This episode was hosted by John Alexander and Omezzine Khelifa and produced by Joe Barrett. The studio engineer was Kristen Kaca. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, or if you want to get closer, find us online at howtosavedemocracy.co and sign up to the mailing list. How to Save Democracy ...

Maybe I want to take us back to your comment at the beginning about the two kinds of leadership that are present here: the leadership from the outside of demonstration rather than protest, and the leadership from the inside of being prepared to step into the space that’s made. Powerful.

So one last massive idea from Audrey there: the PPPP, people-first public-private partnership, and this invocation to build and to demonstrate. That’s such a powerful note to end on. She was talking in summer 2024, just after the election of a new Labour government in the UK. That’s the specific ...

At the end of the conversation, I asked Audrey what advice she would give, particularly to the UK, but maybe it’s relevant more widely as well.

Right. Political leadership cannot be disconnected anymore from technology, and they need to have the tech people with them to build the kind of platforms that will eventually become the societal values that we want. It just feels like such a different conversation, doesn’t it? It’s a conversation about how ...

Now, the thing is it’s taking too long, but I do believe and see that these sorts of conversations, this sort of work, is actually happening all over the world in many different places. In the UK right now, there’s a new campaign called Our House, which is seeking to ...

And it’s all built out of an underlying mindset, right? That plurality is what we want, that we can actually build the best solutions by understanding and seeing all of these different perspectives and finding the consensus out of them. We can use technology to help find consensus rather than ...

The subject story: the right thing to do is do as you’re told because the God-given few know best. The consumer story: the right thing to do is to pursue your self-interest because that will add up to collective interest. The citizen story: get involved because all of us are ...

Follow Taiwan. Citizens not consumers—you’re not going to get any disagreement on that from me. Just to underline, the metaphor of the Eurasian plate and the plates crashing into one another is pretty powerful. I relate to this very deeply. In my work, I talk about three stories of the ...

It’s such a powerful thing to juxtapose that with where things are arguably going at the moment. When you start from a lack of trust in people, when you see the role of government as being to manage or deliver for people, you end up with this kind of centralized ...

Once again, we’ve got huge ideas here. This concept of assistive intelligence rather than artificial general intelligence, the giant spaghetti squid in the sky. Audrey has some good images as well, right? But I think juxtaposing those two possibilities—the idea of using technology to tap into the ideas, energy, and ...

This isn’t just a story. There’s an underlying philosophy, a mindset that you’re now working with Glen and putting out into the world as an offer of something to step into.

I totally agree. I think the relationship between civil service and civil society is another of these absolutely fundamental relationships where the trust has to be rebuilt. It speaks also to this underlying philosophy that is there in Audrey’s work and that she’d actually, when I brought her over to ...

This year in the UK we’re on about 20%. To give you a sense, we are actually double where they were at the beginning. The latest OECD data was 20%. So we’re starting at a slightly higher baseline, even with what’s happened here.

But it’s also possible to reverse that cycle, and it’s possible to do that anywhere. The first acts of government putting trust in people begins to turn that the other way. I think that’s what you can see from examples around the world, where just the first experiments with a ...

I think that’s right. The danger in this moment, and what’s so powerful about that articulation—‘to give no trust is to get no trust’ (it’s actually a quote from the Tao Te Ching from Laozi)—is that it tells us it’s a cycle. It’s reciprocal. If you give no trust, you ...

This is exactly the question, I think, and that’s where I took the conversation next. It can be easy to think of Taiwan as just another planet and to say, “Well, this could never happen anywhere else.” So I put that question to Audrey: could it happen anywhere else?

At the core of it, I think, is this idea that the government trusted its citizens. The government sought to tap into the ideas, energy, and resources of everyone in the country to be part of a national team response, rather than trying to do it for them or to ...

There’s so much in Taiwan’s COVID response that is just—I mean, we laugh, right, but it works. I still can’t believe that I’m one of the only people who seems to tell this story that Fast, Fun, and Fair, that pre-bunking not debunking, that humor over rumor—that these kinds of ...

Obviously, right. Career trajectory in four years: hacker to mentor to minister. Let’s bring it up to 2020 and, for me, the pinnacle of the story.

We’re starting to build this muscle of developing these things. 2014 comes, and there’s an attempt to rush through the trade bill. That triggers this protest moment—Demonstration. Demonstration. Sorry. And at this point, you are part of g0v.

Something like that. I hesitate because I consider myself to be an idealist more than a pragmatist, but maybe I’d describe Audrey as a radical pragmatist.

Right, it’s almost like a ‘yes, and’ rather than a ‘no.’ Look, I’m hesitant with this a little bit because hindsight is always 20/20, but I think it’s useful to draw out the contrast between the way Extinction Rebellion happened and the way the Sunflower Revolution in Taiwan happened. There ...

And my thought experiment is, what if they had chosen to follow that citizens’ assembly? What if, for each meeting of the assembly—there were three, I think—what if they’d set the dates for their rebellions, for the big protests, on those dates to draw attention to the citizens’ assembly? To ...

My thought experiment is, if you contrast that with g0v, what these guys were doing: while protesters were occupying the parliament, people were having the kinds of discussions outside that should and could have been happening in the parliament. They were doing the politics that they were wanting.

In that moment, the demands of XR included a citizen’s assembly on climate policy. They wanted that assembly to be legally binding by 2035 for how Britain would reach net zero. I won’t go into the detail, but a citizens’ assembly was commissioned in the UK—not many people even know ...

I want to draw out how different this protest moment, the Sunflower Revolution, the Occupy movement in Taiwan, is in its operation from some others. One of my thought experiments to illustrate this would be about Extinction Rebellion (XR) in the UK. When XR started, it was incredibly popular, right? ...

So demonstrate, not protest, and fork the government. We start there in 2012. The momentum is building. 2014 comes, and what triggered that moment?

So we’re going to paint that timeline a little bit to start us off. The budget website came in 2012.

So two really fundamental differences. The action from outside was to create the space for politics to move into rather than to attack the politics. And from inside, the leadership was to step into that space rather than reject that space.

That moment of the Sunflower Revolution, the protest moment. Maybe just tell us a bit more about the URL that popped up on the screen—budget.g0v.tw—as a real thing. Please.

In summer 2024, I arranged for Audrey Tang, former digital minister of Taiwan, to come to the UK, and I hosted her at the Conduit. We’re going to listen in to that conversation and draw out some of the key lessons, contrasting what happened in Taiwan with what’s happened in ...

Welcome to How to Save Democracy, the podcast where we look at the relationship between humanity and democracy and try to figure out how to rebuild it. I’m Jon.