Cameras are rolling.

All right, you have a very interesting background, so let’s start with this and maybe you can just briefly introduce yourself. I think you did it before. [laughs] Where do you come from? What’s your background? How come that you are now digital minister?

My background is a software engineer. I worked with Apple, with Oxford University Press, on Siri and other computational linguistics technologies. Now, in 2014 I participated in a student movement called the Sunflower Movement that occupied peacefully our parliament for three weeks. After that, I was invited as a reverse mentor to the Cabinet then to help to listen better and also engage better with the public.

After a couple of years working with the Cabinet, I was, I guess, promoted to a full minister-at-large at the Taiwanese Cabinet. Today, I’m Taiwan’s Minister of Digital Affairs in charge of cyber resilience. That’s like cyber security, broadband as human rights, societal benefit, and also the digital economy.

Is that good?

Yeah, that’s…If I got it right, you are a civic hacker or, some also say, a White Hat hacker.

What does that mean, and what’s the difference to the cliché maybe some people have about hackers and what a hacker does?

I’m a civic hacker. Civic means that my contribution is to the public good for the benefits of the society. A hacker is someone who understands the system, but think outside of the box. Now, a Black Hat hacker uses that skill to deliver hacks that profits themselves or their employers, but not the society at large.

A civic hacker builds new systems that don’t suffer from the old vulnerabilities and contributes freely this new system to the society.

If I got you right, you have all the skills a hacker has, but you use them for a different purpose.

Mm hmm.

In general terms, what is your purpose?

I wrote a job description when I entered the Cabinet in 2016 and my purpose is embedded in that poem or prayer, which goes like this: “When we see the Internet of Things, let’s make it the Internet of Beings. When we see virtual reality, let’s make it a shared reality. When we see mission learning, let’s make it collaborative learning. When we see user experience, let’s make it about human experience. Whenever we hear that a singularity is near, let’s always remember that plurality is here.”

That is beautiful. [laughs] Hacking is not only like a profession maybe or, is it even a profession? I’m not sure even.

Cyber security research is a profession, yes.

Yeah, but hacking is also kind of an attitude in life, maybe. What are your convictions? What is your attitude in life? What are your strong beliefs as a White Hat hacker?

I believe to be a good enough ancestor, meaning that we need to free the future. The future generations will face their emerging challenges with the tools and spaces and infrastructure that we create today. If we prescribe too much, if we are taking too much pride in our own abilities then we restrict the possibilities for future generations.

A civic hacker needs to be humble in that we start a design, but do not finished it. We publish freely our work so that future generations can improve upon it and also hack it if they want.

How can people hack? Do they need to learn programming or what can be the different versions, the different ways to take part in hacking?

To be a hacker is to familiarize yourself with the hacking community in any particular field. There could be a hacker in law, a hacker in science, a hacker anywhere. The point of being a hacker is to stay curious and also think of new innovative ways, in a way that can be shared with others.

Question not just the problems in your own field, but also the configuration of your field so that you can build interdisciplinary connections to other fields so that you can view it from the other field’s perspective.

Why did you originally feel the need to hack the government?

In Taiwan, we got democratization relatively late compared to other advanced democracies. We only got out of the martial law in the 1980s. Our first direct presidential election was in 1996, which was already after the world wide web.

For our generation, Internet, democracy, the same thing, happens at roughly the same decade. We see democracy not as a 200 year tradition, but rather a design like semiconductor that people can improve five nanometers, three nanometers every couple years.

Democracy, as originally envisioned in paper technology, usually is very time consuming. Voting is very limited bandwidth. If you vote for someone out of eight candidates, just three bits, it’s very high latency — every four years. You upload just a few bits.

Of course, that’s a good foundation for every society, but nowadays with digital technology, we can afford to express our collective preferences continuously every day. Because of that, I worked to improve the bandwidth of democracy, making sure that we can, through participatory budget petitions, sandbox experiments, presidential hackathon, and so on, practice democracy in a day to day fashion.

Wow. That was impressive speech. You already mentioned that actually democracy and information technology were invented here at more or less the same time. Maybe to sum it up again, how did it influence your take on what democracy is? You have a specific view on democracy.

In the era of radio and television, one person can broadcast to millions of people, but it was very difficult technically for millions of people to speak to one another, to listen to the conversations between the people who share your view and also people who don’t share your view, and find unlikely consensus across the diversity.

When early broadcasting technology were around, it was very easy to start world wars by broadcasting to people who hate each other without any way for them to understand each other through conversations. The Internet changed all that. It can connect people of very different ideas and opinions. Internet is symmetric, meaning that as much as you can listen, you can also talk to other people.

It created a new foundation, a technological background, for the kind of democracy that is deliberative, meaning that people can deliberat,e to think about things together, and come to rough consensus or good enough consensus, meaning that we can all live with it. By discovering what we can all live with, this creates opportunity for collaborative diversity.

In which way is democracy a technology itself?

Democracy, to me, is a social technology that produces common understanding, common reflections, common interpretations, and finally common decisions.

Before, when the bandwidth was limited, people focused on the decision part, so you have voting, referendums, and so on, and leave the deliberation part to representatives of the people. However, nowadays, it’s as easy for 200 people across the world to have a conversation as it’s for the 200 MPs in the same room to have a conversation.

Because of the newfound possibility for people to transcend, even time zones, to have conversations with one another, it’s now much easier for the stakeholders, people who have a stake in it, who suffer, for example, from the climate crisis across the world to have a conversation and come to common understanding, or people suffering from a pandemic to come together to find ways to counter the pandemic.

The same for the disinformation crisis, for computer virus, and so on, because these emergent threats doesn’t know borders at all. Our conversations must be also across borders, and that is the main offer from the digital democracy world to the representative democracy world.

Not to replace the national or regional councils and peace, but offer a chance to discover good enough consensus across the world that may not exist within a jurisdiction, but may be imported easily from other jurisdictions that have already figured it out.

Talking about consensus, you actually invented quite a lot of new tools, digital tools, and part of it were also the consensus tools. Can you describe what that is like in very general terms, so that people were not familiar with digital software can understand what it is? Very, very easily describe.

In 2015, when Uber first came to Taiwan, they said that they don’t have to obey the existing taxi laws because their software dispatch better than the existing system so they can hack the laws on transportation. Some people like it because they can just use their app instead of telling the taxi of the street.

Some people don’t like it saying that it’s a gig economy that exploits the workers. The same conversations were reverberating around the world. Everywhere that Uber comes have the same conversation about workers’ right versus the efficiency of the transportation.

In Taiwan, instead of focusing just under polarized viewpoints, which are ideological in nature and therefore may never come to a consensus, we focus on something very practical. We sent through the Internet a survey that is created by the participants, a Wiki survey like Wikipedia.

People ask very practical questions like, “How did you feel about not getting insurance coverage when you’re on Uber?” “How do you feel when the search pricing…?” Of course, less the drivers and more, but they may also be undercut if the demand are low.

“How did you feel like there’s no registration at all of which one is actually Uber and which one is just pretending to be Uber?” These are the practical points around which everybody can actually come to an understanding.

Everybody understood that registration is good, insurance is good, and it’s good that the local temples and churches who want to organize their rural transportation must also have the same legal standing as the Uber fleets.

All this inclusive access, actually regardless of whether you’re a Uber driver or a taxi driver, you agree, but if you only have radio and television, it’s almost impossible for the people to write their own posts, their own surveys.

Therefore, not possible to see that there’s actually a lot common understanding between you and your neighbors on pretty much all accounts. That is the discovery that we made through the pol.is system in Taiwan.

There’s the sound of an ambulance car.

Yeah.

It’s underscoring that urgency.

Oh, yeah.

Perfect moment. Perfect timing.

Cut. Cut.

Do we need to retake the last part?

No, actually I think…

We can fix that in post-production?

You can hear it, right?

Yeah. People will understand what that is like…We are in a big city. Let’s start again. So interesting.

Rolling. All rolling.

You talk about the lack, the consensus instead of the…

Ideologies.

Confrontation and ideologies, right? Normally, we see when people discuss online in a lot of cases, like on the conventional social networks like the corporate ones.

Antisocial network.

The anti… [laughs] We see a different behavior. What’s your secret sauce? How do you manage to get a pro social network instead of antisocial one?

In her first in operation speech as the president, Dr. Tsai Ing wen said in 2016, “Before we think of democracy as a showdown between two opposing factions, but now democracy must become a conversation between many diverse values.”

Focusing on the common values is the secret to get non polarized consensus view online. To do that, we need to ensure two technological underpinnings. One, everyone who participate in our national deliberation participation platform, the joint platform, need to authenticate himself through an SMS.

In Taiwan, the SIM cards required for the telecommunication carriers must take two photo IDs in order to get a SIM card. It’s very difficult to clone yourself 5,000 times to get to the petition threshold, and so we make sure that people can participate pseudonymously, but always with just their identity, not 5,000 fake identities.

The second is that when replying online, the reply was just to the idea and never to the person. There was no threaded reply button. On the joint platform or on the pol.is platform, you can post a contract opinion or a pro opinion to say you agree or disagree, or write a new survey question for other people to answer, but you cannot tag someone by name.

Because of that, we focused on the values and ideas instead of the polarized ideologies.

Let’s take one small step back, can you also describe again, what is the pol.is platform at all, and why didn’t you just use Facebook for that?

At pol.is is a computational democracy platform that makes sure that people can host it anywhere. You can run pol.is on your own computer because it’s free software. You can host it in somewhere that you trust your cooperative, your school, and so on. It’s open source, you can change it however you want, tune it however you want.

In Canada, when they adopted pol.is for their conversations, they translated that to French, of course, because it needs to be bilingual in Canada. In Taiwan, we have 20 national languages. If it is commercial platforms, it’s not guaranteed that they will have the same quality of care in the lower resource languages that people actually use or tune the algorithm, the code, in a way that everybody agrees with and understands.

But as free software pol.is offers the freedom to fork, meaning to take the software and develop it in a way that the Canadian people or the Taiwanese people are confident with.

That’s very clever. [laughs] You mentioned already the example of Uber. Once how to talking about the moment when Uber actually was coming to the market here and tried to do lobbying work, you did a special move at this moment. I think you filmed the whole thing. Can you talk about that? Why do you film those moments? Why is transparency so important for you like you film today?

There is a lens, after all. Good. Just that lens. In 2016, when I entered the cabinets, Uber started to understand that because we built such a strong case of social consensus, they may actually face social sanction if they do not play by the rules co created by the people on the pol.is platform.

David Plouffe, a person working for Uber at the time, tried to lobby in the sense that he tries to describe the future of trajectory of Uber as a commons movement and how to align it with the vision, with the rough consensus that we take.

Of course, I filmed the whole thing and even with the 360 camera, so you can put on virtual reality and relive the conversation of me. Now, and my deputy minister at the time, director of my office, have a conversation with Mr. Plouffe.

When this recorded and published without restrictions for journalists for future generations to see and reuse, the nature of conversation changes.

You can see that Mr. Plouffe all talk about combating climate change for the welfare, for the future generations, for the public good. Not just for this generation, for future too, because everyone understands in such an environment, it’s the future generation that will judge our conversation.

When thinking about them, the future generations, people tend to be more altruistic, more beneficial to the entire environment, less concerned about the next quarters, GDP growth, ROI, or things like that, but actually taking a holistic view of how technology can fit the society instead of the other element.

If I got you right, the transparency also actually supports a specific behavior of the people who are observed by the cameras. Is that the point? Can you maybe explore that a bit further?

I practice radical transparency in order to contextualize the conversations that I’m having.

For example, if you’re watching the film now, it means that the full transcript and maybe the video also is available in the commons. Instead of just bits and pieces of my answers being edited and quoted into the film, you can understand the entire context of conversation by not doing any research, but just by typing into a search engine.

To enable this is also to enable the freedom to make your own remixes from the source materials. I’ve had a hip hop band in Japan that I don’t know. They independently discover one of my interviews and remix that into a rap song — I call the civil rap song — and without my permission because I relinquished the copyright. They were kind enough to let me know. It’s also a way to enjoy co creation.

With traditional copyright, even if I publish it, there is no way for other people to make remixed works. By turning passive consumers into co creators, turning media literacy into media competence, we want to make sure everybody is a co producer of meaning in our democracies.

That is so impressive that people really participate. Can you talk about the range, like how many people are already participating in which forms, on which platforms, maybe give an overview?

In Taiwan, we have 23.5 million people. Yearly, it’s around 10 million visits to the national participation platform where people raise their petitions and also see the budgets in a participatory way. They can type questions, get answers, also the regulatory pre announcements, and all that.

In petitions, we see the most active people are people around 17 years old and 70 years old, so the younger and the senior populations. Maybe they have more free time on their hands, but also they care more about the future generations than the people in the workplaces normally do.

They form natural allies, solidarities, and start petitions, for example, they successfully banned plastic straws from the takeouts of our national drink, the bubble tea, and many others. They tend to propose things that concerns not just the next quarter, but the next few generations. Through…

Sorry, can you repeat the last sentences?

Of course. In the national petition platform, in which around 10 million visits per year was joined by the people, the people who don’t even have the right to vote like 17 years old and the people who don’t normally go outside to participate in rallies, they’re 70 and 80 years olds, they are the most active.

They form alliances maybe because they have more free time on their hands, but also they care more about future generations instead of the next quarter only. They would, for example, co create petitions that ban the plastic straws for our national drink, bubble tea’s takeouts, and many other environment related petitions, human rights related petitions, and so on.

That sensed agenda, once it reaches 5,000 signatures, there must be a ministerial response. If it’s cross ministry, then the inter agency ministerial meeting is usually held between the participation officers in each and every ministry.

Wow. Why do you think people are so motivated to take part in all these decisions? From my perspective, in Germany, people are really passive in those things. They believe, “Actually, I don’t think anything will change at all if I take part or not, so why even do so?” The attitude here seems really different with this regard. Do you have an idea why that is the case?

In a digital democracy, people share agenda setting power, meaning that people can determine what is the important issue effectively through petitions and also writing pollers, survey questions, and many other forms.

Agenda setting power is very attractive to people because they only have to share their authentic experience what they are suffering from, or what do they perceive like the sea turtles are suffering from.

To share decision making power requires a lot of informed reading, the understanding of the regulatory structure, the laws, the traditions, and so on, which requires considerable investment in time.

By sharing agenda setting power, people who only have two minutes of spare time can join a petition. People who have 20 minutes of time can make a supporting or contra argument. People who have two hours of time can start a new topic, a new agenda, but they don’t need to invest 20 days just to understand the entire history of a regulation.

Another really impressive example was your way to deal with COVID. I think part of it was to have a very tight feedback loop. I heard about the masks and how you dealt with the availability of masks. Can you describe what you did?

In 2020, the first day, January 1st, Taiwan already started post inspections for all flight passengers coming in from Wuhan to Taiwan at least 10 days earlier than any other jurisdiction. The reason why is that on the previous day, the last day of 2019, there was a message on PTT, the bulletin board system built by the National Taiwan University students in the social sector without any shareholders or advertisers to distract people.

People focused on this message from Dr. Li Wenliang from Wuhan that says there’s new SARS cases now in Wuhan seafood market. The collective intelligence in the civic sector already sprung to action. Because they’re not distracted by the capitalistic sectors, ideas of engagement, advertisement and fun or whatever, they get to focus on the actual signal, actual intelligence.

Because the government trusted the citizen enough to not just have a free speech platform, but take it seriously, they abstained from censorship for 25 years. People can freely say anything they want about the issues of public benefits. That resulted in the decisive action, agenda setting power by the PTT people created on PTT that informed our counter pandemic efforts on the first day of 2020.

Can you maybe explain what PTT is?

Sure. The PTT is like Reddit, a forum in which people can start subforums, like subreddits. Unlike the Reddit, PTT is not owned by any company. It is owned by the Student Club in the National Taiwan University. It’s open source, meaning people can take the PTT’s code and start their own forex of PTT. It is free software, meaning that people can inspect how things work.

Through transparency for more than two decades in Taiwan, PTT achieved a special status that the journalists often just curate the conversations from the PTT into their journalistic reports, which is why PTT is a public digital space in Taiwanese politics.

Then let’s continue, like with your description of how you handled COVID here. David, you also sometimes through the hands.

OK.

Running

Everything is good.

Since the very beginning in 2020, we engaged in what I call a people public private partnership, where the people, the civic sector, discovers new ideas, new agenda, and the public sector, the government implements this agenda, and the private sector helps to scale it so that it reaches everyone.

The people, the civic technologists, the civic hackers invented around February 2020, a way to visualize the remaining amount of surgical masks in each and every store. This is entirely citizen led. I didn’t invent it, but I discovered it.

Then the state published through our administration for the National Healthcare System, the real time stock in each and every pharmacy, so that people queuing in line don’t need to wait. They can just see immediately the person queuing before them use their national healthcare card to buy how many masks and it’s reflected every 30 seconds on their phones.

This is not a state app. This is built by the civic sector. There are more than 100 different apps that shows not just the availability, but the supply and demand curve. Not just the supply and demand, but the fairness of distribution in rural and urban areas.

That people inform the public sector how we should improve our rationing of the medical masks. The private sector, in just a few weeks, all 12,000 convenience stores in Taiwan, which there’s one or two around the block everywhere, joined the pharmacies in distributing their mask. Triple the points where you can collect the masks.

Because they run well 24 hours a day, you can collect it even very late in the night. Through this relationship, everyone ensured that more than three quarter of our population have the habits of wearing mask can get access to medical grade masks.

That’s what allowed Taiwan throughout the past three years to combat the coronavirus without a single day of lockdown. There wasn’t a day where you will be fined for going outdoors or traveling across cities.

Wow. Listening to you telling me all about all these examples of how actually people run all that it brings the question up to my mind like, can also platforms like Amazon, for example, be run by people instead of corporate one day in future?

Should I mention Amazon? Would that be too specific?

No, it’s good. Everybody knows it.

OK, sure. Why not? It is true that there are very large companies now that hosts meaning stores under their discs, the websites for people, running computation or bandwidth so that if you want to host your own website, sometimes you go to the Amazon Cloud for hosting.

However, there are also the so called web3 community in the world where people can donate their spare hard risk. Sorry, let me do this again. I want to mention web3, actually.

Again, it is true that there are large companies like Amazons in the world that offers so called public cloud hosting, where their hard disk store your data, their CPUs computes the data and offer network connectivity so your websites can stay up no matter millions or thousands of millions of visitors you have.

However, there are also communities like the InterPlanetary File System, the IPFS, where anyone around the world can donate their spare hard disc and connectivity to do the same thing.

For our ministry, the Ministry of Digital Affairs at moda.gov.tw, although you can connect through your browser on the regular cloud infrastructure, you can also visit us through the IPFS. If you want to keep our website afloat during cyber attacks, you can help us by pinning our website on your hard disc and become a cloud provider for the MODA.

Again, this is complimentary. People who can pay those public cloud providers enjoy the convenience of access, but people who care about tamper proof, censorship resistant, especially journalists working authoritarian regimes in which Amazon may or may not stay connected.

Then they will work with the IPFS people to free the future by making sure that nobody can tamper with their content and everybody can help making it accessible.

That was a very specific question of mine. Let’s maybe get back to talking in rather broader terms. Asking a bit about your general attitude towards all that. In which way do people sometimes run platforms better than corporations? Or why is it better for society that platforms or maybe even companies can one day be run by people instead of profit oriented corporations?

In the cities of the modern world, there are, of course, quarters for commercial businesses for entertainment and so on. However, for democracy, we need the public spaces, like town halls, public libraries, in which then people can do their own research and engage in conversations about the common good.

We need university campuses. We need public parks, national parks, and so on, which are, strictly speaking, not owned by any company but rather by people and the future generations. In Taiwan, there’s a very vibrant movement to involve people, some younger than 12, to design the parks of their communities because they are the users of the parks.

The human experience of these young people, even though they’re too young to vote for the district representatives, should be actually from this center. They should be the agenda centers when it comes to inclusive parks. So nothing about them without them. That is the main idea of digital public spaces and, of course, physical public spaces like parks.

For things like these, if we abdicate to the private sector, to the corporations, then it will be very unfortunate because people who cannot afford to pay the tickets will be excluded from the Disneyland, although of course looks very impressive. However, that is not a democratic lesson we want to show our future generations.

It’s still pretty hard to imagine how something like this, like publicly designed parks, can be also applied on the digital sphere where a lot of the infrastructure is already in the hands of big corporations. Can it be turned back? Can we reconquer the digital sphere? Are you optimistic with this regard?

When I first encountered the Internet, that was 1993, I was 12 years old. I was very interested in learning from the public domain works. For example, in the Gutenberg archive where people digitize their works that was already in the public domain out of copyrights and I formed my first vocabularies when learning the English language.

Interestingly, they’re all before the world wars, so I have a unusually optimistic view on the Western civilization because everything after the world wars are still in the copyright.

The commons is already part of the Internet back then, as it is now. The Internet Archive, the arXiv, A R X I V, public access scholarly works, and especially Wikipedia nowadays form the common vocabularies of students, professors, and everyone in the academic and research communities.

Before Wikipedia, the Encyclopedia Britannica feel the same need with the meticulous editing process before publishing.

On Wikipedia, it’s first published and then edit. The people, again, sense the agenda. They can create stubs like small articles on Wikipedia without being an expert in that domain. The experts who don’t want their favorite topic to be described in such a carefree way will join Wikipedia to help making the article better in an act of co creation.

Wikipedia, again, is not owned by any profit seeking company, yet it powers a fair share, a large share of the value for search engines, for AI models, for pretty much everything. It is in the commons. Instead of saying that we need to take back the commons, we need to respect the commons.

The Open Street map, the Lennox Foundation, or the nonprofits that are already the bedrock of the Internet. Then extend it to more parts of the Internet such as, of course, community discussion.

You have a very optimistic take on that.

Yeah. Thanks to the Gutenberg project.

Let’s stay a little bit longer with your forms of participation. I also heard about census. About the air quality in Taipei, right? Can you explain this example, please?

The air quality in Taipei is this one, but the solid cities…

OK.

Yes. In Taiwan, we care a lot about air qualities, especially around 2012 when PM 2.5, the very small particles and the harm it causes to our respiratory system was understood by the people.

The state at a time only had less than 100 measuring stations for PM 2.5. However, people cannot make informed decisions if they do not have closer to their neighborhood what the PM 2.5 level is actually like.

People contributed their balconies, their houses to host PM 2.5 measuring devices, the air boxes, and because it is open source, open data, and open hardware, the research itself is also open. People very quickly formed data coalitions, coalitions of schools. The teachers also want to teach about data stewardship by the air boxes hosted in the primary school.

The students also formed the backbone of measuring the air quality to inform their parents’ decision of whether to go hiking that day and so on. Because of that, the civil society emerge with a very complete picture of how the air pollution is like.

Now in other authoritarian jurisdictions, that would be the time where the government starts saying, “Oh, these air qualities are low quality, low cost, therefore not to be trusted.” However, in Taiwan, the government allocated funding into the civil IoT project to first complete a puzzle to measuring industrial areas where the teachers and student cannot enter.

Also, to offer higher precision calibrated components so that the power and the resolution as to say the likelihood for it to be correct, the accuracy in the civil society can be better by offering this research for free funded by the state.

This is funding the commons, working with the people, not for the people. And so, this participatory democracy project would eventually form the backbone of not just air quality, but also water quality and many other environmental movements. Even the local scale referendums when it comes to water quality.

Starting a metric effect conversations just like what we had in the mask availability and fairness of reasoning when it comes to pandemic. That map, the mask visualization map actually came from the air pollution visualization map with the same infrastructure and some of the same community members.

Let’s have a short break, so you can take a bit off the mask sweat off. It’s getting warm in here.

People own the data, as much as possible, or that is at least the goal, right? People should own or not own the data, but have access to the data. Is that the point? That is much better, I guess.

Yeah.

Data should be free and accessible, but then also how do you enable people to work with the data? I think it’s sometimes like the step which is missing in at least in Germany, even if they can download their data, like their personal data from Google or something, they get Excel sheets and whatever. They don’t know what to do with it in a lot of cases and how do you…

Do want me to talk about airbox, which is not personal data, or Google profile, which is personal data…

You’re right. Let’s start with airbox. How do you empower people to work with data?

OK. How would it be? In an airbox example, the students learn about data stewardship, not just as a theory, but as a daily practice. They need to look at the airboxes that they collectively maintain, to collaborate it with the results of nearby Airboxes in the neighboring school.

If all the neighbors said the quality is very bad, but their airboxes, the quality is very good. Maybe there’s something wrong with the physical equipment. The same for the trend and analysis.

The students, of course, they’re already happy that they can provide the numbers closer to their parents place so that your family can plan their hiking or whatever based on the contributions they make at the school. More importantly, they can also take this hardware and have a copy, like Arduino or Raspberry Pi, the open hardware, and host it on their own balcony to be even more close to their own.

This promotes this collaborative production of data. Once you’re a producer of data, that makes sense, makes impact for your community. The community will give you feedback, the Committee will say, “Oh, I like to receive alerts when it’s unusually bad in air pollution.” The community would say,” Oh, this is because of the motorcycles. Let’s switch to electric scooters,” and so on.

“Let’s have a referendum about water quality in our city, Shinju city,” and so on. When there’s community movement behind those data practices, they’ve become alive with the voluntary sectors, donations, rallying, protesting, and so on.

It is symbiotic with the democratic society where people set the agenda, but it’s not satisfied with just setting that agenda, but also working with the representatives or the referendum to get their points across and that is how we make real impact with non personal data collected in stewardship of the people.

Wow. [laughs] I think this is already maybe also connected to the maker’s culture, which I heard you talked about often, but it goes further even. What is behind maker’s culture and what does that mean?

Just as a hacker is someone who understand the system and think out of the box, a maker is someone who use easily accessible components and make this alternate vision reality for their community. A hacker sees a new way of doing things, but makers make it real, at least for a small community of people.

A maker’s culture makes sure that when people think that’s the governments, the less than 100 stations isn’t doing a proper government’s job, people can fork the government, meaning that taking what’s existing, not writing it off, but learning from it and taking it to a different direction, a grassroots direction.

Maker community is also about merging. When an emergent way of, for example, making the air qualities measurement devices is generally understood by people as good, that they’re good to contribute their research, their models, their trends back to the decision makers, and to build collectively the civil IoT projects.

It exists in a symbiotic relationship with the national government and local governments, in democratic societies by people making their own future, but also willing to share this design so many other people, even not in your community, can enjoy it together.

How far can this lead? Can all these digital tools and all the participation lead to a completely different society? What is the impact all this can have? Are you reluctant to say this will change the world or will this have…If this exists in full blown version one day, will this change everything in society?

I believe civic hacking and the maker’s culture can help shape the digital world to match the societal values, to match the ideas. For generations and generations, people hold as important human rights, human agency, and so on.

Because the digital technologies, if they are only owned and controlled by profit seeking actors, there is a sense of centralization. Meaning more and more control of data is concentrated in the hands of just a few very large shareholders. These environments, that agency, the decision making power in democracies will be decimated.

More and more things will be decided not by the people or their representatives, but by who happens to own a majority share in those computational platforms. Or, on the other hand, maybe the state in some authoritarian regimes will decide, “Oh, that’s enough. Let’s nationalize everything and make the people transparent to the state and make none of the state transparent to the people.”

The same technologies that power does digital transformation can also be used as tools for authoritarian control, for surveillance. Without going into maximal state or maximal cooperation, we need to remember the plurality is here.

There already widespread community organize themselves, like temples and churches in Taiwan, who already run their own Uber like fleets way before Uber invented the system.

Learning from Uber, from the ride sharing economy, without giving up control to the companies like Uber, that is the main consensus, good enough consensus for the Taiwanese society and I suppose in many other societies as well.

So many inspiring things. You mentioned already the authoritarian regime and we can’t miss to at least shortly talk about the fact that you are in the midst of a cyber war. Can you explain to maybe audiences in Europe? We’re not so familiar with the situation here. You get a lot of attacks every day. What is the scope of it and why is it so dangerous?

In Taiwan, we face millions of cyber attack every day. In 2021, there was around five millions a day which is more than double the year before. We are under a lot of attack from abroad to try to disrupt the systems to decimate people’s trust in the institutions, in the democratic process and so on.

Now, those cyber attacks are sometime amplified by information manipulation. In 2022, August, when the US Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan, immediately afterwards, there was a drill by the so called People’s Liberation Army around our vicinity. At the same time, the Presidential Office website, the Ministry of National Defense website of Taiwan was disrupted by lots and lots of distributed denial of service spots.

The lives have never been seen. It’s 23 times higher than the previous peak in a single day. When those websites were disrupted, like dialing to keep a line busy for a few hours, the information manipulation, the conspiracy theories like the bad hackers have taken over the presidential office and so on, run rampant.

This hybrid cognitive coordinated warfare in the cyberspace is what we face every day. In a way to not confuse dialing to keep a website busy and actually taking over control of the website on the same hour when the drill started, we put our ministerial website moda.gov.tw online on web2 and web3.

I said publicly to the press that we invite everybody to attack us and if you can take us down, you would also take down the NFTs, the Board Ape Yacht Club, pictures that people were crazy about in 2021, 2022. By tying ourselves to the InterPlanetary File System, we not only proved resilient against this kind of cyber attacks, but also turned the conversation into a participatory one.

Anyone around the world more than 200,000 computer volunteers can help backing up our websites by donating their hard discs and so on. We got a lot of interest from community, from the protocol lab which runs this protocol of IPFS and so on and builds us more democratic allies around the world thanks to the cyber attack.

I think in a lot of cases when in Europe, people talk about data that it reflects immediately. People will only take a few seconds and then there is the example of China, the People’s Republic of China, controlling the data and if using it, using it against the people. This is quite dominant in Europe.

People could hearing you talk about what important role data play in society. Here, people could take get it wrong and understand that all this data can easily be abused in a moment when…I don’t know and nobody wants that, but the worst case scenario, the People’s Republic of China would like be in a even worst war with you and would take over or whatever.

There’s this fear of where is data? Data can also be abused. What is your take on that? How do you protect the data? In which way are we talking about personal data or is this a really completely different data?

Yes, it was a long question so you can maybe…

Right now, talking about personal data. It’s not the same thing. What can the PRC do when they know the air quality?

I think it’s important to highlight the difference because people are often confused and take it for the same.

I have two people say that Google has all the big data about me. Do you mean your personal traces you leave on Google or you mean data in general?

I think it’s about, as you said, control not ownership. Google knows all about me, but not telling me. [laughs] Otherwise, if I forgot where did I place my wallet, I’ll ask Google. Google will let me know. Maybe Google knows, but doesn’t let me know.

Cool. OK, continue.

When we talk about personal data, it is not the same as air quality or water quality. The airboxes are environmental science. In science, of course, we publish. There’s no harm in publishing. Actually, without publishing, there will be no science. The same for journalistic reports, or the court proceedings, or the parliamentary records.

All these are in the public domain. In personal data, by definition, is things that between you and me, between my family, between a close group of friends.

However, if people store those collective memories like selfies and so on, in platforms that are not respecting the privacy of the people in the room, then anyone who take a selfie of three friends posting on a non trustworthy platform also compromises the privacy of the two other unfortunate friends caught in the picture. They cannot even opt out of being stored on that shady platform.

This is not about ownership, but rather about control, about making sure if the three friends agree this selfie is for the three of them, any place that stores this photo need to respect their collective will.

If this is free software, that is to say hosted by one of the three friends on their phone or their computer, this is very easy to verify and it leaks to a tabloid or whatever. Of course, you blame that friend [laughs] because they host the photo album.

When this is somewhere abstract, the public cloud, the Google Cloud, the Microsoft Cloud, the Amazon Cloud, it’s very difficult to pinpoint which computer is leaking the private information.

It’s almost impossible for an individual to do an audit of an entire data censor of the public cloud, which is why nowadays people rely more and more on free software and open source components and publicly audited so that they know that the individual building blocks are trustworthy.

When they run their own systems, taking control of more and more of their interpersonal data, people will start demanding encryptions.

If I send instant message to you, even if it’s through a third party like Signal, people demand to reveal the source code of Signal to make sure that they cannot intercept the message that’s encrypted from my phone to your phone and any intermediaries, people in the middle cannot mathematically speaking, gets the original plain text that I sent you.

The most a attacker can do is to disrupt the service, but they cannot compromise the privacy of our two one to one private communications. Private instant messaging is something that we have seen more and more people start demanding.

If a instant message provider doesn’t provide end to end encryption, there’s a backlash against them providing such services that may sell the content of the conversation to the highest bidder for our attentions.

It’s only through consumer right protection and the civic hackers and the maker’s [laughs] movement that we can set a new norm that is only normal if they cannot eavesdrop into our postings and is not normal at all if they start to profit from the private communications that people have on in instant message.

At the same time, the model, how to treat data of People’s Republic of China, and all the successful companies from China, like TikTok for example, is popular in Europe. There is Weibo and there’s Alibaba and all these shiny examples.

What makes you optimistic that people not one day accept all the forms of control from the government because they like so much all the comfortable services they can use provided by these companies, which accept the censorship and all the repression?

Platforms built by people in…Platforms in authoritarian regimes sometimes justify their censorship by saying that, “Oh, we’re protecting people against dangerous thoughts.” words like civil society is banned because it may lead to mobs and protests and chaos, and so on. No person in the free liberal societies can accept this argument.

If we cannot even talk about civil society, we will not have a democracy. It will be like fake elections. There may be people with names like representatives, but they’re not representative at all if people cannot even question their relationship to the civil society.

In democratic societies, people would not buy the argument of state control when it comes to the content of our instant messages and the content that we post online. In taking zero hate approach when it comes to social media platforms, the authoritarian regimes are proving that this zero tolerance doesn’t lead to better innovations or more innovations.

It leads to more and more de facto state ownership and controlling of the apparatus of the Internet so much so they resembles Intranet, not the Internet anymore because there’s no peering and interoperability with the other messaging platforms.

I think what started as a technological decision, like a great firewall, the censorship of the sensitive words eventually becomes so intertwined with the way the lifestyle that the society is run, so that journalistic freedom on are caught in the net. In authoritarian regimes, the journalists, the people who thrive only by publishing cannot mention the sensitive words.

Either they start to self censor and not because they’re explicitly told that they cannot mention these words, but because during the writing, the investigation of their reports, or the communication tools have those words censored. Of course, the outputs, the journalistic report isn’t journalistic at all.

It looks like propaganda because the actual investigations are self censored in such an instant message environment, but to the detriment of everyone, because without journalism there’s no way for the leadership to be in touch of what’s actually happening on the ground leading to more and more blind decisions to the detriment of people.

That makes you optimistic that it’s the more clever form of governance based on decentralized data?

The building of the democratic feedback loop thanks to the Internet, I think, will lead to more and more awareness of the agency, the potentials one can take the right actions in our communities and have a sense of democracy as a social technology that we can all contribute. It’s self accelerating.

On the other hand, if you take away first the ability to talk about civil society on an online platform and next journalistic freedom and maybe the next scientific freedom as well, that more and more the lose of touch in the reality will lead to more and more top down, shutdown, lockdown, take down decisions that are also self perpetuating.

I don’t think we’re competing because it’s not the same track or maybe same track, but opposite directions. The more we move to the democratic direction, the farther apart we are from the surveillance state, from the all seen controlling state apparatus that authoritarian regimes are moving toward.

Another nine minutes. Maybe shortly, you already mentioned that you’re not too familiar with this experiment in the ‘70s.

Minus 10 years.

Have you heard of it?

Of course.

Do you see any meaning to discuss that? Do you see any parallel? It was a completely different society, was a society run by a socialist government, but what interested us a lot was this utopia of having a constant flow of information. We had a very decentralized…You had all the telex machines at all the manufactories.

Then the idea was to use all the information coming in as a constant feedback…

Like the airboxes.

In a way. That made us curious if you see any parallel there.

Before the Internet, there was many attempts at building central nervous system of a society with whatever technology people used to have. Like the Internet, it connects people in very different areas, different experiences into the commons, meaning that people can look like a physical map, what is going on in a more agile fashion and adjust our behavior for the common good.

Unlike the Internet, the system is controlled by a few designers. In the Internet, the main thing is permissionless innovation. If you think about a better way to do things, you can convince two or three of your friends across the world, and then you start building a new protocol, a new system.

The providers of Internet service cannot object to you inventing a new way that may be putting some of the actor out of business. In projects like Cybersyn, there is a architect, there’s a designer, and their design may be good, maybe bad, may inform the society, distract the society, but it’s very difficult for the society to say, “Yes, and we want to make it better this way.”

However, on the Internet, people who don’t like the original configuration of their pol.is system, maybe it was English only, maybe it doesn’t run on small screens, on films and so on.

Instead of disagreeing, protesting the design, they can just write a few lines of code and translate that to French, to fit into the small screens on the phone, without permission from the original creator, because it’s in the commons, it’s free software. I think free software and the permissionless culture of the Internet offers a wider canvas that we can share with our future generations.

Can you explain, again, you said there is a certain parallel between you’re dealing with the airboxes here and the telex machines, which were distributed to the manufactories taking data in real time. Real time was a bit “back then.”

There are certain parallels between the, for example, air quality measurement or water quality measurement and the Cybersyn project, because they’re like the nervous systems that allows people to see in a more holistic way, in so called real time what’s actually happening. The parallel ends there.

In air box and water box, is people who care about the design can improve the design. They can configure the design in a network topologies previously unimagined. They can choose to use distributed ledgers to keep multiple records in multiple parties that don’t fully trust each other, so nobody can tamper the records.

In Cybersyn, there was no invention of distributed ledgers back then, and so you probably have to trust the main architect.

Yeah, you are right. Maybe in a broader sense, what role does…you already talked about that, but let’s sum it up again. Why is information and the constant flow of information and the accessibility of information so crucial for a participatory democratic society?

In a democracy, decision making is only as good as the information we have on the actual problem at hand. Consider during the mask creation of 2020, if we publish the real time inventory of pharmacies every 30 seconds as we did, then the opposition party can be turned into a co creation party. When they say that, “Oh, you’re not taking care if the rural place is good enough,” and so on.

The minister can say to the parliamentarian, “The MP, you know a lot about data and so teach us.” However, if we publish only every 30 days, then the MP can only make critics, but they cannot make improvements because they do not have the real time information on top of which to build better systems.

The real time information shared upon collection, as long as non personal data is the common ground on top of which that the competition in partisan democracy can grow into the flowers, the blossoming of co creative deliberative democracy.

How much have you kept your hacker way of life and your hacker way of thinking in your everyday life as a part of the government today, in being a minister today?

I’m a minister that work not for the people, but with the people, thinking outside of the box. Meaning that when we encounter important challenges like cybersecurity, climate crisis, we do not think, “Oh, how can the state solve it with state capacity?” I think instead, how can the civil society with the civic capacity solve it?

The remaining parts, the parts that the civil society cannot take care of yet, maybe the state supports them for a bit, but then always with the aspiration of relinquishing more control to the people instead of the state. A state that works to minimize its control is the direction I’m taking. This direction is radically different from the authoritarian states.

In that, you can say that we’re hacking the governmental system in the service of democracy.

Also what surprised me so much is there is no police on them. I couldn’t almost even see any police. What is the secret behind that? Why is them not necessary, obviously?

There’s a police there. [laughs] My bodyguard. [laughs] In Taiwan, we think about the community of crime and prevention and so on in a holistic peer to peer fashion. People care about the neighborhood. People keep it tidy and remind each other to wear mask before the vaccination, and things like that.

If you have a community that cares about each other’s well being very much, so much so that if you double park, chances are the neighbor will discover it before a police does.

We don’t need so many gun carrying polices on the street to keep the street tidy and safe, because in a sense this community spirit is even closer to home, quite literally speaking, when it comes to policing against the behavior that may harm the community.

Is this also valid for the digital public sphere? Let’s wait for the beep, beep, beep we have in one moment.

Sure.

We done. Good.

On the digital arena, in around 2012, 2013, in authoritarian regimes that used to have some freedom of speech and journalism back then, they decided that the retweet button, the share button is too potent a virus, that they have to apply professional people to police the speech.

They were so scared by the color revolutions and so on, the counter power potential of the social media, so that they would even take away what used to be some journalistic freedom that they have online.

In Taiwan though, we learned that if people participate in civic journalism, if people learned the art of source checking, of proper narrative framing, of making sure that there’s context behind each report, this act of fact checking, of reporting likely disinformation or misinformation, the same thing as you would flash a double park, it joins the community of professional journalists through the idea of civic journalism.

When the middle school students can fact check our three presidential candidates in real time as they’re having the debate on platform 2020 election, well, that brings them into the mindset that renders them immune detox from the outrage that is the share button and the retweet button.

In this, we discovered, I would say, a cure for the disinformation crisis because collective fact checking is like community policing.

Means that nobody need to be a top down censor, but rather people can take care of the quality of public discussion through voluntarily supplying context to discussions and reporting the most viral disinformation and conspiracy theories so that professional journalists can dedicate their time to debunk those.

People don’t abuse it? This power?

Community policing?

It could also mean if there’s a very strict community like not accepting any positive freedom of people.

I get this, like if you’re all Confucius worshiping robots, but we’re not. [laughs] In Taiwan, we have 20 national languages and a lot of diversity including the sign language, many indigenous languages, the whole of Gan Hakka and so on. Each community tend to think of the society and there’s likely different perspective, but there’s strength in this diversity.

When we have deliberation about, for example, marriage equality here in Taiwan, it is the matriarchies of the indigenous community, or the Paiwan community which doesn’t care about gender in choosing leadership, that offers valuable perspective to this conversation.

At the end of the day, the conversation turned into this kinship relationship where some people think marriage as families wedding to families. The individual are just representatives for the essence through spirits and lineage, and the text that is about the individual rights and responsibility and so on.

When the constitutional court ruled that marriage equality needed to happen, the legislation finally took the form after two referenda that the individuals wed as individuals, but their families don’t. Enjoying the same rising duties without confusing their confusion can ship idea. This eclectic solution is what I call good enough consensus.

A vast majority of people nowadays agree with that no matter how they voted on the referendums. That is the deliberative spirit. The more diversity you have, the more tolerance, no inclusion that you enjoy from the co creation of inspiring creative solutions, I liken it to the tectonic plate of the Eurasian plate and the Philippines sea plate bumping into each other.

In Taiwan, we have those ideological earthquakes constantly, but with the resilience in our democracy. The Jade Mountain, the highest point in Taiwan raises by a couple of centimeters every year because of these tensions that brings co creation.

Beautiful. We need to come to an end, last question. What is your dream? If you could wish for the future you would love to see, what would be there, what do you see? What would digital democracy be like? If you could dream.

When we say plurality, that is collaborative diversity. We mean not just this transcultural republic of citizens that we have here. It’s a start, but we also think that it is one of the potential models for the future, for the entire planet, for people, but also animals, rivers, and so on, to have some agency, some person move in the democratic process.

We start with human beings that are adults, but then to younger people, to even younger people, to representatives of future generations and eventually to the entire ecosystem. It’s infinite diversity in infinite combinations.

They all will take part, you mean?

Yes. Across the diversity, across the generations, the ecosystem, the environments, maybe other planets can be part of democracy and in making sure plurality collaborative diversity as a philosophy can work to serve the people, not asking the people to serve the technologies.

We bring digital and plural, which is the same word in Mandarin, shu wei, together. A digital democracy is a plural democracy.

That was a beautiful way of ending the conversation, I think. Let’s take a room tone for 20 seconds. Everybody quiet, please.

Then last thing, could you stand up, walk away this way and come back and sit down again, and walk away again.

Sure. With my coffee?

Yeah. You can actually take a coffee…

OK. Sponsored by City Cafe.

Could you walk in again and sit down again and then walk out without talking?

All right. Thank you so much.

Thank you.

We appreciate it.