You are Audrey Tang. This is the second “Steal This Show” appearance. Thanks for coming on the show again, really appreciated.
You are the minister of information, I think at some point, described as minister without portfolio and also minister for information in the Taiwanese government, right? Could you just quickly tell us again about your role there?
Right. [laughs] During this COVID crisis, because even though you guys have handled it, as we’ll be hearing, incredibly well, it still counts as a crisis for Taiwan as well. What has your role been in helping address the COVID-19 situation in Taiwan?
[laughs]
It doesn’t just sound like you’re living in a different country. It sounds like you’re living in a different universe, to be frank. I’m listening to you talking about, you’ve mentioned at least four things that I wanted to stop you and say, “How the fuck?”
Here the first “how the fuck?” How the fuck would you get the news from China, instead of immediately launching into an argument about, “You’re an op. You’re a bot. This is a Chinese CCP lying. You can’t trust this information.”
In the West and in many countries, people just launched into a series of arguments. “It could never happen here,” etc., etc.
The first “How the fuck?” Why were you able to respond so quickly? Sure, you had the information, but other people had the information.
What differs? Is it just the fact that you had this huge problem with SARS in 2003, right? Or are there other reasons why you’re able to act coherently?
My second question relates to this relationship between the Reddit-like message board, PTT?
And governmentality. Let’s say in the West, generally speaking, what you see is an almost complete division between what people are talking about in the social forums and then the electoral process and governmentality.
People chat. At some point, they get the chance to vote. Then they vote, and there appears to be a more or less complete detachment between the people who were voted for, the representatives, and the populace, who go on chatting.
My second “How the fuck?” question is how and why are you able to take feedback from a Reddit-like forum, PTT, and quickly absorb it into your governmentality? What is the context behind that? Why is that able to happen? Do you have thoughts on why it’s not able to happen outside Taiwan?
Basically, if I am understand, after the Sunflower revolution in Taiwan, when was that now, 2014, 2013?
I think what you’re saying is that the deliberate processes that were experimented with then have been incorporated into the DNA of government as it went forward from the revolutionary moment.
We’ve talked about this previously, but I want to come back to it. One of the systems you’re using is this pol.is, P-O-L-dot-I-S.
Tell me about that. Tell me first, how are you using pol.is? Briefly, what’s important about it? Are you able now to say what it is about pol.is that is enabling consensus to form, and how are you using it in the COVID situation?
You don’t know where that came from? You don’t know which country that participant was from? It sounds like a Chinese, sounds like a social credit system. It sounds like a social capital.
I’m listening to you talk, and like I say, it just sounds like you’re in a different universe, where these seem like the type of innovations that…We see this type of innovation in Silicon Valley.
We see this type of quick iteration. This sounds like stuff companies could do. Twitter could do this, or Facebook could do something like this and do it fast, or Google. To hear a government doing it, it’s just unheard of.
There’s nobody else, as far as I know, who’s been able to do this. Are you thinking again this is emerging from the revolutionary moment still? This is that same spirit of bootstrap government?
You used the word infodemic. When you’re using the word infodemic, what do you mean by that?
Of course. Look, I think we’ve reached a moment now we could describe as some kind of epistemic crisis, a crisis of knowledge, a crisis of what I hear people calling sense-making in the West.
In the UK, we’ve seen people burning down 5G masts. I think Vodafone alone had had 14 masts burned down because people believing that 5G activates various things, activates coronavirus, or is causing radiation sickness.
In the United States, you’ve got plenty of people just refusing to wear masks, because they say, “Well, pick your poison. COVID, it doesn’t exist. It exists, but it’s no more serious than the flu. It’s a Democrat hoax,” blah, blah, blah.
You mentioned one piece of infodemic, which is this idea that too much toilet paper was going to eat into the mask production and causing people to stock…That seems a very benign piece of conspiratorial thinking, of panic thinking.
My question is, A, have you had, or are you having similar conspiracy theory epistemological-level issues in Taiwan, and if not, why not?
Connected question. One of the other big infodemic vectors is people accusing each other of being bots, of being manipulated by some external forces. An idea creeps in, and then you hear someone say, “Oh, well, this is the evil World Health Organization.” Or that you can’t believe this, because X faction is behind this.
Have any of your processes been hijacked? You’ve got a lot of open, or more open processes. Essentially, what you’re saying, it reminds me of Gregory Bateson’s ideas from the 1940s, the essential idea of cybernetics.
Early Bateson, he’s thinking about how you can improve societies by creating feedback loops between the power structure and the civics. It’s like a constant loop, which is what you’re saying, is it’s improving democracy. It’s improving consensus-building.
I guess what I’m wondering is, is anybody exploiting those loops? Have you experienced any bad actors in there trying to get inside the loops and corrupt them in any way?
Do we need to evolve some system like that globally?
Do you have ideas on how that would look? I think we’re reaching the point now where we’re in serious trouble. If we don’t start evolving some systems to do similar things, I don’t really see…
Let’s face it, we’re in a crisis, and the outcomes look pretty bad. I think this epistemic crisis is absolutely central to it.
It’s another feedback loop, isn’t it? It’s a little bit like a game theory thing, where as I suspect, the more you do things like this as a government, and people see this demonstration of good faith, they’re then more likely to believe you the next time round.
Yet we’re in the opposite loop in many other countries in the world. We’re in exactly the opposite loop. It makes me wonder whether when I see…Again, it’s like this sense that you’re in a new universe.
Is this something that’s only possible in a new democracy which has had a fresh revolution? For example, in the United States, we saw this deeply, deeply sketchy voting process at the Democratic primaries, where there was this software made by some company with some deeply suspicious-sounding name.
I can’t remember what it was like, Blacklist, or Under Cover, or something. The results didn’t seem to represent what people felt they’d voted for. You have this sense of these old, old machineries, like Democrat Party, Republican Party.
The US government with their “intelligence community,” the deep state, all these ideas. I guess my question is can you see the old governments – and I mean the British government, even older – implementing these types of feedback loops into its processes without being forced to? [laughs]
Does this need to have a fresh revolution in order for these ideas to work, or do you see it being something that could be implemented piecemeal?
Let me just tell listeners, as far as I know so far, Taiwan has had – as far as when I last checked – seven deaths from COVID-19.
Obviously, seven is a tragedy, but in the UK, I think it’s edging in on 60,000. This is a tragedy on an unimaginable scale, one that governments seem to be doing their best to just spin it is what they’re doing.
One of the things I wanted to ask you was just to go through the concrete ways that you managed to…With an early shutdown, an early response to the news coming out of China, what form did that response take?
I’ve heard a few things. I know you’ve got this digital fencing system.
That software was developed in conjunction with open source developers, or is it something you do as the government?
Just for listeners who aren’t aware, Taiwan is the closest country to China, and seven deaths total, free public healthcare. This is a model I think everybody should be…Britain has free public healthcare, but somehow has been completely incompetent in dealing with getting people in and protecting people.
I just think are there national conversations going on at the moment tooting your own horn, as it were, comparing what’s happened in Taiwan to…? I feel like this must generate some national pride.
Is this something people are discussing? What’s going on in the rest of the world, and how does Taiwan see that?
Two final questions. Which countries do you see reaching out, saying, “We see that you’ve had this amazing success, and your social order isn’t breaking down. People seem to be on more less the same page about what to do. We’d like to learn from you, and we’d like to take some of the stuff, your mask machinery, whatever, and implement that”?
Which countries are doing that? Are you able to say?
