Yes. Let’s make digital democracy great again. Thank you.

…something great again?

Open API. Make it permissionless.

So I think it is in these non-crucial times, in these more chronic times, that you have this national conversation, maybe with some alignment assemblies, around these very important boundaries, the red lines to draw. And once the pandemic or some other disaster happens, then the red lines become also ...

And so I believe that in Taiwan we’ve had years of citizen assemblies and also online Pol.is conversations about exactly the boundary to draw between say public health and privacy. And we did that <em> before </em> the community spread in Taiwan. So when the community spread <em> did </em> ...

And it really is the case in Taiwan that because of the SARS experience, it propelled us to adopt the Central Epidemic Command Center and the digitalization of our public health system and investing in contact tracing, vaccination, mask rationing, and so on and so forth.

Well for Taiwan, COVID-19 was the second pandemic. We were hit by SARS the most, and suffered the most of all countries when SARS happened. And when SARS happened, our health card was literally a piece of paper with six box on it. So you can stamp the date you ...

Exactly.

Well, Bluesky was designed around interoperability. It’s the AT Protocol. Right? So the AT Protocol can federate with the Fediverse, with Nostr, Farcaster, Lens—I’m missing a few. But it’s all the big interoperable web. And the lesson here is <em> not </em> that we need a Euro champion to replace ...

It’s called “Green Earth” because Bluesky, Green Earth. And Green Earth uses language models so you can tell it, you know, I prefer biblical creation care or I prefer climate justice framework and so on. And then it figures out the connective tissue for the ranking system to be maximally ...

As we are the Nobel for alternatives, I heard, the Right Livelihood Award—the idea is to come up with something on a small scale that actually works. So for example I’m working with a team to build this pro-social ranking algorithm that can bridge Truth Social and Bluesky together, the ...

I think the difference between a guardrail that stifles innovation and a protocol that fosters healthy competition and innovation is that the protocol must always come with not just a guardrail against something, but a <em> guide </em> rail, an alternative.

Yeah.

Yeah, I think I pre-bunked that question.

Well I listen. I mean radical interoperability and throttling is not stifling innovation, last I checked. It is not censorship of content, last I checked. Last I checked the state of Utah is conservative, last I checked. And so this is not something that is progressive versus conservative. Not something ...

Of course.

To slowly slow down their connections.

Because if it’s funny, it travels faster than outrage. And if you roll it out within the two hours, you can do a Tenet move and pretend you’re doing pre-bunking. Because for most people, this pincer attack means that they see the polarization <em> after </em> they see the humor. ...

No, we upgrade that to one hour. So yeah, we have this 2-2-2 principle. Whenever the citizens through the collaborative fact-checking grassroots network Cofacts detect that there is a viral polarization or disinformation attack, then within two hours, we need to roll out two minutes of video or two pictures ...

And so all this meronymity, all this selective disclosure so you can prove that <em> Ich bin ein Berliner </em> without revealing your street address in Berlin, for example. All these are fundamental infrastructures that taken together offer a very strong pre-bunking infrastructure instead of debunking.

We embrace the idea of “meronymity” or partial anonymity. So not everybody signs their name on their message, which is very bad for whistleblowers, doxxing them. But it’s also not complete anonymity because our constitution never offered freedom of expression and amplification for foreign robots. And so at least you ...

And we say to the people: This is coming. And the deepfake audition says shift from the content level—where you basically assume anything can be synthetic—to the behavior level and the actor level to ensure there’s digital signature to look for behavior patterns, for example disclosing where this message is ...

Yes, I deepfake myself. Yes. So around three years ago, an actor played me in a deepfake. And it was kind of a fake deepfake because it took a lot of computation actually to calculate that. But we say that in the future, this will take not 12 hours, but ...

In Taiwan, we basically invite these as topics for conversation. Social objects. We pre-bunk instead of debunk messages. Debunking is after the fact. And it’s bound to polarize some people if you debunk.

Okay. They are widening their free service now. And it’s because of language models. It used to be that you had to speak the target language to successfully mount an attack. But now malicious AIs not only speak all languages so well, even the memes, that’s to say pictures, can ...

You don’t get that anywhere else.

Yeah, people can <em> live </em> with it. Which is much easier to achieve than complete consensus. Which only ensures that the people with the most time wins because it’s endless negotiation. But if you only ask: Can you live with it? You can very quickly get a snapshot. Like ...

And we want Personal Computing, which means you can install your own spreadsheets, your own desktop publishing. You can share your fixes, your patches to the software called Apache and then form this movement together of Free and Open Source Software. And so without Personal Computing, there is probably no ...

Because we made many of those PC compatibles back in the 80s. And it was a very different era of course. But I was born in a place that basically fostered this counter-cultural thinking that you do not need to rely on the mainframe computer, so the big state or ...

Yeah. Our AI Basic Act is on its way to the final reading. So fingers crossed. I think it’s down to the last clause. And I think the negotiation throughout the AI Act conversation in Taiwan put an emphasis on interoperability, data innovation, data reuse, and things like that. I ...

And so I think the key here again is air cover, is commitment. When people know that whatever they <em> do </em> agree on will be treated as <em> real </em> red lines by the Minister of Digital Affairs at the time, yours truly, then people really pour in with ...

I think young people by and large feel that the AI systems are out of their control. Like it is somewhere else. So if the tech-broligarchy decides to steer the AI system towards some other future sacrificing the young people, the young people really want to take that steering wheel ...

Yeah, definitely. And Finland just ran one this September: “What do youth think, Finland?” when it comes to AI. Again using the Pol.is technology for sensemaking.

So Japan and California, last I checked, are both much larger than Taiwan. So we are no longer the largest polity with digital participation infrastructure.

I also worked for the past couple of years with Governor Gavin Newsom of California and his first partner Jennifer to work on an Engaged California platform. Initially, we built this to have a conversation with teenagers and even younger children on social media usage because it is a classic ...

But of course Koike won the reelection. But he, Anno-san, got more than 1% of the votes. And then Koike-san invited him to do the Tokyo City consultation for Tokyo 2050. And then he formed a new party, Team Mirai, the Future Party. And with 2.5% of write-in votes for ...

But he did not have a platform for the election. And so he crowdsourced his platform. Saying anybody hashtagging #TokyoAI can be part of Anno’s platform. And so he used exactly the same tools: Pol.is, Talk to the City, and so on—and one month before the governor election he launched ...

Yes. And we also have Japan joining the ranks. It used to be in the Tokyo Metropolitan Area. I’ve worked for many years now with Governor Koike-san to run the Governor’s Cup Hackathon, which is modeled after the Taiwanese Presidential Hackathon. And one of the very young people reading the ...

Well, I mean, there are two differences. One, the EU is doing another round of consultation to expand from instant messaging and group messaging to social networks. So that’s the main difference. The other is that the Utah law applies to all social media, not just the very large social ...

Starting next July, if you’re a Utah citizen and you migrate from TikTok to say Bluesky or Truth Social—both are open source—the old network is required to forward new likes, new reactions, new followers to the new network, just like network portability of telecom numbers. And so you can think ...

However, if there is a magic button you can press and everybody they know also moves off TikTok together… they’re willing to pay <em> you </em> $30 a month for that to happen. So it’s a trap. Literally a product market trap. Because everybody is losing utility. But the first ...

But there are people who build such alternatives but really struggle to solve the problem called the “cold bootstrap.” Because most people are trapped on those large platforms already. There was a study a couple years ago of the US average undergrad person using TikTok. And if you want to ...

Well first of all, I use Proton, which last I checked is based here, not some digital colonialism. And there are many platforms like this. Proton is also Taiwanese-founded so I have a special affinity.

Because if you individually survey people, they tend to be extreme. They’re like “YIMBY! Yes, in my backyard!“ “NIMBY! Never in my backyard!“ But if you say to a group of ten: Only the idea that resonate in the room has a chance to pass out of the room, to ...

Well, I’m sure you already have surveys, that’s to say polls, and institutional media that runs such poll results. So in a sense, our way, the Alignment Assembly, from one side looks like a regular citizen assembly. But on the other side, it looks like a poll. So you can ...

And so we brainstormed better ways. And we did come up with better ways. For example, hosting human rights conferences like RightsCon. Giving Gold Card residency to people who contribute to open source, open science, and open access. We did that too. We advertised the way that we built our ...

And we invited the people who comment on Join—which uses the same design: no reply button, you can like, you can unlike, there’s two columns, one for the best supporting argument, one for the best contra argument—and then we invite the people who post the best of those two ideas ...

It was on the Join platform which was built after the vTaiwan platform as an institutionalized national participation platform that reaches I think 10 million people… or half our 24 million people country. So it’s a pretty wide platform. And anybody with 5,000 signatures—e-petition—can force a conversation, a response from ...

Yes.

Yes. It is… In fact, we’ve discovered again and again that it requires two essential ingredients. One, you need a pro-social designed space where people add to each other instead of detract from each other. And second, you also need air cover. The pre-commitment from the committed listeners that if ...