…Alexandra.
Hi, I’m Audrey.
Very nice to meet you.
As I was telling Zach, we have been following your work and also Taiwan’s work with great interest. As you know, Switzerland is a small country, but democracy is also very important. We have a mixed democracy between a direct and indirect. Our executive government is, for instance, is elected indirectly which has some very good things regarding the whole campaigning and stuff.
They don’t need to focus on campaigns, they can actually focus on the work that they’re doing, but the legislative chambers are both elected directly. We have the option of referendums and initiatives that are voted on. Switzerland, I would say, is a very interesting democracy but we are not as far yet in the area where you are pioneering with the digital element and the democracy hacking.
We haven’t integrated very much of that yet, so we’re kind of in the more traditional sense a very stable democracy, but I think your work and Taiwan’s work would be fascinating on the one hand to hear more and learn more about it, and also specifically we will, I was telling Zach…We’re a student initiative at the university, we’re celebrating our 50th anniversary next year. The topic will be “Freedom Revisited.”
We were looking at freedom in various aspects, and there’s a very traditional, historical, how did the concept from freedom develop from the ancient Greeks up to today, but today it also links to various political developments, developments in the environment, but also in the tech area. For instance, one thing we want to be looking at - I don’t know, have you heard of Shoshana Zuboff, is surveillance capitalism.
Yeah, of course, I’ve read her book.
Yes, of course.
It is written very well if you begin by thinking in a capitalistic fashion, which I don’t, but I’m happy that somebody did that work.
(laughter)
Yes, that’s right. I think one of the questions we want to shed some light on, and analyze in the context of Freedom Revisited, for instance is this whole question of how are freedom and technological progress linked? If you read Shoshana Zuboff’s book, you get quite worried that it actually is not productive for our individual personal freedom, the way it’s capitalizing the personal private experience.
The alternative is surveillance state-ism which is even worse.
Yes, exactly. It’s a very kind of interesting and controversial question. One thing we want to discuss is this whole can technological progress be the key to freedom, and if yes, how? I think you were very interesting, and the work…
Yes, that’s our main work actually.
We would love to invite you, and the question would also be we will have an Oxford-style debate with people who argue, “Yes, it is the key to our freedom,” and people are like, “No.” Like Evgeny Morozov.
I just did a tweet in that style.
Oh, yes, exactly.
With the ancient Greek stone technology for democracy.
(laughter)
We seem to be interacting in the thoughts.
Yeah, that’s right, that’s right. That’s a style that I’m familiar with, and I’m really happy to participate in that style if my schedule allows.
Yes, and I will coordinate with you easiest, and then the other thing we could also, so one format is that, and the other idea would be BBC has Stephen Sackur who does a HARDtalk but with us he does one on one. That would be more of a setting where you can really have a conversation with him.
It’s like a fireside chat.
Yes. We’re open for both, I can also send you description of…
The thing is would you have anyone who would like to defend surveillance capitalism or surveillance state-ism?
Yes, we’ve have invited people from Facebook and from Google.
Ah, yes, excellent, excellent.
We’re waiting to hear.
They can maybe invite Libra people.
Yes, David Marcus, we’ve invited him, he has said no.
Oh, too bad.
We have invited, for instance, Nick Clegg, or also Keith Enright from Google, we’re waiting to hear. You’re right, it will be difficult probably to find someone who debates it. The question for you would be, if I asked you a question is technological progress the key to our freedom, would you answer yes or no?
It’s a great amplifier. If you start with freedom in your philosophy in your core value, you amplify that. If you start with authoritarianism, it amply that as well.
Of either. I guess a question we have to kind of refine it a bit so we can have a clear yes or no, because you’re right, it can go in either direction.
It’s a great amplifier.
The date will be, I will communicate, in May. The other thing we also have smaller more interactive session which would take place in the afternoon, which would offer a bit more exchange, and where also the young people are really asking you the questions. That would be an additional format.
We also will have government representatives there and officials, and I was wondering if the dates work for you, I would be very happy to see, because I know Switzerland is trying to continue how we can say it, the progress, continued progress on a political level, and I was wondering if perhaps there could even be one or two meetings or bilaterals for people that are working on similar questions in Switzerland, but also just in general, we have the ETH in Zurich, which is the leading polytechnical university.
Yes, of course.
If you do take the far trip, we would try and help you make it as interesting and as valuable, with as many people who could be of interest for you.
He manages our schedule, so I’ll defer the date for him. For remote participation, we’ve made telepresence work very well, using a robot, a hologram, or things like that, that of course works. Fireside chat will also work in this telepresence formula we’ve tried that as well. It probably won’t work in a debate scenario, because a lot of message is non-vocal, and we still don’t have that good mixed reality technology.
Maybe in five years, but not now. If you didn’t manage to get a schedule worked out, then we can still have a fireside chat and a Q&A, but not a debate. If I make the physical trip, of course debate is much better. We actually try to get one of the events here to set up a debate between me and Libra, or me and Social Credit, but neither agreed to show up, so it didn’t work.
That’s the thing, that’s the trickiest part getting someone there who will really defend that view against someone who has very legitimate understanding from the other side. As you said, it is an amplifier which you used for the good, but also for very worrying developments. For me, the question also would be, because I was telling Zach, we see very much a triangle between this topic freedom and Freedom Revisited with tech and politics.
You kind of really bring those angles together. What from your perspective and the work you’re doing, where do you see some of the most important areas or questions we should be asking in the context of Freedom Revisited? Because we have a chance here to address a lot of people, a lot of young people also, and if you could wish for some of the most important question that should be addressed in the context?
I would like us to focus not only on the positive freedoms, which like the freedom of speech, assembly, the usual things, the human right perspective, but also freedom from, like negative freedoms.
As in Isaiah Berlin.
Yes, that line of thinking is much more pertinent in the digital scenario. For example, surveillance, it happens kind of just by default if you don’t have end-to-end encryption.
Freedom from surveillance is a much stronger freedom in the digital area, because if we’re facing, talking to face to face, it is one of the spaces we personally set up, like this is my office, of course it’s assumed we’re free from surveillance, but if we talk through an intermediary like a robot or something, then this mid-point become kind of by default surveillant.
“Freedom from” — the negative freedoms become much more pertinent in this section, while the positive freedom of course still helps on those sections.
A very important differentiation. We’re asking ourselves also in the context of basic human rights, for instance, how much can you take in a universalist stance which I think we should to say that there are no matter which country or which place it is, one needs to respect those basic human rights.
Then also at the same time we’re seeing violation of human rights in certain countries, and we’re still trading with them, we’re still interacting with them, but how can you get them involved more in actually putting that on their…
Yeah, in Taiwan we also say that broadband is a human right.
Yes, that’s right.
Wherever in Taiwan, top of the Yushan Mountain, almost 4,000 meter, you still have 10 mbps for 15 euros per month, unlimited connection. We took great effort to make that happen. We’re now at 98 percent coverage, the remaining two percent are above 3,000 meters, and still the Minister of Interior said we’re using helicopters in their training runs to take those two percent.
We do that to make it so democracy legitimate, otherwise it excludes people systemically. That is the foundation on which we can build digital democracy. It’s only when broadband as a human right is also democratized. I think that is a very important point, but having digital as a default also creates kind of surveillance censorship takedowns and things like that. That kind of thing can become ignored, because the Internet was built with free innovation without permission.
Some innovators as shown in the book, took the way of funding from advertisers, or other funding sources, not directly from the people using them. They think less about human experience but more about user experience, because user is somebody who can get addicted, as in some other trades also use the word user. [laughs]
The point is free from addiction, free from surveillance, free from censorship must not be taken for granted in the digital world, because they’re kind of the default now. That is an important part when we’re talking about digital rights. If you talk about universal human rights, the simple answer is just don’t go digital, and then you have those basic rights.
Those two are both important debates to have, but the online part I think is much more prevalent now to a lot of your audience, for sure, but I’m happy to talk about the basic human rights as well.
I think as you said, we will be inviting people also from the Red Cross, because based in Geneva, but I think you bring in this really interesting tech perspective and the kind of democracy, so we would definitely try and focus on that element, and we would outline it for you on paper, of course, make it more specific, because now we’re just forming the program. Have you ever been to Switzerland?
Oh, so would be your first time.
That’s right.
It would be very, very exciting to welcome you there. I was reading about some of your work, have you heard of Evgeny Morozov?
He will be someone who very much argues about the dark side of…
I would agree, 100 percent. Much more than the surveillance capitalism book. I think I come from a more similar thought lineage as Evgeny.
He was with us twice as a Leader of Tomorrow, now we’d invite him again as a more senior person, he’s definitely someone where we could see if there would be a good alignment between you two.
Yeah, that would be fireside chat because we agree on everything, it’s hard to set up a debate. [laughs]
It would be hard to have a debate, yes, that’s right. [laughs] OK, good to know. Some of the other people who you might know who we’re going to invite are, for instance, Michael Sandel, he’s much more coming from the more philosophical different area, but there’s going to be a story line through the symposium, that’s why we need people with different expertise.
The question is also are there any questions from your side, and just to show you, this is our key visual, because it’s on the hand, this is more the negative side, but it’s exactly the addiction and the surveillance elements if it’s not…
It is a perfect visual. I’m happy to start from there.
That’s good, that’s good.
It’s a good start.
That’s good. How hard is it for traditional democracies where Switzerland where we have high involvement of civil society, and we have high and transparency and efficient government, how hard is it to get to integrate the technological part into it? We’re, for instance, trying to introduce e-voting now, but that’s just one very specific area. You’re going much further back by already kind of…
Our collection of referendum signatures, for example, will become electronic maybe next year.
That’s just for agenda setting, it’s not the referendum.
It’s just agenda setting, yes.
Right, it’s not the referendum itself. In design thinking terms, we use digital technology a lot in discover and refine, but not so much on the development deliver, which is the decision-making stage. We believe that face to face consultations are still the best when we’re figuring out how many big questions that connect those diamonds together.
Using non-digital means, it’s very hard to do a proper rolling survey, an ethnographic survey, that may take years. Then the situation changed. For emergent technology issues, the Swiss tradition unfortunately takes too much time for the subject matter.
That’s it.
The subject matter may have already changed.
Too slow.
It is too slow.
That’s it.
It’s not to speed up the second diamond, which is already well-established institutional democracy, but rather governance. What’s important is to make the first diamond to discover and define more effective, and reach more people and empower more people whose voice is simply excluded because it was too hard to reach them.
If people can collectively and discover the main pushback from the administration was that there’s too much noise and not enough signal, so the define becomes harder. Using AI, and other technologies, data-driven technologies, we can actually automate part of the define process. That become then a much better start for collaborative meetings, to get the how might we questions.
We don’t actually do anything that makes second diamond work harder than it needs to be. We still hunt to the regulators, to the legislators when they come to the final decision-making.
What we’re doing, essentially, is to better inform the traditional institutional democracy process with new tools that helps with the first diamond, that’s the discover and define. We sometime help with the development by rapid prototyping, sim boxing, and so on. But final delivery of political agenda, that is not our priority.
This is our theory, and it is very easy if you start early on, because everybody wants to participate early on, because government was saying, “We have no idea,” at that time. The later it gets, the harder for people to remove it.
That’s right, and then you can really do the need-driven part, because people live their day-to-day lives and experience where there needs to be something adjusted.
They’re all experts in that stage.
Because there’s no expert, really because it is an emerging field.
That’s right. That’s good that you make the vision, because I was thinking when I was preparing to meet you, I was thinking and comparing how could Switzerland learn from this, and where could we integrate some parts of it.
You add it to the beginning of the process, you don’t change the existing process. That’s our theory of change. We haven’t really challenged the parliament with our work.
That’s very good. Is there anything you need, that you’d like to ask me, or anything I can help with now?
I’m good.
OK, excellent.
Thank you. It was very, very exciting to be here, I was having my first time in Taiwan, had a wonderful experience. I arrived yesterday, and while Switzerland was sleeping in the morning, I got to explore a little bit, and I like it a lot. It’s also quite, 23 million people, quite a densely populated…
Very densely packed, and if you take the high-speed rails on the Western side, which is very Westernized, it’s just 95 minutes from the north to the south.
That’s incredible.
So it’s a large municipality geography-wise, but a very large population population-wise.
Often there’s the argument that kind of small countries can be very successful because it’s very easy, small also population wise, but Taiwan, even though you’re 23 million, you’re still really managing to bring the transparency.
I think it’s a polity feeling, that people can easily step into other people’s shoes just by taking a day to travel anywhere in Taiwan, to really participate in their local community. That helps this idea that we’re a polity, even though we’re from 20 different languages, but that’s fine, because we’re geographically close together.
We still feel that we can live with each other’s’ work and each other’s’ languages, there’s something that Switzerland has, too.
Exactly. We’re four languages, well three official, fourth which is just a dialect leftover from the Roman soldiers that stayed in the Swiss mountains. It’s the closest living language to Latin, but actually three main languages and quite different mentalities even though we’re such a small country. We always make fun of the other part of the country and their type of people, but we do get along well, most of the time.
That’s we do here too, most of the time.
(laughter)
All right, well I will leave the booklet for next year. We have a team of young journalists that we invite which are in training, and they get to cover the symposium and the topics that they would like to cover. This just last year’s book and magazine, for you to if you’d like to take a look. We’ve done a rebranding. This is the old branding, this is the new branding.
Good to know.
We sent, I’m not sure if the official letter arrived, but just this copy, this here just got copied in accidentally, but I just printed it once more in case you’d like it.
Yeah, we got it here.
You got it, OK.
Then you probably don’t even need that, unless you’d like to have the copy.
That’s fine. OK.
Yes, thank you so much.
Thank you.
I will follow up with you directly, and will keep you informed. Ideally, if you could come perhaps the Friday May 8th, but we could arrange around both days, but May 8th would be where we’d have a bit more time to develop the topic and have the debate, then on Thursday, because that’s always very crunched time-wise. We will see depending on the agenda and how it looks.
Otherwise, we have the other option, always.
OK, thank you.
Good. Thank you.