If you would like, we can embargo this transcript until you publish.

I’m so glad to hear that.

Both my parents are journalists.

OK. Very good. That’s so much better.

That’s right. All right, so, yes?

Good. Thank you for meeting with us. We are here along with many other journalists, we understand, because we have an election coming up in Taiwan.

That’s right. I just met 25 journalists.

Is it OK if we have computers?

It’s a deeper conversation here.

Yeah. Is it OK if we have our computers and take everything? Yeah?

Of course.

We’re interested in looking at some of the efforts of this administration to try and change the way the Internet can help democracy because we know that in the West and the US, there are a lot of concerns about what online discourse has done to…

It’s a weapon of mass distraction.

[laughs] There is some truth to that. I think a lot of people have that fear. We want to hear about how you’re trying to do things differently. That’s the thematic…

So it attracts consensus, rather than distract people from democracy.

Yeah. Well, if you could start, can you just tell us a little bit about what your philosophy is?

Our basic philosophy is that the government need to radically trust the people, without expecting any trust back. That the government need to make ourselves transparent to people, without making citizen transparent to the state.

That is the basic idea. Implementation-wise, it builds on broadband as human right. Anywhere in Taiwan, even on the top of the Yu Shan Mountain, you’re guaranteed to have 10 megabits per second, with very affordable – like 16 euros per month – unlimited 4G connection, even on the Pacific Islands of Dongsha and Taiping.

The broadband as human right now at 98 percent for rural, indigenous, and remote islands is the basis of democratic legitimacy when we’re building anything online. Of course, it’s not just about connectivity and devices. It’s also about habit.

We bring technology to people by joining people in their existing town hall meetings, amplifying their voices, rather than asking them to come to Taipei or to technology. These are the overarching philosophical ideas.

We think that, like five bits every four years, which is called voting, is too narrow a bandwidth for people’s collective preferences to be explored.

We use newly invented voting methods, such as quadratic voting to surface the best collective intelligence ideas and pair them with the best teams on assistive intelligence, or AI, and co-create solutions. That gets then amplified on the presidential level through Presidential Hackathon.

On the premier level, through the reverse mentors to the ministries, who are all under 35 years old, each participating ministry have two young reverse mentors.

On the ministerial level, through participating offices, which is a group of people who respond to any petition over 5,000 people in e-collecting signatures, can summon the participation offices to look into their issues and co-create solutions.

Even on the agency level, through the training sessions and office hours, where again I bring my mobile office to the townships, the section chiefs, and so on, all innovate through a Zoom participatory teleconference to look at what the local people are dealing with and co-create solutions right away. That’s different levels.

A principal to work with the public service through vote for the senior leadership, we ensure that the political risk for everybody else is at least not increased. For them, it’s decreased. By participating in co-governance, they can actually hold the service society and private sector accountable.

It’s not just one direction accountability, and so everybody’s risk decreases. That’s the first-level senior leadership.

For middle management, we ensure that they get the credit that is due, because they were anonymous. If things go right, minister get the credit. If things go wrong, the minister blames them, and so they get no credit. We make sure that they get seen by the people whose problems they’re solving, seen by the president and the press when they really innovated to solve some issue. We absorb the risk.

The third thing is the frontline staff. We make sure that it saves the chores. We automate away the chores so they can focus on creativity, and they can go home sooner every day.

We do so by asking for volunteers from each ministry. They can send one delegate to my office to co-create this form of horizontal governance by one delegate from each ministry forming a horizontal office for digital transformation.

That is the theory of change. These are kind of the pillars.

You’ve been in this role now three-and-a-half years?

Three years.

Three years, and…

Three years and two months.

[laughs] Three years and two months.

One month and five days, actually. But, yes.

Can you give us a copy or an example? How does this manifest itself? Is there a policy that you can say exists because of this different approach to governance?

Mm-hmm, sure. What would you like to hear?

What are you proudest of in terms of…

Proudest of?

…something that you’ve sort of delivered through this that, perhaps, wouldn’t have happened if your position hadn’t been created. If these ideas hadn’t…

Well, I’m committed to take no credit, so I wouldn’t answer that question directly.

[laughs]

It’s like saying like who is your favorite child that you feel who wouldn’t have been raised this way if not for your parenting. I would not say that. [laughs]

I will instead show this, my social innovation lab office, which is my real office – you came to the boring one.

Because first day is cabinet meeting, and so I’m, by necessity, in this office. Usually, I’m in this office, which is must more co-creative. The soccer field here is co-created by people with Down’s Syndrome, who look at the world through geometric abstractions. We work with them because we cannot see the world through this abstraction.

People become more creative in this space. Just by existing, this space provides the sandbox for new experiments. For example, self-driving tricycles, to interact with, literally, the market. Because it’s next to the Jian Guo Flower Market.

People can look at those robots and say, “Oh, we know that it can take me places.” We saw the TV series on self-driving cars. But what if these shopping baskets can follow me around in flower market as I shop hands-free? I just put things to the basket. Once it’s full, I summon another one in front of it, forming a fleet, and so on.

It calls for creativity across sectors to modify their self-driving vehicles so that it has two eyes. It can follow people, things like that, and can read non-verbal expressions.

This way of co-gov, instead of saying the law determining the code, determining the market, determining the social norm, which is what you would do if you’re into serveillant statism, the Taiwan approach is to start with the norms and figuring out what feels normal when you’re interacting with these self-driving creatures.

After a year or so, when the market co-created norm, that then decide the technological architecture that protects not only privacy, but also the will of the people for collective control and also financial reimbursements, and so on. Once that happens, then we say it’s out of the sandbox. We can turn it into a regulation.

Any regulation for any ministry can be challenged in this norm first way, other than funding terrorism and money laundering, because we know what would happen. There’s no need to experiment. But everything else is fair game. This is the general way of building effective partnerships.

If you look into the Presidential Hackathon, which is every year we ask hundreds of teams across the society to say how would you enable sustainable infrastructure? They came up with potential solutions. For example, these are repairs people from the Taiwan Water Corporation.

In the Keelung area where they piloted for three months during Presidential Hackathon, they used to take two months for a water leak to happen in the pipes before it gets detected, because they rely on people who physically travel and listen to the pipes. Most of the time it’s not leaking, and so they’re basically having trouble recruiting young people.

In any case, through Presidential Hackathon, we work with the private and the academic sectors, and to co-create the chatbot that very quickly repair the obvious issues and also identify the new leaks in a very quick way. It’s not quite self-healing, but it’s what we call assistive intelligence, working with the skilled people so that they can wake up and investigate, instead of doing repetitive work.

This is one of the examples of the Presidential Hackathon. Once they piloted on this small area, they get a trophy from the president.

This is a micro projector. When you turn it on, it summons the president and show a small film of the president giving the trophy to the team. It’s very useful in a public sector, because when you’re there, if your jounalist say, “There’s no budget,” you just summon the president.

Then they say, “Oh, there is budget to scale Keelung through the entire country.” Because it signifiy the political promise from the president. Whatever they’ve done in the past quarter, we commit to make it national policy within the next 12 months.

It’s a very quick amplification of social innovation. It may even extend to the Parliament. One of the five winning teams last year was working on telemedicine. They started from Green Island or Orchid Island. There’s many smaller islands around Taiwan.

Most of the time, the people there, who get wounded and so on, their family would insist that a helicopter take their loved ones to the main Taiwan island for the specialized treatment because they don’t quite trust the local general practitioners and nurses in the local clinic.

That, in turn, makes qualified nurses and doctors not willing, really, to remain on these remote islands because they don’t get as much training. It’s a kind of vicious cycle. They break out of this vicious cycle last year by saying, “Oh, we saw a recent helicopter crash. We really want to fix that.”

The nurses tells us that if we relax the Telemedicine Act, which at that time only allows the nurse to do diagnosis and medical practition if the doctor is right nearby them.

But they say what if the doctor’s in the specialized hospitals can teleconference in, and also is the hospital in charge of the helicopter run, the three people can form a data coalition to swap and exchange data with the family’s permission, because the family is watching in the clinic, and do treatments together.

It’s such a good idea, I really won trust. Within three months they build a prototype system, again on a very small island. But because they won the presidential trophy, the president’s promise extends to the Ministry of Health who would say we have to change the law, actually, for that.

Helicopter is owned by Minister of Interior, so it’s not just one ministry’s business, but they have to go and co-create a new amendment for the Parliament. Then the Parliament, of course, fast-tracked it.

During the Presidential Hackathon with the involvement of the participatory platform, we already know that hundreds of thousands of people really want to see this happen. For MPs, it’s of course no harm done if they pass this in a fast-track way across parties.

To this year, of course, we are seeing in more than 100 places in the more rural places, indigenous nations and offshore islands, more than 100 teleclinics get set up, and that would only expand with 5G deployment which starts next month.

That is two cases from last year’s Presidential Hackathon, and there’s many, many more cases from this year’s Presidential Hackathon. That is just one of the more flagship products, very similar co-creations happening on the Prime Minister, on the ministrial agency, and every day work level.

Let me just go back to the water issue, very intriguing. How is it they discover the leaks in the water system? What is the method?

What is the formula?

Right.

First they use the SCADA system, which is the industrial measurement system for water flow, water pressure, and so on. They couple that with the activities data on the ground. For example, human activities data, the temperature data, the usage of electricity in the aggregate data, and so on.

They feed all of this into a machine learning model, who then look at the predicted average of the next output of the next SCADA monitoring station. If it exceeds the predicted output, it means that it is leaking, so that’s that. Intuitively it’s not hard, but it actually requires gathering of many different sources of data information.

Let me ask you another question…

Of course.

You’ve just stimulated a last question.

The two parties cooperating, I’d like to hear more about that. How did you manage it? How did you convince two parties that hate each other to cooperate?

It’s actually very simple. We use AI-based conversation to show people, each individual, where their sentiments, where their feelings about a public issue by very specific case.

For example, this picture is a real picture from 2015 where we asked people, how do you feel about a non-professional licensed drivers on their way to work using an app, taking a request from a stranger that takes the car to another point, and then they resume working, but charging them for it, which also known as UberX.

It’s a very specific case. We’re not deliberating about sharing economy, platform economy, future of economy, future of work, but rather very specific case. People feel differently about it, of course. We first share open data. In Taiwan, we always mean open citizen data, citizen science data, social sector controlled data production first, and then public sector and private sector.

I can make some example, but in any case we show people the data that they can trust. Then we ask people how do you feel about it?

For three weeks, people may feel happy, or anxious, or angry, or whatever, but what they do is that they generally see what each other is feeling as well. These people are their friends and families, it’s just they didn’t talk about UberX over dinner, but they are not nameless trolls on the Internet.

Gradually, after three or four weeks, they coalesce ideas, and the best ideas are the ones that take care of most people’s feelings. Finally, we turn the most resonating ideas into agenda, where we meet face to face and make them into regulation. The multipurpose taxi regulation which Uber is operating under right now, is actually cocreated with thousands of people this way.

The UI is like this, everybody see a fellow sentiment from fellow citizen, I think insurance liability very important. You can agree or disagree. Once you do, your avatar moves towards people who feel like you, that is it. There is no reply button, so there’s no room for trolls to play.

If you mobilize 5,000 people voting exactly the same, it doesn’t expand your group, because that represents the plurality, not the head count of each group.

The machine learning constantly show people this picture, and this may be the most important picture in this whole slides. It shows that the political parties, the ideologies, like this is the actual picture from Bowling Green, Kentucky, USA.

These five, any of which readily identify whether you’re kind of traditionally Republican or traditionally Democrat. These are divisive issue. If you only look at social media in a kind of person’s echo chamber, you would think these are the only issues concerning the polity.

Actually, most people in Bowling Green agree on most of things, most of the neighbors, most of the time, it’s just the political debate is not spending any calorie on any of it. The top consensus was in the curriculum where there’s science, technology, engineering, and math, there should be art. It should be STEAM, and not STEM.

Such a simple idea, costs almost nothing. Guarantee to win the mayor a little bit of popularity when they run for reelection, but again, the Republicans and Democrats are unanimously supporting this idea.

Just by identify the lower-hanging fruits, which is much more numerous than people usually think, we can restore a sense of polity and working on incremental changes that are individually, actually, quite significant. It’s just not as eyeball-catching clickbait as those five issues, but we can table those. That’s the basic intuition.

It’s almost like taking the idea of silent majority, right? We see that…

Silent only because we don’t have ways to listen in scale. Yeah.

Right, and is the net upshot of this that you feel like people in Taiwan feel more engaged now?

Yes.

Is there a way to measure that?

Of course. There’s a way to measure that on our national participation platform, which is called join.gov.tw, which has 10 million visitors. Out of 23 million people in Taiwan, that’s not a bad participation. You can also see that at any given point like right now, there’s 149 petitions going on. There’s 141 regulatory pre-announcements and so on, under discussion.

In all 2,004 mid to long-term projects are for people to supervise, and look at KPIs and how well they’re delivering in their original planning and the budgeting. This exactly is the same numbers and information as seen by the control Yuen, which is a separate branch of the government.

This basically allows for day to day participation. We did actually a survey, multiple surveys, to measure people’s reaction to it. Everybody feel they have understood more, more curious about public matters, and much more engaged if they around 15 or 65 years old.

The other ones were like yeah, this lets us understand more, but not necessarily make structural changes, because people understand this only does the low-hanging fruits that harms no one, but the 15-year-olds, really, you can’t even vote.

That is the real participatory agenda setter. A lot of most popular petitions are done by people who are 16 years old, and so that’s that. And the 65-year-olds have the wisdom to implement them, so they often lead the face-to-face deliberations in the town halls local to their vicinity. These are the two most empowered groups.

This will lead to more confidence, and more faith, and more optimism in government and what it’s doing.

Not necessarily…

Not necessarily?

Not necessarily. It will lead to more trust between citizens. Like we are actually of a polity, that there’s less room for divisiveness to grow. Once you work together on a subject, there’s no easy way for propaganda and information operation to influence you on that particular issue. It’s mutual trust, it’s not about just trusting the government.

But of course, we’re now in an election season where both sides are highlighting the differences between the two sides, and people are…

Also, the commonalities.

And also commonalities? Do you feel like both sides are doing that?

Yes.

I mean…

They’re both supporting, actually all three are supporting Hong Kong.

Right.

All of them are saying no to “one country, two systems.” This is the first time in the presidential election for something like that to happen.

Right, but of course we met with Han Kuo-yu last night, and he will tell us that this is the dirtiest election that he’s ever…

But he does support Hong Kong, right?

He does.

He did say that.

But he’ll say that, and he’ll say it’s the process has been illegitimate, or almost suggesting that. In many ways, if you just listen to him, the picture you’re painting of Taiwan is one where it’s a very different one than what you’re trying to do here.

Mayor Han is really adept at highlighting divisive issues. He’s very capable of doing that, almost an art. That’s just that.

I’m not denying that these are those five divisive issues either. I’m not saying that these don’t exist. I’m just saying open government work, by necessity, is with the career public service which mostly care about these issues and not these ones. These ones are for people who want to run for president.

I’m curious, you talked about how this reinforces peoples’ sense of community and commonalities. Do you see that as your main goal? Do you see that as the main goal, as your main goal trying to deliver a good public policy, good governments? Then the sense of communities is a positive feedback loop? Which is the main priority for you?

Like personally?

Yeah, or in effect, what do you mean is the most important thing?

I’m a conservative anarchist. My ultimate goal is for any hierarchical top-down government to disappear. It’s pure horizontalism. I’m trying to maybe not in my lifetime, but show that state is useful illusion, but you can use it only when it’s useful, but if it’s not useful, don’t use it.

As I said, I don’t represent anyone here. I’m just presenting my own view. Basically, for me, it’s a demonstration, in the sense of a demo.

After collaboration, people would discover that if they hold each other to account, the social innovators can deliver what used to take a state apparatus to deliver, but then it doesn’t have to be that. Through distributed ledgers, for example, my favorite example of one of the very few legitimate uses of DLT, also know as block chain, is the AirBox.

All the 2,000 points you see here, are people who donate their balcony, their schools, or whatever, to measure PM2.5 air quality indicator, and sharing it to distributed ledger system. It’s called an AirBox, and all of them have different interests, right? For people who are in this area, maybe they want to hold the over polluters to account, and just report it for justice.

For people who are in the primary schools, they use this to teach about sustainability and about data stewardship.

There’s many different interests, but they all agree that reinforcing each other’s measurements make the collective stronger, and so they form a data coalition called the LASS, L-A-S-S project. Then they collectively bargained with the environment minister, who only have 87 measurement stations in Taiwan.

Of course people are going to trust the social sector rather than a very far away, like literally, environmental minister’s public sector measurement, even though it’s more precise.

The people are saying we would like to lend you our legitimacy by allowing you to participate in our social sector data collection, only if you can help us to fill in the gaps which are the industrial parks, the areas that are private property that we couldn’t break and enter, and install AirBoxes on.

Some of us suspect they may contribute to air pollution – very fair. It turns out that the government owns the lamps, so we agreed to install tens of thousands of their microsensor design on the lamps and complete the puzzle together.

Then, share this entirely as open data, and open source, and open hardware, to the global community so there’s an additional thousand or so across the world that use the Taiwan-developed AirBox system without paying any licensing fee, and patent, and open source, they pay instead on co-creation and contribution.

When seen this way, and when they expand their work to, say, WaterBox, which measures water pollution in the land designed for agric use, because if any industrial plant pollutes that, then they get cuts electricity and water by the Minister of Economy, that’s a new law passed this year, so they’re tackling this problem. The industrial plants may say it’s actually upstream that’s polluting.

So they’re also motivated to join the WaterBox system, and install that on their waterway from the upstream, and so on. Again, it increases everybody’s legitimacy and reliability. When you have participation in a co-governance project like this, you know then that this way of mutual accountability is better than a state apparatus. Then you see state as useful illusion. That’s my agenda.

I may be misrepresenting this in trying to simplify. Your current design approach to governance that true government, true to state, eventually that lays all the groundwork, and all the systems, and practices, and norms in society, that eventually the state destroys its own usefulness

I would say the hierarchical command and control structure, eventually remains useful only where it’s necessary, but otherwise, yes, collective collaborative governance will take most of the public sector work.

It doesn’t mean that there’s no public sector. It means that just like in Internet governance, Internet is owned by everyone and no one. The rules that describe the Internet, the protocols, are co-created by anyone with motivation.

We start in Internet governance with norms rather than hierarchical structures. There are hierarchical structures, but they’re by necessity, like the norm, interact with the market, interact with the code, interact with the law that necessitates the hierarchical structure.

I’m not saying that these are completely going away. I’m not like a radical anarchist, I’m a conservative anarchist. Meaning we conserve the part that honors the history, the lineage, and the culture, taking a transcultural view, but while being transcultural, build a republic, so it’s a republic of citizens, and not only representatives.

I have questions on just like you said some the echo chamber. I mean when we opens up the door to more access to the Internet, but I’m just wondering, how is Taiwan doing to make sure that without bringing so many negative impact that might have already been seen recently. I’m just wondering your take on the issue.

I think echo chambers are natural because Dunbar’s numbers mean we can only hold 150 different other people’s lives in our head. By necessity we cannot hold like 23 million positions in our head, nor should we.

The problem with social media is that sometimes they reinforce those tendencies of tribalism. So much so that people start treating people who fall outside of the echo chamber as essentially non-people.

That’s the danger of populism. The danger of populism is not that it’s popular, it’s OK if it’s popular. The danger of populism is that it excludes part of the people outside of the definition of people. To work to mitigate that problem, we are basically relying on humor.

Whenever there is a kind of disinformation package that sows discord, say between the citizens and a ministry, or between people holding different views, nowadays, all the ministries are trained in the art of memetic engineering which is about clarifying rumors, not by saying that the minister’s words is above a journalist’s word, which we never do.

According to CIVICUS Monitor, we’re the only jurisdiction in Asia that’s not doing that. Everybody else infringe a little bit on the freedom of the civil society because of disinformation crisis.

We’re saying no, that journalists’ word is as good, if not better, than a minster’s words. Because of that, we have to contribute into journalism by getting you the fact-checked clarifications faster. Also, by publishing when a disinformation is kind of brewing within two hours, and now usually within one hour, a meme that are independently interesting.

There’s the triple two principle, within two hours, there need to be a clarification that’s less than 200 characters. For example, this one says perming your hair many times a week is subject to a million-dollar fine. That’s not true. A younger version of the Prime Minister says, “I may be bald now but I would not punish people with hair.”

And a line that says what we’ve done is actually introducing a labeling requirement for hair products starting in 2021. Prime Minister, as he looks now, says, “However, if you keep perming your hair many times a week, while it will not damage your pocket, it will damage your hair. You may end up looking like me.”

It’s funny. When people laughed, the joy takes people further. It goes viral by itself. That’s what we mean by memetic engineering.

Did the Premier laugh?

Yes, of course.

Of course, he laughed heartily about that. He pre-cleared the use of all these messages, of course.

The point here is that if you search for perming hair, fine. This shows up on the top hits. It completely washes down the disinformation. Second, that people, when they laughed, they no longer get mobilized by anger into outrage. Their anger turns into laughter. That’s the humor sublimation pathway instead of the outrage pathway.

By making the clarifications more fun and more viral, we ensure that people are in a more deliberative mood because, once you laugh about it, like the effect of catnips on cats, once the effect wears off, people become calmer and then, can enter a deliberative mood. That’s our main strategy against divisive messaging, it’s just humor.

Do you have a staff of joke writers because you’ve got two hours to come up with a…

Like standup comedians.

Right, in two hours, you got to come up with this.

Many of those professionals, not neccessarily comedians, just formed a new party called the Can’t Stop This Party. That was the name. Literally, an unstoppable, happy party.

I sent them a basket of catnip when they formed the new party.

Anyway, yes, of course, these are professional people. In each ministry that adopts this kind of social innovation, they have at least five different roles clearing the speech, the image, the visuals, the memetic joke, the policy, and so on. And the political staff, of course. This is coordinated by our spokesperson Kolas Yotaka.

They are syndicated, actually. On LINE Today, for example, which is a very popular app for messaging in Taiwan. LINE Today lists the gossiping and entertainment as the top section. Then, after the top news, the clarifications.

I always tell my colleague, it’s because we’re not funny enough so that we’re only above the social issues and whatever but below entertainment and gossip. When we get good enough in our art, we will overtake gossiping and entertainment.

Is there a place where we can see a selection?

Yeah.

Besides the hair perming one.

It’s on LINE Today, so you can just check LINE Today or you can go to factchecker.line.me, which is the dashboard from the LINE system. This is the number of messages reported by people as potentially disinformation to be clarified.

147,000.

Every day, it’s like flagging your email as spam. You’re donating your email to a spam house to clarify so that it lands to your junk mail folder and not your inbox the next time around. Uniquely, these are 32k reported messages. The trending ones gets attention from the four clarification partners and from the administration.

Altogether, we clarified this much for the people. You can see the cards, the trending ones, from the administration and also from the four fact-checking social sector partners. It’s factchecker.line.me and you can browse a selection.

.line.me?

Yeah, fact-checker.line.me.

To say that you’re going to correct fake news within two hours is one thing but the definition of what is fake news and what isn’t fake news is contentious.

We don’t use that word.

Or misinformation, that idea…

We say disinformation…

…or disinformation.

…which has a legal definition. A intentionally harmful untruth that harms the public.

I guess that definition is also open into political…It lends itself to being manipulated and people who contest what is true.

Of course, and they do so in the court system. These are established legal concepts. We’re not reinventing any concept. We’re taking existing laws that says you cannot spread fear during a epidemic like SARS, and things like that. That law originally, for example, only says something about newspapers, and radio, and so on and, somehow, omitted the Internet.

We revamped the laws to add the digital part but the definition stays the same. We’re not creating new legal concepts, nor are we making new laws.

I guess the issue is because of the speed of the way misinformation or disinformation is spread, the legal system doesn’t have time to catch up. It’s not able to punish people or interdict the dissemination of information. It seems like the response so far, you’re talking about is mitigating the impact of the disinformation.

Making it less viral, essentially.

Right now, the context is people are talking about disinformation engineered by, for example, by the PRC. I’m wondering, do you have any views on that? First of all, do you believe there is an organized campaign by the…

Paraphrasing Nietzsche, “You don’t have to believe when you know.”

The Taiwan FactCheck Center is a real good source because it fact-checks in a way that is nonpartisan. It only accepts crowdfunding.

It’s, alternately, attacked by the green and the blue camps, meaning that it’s somewhat neutral, and like me, they’re nonpartisan and not belonging to any party. They said that there’s a trending graphics that goes viral in Taiwan that says, “The rioters in Hong Kong pays young people $20 million to kill and murder police.”

That is manufactured by PRC. Why do we know? Because it’s posted directly on 中央政法委长安剑, which is the premier social media account from the Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission of the PRC. Then, people started fact-checking it like whether that card, which is designed to provoke outrage, is describing something that has any ground in reality. Turns out, there’s none.

Not only did they get the Cantonese wrong, the purported telegram group is using Hanyu Pinyin, which no protestor in Hong Kong would use. [laughs] If you join this Hanyu Pinyin group on Telegram, you see mostly spam and people making jokes about the communist party.

Also, the picture they use to frame the story is actually from Reuters. The Reuters caption says nothing about them being paid to do so. It does a very thorough fact-checking in a quick enough way. Once they do so, on Facebook, they agree, anything that’s clarified here, which is the member of the International Fact-Checking Network, gets dialed down on virality, so you no longer see our news feed.

It’s not taken down. It’s buried. Meaning that you can scroll two hours or you can go specifically to that poster’s wall, but otherwise, it doesn’t reach more people.

By amplifying the virality of fun, memetic clarifications and decreasing virality of this social sector, journalistically-checked disinformation packages, we ensure a public forum that can still take into account all the different viewpoints but without this kind of deliberative manipulation.

Even PRC would say that, really, the 长安剑 posted this message. It’s on the Internet archive.

Are you saying that you don’t have to be concerned so much with who’s creating disinformation or misinformation as long as you are making sure the safeguards are in place? You are making sure there is an effective countermeasure to that misinformation?

It’s like spam. Of course, it’s important to ultimately know who are the spammers and put them to justice but that takes time, as you said. The court proceeding takes, especially when they’re overseas, maybe infinite time.

On the other hand, if we design, like SpamHaus, a social sector organization that can analyze the inauthentic coordinated behavior without relying on censorship, that relies on people voluntarily marking their incoming email as spam, by and large, will solve the spam issue without making any law about it.

Going on that analogy, I don’t think an effort, at least not in my lifetime, will ever solved a spam problem. We’ll always still get spam. In some ways, we can expect…

Some of our inbox will be spam, yes.

Disinformation will keep coming. You can never fully prevent the problem. You just need to make sure…

Yeah, because they are also evolving, so we need to co-evolve. That’s how the Great Firewall so great – because it’s co-evolved with people who develop bypassing measures. C’est la vie.

Are you confident in the measures that Taiwan has been able to take so far to safeguard itself?

I would say because we choose a path that is hinged on not encroaching journalistic freedom, we have more support from international, like Reporters Without Borders, which knows no borders, so everybody can contribute this way of countering disinformation while remaining a liberal democracy.

We have our friends in various different countries, none of which are geographically nearby, though, [laughs] that co-develops these measures in the open, so that’s that. For the geographically nearby jurisdictions, we’re also working with them to show that if you adopt this kind of social sector fact-checking, you don’t have to put as much a strain on your public service and your judicial system.

You can still keep your more authoritarian ways of life but you can decrease their burden by having the social sector participating in it. The original LINE reporting system from the civil society here, cofacts.org, if you remove the s from its website and go to cofact.org, you see the Thai version. That’s because it’s open source.

They just took and downloaded the version that’s prototyped in Taiwan and translated all the important strings, text, and lo and behold, they have a social sector kind of immune system, which LINE is also operating in Thailand.

I’m just wondering if you have any thoughts going back to Han because we did meet with him yesterday. He has gotten a lot of publicity and a lot of confusion by saying do your supporters, if you get asked who you’re supporting, say “唯一支持蔡英文” or lie to them? That’s a deliberate and very open attempt to seed false information.

Is there a remedy for that? Should we care? Is that bad for democracy or is it irrelevant, in your opinion?

Well your source is correct, and Mayor Han did post the message on his social media account, so it is not something that this system deals with; that’s not a piece of disinformation.

You may say that the message tries to decrease the social trustworthiness of people who participate in the science of surveying or polling or, at least, if they want to be as accurate as before, invest more into it.

I think that’s a fair assessment, but it is fundamentally different from what we just talked about. Please make that very clear.

Yes, that’s fair.

OK.

It’s just I don’t know of any politician who’s ever said that before. At least, we’re not aware of that. Again, you’re talking about building trust, and building human capital, and building trustworthiness between each other. That seems designed to do exactly the opposite.

The public opinion polls are not run by the career public service, so I see them not really in the purview of our open government work. We deal with how the government trusts citizens and how to make our open government data agree to international standards and publish upon collection if it’s not related to privacy, and so on, but none of the election’s opinion polls are state apparatus.

As long as, I think, they’re in the social or private sector, there’s self-regulation on that, on the science and practitioners of polling and surveying. That is outside of my purview.

I have a question. Measuring the effectiveness of your ideas, your policies, how do you go about measuring, determining, how effective your efforts have been? Any benchmarks you’ve set for yourself? If you’re talking about, you want to create social trust, you want to create…

Yeah, yeah. Yes.

…how do you measure that?

First, we see how much is spreading not only in the administration proper, but also voluntarily by the municipalities and cities. That’s one very quick measurement. Like if it’s a bad idea, they would not join because there’s no regulation that force them to. Currently, we have 11, almost half, of cities and municipalities voluntarily join the joint platform, join at g0v.tw.

We also have the National Auditing Office joining from the Control Yuan. The Presidential Hackathon this year, for the first time, we have a team from the judicial branch as well. They use machine learning to explain automatically each drunken driving unsafe cases to the people, co-creating the way to automatically explain the threshold of drunken driving.

Without them having to answer to the press every once in a while, why this drunk driver gets sentences so lightly.

Of the Yuans or the branches, at the moment, only the Examination Yuan is not actively participating on Join.gov.tw. Maybe we will work with them on the next year’s Presidential Hackathon to include also the Examination Yuan into the fold.

My point is that the adequacy of this measure is not measured by the time saved by citizens because you can always cheat by spending more of the public service time in exchange to saving some citizen’s time.

This is measured, instead, on the willingness of the career public servants to join my office, to participate in the participation offices, it seems, to submit their ideas to the Presidential Hackathon, to join the social innovation tours, and so on.

We have, in many ministries, people are lining up to join my office. There’s a dozen people willing to join from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, I’m told, and apparently, no volunteers from the Ministry of Defense, so I know nothing about defense.

In any case, the willingness of public service to join, I think, should be the primary metric because that shows how much willingness they have to trust the citizens this way.

What about more broadly? So that’s a way to measure…?

Also, how it’s spreading to other countries. I think that’s another measure. As I said, Chulalonkorn University in Thailand invited us to do a workshop. They really started adopting some of the measures. You can see it on their CoFact.org system. That spreads easily.

We’ve seen the Polis system, the AI-based conversation system, which was invented in Seattle by some occupiers and not only taking place in Taiwan but also in Canada, where they contribute this bilingual mechanism by the AIT, which is a de facto US embassy that sets the diplomatic agenda with Taiwan and also by many newer parties across Europe.

We also see the same methodology being spread in, for example, the Icelandic pirate, for a time called the best party, I think, which is very much like the very happy party. [laughs] We also learned from their work, like Better Reykjavík and so on.

There’s an international tribe of people who use technology with the people, not for the people. I think the growth of this network, broadly called the Civic Technologists, is also a good measure of our methodology being spread around the world.

You just went to Washington a few weeks ago, right?

Yes.

How was that trip? Who did you meet with? Was it more for you to share what you’re learning or to learn from them or both?

Both. I think I tweeted all about it actually. It’s very interesting that, for example, the State Department folks and the GEC folks that I met with all said it’s fine if you tweet about it. It’s more like government-to-government meeting now. I met with the State Department and GEC both.

We also met with a lot of people working on the sustainable development goals, because that was during UNGA after all.

We bring this year’s Presidential Hackathon winners, two teams, both career public servants and academia, to share about data governance and the way that we co-create solutions. Basically, what I told you but from the practitioners and the public servants enthusiasts themselves and not through me.

We also visited semi-sovereign entities, such as Facebook, and did semi-diplomacy with them on humanitarian data.

The Control Yuan reveals campaign donations in individual record on raw data for everybody to analyze well past the election. That’s the social norm in Taiwan. I don’t really care a whit about other jurisdictions but they must do the same in Taiwan. Period.

Otherwise, they may face social sanction, I’m not sure. In any case, they’re now doing the same in Taiwan. Google and Twitter declined to run political advertisements during this election season. They run hashtags though. [laughs]

A lot of it is this kind of semi-diplomacy with established platforms but also a lot with the think tanks who are both interested in learning from our practitioners but also very interested in, also, sharing.

For example, through the GMF, the German Marshall Fund, I learned that a very similar conversation is going on about PRC interference in Netherlands and Germany, also, right this moment. I just visited Netherlands and Germany in Berlin, in The Hague.

You think PRC influences those countries?

Well, in those countries, not only telecommunication infrastructure, which is the more visible topic, but also creating path dependency on all walks of life, basically. The Netherlands published a new China strategy that outlines, this while in Germany, that’s still being deliberated.

Ultimately, is the PRC watching what you’re doing? Are you interested in even having these sort of ideas…? I don’t know. Is it possible to cross the street and…?

Well, I held classes with students in Hangzhou joining, even after becoming digital minister.

You did?

I did, through a robot in virtual reality.

Not only people in Hangzhou. Some students in Hangzhou dialed in from the China Art Academy. That was in late 2016. They joined me in this virtual reality space called High Fidelity. The hardware was in the Google Changhua data center in Taiwan, hosted in the Google cloud.

Also joined was art students around the world, including the Kaohsiung Art Academy as well. They 3D scanned their classes. They made their own avatar. I 3D scanned myself so that when I put on HTC Vive, I feel that I am in the shared classroom even though I’m physically in Paris at that time or in Taipei.

This robotic, holographic, and virtual reality telepresence is safe for everybody involved. It’s all on YouTube. There’s nothing hidden. I taught about listening to each other on cyberspace. This is non-political, but it’s also kind of subversive.

That then gets really popular, so I get invited to universities, like the Rome University. Before I took a trip to Amsterdam, I was in Rome as a robot, walking around and talking to people. The embassy people there were very happy, asking me questions and say, “Minister, I’m so happy because I don’t have to pick you up on the airport.”

Also, I can talk about how it reduces carbon footprint, and all that. That’s good. The same arrangement is also done in a UN setting. For example, late 2017, I spoke in UN Geneva building to the Internet Governance Forum on record, using a workable double robot because they don’t check robot’s passports on UN buildings.

There really is nothing against me speaking there. [laughs] So then it become kind of a norm. But for the press mostly took attention of that one is that one before and after, because only this was live-streamed, and things like that.

I think PRC has also signed up on the sustainable development goals back in 2015, including Goal 16, which is rule of law, access to justice, and all that.

We’re just saying “UN Global Goals — Taiwan Can Help”, and keeping it strictly within the confine of the 17 goals. Because Beijing also signed off for it. I don’t think they’re against sustainability.

Do you think that’s a very practical workaround around the PRC’s effort to suppress Taiwan’s participation in international organizations and UN forums?

Yeah, I think SDGs is designed to be a hybrid between the traditional MDGs multilateral model and the Internet governance multistakeholder model. Any major group, non-state, like people who are influenced by climate change or may lose their habitation, can form groups with equal participation and seats as any representative from any country.

In these hybrid forums, Taiwan may or may not participate as a state, but of course, as civil society. That, I think, is because of the topic SDGs, and it explicitly calls for civil society participation, and so that is the main theme that we’re working on.

Can I just ask a little bit about your time in government?

Sure.

You’re coming with sort of a hacker’s mentality.

Still am.

A government is very hidebound and very traditional. When you’re sitting in the cabinet meeting today, how does it play out? You’re a minister without portfolio. How do the other ministers relate to you? Does it work well, or…?

Yeah, sure. Minister without portfolio means with no fixed portfolio. I have exactly three portfolio, which is social innovation, open government, and youth engagement but they may change. It’s like social innovation used to be social enterprise, which is rather narrow. So, the portfolios may change. That’s what without portfolio means.

We, the horizontal ministers, there’s nine of us, are, of course, supporting the Premier in his mission. The Premier may designate any of us to act as his double, to convene meetings around emergent issues.

By necessity, I have to interface with most of the ministries. Because a minister voluntarily send people who are also volunteers to my office, we make sure that whatever policy is created here is not putting any ministries at a disadvantage. That is, again, Pareto improvement style thinking.

I’m in, I think, pretty good relationship with all the vertical ministries. Because the other horizontal ministers dealing with emergent issues that are less directly to the people than youth engagement, open government, and social innovation, which by its very nature is about working with people.

They’re also happy that in my social innovation tours, and so on, I can also share their work with people, which may not always be so visible.

Do you feel like you’re having an impact across government, that people are looking at what you’re doing and saying?

It’s OK to copy part of it, yes. That’s the spirit of social innovation – everybody can copy, everybody can contribute and they can fork it in various different ways. Mostly just demonstrating, really.

Do you have more achievement beyond being a minister?

I don’t have any achievement. I’m just a channel, a space through which people achieve the sustainable goals together.

I design myself out in every possible occasion, institutionalizing the regulations needed for those spaces, internalizing through mutual learning this participation culture and officers, and spreading, of course, via toolkits and open source, and so on, this idea is into international counterparts.

None of this is my credit. I’m just making sure this space holds. In a sense, I’m a digital minister with a lowercase M, meaning I only preach about these ideas. [laughs]

That definition, whether I’m an uppercase minister or not, I’ve always been doing the same thing, like well before this cabinet, in 2014, 2015, I’m doing the same thing as a citizen. Really, it doesn’t take a minister’s title to do the work that I do.

Do you look forward to having another term to do this?

I keep doing this whether the cabinet want me or not.

Regardless of official position.

A official position, of course, helps to convene people, but it doesn’t have to be me. The term Digital Minister, it means in Taiwan, also, a plurality of minister. Anyone, like many digital ministers, 數位, several. Several ministers, right?

Anyone from my office can literally perform my work. As I was visiting Addis Ababa, or Berlin, or The Hague, or NYC, or the DC. Of course I’m looking forward to work with the government, not necessarily for the government. I’ve never been working for the government; I’m working with the people.

If this position is still useful, and whomever winning the election feel it’s useful, I’m happy to serve for another four years. If they don’t think this is the most useful place for this kind of horizontal work, they can come up with better innovations.

Let me flip the question in another way. Do you think that since you’ve become a digital minister, you’re given this platform to channel your ideas. Do you think you’ve achieved more than before you became digital minister? Has it given you more…?

Well, the platform was established in 2015. That was one of the demands of the occupy. Not one less, right?

I mean the Sunflower Occupy here.

All five gets accepted by the head of Parliament at the time, who is not running for president this time, Wang Jin-pyng, that is. The great thing about occupy is that with half a million people on the street and many more online, the consensus that people see, that gets formed before people’s eyes into those five demands, is legitimate, regardless of which political party wins the election.

I work heavily with career public service, trained 1,000 or more public servants during ‘14, ‘15, and that was still under Ma Ying-jeou as a president. I don’t think it’s a partisan thing, and that’s my real answer to your question.

I really don’t think any president will cancel this. They may innovate in different ways, but even in the DPP primary, William was saying, “This is great, but I will be even more open,” or Simon Chang, vice president candidate to Han, was saying, “This is great, but I will be even more open.” That is the access that people can agree to, other than supporting Hong Kong, of course.

Part of the thing I’m trying to get at is that, because you were saying you will do this with the government, whether you’re a Minister or not.

Yeah, I’m just having fun, really.

If you had a choice, do you think you’d be more effective using your government position, therefore having access to tools of government, tools of the state, to help advance and spread your ideas nationwide, rather than being an ordinary citizen with only your ability to communicate with people?

Not it being be an issue, like instructions or policy paper and stuff. Does that affect your ability to work?

I’m also a board member of international NGOs, and so this is a kind of trick question. My work is mostly on what the sociologist Manuel Castells calls as network-making power. It’s not about a power within a network. It’s about the power to connect networks together.

For example, through my work in the New York-based NGO called RadicalxChange, with Glen Weyl, Vitalik Buterin, who works on the Ethereum network in the purest term, [laughs] the network, we are also affecting the same design we used for Presidential Hackathon, like quadratic voting and so on.

For example, the Colorado budgeting for the ruling party there in their congress. We are spreading the idea to a lot of other jurisdictions. Like the data coalition idea, it may be actually a good way to mitigate surveillance capitalism. That’s my work as a board member there.

I am also working as a board member, for example, for the Digital Future Society in Barcelona, actually. Interesting cities, these two. In any case, very participatory. Their ideas, again, is about expanding the promise of 5G and mobile computing, not as a top-down way, but allowing for people to, in the society, in the small region, to say why the telecoms are not seeing the reason to invest here.

Maybe we will have a sandbox and run our own 5G experiment to prove that 5G is also working for this particular use case. Starting today, actually, we’ve introduced the 5G sandbox. Not only the fintech and not only self-driving vehicles, but also, 5G. There’s a special band outside of the auction bands for that.

Again, this idea spreads. Viewing from this viewpoint, Taiwan is just one of the places where those ideas gets formulated and tested, but we are already doing that in many jurisdictions as well. Having a government position in Taiwan, of course, gives me access to one more field to work with, but I am not dependent on this.

That position, to you, doesn’t matter. It’s what you’re capable of doing.

Exactly right. If it relies on a political appointee, then that means it’s not institutionalizing internalized into the public service culture. That means that I’m not done designing myself out.

What would you hope to be your lasting legacy, whenever you’re stepping down with this turmoil? Whenever you leave this office, what do you think you hope to be, achieve? What’s that one thing you want to be remembered for or you hope to look back at your term, what do you want to have to achieve?

Well I don’t really want to be remembered.

“Whatever I achieved” — that question doesn’t matter seven generations down the line.

What does matter is sustainability. What matters is that innovation and inclusion is kept, in a conservative fashion.

In conservative anarchism, important cultural lineages are conserved, not in a ritualistic way, but in a transcultural way.

If this culture speaks to future generations, then I am just a channel through which that it speaks. I don’t really care about myself, my name, whatever. I’m way past that.

That’s good.

Do you have a few more time?

Yeah, I don’t have anything else after, so you’re free to stay around for two more hours.

Just might.

It would be great to talk about some personal topics.

Sure, of course. Why not? I can read you some poetry.

Anyway, go ahead.

I guess one other question is how do you juggle with so many different things on? Everyone have 24 hours, but you have so many…

The trick is you delegate away the delegation. Even the delegating, the act of delegating, like figure out who is responsible what, I delegate to my ministerial delegates. I’m really just holding this space, making sure that people have room for experiment, to have room for having food, fun, and music, together. That’s all I do.

It’s very interesting that people somehow see me as doing all things, but it’s actually more than 12 ministerial delegates, co-creating whatever public sector innovation they want to co-create. I am just making sure whatever they came up with, if it goes right, the president knows about the idea. If it goes wrong, they can blame me. That’s the only function I serve.

Essentially, instead of Digital Minister, you could be called chief facilitator.

That’s right. It’s a very Taoist approach, a very moderating theory.

We’re all good?

We’ll have to have the headline, “The Taoist Conservative Anarchist.”

That’s right. I think some other journalists did use the conservative anarchist already.

I’ve seen that.

Taoist, I think, is new.

OK. Let me…

Yeah.

We’re good.

Thank you very much.

Thank you. Thank you.

It’s quite…

Very stimulating.

Yeah. [laughs]

Thank you.

Yeah, pleasure. Thank you. Great questions.

Thank you very much. Thank you.

Thanks for your time.

Thank you.

Cheers.