Awesome. [laughs] Thank you.

Thank you Frances for being the intermediary in all of this, and we’ll let you know when the episode’s out, and you can share it online.

We’re good. OK. Excellent. Thank you for being so generous with your time.

I will make sure that happens. I’m not sure with this platform, whether we all hang up now or something has to be done to take a copy.

Minister Tang, thank you so much for joining us on “Global Insider.” It’s sharing a fascinating conversation.

The evolution of your avatar. We’re going to follow that closely.

I just hit my wedding ring on the table. We are not going to wear your avatar. We’re going to promote it. We’re going to make it part of this podcast episode.

This is truly, truly my last question. I know you will be frustrated, but my producer is dying to know how you designed your avatar.

I know we’re not…

Does sound like it’s a bit hard to dive into.

Name one of them now. I’m going to be greedy. What is one of those geopolitical issues?

That was all of my questions. Is there anything else we didn’t cover? Is there something you want to share, or something people need to hear about Taiwan?

I like that it’s an act of positive resistance. You’re just working with whatever threads are there to build something.

That’s a really funny point. Not a funny point in that laugh-out-loud funny, but that resonates with me. I often find that I will clash on Twitter in particular with somebody, and then they find that when we have a little bit more of a discussion that actually there is ...

Free troll hugs.

Good. Well, that brings me to my very last question. You do all of this extremely serious work that impacts so many people. I wonder for your hobby, how do you use the Internet for fun? Is it shopping? Tetris? Tell me all about it.

Well, how could they say…It’s a cute joke in a way, but to say that to you, like, you’re right in front of them. It’s a terrible way to react to. [laughs]

That’s a beautiful way of seeing it. It requires that people see you, or the experience where everything that it is instead of reducing it down to the label or a shortcut that’s convenient for them.

More recently, you’ve identified as non-binary. It’s such an extraordinary journey. I wanted to hear about what that experience is and how you bring that to your work today.

What did that feel like to just cross oceans when you were still a teenager, to do that sort of work? Then at the age of 24, you decided to transition to female.

That’s fascinating. I love that you are ground breaking in that way. I guess, I had two other personal questions about your journey. Then you went to Silicon Valley a couple of years after that, and that’s a thing that a lot of people spend half of their career working ...

Wow.

How did that…

You must have been the first Taiwanese student to ever outsmart your principal in that way.

Advance math at six. You were programming when you were still in the primary school. What led you to drop out? Is it that you couldn’t be extended? You didn’t feel included? What happened?

Sorry. I was on mute for some reason. I didn’t realize you dropped out of the second year of high school. Can you tell me about that? I’m relying on Wikipedia here. I got the sense that you were a child prodigy.

I jump all over the place here but I read that you’re a fan of self-learning as well, and I feel like that’s a close cousin to what you’re talking about. Not just co-creating, or learning through creation instead of just receiving the material.

Wow, that sounds very impressive indeed. Thinking now, if you were creating that competence program now, is there a particular piece of advice or a must-read essay that you would direct people to or is it in fact just this massive collective effort and you send people back to the ...

You were first brought into government when the prime minister of Taiwan asked you to develop a media literacy program. Was it connected to that cooperative structure that was trying to deal with misinformation in this very flat, non-hierarchical way?

…interrupted you inefficiently. I did not optimize that interruption.

Did you do that when you…sorry if I…

Trading off…

Is that the sort of trade off and challenge that you face in dealing with your colleagues or in dealing with this companies and how they operate in Taiwan?

You’re really correct. Optimization is a luxury in a way that a democracy can’t afford. If you have an optimizing mentality, instead of a democratic inclusion mentality, then you can’t function as a government because you’re leading behind the hardest to reach people, or the most expensive-reserved people.

I wonder, what’s been your journey in dealing with the downsides of how technology is used. How much do you have to guard against that in your job?

One of the things I struggle with is the certainty that those companies just projected about everything that they did. I believed it a lot more in the beginning. I was much more of a tech optimist. Then I came to see more and more the dark sides of how ...

I think back on the time I’ve been involved in tech. I wasn’t a programmer, I wasn’t a startup founder, I didn’t invest in anything. I was involved in the regulatory side, and I worked for the European Union for seven years and ended up the spokesperson on tech issues.

Yes, lowercase conservative.

Is that where the conservative comes out in your philosophy?

Tell me about that.

Or is it nothing to do with geography and it’s the question of big versus small, profit motive versus Creative Commons. What do you think of the things that distinguish the two cultures?

Now you’ve seen both sides, Taiwan and Silicon Valley, you worked there from a very young age in Silicon Valley, it’s my understanding. Do you feel like there are big differences in those two cultures?

We’ve talked a little bit about what that spirit is, and how that infuses to Taiwan. How do you think that compares to China? Do you travel to China? How do you…the culture of technology there?

That was original Silicon Valley in some respect. It clashes now, with some of the business models of Silicon Valley. It certainly clashes with digital authoritarianism.

Yeah.

That is such a fascinating tension of values or world-views where I connect things like the Free Software Movement, and that kind of slightly hippie. Let’s say…

That is a great jumping-off point into the philosophy of open source. I would love it if you could tell me what your dream Internet looks like? How does the spirit of open source inform that? How does that feed into the day job that you have?

Thank you.

[laughs] Sometimes there are more basic things to deal with. Who do you consider as your most important allies? Not just people. It could be ideas, people, government. Who are the allies that Taiwan most associates with and needs to ensure its success in the future?

That’s so interesting when you’re thinking about it. I don’t mean to prophesize this, but even if you imagine the worst case scenario, and the communist regime, does somehow invade Taiwan, Taiwan will continue to exist in this digital realm. That, obviously, that is not the goal, but they can ...