The reasoning behind the Russian attack on Ukraine involves more than Putin’s ego. It’s also a Russian attack on the rule of law, on borders, on a certain idea of international community. He wants to undermine those things, to make mass murder, war and genocide acceptable. In other words, he’s trying to change the …
…the narrative.
He wants to get everybody used to the idea that these things are OK.
Yeah, to change the international norm.
How do you think about pushing back against a similar kind of attack in Taiwan? This is question both about Taiwan internally, and about Taiwan’s foreign policy.
We’re very familiar with such narratives.
(laughter)
We’ve been subject to that sort of narrative for as long since I can remember.
Especially before the pandemic, there was a few years where the dominating narrative from the Beijing regime was that “democracy can only leads to chaos, to polarization, to hate between diverse groups of people… only the model from the Beijing regime can foster innovation…” Like fintech, high-speed rails, whatever. For a while, it looked – as part of the One Belt One Road – attractive to many commentators abroad.
I don’t think they’re ever convincing to the Taiwanese people, maybe because we understood already that the authoritarian expansionism carries a very heavy toll of systemic risk. The civil society cannot supervise anything – once you make the citizens transparent to the state, the state’s not going to make itself transparent to the citizens.
The democratization in Taiwan is our immunization against ideas such as these, that says the international norms need to be shaped on however the authoritarians feel about the in-the-moment need of justification.
After speaker Pelosi visited Taiwan, we’ve seen a lot of cyberattacks, disinformation and so on that resembles the similar kind of narratives that you have seen around the Kyiv situation.
For example?
For example, we have cyberattacks denying the service of our Presidential Office website or Ministry of National Defense website just for half an hour, an hour, whatever. The disinformation campaign says the PRC forces have successfully infiltrated the Presidential Office, or the Minister of National Defense have collapsed central command, and so on.
The public bulletin board in one of the Taiwan rail stations, which is advertisement-only – it doesn’t even display the timetable – they were able to hack into that and make it display a anti-Pelosi message. The disinformation narrative says the critical infrastructure of the railroad is now under control of the PLA or something.
This is very similar to how, during the attack to Kyiv, wherever there is a void, a vacuum, where the local Kyiv Independent and other journalists cannot get a message out, you see disinformation that capitalize on this. The appetite for information is there. People will read and spread disinformation.
We need to be aware of this kind of hybrid form – a little bit of cyberattack, but mostly disinformation capitalizing on that.
First of all, let me ask about Taiwan internally. You say you have a kind of viral vaccine against it from history and so on. What the Chinese are very good at and what the Russians are good at, were good at in Ukraine, is picking out those parts of society that don’t belong, that reject the system, or feel angry, or want some other political …
Yeah, the excluded parts of the society.
… or excluded or want some political option that’s different. How do you think about that? How do you think about reaching them? How do you think about bringing them into the main narrative?
We’re helped by the fact that the PRC regime didn’t do very well on this wild innovation thing. They canceled their own narrative on that.
You mean because the economy’s not doing well?
That’s one. Also, they put restrictions, real restrictions, on the freedom to innovate in their Internet sectors. Previously, the narrative was the liberal democracies isn’t that liberal at all because the check and balances and so on. Only in the sandboxes offered by the authoritarian regimes can the private sector truly grow in a wild way, “野蛮生长.” It’s one of the One Belt and One Road narratives.
Now, because they clamped down the entire Internet industry sector, that is no longer a argument they can make. Previously, our, as you put it, some of the more excluded or marginal part of society were attracted around 2014ish to that narrative. That’s the background of the Sunflower Movement. Nowadays, they cannot even make that narrative work very well.
The same goes for the pandemic control, which was a dominant narrative 2020, ‘21. Again, nowadays, they cannot make that argument very well. I think we’re helped by the fact that our counter-pandemic or counter-infodemic efforts were inclusive by nature.
Even people of very different political affiliations – like deep blue, deep green, and so on – can still collaborate on CoFacts and other platforms to dispel the food- and drug-related misinformation so that it’s non-political, nonpartisan ground for collaboration to build the competence, like media competence so that people can contribute to the fact-checking effort.
Once they do have some positive experience of working together across party lines and so on, when the really large rumor about, for example, election fraud, the CIA printing invisible ink, or whatever, then the existing civic journalists can cover this from different party angles and jointly dispel, debunk that rumor, even though they vote for very different candidates.
As you know, this failed completely in the United States.
The disinformation governance board?
That too, but the effort to do COVID information failed completely, and it became completely partisan.
Mask use and so on.
Masks and vaccines, and so you had a …
Interesting, we don’t have an antivax political faction here.
You don’t have …
We don’t.
The antivax movement almost all over the world is supported by Russians.
What we did is, again, humor over rumor. We put a scoreboard of the people’s willingness to get vaccinated by AstraZeneca by age bracket versus Moderna at the time, then later on BNT and Medigen. You have cheering for your favorite basketball team or something. People were saying, “Oh, I must wait for Moderna. I would never do AstraZeneca or BNT or Medigen.”
People do attack each other, just like people supporting different sports teams, but there’s no antivax team. We turned very successfully the anxiety, fears, and doubt at the time into this, “My vaccine is superior to yours.” That is much better because, at the end of day, all four – now, with Novavax, five – vaccines work.
The idea is to recognize that this kind of competition always exists and try and channel it in a way that’s useful.
Yeah, in a prosocial way.
What about internationally? These narratives: The UN is useless, international law is useless; We don’t believe anymore in conventions on genocide; We don’t believe anymore in human rights.
This is what the Russians are trying to achieve through their war. It has a certain echo internationally, or at least there are parts of the world where people don’t push back against it, especially in Africa, in the Middle East, and other places where there’s Russian influence. Do you think of yourselves as being part of that argument too?
Exactly.
How do you think about building an international coalition? Should there be one? There isn’t right now.
There is. There’s this Joint Declaration for the Future of the Internet and so on, which is very good to Taiwan because .TW is an independent domain, we’re not .CN or .UK. On the Internet digital realm, we have a full voice, not just a observer or something, because it’s not the Westphalian territorial model. It is multistakeholderism, not simply multilateralism.
In the multistakeholder sense, for example, I often say, in countering the pandemic, if the people in the U.K., for example, think Taiwan is too different, then maybe call it the New Zealand model. Call it by any name.
It means that if we make sure that everyone, the entire citizenry, understand the science in a way that’s humorous and easy to spread, then you don’t have to do this arbitrary dilemma between public health on one side and economic growth on the other.
If you do lockdowns and so on, it’s like a dial where you have to choose a point between those two. If everybody understand how the epidemiology works in the various variants, then people can self-organize so that you can have both economic growth and public health.
Taiwan is both an existential proof, just like New Zealand – that is where it works – but also we can be an exporter of the models, the actual nurse and doctor tools that enable this kind of conversations to happen.
Can you give some examples of how you’re exporting it, what institutions you’re using?
Yeah, sure. For example, the pol.is system that we have used to deliberate on the Uber case …
I was going to ask you that.
Yeah. Where the Uber drivers, the taxi drivers, their passengers and so on looked like very polarized. They actually have many things in common. They care about insurance, registration, the fair use of the road, taking care of people in the very rural places.
The local temples and churches, maybe they want to organize their own Uber like fleet and benefit from this kind of search pricing and things like that. The traditional media and the more antisocial form of social media, fueled by advertisement, tend to capitalize on the division on the one or two things.
Like it’s gig economy. Economy is exploitation, or it’s sharing economy is good for science. That is big ideological thing. Underneath these ideological thing, like 90 percent of arguments is actually shared by 90 percent of people most of the time.
By using pol.is, the joint platform, and many other co-creation civil society we put it into a kind of social sector first forum where it’s not a public sector, not a state, not a private sector, not the Uber company, but it’s civil society.
Like the, I know, National Public Radio or something. Somebody that’s well-trusted across parties. That can run such dialogs and sketch the good enough consensus to solve the issues. This technology have been spreading to Europe.
Of course there’s a lot of European experiments – Icelandic, Italian and so on. Denmark, too. In the US I think there was a Bowling Green, Kentucky that used the Technology for a kind of civic conversation, town hall, online.
Again, whether you identify as Democrat or Republican, everybody understand that more choice in broadband connection art, STEM education, and things like that. These are broadly agreed upon by people on those sides.
Where else have you used pol.is? I know the taxi driver example you told us …
For example, we also use that to have a conversation about e-scoters. It’s all very practical like whether e-scooters can be as bikes or as pedestrian or things like that and to very good effect. We have now multiple paddle sites and a upcoming …
The law change already happens, so it would just have to put it into effect. Also online liquor sales, like non-consensual intimate images online. Airbnb, quite a few, like 25 legislations on the original platform. It is also being used for something this suddenly known digital.
There was people who a few years ago proposed that we adopt the Singaporean caning for people who drunk drive. That was very divisive. Using pol.is we were able to adopt something that is not a corporal punishment on human, but on the car.
There was a mandatory alcohol levels sensing device that locks your car if you’re alcohol level is a little bit high for offenders. Lock down the car, not the person or something like that.
That’s interesting. You don’t use it for areas that are very sensitive to the government, for example, like budgets. You don’t have a national debate on budgets using pol.is?
No. We have participatory budgeting and we use quadratic voting or qv to select the innovations, the ideas that requires budgets to deliver the sustainable goals. It’s called Presidential Hackathon. We don’t use pol.is for that.
Poli.is is to let people who are very polarized to reflect on each other’s feelings, to come to good enough consensus. But budget is ultimately about sorting a set of preregistered options. poli.is is about adding more options, like everyone can add more option to the pol.is conversation.
For sorting out budget priority, this is a convergent process. pol.is is a divergent process. We use quadratic voting and other innovations on the Presidential Hackathon when determining budget priority.
How does that work? That gives citizens or vote say in the budgetary …?
What percentage of people participate?
When people do their own petitions, like anyone can get 5,000 people online and say for example, we want to change the time zone of Taiwan to plus nine, that of Japan. Another 8,000 people may then do a counter petition they did and say we want to remain at plus eight.
That’s on the joint platform. Of course a lot of budget would be involved if we actually change our time zone. At the end of the day, it is these 18,000 people and they’re sympathizers during a focused conversation, collaborative conversation on this matter.
This is not about X percent of people who participate regularly. This is about the civil society setting, like change.org, a petition for a cause. Then ad hoc people who care about the costs joins together maybe 18,000 people, 20,000 people. In theoretical terms, this costs self-selection. This is not sortition.
We have 10 million or so visits per year to these platforms. Of 23 million people, that’s a lot. It’s not like 50 percent of our population participate regularly. Most just participate in the one or two petitions they care about. How do you ensure that those very small percentages of people don’t change the argument, don’t shift the conversation?
Because, again, re-transplanting it to the United States, for example, or most European countries, with a lot of the problems with trying to do any kind of online democracies, that very small groups of very partisan people …
Yeah. I understand.
… can change the conversation as they do already on Twitter and on Facebook. How do you guard for that?
For both pol.is, the joint platform Presidential Hackathon, all the online part does is sets the conversation agenda for the face-to-face meetings for the existing representative democratic process.
This is not a referendum. If this is a referendum then it will probably have to be a sortition, like statist like jury. Statistically significant group of people replacing the work of MPs. It’s not what we are advocating. What we’re saying is that before it was only the MPs setting the policy, possibility or budget possibilities.
How about let’s open the agenda setting power so that people can do that too. At the end of the day, it’s still MPs deliberating the agenda.
Chinese influence campaigns work on many levels in business, information, and so on. How do you prevent them from infiltrating this process? How do you know who you’re talking to?
Of course, you have to have a local SNS number to join the Join platform. If you get 5,000 fake SIM cards, the anti-money-laundering office will discover that very quickly. We piggyback on the telecommunication carriers to verify. This is the same way that we authenticate for the counter-pandemic efforts.
You have to be pretty trusted by somebody who’s physically in Taiwan who have to provide two photo IDs in order to get the SIM card so there’s a root of trust.
The root of trust comes through the telecoms company?
It’s not a government process?
No, it’s not a government process.
That’s another thing that most other countries don’t have.
You don’t?
No, it’s very easy to get a U.S. telephone number and …
… you don’t have to produce anything. The British are right now having a problem. You know how the British choose their party leaders now depends on the votes of ordinary party members. This is affecting the Tory Party contest right now.
One of the things they’ve discovered is something like 10 percent of the people who say they’re members of the Tory Party don’t even have email addresses. The question is, “Are they even British?”
“Are they even human?”
Are they even human?
(laughter)
They may be bots.
They may be bots. They appear to have not taken that problem into …
What about driver licenses? Surely, you can turn it into an ID of some form that can be proven online.
The British don’t have photo IDs.
So they don’t even have the photo IDs that can be turned into an online …
There’s some weird, long-standing national objection to photo IDs …
Interesting.
There’s no ID card of any kind.
Our universal healthcare is a photo ID, and it covers residents, not just citizens. For the entire counter-pandemic work, we just piggyback on the universal healthcare.
I know in some places there’s a conversation about using blockchain, for example, to help identify people and make sure that they’re real online. Is that something you’ve started doing?
Yeah, of course. Using we call it DLTs or distributed ledgers, people can prove their interactions online, prove that they’ve received an award, won our ideathon, and so on. We use that as proof of participation, but it’s still piggybacked on the telecom, universal healthcare, or other photo IDs.
The blockchain, for us, is a shared database, but it’s not replacing, it’s augmenting the root of trust.
The root of trust is these real-life documents and connections to healthcare and so on?
That’s another thing. That doesn’t work in most countries. The Ukrainians are trying to institute something.
The Diia, they did that.
They integrated multiple photo ID forms into that app just like our National Health Express insurance app. They turned something that was just a ID into a full participation platform because they first authenticate everybody through Diia.
Yes. Did you talk to them about that?
We studied in detail how the app works.
You studied in detail?
Yes, in detail, how the app works.
What do you think of it?
I think it’s really good that they were able to do that before the war. I knew the Ukrainian people from the ProZorro days. That must be ‘14, ‘15. They built a open-procurement platform where all the procurement is made into transparency.
It’s like a blockchain, but not using blockchain technology, a ledger, the Open Contracting Partnership, and so on, around the world can read to be anti-corruption on their existing procurement platform. I was in Paris for OGP. That’s how I learned about ProZorro.
It always strikes me that we started from very similar assumptions, that a career public service wants these transparency tools to safeguard the career public servant against the political influence that want them to hand over contracts to other people. Eric here can relate …
(laughter)
… as a senior public servant.
(laughter)
The interest of the hacktivists, the transparency people, and the interests of career public service to reduce personal risk so that you don’t go to jail are the same. That’s how we got in touch with the Ukrainian civic hacker group. Many of them are now working with the digital transformation ministry.
I went to that ministry when I was there in July.
Excellent.
I’ve seen that. Of course, what’s amazing about it is that it works outside the country for people who are displaced.
Yes, they can hand out vouchers, reimbursements, or whatever through it.
I understand that you’re trying to build a community of trust. How, in a democracy, do you prevent that from being divided by political partisanship? Is it never going to be tempting to one political opposition or another to say, “This whole system is against us, and we’re opposed to the whole system”?
You would get that in other countries. Do you get it here?
If so, why not?
Not at all.
If not, why not, rather?
Because we have a social sector that has higher legitimacy than both political parties and the private sector.
Social sector meaning NGOs?
NGOs, co-ops, social entrepreneurs, credit unions – people working on the grassroots level that’s also political in nature, but not party politics, community organizers, and so on, nonviolent communication facilitators. From what I understand, in the U.S., there was a time where the social sector was also strong but not now certainly.
The difference is very tangible. When we say online political forum, the U.S. people may think Reddit or something, but that is in the private sector. They have advertisers, shareholders, and so on. When you ask Taiwanese people, they PTT. PTT has no shareholder or advertisers.
It’s a student club, the National Taiwan University bulletin board system student club running the show for 25 years now, and all free software, open source, collective governance, and so on. When your go-to example is in the social sector, then no political party will say, “Oh, let’s shut down PTT.” If they say that, they don’t get votes.
(laughter)
It’s not possible to even think about that. You can imagine if Reddit leans left or right or whatever, the opposition party would say, “Oh, let’s take down Reddit. Let’s replace it with something better.” That doesn’t happen in Taiwan.
In the U.S., what you have is this phenomenon of people saying the mainstream media is associated with one party, so we’re going to create a separate media. The separate media then becomes an area for disinformation, rumors, and so on.
Again, I think that’s because local, independent, civic media is not as strong. Here in Taiwan, people do have a lot of choices in not-for-profit media. The Taiwan Reporter, which is entirely run by an NPO, provides useful input. Actually, the public television too.
My video podcast is on the public television. People don’t think of it as partisan, because it has, in its board, people from many parties. People see it as a common good.
Public TV.
Right, public TV.
Public TV can also be captured.
I know, and there are people who are worried that once the public TV start airing TaiwanPlus, they will be captured by the brainwave of Audrey Tang. That didn’t happen. [laughs] We proved that we’re not making PTV do propaganda.
How do you deal with the influence of Facebook and other outside social media? They don’t have these same kinds of …
I know …
… and these same kinds of rules. You can’t regulate them.
They’re very addictive, like liquor, much more addictive than PTT.
Back in 2018, for example, based on the open data published by the Control Yuan, the auditing office, although we ban domestic contributions to campaigns that are unlisted – it has to be open data in order for you to even give to any candidate – and extra-jurisdictional, foreign, external contributions are not allowed at all. That’s our law.
We have seen in 2018 elections/referendum that the social media on Facebook, through advertisements, bypassing fact-checking, is not subject to that law. As you said, there was no law against foreign people or external people doing precision-targeted advertisements right before the election session on Facebook.
You’ll see a lot of influx of money from the PRC jurisdiction to Facebook targeting Taiwan. The PRC isn’t even allowing Facebook. I’m sure it’s not all tourism advertisement. Facebook was not under pressure at the time to disclose such things.
What we did is not passing a new top-down law, but rather, the same people – the g0v and so on – who occupy the control unit, to demand the release of the campaign donation records – it’s open data – did a conversation to Facebook saying that they’re going to start a social section if Facebook does not obey the same norms established by the civil society to our campaign donation records.
Facebook caved according to one of the people who used to work in Facebook. They caved only in a very few jurisdictions that they can see that there is social backlash coming to them. Do they actually invest in the civic integrity work leading to the next election?
On 2020 election, Facebook agreed to publish all the social and political advertisements in the honest ad platform in real time as open data, banning external contribution as well, all without us passing a law. Rather, making sure that they understand the social sector demands and the consequences.
Was your social sector pushing on Facebook to make a change?
Yeah, the Taiwanese social sector, which is non-partisan.
For example, the Uzbek social sector also objects to the way Facebook works sometimes, but apparently they don’t seem to have the same purchase, or the …
Exactly, and that’s because the social sector, as I mentioned, has a higher legitimacy than even the public sector when they occupy the control unit, or when we occupy the legislative [laughs] , again totally peacefully, non-violently. What we did was demonstrating that it was radical transparency, that current public service can also benefit by reducing their risk.
We built a camaraderie with National Development Council [laughs] in 2014. He was the person in charge of open-data policy.
(laughter)
This was into 2014?
Yeah, this was in 2014, where the National Development Council was just formed, and really needed the legitimacy that was in very short supply. The government support was nine percent or something in 2014.
In a sense, we built a pact where we, the occupiers, leant them legitimacy. They provide the open-data infrastructure, providing the data we want. That collation together has higher legitimacy than political figures.
It’s this legitimacy surplus that made a conversation to Facebook work because Facebook cannot appeal to the lawmakers to test pro-Facebook law. Previously, we already said that this way, the radical transparency was better.
(Suona sounds from outside)
This is a parade or something?
(laughter)
Yes, heavenly communication on the street.
(laughter)
Taiwan is really only safe as a democracy if other democracies support it.
Yes, of course.
A lot of other democracies are in trouble. American democracy’s in trouble. Some European democracies are in trouble. More generally, the pressure on democracies around the world is quite strong. Do you think at all about that, about how to share your methods with others? Do you have conversations about these issues across borders? You mentioned Ukraine.
Yeah. First of all, of course there are troubles within the world democracies. From a comparative stance, there’s far less percentage of people in democratic qualities that will say that Putin’s way or Xi Jinping’s way is their preferred form of government compared to 10 years ago.
Comparatively, we’re gaining ground in mindshare. The liberal democracy might have its troubles, but it’s our way. We need to work on it together to free the future.
Previously, we had this inkling from people who likes “one belt and one road,” maybe they would say autocracies can coexist, and eventually take over. We don’t hear that anymore after the pandemic. Yes, we will, of course, work with liberal democracy around the world. We have programs called Public Code that let us freely reuse, for example, the Estonian system X-Road.
We also contribute our cybersecurity defense interplanetary file system, where three into the comments. The DI team, or any team, can freely reuse that. All of our cybersecurity penetration testing efforts have a amplifying effect because we can also …
When we find out potential vulnerabilities in pol.is and fix that, the Canadians also benefit. When Canadians contribute their French conversation and translation for the multi-language support points, we also benefit, and so on.
You find people are taking it up?
Yes, definitely.
As I said, in the U.S., at least on the surface, I don’t see any of these things happening. I see, in fact, the polarization growing rather worse.
That’s like the symptom. We’re working on the root cause. It will take a while for the symptom to look better I guess.
You think people in America are working on the root causes, other than the three academics at University of Texas, and University of Massachusetts?
I think so. [laughs]
Are you aware of more?
Yeah. The general sentiment … A lot of Silicon Valley VCs, people working on startup ecosystem, they were physically in Taiwan with a gold card during the height of the pandemic. We had a lot of talks. Some of them relocated back, like YouTube’s cofounder, Steve Chen, but they still maintain connections.
It’s quite clear that the investment climate after the NFT crash, incidentally, is now really on somethings like that, something civic, something improves the democratic experience, seeing that the NFT community don’t have the same level of legitimacy now …
Again, a very similar structure. Now they’re looking for the impact certificates, or the use for Blockchain to prove you have decarbonized, things like that, things that are of environmental and social benefits that are non-partisan. There’s a renewed appetite to invest to these things.
You’re the first person I’ve heard say that. I hear, “My impressions of Silicon Valley is getting worse, [laughs] not better, on these issues.” You’re in touch with people there on …?
Mm-hmm, who are investing. Again, for the teams that are investing in Gitcoin, it will take a few years to grow up. When you look only at the meta level, I mean the Meta [laughs] or Alphabet level, it doesn’t look like it’s getting much better.
Also, in the legislature, I read that the U.S. is considering the EU digital markets’ interoperability idea. If these new startups actually gain ground, it would be much easier to do instant message between Messenger or Instagram to these startups, and you can bring your friends with you so that it makes this exodus much easier.
Of course we’re very interested if the U.S. actually adopt that new idea, because that’s going to be critical.
Do you think at all, not just about defending democracy and democratic resilience and so on, do you think at all about pushing the idea of democracy in the autocratic world, so in China or in Russia?
Yeah, empowering democracy, that’s my job.
What do you do that you think is successful?
Quite a few things.
I’m aware of some projects, mostly not publicized.
Well, I’m radically transparent.
I know you are.
I’m proud to say that I’m one of the first people in Taiwan to work on Freenet, the original – before Tor, before all these stuff, before blockchain certainly – a way to get around the Golden Shield and the Great Firewall. That was very early 2000s when the firewall wasn’t great at all in its beginning.
Still, we were already looking at the possible detrimental effects to journalistic work if, within the intranet that is the PRC regime, any journalist can have their name not changed, but their content changed. It will make it much harder to form a civil society. A couple years down the road, the word civil society gets banned by the PRC in public discourse online.
It’s very clear that the People’s Republic don’t really want the social sector to form online, so we work on technologies that will enable anonymous secure communication and tamper-proof publishing. All these distributed ledger stuff, anti-censorship work now, we did a lot of work back then.
Still today, when we say our website is backed by the interplanetary file system so that no matter how many people use DoS, denial of service, 200,000 people around the world, some in authoritarian regimes, can donate their hard drive and connections to help backing up the moda website.
When we say that, it also ties ourself to the back-up that backs up a lot of Hong Kong dissidents’ writings, a lot of investigative journalists’ work that must be anonymous or pseudonymous within the PRC regime itself who are all sharing the same IPFS through matters.news, through many of the portals, to get those writing in a way that cannot be censored or cannot be tampered with.
We tie ourself to these global democratic network, which is why our department is called Democratic Network instead of International Cooperation.
That reaches the people who are …
Digital.
… already activists …
Who are digital.
… who are digital. Do you think at all about the broader public in China? In China and in Russia, but it’s the same …
Yeah, it’s the same question. I think what’s important is that the ladder of skills remains mellow in the sense that it’s not just the three academics or the three hacktivists understanding how the things work, and then nobody else has a clue.
Rather, when people want to, for example, form book-reading clubs online in a secure and deniable fashion, there’s a lot of people understanding how that works. In Hong Kong nowadays, a lot of people know how that works.
Then providing the free software and the cybersecurity habits and sanitation habits to help defending the people who are spreading those democratic network within their neighborhood to protect them both in the cybersecurity sense and in the more traditional secure sense.
Also, once they can spread those tools, which are all free software that can be installed on phones and so on, then it spreads the possibility of secure communication, even in the places that are under the most surveillance. I’m happy to say that the Great Firewall currently have not banned access to GitHub where most of these tools are.
The Great Firewall has not banned access to GitHub?
Yeah. If they do, they lose access to all the cutting-edge AI research. By, again, piggybacking on the academic AI community, we say if you disown GitHub, you also cut yourself away from AI. That worked really well.
Do you have any sense of any kind of take-up among the general public? Is that something you can measure or not? Are you able to measure counter-messaging in Chinese media or Chinese Internet?
Of course, I’m biased because I read those … matters.news or whatever, so I’m unusually optimistic. It’s quite true that, especially on the oversea communities where …
Overseas Chinese communities?
Yes, Mandarin-speaking communities. They now have what we call digital public infrastructure that connects them with the Hong Kong expats.
It feels like the role is being reversed because, during my childhood, it’s the international correspondents and the journalists in Hong Kong revealing the human right abuse in Taiwan … and asking Amnesty International to interfere, so Chiang Kai-shek or Chiang Ching-kuo won’t do something extreme. It’s exactly like that except the role of Hong Kong and Taiwan in reverse.
Do you think at all about narratives that work or ways to contact people in China? Or is that you leave to the Hong Kong journalists?
We are not trying to shape the conversation with tools. We’re trying to shape the tools so it fits the needs of people holding those conversations. It’s very important because, at the end of the day, we’re not here to demand a certain change of discourse.
What we’re saying is that this is just like my role in the Sunflower Movement. I provided broadband connection to journalists, but journalists are in two sides. Even the civic journalists, there were also some that are pro-unification, the White Power people.
I also provided bandwidth to them because I’m interested in conversation that bridges across diversity. If they don’t have a chance of airing their gripes, then maybe they turn into something that’s excluded and get captured entirely by the PRC narrative.
It’s important to bring everybody together, and that’s my role. It’s not my role to say only the Black Island Youth gets a voice, the White Power doesn’t.
I was asking something a little bit different, namely do you think about what narratives would be effective in China? Are there ways to reach … There are different kinds of audiences in China. Obviously, there are different audiences everywhere. There’s an audience that would be receptive to hearing about democracy, and that’s probably very small.
Right, exactly.
Then there’s an audience who would be interested in hearing about peace in the world, and that might be a little bit bigger.
Exactly.
There’s an audience that would be receptive to hearing about the environment, and that’s a different audience.
Do you think about those audiences and how to reach them, or is that not your job?
That’s not my job. My job is to make the infrastructure for collaborative diversity work in a secure way. That in itself is a existential proof that this way counters disinformation better, counters pandemic better, and so on.
Is there anyone in Taiwan who thinks along that way, or not?
I think there are many, but not me personally.
Your interest is creating the digital infrastructure that makes it possible.
To free the future, not any particular future.
Any future’s fine with you?
Any future’s fine, as long as it’s collaborative diversity.
Can I ask you, just out of curiosity, what you make of the events in China over the last few days and how that …
The Congress?
The Congress and the completion of the transformation of China into not just a one-party state but a one-man dictatorship.
The full consolidation of power.
Which it didn’t used to be. Do you have a sense of why that’s happening? How’s that going to affect Taiwan? How does it affect the work that you do?
It’s like the military excursions … Previously, something like that only happens when a major political event happens. Nowadays, it’s practically every day. It’s news if it doesn’t happen a day. [laughs] Again, the hybrid cognitive and cybersecurity attacks we encounter separately. Leading up to a presidential election, of course, there will be disinformation manipulation.
After Pelosi’s visit, of course, there were cyberattacks, and we anticipate that. The hybrid that combines the cyberattack and the disinformation together used to be only reserved for major events, but with the full consolidation of power, maybe like military excursions, we’ll probably have to prepare ourselves so that it happens on a smaller scale every day.
It’s like low-impact earthquakes happening every day here. This is just a reality. Previously, these things were controlled by different branches within the PRC, or PLA or Taiwan Office leaderships. It’s clear that, now, all these are being consolidated.
You mean cyber disinformation, military pressure …?
All that, right. Previously, they were not always coordinated. We can expect more coordination from now on.
Do you have a sense of what’s happened in China that makes that possible, or what’s changed? Do you have a guess at it?
I am not an expert on their congress, but it’s clear that the zero-COVID policy marks a very different political climate. Provinces and lower-level officials, they compete for positions by how strictly they interpret the zero-COVID things. That’s different.
It’s different even compared to the first year of the pandemic, when the lockdowns were seen as a necessary evil, but still evil. Nowadays, these rolling lockdowns are being normalized there. In situations like this, there’s a natural consolidation of power, where everybody has the higher-ups imposing the top-down way to do things.
It used to be that each province, each metropolis may have their own way, like in Shanghai, there used to be a “Shanghai model” to counter the pandemic. During this year, they were being dismantled city by city. Now, it’s just one single command chain from Beijing.
Why is that producing this new level of aggression against Taiwan?
Well, we’re not escalating.
First of all, one of the messages that we keep hearing from them is “one country, two systems,” or “only patriots can govern Hong Kong.”
Previously, like 10 years ago, there was room for debate, like whether “one country, two systems” must actually be a premise of talks.
Now, it seems that they’re more hardline on that. “One country, two systems” is now party line, the doctrine. That contrasts with the Taiwanese perspective on Hong Kong. Today, none of the four major parties here even toy with the idea of accepting “one country, two systems” because we’ve seen what happened in Hong Kong. That narrative distance is much larger.
10 years ago, there were people in Taiwan that says, “Oh, maybe one country, good system. We can influence the PRC regime to adopt democratization.” I can still remember those arguments. [laughs]
I remember people saying that about Hong Kong.
On the other side, they were saying, “Oh, look at Hong Kong. They’re very liberal, and maybe one country, three systems’ pretty good.” The more moderate side on both sides in this particular debate had all but disappeared. What’s left is something that looks like a large gap.
The Hong Kong dissidents here, how did they fit into your argument or your plan? Do you have regular dialogue with them?
Yes, of course. There’s a bookstore called Nowhere, in Ximending. If you find time, you can go there. It’s a natural gathering place for Hong Kong people here. A lot of them are very into this whole web3 Blockchain thing – immutable, facilitating independent-media stuff.
They have to operate on a governing experience outside of a territorial place now. They joined the ranks of other decentralized, autonomous organizations, and can actually contribute to a lot of the same tools. It will be a interesting visit to Nowhere if you can find time.
I might even be going there. I know I’m meeting several Hong Kong people while I’m here.
Good. I’m reluctant to take up your entire day. [laughs] I wanted to thank you for your time …
Thank you.
…and wish you luck. As I said, we’re coming into a very rough period in world history.
Interesting times.
Yes, thank you.
(laughter)
Thank you.