Great, OK, lovely.
I just started.
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Audrey Tang, thanks for taking the time for this conversation. The main topic is corona and data. What did Taiwan do right, overall?
Good local time, everyone listening, really happy to be here virtually.
What did Taiwan do right in the measures to fight corona in your view?
It’s our second time around. The first time, we didn’t do much more than panicking, buying N95 masks, the central government saying different things from the municipal government, barricading, locking down entire hospital unannounced, 73 people dead, and all that was in 2003. Eventually, we got around and put SARS 1.0 behind us.
In 2004, a constitutional court in Taiwan charged the legislature to review everything we did wrong in 2003 and set up a new mechanism, the Central Epidemic Command Center, to make sure that the communication’s not only timely, but also make sure the collective intelligence, that is to say citizen’s input, can reach the CECC in a timely fashion.
I usually say it’s fast, it’s fair, and it’s fun. The fast part is this toll-free number, 1-922, that anyone can call and report anything that happens. For example, when we were rationing out masks, a young boy called saying, “Hey, you’re rationing out pink masks to me. I don’t want to wear it to school.”
The very next day, in the daily 2:00 PM CECC press conference, everyone wore pink medical masks. That is a brilliant gender mainstreaming, and increased the mask use almost immediately.
The second pillar, the fair part, pertains to reaching more than three-quarter of population washing their hands and wearing their mask, and ensuring through the single-payer, National Health Insurance card, more than 99.99 percent of not just citizen, but also resident can have access to the rationed mask in nearby pharmacies and later on in convenience stores.
By April, we’re pretty sure the basic transmission rate has dropped below 1.0. Finally, the fun part pertains to humor over rumor, meaning that whenever there’s a panic-buying conspiracy theories and so on, we make sure that there’s this very cute Shiba Inu saying, “Wear a mask to protect yourself against your own unwashed hands.”
It’s very cute, so people share it much more than conspiracy theories. When we introduce physical distancing, we say, “When you’re indoor, keep three Shiba Inus away from one another.” or, “If you’re outdoor, keep two dogs away from another. Otherwise, wear a mask.” The signs and clarification reach more people than the panic buying and conspiracy theories.
It’s interesting. It goes back to 2004 in some way, an awareness that it is about citizen participation and better flow of information. 2004, wasn’t the peak digital time. It was, in a way, pre-digital. Can you explain that to us, how that was…
In 2004, already there’s this notion of civic participation. It’s true that we didn’t at that time have broadband as human right, 10 megabits per second. No matter where you are in Taiwan, you’re guaranteed to have unlimited 10 megabits per second for just â¬16 per month. Of course, we didn’t have that.
On the other hand, for example the toll-free number is already firmly part of our response plan. Even in the most rural or remote areas, you’re guaranteed to have access to landline, to public telephone booths or, at that time, it’s probably about ADSL, and things like that.
In a sense, of course, nowadays our bandwidth is much wider than that in 2004. The central idea of the daily press conference, a single communication agency, the toll-free number, everything like that. Also the national single-payer healthcare system is already in place.
In 2003, the smaller island, the Pescadores Islands, Penghu, already has an IC card. Instead of a paper card, they are already piloting the IC card for the healthcare access. We found that it’s very useful when you’re making sure that, for example, people in clinics have the access to the previous prescription history
It’s essential for the Pescadores Islands for run that pilot, because people understood that when SARS 1.0 came, that’s why the Penghu Island’s response much better actually [laughs] than the main Taiwan Island. The very next year, i 2004, we started rolling out the IC cards island-wide.
It’s interesting to understand that this crisis is more than a health crisis. It’s connected to how society works. It’s a societal issue. That’s key in what you’re saying. The way the state is conceived, the way citizens feel represented, the way that their participation works, that’s key to solving a crisis like that.
Definitely, because just like we fought off the infodemic with no takedown, we also fought the pandemic with no lockdown. We all remember how bad lockdown was in 2003.
This basically enabled us to think of the all-of-society approach. We understand that lockdown may work for some time, but there’s real fatigue setting in, not to mention the restrictions on human rights, for example, on education and access to healthcare, when in lockdown mode.
We really need to hit the number of three-quarter of people wearing mask and washing their hands as early as possible, in order to prevent a scenario where we’ll be forced to lockdown. This is of course the people public-private partnership, where those coalitions came in.
I’ve been talking about the ministry of health here, and in terms of the digital ministry has a certain relevance for this issue, because data played a big role in solving this or in preventing this crisis. Could you explain a little, the digital ministry that you lead, how it works, and how it’s related to your work in combating corona.
Sure. I must say that digital plays only an assistive role. The most important technology here are chemical, [laughs] soap and sanitizers, and also physical vaccine, that is to say the mask, digital maybe the third most important.
With that said, we do use a lot of novel data applications. For example, there’s this app developed by citizens, civic hackers as we call them here, that just visualizes all the nearby pharmacies’ availability of mask. There’s actually more than one hundred different implementations of this.
When I click on one, it shows that in my vicinity, the pharmacies that run out of mask are in red, and those that still have some masks are in green. People who queue in can actually just take out their phone and check through this participatory accountability, like this number of adult and children’s masks are in stock.
The people queuing before them, once they swipe the IC card, people queuing after them can actually see it depleted by 9 or 10, which is the allotted quota. If they detect any anomaly, they can just call 1-822 to report that.
When we render the mass production in a country of 23 million, from 2 million a day to 20 million a day, everybody can see that it’s actually going to the pharmacies and later on convenience stores.
Also, people can make evidence-based interpolation and critiques about, for example, how the urban and rural area people did not have the same opportunity. The rural people would have to spend more time on public transportation to get access to a nearby pharmacy, because although it looks fair on the map, the map is not equally accessible through public transportation.
That’s why we later on augmented it with the 12,000 convenience stores and so on. The data plays two roles here. One is about this alignment. Everybody can see that pharmacies are really aligned with the value of getting as many people masks as possible, but also it’s accountable.
Not only everybody can check it, but everybody can suggest better distribution methodologies, but we do not collect new data in the name of pandemic. All those innovations I just mentioned are just using the data in the existing collection method.
Like in a pharmacy, for people who show up to get a refill on the chronic prescriptions, they already use the IC card in exactly the same experience. Instead of new data collection points, we just use the data in a more creative, in this sense, an open API fashion to enable these people a public-private partnership.
That’s something very important to understand and how, for example, these digital anchors work, because there’s on the part of Western countries, often the question that there’s maybe protection of privacy and some data measures. Maybe it’s important that you explain that approach which is clearly a bottom-up approach in a way.
We call it participatory self-surveillance. It is true that in the higher-risk places, like host bars and hostess bars, for example, in the nightlife district, they do require that their patrons basically leave some way to be contacted.
It could be a pseudonym, it could be a prepaid SIM card, it could be a throw-away email address. They do require you to leave some way to contact you if there’s a local transmission that happened there. After a few weeks, if nothing happens there, they literally shred that scratch pad, and at no point do the nightlife business owners hand those data over to the central government, to the CECC.
It’s distributed decentralized, and preserves the pseudonymity or anonymity valued by such patrons to a nightlife district. It’s decentralized, in a sense that people can verify it by themselves that this is actually physically destroyed if there’s no transmission cases. I would say it’s privacy preserving.
The citizen hacker, how does that work? In Germany, you have this approach that the government set up a group which also then actually did a hackathon, so that was quite advanced for understanding of these measures. How did that happen in Taiwan?
In Taiwan, there’s already a community called gov-zero, or g0v, and it’s basically by saying all the digital service the government provides something, the gov.tw, can be forked, meaning taken to a different direction, but preserving its core value by something, the g0v.tw.
Literally, changing a letter to a digit in your browser bar gets you into the shadow government, which is always more fun and participatory, and is always under an open source or free-software license, meaning that the other people can also fork it and also the government.
If we understood that, for example, the map visibility is much better that whatever PDF or tables that the NHIA, the National Health Insurance Agency’s rolling out, then we can do a reverse procurement basically for filling their data on these, and then just retroacting to the citizen hackers’ implementation.
I personally curate this list of more than one hundred implementations that, for example, showed availability as a chat bot, as voice assistant for people with seeing difficulties in multiple languages, and so on.
What in your mind enabled the Taiwanese society to be that open to technology or that able to adapt quickly to new technologies?
There’s two things going on here. One is that in Taiwan democracy is really new. The first presidential election was in 1996, which is already after the World Web. [laughs]
The career public service, the politicians, and so on are all already versed after the personal computer revolution, and a little bit experience with the World Web when we democratized to allow direct presidential election. In that sense, it’s a little bit like Estonia, in a sense that we see democracy itself as an applied social technology.
Also, the Constitution even is like a kernel and you can tweak and fork and change it. The Constitution changed five times [laughs] in a very short time framework – now considering another change. The democratic polity itself is seen as something like a technology, like semiconductor design that people can improve on. That’s the first thing.
The second thing is that people who are 40 years old or older, all remember the martial law, pre-democratization, the authoritarian days. This basically means that whenever there’s any technology that threatens to take the society back to a more authoritarian era, it’s an automatic non-starter in Taiwan.
We will just say, “Do you want to go back to a martial law? Do you want to go back to a White Terror,” and then that will be a non-starter. We’re much more focused on the democratizing technologies, for example, the free-software movement, later on the open-source movement.
The World Web itself nowadays distributed ledger like Ethereum and things like that. These gain popularity in Taiwan, and indeed have many of the core developers in Taiwan, because we believe in the democratization of technologies that takes the society even more democratized than what we currently have.
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Hello.
Can you hear me now?
Yeah, yes.
You record on your side, because I think the recording might not have worked as well.
OK, I did record on my side. From my point of view, you were frozen for a bit, and then you just dropped out.
No, my computer actually went down.
It literally went down.
You were in the middle of explaining the Taiwanese democracy as the key in…
To be short, to be brief, it’s just two things. One is that democracy is new in Taiwan, so we democracy itself, including the constitution, as a social technology that people are free to innovate. The second thing is that we prefer technologies that make the society more democratized.
For example, distributed ledgers, free software, and things like that, because we have a deep mistrust of authoritarian technologies.
That’s interesting. I never made the connection between Estonia, for example, as also being a young democracy and Taiwan as being a young democracy being key to understanding how adaptable to new technologies it is.
It is a conception of the state as something that is an experiment or that is being constantly reassessed or worked on and redesigned, in a way. Is that how you see it?
Yeah, that’s right. It means that, instead of a historical rituals, with all due respect, set in stone, it will be us reevaluating, for example, whether three bits every four years is a good idea as the input to the democratic institution. That’s voting.
We augmented that with not only referenda, but also Presidential Hackathon, sandboxes, participatory budgeting, e-petition, you name it.
How do you view either criticism of established democracies, or more established democracies, legacy democracies themselves? We struggle very much in this situation.
I think many democracies actually reacted quite well, if we compare them with the Taiwan in 2003. We understood how [laughs] bad it could be if it’s the first time of your democratic exposure to the virus. The great thing about democracy is that it’s resilient.
It relies on people actually having scientific understanding, and also renewing the institution so that it will be better the next time around. Just as Taiwan in 2004 set up this infrastructure, did yearly drills, and augmented with the latest digital technologies, I’m sure that now that you have this societal exposure to SARS 2.0, you, too, will do better when SARS 3.0 came.
Was there contact, or did Western governments approach you to learn from you, from your experiences?
Yes. Actually, I nowadays wake up at 7:00 AM Taipei time and most of the time talk to the North and South American people. The evening, around 7:00 PM here, is with European and African people.
There is wide interest in what we call the Taiwan model in countering pandemic with no lockdown and countering infodemic with no takedown.
Is there something that you learned from the pandemic that you didn’t know before, or how you could improve your understanding of how to use data, or how to use data in such a crisis moment?
I think there are two broad lessons. One is that this participatory self-surveillance really relies on broadband as human right, because if there is no broadband access, people can, of course, still watch television and listen to radio, but they cannot report in real time the novel social innovations and the actual what’s happening in the frontline.
Broadband as human right, much more important than what we already understood its importance, the second thing is that, instead of data literacy and media literacy, which assumes a television and radio type of communication, we need to emphasize media competence and digital competence.
Meaning that everyone is essentially media, and need to focus, for example, on humor over rumor so that every media – that is to say, citizens themselves – can remix the message and get the scientific message to the wider distribution of people.
We already have an inkling that this will be important, but this twin pandemic/infodemic really highlighted its true importance.
Do you feel that there is a geopolitical divide along the lines of the digital now these days?
It’s about two things. The first thing is that what we are trying to do is that we are building a norm around data that is social sector first. It’s neither public sector first, which would mean state surveillance and authoritarian intelligence.
Neither is it private sector-dominated, which would mean surveillance capitalism and the dominance of the multinational companies. The divide, from what we perceive, is three-way, which is why I always put people first in people, public, private partnerships.
The divide is, on the one hand, surveillance capitalism, and then monopolies in the United States, mainly, and the other one is the surveillance capitalism, or the surveillance authoritarianism, the Chinese?
I would say surveillance statism, of course, is not new, but recently, because of pandemic, we understood that public health being a very good reason/excuse for the state to expand on its data collection methodologies, really paved the way for more authoritarian use of AI.
On the other hand, if what we are trying to do here is to democratize the country, even during the pandemic, then we need to make sure that the people understood that they, too, can form, as I mentioned, surveillance in a social sector, or even sousveillance kind of way that can hold both the public and the private sector accountable.
I wouldn’t say it’s particular to any jurisdiction, but I would say that what we’re trying to do, I think, have universal applicability, and it’s preferable in an assistive technology sense than authoritarian technologies.
What you said is changing the notion of what the state is and changing the way the state works. I wonder how applicable it is in the U.S. That’s the other side, which is such a hard ask to get there. Do you have any suggestions how to use that moment – for example, the corona moment – in a constructive way?
Sorry, the constructive wave?
Yeah, to further that change. Is there something to learn from that moment for Western societies?
First of all, I think the messages that we send appeal to rational self-interest. I think this is one of the main lessons that is very adaptable to other jurisdictions, Western or not. When we say, “Wear a mask to protect yourself from your own unwashed hand.” this is universally applicable.
If we say, “Wear a mask to protect the elderly,” then people who don’t live with elderly people, or frankly, don’t care, will not wear a mask. If we say, “Wear a mask to respect each other.” then people who don’t want to respect each other wouldn’t wear a mask.
By framing this as something that appeals to rational self-interest, very interestingly, allowed people to remind each other to wear a mask much more easily than if we frame it in a collectivist approach, a collectivist message.
Individualism, enlightened self-interest, is actually, collectively speaking, a better strategy than appealing to collectivism. I think that is something that all jurisdictions can learn from.
How do you communicate that rational self-interest, through public messaging, or how is that communicated?
Yeah, through essentially public domain communication materials. As I mentioned, in our Ministry of Health and Welfare, there is this very cute dog with the name Zongchai. The name’s a wordplay by itself, a Shiba Inu.
We say very clearly, “Wear a mask so you don’t accidentally put your hand into your mouth, as the dog is doing here. Instead, wash your hands with soap.” This is one concrete messaging strategy, and this is the physical distancing one.
That’s a public domain that you can access, or that’s a…
That’s right, exactly. It’s a campaign, and everybody are free to remix, and also translate it. We made sure that the materials is not only multilingual, but the text does not overlay on the graphics. If you want to translate it into other languages, like German or French, you can very easily do so.
That is, again, it’s more or less open source, because you can play with these images.
Yeah, as we say here, humor over rumor.
Can you complete this sentence for me? “For me, this is personal, because…”
This is personal because… What is “this”? What does this mean?
The corona and…
All right. This is personal because everybody’s business needs everybody’s help.
Lovely. Thank you. Great to learn from you about your approach it’s very insightful. If you have the recording, hopefully you can send it to me. Then…
Of course. I will send to you right away.
Good. Thanks for taking the time, and thanks to Julia Kloiber for connecting us.
Do you know her from working with her a bit, or…
Exactly.
My slides are inspired by her style of mostly emoji. We’ve found emoji to be universal.
Great. Thank you. We can talk some other time.
Yes. Send me the recording from your side also when you got a chance.
I will.
OK. Live long and prosper. Bye.
Thank you. Bye.