Audrey Tang: On Becoming a "Good Enough Ancestor"
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.
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Transcript
Audrey Tong hardly needs an introduction. As leader of Gov Zero 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 the leader of radical exchange. We spoke on March 9 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 Pruitt. And without further ado, this is Audrey Tong. Audrey, it's, it's great to see you. Super happy to have the, opportunity to have a conversation with you today. And, yeah, thanks for thanks for joining us on the occasion of the release of the short doc. Yes.
Really happy to be here virtually. Good luck of time, everyone. I saw that the release roundtable, is up on Combinations
magazine, so it's very exciting. Yeah. We're, we're we're really, really proud of the documentary, Good Enough Ancestors, 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 a conversation about, about your life and your work and, help people who are interested in it get a deeper a deeper window into it.
Definitely. Let's get started.
Sure. So one of the things that comes through really strongly in the in the documentary is that you have a a relationship with with spirituality and with this sort of a practice of of 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 what does your spiritual practice look like? How does how does your work connect with with your well known ideas about Daoism? Maybe you can just kind of give us a an an intro to that. Yeah. 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 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 spirituality 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 phenomena arise. For me 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, I've become more aware of how those different ideas shape collective outcomes, both individually and also as a group. And I think one thing that always 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 Taoist 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. Super. And when you were in the documentary,
it's mentioned that, at at some point in your teen years, you you did some kind of a some kind of a retreat or something or took some sort of a break in which to focus on this. Well, what what
Yeah. So it was when I decided, to quit school, essentially, because that was not that easy to basically take a 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. So 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 world 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, the Audrey does 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, and so 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, okay, 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 composer education. And so I think this instilled in me both a belief in the, bureaucratic innovation capabilities, but also the, potential that 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. Actually, we can, I wanna stay in this early part of the conversation a little bit on the topic of your
your your life and and the influences that have shaped you, but I can't resist the temptation to ask a little bit more about school? Sure. Of course. There's there's a lot of ideas out there recently about the the purpose of education and the utility of education and what what are people getting out of it, what are people not getting out of it. And school is also, an important idea in the history of democracy. There are important figures about democracy who have seen, for example, state education as as a as a critical part of forming a democracy. What do you think about that? What what do do you 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 what do you think about the role of education? 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 ten 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 can 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 culture that it came from. And so, yeah, I think it is very valuable for me to then identify that, okay, 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 ten years, I'm like, okay, I'm ready to 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. Yeah. Let's let's put a pin in that and maybe come back to the topic of education because I think it's I think it's sort of underestimated in a lot of conversations about democracy, but more on the theme of your your development and your your worldview. I know you're a big Leonard Cohen fan and I am too. Another great moment in the in the in Good Enough Ancestor is you you explain your interpretation of the of of the famous Leonard Cohen quote. There's a crack in everything. That's how the light It's it. Yes. The way you put it in the documentary is, is that you observed a gap between the sort of world that technology was was creating in, in 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 as a as a chasm or an abyss, you saw it as a generative opportunity. Okay. I'm really curious if you can elaborate,
elaborate on that. Yeah. Definitely. So I think technologies, when the societies are ready to steer it and has this healing function, there's another Leonard Cohen song, I think that's called calm healing that talks about longing of the branches to lift a little bit, a longing of the arteries to purify the blood. So it it's almost like the 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 or something happening to it, then there's learned helplessness, there's depression and things like that. So I think to me, both the Anthem and also Calm 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 happening 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. What do you think it is about Leonard Cohen that makes his songs so interesting? Well, I think he's first and foremost a poet, and with this very philosophical bent. And just so happens that he is later on capable of put 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 like the specificity, but rather about the underlying, protocol, if you will. And so this protocol level thinking, I think, is also why it can apply to a lot of the situations that maybe Leonard 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.
He has an album the the album that Anthem is on called The Future from the, from the early nineties. There's a bunch of other interesting songs on that album. Mhmm. Which it seems to me that when he wrote those songs, he was grappling with the sort of fall of communism and that kind of early nineties moment, which appears to have been, you know, an important formative moment in your life as well.
Oh, yeah. He had mentioned the Berlin Wall. Right? Give me back the Berlin Wall. So I I think, yeah, that's certainly the case. I mean, my 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 June 1, which is very fortunate for our family because something terrible happened, three days afterwards. And so he made it his PhD 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 Snakhalin, to, Dutweiler to study, with him, when I was 11. His research subjects, that is to say early twenties 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 like debating, like 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. What do you think of the,
are you are you familiar with the song Democracy on that album?
Yeah. Democracy is Coming to The USA.
Yeah. The well, how do you how do you hear that song? What do you think of the are there any sort of lyrics from it that that that stand out to you? Or I'm just I just think it's an interesting I mean, there's a bunch of lines that I think are interesting. Like, 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 what do you think he means? What do you think he's I'm just curious what you to me, it's it's a little bit hard to interpret and, curious if it means anything to you. Yeah. I mean, of course, I know that song because it literally opens with the ninth 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 and I quote, that the heart has got to open in a fundamental way. Right? So so this is a more radical exchange that happens in democracy is expanding beyond elections. It is basically saying, oh, the psychological wounds, the spiritual wounds, and so on in our every aspect of life, by steering our politics together, we can help to heal those device 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. Yeah. He has this he has a he has a beautiful way of, I think, conveying the idea of, brokenness as an opportunity or as a as a point from which something beautiful can be created. There's another 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. Yes. I think it's just so beautiful.
Right. It's right before the ring the bells, that still can ring. Right. That's also
yeah. Yeah. So you also the I 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 an environment in which there were lots of different people with lots of different ideas, and that helped sort of see that helped you get this ability to sort of see multiple sides of things, I see generative potential in the in the conflict or in the irreconcilability of different valid perspectives on the same same issue. How do you first of all, I can relate to that. I that's something that I have grappled with a lot, and I think it's something that many lawyers like me have have also grappled with because it often is just possible to see both sides of something in a way that it can be 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? 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 unlike 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 a 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 grounds, 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, ethnographic, 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, I think anyone can see that. 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 of the existence of multiple perspectives is sort of core to the critique of democracy, which is anti democratic thought. Whereas, the, you know, kind of training 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 or of 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.
Yes. Love to be good. Yeah. Sorry. Go ahead. Yeah. No. I I'm just saying I totally agree. And also there's now assistive technologies. You know, the sense making AIs, the Polish, bridge making algorithm, even community notes, pro social media, and so on. All 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 other side saw it as well. And then it's impossible to ignore the fact that at least one uncommon ground exists.
The, we've already thrown the word democracy around quite a bit. It's Mhmm. A word that's been abused quite thoroughly over the over the past, quite a long time, honestly. And, you know, for example, one sort of unfortunate abuse of the of the word is, you know, I mean, some people, I think, at this point here hear the word democracy as, 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 what does it mean to you? Like, why is that word so important to you, and, what is it? Is it is it a form of government? Is it a is it a cultural phenomenon? How do you how do you pin it down? Yeah. I mean, yesterday in South by Southwest,
Corey 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 that has been stretched into so many context that it sometimes feel empty. Like, what 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 analyze 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 natural language is 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, 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, a presidential hackathon, IDS on 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 is moving and more like an organism that can kind of steer its own course. 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, there's first of all, there's a very interesting point about the role of information in democracy Mhmm. Which you have spoken about before, and I'd I'd love to unpack a little bit. There's also a metaphor in what you just said that I haven't quite quite thought of before, which is the idea of democracy as basically like a media experience.
Mhmm. Yes. As a move as a moving picture.
Yeah. I'd love to return to that and discuss that in light of some of sort of McLuhan's ideas and some of these other ideas about the relationship between between media and form of government. But why don't we take a quick break and, and then we can, we can keep going. Let's talk a little bit about the 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 sort of context of its emergence was? Certainly. And so in 2013 and then up, to q one fourteen, the president of Taiwan was enjoying a 9% of approval rate, which is not very high. And in a country of 24,000,000 people, that means anything the president says, 20,000,000 people were very skeptical about it. And so one of the reason 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 Gov Zero. It's a movement that started late twenty twelve that look at all the government websites, something that gov, that tw, and make shadow versions of those websites. So something.g0v.tw. So changing an o to a zero gets you into the shadow governments that deliver the same information like budgets or dictionaries and so on, but much more interactive and always a 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 gov zero people supported many civil society organizations 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. And so armed with these almost like group picture kind of sense making tools, people become much more informed. And so I think it 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 half a million people on the street and many more online into such conversations, It 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, facilitate conversations, citizens assemblies, and so on around the occupied streets of the parliament. It's a collective sense making learning process that every day interests 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 and go home. So it is one of the very rare occupy that converge instead of diverged. So would you say that the core of the movement had to do with the sort of or procedural
issues about how to make democracy work rather than substantive issues like trade deal or no trade deal?
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, 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 a urgent issue that no special, fields, 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, ten 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 Yiten and police aid. So it has the same structure. Basically, this is not a, like, hyper specialized field that just one department can solve everything. Now 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.
Yeah. I mean, it's it's it's interesting to me because I think that one of the I mean, something that I find, frustrating about many 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 I've I've hoped that radical exchange movement could sort of redirect attention towards is is public attention to the process. I feel like public engagement in in the question of how decisions are made, and the the procedures of 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 and second, it means that the public isn't thinking about the structure of the society and the structure of of of government. I wonder why, you know, why do you think it kind of came naturally to, to the to the gov zero movement or to or to Taiwan more broadly to be concerned with with the procedural dimension of of of governance in that period? 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 on speech and association, that was, the late ace. 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 two hundred 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 worldwide 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 the very beginning of The US constitutions. 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. Publish came from the Seattle Movement. Lumio, another tool we use at the time, came from the New Zealand occupied movement. And not to mention e petition 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 Castell's 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 the it's structurally done in such a way that makes everybody lose. And so it's easier to upgrade the protocol, upgrade the process, the platform, instead of just the product. Yeah. That's interesting. And it's that seems like an important, attitude to try to bring, bring over to other parts of the world. Mhmm.
Now when we get to 2014, there's this interesting historical moment in which the the Parliament Building was occupied by students. And there there's there's an interesting, kind of bizarre mirroring between that moment and the January 6 phenomenon. And I wonder if you can say something about that. I mean, what do you what do you think about that that parallel, which I'm sort of not the not the first to notice? Yeah. 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 a 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 policies. What is not is that it's not just stopping the passing of the trade deal. So I think the original kind of story of Sunflower movements 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's building, but the software that's running, in Taiwan is quite different. Yeah.
One of the important roles that that you played, and you can, you know, feel free to add to this or or correct if I'm getting a little bit wrong. But, one of the important roles that you played was, to set up a a mechanism for, live streaming the Uh-huh. Dance.
Yes. And,
through doing that, you were able to, to to show that the movement was nonviolent, 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 about what you what you did
and why why it worked. Well, I I take this as a plural, you, because definitely I'm not the only person. There's dozens and dozens of people working under the gov zero common batch 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 occupied parliament. And so communication, due process, and health, these are like the three things like air, sunlight, and water that empowered the the sunflower movement. And so my personal, contribution involves, I guess, carrying a 350 meter Ethernet cable so that, people can livestream with higher bandwidth and lower latency, as opposed to the WiMAX. People probably have forgotten that now, but there's a, alternate way that's not four gs, that's slightly faster than four gs to provide such kind of, live streaming. And also making sure that online, there is a shared website called g0v. Today, g0 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 nonviolent, 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 us real time feedback that if I type is 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 a 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. I wonder if you can say a little bit more about the nonviolence. Like, what what was the sort of, what was the role of nonviolence, nonviolent philosophy in the, in the Sunflower Movement? And how do you you personally think about that? I'm I'm curious in particular if it connects to your, like, your spirituality or your or your larger worldview. Yeah. The people
facilitating the conversations around the occupied parliament had a 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'll have solidarity of a different kind. Right? And so by deescalating using nonviolent methods, including live streaming, but also art, humor, you know, public creativity. There's a lot of art in the sunflower movement, including music and so on. By amplifying those nonviolent 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 a 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 I think that also goes back to my early Daoism training. There's there are very interesting puzzles around this for me. For example,
one one puzzle is like sometimes it can be hard to draw the line between violence and nonviolence. For example, if you have a nonviolent movement that occupies a parliament building merely by pushing past some guards or something. There's sort of a minimal, you know, minimal violation of a of a property law or Mhmm. Mhmm. Something like that. Where do you so I guess the first question is, how do you think about that? I mean, how do you where do you draw the law? How how radical should our nonviolence be, first of all? And then and then the second is the second part of the question is this relationship between violence and information seems increasingly increasingly important to me because so you've got things like nonviolent communication, which already implicitly acknowledge the idea that communication or information can, in certain contexts, tip into coercion on a personal level. And then also on a on a larger level, on a sort of a strategic level or governmental level, there's a there's a very interesting relationship between information and and power. And there are really, really difficult puzzles in here, and I'm curious if if you have ways of navigating them. Yeah. So first of all, I I don't think,
civil disobedience is necessarily violent just because it breaks a regulation, a norm, or a law. I 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 the norms are harmed, but the norms is not a living being that can suffer. And so by saying that it's harmed is a little bit like saying, you know, a corporation, a company is harmed. I guess it makes certain sense in the extended metaphor sense, but certainly it is not the the original sense of harm or suffering. And so, yeah, I think the 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, sometime 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, it's 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. You know, since 2015, there's a lot of research into the engagement through enrichment 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 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 the online place, just like the offline nonviolent space that we hold, can prioritize different logic that is much more oxytocin or serotonin that is the 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 interaction. Alright. So
building on, some of the ideas that we were just getting into with information, I've, I've long been interested in Marshall McLuhan and, in particular, McLuhan's ideas about the relationship between between media and politics. So just to set the table here, you know, he has a lot of interesting ideas, one of which can be summarized fairly concisely by the the insight that different eras in media can sometimes drive a different shape of politics. So for example, he thought that the era of 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 to reach the ears of of of millions of people, simultaneously and sort of transfix them through the nature of the of the media experience. In 2024, we saw a lot of societies make move away from, a commitment to democracy. I you know, to me, it seems, you know, like too much of an international sort of phenomenon to be a pure coincidence. Mhmm. And I'm curious what you what you make of it. How do you see it in in light of that kind of McLuhan view? And, I mean, that's the first question that we can kind of get into what to do about it. 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 the 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, many 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 mines 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, 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 post was under 40% instead of pulling it down. Attempting to manipulate in this way actually made it backfire. So he was elected at over 40%. But in other jurisdictions, such as Romania, the same mechanisms made someone who was enjoying, you know, less than 5% 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 engagements, rearrangements, 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. So one of the,
I don't think this is quite doing justice to 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 ten 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. Mhmm. And McLuhan's sort of one I mean, an interesting distinction that McLuhan drew between radio and television is, is this distinction between hot and cool media. Mhmm. So and the relevant thing here is that both are broadcasting, but McCoolan still saw an important distinction between them because radio is this kind of, like, single channel, single sensory input Mhmm. Type of type of experience, which has this kind of more more, like, almost exciting and agitating influence on the 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 he thought of it as a cool media cool medium because of this sort of multisensory aspect of it. The idea that you kind of have a television on in the in the 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 this 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? 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 to 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 and things like that. So 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 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 will be like, oh, that's a very good point and things like that. And so you 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, conversation network logic that counts the, the spontaneous understanding and how much it widened the bandwidth for future communications. And then now, again, with the advent of tools that can automagically, make transcripts, make summaries, make math leads, have snippets. We just talk about identifying the thirty 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, oh, that's a very good point. Do you think,
do you think that, like, the from the McLuhan point of view, McLuhan sometimes paints this picture where it's almost, like, predetermined, where, you know, the sort of the dominant form of media just determines a form of government that will that will emerge. I think that's I I guess, first question is, like, do you think that's overstated? And the second question is, is do you think there's, like, a sort of a, you 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 what what kind of media is it? What does a predetermined form of government is it gonna push us towards? And can we steer that? How can we steer that? 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 a 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 ambiance. Instead of being the focus of your attention, they're in the ambiance 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, I cover overlooked perspectives and issues and so on. Then it, this kind of group chat conversation network AI, I think will determine a much more deliberative and all much more bridging sense of listening of conversation networks. So I do agree that the media kind of constraint the kind of governance politics 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 Roy and Lawrence Lessig and yours truly that talks about this.
I've, 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 in the context of, for example, driving apps and and things like that. But you've also drawn this parallel, this sort of historical parallel with parliaments. So 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. The monarch. But over time, evolved into a system of control or the actual the actual site of of power. 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 or, you know, I mean, how do you how do you apply that to the world that you see? Yeah, we we just talk about it, right? We we talk about social networks
that are initially just a place to share ideas. Microblogging literally started as blogging with some size limit on your blog and nothing more. And it just shows the people you follow, on the microblogging side. But over time, they accumulate power. And starting 2015, the four u feed, we talk 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 some place 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, oh, maximize people's time spent on their touch screens. There's nothing in the original blogging movement that connects to this. This is entirely arbitrary. So, so I think, yes, the consultative systems through feedback loops can become control systems. There needs to be a, 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 foreign interference machine. Right? So yeah, I 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 we become a, again, authoritarian
control system. How does this relate to, to to education? So Mhmm. You know, the the history of democratic thought is is is littered with the idea that basically people need the right information in order to be able to participate in in in democracy, which which can include the news media. It can also include, education systems. How do you think about that? Like, kinds of things you know, do you view them as, you know, 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? 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 prebunking. That is to say, if a 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 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're being media competent. And so competence become 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, see a zero sum or 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 this 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.
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 are 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 system of kind of pre liberal or pre democratic shared values is necessary for a as kind of a base upon which a democratic Like, society. Traditions.
People with common stories to tell.
Yeah. Right. And so, for example, you see this in thinkers like David Brooks, who is written about the idea that, for example, religious values were for a long time, a kind of an unspoken important you know, keystone or element of foundation of American democracy. How do you I mean, you have this great kind of way of having a binocular view of, for example, you consult you call yourself a conservative anarchist. Right? So you have this great kind of way of synthesizing
the right one.
Young. Yeah. How do you how do you hear those kinds of ideas when you hear those kinds of conservative ideas about the culture circulating? How do you hear them, and how do they relate to what you were just talking about? That kind of, you know, educating people to be able to interpret information
reasonably. Yeah. I mean, in in Taiwan, it is quite interesting that the more highly educated you are, the more openly you're likely to practice spirituality. So this is quite different from, for example, US or much of the Europe. And so we we don't draw a 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 a 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 is 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 is 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. 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. Yeah. I mean, I think in in The United States and, and and probably Western Europe, although in a slightly different way, there's this there's kind of a there's an idea that these two things can't be can't be synthesized or mixed, which in my opinion has something to do with, with sort of John Rawls. So in in other words, there's this side, you know, there's 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'd be internally universalistic, but they, you know, not universally shared, let's say, and and therefore not appropriate as an expression of public reason. Mhmm. Or on the other hand, the shared values must be entirely scientific, entirely enlightenment, entirely technocratic. And there's a real problem. There's a real There's a real difficulty in, I think, overcoming the kind of Rawlsian categories that are in our heads in order to see that, for example, that there are that these two conversations can be pointing towards the same thing.
Yeah. I 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 refuse to make any, like, associations when it comes to important traditions. But then if you just strip a 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 AI's 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. Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, this this actually feels quite quite close to the heart of of the problem or quite close to the heart of what we need to really synthesize in order to, in order to reweave the social fabric in the in the West. Yep. I'd like to ask a few questions about sort of markets and trade. The Sunflower Movement was, as we've discussed, largely prompted by a trade deal. Mhmm. What do you think about, about trade deals and international trade in general? And the the sort of spin that I wanna put on this is that, when, you know, 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, these two things? This seems like an important question that that often gets kind of lost in our discourse, the sort of distinction between between system of government and sovereignty. And, yeah, I just wonder if you can say 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, you know, radical integration of polities through trade in the along the lines of, you know, the the WTO or the or the EU and these kinds of things? How do you how do you think about it? Yeah.
Interestingly, there was no sunflower sized demonstration when the first part of the cross strait agreement was passed, which is about the products part. And it only became a large problem in the uprising sense when the service part is considered. And primary among the issues raised by the civil society on the service part is the services related to communication, which includes, of course, Huawei and ZTE in our then new four g networks, which would put a systemic risk. Let me do this again. Yeah. I think there's trade and there's trade in Taiwan, but 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 four g and then later on in all part of world five g networks. That's a real problem because people have very reasonable doubts about these so called private sector resisting their states 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 a 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 threaten 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 assault on the democratic values? So in a sense, I think the occupied parliament in Taiwan was about sovereignty. And the sovereignty is in a 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.
I think I want to push on that just slightly because, for example, if you think about certain kinds of, you know, non traditionally information oriented trade arrangements, let's say imports of agricultural goods or Mhmm. That these things do interfere with with the culture and the structure of societies where they, come into into place. You know, you can see, for example, just to name one example, like, the farmers in the 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 upholds the EU Mhmm. More than it can withstand. And so, and I and I think that you that that kind of concern with the impacts of trade on society and that kind of jealousy about sovereignty and that sort of or this 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, in with Trump's politics, for example. But I 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 people who care about democracy in this deeper, behavioral 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? 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, on manufacturing, and so on, feel that they don't want to be, annexed or or, overly included, into a a larger trading system. So in a sense, there's a parallel there. I'm not saying that only the information ecosystem is important. I was saying that in 2014, it was the trigger point. Right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And and so yeah. I think any of the shared urgencies that are broad 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 it's just there to stop and merging of borders from happening, or whether they are generative in a 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 agreement. Great. Thanks. And I think maybe the final question or we can develop it or build on it here is I'm not having it. I'm I'm curious how you think about the challenge of maintaining pluralism or plurality. And I mean this slightly broader context than just democracy. Like, This strikes me as a real puzzle because we get this amazing generative activity and creative force that is unleashed when we break down boundaries and create diversity. But there's almost this there's almost kind of a physical, you know, entropic sort of a process here in which, you know, when you break down boundaries between two chambers, eventually the pressure in them equalizes, and you don't have that that diversity anymore. And and what this leads me to 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 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, the famous kind of arrow information paradox is that, you know, when you is that, you know, in a competitive market, innovation and information is always underinvested in because once it's out there, it just kind of equalizes. 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 to 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 and and informational freedom. So we have this sort of paradox of how to 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 your thoughts about about this. Well, first of all, I think in the book, plurality,
the 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 camp, 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 the almost fractal sense. And then the sides that want to cross a bridge on this side and that side maybe become a a new higher dimensional group. And very interestingly, the two side that did not want to cross that bridge may actually also find what was called surprising validators and form new allies and so on. So what 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 uncommon ground, you then regroup into unlikely allies and things like that. So this is the 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 Radical exchange 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 coproduction that allows a newer generation to come and contributing to 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 sum 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.
So what kind of patterns do you see? For example, do you like, the there one pattern there is is this kind of building a building a boundary between the, emergent ecosystems and the, you know, emergent alignments and fiat currency system. Mhmm. Right? That that's that you know, 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 of of building a of of finding a finding a place to build a boundary that really respects and and enables social diversity to thrive without being immediately collapsed into a money system.
Mhmm.
The 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. Are there it's a little bit I'm trying to sort of feel my way into something, but it you know, are there other kinds of productive places to build those boundaries that respect plurality and then enable diversity to regenerate
that people in this space should be thinking about, experimenting with, and and looking to articulate? Well, in a sense that the movie we are talking about, good enough ancestor, is a good example, not just in a traditional sense of a proof of value without full disclosure in the form of a three minute trailer. But also, you can see the twenty one minute edited version as also just a 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 one terabytes of footage. There was the raw material, the source code that went into the twenty one 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 terabytes 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, right, 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 commons, then you can preserve both
the positive sum nature of the commons, but solve a lot of the free rider problems. Super. That's a that's a great place to to close. Any final thoughts for sort of radical exchange movement, fellow travelers who are thinking about what they can do in the in the coming years? Yeah. Definitely. I think what's really attractive
about radical exchange is that it refused to be placed on the left or right. In a sense, it's like saying conservative anarchism or a Taoism. It is both extreme left and extreme right, so much so that it wrapped around and into some unlikely ally. And and this is, I 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 left the country, but I can't stand the scene because I'm neither left or right. I'm just staying home tonight. So I I think this is a a good place, to close on, where 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. Super. Thank you so much, Audrey. Thank you.
