A New Era of Democracy Ep. 1 | Audrey Tang and Jo Guldi with Rosa O’Hara
Rosa O’Hara moderates a discussion between Audrey Tang and Jo Guldi on Taiwan’s expeditious response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the history of the g0v movement, the democratic power of embracing new forms of civic technology, and more.
Top Keywords
- taiwan 0.027
- audrey 0.010
- government 0.006
- contact tracing 0.006
- tracing 0.006
- land 0.005
- taiwanese 0.005
- contact 0.004
- data 0.004
- citizens 0.004
- information 0.004
- public 0.004
Transcript
This is a RadicalxChange production. Hello, and welcome back to Radicalxchanges. In this conversation, frequent RXC collaborator who's a professor of history at Southern Methodist University. This is a deep dive into how Taiwan was able to tackle the pandemic in unprecedented and creative ways by embracing new forms of democracy and social technology. They also discuss the history of the Gov Zero movement and how particular philosophical underpinnings, such as Taoism, lie at the heart of these socio technological innovations. It's a fantastic starting point for our mini season called A New Era of Democracy and was originally filmed for our RXC TV program. We can't wait for you to hear from these brilliant innovators and the fascinating ideas being brought to the forefront. This is Radical Exchanges podcast, and this is a new era of democracy.
Hello, and welcome to a RadicalxChange talk where we are beyond honored to have with us the Taiwanese digital minister, Audrey Tang, and historian, Joe Gouldy, to discuss Taiwan's civic technologies, how these technologies have been deployed by its citizens, and what that means for Taiwanese democracy. I'll be the moderator for today's talk. My name is Rosa Ohara, and I'm a staff writer with NOEMA magazine. At NOEMA, we cover some really interesting topics to do with philosophy, reimagining democracy, and so forth. We've published quite a bit on Taiwan that our readers have really had an appetite for. Taiwan is such a fascinating, complicated place, a tiny nation that is highly technologically mature and still such a young democracy that has been so successful at getting its citizens involved in the democratic process. So I'm really thrilled to be moderating today. Before I introduce our two wonderful guests, I'd like to lay out the themes that we'll be discussing today. We'll be talking about how Taiwan has had what many would call a very successful response to COVID and how Taiwan's population has helped out in this success by developing civic technologies like different types of apps to track and combat COVID, which have played such a crucial role in the country's pandemic response. We'll also talk about Taiwan's participatory democracy, the high level of transparency within its government, and the philosophical underpinnings of what makes civic technology and democratic participation so universal in Taiwan. We'll also explore the historical context in which these innovations have emerged and how Taiwan's unique synthesis of eastern and western values have put it at the global forefront for government innovation. With those themes in mind, we have two people who are very qualified to speak on them. We have a hacker and a historian, both of whom have dedicated themselves to understanding and promoting innovative thinking on collective governance. Our first guest, Audrey Tang, was part of the sunflower student movement in 2014 and then entered politics becoming the second youngest person to ever be appointed to the Taiwanese cabinet in 2015. And she's now the digital minister of Taiwan. Audrey has sought to make the Internet a place for civic participation, a place to create a transparent government through open data and radical transparency with all of Audrey's meetings recorded and uploaded online. With other democracies struggling with misinformation all over the world, Audrey is perhaps the global leader in how to use digital spaces to strengthen democracies. Our second guest, Joe Goldie, is a historian of capitalism who is currently an associate professor at Southern Methodist University. Joe also directs democracy lab, an initiative across several universities to find ways to empower people to use technology to advance the public good. Jo writes frequently on land politics and is the author of two books. And her next book, The Long Land War, will be published next year in March. Audrey and Jo, to start, could you tell me about your respective backgrounds and how they've informed your interest in the importance for citizens to be active participants in their democracy? Audrey, welcome. Let's start with you.
Yes. Gladly. Taiwan was notified of the pandemic, thanks to a young doctor, Li Wenliang, from Wuhan, who posted on their social media that there were seven new source cases in the Huanan seafood market at the December 2019. Now in December 31, the PTT, Taiwan's digital civic infrastructure, gets this, notification by another young doctor, Nomar Pfeiff, and PTT immediately start to apply their collective and connective intelligence to triage this news. Just in twenty four hours, we started health inspections for all flight passengers coming in from Wuhan to Taiwan. So doctor Li Wenli literally saved the Taiwanese people, while his message, of course, could not be transmitted to the people in Wuhan because of the very different infrastructure when it comes to Internet enabled listening. And PTT because it has no shareholders nor advertisers for more than twenty five years, is squarely in the social sector operating within the Taiwan academic network with a norm of what I call prosocial media rather than the more antisocial corners of social media. So that was the first, I guess, digital innovation that saved the people in Taiwan when it comes to the pandemic. Of course, mask rationing, contact tracing, and so on were cocreated with g zero v or gov zero, community. Around 10,000 people on the same Slack chat channel, or Telegram or IRC, all the time, contributed to the internationally recognized early response. And this may, of course, also on the SMS based contact tracing system where people can check-in the public venues without having to download any app, and sending a SMS to a well trusted number +1 922 representing the counter epidemic, Khamhad sangha, without, having to pay SMS charge and no worries about the privacy implications as well because it's just stored in the five telecom carriers. If there's no contact tracing request from our local contact tracing office, it's just deleted, after twenty eight days. So so far, there's a quarter billion SMS sent this way and around 11,000,000 that has been used to shorten the contact tracing from more than twenty four hours per confirmed case to less than twenty four minutes. And that's why, of course, for the past couple months, there's essentially zero local cases in Taiwan, and we're back to safety.
And, Joe, we'll move to you.
So there's also a story, a longer story about, the out outbreak of SARS. Why is it that Taiwan was able to develop this culture of trust in government? In The United States, we had various decentralized initiatives to try to make up some kind of contact tracing. It was happening on a state by state basis. My own university had its own contact tracing app, but there was no centralized initiative. And indeed many many intelligent people felt that if the federal government were to release a contact tracing app, it wouldn't be accepted in The United States in the way that the the people of Taiwan had come to accept these apps. So when I I've spoken about this with my colleagues in China history and the history of Taiwan, and what they've explained to me is that twenty years ago when the first outbreaks of SARS occurred, Taiwan had already gone through some initial experiences with sharing privacy and the kinds of issues that come up in a society in which people trust the government to monitor where they are every moment of the day. So for example, there were news stories twenty years ago about individuals who were having an affair and that information came to public light because they were exposed as having the disease when they were away from their home at a time when they shouldn't when their family thought they shouldn't have been away from their home. The media had had a conversation about this. The people of Taiwan had had a conversation about privacy and the kinds of risks and intrusions that monitoring data by the government might cause. And one of the things that the Taiwanese government had done even in the years leading up to the sunflower revolution was to openly vet and answer and speak to these concerns. So there was a dialogue set up between public health experts and journalists in the media, ordinary members of the public. The de sunflower movement, of course, played on that and expanded that. Government ministers made themselves more responsive, answered questions online, shared all of the documentation about their conversations with lobbyists. The sunflower movement was able to build on a culture of public trust in government. My understanding is that that's one of the reasons why the why the contact tracing was successful in Taiwan. The government had worked to educate the public. A question that that arises from this, we I think we sometimes stumble in thinking through the role of government and information in The United States because of the history of propaganda. Propaganda is the word for government dissemination of information in a top down fashion, where the government is printing posters saying loose lips sink ships. Our experience with propaganda in the in The United States dates from the second World War. And we've largely stepped away from the propaganda model. Propaganda is associated with dictatorships. It's associated with fascism. So I'd like to ask Audrey to help us to understand. I think I could use help understanding, and many American listeners could also use help understanding What is the difference between the culture of trust in government that allows this open sharing of data, that allows listening? How is that different in Taiwan from propaganda?
My favorite quote from the, was to give no trust is to get no trust. By trusting the citizens, that is the entire different world as opposed to if the government has developed one single application. It's not the case in Taiwan. The SMS contact tracing system is not government invention or government technology. As I mentioned, it's part of the gov zero community's cocreation, and the people who participated in the cocreation are the people, for example, who operate the, the people who, are in charge of some previous contact tracing systems in other parts of the world, the people who are in charge of one of the most popular messaging tools in Taiwan and so on. So a broad collective intelligence that connects through the network of contact tracing developers around the world, mapped out the possible solution space and converged on SMS that's not transmitted to government really, but rather stayed, in the telecom operators emerged as the specification. And my role is simply, I call it reverse procurement, right, to deliver on the civil society expectations of a safe and privacy preserving contact tracing system. So by trusting the citizens and not delegate, but rather working with the people and have the social sector set the norm, the public sector simply amplify these norms, and we implement it in a way that's entirely voluntary if you want to use pen and paper or any other method, in addition to or replacing the SMS based contact tracing system, you're still free to do that. There is no penalty for not using this newly invented system, which is why it doesn't, foreclose future possibilities of iteration, and it amplifies the norm such that the private sectors, adhere to the norm, not because it's a government mandate, but because the citizens already prototype and ask for it. So I call this forking the government, taking government digital services, developing a different direction by the people closest to the pain and suffering, and our job again is just to amplify them.
I'm also really interested to know, Audrey, how are civil liberties, which are so important in Taiwan, maintained during the tracking and tracing of COVID?
Yes. That's a really great question. So, we use a principle, and by we, I mean the Gov Zero community who designed this thing, use a idea called secure multiparty computation. It is one of the privacy enhancing technologies that ensures, for example, the telecoms, which has your check-in SMS records, nevertheless, has no access to the mapping table between the digits that represents the venue and the actual venue themselves. To individual telecom operators is just random code that means nothing. And for the QR code maker, anyone can be a QR code maker, by the way. But for the primary QR code maker at Trade Fund, they do not have any access, to your SMs records or indeed of any person entering the venue. They just interact with the venue owners to make some unique 15 digits code. Unless you are a contact tracer that has the lawful authorization to get the puzzle pieces from the Taipei Pass system, from the five telecoms, from Tradefin, and so on. Individually, those data do not compromise anyone's privacy because it's just like puzzle piece without piecing together. It does not complete a contact tracing. So what I'm trying to get at is that if we design with privacy and accountability in mind in the very beginning, then it leads naturally, for example, to people who want to see which contact tracer in which municipality have accessed their records in the past twenty eight days. And they can simply visit sms.192two, .gov.tw, enter in their phone number, respond to SMS, and then, just see the entire reverse accountability audit record. And so all of these are earning trustworthiness, as Joe mentioned, by essentially giving an account whenever there is a doubt instead of a blanketly sign, oh, the state knows the best. Actually, the state just designed the process and mechanism, but do not hoard the data in any centralized way.
I think this is really interesting, Audrey. You're talking about creating a ledger or an archive of privacy, an archive of access. So every time every time the QR code tracker looks at an individual and where they've been, there's that information is recorded so that citizens can keep monitoring the state even while the state monitors citizens. It's a two way transaction. And the ledger is there. The archive is there so that even after the moment, you can you can ask, how was the state accessing that data? How who was doing so? I think this is a really important point because when we talk about open government and open information in The United States, much of the discussion in the mainstream media is dominated by conversations about Bitcoin, which is just one one section of ledger, only financial transactions. Can you say a little bit more about the kinds of archives and ledgers that you've used and why designing them appropriately is so important?
Distributed ledger technologies form a important inspiration, to the Taiwanese civic technologist community. Indeed, many of the developers in, for example, Ethereum ecosystem and Tezos and many other ecosystems, are either primarily or, importantly based in Taiwan. So when we introduced, for example, the mass rationing system last February, people immediately thought, yeah, this is something a ledger technology could help. And with the help again from Gov Zero, last February, all the pharmacies in Taiwan, more than six thousands of them, published their real time inventory of medical grade mask. Every thirty seconds, there is a kind of global update to more than 100 different applications. Some are interactive maps, some are chatbots, voice assistance, things like that to ensure that whenever anyone purchase two or three masks at a local pharmacy using their national health, insurance IC card, more than 100 different developers, gets this renewed number immediately so that people queuing after them, actually can check their phone and see in real time, whether this pharmacy is going to run out of months, whether they should queue elsewhere. They can make that decision even be before, deciding, which pharmacy they want to to use. So, again, this is a kind of coordinated solution, but it's not implemented in a centralized way. Rather, all the different interactive visualizations points out, for example, to the data bias, that privileges, the urban areas because, initially, we're distributing based on physical distance, but not everyone own a helicopter as the open street map community pointed out to us, rather quickly. And then, they forked the government, essentially, by interpolating, through an MP to our Ministry of Health and Welfare. They said, I think we have this better distribution method based on the real time number that you publish. So demonstration is not a protest here. Demonstration is literally a demo. And minister Chen said, yeah. Legislator teach us. And the very next day, we started implementing a better distribution mechanism. So this is not a accountability in a traditional sense of the government does everything. Rather, this is truly cocreation where the citizens can also contribute better algorithm to address data bias.
I love the story, Audrey, that you talk about how you went to your colleagues and you said it's the people who actually have a better plan with how to manage the masks. Different places were going to run out of masks, and you said that we have to, kind of work with the people and engage with their ideas. You've mentioned a little bit about the gov zero movement. Could you describe, Audrey, a little bit about how citizens in Taiwan improves the user experience of government platforms using the Gov Zero website. For the past ten years or so,
Gov Zero has been systematically looking at the digital services in Taiwan, which is usually something that g o v, that t w, and forking those services into something that g0v.tw. For example, in our national participation platform, join the gov.tw, if you change it o to a zero, join the g0v.tw, then you get into the Gov Zero Slack channel. So, basically, what Gov Zero is doing is showing alternate imaginations of what's possible in government digital services, but always in open source and creative common licenses so that it's a soft fork, as we say, in the DLT space. If the state wins in popularity, and the got zero, alternatives gain in popularity, then the state can, at any given sign, and we did so for many different occasions, simply say, oh, we can't speed them, so we join them and simply adapt the Gov Zero designs, through reverse procurement and, instead of traditional procurement, and integrated into the government services.
I'd like to move into the history of civic technology in Taiwan and its parallel taxation system. Taiwan's civic tech East Coast system seems to be significantly rooted into the fabric of Taiwanese society, which is perhaps the product of the ten year transition period between martial law ending in 1987 and the first democratic elections in 1996. I'm really interested to know whether Taiwan's civic technology during the pandemic can be attributed to the fact that during martial law, the state somewhat failed to provide services to its citizens. So basic government services were faltering and community service organizations, CSRs, started delivering them to the population, bringing about really a decentralization of services and a parallel taxation system where people donated to these platforms, these CSRs, in order to support them, which still remains to this day. So a question for both yourself, Jo and Audrey. How do these civic institutions, not only in Taiwan, but also elsewhere, strengthen the social fabric of a society, and what are the benefits for a parallel taxation system?
When I was a child in the late eighties, Taiwan already had a very strong social sector. The cooperatives movement, the social entrepreneurs, the local charities, and so on, indeed delivered many essential services and campaigned for democratization even before the martial law was lifted. I think one, large event around the turn of century was the, September twenty first earthquake. And the earthquake really caught people of different parts of the social sector, of different phase, of different practitioners, to essentially work together out of necessity and build social solidarity because the that disaster is such a massive scale that people simply cannot, rely on the local and central governments to provide the necessary response in time. And afterwards, for pretty much all the large disasters, and I include the occupy of the parliament, the South La Herr movement in that, the social sector that already had the prior experience of trusting each other, simply bonded together. So the occupy movement was really orchestrated in 2014 by more than 20 NGOs, which, has the corners on the occupied parliament on the street. And, actually, people half a million people on the street worked toward getting the messages of the 20 NGOs across each other so that across trade service and trade agreement is debated not from a purely economic perspective, but also from the system risk, associated to cybersecurity, to labor conditions, to LGBTIQ rights, and many other things, giving a more full fledged deliberation on the quality of the, occupied parliament and its, constituents of people who participate in the movement. So I, do agree that this is continuous.
Fascinating. And, Jared? This is so interesting. I think about the history of the CSOs in Taiwan that you've been telling us about, Audrey. You know, it occurs I'm asking myself why it seems that America has had such a different experience of civic technology over the last ten years. Ten years ago, it seemed to many Americans as if technology itself was a silver arrow. Add technology and add the Internet, and you will instantly get a democratic revolution. And on the basis of this kind of thinking, many Americans believed that, for instance, that an Arab Spring would be possible with democratic revolutions across The Middle East. And this, of course, did not happen. And technology provided certain freedoms and revolutions in Taiwan. But in America, looking backwards over the last ten years, we mostly see a story of fake news and political division and the creation of echo chambers. So rather than technology providing the opportunity for people to come together and build collaboratively in the way that you're talking about in Taiwan, we've seen divisiveness. Now if I try to understand this as a facet of American history, I'm lost. The American history has a great history of collaboration. And there was a cooperative movement here. There were back to the land movements here just as there was a cooperative movement in Taiwan. There have been strong civil society and voluntary organizations in The United States. And we had our own occupy movement where people showed up with food, and they spontaneously created book tents and library tents and a religion tent. People turned out in the street and offered their time, their money, their resources, caring for each other. Street medics appeared on the on the cities of North America. So we are also a a collaborative culture. It seems to me possible that we're beginning to understand, historians of America are beginning to understand that one of the things that's happened over the last forty years is a growing distrust of government in The United States, which has been in many ways planted. For example, in many of the textbooks which have been assigned at the secondary level textbooks published by evangelical history publishing houses, which for example have made a case that the Civil War wasn't fought over slavery, that America was inherently designed as a nation for capitalism, a Christian nation rather than a nation designed around enlightenment principles. And maybe through reading these textbooks, we have persuaded ourselves and each other that we are a nation that cannot cooperate. You've spoken so beautifully about the experience of your own experience, coming up in the cooperative movement, learning to trust and work with others, but also the way in which Taiwan and Taiwanese schooling is providing an education in cooperation. For example, I I I think I heard the figure that now there is an opportunity to propose government initiatives, and some quarter of these new government initiatives come out of the secondary schools where students are doing capstone projects. Could you speak to me in general about the role of education and how it is that a society learns to collaborate with each other? What is the experience in Taiwan like? In Taiwan, indeed, we have a constitution
that mandates fostering from the state of the cooperative movements. It's part of the constitution. And when I was a child, each and every primary school and middle school, has to have a consumer co op within that school, democratically elected to make sure that, we eat healthy food during lunch breaks and things like that. So, these are small things, but I do think that it gives rise to a culture where people instinctively think of cooperative solutions to structural social issues instead of relying on the, capitalistic solutions that relied mostly on the control of a few shareholders that, people has no democratic governance over. Right? So the early experiences are important. And in the this century, of course, we focus on the education reform, that replace the literacy to competence. Literacy, again, is when you're just a receiver of media, of radio and television, for example. But competence is when we're makers and remixers and producers of our own narrative. One case in point is that in a lot of the schools, I think it's most schools now, the climate science and data science are taught via air boxes, which is this device that measures PM 2.5 and other climate indicators and contributes to a distributed ledger, maintained by our national academy and supported by our national center for high speed computation decidedly, distributed so that, the students learn if they maintain the airbox well, actually their friends, their neighbors, their family before deciding whether they want to go out for a jog or something. We rely on the data that they could curate and produce. And if they want more precision around their community, they can very easily get one. It's open hardware and place it on their balcony or things like that. And, again, this is beautiful data collaboratives, that the students, without being indoctrinated with any top down ideas about how data should work, They see for their, first hand's educational classes, their capstone projects, how to tune, how to work with the other, data that's contributed by other data altruists. And if there's, as I said, data bias, data stewardship problems, and so on, it's, within their rights and within their duty, to fix that, in their school. And I think it's very powerful when we concentrate on the competence rather than literacy.
I think that's so fascinating, Audrey. And, Joe, with what you brought up, Taiwan is such a a cooperative nation, and we've talked about early experiences for cooperation. What I'm really interested in, what this makes me really curious about is incentives for the Taiwanese people to cooperate and to develop civic tech, which I think is really the key to understanding how it can be applied elsewhere. Audrey, what would you say is the incentive for Taiwanese people to cooperate at such a high level and to create these civic organizations
and civic tech for common good? Well, as I said, the social sector, we're fully empowered, is in charge of creating the norms and habits. And that, again, has higher legitimacy because of our history as compared to the rules and regulations produced by the state, by the public sector. Instead of a relatively disempowering stance where each person only contributes three bits of information every four years to governance called voting, by the way, this is a higher bandwidth, direct participation and direct action, that can result in better changes faster. So almost like instant gratification. And that, of course, is a very strong intrinsic, of course, incentive, but also extrinsic because by, you know, tackling the pandemic with no lockdowns, it allow our economy to thrive. So, obviously, there's also economic incentive at play here.
And, Jo, I think you had a question, so I'll let you jump in. I love that Audrey talks about
democracy as an information problem that's sold by more bits of information. And it occurs to me that in in America, in Europe, and most of the world, we embrace something like this. You know, we wanna grow up and become one of the people who contributes to a world of shared information. So I do that as a researcher, and my medic friends do that when they write articles. My scientist friends do it. We send it off to peer review. It becomes part of the academic research matrix of the articles that all of us have access to through our academic subscriptions. But there's a paywall around all of that information. We share with this information commons with each other. That's something that experts get to do, whether they're working for NOAA or Parks and Wildlife or social services or they're a doctor working for a major hospital. They're sharing with other experts, but ordinary people have to pay 50 to $200 to access just one of these research papers. We also have, now a growing culture of kids learning to do things, kids learning to get their hands dirty. This is called the maker culture. So in my child's school and in many schools around America, there's there's great enthusiasm for teaching children to code or teaching them Arduinos. But it's very, very rare to see those practices connected to a public ledger, again, with the exception of Bitcoin, which we love. But the idea of having a citywide program for collecting air quality measures, as you've done in Taiwan, or a citywide collection of information about homelessness, that's something that experts do, that ordinary people aren't allowed to participate in. And I think this, I think what you're helping us to understand, Autry, is the the kind of transformation of the soul as well as of the community more generally that happens when we establish the fact that we're working on a common project, that a common project is worth holding in the attention of many hands.
I would love to see that kind of translated in The US. Audrey, you did mention about how at primary schools and high schools, children in Taiwan, most of them do learn to code. And I'm interested to know Taiwanese democracy and the Internet really emerged at the same time and developed together. And you've spoken about how citizens have an intuitive understanding of the liberating power of information technology. Can you talk a little bit about that topic?
So for example, in Taiwan, we use, still paper based ballot when we vote for people, electronic, sometimes when we vote for things, priorities and budgets. But for people, ballots, the counting mechanism is very well live streamed and recorded. From the very beginning, to ensure the integrity of the voting process, the role of the observer, of course, is highlighted. But because, as I mentioned, the wide web is already around when we vote the president for the first time directly, the counting booth became kind of small, YouTuber, recording booths nowadays. Each major party has their own telling app, and you see people just with their smartphones and so on, what used to be larger cameras, but the same idea to to film the counting process. And and it has the, benefits of people participating not as party representatives, but just a a layperson, but they can contribute to resolve, any election issues. And when the counting, app of one major party agrees with the opposition major party, there's simply no dispute and no room for the trolls to grow when it comes to the disagreeing counts, any election counting station. And when you scale it to a nationwide level, it leads to a faster resolution imposed election disputes, which, of course, doesn't happen in advanced democracies like, The US. But in Taiwan, it used to be a a problem as people develop digital democratic tools not to replace the paper based voting, but actually augment that voting with, even more trustworthy counting, live streaming process. And, leading before the presidential election, there is the presidential debate and forums by the three candidates. And, again, the middle schoolers, as well as really anyone, can contribute to the meta competence by typing in what they heard and cross check it, with a wealth of databases that is already collected by professional journalists and help in the fact checking work. But this is not just assigned homework. If they revealed that the presidential candidate says something that's factually inaccurate, their fact appear on national public TV in real time. So they contribute to the democratic process, both right before and right after the national election.
I'd like to turn now to the philosophical foundations of Taiwan's political system and how that shapes democracy in Taiwan. Audrey, you've said in the past that the ideas of the nineteenth century economist Henry George permeate through Taiwan's policies. I'm really interested in hearing about how his ideas on land rights and ownership have influenced the collective mindset of Taiwan. Jo, I'd love for you to frame for us who Henry George was and the idea of land value, increment tax, and we can then have Audrey delve into his impact on Taiwan.
One of the interesting facts of Taiwan's history is that Taiwan and America share some episodes, some important episodes in the history of governance. Taiwan famously had a land reform, a redistribution of the land from a handful of wealthy aristocrats to everyone in Taiwan during American occupation. And this land reform was in a certain way modeled after the two major American land reforms, the Homestead Act in the nineteenth century and the GI Bill immediately after the second World War, both of which established a precedent for widespread land ownership through government intervention. The GI Bill is responsible for the fact that in most American cities, there are sprawling American suburbs where middle class families, at least middle class white families, could expect to own a own a piece of land, paying it off on a government backed mortgage. Both of these ideas of land redistribution can be traced to the movement of the late nineteenth century, to ideas about what unrestrained capitalism did to rent. In a system of unrestrained capitalism, the rent goes higher and higher. There's no no bar stopping trees from growing to heaven. And so you have to introduce measures of for widespread land ownership or rent control to keep rent within the reasonable cost of something that ordinary people can afford. So those ideas in the 1880s were associated with the San Francisco journalist Henry George, who saw the transformation of San Francisco from a recently settled town in the West where many people could afford a place to live to the to the estates of railway barons subsidized by their earnings, plowing railways across the the the West Of The United States, railways that were subsidized by the federal government. We're talking about a a moment in time, a gilded age not unlike our own, where the fabulously wealthy became even richer than before and where housing went out of the grasp of ordinary people. It's a familiar story to many Americans today, especially since the crisis of two thousand eight to 2010 mortgage and eviction crisis. So Taiwan has a special relationship to all of those stories in part because Henry and George's ideas spread across the Pacific, through political actors like Sun Yat sen, and then afterwards through the American occupations after the second World War and the American led redistributions of land in Korea, Taiwan, and Japan. But I Audrey has spoken in some other venues about the importance of Sun Yat sen to Taiwanese citizens over the age of 30, foundational idea that the state should keep a ledger of prices, convey information about real estate, real information about prices to citizens so that they can make informed decisions about the economy. If you like, I like to think about Henry George as a thinker about data and the life of information in economic opportunity well before the Internet. He was thinking about land as a commons, the role of the state as making sure that information was accessible to all, using taxes to ensure that a wellspring of opportunity was available to all and that inequality had certain limits.
Fascinating. Thank you. And, Audrey, if you wanna delve into Henry George's impact on Taiwan.
Well, one impact, of course, is that, I pay also, small amount of land tax, each year. And if I think that I shouldn't pay this amount, which is calculated roughly by the real prices that is, forcibly declared, all transactions around my neighborhood. Right? If I think that for some reason, that the land tax that I should pay is much smaller than the amount that's calculated by the peer to peer information, Well, I I can say, you know, my my land was nothing, so I shouldn't pay the tax. But the result of me saying that is the municipal government can then, just acquire, that piece of land at a cost of nothing, because after all, I publicly said that. Right? So so this is the idea of the, Herberger's tax, that gets more accurate bits of information of the self gouged land price even without, the calibration of the real price that's, the result of real estate transactions around the vicinity in my neighborhood. Still, it incentivizes me to actually pay the land tax, but also report a more accurate number if those calculations are somehow biased. And so that is one direct result. Actually, it's a Georgism. It's one of the ideas that Henry George, that held and influenced Sonia Sen, which became part of Taiwan's land tax system.
I think it's so interesting how Taiwan is such an mishmash of dichotomies of free market capitalism, but also this collectivist mindset with this really unique synthesis between eastern and western values. Recently, the president of Taiwan wrote an article for foreign affairs in which she describes Taiwan as vibrantly democratic and western yet influenced by a Chinese civilization and shaped by Asian traditions. How did the two of you see this synthesis of eastern and western values at play in Taiwan? And what do you think other countries around the world could learn from it? Well, I could briefly make the case
that Taiwan is one of the most successful post colonial nations. Taiwan deserves to be recognized as as a symbol of hope in democracy, not only because of of of the work that Audrey and her ministry have accomplished in terms of creating an open and participatory government and experimenting with new technologies in a way that most governments in Europe and North America are still trying to learn. But, also, if we think about the rise of China over the last forty years, we think about, the about about the strangulation of civil liberties in current day Hong Kong. Taiwan and India together have carved their own way, their own peaceful path to democracy and capitalism in alliance with The United States. We have to think about an island nation which has drawn on ancient traditions of many places, but also experimented with the kind of democracy and capitalism that's uniquely its own. And this is one of the reasons why I think so many people in the tech world and in the activism world and looking for working models of government reform are taking note of what Taiwan is doing right now.
Yeah. To to continue, the the metaphor of eastern and western influences, I think Taiwan as an island, is defined, of course, by the clash, between the Philippine Sea plate on the east side and the Eurasian plate on the West Side. And when the two tectonic plates bump to each other, we have really large earthquakes, that, of course, cause for social solidarity and resilience in our buildings, but also the resilience in in our minds. So the people who, built such resilient, as I call it, transcultural frameworks can absorb, the energy that's released by the earthquake. And just like the top of Taiwan, the Savia, Pendulge Nung, the Yushan Mountain that grows, two or three centimeters each year as a direct result of that clash. So for example, when we legalized marriage equality, we take the definitely pretty western, idea of marriage by registration and the rights and liberties that should be enjoyed regardless of one's gender and sexual orientation. But we also respected and honored, the tradition of the kinships, that is formed by the familial bounds and so on. So we legalize it using a nickname hyperlink act that says only the bylaws are wed when to same sex person's wed, but their families, their kinships, their last name, and so on do not wed. And this social innovation is a direct result of a constitutional court, ruling as well as two direct democracy referenda that passed. And it defined such a solution space that, I call it a good enough consensus or rough consensus where everyone can live with. And then this model, quite innovative, is then being considered seriously, by other, still, you know, kinship oriented societies around us in the Indo Pacific as a kind of model that will enable the civil liberties and equalities without writing off, the cultures. And this is just one of the more recent examples of a transcultural, republic of citizens.
Audrey, I'd love to talk about your Taoist approach to political life. You've mentioned in previous interviews the idea of do without doing, which in some ways to me, hugs back to your collectivist mindset and the collectivist mindset of Taiwan. For example, creating a space for others to collaborate can be seen as a Daoist approach.
Could you comment on how you've used this belief system in your work? As I say quite publicly that I work with the people, not for the people, work with the government, not for the government. These connective spaces are designed to make sure that each person participates not as a representative, but just representing their authentic experience and innovations. And this applies also to the public service itself. The engagement officers that Joe briefly mentioned is one case in example where we put, professionals in the public service well outside of their silos as champions of citizen interest. So for example, when we redesigned the tax filing system in 2017 out of a popular petition that says the tax filing was, and I quote, explosively hostile, end of quote, to non Windows users, the breakout groups is chaired not by the people from the Ministry of Finance, but rather they could be from the coastal guards, the ocean affairs council. But when we talk about the ocean policy, how to enable more supports for amateur surfers, amateur fishers, and so on, Well, then maybe that breakout groups is facilitated by the Ministry of Finance public servant. And the idea is very simple because the, coastal guards person also have to file their own tax, and the tax collector, is also, of course, a avid surfer in their spare time. So when they facilitate such deliberative town halls and meetings, they automatically take the side of the citizen because after all, they are citizens themselves as, opposed to representatives within their professional silos. And these are just some of the designs of the participatory, officer network that deliberately put deliberation at a core of the public servant's work instead of being, you know, a top down mended way where they have to service the public. So in a sense, it's also a incentive to serve their own self interest and their community, be it server or fisher's interest, while, of course, offering their professional training as a public servant so that the translation occurs more easily between the professional community, the academic community, and the laypersons.
In The US, we have this expectation that government provides the services. And, of course, elsewhere, there's that expectation as well. We pay taxes. We hope to get high quality services in return for these taxes. And the legitimacy of the state rests on the provision of these services. But this doesn't really empower the citizenry to create their own civic spaces. And I'd love to know what other countries like The US could perhaps learn from Taiwan and perhaps adopt some of these Taiwanese
practices. You know, I think it's important to remember that there was a time in American history and indeed in the history of the West when we didn't expect states to provide the services that we now expect. If you think back to The United States around 1820 or Great Britain and France around 1820, you're thinking about a time when cities don't have shared water systems. They don't have flush toilets. They don't have common sewers. When cholera breaks out across European and American cities in the eighteen thirties and forties, it will devastate populations both rich and poor because of our poor understanding of public health. Now those same decades, it's not normal to have sidewalks that anyone can walk on. You walk in the carriageway with all of the horses through all of the muck and mire. There aren't bridges that anyone can use. You have to pay a toll to cross a bridge. And if you wanna get from one end of London to the next, then you might might have to pay 20 toll bridges to get from here to there, which means that there are fewer opportunities for the poor cobbler to sell his wares at an ordinary market. In the West, we had to have a revolution in information to build modern city services, And that information was largely about trust. We invented modern professionals like the modern civil engineer. We invented modern modern means of keeping accounts and inspecting budgets together and approving them. And we trusted our delegates to make those decisions. And it was new, and it was sometimes corrupt. And it changed the structure of capitalism from a force that primarily benefited a tiny, miniscule majority minority to a structure where a rising tide floats all boats. It was a fundamental transformation. It was one of the things that thinkers like Adam Smith thought was wonderful about capitalism was that it could be extended in that way. And I think it's important to remember that that was made. It wasn't an accident that was inherent in capitalism. We could we all we have to do is look at what cities were like in in London or Paris in 1810 to imagine a very different kind of capitalism that worked only for the upper 1%, a world in which all of the land is owned by the aristocracy where all of the markets work only for the enrichment of the few rather than the many. If we want to see a more equal world where there is more opportunity and capitalism works for more people, we may need in today's world to reconsider the question of infrastructure and data. And I think Taiwan is at the cutting edge of a modern experiment with information and data, with broadcast citizen participation, in which they have proved that you can solve a problem like COVID by increasing what Audrey has called bit rate of information, where we up citizens on and store managers across Taiwan, sending in information every thirty seconds about where there are masks, where you can find them, or we allow contact tracing so long as we, the citizens, can see the guards, watch the people who are watching us. There's a give and take. We've had to imagine that, or rather Taiwan has had to imagine what that future is. But now that Taiwan has seen it and has imagined it, I think it's altogether appropriate for other nations to start taking note and start
to imagine
what similar kinds of infrastructure and data sharing technologies might look like. But if I may, I have a follow-up question from that. If we see Taiwan as in a way rounding the arc of history a little bit ahead of other nations, glimpsing something about the information economy that allows ordinary people to become players, that it allows us to share common goods like air quality or public health in a more robust way. I wonder if Taiwan's experience with infrastructure and data can help us to understand how to fight climate change. And I mean that in a very direct way. I've just published an article about participatory governance, reviewing many activist experiments around the world. All around the world, there are indigenous people and working class groups and city movements that are collecting information on air quality and water quality and public health, collecting incidents of people who are contracting cancer after being exposed to toxic waste. They have that data, but it has nowhere been collected in a centralized register. In my article, I suggested that perhaps this is a fault of the lack of cooperative government. We have no international authority with binding agency over climate change. A Trump or a Bolsonaro can turn away from the climate agreements. And similarly, we have no centralized authority now to collect and monitor the data of climate change, all of these people who are getting sick. We have centralized corporate corporate technologies that are using satellite data to monitor emissions, and that may be useful for stopping certain kinds of pollution. But I wonder about Taiwan's experiments with grassroots data collection. And I wonder if Audrey has any insight for us about the role of participatory technology and infrastructure in helping us to fight climate change and pollution more generally.
Definitely. In Taiwan, we have this annual event called the presidential hackathon, that also takes place actually right here in the social innovation lab, where more than 200 projects from social innovators across Taiwan. We use a new voting system called quadratic voting that invites people to reveal, the synergy between those projects. And with this new voting system, we take the top 20, coach them, across collaboration of different sectors until it's, culminates in the five champion teams, each year, which received this trophy from our president, doctor Tsai Ing wen. The trophy is the shape of Taiwan, like this, with a micro projector underneath. And if we turn on the micro projector, it projects doctor Tsai Ing wen giving you the trophy. So it's very meta. It It describes itself. The trophy represents whatever you did in the past three months on a smaller scale for one river, for one neighborhood, will become public policy in the next fiscal year as if it's a presidential promise. So, basically, it's a way to offer national agenda setting power with all the personnel, budget, and regulatory changes required, and invest that to five teams each year. And we just got a result of the five championship teams, actually, very recently, in the past couple weeks. And this time, four out of the five, are working on climate change and climate action. The other was on long term health care reform. So we now have the cases, for example, where the last community, the original community that built those air boxes on the civic tech, now shifting their attention to water pollution and measurements through water boxes and many other, end of us. We have another championship team, evolving the previous championship case, where people show a mask map like system of drinking fountains and refilling people's bottles and calculating the plastic and carbon reduction and apply that idea to cataloging the carbon sinks, and make sure that people, augment their realities by committing to support those carbon sinks, from community action. And so the Taiwan Electric Company also offered, a way to use the residual heat from their, plants, to aid in fish farming, and to reduce carbon, because otherwise, it will have to, emit more heat, than required. So turning a side product, into something that could be circularly used and so on. And so, I believe this is not a a top down thing. Right? The centralized registry will necessarily come from the various way to account for the carbon emissions and other greenhouse gases, from the social sector. And then the championship teams provide, a way for us as part of the presidential hackathon committee, to look at already existing ways for people around the globe that's making such accounts successfully on a local level, but then elevates the underlying principles to the presidential
or country wide level in the next fiscal year. Thank you so much for that, both of you. As a kind of final question, I'd love to get your opinion, Audrey, on what are the most important issues for us to focus on for the future in Taiwan and elsewhere?
As I mentioned, already many jurisdictions look at Taiwan, the Taiwan model, so to speak, of a successful people, public private partnership. But I would like to focus the attention not just on the biological virus and its prevention, or carbon dioxide and some, you know, physical emissions, but rather the virus of the mind. Right? The polarization, the divisiveness, the hate, and discriminatory, vengeful action that's taken by people in the more antisocial corners of social media, which may initially be good to manufacture counter power, but it's not good at all when we're talking about digital democracy. So the idea of a pro social social media, of deliberative design on deliberative spaces, of the nationwide investment, for example, in 2016, when we classified PTT or joint platform and so on as public infrastructure on the digital realm and can allocate special budget money that's previously only allocated to the bridges and roads, that are concrete, like made out of concrete. Those ideas, I think, are important around the world for us to reinvest in prosocial social media and the digital equivalents of the institution that we rely on the physical space, you know, university campuses, the parks and national parks, the townhouse, and so on, so that the citizens around the world would not be forced to deliberate about public issues in the digital equivalent of a nightclub with very loud music and noise and addictive drinks and private bouncers. I have nothing to, to to I have no grudge against the entertainment sector, but the nightclub is simply not a place to hold a town hall.
Thank you so much, Audrey and Joe, for joining me on this radical exchange talk. It's been such a pleasure to have both of you. And as every journalist is meant to ask at the end of an interview, any final comments from both of you? No. I've spoken too much. I would just second.
Autry has given us a vision of a renewed moment of building public infrastructure, And I love the parallel of setting up commons online that are the equivalent of the public parks. And, again, I I think it's so important that Americans and Europeans, we easily forget that so many of these college campuses and parks that we enjoy in our cities, they had to be built. They were built often in one generation, only to walk to drive from one end of Chicago to another to think about the era, the generation in which all of those parks were laid out and funded and all of those baseball diamond diamonds laid down, all of those rec centers built. And there are a handful that were built later in the nineteen sixties and nineteen seventies and more recently. But it's often the work of one generation to build the kinds of spaces that, people will live in thereafter. And we do need safe spaces for discourse. We do need safe infrastructure for democracy and for managing climate and environmental data. In fact, that's probably the only way that our institutions of democracy or the health of our environment are going to survive in the coming generations if we build them so that we can use them. So thank you for giving us that vision of a livable future. I hope we can learn from it and live in it.
Definitely. And thank you for this awesome conversation. I look forward to meet you, in person. But before then, live long and prosper.
Thanks again to Audrey Tang, Joe Goldie, and Rosa O'Hara for that illuminating discussion on the fascinating ways that Taiwan is embracing innovative social technology that's empowering new forms of democracy. This conversation was initially produced by Paola Berman and Rachel Knoll for the twenty twenty one RadicalxChange annual conference RXC TV program. The RadicalxChange's podcast is produced by gee Angela Corpus, Jennifer Marrone, and Matt Pruitt, and co produced and audio engineered by myself, Aaron Benavides. And a big thanks to listeners like you. Radical Exchanges is a Radical Exchange Foundation production. You can help support the Radical Exchange Foundation by visiting radicalexchange.org.
