Anyway, the core is that there is first a cyber norm, and based on a cyber norm, market policies, usually imposed through fines and incentives, and from the policies, then code. People will write code that are more conforming toward the incentive and policies, and finally, law.

It is. I think the recent fine on Facebook, it doesn’t so much hurts its bottom-line but rather sets what the norm is, and it’s very important in Internet governance. Or in COGOV, I’m still getting used to the new branding...

If there are things that are heavily dependent on what we call a increasing return on research, then you can set your research agenda accordingly. Of course, it’s a science policy question, so we really need to discuss this case by case.

One thing is that if there is a high chance of abuse, I would actually argue for export control, like antiproliferation is the best example, but it depends case by case of course. If there are things very easily to rediscover from first principles, then it’s a lost cause anyway, ...

But certainly not in people’s homes, like they do in...

These are more or less considered that it will be abused and so not really provided to places where it could be abused.

There was a prior art, that is to say the restriction on exporting dual-use technologies, so, technologies that can be used for both civilian and military, like nuclear technology.

...dominant philosophy is, it’s bound to amplify that.

Yeah, it’s a amplifier, so whatever your...

I think it’s very interesting, like mirror image of philosophies, and using more or less the same technology.

In the CCP, which is the Chinese Communist Party, they insist on installing a party branch, by law, actually, into any large enterprises so that each enterprise must be led by the communist agenda, which is, again, exactly the opposite direction, but this time applied to the private sector rather ...

As I mentioned, the sandbox is essentially having the society to judge the private sector’s ultimate regulations in order for the social innovations to lead the regulatory innovations.

...no appeal. There’s no due process. While it’s the same transparency technology, it is used in opposing directions.

With that configuration, there really is no accountability. If somebody made a mistake or a deliberate "mistake" on somebody somebody’s social credit, there is no court. There is no...

Using social credit, accountability is zero in terms of state because while they implement it in the private sector, the private sector is de-facto owned and controlled by the state using nonmarket forces, as you very well know.

Whereas with more or less the same technology, we’re making the state transparent to citizens by publishing all the budget data, procurement data, implementation data, planning data and then asking people to participate and comment openly as I mentioned, meanwhile, the PRC is making the citizens radically open to the ...

I think it will remain like that for decades because we still have people like me who remember the martial law and how it was like, and we really don’t want to go back there. It’s a identity thing.

That means that we are founded on the idea that freedom of expression and assembly is not a instrumental right, is not a instrumental value. It is a core value, meaning that it’s part of Taiwanese identity.

I have two slides that talks a little bit about the PRC model and the Taiwan model. What we have seen, of course, is in terms of freedom of assembly speech, and basically human rights, where according to CIVICUS Monitor, the only place in not just Asia, but all the ...

That’s still not 100 percent true. We usually say collaborative, which means that we only identify some common values, and we’re satisfied with that. It’s not really consensus. It’s like consent, that I can live with it, not I can sign my name on it.

Exactly. I don’t usually say that we’re deliberative. The informed decision part, the informed part, is utopian. It assumes that people bring to the table, honestly, their interests. That’s often not the case, even in the really deliberative Swiss model of referendum.

Otherwise, it’s all fair game.

It could be anything... Well I shouldn’t say that. The Ministry of Justice said, you cannot experiment on money laundering or funding terrorism, because we know what would happen. [laughs]

After one year, maybe the society thinks it’s a bad idea. We thank you, and your investors for paying the tuition. If the people think it’s a good idea, actually, then we just adopt the entire regulation.

First, you have to propose your own alternate regulation to run during the one-year trial. The second, the entire data and everything, must be open. It must be open innovation during the one year, for everybody to see.

In Taiwan, we’re adopting the sandbox laws, which means basically, whether you want to deliver your innovations to any of the heavily regulated areas, you get one year. We promise not to fine you for breaking the law or regulations. You’re encouraged to break regulations, but you have to do ...

The second thing is that given the common values, can anyone deliver the innovations that are pareto improvements, that are good for everyone without sacrificing any other people? Basically, it’s an innovation-focused democracy. People who propose such innovations in a previous way, especially in continental system which we share with ...

In this old model, we basically ask, who are the main organizer or representatives, how to arbitrate between their interests? That’s the two main questions any democracy asks. This one, we ask two different questions. We ask, given the stakeholders’ positions, are there nevertheless, some common values that we can ...

In any case, MSM, nobody really knows what MSM means, and also its main dialectic predecessor is multilateralism, which also is MSM. You can’t really tell each other apart. [laughs] They call it COGOV now. We’ll use the COGOV, whatever. COGOV means that we ask a different set of questions ...

There is a term recently coined by the UN’s High-level Panel on Digital Cooperation, called COGOV, or collaborative governance. It is actually a rebranding of multi-stakeholderism, which has been going on in Internet governance for decades. COGOV is easier to remember.

Democracy need to evolve into a real-time democracy, in turn, to basically give alternate means, like the Polis that I just mentioned, but also participatory budgeting, also e-petition, also all sorts of different ways, so people can feel that whatever the issue is, there is a actual place of fighting ...

With democracy, you only get to upload maybe three bits every four years, or every two years, and the three bits, two of which are discarded because of German Mandarin or whatever. It creates asymmetric hope, and that brings about outrage against the slow bandwidth democracy.

Basically, it creates hope, however terrible it is, for people who are suffering from the lack of representation. This hope is banked on the outrage against the old democratic system, which actually works really well. By using hashtags, people feel they’re part of each other’s self-consciousness even, in a real-time ...

And so on. It isn’t top-down at all. It’s basically just a meme if you will, and then people will identify with the meme, actually take control of the meme, and apply it however they want.

This mechanism basically creates a reflection of the new fact that people don’t organize like this anymore, with #MeToo, or a #ClimateStrike.

Very much so. As you have observed, in many cases, the social abilities feels that you have to join one tribe or the other, to organize and find a representative, and force the public service, which is always anonymous but to solve all the tension, to tug of war a ...

Yeah.

We create a kind of reflective stage between the facts and the ideas so that people can see each other’s feelings, and the best ideas then are the one that take care of most people’s feelings.

Everybody can relate to a fellow citizen sharing their feelings, and so this creates, I think, the missing link between the data which is objective and always out there, versus the ideas which, as you said, that everybody can have different ideas, but only a few gets presented.

Right. It’s not just a open space. It’s a reflective space, and a reflexive space let people become aware of the common good because if you quantify things like with money, with utility, and things like that as most policy planners tend to do, it is very abstract and doesn’t ...

This is actually from Paul and Green, but each consultation we run has this same shape.

Everybody can speak just to themself and identify as a stakeholder but then see that despite different stakeholders’ positions, there are common values and we can just pass these through and then leave these for maybe sandbox, or experiments, and so on. It’s not only more effective, it’s actually more ...

That’s my answer to you. If it’s on the agenda-setting stage, not on the implementation stage, then this kind of agenda-setting power, I would argue, it only helps the decision-makers because then the horizon is expanded and people don’t have to rely on traditional associations or unions and things like ...

Also, it’s critical that we see this is maybe populism because it allows everybody to escape their elites’ lie and then share their feelings, but it’s not tribalism because people can see, "We’re more or less on the same tribe, no matter how superficially we may be different."

Through this kind of a machine learning revelation of collective intelligence, people can actually see that most people agree with most of their neighbors on most of the issues, most of the time. [laughs] This is very important for a polity to emerge.

In these kind of situations, it helps enormously for people to see a accurate reflection of everybody’s feelings around this matter because if you only look at mainstream media or indeed some social media, you will see only maybe five divisive issues being repeated again and again. That led to ...

They’re emergent, like self-driving vehicles, and there’s no clear strategy for the governed because they literally just happened last year and before our budget cycle.

If we open up the agenda-setting power to the crowd, we have this reflection to the people after they vote, agree or disagree but without rebutting on each other’s sentiments around each emerging issue. These issue have the same characteristics in the sense that there’s no clear ownership within the ...

The advent of machine learning actually is not a substitution of collective intelligence, but rather in amplifying, enable the collective intelligence so that people can focus their time on moderating each other’s voice so that a real picture actually emerges, rather than being forced to this kind of step.

That is maybe, I don’t know, 0.1 percent or less of the total mail. As I said, before Internet technologies, it’s impossible to crowdsource, and so it’s impossible for the people who write to help also moderate other people who wrote and for the consensus to emerge.