Dr Robin Niblett CMG
So, ladies and gentlemen, members of Chatham House, guests, friends, and all of those joining us today, I’m Robin Niblett, the Director of Chatham House, and I’m absolutely thrilled to have with us today, as part of our Digital Society Initiative, an initiative we set up at Chatham House about a year ago as part of our second century, which, for those of you who know Chatham House, will know is starting in 21. 2020 is 100 years of Chatham House, since we were first founded, and our Digital Society Initiative is a bit about how we think of our engagement for the future, what are the opportunities, in many cases, that technology can help deliver to build a better world in the future, and not just the risks and negatives. People spend a lot of time talking about the negatives of technology. We want to be as alive at Chatham House to the opportunities for technology to drive progress, especially in public policy, and in democracy. And, for that reason, I am absolutely thrilled that we have with us today Audrey Tang. Audrey Tang, welcome to this interview, which we’re recording, but, Audrey, great to have you with us.
Audrey Tang
Hi, very happy to be here and have a good local time everyone.
Dr Robin Niblett CMG
Yeah, well, exactly. Well, as this is a recorded interview, I’m trying to think, it’s quite late in the evening in your time, I suspect. It’s still, in our context, on the 17th of June, and relatively early in the morning, but Audrey is joining us today for a conversation with two of my colleagues, and Marjorie Buchser, who is the Head of our Digital Society Initiative and Executive Director, and Hans Kundnani, Senior Fellow in our Europe Programme. But the reason we thought it’d be especially good to have Hans with us is he is leading our commission on democracy and technology, in particular thinking about the modernisation of democracy in Europe, and I’m looking forward to, later on in our conversation with Audrey, looking at parallels of lessons that maybe we can learn in Europe from the experience of Taiwan, or certainly to compare experiences between the two.
Audrey, I’m just going to – I mean, I think your name is now well-known. It was pretty well-known prior to COVID-19, but with Taiwan having really come into the public presence because of its very successful response to the COVID-19 outbreak, people have been trying to work out how did that happen? And the use of digital technology, the fact that Taiwanese citizens appeared to be so comfortable with the, kind of, digital-led responses, whereas we, in Europe, you know, are trying to hold digital innovation back in many cases ‘cause we’re so suspicious of it. Clearly, there was an advantage to the fact that you became Digital Minister for Taiwan back in October of 2016, this wasn’t some recent innovation, this has got four years, pretty much, history through out.
Audrey Tang
That’s right, that’s right.
Dr Robin Niblett CMG
And I know you’re somebody who cuts your teeth not at all in politics, you were somebody who – a software programme from age 12/14, somewhere around there, if I’m describing it right.
Audrey Tang
Hmmm hmm, yeah, well…
Dr Robin Niblett CMG
And followed lots of start-ups.
Audrey Tang
Yes, well, internet governance is also politics, but it’s not representative politics, that’s right. Yeah.
Dr Robin Niblett CMG
Well, that’s a very important point, and, actually, Hans is somebody who always reminds me that when you talk about democracy, accountable and representative democracies are not always the same things. You’ve got to be able to break them apart. So, can you just tell me, before we talk about COVID and so on, and your response, why did Taiwan create a Digital Minister? What was the point? What was the driver? What did you bring to the Cabinet, as a, sort of, technocratic invitee into it? What did you bring? What did the government want?
Audrey Tang
Yeah, so, a few things, right? You said democracy and technology as if they were two things, but in Taiwan, democracy is just a set of technologies. We literally have the first Presidential election back in 1996, when the world web is already in place, so it’s very natural for us to see that democracy is a evolving technology, social technology, of course, and applied political science at that, and we see it as improving as more people participate. So, as Digital Minister, I think that digital technology remain one of the best ways to improve participation, which is at the core of democracy, as long as the focus is on finding common ground and creating what I call a pro-social media and not the anti-social media, and creating a rough consensus and running code in this sense, a code – running code of law. And so I bring with myself my experiences in multi-stakeholderism, in internet governance, in open source and free software community, to reimagine how democracy could be done, aside from traditional way of, like, uploading five bits per person every four years, which is called voting, and maybe we can increase the bit rate of democracy.
Dr Robin Niblett CMG
That’s, I tell you, fascinating, ‘cause you’ve laid out there all sorts of ideas that I really look forward to unpacking. I read – and not my own thing, somebody quoted to me the other day that Alexis Tocqueville talked about “Democracy being a set of participations and associations,” so it’s amazing…
Audrey Tang
Exactly.
Dr Robin Niblett CMG
…that you’re channelling today, in the 20th Century, what he was channelling back in the 18th, I hope I got that right, ‘cause that’s recorded, Alexis Tocqueville. Hans is nodding, so I was correct on that one. But can I just pick you up on one point, ‘cause you used a very important word there, ‘consensus’. Here we are in Europe, ‘cause, I mean, I’m sitting in London, and we look over at the United States, we look at Europe, people increasingly associate democracy with a lack of consensus. Democracy about being competition between different viewpoints, fighting it out, winning an election, one side gets to try to implement its programme for four years, and then somebody else gets a turn for three or five years, or whatever. But you seem to be talking about democracy as a much more fluid, evolutionary process, and you said about building consensus. Could you just explain that process?
Audrey Tang
But there was a objective before that, though. I said building rough consensus, and rough consensus is not the same as, like, a fine consensus that you can sign your name on, that you’re perfectly happy with it, because we know, on the internet, nobody has the time to do that. So, people with the most time end up getting their voice, if you are seeking fine consensus, but rough consensus, as defined by the Internet Engineering Task Force, is just somebody we can all live with. It’s a much softer sense of consensus, and, in fact, in Mandarin, we say gònshi, which literally translate as common understanding. So, it’s just a common understanding that we can all, more or less, live with, and that’s the kind of consensus we’re seeking.
Dr Robin Niblett CMG
So, common understanding will rely critically, I’d imagine, on transparency, access to information that is shared by the entire citizenry. Could you just say a little bit about how connected Taiwanese citizens are, their capacity to engage with the type of democratic, rough consensus building you just described? You know, is that one of the prerequisites for a successful digital democracy, that access, that in – that sense of ownership of information, but access to….
Audrey Tang
Definitely, definitely. In Taiwan, we have broadband as a human right, so no matter where you are in Taiwan, even at a peak of Taiwan, almost 4,000 metres, the [inaudible – 07:42], the Yushan mountain, you are guaranteed to have 10mb per second, enough for high bandwidth videoconferencing for just €15 per month, unlimited 4G or cable or fibre, one way or another. But if you don’t have that access, it’s my fault personally, you can just call me on it and I’ll just make sure that when we deploy 5G later this year, your place will be the first spot that we set up 5G telecommunication towers, because we explicitly said that the additional auction money that we got from the 5G spectrum, will preferentially go to the place where there’s less 4G connections. And so, the broadband as human right underpins the idea of the digital democracy, because with that, we’re not excluding anyone. Anyone who need a tablet, for example, can rent it for free, actually lend it, from a local digital opportunity centre, that’s a public library or indigenous healthcare centre. In any sense, we see that people trust that their voices, their ideas, can be represented, if they start livestreaming at no additional marginal cost or things like that, making Taiwan a – kind of a very large town, with its town hall, that has always livestreamed, and during the coronavirus, we do that every day. Yeah, that’s the first responses and they realised essentially, are not excluding anyone when it comes to broadband access, and it must be symmetrical.
Dr Robin Niblett CMG
But, you know, just one more question, ‘cause I actually – I want to get a little bit into the COVID restraints side here, but one question on generations, ‘cause you talked – the big debate in Europe right now is generational divides, and whether these will become corrosive of democracy, and so when you have such a connected society, everyone has access, everyone has the right, broadband as a human right, but do you find that there’s a generational disengagement? Do older people engage less well, younger people engage better? You know, old democracy have argued that in many cases, the older generations are overrepresented in traditional forms of democratic voting. You seem to be creating a world in which maybe the younger generation will feel that it has a bigger voice. How do you deal with generational attitudes to connectivity with technology?
Audrey Tang
According to the TWNIC report, people who are, like, between 12 and 55 have roughly the same internet penetration rate, which is around, like, 97% or something, a large number, 97 to 99%. And for people below 12, I think it’s at 80 something percent, 89%? And for people between 55 and 85, I think that’s also around 80%. So, you see a curve, but the curve is manageable, I would say. It trails off, I think, around people who are around 75 years old, and that may not be because of generation, but maybe because of health issues.
Dr Robin Niblett CMG
And before I bring my colleagues in on questions, I think, you know, what has been fascinating for so many of us around the world is the way that you’ve been able to take this digital connectivity, the level of trust you appear to have built up around the government system, to help manage your COVID response, because this is where, I think, when I look at the UK, and I can speak for that as I’m based here, it’s been very difficult at a time of a lack of trust in government, to really pivot quickly to deal with such a fast-moving crisis, but tell us a little bit about the Taiwanese response.
Audrey Tang
Yeah, but – well, in Taiwan, when we say trust, we always mean the government trusting its citizens, and when we say transparency, we always mean making the stage transparent to the people, and I have to say this upfront, and we don’t mean it the other way. Okay? That’s some other, nearby jurisdiction. In any case, what I’m trying to get at is that the success of Taiwan, we’re now officially post-pandemic for quite a while now, actually for two months now, with no local confirmed cases, and I think the success is due to the social mobilisation and the power of digital democracy, and that has three tenets, which I call fast, fair and fun.
Fast is the collective intelligence. Whereas, many jurisdiction began countering coronavirus only this year, Taiwan started last year, last December, when – that early, when Dr Li Wenliang, the whistle blower, posted that there’s seven new SARS cases in Wuhan. He got inquiries, eventually punishment from his local Polis institution, but at the same time, the Taiwan equivalent have read it, the PTT Board has this post, reposting Dr Li Wenliang’s whistleblowing. And our Medical Officer immediately noticed this post and issue an order that says all passengers flying in from Wuhan to Taiwan need to start health inspection the very next day, the first day of 2020. So, this says two things.
First, the civil society with its upvoting mechanism trust the government enough to talk about possible new SARS outbreak in such a public forum, and the government, of course, trusts its citizen enough to take it seriously, and treat it as if SARS happened again, something we’ve always been preparing since 2003. According to statistics, Taiwan is the most open society in the whole of Asia, actually the only jurisdiction in Asia that enjoy the completely free freedom of speech assembly, the press, and so on, as other liberal democratic countries elsewhere, but with the emphasis on keeping an open mind to novel ideas from the society. And that is why we managed to counter the coronavirus with no lockdowns and counter the epidemic with no takedown. I will get you that later.
So, for example, as I mentioned, every day our Central Epidemic Command Center, the CECC, hosts a press conference at 2:00pm, which is always livestreamed, and we were with the Journalists, they answer all the questions from Journalists, either onsite or online, which is always also livestreamed, and because of this, whenever there’s a new idea coming in from the civil society, anyone can peek at their phone, and landline even, and call the simple number 1922 and tell that idea to the CECC. For example, there was one day in April where a young boy, who said he doesn’t want to go to school because we rationed masks, and when you ration, you don’t get to pick the colour, and it just so happened that he only has pink medical mask, and so he doesn’t want to go to school because his schoolmates may laugh at him. The very next day, everybody in the CECC started wearing pink medical mask, regardless of their gender, making sure that everybody learns about gender mainstreaming, which is also a social innovation. So, this, kind of, rapid response, within 24-hour cycle, builds trust between the government and the civil society.
The second thing is fairness. You’ll see this website called join.gov.tw, which is our national participation platform with a lot of good ideas, but in Taiwan, there’s a shadow government organisation called the gov-zero movement or g0v, that I’m also a part of, that look at all the websites that they don’t like and build a shadow version of it just by changing a o to a 0, so if you go to join.gov.tw, you get connected with a bunch of Civic Technologist. And so, when we ramped up the facial mask production, making sure everybody can use their National Health Insurance card to collect masks from nearby pharmacies, everybody wants to ensure the fairness. But people from the gov-zero community started prototyping services that let people voluntarily report, where there – are there nearby shops and how many medical masks do they have in stock? And the National Health Insurance agency, immediately notified this, and the Premier asked me what was this about, I’m like, “This is, like, a – you know, a navigation system,” and he’s like, “Oh, it’s just like a GPS,” and so he said that we need to support the social sector.
So, what we did is that we trust citizen with open data and we published every 30 seconds, all the different pharmacies, not just locations, but the real time, it’s like a distribute ledger, how many adult mask and children’s masks are still in stock. That’s why gov-zero and many committed collaborators produced more than 100 tools that enabled people, for example, people with blindness, who prefer to hear from voices systems or chatbots and so on, all of them can have the same inclusive access to the information about which pharmacy near them still have masks. And because the National Health Insurance covers more than 99.99% of citizen and also residence, people who show any symptom, would then be able to take medical mask from a nearby pharmacy, go to a local clinic, knowing that they will get treated fairly, without incurring any financial burden, COVID or not. And this also enables Civil Technologist to make dashboard that let people see that our supply is indeed growing.
This is where we ramped up the production from two million a day to 20 million a day, and so that you can now collect it for adult nine facial masks every two weeks, or ten, if you are a child. And this also, is evident-based policymaking, because this social sector-built dashboard showed us where in Taiwan do we have over or under supply, and we change our supply strategy with the pharmacies, co-creating with the real feedback of the pharmacies, and with the whole of society. And based on this analysis, as you can see, our Premier here, Su Tseng-chang, is smiling happily because according to analysis, our medical masks, after one month of the rationing through pharmacies, peak at 70% of population. The other 30% are people who work very long hours, so that after they go off work, the pharmacies are all closed.
So, we started working with convenience store that you can now also take the same NHI card to go there and collect your masks anytime, 24 hours a day. Of course, now, in addition to rationing, there’s also a free market, but the point here is that when we were quite short on the medical masks, everybody gets treated very fairly, and there’s more than 21 million out of 23 million people who have access to this digital service using the NHI card. And so, we ensure fairness of all kinds across all the different regions.
And, finally, I would like to stress, because this is a very stressful time, people feel anxious, there’s a associated infodemic, panic buying, conspiracy theories, things like that, and in Taiwan, our – this information strategy is based on the idea of humour over rumour. Whenever there is a panic buying of tissue paper, for example, there was a rumour that says, oh, tissue paper are made out of the same material as facial masks, because we’re ramping up production, people will go out and buy because they think that tissue paper will run out soon. And the same Premier, which you just saw smiling in the previous slide, now shows his bottom, wiggling it a little bit, and says, in very large print, that we only have one pair of buttocks each, meaning that we don’t need to panic buy tissue papers because stockpile and buttocks sound the same, it’s a homonym in Mandarin.
And then, of course, the real payload of this meme is the clear table that says facial masks are produced using domestic material, and tissue paper produced using South American material. And this went absolutely viral, this maybe has a R0 value of three, and because of that, the panic buying of tissue paper died down within a day or two, and we eventually discovered that people who spread the rumour in the first place was the tissue paper reseller. And this is not just a single shot social media campaign. Every single CECC daily press conference gets translated by the Ministry of Health and Welfare Spokesdog or [inaudible – 18:49] Dog CEO. That’s translated, for example, as physical distancing, when you are outdoor, you need to stay two dogs apart, indoor, three dogs apart, hand sanitation rules, and not touching your face with your hand, and wear a mask to remind yourself of that, pay for your pre-orders on mask rationing and so on, all into very cute dog memes that all have a R value of over one. And because all of this goes viral, we make sure that our humour, factual humour, spreads faster than rumour, and it gets remixed by all the different social sector comedians, and that is how we make sure that Taiwanese people still feel calm and collected, even during the pandemic. And so, that’s my five-minute slide, you can read more at taiwancanhelp.us.
Dr Robin Niblett CMG
Thank you very much for that incredibly rapid run through the COVID approach, and I think you’ve confirmed about this combination of government really using rapid, fast, online means, almost keeping ahead of the public mood, preventing, as you said, rumours from becoming facts. You always feel, in many democracies, governments are desperately racing to catch up. What I hear you saying there, in a way, is you’re, sort of, keeping yourself ahead, but I was surprised you didn’t address one issue, which is really at the absolute heart of the debate in Europe and in the US about this post-COVID, if we can use that term, period, which is the role of technology in tracking and tracing.
Audrey Tang
Yeah, because we have…
Dr Robin Niblett CMG
Because this is where…
Audrey Tang
…no apps that sends Bluetooth or whatever signals. We’ve deployed no such apps.
Dr Robin Niblett CMG
See, I know you’re just not taking that route at all, so you will not be using technology the way that every European country is saying right now, the only way we can get out of lockdown confidently is to be able to track and trace people. And this is where they’re putting all of their technology effort, along with vaccines, so…
Audrey Tang
Well…
Dr Robin Niblett CMG
…could you just explain, why is Taiwan not doing – the most digitally advanced democracy is not using digital for the thing everyone else wants to use it for?
Audrey Tang
We are using…
Dr Robin Niblett CMG
Can you explain that?
Audrey Tang
…digital, we’re not using apps. So, apps, like mask, become useful only if you can get the majority of people deploying it, and you need an incentive design for that. For mask, we say this protects you from your own hands. It’s a, kind of, selfish incentive. For apps, much harder to do that, actually and so, instead, what we did is border quarantine. When you arrive at our airports or seaport, you’re asked to make a choice. You can either go to a quarantine hotel, where you are physical barred from leaving for 14 days, or, if you live with no vulnerable group of people, you can choose to stay home, but then your phone, which already have its signal strength checked by the nearby telecom towers anyway, will be put into what we call a digital fence. And it’s reusing existing collected data, it’s not some new data we’re collecting, using triangulation in urban areas, we know that this phone is within, like, a 50 metre radius, and if they exceed that radius, or if it runs out of battery, the telecoms send a automated SMS, just as our earthquake warnings and hurricane warnings, to a local Household Manager or a local Police Officer, which would then check your whereabouts. And that is the constitutional limit of 14 days, after which we have no constitutional basis to track you, because we never declare a emergency situation, a state of emergency, so we have to make do with whatever the Parliament have authorised us to do anyway, and so we reused a lot of collected data, but in a way that’s out of its original collected purpose, but also, still firmly within the constitutional limit.
Dr Robin Niblett CMG
So, in a nutshell, you are tracking and tracking, but you’re just doing it using the existing technologies and relying, in a way, on citizens obviously to obey the law. If they don’t, there is a system to be able to track it, but you’re not having to create a whole super structure of new digital infrastructure to be able to…
Audrey Tang
Yeah, people get SMS warnings for, like, imminent earthquakes or flood warnings all the time, so it’s easy to explain that it’s the same technology.
Dr Robin Niblett CMG
Yeah. Whereas, interestingly enough, we don’t get messages, SMS messages, from our government…
Audrey Tang
Oh, wow.
Dr Robin Niblett CMG
…so, if we did, we’d probably scream in horror, you know, because we’d think somehow, we’re being watched, when, of course, we are, but we don’t know it. I think it’s a good point. Then, if I can bring my colleague, Marjorie, in, who I introduced earlier, Executive Director of our Digital Society Initiative. Marjorie, why don’t you come in? There’s so many interesting things, I’ll let you pick your question.
Marjorie Buchser
Yeah, it’s fantastic and a great – it’s a real pleasure to have you, it’s so stimulating, and also refreshing because you perspecting on technology is quite different from the main narrative that we have today. And I think the example of the way you use contact tracing, and there’s a clear sunset clause, it’s evident when it’s going to stop, and it’s after 14 days’ quarantine, when in Europe, there’s no clear start, also, no clear end, and that’s also a very interesting difference there. But I want to talk a little bit about this perception in attitudes towards technology, because, as I say, it’s really refreshing. In Europe, we’ve really grown suspicious of digital technologies. Since 2017, you can see that there’s more appetite for technology regulations, there’s more fear, and we talk more about the parallels or the, you know, risk related to digital technology and that’s manipulation of information, as you alluded to. But also, you know, for a digital platform, mental health issues, or addiction, and is there a strong effort here to regulate, and also, to moderate and curate what people and citizens see online, because we’ve seen a lot of that view? So, I’d be very interested to hear about, first, Taiwanese attitude towards technology, and your appetite or your perspective on how much digital technology and platforms should be regulated.
Audrey Tang
Sure. Well, moderation, I guess, is good in theory, and theory is good in moderation, but I think the point about moderation is that it needs to be accountable in a participatory way. You just saw the mask map, and if you go to a pharmacy, swipe your NHI card, check after a minute or two, and see really that the stock level decreased by nine, or ten if you are a child, you trust the system more, right? Because that’s essentially, participatory accountability, but if the government insists on publishing the sum every week, or, like in many freedom of information access, every month, right, then people have no way of participating in holding each other and the Pharmacist accountable. And so, a distributor ledger, that is essentially open API, that doesn’t pass before the eyes of any human beings before it gets published, publishing upon collection, I think it’s a very powerful idea.
Because of that, everybody can form data collaboratives that look at those numbers, as I showed the dashboard built by the academic sector, or the over and under supply by the economic sector, and so on. And because everybody shared the same ground truth, so to speak, and everybody can call 1922 if they see that they’ve bought nine masks, but actually, the stock increased by nine, so everybody trust these numbers more. And this, I think, is something that is really missing from a lot of cross-sectoral collaboration, is simply that the ground truth of the shared data or the shared ledger is not there, and when it’s not there, of course, people will second guess each other.
And in Taiwan, I think it’s not just about the COVID. For example, around air pollution, we rely on the environmental autosensing network called the AirBox, that is just less than €100 each, it’s deployed in many primary schools, in balconies, and so on, and altogether, they write into this distributor ledger that nobody can go back in time to change, and then the social sector was more than 10,000, and I think now, environmental sensors are all posted together, the PM 2.5 level, and other levels in the atmosphere. And then they have sufficient clouds then, to convince the public sector to work with them and to install in the economic sector, like industrial parks, on the lands, because, of course, the high school Teachers cannot break into the industrial park to install AirBox sensors, but we own the land, so we can do that. So, it is the social sector gaining legitimacy, working with the public sector to set fair rules and norms, and with those norms to convince the economic sector to scale it up and scale it out, and that’s precisely the – kind of the people-public-private partnership that are described on the mask rationing, which is quite a different order actually, from the traditional PPPP.
Dr Robin Niblett CMG
But it sounds to me, therefore, Audrey, that the role of civil society is incredibly important within the Taiwanese democratic system, and it sounds like there’s much more organisation, yeah?
Audrey Tang
Yeah, so important that I call it the social sector, yeah.
Dr Robin Niblett CMG
Yeah, the social sector, rather than civil society. But what are – these are – these could be – are they just, sort of, traditional NGOs, are they large organisations, are they very local, do they emerge and disappear? I’m just wondering, ‘cause civil society in the UK, or in Europe, we think of these large, often well-known, quite well-funded, organisations that specialise in particular sectors of…
Audrey Tang
Yeah, we have that, too.
Dr Robin Niblett CMG
…housing or environment.
Audrey Tang
Yeah, we have that, too.
Dr Robin Niblett CMG
Could you explain in Taiwan?
Audrey Tang
Hmmm hmm. Okay. Yes, we have that, too. Even before the lifting of the martial law at the 80s, there are many charities specialising in placemaking, in humanitarian aid, in co-op movement, on both the consumption part and the agricultural part, and so on, and I’m sure that, broadly speaking, it’s the same as the UK’s understanding of the co-ops and the NGOs. However, in Taiwan, there’s also a different configuration, which I would say it’s more like adhocracy, in the sense that they’re loosely based on internet communities, they still meet, because in Taiwan, from the southmost to the northmost municipality, it’s just 95 minutes away by high speed rails, so people meet together quite often, and, like, the gov-zero community is one prime example.
At the moment, on the gov-zero community and which everybody can join, and I just shared the URL, join.gov.tw, on the chatroom, we can very easily see that there are more than 7,700 people on the chatroom, the general chatroom, and of which more than 565 are now working on COVID-19, that’s the COVID-19 chatroom. And that’s actually more than membership of many traditional NGOs, and so these kind of internet-based communities and projects I think complement, they’re owed more placemaking or human right or otherwise, you know, respected NGOs, and these two groups of people, instead of, kind of, working against each other, they work very closely with one another, especially during the occupy of Parliament in 2014, March.
At that time, the 20 NGOs, all quite well-known and had a high legitimacy, deliberated on one aspect each of the cross trade and service trade agreement, that’s the SSTA. For example, one particular NGO talks about whether we need to allow PRC components, People’s Republic of China jurisdiction components, into our then new 4G network. So, we had that discussion, like, five years before anyone else, and that’s just one of the plenty discussions around the occupied Parliament, which was occupied because the MPs were refusing to deliberate substantially that agreement with Beijing. And because of that, the digital communities ensured a fair communication right, we livestream all the NGOs’ meetings, we do transcriptions, we make sure that we consolidate and facilitate a consensus every day, inching towards rough consensus until three weeks after we reach 14 months, not one less, and the Head of Parliament actually accepted that. So, based on that experience, the traditional MPOs and the newer generation of internet enable hacktivist, for the lack of better word, become very close allies.
Dr Robin Niblett CMG
Very interesting. Before I turn to Hans, one very practical question. What did you decide about allowing PRC companies into your 4G? Did you decide yes or no?
Audrey Tang
We decided that there is no market player when it comes to 4G infrastructure, so we said no, because it’s always state-owned, or eventually state-owned, and it’s not a application of what we call fair market rules because the fact that the CCP installed more party branches, in all this large companies, tells us that they are, in fact, de facto, party-owned and therefore state-owned, so we said no.
Dr Robin Niblett CMG
There we go. Clear answer for that, and, as you know, big debate in the UK about that right now.
Audrey Tang
I know.
Dr Robin Niblett CMG
Hans, maybe we’ll invite Hans in, ‘cause I’m sure he’s got – bubbling with questions from all you’ve said. Hans, where do you want to go on this?
Hans Kundnani
Yeah, there’s lots of things I could ask about, really, really interesting, Audrey. I guess I’d like to ask a bit more about Taiwan’s specific democratic culture, because, I mean, as Robin was indicating at the beginning, you know, we’ve all been looking at Taiwan, also at some other East Asian democracies like South Korea, since the coronavirus began, and trying to think about what we can learn from you, and in particular, to what extent your approach to the coronavirus is, sort of, transferrable to Europe? And, you know, it struck me – I mean, Robin already mentioned this, you know, is some of the things that – I mean, each of these countries, South Korea, Taiwan, have taken a slightly different approach, but it seems to me that there are elements of each of them that Europeans would struggle with. So, you know, as Robin was suggesting, this idea that you would get a message from the government telling you that you have, you know, moved, you know, too far away from the place you’re supposed to be quarantined in, I think Europeans would find quite disturbing. And, you know, there are some variations within Europe, you know, Germans, for example, are particularly, kind of, sensitive about these things, Brits perhaps less so, but, overall, I think that would be seen as being problematic.
And then, similarly, you know, I was struck when you were presenting your slides, talking about the government information campaigns, you know, and how instantly, you know, the government information campaign changed people’s minds about some things.
Audrey Tang
Hmmm hmm. That’s right. That’s right.
Hans Kundnani
I can’t imagine the government here trying to do that, I mean, and that’s before we talk about America, I just think people wouldn’t have that much faith or trust in what the government said. So, I guess that all brings me to – I mean, as I say, I’d just like to, sort of, hear a little bit more about Taiwan’s specific democratic culture, what you think makes it different from the democratic culture in other places. But one thing I do wonder about is, it’s very striking to me that both Taiwan and South Korea are very new democracies.
Audrey Tang
That’s right.
Hans Kundnani
Right?
Audrey Tang
Democracy for us is just a set of technology, yes.
Hans Kundnani
But I hadn’t thought about it in the way that you put it, that the first Presidential election you had in 1996 was after the creation of the internet, but, you know, Taiwanese democracy, more broadly, only goes back to the 80s, and South Korea is also a new democracy. So, I suppose there are different ways of thinking about how that newness of your democracy affects these things, but I’d love to hear your thoughts on, you know, is there something specific about East Asian democracies? Is there something specific about new democracies that means that you deal with all these questions around technology and how that impacts rights and freedom, liberal democratic rights and freedoms in a different way than we’re used to?
Audrey Tang
Well, I mean, there are also European counterparts of our work, right? Estonia was founded after the internet, and Iceland also, their constitutional and a better Reykjavik platform, also after the world web, actually, after the social media. And so, I don’t think this is a East Asian thing, right? If you have a generation of people who don’t think democracy is something of a proud legacy, tradition, thing, but rather as a set of living technologies, that they can all participate and increase the bit rate, then they will see, you know, the tech companies, like Facebook, Google, Amazon, whatever, and so on, as, you know, not monopolising the word ‘tech’. Democracy is tech. So, the web is no more of a tool of cataclysm than paper was, right? Paper is paper. Writing is writing.
And so, the idea is that – not that the state must be weak for the market to be strong, or the state must be strong for the market to obey, or anything like that, but rather, the government need to radically trust its people by making how we work transparent, so that people are on the same page as us. And when we do that, then people feel free to remix however they want on those cute dog messages, and so the – basically, the idea is that democracy itself is a platform. Liberal democracy can enable all sort of local and online and whatever decision-makings, including sent boxes, Presidential hackathons, participatory budgeting, all sort of different experiments being tried out in Taiwan in a Presidential hackathon. Every year, we hand out five teams, no money, but a shape of Taiwan with a micro projector. If you turn it on, it projects the President handing you the trophy, so it’s self-describing, and promising that whatever you’ve made in the past three months will become national policy in the next 12 months. So, there’s executive buying power as the hackathon prize.
And so, when you do mechanism designed for participation in the participatory way, there really is no limit to what the innovative people in their civil society can suggest, and you just put the agenda setting power to the people, and that is the extent of democracy as a platform, so that’s why I think people think tech as not something that only the private sector captures. The civil sector, if they want, they can just start measuring air quality, water quality, whatever, any time, and actually really co-create with the government.
Dr Robin Niblett CMG
‘Cause I’m wondering whether that – in a way, Hans was asking also about the culture, you know, the danger is, have we spent too long developing an adversarial, confrontational culture around our democracy and many European countries? You noted Estonia, Iceland, I mean, these are, I would say, exceptions rather than proving a rule. And, Marjorie, you wanted to come in on this point maybe, as well?
Marjorie Buchser
Yeah, actually, a very short comment, but I think it’s fascinating also because the debate we have here, and we have often highlighted the deep cultural differences between the political community, policy community and Technologist, and that essentially, they don’t understand each other, they don’t have the same values, they don’t understand the systems. And then, a lot of what we do is trying to put them together with some clashes, but essentially, deeply rooted different perception of what democracy, what prophecies, what values are, and which, to some extent, doesn’t seem to be the case, or never had that history dealt with in Taiwan.
Audrey Tang
Yeah, but it’s a new culture in Taiwan, too. I mean, prior to the Sunflower Occupy, if you ask a random person on the street that where do they think that just 5,000 people on an e-petition platform can just basically bind and administer only face-to-face meeting twice a month, or that we will have assistive intelligence, AI powered conversation method to find a solution to the UberX problem back then, people would look at you funny and say, “That’s not possible, we all know that the state is bureaucratic.” I really think that after the Occupy in 2014, the norm changed in politics because the demonstration was not a protest, it was a demo. It was a real demonstration of how half a million people, on the street and many more online, can come to four consensus items and bind the Parliament to it.
Dr Robin Niblett CMG
They demanded, in a way, you had an occ – we’ve had an Occupy movement obviously in many Western countries around the austerity and the financial crash, but it sounds like you had almost a national, how to describe, like a national trauma or a national awakening, which you could say Estonia did as well, partly because of its ability…
Audrey Tang
That’s right, exactly.
Dr Robin Niblett CMG
…to escape from Soviet control, and there’s few other countries that have had quite the same awakening, although…
Audrey Tang
15-M, 15-M is one.
Dr Robin Niblett CMG
…the election of Emmanuel Macron in France was an awakening of a sort, but, yeah, I mean, didn’t create a new digital democracy, but it destroyed several established parties in the process.
Audrey Tang
Yeah, Spain was like that during the 15-M, also.
Dr Robin Niblett CMG
Yeah, so maybe – I mean, but this is very interesting on the culture point and what drives that change and when the appetite comes, can I ask you, I mean, two questions connected to this, one small and one big? The smaller one, well, I don’t know if it’s small. The press, the role of media. Now, again, we, in the West, think of our democracies as, in a way, guarded, in many cases, not just by having an opposition, but also having a media that’s sort of independent, we can debate how independent the media is, but it’s not government-controlled, let’s put it that way, in many democracies, and they’re seen as the guardian against government excess, government corruption. They’re meant to be…
Audrey Tang
Definitely.
Dr Robin Niblett CMG
…the providers of transparency. What role does the media play in Taiwan, and what do you think about the role of the media?
Audrey Tang
Yeah, well, both my parents are Journalists. The point is that news work and journalism in Mandarin is the same word, so journalism is literally news work. And so, we say this information, and when we counter this information, Journalists are our best friends, our best ally. We share the same liberal democratic tradition that sees journalism as keeping us accountable and honest. It’s they who report, for example, for the digital fence. I think the approval rate of the CECC measures was around 94% at that time, and they report how the other 6% people thinks. And that’s very important because that keeps us honest and accountable of all our work, and then it became 96%, but in any case, [inaudible – 41:49], I mean.
So, the point here what I’m trying to make is that the Journalist is really the most important part, not only on the fact-checking, but also, on teaching the whole society of how to talk about things in an evidence-based, fact-based basis, and they’re basically guardians of ground truth. And that’s why we put in our basic curriculum, starting from seven years old, from the first rate, that everybody in the school learn about media competence. And note that we say competence and not literacy, because literacy would be about how you consume media, but competence is about how you make media, recognising that many primary schoolers maybe have an Instagram account with more followers than me, and so they are all media, in a sense, And so, it’s of utmost importance that they learn about how a Journalist looks at the news stories, at how to balance the narratives, how does the framing effect work, and things like that, because they, too, are immature Journalist, to a degree, and they do participate actually, for example fact-checking, or our three Presidential candidates during the platform debates, and so on.
Dr Robin Niblett CMG
Very interesting. Hans, did you want to come on this, or not? I – no.
Hans Kundnani
No, no, go ahead. Go ahead.
Dr Robin Niblett CMG
Well, just – but it just strikes me that our media – it’s almost like that Taiwan has an openness, and maybe I’m overinterpreting it here, to want to come and be united in this project that you’ve described. To what extent is there something unique about Taiwan that is imposed by the discipline of having the PRC next door? So, you talked here about, you know, dealing and countering disinformation, the key value of a free press is that they counter the disinformation. Is there something unique about Taiwan, its willingness to cohere, to come together, around this heavy use of digital technology…
Audrey Tang
Yeah.
Dr Robin Niblett CMG
…that’s partly inspired by, driven by, your proximity to China and the, kind of, threat that it seems presenting to Taiwan’s very existential survivability?
Audrey Tang
Well, there’s some of that, but I think a large part of that is our own past, right? For people who are above 35, and that includes me, we remember how the martial law was, which, by and large, was not that different from what PRC is now doing to their Journalists. And so, what I’m trying to say is that for people of a – above a certain age, not going back to the martial law days is of core importance that we need to counter disinformation without resorting to censorship and takedowns, because had we done that, all the democratic struggle that we made to lift us out of the martial law would be in vain, and I think that is really at the core. And, of course, PRC keeps reminding our new generation how it was in the martial law days in Taiwan.
Dr Robin Niblett CMG
Very interesting. Hey, Hans, why don’t you come in now? Very interesting, Audrey.
Hans Kundnani
Yeah, I mean, this whole issue, which you’ve just come back to now, of, sort of, Taiwan’s history and the democratic transition and how recent that is, is so interesting. I mean, earlier on, you were, sort of, suggesting that it was – there’s always been an advantage, in a way, for Taiwan, and then you pointed to these European counterparts, like Estonia. I think in the European debate though, what’s quite interesting is you also have these countries, like Hungary particularly, and Poland, you know, which also made a democratic transition relatively recently, you know, in the 90s, and I think part of the conclusion that many, you know, Europeans are now coming to is that actually, it takes a really long time to, sort of, embed a real democratic culture, and that you can go backwards, right? You know, as Hungary, kind of, seems to illustrate. And so, what I think’s so interesting is, you know, this question of how Taiwan apparently, so quickly, has developed a really deep democratic culture. But then, you know, again, to come back to some of the issues around the coronavirus and the coronavirus response, I think what a lot of us worry about is the way that – I mean, if you think of liberal democracy as being on the one hand, you know, participation, as you said, voting and so on, but on the other hand, the liberal part of it, in other words, a set of, you know, guaranteed rights and freedom that are guaranteed by a constitution.
Audrey Tang
Yeah.
Hans Kundnani
I think the thing that many of us worry about is that in the context of coronavirus, it, sort of, almost pushes you to restrict some of those freedoms and rights. Now, on the one hand, there’s the way we’ve all been forced to do a lockdown of some kind, I mean, you said you haven’t, which is fantastic.
Audrey Tang
Yeah, we have no lockdowns, and so…
Hans Kundnani
Right, but…
Audrey Tang
…lockdown is an even more fundamental right, which is the right of freedom.
Hans Kundnani
Right, so that’s…
Audrey Tang
Right to move, right?
Hans Kundnani
…one side of it, is, sort of, rights and freedoms in the real world, as it were. But then, on the other hand, you do have this whole question around privacy rights in relation to the use of data, and so that’s where I think it is quite interesting that, you know, some of the things that you said…
Audrey Tang
Yeah.
Hans Kundnani
…that Taiwan has done…
Audrey Tang
Yeah, yeah.
Hans Kundnani
…I think some Europeans would worry that that would be a, sort of – a kind of democratic rollback almost, a liberal democratic rollback.
Audrey Tang
Well, if you choose to go to a quarantine hotel, which is entirely your choice, we still pay you, I think €30 per day stipend, but you fine – fine you – we fine you a 1,000 times that if you break, but, in a physical quarantine hotel, it’s very hard to break, though. But what I’m trying to get at is that there’s always the choice and also, that the digital fence is strictly less intrusive than the quarantine hotel, actually, and we use already collected data, meaning that it’s not GPS. We don’t know which room you are in. We don’t know which floor in the building you are in, actually, so the resolution, the – of fineness of the detection is, strictly speaking, just needed for people who break the quarantine to get a notification. And even then, there may be some false positives or things like that, people are always very friendly about going.
So, first of all, I would say that it’s not the rollback at all, because back when SARS happened in 2003, we had to barricade the entire hospital unannounced, with no fixed termination date, and that is the encroachment of the fundamental freedoms, and our constitutional court, which had a interpretation and a large debate right after SARS. So that even barricading an entire hospital was constitutional because it saved lockdown in other places in Taiwan, but Polis legislation figure out something, like the CECC, that has a clear termination date, that has a pre-communicated set of rules, and most importantly, pre-authorised by the Parliament. And so, that’s a, kind of, societal inoculation, and I think that’s what the European countries are now being inoculated, for a lack of better word.
Dr Robin Niblett CMG
Just a follow-up question on this. Is this outlook the preserve of the Democratic Progressive Party, which – in whose Cabinet you serve, or if…
Audrey Tang
Well, I work with, but yes.
Dr Robin Niblett CMG
With, sorry, exactly, with. Exactly. But would – you know, if there were a change of government, I mean, you’ve just been – GPP has just been re-elected obviously, so it’s got another four years, I presume, ahead of it, but if there were – if the KMT…
Audrey Tang
That’s fine, I work with…
Dr Robin Niblett CMG
Is this view shared…?
Audrey Tang
…the KMT Cabinet, too. Yeah.
Dr Robin Niblett CMG
Yeah, but is the view shared – is this a cross-party view…
Audrey Tang
It is.
Dr Robin Niblett CMG
…this move to digital…
Audrey Tang
It is.
Dr Robin Niblett CMG
…democracy, is it shared…
Audrey Tang
It is.
Dr Robin Niblett CMG
…by both parties? It is.
Audrey Tang
Definitely. Because, right after the Occupy order, the Mayor or candidates of all parties who supported the Occupy won the election, sometimes without preparing inauguration speech, and everybody who were against it, either because of their party affiliation or their personal taste, failed the Mayoral election. And that sends a sweeping political signal, so that even though there was still KMT that was in my [inaudible – 49:49] Presidency, they openly announced – and the new Premier [inaudible – 49:54] announced that cross those thing, open government data, and so on, need to be the new national direction. So, I was actually hired as the reverse mentor back then, because I was still under 35 at that point, a used reverse mentor, to the then Minister [inaudible – 50:10] actually in the very same office. And so, after two years working with the KMT Cabinet, I gets promoted from intern into voter, but still working in the same office. So, I would say that currently, in the Parliament, they have all of the four major parties, the KMT, the DPP, the New Power Party, which is itself born from – by the Sunflower Occupy, and also, the Taiwan People’s Party, whose party Chair is Dr Ko Wen-je, who openly run our open government as platform during the [inaudible – 50:43] election, right after the Occupy, all supported the cross-parliamentarian, open government, Parliament network that they just did a summary declaration of all the four different parties on opening up the Parliament, as well.
Dr Robin Niblett CMG
And do you use referenda? I mean, is…
Audrey Tang
Yes, we do.
Dr Robin Niblett CMG
It almost sounds like you’re beyond referendum. There’s a big debate going on here in Europe as to whether referenda are, you know, majoritarian and therefore negative, or are they helpful? What’s your attitude to that?
Audrey Tang
Yeah, we do referenda. We do alternating years, one year of Presidential election, which, as you pointed out, we just had, and then next year, a national referenda, and next year, a Mayoral election, and then next year, a national referenda, so it’s on alternating years. So, the representative and deliberative or the direct doesn’t interfere with one another. And our referenda, because it’s every two years, are binding for two years, so you try it out for two years and see whether the people like it.
Hans Kundnani
Can I ask about deliberative democracy, which you did just mention in passing? Robin, at the beginning, talked about the work we’ve been doing around democracy and technology in Europe, thinking, as Robin indicated, also about some of the ways in which technology can help deepen democracy and revitalise democracy. And so, we looked, in particular, at these two, sort of, alternative forms of democracy that potentially at least slightly take you beyond representative democracy, i.e. direct democracy and deliberative democracy. And I think part of the reason there’s so much enthusiasm around direct democracy at the moment, although, as Robin was alluding to, there’s a lot of scepticism too, but part of the reason there’s a lot of enthusiasm is because of the way that it’s easy to see how you could use technology to, sort of, scale up referenda.
Audrey Tang
That’s right. That’s right. Hmmm hmm.
Hans Kundnani
But what you’ve done in Taiwan, which is really fascinating, is to do a, kind of, online deliberative democracy…
Audrey Tang
Exactly.
Hans Kundnani
…which, as far as I know, is pretty much the only at least successful attempt at doing that around the world, and, in general, I think there’s a lot of scepticism by people who think about deliberative democracy, about whether you can do that online. Can you just tell us a little bit more about that initiative and how you manage to make deliberative democracy work online?
Audrey Tang
Yes. So, first of all, we always bring technology to people, we never ask people to come to technology. So, we do so not as a replacement for face-to-face deliberation, but rather, we call it crowdsource agenda setting, meaning that it determines what topic to talk about in a face-to-face deliberation. So, in design-thinking terms, that’s at the discovery and define stage, before we settle on the common “How might we” questions. And so, what you’re looking at is a real example. The first example, actually, for it to use informal policymaking back in 2015, when we did a UberX conversation, and you can see myself as the avatar there, with all my friends and families, and they represent all the different feelings across the board, and the software analyses automatically the most divisive point and the second most divisive point, and did a, kind of, dimension reduction, so that people can see literally who are the Uber supporters or things like that. And the software is called Polis, it’s called assistive intelligence, or AI-powered conversation.
And so, it proceeds like this. With first crowdsource data, so the data around transportation, about the use of the public roads and things like that, from all the different sectors, and we publish those, and after reading those data, everybody, for three or four weeks, can just share what they feel about it. And the great thing about this is that there’s no right or wrong thing about feelings. Many democratic designs, deliberative or not, skip this step, but this is the crucial state. People are encouraged to share, and there’s no right or wrong, what they feel about this common data, and then we brainstorm about possible ideas, and the best ideas are the one that address the most people’s feelings, which then gets translated into regulation.
So, in user experience terms, it’s a very simple Wiki survey, a crowdsource survey, everybody going into here, I see one sentiment from one tele sensor, in this case yours truly, who said that “I think passenger liability insurance should be mandatory for riders on UberX private vehicles,” and if you agree, you move slightly toward me. If you disagree, you move slightly away from me and then you see the next one, until you get a new idea, and then you can share how you think registration is important and taxation is important, or whatever, and other people will then also upvote or downvote on your idea. And the great thing about this interface is not only that it provides instant gratification, but also, there is no reply button. With no reply button, there is no room for troll to grow because you cannot – you literally cannot make a personal attack on this platform.
And so, after three weeks, we always get this shape, where people agree to be different, on many divisive statements, which are often ideological, about the nature of platform economy or whatever, and which we always tickle, or we acknowledge, but we never talk about this. But then, we look at the consensus statements, of which there are many, and people find that they agree with most of the things, with most of their neighbours, most of the time, simply because the software rewards people who propose more nuanced, more eclectic comments. And so, this is actually a real screenshot from another conversation, and to prove this doesn’t work only in Taiwan, this is in Bowling Green, Kentucky, USA, and they had a virtual town hall using the same Polis technology, and regardless of people who identify as Democrat or a Republican, everybody agreed that, in the existing curriculum of science, technology, engineering and mathematics, they need to add art to it, so that it becomes steam and not stem.
And, I mean, this is such a, you know, not pressworthy thing, I guess, so you never see it on the institutional media, but this is actually something that the people care really mu – really about, and so, if the Mayor accepts that, which costs almost nothing, then they automatically get more support from the entire population. That’s the low-hanging fruit, that’s what I mean by rough consensus or by common understanding. And so, we resolved Uber in this way, and we actually did coronavirus hackathon to seek the privacy enhancing technologies that would strengthen privacy and democracy, for example, there was one winning case using Polis that says people should have an app that works in airplane mode and only transmits the information only to a medical officer and only as a one-time link that provides exactly the kind of information they need, without divulging private information of your friends and families, as a traditional contact tracing interview would do, and that’s something that people can get behind.
Hans Kundnani
Fascinating.
Dr Robin Niblett CMG
I’ve got a list of almost quickfire questions, I don’t know if they’ll be quickfire answers, because they’re big, but I just think things I don’t want to miss having not talked about.
Audrey Tang
Go on.
Dr Robin Niblett CMG
And I’ll let either Hans or Marjorie, kind of, raise their hands when they want to come in, if they want, on anything, but if – otherwise, we’ll just enjoy your answers. First thing.
Audrey Tang
Sure.
Dr Robin Niblett CMG
Digital identities, is – this is a big discussion here in Europe, so how important is it that individuals can, kind of, take ownership of their own data, have a digital identity that they curate? Is that critical to your system or margin?
Audrey Tang
It is. It is critical. Everybody who are born in Taiwan, after, I think, three days, gets the National Health Insurance card. Without their NHI card, which is a IC card, and it’s only used for public service, never for economic sector services, we would then be able to ration the masks.
Dr Robin Niblett CMG
Right. So, everyone has that – you know, with that digital identity, it is used specifically for public service provision, yeah?
Audrey Tang
Yes.
Dr Robin Niblett CMG
Cybersecurity. Now, here we are, you know, we’ve created this incredible construct, boom, boom, boom. You’re next to a very large neighbour that’s pretty good at deploying large amounts of state resources into cyber involvement in other countries. How much does Taiwan invest in its cybersecurity? How resilient are you – is your system to this? You’ve mentioned some things about how to avoid trolls and so on, but I’m talking here about something much more systemic…
Audrey Tang
Yeah.
Dr Robin Niblett CMG
…more structural, in terms of a threat, how was resilient are you and where does this fit into your big picture?
Audrey Tang
Yeah, very resilient. The fact that we’re still talking here proves…
Dr Robin Niblett CMG
Yes.
Audrey Tang
…the resilience because it’s battle-hardened, quite literally, and so, on the hard cybersecurity side, we make sure that we allocate 5 to 7% of all IT budgeting, all government projects, to threat hunting, penetration testing, working with the whitehat community, and we’re looking to increase that to 5 to 7% of all government project going forward, which is a huge sum, right? So, basically, we see it as a extension of the national security, and we also want our cybersecurity industry to be seen as essentially battle-hardened, and if you’re a whitehat hacker in Taiwan, you have plenty of choices to penetration tests before this public service goes public. You get to meet with the Minister or the President all the time, you get treated as national heroes, so you don’t give void to the dark side, which always has more cookies, and that is basically our strategy.
Dr Robin Niblett CMG
Fantastic. You know, the – just a question about the, kind of, future – the – you’ve talked about the sharing economy, now I’m just wondering if you could just share a quick thought, because one of the points Hans has often made is we spent a lot of time talking about the way technology’s affecting democracy. But quite often, democracy is simply being undermined by a loss of the social contract around the political economies around which many democracies were founded, and actually, technology is simply a second order effect. What do you mean by this sharing economy? I mean, how optimistic are you about the future of a more technologically engaged workforce, etc.?
Audrey Tang
Yeah, sure. So, I mean sharing economy in what many people would mean – would use words like co-operatives or collaborative economy, meaning that people who own, or at least co-own, their mode of productions, specifically jointly control the data and the use of data, which is part of the GDPR. But there’s very few cases, like AirBox in Taiwan, that people truly jointly control and determine the use of their collected data. So, I think it was called in a international article about Taiwan’s COVID response as a participatory self-surveillance, meaning that the data is produced and collected by the citizenry, for the citizenry, shared with the citizenry and not with any company or the state, and they negotiate, based on these terms. And I think these kind of economic structures is really powerful, in the sense that the social sector can determine their own mode of distribution and production, and even making their own decision and structures, without actually a lot surveillance capitalism or surveillance state side effects. And I’m really a proponent of that, and because of mass creationing, everybody in Taiwan now have a taste of that, that they have the app that can see all their health data or their medical prescription and things like that, that are individually invisible outside of the original clinic or hospital, but used in the same app. They own their data and can jointly control its use.
Dr Robin Niblett CMG
Very interesting, and just in the sense of education, of citizens’ skills, I presume this is just a critically important part, so the digital element is built into – you talked about steam, and that was a US example you gave there, but people think of Taiwan as a nation full of brilliant Technologists, probably ‘cause of your large semiconductor industry and so on. But are you facing some of the similar challenges other parts of the world are, with levels of education, making sure you have a citizenry that’s going to be ready for this much more digitally driven world?
Audrey Tang
Yeah, I think we’re uniquely prepared, because the – not only the education budget is seen as one of the two, like, I mean, in Taiwan, we would say that we’re a social democracy on healthcare and on education, that simply living anywhere behind is intolerable, when it comes to education and healthcare. And so, just like we have a single-payer health system that take care of everybody’s needs, we also have a very vibrant education system that authorises, for example, alternative education, including home-schooling, I’m a home-schooler myself, and all sorts of different configuration of education that feeds back into the curriculum and all the different K2-12 schools can try their own, kind of, mini curriculum, as a way of working with the everchanging world, and I think we’re uniquely prepared for that.
Dr Robin Niblett CMG
I’ve got one last question, and I think my colleagues are happy for me to do it, I don’t see – exactly. So – and it’s, I suppose, slightly more political, as you might imagine. I’m just thinking that, you know, there seems to be a remarkable acceleration taking place in Taiwan, around the hole where you’re designing your democracy, which is why there’s so much interest in other parts of the world. How much, though, is the urgency that I hear in your voice, the drive, driven by the centralisation that’s taking place just across in your large neighbour? You know, the move to a one country, two system – a re-exploration of what that’s really going to mean in Hong Kong, seems to have really mobilised…
Audrey Tang
Well, I – yeah, I don’t think they even…
Dr Robin Niblett CMG
…people in Taiwan.
Audrey Tang
…say that in Hong Kong anymore, right?
Dr Robin Niblett CMG
Yeah, well, that’s what I mean, in a way, maybe you’ve already moved into a different – yeah, so, well, you’ve obviously got a chart ready for this, so this was not planned. This is very interesting. Explain what you mean by this one.
Audrey Tang
Right, so, this – these are our Sustainable Development Goals, and specifically…
Dr Robin Niblett CMG
Oh, yeah.
Audrey Tang
…targets in the SDG17, and I think the new #TaiwanCanHelp or Taiwan is helping, symbolises that this is not being motivated only by a nearby jurisdiction, or that we’re competitive in any sort, or things like that, but rather by a realisation that the pandemic is a great amplifier. In places with authoritarian tendencies, the pandemic amplify authoritarian measures, right?
Dr Robin Niblett CMG
Yeah.
Audrey Tang
In places where people put more trust in the economic sector than the state, the multinational economic sector gains everyone in trust, we see that already in some places. Or in Taiwan, where people trust the social sector to come up with the solutions, then we see a lot more trust, and deepening of democracy during the pandemic. And so, I think it’s very important to remember that IT, information technology, or ICT, including communication technology, is a amplifier of the underlying value of the society, and a value, to quote the SDGs, are still reliable data, effective partnerships, and open innovation, something that all the different nations of different philosophies managed to agree back in 2015 about the common goals. And so, that maybe, kind of, seem archaic now, but I think it’s still very important to look back at what we all agreed in 2015, and think beyond the terms of ICT technologies, as my job description said.
My job description, by the way, was written roughly at the same time as the SDGs gets translated into Mandarin, back in 2016, and they translate these three goals into just plain English, to highlight the difference between a ICT-based Technologist technocrat thinking, versus a digital-inclusive thinking, and I’ll just quote it here, because it’s a very short poem, and it says this. “When we see the Internet of Things, let’s make an internet of beings. When we see virtual reality, let’s make it a shared reality. When we see machine learning, let’s make it collaborative learning. When we see user experience, let’s make it about human experience, and whenever we hear that singularity is near, let us always remember the plurality is here.
Dr Robin Niblett CMG
I tell you, you’ve clearly done one or two interviews recently, because that was a very, very neat way to end. I was trying to think how to pull together the threads of this great conversation, but I particularly like your idea of the plurality being near. Not least because I think, in the West, if I can put it that way, certainly here in the UK, the idea of pluralism has always been held up as that – you know, that ambition and that thing that we subscribe to and believe in, and singularity, that very phrase of it, is partly what frightens people about the technological future. But, Audrey Tang, I think what you’ve done for us today, at a time of anxiety, in many cases pessimism, acceleration of negative trends, you’ve really given us some insight into the acceleration potential of positive trends, especially around democracy, which is so important to all of us. And I’ll just reiterate what I said at the beginning, with our – it being our centenary year, we’ve made thinking about the future, and the updating and the modernisation of democracy, and accountable government in general, and I think this idea of accountable governance, which I think you’ve really put at the heart of it, government being accountable for its citizens, not the other way round, that’s one of the values, I think I speak on behalf of my colleagues, we certainly subscribe to, and great to share them with you, far away, but feeling very close, so, I think, to our hearts and to our minds. So, you know, just been a great conversation, I think I can say on behalf of Marjorie, Hans.
Hans Kundnani
Absolutely.
Dr Robin Niblett CMG
We hope to see you in person in the future, but, hey, this’ll definitely do for now. Thank you very much, Audrey, for your time.
Audrey Tang
Thank you very much.
Dr Robin Niblett CMG
I’ve really enjoyed it.
Audrey Tang
Live long.
Marjorie Buchser
Thank you.
Hans Kundnani
Thank you.
Audrey Tang
Prosper. Okay.
Dr Robin Niblett CMG
Yeah.
Audrey Tang
Bye.
Dr Robin Niblett CMG
And you, take care as well. Bye, bye.
