Right. The moda began as we shifted from contact tracing and containment to a coexistence strategy focused on vaccination rates. Preparation for moda coincided with that transition. I became the founding Minister of Digital Affairs, essentially pulling into one roughly 600‑person team the government units that had interacted with me ...

A cluster of projects comes to mind rather than a single one: mask‑availability visualization, privacy‑preserving contact tracing, vaccination coordination, counter‑infodemic work, and so on. There’s no clear end to one and beginning of the next—technology evolved as the virus mutated.

The Japan stories are now part of the book as well. For example, Takahiro Anno, a sci‑fi writer and AI engineer in his early 30s, read <em> Plurality </em> , decided to run for office without partisan backing, won the most votes anyone under 40 has received, and is now ...

Right—the “network‑making power” Castells analyzed was specific to the Occupy era he directly experienced. Once practices are institutionalized, you can’t analyze them only with networking power or network‑making power. I sometimes describe a different lens: a <em> care </em> framework—attentiveness, responsibility, competence, responsiveness, solidarity, and so on. It’s a different ...

That sounds very Manuel Castells—network theory.

What’s your research question?

That’s great to hear. Between Puerto Rico and Taiwan—or other countries too?

Wow—congratulations!

You’re here for a critical month—there’s been a lot of activity.

Of course.

Sure—of course. Feel free to do more recordings or redundancy. The recording quality on this MacBook is pretty good.

Of course. Thank you for your time.

We can negotiate, but usually I make a textual transcript, lightly paraphrasing, send it to you to co‑edit, and once we are both happy, we publish it to the public domain.

Sure; I am in the U.S. every other month. I am also an AFP Fellow in Philosophy at Oxford along with Alondra Nelson, working on machine ethics — training multi‑agent systems to practice civic care. That sits at the intersection of CS, politics/mobilization, and philosophy — natural allies for CITP.

As for Yarvin’s CEO‑king idea: the DOGE experiment shows that unchecked CEO power yields mixed results. Public experiments are valuable; we learn by trying.

Yes, that is why the U.S. example matters.

Today you see backsliding because there’s no obvious model like the U.S. of the 1950s.

Exactly — the stable attractor of the first Cold War wasn’t just missiles; it was <em> rock ‘n’ roll </em> and <em> blue jeans </em> . That made it possible for Taiwan to democratize peacefully — both the ruling KMT and nascent DPP looked at American democracy and said, “We ...

So, the most useful thing Americans can do for Taiwan is to foster civic care and civic muscle at home. <em> No democracy is an island </em> — not even Taiwan. Without a vibrant U.S. example, backsliding accelerates globally. I have talked about this with large U.S. livestream audiences; people ...

The only way Beijing can take Taiwan without firing a shot is by convincing the world that democracy never delivers and only leads to chaos — the authoritarian narrative. In 2014 some in Taiwan flirted with that; not anymore. But in the U.S., both extremes risk buying into that narrative. ...

Again: deterrence first — kinetic, cyber, information. Only then do talks become politically viable. By then, KMT might rebrand itself as a culturally conservative party rather than “pro‑Beijing.” The partisan split may be on other issues.

Trump said Xi told him that as long as Trump was president, he would not invade — I decline to comment further. The point is: once deterrence is credible and the kinetic domain becomes defense‑dominant, Taiwan’s people will be more willing to talk. We are fine with interdependence where others ...

If asymmetric deterrence is fully in place — so allies do not lose soldiers defending Taiwan — then a hostile takeover will not be an option. At most you get moves on Kinmen and Matsu or blockade scenarios — but our war‑gaming shows blockades can escalate quickly. Politically, Xi gets ...

Initially, yes — mobilized younger “none‑of‑the‑above” voters. But recently the TPP has maneuvered to be a better‑branded KMT — aligning with older KMT constituencies rather than just broadening the youth base. This pivot followed the speaker/deputy speaker vote, where KMT secured both. If TPP had gotten a deputy speaker seat ...

Also, independents — people like me who do not attend party rallies — are the largest segment: about 40 percent. More people believe in direct action: e‑petitions, participatory budgeting, deliberation — democratic expression outside party sorting.

Neither the KMT nor the DPP holds a majority in parliament; the people do not want dominance by either. In the last presidential race, none of the three candidates even entertained “One Country, Two Systems,” especially after Hong Kong’s National Security Law. What can Xi say now? The ROC national ...

They argued self‑defense: the Legislature was trying to deny the Cabinet’s budgeting power, deadlock the Constitutional Court, and even zero out parts of the Control Yuan (we have five branches; the Examination Yuan was unaffected). Civil society launched the recall as democratic defense against cross‑branch overreach. The Legislature dialed down ...

You might expect Eric Chu of the KMT to be jubilant; instead he was humble and did not escalate. Society healed rapidly. We are now heading into a nuclear‑power referendum, historically polarizing — yet this is the least polarized referendum I can recall.

Very. We had four weeks of heightened polarization before July 26 — before a mass recall some dubbed the “Great Recall.” It was the first time since 2018 that something resembling McCarthyism gained traction: talk of impurities, treason laws. But it quickly fell out of favor after the vote. Taiwan ...

Yarvin’s CEO‑king idea got a real‑world experiment with Elon and DOGE — to very mixed success. The good thing about Americans: you are not afraid to experiment and share results.

The battle is still very much on.

There are tamper‑resistant, censorship‑resistant tools — zero‑knowledge payments, privacy primitives. These used to be nerdy, expensive, GPU‑hungry; now they are democratizing. You no longer need to be a master coder — you can speak to a model and it assembles tools. My competitive coding edge is diminishing. That democratizes mobilization ...

Today LLMs run locally on laptops at near GPT‑4 quality. You cannot deny access — it is just a file of a few hundred gigabytes containing much of Wikipedia and more; one can surgically ablate alignment layers, yielding base models that say the quiet parts out loud. People in the ...

Exhibit A: deepfakes. I made BBC news by showing that DeepSeek and other PRC models lacked guardrails against deepfakes and info‑security harms. You would expect them to purge Tiananmen from training data, but a single prompt can surface it. Simple narrative control is failing.

More people inside the PRC now feel that the once ironclad control of speech pre‑COVID has weakened. The lockdowns went on too long, testing mental health and endurance, leading to the White Paper/A4 movement. The swiftness of policy reversal after direct action bolstered confidence in mass demonstrations. You now see ...

That is more my dad’s expertise. He was a journalist in Tiananmen from May ’89, left on June 1 — good for our family; a colleague was shot on June 4. He later studied the student‑group dynamics for his Ph.D. and attended a Berlin reunion a year after the Wall ...

Once we take the right action, hyper‑arousal fades.

Both civil society and the state had reasons to promote plurality. And yes — <em> taking out the trash together every night </em> helps build everyday civic habits.

1. Civil society legitimacy even during martial law: disaster relief for earthquakes, typhoons. On an island with daily tremors, you cannot afford to splinter; you exercise civic muscle in a constant civic gym.
2. The existential threat from an authoritarian, atheist CCP regime. Many fled to Taiwan during the civil war — ...

Two reasons.

I was also called the minister of Plurality. I believe the digital space can connect otherwise unrelated people — and those connections translate offline. The two go together.

Try Partifu l — an app that makes it trivial to host house parties; it amplifies in‑person connection. In Taiwan we are among the least lonely societies by various measures: community colleges, vibrant spiritual practices (I am a Taoist), the second‑most religiously diverse society. Highly educated people often practice spirituality ...

I was reading Patrick Deneen on the drawbacks of liberalism and restoring civic institutions, including spiritual associations. DEI in universities and tech rarely considers spiritual diversity. Removing those practices creates a vacuum filled by conspiracy and rabbit holes. Maybe restoring faith and family is easier than electoral reform.

How do you feel about state‑level advances? Maine moving against super PACs, Utah’s radical interoperability we discussed, Engage California, Kentucky’s “broad listening,” Oregon’s citizens’ assemblies — policy juries moving from the judicial to the executive space. Do you prefer federal‑level change first, or states as labs?

In Taiwan we shortened tax filing from 3 hours to 3 minutes — real‑time filing and feedback.

Which other democracies are you studying or learning from?

Much of our military modernization follows this asymmetric logic — we cannot afford attrition with the PRC. This fits military‑industrial priorities in D.C.; they want us to buy drones and co‑design algorithms. Whether the Republicans or Democrats , the technological underpinning does not change — that is why I am ...

We now cooperate closely with the U.S. on drones and unmanned systems. Palmer Luckey of Anduril was just in Taiwan discussing “hellscape” scenarios and asymmetric defense. In modern warfare, if you have strong production capacity and edge swarm AI, it is less about conscripting bodies and more about adapting AI ...

That was our “uncommon ground” in 2014 during the Sunflower Movement, when half a million people deliberated — many more online — on whether to allow Huawei and ZTE into our then‑new 4G infrastructure. The consensus: keep reassessing whether so‑called “private” PRC firms are de facto state‑run; amortized over time ...

Most of my work — the things we just discussed — was during Trump 1.0. Not my first rodeo. Even then, we worked closely with Keith Krach, then under secretary of state, to popularize the Clean Network — now often framed as trusted technology — so supply chains (TSMC and ...