Please welcome to the stage Deepak Bhargava, Audrey Tang, and Dr. Chelsea Clinton.

Oh, thank you again for that warm welcome. I’m really looking forward to this conversation, though before we begin, as I was just saying to Audrey, to the ambassador, I’m just so sorry for the terrible tragedy that Taiwan has confronted with the horrific storms. And so really before we begin this conversation, I wanted to extend our sympathies and to acknowledge what your country’s going through.

We heard earlier this morning Maria Ressa say that these days everything is downstream from information and that mis- and disinformation are upstream from so many of the kind of conversations, the debates that we’re having, whether around kind of global health or climate change.

Audrey, I wonder if we can turn to you and you can share, while I see you nodding, you are still an optimist about technology and kind of what work you’re doing in Taiwan to try to protect and mitigate harms and also simultaneously use technology as a force for good.

Certainly. In Taiwan, we have weathered this sorts of storms and typhoons, including the cyber attacks, literally called Volt Typhoons and Salt Typhoons, and also polarization attacks, malicious AI swarms, generative propaganda, and so on, for the past 12 years, according to V-DEM.

And 12 years ago, it was pretty bad. Taiwan was very polarized. The trust in the democratic institutions were crumbling. The president in 2014 was enjoying 9% of approval rating. In a country of 24 million people, that’s 20 million people automatically against whatever the government says.

We were able to overcome this polarization by doing something very simple, which is to find the uncommon ground.

In 2014, half a million people went to the streets and many more online to protest against the trade deal that we were about to sign with Beijing. But instead of just protesting against something, we demonstrated for a system where anybody on the street can talk what they feel about the trade deal.

And then an AI system that is not trained on maximizing engagement through enragement, but rather trained on civic care, summarized these ideas into common knowledge.

So every day we say to the people what was agreed the previous day, what was remaining to be deliberated. And after three weeks, we converged so that we have a package of ideas about the trade deal that leaves everybody slightly happier and nobody very unhappy. And this was passed.

And so after hundreds of times doing this kind of broad listening, uncommon ground building, by 2020, the approval rate is back at more than 70%. And today, the BTI rates Taiwan more than 90% of Taiwanese people think democracy is at least fairly good.

Yes.

You know, Deepak, you’ve written and spoken about kind of the crisis that we have in civic engagement, in civic life, and kind of the connection between those crises and democracy.

And we heard my mom earlier reflect that for the first time in more than two decades, more people are living in non-democratic systems than living in democratic systems.

How do you think technology plays a role in moving us forward to hopefully a healthier civic life, whether it’s in kind of a reaction to a particular moment, like we heard from Audrey, or in the most wonderful sense, kind of the banality of every day?

Well, thanks for the question. And I think what I’d reflect is that democracy as a political system is losing legitimacy and is imperiled in part because people do not have a sense of agency and a lived experience of democracy in their everyday lives.

And I’ve been focused on the kind of in real life part of that problem more than the tech side of that problem.

And as I see it, in the United States, we’ve had a titanic erosion of the kinds of civic organizations that give people that everyday sense of participation and meaning.

Church participation, community organizations and civic organizations, places where you might meet people who come from a different background than you, who come from a different neighborhood, who don’t have the same political views, and you have to figure out how to kind of interact and work together.

That atomization is a huge part of the crises of loneliness, of isolation, of despair, that I think is driving our small-D democratic crisis.

I’d also point to the dramatic decline in the labor movement throughout the world. In the United States, we’ve gone from 35% of people, workers, being part of a union, down to 6%.

So the consequence is that most people go to work and they have an experience of having authoritarianism every day, having very little power on the job.

So democracy can’t just be an experience we have every two years or four years. As important as voting is, it has to be an experience we have every day in our lives.

So at the Freedom Together Foundation, we’ve made a generational commitment to invest in rebuilding that kind of social organizational infrastructure to give people a tangible experience of what it’s like to negotiate, to take action, to set an agenda with your neighbors.

And I think one of the bright spots of this moment for me is that out of this crisis we’re in, I think we are beginning to see an upsurge in participation and civic engagement.

In a way, this is the biggest organizing opportunity of my lifetime. Whether it’s veterans experiencing the pain of cuts in the VA, or parents experiencing the pain of cuts in the education system, or the family and friends and co-workers and co-parishioners of immigrants who are living in fear of what’s going to happen to their loved ones.

Out of this crucible of crisis, we can rebuild a civil society in this country that can undergird a much healthier and stronger democracy than what we had before.

Deepak, admittedly, I tell my children, our family’s not a democracy. Their voices always matter, but they don’t have a vote. And yet, I expect them to be citizens every day.

Like citizens in our family, citizens at school, citizens in our faith community, citizens in their extracurricular activities, citizens who are walking down the street in the grocery store on the subway. And I don’t want that to be a privilege in our country.

So I think the decisive sense of we need to authentically catalyze and yet then really purposefully build community is so vitally important.

And, you know, Audrey, I know you talked about what happened, you know, a dozen years ago. You also, though, referenced it’s not as if sustained cyber attacks or, you know, cyber typhoons have stopped. If anything, I would imagine they have accelerated at different junctures.

Thinking about what Deepak just said, what are the ways from your kind of official position that you work with the 20 million people in Taiwan to kind of build the digital literacy so that they’re hopefully not susceptible kind of to those attacks? And also the civic awareness that they’re not spending so much time online being susceptible to those attacks.

Yes, great question.

I was reminded in 2019, we switched our basic education curriculum in Taiwan to prepare for a post-AI age.

Were you the first country in the world to do this?

I think so.

We basically reasoned that anything that is routine will be taken over by robots. And so what’s remaining for humans to do is curiosity, collaboration, and civic care.

And in that curriculum, we changed our words. It used to be literacy, media literacy, data literacy, digital literacy. And we switched away from saying literacy, which was consuming information with critical thinking, into competency. And so it’s media competency, data competency.

It is the primary schoolers measuring air quality and then informing together their parents whether to go to a hike or not because of air pollution.

It is the high schoolers doing real-time fact-checking on the three presidential candidates as they’re having a debate, because we know that independently checked facts by vertical institutions such as journalism doesn’t really move young people anymore.

But if they go through the journalistic motions and with their peers so that they understand that, oh, you have to balance the two sources and so on, that creates an inoculation effect that we call pre-bunking.

And so this kind of media competency also meant that the young people demand that they set the national agenda way before they turn 18. So they went on to online platforms.

They demand, for example, that they go to school one hour later in the day because study shows that one more hour sleep gets you a better grade than one more hour study. And they did get it.

So the 17-year-olds and the 70-year-olds formed this intergenerational unity. And we tapped them into reverse mentors, advisors to the cabinet sometimes even before they turned 18.

Well, I apologize for using an anachronistic term of kind of literacy instead of competency.

Deepak, I saw you nodding while Audrey was speaking.

And certainly while listening to Audrey, I was reflecting on something that you said, you know, all of 10 minutes ago.

And that one of the reasons Americans have lost trust in our democracy is the erosion of ways to participate and to have kind of tangible agency, to really feel like kind of energy and effort at least somewhat correlates to outputs and outcomes.

You know, Audrey just gave a stunning example of high school students, it sounds like, working with their grandparents to successfully campaign for starting school an hour later.

Oh, yeah, there are people in the audience applauding.

What do you think that would look like here in the United States? What can you give us kind of in this audience today? And I know many of us, you know, are not American. So feel free to cast also the net wider. How should we be kind of using that very clear, concise, powerful example as we’re kind of imagining and thinking about what we want to do to strengthen our civil societies?

Yeah. We need in the United States a massive, small-D democratic revival.

And, you know, we are code red on democracy right now. Every indicator is pointing in the wrong direction.

If we’re looking at any other country, we would say we have had an autocratic breakthrough and we are now in a process of autocratic consolidation.

The simplest thing that I ask the question of people is, do you feel free to state your opinion, even if it’s unpopular or critical of those in power? And in more and more audiences I’m in, people say, no, I’m afraid. Everyday people say it, powerful people say it.

So here’s the lesson, I think, from our own history of democratic crises and from around the world. There are two ingredients that have to come together, and I think we don’t have a ton of time, in order for the small-D democratic revival to take place.

First of all, we need the leaders of major institutions in society, universities, charities, businesses, media companies, journalists. We need these law firms, we need these institutions to actually stand up and take a stand for what’s right. And we need them to do it now, not tomorrow. We’re running out of time.

And I say this not glibly. I say this as the leader of an institution that feels all the cross pressures. There’s every incentive to put your head down and to try to not be the one that is targeted.

But if all of us make that choice, we’re done for. And our democracy is done for.

And I want to point out that there are positive examples here. Last week, over 800 charities came together and unequivocally denounced political violence in this country and also condemned the use of political violence to attack our basic fundamental constitutional freedoms and rights of free speech and association. We need to see more and more of that in America from our civic leaders, and all of us have a role in insisting on it from our friends, our peers, our co-workers, our leaders. That’s one.

Two, we need a mass democratic movement in this country. Institutions by themselves are not going to save us. So millions of people are going to have to find agency and find a pathway to take action. And we know the formula for that. We’ve been through this before in this country. It’s going to take things like strategic non-cooperation. You think about the Montgomery bus boycott, or you think about the activity that led to Jimmy Kimmel coming back on air.

We do know how to do this. You think about organizing people who are being harmed, whether it’s scientists, students, veterans, people of faith. So many people are in the crosshairs here, they can be engaged on those everyday issues to make them better, to create a pathway to somewhere better. We also need to welcome people who are not already with us with open arms. There are so many people who are not with any program, who are ready to be invited in to be part of something.

The last thing I’d say is we should not be trying to go back to a system that was not working for most people in this society. We need to go forward. The academic literature says 70% of the time when we have autocratic breakthroughs, there’s a U-turn. We come back around the world to a democratic society, and sometimes it’s more democratic than when we started. That should be our goal in this case.

I completely agree, Deepak. Thank you.

Audrey, building on what Deepak said about inviting more people in, including people who at the moment don’t possibly feel invited or included anywhere, I know you have written and spoken a lot about finding the uncommon common ground. What do you mean by that? And how do you think technology can play a role in not only finding it, but nurturing it and sustaining it?

The uncommon ground stems from this idea that if you poll people individually, or if you just look at the extreme corners on social media, you may see that the most extreme ideas are like fire on the ground that threaten to explode.

But there are ways to harness those conflicts into energy, like a combustion engine, so that if you put people in, say, small groups of 10, and only amplify the ideas that resonate across those 10 people, then suddenly you find the YIMBY or NIMBY energy becomes like MIMBY:Okay, maybe in my backyard if you do this, if you do that.

One very concrete quick example. Last year, around March, Taiwan was hit by the wave of deepfake scams. Anywhere on Facebook or YouTube, if you scroll, you see Jensen Huang, our Taiwanese NVIDIA CEO, his likeness, saying that he wants to give back to the Taiwanese by giving you free investment advice or crypto or something like that.

And if you click it, Jensen actually talks to you, of course, as a deepfake running on NVIDIA GPU. And people did lose millions of dollars to these scams.

But also, if you poll people individually, they say, oh, we don’t want government overreach. We want freedom of expression. We’re the most free in Asia in terms of internet freedom. So it looked like a stalemate.

However, we sent 200,000 text messages from the trusted government number 111 asking people just one very simple question:What should we do about information integrity online?

People gave us their ideas. And then thousands volunteered to participate in online alignment assemblies that we coordinated with CIP, the Collective Intelligence Project, here in the US.

Basically, people in rooms of 10 start brainstorming. And the most resonating idea, for example, is that all the advertisements should be displayed as probably scam until Jensen Huang or anybody signs off on it. One very good idea.

Another room says if somebody gets scammed $5 million out of an investment scam, let’s make Facebook liable for the full damage instead of just fining them. Another very good idea.

Another says, oh, if a foreign TikTok or other service that did not want to play by the rules and set up a local office, let’s slow down connection to their video, but not censor them. Another very good idea.

And so these ideas are the uncommon ground. That is assembled by a language model. These rooms of 10, they’re machine facilitated, so we can scale this out to like 1,000 or 100,000 of people.

And then, again, the pack of ideas that was agreed by more than 85% of people randomly selected to be representative of the Taiwanese population passed just last March to May to July.

So within four months, we passed all the laws because we showed the legislature, even though none of the three parties hold over a 51% majority, they know that this is the people’s will.

And so this year, if you scroll in Taiwan, we don’t see those deepfake ads anymore.

Wow. Wow.

Audrey, thank you. Thank you for being so tangible.

I think it’s really helpful when oftentimes we talk about kind of democracy, understandably, from a principled perspective in this country, given that, you know, as we heard from Deepak, so many of those core principles and constitutionally enshrined rights are under threat, it is important also to focus on the pragmatic.

In just our last few minutes, I want to give each of you the chance to kind of share final reflections, something maybe that didn’t come up that you want the audience to know about your work or kind of where your work may be going or to give us another reason to be optimistic.

Maybe Deepak, we’ll start with you and then Audrey.

So I think one of the challenges for our sector, for charitable organizations, for philanthropy, is we are going to need to create the on-ramps for millions of people to come in to revitalize our democracy.

And I think that’s going to mean a little bit of a culture change for us, which I think we can do, instead of just being focused on expertise, making the case, research reports, we’re going to have to be in neighborhoods, in rural communities, listening to people, not just trying to get people invested in what we already think may be the solution to a problem.

That kind of grassroots outreach is something that the civil society sector in this country has historically done, we can return to those roots.

And I see it happening all over the country, in rural North Carolina, in upstate New York, in parts of this country you wouldn’t expect that neighbors are coming to rally with each other and for each other.

We are a good and compassionate country. There is a wellspring of decency in this country that can be tapped. It’s up to us to go do it.

First of all, 100%.

In 2016, when I stepped into the cabinet as digital minister, in Taiwan, shùwèi means both digital and also plural. So I was also the minister for pluralism. And I wrote a very short poem as my job description, which I will quickly recite for you here. It goes like this.

When we see Internet of Things, let’s make it an Internet of Beings.

When we see virtual reality, let’s make it a shared reality.

When we see machine learning, let’s make it collaborative learning.

When we see user experience, let’s make it about human experience.

And whenever we hear that a singularity is near, let’s always remember:the plurality is here.

Thank you.

What a perfect note to end on.

Thank you both so much. Thank you all.