No. It was important back in the late ’90s.

Yep.

That’s a great opening.

Yeah.

There’s all this idea of Internet participation, democracy thing that’s co-evolving, in a sense, in my life.

That really indoctrinated me, in the sense that participation and every vote counts, literally, and that the public sphere is there for everybody to participate. By the way, my dad was also the spokesperson of one of the presidential candidates back in 1996, so he also did a lot of ...

The other interesting part is in 2001, when I first got the right to vote, I went back to the district for a head-of-district level voting. I wasn’t living in my district at the time and I had to travel for a couple hours to go back to vote. The ...

I helped this very new project called Wikipedia, on Freenet, Slashdot, all those early community websites. I think the main idea is to create a safe space in which we can all learn from each other. Even if the experiments fail, we can always go back here, so it’s like ...

Now, where am I? I don’t really know how much detail I need to tell. I can tell that, when I was 20, I started devoting full time to the open source movement, to the free software movement, because I want to give back to the community that taught me.

We know that free software, the "free" doesn’t stand for free of cost. We know that freedom is never free of cost -- freedom of assembly, of speech. Our parents’ and grandparents’ generation fought dearly for it. That’s another arc that we can use.

It’s like Internet and democracy is not two things. It’s the same thing. In Taiwan, they happened literally the same year. The year we have World Wide Web, we also have our first presidential election. I think that’s why there’s a very strong free software community in Taiwan.

In 1996, when I come to think about it, is also the year that we, in Taiwan, after 30 years after military dictatorship, finally have our first presidential election.

It’s a public school.

Certainly.

1996.

They were initially very skeptical, because nobody really knew what the World Wide Web is, but I managed to reason it out and convince them after a couple months.

Oh, yeah. They actually faked my records to the Ministry of Education, so I won’t get fined by skipping compulsory education.

That’s the first political system that I know, and it’s the political system that I’m introducing now to Taiwan’s national government.

I found that, online, everything is voluntarily given. There’s a lot of free resources, and the best thing is that this whole online system, this thing we call Internet, there’s a political system behind it. It’s called the rough consensus model, where people follow these anarchistic principles of coming to ...

When I was 15, I dropped out of junior high school to pursue an education exclusively on this newly invented thing called the World Wide Web. I told my principal at the time that everything that I can learn online is 10 years in the future compared to the textbook, ...

Sure.

Mm-hmm, sure.

OK, sure.

How long do you think the intro paragraph needs to be?

But I wouldn’t mind another recording. [laughs]

I’m recording this entire Skype call.

You mean like an iPhone, like this one?

Yeah, sure. I’m Audrey Tang. I’m Digital Minister...

I think that’s my tribal culture. That’s how I get accultured.

Before I got my voting right when I was 20, which is the age of consent in Taiwan, I already experienced, for five years, a very different political model, which is what we call the rough consensus model, which is the model, mostly up to this day, but still most ...

I think the idea is, when the Internet was first beginning, nobody really thought, at least at that time, that it will be as centralized, as domesticated, as today’s Internet. Back at that day, I learned from, for example, the first Blue Ribbon Campaign of Electronic Frontier Foundation and a ...

Before the First World War, most of the thinkers, in Europe at least, did not anticipate civilization would even go into a downward spiral.

Also, I think my outlook on history or human nature is very much biased toward optimism. Project Guttenberg only contains at that time works before the First World War, because everything afterwards is still in copyright. I read the classics before the world wars. I think that really biased my ...

I was able to quit school because of things like the Guttenberg Project. It’s like before Wikipedia. There’s people who digitized all those books. I basically got all my education from projects like Project Guttenberg, so I would like to give back. That’s my motivation, because otherwise it wouldn’t be ...

It was widely considered impossible to implement, to do. I just came out of nowhere and implemented it. That was in 2005. Between 2000 and 2005, I’m mostly doing free software advocacy and free speech, and all sort of other activism things, while running a social enterprise called Our Internet. ...

I co-founded a pretty large Internet company, sold off the stocks when I was 18 or something, and led the Perl community for a while. Perl is a computer language, one of the earlier scripting languages. It was in a state of stagnation, and its creator, Larry Wall, decided to ...

Mm-hmm.

That’s right. That’s when I was 15.

Also, I think that’s because there’s this Tim Berners-Lee, who invented this World Wide Web thing. I found out everything that I can find online is 10 years of what a textbooks have to teach me, so I just told my principals, "I’m going to learn from the Internet, instead."

I’m from Taiwan. I’m always in Taiwan. I went to Germany for a year, but otherwise haven’t stayed for more than six months anywhere else. I’m in Taiwan, and part of the initial dot com rush back in 1996, which is when I quit junior high school.

I’m 36. I drop out of junior high school after going through 10 different schools, counting from kindergarten. After I dropped out, I founded an Internet search engine company with a few friends, got invested by...

No, I don’t think so, either. Very quickly...

I’m the first person to offer technology help to the Occupy, the day before the Occupy. It is intrinsically a very personal story. The Uber case, I’m the facilitator and the co-chair for the whole thing. Again, it’s my story. Of course, the third story is about my work as ...

You want me to tell a three-minute version now or paste you a link or something?

I think the easiest thing is just to keep to the visual slides and have the voice carry all the tonality and passion, and only have my face appear during the very beginning and during the transition between the video and the Q&A. That’s my idea.

On the other hand, of course it enables a lot of visual gimmicks that we may or may not use, because it’s not in person. I can levitate or whatever... I tried that once.

The last question, "What skills am I interested in acquiring or behavior I would like to change?" we’re working with telepresence, a very restricted medium, because it’s literally just a video that I have for 10 minutes to deliver.

I’m 36.

"What are the questions you’re dreading asked?" This is actually a very good question, and I thought about it a lot, but I can’t really think of anything. Maybe you can also help me there.

"What statistics do you employ?" I check the transcript. There’s no statistics used in my script.