Thank you. See you there.

Very surprisingly, it’s definitely getting there. Audrey, again, thank you so much. Hope to see you in Taiwan sometime. Have a wonderful week.

Definitely. We’re definitely getting there.

Thank you for reciting two poems to bookend this episode. I hope we get to say hello in person at some point in future. Audrey, thank you. It’s very inspiring and wonderful to talk with you.

That would beautiful, please do.

Thank you so much for your time. I don’t know if there’s anything else that you would like to cover that maybe we haven’t touched on?

Absolutely. We’ll have to have the UN on next week. Thank you.

Emphasizing the individual too much was actually the promotional strategy of the interdependent music industry. Those new kinds of cooperative organizations, the individual wouldn’t have thrived at all.

That’s wonderful. Because we’re coming at it from a music perspective, where we come from an independent music background. The conclusion that we came to was that everything that people liked about independent music was the interdependent parts.

I love it. Is there actually a declaration for the Interdependence of Cyberspace because I didn’t know about that?

Audrey, we have one final question that we ask all our guests, and we don’t tell them in advance obviously, because it’s fun to hear your spontaneous response. We named this podcast interdependence, and we’d like to ask people what that word or term means to them.

Certainly that’s not a bad suggestion.

It’s like the back to the future car, you know, like the…

Maybe projects in the space we were discussing, or something else optimistic, because it genuinely did feel for the two weeks I was there that I was stepping into the future, and maybe there’s 100 things that more I need to know about and we should maybe pursue with this ...

I wonder specifically speaking about these technologies or other things, do you have any recommendations for other things happening within Taiwan that we should be familiar with, and other people should be familiar with?

One thing I did want to add. Just to reiterate, again, we’re a mate, we’re big fans of Taiwan. I want to share it out right now, Final Club, which is a place where you can go and have a nice drink and listen to music.

Exactly, the array. The array of bad stuff always seems to somehow overpower the array of good stuff, which is a great shame. I’m completely with you and it’s nice to hear the sober enthusiasm on the topic.

That asymmetry in public perception is really frustrating, because generally speaking, also, there’s a lot of marketing language, there’s a lot of marketing spend on promoting the aspects of that world. They’re purely speculative and scummy.

The emphasis of people you mentioned earlier, like Vitalik, focusing a great deal of his time and energy and thinking about specifically mechanisms for the support of public goods.

It’s true. It’s a great source of frustration for me. I’ve been very, very interested in participating in the theory community for a very long time and the asymmetry between the public perception of projects built on top of a theory as mostly being speculative financialization projects.

I just wonder if there’s some potential there, using zero knowledge proofs, to be able to have…there be an avatar and parallel to the world that you’re describing, which actually subscribe to in the broader sense, give people the ability to trust that this avatar is someone who knows what ...

Exactly and also this attention between journalistic protections and protecting the state. If you have people in official state positions, who are, for example, investigating corruption related to drug cartels.

The way we would normally arbitrate that, but sadly seems to be in some decline is through journalists. You would have journalistic institutions with integrity, who can protect a whistleblower, but in the case of…

In those circumstances, that’s more what I mean with this is, in certain circumstances where one would need to establish some credibility, some assurances that, for example, this report coming out of this hospital is coming from the right person.

I was like, “Who in the world would I want to talk to about an avatar politician?” I’m like, “It is Audrey Tang.” Please…

Sorry. I hope my question’s not too much of a…

If something like a zero knowledge proof could allow us to verify credibility without disclosing identity, could there be advantages to digital politicians? In some cases, they are, maybe, optimistic, because what I love about you is, you have such an optimistic framing about things, and in a sense confirmed ...

Which for those who don’t know what that is, it’s basically an advanced cryptographic technique that allows you to verify information without disclosing information. We could probably talk about it for an hour, but that would be too off topic.

Exactly. My first question was like, “Well, who would want that job?” Then my second question was, “Is there a way potentially through using zero knowledge proofs, to…”

I wonder, we were last year in Mexico for a period of time, and we’re speaking to a friend there who interacts with the government quite a lot. The issue came up, for example of, we were talking about issues with corruption in the state, issues, obviously, in mitigating the ...

Fair point. Also, way better music.

Exactly, yes. Thank you.

Somebody creates a cartoon character, and it’s this populist evil, unaccountable figure, and to the whole idea of a digital political being is very much framed as being a dystopian kind of unaccountable, farcical…

Also, it raises in my mind, the potential in some senses of digital politicians or avatar of politicians. Now, of course, traditionally when that specter or that concept is raised, for those who are familiar with “Black Mirror,” there’s a very dystopian episode.

I’m personally quite interested in the idea of integrating zero knowledge proofs or working around identity systems. One of the things that your hologram presentation avatar reminded me of, or made me think of, is in a sense, one, the potential of decoupling a digital identity from our corporeal form.

It would become the norm so I applaud you for piloting that very early. One of things that occurs to me, are you all familiar with zero knowledge proofs?

I was reminded off from seeing for example that you’ve been known to present quite often telematically through a hologram, which is very interesting, very pression, and obviously with COVID and remote work and remote presentation lightly becoming a reality.

…I noticed there quite a great segue when we are talking about the idea of a kind of the avatar representative for the natural system like a forest. That’s a really cool intro to something I’ve been thinking about great deal.

This is where maybe I start getting a bit too psychedelic but…

Thank you.

Any more information on where that stuff might be happening it really, really welcome.

That would be wonderful, yeah. It’s really great, we’ve actually in various capacities been involved and there is, of course, such an underwhelming minority of projects that we’re thinking about applications for governance or for state based applications I should say, or environmental applications.

She was also part of the free Citizens’ Movement in Iceland about that time. It would be nice to see a book of all the poetician.

We performed with her a few years ago. She stood up and recited a poem.

Poetician. Did you just say poetician?

Early. His framing, of course, it’s just this idea that poetry as a technology is resilient generationally. There’s something about…It’s funny. It reminds me. Have you ever interacted with Birgitta Jónsdóttir?

His argument is that Shelley was writing about Internet protocols was the first maybe.

Wonderful. I’m going to publish that because even the presentation of it on the website, the bilingual presentation is very beautiful.

I think that the transition to speak about your history and your interest in poetry would be a beautiful segue.

We have some unusual, increasingly unusual questions to follow after this.