Imagine a tapestry, woven not of threads, but of lives. Each carries its own strength, but together they form something unbreakable. Collective action is what binds this fabric. For more than 45 years, Right Livelihood has walked alongside courageous changemakers. Each laureate weaves their struggles together.

Hello and welcome to the interview series, How to Mobilize Change. My name is Teldah Mawarire, and in four 30-minute conversations, I take a deep dive with the Right Livelihood laureates to hear their stories. In the next 30 minutes, I welcome Audrey Tang. Congratulations and welcome to the conversation.

Congratulations on winning the Right Livelihood Award. What a moment for someone who is a cyber ambassador to be one of the four to receive this award that is widely regarded as the alternative Nobel Prize. Welcome up on stage, Audrey Tang. What signals do you think this sends to democracies right now?

I think it shows that we can have positive vision for positive action. Without positive alternatives of digital systems building the social fabric to bridge the polarization, the default trajectory is toward authoritarianism and democracy backsliding.

So I think the award is showing people that cyberspace, like any conflict region, there are people waging peace, and people can free the future together.

Before we get into a bit of your work, I am interested, of course, in you as a human being and your background. So I saw a little bit that before the age of five, you were someone who was reading classical literature. At the age of six, you were studying advanced maths. By eight, you were building code for video games. And you've been described as a digital genius elsewhere, online.

Today, the education sector has embraced technology. But there are some voices that are urging caution in terms of use of tech tools in education. In your view, can the internet produce critical thinking people?

Well, I think the internet is literally just interconnecting networks. So it is the communities that foster critical thinking, that have the civic care for curiosity and collaboration. So first and foremost, children, and really anyone, needs to embed ourselves in communities of practice for common purpose. This is in Taiwan, we call PBL, purpose-based learning.

And then the internet can connect the people working, for example, on climate justice in one community, and another on biblical creation care, another community, and translate between these two, and see that, oh, they're actually also doing God's work, and so on.

And so this inter-protocol comes after the communities, which is why I call myself a techno-communitarian. Technology is fostering communities, not some abstract progress.

Still on this issue, there is a quote of yours that says, "The superintelligence we are looking for is already here. It is us."

There are feelings, however, that artificial intelligence today is out of or beyond human control, or soon will be. Are humans really the superintelligence of the future?

Well, I believe our collective action is currently inhibited by a very high PPM environment. And I don't mean parts per million CO2, although that's very important. But I mean polarization per minute.

So every day, if you open social media, you scroll, figure out the optimal number of polarization to hit you, to keep you engaged by getting you enraged. And so the human in the loop of AI is like a hamster in a wheel, like running, exercising, a lot of dopamine, but not going anywhere. There's no steering by the hamster of the wheel.

And so I believe if we're stuck in this loop, then I agree with you that it seems out of control. And then people talk about, let's stop the spinning wheel, stop AI, or people talk about acceleration, and so on. But to me, I think the spinning wheel is the wrong approach.

We need to take the steering wheel so that the assistive intelligence to foster our communication can lower the polarization per minute. And only when we have a low PPM can we regain the civic muscle for collective action.

In terms of still artificial intelligence and in terms of this regaining, we see moves in different parts of the world to legislate artificial intelligence, taking different approaches, some of it taking a legislative approach that is for fostering innovation. Others going stronger on protections of individuals and protections of data and so forth.

What approach should we take in legislation? And in fact, should we be legislating or thinking about legislating AI at all?

In the Taiwanese legislature, our ministry, the Ministry of Digital Affairs that I founded in 2022, sits in the Transportation Committee. This is very unique. In other places in the world, digital ministries are in economy, in science, in interior, if it's cybersecurity, but only in Taiwan on transportation.

And the reason why is we believe that it's a matter of infrastructure. The information superhighway all needs the off ramp and the on ramp. Because think about it. If you have a highway with no off ramp and on ramp, it's just a loop. It's a spinning wheel, right? So it's not going anywhere.

And so I believe the legislators' job and ministers' job is to enable the freedom of movement, the freedom of association and expression online. So if a platform wants to capture our citizens, offer no way for them to migrate to newer, better networks by keeping their communities hostage, then of course we need laws that say, oh, if you change your telecom, you can take your number with you. If you change your social network, you should be able to take your friends with you. If you change an AI service, you should take your contacts with you.

Because that is not stifling innovation. This is not some guardrail. This is a guiderail in the shape of off ramps and on ramps.

So trust seems to be one of the big issues around tech. Can we trust the current speed of technological developments? How do we build trust into this?

Well, to give no trust is to get no trust. And this applies to governments as well as to the big tech.

In Taiwan, we believe we should make the process that the state apparatus does radically transparent to the people. So it's sousveillance. We let people surveil what we do as public officials. Whereas in authoritarian polities, they make the citizens transparent to the state. So the state knows everything, what the citizen is doing. So very different ideas, even though both are about transparency, but different sides of transparency.

And so I believe in the tech world, if it is the tech world's creations being steered by communities, then the community have the final say. It's just like personal computing. You can determine what spreadsheets, what desktop publishing you install on your own computer. Instead of typing into a terminal and have a large mainframe computer administrator watch every key that you type.

So I think the point I'm making is that it's not about a European champion that is an alternate big tech that monitors European people in Europe. But rather, you should have the EuroStack that is about empowering communities to own their own compute. So there's no surveillance anywhere from the state nor from the corporations.

I will come to the issue of surveillance a bit later, but I want to talk a bit about polarization. The internet and technology have evolved so deeply, but we have misinformation, disinformation, the issue of deepfakes, deliberate manipulation of public opinions that leads to everlasting impacts around democratic participation, electoral processes and so forth.

If you take the pulse on social media alone, it seems scary with seemingly deep polarization and people unable to find each other. I've heard you say that humans are actually not as polarized. Why do you say polarization is not deep and can technology be used to help humans find one another?

I say that polarization online, the high PPM, is an illusion because it is a broadcast network and it gives the megaphone to the people on the extreme side of ideologies. So if you just look at social media, you see the anti-social messages being amplified, creating the caricature of ideologies and mislead people to think that we're polarized.

But if you put people not in a broadcasting network, but in a conversation network where people talk to like nine other people online or in person, you find everybody actually agree on most of the things most of the time. So it is a function of the space, not a function of the individuals, which is why in Taiwan we develop what's called pro-social media. It is not about amplifying the extreme, but rather amplifying the uncommon ground, the unlikely consensus that was discovered by linking the ideologies on both sides.

For example, when we legalize marriage equality, one side said same-sex people should enjoy the same rights and duties. The other says that the lineage, family, relationship, kinship should not be disrupted. And then we brought them together, plate against plate, like collision. But in the kind of geothermal democracy, they co-create a new idea so that same-sex couple in Taiwan enjoy the same rights and duties, but their family don't form kinship.

So this kind of co-creation leaves everybody better off and people can not only live with it, but also deepen their trust on each other.

I want to take you back to 2014 and back to the present. You were part of a social movement, the Sunflower Movement, that occupied parliament peacefully. And you live streamed for three weeks over a trade pact. I think that was deemed as not beneficial and this led to the deal being rescinded.

Today's civil society appears to face an existential threat together with movements as well as the dismantling of international development as we knew it. If we go back to 2014, do you think there are lessons in that time that civil society and movements could draw to inspire today?

Well, in 2014, Taiwan was not the first polity to have Occupy Movement. We already have Occupy Wall Street. We have Occupy in New Zealand, many states in the US. We have the Arab Spring and so on.

However, the Taiwan experience was unique in that we don't see ourselves as protesters. We're not against the trade deal. We're demonstrators. We're showing that we can have a much more legitimate process inviting half a million people on the street and many more online to form conversation networks and settle the trade deal issues aspect by aspect.

So we have more than 20 civil society organizations, each taking care of one aspect. For example, I joined the one on cyber resilience, but there's one on human rights, on LGBTQ rights, on environmental and so on. And so once people agree on something that day, we broadcast to the entire country. And then we announce these are the remaining issues. And then we talk about that the next day.

And so after three weeks, we're the only Occupy that year that converged instead of diverged. So in the end, we didn't just make that bill withdrawal, but rather we proposed our demands in very coherent ideas. And the Speaker Wang Jin-pyng of the Parliament at the time, simply said the people's version are better than the MPs' version. So it's Occupy that resulted in victory.

So I think the lesson here is that if you're only protesting, then over time you diverge, you fracture into different factions. But if you have a way to listen broadly, then you converge and you produce what Manuel Castells called network making power, not just counter power.

Today, throughout the world, civil society, social movements are reeling from what I would like to call weaponization of technology against them. Things like spyware, surveillance, digital laws that can declare them as cybersecurity threats.

In a digital democracy context, how do we reimagine the right to freedom of peaceful assembly?

I think first and foremost, we need the freedom of movement. If we don't have the right to move between service providers, then even though initially the platform like Twitter, initially very friendly to activists and makes a lot of room for the peaceful conversation and assembly online.

However, as time goes by and it captures the majority of the population, then because moving out is difficult because you cannot take your community with you, then the platform owners, because of shareholder value or whatever other reasons, start squeezing. So then we become not citizens, not even customers, but just users, as in drug users, that cannot escape from the addiction of the social media.

So before we can have freedom of association online, first of all, we need the freedom of movement, which is why I really applaud the EU Digital Markets Act that is already specifying freedom of movement across the like WhatsApp, instant message platforms, group chat as well. And I understand Brussels is now reviewing whether to extend that also to social networks or even AI services.

Let's focus a bit on free speech. We did touch a little bit on it. But with deepfakes, bot farms, info ops, how do we restore trust?

Well, first of all, Taiwan knows a lot about these attacks. According to V-Dem, we're the top target in the world for the past 12 years straight for polarization attacks. From our very friendly neighbor that provides free penetration testing service. Usually you have to pay for that sort of service, but we just get 2 million attempts every day to test our resilience.

So thanks to their free service over the past decade, we now have a very strong playbook when it comes to this cyber resilience. And first and foremost, this is the idea that each of the citizens need to be part of the defense, what we call the all-of-society resilience. And it involves the young people, even primary schoolers and high schoolers participating in journalism.

Because institutional journalism by itself is no match to the manipulation of those bots and swarms and so on. But the journalism as a civic muscle in young people's minds does serve as inoculation. So just reading fact checks doesn't do much. But participating in fact checking does everything.

So in Taiwan in 2019, we changed our curriculum from media literacy where you receive information to media competency. And by fact checking the presidential candidates, by measuring air quality, water quality, noise level, by starting petitions — 5,000 people younger than 18 can force a deliberation to go to school one hour later because one more hour of sleep gets you a better grade than one more hour of study, the science shows.

And winning that — by 2022, according to ICCS, Taiwanese 14-year-olds are now top of the world when it comes to civic knowledge and the feeling that they steer the society direction instead of being dictated by it.

So some analysts would say with technology, all we are doing is transporting our isms out of the physical world into the digital world. So whether it's racism, sexism, that we are just taking and amplifying what is there already.

So the human race seems to be advancing in technology, but in terms of isms and other ills, it looks like we are going backwards. How do we approach this?

Well, speaking as a pluralist, I think pluralism is uniquely suited for the digital realm. Because pluralism was difficult because our mind cannot simulate more than 150 other positions, the Dunbar's number. Beyond that, we rely on abstractions, ideologies, isms that makes it difficult to truly be in other people's shoes.

However, using internet technologies, we can have deep and broad conversations. We have alignment assemblies where we have citizen assemblies online, where we invited 447 people, a microcosm of the Taiwanese country public, the same demographics, to talk about, say, deepfake regulations and so on.

Now, if you fit 447 people physically in the same room, they will not be able to listen to the other people. But thanks to the structural facilitation using AI technologies, small language models, they can first have conversations in small groups of 10 and then using language models to weave their viewpoints with the other people, and even doing social translations. And so by doing so, we have very deep listening, transformative, generative experience, but also a very broad segment of society.

I want to turn with you a little bit to democracy as an aspiration. In many parts of the world, I think the rising view seems to be that democracy has not delivered the dividends, especially the economic dividend, the total peace dividend.

In your view, is democracy still a viable aspiration?

Well, certainly. I mean, we hear that a lot from our friendly neighbor who wants to save the world from democratic chaos by propagating a much more top-down way so that there's no dissent or chaos can be controlled.

Even during the pandemic, we hear the very interesting narrative that says democracy cannot do lockdown well. And so public health relies on autocracy on lockdowns and so on. Well, Taiwan showed that even though we never locked down any city during the three years, we only lost seven people in the first year in 2020 to COVID. And TSMC or the factories keep churning out products because we understand it is about democratizing the response to the pandemic.

We have even like 10-year-olds contributing, calling 1922, our hotline, to contribute the ideas into the epidemic response. Because even though authoritarianism can do lockdown, by the third year, everybody is very tired. There's fatigue.

But in Taiwan, because it is communities participating in rationing out masks, in contact tracing that's privacy preserving, in vaccine that has a friendly competition of the four different brands — so we don't have an anti-vax faction, but we have like sports teams. I got all four brands just to make a point.

So democracy can deliver if you tap into the superintelligence of the people and pluralism.

During your time when you were a digital minister, 2022 to 2024, you declared broadband as a human right. The reality is different for many people in many parts of the world in terms of enjoying the same internet and technology.

Today, millions are left out of the digital realities. We see an increase in ills such as technologically facilitated gender-based violence. Millions of people in lower income countries who have close to zero access to digital technologies and infrastructure or hardware. How do we imagine hope?

So when I was Minister of Digital Affairs, our universal service initially only covered citizens. And then we look at, for example, overseas fishing vessels. Many immigrant workers on such vessels. Are they not protected by the broadband as a human right?

I think by extending it to literally everybody, then we are basically investing into, for example, satellite technology. They initially need a relay on that vessel. But initially investing in that increased the incentive for our providers to have investment into the direct-to-cell-phone connectivity. So now they are more and more enjoying direct to cell phone, which means that the ship owner would not be able to throttle or monitor their traffic and so on.

So I think the point here I'm making is that the government needs to set the norm first and say, even in low resource regions where it does not make economic sense to provide internet access, the state redistributes the service fund so that the other telecoms that did not invest in such areas should cover the full cost of investing in microwave, in satellite and so on.

And once that is in shape, then there's a friendly competition of who can deliver such universal service in the most economic fashion, like the direct-to-phone technologies. So I would encourage everybody to think about a long-term investment that people can do simply by specifying this protocol of the off ramp and the on ramp of the information superhighway.

So Audrey, you have co-authored the book, Plurality: the Future of Collaborative Technology and Democracy, which I believe is openly available. If you had a crystal ball and could look into the ball, say 20 years from now, what do you think our technology world will look like?

Yeah, I think currently there is this false dilemma between innovation and regulation. Many people here feel that if you regulate, set too much guardrails, then the innovator will simply arbitrage and go some other places for innovation. However, I think this is a false dilemma as we analyzed in the book.

I believe if there is a way for the people to fork the technology, to take whatever big tech have to offer, but then offer like Wikipedia, like Signal, like Proton, the people's version of these — well, since we're the alternative award, the award to produce workable alternatives should be the direction for the next 20 years.

And then people will look back and see this dilemma as very silly because obviously when the innovation is led by the people closest to the pain, empowered to tackle the issues that they are facing with, obviously the tech innovation serves the people instead of being stifled by the people.

So, coming to a close, are you advocating non-regulation in tech rather than going the innovation way? Regulation or innovation?

So, what I'm trying to say is that the idea of Plurality is to take people's grievances, the vulnerabilities, the harms you mentioned, but then empower these people to imagine alternatives for the technology to serve their communities.

And then for the state to refocus, to have the big tech play the role of utilities, and then to make them compete on fulfilling the specification crowdsourced by the everyday people, especially vulnerable communities.

If you do this very simple change, then this is not about putting the brake on the regulation. It is not about pressing the pedal on innovation. It is about building the steering wheel so that communities can steer the technology toward digital freedom. And so, the false dilemma just dissolves itself once you build the steering wheel with the communities.

On that note, I think I would like to thank you, Audrey Tang, winner of the Right Livelihood Award 2025. Thank you so much for coming to this deep conversation, and congratulations once again.

Thank you.