About the fact that Taiwan is not party to the international court of justice... Well this is just a reality; I don’t have any more comments.

We mean very well when working on matters like this. Other than that, I don’t know.

Through its normal official means. It’s a matter of our mainland affairs commission. I think the mainland affairs commission is working very hard to get some sort of friendly collaboration with the mainland.

Cybersecurity is an interesting, economically sustainable skill. I don’t know that much about the foreign aspect.

Of course, there is mobility. Cybersecurity is one of the skills that if you have it, you can find employment pretty much anywhere in the world. It contributes to the mobility. Other than that, I don’t know. I haven’t thought of it this way.

The case you mentioned, I am aware of this but it never occurred to me that it is particular to Taiwan. [laughs]

There is a lot of general interest among people on cybersecurity. The equipment here is cheap. One can get easy access to pretty much all the electronics they need to further their skills. I don’t know that much about going abroad, though.

Like what?

The younger generation may no longer think it’s existential, so maybe they identify more as, for example, a Jazz player. It’s more about overlapping communities nowadays, with better access to globalized cultures. That is becoming even more so in the case of 20-something people.

It is true that many young people, they are much more comfortable of being eclectic in their identification. Nationality may be one identification, but not always the primary one, not just nationality. Whereas the older generation, because of the the martial law and everything, they tend to think that’s very ...

You are asking the one wrong person here; as an anarchist, I don’t even have a national identification... When I make contributions, I think of not just human beings, but future species that may enjoy the fruit of the work. I don’t even think in terms of speciesism, let alone ...

My message to the younger generation would be to recognize what things are not yet abundant, that are actual scarce and really need to be collectively decided and managed, rather than just imagine everything is going to be digitally transformed. That’s my main message.

For the older generation, my message is to re-evaluate with new organizational and technological advances. Which part of previous scarce resources are now actually abundant, and should be given more freedom to innovate?

It is true that people sometimes jump to solutions. If you work exclusively with abundant resources, trying out experiments cost nothing. You can try 10 ideas every day. In many other areas it’s not like that; there may be a lot of cost for trying.

Maybe in the end it’s about helicopters, it’s not about bridge-building anymore. It’s not about any particular mechanism, it’s about collectively trying to find out what the problems and the visions of the society are, rather than jumping into any particular solutions.

Then, maybe we can collectively find a way toward abundance because it’s a preference, but not by ignoring each others’ reality. We see a lot of youth advisory council members suggesting fantastic ideas, such as universal basic income. When talking with the premier and with the other ministers, they also ...

The work here is not just getting the so-called older generation to bridge the gap, so that they can converse with the new generation, but also for the new generation to not take everything for granted, so they can think and empathize with people who do manage scarce resources.

There is resource that are scarce which are becoming more abundant. There are also resources that are abundant that are under threat of becoming scarce, the trust in Internet being one.

There is a gap because it is a fundamental different attitude between what scarcity and abundance. The reality is a mixture of these two.

I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily a generational gap. There is a gap, but it is between scarcity and abundance. People who think in terms of abundance, who thinks in terms of thing that when shared actually becomes more. People who think in terms of scarcity, would think of goods that ...

Just a quick fact-check, I’m the youngest ever Minister without Portfolio, but I think Minister Cheng Li-chiun, when she first entered the cabinet in 2004, was one year younger than me. She headed the youth development administration. Interestingly, I’m responsible also for the youth advisory council in this administration.

About this particular issue? I am not that into marriage myself, so I refrain from sending any messages, but I do think that people who care about marriage -- gay people or straight people -- they have more in common with each other than they do have with me. It ...

It is.

No, it’s fine.

It’s fine.

That’s essentially what we call open-source governance. Just taking the lessons we learned from Internet community, and see whether its applicable to public service as well.

Basically, I’m a hacker in the sense that I’m trying to learn where the public service works or not, but we’re not patching it or exploiting it. We’re trying to come up with a different way of making policy, starting small but gradually expanding, so that people can learn there ...

A hacker is someone who immerse themselves into a system, and knows its details. If someone then exploits those details, that is a black hat hacker. If someone then makes a better system by patching the old system, that is a white hat hacker, but I’m neither. I make entirely ...

Because we are still in the early days, I think just mandating one particular way would be like over-investing in particular technologies. They way we’re working now is just to get all practitioners on the same page, know what every other practitioner is doing, and then get people more room ...

It took a swarm-like approach for 1,000 approaches to appear, 900 approaches to fail, the other 100 to converge, before we arrived to a blend that actually made emails work better. I expect very much the same thing here.

The paradox of this is that leading an effort may actually backfire. You don’t see one particular sector, or one particular department leading the whole solution, because the solution space is vast.

As you said, as a technical adviser. I’m not leading any effort, though...

If we do figure out some combination, a cocktail method that does something about this, then of course we’ll be very happy to contribute. They will take a long time to develop, though.

For many people here, it’s a core value, not utility value. We have to design our curriculum, our cybersecurity agenda, our whole response to rumors, by taking in freedom of expression as a core value. We are unique in that around Asia, I would say.

I would say we take freedom of speech much more seriously that most other Asian countries. Many other Asian countries see it as a utility value, which could be traded if some other value of higher utility, for example if national security is at risk.

When we were working in the NAER, we talked a lot about Finland. We talked a lot about countries like Estonia, with its e-citizenship awareness programs. I wouldn’t call us pioneers... [laughs]

We are not hard-coding classes, instead we are saying that you have to achieve these things... We’re saying that the literacy means at least awareness of these things, and schools can work with the text book makers to design coherent, autonomous learning materials.

It may be designed differently, and may be implemented differently across schools, because for this new curriculum, we put a lot more autonomy to the individual schools, so that they can design the implementation curriculum, with particular details, particular fields, particular interests, or particular composition of the students.

It’s integrated. If it’s classes about the use of social media, for example making an online presentation of their own projects, it is more media-like course, then security is an essential part of it. In other cases it may be security on a more defensive nature, like how to identify ...

Of course.

Of course. This is to say, literacy is the foundation.

NAER. The National Academy of Educational Research. I was one of the development committee members, before I was made a minister. Nowadays I don’t work on the curriculum anymore, but I did enjoy working on it.

Yeah, hopefully.

Also, we try to get people into this idea that whatever view that they are perusing, critical thinking and a balanced view is always useful to their studies, as someone who learns. Because otherwise you might as well be learning from random sources, which may not actually be apparent, and ...

The point being, for example, being able to look at one argument, and find its pros and cons, the debate techniques, the fallacies that it’s falling under. Looking at propaganda, knowing it as propaganda. Learn what sources are, the basic journalism training, and how this changes or is going to ...

It’s called "Information Technology and Media Literacy". It was designed so that it is not as its own study, but integrates with all studies, and starting throughout the whole K-12. Every single part of the curriculum needs to find its link to the literacy points.

It takes technological, it takes educational, it takes an awareness of people’s responsibility to each other, for as long as it takes, it would take all sides to solve this. Eventually we’ll solve it.

We’re putting this also into our new education curriculum, hopefully starting next year. We’re working on education material on that as well. Then again, it will not be fixed by education alone.

If there’s anything we learned from the spam epic, it’s that one single method never works by itself. It takes a collective awareness that whatever message that one finds comfortable with, may not be entirely fact-checked. It requires a much more deeper understanding on how journalism works.

Exactly.