Taiwan’s Transformation
Trust in government has been collapsing all over the world over the last decade - but one country has bucked the trend. Fewer than 10% of the population trusted government in 2014, but by 2024, that figure had climbed above 70%. Spurred on by a collective of civic hackers calling themselves “Gov Zero”, Taiwan has trusted its people, opened its institutions, and even crowdsourced what was arguably the world’s most successful Covid response. In this episode, we draw out the lessons every nation can learn from this story with the help of one of its key actors, Audrey Tang.<br>Audrey is Taiwan’s “Cyber Ambassador” and former Minister of Digital Affairs. A prominent member of the Gov Zero collective, she became a reverse mentor to Minister Jaclyn Tsai in the aftermath of the peaceful Sunflower Revolution in 2014, before joining government herself in 2016 - and becoming the world’s first transgender minister in the process.
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Transcript
There was no digital minister in Taiwan before, so I get to write my own job description. And so I wrote a prayer poem really, it's very short, I just recite it here, it goes like this. When we see Internet of things, let's make it an Internet of beings. When we see virtual reality, let's make it a shared reality. When we see machine learning, let's make it collaborative learning. When we see user experience, let's make it about human experience. And whenever we hear that the singularity is near, let us always remember the plurality is here.
Welcome to How to Save Democracy, the podcast where we look at the relationship between humanity and democracy and try to figure out how to rebuild it. I'm John.
And I'm Omezine. And for this episode, we're going to look to a place where actually the relationship between humanity and democracy has got better over the last ten years, which isn't the picture of most of the world. A place that has actually got stronger and stronger, where trust in government has gone from 9%, wait for it, to above 70%.
In summer twenty twenty four, I arranged for Audrey Tung, former digital minister of Taiwan, to come to The UK, and I hosted her at the Conduit. We're going to listen in to that conversation and draw out some of the key lessons, contrasting what happened in Taiwan with what's happened in other places, and use that to see what could be done differently. That moment of the sunflower revolution, the the the protest moment, maybe just tell us a bit more about the the URL that popped up on the screen, budget.g0v.tw was a real thing. So please.
Yeah. So we'd like to say that we're not protesters. We're demonstrators. Protesters manufacture counter power, and demonstrators manufacture alternate power. So g zero v, starting 2012 is the systemic movement that look at all the government websites, which is something that g o v, the t w, and make better shadow government websites at something that g zero v, the t t w. So just by changing o to a zero, you get into the shadow government, that is built by, open source, civic technologists. And that always works in a way that is free of copyright, that the government is basically shamed into merging it back. And the best thing about such gov zero experiments is that a lot of it actually came from the courier public service. It is the actual section chiefs, and so I participating in our hackathon synonymously, and only when, they really saw that this is a better way that the public can see the budgets, you know, cocreate a dictionary together, make better, contact tracing systems during the pandemic, make better distribution systems of mosque, during the pandemic, and many other things, better way to collaboratively fact check and so on, so the government can then say, okay. Because it's free of copyright, let's just make it digital public infrastructure. And so this has been, for the past ten years, a lot of very, active, what we call the social sector in Taiwan, has been able to very actively set agenda for digital infrastructure in Taiwan. And so that Occupy Movement was kind of the peak experience for all of us, because as many of you know, there was, like, many occupied movements before 2014 in Taiwan. But very rare did it actually reach, a place where the head of the parliament actually said, okay, it sounds very reasonable. After three weeks of nonviolent occupy, there's half a million people on the street and many more online managed to agree on a very coherent set of policy demands. So, okay, I'll accept, and consider that. Right? So it's one of very rare, successful, occupied that Stern institutionalized the kind of facilitation, the kind of crowdsourced agenda setting that we demonstrated during those three weeks.
Yeah. I I see two main powerful things in what she said right now. One is the demonstrator part of the movement, of the Occupy Movement in Taiwan, and second is the political leadership. I wanna start by the first one because it's really this fundamental difference between protesters and demonstrator that she's spoiling at. And I think most protest movements, and occupy movements and the Tunisian revolution were unified against a system that was dysfunctioning, oppressive, and so it's easy to unite people against one single enemy. But I think it's kind of revolutionary and very visionary and and and and adding those both those two words together to bring a solution and an alternative to the current system. And I think this is why it was successful.
So they created the space for the politics to move into.
Yes. And then it comes the the the second point where the political leadership was not violently repressing the movement as they did everywhere everywhere else. In Tunisia, people were shot by the police and got killed. An occupied movement, people were taken out of the street and and arrested. Right. But here, the political leadership was open to see that there is an alternative, that these people are coming
with a solution and that they need to listen to them. So two two really fundamental differences. The the action from outside was to create the space for politics to move into rather than to attack the politics. And from inside, it was to the leadership was to step into that space rather than reject that space. Absolutely. No. There is this very delicate
place where there is this maximum tension between the protester slash demonstrator movement that are gaining attention and they're really pushing the political leadership at its limit. And the political leadership seen that they lost power and the trust of the public. And so what do they do that I mean, in most situation, the violence happened to repress this new power that was coming up from the people. Right? But in this case, you know, they didn't try to coop the movement either. And it makes me think of what happened in the Tunisian revolution where the social movement was at the end of the day coopted by political parties because they didn't have this vision. They didn't have this new proposal, this alternative system. And so slowly but surely, political parties were more structured, even though not really structured to govern, after the dictatorship was taken down, They had more power, more connections to the regime, so kind of a conversation started with the regime, but kind of excluding the people because they didn't have any leader to represent them and and and no really idea a new idea to how to handle this period. And so there is this delicate movement where a delicate moment in time that, you know, the the movement can totally lose, in front of the existing power. And in Tunisia, I think one of the failures of this transition was that people who wanted the streets were really you know, didn't have the tools, didn't have the, collective capacity to bring this new vision, that made it super weak in front of others who had another vision. And so in protest movements, in revolution, you need to come up with a vision. Otherwise, others will take it from you, will use their own vision to to to to force it on you, kind of.
So we're gonna, like, paint that timeline a little bit to start us off. So so the budget website came in 2012. '12. That's correct. And that was the Gov Zero movement, as it was known, starting to organize
outside of government. So, like, basically, every two months, we will hold a physical hackathon about 200 people or so, and we meet in the National Academy. So, the idea is that we need to find places that are incredibly neutral, that are above any party politics, any ministers, and so on, like, purely social sector place. And it just so happens that Taiwan has this idea of a national academy that only reports to the president, and president doesn't have control over its research direction. And so we were able to just keep meeting there every two months for ten more than ten years now.
And so so 2012, these these these
these websites that have forked the government, I've heard you use that phrase. Forked the government. Fork means, you know, steering it in a different direction. I and always with the hope to merge it back. So demonstrate, not protest, and fork, not,
the government. And and so we start there 2012. '24 so the the momentum's kind of building. 2014 comes and what triggered that moment?
So in 2014, the parliament was, at a time, trying to fast track through, in thirty seconds, a trade deal with Beijing, and that would open up a lot of the service industry, including the then very new four g core infrastructure, to the likes of Huawei and ZTE and so on. So the conversations that people here have almost ten years after that, we had that in, 2014. And so, it's not just the telecom industry, but also publishing and basically all of the service of trade. And so the Gov Zero people helped to code up some tools that says, you know, if you just enter your, company's registration number or the name of your company, it shows exactly how the CSSTA, the Cross Strait Service Trade Agreement, affects you. And then you can join one of the 20 NGOs around the occupied parliament to talk about things from the environmental perspective, from a labor perspective, from a consumer protection perspective, from a cybersecurity perspective, however you want. And then every day, we take this group selfie, this snapshot, because every this thing is live streamed, just like we're being live streamed now, and transcribed and translated in so on. So instead of diverging over time, it actually converged day after time. We will read what people were able to agree, roughly with each other. We call it rough consensus, to live with, such a agreement, the previous day and what remains to be deliberated. So no matter how soon or how late you join, there are still some points to contribute to the deliberation.
So I wanna draw out here how different this protest moment, the sunflower revolution, the occupy movement in Taiwan is from in its operation from from some others. And one of my thought experiments to to illustrate this would be about extinction rebellion in The UK. And, when exile started, it was incredibly popular. Right? It's hard to remember now, but but my mom nearly went to Waterloo Bridge. Right? My mom is not a Waterloo Bridge woman. But but in that moment, the the demands of XR included a citizen's assembly on, climate policy. And they they they wanted that assembly to be, legally binding and by 2035, how how Britain would reach net zero. I won't go into the detail. But but, actually, a citizens assembly was commissioned in The UK. Not many people even know this, which illustrates my point. A citizens' assembly was commissioned by six select committees of parliament. And and my thought experiment is if you contrast that with with GovZero, what these guys were doing, they were actually around the parliament, not perfectly, but while protesters were occupying the parliament, people were having the kinds of discussions that that that should and could have been happening in the parliament outside. They were doing the politics that they were wanting. So my thought experiment is what actually happened was because the the citizen's assembly that was commissioned was not quite what XR had asked for. They basically decided to ignore it.
Big mistake.
And my thought experiment is what if they had chosen to follow that citizen's assembly? What if each each, meeting of the assembly there were three, I think, meetings of the assembly. What if they'd set the dates for their rebellions, for the big protests on those dates to draw attention to the citizens' assembly to say this is this isn't perfect, but it's we need more of this. This is the direction we want to go. This is I I wonder if that might have conducted energy into that process that could have shown a new way forward in the same way as the gov zero game by equipping people to have these meetings or outside the parliament. They they sort of validated the occupation of the parliament by doing that. Mhmm.
So if they have been more pragmatic, if they would have accepted the situation as it is and not try to implement from the beginning their vision and impose it, like, accept that maybe the situation, the political leadership was not ready yet for that, but see the citizen assembly as imperfect as it is
as a first step instead of, like, okay. This is a no go. Right. It it's almost like a yes and rather than a no. And and look, I'm not I I'm hesitant with this a little bit because I don't want to hindsight is always twenty twenty. But I think it's it's it's useful to to draw out the contrast between the way Extinction Rebellion happened and the way the sunflower revolution in Taiwan happened. There was this there was this participation that showed and demonstrated and lived and said, yes, and, and we can do more of this rather than a kind of
a a a demand and then a and then a failure. Would that be, like, the contrast between an idealist and a pragmatic person or a a group? Like, an idealist would have this idea and wanna implement it exactly as it is in a utopia. And then the pragmatic person in the group would say, okay. I have this idea, this beautiful vision. It's still a utopia, but I have to deal with a reality. And so any step towards this idea, real realizing making this idea concrete, is relevant. And I take it, and I accept it, and I move forward with it.
Something like that. I think, I hesitate because I consider myself to be an idealist more than a pragmatist. But but I think maybe I'd describe Audrey as a radical pragmatist.
Mhmm.
We're starting to build this kind of muscle of of developing these things. 2014 comes in the trade bill. There's an attempt to rush through the trade bill. That triggers this protest moment. At this point, you're Demonstration. Demonstration. Sorry. Sorry. What happened to you? Busted. And, and then and at this point, you're part of GovZero.
Yeah. So I started very, very early. I joined GovZero 2012. And, at the time, I was working with Apple on Siri Technology and with Oxford University Press on empowering the low resource languages, such as, it's Zulu or the other languages, to crowdsource dictionaries so Siri can't speak those languages. And so naturally, because in Taiwan, nowadays, we have 20 national languages, 16 indigenous nations, 42 language variations. So not all of them have the same degree of support, like traditional Mandarin when it comes to dictionary building. And so a lot of the early GOV. Zero work is actually on forking the official dictionary to add in, modern words, contemporary words, and so on. So that was my, like, first projects in 2013 when I joined. And so in 2014, what's really interesting is that this kind of crowdsourcing, this kind of facilitative conversation and so on, that we practiced over two years, really found its place, coupling with the dynamic facilitation, the open space technology, the nonviolent communicators, and so on, the face to face facilitative people. And so unlike many other occupy, where the face to face facilitated people and the online, like, communications people were really two different comps. During the 2014, occupy, we kind of fused together. We all learned the art of face to face, dynamic facilitation, and the facilitators all learned the art of online, organization, basically. And so we became kind of the same people. So after that, there was a mayoral election at the 2014. And so all the mayors that did support, you know, crowdsource agenda setting over government civic participation did get elected sometime to their surprise without preparing a inauguration speech, and all the mayoral candidate that did not support it did not get elected. And so the wind really shifted, and then it's then up to us, right, to determine what to do. Now we have mayors that run with open government as their platform, with participatory budgeting, with business initiatives, with reverse mentorship, but they also have no idea, like, how to properly work with people. They just, you know, have this pre commitment. And so we, the reverse mentors, are the people who are under 35 years old. And each cabinet member at a time were kind of tasked with finding at least one person under 35 to mentor them in the art of this new communication style. And so I was 33 at the time. So I got recruited, into the cabinet as a reverse mentor to minister Jacqueline Tsai, who is, in charge of, like, regulation for the cyberspace, basically. And so we did a bunch of stuff together, UberX, Airbnb, crowdfunding, you know, all the interesting things around 2015 using the vTaiwan process that builds, this kind of bridging sentiments across polarization. And so that's long story short, after two years serving as the young reverse mentor, then I turned 35. I'm too old to be a young adviser, so I got promoted to a full cabinet minister. Well, obviously. Right.
So we've gone we've gone, career trajectory in four years, hacker to mentor to minister. And but that and and so in that moment well, let's let's bring it up to 2020 and sort of, for me, the kind of pinnacle of the story.
No idea. Right? It's a very uneventful year. Well, so, we started building, and institutionalizing, such relationship muscles. And within each and every ministry, we have a team called participatory, team and with participation officers, or POs. And they were trained in the art of facilitation, of citizen engagement, of civic tech, and things like that. And all that relationship muscle, all that, 30 or so ministries horizontal network, really, got into action in 2020 when we started setting up this daily, system where people can call a hotline at +1 922 and ask, to their heart's content what's really going on with this pandemic. So in Taiwan, we discovered, that we need, for example, to rationale mask very quickly. I think it was February 2020 when we started, having this open API that anybody can see with a civic tech tool. Actually, there's hundreds of such tools, how to navigate to your nearby pharmacy, how to get some rationed mask, and things like that. There's some communication efforts, we crowdsourced, very cute memes. There was a spokesdog, Shiba Inu, very, very cute. And, she would just put her paw to her mouth and say, you know, wear a mask to protect your face against your dirty, unwashed hands or something like that, which is, you know, completely circumvanced this, you know, aerosol debate or whatever. Right? It's just a very viral meme that people would link mask wearing to hand washing and so on. So, then this, broad listening it's not broadcasting, this broad listening network, really paid dividends. For example, not, long, after we started, racialized mask, there was a young boy, 10 years old, calling +1 922 the hotline saying, you're reaching out a mask in schools. That's great. But all I got was pink ones, which is not great. All the other boys in my class has blue ones, like standard medical grade masks, but all I got was pink ones. I don't want to wear pink to school. I'll get bullied or something like that. And so we we need to handle that fast because if we do not do that, if we just, you know, after this goes viral and the minister of education goes out and say bullying is bad, it actually makes it worse. Right? So we need to handle this in twenty four hours, and so all the participation officers huddle together. And so there was a great idea from the Ministry of Health and Welfare as participation officer, which we turn into action. The very next 2PM press conference, everybody wore pink. And the health minister wore the pink mask and, like, looking very hip. And so, basically, regardless of gender, everybody wore pink. And so, the Instagram, Facebook, whatever avatars of all the trending brands all turned pink. And so the very next day when the boy comes to class, and he has the, you know, the immersive color, the most sought after color. Alright? And so with that, the idea of humor over rumor, the idea that it's not debunking that, fixes this polarization. It is prebunking. This is anticipating the energy that will go into polarization and shifting that energy in a kind of aikido sort of way into something that's humorous that is gets viral.
And the the just to unline one more thing in this, the the the three design principles that were I believe were publicly announced. Right? Yeah. It's called a fast, fair, and fun.
Right? So the Triple F, that was our counter pandemic response. And it applies to everything, not just masks, but contact tracing, vaccination. We have a, like, global, well, national, vaccination scoreboard, that, just like soccer games, you know, displays the score of each age bracket's preferences. And so, for example, people in their 70s, in their 60s, because they read some reports from Europe around AstraZeneca. They don't prefer AstraZeneca. They would say, I will prefer Moderna, for example. And there are people in certain age brackets, like 30 years old or something. They really root for the local team, the the home brew, the Medigern. But there are people who swear Medigern is, you know, toxic, and then they will only get BNT and whatever. So I I got all four brands just to make a point. But anyway, so, the the point is that we knew there's going to be a anti vax polarization attack down the road. But instead of debunking that, we turned that energy into civic participation. Basically, my, vaccine better than your vaccine kind of friendly competition. And so because of that, Taiwan does not have a anti vaxx malignant faction. Everybody got vaccinated. But still to this day, people would believe that only the one that they got, works. The other ones are fake or something like that.
There's so much in Taiwan's COVID response that is just like I mean, we laugh. Right? But it worked. Yeah. Like this this this I still can't believe really that I'm one of the only people who seems to tell this story. That that that fast, fun, and fair. That that prebunking not debunking. The the humor over rumor. The this these kinds of approaches really works. Like, Taiwan had the second lowest death rate anywhere in the world. But the country as a whole never went into lockdown. And trust in government built through that process. So economic the economy was doing better. The trust was doing better. And and at the core of it, I think, is this idea that the government trusted its citizens. That the government sought to tap into the ideas and energy and resources of everyone in the country to be part of a national team response rather than trying to do it for them or to them. Rather than seeing citizens as something to be managed, they saw their citizens as a resource to be tapped.
And I think this is unique. I mean, I would love to see that in more places in the world, but I again, I wanna acknowledge the the the political leadership there because seeing citizen citizens as resources, trusting collective intelligence, understanding that it's really crisis, a humanity crisis, I was going to say, and that they don't have the the solution. And they need everyone to come up with, you know, the answer is is is pretty unique. And and I'm wondering how we can get politicians to embrace more that vision, you know, that trust in their citizens.
This is exactly the question, I think. And that's where I took the conversation next actually because I I think sometimes we think of it can be easy to think of Taiwan as as just another planet. Right? Like, and and and and to say, well, this could never happen anywhere else. And so I put that question to Audrey. Could it happen anywhere else?
Yeah. I mean, in terms of pandemic response, we're second to New Zealand. So obviously, it's not just Taiwan. But I think in more generally speaking, it does require, as I mentioned, the relationship muscles. Right? It does require the public service, trusting the citizens, because to give no trust is to get no trust. And so it does take somebody to trust the citizen first before some of the citizens trust Bach. But the trust level was really low in 2014. The approval rates to the administration back then was 9%. And so, like, anything the administration says at the time, automatically, people would just say, you know, we'll we'll have none of this. And then if you ask a random person on the street, like, whether, you will get democratic agency, like, nothing about you without you or something like that, they were like, of course not. Right? And so, it did take a lot of time and institutionalization and hard work, for the public service to start trusting bit by bit the citizens. And it does take, technology, right, technology that highlights the bridges instead of the polarization to show the public service that it does actually surface the signal, not just the voice. It actually saves you time instead of waste your time when you engage the public in this particular way. And so, I think in Taiwan, what we have demonstrated is that it does take, you know, in 2018, it was still just 20% trust level. It took us, like, almost eight years, to reach, like, 60%. Right? So my president, doctor Hassan Yiwen, graduated, with almost 70%, trust level, all, like, panpartisan, which is very good. But it's, like every year, we just dialed the trust from the government to the citizen way up, and then maybe 10% of citizens,
trust back a little bit. I wanna go back to this powerful sentence, to give not trust is to get no trust. And I'm wondering where it starts. Someone needs to be the first, you know, to give this trust, right, in this atmosphere of, suspicion and yeah. And, again, we we can think of it as, like, this unique place. But at the same time, if you
the most powerful give that trust. Right? I think that's right. Like and the danger, I think, in this moment is that we're in and I think what's so powerful about that articulation to give no trust is to get no trust. It's actually a quote from the Tao Te Ching from Lao Tzu. And and what it tells us is that it's a cycle. It's it's a reciprocal. And so if you give no trust, you get less trust. And then when you trust people less, you then so, like, so government trusts people less, people trust government less, government trusts people less. But it's also possible to reverse that cycle, and it's possible to do that anywhere. So that the simp the first acts of government putting trust in people begins to begins to turn that the other way. And I think that's what you can see from examples around the world where just the first experiments with a citizen's assembly like in Ireland in one of our other episodes or or in Norway, a similar thing or or a participatory big participatory budgeting effort in the city of Paris or a climate assembly in the city of Brussels. Like, these sorts of things begin to create a different relationship. And anywhere in the world, it can begin from there. So I just wanna underline this because, there is a there is a sort of an instinct to sort of project onto Taiwan as this sort of deeply solidarity nation in the face of an oppressor and By this year, of course. Yes. By this year? But but but not ten years ago. Yeah. And and just to just to, like, refer to some of those numbers that you put out, so trust in government was at 9% in 2014. Yeah. And 20 in 2018. And we're this year in The UK, we're on about 20%, to give you a sense of, like so so we are actually double where they were at the beginning. On some you may have different data. No. No. The the last the latest OECD data was 20%. So so 20 so we are we're starting at a slightly higher baseline even with what's happened here. And then this point about kind of a a a sort of, like, singular a sense of a sort of singularation. But you're saying 20 different languages, there's there is some deep polarization there. Right? So we're not Yeah. We're not talking about Well, there's a lot of,
like, if you go to political rallies, for example, if you go to the ruling party's rally for presidential election, you will find that none of them are waving the national flag. They're all waving this green island flag or rainbow flag or something. And it's actually at the opposition party, the KMT, where they waved the national flag. So it's, very divided, in terms of even the English name of our country. They will give you a very different analysis. And so, anyway, and so but all these did not, prevent the depolarizing work, because we boast, on both sides. And now with TPP, we have three parties, now of which have majority in the parliament. But all three parties doubles down, on the democratic process and open parliament and citizen participation and so on. So it becomes a race to the top once the career public service know that they have the social sector as the ally, to just foster this kind of work, then the political parties, the ministers, the MPs, and so on, they can compete, of course, on even more transparency, even more accountability. But then the ideology stopped being, you know, the stopping point to stop, the people from, you know, participating meaningfully.
So it becomes a race to the top, and I think this point really stands out. I mean, one of the most striking realizations I had when I joined the Tunisian government as a adviser to the minister of finance was the deep distrust high level state officials had towards civil society organizations. And I hadn't fully understood just how deep that suspicion or even fear ran until I met with a member of the European Parliament who served on the delegation for relations with the Maghreb countries. She mentioned that during Ben Ali's dictatorship, Tunisia was the only country that sent the names of civil society activists and political opponents to Interpol, labeling them as terrorists. Can you imagine? Looking at Tunisia under dictatorship and Taiwan under democracy, I've come to see the relationship between civil society organizations and public servants as a kind of thermometer for the health of a democracy. The more trust there is between them, the healthier the system, I think, tends to be. To repair our relationship to democracy, we need to start looking at the relationship between civil society organizations and civil servants, I think.
I totally agree. I think the relationship between civil service and civil society is is another of these absolutely fundamental relationships where the trust has to be rebuilt. It speaks also to this underlying philosophy that that is there in in Audrey's work and that she'd actually when I brought her over to The UK, had just put out into the world in the form of a book, coauthored with Glenn Whale, called Plurality. And I decided, at this point, to steer her into talking about that. So let's let's zoom out again a little bit to the to the to the underlying philosophy here. Right? And and this is this is the book Plurality. The only 20 odd copies that are in The UK at the moment are at the back of the room, and have all been signed. Not that there's a massive sales plug going on here or anything. This isn't just about there's a story and, there's there's actually an underlying philosophy, a mindset that you're that you're now kind of working with Glenn and putting out into the world as an offer of something to step into.
Yeah. It's, like one kilogram of this distilled distilled wisdom, over the past ten years of work. The idea, really simply put, is that singularity may be near and nearer. There's a new book that says Singularity is nearer by Chris Whale. And so, but every time that we see a technological transformation, we can ask, like, whether this technology is in the service of the plurality that is the diversity that collaborates, around us, or whether it is a technocratic force that centralizes more power to, you know, this flying spaghetti, shotguns, AGI, whatever, in the sky. Right? So to every technological transformation, we can ask that question. And so in Taiwan, we've been consistently asking that question, like, whether we're developing AI as assistive technologies like this, assistive technology, very transparent, and, also that I can fix it when it has bias. It improves my dignity. It's not transmitting photons to the cloud and back to my retina with advertisement pop ups or things like that. Right? So the the idea really is that AI should be assistive intelligence. It should not be technocratic. And plurality or collaborative diversity stems from the radical kind of conflict that Taiwan brings, like earthquakes. There's three filled earthquakes somewhere in Taiwan every day. But because that we anticipate that there's earthquakes out of this tectonic conflicts between the Eurasian and Pacific plates. So we work on resilience. We work on the building codes. We work on the societal preparedness that turns this conflict into co creation. So it's like harnessing, the fire, the explosion, right? Like before, when we see fire on the ground, we put it out, but now we see fire on the ground and we drill. It's knowing that there's energy underneath. And so the idea is to turn that conflict into co creative energy. And there's a lot of ways that the digital technology can help the face to face, the in person, the facilitative, the community sectors, the neighborhoods, to make that happen. And so if we, look at traditional Mandarin words for digital or, it actually also means plural, like, several, more than one digits, like 10. Right? So a minister of digital affairs is also a minister for plurality, and this is where the philosophy stems from. It is digital in the service of collaborative diversity.
I mean, once again, we've got huge ideas here. Right? Like, this concept of assistive intelligence rather than artificial general intelligence, the the the giant spaghetti squid in the sky. I mean, Audrey has some good images as well. Right? But but I think that juxtaposing those two possibilities, the idea of, using technology to, again, tap into the ideas and energy and resources of citizens to to to enable collaboration, to to enable human experience, not user experience. It's such a powerful thing to do to to to juxtapose that with the where things are going at arguably going at the moment, where when you start from a lack of trust in people, when you see the role of government as being to sort of manage and or deliver for people, you end up with this kind of centralized power that that is crushing. And and it I find it so inspiring to see and hear Audrey talking about this. It's like seeing people as citizens, as as capable contributors means that you you use technology entirely differently. The the starting point is how do we make the most of what people are capable of and assist them to do it rather than how do we supersede?
Private sector is guilty. No. For to be honest, like, when you think of it, our technologies today are not designed to see people as citizens, but mostly as consumers. As people who need to buy and be addicted to the products they buy. And the more addicted, the more, you know, we can buy them things instead of seeing them as a resource for intelligence and for moving humanity forward. And I think that's our curse today because the AI is not designed by visionaries like Audrey, but by people who wanna extract more from us. How do we chase that?
Follow Taiwan for citizens, not consumers. You're not gonna get any disagreement on from on that from me. And just to underline it, I mean, the the metaphor of the the Eurasian and the Pacific and the plates crashing into one another is pretty powerful. Right? And and I relate to this very deeply. So in in my work, I talk about three stories of the individual in society in this moment. The subject story, the consumer story, and the citizen story. The subject story, the right thing to do is do as you're told because the god gimme if you know best. The consumer story, the right thing to do is to pursue self interest, because that will add up to collective interest. The citizen story, get involved, because all of us are smarter than any of us, and that's how and that's and you draw on a on a analogous way, I suppose, seeing the same thing through a different lens. So and so maybe you could set out how you see the the sort of
that that trio or Yeah. I'll I'll just continue the story. Right? The the idea of the two tectonic plates bumping into each other is also the story of the tip of Taiwan, almost 4,000 meters high. Yushan,
raising, rising up to the sky, half a centimeter every year because of this tectonic plates. And so in a
technomic plates. And so in a sense, the citizen story says that, if we have the capacity to face the conflict and just entertain in our mind the plurality of view points. I'm non binary, which means that I don't see half of the people as closer to me and half the people necessarily farther away from me. So in 2016, in my HR form, in the gender field, I filed not applicable and in the party field also not applicable. And so, I do not have any political party affiliation, but in a sense, I'm panpartisan that if there is a party that I feel that I really can't understand why would people feel this way, I I would always problem. So I should spend time on a ethnographic or just hanging out, with them until I can really see things from their perspective. And so I think this actively seeking to balance, different viewpoints and so on, that is also plurality and that is the citizen story. Because if you participate as an active citizen, you're going to run into people who share some of the world views, but also vastly different in some of the other points of the world views. And the point here is not to, build a bridge so that we can all cross to the other side, it's not that. It's to build a bridge so that we can meet a little bit in the middle to share some stories and then go back, right, to where we came from. And that bridge building, I think, is core to digital democracy.
I would always think it's my problem. It's not their problem. I mean, she says so many things that are full of wisdom and I would love to stop and meditate at every sentence almost. I don't know. There there we have a political leader who sees conflicts as a possibility to grow by sitting and learning from the def deferring point. She sees herself as a bridge builder instead of a wall raiser. It is this ability to get close enough to everyone in the room to understand their viewpoint while being able to take a step back and have a look at the whole room. See the big picture. What can unite everyone? I mean, the common ground. Right? And start from there to create understanding. That also means that she is able to build trust with everyone in the room, which is one of the toughest task and one one hell of a powerful skill to be a leader.
Another I've heard you also talk about it not as kind of just just sort of papering over the differences, but actually drawing the best of
the best of all these different views. Right? Yes. And when I said bridge building, I don't mean it in a metaphorical way. I mean it in a very technical way. If you have participated in community notes on x.com, previously known as Twitter, then you probably know that the notes that gets featured, as a kind of context check to any viral posts that may be lopsided, are the notes that, convinces people on both polarized sides. So if people on two very different ideologies both resonates with one note, then that note flows to the top. It is a very different way to sort, information. Instead of just sorting by addictiveness or engagement, however you want to call it, it starts by how much bridge making potential it does. And this open source algorithm stems from something that I worked personally on in 2015, the Polis algorithm. The Polis algorithm basically asks people a very simple question. Like, for example, on the UberX case, first, we map out the facts that, instead of, you know, the very idealistic, abstract sharing economy, gig economy, extractive economy, whatever, exploitative economy instead of those abstract words, which is say, okay. Nowadays, in Taiwan, there is an app that a person with driver license, but no professional driver's license, can use to meet strangers on their way to work and pick them up and and then charge them for it automatically. So this is a fact. And the insurance situation, the registration situation, the metering situation, the search pricing, these are the facts. Now we map out the facts, and then we ask just one simple question to everyone. How do you feel about it? And this is really the key because everybody is an expert in our own feelings. There is no, like, judgment in terms of feelings. If people feel that UberX is not covering their rural areas very well, then they can say, I feel that the rural areas are not being covered well. And that's, like, nobody can say that this feeling is right or wrong. It is just their feelings. And so instead of a reply button, there is no reply button, and so there's no flame wars. There is instead, I resonate or I don't resonate with this feeling. And so when you go to the Palace website, all you can say is I resonate. I don't resonate. And then the next feeling comes. The next feeling comes. And at some point, you'll be prompted also to write your own feelings about the UberX thing. And so next to the interface, there is this visualization that shows the clusters. Initially, very much, polarized. You can literally see in the four corners people who identify more with the taxi associations, people who identify more with the UberX app startup ecosystem, whatever, people who identify more with the transportation, ministry and the rule of law or whatever, and the people who simply really don't care about all this, but they care about rural coverage very much. Right? So and so all all these are, like, valid. And, the great thing about this is that this is not a vote, not even a straw poll. So if you have 5,000 people all joining, all voting the same, it doesn't increase the area of the cluster. It only counts as one point because the idea is to surface to the top the bridgemakers. First, the bridgemakers that build bridges within clusters, and then the bridgemakers that manage to build bridges across clusters. For example, there are statements that says, search pricing is fine, but undercutting existing meters hurt, the, you know, livelihood of the people who drive. So it can only go up and not go down. And that's a unifying sentiment across two islands. And so after three weeks of nonviolent communication, people literally see those clusters merging to the middle. And then we have, like, 10, like, high consensus, 85% or more statements that we can then read as agenda to Uber, to Taxi Association on an open livestream multi stakeholder meeting that says, okay, this sounds very reasonable. Would you like to commit to it? And once they all commit to it, it then becomes law. So since 2015, we've been have a, you know, more than 20, such laws and regulation passed this way, and more than 100, collaborative meetings,
from citizen initiatives and so on, that also use Polis as a bridge making algorithm. I think this UberX story is a powerful example showing how the design of a tech platform and the values it is promoting can influence the outcome of dialogue and the real possibility to reach consensus to eventually become law.
And it's all built out of an underlying mindset. Right? That that plurality is what we want. That that that we can actually build the best solutions by understanding and seeing all of these different perspectives and finding the consensus out of them. And we can use technology to help find consensus rather than just to deliver goods and services to people more efficiently. So that's so inspiring. And I think the joy in this conversation for me was was going, I know that these tools, these approaches are available and are also starting to get picked up. This conversation is making me understand how important it is
to have ethical political leadership ally with good technologists to build the kind of platforms we need to advance democracy. And right, like, political leadership cannot be disconnected anymore from technology, and they need to have the, yeah, you know, tech people with them to build the kind of platforms that will eventually
become, like, societal values. Right? That just It just feels like such a different conversation, doesn't it? It's like it's a conversation about how could this actually create a better world rather than how do we limit the damage that technology does, which feels like it's about the best conversation that anyone can dream of at the moment. This is a just another level. And I find that super exciting. Now the thing is it's taking too long, but I do believe and see that these sorts of conversations, this sort of work is actually happening all over the world and in many different places. There's a and in The UK right now, there's a there's a new campaign called Our House, which is seeking to use some of these same tools to crowdsource what they're calling a people's charter for their twenty first century democracy. Trying to crowdsource what the rules of democracy that might need to change might be from outside of the political system, drawing inspiration from Gov Zero, using some of the same tools as Taiwan. So this is starting to replicate. At the end of the conversation, I I asked Audrey what advice she would give, particularly to The UK, but maybe it's relevant more widely as well.
I think it really is a time for demonstration for for demonstrators. There is a very clear energy, in the air about let's just do something, in the first one hundred days. We yesterday had a workshop, with, the Hart Art community, and there's just huge amount of energy there that says, if we manage to build something from the social sector, from the impact communities and so on in the next one hundred days, then there's a real chance that it gets institutionalized. And that is the kind of moment that we faced in 2014, in 2016, and we did institutionalize a lot of the stuff. And that then led to this, what we call people first public private partnership. Right? So PPP pay, that then defined Taiwanese politics for, like, the past, like, five years. And so, yeah, I would encourage you to think as a demonstrator and with an eye on perhaps institutionalizing the stuff that you'll be doing in the next coming months.
So one last massive idea from Audrey there, the PPPP, pub People First Public Private Partnership. And this invocation to build and to demonstrate. And I think that's such a powerful note to end on. She was talking in summer twenty twenty four just after the election of a new labor government in The UK. That's the specific context. But these moments keep coming. The the the moments when things could change dramatically. Whether it's whether it's a moment in response to riots, and protests in a place. If we can have a different model available for a government to step into like they did in Taiwan with that that occupy moment, then things can change very quickly and the work needs to start. And maybe I wanna take us back to your comment at the beginning about the two kinds of leadership that are present here. The leadership from the outside of demonstration rather than protest, and the leadership from the inside of being prepared to step into the space that's made. Powerful.
This was How to Save Democracy, the podcast for people who love democracy but know we've got serious work to do to save it. This episode was hosted by John Alexander and me, Omezine Khalifa, and produced by Joe Barrett. The studio engineer was Christian Kabwika.
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