I received this morning an invitation to the atypical course and prestigious CV. She learns to program at 8 years old, leaves school at 14, goes to the United States and founded her startup at 16.
In 2014, she returns to her country of origin, Taiwan, where she actively participates as a civic hacker in the ground-breaking movements against the Kuomintang administration, before joining the new government of the young Asian democracy at 35 years old.
Hello Audrey Tang. Good morning.
You are the Minister for Digital Affairs in Taiwan since 2016, and you advocate for full transparency and open data in your country.
Audrey Tang, you record all the interviews that you give. Are you recording this?
Definitely. Because I’m not video conferencing but just doing the radio, we usually publish the transcript after 10 days of co-editing.
Now, this is very interesting about your view of politics. What does this say on your view of politics?
Yes, the idea, very simply put, is to share the why and how of policymaking, not just the what of policies.
So all the meetings that I chair, the ministerial meetings of my ministry, as well as the lobbyists and the journalist visits, we publish as either a transcript or sometimes also as a video.
For you, transparency of information is essential, but can you both be a government minister and still have this view of things?
Definitely. I think, for me, this is not about citizens trusting the government, but about the government trusting the citizens. Only when we trust the citizens can some of the citizens trust back with co-creation.
In a liberal democratic society, it should always be that a state initiates this trust.
I am describing you to our listeners, you are a child prodigy of digital technology, you started coding at age 8.
Where did this passion come from?
Yeah, I still remember when I was eight, I was very interested in mathematics, but not that good at math, that’s to say to manually do the calculations. Then I encountered programming in the form of a programming book.
So without having a personal computer, I started programming by writing with pencil on a piece of paper, typing the keyboard like CLS, enter, and then using an eraser to erase the output and then simulate what the computer will output.
I think this made computational thinking part of my thinking pattern, so I can face a problem and just distill it into modular parts, so as to interact with them one at a time.
You left school at age 14 and then you started up your own company at age 16. What did your parents have to say about this? How did it go?
They, of course, were very interested in getting me into a good research lab, working with advanced researchers, the doctors and professors and so on.
But I told the head of my school and my parents that there is already this new thing at the time, 1995, called the World Wide Web. People do publish on arxiv.org from Cornell University, the preprints, that’s to say, the drafts of their papers.
Then I just wrote emails to those researchers and start doing research because they didn’t know I was just 14 or 15 years old. So I told the head of the school that, you know, that the end goal is already being met by the way, and I don’t have to spend 10 years to get an advanced degree.
And the head of the school said: OK, from tomorrow on, you don’t have to go to my school anymore.
You became a hacker. What is a hacker? I mean, we think of hackers as people, as pirates stealing your confidential data. That’s not what you did. You didn’t do anything illegal.
Well, a hacker is someone who thinks outside of the box. To deeply understand a system so as to fit the purpose of emerging requirements, not just the original requirements.
It is true that there are cybersecurity hackers, like the white hat hackers, that discover the vulnerabilities, the issues with the system, and then notice the person running the system so as to stop the black hats, the bad people, from hacking into the system.
But there are also civic hackers who build new systems, not suffering from the same vulnerabilities without getting into the attack and defense of cybersecurity. So a hacker is anyone who thinks innovatively outside of the box.
What I’m interested in here is how did you go from being a geek, as it were, to become an activist for democracy.
I mean, what’s the connection between technology and political activism?
In Taiwan, democratization and the internet happen exactly at the same time. We had our first direct presidential election in 1996, and already all the campaigns were having bulletin board systems, world wide websites, and so on.
From the very beginning of Taiwanese democratization, the imagination is not just limited to the low bandwidth, high latency communication, namely to vote, like three bits uploaded every four years or every two years, but rather something that is more like a continuous democracy.
So we have, for example, participatory budgeting; we have citizen’s assembly; we have the ideas of people participating online and offline in a hybrid way — all of this around the turn of the century. Working on digitalization and democracy, for me, is the same thing.
And also in Taiwan, the words are the same. The word for digital, 數位, also means plural — to work on plurality or pluralism, a collaborative diversity, is written with the same word as digitalization. So I’m also the plural minister.
In other countries, the internet was used for repression purposes. Look at China, for instance…
Of course, for someone who wants to use the word “transparency”, sometimes it means different things.
In Taiwan, we always mean making the state transparent to the citizens. But there are other jurisdictions in which it means to make the citizens transparent to the state.
So, ostensibly the same word or the same technology can be used in totally opposite fashion.
Beyond the cases where the state controls the citizens, there is a big debate about the real problems with social media, the fact that kids are being harassed through the social media. What do you think about that?
Well, we need to distinguish social media that are serving the needs of their shareholders or advertisers and so on, versus more pro-social social media that serves the needs of the common good.
In Taiwan, the most notable social media, the PTT, has been for 25 years running fairly in the social sector.
As part of the National Taiwan University’s campus, it’s a student club and it’s open source, meaning that everybody can participate in the governance. It serves no advertisers nor shareholders.
The state, of course, doesn’t control the speech in the campus; they are at arm’s length to the public sector.
And so, on PTT, collaborative governance becomes possible because there’s no need to build addiction for example to get people buying new things or polarizing opinions and so on.
So depolarization, I believe, is only possible if we have the underlying incentives to be not optimizing for shareholder profit but rather for purpose.
You believe you should fight the power of the GAFA?
Of course, it means that the GAFA companies don’t get to set the norms. When you do not have viable pro-social alternatives in an open source community, of course people go and use the GAFA services and think that as the norm.
But in Taiwan, for example, around 2018, we discovered that the existing fact-checking mechanism was being bypassed by foreign money buying sponsored advertisements on say Facebook and other global platforms.
Because of the norm around campaign donation expense transparency is already set by the social sector and endorsed by the PTT and other social media in the social sector, it created a social sanction pressure on Facebook so that they instilled the civic integrity team adhering to our local norm, not a norm at a time that they have in other jurisdictions.
So this is exactly like a trade negotiation. If you already have popular support and a strong norm locally, the global companies will have to work with a local norm. The same happens with the Uber company, which became a legal taxi service, adhering to local laws here in Taiwan.
I said that you were an activist for open source, now you are a minister for digital affairs in Taiwan, and I say the word, to be “conservative anarchist”, what does that mean?
Taiwan is home to 20 national languages, 16 of which are Austronesian — Indo-Pacific, Pacific Islander languages.
So for each and every issue in our society, we have at least 20 traditions that we need to take care of. This idea of a transcultural conservative stance means that we would not sacrifice the dignity, the rights of the 19 communities just to push progress on any particular community in Taiwan.
And the other part, the anarchist part, means that I implement my policies in a way without coercion, meaning that it’s about voluntary cooperation, it’s not about giving orders or taking orders, but reconfigure the norm in such a way that people find it easier to work with the new good enough consensus.
But how can you reconcile this conservative anarchism with big companies doing this in the digital industry? Because our listeners should remember that Taiwan is a central hub for the digital industry. And without Taiwan there would be no computer chips, for instance.
Indeed, I think people do trust not just the semiconductor makers of Taiwan, but the entire supply chain around the chips, as well as the cybersecurity standard, confidentiality, integrity, and availability of our chipmaking, but all the related industries.
And I think this value of trustworthiness is the main value that we provide to the world, so that you can feel secure and comfortable doing the most confidential computations on Taiwanese chips.
And with that said, I would also say that this kind of tamper-proof, censorship-resistant, privacy-preserving computation, I don’t think it’s something only Taiwan wants. It’s everyone — including people in authoritarian regimes. They would much prefer if they have this kind of computation as well.
Is this to say that you took advantage of that technology during the COVID crisis? The whole world admired your methods
What did you do during the COVID crisis? I mean, you were the digital minister, but what did you do during COVID.
A few things. I helped the civic technologists visualizing the availability of masks in real time in early 2020.
So, when people around the world were still debating on the effectiveness of masks, we already focused on the good enough consensus, which is masks are there to protect your own face against your own unwashed hands. On that, everyone can agree.
And so, we spread that idea and have the civic technologists working on open data, real-time open data, to visualize the nearest possible place to get some medical-grade masks.
Later on, we also worked with the same civic tech community, g0v (gov-zero), on a zero-knowledge, privacy-preserving contact tracing program where you scan a QR code before entering a venue but the venue learns nothing, not even your phone number, and you do get exclusion notification. It’s called 1922 SMS.
I also helped the vaccination registration system and so on.
And yet again, there was a major breakthrough by Taiwan. Taiwan was ahead of the rest of the world in the COVID crisis.
How do you explain this? Is this to say that in schools, also in educational terms, do schools learn more about digital technology? Are there government incentives to learn more about information technology?
Yes, that’s because we emphasize not just literacy in our curriculum. In 2019, we passed a new national curriculum for basic education, and we changed digital literacy, media literacy, data literacy into competence. So media competence, data competence, and so on.
Literacy is when you receive information and process, like with critical thinking and so on. But competence is when you are a co-producer, a maker of information for other people to work with.
Instead of relying on fact-checkers only, everyone can become a fact-checker through civic technology. Everyone can measure air quality and on a distributed ledger, share what the air quality is like, so on and so forth.
When people participate in the collective stewardship of data and digital world, it means that people become inoculated against this kind of outrage, polarization, foreign interference, manipulation of information and so on, because people went to the root of the competence, that is to say, the production of reliable data.
Taiwan is also a society of hacking citizens, which is called vTaiwan. Can you tell us about that platform?
Certainly. So, as I mentioned, the g0v community pioneered a lot of the ways for people to get to rough consensus, good enough consensus, despite their polarized or partisan differences. And one of the main things that we tried starting 2014-15 was this idea called Polis.
Polis is a technology for collating, analyzing, and understanding what large groups of people think. And powered by AI, machine training, assistive intelligence, it makes it more visible for agreements than polarization.
So people naturally gravitate toward finding common ground rather than building into divisive ideological issues. And it’s with Polis that the vTaiwan platform and later the Join platform resolve successfully the issues around Uber and many other emerging technology challenges.
But there’s another use of technology, and that’s the way in which Taiwan has to defend itself against cyber attacks. What do you do about that as a minister?
We also tapped into the democratic network. For example, last August, when the former US Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan, we suffered in a single day 23 times more denial of service attack volume compared to the previous week in a single day.
So many ministries’ websites were disrupted. But our ministry’s website, which went online the same hour as the PLA drill started, never even suffered one second of damage. And that’s because we’ve worked with the content distribution networks, and the web3 community.
Using the civic technology Interplanetary File System or IPFS, anyone in France or even in authoritarian regimes can donate part of their hard disk and connectivity to help to pin our website content to help us stay uploaded to become a joint defender against DDoS and really a lot of people around the world volunteered to help us defending this DDoS attack so.
So I would say that the worldwide democratic network is actually the same alliance — it’s not this jurisdiction or that jurisdiction under attack. I think because we are liberal democracies, our citizens feel a sense of collaborative duty to defend one another.
There is another threat, and that is that from artificial intelligence. I mean, for our jobs, do you see that artificial intelligence is a threat or what?
To me, AI means assistive intelligence. It augments the collective intelligence we’ve been talking about without taking away human agency or dignity and so on.
And so, for example, while I’m having this conversation with you, I’m doing so on my laptop and this laptop runs an open source model that is even better than ChatGPT 3.5 and I can just train it according to the transcript that we’re going to make together.
And so it learns to be my personal assistant, it means personal computing, without me having to share anything confidential or private with other global GAFA companies.
And should one regulate ChatGPT? Is artificial intelligence, when you leave artificial intelligence to itself, might it not run the risk for society?
I think it’s important to have viable alternatives that are in the social sector. This is exactly the same as the social media question you asked a while ago in this interview.
If we don’t have good open source alternatives that people or entire communities can align, that’s to say, to make, adapt technology to fit the societal norms, then of course, stronger regulations will be called for and it will be a more divisive ground.
But fortunately, even the largest AI language models fit into a USB disk, it’s just not even 100 gigabytes.
So I think this is the Linux moment — or Android moment — where people can actually experiment with state-of-the-art language models without creating a monopolizing situation.
The free world is afraid for your country, for Taiwan. They are afraid that Taiwan might be attacked by the People’s Republic of China.
How are you doing these weeks? Is there a lot of tension? How is this experience right now?
I think to us, it’s not sometime in the future. You spoke like something in the future, but for us, we face literally millions of cyber attack attempts every day.
So to us, this has been always going on for a while, and it’s like earthquakes, I guess, because large attacks do not give you a lot of warning. But with devotion and innovation, we’re able to give a lot of warnings from threat indicator sharing from across the world, from the liberal democracies alliances.
We look forward to work with people both in the web3 community, as well as people in the different liberal democracies to enhance our detection possibilities so that we can mitigate even more timely and more effectively.
Are there contributions from France?
I think the web3 community do have a lot of contributors in France.
The particular communication methodology we’re adopting, Element/Matrix, received a lot of funding and development from France.
And our trustworthy AI dialogue engine by our National Science and Technology Commission started the work from BLOOM, which is a BigScience project, also partly sponsored by the French government.
So I thank the French people for sharing the same values and ethos and for jointly collaborating on defense.
I would like to thank you from the bottom of my heart, Audrey Tang, for having accepted to answer our questions.
Once again, I’ll tell the viewers that you are in charge of digital affairs in Taiwan.
Have a lovely day. Thank you.
Thank you. Live long and prosper.