“I started programming when I was eight years old, and I started without a machine. I just had some programming books on the bookshelf, I think from my uncles, and I just started reading it. We didn’t have computers at the time, so I just took [an] A4 [sheet of] paper and split it in half, and drew on the bottom half a QWERTY keyboard, and started mock typing on it and writing the computer’s responses and so on. Of course, after a couple [of] month[s] my parents kind of gave in and bought me a personal computer. But that’s how I learned to program when I was eight years old, that was 1989”. This anecdote about her childhood, dropped casually into the conversation is just one example of the self-education of Audrey Tang.
While teaching herself programming, Tang decided to leave formal high school education at fifteen-years-old to pursue a more extensive learning experience. Contrary to expectations, the decision was supported by her principal. “I remember distinctly telling my principal at the time that instead of going through the university, college, post-doc, and so on, I actually wrote emails to the leading researchers of the field asking for clarifications. My principal heard that story and thought about it for a minute and said, ‘OK, from tomorrow on you don’t have to go to school anymore, and I’ll cover for you’”. This willingness to bend the rules to find a more suitable path for her student, Tang says, instilled optimism in her regarding flexibility in bureaucracy. Part of this self-education was a close reading of written classics which she accessed due to their availability on The Gutenberg Project. She also attributes some of her optimism to the fact that these were written before WWI and as such had not taken on the despair and dystopian tones of post-war writings.
From anyone else, this reasoning of childhood influences might seem an oversimplification. However, Tang delivers the analysis in an almost conversational tone that marks it as a concise observation where she just happens to be the subject. She seems to have a memory of near-perfect recall. Throughout our hour long conversation, she responds with a date and context reference for nearly every question. Recalling the specific year and occasionally even the specific software she would have been working on at the time.
ON BEING TRANSGENDER
Tang’s overall philosophy is underpinned by the aforementioned optimism. Asked about her experiences as the first transgender minister in the world and the potential effects it has on her working relationships, she is quick to jump to her country and colleagues defence. “Taiwan is especially inclusive and tolerant”, she notes, pointing out that due to the country’s comprehensive approach to gender inequalities -they carry out gender impact assessments on every single policy and draft- she feels supported. She emphasises that the issue of gender equality is of such import that their gender equality committee is designed so that they have exactly one more seat than government ministers in the event of a vote. She is also quick to point out that though she is seen as an outsider advocating for the next step in gender mainstreaming for the post-gender age, it is built on a feminist movement. As a result, she has a large community in the mainstream of public servants that support her. “It’s not like I’m in the minority, literally every public servant in the past 12 years supports my mission.”
Yet she is aware of the influence it has had for her both personally and professionally. “I think having gone through two puberties, really helped [my] communication” Tang explains. “It gave me a perspective of intersectionality. Meaning that although I do have my privileged positions, I also have my vulnerable lived-in experiences”. As a result of this, all decisions, policy and otherwise are approached from an empathy base. Before policies are decided, she seeks to understand not just the technicalities of potential new implementations, but also the emotions of citizens comprehensively quantified through an online forum.
FROM HACKTIVISM TO POLITICS
Her expansive approach to policy making is rooted not just in her experiences with gender but also in the route she took to arrive at politics. Having participated in the free software movement early on, she became involved with Silicon Valley by fixing issues on open source platforms before becoming a consultant for companies such as Apple. Discussing whether there was a particular strategy for seeking out work as a nineteen-year-old self-taught programmer, Tang states “the work just found me”. She acknowledges this was in part because she had published over a hundred reusable software components and had received thank you emails from the BBC and the Human Genome Project amongst others. During this period, however, she reveals that she worked as a liaison or “branch point between the two bodies” of the digital movement and the government.
Whether due to her experiences with gender or finding herself in foreign spaces in her youth, being a branch point comes naturally to Tang and is what she credits with her ability to transition from protester to policymaker. “Buckminster Fuller said it best, ‘instead of fighting against an old system, make a new one that makes the old one obsolete’. That’s exactly what I’m doing”. She sees her role more as a connector between the people and the government, focused on making space for experiments on alternative governance systems to see what might be a better option for existing models. She also has the backing not just of her department but of the government as a whole, noting that while she came in under Jaclyn Tsai, who she met while she was hacking as part of the Sunflower protests -a movement which saw groups protesting overall for more citizen participation in multiple areas including constitutional amendments- the new minister Doctor Tsai, has continued the work and has made digital economy issues subject to public nationwide debate. Though Tang came into politics after the events of the protests and essentially from a position that was ‘anti-establishment’, she doesn’t see her relationship with her colleagues as particularly tense and finds that they have been welcoming. “For them, it’s risk reduction. It’s also improving their efficiency so they can actually get home earlier”.
RADICAL TRANSPARENCY
An interview request sent to Tang is met with a link to her radical transparency protocol where you are informed that in order to interview her, you must be open to having your conversation recorded and published for public consumption. This is part of her endeavours to create more transparency in the way governments work to encourage more public engagement and civic participation. The process involves the utilisation of online technology through their platform g0v (pronounced Gov Zero) as a way to amplify and connect the voices of citizens on certain topics. Unusually, the platform also includes an emotion rating which shows not just what the votes are on particular issues but also why individuals have voted that way and how proposed policies made them feel. Their engagement is one that Tang accords the utmost importance. She points out that in Taiwan “we have broadband as a human right” and states emphatically that “anywhere in Taiwan if you don’t have 10Mbps, it’s my fault. You can talk to me.” She is quick to point out that these online participation tools do not replace face-to-face meetings with constituents. “We never ask people to come exclusively to the digital. Digital is just a way to determine the agenda [for the next face-to-face meeting]”. Here, in the unlikeliest of places, Tang’s understanding of human interactions is highlighted as she underscores the significance of 1080p high definition video as part of the data collection process. She explains that its import lies in the inscrutability of micro expressions at lower definitions which affects the ability of users to interact with one another and in the long run diminishes trust amongst participants.
Radical transparency also has limits. “I told the National Security Council, ‘don’t tell me anything that is a state secret!’” Tang laughs. She clarifies that the aim of a radical transparency policy is not to make all information immediately available but rather to operate from a position where transparency is the default which then requires an extra effort to redact. She also discloses that the policy does not operate in a vacuum. As the reach of the policy continues to extend there are larger considerations to be met. Using indigenous nations as an example, she underlines that, “the democratic principle is very simple. If something is systematically in the minority, as defined by intersectionality principles [it] should not be put to a popular vote”. Pushed on whether their radical transparency and civic participation policies are similar to China’s Social Credit system, Tang smiles and eloquently points out their differences saying, “what we’re doing is making the state radically transparent to the citizens. What they are doing is making the citizens radically transparent to the state”.
A NEW APPROACH
In a ‘post-truth’ age where some see ‘PC’ culture as detrimental, Tang sees social outrage as a useful tool. She delineates the differences between “personal anger” which comes from personal offence and“social outrage” which unites rather than divides people. Social outrage she notes can lead to finding a “common cause” amongst areas of disagreements and moving forward in contrast to personal anger which seeks consensus. With the former, “if we keep meeting, we will reach something that we can both at least agree is factual. That is the foundation of conversation”.
How can citizens from other countries hold their governments and industries to account and implement the same policies? “I think it’s easier if you start with a level of governance that is smaller scale” Tang says. Throughout our conversation, it has been evident that for her, the nexus of change is in the ability to connect with one another on shared “similar lived experiences”. She notes that often “ideologies mask common concerns”, so citizens should start in their local precincts and city council, if possible, she even suggests they start “without the public sector, you can just run it in your co-op”. She is also quick to point out that while Taiwan may be seen as particularly progressive, their progression stems not from any technological advancements or contributions but instead from how they operate that technology, that is to say, “not on the fringes of the governance apparatus but rather at the core of the governance apparatus”.
In true radical transparency form, our interview ends with Tang asking whether I would like a written transcript or a video recording of our interview to be made available for the public. One of my last questions to Tang is what drew her to g0v? she responds that it was its simplicity. A simple domain hack changing an ‘o’ to a ‘0’ taught her that “if I don’t like the government, I can do better”.
Illustration : Aaliyah Palton / Words : Chinasa Chukwu.
postcript.london/feature/audrey-tang
”Imagine a world where every country has a digital minister and technologically-enabled legislative bodies. Votes are completely transparent and audio and video of all conversations between lawmakers and lobbyists are available to the public immediately. Conspiracy theories are acted upon within two hours and replaced by humorous videos that clarify the truth. Imagine that expressing outrage about your local political environment turned into a participatory process where you were invited to solve that problem and even entered into a face to face group workshop. Does that sound impossible? It’s ambitious and optimistic, but that’s everything that our guest this episode, Audrey Tang, digital minister of Taiwan, has been working on in her own country for many years. Audrey’s path into public service began in 2014 with her participation in the Sunflower Movement, a student-led protest in Taiwan’s parliamentary building, and she’s been building on that experience ever since, leading her country into a future of truly participatory digital democracy.”
Digital-Democracy-is-Within-Reach-2020Chang-Anita-Wen-Shin-Making-Our-Best-Move-with-Audrey-Tang-Taiwans-Digital.-Democracy-2021
Interview-Audrey-Tang
Originally published by US-China Today on March 11, 2021. Written by Emma Cockerell.
At 35, Audrey Tang (唐宗漢) was appointed as Taiwan’s digital minister, a role that she also occupied as the country’s first transgender and non-binary member of government. More recently, Tang has been behind Taiwan’s technology-driven COVID-19 response, which helped the country keep its case counts under 1,000 as they soared across the world. US-China Today sat down with Tang to speak about her identity as an illustrious young programmer turned government official, her optimism about technology’s ability to ameliorate social ills, and her thoughts about politics in a polarized world.
As a young person, you were famous for your prodigal computer programming abilities. How has your conception of technology changed since your earliest coding days? In the same period of time, how has your view on politics changed?
“Well, it’s changed a lot. When I was 8 years old, there wasn’t such a thing as the World Wide Web. [In] 1989 it would be quite some time until the first web browser was invented. At the time, To me, computing was very much [about] personal computing. The personal computer revolution was just starting. A lot of that resides in the idea that anything that I can do in the day-to-day, for example doing math or learning a new language, a computer can help me to do better. So I guess my earliest notion of computing is that of assistive intelligence.
Fast forward to today, we have seen that computing is not necessarily just helping out individuals anymore. I would argue that most of our online life isn’t actually solo. … It’s more social. Our video conference for example, where our attention is on each other rather than on any particular computation infrastructure. … What used to be clearly defined by the person doing the computing is now more and more also defined by the system that facilitates communication is as important as the computer itself.
You have an incredibly high IQ and started coding when you were very young. But you are also Taiwan’s youngest-ever cabinet appointee. Have people ever doubted your abilities to serve in such a high-up place in government? Have you experienced self-doubt of your own?
I’m actually the second-youngest appointee. When I was [appointed] Digital Minister I was 35, but a few years back when Miss Zhenli Jun was first the cabinet member in charge of Youth Development, she was 34.
I mention Zhenli Jun — [she was] very important — because her work was mostly bringing in youth engagement, bringing in youth councils, introducing deliberative democracy and citizens assembly. … [This] played a very important role in paving the way [for me]. When I entered the cabinet, she was the Minister of Culture, so we worked together to modify what the term ‘public infrastructure’ means. Previously, in the olden days, public money [could] either be spent on public infrastructure, which is considered investment, or on operations and maintenance, which is considered ongoing spending.
But when we’re talking about [wanting to] digitize the Taiwan Digital Asset Library, the historic buildings … into polygons using photometry, videography and so on, there’s no tangible ‘thing’ in it. The argument that [the library represents] digital public infrastructure is new to many people. There’s no concrete — like literally concrete — structure as a deliverable to such a project. But … because it’s creative commons, everybody gets to use it, it changes the discourse around these social objects. People don’t have to rely on second- or third-hand reports anymore. Everyone can feel it for themselves. … Gradually we did convince people that digital public infrastructure is as important, or even more important, than analog public infrastructure.
I don’t think that I’ve had any [self] doubts, but that’s because I’ve had really good colleagues who are similarly innovative and [are] willing to engage the digital world.
Taiwan’s civic tech sector mobilized to enable one of the world’s fastest and most effective COVID-19 responses. What lessons can other countries take away? Are other countries looking to partner with Taiwan to share tech resources and practices?
During COVID[-19] we’ve had many exchanges, even a multilateral, 14-economies exchange a few days before the World Health Assembly. I think the main idea of Taiwan’s model is the ‘all of society’ model, where people, instead of just repeating or obeying top-down instructions, are empowered in the sense that both epidemiological ideas are plentiful, people do understand [them], and also people are free to innovate, to remix, to — as people in civic tech say — to ‘fork’ whatever government policies that are in place.
Also very important is for the government to give an account, in a very predictable fashion, and that welcomes citizens’ input. In the past year there was more than two million phone calls to the toll-free number 1922. Each [call] ask[ed] either for personalized, individualized explanations or actually contribut[ed] to counter COVID-19 [measures].
[There was] the boy who called saying ‘you’re rationing masks, we’re getting only pink ones, the boys in my class all have navy blue ones and I don’t want to wear pink to class.’ In the next 2 pm [government] press conference, everyone wore pink. Pink became the most-hip color, and the boy became the hippest boy in class.
The point here is rapid iteration cycles, and it can be done using not very cutting edge [technologies] — essentially just TV or radio — but … a predictable way for people to understand that their ideas get amplified within 24 hours. If [there was] anything we didn’t do well, we just apologize and correct that within 24 hours. That’s always very important.
Can you expand upon your “Daoist approach” to political and social action? Is the role that spirituality plays in your professional life distinct from the role it plays in your private life?
Well, I’m currently doing [government service] for fun so there’s no real difference between the daytime and [night]. Actually, I do most of my work in my sleep anyways. Most of the daytime is just for listening and communication.
The idea of a Daoist approach is very simple: it’s not to do any top-down, shut-down, take-down, lock-down. … The idea is ‘wei wu wei’ — to do without doing. Instead of doing specific things, [wei wu wei encourages me] to make spaces so that each and every citizen is able to innovate without me, or really any [government] official, being the bottleneck of innovation being spread.
Fostering a co-creative space — I think thats’ the main thing I learned from the Daoist approach. It’s I guess spiritual, but it’s also very practical and secular.
vTaiwan is an open-source software which builds consensus on controversial topics and has inspired legislative change. What was the most illuminating aspect of building the platform? What important governmental issues do you see it being instructive for in the future?
Well, vTaiwan is run by the social sector, so as soon as I became Digital Minster in 2016 October, I handed the route password [over]. It’s been quite a while, [so] I can’t really speak for the project anymore.
But I think still to this day, vTaiwan is being used to deliberate open parliament [and the] national election plan by the legislature. … The vTaiwan team is still using a mixture of online agenda setting and face-to-face — but also live-streamed — deliberations. So I think one thing [that has] stayed constant since I was more in charge of vTaiwan in 2015 to now is that the online and face-to-face compliments are not canceling each other out. It’s not a substitute or replacement relationship. Rather, the online part is best [used] to explore agendas, because online, especially asynchronously, people get more time to reflect on each others’ feelings. But online, it’s very hard to get to the actual deliberation. So we always arrange a face-to-face deliberation… [with] rough consensus as the agenda … and without over-focusing on the ideological or divisive parts as identified by political mechanisms. The rule of thumb is to discover and explore online, but to converge, to define [issues] together, face-to-face.
Something you just mentioned is the idea of rough consensus. Can you sum up your thoughts surrounding rough consensus and why that’s important for a country?
Rough consensus is an idea from internet governance, where people home alone get the feeling of each others’ resistance to any particular idea. But I think the main idea of rough consensus is contrasted [with] the traditional way the word consensus is used.
Consensus is usually used to mean something that is a defined consensus, meaning that we can all sign our names on it. The problem is that when people get online, especially when they don’t share many of the [same] first-hand experiences, it’s very difficult to get to that defined consensus. The people with the most time on their hands win the argument.
But if someone is just aiming for rough consensus, meaning that we can live with it, then we’re really not talking about a concrete solution that is accepted by everyone, but rather a [sense of] shared values out of those different positions.
For example, in 2015’s UberX case, instead of debating endlessly whether to have a sharing economy or platform economy or gig economy, we instead just focus on the specific case of someone driving to work and back, and picking up a stranger. Even though [driver] doesn’t have a professional driver’s license, it turns out that everyone, including professional drivers, all agree … [on some basic] shared values despite the very different ideological differences on quote-unquote sharing economies.
Do you think that other countries can achieve rough consensus as much as Taiwan has?
Well in 2014, the Taiwanese cabinet only had a citizen approval rate of around 9 percent. I don’t think it had ever sunk this low in terms of trustworthiness of government. People were very, very polarized.
I think the main thing, though, is not to concentrate on the parts that are polarized. In Taiwan we’ve had many elections since our democratization, one where the winning president got barely 40 percent of the votes out of three candidates, [and] one where [someone won by] literally 51 percent or 49 percent. We’re no stranger to polarization.
The point of [embracing] the rough consensus platform … is to focus on a different picture of the population. There are many people who look at the policy reports for the first time and see that even though there are only 5 percent of statements that define the country, there’s actually 95 percent of statements that everyone more or less identifies with. That’s a very powerful image. It’s been repeated in the U.S. as well. … People — no matter Republican or Democrat or Libertarian — all agree that we need to put art into STEM education and diversify our broadband access so it’s more inclusive.
There are a lot of concrete points that are really unrelated to political ideologies. The important [thing] is whether we have a digital public infrastructure to reflect this basic fact to the citizenry, or whether we misuse the private digital infrastructures, like Facebook, which are really like nightclubs with their private bouncers and addictive drinks, and misuse it as a place for public deliberation.
Many people feel that tech has failed society. Disinformation and polarization are some of the biggest issues that technology has given rise to. Some also point to the decimation of the news industry business model. Do you believe critics are right, or are you more optimistic? What can the government and corporations do to address this?
Well, both of my parents are journalists, so of course, I support local journalism. But I don’t think the internet was invented to boost internet journalism. It’s a worthy goal, and I’m happy to work on it, but the internet is, as far as I understand, designed to [uphold] communication in a civilization after a nuclear fallout. … In that [regard], Internet probably didn’t fail society. Amid lockdowns, we still managed to get a lot of things done thanks to video conferencing and other technologies
With that said, I do think that the so-called social media, which I sometimes refer to as ‘anti-social media’, is having a very adverse effect on the quality of not just political discourse, but also on the basic ability to generate facts. Journalism, science, research [and] public deliberation are supposed to generate facts in a way that everyone can participate in. But nowadays, through the more antisocial corners of social media, the same attention span that could be used for fact-checking and digital competency and contributing to your local news, are being repurposed to amplify the most polarized and the most toxic part of the discourse.
I do think it is an asymmetry issue. We have broadband as a human right. … Here in Taiwan, we make sure that everyone enjoys 10MG both uplink and downlink, and use it in a more symmetric way. The point is that if one uses social media or the Internet, just downloading 10 megabits per second but uploading only 1bit, … it’s very asymmetric and it’s essentially amplifying the worst of radio and television without the kind of public accountability that people used to have over radio and television.
I think the solution is digital competence. In [Taiwanese] curriculum, we don’t say digital literacy anymore, we say digital competence, emphasizing that each schoolchild … is free to contribute not only to environmental science and local news, but also fact-checking presidential candidates, or taping a film of the local tallying process during elections.
Once everyone sees themselves … through the lens of media, then people could use the ‘uplink’ much more than many corners of the world currently do. That will deepen democracy by giving democracy more bits of source-checking information to work with.
Can you speak about specific examples of disinformation spread in Taiwan by China? How did Taiwanese citizens harness technology to find proof that China was the culprit?
One example was in November 2019. It’s not even covert — it was very overt. You can check it out in the Taiwan FactCheck Center. I think the fact check number is 204. The interesting thing is that it’s actually based on a real photo. It’s a Reuters photo with some young people participating in the Hong Kong protest, which [was] shaping up to be, at the end of 2019, the defining issue of the presidential election in Taiwan.
[Reuter’s] caption — which was just saying there were teenagers in the protest — was captured into a variety of mixes, such as and I quote: this thirteen years old bought new iPhones and game consoles [after being paid to riot in the protests], and is recruiting his brothers unquote.
We didn’t take anything down, just as [now, during the pandemic,] we fight the infodemic without administrative takedowns. Instead, what we did was partnering with the International Fact Checking Network. … [They] did a fact check really quickly, and said that ‘oh, this actually is a wrong caption.’ The Reuters caption didn’t say anything like that. That [fale] caption originally came from the Weibo account of 中央政法委长安剑, the account of the central political and law unit of the Chinese Communist Party.
This is interesting, because this approach of what I call public notice — as opposed to notice and takedown — actually inoculates people. … Antisocial media is made more prosocial by a very clear marker that says ‘This is a state-sponsored disinformation campaign. Click here for a fact check.’ We didn’t take anything down and people came to understand that there is a Beijing-sponsored … disinformation campaign related to the Hong Kong protests.
This is just one example. There are many. But they are mostly on the Fact Checking Center website, which is a social sector organization and not at all sponsored or directed by the government. Thye fact check us all the time too.
Why are there so many civic hackers in Taiwan? What incentivizes these hackers to forego high-paying tech-sector jobs to instead work on promoting democracy and working toward social causes?
Well, these definitely are not competing interests. There’s many high-paid people — yours truly included, before I joined the cabinet — that dedicate their weekends and even some weekdays into public infrastructure work for digital democracy. This is not just out of a sense of fun or passion, but also it has very concrete rewards. If during an HR interview, someone says that ‘hey, you probably have used the work that I’ve done, because your child is learning Mandarin and the Mandarin dictionary is collaboratively done by people in g0v — chances are that their recruitment will go much more smoothly. They have essentially contributed to a very high-profile project that the government wasn’t doing very well in the beginning. Civic hackers ‘forked’ and did very well. …
There’s an ecosystem. If you solve a problem that has broad public appeal, it’s probably also solving worldwide problems, and that gives you much better access to the worldwide network as a whole. It’s still entrepreneurship — it’s just social entrepreneurship. Things that don’t destroy democracy, but rather repair democracy, as part of entrepreneurship.
That’s part of why people devote so much time to [civic hacking]. They see an exit not necessarily to the public listing of [an] IPO, but exit to a community which is very much thriving worldwide.
How has Taiwan’s open government policy made hard-to-find material accessible to the general public? What information are people demanding the most?
Well, their own information, of course. The top downloaded app last year in both iOS and Google Play was the National Health Insurance app, or the NHI Express (简报快意 in Mandarin). That’s where people could … see all their dentist visits, traditional medicine visits, doctor visits, x-rays and CT and too. Basically any medical record that’s held by any clinic that’s covered by the NHI — which is pretty much every [hospital] — is in that app. People could very easily download their data as well [and] even dedicate their mask rationing quota that they don’t need to international humanitarian aid.
This is much more than downloading public information. This is a data collision where each and every citizen is in charge of how to make use of their personal data. … The point here is that with one-quarter of the population know using this app and dedicating their quotas to international humanitarian aid and also participating in studies … by authorizing, through a third-party research [body] that they trust will make use of their data well without targeted advertising … this shapes a new way that citizens control the production of their data, not just the consumption of public data.
Of course we also do public data downloads very well, like real-time mask availability in the 6,000 pharmacies. That is of course very popular. But in terms of the time people spend on data, definitely their personal data, what we call ‘my data’ is more [frequently accessed] than ‘open’ data.
Tang’s media policy stipulates that each interview be uploaded as a video or transcript Tang’s social media. You can watch the interview here.
