And you. Live long and prosper. Bye-bye.

Audrey Tang, thank you so much for taking the time to speak to me today.

No, it’s amazing that there’s so much to talk about with you. Minister Tang, I’ve really enjoyed the discussion. You’ve identified yourself as a conservative anarchist. Can you briefly just put those two words together for us?

I could spend hours on this topic, but unfortunately, we’re at the top of the time.

On that note, you’ve talked a little bit about the importance of the digital commons in some of your other work. When I look at companies, the very big platform companies like Facebook is a good example. I do see a lot of what they operate as being what I ...

I’m curious about how that is changing the entrepreneurial environment within the Island. Taiwan has got some amazing technology companies, Pegatron and Hon Hai, which is Foxconn and TSMC, which is the major fab for the world’s semiconductors, but what it hasn’t got, to my knowledge is really, really exceptional ...

One of the notions that comes out from you a lot, is this notion of social pressure. You talk about media competency, not media literacy. We’re talking about a highly digital level of skills, probably amongst the younger population, but increasingly across Taiwan as a whole.

Right.

I’m curious from another historical perspective, how the Taiwanese government hacker community of which you were part reflected or responded when we had the Edward Snowden revelations and the greater awareness of the American National Security Agency’s, tactical operations, which involved trying to weaken thetrustworthiness of hardware coming out of ...

Right.

But it’s not just the PRC in a sense that is demanding particular constraints. The Indian government is starting to make claims about data localization, and the European Union is obviously starting to embed its own demands around citizen privacy. And in the US of course we’ve seen some moves ...

As somebody who comes from the similar internet culture background to myself, which was a free and open internet of permissionless innovation and multi-stakeholder governance, how do you look at the development of the internet over the coming 20 or 30 years?

and of course the big meme platform today is TikTok That’s growing globally, it’s it’s getting quite engaging.. And of course Taiwan itself is a couple of hundred miles away from PRC. It is the unwilling recipient of a vast amount of cyberattack. This is a huge question. I almost ...

It’s a very clever idea. And the analogy is that, 60 years ago governments had to think about how they presented themselves on radio and then on television. And now we need to think about how we present ourselves in the meme-sphere, the hashtag, the comedy that pushes things around

I can’t let you say the word meme without seeing if this is true. Do you really have comedians working in your ministries?

Right. You’ve identified a couple of interesting ideas there, and let me try to play them back. So you talk about running code and you talk about sandboxes, and the observation being that in a technological system the theory is not as useful as the actual practice where you can ...

Right. That’s an interesting idea. One of the things that I’m curious about though, is it means that within Taiwan you’ve established and you’re starting to establish a new set of norms for governing applications on the internet, at the highest layer of the stack. Earlier on, you talked about ...

Boycotting, right. But that I suppose is then contingent on you having sufficient trust from government through to individuals that the boycott would be, in some sense, effective, without the force of law behind it.

does social sanction mean kind of a legal sanction? You instruct the ISPs to…

How do you propose taking that model of co-governance to a $700 billion company, like a Facebook…

And this is the place where the first notion of the Coronavirus was identified. Is that correct?

Right. It’s like product specification almost. So I’m curious about the other side of the public space in the digital world is the social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, and we’ve definitely seen across these platforms, and we should obviously include YouTube, real issues in many, many jurisdictions around ...

I’m just curious about why you think you end up getting to consensus. When we look at open source projects, sometimes they don’t get to consensus and you get what’s known as the fork, right? The project goes in a different direction to the original. That’s certainly happened in cryptocurrencies ...

Interesting. And what sort of proportion of the legislative agenda or the policy agenda is now influenced or directed by what goes on in Polis and the joint platform?

Right. But one of the things that strikes me that is different to the internet models, goes back to your original escape from middle school, where you said you just needed an email address and some bright ideas. One of the things I noticed in Polis is that it has ...

So that’s like an idea that comes out of open source governance, which is that if I’m contributing code to an open source project which people think is useful, my status within that project rises, and I might get included in more aspects of the governance of that project.

Right.

That’s really fascinating. And the process that you’ve described, it reminds me a little bit of a citizens’ jury. So citizens’ jury, just as I understand it, is a way of bringing a representative group of the population together over a few days to have a discussion and deliberation over ...

They’re very few. Right.

You’ve done a couple of really interesting things around how you bring citizens together to engage them through the vTaiwan platform and the polis system as a means of generating consensus. Now, as I understand, the polis system is, is a tool that allows people to identify their specific perspectives ...

And that idea that every PRC technology company is only one or two steps away from being state controlled… is something that is now becoming a widely held belief in the United States and the United Kingdom, some five or six years later.

Right. So, if we unpack that a little bit, Taiwan is a mid-sized country, 24 million people. It’s pretty wealthy, 55 to $60,000 per annum GDP, which is about as wealthy as America. Higher GDP per capita than the United Kingdom. And it also has, in a sense, a clear ...

And then you move on to this idea of essentially the marketplace of ideas, the notion that well-argued positions respectfully held can get us to better outcomes in a sense. Is that a fair summary of that part of your journey?

Because we were using the Apple platform.

It’s a fascinating story there, and there’s a lot to unpack within that. So, we have the bravery, the vision of your middle school principal. We also have this engagement with the open access movement of free information and free ideas, which is arXiv founded by Paul Ginsparg. We have ...

Amazing.

Absolutely.

Well, I think it’s fair to say that your path to government has been somewhat unusual. In fact, you’ve said that as Taiwan’s first Digital Minister, you’re putting into practice, what you learned when you were couch surfing as a teenager. Can you tell us about your early experiences growing ...

Minister Tang. Welcome to Exponential View.

Hi there. I’m Azeem Azhar and you’re listening to my Exponential View podcast. Every week, I come together with a brilliant mind to discuss the intricate dance of technology and society in a rapidly changing world. My guest today is Taiwan’s first Digital Minister, Audrey Tang. As we grapple in ...