The third question, on the new media. During the transition time, like from the January election last year to May, we had an experiment that I contributed to, but not produced by me.

West cost code into the east coast code. It’s very, very important to have this mutual dialog in this way, so it doesn’t get off track in the ASV project.

Exactly. Just carrying this, what you call, west coast law...

I think that’s an asset too. I wouldn’t call, we code makers, natural policy makers. I think policy making still has its place. Lawmakers still have their place.

Right. Exactly. I have my most research interest around agile governance and so on, and I do have connections of the external community, which is not at all national or region‑based. We’re just a bunch of cyberpunks [laughs] experimenting with everything.

Whenever anyone wants to have some consultation around fintech, around regulation tech, around whatever, I’m mostly just this internal expert who can provide pro bono service. That’s pretty much my...

The other parts of Asia Silicon Valley are most around investment and regional development. Those are handled out by the ASV agency, which is a semi‑independent entity, not really a branch of government. I’m not directly involved with that.

Not just a bodiless voice narrating on the whiteboard. That’s my main research interest anyway. I’m interested in that part.

Right. More hands on and much more interactive. You see the whole teacher, or at least their hands and heads.

Those are good to learn just mathematics, psychics, things that are more verbal, more knowledge based. You can’t really learn fixing a motorcycle this way though. For that matter, repairing IoT devices also quires a more interactive kind of education. We really need to charter something that’s based on augmented ...

One of the deliverables is establishing a cross‑discipline cross‑university online learning platform, which is tailor-made for things that are tangible. That means we have plenty of Coursera, edX, and the Taiwan learning communities on two dimensional videos, and the interactions with chat rooms and whatever.

The media of course is our ally. However, we can’t really delegate all the work to the media to communicate to non‑specific people. That’s the main work so far. As of the second question, the Asia Silicon Valley plan, aside from the name and the concept redefinition, I’m mostly involved ...

In a sense it’s like running a media studio. All the ministries need to be there in what we call self‑media. We can’t really count on any particular media [laughs] to serve as a proxy of the translational and the engagement work that the ministry really has their own duties ...

That’s the main work. We’re just facilitating and doing a lot capacity building with all the ministries who can face the online world as well as non‑specific people, so they can run their own engagements, public hearings and whatever, in a much more efficient way. Also consuming less resource internally, ...

At the moment it’s mostly online, because online we cannot really know who those people are. We still have to talk with them anyway.

We are building a network of people‑facing officers. It’s just like how all the media communication people of all the ministries, though by "media" they just mean traditional media. There’s no similar group to face non‑specific people, both online and offline.

Or taking commands for that matter. I’ve been building a learning circle of sorts, where people of a very diverse background -- interaction designers, policy designers, code makers, and lawmakers get to learn with each other, and supporting what we call the participation officers of each ministry.

The general experience has been great. I’ve been more or less doing exactly the same thing for many years now. Since I’ve got a staff which is entirely voluntary, basically I don’t have a ministry to command, which is great because I don’t like issuing commands. Which is what an ...

OK. My computer is out of battery.

Oh wow! It took that long?

I got the idea. I think this is really original and we did not have this discussion in Taiwan, so thank you. I’ll be using it in my talks.

Yeah, and this is a hacker thing. It’s in the Jargon Files — called “ha-ha only serious.” I know completely what you are saying. It’s the serious way to troll the governments.

Yeah, sure. But it doesn’t have to…

I mean that when Anonymous says that, "We don’t forgive and we don’t forget." Whatever they are trolling, whatever that’s happening now in the political and the media agenda. It’s very sensational, but the media again catches up on that and change the narrative by saying, "Oh! The Anonymous are ...

What you’re saying is they are not just testing it at their own community like for a change, but once they build this habit of kind of exploring and negotiating the boundaries of their own community, they start to grow and explore other systems and other communities, which then transformed ...

Limits.

They are trolling you to test how much of... The text seems to say at times it is actually something positive, because it helps to delineate the community’s code of conduct, or standards, or behaviours and the trolls are in a sense like the explorers in a social setting. Is ...

Next, trolling. This I think is very original. I don’t see this in the analysis of other hacker narratives. Meaning that people who are exploring the limits or the tolerance of the community, because they want to determine the border of the hacking, so to speak. As if they’re trolling ...

Because it just data on the disk, and the boot sector tells the computer, tells the CPU, what the data means in terms of what CPU can understand. We say that we are the bootstrapping sector that links the public, private and the voluntary sector together so that they can ...

...rebooting your computer, it first reads a piece of code that tells the computer how to read the rest of the operating system. Without a boot sector, none of the other sectors make sense. It would be just data and not code.

You know what a boot sector is?

Yes, so instead of the public sector, private sector or the voluntary sector, we say we say we are the boot sector.

It’s all done by forking the government.

This is counter-power but within the government. This is exactly because of that g0v does not have to be a party because we are not relying on our representative power. We are subverting, so to speak, the representative power from within the administrative power.

Through joining g0v, what we do is, we have civil servants with practically all the industries because we fork their websites. They join g0v hackathons and propose why they cannot get approval from the electorate officials as a fault against our own ministry. Then lobby through mainstream media, their elective ...

Meaning that, in the current Taiwan system, they get all the blame if they do something wrong, because we are not totally anonymous to public servants like in the UK. But elected officials get a praise if they do something right, because we are a young democracy. Everybody is claiming ...

Yeah, I see what you’re saying. Yes, it was the same with the Green people. Then there’s still Greenpeace, but there is now the Green Party. For that I have just one word to add. The way g0v works, every time there is a 100-people hackathon nowadays, maybe 12 people ...

But you mean that it has to enter the narrative as serious about political system, and not do anything as Flying Spaghetti Monster narratives?

This is where it comes about, and this has to be something that’s framed in every presentative narrative, not something like the Flying Spaghetti Monster, which is also a pirate party, by the way. It’s a religion of pirates.

It’s representative.

It was relegated — meaning that the digital tools are good for the existing system to broadcast your message to reach more people or something, but the reverse is not happening — or it doesn’t really have a counter-ideology, is the feeling I’m getting from the text. I’m not sure ...

My real question — now that the Bitcoin misunderstanding is out of the way — is this: You said the German people is critical of this ideology, due to it anchoring this way of hacker into politics into the hacktivism, into the politics.

This is actually a known word. So this has nothing to do with the semantics. I was thinking something about Bitcoin or something and I was going to...

As the primary meaning in the dictionary.

Yet. [laughs]

It really means "gold," right?

My next bookmark. Just a second. This whole section is very CCC-influenced. When I was reading the text I see a lot of ethos of the Chaos Computing Club getting through this narrative. My question to you is, for example this is obviously a mistranslation, this cannot really be “gold,” ...

All of this was livestreamed and transcribed, so it evolved. More, better ideas get adopted in more sites. The fringe ideas where they can continue to play by themselves, but eventually the good ideas prevailed and they were able to work something like that. This is specifically something that is ...

What we talk about then is the way they were in the Occupy movements, not just Occupy Central by the way, but Occupy Central were consciously modelling the sites as gateways — in which they had seven Occupy sites, and each one tried a different approach, and then some of ...

Once the committee goes to about 20 people, the wetware restriction enters and nobody can really know each other’s non-verbal expression means anymore. Above that number you start to see hierarchies, but not because they’re bad people, but because humans are wired like that in hardware.