In this episode, Matt Prewitt sits down with Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s Cyber Ambassador-at-large and 1st Digital Minister, as well as the star of the new short documentary Good Enough Ancestor. It is a fascinating conversation exploring the profound intersections of technology, spirituality, and democracy.
In this episode, Matt Prewitt sits down with Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s Cyber Ambassador-at-large and 1st Digital Minister, as well as the star of the new short documentary Good Enough Ancestor. It is a fascinating conversation exploring the profound intersections of technology, spirituality, and democracy.
Topics they cover include:
Watch Good Enough Ancestor at combinationsmag.com/good-enough-ancestor.
Bios:
Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s Cyber Ambassador-at-large and 1st Digital Minister (2016-2024), is celebrated for her pioneering efforts in digital freedom. Named one of TIME’s “100 Most Influential People in AI” in 2023, Tang was instrumental in shaping Taiwan’s internationally acclaimed COVID-19 response and in safeguarding the 2024 presidential and legislative elections from foreign cyber interference. Tang is now focused on broadening her vision of Plurality — technology for collaborative diversity — to inspire global audiences.
As the first nonbinary cabinet member globally, Tang identifies as “post-gender” and is comfortable with any pronouns. She is a respected community leader and a founding contributor to g0v, an initiative promoting transparency by making information about Taiwan’s economy, history, politics, and culture accessible.
Tang has been key in developing participation platforms such as Join.gov.tw, leading to practical improvements like enhanced access to tax software and revised cancer treatment regulations. A “conservative anarchist,” Tang is dedicated to boosting digital competence and safeguarding information integrity online through collective intelligence.
A child prodigy, Tang excelled in advanced mathematics by age six and computer programming by age eight. By 19, she had held significant positions in software companies and worked as an entrepreneur in Silicon Valley. Growing up in a large family following Christian and Taoist traditions, Tang embraced pluralism and the internet’s potential to connect people based on shared interests rather than geography, fueling her drive for global impact.
In Taiwan, Tang’s generation has always intertwined politics with the internet, striving for a more transparent and inclusive society. Despite Taiwan’s martial law history, Tang and her fellow civic technologists have achieved internationally acclaimed progress toward greater governmental transparency.
During the 2014 Sunflower Movement, Tang played a crucial role in livestreaming protests against a trade agreement with Beijing, facilitating real-time communication that led to more peaceful negotiations and the movement’s success.
“Democracy can evolve.” Tang says. “We can create innovative policies by simply asking the people, ‘What should we do together?’”
There is also promising news behind Tang’s grand plan: more than half the world’s population – over 4 billion people – are holding elections in 2024. That’s over 70 countries.
Says Tang, “I want to be a good enough ancestor for future generations.”
Audrey’s Social Links:
Matt Prewitt (he/him) is a lawyer, technologist, and writer. He is President of the RadicalxChange Foundation.
Matt’s Social Links:
Additional Credits:
INTRODUCTION (Matt Prewitt): Audrey Tang hardly needs an introduction; as leader of g0v and the Sunflower Movement, she prompted major reforms in the Taiwanese government, and then as Taiwan’s Digital Minister, led some of the world’s most exciting and inspiring work in digital democracy including vTaiwan. She is one of the principal authors of the Plurality Book and a leader of RadicalxChange. We spoke on March 9th on the release of the short documentary Good Enough Ancestor, which introduces viewers to the history and perspectives that have shaped her life. In this conversation, we had the opportunity to go a little deeper. I hope you enjoy it
I’m Matt Prewitt, and without further ado, this is Audrey Tang.
Matt Prewitt:
Audrey, it's great to see you. Super happy to have the opportunity to have a conversation with you today. And yeah, thanks for joining us on the occasion of the release of the short doc
Audrey Tang:
Yes, really happy to be here virtually good local time everyone. I saw that the release roundtable is up on Combinations Magazine so it's very exciting.
Matt Prewitt:
Yeah, we're really proud of the documentary, Good Enough Ancestor. So would encourage anyone interested in this conversation to go watch that at combinationsmag.com. And what I'd really like to do is to just have a conversation about your life and your work and help people who are interested in it get a deeper window into it.
Audrey Tang:
Definitely, let's get started.
Matt Prewitt:
Super. So one of the things that comes through really strongly in the documentary is that you have a relationship with spirituality and with this sort of practice of calmness and equanimity that is really important to your work. And it's necessarily touched on quite briefly in the documentary, but I'm hoping you can say a little bit more about what that is and what that means to you. What does your spiritual practice look like? How does your work connect with your well-known ideas about Daoism? Maybe you can just kind of give us an intro into that.
Audrey Tang:
Yes, certainly.
So to me, Daoism is really not a religion, but rather a survival skill. I learned Qigong, the breathing exercises, and just Zazen, right? We call it Dazuo, but it's the same as the sitting meditation when I was four years old. And so, from since I have memory, I've always approached spiritual reality with a sense of curiosity, like I want to learn everything there is to learn about this idea of the emphasis on emptiness, the silent core from which all of phenomena arise. From exploring that phenomena is as interesting as exploring the outside world.
And so practically I do regular meditation. I observe my thoughts, their interconnections. I find in the stillness, become more aware of how those different ideas shape collective outcomes, both individually and also as a group. And I think one thing Taoism encourages us is to move in harmony with natural flows rather than to force any particular outcome.
So this parallels with my later engagement with the open movement, which is to say if we observe a problem, we invite everyone in to address it collaboratively, rather than commanding people to follow a single directive. And so this idea of a space key, which is the largest key on the keyboard, was central to the Daoist practice of holding a space, just breathing, and entertaining the thoughts as guests and...from my own thoughts, thoughts from other people, and so on. There are guests in this shared space.
Matt Prewitt:
Super, and when you were in the documentary, it's mentioned that at some point in your teen years, you did some kind of a retreat or something, or took some sort of a break in which to focus on this. What was that?
Audrey Tang:
Yeah, so it was when I decided to quit school, essentially.
Because that was not that easy to, basically, take it all or nothing plunge into entrepreneurship when somebody, you know, have always told you as part of the school that you really need to get a good grade to get a good university and things like that, credentials and so on. Basically the social expectations and the reality that I was experiencing which is across the internet on the preprint server – you can just write to any researcher and just start doing research together.
These two worlds doesn't seem to agree on some very basic norms. And so making that decision requires me...to sort out all those different parts of myself, Audrey that's on the internet, the person that's in the schools, and also the family expectations, and so on. And so I focused just to clear such a space, both physically and also temporary, to just...watch, observe, witness these different norms, thoughts, until they converge and fuse into something coherent. And so once I'm back, I just went to the school and told the teacher and also head of the school that I just want to do research. This is what I truly want. And the head of my school was like, “Ok, you don't have to go to school anymore from tomorrow on. I'll fake the records for you so that you don't get fined for breaking compulsory education.” And so I think this instilled in me both a belief in the bureaucratic innovation capabilities, but also the potential that if, if one sorts out this inner coherence of the inner plurality, it does have a way to shape the norms around the other people around the world so that they see also that the old norm is not the only norm possible.
Matt Prewitt:
It's actually, can, I wanna stay in this early part of the conversation a little bit on the topic of your life and the influences that have shaped you, but I can't resist the temptation to ask a little bit more about school. There's a lot of ideas out there recently about the purpose of education and the utility of education and what are people getting out of it, what are people not getting out of it.
Audrey Tang:
Sure, of course.
Matt Prewitt:
And school is also an important idea in the history of democracy. There are important thinkers about democracy who have seen, for example, state education as a critical part of forming a democracy. What do you think about that? Was your experience of school an experience of sort of being forced into an institution? Was leaving school good for you? Do you think that it, even if it was good for you, is it good for everybody? What do you think about the role of education?
Audrey Tang:
Well, I mean, I've been to three kindergartens, six primary schools, and one year of middle school before deciding to drop out. So like during the first 10 years between when I was, say, four and I was 14, like every year I'm getting out of a school and getting into another school. And so it is not possible to speak about this in a generalized fashion. What it did teach me though is that it is really about finding your community, finding a bunch of people to build civic muscles, to build relationship muscles, and to make sure that the...coherent understanding is done not just by a single person reading the books and so on but by having conversations and even exactly the same textbook because I attended the sixth grade twice when I was 10 and then when I was 12 in Taiwan and carry completely different meanings just because the teachers the classmates and so on are just different when it comes to the backgrounds when it comes to the spiritualities even the coaches that it came from. And so yeah, I think it is very valuable for me to then identify that, now I want to mingle with a different set of people, the researchers or the entrepreneurs and so on, instead of, you know, just other people 14 years old or other people 15 years old. So I think it did teach me the importance of communities and understanding in the context communities and also got me into this, I guess, sense of ease in switching to a different community, kind of almost like code switching.
Every year and then for 10 years I'm like okay I'm ready to switch to a community that is a mixture of online and offline that values curiosity because they're researchers and also that they don't care about the age that I am.
Matt Prewitt:
Yeah, let's put a pin in that and maybe come back to the topic of education because I think it's sort of underestimated in a lot of conversations about democracy. But more on the theme of your development and your worldview. I know you're a big Leonard Cohen fan and I am too. Another great moment in Good Enough Ancestor.
Audrey Tang:
Mm-hmm.
Matt Prewitt:
...is you explain your interpretation of the famous Leonard Cohen quote, there's a crack in everything, and that's how the light gets in. The way you put it in the documentary is that you observed a gap between the sort of world that technology was,
Audrey Tang:
Yes.
Matt Prewitt:
...creating in Taiwan and the traditional values or the traditional society. And you saw these things apart in some way, but rather than viewing that as a chasm or an abyss, you saw it as a generative opportunity. I'm really curious if you can elaborate on that.
Audrey Tang:
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, definitely. So I think technologies, when the societies are ready to steer it, has this healing function. There's another Leonard Cohen song, I think it's called Calm Healing, that talks about, longing of the branches to lift a little bud, a longing of the arteries to purify the blood.
So it's almost like the logic of plants and the logic of animals. Like two different ways of healing, but like both are healing nevertheless. And so, and both relies on this artery or branches that is to say the connective tissues, the connectivity between the parts in a organism and then when the connectivities are active, then the organism is ready to adapt to the surrounding environment, in this case, the emergence of internet. And if there is no agency, if the organism feels that it is just facing technology as something happening to it, then there's learned helplessness, there's depression, and things like that. I think to me, both the anthem and also comp healing shows that agency doesn't have to be a, you know, let's solve everything with one single action solutionism, especially not tech solutionism. It can be something very organic of just people sharing their feelings to people who are also observing the harms or the impact that technology is having to them. And just by sharing feelings among each other, we build this kind of branches, we build this kind of arteries that can collectively heal this polarized divide between society on one side and technology on the other.
Matt Prewitt:
What do you think it is about Leonard Cohen that makes his songs so interesting?
Audrey Tang:
Well, I think he is first and foremost a poet and with this very philosophical bent and just so happens that he is later on capable of putting some melody to it. But I see him mostly as a poet. And I also think he speaks in a register, as I mentioned, that covers like, you know, all of the living organisms, all of the plants, all of the animals and so on.
So less about the specificity, but rather about the underlying protocol, if you will. And so this protocol level thinking, think, is also why it can apply to a lot of the situations that maybe Lennar Cohen did not have in mind when he wrote those lyrics, because they're isomorphic. That is to say, equal in structure in many different circumstances.
Matt Prewitt:
He has an album, the album that Anthem is on called The Future, it's from the early 90s and there's a bunch of other interesting songs on that album. Which it seems to me that when he wrote those songs he was grappling with the sort of…
Audrey Tang:
Mm-hmm.
Matt Prewitt:
…fall of communism and that kind of early 90s moment, which appears to have been an important formative moment in your life as well.
Audrey Tang:
Yeah, he mentioned the Berlin Wall, right? Give me back the Berlin Wall. So I think yeah, that's certainly the case. I mean, my dad, as a journalist, covered not just the fall of Berlin Wall, but before that, the Tiananmen Square protest. In 89, he covered until the 1st of June, which is very fortunate for our family, because something terrible happened three days afterwards. And so he made it his PhD study to basically see the communication network in such student uprising and the influence such communications have on the dynamics of the group and eventually the outcome. And so because that's his PhD thesis, when I went to Germany, to Sackland, to Duttweiler to study with him when I was 11, his research subjects, that is to say early 20s people from Beijing, from other places in China that participated in the Tiananmen Square that cannot return home anymore and have to find a different life, a different study and so on in Europe. So I remember them debating very vigorously about first the role of technology that can have on democracy, but also how it could have been different if they organized differently. So that left a very early impression.
Matt Prewitt:
What do you think of the, are you familiar with the song Democracy on that album?
Audrey Tang:
Yeah, democracy is coming to the USA.
Matt Prewitt:
Yeah, how do you hear that song? What do you think of the, are there any sort of lyrics from it that stand out to you? I just think it's an interesting, I mean, there's a bunch of lines that I think are interesting. It's coming to America first, the home of the best and of the worst. It's here we've got the range and the machinery for change. It's here we've got the spiritual thirst.
What do you think he means? What do you think he's, I'm just curious what you, to me it's a little bit hard to interpret. And I'm curious if it means anything to you.
Audrey Tang:
Yeah, I mean, of course I know that song because it literally opens with the knives in Tiananmen Square. And to me, I think the stanza that you just mentioned is basically saying democracy is not just mechanism, it's not just a set of rituals or a set of rules, it's not just information system design. Fundamentally, it is about feelings and how people share their feelings.
And I quote, that the heart has got to open in a fundamental way, right? So this is a more radical exchange that happens in democracy. It's expanding beyond elections. It is basically saying, the psychological wounds, the spiritual wounds, and so on in our every aspect of life, by steering our polities together, we can help to heal those divides and heal those wounds together.
If we open our hearts in a fundamental way. So to me it's also talking about democracy as kind of a social technology of feelings as input and social fabric as output.
Matt Prewitt:
Yeah, he has a beautiful way of, I think, conveying the idea of brokenness as an opportunity or as a point from which something beautiful can be created. There's another, you know, what you were just saying reminded me of another line, which I can't remember if it's from the same song, but he says, every heart to love will come, but like a refugee. Which I think is just so beautiful.
Audrey Tang:
Mm-hmm.
Yes. Right, it's right before they ring the bells that still can ring.
Matt Prewitt:
Right, that's also. Yeah. so, you, you also, the, mean, the other moment in the documentary that stands out is you, talk about, this, you talk about how you grew up in a, in, in an environment in which there were lots of different people with lots of different ideas. And that helped you sort of see, that helped you get this ability to sort of see multiple sides of things, and see generative potential in the conflict or in the irreconcilability of different valid perspectives on the same issue. How do you, first of all, I can relate to that. That's something that I have grappled with a lot. And I think it's something that many lawyers, like me have also grappled with because it often is just possible to see both sides of something in a way that can be generative or it can be paralyzing. How do you make it generative? How do you ensure that that is a generative state rather than a paralyzing state?
Audrey Tang:
Mm-hmm.
Audrey Tang:
Yeah, well, I, a few months ago, got this laser surgery to my eyes, so I'm not wearing an eyeglass anymore. What it does is that it's called laser blending vision or LBV. That makes one of my two eyes see very clearly near and the other eye see very clearly far. But I like the earlier version of the laser surgery monovision, which would leave a gap in the middle.
The blending vision basically shapes both eyes such that in the middle the brain just fuses those two images together. So I see very clearly near and very clearly far, but extra clearly on the middle range. It is quite magical. And so I'm using this metaphor. Basically the idea is instead of just saying that there are differences and there are conflicts, and we cannot do much about it. We just accept that it exists. Just saying this, I think, requires some emotional investment already. It is, frankly speaking, draining if you're just keeping saying only this.But then I think the blending part is interesting because then the mind also has a way to find what we call the uncommon ground, the common ground that is very rare to be admitted by either side. But if you then see their conflict in light of that uncommon ground then actually the entire perspective changes because like suddenly you see three dimensions instead of just two dimensions with two poles and so I think it takes some training it takes some practice but now I very much entertain the idea that if I cannot yet see a blending vision of an uncommon ground it's very much my problem not a problem of one side or the other side. If I really cannot see a blending vision just because somebody says something that is too removed from where I am, I actually should move closer and spend some time and maybe do a, hey, there's no graphic, you know, just hanging out with them until I can then blend with their horizon. So yeah, I do think that in any practice, it doesn't start naturally. Certainly there's a lot of...mechanisms in our mind like tribalism, in-group, out-group and so on that prevents us from seeing this way. But with some practice, think anyone can see that.
Matt Prewitt:
It's a great gloss on democracy as well, because, I mean, I'm curious what you think of this parallel, but it strikes me that that sort of paralyzing view of the existence of multiple perspectives is sort of core to the critique of democracy or this anti-democratic thought. Whereas the kind of training…Audrey Tang:
Hmm.
Matt Prewitt:
…training ourselves to be able to find that middle ground in ourselves, but then also between ourselves in society. seems like the, that's the beautiful possibility that democracy aims at. And we need better ways, I think, of reminding ourselves of that, of training ourselves as individuals or of bringing forth that kind of movement towards the uncommon possibilities in society in order to remember the positive potential of democracy. Let's hear, yeah, sorry, go ahead.
Audrey Tang:
Yes. Yeah, no, I just saying I totally agree. And also, there's now assistive technologies, know, the sense making AI is the polis, bridge making algorithm, even community notes, pro social media, and so on all these lines of research and now products is about saying, you know, although it could be difficult for a person with just a couple minutes of spare time to immediately jump to the uncommon ground, there exists ways, like a data journalism, basically, that we can teach machines practice to offer a first draft. That's then, after seeing that, then we are exposed to the common knowledge. That is to say, I also understand the others I saw it as well. And then it's impossible to ignore the fact that at least one uncommon ground exists.
Matt Prewitt:
The, we've already thrown the word democracy around quite a bit. It's word that's been abused quite thoroughly over the past quite a long time, honestly. And I'm, you know, for example, one sort of unfortunate abuse of the word is, know, I mean, some people, think at this point hear the word democracy as…
Audrey Tang:
Mm-hmm.
Matt Prewitt:
…you know, kind of like a mask of American power or something like that, right? And I'm curious what, you know, just in order to sort of fight through the accretions around this word, what does it mean to you? Like, why is that word so important to you? And what is it? Is it a form of government? Is it cultural phenomenon? How do you pin it down?
Audrey Tang:
Hmm. Yeah, mean yesterday in South by Southwest, Cory Doctorow and I in the Creative Commons house moderated by Anna, leader of Creative Commons, talk about the open movement. And the open movement is like the democracy movement. It has been stretched into so many contexts that it sometimes feels empty. Like what is actually the defining characteristic?
That can cover open source, open access, open weight models, open government, so on and so forth. At the end of the day, maybe there's none. There's just a family resemblance, right? And I think democracy is in a similar shape. But to me, again, like the open movement, it is about movement. It is both a movement away from something. And in this case, away from overly centralized decision-making forms, away from dictatorship, away from autocracy, basically. But also it is a movement toward something as well. And to me it's toward the ever-present possibility that anyone can meaningfully contribute to the collective intelligence, the collective decision-making.And so I analyzed the latter part, the part that is a positive, not just a negative freedom of democracy in bandwidth and also in latency. So bandwidth is how many bits, how many useful information can one contribute in decisions related to ourselves? And if it's just one referendum vote, that's just one bit. If it's choosing a candidate out of eight, that's just three bits. But using much more high bandwidth ways, including quadratic voting and funding, which is higher bandwidth, all the way to national language to let deliberation and so on co-creation.This improves the amount that any single person can usefully contribute to affect collective decision making. And if we do that continuously instead of once every four years, the latency, the time to wait is also much shorter. So at some point, just like if you move a picture,
Audrey Tang:
You know, 20 times a second to the mind. It feels like a moving thing. If you practice democracy defined as in a high latency, very, sorry, a high latency, very low bandwidth voting ritual, then it doesn't feel like it's moving, right? It feels like it's just a checkpoint in time. But if you start to practice democracy with a much lower band, lower latency, and much higher bandwidth, then that feels like a moving picture, almost like continuous democracy. When you can start e-petitions, participatory budget, presidential hackathon, idea-thon, you name it, like any given time, and at any second there's like multiple ways for you to contribute in a high bandwidth way, then it feels like something that is continuous, something that's moving and more like an organism that can kind of steer its own course.
Matt Prewitt:
That's super interesting. We should, I wanna return to that maybe later in the conversation because it seems like what you're, the picture you're painting there, well, first of all, there's a very interesting point about the role of information in democracy, which you have spoken about before and I'd love to unpack a little bit. There's also a metaphor in what you just said that I haven't quite, quite…
Audrey Tang:
Mm-hmm.
Matt Prewitt:
…thought of before, is the idea of democracy as basically like a media experience.
Audrey Tang:
Mm-hmm, yes, as a moving picture.
Matt Prewitt:
Yeah, and I'd love to return to that and discuss that in light of some of sort McLuhan's ideas and some of these other ideas about the relationship between media and form of government.
Matt Prewitt:
Let's talk a little bit about the Sunflower Movement and about your political experiences in Taiwan. Can you bring us back to 2014 or perhaps before that and help us understand how the Sunflower Movement evolved and what the sort of context of its emergence was?
Audrey Tang:
Certainly. And so in 2013 and then up to Q1-14, the president of Taiwan was enjoying a 9 % of approval rate, which is not very high. And in a country of 24 million people, that means anything the president says, 20 million people were very skeptical about it.
And so one of the reasons why was that there's this perception that the people are now very close to each other thanks to social media, thanks to real time live streaming. But then the government is perceived as very far away and there's kind of nothing that a civil society can do that can meaningfully affect how the government works. So there's a perception of the latency gap between the administration and the democratic institutions on one side and very quickly changing the social networks and so on on the other. And Taiwan already at that time was one of the most highly connected in terms of internet and bandwidth and society that is very digitally savvy. And so because of that, there's a lot of organized actions and each one pushes the front a little bit of how many people can coordinate using just internet-based tools to support, to empower people on the streets, basically. And so I was involved with G-Zero-V, or g0v, is a movement that started late 2012 that look at all the government websites, something that Gov.tw, and make shadow versions of those websites.
So something that g0v.TW. So changing an O to a zero gets you into the shadow government that deliver the same information like budgets or dictionaries and so on, but much more interactive and always lower latency. That is to say it's open source, it's creative commons. So if you have some idea, you can easily change it by making a contribution. And so the g0v people supported many civil society organizations.
Audrey Tang:
in the digitalization of their common cause in putting on, for example, a tool that let people look at exactly how would a trade deal with Beijing affect their company. So they just enter the name of their company. It shows exactly how does the trade deal affect them and exactly how, so on and so forth. So armed with these almost like group picture kind of sense making tools, people become much more informed. And so I think it comes to a point where in March when we occupied our parliament peacefully for three weeks, we very explicitly said we're not just protesters who are against something, which is the opaque process to lead to the fast-tracking of the trade agreement, but we're also demonstrating something.We're demonstrators showing that if you include a million people on the street and many more online into such conversations. It doesn't become chaotic. The idea that if you invite everybody in, it would just be chaos is actually wrong. And we can prove it by hosting, like facilitated conversations, citizens' assemblies, and so on, around the occupied streets of the Parliament. It's a collective sense-making learning process that every day inches a little bit more around the coherent set of ideas and at the end of three weeks the speaker of the parliament basically said, okay the people have a point, we're going to adopt those points, go home. So it is one very rare occupy that converged instead of diverged.
Matt Prewitt:
So would you say that the core of the movement had to do with the sort of procedural issues about how to make democracy work rather than substantive issues like trade deal or no trade deal?
Audrey Tang:
Well, I think there is urgency in that matter because if we don't take matter to our own hands, the parliament will pass the trade agreement the next day. So there's a shared urgency. But also, there is this recognition that it does require everybody's input. So it affects pretty much everyone. So in a sense of nothing about us without us, it requires a instead of just one specialized field of knowledge, it requires the lived-in experience and wisdom from all the different corners of the society. So it is basically an urgent issue that no special field, specially trained expert, can readily solve by themselves. And so the breadth and the urgency both demanded this kind of way to do democratic inputs.
And now fast forward 10 years when we launched Engaged California with Governor Newsom just a few weeks ago. Again, the topic is about how to recover better from the wildfire in Eaton and police aid. So it has the same structure. Basically, this is not a hyper specialized field that just one department can solve everything. No, this is all of society efforts to recover better. And it is very urgent in that if we don't make something work together, the polarization, the infighting, and things like that will really cause a lot of harm in terms of delayed recovery. So I think this general shape is a good shape to trigger this kind of society-wide conversation.
Matt Prewitt:
Yeah, it's interesting to me because I think that one of the, I mean, something that I find frustrating about many, democracy, or indeed anti-democracy movements around the world is that there seems like, there seems like there's often a focus on the substantive outcome rather than the process. And one of the things that I've,
Audrey Tang:
Mm.
Matt Prewitt:
I've hoped that RadicalxChange movement could sort of redirect attention towards is public attention to the process. I feel like public engagement in the question of how decisions are made and the procedures of government feels like such a, feels like a much more productive area of engagement to me than this sort of fixation on outcome. Because if you're fixated on the outcome, then you actually, you actually, I mean, first of all, it's short-sighted. And second, it means that the public isn't thinking about the structure of the society and the structure of government. I wonder why...
Why do you think it kind of came naturally to the g0v movement or to Taiwan more broadly to be concerned with the procedural dimension of governance in that period?
Audrey Tang:
I think a historical fact is that democracy and the internet are equally new to the Taiwanese people. When we first lifted the martial law after decades and decades of censorship and top-down control and speech and association, that was the late 80s and it is also the same time that a so-called PC compatible the personal computers are basically being manufactured out of Taiwan on a huge volume and making it very accessible. And so from the very beginning, it is not like this set of people doing bureaucracy, during democracy, doing the procedures for like 200 years, and then these new people challenging it with new technology. In Taiwan, it's the same generation of people, literally the same people that is exposed to democracy for the first time and then also to the internet for the first time. And so by the time that we have the direct voting of the president in 96, that is already after the browser, the World Wide Web, the e-commerce and things like that, right? So from the very beginning, we see democracy as social technologies that can upgrade every year or so, like the Taiwan semiconductor layout that can consistently be upgraded by improving the throughput, that is to say the bandwidth, and also reduce the latency. So you can almost see a kind of engineering-like mindset. We change our constitution, like amended, I think six times, seven times during a few years around that time. And so yeah, it's just like the very beginning of the US Constitution. People passed it, but then expect amendments and a lot of amendments did come. And so because of this, I think we always have this much more startup feeling when it comes to the process innovations. And so in 2014, again, people have seen in other places of the world, the Occupy movement.
And many Occupy movement experimented with new decision-making procedures. Po.lis came from the Seattle movement. Lumio, another tool we used at the time, came from the New Zealand Occupy movement. And not to mention, ePetition from Iceland, Participatory Budgeting from Brazil, and so on and so forth. So people, when we occupied the Parliament, we already have this kind of textbooks, literally Manuel Castells textbooks about the earlier attempts and also the open source code that we can set up ourselves as situational applications. So I think in terms of the culture, we always have this idea that if it doesn't work, it is not because we lose this battle, but because maybe it's structurally done in such a way that makes everybody lose. And so it's easier to upgrade the protocol upgrade the process, platform, instead of just the product.
Matt Prewitt:
Yeah, that's interesting. That seems like an important attitude to try to bring to other parts of the world.
Audrey Tang:
Mm-hmm.
Matt Prewitt:
Now, when we get to 2014, there's this interesting historical moment in which the parliament building was occupied by students. there's an interesting kind of bizarre mirroring between that moment and the January 6th phenomenon. And I wonder if you can...
Say something about that. What do you think about that parallel, which I'm not the first to notice.
Audrey Tang:
Yes, certainly. I mean, for the first few minutes, they are similar, I guess, because they both involve the physical occupation of legislative spaces. On the other hand, what almost immediately diverged between the two movements was the idea, as I mentioned, of a demonstration, not just a protest. The sunflower movement, from the very beginning, was about demonstrating, showing a different process to achieve the same goal, which is a more fair trade agreement. It's possible by including everybody that's not in the parliament. So it's an explicit invitation, both offline and online, to welcome people, to think more deeply, to deliberate about what could be fair for everyone when it comes to trade deals with other external...qualities. What it's not is that it's not just stopping the passing of the trade deal. So I think the original kind of story of sunflower movement was both that the opaqueness of the process, we need to shine a light, hence sunflower, to the process, but also we need to be that sunflower.
That is to say, to build new processes that are much more radically transparent. And so I think, yeah, there is similarities in the sense that they both involving a parliament building, but the software that's running in Taiwan is quite different.
Matt Prewitt:
Yeah. One of the important roles that you played, you can feel free to add to this or correct me if I'm getting a little bit wrong, but one of the important roles that you played was to set up a mechanism for live streaming the dance. And through doing that, you were able to show that the movement was nonviolent.
Audrey Tang:
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yes.
Matt Prewitt:
that the movement had this kind of productive message as opposed to just trying to stop something. Maybe you can say a little bit more about what you did and why it worked.
Audrey Tang:
Mm-hmm.
Well, I take it as a plural you because definitely I'm not the only person. There's dozens and dozens of people working under the g0v common badge that provided the right to communicate because we do think broadband is a human right. And we're not alone in providing such services to the occupiers in the parliament. There's also a team of lawyers that provided legal support to support the human rights. And there's also a team of medical practitioners and nurses that basically protect the right to health in the occupied Parliament. And so communication, due process, and health, these are like the three things, like air, sunlight, and water, that empowered the Sunflower Movement.
And so my personal contribution involves, I guess, carrying a 350 meter ethernet cable so that people can live stream with higher bandwidth and lower latency as opposed to the WiMAX. People probably have forgotten that now, but there's an alternate way that's not 4G, that's slightly faster than 4G to provide such kind of live streaming, and also making sure that online there is a shared website called g0v.today that people can connect and just at a glance see all the deliberations that are happening around the Parliament, almost like a program of a festival of sorts, and then also for people who cannot physically make it, then the live stream, the live text, and the online forums so that people can chime in asynchronously or synchronously without necessarily traveling to Taipei. And what it does is that it first demonstrated the non-violent nature of the movement, but also it made it much easier for people abroad, like in different countries, in different time zones, to care and to see that their caring did affect – somewhat – the conversation, the outcome, to provide this real-time feedback that if I type a supporting text and the people receiving it, you can literally see them reading it and it changes the live stream and so on. And so it provided connective tissue across civil society groups. And so none of the 20 or so NGOs occupying corners of the parliament felt alone because they're connected quite literally by the internet.
Sure, yeah, I was just saying that the Parliament's almost like a festival, a program of sorts, is posted online in g0v.today so that people can read that and just choose the part of conversation and to see the live stream, the textual reporting, the online forums, so people can chime in asynchronously or synchronously without necessarily traveling to Taipei. So it's not just a demonstration of the nonviolence, but it is a real-time feedback system, a steering system, so that people can type something and see their typing being read in the live stream by the people occupying the Parliament. And they receive the support, they say something grateful in return. And so it provided connective tissue across civil society groups in different time zones and the 20 or so NGOs that are in different corners of the occupied Parliament never felt alone because they are quite literally connected by the internet.
Matt Prewitt:
Super. I wonder if you can say a little bit more about the nonviolence. What was the role of nonviolence, nonviolent philosophy in the sunflower movement? And how do you personally think about that? I'm curious in particular if it connects to your spirituality or your larger worldview.
Audrey Tang:
Yeah, the people facilitating the conversations around the Occupy Parliament had training in nonviolent communications and also focused conversation methods, facilitations, and so on. And so I think this is quite deep, actually, because with violence, nobody wants to spend time in dialogue. People would just enter this fight or flight mode, and then you don't have solidarity that can lead to co-creation of workable policies anymore. You have solidarity of a different kind, right? And so by de-escalating using non-violent methods, including live streaming, but also art, humor, know, public creativity, there's a lot of art in the sunflower movement, including music and so on. By amplifying those non-violent co-creational parts, it transforms a political conflict into a space of collective imagination. And also to me personally, because if my heartbeat goes above a certain beats per minute when I was a child, I would faint and wake up in hospital or something. So nonviolence for me is again a survival skill, no matter how radicalized that the crowd around me feels during the Occupy I always make sure to almost instinctively like breathe deeply to find a healthy distance to ensure that I hear from not just this part, but also that part like almost literally slowing down my clock rate like pressing turbo and Slow down my motions and so on and then making sure that we can then see the living beings around us as interdependent manifestations instead of in a kind of army that is trying to win a certain battle, we see ourselves as interconnected in a nonviolent perspective. So I think that also goes back to my early Daoism training.
Matt Prewitt:
There are very interesting puzzles around this for me. example, one puzzle is like, sometimes it can be hard to draw the line between violence and non-violence. For example, if you have a non-violent movement that occupies a parliament building merely by pushing past some guards or something, there's sort of a minimal violation of a...
Audrey Tang:
Anyway.
Matt Prewitt:
…property law or something like that. Where do you, so I guess the first question is, how do you think about that? mean, how do you, where do you draw the line? How radical should our nonviolence be, first of all? And then the second is, the second part of the question is, this relationship between violence and information seems increasingly important to me because,
Audrey Tang:
Mm-hmm.
Matt Prewitt:
So you've got things like nonviolent communication, which already implicitly acknowledge the idea that communication or information can, certain contexts, tip into coercion on a personal level. And then also on a larger level, on a strategic level or governmental level, there's a very interesting relationship between information and...power. And there are really, really difficult puzzles in here and I'm curious if you have ways of navigating them.
Audrey Tang:
Yeah.
So first of all, don't think civil disobedience is necessarily violent just because it breaks a regulation, a norm, or a law. I don't think that's violent in the physical harm or verbal harm sense, because in a sense, well, you can say that the norms are harmed, but the norms is not a living being that can suffer.
So by saying that it's harmed, it's a little bit like saying a corporation, a company is harmed. I guess it makes certain sense in the extended metaphor sense, but certainly it is not the original sense of harm or suffering. And so, yeah, I think the red line, your first question, is indeed just focus on whether it is a living being that can suffer suffer from the violence that was caused and so that to me is the is the red line and Sometimes the harm is already done. So the focus needs to be on de-escalation and also on mutual care so that people can heal from those harms that are already done, but of course is in no way Justifying any existing or future acts of violence or harm.So I think this is a pretty standard textbook definition of nonviolent action or direct action for that matter. To your second point, yes, I do think there are info hazards and there are ways to deliver harm and violence and so on across the screen, of course. And so there needs to be a lot of design to make sure that it's not those abuses that dominates people's attention.
Audrey Tang:
You know, since 2015, there's a lot of research into the engagement through enragement thing that basically says the online...abuse, toxic harm and so on, messages have a way to going viral and no amount of debunking or no amount of after-the-fact clarification can clear away the kind of addictiveness of the dopamine cycle that people just keep pulling those machines slots to receive another hit of getting abuse, abusing others, and things like that. And so a lot of the work that goes into pro-social design is about making sure that an online place, just like the offline non-violent space that we hold, can prioritize different logic that is much more oxytocin or serotonin, that is care-based instead of this abuse and essentially hate-based dynamics.
And so yeah, that is also one large part, I think, of the plurality. Movement is just to find some design patterns that you can consistently apply to online and also offline interactions.
Matt Prewitt:
All right, so building on some of the ideas that we were just getting into with information, I've long been interested in Marshall McLuhan and in particular, McLuhan's ideas about the relationship between media and politics. So just to set the table here, he has...
A lot of interesting ideas, one of which can be summarized fairly concisely by the insight that different eras in media can sometimes drive a different shape of politics. So for example, he thought that the era of radio tended towards authoritarianism because of the way that people engaged with radio, because of the way that it made it possible for sort of the voice of a single person to reach the ears of millions of people simultaneously and sort of transfixed them through the nature of the media experience.In 2024, we saw a lot of societies move away from the commitment to democracy. And to me, seems like too much of an international sort of phenomenon to be a pure coincidence. And I'm curious what you make of it. How do you see it in light of that kind of McLuhan view? I mean, that's the first question that we can kind of get into what to do about it.
Audrey Tang:
Yeah, so in a sense, what you just described is a dynamic of broadcasting. That is to say a single person having the reach of millions and millions of people, but there's no way for those millions of people to talk back. There's no broad listening that is counterpart of broadcasting. And what we have seen recently is that this kind of broadcasting power is amplified with what's called algorithmic targeting. That is to say, instead of like the previous era, where there's a fixed number of broadcast channels on radio or on TV, and people in the same living room or in the same village, the same city, kind of shared some common experiences, like people in APM in Taiwan, they follow one of these long running shows or things like that; however, as we mentioned earlier in 2015, online social network platforms switched to what's called a For You feed, a personalized feed.And so coupled with autoplay and later on with short form videos and with touch screens, it resulted in what Jonathan Hyde described in the anxious generation, a very different landscape where each person is alone and what we see in our respective screens have nothing in common with each other. And so in this sense, the social fabric is discovered by the algorithms, by the social network platforms. But instead of strengthening them by making sure that people have shared experience, common experiences, it just ditched that. So it kind of strip minds the social fabric and just sell the attention to the highest bidder. And in election season, usually the highest bidder is the bidder with some very interesting message to push that they can otherwise not succeed in traditional ways of campaigning and things like that. And so what it does is that it essentially created a market that lets people sell bypassing fact checking as a service.
Audrey Tang:
manipulation through isolation as a service, it created a market for that. And so what we have seen is while in Taiwan, those sorts of manipulations backfired. So they did not achieve the results that they want. Instead of pushing William Lai, our current president, before the election, his polls was under 40 percent. Instead of pulling it down, attempting to manipulate in this way actually made it backfire. So he was elected at over 30 percent. But in other jurisdictions, such as Romania, the same mechanisms made someone who was enjoying, you know, less than five percent popularity in just a couple months to the first place in the first round of presidential election.
So we have seen many democracies falling victim to this kind of engagement through enragement, polarization attacks, and things like that. So if you want to analyze it from the social media lens, I'm sure that it can be argued from such a lens that it made it much easier to sow discord and chaos and polarization. And it's partly seen by the fact by none of the existing governments won more shares of votes throughout the entire year of election. The best, like Taiwan, kept some seats and declined just slightly, but in most other places they declined a lot.
Matt Prewitt:
So one of the, I don't think this is quite doing justice to McLuhan, but one of the things that I am thinking about these days is like, if we want to imagine a new era of democracy, we want to imagine what democracy could look like 10 years from now. I worry sometimes that we are thinking about the prior, the kind of democracy that worked for the prior media era.
And so the democracy that some of us grew up with was sort of the democracy of the television era. And McClellan's sort of, one, mean, an interesting distinction that McClellan drew between radio and television is this distinction between hot and cool media. And the relevant thing here is that
Audrey Tang:
Mm-hmm.
Matt Prewitt:
Both are broadcasting, but McLuhan still saw an important distinction between them because radio is this kind of like single channel, single sensory input type of experience, which has this kind of more like almost exciting and agitating influence on the viewer. Television, you know, it's a little bit counterintuitive because in some way television seems like more stimulating than radio, but he thought of it as a cool media, cool medium, this sort of multi-sensory aspect of it, the idea that you could kind of have a television on in the kitchen while you're doing other things and interacting with other people made it sort of a more passive experience.It sort of like washed over people in a way and made it...made possible a kind of a culture in which the sort of like loose coherence of a democratic capitalist society was a natural outcome. How can we, you know, how can we avoid the trap of trying to recreate the television era democracy? Like what does the, what will the next thing look like?
Audrey Tang:
Well, in a sense, we already know what the next thing will look like because we're having this conversation right now. We're having a synchronous conversation, and the conversation transcends time zones, as it were, and also makes it much easier now.
You have such conversations across linguistic distances, across cultural distances and so on, because of the advance of machine translation. And so I think conversation networks is what people find themselves in. And it's true since the pandemic times, right? So it saw the rise of Clubhouse and also now, of course, people still gather on Discord channels using voice chat or the x.com spaces and things like that. this kind of voice primary, but also occasionally with video conversation networks is much more like telephone networks in a sense that it assumes that attention is symmetric and people see their ideas being confirmed as resonating–resonating or non-resonating in real time by the nonverbal cues that people transmit across the channels.
So if I'm in a conversation network of six people, just by saying something that's really resonant, people will be like, that's a very good point and things like that. And so you don't actually need the count of likes or views or things like that. That is much more asynchronous explicit statistics. This is much more a conversation network logic that counts the spontaneous understanding and how much it widens the bandwidth for future communications. And then now again with the advent of tools that can automatically make transcripts, make summaries, make medleys, have snippets, which just talk about identifying the 30-second clips within this conversation that are resonating so you can post it somewhere else. And imagine those fragments being played as a prompt in some future conversation networks so that it carries one resonating point or multiple into other group conversations.
I think that is quite powerful. It is also scalable, but in a rhizome or telephone kind of way. And it is virtually impossible for one very toxic, very abusive dunk to go viral in this setting. What can go viral in this setting is rather a medley that uncovers the uncommon ground. And people who listen to it goes like, ooh, that's a very good point.
Matt Prewitt:
Do you think that, from the McLuhan point of view, McLuhan sometimes paints this picture where it's almost like predetermined, where the dominant form of media just determines a form of government that will emerge. I guess first the question is, do you think that's overstated? And the second question is, do you think there's like a sort of a, know, if we assume that sort of the AI kind of, you know, is if not the dominant, then close to it, you know, in terms of the form of media that will shape our lives for the next, for the foreseeable future? What kind of media is it? What predetermined form of government is it going to push us towards? And can we steer that? How can we steer that?
Audrey Tang:
We're essentially talking about AI as assistive technology, almost like eyeglasses in a group setting. And that is something that is quite different from people's current experience with AI, which is entirely dyadic. That is to say, a single person chatting to a chatbot or to a agentic operator. But it is basically the operator or the assistant serving as an intermediary between this person and the rest of the world. But the conversation network arrangement that we just talked about is essentially AI purely in a interpreter's mode, in a summarizer's mode, almost in the ambient. Instead of being the focus of your attention, they're in the ambience of attention, not demanding attention, but rather making sure that people can focus on each other better in this very mundane AI such as noise cancellation that is operating on both sides here. And so I think this is a much more important use of AI. If it can expand participation, if it can reveal the blind spots, if it can through the real-time summarization uncover overlooked perspectives and issues and so on, then this kind of group chat, conversation network AI, I think will determine a much more deliberative and also much more bridging sense of listening of conversation networks. So I do agree that the media kind of constraint the kind of governance policies can take but even when we say AI it actually means very different configurations of media. There's an upcoming paper called Conversation Networks by Deborah and Lawrence Lessig and yours truly that talks about this.
Matt Prewitt:
Great. Back to the topic of information a little bit. I have heard you make a very important point about information that has influenced my thinking quite a bit, which is that the idea that systems of information can kind of become systems of control. You've given an example of this in the case of in the context of, for example, driving apps and things like that. But you've also drawn this parallel, this sort of historical parallel with parliaments. if you can feel free to restate this in better form, but the basic idea is that parliaments kind of started as like a method of advising or informing the monarch. But over time, evolved into a system of control, the actual site of power.
Audrey Tang:
Monarch.
Matt Prewitt:
Can you say a little bit more about this and how do you, how do you think that the information systems that we've built now kind of demonstrate that principle or show its limits? How do you apply that to the world that you see?
Audrey Tang:
Yeah, we just talked about it, right? We talked about social networks that are initially just a place to share ideas. Microblocking literally started as blocking with some size limits on your block and nothing more. And it just shows the people you follow on the microblocking side. But over time, they accumulate power. And starting 2015, with the For You feed, we talked about how it shapes perceptions, discourse, and now elections. so recognizing this shift is quite essential to designing democratic institutions because we should not mistake this kind of algorithmic control and so on with the earlier point, which is just that people need someplace online to share their life stories. There's nothing in sharing life stories that makes it inevitable that once we're all on a platform, the platform will just adopt a different KPI, a different metric that says, maximize people's time spent on their touch screens. There's nothing in the original blocking movement that connects to this. This is entirely arbitrary. So I think, yes, the consultative systems through feedback loops can become control systems. There needs to be a very explicit distinction made on whether the steering wheel is still on the hands of the people who participate or somewhere in the middle of a journey, the steering wheel went somewhere else and became the control device of some foreign interference machine, right? So yeah, I call myself, well, my official title is Cyber Ambassador and cyber here means cybernetics literally in Greek, the steering, right, the people who steer. And so cybernetics in the steering sense means that we recognize the feedback loop control loops, but we need to make those loops regenerative and make it to the hands of the people instead of just the hands on somewhere else and it become, again, authoritarian control system.
Matt Prewitt:
How does this relate to education? So, you know, the history of democratic thought is littered with the idea that basically people need the right to information in order to be able participate in democracy, which can include the news media, we can also include education systems–how do you think about that? Do you view them as the news and the state education have always been sort of a surreptitious exertion of influence over the democracy or is there a way of getting that right?
Audrey Tang:
I mean, there's this very basic idea of literacy, which is that people need a set of critical thinking skills so that when they receive new pieces of information, they can contextualize it. I think that is, of course, very important. In Taiwan, starting 2019, we adopted a new curriculum that changed the original idea of literacy into the idea of competence. Because we now realize that in light of this AI-powered persuasion, it is too much to ask an individual to do critical thinking around it. It is just impossible.But what works instead of debunking something, which is very often a lost cause, is pre-bunking, that is to say if an entire class of students, if people working with their families, with their communities to find out what's going on, like doing a journalist work and considering different sources and balancing them and creating a balanced, rich narrative and publish it to the world so that the other people, including their community and families, depend on their reporting – they are not just being media literate, they are being media competent.
And so competence becomes the core of the Taiwanese education, which includes the autonomy, like exploring curiosity, interaction, like listening and working with people who are different from you, and the common good, that is to say, a zero sum or a negative sum situation and then reimagine it as positive sum. All these are co-creative qualities. These are not simply individual consumer qualities. And I think that is precisely what we need to focus on in terms of learning. Whether it's institutionalized education or whether it's online learning groups, we need to co-create based on these new competencies, not just the individualized literacies. Again, because of the epistemic situation, the information ecosystem is very different from the original configuration like you said the TV era where there's already the first line filtering of gatekeepers and so the critical thinking amount is less that is needed but now there's virtually no gatekeeping so everyone needs the basic ideas of how to become a gatekeeper with the community as competencies.
Matt Prewitt:
There's kind of a, so when you talk about sort of creating these competencies, it's interesting to me because it relates to another set of ideas, which I think are circulating out there in an influential way right now, which sort of come from the conservative side of the political spectrum. The idea that some kind of a, some kind of a, system of shared values or a system of kind of pre-liberal or pre-democratic shared values is necessary for a, as kind of a base upon which a democratic society can traditionally act.
Audrey Tang:
Like traditions, right? People with common stories to tell.
Matt Prewitt:
Yeah, right. And so, for example, you see this in thinkers like David Brooks, who is, you know, has written about the idea that, for example, religious values were for a long time, kind of an unspoken important, you know, keystone or element of the foundation of American democracy. How do you, I mean, you have this,
Audrey Tang:
Mm-hmm. Yep.
Matt Prewitt:
Great kind of way of having a binocular view of, for example, call yourself a conservative anarchist, right? So you have this great kind of way of synthesizing the right and the left. Yeah. How do you hear those kinds of ideas when you hear those kinds of conservative ideas about the culture circulating?
Audrey Tang:
The yin and the yang.
Matt Prewitt:
How do you hear them and how do they relate to what you were just talking about, kind of, you know, educating people to be able to interpret information reasonably.
Audrey Tang:
Yeah, mean, in Taiwan, it is quite interesting that the more highly educated you are, the more openly you are likely to practice spirituality. So this is quite different from, for example, US or much of the Europe. And so we don't draw an arbitrary distinction between the competencies that we receive from the collective sense-making exercises like practicing journalism and things like that that of course takes a lot of training and lot of effort and the spirituality whether it's the Taoist or Buddhist or animist or Christianity or things like that that is basically providing the tradition, the vocabulary that we can then express those ideas with.
So for me it's like the yin and yang of both sides and these both sides are not just in parallel; they're really supporting each other. And so, yeah, it's quite puzzling, actually, for me, when people that I meet in US or in other Western civilizations, they almost treat their spiritual side and their professional side, for like a better term, as two different lives. And they never mention the other life in the context of the other, whereas in Taiwan it's much more intertwined.
And so I think this intertwinedness is really what makes Taiwan less polarized, even though that we could be polarized on the political sense or the professional sense, but we are really part of the same fabric when it comes to the spiritual part or of course also baseball, but also the intergenerational, the urban rural and so on, we're the least polarized among OECD equivalents. And I think that has a lot to do with this intertwinedness of the spiritual conservative thoughts on one side and the much more enlightenment oriented professional one on the other side.
Matt Prewitt:
Yeah, I think in the United States and probably Western Europe, although in a slightly different way, there's an idea that these two things can't be synthesized or mixed, which in my opinion has something to do with sort John Rawls type liberalism. So in other words, there's this idea that
Audrey Tang:
Hmm.
Matt Prewitt:
If we're going to create a common set of values. Those common set of values can either be religious and therefore non-universalistic and therefore, or they may be internally universalistic, but they're not universally shared, let's say, and therefore not appropriate as an expression of public reason. Or on the other hand, the shared values must be…
Audrey Tang:
Mm-hmm.
Matt Prewitt:
…entirely scientific, entirely enlightenment, entirely technocratic. And there's a real problem there. There's a real difficulty in, think, overcoming the kind of Rawlsian categories that are in our heads in order to see that, for example, that there are...
Audrey Tang:
Mm-hmm.
Matt Prewitt:
…that these two conversations can be pointing towards the same thing.
Audrey Tang:
Yeah, mean the mutex, the mutual exclusion could be really harmful because that means that there's no cross-pollination between the wisdom gained on one side and the knowledge gained on the other. And then you end up with like AI models that are so heavily censored from the religious sense that it refused to make any associations when it comes to important traditions.
But then if you just strip an AI model of all of these things, then you are left with, I don't know, just some deontologic laws and some utility functions. But then it's no wonder then that people do not welcome those AIs into their lives because they don't speak from the same moral tradition as the...virtue or care, whatever other ethics that people speak when they're in the more spiritual or family setting.
Matt Prewitt:
Yeah, I mean, this actually feels quite close to the heart of the problem, or quite close to the heart of what we need to really synthesize in order to reweave the social fabric in the West. I'd like to ask a few questions about sort of markets and trade. The Sunflower Movement was, as we discussed,
Audrey Tang:
Mm-hmm. Yep.
Matt Prewitt:
largely prompted by a trade deal.
Audrey Tang:
Mm-hmm.
Matt Prewitt:
What do you think about trade deals and international trade in general? And the sort of spin that I want to put on this is that when that trade deal was contemplated in Taiwan, was it seen as a threat to democracy or was it seen as a threat to sovereignty?
And what is the relationship between these two things? This seems like an important question that often gets kind of lost in our discourse, the sort of distinction between system of government and sovereignty. Yeah, I just wonder if you can say a bit about that. Do you think democracy depends upon a certain notion of sovereignty? Do you think that democracy can sort of survive the radical integration of polities through trade along the lines of the WTO or the EU and these kinds of things? How do you think about that?
Audrey Tang:
Yeah, I think there's trade and there's trade. In Taiwan, there's nothing like Sunflower happening when the first part of the trade agreement with Beijing went into effect, which was more about the products part. It only became a society-wide trigger point when the service part, and in particular, communication services, including Huawei and ZTE in our then new 4G and then later on in all parts of world 5G networks.
That's a real problem because people have very reasonable doubts about these so-called private sector resisting their state's power when it comes to surveillance and cybersecurity and so on. And also the publishing industry. If all our newspapers or publishers become much more intertwined with the Beijing norm of communication, people are already seeing at the time that the bloggers are enjoying a lot of different harmony efforts from the state at that time in Beijing. And now, of course, it's shrunk to the point that there's no meaningful journalism that can be done in the blogging sphere now. So long story short.
I think democracy relies on a healthy information ecosystem. And so any trade deal that threatens to sow discord or to overtake that epistemic knowledge production ecosystem is naturally really about whether the democratic values can continue or thrive or is it a thought on the democratic values. So in a sense,
I think the Occupy Parliament in Taiwan was about sovereignty. And the sovereignty is in the sense of like when people deliberate about the future of political communication, it is the people who are affected by such political communications having such a conversation. So to me that is like popular sovereignty.
Matt Prewitt:
I think I want to push on that just slightly because for example, if you think about certain kinds of non-traditionally information oriented trade arrangements, let's say imports of agricultural goods or something like that, these things do interfere with the culture and the structure of societies where they come into…
Audrey Tang:
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Matt Prewitt:
…into place. you you can see, example, just to name one example, like the farmers in Europe are very, very upset. They feel that they're under a lot of pressure. And the EU has, in effect, had to subsidize the entire European farming industry in order to hold back that pressure. In other words, if there's too much trade, if there's too much international exchange of agricultural goods, it's going to put democratic pressure on the order that opposes the EU, potentially more than it can withstand. And so, and I think that kind of concern with the impacts of trade on society and that kind of…
Audrey Tang:
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Matt Prewitt:
…jealousy about sovereignty and that's where there's concern. Maybe that's the wrong word. Just a sort of concern about the maintenance of sovereignty is something that shows up mostly on the right in practice, right? We see, you know, we can see this in, Trump's politics, for example. But I wonder whether you think that, I guess what I want to float out there is, you know, have people who, are concerned about democracy or people who care about democracy in this deeper procedural kind of way. Have they put dedicated too little attention to that? Have they been insufficiently concerned with the sort of influence of trade on their democratic systems?
Audrey Tang:
Yeah, I think the idea here is again that the power of the people to shape their collective destiny is sovereignty. And so just as the Taiwanese people in 2014 collectively cared more on our ability to kind of culturally, socially exist as a ecosystem, not to be overtaken by a larger ecosystem, so could the farmers, people working on agriculture, manufacturing and so on feel that they don't want to be annexed or overly included into a larger trading system. So in a sense, there's a parallel there. I'm not saying that only the information ecosystem was important. I was saying that in 2014 it was the trigger point, right? Yeah, and so...
Matt Prewitt:
Yeah. Yeah.
Audrey Tang:
Yeah, I think any of the shared urgencies that are brought in its societal impact can serve as this watershed triggering points toward the idea of a wider and also more direct sense making exercise for meaningful respective collaboration within the policy. I think the question we need to ask is that whether the people doing such gatherings feel that they're just protesting that is just there to stop and merging of borders from happening or whether they are generative in the sense of that they can demonstrate something that is much more oriented in co-production, in a coalition or co-op based arrangements and basically providing real alternatives to the previous logic that triggered this kind of trade agreements.
Matt Prewitt:
Great, thanks. And I think maybe the final question, or we can develop it or build on it here is, I'm curious how you think about the challenge of maintaining pluralism or plurality. And I mean this in slightly broader context than just democracy. This strikes me as a real puzzle because we...
Audrey Tang:
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Hmm.
Matt Prewitt:
We get this amazing generative activity and creative force that is unleashed when we break down boundaries and create diversity. But there's almost kind of a physical, entropic sort of a process here in which when you break down boundaries between two chambers, eventually the pressure in them equalizes and you don't have that, that diversity anymore. And what this leads me to wonder is how to think about that sort of time dimension of plurality. How do we build lasting plurality? How do we build diversity in a way that sustains itself over time or regenerates new forms of diversity after, after certain forms of diversity have leveled or equalized. And it's a big question and I'll also just suggest a parallel here. This question strikes me as related to the old puzzle of sort of informational freedom and intellectual property. Because when, you know,
Audrey Tang:
Hmm.
Matt Prewitt:
The famous kind of arrow information paradox is that, know, when you, is that, you know, in a competitive market, innovation and information is always under invested in because once it's out there, it just kind of equalizes and everyone has it. So the people who went to the trouble to invent something new don't get the full benefit of it. Then on the other hand, we can put in place boundaries.
like intellectual property law or other kinds of monopolies that sort of hold the information in place. But if we do that, then we leave on the table all the gains of information sharing and informational freedom. So we have this sort of paradox of how to share information with all of society in a way that is sustainable.
There's this parallel puzzle with pluralism. I would love to know your thoughts about this.
Audrey Tang:
Well.
First of all, think in the book, Plurality.net, we say plurality is not just about bridging differences, but also regenerating differences. And so if we see it as a renewable energy source, then once we resolve or bridge a difference, that bridge must by itself create new differences. So one easy way to think about this,is that previously, before a bridge was built, the two camps don't actually talk to each other. But once we build a bridge...on both camps, there's now a new fragmentation of people who are willing to cross the bridge and the people who are not willing to cross that bridge. So that's a new difference in an almost fractal sense.And then the sides that want to cross the bridge on this side and that side maybe become a new higher dimensional group. And very interestingly, the two sides that did not want to cross that bridge may actually also find what's called surprising validators and form new allies and so on. So what we're saying is that this common knowledge is not about a compromise. It is not about saying that we just take the arithmetic average of people's preferences and call it a day. What it does is that it offers new vocabularies, like a new group picture that people can see. And then based on whether you agree with this new found on common ground, you then regroup into unlikely allies and things like that. So this is to your first point. To your second point. I think the information paradoxes that you mentioned is less acute in positive sum arrangements.
Wikipedia, Creative Commons, Linux, and so on, offers a positive sum currency when it comes to reputation, basically, that replace direct monetary compensation. And so as RadicalxChange have experimented, I was just talking with the Edge City curator, it is possible to design this kind of reputational award and reward in a way that's not directly exchanging to fiat. And if you design things this way, then you have a different, more aligned to intrinsic motivation way of doing extrinsic incentive that does not suffer from this information paradox that you just mentioned.So peer commons-based co-production that allows a newer generation to come and contribute into the commons without taking things away from the OG. I think that is the general shape of how, well, certainly the decentralized communities, but also increasingly many other communities are looking at shifting this mindset beyond ownership or personal private ownership that can only be transferred as a single unit, like a intellectual.
property that I can only transfer to somebody else. So we can talk, of course, about partial common ownership and everything like that. But these are the kind of design that in my mind, just as the regenerative diversity thing resolves this pluralism paradox, the co-production in a positive sense and the changing of the meaning of property in a sense that is much more intrinsically rewarded, that also can change the information theoretic paradox about the intellectual properties.
Matt Prewitt:
So what kind of patterns do you see? For example, you, like the one pattern there is kind of building a boundary between the emergent ecosystems and the emergent alignments and the fiat currency system, right? That, as you know, I'm very interested in that kind of, in that design pattern because I think that that is one of the most productive ways of finding a place to build a boundary that really respects and enables social diversity to thrive without being immediately collapsed into a money system. I guess there's something like that in the sort of, reputational currency that people build on Wikipedia or in other kinds of open ecosystems. It's a little bit, I'm trying to sort of feel my way into something, are there other kinds of productive places to build those boundaries that respect plurality and that enable diversity to regenerate that people in this space should be thinking about and experimenting with and looking to articulate?
Audrey Tang:
Well, in a sense that the movie we are talking about, Good Enough Ancestor, is a good example. Not just in the traditional sense of a proof of value without full disclosure in the form of a three-minute trailer, but also you can see the 21 minute edited version as also just an extended trailer because a few days from now, maybe a week from now, we will also offer a Creative Commons Zero full download of around 1TB of footage that was the raw material, the source code that went into the 21 minutes edited version. And so you can see this version as something you like, but you can also as a remixer, as a creator, you know, just pump this one terabyte of footage into some sense-making engine and maybe make a manga or make a summary or make something else from it. So in a sense, these are like progressively released short excerpts that signal value that at each given time does not expose the entire work. And we can generalize this with zero-knowledge proofs and so on in cryptography that allows you to demonstrate convincingly and also contribute to the community like a partial information and also hint at even more valuable knowledge that's after it that you certainly possess but do not yet reveal. And so that can also allow exchange of proof without compromising the full core content. You can set a threshold and then release this content only when the threshold is made.And so if you make such contracts in a way that is positive sum to the commas, then you can preserve both the positive sum nature of the commas, but solve a lot of the free rider problems.
Matt Prewitt:
Super. That's a great place to close. Any final thoughts for sort of RadicalxChange movement, fellow travelers who are thinking about what they can do in the coming years?
Audrey Tang:
Yeah, definitely. I think what's really attractive about RadicalxChange is that it refuses to be placed on the left or right. In a sense, it's like saying conservative anarchism or Taoism. It is both extreme left and extreme right, so much so that it wraps around and into some unlikely ally. And this is, think, by design because if you truly think out of the box, then the two sides of the box stop making sense as the basis of judgments of understanding, right? So again, I think closing with Leonard Cohen from Democracy that says, I'm sentimental if you know what I mean. I love the country, but I can't stand the scene because I'm neither left or right. I'm just staying home tonight.
So I think this is a good place to close on. We're neither left or right, or we're both left and right. And just by making sure that we don't literally stand a scene, but creating new scenes, new ways of exchange, we can actually make sure that we can hold up this little wild bouquet that democracy is coming to the USA.
Matt Prewitt:
Super. Thank you so much, Audrey.
Audrey Tang:
Thank you.