hello everyone welcome back to conversations with tyler tonight i'm chatting with the amazing audrey tang who is also digital minister of taiwan audrey welcome hello good local time everyone what software that doesn't exist yet would be most helpful for coordinating future anti-authoritarian movements well of course a quantum resistant cryptographic channel will really help
that enable true secure conversation that once it's someone try to intercept it you will know immediately there are encrypted channels now such as whatsapp do they not serve that function if the makers of the software decide to eavesdrop themselves then there's no physical property only mathematical property that stops uh the conversation being eavesdropped now those um what we call the public key cryptography
mathematics is it is a very real danger of being broken within a decade or so or two decades if you're optimistic by the quantum computer themselves what kind of software do we need to make the democracy of the future work well first of all i think democracy is a ongoing process so definitely something that makes the listening at scale work that makes co-presence work that enables
people who are closest to the suffering amplify their experiences and so that people with various different backgrounds can emphasize with that experience so in short software that enables listening and feeling skill and does virtual reality help in that regard or does virtual reality give us experiences so intense that we become less empathetic to suffering because that vr vacation in paris is just so amazing
that's right so uh only if it's shared reality though um i hear you talking about your amazing vr paris vacation but unless i can answer the same space and make it an extended reality that contains both of us it would not become a social reality and to say individual reality and that may of course have some therapeutic uh effects uh or overview effect i'm not denying that but i would
say that this is pro-social but not necessarily democratic do you think at the margin people with virtual reality will be more interested in visiting the slums of mumbai or going to sun moon lake in taiwan which is very beautiful of course well why not do both i mean uh you can definitely take this uh sun and moon lake uh and just in the summer lake have a conversation and watch together
how it works in mumbai and vice versa i mean we just had a asia-pacific social innovation partnership award and in the summit we hear the designers in singapore working for a app that enable the foreign workers the offshore workers from philippines uh in say taiwan to take care of their loved ones instead of sending cash home they can do grocery shopping to make sure that their money
is not spent on luxury goods and so on so that's like three different countries and coaches right there let's say we had a service a better version of ai and anyone in the world could ask it any question in any language it would mostly give pretty good answers would that increase empathy or lower it well of course that um depends on what you mean by pretty good does it make satisfying sounding answers does it make
answers that seems real does it make mostly factual but not empathetic answers uh does it make mostly empathetic but factually untrue answers what does good enough mean to you say it's mostly factual answers it's as good as a computer chess program not perfect but quite good relative to human knowledge and anyone can ask anything like a supercharged google plus a a better functioning siri with real
answers what do we do with that knowledge well first of all uh that that's the value alignment part what you're saying is that it more or less agree with the um epistemic norms that is to say the norm around knowledge that the society has uh the other part to ask is about the accountability like when it makes mistakes who get to correct those mistakes when it's biased who get to
participate in overcoming the bias is the source code is the api is the data that uses participatory or it is known to only a few what's the innovation that would do the most to boost empathy um definitely open innovation that is to say innovation that is co-created to bring technology to people rather than asking people to adapt to technology do you think the united states today has more empathy than 20 years ago
i'm not sure that the state is a useful abstraction when you talk about empathy empathy are between human beings or at least animals do we have more empathy toward animals than a hundred years ago there's much more factory farming right there's much more factory farming that's exactly right on the other hand of course people understand how animals suffer more and so that leads to more uh
people understanding the animal welfare and immoral right angles it also leads to innovations such as the impossible burger uh the future of meat uh and things like that maybe people eat it only because it actually tastes better and is free of the possible industrial farming side effects uh specifically on carbon emissions but whatever reason you approach those new kind of meat i think they are superior
in almost every regard uh them cost and that part uh the science are working on it too what's your view of that old i think stalin quotation that one death is a tragedy a million deaths are a statistic could it be that the evolution of open source technology it directs our attention toward the whole and the telling of a single story becomes somewhat diminished and therefore we're less empathetic
well of course that uh between one and one million there's many many zooming levels i mean if you look at a open street map but you can only zoom to the globe or zoom to an individual block in a city or even just to an individual level then that map is not very useful at all what's useful is in the transitional zoom levels that makes sure that people can build the context in their hand and connect their experiences
with people who are slightly different but not at all that different and that builds common values so the transition between the zooming levels is much more important than the one and the million level would it be better if smartphones did not have touch screens i use of course stylus um like all the time and so the touch screens are useful when i don't have the stylus and keyboard hanzi
as they kind of fall back but if the touch screen is the primary interaction but uh button then of course it builds addiction but say we could magically revert to the days of blackberry and somehow that would stick would society be better off do you think i'm sure that people will still invent a touchscreen but say we could avoid the touch screen right and we just stop at blackberry
do we use social media in better ways why do we do we jump to neurolink directly from the blackberry then it would take several decades at least right so we have 30 40 years of blackberry and people are on social media less is that a better outcome do we have better discourse more empathy well that may be uh the case because in taiwan the most popular reddit equivalent is the ptt and it's still terminal based it's like a
late 90s version of the bulletin board system and we do see that it leads to better discourse qualities how bullish are you on work from a distance this is pandemic time there's a lot of data what do you think well working from a distance does not mean that you don't meet people face to face it only means that we transcend space boundaries when we're talking to each other and so if it is something
that you can opt in to then of course there are places and ways of work uh that improve the work quality and i'm quite bullish on that but if it's a must and you have to work from the distance even for the kind of work that doesn't quite suit just working from distance then of course is going to hurt the quality of work but take the major tech companies apple where you've worked facebook google so
seven years from now and the pandemic is clearly over say in the united states how much of the current work from distance practices will persist or do you think it would all just have gone back to how it was in 2019 i've never been to cupertino so all my work with apple for six years were telework so i'm biased i i think it's um pretty smooth and if we don't like the
tools that we're using for telework we just make the tools better and and that's the the main idea about open innovation in that if people don't like the particular way that a tour is limiting our imaginations they can always improve on it um so yeah i think um again this is not about excluding uh people from participating in the work it's about expanding the idea of face-to-face meetings and the kind of
empathy and rough consensus that we can form and scale it to the more remote places it's a um not a replacement it is a augmentation to the face to face for how should the united states handle the regulation of major chinese tech companies the service tick-tock or say the service of wechat should we allow major chinese tech companies to own them well take a systemic risk a system approach uh do what the taiwanese people
did in 2014 uh which is people on the street deliberated uh with their own experience working with um people who are from the prc uh coming to a consensus on the street that there's no pure private sector companies in the prc and the party or the state really the same thing can just replace and swap leadership as they like through the party branches so we decided eventually that making the
infrastructure components in the prc while their state subsidy looks quite lucrative a mutas is actually a higher overall cost of ownership because you have to reassess for each upgrade whether the state have already taken over that so-called private venture so the us government should block tick tick tock or make sure it's sold to oracle or microsoft or what concretely would that mean
i'm saying that i'm saying that a all of society deliberation the style of the 2014 sunflower need to happen for the society had come to a common value about these sort of things and this is what we call data norm do you think it is normal uh for facial recognitions and such data that you uh are just you know filming yourself as singing and dancing to be aggregated uh to a single state
and of which there is no jurisdictional accountability of using such data if you think it's great as a country more powers but if you think it's not great as a country then maybe you collectively can find something to do given your position on democracy are you concerned about the de facto extra territoriality of european privacy regulation that web services web services marketing to the eu have to meet gdpr say
so there's not an actual democratic deliberation but it's handed down by the european union right uh yeah theoretical it's even extraterrestrial right so if there's european astronauts and so on they're still regulated by the gdpr um so i think there's two things going on here one is about the data norm uh and uh for the eu citizens it extends uh by the framework of human rights and therefore
of course travels uh with the individual not within the territorial jurisdiction and the other view of course is based on the infrastructure uh where the data is collected whether it's used under native data localization and even sovereignty uh we have heard that word too uh when used on data borders and so just like the example i mentioned of the singaporean app uh with filipino workers
in taiwan uh buying grocery for their families uh it's by its very nature three different overlapping jurisdictions and all have a governing interest in it and so it's a reality and gdpr is part of that reality why is finnegan's wake your favorite book uh well because it's very complex and complicated and i can enjoy it without understanding it just treating us as lyrics like a notebook literally book of
notes has it influenced your approach to tech at all uh yeah i think so uh because uh when i was 20 years old i would wake up log into the pearl irc channel that's internet relay chat and type riverrun and then a bot uh will just paste a random paragraph literally a random paragraph from finnegan's wake which will begin my day's work and so that's social too everybody in the channel sees it uh and
so i'm sure that it has influenced our work on pearl which is full with haiku and poetry and things like that have you written poems in pearl oh yeah of course are they good uh i don't know you can check the pugs.hs repository to see them now your ideal of radical transparency in communications do you think this is appropriate for all organizations and personality types or just something
that's good for you what's the personality type i know people who are very balanced and moderate i think can do better with radical transparency people who say might have very high levels of testosterone if they see and hear everything being said about them they might go into a rage or overreact right well going into a rage may also be cathartic it might be but rages can be dangerous
right countries going into a rage people going into a rage i don't know because outrage is the beginning of social movement the the thing is where do you direct the outreach to if it's directed to revenge that is to say hurting uh imaginary or real people or if it's directed to i don't know um discrimination which is lowering other people's social status without the one's own of course those could be destructive as
you said but it could also be directed into co-creation that is to say make new institutions so that the old problems that provoked your rage in the first place do not happen again and that's how democracy grows and so i'm i'm also outraged actually what do you think of creative ambiguity of a way of postponing disputes so the european union often does this they write a complicated document that means
something a bit different to each country they don't agree they don't have to agree it's never radically transparent but they revisit it seven or eight years later and do another tweak and just keep on moving down that road does that offend your sense of radical transparency well these two are certainly orthogonal i mean i can imagine being radically transparent but deliberately moving in a
very slow fashion and only act on the lowest of the lower hanging fruits i can see merits in that too i can also see of course this slow moving part uh being non-radically transparent and then the main repercussion will probably be that people cease to feel that it's relevant to their lives and will not devote their energy to it given your own radical transparency do you think people speak to you
differently always being aware that it's being recorded or transcribed or do you think they just forget about it and become their normal selves well i think uh the better parts of themselves are shown much more visibly that is to say if they have an agenda that benefits um the human kind or the planet or the cosmos they're much more likely to share it because it's also performative they understand that people
from the future will see it but the parts of themselves are thinking for the next quarter only of linear uh individual growth or gdp growth at a cost or expense of future generations that part doesn't seem to show larry wall once said that pearl is designed around laziness hubris and impatience that's right which of those qualities do you think most appealed to you laziness why you don't seem lazy you've
done a tremendous amount uh-huh well uh first of all um i've done a tremendous amount precisely because i designed the spaces for the people who care about things to make things happen so certainly not me personally that have done those things i just hold the space and the second is that laziness also mean that you do not um over scare yourself and you you evaluate this is
called lazy evaluation evaluate the parameters the input and so on as the situation calls it uh and so that also enables a much more balanced work life balance i guess what is the way the world could use the incentive of fun more productively uh so use humor over rumor what does that mean specifically in taiwan whenever there's a trending uh um even end-to-end encrypted channels uh
disinformation campaign the people who voluntarily report that uh just like flagging email as fun dedicated not to the government certainly but to the social sector with the crowdsource fact-checking mechanism called cove facts and also the uh taiwan fact-check center michopen and so on part of the international fact-checking network and so the trending rumors are met with fact checkers almost
immediately and our ministries uh who has teams of participation officers who talk to hashtags um like the minister of health and welfare participation officer literally lives with this dog and so can meet the rumors within a couple hours and wrote out very funny dog memes that just responds to those misinformation and so for example this one is about musk and this says why do you wear a musk well to
protect yourself from your own and watch times say that's a very individualistic uh incentive or why do you observe social distancing when you find it hard to measure we're measured in terms of dogs when you're outdoor two dogs away uh indoor three shipwright is doing so and so on the idea is that before people goes to sleep even if they see both the conspiracy theory they also see this
humor because the travels very quickly go viral and so by the time that they go to sleep and form long-term associations uh in their minds uh with the keywords such as months or social distancing they think of something fun and that enable more pro-social behavior arguably contemporary taiwanese culture is really quite gentle in a nice way but say you were in one of the less liberal
parts of eastern europe or the balkans and the slogan was humor over rumor do you think it would work as well as it has in taiwan well we know this would be nice here and less empathetic sure we know that humor uh is not the same um as sarcasm for example or as you know toxic attacks that makes fun of someone right the humor is makes fun of oneself or makes fun with someone but it's never um a kind of aggression so
when i say humor i mean specifically humor and not any kind of comedic style of course there are comedic styles that doesn't work uh and that will very quickly uh actually reinforce conspiracy theory thinking how much of humor do you think is it someone else's expense so say you watch seinfeld they're quite brutal to each other right even though they're friends i don't think that's humor by the way
what is it uh well um it is of course comedic right uh it makes uh makes fun of people but to me humor is mixed fun with someone or makes fun of oneself what is the future of blockchain in taiwan um well it would just keep growing i guess but used for what purposes what's the killer app for blockchain 10 years from now what will i be doing with it what's the killer app for relational database again
well there are many kinds of relational databases it's not clear that blockchain is the one emerging from markets as the preferred solution visa has databases right those work well it's a huge company what's the competitor from blockchain that's exactly right so so blockchain is just one implementation of a broad swath of technology known as distributed ledgers or dlts and relational databases
again could be distributed and if people want easy accountability or auditability they can use some of the technologies originated from blockchain in in that sense git is a blockchain because it's a chain of blocks and of course git is the killer app of open source uh decentralized working and so i mean if you think only of the cryptocurrency applications uh i don't think that it will overtake central bank anytime soon
in taiwan i think it only is a value in the cryptocurrency uh sense if the people have very low trust in the fiat right in the central bank but if you mean it like a ledger technology that keep people accountable and honest across jurisdictions among multiple writers for things like environmental science and things like smart contracts for labor uh like for migrant workers as i mentioned on the very beginning uh
those can see useful work of distributed ledger technologies and blockchains just more implementation detail how do you think it mattered for taiwan that democracy and information technology came to the country at more or less the same time well uh of course that means that we see democracy as set of technologies social technology so to us technologies are not always industrial
it could also be social uh the set of uh constitutional amendments uh of which another one or few is going on right now um it shows that even the constitution the kernel of democracy is technology that people can contribute to just like sending pull requests to the linux kernel how did taiwan become such a nice country so quickly um well maybe uh the food is good and bubble tea helps too
what's the best food in taiwan and where do you find it well i think the rough consensus is that you can consult the michelin guide which operates in taiwan in a lot of municipalities but of course being a oyster vegetarian the majority of which is i don't really pursue so you have to be your own guy how do you think your politics have been influenced by taiwan's aboriginal communities
yeah um the indigenous communities that i'm more familiar with is the attaial the former because i spent quite a few months actually if not here right after dropping out of the middle school because my mom was co-founding experimental primary school in the adele mountains in collaboration with the indigenous people there so actually the students there also learns the indigenous perspective
and i really feel liberated uh from a written culture that this orally preserved culture really takes me out of this human-centric point of view in the view that uh the mountains and rivers are long-lifed sparrows and we're just transient uh stewards that works with them i think that really have influenced my politics a lot to be less human-centric uh the armies because i think they're a matriarchy uh and so
quite useful to remind people that in taiwan with more than 20 national languages there's various different uh gender stereotypes going on and once you have 20 different kind of stereotypes uh it becomes a rainbow and it helps people to break out of the binary kind of thinking when it comes to gender but also to other categories how useful a way is it of conceptualizing your politics to think
of it as a mix of some taiwanese aboriginal traditions mixed in with taoism experience and programming and then your own theory of humor and fun and if you put all of that together the result is audrey tang's politics correct or not well um as of now of course but of course i'm also growing like a distributed legend at the margin what's the new influence on your thought in addition to those
sources uh i just read again the mandarin translation of ted john's novel collection exhalation i already read the english one but the translation book just arrived so i read that again and so that's on the emergence i learned about the life cycle of software projects and so on i think that one is really good what else from chinese literature has influenced you um of course
there's not only the tao daodejing there's this whole uh literary tradition um that began with laozi but john's of course is of um a lot of influence to me uh the collection of poems the xiujin also uh and of course also the eating the original binary um thinking but of course uh the thing about the book of change is that uh it teaches about the only thing that is um immobile that would not change is change
itself and how to work with the change to face to accept to deal with it and let go of it i think is the core of a teaching of the eating and how about contemporary chinese fiction or is that somehow too anti-empathetic i mean i employ i enjoy the three body problem um trilogy uh that's contemporaries chinese fiction isn't it from from taiwanese culture what has influenced you most so taiwanese cinema
from the 1990s does that matter for you or that's orthogonal um well of course i i watch um the the artworks uh done by the taiwanese renaissance of filmmakers and books and so on but i wouldn't say that any of them influenced me uh to such a high degree as the classics uh has so i'll probably have to say that of course i'm influenced one way or another but not in a major part of my thought
and which western anarchists if any have shaped your thought um well that's a really good question isn't it um well i i don't i don't know i mean i've read of course the the anarchists faq the anarchists um like handbook uh online right and also the illuminatus trilogy which may or may not count as anarchist that of course uh has really led it left an impression to me but uh no i think the the main source
of inspiration i draw and that's why i call myself a conservative anarchist is from the the more eastern uh traditions the taoist tradition the dramatic tradition and more constantly from uh a japanese anarchist to what extent do you understand taoism as standing in opposition to a more hierarchical confucian view or do you think it's simply a separate doctrine by being a taoist do you view yourself
as opposed to confucianism well uh the the taoist isn't quite opposed to anything that that's the thing was taoist right uh we're always uh making space so that opposition can grow into common values and innovation and i think that's something that a confusion approach works too except for the confucianism that is by coding essentially the the rights right the norms practice the best practices of norms and
for a taoist um of course that there's no best practice there's just practices uh and the best best practice is maybe just to share and let go of your practices and be humble how do you think singapore differs in this regard is there a different understanding of taoism there more emphasis on confucianism i haven't been to singapore can't answer them never i'm surprised oh
what would improve taiwanese education the most um that's an interesting song right well maybe neural link but i i don't know in the meantime in the meantime uh well i think that the shift uh from a um literacy uh based like a standardized answer wrote um memory uh standardized test the teachers knows the best uh into a competence based education which is the people are producers of data and
media and narratives that really helps on the other hand i'm biased because i'm part of the k212 curriculum committee that put this into action starting last year do you have any sense how that's going i know it's only a year but mm-hmm yeah it's different quite well uh the the cram schools uh for example instead of putting people into like uh long hours trying to memorize standard senses are
now offering crime schools on hiking and maybe kayaking and all sort of outdoor group activities and also help on the humanitarian aid overseas even though travel is restricted now we can still help through teleconference and so on um and so yeah there's a lot more emphasis on social responsibility starting from a more tender age uh rather than just individualistic uh competition uh between people and people
you're working of course in taiwanese government what's the biggest thing wrong with economists uh you mean the magazine no no pete the people economists as thinkers what's their biggest defect or flaw i don't know i i i haven't met an economist that i didn't like so i don't think there's any particular personality flaws there a few questions about the pandemic how much of taiwan's success you think
was due to government's openness and how much do you think was due to the fact that in taiwan standards for privacy are different than in the west and there's a certain acceptance of government or higher i'm sure yes and more clearly spelled out uh and um so first of all i think yeah having a clearly spelled out uh perimeter uh in taiwan when it comes to privacy and a strong civil rights
movement that literally fought for those uh freedoms and memories are still fresh uh really helps the conversation because anything that try to encroach on the basic freedoms is immediately met with the counter argument do you want to go back to the martial or do you want to go back to the white era and of course the argument would be a um very strong and so the people who advocate for less privacy would
that argument with their argument would be a nonstarter and so i think it really helps to conserve the societal energy to work with the data that's already being collected just use it in a way creatively to counter the pandemic instead of inventing new ways to collect data which always has uncertain privacy properties so i think of course that helps now my country the united states has
made many many mistakes at an almost metaphysical level what is it in the united states that those mistakes have come from what's our deeper failing behind all those mistakes i don't know i mean uh isn't america this grand experiment to keep making mistakes and correcting them in the open and shared with the world that's the american experiment have we started correcting them yet uh i'm sure that you have
okay i'm delighted to hear that how much did taiwan rely on private lira and apps to combat the pandemic um actually civic tech which is i guess could also qualify as privately coded is different in the sense that how it works is open for anyone who want to fork that is to say to take it to a different direction so while it's true that the original mask availability map
wasn't open source the api was open and open source uh clones uh and derivatives from the openstreetmap community from various other communities very quickly sprouted and we have more than 140 a majority of which are open uh innovations and even the original mass availability map become open source after a couple months so if you keep working in the open working out loud even the most privately held
corporations such as google and eventually agreed to make the parts of the counter pandemic the mass availability and so on and develop them in the open given taiwan's remarkable success with the pandemic it's amazing success with high quality semiconductor chips why are there in relative terms so few successful taiwanese software companies and to what features of the taiwanese psyche do you attribute that
i don't know tsmc writes a lot of software uh so i think uh it's just consumer software like uh to see software it's true i mean taiwan has a um unicorn now um although i don't you usually use that way uh company uh apia that uh basically is entirely to be uh they enable businesses to deliver insights from the interactions and refactor their online experiences and so on but i'm sure that pizza hut or any
company that deploy apr technology would not uh probably feature a powered by appear uh kind of way uh as the you know powered by intel or um powered by uh arm uh kind of um marker uh in their websites uh and so there are very successful taiwanese software companies they are known in the software world trend micro is another one uh but because these are less directly uh to
users to customers um and so maybe they're less well known uh that that's a fact and so the taiwanese psych uh i think is mostly about um being okay with that i guess uh the hashtag taiwan can help taiwan is helping uh really says um it on the tin that uh we don't quite do this egoism you don't have to thank taiwan every 20 seconds if our innovations have helped you we really just want the world to be better
do you ever worry that taiwan has had so much success against kobe 19 that now the country is painted into a kind of corner unwilling to give up its grand prize and it just won't be able to open to other places for a long time or do you think should we take that vaccine once the vaccine is here around the turn of the year i'm sure that by q1 next year when people are vaccinated it will open that
is what the scientists are saying if you're recommending for a visitor an ideal trip to taiwan obviously they fly into taipei there's plenty to do and see in taipei national museum but where else should they go for you um well the pescado the poncho islands is great too i mean taiwan is beautiful islands and it's plural so it's not only the main land of taiwan but also the pescataria
islands the orchid islands there's many other islands other than the main island of taiwan for you to enjoy what's your favorite chinese dynasty and why um i don't know i don't have a favorite chinese dinos do you have a favorite gps location uh my home but the tang dynasty i thought would be your answer there's this i haven't lived in the town dynasty i read about it on dynasty and
although my family name i guess is the same character as the tan dynasty it never really brought me closer to any particular dynasties as a taiwanese how do you think you understand earlier chinese history and maybe a different way than chinese mainlanders would well i don't know i mean i identify mostly as homo sapiens uh and so i don't i mean we're all descendants of some uh east african common ancestor uh and so
when you say you're home i immediately think of lucy uh which was strictly speaking isn't homo sapiens but at the gps um location would be quite similar uh so so yeah that's the view that i take that uh of course uh uh on the land of the eurasian plate there's many uh cultures and civilizations uh whether you call it chinese or not is quite besides the point the main interest for me is how those
cultures uh transfer and learn from each other and make cultural innovations such as zen which is a trans-cultural conversation between the buddhist tradition and the daoist translation and and that interests me more than whether you call a particular dynasty chinese or not i mean for the qing dynasty in the yuan dynasty that's a very interesting way to call it a dynasty i believe no chinese person from
the mainland would have given me that answer another historical question when you read about the taiping rebellion for whom are you rooting the rebels or the government well um yeah the typing rebellion the the jesus uh worshipping uh really there's a millenarian sense to it that's a bit like some of tecutopianism right that's the worst i mean there was a place it was a document uh i think it
was typing yellowshoe or something that has a lot of tech uh utopianism in it but uh i don't think it's ever put into practice so uh if you view it from a kind of uh admiring a science fiction novel kind of way i think you can definitely root for it but i don't think the taiping tingle actually deployed uh what's described in the typing yaochu to any significant degree which are the most important remnants of
japanese influence remaining in taiwan well the emphasis on public health the fact that people see that working in the medical and public health professions as the high and noble cause of calling i think that um was introduced by the japanese colonial rule uh and it's well of course there's a political part of it because the japanese really didn't like taiwanese uh going into politics uh
or law for that better uh and but yeah the emphasis on um public health and on medicine and medicare i think that really is one of the legacies the organization of streets and shops in taiwan especially taipei feels quite japanese to me do you have the same impression there are parts of taipei that feels quite japanese of course um the the uh cabinet office the executive yuan and the presidential office were both um
buildings of that era of course they were also learning from european architects so it's also very trans-cultural in both japan and taiwan baseball is fairly popular as it is in the united states but most countries reject baseball altogether do you have a sense of why taiwanese have welcomed baseball is it just historical accident or revealing of something deeper i haven't considered that question maybe
because when i was you know i couldn't participate any kind of sport baseball included and so i've never thought much about sports esport of course i have thought about quite a bit but uh of course we're not here to talk about match the gathering which i can talk for hours what's the most popular esport in taiwan um well that's a really good question um i think by the current definition of
esport uh it will probably uh be b weichi uh the the ago which is a intellectual game um that's played on stones uh and large boards and of which alphago of course showed that um machines can play it too uh but it's still very popular in taiwan as with uh gomoku are also known as ranju and xianxi um the um the elephant chess uh i don't know how to translate that actually uh so various
sport games and these are right yeah yeah that's right uh but shogi is a a slightly different rule uh and uh play in japan but yeah both games that are um turn based and uh moved uh of course nowadays all into the electronic room uh remained of the lowest threshold to join and therefore very popular and what's your favorite e-sport um as i mentioned uh measure the gathering but i don't play it much
anymore i used to play a lot because of addiction so it's like the touchscreen smartphone no uh because of i was making the software that enabled people to play and match the gathering without paying wizard of the guest and so it was a real software project that i was working on the magic suitcase and also working with the apprentice with the drafting mechanism so that people don't have to
be locked in to wizard of the coast and so on so to me it also feels liberating i guess so that people even with no um money and uh who are living very modest means and so on can enjoy the game and essentially creating their own rules why is it you think that taiwan has been so much more open and accepting of lgbtq than most or maybe all other parts of asia well first of all i think uh that's
because as i mentioned there's more than one norm going on right even in the ethnic hunt uh there is the taiwanese hollow taiwanese hakka and many traditions uh some of which is actually quite natural to uh have um i think um i i don't know how to translate that that term like a contractual union um brother uh whatever that means uh and in the taiwanese hollow tradition and there's also the indigenous nations
um and with for example the taiwan nation that doesn't quite make a distinction between genders when uh electing their uh leaders of the uh indigenous nation and so on uh and so because of the transculturalism uh in taiwan and uh open and democratic uh culture we eventually see that even though there's a part of the country maybe the majority at some point that sees marriage as uh between
families and the individual that wed are just representatives of their families eventually other more individual to individual norms prevail and in 2008 become the only form of recognized marriage which is by registration and that in addition to the feminist movement that fought for the equal rights for women to not having to you know uh relinquish her family name or they uh marry and things like that um all led to
the feeling of intersectionality so that the earliest uh feminist activist would then uh be the most uh ardent allies to the lgbtiq plus community so i think early successes and also the way to uh work themselves into the gender equality community and 12 years of gender mainstreaming work the gender impact assessment in the public sector and so on all of these mechanism designs
help to make a more liberal culture out of the existing culture a family to family relationship which we did not actually um disrupt with the marriage equality law it only hyperlinks to the individual parts the bylaws but not the in-law relationships the family between family relationships for our final segment of this conversation i'll turn to what i call the audrey tang production function
at ages five to six you read a lot of classical literature uh what did you read and how did it shape you yeah i read the shooting the collection of poems and it shaped me uh to a few things always from um coaches from various different cultures because uh each chapter in the shooting is literally one slice of culture of a very different culture and it's a kind of collection of poems that shows how the
same thing may be interpreted and narrated in completely different ways from two uh different cultures when they view the same historical event and of course the daodejing that showed me that we are merely spaces uh of which that uh thoughts may pass through us but we don't own the sauce the thoughts only springfield how did having a heart problem until age 12 shape your life uh well i guess it made me less
interested in outdoor sports uh it also made me less prone to anger or really any passion right i can't feel a very joyful either because of the heart condition so i'm more calm and collected i learned that was breathing exercises and there was me like a survival instinct still now do you think there's any cognitive disadvantage to being more objective and arguably more detached
i'm not sure that i'm currently detached to you and i'm not sure that i'm sharing things from objective point of view i mean i'm sharing my feelings and personal memories when i was a young child and these are only verifiable as phenomena in my own mind and so i'm not sure that the term objective is the right term to use here what was your family discussion table like um is with were very lively uh and
because um both my parents were journalists that works um with the political and law training uh and so uh democratization is on the forefront of their minds uh and also because they were censored by the single party a lot at the time and so i would read their drafts and the drafts being censored and they will debate the sensor taking the case to the owner of the press if needed be and for environmental justice and
social justice and so on and so a lot of discussion was around censorship and the freedom of press when i was really young are there cognitive advantages to being well uh of course i think it makes it easier to empathize with people right because i've gone through some parts of your puberty no matter the gender of you and so i wouldn't feel that half a population is different from
me i would feel that i'm just part of homo sapiens this is a large community do you think there are cognitive disadvantages of being transgender um no i think people can be more transgender i mean um when our minister chen shi john the commander of the central atlantic command center put on the medical mask to show solidarity uh to the young boy who caught to say that he doesn't want to go to school because
pink musk's being rationed uh makes him look like he'll be bullied um i think uh mr chen and the medical officers became a little bit more transgender on that very moment and so it's a practice like translation and trans culturalism what's the biggest misconception about transgender life and existence amongst intelligent educated people i i have no idea i have not done a qualitative
survey now you didn't go through the cycle as being educated in the united states the way many taiwanese do uh do you think that's given you a different perspective i don't know i mean i mean the ietf and the internet itself maybe is really the american experiments value the united states value the value of the united states uh written in a like 70 80 um kind of view uh in code uh and so by
working with internet technologies by working with the implicit assumption of freedom of speech freedom assembly and the press uh end-to-end um innovation and permissionless innovation and things like that i think um i'm more uh imbued in the internet seeing more imbued american value in the internet than a traditional education in the states would i i think now of course nowadays the internet governance
is multi-cultural and there's multicultural internet domain names but we're still using ascii which is um the a in ascii miss american and the um idea that uh the empty american values imbued in the internet are somehow universal of course are now being challenged but is not lost i think the core internet is still very much the values the united states now in 2014 you were part of a group of
activists that occupied taiwan's parliament building what was your thinking behind participation in that activity what were you hoping to accomplish what did you see as the trade-offs yeah i've read uh and actually translated uh manuel castells uh in the um ideas uh in the books uh network of uh outrage and hope and earlier in communication powers uh and so we have to benefit i guess from learning from
previous occupiers such as the occupy wall street of course but also the 15m and other movements and so um i started understanding that the more that you can make humor uh travel faster than rumor uh the more you can get people interested in a kind of night market uh fun ish kind of way uh the less likely that the more divisive and the more revenge seeking part of a occupy
movement will grow that is to say the conservative part in anarchism has a chance to thrive and people have a chance to arrive to rough consensus and running code legal code in this case when they can literally hum in the street and so uh my main work there is just with a bunch of people in the zero community to set up communication infrastructure so that people can understand uh what's really going on uh
with their own eyes and participating in the journalism making without being derailed by the rumors and disinformation campaigns that's bound to come with any occupy how important is the skill of translation for becoming a better thinker i think it's very very important but so also important is the skills of rotation and scaling were you afraid that working in government would ruin or corrupt you
no not at all i'm working with the government i'm not working for the government what are your skills of rotation and scaling and how do you use them in the government yeah scaling means that taking something that used to only happen between two people or three people that's listening intently and scaling it using technology to make sure that when i tour around taiwan i can still listen
intently uh to people who are social innovators in their indigenous nation or their remote island or rural areas but at the same time through the modern technology uh which seems like magic at times uh people from five municipalities from 12th century government ministries can also listen as intently as i am to the stories and the innovations of the local people and so that skills the listening
idea and by rotation i mean taking all the sides so whenever there are people of differing positions on an emerging topic it could be uber it could be esports it could be 5g self-drive vehicles you name it if i find that i cannot argue from any particular viewpoint i will book a couple days to spend time with the community on ethnographic just hanging out uh and until i rotate my worldview and until i can argue from
their viewpoint and so that's called taking all the sides why aren't there more audrey tangs than the other governments of the world i don't know uh i mean that's a question for the other government uh maybe uh i think um people were limited by the imagination of the government being a single thing right we said internet governance we didn't say internet government if the ietf or icann started calling
themselves internet government i'm sure that there's will be a lot of more limitation in thinking in the multi-stakeholder approach but no we call it governance we don't call it government so maybe just the word government itself limits people's imaginations and if rotation is fundamental to your thought it seems that most governments in the literal sense of that term are not always so interested in rotation
right they want to push through a particular set of policies to serve interest groups and constituencies toward the end of being re-elected uh well by election is a kind of rotation it's just temporal right it rotates a little bit every four years sure but any particular government uh is not interested in rotation per se in fact they would prefer its opposite over time yeah but i'm talking about
democratic cultures and democratic norms so if we shorten the iteration to not four years but actually maybe 60 days uh as is the standard uh iteration in taiwanese citizens initiative the the e-petition platform then we can iterate more each particular generation of course in that 60 days are interested from their point of view but if you rotate quickly then even a still pictures when rotated quickly
looks like animation actually that's where the word anime came from it's just quickly animated frames if you think about your own life and career over the next few years if you wish to increase your own empathy at the margin uh what do you feel that calls for from you yeah uh i think uh a couple more things right i need to learn more languages uh and now with the help of assistive
intelligence such as machine learning and translation is becoming much easier i take a step doing that translating how to use the traditional rest cooker that you see right there to disinfect the mask so that it kills the virus but doesn't destroy the pp material i translated it and narrated it in i think a dozen languages and so it's the beginning but i look forward to learn more languages and
communicate in more languages and the other thing is also um synthesize right more of the cultures that i have come across into a more trans-cultural way of living uh transcriptional way of thinking and that includes up to the name of the country itself taiwan the native country is officially jonghyun mingua which i translate as a transcultural republic of citizens and and now that's a
i wouldn't say universal but at least a world globally applicable view anyone can be part of their trans-cultural republic citizens and which languages do you know now already um javascript pretty well um yes well pearl uh and uh python not very fluently ruby of course uh and so on uh there's english right c plus plus c sharp uh not really c sharp o camel uh and also c ah anyway yes um sorry uh okamos f sharp uh
yeah english of course uh but i think i see the taiwanese yeah i think in english uh mostly nowadays if you talk about natural language and for me um mandarin or along with mandarin thomas hollok which are my two native languages i reserve them for more poetic expressions but my work language is not definitely english audrey tang thank you very much it's been a great pleasure