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?

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?

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?

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?

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?

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 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?

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?

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?

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?

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?

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 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?

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

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.