OK, great. Very nice to meet you virtually. Hopefully, soon face to face. This is why we’ll have to manage.
Thank you. Yeah, it’s incredible to meet you too. I’ve been following with great interest and relish what you’ve been working on lately and it’s phenomenal to be in touch. This is, to be honest, not how I imagined we would be in touch because I had been thinking of interviewing you, like “we’ve got to interview her.” [laughs]
That’s right.
The tables are slightly turned.
[laughs] No, but this is not a interview or audition. [laughs] This is just Glen saying, “You know, Audrey, I think you should meet this interesting person.”
Very excited to have this conversation. If you want to tell me how to…If you have ideas on structuring a conversation, I can let you know what. I’ve spoken to Glenn, to Vitalik on Monday too.
You did. Just to make it clear, I am not voting actively within the regular exchange board. I’ve never cast a negative vote, and [laughs] so I make suggestions.
This is the same role that I play in, say, reset.tech, which I’m also part of the…It’s this Luminate-ish thing that talks about [laughs] how to restructure against surveillance capitalism, and for digital democracy.
Again, I never cast down votes. I only give suggestions. I’m a purely advisory role, and in order like Presidential Hackathon, which attorney’s thing I’m on the Board of Convener of the Judge.
Again, I never vote [laughs] to vote anyone out. This is a very consistent way how I operate. My main interest is to get to know you and your work better, and what’s your imagination for whatever.
It could be RadicalxChange. It could be your magazine. It could be the question you wanted to interview me. This is a free form.
I know it. I spoke to Glenn twice. I spoke to Vitalik. For the record, it’s been so fun. [laughs] I also spoke to Matt and Jen. I’ve got a little bit of a sense of the bigger picture. Like, the origin story and the bigger — I don’t really want to call it my ideology — but a bigger your imagination for how it plugs into broader discussions.
Then, I’ve also gotten a little bit of a look at the structure of the organization and hearing these talks is getting a sense of where everyone’s ideas are and how the organization can provide a platform for execution. The way I see it, it’s kind of the lab or broker for experimentation.
Definitely, it’s the lab for a lot of — I don’t know, jamming or something. [laughs] That’s like previously very different ideas may somehow work together.
How did you get involved?
It’s on public record. I can paste the public transcript [laughs] of my first conversation with Glenn. This system is good in this way. In 2018, I emphasize the entirety of my conversation was planned back then. In November, I saw a tweet from Vitalik. I’ve been meeting with Vitalik since I become digital minister. That’s late 2016.
Again, Vitalik agreed to be on the record. It’s entirely the video is on the record. Long story short, I saw that he and Glenn is working on quadratic funding. I’ve read the paper and it’s because we are at a time looking for better voting mechanisms for the Presidential Hackathon, or to citizens’ initiatives. One, so I was very interested in that particular voting system.
The first conversation we mostly talked about QV, about how to visualize it. How it works in, say, impact investments. A step beyond crowdfunding, as I said. It’s all very instrumental things. Then Glenn said, “Would you like to be a board member a while later.” I’m like, “What?”
Then I checked with the public service office. They never had a case where I’m serving as both minister or really any public servant and also board member of international NGO. It took me a while to actually suss out the regulatory changes needed. It turns out it doesn’t need any changes, interpretation, saying that it’s not just domestic NGOs. Actually, international ones aren’t good too.
Partly thanks to Glenn, I’m now seven board members, [laughs] seven international NGOs. I’m also very much slushy.
[laughs] That’s super interesting. That was actually one of my…You got to a very practical question. As a non profit organization, how does RadicalxChange see itself operating with these institutional bodies? Also, what are the goals of that?
Obviously, there’s these amazing institutional partnerships partly attached to board members, like you and like Danielle, but also this kind of international network…
A self governing island. That’s a very interesting institution.
(laughter)
I’m so curious about…Obviously, from the vista of Taipei, there’s different regulations. I don’t know Taipei well. My parents live in Hong Kong.
Oh, cool.
I miss them very much.
I know. I know.
I’m curious of this positioning. You refer to it as an international NGO…
It is.
…which exactly, it is. I don’t think anyone else I’ve spoken to has given it quite that scope.
OK. It has regional chapters, and municipal and city chapters which makes it, by definition, a international NGO. Of course, I understand many other people see it more as a hashtag. This new century style idea was spreading.
We don’t have any de facto control, not like the traditional NGOs, which is also true. We’re more hashtags than taxonomy, but for the purpose of the cabinet office, it’s a international NGO.
Absolutely. Also, how do we wrangle the hashtag into something, a functioning body that can assist where we need it as an international NGO but without institutional paralysis or whatever. That’s also what’s about how you’ve navigated it in particular, not just board member of several NGOs with that where there was a president for that.
One thing that came up with Vitalik was…A big theme for me academically, in conversation, editorially is, how do we…? There’s always been a call for new institutions or at least tearing down old ones. Then what happens historically is that you rebuild them in the image of the thing you were trying to tear down.
Yeah, shinier but essentially the same materials.
They tell a story that it’s new basically, and the hierarchies and whatever kind of politics have used it usually. I’m interested in your view on that. I’m interested whether or not you feel like RadicalxChange has maybe…or even the themes of RadicalxChange’s’ interest.
For the past year or so, I’ve been telling the Telemundo as a new story, new institutions. The moral of the story is that we can counter pandemic with no lockdown. We can counter infodemic with no takedown. Now that’s a great tagline.
[laughs]
Then the obvious counter question is, “Without lockdown, without takedown, without top down or shutdown, that’s all very good, but then with what?” That’s the main question that I get asked. To me, our RxC answers a little bit of that with what.
In summary, I refer to it as variously people public private partnership, social sector first approach or just a plurality instead of singularity. All this refers to essentially the same thing. It’s about a institution built upon one’s self trust or autonomy to act competence, not literacy, trusting each other through transparency and participation, accountability. Instead of trusting them, be it the damn being, sorry, I have to go back to the transcript to fix this.
With all due respect, them being the World Health Organization [laughs] are the damned as the United Nations and its high level multilateral, control over the ITU, over the Internet, which probably isn’t actual control, is more formal, only multilateral, but exclusive of all stakeholders.
Now, this is not to say that UN or WTO is not now considering three major groups and so on, a more hybrid multistakeholder approach.
To me, RxC starts with this Internet governance theme of rejecting kings and presidents and believe instead in rough consensus and running code. To me, that answers the with what question. I can say, with the people. Not for the people.
Amazing. One thing when I think about these overarching goals and dominant themes within RadicalxChange and within the orbit, and I’ve been interrogating everybody [laughs] about what the chapters are doing and how they’re working with chapters. Obviously, some more than others, some are more institutional, more formal partnerships.
I’m only in touch with RxC Taipei and I’ve been to RxC Berlin, can’t talk about other chapters.
What’s RxC Taipei?
RxC Taipei is basically a bunch of people who are interested in the distributed ledger technology as governance tools rather than as, I don’t know, cryptocurrency to replace Fiat. Instead of replacing the Central Bank, maybe they want to replace the central government. [laughs]
I’ve known the RxC Taipei folks, a lot of them for quite a while, in 2014, right after the Occupy, the people that we convinced a career public service to start listening to us through both mentors, the weTaiwan project and so on.
That lecture to all the senior public service I deliver with the AP or publisher, one of the more prominent RxC Taipei, a guy who is working on popularizing blockchain governance ideas in everyday governance and exploring instead of virtual reality in deliberative modes and things like that, more artsy, like applied art person.
There’s a lot of more whimsical instead of ideological vibe in RxC Taipei in the meet ups and so on, is definitely less about the economy models. It’s more about having fun and sharing these ideas.
Mostly, because Glenn’s main geologist models are what Dr. Sannyasin founded the state in Taiwan, officially, the Transcultural Republic of Citizens, my translation. [laughs]
For the past 110 years or so, we’ve been running with this Georgia’s idea. We’re quite familiar with this idea. We don’t have to popularize it in Taiwan, but we do want to introduce the modern applications of these ideas to more people, not in politics or economy, but rather in art, in design, in pedagogy and so on.
That’s interesting with the pedagogy as well, that was geared towards that conversation a little bit, even the way, or at least it certainly seems to be in the perception of Emporium versus Bitcoin.
Definitely.
That is a community and ideas oriented. Cryptocurrency rather than tech-oriented. Vitalik agreed with that assessment and then also was like, it’s nice when it’s not compared to Bitcoin.
(laughter)
Yes. I appreciate you not comparing Taiwan to other countries. [laughs]
For me, I’m interested in Taipei also because I get the sense that what you’re working on over there is the most practical applied instance, and especially the most scaled up instance of having implemented some of the ideas.
Certainly.
How’s it going? [laughs]
It’s going very well. [laughs] That’s our story, that the idea of digital democracy, moving post pandemic world is more and more in, for example, the Lincoln/Biden diplomatic playbook is more and more center around an alliance of democracies making improvements to democracy itself to solve world skills problems better than autocracy.
That’s definitely what a so called democratic alliance in the Pacific [laughs] is alliance of two. We do have the full support of not just the four major parties, which just signed an Open Parliament Accord National Action Plan on the open parliament in the legislature, but also foreign service and pretty much all the people facing ministries.
It’s going very well. It’s one of the very few things the four parties in Taiwan all agree on.
I’m surprised. Do you see it as like a pandemic accelerated?
Definitely, yes. It’s first accelerated by the Sunflower Occupy, but then, of course, accelerate again by the pandemic.
Not to say that it wouldn’t have happened anyway. For me, the pandemic is like an accelerator – that’s why I say accelerated. It didn’t make new stuff happened.
It’s a very good observation. Before the pandemic, our data coalition work, for example, did not have the same visitors number as the Digital Democracies Citizens Initiative work.
While the petition website has anywhere from 8 million to 10 million visitors, the National Health, like, Health Bank thing, which allows people to participate in the coalitions, only had, anywhere from 500,000 to at most, less than one million for sure.
Now we’re way past 10 million. It’s been the top downloaded app in both app stores and Google Play for the past year. People dedicate their mask quota to international humanitarian aid for a non fungible token [laughs] contact data collaborative.
They may choose to mint their name on it or they may choose to remain anonymous roughly half and half.
It’s a great story, but if you introduce that before the pandemic, we won’t have. Nowadays I’m just checking out latest number, 760,000 citizens participating and collecting eight million medical masks.
It’s just a resounding success, and thus indeed accelerated.
That’s it, yeah, that’s incredible. I mean, we’ve also got everyone present where… [laughs]
Oh yeah, yes.
I’m not allowed to have any Zooms or any video calls where we don’t talk about NFTs. It’s just the way [laughs] of my life right now.
I know. Here is the war of heroes that dedicated, just for the record. [laughs]
Where else do you see within the RadicalxChange network, the current one…? Not to ask you to answer a question that I should work on answering myself, but do you see other opportunities where these principles being explored on a more theoretical level could be just deployed?
The obvious answer is the Ethereum community with Gitcoins, because it’s essentially the original app.
(pause)
On a way more old school.
More Westphalian sense. [laughs]
I see quadratic voting as a test, as the Petri dish for quadratic scenario. I see it in these institutional partners. People on communities vote on stuff or student body.
I was going to say Sid Meier’s Civilization VI, but student bodies are bodies too, not just video games.
[laughs] I don’t know, just in terms of the network that already exists and then maybe the State of Georgia in the US “quadratic.”
Sure. Colorado already did, right?
Colorado did. Is it statewide in Colorado?
It is statewide. It’s rating the importance of bills, I think, by the ruling party, the Democrats, I believe. Yeah, they are. Of course, if you are more into the Westphalian imagination, then the Democracy Earth folks, they are your natural allies and can help popularizing these, especially around QV.
It’s indeed a cheap and cheerful thing to implement. Seeing how I was initially attracted by low QF but then later on QV, certainly, is the most easy to explain.
Also, that we touched on Gitcoins super briefly with Vitalik. I had discussed it with them, but I was curious. I asked Vitalik whether the relationship with RadicalxChange was formal or systematic. He said that is more because he’s involved with…
It’s a hashtag-ish collaboration. [laughs]
Which is cool. I like that, decentralized. Also, I like the idea of an organization registered nonprofit. Like water.
Definitely, folksonomy and all that.
Yeah, exactly. I did wonder…I’m jumping around a little bit. I…
Sure. Of course. Bruce Lee does that too. [laughs]
That would be the first and last time. I would have compared my movements to Adam and Eve. [laughs] I did wonder whether in terms of translating what RadicalxChange does or somehow making it accessible on this more grassroots level, whether it did come up to attempt to also…
Again, this is an institutional question. I don’t know, and I want to know what the organizational goals are around it, but whether it would be worth also inhabiting the language that’s more familiar when it comes to nonprofits, “Here’s our mission. Here’s the communities we serve.”
Obviously, the best nonprofits do this in a way that’s extremely expensive. I forget which NGO I’m thinking of but one of these big international behemoths.
United Nations. [laughs]
Yeah. It’s a mission statement, but it’s also a slogan, as you say. It’s something along the lines of like, “We provide water.”
Yeah, definitely. I mentioned the UN not to make fun of them, but rather to say that they’ve since developed a useful logo type, the 17 colors thing, the SDGs. Seeing how we’ve printed it and made it dependency, Taiwan can help on it.
The SDGs.
Right. I wear this all the time. It’s on my card, and so on. What I’m trying to say is that the 17 colors, the triple button line, the logo types at globalgoals.org and so on represents the hashtag version of the UN and definitely not the international NGO part of the UN.
Even though that we know there are 17 very high level yearly meetings, whatever, what made the impact is the people recognizing these initially very different sectors and now talk openly about the circular economy, the governance that made order not just publicly listed but all companies, stakeholder capitalists, and things like that.
The idea that the hashtag and logo type arguably did much more to sustainability than the international NGO itself with its organizational capability, large as it is, did. I’m saying this after a conversation with many people in UNSDSN and UNDP and other habitat and related organizations.
RxC has the potential to be this sort of hashtag, even though when I search about RxC still, I see race cars. That’s the main association. [laughs]
That’s incredibly clarifying for me, I have to say, just taking ownership of this hashtag as NGO.
There’s a kind of space. Just like the slogan as mission statement, as we say, already exists into Fridays for Future or what have you. Now my mind’s racing a little bit.
One of the things that appeals to me about RadicalxChange is also the diversity of the community, which capacity to engage. It could be the diplomatic community. It could be the Ethereum community. It could be super localized.
Before coming back to Berlin, I was living in Georgia for five years. I’m not from there, the state, not the country. What I saw, there were a lot of grassroots organized projects, like coalitions of black farmers, or even there was some, specifically from the black communities, really radical educational initiatives by families who were not happy with the school system, for example.
I was on the board of a DIY media organization that had XEN workshops, just the gamut. These organizations or even in these little board meetings that are already quite…I’d have people over to my house. We could have had a version of quadratic voting and some of those scenarios.
I throw the voting out as an example, but I was just like, the NVs for me, these levels of institutional partnerships, and then you have, like, the Harvard’s under graphics or the MIT Media Lab or whatever.
For me, these types of relationships are very exciting because of the diversity of the means of engagement but also as information streams back to the organization, because you learn so much in engaging with these various communities, like what people are talking about and what their needs are.
Then noting the similarities, not comparing but I would say synthesizing, then suddenly you have information about what you’re supposed to do or what you can do from the platform.
My first impulse would be getting excited about the chapters or figuring out what the community is without intervening upon it, without being hashtag this piece or implement this piece but almost doing some audit or whatever the less scary language for audit is.
Deep dive into the conversations in the already existing international chapters to decide where everyone’s at and then also how this can grow inappropriate, organic ways.
Audit is exactly what it is, to go regularly to a class without being formally involved. [laughs]
Exactly. I should know. I should think about that version of audit. I was thinking about the dramatic tax version of it. That’s exactly right, auditing the class. We attend it, and listen, and learn, get things from it. We don’t submit a paper per se.
That’s right. I audited many classes as a middle school dropout. I know something about auditing in university. This is what we can feasibly do anyway as a relatively small amount of permanent staff in this so called NGO. To do anything beyond that will require a staff count as easily 50 times.
Then it does become about information exchange too. Radical exchange. In a lot of these, if it’s good, then, as you say, there’s no “Wizard of Oz” figure actually orchestrating. You trust the individual units. You trust the individuals to cultivate what they’re going to cultivate from the ideas.
The other thing, the other thing RadicalxChange could do is also to platform them. This was also something I was interested in at Art Papers, which was the nonprofit I was running in Atlanta. I had to do a lot of service to the local community. They funded us. They showed up to our fundraisers. They were important.
We had an international audience. It was always about navigating those things. That became one of the real pleasures of the exercise. We had a magazine. We also did public and educational programs.
When I elected to cover, say, a digital art collective in Seoul, Korea, it was because whatever they were talking about was also something that art students at the Georgia State University we’re talking about. Even if they were doing it on a super look like.
What I would want to do with that media platform was to allow people to connect the dots. If there’s a housing rights group in Budapest and they’re doing something interesting that could apply to housing right groups in Minnesota, then there’s certain ways you can get them in touch. That’s by acting it up.
For me, in addition to auditing what the applications and what the conversations are in the existing network before building it up, which will be easy once you know what people are doing, it’s creating ways that can also expand based on the work of others within the network.
(inaudible 32:50) how much of a filter for that and without entering as a gatekeeper like putting out...You don't need to be the author of the manifest.
That’s right. Otherwise, it’ll be the professor. You’d not be auditing the class. [laughs]
In terms of auditing, what you do get sometimes are then syllabi or reading lists circulating as downloads. [laughs] We’re not students at the school.
I see RadicalxChange. This is also what’s within the scope, as you say, as a two way informational exchange. That would be at least the bare minimum before it gets hands on and logical. [laughs]
Definitely. Like from a chapter viewpoint, just having this bidirectional exchange is quite sufficient to keep the heartbeat going. When we occupy the parliament in 2014, we also learned that during the worldwide Occupy, the norm to build a small world network was just to send two delegates in each Occupy online to connect with all the other Occupy.
This worked because if you drop one of the liaison, then the other one can still bring somebody on board. The number is small because you need a heartbeat, and each Occupy is sending 50 people. It’s not going to keep the heartbeat running.
I didn’t know that about the Occupy.
I learned from Clay Shirky.
That’s super interesting. I’ll have to look into that. For me, the leadership of RadicalxChange, as you say, is a small organization. In the conversation with Madam Jen, where we talked more about the institutional structure, they explained to me that previously, the leadership was a bit more decentralized. Different people had their beats. There’s a politics person.
It’s a post conference community.
(laughter)
Oh my gosh, I’m part of some of those.
(laughter)
…and that like…
Yes, of course. [laughs]
After organizing or participating in a symposium in thought like grew a new Twitter follow?
Yeah, exactly and then for a while all we can talk about is when is the next summit? Initially RxC is a little bit like that.
Those conference communities are… something that we could probably survive democracy. [laughs]
Yeah, just have more conferences. [laughs]
…or whatever summits?
Yeah, exactly.
It was more a diffuse in terms of people’s areas of expertise, basically. Then it was observed that in order to solidify the organization and get it on its own two feet, as it were, that it needed something of little bit more centralized in terms of leadership.
My observation is maybe there’s things of both that we can take up for now, and it’s a fusional vision, position. I’m still curious about how to meld this decentralized attitude and get the best of what was working with that while still building a sustainable policy.
Definitely.
The other thing that was addressed, they agreed also that there was a bit of a golden age [laughs] at some point when it was more diffused, obviously, for me, conferences would be super catalyzing, but they’re harder to get that. You don’t do the dinner after the panel.
I do. We’ve been post pandemic for 10 months. Sorry about that, but we had. [laughs]
Yeah, I’m in Central Europe. I know.
[laughs] I know. I don’t voluntarily bring this up because [laughs] it doesn’t sound well. Since last May or so, we’ve had no pandemic. [laughs]
I know you’re not being cavalier about the virus and how you handled it.
(laughter)
That’s right.
It’s funny. I’m so grateful that my parents are in Hong Kong because they’re…
Yeah, they’re relatively safe.
Relatively safe. They can also go on walks and staycations.
Yeah, and have dinner.
That was the real pain, was when the restaurants were closed for dinner. They had to…
I know.
…right at lunch.
I know. This pining for that golden era of post conference dinners, fortunately, [laughs] is surmountable. It’s well within the ability in major countries. Around end of the year, I’ve had countless invitations for around Christmas, face to face gatherings. I don’t know how I can be at all these places as I’m trying maybe with double robotics.
By early next year, I will be sure just reliving this kind of dinner parties. The good thing is that we know now also how to include people from other chapter and other time zones. It’s actually better. It’s hybrid.
Yeah. I was looking at some…I got an iPhone memory on this day last year. I was like, “Oh, my God.” Then I looked at the text message that was associated with it. It was hybrid meetings or in the way we think. We were just talking about that in march 20 or something. I’ve had you for 45 minutes or so. I’m sure…
That’s fine. It’s fine. I don’t have anything else. I’m a lowercase minister.
(laughter)
I just wanted to check in. I know I’ve been jumping around and kind of rambling and throwing ideas out there, but I do want to tell you about myself if… [laughs]
…you’re interested, but also give specific questions. I mentioned the short answer when people ask me what I do is I say edit magazines, but I don’t just do that. I edit magazines, but I also make public programs. The magazine I edit now is also a fashion brand.
Oh, OK.
There’s a brand building aspect to it and idea of content that also could be on a T shirt, but also could be a party, [laughs] but also could be an exhibition, also could be a talk, also could be in a magazine or just like wherever we can get that, wherever we can get an idea going and explored by more than one person.
That’s the kind of thing. For me it’s not so much like I’m a hardcore magazine. I mean I love that, [laughs] but I’m not like a traditionalist in that respect.
It’s for me, publishing is making public. That’s what that means.
Yeah, I see what you mean. I say I’m a lowercase minister precisely because I see myself as a poetician and this lowercase minister position is just for me to make my poems heard, I guess.
There are so many arenas one can inhabit. One is, I don’t want to say promiscuous intellectually because that implies superficial if not, [laughs] but interested in a fusion of ideas or a kind of being together ideas and conversation.
There’s only so many area in which you can do that, which is why, I assume, actually why even something like RadicalxChange has been drawn to call promiscuity, right?
Yeah, that’s right. I mean, I’m totally fine with promiscuous. I think it’s [laughs] precisely the right word, unless, of course one would like to say adhocracy or something like that, but I don’t think adhocracy pertains to individuals or two ideas.
Adhocracy mostly to me means something that [laughs] actually you describe after the fact. Like we’ve had a Occupy. We describe it as adhocracy.
Nobody, four or five people start saying, let’s build adhocracy together. That doesn’t seem to work like this, but promiscuous, it’s a very scalable concept. One can apply that to a certain individual, [laughs] two persons, three people. I mean, the more the merrier, but it’s scale free.
That’s amazing. Well, there’s also a little bit more intention in that.
Yeah, that’s right, that’s right.
Ad hoc, whereas I would say… like a post, and just not like…
It’s very descriptive. It’s not inspiring. In a way, it’s emergent.
…more I touch to linear time or something.
Yeah, exactly.
Promiscuity is more like an essential passion.
That’s right.
Intellectually curious, obviously that thing too, but for me it’s more like going out and getting something out. I think that, for example, there’s certain words as you say, the lowercase minister in your case, which bravo, lot of people don’t figure out that.
I know, [laughs] yeah. I mean, as a lowercase minister, I preach, I pray, I write poetry, I sing, and I hear confessions, so that’s sort of ministered too. [laughs]
Right, exactly. That is interesting too and there is an unite without the religious comparison, we could go a long way with in terms of these communities too.
Yeah, so this is my recent tweet with a fellow Congressperson. He’s a legislator and a member of Cabinet.
If you follow this tweet, that’s what our events look like in Goshen just last week, and so is that death metal band, and it was just in the backdrop. Of course, the fact that we had this mega port festival means that we don’t think about pandemic much anymore.
The point here is that we see this as a preferred vehicle for us to deliver the political visions that we have, which is about transcultural republic citizens.
I think something similar was going on for quite a while in the early RadicalxChange press conference community there. There’s a lot more modalities in the art, and of course we still do a little bit like that.
Like I suggested, Jen and folks do a radical [laughs] redesign of the logo type and the font, and so on, but still that feels more design and less art. I think there could be more art.
In the past, I’ve edited art magazines obviously, and made programs around art, but it was never about art. That’s for the academic journals. It’s about what artists are talking about or using art or vehicles.
I got funding to do a special issue on public transportation. Our papers, for example, where the art in a given thing was like a photographer going inside [laughs] of the vehicle or charting bus routes or observation of that stuff, in addition to just being about…I did an issue on port cities, for example.
It was also artists talking about terraforming. It just happens to be a pretty flexible, discursive milieu for conversations like that. Plus, it’s less regulated. You don’t have an FDA requirement. If you want to try a new idea, you can just see how it vibes.
Unlike the political media, you do have constituents, but the threat is less. [laughs] Going back to the spiritual connectivity too, I super love religion, but I just hate dogma. That goes back to the institution building question too. How do we structure it in a way that’s dynamic, and accessible, and so on without recreating whatever has been done in the past?
Since we’ve touched on Occupy a lot and various methodologies, I’d be really curious about what your views organizationally in terms of the Occupy system.
Networks? The Hong Kong people have advanced this much more than we had in Taiwan. We all learn from Hong Kong, the Bruce Lee thing. It’s like I’m on LIHKG and so on. I see firsthand ish. I have colleagues who have been to Hong Kong during the height of the past couple of years.
The main thing here is that if we make sure that the ideas with spreading are spread in a way that makes people feel safe to experiment, and whatever they did experiment are done in a way that’s not vengeful or discriminating but rather to tackle a common challenge that’s insurmountable by any individual.
That’s the two precondition, a safe space, a shared purpose. If all the main ideas are proposed this way, it becomes…Mathematically, I’ll call it a conflict free replicable data type, meaning that it has this nonviolent communication core in it. If it’s phrased in a way that’s retaliatory, discriminatory and so on, then basically it creates an outsize out group and just burns.
We’ve seen many of that. Then even if it’s pro social and for a shared purpose, if it’s framed in a way that doesn’t allow the safe space to be observed or in a way that’s only privileging the people who can enjoy some relative security, then it becomes not a commons. It becomes a club good.
That’s not sustainable either for the decentralized community. You will then just go back to become a few churches, for lack of better analogy. If it’s me, I always work on the safe space where people can have music, food together, dinners, have fun, maybe some poetry jams and things like that.
When we have doubt, then the pro social part is more natural, but still there’s need to be some auditing [laughs] to make sure that the pro social memes are conflict free in itself. That’s what Glenn has been doing to his book. Daily, he’s been reinspecting the core ideas and rephrasing it in a pro social emergent space rather than a top down central design based sense.
When two central designers hote similar ideas, they are actually rivals with one another. When two emergent, participatory hippies hote similar ideas, they’re natural allies. That’s what I see Glenn has been doing lately, especially with the rationalist community on Twitter.
[laughs] Yeah, I would agree. I’m curious, as you’re saying, not a top down method but how to engage outside the rationalists. We get the nihilists on board.
That’s right. Yes.
[laughs] That’s really interesting, what you say. I do find myself, for example, in my editorial work, in terms of what discourse, or imagery, or language I choose to engage with, what feels right for a given moment, I do find myself auditing in the sense of a horrible tax person digging through your life’s history, ultimate fear.
I do find myself going into, let’s say, whatever given meme or thread, often with the view to not trust. It’s non violence. There’s an interesting…Just occurred to me as you’re explaining this too, is like coming at it from a more of a benefit of the doubt position rather than one where you’re looking for the conflict. You’re looking for the darkness that inhabits particular thread or trend.
Also, what I do see a structure such as quadratic voting does is that it actually does press the individual’s preferences without dictating the prioritization of it. What do you think is going to…?
In other words, I do even reading radical markets, for example. My impulse is a critical one that I’m like, “Wait, what if this happens? [laughs] What if we choose the wrong? What if we choose the wrong?”
The fact of the matter is that the tools that will support us are always, it’s just historically, it’s always been the case. They are also always the same ones that we could use in the harmful ways. It’s not the media. [laughs]
(inaudible 54:00) Sorry, I got a bit esoteric there.
No, I am following that train of thought. I’ve been there. [laughs]
In other words, this is quite inspiring in a very nice infusion of rather reminder of the fact that prosocial [laughs] means can be conflict free, or that there can be natural synergies between what could in a different way look like.
That’s what I learned from the very early Internet governance world in ‘89 when I was just eight years old. [laughs] The core principle of the prosocialness of Internet itself was defined by Jon Postel. It’s very simple. It says be conservative in what you do, and be liberal in what you accept other people do. Just in one sentence, that’s the spirit of the Internet.
The RxC editors, of course, cannot anticipate all the uses, abuses, and misuses. They’re Zen about that. [laughs] They’re like, “Let’s work on these things that are maximally robust within our limited, bounded rationality.” Then we have this implicit belief that the future generations are smarter, and they’ll figure things out. Let’s not foreclose their possibilities.
It was for the first issue with Art Papers Magazine, I did. It would have been late 2013 or early 2014. We published. We called it the Balconist Manifesto. I know there’s like… right now, it’s not. Despite this artist called Constant Dullaart, who was among the Dutch. I don’t know if you know Constant. Well, the Dutch Internet art, late 2000s, early 2010, leading voice at that time.
He wrote this thing. It took the metaphor of the balcony. I never thought about it in these terms, but what you said is this as a way of mitigating in this case, public and private and self and community in a way that’s selective and safe on the Internet, but what you just said about this mitigation of conservatism. [laughs]
Small c. Lowercase conservative.
(laughter)
Exactly. I’m a big fan of…I lowercase everything I can get away with lowercasing. That’s also seems very pertinent. It’s gone noon and I do have to go, but can I offer you anything? I enjoyed this conversation.
Well, you can offer me a little bit of time to edit the transcript that I’m going to send, [laughs] and then we’ll dedicate it to the commons. It’s free of copyright. How about that? We give the future something. [laughs]
Completely aside, if you would be interested down the line in a more in a formal interview for public consumption, I’d be very honored to.
Of course. The SayIt website that I pasted you are all free of copyright that we can publish any of it without asking for my permission, but I’m glad that you asked.
(laughter)
Yes, I do. That was another thing to go back there. For me, one of the most tangible ways I see the discourse that you’re working in that RadicalxChange is working in that Vitalik’s speaking, specifically Ethereum, are operating in one of the most tangible ways I see that there is an actual broader ideological shift is in attitudes towards IP.
I act as if I’ve been dead for 70 years.
It’s amazing. You have these holdouts. With NFTs, I’m curious, for example, whether there’s…I just have this picture that there’s lawyers circling the scene, waiting to go corporate and sue somebody for image misuse or something. I haven’t seen the big…Just think about that. I’ve seen some Instagram posts [laughs] where people have said, “Hey, I took that picture.”
The fact that you can’t take down things on Ethereum blockchain means that there has to be a large shift.
You have to. Exactly. My perspective on it, I’ve just always found it quite boring. An idea is an idea. I want everybody to be compensated for what they do. I also don’t want to fight about overviewing.
Their royalties are ad hoc. Quadratic funding is promiscuous.
Creative production is also commons.
That’s right.
The focus should be there if anywhere. It came up with Vitalik’s accuse, he was talking about the bifurcation of Ethereum with Ethereum Classic. The portion of the community, how to stop them from using Ethereum name. He was like, “Not really.”
This liberal sharing of information and content is something that does excite me, [laughs] publishes thing. Then the other thing, it’s like, “What is it changing? Are we just re institutionalizing ourselves?” In the conversation around intellectual property, the shift there is observable. That’s interesting. By all means, do take as much time as you need to edit the transcript.
I look forward to reading over it.
That’s it for now then. Maybe we can meet post pandemic for dinner or something after a conference. [laughs]
I will be on that side of the world as soon as I don’t have to quarantine for 21 days.
All right. In Taiwan, it’s 14 days. You can get a Gold Card to make it easier. This is just for your information in my lowercase minister position. This is kind of get in Taiwan for free card that we’re now giving to anyone who has any potential to contribute to science or technology, which is literally everyone.
A friend of mine did go to Taipei.
Via a Gold Card?
I don’t know the system. I was so surprised that she did it. It was to give a talk. I was like…
It’s now quite easy. I’ve pasted that link to the chat.
Amazing. Thank you. She said she enjoyed her two weeks in a hotel.
[laughs] They’re quite enjoyable. All right. I guess that’s it for now. Live long and prosper in the meanwhile. Bye.