What about the power people?

To be an anarchist in government, how does that feel?

...democracy are very powerful, and in the end, maybe more powerful than the others.

These ideas of freedom...

Now the Communist Party loves the Internet, and they love social media, and they love artificial intelligence. [laughs] Doesn’t that prove all our optimism wrong, that the new technologies, they benefit the most determined people with the most resources, with the most power?

What we’ve seen in China, and especially under Xi Jinping. Xi Jinping, I’m saying because they’ve controlled the Internet for much longer, but Xi Jinping made a brilliant job in taming social media in the summer of 2013. Maybe you’ve also watched the process. It only took him four weeks.

I still remember the early days of optimists. I still remember the ’90s when we had people like Bill Gates, and Rupert Murdoch, and all of them making the prophecy that the new technologies, and especially the Internet -- and Bill Clinton, "Jello on the wall," -- most definitely will ...

I’m asking the question, of course, because I’ve spent most of my past 20 years in China.

The upper layers, you are saying, is what governs everyday people’s lives. Isn’t it for normal people? Isn’t the upper layer more important than the core?

The core is sovereign, but the core stands for potential, right?

Sorry, I just interrupted you. The modern Internet governance seems... Isn’t that like that was the ideal some years ago, but doesn’t reality show something different? Haven’t hierarchies and commerce taken over?

The Taoists.

Did you also read the old anarchists like Kropotkin?

The anarchism, how did that inspire you?

You were born into it.

When was that founded?

Where is that?

The cabinet has a dormitory?

Did you live with a lot of cats and dogs already at your parents’ house?

Your love for animals, that also started back then?

What about you, did you feel much more at home with them?

Bullied for what, about what?

I remember in one of the interviews I saw with you, because you mentioned now twice things that you did when you were eight years old and in one of the interviews you said you were bullied a lot when you were eight years.

Some people at least have the image of these nerds, that it’s about isolating yourself.

For you, it was always, from the start, also about sharing and collaborating.

I don’t understand it.

Did you feel you understood it?

You read it? How old were you when you read it?

Goethe was something like 70 or 80 when he finished and he wrote his whole life.

Have you written your own Faust already?

Yeah, I was about to ask. What is the fun in programming for me as a complete layman? You saw it as a musical instrument?

Did they have anything to do with computers or programming or was that your own thing, the programming thing?

They influenced you a lot?

They were both journalists.

Did they have to suffer? Did your family have to suffer at some point for their political views?

So that came before the computers.

OK, so you were interested in computers and programming from a very early age. When did you start getting interested in the sort of human rights, civil society...?

So early.

When you were eight you started coding?

Did you do some programming before that?

You quit school when you were 14, right?

OK, so scientific research, and why should they care politically?

As we’re talking about a subject like this, what would you tell my readers, why should they care about Taiwan? Why is Taiwan important?

Was anybody disputing that?

This is like day-to-day life scientific stuff, but what about political stuff?

Do you have an example?

Of course, for all these kind of solutions, you need a very rational, well-meaning, non-ideological public.

Like what...

Do you and your team engage in such efforts, also?

Does it work?