Yeah. I guess anarchists and libertarians both have a lot of reluctance to force people to do things — especially using violence to force people to behave one way or another. What’s the limiting principle for you? Under what circumstances is it acceptable to coerce someone into doing something?

Yeah. Right.

To fork, basically. Yeah. Well, I don’t know what individual libertarians think, but I think people who’ve thought about this more deeply think that this is kind of the vision that seems more viable. I mean, there might still be problems, but…

Yeah. I think libertarian political philosophers would strongly sympathize with what you’re saying. If I understand it right, something like the individualist liberal anarchist part is that you get to voluntarily associate with the groups that you want to be a part of — so you’re not forced to participate ...

How is your style of conservative anarchism different from a kind of moderate libertarianism? Because I guess libertarianism would be a more familiar term, in the US anyway.

Yeah, conservative anarchist. Given that, would you probably rather emigrate than live under control of the Chinese Communist Party, or even partial control of the Chinese Communist Party? Because I think it’s fair to say that they are not anarchist — conservative or otherwise.

You personally describe yourself as a sort of anarchist — a “conservative anarchist,” you say.

You have no inside info.

I suppose initially you might not know how it will play out.

Yeah. Over the last year or two, I’ve heard more active fears that China might be going to invade Taiwan, or try to take over Taiwan, relatively soon. If it does that, how do you think you might personally respond?

Is there any technology, or just anything that you wish had been different about Hong Kong that would put it in a better position now, now that the Communist Party is taking more control?

Sounds like I’ve got to learn more about what Git is. Is there any technology or social norm or system that could be deployed in Taiwan that would help maintain its people’s freedom, even if the island were to later be taken over by the People’s Republic of China?

You mean GitHub, which stores people’s codes…?

What application of decentralized ledger technology, more often called blockchain technology, do you think will be of greatest value over the next decade?

Interesting. I suppose I’m a little bit skeptical about the brain-computer interface. When I think about people having empathy and understanding one another, it seems like we already have a reasonably high-bandwidth technology for developing that, which is language — people talking to one another, and I guess as you’re ...

You still feel that way? Why is that? Tell us about why it will hopefully be useful.

To what extent do you think that advances in artificial intelligence that may well come over the next 100 years are a threat to the liberal democratic order?

Is there any emerging area of technology, either science and tech or social technology, that you are maybe more worried about and nervous about the implications that it could have than other people are?

This is slightly random, but how do you feel about parliamentary democracy, like the sort of thing you see in the UK, as compared to the presidential republic style of government that you see in the US?

Is there any other area of emerging technology that you think of yourself as more excited about than other people are?

If you had to work on something else, what might it be?

Let’s move on from the Sunflower Student Movement and talk about technologies, broadly construed, that you’re excited and not excited about. If you were 18 again and needed to work on some kind of technology-focused project, what’s one idea for something that you might choose?

Right. Yeah. With the benefit of eight years of hindsight, are you glad that the Cross-Strait Service Trade Agreement was never actually signed and implemented? That it was prevented from going through?

I see. People will know something about the relationship between the People’s Republic of China and Taiwan, the Republic of China. I’m surprised that the Taiwanese government was taking the position that an agreement with the People’s Republic of China was a domestic agreement rather than an international treaty. Why? ...

And so that was the objection: that it was being rushed through and not even being considered properly.

Yeah, yeah. It seems like the protests have led to systematic changes in how the Taiwanese government does its business. But I guess the proximal concern, as you were saying, was this Cross-Strait Service Trade Agreement between Taiwan and China. At the time, were advocates in favor of that agreement ...

In what situations in other countries now, say, would it be appropriate or inappropriate for citizens to go and occupy a parliament building and conduct their own similar thoughtful deliberations there?

I imagine that critics at the time would’ve said you’re just a non-representative group who feel very passionately about this issue. And you are taking over the parliament, but you don’t have the same legitimacy that the elected representatives, who were elected by the majority — or at least the ...

So when the protests occupied the parliament, basically you conducted your own parliamentary proceedings of a sort, where you had your own deliberations about different topics. How were they different or more open than what the parliament was already doing?

Not enough people agree. Yeah. In the UK, we have this system where people can put petitions to parliament, and if a particular number of signatures goes on the proposal or people agree with it, then the government needs to formally respond. And that seems fine, but I’m not aware ...

Oh yeah. Tell me about that.

You’ve probably heard of citizens’ juries, which are this idea of when you have a difficult policy issue, you’ll randomly choose something like 100 citizens to come for a weekend, or a weeklong conversation or deliberation process, where they’ll try to figure out what they agree on, come up with ...

Yeah. You mentioned quadratic funding, which is this more elaborate extension of quadratic voting, in a sense. Do you have plans to actually try to experiment with that in an application?

I guess you were saying, if someone tries to order 5,000 SIM cards in order to game this system or other government systems, people will get onto them. But you could have a problem on a smaller scale — where someone has three different mobile phones, 10 mobile phones. They’re ...

Yeah. A key concern that people have had with quadratic funding and with quadratic voting is that, as you were saying, people can register with an SMS. So as long as they have a SIM card, then they can potentially get a bunch more votes. And so in this case, ...

Is there a way of telling whether this has led to a better outcome in this case? Maybe you can just look at it and see intuitively that the results seem good.

And what happened there? Can you talk about it?

What’s a case in which you have been involved in an experiment or an application of quadratic voting?

Let’s leave Polis for a minute and come back to the quadratic voting. So just to explain quadratic voting briefly: basically, you get a particular number of voting credits, in effect. If you want to give a project one vote, then it costs you one credit. If you want to ...

So this is more about aggregating values and preferences. And then the next stage is more about beliefs and empirical information and so on.

I see. That’s the next stage.

What if I have quite a complicated argument for why I feel a particular way that doesn’t fit in that number of characters? What do I do?

Fantastic. Yeah, we’ll stick up links to those. Just coming back to Polis and people making statements and agreeing and disagreeing. What are the limits on the length or the style that they can be in? Because you could, in theory, make a statement that is just a reply, that’s ...

I see. So then you’ll have a livestreamed discussion, where you’ll invite a whole lot of people who have been selected by someone for some reason — because they know a lot about this topic or they’re representative of a group. And they’ve committed to talking about the shared values, ...

OK. So that’s the next stage of the process, where…?

Because it comes in at the next stage.

Another concern that many people, including me, have with these more direct democracy participatory things is that, with the Uber case, there’s presumably some academics, some real experts in this question of sharing economy — How has Uber gone well or badly in other countries? — who might have a ...