Yes. Guarantee that any coalition of <strong> ~10% </strong> can <strong> veto the worst 10% </strong> of proposals concerning them. It’s a dynamic coalition. We require <strong> consent, not consensus </strong> —protecting against what we don’t want versus mandating what we do want.

Autocracies think in a command way: if a solution is deployed and some people are unhappy, those people need to align because it is state policy. In a democracy, if it doesn’t fit, we figure out a <strong> fork </strong> —like privacy‑preserving contact tracing—that makes people happier. Ideally, everybody is ...

Journalists have this curiosity— <strong> investigative journalism </strong> —which autocracies dislike. You also need <strong> responsibility </strong> : each person taking some responsibility in addressing part of those needs, building <strong> confidence </strong> , exercising those muscles, delivering, and checking feedback—being <strong> responsive </strong> to what’s actually happening.

Democracy is participatory decisions and processes people can live with. One needs to be <strong> attentive </strong> —a special curiosity about actual needs and emerging shared challenges, and a curiosity to address those needs <strong> together </strong> .

We decided <strong> curiosity, collaboration, and care for the common good </strong> are what matter. These are <strong> competencies </strong> , not literacies—fostering intrinsic motivation to be curious, to collaborate, to care. That became our new curriculum.

In Taiwan’s <strong> 2019 curriculum reform </strong> we assumed: anything that can be automated will be automated. Anything with standardized answers memorized by rote won’t matter. Those literacies were core to basic education. What still matters when cognitive and most motor functions are machine‑driven?

<strong> Language models </strong> —human‑level cognition engines that understand across cultures and disciplines the nuances of qualitative human expression. Electricity gave the internet; the internet gave language models; the language models contain most of the public internet. The microcosm of the internet is now in language models.

People come together to make decisions that concern them in a way people generally can live with.

The outcome: share the Taiwanese experience of building <strong> civic infrastructure of horizontal trust </strong> that is <strong> anti‑fragile </strong> against polarization, radicalization, and the authoritarian narrative that “democracy only leads to chaos and division.” Spread the message of <strong> empathy </strong> across info/cyber/social domains.

Last month I was supposed to be in <strong> Tel Aviv for Cyber Week </strong> —a meeting of cyber ambassadors and security officers, although it’s now postponed to December. I think I’ve gone to more than <strong> 20 countries </strong> , averaging <strong> one time‑zone change every four days </strong> ...

I get summoned by missions of Taiwan around the world. For example, at the <strong> AI Action Summit </strong> in Paris in February, I showed up sharing Taiwan’s experience. Then I was in Munich as well. Interestingly, I listened to <strong> J. D. Vance’s </strong> first and second international speech. ...

Civic technologists critiqued the old system. I worked with them: <strong> here are the APIs </strong> powering the old system. If you design privacy‑preserving, zero‑knowledge methods—venue learns nothing about you, telecom learns nothing about the venue, government learns nothing—yet notifications still work—then in <strong> three days </strong> I commit to ...

Yes, but particular designs needed privacy. Existing contact‑tracing had people writing phone numbers; the next person could see the previous number—a privacy hazard. Google Forms and other venue‑level aggregations created attractive targets for cyberattacks.

My role was ensuring civic technologists could make full use of this infrastructure so it reached everybody and reduced <strong> epistemic harm </strong> and chaos— <strong> fast, fair, fun </strong> —things people would vote for. Without the electronic <strong> NHI </strong> infrastructure, there would be no ingredients for g0v to ...

The health minister who coordinated SARS, Chen Chien-Jen, later became Vice President during COVID, a Johns Hopkins–trained epidemiologist. <strong> Right after SARS </strong> , he designed the <strong> CECC </strong> (Central Epidemic Command Center). The system puts all ministries in one place, with the health minister as commander. Communication is ...

Our national healthcare system existed but used paper cards. Only Penghu had an IC‑card pilot. Without an electronic system for cybernetic feedback, it was chaos—random phone calls, everybody to everybody.

Yes. During SARS we lost more people than any other country. It was contained because it was too toxic—self‑limiting. It didn’t spread a lot because people got sick very quickly, but it could have been very bad.

In Taiwan we also had SARS.

Yes, <strong> civic muscle </strong> . I felt that at the Medialab-Prado around 2015–2016. There was a huge amount of civic muscle built before 15M. 15M was the front of existing connections.

When things go bad—private harms, chaos, polarization—those can serve as triggers. People get fed up and amass. <strong> Civic infrastructure </strong> is like a <strong> combustion engine </strong> : if you harness the social fuel of conflict at that moment, it produces something beautiful and co‑creative. If you don’t, as ...

You have many waves and don’t know which will meet the urgency. With an <strong> open‑innovation culture </strong> , once you hit a wall, some advanced waves will tunnel over the wall— <strong> quantum tunneling </strong> . It’s a very different theory of change from the classical social movements model ...

<strong> Civic infrastructure. </strong>

It felt like putting theory to practice. We made new applications, but the Castells theory was clear in my mind. It influenced our commitments to <strong> radical transparency </strong> and to <strong> demonstrating </strong> renewed democratic systems—not just protesting. Those were straight from his texts.

I translated parts of Manuel Castells’ <em> Networks of Outrage and Hope </em> and went deeply into his network power theory. We were influenced by the wave of internet‑enabled activism in Spain and elsewhere. We were at the tail of that wave and benefited from studies of Occupy—international configurations where ...

Before Sunflower, <strong> g0v </strong> was already supporting demonstrations with internet connectivity. 2014 was the first year YouTube Live, Facebook Live, Twitch, and so on, went production‑level. The first year of livestreams.

My first vote literally mattered.

When I turned 20, I cast my first vote in the neighborhood chief (里長) election. The candidate I supported won by one vote.

The early internet engineering pioneers designed an egalitarian system. Anybody with an email address can participate. Anyone can nominate themselves to the governance board. Electors are drawn by lottery. It’s very sophisticated. I participated when I was 14 or 15—five years before I could vote—immersed in an advanced political system ...

The founding people of internet governance are still around. I still work with David D. Clark every couple of weeks. He came up with the notion of <strong> rough consensus and running code. </strong>

Exactly. There’s no separation between activism, politics, and technology while lifting martial law and democratizing with the help of the internet.

I wouldn’t point to a single turning point. My journey into internet governance and internet freedom, and my trajectory toward democratization, were two parallel paths that eventually converged.

For me, getting into the early internet and working with democratization activists were literally the same experience.

In Taiwan, the Wild Lily student movement and other movements were happening at the same time, calling for democratization in a thoroughly non-violent way. To have personally experienced all of this was fundamentally formative for me.

I went to live with him in Germany for a year. During that time, young students from Beijing, Shanghai, and other places would visit our living room—they were people in their early twenties who remained passionate about democracy after the Tiananmen Incident.

In November of that year, the Berlin Wall fell, and in January of the following year, he went to Germany to pursue a PhD in political science, and also went to Berlin to cover the annual conference of pro-democracy activists. He pursued his PhD in Saarland, near the French border, ...

When I was a child, Taiwan was not yet a democracy; it was still under martial law. My parents were both journalists. My father went to Beijing on May 12, 1989, and the very next day the Beijing student pro-democracy hunger strike began. He stayed in Tiananmen until June 1st ...

It’s a very different branch of anarchism than anything violent, sabotaging, or coercive. We don’t fight coercion with coercion. I’m heavily influenced by Taoism growing up. Another way to say conservative anarchism is Taoism.

I’m Audrey Tang. My work has been fostering <strong> conservative anarchism </strong> , which means honoring human traditions and existing institutions, and changing them in a way that’s non‑coercive—shifting vertical, top‑down control to horizontal, voluntary cooperation.

Polycrisis.

Some say it’s the same crisis; they call it the metacrisis.

It’s assistive intelligence.

Yes, I use Granola as well. It’s very convenient.

Thank you so much. Very good questions.

Yes. So in Asia, I think the peak threat is yet to come. But by the time the threat comes, our social resilience, our immune system will also co-evolve. So maybe it will not be that bad. It’s like if we’re inoculated, but not yet have our booster shot. So ...

For many, yes. I think, as I mentioned, for many, the 2024 election showed for the first time how polarization redefines people’s imagination of democracy. We even have cases like Romania where an entire presidential election was canceled, was annulled, because of the malicious AIs we were just talking about. ...

So the media institutions, including social media institutions, academic institutions everywhere, they’re now saying, “We need to learn horizontal trust.” Because if we don’t learn horizontal trust, the vertical mode of trust risks becoming less and less relevant, especially among the young population. So I’m actually quite optimistic about the ...

Because the vertical institutions around the world are crumbling, especially among young people. The best newspaper, the best university, the best ministries, they lose their potency. And even like in Japan, I think people still respect journalists, professors, and so on, very much. They still have the reverence. Like people ...

So that is the main difference. It was difficult to spread these ideas of bridging, of listening for the past 10 years outside of Taiwan. Because if you’re not on the front line, you don’t feel that pressure. But now, suddenly, the front line is everywhere. And so I’m actually ...

On the other hand, I think in the past couple of years, everywhere, all the democracies feel the pressure of polarization. There’s not a single democracy last year where the leading ruling party did not lose seats. There’s not a single democracy where they can keep their seats. So suddenly, ...

I switched from the cabinet position last year to the diplomatic position, and I felt that “pressure makes diamonds” in Taiwan. So in other polities which had yet to feel the pressure, people would not have an urgent motivation to change the status quo, and it was harder to obtain ...