I actually entered the field early. I started programming in 1989 . The Tiananmen crackdown shaped my family’s attention to democracy and autonomous communication systems — my father’s thesis explored those dynamics. After the Berlin Wall fell, he went to Germany for PhD studies; I also studied for a year in Saarland . That exposed me to what we would now call second‑order cybernetics — trust, feedback, self‑organization. I later left middle school with my principal’s blessing after a science‑fair project using AI for philosophical inquiry, co-founded startups in Taiwan around mediatization and built intermediary algorithms to improve epistemic security and resilience . That entrepreneurial work eventually intersected with public service.