That is great. Thank you.

That would be great. That would save me…How fast do you turn that…

Thank you. I feel honored to have been able to take part in this conversation.

We could go by without that.

That relationship of trust in my country is broken. I understand the direction that you want it to go. How do we fix that? What do we push on to reestablish that faith in the people?

Looking across the Pacific at the US, we have all these video now of armed protesters and state legislators protesting social distancing, protesting measures that are for the public benefit. Is that a situation you could see where we could…I’m not articulating this very well.

We’ve covered a lot. One last thing. You talked many times about how the government should trust the citizenry. Citizens should be wary of the government.

Has Taiwan figured out how to be a civilized democracy while the rest of the world flails?

That 12 years, that would date to the Chen Shui-bian administration?

When I lived in Taiwan in the ‘80s, it was much more traditional and male-dominated. China’s going the opposite direction, Mainland China. It’s getting worse. What explains Taiwan’s success in gender?

It’s hard for me to imagine some previous premiers doing that, like Hau Pei-tsun. I’ve been intrigued at the stats on gender parity in using Internet services and on presentation in parliament.

Do you have a favorite meme of this period?

How does all of this openness, the transparency, how has it helped Taiwan face COVID-19? Three months ago, you’re giving interviews about COVID-19 is not coming up and all of these things, and then it happens.

What does that mean for just larger penetration into Taiwanese society? How many people are engaged in…?

Is there a way to quantify how many people in Taiwan participate in civil tech who are engaging with vTaiwan or…?

They do? How is that? I find that when I looked at the disinformation that surges through my info center it boggles the mind that 20 editors and a Line chat bot can scale up to the power of the entire population.

You have the Taiwan FactCheck Center. You have the Cofacts. Do things like that scale up?

I feel like that is a way Taiwan can help. Back on the disinformation point, there was a report last year that said that Taiwan experienced more disinformation than any other country in the world.

That strikes me as a very profound alternative to building rough consensus than you have across the Strait, where anything that deviates is by definition not accepted.

Can you explain to me how g0v and vTaiwan implement that? I was very taken in your “TED Talk” by your comment that the way you implemented pol.is it did not have a reply button, and that killed the trolls. Is it really that simple, an interface tweak?

That implies that there’s a majority or a consensus in Taiwan on these norms. That’s where, to me, the Taiwan Can Help model breaks down with respect to the United States. The idea of consensus right now seems so unreachable on a federal level, and Facebook in the United States, ...

I’m fascinated by the collaboration between the platforms, civil tech groups, and the government when combating disinformation, especially in the case of Facebook, which was huge at that time. Correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems like in Taiwan Facebook acted like a good citizen.

How do you get consensus on what is intentional untruth to cause public harm?

Haven’t there been some laws passed for fines for misinformation?

Then you have Taiwan saying, “Well, we’re free, and we’re using the Internet.” In a way, it’s a huge rebuke to China. It’s this example of how you can use these technologies for liberty. Do you see? Do you feel it? Does Taiwan feel that at a gut level?

In the current world, where we see so many democracies stumbling, and so many authoritarians all over, this idea that the Internet by itself would lead to liberty seems more in question than ever, really.

It’s going to beat the Chinese Communist Party. I was like, I still had pretty fresh memories of Tiananmen. I was like, “I don’t know if the Internet can beat the Chinese Communist Party.”

There’s also, I think, a very potent metaphorical battle happening here. I remember sitting with some Wired editors in 1996 or something, and I had a China background. They’re asking me, “Well, the Internet’s going to be the enemy of authoritarianism. The Internet’s going to bring down totalitarians. Won’t the ...

Generative adversarial…

I feel like that’s just a micro example of constant pressure in every forum that you get, Taiwan, from Mainland China. Some people have suggested to me that that’s one of the reasons that has focused people on making your democracy strong, on using every technology available to really be ...

I noticed that after the PRC representative spoke, a representative of the Solomon Islands spoke and defended Taiwan’s presence. Then two years later, the Solomon Islands basically gets derecognized as Taiwan.

OK. I have a couple of questions about that. The first is how did it happen in the first place, since technically speaking, Taiwan isn’t in the UN? How was that organized? Was it in any way intentionally provocative?

In 2017, you appeared via telepresence robot at an Internet governance forum. After your remarks, a representative from China was upset, and, “so-called country, so-called Taiwan independence.” This is a big problem.

I’m going to steer a bit away from Taoism. I think I won’t have much space to talk about that in Wired.

One of the stories I wrote in that crazy era of the ‘90s was a profile of Larry Wall and Perl on its, the way it is a medium for connection. That was very powerful. It’s amazing. Now, no one ever talks about Perl. It seems to have disappeared into ...

Is that available online somewhere?

Really?

That’s fabulous. As you know, there seems like in Chinese history not that many examples of actual Taoist philosophy being employed by the rulers. There’s this great concept in the era of the warring states, but then it’s just legalism, Confucianism. Is one of the things that’s powering Taiwan’s digital ...

Code is the true thing. How do you mix those two things together? You’re both a channel, but you coded up that website. You made something out of nothing. How do you resolve that contradiction?

Then at the same time, you actually coded something. Code is ones and zeros. It’s like if you start with the first line of the “Tao Te Ching,” it says, “The thing that can be said is not the true thing.”

You said, “I take a very Taoist approach.” That says to me Wuwei, which has always been a tricky concept for people from the West to understand, because at first, it’s like you’re doing nothing. Then, you talk of yourself as a channel, which seems to me a very Taoist ...

That is great. That is so interesting. This intersects with some of my personal interests, but I was watching the very informative interview you did in Amsterdam a few months ago. The interview said, “How do you go about achieving this?”

What he coded up was people reporting individually what was in stock. It wasn’t automatic?

Then his server got overloaded, because it was so popular. Apparently, you connected him with some Google engineers. Can you walk me through the granular details of that? That story is fascinating.

Well, my first experience of it was in Taiwan. I started writing about Taiwan, because you were doing so well. Then I saw the video where you talked about the mask hack. I know that there was an engineer in Tainan who came up with the idea.

Oh, really?

It’s about Szechuan food, globalization, and Taoism.

Just to drill down on the masks, because that’s…I’ve been following you on Twitter since I started first writing about COVID-19. I actually have my own little newsletter.

The Sunflower movement?

A lot of that going on in the United States lately. We’re all doing weird Zoom…