For the French reader who doesn’t necessarily know you exactly, so who are you? I think you were raised in Europe.

No, just for a year.

For a year? OK. It was in Luxembourg?

It was in Saarland.

Where?

In Saarland.

Saarland, OK.

It’s near the French border, actually.

Which age was it when...?

11.

Then you came back to Taiwan?

To Taiwan, that’s right.

What was your education? Because I think you were very precocious, you quit school very early. How that manage, you were very clever? You were very curious?

No, no. It’s just I needed education and there was this World Wide Web thing that makes the education possible without school. I just chose to learn from the World Wide Web when it was invented, back in 1994 or ’95. That’s when I quit high school, but it’s not like I didn’t go to school.

I went to the nearby university also, and attended graduate school classes and so on. I went to that like 11 month. It’s not that I quit schooling. In fact, the first thing I did after dropping out of high school is to search for courses in a nearby university, so it’s not like I dropped out.

But how can...do you explain or do you parents explain that at the age of 13 or 14 you were able to follow graduate school?

On the World Wide Web, if I don’t understand something, I just email the author and I ask.

[laughs]

It’s natural that I don’t understand, because these are new fields. The field that I’m interested in today, we would call it maybe communication theory or Internet sociology, or things like that. That field doesn’t even exist back in 1995, because they was still working on the information era thing.

At that point, it was called either cybernetics or applied sociology or cyberspace research or whatever. These were very new words, so there’s not even a single field. It’s natural for everybody working on that field to just keep asking questions, because nobody has the answers at that point. To a 14-year old, that is very normal, because [laughs] I have all the questions, I don’t have any answers.

But I’m interested in emailing people and figuring things out together.

It’s nice that they responded to a kid.

They don’t know I’m a kid or adult. It doesn’t really matter. It’s just a email account.

It means that at 14, you were able to formulate question that seems to them interesting to respond?

Yeah, because those are a new world also to them. The World Wide Web was just invented, so everybody’s questions is equally good.

What kind of questions did you ask, yourself, at the time?

For example, whether it is possible to explain why we trust strangers very quickly online, but we trust strangers very slowly in face-to-face, offline settings?

Why is it that a keyword online can spread like a virus, and so people can unify around these keywords and form a imaginary clan, if you will?

The same thing in offline world, in the real world, takes ages for a religion or a cult to formulate, and so on.

There are many, many interesting questions.

You were very, very early capable to navigate on the Internet?

Yeah.

How come?

Because I was very young.

My kid is not able to navigate as you did...

Really?

Yeah, there are websites he likes to go. He’s coding a little bit, but...

From my experience the kids today, they learn programming, they learn browsing using the Internet easier than I did when I was a child because I was not really a digital native. I learned about Internet when I was 12. I’m already slower than people who learn it when I was seven or when I was five, at the moment.

No, I don’t think I learned particularly quickly. It’s like learning a new language. If you are exposed to any language when you are 12, then you tend to learn quickly, and when you are 5, then you learn even more quickly. But if you are 50, then, of course, it takes more time.

Learning was on the Internet, but how did you learn literature? How did you learn ethics? Do you learn that by yourself, too?

On the Internet there was a project called the Gutenberg Project. They tried to digitize, that is to say to type all the classics that’s out of the copyright, that’s in the public domain into the digital books.

Because they are public domain, they are free of charge, so I can read them. If I don’t understand, I talk with professors, with my parents, with people that I met online. It’s a normal learning process.

You did read literature by yourself?

Not really by myself, because I have people to talk with, to talk about it.

It’s not junior high school classmates, but it’s still a learning circle, if you will.

I didn’t have access to anything that’s written after the First World War, because they are under the copyright.

It starts before the World War?

It’s all the way from the classics, from Plato, and whatever, and to the First World War, but nothing after the First World War I can read online because they are still under copyright. So I have a very lopsided, optimistic view of civilization...

...because that was when people were very optimistic. That’s the message.

It’s amazing. You understand that for us it’s very surprising that a kid could, by himself, auto-educate himself, go to Plato or Shakespeare by himself without a teacher who would say, "You have to do this, you have to do that, you have go to..." You seem not even to imagine that it could be amazing.

No, it’s not, because I met a lot of fellow students who learned this way.

On the Internet there are full of people who don’t have a good supporting structure for learning literature, so they formed what we call interest groups online, because they’re interested in the same thing.

Then they have their own discussion boards, their own reading classes, and their own chat rooms. It is very popular and, actually, a commonplace thing, even before the World Wide Web, back when the Internet still only has its forums. It’s called Usenet. People are already learning literature and philosophy this way.

I joined this very long tradition -- well not very long, since the ’70s -- a somewhat long tradition of people who learn, not by themselves, but across the Internet together.

You said that among the people you contacted at that time there was a philosopher, Douglas Hofstadter. Could you tell us why you were interested to his work and what kind of exchange you had with him?

I read his books, of course, the "Gödel, Escher, Bach", and then later a book on translation, on Clément Marot’s poem. He wrote a lot about the intersection between computers, and language, and then art. He seemed to think, taken together, consciousness can be explained based on those three different foundations.

I was very interested into his thoughts. Also, because I was a translator, I was very interested in translation, and also computer translation. I find many of his thoughts very refreshing.

I initially contacted him because I wanted to share my translation of Carol Hofstadter, his wife’s rendition of a French poem. I translated her English translation of the French poem to Mandarin, and then shared it with Hofstadter...

...who speaks Mandarin?

Who speaks Mandarin, much to my surprise. I didn’t know that he speaks Mandarin. He was able to correct my pinyin.

I was very surprised. We talk mostly about translation and about that poem.

I also learned about his current research about what today we would call stylometry, to use computers to discover style, and transfer styles, and so on. I learned a lot about that.

You were what age at the time?

I don’t know. 16? Something like that.

You consider it natural to discuss with a great philosopher? You had no -- how would you say? -- intimidation of the differences of age?

Maybe I would if I see him, like with you on a meeting like this. But across the Internet it’s just another email address. [laughs]

One thing is that what interests you is the Hofstadter works. You said, "I was interested by computational languages."

Mm-hmm.

For me, it’s very strange because I’m not used to that. You explain that is to say, to make understand to computers human language, and to make understand to human how computers...

These are two different fields.

One field is called computational linguistics, meaning that using computers to understand human language.

There is another field, a different field, called programming languages. It’s about how to make machines programmable and understandable by humans. That’s the other direction.

These are two fields that are not really related, but because of the way that I tackled those two fields, I tend to blend them together.

It’s very strange for someone who is used to culture to consider a computer as people or a person who... as agents to whom you have to make understand those other agents which are humans.

I’m not saying they’re people. I’m saying that they’re capable of cognition or understanding. This is not saying they’re people.

When we’re saying people, we usually say they’re moral agents. That’s what "people" means.

No, I’m just saying they’re capable of understanding, as cognitive engines, cognitive agents.

What does it mean that? To understand for computer?

Just like as in humans, it means that if you read something, or you hear something, and later you ask some questions, they were able to answer based on their cognitive capturing of the content of what they have learned.

It is what we use as the operational definition for teaching children, for example.

For human the understanding it means you have been in the sense of a phrase, and you’re capable to catch the sense, not to catch what we learn you to catch.

That’s right. To relate to the episteme, to the knowledge in the message.

And you think computers are capable of producing meaning by themselves?

Of course. Today they already are, so it’s not a matter of when, it’s already there.

Can you give an example of a real producing of a new meaning?

Of a real producing of a new meaning? Just take computational poetry or computational symphony composing. There is now no way for people to tell between authentic human poets output and synthetic computer poets output. That is to say, when it comes to poems, it’s already passed the Turing test, meaning that people generally can’t tell the difference.

The same applies to, for example, contrapunctus, composing of melodies according to certain rules. If you interweave Bach or some other composer with a style transfer from a machine intelligence doing the composing, people in the audience can’t tell the difference.

I think that it means that they were now capable of producing the same kind of understanding of the styles or the content in such messages.

You understand also that the point you make it’s because people outside the box don’t see the difference between a human and a box, it doesn’t mean that the box acts like the human.

No, they don’t act like the human.

It signify that a human cannot make the difference. It doesn’t mean that the box produce something human.

I’m not saying that it produce something human.

Meaning. You said it produce meaning, new meaning.

Dogs and cats produce meanings also. Humans don’t have a monopoly...

That’s no proven.

It’s in the 2012 Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, that’s one of the founding documents of the current animal ethics.

Which is?

Which basically says most mammals, and maybe other vertebrates — certain birds — and maybe octopus are capable of consciousness.

Most mammals, and certainly cats and dogs and pigs and so on, are capable of having subjective feelings, that is to say qualia.

That’s feeling, it’s not meaning.

Sure. But if you can relate to your inner experience and produce a expression, which when seen from the outside there is no difference — if you can’t tell the difference whether it produced from a human subjective experience versus a non-human subjective experience, then operationally, I would say that they are both capable of cognition.

It’s a supposition.

Well, I’m just saying it can’t be easily proven that it’s not cognition. I’m not saying it’s human.

You are an amazing spirit. Let’s continue your itinerary.

You have been an advisor for the big company of the Silicon Valley? What was your job at that time? What kind of job did you do?

My job is like a bridge. There is a world called open source technology, which means people who abandon most of our copyright, or in my case, all of my copyright.

Usually, to protect this open source, people abandoned what we call exclusive rights of readers, meaning that people can just take my work, and then go ahead and produce better work.

Wikipedia is the best known example. Anyone can edit my words on Wikipedia, as long as they agree to let other people in the future also edit in the same way.

For me, I also relinquish what we call the right of attribution, meaning that if I write a text, but then you take it and say you wrote it, I’m fine with it, so I completely relinquish my copyright. Because of this practice, and also a very similar practice by other programmers and artists and writers, there is this free culture movement.

Apple was one of the companies that are somewhat unfamiliar with this culture, and the bridge makers to this culture are very much needed from inside Apple. Microsoft, for example, or IBM has already reached out to this community early on. IBM was perhaps the first of the large company to reach out, and Apple is one of the last to reach out to this community.

I was one of the more trusted people in the open community for Apple to reach out, and so I worked with their computational language team, and also what we call localization team, taking the same concept that Siri tries to say, and say it in 20 different languages in a way that makes sense to those cultures.

When those cultures speak back to Siri, it also need to understand the 20 different cultures or 30 different cultures way of expressing the same concept.

This translation also is one of the areas where the open & free software community had made a lot of contribution on. I was just introducing these contributions to Apple and also introducing Apple to these people, like a bridge maker.

You did that for long or for...?

Six years.

It was in the US or you work here?

I work here. I never visited Cupertino. I visited Palo Alto for a few times. It’s only very short visits.

Most of the time, I work and I only have one hour for meetings. That is to one hour before midnight here which is their 8:00 AM or 9:00 AM. That is to say that I already entered office.

We only have one hour and I describe the work that they need to do or I need to do. Then I go to sleep and they do the work. I wake up, they already leave work and I carry it. There is just very small window of interaction.

At the end you have the feeling that you’re being useful and not for Apple but for the...?

Yeah, for the state of the art.

For the state of the art? [laughs]

Yeah.

Let’s come to your implication, The Sunflower Movement. It was a big movement here from what I heard and from what I knew. Why did it interest you and what was your intervention in that movement?

The movement was there 10 days after another movement which is the Anti-Nuclear Protest. The protest here was traditionally a very large affair. On that year, on 2014, there was a typhoon or, at least, a very heavy rain. Not many people can go to the parade.

The organizers anticipating a large crowd established a direct connection line to the Internet so that people, at least, journalists can just send out their reporting footage and video in real time. Because of the heavy rain, the people that came to supply this connectivity...

I was the first one to respond, but there was many other experts who joined me in that parade, found that we have a very fast Internet, but there was nobody there to use it because of the rain. We have a lot of spare bandwidth.

We decided, at the time spontaneously, to have a camera that’s taking the show on the stage for the parade and directly stream it to the Internet, to the whole world to see. It was not pre-announced. The people were maybe feeling guilty that they cannot attend the parade. They all tuned into the live stream.

Very quickly there’s more people watching the live stream than people who are on the front of the stage. It was very successful even though we didn’t plan it. When our equipment was still hot, so to speak, 10 days afterwards there was a demonstration also about the members of the parliament refusing to deliberate a trade service agreement.

Constitutionally, the MPs considered Beijing as part of Taiwan, and it’s a domestic agreement.

In any case, there was a demonstration that’s supposed to run until the midnight, but it was not planned so they don’t have this dedicate Internet line. They still need fast connection to broadcast the live stream.

I took my equipment and went there to support them. I was paired with another camera person. Initially, I thought I only had support them until midnight and then they will go to their homes. It didn’t go like that.

They just broke into the parliament and then started occupying the parliament. Then the CPR team, the cable, power and radio team, the professionals takes over of the connectivity.

I was mostly working on the communication side. That is to say there is a shared logistics platform that we put together and make sure that everything happening in the occupied parliament gets transcribed, gets video streamed, is translated to 12 different languages and the supplies that is coordinated.

Everybody on the nearby street knows exactly what’s being deliberated. It was a demonstration, not just a protest. It’s a demo of how to have people in the occupied parliament do what MPs aren’t supposed to do. That is to say to deliberate the trade service agreement line by line. You say, it’s a demonstration in its original sense.

The demo went for 22 days. Because of the occupied parliament in the streets decided all participated into this, what we call a reflective space, meaning any utterance gets recorded for perpetuity and then read again next day and next day. People, initially, were very divergent. At the end of the 22-day protest, they have a consensus.

They forced the head of the parliament to sign that consensus and basically won the occupy. Everybody retreated peacefully. My role as the other gov zero hackers role are just to make sure that everything is transparent, that everything happens is seen equally everywhere regardless of which side you’re on.

We support it, the separatists, the greens, the labors, even the so called "white justice" counter-protest protesters.

It looks like you said "my intervention was mainly technical", but it’s more than technical.

I wouldn’t say it’s technical. I would say it’s about designing a reflective space, to use a more philosophical word.

Put in a more cybernetic way, it would be designing what we call "situational applications".

Meaning that the software, the technology, you respond to the situation usually within 5 minutes or 10 minutes. Depending on what the occupiers need, we just supply. There’s sufficient technologies to make their plans work.

Yes, but what I mean, imagine that this deliberation would end to the fact that Taiwan decided to agree with the agreement with China and more than to just submit to it. You would not be angry?

I wouldn’t be angry.

OK.

I was one of the very rare people in the occupy who said publicly that I’m not "anti-" the agreement and I’m not even "anti-" the Black Box, which is the so-called opaqueness of the procedure.

I’m fine actually with these two. My philosophy was always that they exist, but it does not not mean it’s finalized, it’s just nobody showed them how to do it the proper way. My main work is just a demonstration also of how it may be done in the future.

If people want that, it’s the way to be?

Yeah.

I would like to ask you now on the conception of Internet. How do you conceive Internet? Several times you use architectural metaphor.

That’s right.

You said you don’t need to be a professional architect to participate to the country’s construction of that new space. It’s like the people who constructed the cathedral. You said you are back to the other main most collective construction of the cathedral.

Yeah, but I didn’t quite say that. I think it’s something that’s lost in the translation. Here is the original words that I said. Just a second.

Fact checking?

Yeah. This is very interesting because... I did notice that with, I think it was in one of the interviews that I said that the part of... Just a second. Where did I put it?

It’s a very nice metaphor.

Sure, but it’s not mine.

"The Cathedral and the Bazaar" is one of the classical metaphors to describe the top-down approach and the bottom-up approach in the free software world. The point here... All right, here we go.

The point here is that it used to be that software makers like Microsoft felt that anything that’s large, that requires many people requires one architect who requires a coherent vision, a design concept that’s held in somebody or at least at most maybe two peoples mind. This is what they call a design integrity, the integrity of the design.

Then people are just following the blueprint of the architect to make the cathedral that you speak. The bazaar approach allocated by the free software movement is that, no, it’s just one person raising a tent to fix their own problem. They’re not opposed of people putting up tents next to them and form connections.

More and more people just form tents around this kind of spaces, and become a organic community, and share their trades and goods. The main thing here is not that people who say that the tents are not professionals. They are the professional traders. It’s that they don’t have a vision of how the bazaar should look like. None of them are urban planners, so to speak.

The space just grows in response to the need of the bazaar or the merchants. There was the original metaphor. The metaphor, when I used it during the quotation, is more about the amateurishness of construction, of that how you don’t have to a professional stone smith or a wood smith but you can nevertheless contribute to this bazaar making.

I extended the original metaphor that’s made by Eric Raymond which he says just cathedral is planned, bazaar is organic. I also said, but also to participate in the bazaar’s construction, you don’t have to be a professional. To participate in the cathedral, maybe the architect really needs somebody with a professional capability. That was my main point.

It’s more camping model?

It’s more of a camping model. Or the rhizome model, if you want.

The idea is there is the organic connection.

Let’s take the camping model. In the same time it looks like for you, Internet is more than individuals next to each other pursuing their personal goal. There is something like a new space and a new kind of links between people?

Yeah.

In the camping everyone has his spot and lives his life on his spot without caring about what’s right. The camping model, do individual or is there another model to think how those individuals are linked together?

The campaign model is perfect because that’s exactly what a normal occupy is, in a normal, non-Taiwanese occupy.

Usually you have, literally, people of different ideological camps setting up literal camps in the occupied place. Usually you have radicals and people who shout the loudest dominate the discussion or even people who are harmless who want to be part of the larger community. Then occasionally, of course, people will want to intervene.

More or less, they just dissolve into something that’s thousands of people that have thousands of camps, but there is no one consensus among those camps. The contribution that the ICT, Information Technology, connected to camps, if you want to extend the metaphor, is that they make sure that every point in the camp is not just a topological point.

It is also not just a topological, what we call a place ref, but is also has a place in its link ref. In a place ref, of course, you have tents. You have larger camps those camps. We’re very familiar with this. With a link graph, you can also have the direct connections between those points. All those are needed because different place that gives different perspectives.

The links are what makes this alive and organic and not just people who splinter into smaller and smaller places. These two taken together there is a theory that describes this called Bigraphs. The Bigraph theory which is used, for example, when you take the high speed rail in Taiwan.

The software uses Bigraphs to figure out where your mobile phone is going to be and tells the next tower to prepare its signal anticipating your activity. To do that, you need to think in category theory where you’re placed in a place wrap but also where you’re trying to reach in the Link Graph to figure this out. There is this whole calculus to talk with this.

My mental model is just occupies used to be thinking about the price model. For example, the people’s microphone, the megaphone, where one person speaks and people around him repeat and so on. It is fundamentally one directional. There is no people listening. It doesn’t work in reverse. [laughs]

With the Link Graph, we can actually with it design things that are bi-directional or multi-directional. Meaning, not only you can disseminate to millions of people, you can also listen to millions of people and also have millions of people listen to each other. With this bi-graphic model, I think it makes the camping model more complete by having it reflect upon itself is the main idea.

It’s amazing because the philosopher Michel Serres, he said the model to think Internet is the Monadology of Leibniz. In the Monadology, you have, you know it, monads which are close to each other but he’s go to organize their communication. It looks like Internet is the new god for you.

It’s not really a god to me... It is, to use a category theory term, at most a monoid.

Meaning that it looks like a monad, but it’s not quite a monad. It’s a more relaxed form of monad. When you add any point to it, it still forms a coherent whole, so to speak.

It’s not as strong as a monad. Monads must keep to its monad laws, meaning that there are laws in the monad theory that says that you must completely remain in the same category (of endofunctors).

Now with the monoid, the category can change. It’s a more relaxed form of monad.

The Monads reflect each other too.

I’m aware of that.

OK.

Let’s come down from the metaphysical point to the political point. What kind of policy is designed by Internet? It looks like you hesitated, you said, "For me, Internet has not guided people in this or that direction. It has to give them the way to choose the direction they want." Is there a political model link to Internet?

Yes, the political model is called the end-to-end principle. It’s very hard coded that you can say it’s the constitution of the Internet literally because it’s how it’s constituted together. Before the Internet, there’s already computer networks. There’s many computer networks. The point is that they don’t talk to each other. Every computer network only talk to itself.

The Internet Protocol, it doesn’t build a new computer network from scratch. It just talks about a way how existing computer network operators need to talk to each other. That’s the "inter-" part of the Internet. As part of the Internet Protocol, what this says is basically... Because you can see this point, when it want to talk to this point, it has to pass through at least two other points.

The Internet Protocol says these two points should not have any say on what these two points are trying to do. If the point A invents a new way to talk to point B, those two middle points must not interfere with this innovation.

That’s the end-to-end principle. The Internet at a point is basically saying, although there are three physical networks, it must act as one and not forbidding any two points inside the network from innovating new ways to communicate.

OK, that’s very abstract for me.

Yeah, but that is coded in the law, in the code.

What does it mean politically? It means that Internet is a democracy which respects individual as individual.

It means politically that it doesn’t respond to sovereignty. That it has its own concept of sovereignty. That’s it sees any act of censorship as damage and just roots around it which is why the Internet society or the Internet governing bodies they don’t answer to UN. They don’t answer to any countries. They don’t answer to the International Court.

They answer to the stakeholder groups, which means, the users of the Internet. That’s how it gets its legitimacy. It doesn’t get legitimacy from the Westphalian model of sovereignty.

They, who are they?

The Internet Society, that’s a real...

It’s everyone then.

No, it’s a real governing structure. You can see it. Everything is pretty transparent.

There is a technical arm and a political arm... The engineering group is called the Internet Engineering Task Force.

Task force. Military.

Yes, it starts this way because it worked as a DARPA project. [laughs]

The regulatory body is called ICANN which is the commission. ICANN stands for the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.

There are the governing bodies of the Internet. The strange thing about these bodies is that they’re not answering to sovereign state or to the United Nations. They’re just answering to its own governing structure which is radically transparent.

You consider them as a real government of Internet?

No, it’s just a government of the Internet in the protocol level. The protocol is how the machines talk to each other.

It doesn’t talk about, for example, regular how Facebook or Twitter is applying this protocol, which is on the upper level. It’s above the application layer. This is about the link, the communication layer.

But you told me that in the renaissance, it was the editors who decided on the public space of Florence. There’s a gap between the maker of the books and the public space which...It’s like you said the political model of Internet, there’s the technical model of the Internet. For me, there is a gap between...

No, I think it goes back to what we mean by Internet. Internet, if you just go to its original definition, it’s just a technical way for computers to talk to each other. It’s called the Internet Protocol or IP, which is to be short. On top of it, people started to lay meanings on it. For example, one of the applications of the Internet is the World Wide Web.

The World Web is now a, you can say, it’s a connected documentation space or there are many ways to describe the World Wide Web. The World Wide Web is just one of the many, many, many, different applications of the Internet. Mostly when we talk about politics or about the governing body in Taiwan, we have in our mind just the Wide Web, not the underlying Internet.

For you, it’s the underlying which matters?

Yeah, of course. The World Wide Web is just one application. Like many other applications before it, Email or whatever, it may change. It might fade. Other applications can thrive.

It’s new notion materialist vision of politics, the infrastructure decide for the super structure?

It doesn’t decide, it enables. It’s what we call a necessary, but not sufficient condition to the other levels.

If it’s so important, how come is it that Internet hasn’t changed Chinese cyber?

It’s an intranet there. Not really the Internet.

It means that Internet does not exist in China?

The Internet Society, some people in it like Vint Cerf, is very careful when he talks about internets which he used the lower case "i".

When he talks about the global public Internet, he used the upper case "I".

This distinction doesn’t really carry when we were speaking...

Yeah, but for me, the politically useful Internet is the capitalized Internet, the one Internet.

If it’s just one intranet, for example, with five people and four computers, and they don’t connect to the public Internet, then the Internet Protocol’s still works but it’s just for those four computers to talk to each other, then of course it has no transformational potential. It is just a faster way than if you copy it by disk.

That’s the answer.

You’re a Minister here in charge of Digital Affairs. What’s your job?

My job is mostly, as I explained, to communicate, to make sure that the Premier gets accurate picture of what’s happening when it comes to digital affairs, and to make sure that when the premier wants something to be done about something digitally and that the stakeholders in the digital worlds understand what’s going to be done.

It’s mostly not about policy making, although it’s occasionally about policy making. It’s mostly about communication.

Does it mean that you are just a "serviteur" of this politics? You give a way to understand what’s Internet and how to use it, or you want to change or improve the digital politics in Taiwan?

Well, I’m a conservative anarchist...

Yeah, what does it mean?

It’s a more radical way to say radical centrism...

In Europe, anarchists are people who want to destroy the state.

Yeah, that’s right. That’s what I want to do.

That’s what you want to do?

Yes.

But you serve the Prime Minister?

I have a working relationship with the Prime Minister.

To destroy...?

To destroy the state, eventually...

...but maybe not in my own lifetime.

Are you serious? He knows it?

Yeah.

It’s a she or no?

It’s a he.

It’s a he.

As of today. In any case...

He knows it?

Yeah, we had a one month’s negotiation in public before I entered the cabinet.

Everything is recorded because I refused any exclusive interviews. All the journalists need to ask me publicly. That includes people in the Prime Minister’s office.

I came to him saying "I was doing all this work in the civil society. If you recruit me to work in the cabinet, I will do exactly the same thing."

I was very clear on my anarchistic inclinations. He says "fine".

There are, of course, some gives and takes. For example, I can’t look at national security, or top secret, or any confidential information.

One of my algorithmic work is to make sure that anything I can see, I can also make everybody see, including any other country.

So naturally, I can’t...

...I can’t really see any national secrets, because otherwise they might as well not exist.

Within those limits, I have the same mandate and privilege of a minister without portfolio. It was just somewhat restricted based on my political inclination.

Anarchists are violent; there is a tradition that they ready to use violence against the state institution. You are ready to do that?

You would understand that programming, code, algorithm, is violent. It’s not about how I use it. It is just code by itself is law, and is not just like any jurisdictional law depending on human interpretation.

They’re more like physical law, in a sense that it determines what’s easier, what’s harder, and ultimately what’s possible and what’s not possible.

It changes the way people interact. As makers of code, I understand that it’s actually more violent than, say, guns are.

More?

Yeah. When used as a violent device, it excludes possibilities. A gun only excludes certain instances of a possibility, but code has the potential of the effect on excluding even the ways to think about those possibilities.

While guns and canons can only make examples and deter people from thinking some thoughts, code can actually make people not to think about those thoughts. I would say in many ways it’s a more violent device.

That’s what anarchistic means. What is conservative?

For the conservative part... As part of anarchy, of course, I don’t give commands, I don’t take commands. That’s the tenet of anarchism.

The conservatism means that there is things in the human tradition that is worth preserving. That history only makes sense if there are people in the future who can still understand the history of today.

You can call it humanistic maybe. Even for me, it’s not just for humans. In any case, the idea is for a continuity of civilization. If the civilization has some trans humanist think will collapse to singularity.

The species afterwards will make no sense of our history. Then this is something that I don’t want to see. I want to still conserve this civilization as it was and maybe include it somehow, but at least conserve it.

Does it mean that there is for you a human nature against transhumans?

No, it’s not like that. It’s that, if we are going to be transhumans, it’s a continuous approach. It’s not done by five people become transhumans and killing everybody else. It’s everybody and not just humans. Others are a part of anyone who has the stake gets into the process of transformation.

There’s no one single point where we call Singularity. This is what I refer to as Plurality. Meaning that there’s many different views in many different zones on earth and they have to all make sense to go forward.

A little question on France. On that point, there’s a lot of people in France who think that Internet is damaging the part of the humanistic culture.

Yes, I agree.

Keep a city of young people to have performed lecture capacity to concentrate attention. What do you respond to them?

It’s just one unfortunate fact that the World Wide Web is just one of the applications of the Internet. It starts with a form that is mostly textual and then graphical, but it’s not fundamentally reflecting the micro expressions that we need to see on each others’ faces in order to reach empathy.

Most of the empathy inducing ways are mostly just filled in by projections in their early forms of the World Wide Web. It doesn’t mean that the Internet cannot produce new mediums that’s not the World Wide Web that respects or even keeps the empathy and the sustaining attention or the understanding of attitude that is needed for humanities to thrive or to communicate.

It’s just this current usage of these classes, tablets and the short notices on the World Wide Web. It is damaging, but it doesn’t say anything about the Internet that says about the current generation of World Wide Web applications.

It’s amazing because all the critics we can make about Internet, you say, "No. That’s World Wide Web, but we are Internet." It’s strange because it’s a way to avert criticism. You say, "The profound Internet, it’s the idea I make which is something profound."

No, that there are real applications. If you would try it...

Like this one, the virtual reality thing. If you get into this immersive space, which is not the World Wide Web, then you’ll get into the kind of mental state or emotion that lets people understand each other in a more holistic way, and it doesn’t pops out constant notifications or anything else.

The point here is that it’s a new modality that lets people participate not in the World Wide Web, but in each others’ experiences, so to speak. If we can just reorient quickly, if you take off your glasses, this is how you adjust the focus, and you can look all around.

That’s the solar system as it is, and then if you look at any planet, you can use your finger to select it, and here is a trigger where you can pull it, or even just enjoy the view anyway.

The view is nice.

That’s not a fantasy. It’s the solar system as it is at the moment. Of course, you can travel to other stars, as well.

You can look to any other planet and use your... to go to there, but just look around, up and down, left and right.

It is a pretty good view. What I’m saying is that this is one of the application of the Internet, and it’s not the Wide Web. It’s not in the browser, and there’s many other modalities in which that we can use the Internet.

For you, the World Wide Web is superficial?

I would say the current generation of browsers is mostly superficial, yes.

All the chain that are linked to Internet today is more linked to the World Wide Web, and...

What if you use email, they would have another link. The email was not part of the World Wide Web. There’s many other protocols, as well.

If you just use Facebook and Twitter, these are applications that mostly work on top of the World Wide Web.

That political model of Internet and the World Wide Web, is it necessarily for you democratic?

I don’t think so. It’s anarchistic. I wouldn’t say it’s democratic.

What’s the difference?

Anarchy and democracy, they certainly have overlaps. There is many people who practice direct democracy that says themselves are anarchist, or anarcho-capitalists or whatever.

For me, anarchy is about what we call a recursive community, meaning that the community reflects upon itself and has a way to systematically improve the constitution, or not improve, just adapt the constitution of the group itself so that they become gradually more self-aware. You see that in many early democratic models, as well, so they’re certainly not enemies. [laughs]

It is possible for a democracy to be fossilized and lose the capability to reflect and improve upon itself so that it becomes more ritualistic, a ritualistic way of democracy. Once it becomes like that way, then no anarchist would say that it’s anarchist.

I understand. An example of an anarchist society where the past?

There’s many [laughs] anarchist societies in the past. If you read Kōjin, there is this philosopher, Kōjin Karatani, who categorized many of the early pioneers, that is to say, people who just arrived to a new place and formed de facto anarchistic society, because everybody is free to move. They vote with their feet, so to speak.

But when the dimensions become constrained, either because somebody set up into farming or because the land gets used up, then it very quickly turned into a hierarchical and not a anarchistic organization. He has a hypothesis that the early Ionia was a more anarchistic society to build those pre-Socratic philosophy. But this is more or less speculation.

He has a hypothesis on how the early philosophers are actually born out of anarchistic tradition, like Hippocrates and so on. He also has another idea that anarchy, to him, is about a exchange model, so that there are people who exchange only to people they know or are strangers, and also people who exchange in the return of something more, versus altruistic, free exchanges.

He has this schema that he said the original family or tribe was where people exchanged freely, but only with people we know.

It gradually evolved from a state of quid pro quo exchanges, to unequal trading with people we don’t know. That’s his definition of markets, not mine.

It also extends to the other quarter, which is that to keep working only with people that we know, and we start to demand unequal returns.

But he said that the anarchistic model is a forth possibility, which is free exchanges with strangers.

He says that only some early nomadic possibilities — or in the early Internet, why not? But he didn’t say that — He basically says whenever there is a new space, people would want to exchange freely. He says it’s like a regression of the repressed, to those early wish of freely sharing with everybody.

But we know that outside 150 people, it would no longer be possible, and either the market model or the state model will appear.

He says that everybody wants the best of those two axis. It’s a very seductive, I would say, schema, which I don’t actually subscribe in.

Very speculative.

It’s very speculative, but it still says that there is something here about the model of exchange, which is, I think, the main insight.

I don’t buy this alternative history, but the main insight...

...is that if we manage to find a way so people can exchange freely with strangers without fearing the tragedy of the commons, then it established the foundation of anarchy. That’s the main thing I learned from Kōjin.

Would you say that it’s the positive part of all the phenomena we see with Uber, Airbnb and so on? Besides the market, away that people can exchange rooms, exchange things, thanks to Internet?

I think Uber and Airbnb are two completely different thing. Uber, as far as we know, doesn’t allow, say ride-sharing in Taiwan. It used to allow ride-sharing in France. I don’t know about now, but it always has to dispatch through an intermediary.

Airbnb is more like a listing where people can see what other landlords or people around them are are, so it’s more like a platform, while Uber is more like a middle person.

Of course, these are two different models. The European Union calls this collaborative, and calls this platform. I wouldn’t say it’s a anarchistic foundation. I would say that they harness some of the needs, psychological and material needs toward this free exchange, but taking a cut from it.

Whether they are taking a cut that’s too much by being de facto employers or a cut that is reasonable as considered by everybody else, it remains part of the society to decide together. It’s not my personal opinion. My work is to make sure that everybody understands the facts.

I understand. Just one question, I heard that the big thing here about the Internet was the Internet of Things. Are you into that or it’s not part of your job?

I am involved in setting the overall direction of the "Asia connecting to Silicon Valley" plan in Taiwan, which talks about two things.

One is the Internet of Everything. Not just things, but also beings.

Beings?

Beings, meaning — I don’t know — dogs, humans.

OK.

Yeah. [laughs] It’s not just things, it’s beings and things, which taken together we know for Internet of Everything or IoE.

Then the other part is about the startups, or social enterprises, or any of those nontraditional company systems or what we call, innovative economy or digital economy.

I’m involved in, mostly, just setting the concepts straight for those plans because the Ministry of Economic Affairs, the Ministry of Agriculture, the Ministry of Finance, they all have very different associations when they see those words.

My main work is philosophical, which is making sure that everybody see the same words and think more or less along the same lines. That’s my main work here.

By example, you think that agriculture tomorrow will be Internet Agriculture?

Yeah, of course. There’s many different layers. There’s the layer about the use of technology like drones where there’s just robots on the air detecting what the props need and give them the chemicals. Essentially, make the land one of the devices on the Internet.

There’s also vertical farming and other farming techniques that keeps a very close watch on individual plants, essentially making each plant one device on the Internet. There’s also the, what we call robotic farming which just abstracts out the farmer all together and have the farm run itself, maybe supervised by one or two people.

That’s the idea. At this point, I would say most of the things are connected. We’re just figuring out how to establish a ground where the connections are fair, are secure and that people understand it.

Would you say philosophically that new Internet of Things and Beings is like a new ontology where there is no more differences between human, things, a tree, a cow and you put everything on the same level?

I wouldn’t say that. Just like we’re both using the English language, but it doesn’t mean that you and I are the same person. That will be pushing things way too far. [laughs] It was just so that the things and beings can talk.

It’s the language and not ontology?

Yeah. I wouldn’t say it’s the same ontology. I would also say that it is a new application of the Internet that is unrelated to browser or World Wide Web. It is not a shared content space anymore. It is some other space.

In that regard, I would say it lives on a different ontological space than most of the Web. I wouldn’t say that it by itself necessitates a conflation of different ontologies.

Last question about you. You are transgender?

Yeah.

How did you experience the fact to change, so philosophy, existential experience? Why that happened? How did it happen? Politically, did it change something to be the first transgender minister?

I don’t really feel any different. The idea of transgender it’s like... I filled in my gender as null, as none.

Neutral?

Just none (無). It’s a very Zen word. "Mu" in Japanese, meaning nil.

In the application form to the cabinet, there is this box that says gender, that I filled in nil. It’s next to the box that says party, political party, which I also filled in nil. Taken together, it’s a political gesture. It’s saying that Taiwan has been living on a two-party system for a very long time ever since the martial law gets lifted.

It’s been quite a few years.

This cabinet, I think, is the first that... Well the previous cabinet also has an independent Prime Minister, but just for four months during the transition. This cabinet, for a year now, not only has an independent Prime Minister, but also more independent cabinet members than cabinet members of any party.

It’s quite remarkable actually in Taiwan. I don’t know about the world, but it’s about saying that this is not the cabinet of any particular party. People find that hard to swallow, hard to understand because it’s not in any one’s experience.

Somehow, combining this with transgender, meaning I’m not responding to the social script of any gender, makes it easier for people to understand.

People start to think, OK so maybe it’s possible to think outside of the binary in political parties and by extension on gender.

If you’re one of those young people who argue for LGBTQ equality, there’s many young people in Taiwan arguing for that, then by extension they can think this about parties.

I would say it’s an inter-generational device.

I understand that you want to make pedagogy.

Does it correspond to your desire because you can choose your political orientation? For your gender identity, it’s more difficult to make it like a choice?

For many young Taiwan people, it’s the other way around.

OK.

They’re free to act to whatever gender expression they like. There’s quite some movement now to basically free people from gender expectation especially among 20 something or teenagers here.

Therefore, for many of them, if they’re born into a family of very strong partisan allegiance, then it is actually extremely difficult to switch party identity.

It is true, right? I’m not talking about fantasy. It is true.

I find these two equally easy; not particularly hard.

I would like ask you a last question. It’s about philosophy. We spoke about a lot of philosophers. What are the philosophers you read, who is active today and you link to Internet or not? How come?

I’m just reading Martha Nussbaum, who wrote a book on Anger and Forgiveness. I think that’s the title. I’m not done reading it yet. It’s a, I would say, neo-stoic interpretation of anger.

She argue that the stoics are correct, except for close intimate relationships in which she thinks anger has a role of making things important, but not to revenge or to demean the other party but rather a transition anger that strives to make things better. That’s the main argument, which is very stoic. It doesn’t have anything to do with Internet.

You enjoy reading philosophers?

Yes.

You need it to read philosophy?

I need what?

You need philosophy in your life? It’s needed? It’s something you need in your life to read philosophy?

Life is a praxis of philosophy, so it’s the other way around: Philosophy needs life. It’s not life needs philosophy. [laughs]

If a philosophy doesn’t have any living person to live out, the philosophy are just text, it doesn’t mean anything to anyone.

No, I wouldn’t say my life needs philosophy. I would say that I’m practicing philosophy and that philosophers that influence me, they maybe come to being again as I practice them.

Thank you very much. Just to say it’s amazing your capacity to pass from Internet to philosophy. I’m very surprised the way you think it’s like things clear evident that meanings that sense is not a human property. You said Cambridge University said it so it’s done. For me, it’s not done and I’m sure for...

It’s just like the word "Artificial Intelligence." Every time the machine can do something people say, "It’s not Artificial Intelligence." [laughs] The definition keeps retreating. When machines can play chess, people used to say, "OK, so chess is just calculations, Go (圍棋) is a much more complex and it’s art. That’s human."

When AlphaGo plays Go better than human, now the same people say, "Well, Go is just calculations." [laughs] Now it’s something else is human. It’s evident to me that, of course, you can always change the definition every time the machine is capable of doing something, or when the animals are discovered that they can also do something.

Of course, you can always change the definition. It doesn’t change the fact that things that a hundred years ago, people thought certain capabilities are exclusive to human. If you go back to before the First World War, then the same things are now discovered to be accessible by animals as studied by biologists, as well as by machines as the AI people are studying. That’s true.

We can, of course, always redefine and say, these things are still human, which I’m OK with it.

I know. It’s the great argument of the end of the human specificity. I don’t mind because I think that there’s still good arguments to think that human and animals don’t belong to the same species and that they’re specific capacity that are special like language and the capacity to produce cells that neither the machines neither the animals are capable of.

I agree.

You said the contrary just a moment ago.

No, I’m saying one day... Certainly for now, already, machine is able to do some philosophy work. They probably don’t do it the same way as humans, because they don’t have a lived experience of the human embodiment of life experience.

Even though machines perform cognitive work, they’re not the same kinds of minds, that is very evident. What I’m saying is that we don’t have a monopoly on meanings. There are alien intelligence also. That’s the extent of what I’m saying. I’m not saying the aliens are also human.

Yes, but you define meaning so that animals has access to it. It’s a cycle because meaning as defined by philosophers, it’s not something to which animals have access.

That’s right.

It’s a discussion that needs two definitions and meaning as defined by philosophers is not something animal have access to.

There is, of course, the great ape argument, which means there are certain animals, chimpanzees, who has at least the same access to meanings as maybe five-year-old humans. Certainly you don’t say five-year-old humans are not human. You maybe say that they’re not as cognitively mature as adult philosophers. Certainly you don’t say that they are sub-human.

The great ape argument is basically saying, it’s spectrum of meaning that we’re able to grasp. Of course, if you hold adult human as the barrier of meaning, that also means there are many animals that fall below this, which is just fine.

One day, maybe next year, machines may be able to reason on this level. In which case, we will say, well they don’t have a life experience of human’s subjective feeling. They have a different narrative of their life’s experience, which is great, because it means a new perspective on the same meanings.

Then I will still call them "meanings" because, well, that’s how we talk with machines now. I’m not saying that the specialness of each individual would magically get replaced by mass-produced machines. Each machine also has to assemble its own life story, so to speak.

They don’t have a human body, so they won’t ever have access to... Until we do whole brain simulation, which is a bit far in the future. Until we do whole brain simulation, it’s a different category of beings. It doesn’t mean they don’t have intelligence or they don’t have access to meanings.

What made me react is the way you said it’s the thing... The argument is done. There is no more discussion. There is still discussion about... You said Cambridge said the matter is fixed. I thought it was dogmatic.

The wording, yeah, I apologize...

No, no...

The wording is that it has a certain degree of... You can say that there is a certain degree is still human only at the moment, which of course is true. There is a number of degrees.

No, I think that the question if it is a question of degree or a question of nature, of sense is not a question which is how to say degree is define. People have good arguments to say that animals have not accessed to what we call truth, to what we call the law and the rule. They don’t have access to the representation of beauty...

Yeah, and if you include five-year-old human people in the "animal" category, then we have complete agreement.

We want a right to agreement. What I mean is I think the question is not ended. You seem to say, "Yeah, the question is ended. The Cambridge University decides such so it’s such." I don’t think so.

No, it’s not the Cambridge University. It’s a collective declaration. This is the document acting directly influenced the UK animal welfare with all of that, a much more strict control on the kind of thing one can inflict on animal consciousness... including octopus.

This is very interesting. It used to be an argument where one needs a neocortex to feel things. That you need a cerebral cortex to perform cognitive work. This declaration is basically saying no, if you have a certain pattern of connection, then it has access to some degree of consciousness.

If you declare something in the sense as "requiring a very high degree of humanness that excludes animals", it doesn’t really require an argument. Most people will agree that it excludes most animals and most children also. That’s just how you draw the line.

Yeah, no but the point, what’s important physically is that today we want to...That’s the big story you told. We want to open our hubs to all beings, animals, even machines. I think that animals, to respect animal is to understand they live in another world.

I think that’s what the job you do with Internet, you make understand us what’s the world of Internet. Not to say "artificial Intelligence, it’s like you". I think it’s not true.

No, it’s not true.

It’s something else. The good thing with you that you try to understand to people that acknowledges make understand how animals see the world.

You make us understand that there’s World Wide Web and there’s another world, you don’t know it. Let’s try to understand it. That’s precious. It’s more precious than to say it’s the same thing that the way we presume machine are like us.

Right. I think that the important thing here is that there are, I wouldn’t say "sameness", I would say "commonalities to communication" where we can try to build more understanding on.

I wouldn’t say that it’s the same, just like the metaphor I said with English. Just because we both speak English, it doesn’t mean that English means the same to us, or that we are the same people.

It’s an important point. Just having the consciousness, the ability to suffer, having affective states, having all these things are just, I would say, just entries to this kind of conversation. It is necessary, but nowhere sufficient, for a conversation to happen. That’s my view.

Thank you very much for the great interview. Thank you very much. I love it a lot.

Now, I don’t know how you work. You are going to transcribe all the things?

Yeah, of course.

OK.

Not me personally.

Some level of machine intelligence plus human intelligence will do this.

You understand that what I publish will be a shortened version?

Of course.

OK.

Yeah, but if you can put a link or a QR code to the forum, that would be great, because the reader can then check the entire thing.

Of course, and you could send me the link.

I will post the link to the forum that we set up.

OK, nice.

I’m very interested by that.

Do you speak French now?

No, I read a little bit of French, but I don’t ever stay in France long to actually speak French.

I just posted to the forum and you’ll get in email.

OK.