You are based here?

Yes. It’s my office.

We’re happy with the show on the 24th?

Sure, very much so.

I’m happy you’ve been happy with it.

Very professional interviews. Then, people ask me to sign all sort of things after that. [laughs]

There you go. That’s good publicity. I’m sorry, because I didn’t send you any draft in between.

No, that’s fine. Very used to this. [laughs]

There’s definitely two topics we’re going to tackle today. The first one, the portrait, I want a feature of you on the French magazine I’m also writing for, which is called "Technikart," which is a little techy, but kind of edgy and everything.

What we are trying to do in Technikart is to tackle whatever’s called power. You’re the right person to do so. Then there’s part of the discussion I want to have with you about an upcoming book I’m trying to put together right now. You’ll see we’ll dive into this discussion. It’s about what we could call digital elites.

Digital what?

Elites.

Ah, elites.

You’ll tell me if you feel you’re part of them, or not, or frightened of them for some reason. I was attending a workshop with my friend and your friend, Michael Lin from MIT, yesterday. He says, "Hi."

[laughs] I’m just a tweet away.

Let me see how this is work. It’s bring you to me in a more digital journalist way. It’s fun. I think it will work.

That’s fine. We can also send you our recording.

That’s great. We’ll have a doublecheck recording. Let me see if it works. I can’t put...No, I’ll do this this way. We’re at the Social Lab which is the innovation place when it comes to Taiwanese ecosystem. I’m sitting with Audrey Tang. Hi, Audrey.

Hello. Welcome to the Taiwan Social Innovation Lab.

I wanted to sit with you for a very good reason. You’re the secretary of digital when it comes to the government of Taiwan, but you’re way more than this. Before entering government, you were a hacker.

I’m still a civic hacker. A civic hacker is someone who looks at systemic issues in the society and creates social innovations, innovates with people in order to solve common social environmental issues. We’re not a cyber security hacker, which is like white hat or black hat hackers. We are hackers of no hats.

While under in government, did you feel that, for some reason, you had to cut into your core values as a hacker again, or are you more trying to bring to the government or an institution the hacker type of mold?

Actually, I’m working with the government, not for or in the government. By working with the government, I have three principles going in. That is radical transparency. Everything that I hear, every meeting that I chair, is published to the Internet.

Location independence. I can work anywhere, including here in the Social Innovation Lab. All my team is formed through a voluntary association of all the different ministries in Taiwan. We have 32 vertical ministries, each with one minister.

I’m one of the horizontal ministers. My office is literally one person at most from each ministry. Technically, I can have 32 colleagues. At the moment, I have 22.

Would you say that’s in a way breaking silos?

I would also say it’s not actually challenging existing silos or disrupting them. We’re merely providing a complementary horizontal relationship between the silos, so that people can get into the habit of what we call working out loud, which is not afraid of letting other ministries know what your agency or ministry is doing.

That is at the core of open innovation and introducing it in the public service actually increase the personal credit, success, and self fulfillment of the public service. While I absorb all the risk, so far, I pretty much get all the support from the different ministries that send dispatch to my office.

Of course, there are exceptions. For example, the Ministry of Defense have yet to send any dispatch, but that’s very understandable.

The previous secretary of digital actually also took part in some government or politics hackathons with g0v hackers, as based in the community, being part of it for so long, which is such a tradition here in Taiwan, to try to bring together what the e-government or civic tech could bring to politics.

Very much so. In Taiwan, we’re very unique in having a directly elected president who appoints the premier, who appoints the cabinet, and that’s us. Because of that, it’s a separate branch from the legislative. Because of that, in the cabinet, there’s more independent ministers than ministers of any party.

You can’t say that for many other liberal democracies. Because of this, we’re much more neutral when it comes to party politics. When we’re drafting our regulations, our policies ready them for the parliament’s review we can operate in the way that is truly multi-stakeholder and less interfered by party politics.

Which happens, if I’m not mistaken, on vTaiwan which is a platform where citizen can...There we go. We have an interaction of a future voice on V Taiwan here.

From what I read, over the past few days, even legislation has been passed on Uber taking into account what citizen have been saying on V Taiwan. Is it something super genuine when it comes to the making of the law here? Is it this tool you would use once in a while?

It’s both. For all the regulatory pre announcements, all the regulations, and all the policy drafts, and all the draft of bills and so on need to be announced on e-participation platform. Unlike other governments’ e-participation platform where it is mostly posting a draft bill and asking people to write emails, this is a back and forth conversation.

You can see thousands of ongoing projects, and all the budgets, KPIs, procurements, and so on in a very well informed fashion in e-participation platform. Anyone who gather 5,000 people of e-petition signatures can summon me personally along with any ministries involved to have a real discussion around whatever people are petitioning for.

What I’m saying is that first there is a baseline of participation for all the budgets and all the projects. For things that people pay attention to, as evidenced by 5,000 of petition and so on, then we pay special attention and use a multi-stakeholder consultation.

We can’t afford to run the same process for all the thousands of policies. One, we’ve focused, instead, on what the people tell us that are most important to them.

I don’t know if you’ve been following closely the grand débat we had in France over the Yellow Vest Movement. Do you think that it’s a new form of direct democracy that could be brought to Europe? Of course, European election are coming. We’re definitely craving for more political debate there.

I think the grand debate is one of the, what we call, social innovations. It’s participatory meaning that people have agenda-setting power. Although the government initially said a few topics that they want to discuss, people discuss whatever they want to discuss and the participating real agenda setting. That proves that democracy is not just voting every two years or every four years.

In information science terms, that would be like two bits of information uploads every two years and four years. That is not enough information to inform what the government is doing. This day-to-day democracy, continuous democracy underlies both the Grand Debate as well as what I said, the e-petition, the participatory budgeting, and everything here.

It lets people, whenever they think that there is a social issue that need to be tackled by cross-sectoral partnership, they can raise the awareness to the entire society. They don’t have to wait until the election voting day.

Elections are coming here, too, in 2020, January, if I’m not mistaken again. Do you think Taiwanese people are craving for political debate still even though there are background question when it comes to mainland and those type of topics? Would you say that Taiwanese citizen and voters per se, even in the design even before being citizens?

Very much so. In Taiwan, as we have seen the previous referenda, people put into a lot of energy into getting the signatures required for having binding referendum. We also learned from the previous referendums that people are craving for more well versed discussions, well informed discussions.

Before the results of the referendum are in people are already saying, "We wish that people who propose counter referendum to each other have more time to deliberate on that particular issues." We’re switching to a more nuanced, more deliberate pace of conversation before referendums.

There’s a draft bill amendment in the Parliament now that relaxes the time constraint when the signature being gather into the next election for referendum to pass so that the future referendums, not only that we hope that it will not violate any United Nations resolutions on human rights and so on. This is a e-petition subject, but also that it is given more time for real deliberation and debate.

Some of the Taiwanese e-government features make me think a lot about Estonia, of course. Would you say that there’s also a question of scale, Estonia having like 1.3 million inhabitants, there’s 23 inhabitants here in Taiwan? Is that a question of scale or of mindset?

I think it’s most of a broadband access. If in a society many people have broadband access, or indeed the majority of people has, then it feels that there is less of digital gap when we introduce e-governance.

If in a country where there is a spanning landmass where only a few percent of people have true broadband access, then they can very easily reinforce existing inequalities. In Taiwan we’re very fortunate in having broadband as a human right, meaning that in Taiwan you can have unlimited 4G for less than 20 Euros per month.

If anywhere in Taiwan, even in a remote island, you don’t have 10 Megabits per second, it’s my fault, you can talk to me. Because of these conditions, Taiwanese people enjoy a high degree of e-participation without worrying about mounting inequalities.

We have measured, for example, the age groups of our e-participation, and people around 15 years old and 65 years old are the two M shaped [laughs] participation groups. We don’t have that much of intergenerational issues when it comes to e-participation. Everybody is very willing to participate in public debates in the Internet.

Our remaining challenges is perhaps through the indigenous cultures as well as new migrants, but for Mandarin-speaking and English-speaking people, I think we have a really good, inclusive e-participation landscape.

Inclusion and trust are definitely the two words which are actually the base to build upon an e-government and really efficient e-administration.

We have a way of saying. We say, "We don’t ask people to come to the space of technology. We ask the technologists to bring their technologies to people."

This is why in the Social Innovation Lab here I have the office hours. You are in my office hour, but I also actively tour around Taiwan to go to the rural places, indigenous places, offshore islands, and so on, and have a face to face conversation with the coops, NGOs, and social entrepreneurs.

While I do that, thanks to broadband as a human right, we have people here in the Social Innovation Lab, the Public Service from 12 ministries to participate through two way telepresence to see whatever I see, to hear whatever I hear so that people can build rapport, that is to say trust to the central ministries.

The central ministries’ people don’t treat those localities as abstract numbers or PowerPoint slides or thing like that, but actually real breathing people. We help building that kind of facilitative ecosystem so that anywhere in Taiwan, anyone want to summon this two way conversation can do it through a youth council or through the social innovation tools or through e-petition.

Coming back to your path as a hacker being an official of the government right now, how do you feel coming from more of a counterculture and type of the Internet and your style bringing that spirit into government?

Would you say that at some point that will lead us to a very interesting discussion I guess on what could be called the digital elites at some point? What do you think about, again, counterculture versus a more normalized culture?

I think I’m not from a counterculture as Buckminster Fuller put it. If you see a system that is old and that is broken, don’t bother to fix it. Rather build something new that makes that old system obsolete. That’s my theory of change. It is complementing existing political systems.

I’m not trying to fix or disrupt or challenge it, so I wouldn’t classify myself as counterculture. I think I’m more from the future, and [laughs] as we know the future is already here. It’s just not actively and evenly distributed.

The idea of social innovation is simply to get the latest in the cutting edge thinking of the futurists. For example, there is a new voting system called quadratic voting that allows people to cast votes in the terms of points.

Everybody gets 99 points and for one vote you spend one point, two vote four points, three vote nine points, and so on. That will maximize the preferential utility of each vote’s cast.

Thanks to the social innovation system, we adapt that and actually used this in the last week’s Presidential Hackathon. Taiwan is actually the first country to use at a country national level, a real election and for Presidential Hackathon topics, data collaboratives as we put it, a general population of quadratic voting system.

This is just one of our democratic innovation examples, but what I’m getting at is that this is not a counterculture. We’re not fighting the one person, one vote system. We’re just bringing our new systems and showing the people where it actually makes more sense to do so.

Which would actually please our friend Glen Weyl, I guess, which is a fierce defender of the...

...of QV, yes.

Exactly. Would you say it also relies on a new way to rethink the Internet as we know it? Of course, we have Tim Berners-Lee broadly speaking about the fact that basically his printer has been taken under monopolies by a monetized form of the Internet platforms.

That we probably need to go back to the basics and to a more pure decentralized vision of it or mindset of it. Would you say in this way that a forum could be the future of Internet?

Yeah. For the Presidential Hackathon actually Glen Weyl as well as Vitalik Buterin have personally recorded recordings to explain to the Taiwanese people why this kind of voting is a good idea.

Because of that, I think it is not just one future or one vision we’re making toward. What we’re doing essentially is forming new, what we call, data collaboratives.

Any Presidential Hackathon team, we select 20 teams as a cohort each year, and each team need to have three kind of people. There need to be a technologist versed in data and code.

There need to be a domain expert versed in the sustainable development code that this innovation is trying to achieve, and there need to be a regulatory public service expert that is well versed in how to translate this idea into the existing administrative system.

If a team comes and they only have one of the three players, we actually coach them to form those trilingual teams that makes it possible to not only maximize the impact but actually bring the innovation into everyday life.

After three months of co-creation, the President herself presides over the Demo Day and select five winning teams, and there’s no money. What they have is a trophy that is a projector. When turned on, it shows the President herself giving that trophy to the people, so it’s very useful in internal negotiations.

What it symbolizes is a Presidential promise. Whatever the proof of some concept the five winning teams has proved in the three months the President and me, personally, promise by the end of the next fiscal year whatever their idea is, we do whatever it takes to change regulations, budgets, and whatever to make that idea into public service and support it indefinitely.

Through this way, what we’re saying is that not what our vision of innovations is for the society, but rather what the society through quadratic voting and through trilingual partnerships can go back to the agendas that empower and change the presidential platform by way of data collaboratives.

In a way, we’ve been seeing over the past few seasons, a lot of user backlashing on technologies. Even though those people and citizen per se, are really good users of technology, they don’t want to buy more of it, just for the reason of privacy, just for the reason of fake news, just for the reason that basically technology has been invading their lives, and not in a way they want to be.

We’ve seen also platforms on the other end, understanding that type of backlash, and trying to redeem themselves, but way less demanding from their users actually. Are we on a threshold of a change here?

I do think so. I think people are becoming more aware. Thanks to advanced regulations like GDPR, and so on, that there was a exploitive externalities that fueled the current, what many scholars have said as a surveillance capitalism. I think even the capitalist themselves have realized that this is not sustainable because trust is not a renewable resource.

If you deplete trust, if you lose the fiduciary relationship with the so-called users, then basically what is left is just manufacturer addiction. Even that doesn’t last. I think people are more and more aware that if you build a relationship with the people, not users, it needs to be a relational. It’s not transactional. That’s what GDPR means.

It means that once I give you my data, we begin a relationship in which that I can hold you to account, I can ask you to explain, to be portable and things like that. The more you honor that relationship, the more satisfactory that our database collaborative relationship would be.

I think we’re having a sea change, at least here in Taiwan, to shift away from the more commodity-based "data as oil" metaphor which doesn’t work anymore, and into a more data as beginning of a relationship metaphor.

On the other end, we were, of course, talking about the societal issues when it comes to technology, and the way again, we’re somehow backfiring in technology. There was also the other part of it, the economical version of it, way more monopoly than there used to be out there in this world, against cyber maybe.

Still, do you think that global platforms...they could be Asian, they could be American, whatever they are. Actually, do they have some political or societal project for us?

I think, first of all, they no longer identify as any particular nationals. When I talked to those multinationals, I really do feel like they’re semi sovereign and doing semi diplomacy, simply because that most of their agenda are now made in the world, but rather than made in any particular country.

That said, I do think that there are some commonalities between the large platforms and that of a government, namely that we both value trust and our people, the people who trust our services. Basically, because of the monopolistic situation you just pointed out, they have little other choice. That is pretty much the same with government.

If you don’t like the tax filing experience, it’s not like you can find another tax filing experience. [laughs] Because of that, I think we’re all paying much more attention, not just to efficiency and certainty of service delivery, but on the systemic injustices that our policies could actually cause, and other ways to actively remedy those injustices, and also making it more democratic.

In terms of governance, what the existing open source ecosystem have showed us, and what the blockchain governance projects have showed us is that it is possible actually, in a risk profit mindset -- not just for profit, risk profit mindset -- to introduce a sense of governance back into it, so that it’s not a pure cooperative, but it’s not a pure for profit either. It’s something in between.

These hybrid organizations, there’s many names like B Corps, or benefit organizations, social innovations organizations, and so on. I think just the people on both sides of the spectrum focusing on public good and governance on one side, and on profit and monopolistic power on the other side, trying to converge somewhere in the middle, that realizes our common values without sacrificing each other’s positions.

Yet, if you take the Yellow Vest phenomenon for instance in France, even though they never really named it this way, what they’re somehow showing us is that probably some part of...France is part of what’s called the startup nation, whatever it actually means. They don’t want to be part of it, because first, they don’t feel they belong.

Second, with all these researches and analysis about the fact that we’re going to break 30 to 50 percent of the jobs as we know them by 2030, because of automation, because of privatization, because of AI, they’re telling us, "Yeah, but that’s our jobs you’re going to crash, basically."

"We don’t want to buy the part of the story where you’re telling us that 6 out of 10 jobs in the future have not been created yet and that we probably can create them together. Again, what we are focused on is pay in the end of the month, not saving the end of the world."

From your perspective, how can we reconcile both parts, and try to actually make a social contract 4.0, if you may, work?

I think it’s not really a point of creating or losing jobs. I think it is more of human dignities, and how people feel that they are needed by the society and fulfill the society’s needs. That is why we’re seeing much more of an emphasis, as I said, on social innovation organizations, what we call platform cooperatives, where people take control of the platform.

If a platform reduces people’s dignity, then just don’t add that feature. If you have a true governance model where the workers and the people who are impacted, the stakeholders, can collectively decide -- quadratic voting or not -- the collective future of that particular platform, then you don’t tend to have that kind of conversation.

You tend to have the conversation as we had in the Presidential Hackathon, like how to solve water leakage problems using machine learning. How to make the remote islands enjoy more clinical benefits by introducing tele-diagnostics, and e-health, and things like that.

It’s the same technology, but it is not maximizing profit. It is maximizing the people part of it, the partnership part of it, the planet part of it, the peace part of it. The profit is just a by product of solving a problem really well.

The inverted priorities here, by placing profit over the other important pillars is really at the core here. I’m not advocating, of course, pure socialism, but having a really good reflective lens through which the people can see the planet and people externalities that each for-profit actions take and holding those accountable, is a really good first step.

Once people become aware of the negative externalities those for-profit steps take, then people are less likely, even the investors, to invest in such negative externalities. Just making those reliable numbers accountable and making sure that people commit to whatever sustainable goals that they say they are committing to, keeping people honest is a really good first step.

I heard that people won’t use technology they don’t understand, or they don’t trust. How do you intend to make those forums of new direct democracy usable or super seamless when it comes to their utilization or usage?

By making it really easy to deploy. I usually use the example of fire. Fire was a civilization defining technology, but it also has its dangers. It has destroyed whole cities and so on.

We mitigate against the risk of fire, not by restricting fire to a certain elite class of people and telling those early pyromancers or whatever can dominate the fire use in the society, but rather by teaching cooking to every child, and teaching them the harms, the dangers of fire, while they can wield fire responsibly and make food for their friends and families.

This is very akin to how we deploy technologies. In Taiwan, we have media literacy, critical thinking right in the K-12 curriculum.

They learn that if they have a different worldview, if they want to improve society in a way that is non-conforming to the existing technologies companies ways, then they have all the support of, as I said, bandwidth and broadband as human rights of free access to all the open collective intelligence datasets of the GPU and AI computation, and all these things like that.

People can wield AI just like people wield fire when they are in a very young age. I think that the democratization of these technologies is really the only way to empower the citizens to understand how is it like to get data steward.

Once you have the experience, the firsthand experience of running an air quality measurement device on your balcony as a data steward, then you begin to understand the tradeoffs that Google, or Facebook, or other data platforms are having.

Before you have that firsthand experience, you won’t know actually the right question to ask of those data platforms. Having firsthand experience right in the K-12 education, I think one of the most important things for digital literacy in all countries.

If we do acknowledge there’s some workers on this digital economy landscape, we could probably also agree on the fact that there are digital elites on the other hand. How would you define them? Do you feel you’re part of this digital elite per se?

The word hacker originally means a carpenter that makes their own tools. Anyone who can reshape existing tools to fit the societal need, to put in, I think the word is bricolage, to put in whatever the tools are at hand. It may be snippets on GitHub. It may be snippets on Stack Exchange. It may be Arduino hardware, Raspberry Pi, and to improvise a solution that society needs.

That is the spirit of a civic hacker, and I do think that it is somewhat elite. The defining characteristic of the hacker ethic is that we want to maximize the number of people who have this capacity.

That is why we support the freedom of association, assembly, journalism, and things like that, by making sure that people with concerns can always very easily get the access to the tools that amplify those concerns. We’re not hoarding the power, and our power is that of a network making power. It’s not a power within a network.

Speaking of networks, would you think that the elites would be more global because we’re talking about digital and more open minded?

Of course, we’re also talking about digital, or would you in a way say they do belong to this platformization of the world and the vision that will tend to actually harmonize what we’re thinking about, the way we do access information and the way we do politic. The way we get any good online.

Either in a way some here, we could have that form of harmonization on the Internet.

I think it’s not just about the social ends, the social goals. If you ask any large platform, of course, they tell you that they’re working toward the betterment of humanity. All of them do.

I don’t think it is just about the goals. I think it’s also about the means to achieve the goals. I think the key question to ask is that can I fork your project? Meaning that, can I take whatever you’re offering me and take it to a different direction? Is it possible to reuse the part of your work, without subscribing to your agenda? If people answer yes, if their project can be forked, just like most of the blockchain governance nowadays, then I do think that it is then of a global nature.

They are willing to give up control, even artistic control over their projects, so that people can appropriate those technologies to create appropriate technologies that fits a local context. If they say no, do you have to pay a licensing fee, do you have to subscribe to our agenda, or patterns, or things like that, then I don’t think that they are of a truly global nature.

I think there would be a colonizing spirit, that want to impose their part of the world view into the world. That is mostly detrimental, I think, in nature.

While I do see and empathize with the idea of world optimization, as some people in Silicon Valley says, I do think that a collaboration among different people and respecting people’s cultural differences, is much more important than optimizing for any particular utility functions.

Just as here in social innovation lab, we’re trying, for example, self driving tricycles. We’re observing the new social norms, that is gathering people around those self driving vehicles. Here in Taiwan, people expect those vehicles to first yield to the elderly, and then women, and then people with disabilities, and finally children.

The priorities here is difference. Where the vehicles are manufactured in Boston, the MIT actually run an online test. It’s actually the other way around. People prefer the vehicles to yield to children first, and the elder the last. There’s no right or wrong in those different social norms.

What is really wrong is to take one social norm, and through digital platform agenda setting or amortization, to expect every part of the world to subscribe to the same value system.

Would you say that "tech for good," it’s like a new tagline, and so many other digital types of trendy places? Tech for good is like, what, tech washing in a way?

No. I think social innovation, of course, is about the common good in the goals, but it’s also about wide participation in the means.

When we say "tech for good," I think we overemphasize the ends, the goals part, while making it not so clear the idea of open innovation -- it really allows everybody, even empowering the people who don’t even know that they could be impacted, to first let them understand through, for example, your journalistic work, how people could be impacted, and then letting people understand that they could also be agenda setters in technologies.

I think this part is missing in many "tech for good" narratives. Again, if you just have technologies for the people, you tend to forget about the technology with the people, but it’s the "with the people" part of this important.

You actually tackle the very forward question I wanted to ask you about. Again, how do we go back to this narrative and bring those people who are now opposing the fact of belonging to this digital society? How do we bring them back to the table, and try to create the society with it? Believe it or not, we’ll have to live together in the near future. Right?

That’s right. I think the answer is not bringing them into technology. It’s bringing technology to these people. I think if you have a good social design, it should feel natural to the people involved. If people are not used to, for example, using smartphones to do participatory budgeting, you can use whatever they’re using.

It could be automated teller machines or ATMs. The idea of appropriate technology or social innovation is not really that it has to be new globally, that you can file a patent on it. It just has to be new to the particular segment of society, that they can feel that they benefit from it, and can understand it, and can steer its directions.

It has to be new in only that local sense. It’s not new in the global pattern sense. Just by making sure that we apply whatever the appropriate technology is on the local level, we can bring the technology to people.

People can continue to have town halls, to have the tribal gatherings of village elders and so on, where just a digital minister, that’s me, is participating as one of the facilitator in using 360 live stream and other technologies, so that they can summon the people here in the capital city in Taipei to join their tribal meetings.

We’re not using technologies to say, "Hey, everybody here has to install some web browser, install an app," or things like that. We’re bringing ourselves, the technologists, into whatever the people are feeling comfortable with. That’s an ethnographic approach, or in plain language, just hanging out with people. I think that is very important for all technologists.

Would you say that we are in the end, heading to a post-digital type of society?

I do think that maybe in a decade or so, there will not be a role of digital minister, because other ministers will finish the digital transformation and reimagine their relationships in a co-creative future. Maybe we will still have analog ministers, [laughs] to talk with the analog world.

I think these next 10 years or so, where the digital transformation happens, is that we will stop attaching like e-whatever. It used to be fashionable in an email to say, "Oh, it’s nice to e-meet you." It’s not fashionable anymore. People just meet each other. Email is just one of the ways of writing mail. Now people just say mail.

They don’t even say email anymore. I think dropping the "e-" prefix, I think, is really the key to digital transformation. Only when we stop saying e-government or e-participation, it’s just governments, it’s just participation, then we can truly realize the dreams of digital transformation, which is let us re-understand the idea of how people can listen to each other at scale.

Is there anything you want to add to this conversation?

I would just like to quote one of my favorite songs from Leona Cohen, that says, "There is a crack in everything. And that is how the light gets in." While the current digital world has a lot of gaps, a lot of inequalities, injustices, those are actually the lights, the cracks that allow people to discover each other, and to find our common values.

As you quoted Sir Tim Berners-Lee, we are here to rediscover the purpose of the web and let the web to be the connecting force that connects the forces together.

Thank you very much.