Before social media, we used to read an article, to listen to something, and then recommend it to people. Nowadays, with social media, there’s things that just mobilize our center for emotions, for anger, for outrage, for sadness, or whatever.

Sure. Technology is a really broad term. Mostly people blame social media, which is a very narrow slice of technology. Social media makes, for the first time in human history, sharing easier and faster than actually reading something, which is very weird.

This is very useful in a demonstration kind of way, regardless of where on earth that you are. Whether it takes a minister without portfolio or some advisory council or a digital service unit, I think that’s up to each country to decide.

I think having someone who demonstrate in a demo sense that digital tools does improve the quality of life, and in the future not just with VR or AR, but also with the basis of machine learning and so on as part of the public service infrastructure in a safe, ...

As a anarchist, of course, I don’t give commands, but I just show those examples and people take whatever they like. They seem to like it because by showing it works, it’s probably certainly they’re all smart people. They try to pick the things that they need, that they want, ...

Soo we turn the unknown into something that you can see on a smaller scale. It’s up to each level of government, to each ministry to see whether they want to implement these procedures and introduce those digital tools. How much to introduce is all up to them.

By showing people that it actually reduces costs, both in time and also in people involved, also, it’s fun, right, you make this much participatory. Also that is effective. It removes the fear of the public servants of the unknown.

I run my meetings like this. I run my websites like this. I do radical transparency knowing that, of course, it’s impossible to ask every ministry, every level in Taiwan to do this in five months. It’s just not possible.

Whether it’s useful or not, I think it is kind of useful as what we call pre‑figurative politics way. The whole idea pre‑figurative politics is to be the change we want to see in the world, but in a smaller scale.

Before me here was a minister without portfolio, so‑called cyberspace minister, in charge of cyber law and stuff. This is, whatever it’s called, there’s one role in the minister without portfolio level in charge of digital or cyber space or Internet‑related affairs.

So it is transitional. This is a part of digital transformation. We did have this position, a minister without portfolio in charge for digital affairs for many, many years. It was the Science and Technology minister without portfolio, who are in charge of open data and so on.

I think this is also kind of an ephemeral position because maybe 20 years from now, all the ministers will be digital. Maybe we’ll reserve a analog minister for the people who are not digital yet.

Right. It is a great question. I’m a minister without portfolio, meaning that I’m a minister without ministry. Digital is by definition a very cross‑ministry business.

We’re now explicitly saying, as much as possible, we’re now using multi‑stakeholder approach for the innovation with private sector and for inclusion with the civil society. That is the main direction. Of course, if you go into the details, there’s many other details as well, but that’s the main idea.

Basically, what’s that DIGI+ plan? The government has shrunk its size to just maintain the infrastructure and opening of the government, which is one half of our previous duties, if you look at the NICI plan that was before the DIGI+ plan.

We’re changing the basic laws of, for example, the Social Group Formation Act, which means that instead of one county, one representative social association, we now have multiple associations in the civil society to fulfill perhaps overlapping needs, and so on. This is saying the civil society and the voluntary ...

They know how to include people in the discussion. They know how to reach that last mile. If we are to introduce VR deliberation, without the civil society it’s not possible because they know who to contact and which stakeholders to reach. We also say, for inclusion, the government doesn’t ...

Then, of course, the last I is inclusion, which is what the civil society, the NGOs are particularly good at. They’re now so good that they’re sustainable in a way, not just traditional NGOs as social enterprises, but also in different ways.

This is very difficult to do on a paper‑based bureaucracy because papers take time to scan, to recognize. My work mostly is to digitize the government itself and make sure people go through digital systems, and this is very easily then opened up for people to see in a transparent ...

The governance plan, of course, centers around open government. Open government means radical transparency, meaning that we trust the people, even though the people doesn’t trust us yet. We make sure that all the procedures and whatever, to the extent possible, is open to the people in a transparent way.

Then, for the whole society to talk about this new technology and ask what we need to ask to the technology, instead of what the technology dictates to us. This conversation needs to be led by the private sector, not the government, so this is the innovation part of the ...

The government, instead of just, in a very traditional way of saying, "You know, this is black market and this is white market," are regulating both. We’re now actually introducing, for example, the Financial Experimentation Act, which lets the people break the rules and regulations for a while, for a ...

The innovation by the private sector, which means that it should be the private sector’s way to tell the government what they want to experiment. For the governments that’s regulating, just to help experiment and facilitate discussions by the innovation. Instead of the government saying, "You know, from the next ...

I did help defining the cover. The DIGI means respectively the development of a stable infrastructure, which is shared by the whole society.

Great question. The DIGI+ plan or the so‑called Digital Nation Plan, I helped writing its cover, but not much of its content because most of its content it’s done by the time I joined the cabinet.

That’s right.

It is my political view that all the real diplomacy happens in the civil society and the private sector level. The government level, while I recognize that it is a useful illusion, it is not something that I personally contribute to help maintaining.

To me, everyone who’s affected by climate change ‑‑ the Pacific Islanders, islanders anywhere who see their habitats destroyed by extreme weather and so on ‑‑ they have more in common than so‑called the nation states with nearby whatever countries and whatever.

As a anarchist, I think it is, of course, very worthy for people to try to participate in multilateral or bilateral talks because it does affects people’s lives and so on. My focus throughout my life was always on multi‑state coder approaches instead of multilateral approaches.

As a conservative anarchist, I officially don’t think that diplomacy is exclusive among states. I maintain that state is only a useful illusion that serves the people. I would like people to eventually wake up from the illusion. Maybe not during my lifetime, but sometime in the future.

Also, learn from people who’s already moved far beyond us in this constitutional issue. It gives us more to talk about. While I couldn’t really fly to Madrid, I did report two talks for that.

I don’t know, but I do get invited to the Madrid Pride, just on this fact alone, to give not just one talk but two talks. This, I think, is good because it does give us more common language to talk with our international counterparts, both in how we deal ...

She said, "The bill is not the end of it. It’s just the beginning of dialogue with people, with different life experiences." I think that’s very well‑presented.

Then, by reviewing it week after week, the society is converging, rather than diverging. This also echoes what President Tsai Ing‑wen said.

They actually have more in common with each other than with me. It is good, because this weekly review meeting as part of the media communication cycle actually says marriage is not some magic thing. It is, legally speaking, hundreds, if not thousands, of privileges and obligations .

I don’t care about marriage, so I don’t say something about it, but people who care about marriage, like the divorce rate, which is sky high in Taiwan, they do want to hold to those family values. The people who are into marriage equality also uphold marriage as intimate relationship ...

This is very good because it shows that this is something that both sides, or all sides, really, all affirm. This is what we call a common value among different views, is because no matter which side you’re on you must care about marriage in order to say something about ...

Indeed, it does require line‑by‑line review, of course. This is what we are doing, or what the Secretary General is doing, every week.

The Secretary General is meeting with the Ministry of Justice, the Ministry of Interior every week to look at every line in the civil code that pertains to marriage equality and declare whether this applies, whether this doesn’t apply. For example, there is a very obscure clause called divorce by ...

Well, it is already [laughs] , constitutionally. The Supreme Court has ruled that the Constitution must protect marriage equality, and that’s a done deal. It’s not like we’re waiting for two years, no.

The sampling bias I referred to is because it’s called a Personal Democracy Forum, so people who attend are, by default, people who don’t rely on Congress that much, anyway, to begin with, so I don’t really know. I don’t have this much involvement in the congressional politics in the ...

What I got from PDF was pretty positive, I would say, but, of course, it could be sampling biased. I don’t really know.

They think that they now actually have more visibility to get awareness and get to what they call the deep canvassing, which is to listen to people with different opinions, and then find that they actually share some common value.

I remember one of the senators ‑‑ the New Jersey senator, I think ‑‑ who said, "You know, people think this is extraordinary time, but for black people’s rights, it’s actually just ordinary time." Their cause wasn’t surfaced as much during Obama, but it is actually one of those very ...

There is a lot of pro‑something, with something, and I don’t hear that much against something anymore. It seems that the initial reaction to the election has morphed, at least for the people participating in the PDF, into a organizing force for people who care deeper.

We did see that there’s arrangements of people who of the different sides of the political spectrum, and so on. They arranged a retreat, and listened to each other, and reported what they learned from each other.

Really? Because when I participate in the Personal Democracy Forum just a few weeks ago ‑‑ the PDF. It’s a hash tag ‑‑ in New York, what I got there was the sense of there is a consensus of that we need to listen to people with opposing views to ...

Even though at the end of two months the petitioner didn’t survive to see the result, but it was pre‑announced, so that he left knowing that this will pass, and this was indeed passed.

This is one of the flagship cases, where we use to talk with the MPs, and so on, saying that this is actually also good for you, because we did the research and everything for you. If you affirm the process, then we all save some work, because we did ...

Actually, by the next session the parliament will have their own petition system, starting a couple months from now. Their threshold is 10,000 people, versus ours, which is 5,000 people, but they now fully buy into this process, after a couple years of negotiations, so on.