actual wording of the bill says in the end, all of society would have felt that, OK, we got deeper in this conversation as before, not simply determined by a handful of judges and legislators without any society dialogue. As we previously said, that will be actually less preferable than a slightly more vague law, but that’s nevertheless determined by the entire society, so that people can live with it.

Something that we can all live with is better than something that’s perfect, but only one half of people can live with.

It will be a popular vote?

You mean a referendum?

Yeah.

That depends on what the Supreme Court says.

OK then. That was all of my questions.

Thank you very much.