I’m looking forward to visit as well.

Yeah. I’m never too much into grandiose claims — I don’t think they have much effect.

Yes. That’s plenty.

Technology for me is — if we are to change the system — it’s just to make up for the time and space differences. It’s not that we have anything against the existing system, we’re just to restore it to its natural circumstances.

The system for that — our existing language and so on — is pretty good for this purpose. But there are, of course, time and space constraints when someone in Taiwan wants to speak with somebody in New Zealand.

Ok. What I’m trying to say is that the natural circumstances for me is to have my full attunement, full attention, when I try to listen to somebody or have somebody else listen to me.

Well, If I want to listen to you, and say if our Skype connection had a glitch at this moment, would I not want to fix it? If I were to fix that, it’s not me wanting to "change the Internet", nor to "change Skype as an application" — is ...

It has a profound psychological effect, to look at the Earth and its surrounding stars and systems like that. And once that becomes my personal reality, existing political divisions have very little effect on my mind. I think that’s what "individual anarchism" means to me, personally.

Well it means several things. For example, when I was just falling asleep last night, I was wearing this Oculus Rift virtual reality goggles, and looking at the Earth from a satellite of Pluto.

I think it’s just we had the technologies for speaking to millions before we had the technology to listen to millions, that made our current political and media situation like this. Once they become symmetrical, I think it would restore some of the early balance.

Before television and radio, there wasn’t a way for people to speak to millions of people, either; it was just one-to-one speaking via telephones at a time, and the society was structured around that.

Well, I don’t actually think so...

I mean, listening, scalable listening, and building tools for scalable listening? I think that is a majority, that is what most people would want. And in fact they do jump on it when there are better tools for doing so.

Well, we have to qualify what is it that I am doing.

So it was basically saying all these cases, which was tried in a military court due to a glitch in our legal system, must be tried in the civil court and with due process. That demand was also met.

Essentially, it’s an "accidental death" of a certain soldier. When people asked what exactly happened, all the CCTVs — the camera recordings — mysteriously disappeared.

You mean the 1985 protest?

It is, and it prompted a quarter million people to the street. I wasn’t involved back then actually, I was involved in the collaborative document they created. Because that was a flash mob, really, by people who were not activist organizers before, so they collaborated on a Google Doc to ...

That is correct.

Well, I wasn’t so much directly involved back then. But it was due to a Ministry of Defence covering up of a certain accidental death of a soldier.

That is exactly the case, yes.

The outcome was that the Parliament — the head of Parliament — agreed that it’s probably not a good idea to ram through the trade agreement the way it were. So the outcome is the occupiers got their demands met. But the other demand, which is have a bottom-up constitutional ...

The meetings and the deliberations on the street were digitized in such a manner, and this is the first large-scale demonstration that Taiwan has seen, for this kind of deliberative democracy.

In this kind of space, people gradually found each other — people who thought they were in different ideological camps — they cross pollinate with each other, because every day starts with a recap of what got discussed, what reached consensus in the previous day.

Because of the help of g0v civic hackers, we have made sure that every corner of the occupied area was live-broadcasted online, transcribed, with a real-time translation and logistics team, so it became a safe space where rumors and violence have no place to expand.

So they occupied the Parliament. Instead of just demonstrating and protesting, they were demonstrating a different kind of consensus-making deliberation, by going over the suggested trade deal, one line by one line, and have all the people — half million people on the street — participate in this kind of ...

Certainly. So the short of it is very simple. There’s a bunch of students who didn’t like the way that a Legislative Yuan — that’s our Parliament — refused to debate the treaty with Beijing, because their interpretation of constitution at the time was that Beijing is a domestic city ...

Well, a hacker is someone who makes new rules out of new situations, instead of trying to retrofit old rules to new situations. A civic hacker is just someone who does this to the public sphere.

So it’s up to the people to mobilize, to convince, to somehow rally, or to come to a consensus. What we do is provide a space that is — unlike Facebook — trying to highlight the things that people have consensus on. So I would say a little bit of ...

It’s a little bit of both, because what we do is not human intervention during the deliberation; it’s just providing a safe space where people can see each other’s — your Facebook friend’s or Twitter friend’s — stance, on this kind of matter.

So it’s not that the regulation would not happen without this process, is that it would have a much harder time to convince people that this is where we are going forward.

Well it would take longer, I think. Because it’s not the consensus themselves, it is the process that brings the previously opposing or even very violent parties together, so that they could agree to a compromise.

For other cases like online sales of alcohol, we have a 80/20 split, so the threshold would be 90 percent. No matter how many people you mobilize to the majority group, you still have to convince over half of the minority.

Our formula is: To form a binding consensus. It has to cross the threshold to convince 80 percent of people, which is calculated by the 60 percent the majority group, plus half of the minority group.

Well, the idea is that, for example in the Uber case, we had two groups identified by a machine-learning program. It’s open data, and presented to everybody. There are roughly 60 per cent for legalization of Uber, and 40 percent for outright banning Uber.

Well the thing is that, when we had a deliberation, Uber was only operating in Taipei City, and the drivers were reasonably happy with this compromise. But Uber has since expanded to other cities, now we may have to do the same deliberations in other cities as well.

Well, they could join such a fleet. The idea is that existing taxi drivers are still having a monopoly of hailing on the street; and they can also join those dispatch systems, while the Uber drivers would be restricted to only an App-based dispatch system.

But the taxi drivers for this new kind of taxi must be protected in the same way the normal employees are. And we also encourage local co-ops to form this kind of App-dispatched taxi fleets to serve under-served areas.

There’s quite a few outcomes. The government pledged to ratify our consensus in a new regulation, slated maybe a week or two weeks from now. It’s basically saying, as long as they register locally as a fleet,as long as it pay taxes, we’re willing to have a different kind of ...

Over the four weeks, as they try to convince each other, they gradually fuse in the middle, and we basically take the points which more than 80 percent people have consensus, and use that as our negotiation points with Uber.

People were very split in the first week, and we can visually picture the split, because their groups were dispersed in four corners in a two-dimensional graph.

Yeah. We were sending an interactive online survey, that brings both the legal Uber drivers (UberBlack) and the not-so-legal Uber drivers (UberX) together, along with existing taxi drivers and scholars and policymakers, into a four week interactive discussion.

In other modes, we also buy Facebook advertise meant to take people out of Facebook, saying that "maybe you can have your discussions elsewhere, where it has a binding effect on the government" — either state or a national level. Most people would find this motivation enough.

For example one could install this browser plug-in called "Facebook feed eradicator". And once you install the plug-in, the social feed goes away from the Facebook website — you can still use its other functions.

Certainly. Facebook is sort of in its own league, as their social media is trying to encompass all modes of media and try to basically let people stay on it forever, using machine learning algorithms to tailor-made itself into the kind of media that someone craves — not necessarily needs. ...

Well I think it was due to the digital equality program the Taiwan government did when I was 12, to make sure that everybody — even the less connected areas — must have affordable ADSL lines for Internet download. I think I was fortunate in that the first web sites ...

That would be correct.

Yeah. I found a series of companies, and partnered and sold some companies; it’s just standard Silicon Valley entrepreneurship.

That’s exactly correct.

Certainly. For example one of the g0v-facilitated discussions was how the Taipei city — Taiwan’s capital city — distributed its social housing to their people in socially disadvantaged groups. So disaster victims, aborigines, homeless, and mentally and physically handicapped people. So we know as a fact they were not "clicktivists", ...