[laughs] That’s nice.

I can’t hear you now. There’s no sound.

No problem.

Please.

When you say how Taiwan can help, when my editor was like, “How can we make this relevant to an American audience?” That’s one aspect of it. You’re asked all the time, I’m sure, how do these lessons translate to other polities? How do you approach that answer?

That is really interesting. I wasn’t very clear on that before. That’s an actual structural design.

…and Jaclyn Tsai. Again, in the US, this is our core problem, is that everything is a political issue. Even now, we’re arguing about how many people have died from COVID-19. Whether you’re on the right or the left, you have a different opinion. Long-winded, but how does the civil ...

It also seems like, looking a little deeper, that you were originally brought into the consultative process by the previous administration…

Does that lack of what you said, left/right schism, does that translate more generally into the political sphere? On the one hand, it seems like the success of just your appointment and the intercommunication of g0v and Taiwan, you can explain it by saying civil tech is more aligned with ...

That’s great. That very much explains, I love that metaphor of the generation that grows up with both democracy and computers. What connects that same generation to open source principles?

That, the story of Taiwan and semiconductors has been told over and over and over again in Taiwan. Is that connected to what you just said there, this knowledge that…?

Actually, the very first piece I wrote for Wired in 1994 was about Taiwan’s success in becoming the component-maker of the world. Further research learning how you first got into semiconductors, it’s almost an open source story. You got a really sweet deal on IP from ICRA and ran with ...

Where does that come from? What is that rooted in? What’s unique about Taiwan’s development that has given you such a vibrant civil tech society?

That seems to be maybe coming in a little later. I’m also curious about, I talked to a guy who studies disinformation for the Institute of the Future, and he’s spent time in Taiwan, has really been tracking things. He thinks that Taiwan has the most active civil tech society ...

One of the things, when I first encountered your work, I was like, “Wow, this guy still believes in all these things from that time.” I wonder how you’ve kept your faith in all of this and how Taiwan has managed to avoid the information polarization that is true in ...

I feel it’s even worse than that. In the United States specifically, I feel like the Internet allowed everybody to seek their own truth in echo bubbles and actually contributed to polarization and weaponized the culture wars.

I thought access to this global information network that leveraged all of our individual talents to build this would increase our intelligence, we would be able to solve problems better, and it would be a progressive force for democracy.

Then I watched over the next 10 years as those promises did not seem to be realized.

It’s interesting what you just said about the benevolent dictator. I, too, right at that time as a reporter, was falling in love with these same things, and I ended up spending most of the ‘90s tracking down all these probably pioneers, and profiling them, and writing about them, and ...

At what point did you know that information technology was the path that you were going to take? How did you first get exposed to the core of gift economy, the open source principle?

I know a little bit about your background. That you had some rough going early on in school, some bullying, some health problems, and then you dropped out and self-taught yourself over the Internet.

That’s a big part of what I want to try and get out in this story. I want to start very early on and figure out how you joined the open source tribe.

[laughs] Actually, that’s kind of a question for maybe later, but the description of you as the face of Taiwan’s soft power I thought was pretty interesting. I’m wondering if that rings true to you.