That’s a Freddy question. [laughs]

Exactly. It’s about whether the word 婚姻 belongs to the social domain or the legal domain.

I think the Constitutional Court already made the decision. The referendum now is people showing that there is votes in this issue...

Yeah, that’s right.

In any case, what I’m trying to get is that it’s already seen as part of normal life but, post-Sunflower, people are much more willing to express gender fluidity and talk about it in political terms like self-determination, body agency, body positivity. These are things that were considered very queer, ...

Please don’t quote me on that.

People feel generally much more comfortable talking about it in the open. On LGBT rights, in Asia, Taiwan is the foremost — we certainly don’t get whipped here.

Yeah, of course.

That’s the kind of change you see in an entire generation. It’s not one or two successes. It’s the different way the people conduct their daily lives and the social topics they choose.

Now, being politically active is the norm, like spreading political message about marriage equality, human rights, whatever, is seen as cool. Back then, it was seen as fringe. That’s the one large change. That’s why I always raise the idea of regulative idea.

To be awfully honest, I would say that the young people feel that it’s far more OK and far more mainstream to be political post-Sunflower. That’s the main legacy. Young people were very afraid of being seen as political from their peers right before Sunflower. Being politically apathetic was the ...

I don’t know about that...

Sheau-Tyng is actually young, so maybe talk to her after this.

I always not presume to speak for or representing young people. I’m 37 now. I’m not young by any UN-recognized means.

Hong Kong and Taiwan makes a very good contrast, because it’s the same year, the same large-scale movement. Maybe Sheau-Tyng would like to share something about how young people perceive differently...

She literally run the e-forum during the occupy.

Maybe let’s ask the young people.

It’s fun, isn’t it?

Mm-hmm, a small part, maybe a small petal.

The second thing is that because we work almost exclusively with career public servants, they’re not going anywhere, and they are required by law to be nonpartisan. There’s a strong nonpartisan culture. Even now in the cabinet, there is more independent ministers than ministers of any party. I can say ...

Of course, they would stress the fact that the Join platform, the e-petition platform, all these things, were installed in 2015 when they are still in business. They like to stress the continuity of the post-Sunflower horizontalism. That’s the first thing.

No.

No, it’s entirely...

It means that horizontal value facilitative leadership was recognized by law.

One of the success is the institutionalization of the horizontal network model. The peer network is not only a national regulation, but it’s also a municipal one now. Tainan City embraced it, and we just trained our first batch of PO’s.

Yeah, there’s many, of course.

The ministers generally think if the credit is fairly distributed, and the risk can be absorbed, they’ll voluntarily be facilitated, but if they think, "It’s my own domain. It’s my own turf. It’s something that I’m already working on for 30 years and it’s none of the other ministries’ business," ...

People generally come to me when it’s part of the three mandates that I have, open government, use engagement, and social innovation. The good thing about these three, which reinforce each other, is that there’s no clear owner of these issues. Social innovation means emergent things. That doesn’t have an ...

Yes. There’s 30 or so ministers and there’s 8 -- up to 9, but currently 8 -- horizontal ministers. As one of the eight, it’s already in the job description that I facilitate across ministries.

Actually, to be facilitated.

To facilitate.

Generally, the program that runs still continue to run, we don’t break backward compatibility. That’s the conservative part in conservative anarchism, in that we conserve the tradition and values, the people’s values. That is a soft landing to anarchism.

This is what people working in computer science maybe have the most experience of. We were all OK with having a new operating system migrating from an old operating system, we did that many, many times now.

The word I choose, such as the #TaiwanCanHelp message, connecting to sustainable goals, also is in horizontal power. It doesn’t have to immediately destroy vertical power. It’s building a viable new system, and you can do migration.

Mostly fear. They know one way to organize power and information. It’s by asymmetry of information. There’s a lot of fear of just having a contextually correct or focused dialog, because they fear that the power that they hoarded through information asymmetry will be replaced by horizontal power.

Admittedly, in the city council, and counties, and even lower levels, there’s a lot of non-transparency going on. Only the six municipalities have signed the open data charter. That means some cities and counties still have more way to go, but on the other hand, we are operating on the ...

To the power people, I complement but not reinforce representative democracy. If they’re in a national level, this is basically what we can work as a coalition so that they get more insight of what the civil society is doing. Civil society has a much clearer view of what the ...

This speaks a lot about early legitimacy of the non-profits — the human rights associations and so on — that’s working even during the martial law. They have more legitimacy even now compared to the executive branch.

Actually, the room is much larger than I initially imagined. It’s to a lot of credit of the Taiwanese people. Generally, they are OK with people who are saying "the civil society should generally take more and more of the function of the government, until we don’t have a government ...

I just work "with" the government.

You can, of course, argue that it’s not implemented the same way as the SDG framers intended, or not to that degree, but they are a regulative force. That’s my main point. Taiwan can help on that, too.

Are regulative, is what I mean. In the short term, they may not constitute a force. Even the CCP, when they changed the constitution, it’s not just the indefinite terms thing, but also rule of law, and constitutional... like placing an oath to the constitution and generally, what the global ...

And rule of law, constitution.

People can see evidence that backs this narrative, but without this regulative idea, maybe the general people will not spend so much time fighting for freedom.

When we now, like this year, when we actually have the people who work in lighthouse sing in the national day ceremony, it is a reprise of the old free China lighthouse metaphor, but this time, it’s for real.

I think that nevertheless, for all their wrongdoings, the idea that there must be more to it, to this lauded but not practiced democracy. It does shape the kind of collective imagination as what Kant would call a regulative idea -- while you can’t reach there, but it regulates the ...

While the actual use of those technologies in Taiwan was pretty brutal also from the Chiang Kai-shek regime -- especially the early years of the occupation.

In the Chiang Kai-shek era, there were people who put a lot of optimism in the so-called "lighthouse of freedom" message that the "Free China Review" press is sending out from the Chiang Kai-shek regime.

The second thing is that sometimes I compare it to the call for democracy in the Chiang Kai-shek era in Taiwan. You were there.

There’s a lot of narrative that talks about exporting this authoritarian use of artificial intelligence and so on. It’s mostly narratives at the point. We cannot see one clear example for that. That’s the first thing.