Sure.

It really does change different perspectives, so I think it’s...

It still remained true that I hadn’t gone through a female puberty, so there’s many things that I’ve written that doesn’t really match to my personal experience, which is why, around when I was 24, I decided to take hormones and so on, to go through a hormone replacement process ...

That gives to a different development, I think, both physiologically and that I don’t really have as much macho psychological needs as other people. [laughs] Then I’m always happy with being whatever pronoun that people want to describe online.

I did a biological check of my testosterone levels when I was 24. It was somewhere between the average male and average female levels. I was born, I think, not with just a heart defect, but also with something about testosterone that’s, roughly speaking, maybe an 80-year-old man’s level when ...

...because of the lack of accurate representation. [laughs] Because it’s mostly just textual work that we can offer each other. So, I think it was very liberating in not fixing myself into a certain social script. I think that was formative, especially during my adolescent days.

All the prejudices just simply drops away...

Also, I think one of the key influences was the Internet culture, because the computer really doesn’t care which gender you are. It doesn’t really matter. Across the screen nobody really cares about the race, or ethnicity, or whatever.

I think I was raised without a particular gender stereotype. My mom, in particular, can be very assertive and even tomboyish at times, but also feminine when the situation calls her to be. It’s like Judith Butler’s idea that gender as a performance, not as something intrinsic, so I grew ...

That’s exactly right.

If children, their parents, and their supporting community are not trusted by the government, then they grow up not trusting the government. It’s a vicious cycle, so we’re breaking it.

It is important that we still have the children being able to be autonomous, to be constant learners, to work with each other, but it’s less important to train them at any particular skill anymore. So, we re-wrote a curriculum, and it’s going into effect maybe a couple of years ...

I looked at all the senior high school proposals very fairly, because I did not participate in senior high school. [laughs] It was very awesome working with the top educators, who all agreed that we’re now in an age where we can’t predict how the world is like 12 years ...

All this was what we learned from the experimental schools I’m happy that I participated in the curriculum committee for the upcoming curriculum as a kind of, again, indigenous people. [laughs]

The curriculum now emphasizes autonomy and capacity building instead of skill building, as it’s a waste of educating. Instead of just training students in particular skills, now it just builds people’s way to be autonomous, make a decision for themselves, to be literate in media literacy, critical thinking, and so ...

I think this is a really progressive movement. That also then informed the mandatory compulsory education system. When the new curriculum is going in effect, in two years from now, the 2019 curriculum, it actually includes many of those alternative school’s mandates into the regular schooling system.

I think it gives rise to hundreds of students, who either want a different learning experience, or want to specialize in something, or whatever. It’s very diverse here in Taiwan.

They can choose to learn at home, at any of our university, at a supporting group, or whatever, as long as they can write their own curriculum and have their regional, like their city board approval, to review it and approve it.

We did that. The people working on alternative education, a few years ago already passed, I think, the most advanced law, at least in Asia, here in Taiwan, so now people, for the entire ecosystem, from the first grade of the primary school, all the way to the third year ...

I tried to talk with the Principal, and she eventually agrees, and basically faked my records of school attendance so that I won’t get fined. It was compulsory education, after all, so she lied to the bureaucratic system. I still came to the monthly examinations and send out blank pages ...

Especially by that time, I already got -- because of the first place in the national science fair -- a guaranteed spot on a top senior high school. When I drop out of high school, I’m also giving up that spot. The Principal really wanted to understand what is happening ...

Yeah, of course, but they had to be convinced, because it was mandatory education at that moment. The Principal, the person running the high school, actually talked to me for an extended amount of time.

Mm-hmm.

Then I discovered this academic online community that provides a much better learning experience than high school. There really is no comparison. It’s not that I can’t work with the high school. It’s just it’s a much better alternative here.

When I write an email saying, "I find these issues with your paper. Can you explain more?" the researcher would actually write back and react intelligently and direct me to a forum or something. Of course, they don’t know I’m a 13 or 14-year-old, because everybody is an email address.

When I look at those papers, first, I learn that for the interesting issues that I want to learn, I want to solve, these people are working on it, while in the textbook, I was just reading about it. It’s very different. Second, everyone is just one email address away.

With the World Wide Web, they could post their pre-prints. That is to say, before printing in the journal, they could post their drafts for the entire peer-to-peer community to look, and maybe find issues, maybe collaborate.

At the time, many scholars also discovered World Wide Web for the first time. Before, they have to go through the journals. They have to go through the academic publishing system in order to reach the audience.

I could, but there is also the World Wide Web, which there is scholars posting their papers. When I look at those papers, they are like 10 years in advance to the textbooks that I’m reading, because it’s cutting edge research.

All this handled the technical part of the Internet, but even increasingly, the political part of the Internet, also. I was raised in this tradition, so I’m mostly like an indigenous person bringing the way of the tribe to the government in general.

There is very long tradition of giving the whole transcript, radical transparency, due process, face-to-face as well as remote participation, synthetic documents, and everything that was created to give this process a legitimacy, an accountability that is not driven by having a navy or an army, but by radical inclusion ...

This then introduced me to this kind of multi-stakeholder, consensus-driven protocol, which runs the Internet until this day. The organization that runs the Internet, the Internet Engineering Task Force in particular, it is not answering to United Nations or anything, or any nation. It’s just one participant. There could be ...

It’s interesting, because these people all around the world, who have never met before, celebrating a victory together, which illustrates the potential for Internet as a political space, intermingling but separate from any sovereign space. We certainly did not act as representatives of our states. We were individual activists back ...

Very quickly, the Supreme Court in the US ruled that as unconstitutional, and the Act was repealed. It was widely celebrated as a victory.

It was argued very eloquently during the Blue Ribbon campaign, where I cut my teeth. It’s my first experience in learning that Internet is not just a space for academics or for sharing scholarly text, but it’s also a space for assembly, a space for social movement, a space for ...

They become black and featuring a blue ribbon which, when you click on it, goes to the link of websites that explains what’s been happening and why the freedom of speech should be upheld online, why the Internet platform providers should not be taxed with the same warranty or the ...

The Internet community reacted very quickly, I think organized by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. All the websites that I went to at the time turned their background dark.

Now this idea seems very quaint to us now, but at the time, the government really looks at the World Wide Web as any other television channel or whatever, in which this kind of Act is normal for them.

I think that was in ’94, when Bill Clinton, at the time, signed an act called the Communications Decency Act that banned not just pornographic images, but also text, from the Internet. The Act says Internet websites need to identify the actual age and identity of people accessing these websites, ...

Yeah, of course. I’ve been reading philosophy -- anarchists -- for a very, very long time before really diving in into what we now call Internet governance. My earliest memory of that was the Blue Ribbon campaign.

Yeah, participating in the movement.

And power. It was a new medium by which we recognized the world, and who hosts this medium really holds the power to that world, as you would now see with the social media. It is very much a power thing, and we were very acutely aware of that at ...

How do we work with the browsers, the vendors, the websites, the different interests trying to grow the World Wide Web, instead of harming each other’s web by working out proprietary or non-compatible extensions? You remember the early days was Java applets, was Flash, and so on. While it’s technical, ...

When people were forming the earliest World Wide Web Consortium -- it was Tim Berners Lee and his friends -- he actually gave up the patents, the intellectual properties and whatever, when he was inventing the World Wide Web, ensuring that he does not have control over whatever users of ...

I would say that first, this is not my invention of any sort. This is the first political thing I engaged with when I was a child, when I was 12 or so. When I was 12, I started working with people building the early Internet that was before the ...

This need to happen before asking people to trust the government, because it’s mutual. Someone has to move first. A government trusts people by not issuing commands, but instead setting up ways where stakeholders can convene, and listen to each other, and collaboratively determine, while the government endorsing the process ...

Part of this is the idea of peer-to-peer governance. The word "command" is the antithesis of a peer-to-peer relationship. As soon as you give command, that person is not your peer anymore. In order to include more stakeholders in the dialogue, the government is now learning to trust people more.

Whereas before, when she has anything technical, she would ask me, now if I have any legal issues, I would consult her in our weekly meetings. This gives a very, I would say, cross-sectoral way of a working relationship between so-called the government and so-called civil society, but neither exactly.

This is very interesting because before I was the digital minister, I was an advisor on the digital economy deliberation platform, vTaiwan, working with the previous cyberspace minister, Minister Jaclyn Tsai. Now our roles are reversed.

I also still do office hours and participate in hackathons weekly to meet with random community participants. I still work as a bridge that is not obeying commands from either side, by making sure that people understand their mutual concerns and so on.