I wonder if we could talk a little bit about your poetry and specifically, this idea of communicating with machines. To make my intentions fully transparent, this is the point where we’re going to try and get a little bit psychedelic.

Because I’ve seen reference in the past that you write poetry, not only in human language, but also in machine language. You’re quite a brilliant Perl developer, and I’m sure quite well versed in many other languages in that context.

It makes a lot of sense. When I was stumbling earlier, I was trying to create some kind of correlation between this kind of awareness of potential future machinic interpretation of human affairs, and also your poetry practice.

We want to have Kevin from GitCoin on the on the podcast soon.

It relates specifically to the process of quadratic voting. Do you see those techniques ever being able to scale to elections in which people are voting for people, rather than projects? What are the implications of that, I wonder?

That’s true. On that principle, we had a Glenville on the podcast quite early. We’ve been contributors also to the RadicalxChange movement. For those who aren’t familiar, I understand that you’ve been testing a pilot in quadratic voting in Taiwan. I wonder if you might be able to explain for ...

I’ve been trained in many ways to view the merging of new technological concepts and democracy as being somewhat a technocratic imposition, something to be jaded by, and to be in an environment where it felt this was a very active and the real thing was…As I said, I felt ...

I don’t know what I’m representing right now, but still, in terms of active participation, I feel you’re such a practical person, such an optimist on these issues.

This is cool, but they are sticking flags in our shirts, I’m like, “OK.”

Then we realized we were inadvertently attending a pro China rally.

We were handed a lot of different flags at some point.

I can say as someone who has never had an intimate research interest in the practice of democracy, I felt I was walking in the future. It was such a remarkable experience.

For context, and I hope I don’t misrepresent this. You’re walking through the City of Taipei and on every corner, there’s restaurants or laundry services, there’s people counting ballots openly, and people observing the process and counting.

To the 14th. Anecdotally, we obviously, read a little bit, and actually, we’re familiar with you before of that, mostly through the RadicalxChange movement. The experience of witnessing the open democratic polling, this public…

Wonderful. I do want to say actually when you’re talking about this particular period, it related to COVID 19. Incidentally, Holly and I were in Taiwan for the only time in our life, from the first of January, 2020.

Social dog distance thing.

[laughs]

Do you see that approach scaling to other contexts? Because this is obviously a clear issue on Twitter where the incentive is to provoke outrage. Have you heard of anybody else learning from your piloting of this post? [laughs]

It was very much looking at ascendant meme warfare. It’s so interesting and incredibly progressive for you all to identify that issue of meme warfare and jump ahead of it, present exactly this vision of jokes, augmenting government function and dispelling disinformation. It’s remarkable…

It’s remarkable also because it is jumping out in front of me…Actually, we have some very close friends, some Dutch artist called Metahaven who wrote a book. This was five or six years ago. The title of the book was “Can Jokes Bring Down Governments.”

[laughs]

That’s wonderful, but as I said, there’s so many small interventions that could be discussed, because everything seems to be working in such a beautiful fluid way. One thing I’m particularly interested in is the humor over rumor, policy that you’ve been discussing, would you mind, please explaining how that ...

It’s mind blowing. Would you mind explaining? There’s so much to get through, because obviously, you’re in a scenario where you can make a difference in a week to the way a state runs, which again, it’s very difficult to get your head around, but as a result…

The idea that you could deploy this kind of idea within a week, and particularly, not just deploy an idea, but field an idea that somebody independently came up with, and then help them realize that and bring that to more people, it’s just mind blowing.

There’s a whole scandal about the fact that the vaccine delivery is being delayed because the official state offices, the dealing with the matters, are communicating via fax machine.

For context too, we’re in Germany, currently at the moment, and there’s a big scandal. As people have learned. Holly, you actually know more about this…

OK. We’ve got that covered. Audrey wants to talk COVID, because in terms of some of these open data policies, it’s our understanding, at least, that some of the experiments that you’ve been piloting in Taiwan maybe helped with the detection.

Wonderful.

You often use language that is more common among the software development community. You discuss things like forking. It occurs to me that you’re talking about democracy, or the state generally, like an open GitHub roof.

…that stuff is being made public, which I think is such a wonderful experiment in having an open policy system. I’ve noticed before, as well, when you discuss government and you talk about open data policies, we’ll talk about the implications of that and some of the successes of that ...

Yeah, exactly. That’s what I wanted to make clear. On the Wednesdays, basically, people are free to come and speak with you, under the condition that…

It’s nice to hear the opposite.

…the world is exploding with interest in this particular topic.

Wonderful. We’ll have to, at some point in this conversation, hopefully, touch on the topic of NFTs, because it seems like…

We’re here, so days don’t mean anything, just for the record. It could be any day.

Exactly.

Exactly. This would be the radical transparency part, right? Can we talk a little bit about that radical transparency? What does your Wednesday look like?

Tuesday is often traveling to different communities outside of Taipei.

Exactly. For those who don’t know, in Taiwan, you can travel with high speed rail pretty much all over the country in about an hour and a half. Is that correct?

That’s wonderful. It’s funny in a sense because given your framing of that role — correct me if I’m wrong here — where maybe describing your Tuesdays and your Wednesdays where the Tuesdays could be considered…I remember hearing something about on the Tuesday, you would travel around the country…

What is this? It seems like it’s very much emphasizing the conservation component of conservatism. Obviously, in any European or American context, that term has very, very different…

We’ll get there.

You often talk about principles of radical transparency. I wonder if we could maybe explore both of those concepts because both of them sound somewhat familiar. I think you have a very specific take on them and explore those concepts and maybe a dipper toes into how some of those ...

I’ve read about you recently, you described yourself as a conservative anarchist.

I can’t wait to talk more about that. We have so many questions.

Yeah. It’s really nice. For people who are completely unfamiliar with what you do, would you mind giving, maybe a little introduction to yourself and a loose introduction to your background?

Thank you. We also later want to ask you some questions specifically about your poetry practice because it’s something that’s been coming up quite a lot recently. It has been a really nice departure. We had a few people last week reciting poems on the podcast.

Beautiful.

Yes, exactly.

We are very casual.