Yeah, I’ve seen the outline, but you don’t have to follow the outline.
I will try to follow them. First of all, you being an anarchist…
Conservative anarchist.
What do you mean by that?
An anarchist is someone who use only horizontal power, gives no order, takes no orders, try to redesign systems so that hierarchies would eventually dissolve into co-creation relationships.
Conservative means that I honor and respect all the cultural lineages instead of destroying them. We make a kind of transcultural norm out of existing cultures instead of excluding anyone from the polity. These two, I think, reinforce each other.
You respect the…
Traditions.
…the political structure? Or not?
As Buckminster Fuller said, the best way to change a system…
You are quoting?
Buckminster Fuller. Inventor, known for the geodesic dome.
Buckminster Fuller had a saying that says, “You never change things by fighting against the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the old model obsolete.” I respect the old, learn the best from it, but instead of fighting it, make a new one that makes the old one eventually obsolete.
What’s your ultimate vision for good or ideal democracy?
There’s no ideal democracy. Democracy is a social technology, like any other technology you need to co-evolve with the societal expectations. As a process, I would say ideally it responds to what people actually need and in the light of newer Internet technologies that enable millions of people to listen to one another, instead of the older technology that only enabled broadcasting.
The more the social technologies can co-evolve with the communication and societal expectations the better. There is no ideal, because the societal expectations keep changing.
Let’s talk about what you’ve done in this four year. Four years now?
Three years.
Three years.
If you count my work as reverse mentor in the previous presidency and previous cabinet, then that’s five years.
In the previous cabinet, you had the same role?
I was the reverse mentor to…
Reverse mentor.
A reverse mentor to Minister Jaclyn Tsai at the time, who worked in this same office, actually. [laughs]
So they just changed the door…
The plate.
The plate.
It’s true. Jaclyn eventually turned into a civic hacker in the g0v hacker community. I came from that community as a minister. We kind of switched positions, but still collaborating.
What drove you to become like…Can we define you politician?
I prefer the term poetician.
Poetician.
Poetician.
As in I write poems, mostly. That’s my work.
It’s written like ethics poetician or it’s…
P-O-E-T-I-C-I-A-N.
Because you’re writing poems.
Because I’m writing poems. Would you like to hear some poems?
(laughter)
My job description is a poem.
Ah, really?
Can I see it?
Sure. It goes like this:
When we see the Internet of things, let’s make it an Internet of beings. When we see virtual reality, let’s make it a shared reality. When we see machine learning, let’s make it collaborative learning. When we see user experience, let’s make it about human experience. Whenever we hear that a singularity is near, let us always remember the plurality is here.
That’s my job description.
What drove you to take this engagement?
It’s fun.
That’s a good answer.
More seriously…
Weren’t you afraid that it was just something boring or that could not fulfill your ideas or that – I don’t know – will encage you in a structure which would not understand your…
That’s why I negotiated three working conditions when working with, not for, the government. The first one is, as I mentioned, voluntary association. I give no order, take no order. The second one is called location independence.
You arrived at a cabinet meeting day, so I’m this building, but otherwise I’m in the Social Innovation Lab or touring around Taiwan. I’m not caged, as you say, by any particular physical structure.
Even more importantly, I practice radical transparency so that everybody who visit me has to agree, like we do now, to post a transcript of our conversation, and this holds even for internal meetings that I chair.
In a sense, I’m also like a investigative journalist looking into issues together with lots of people figuring out the different perspectives and so on, but the work is always with the commons and not for any private interest.
Of course, you are not allowed to take and publish transcripts of some reserved internal meetings inside the cabinet, right?
You mean, like, national secrets?
Yeah, for example.
I don’t even know about national secrets. I’m delineating my communication because of, exactly as you’ve said, the act around national secrets. If any of the system has any input as a national state secret, then the entire output becomes a state secret. Because of that, as part of the radical transparency agreement, I don’t know any state secret.
What about being encaged by – we can call it – immaterial structures like power structure insights, established politics?
If I give no order and take no order, how would I be encaged?
Can you summarize the achievements you’ve had?
I don’t have any achievements.
My main work is to make a co-creative space, where people can achieve what they already wanted but did not have the connections to other parts of the puzzle pieces to make happen. One example is two years ago someone complaining about the tax filing system being explosively hostile.
Instead of just explaining things away, we work with the participation officers in the Ministry of Finance, and they invited him and everybody who complained into co-creation meetings that altogether co-created a tax filing experience that by this year has more than 98 percent approval rate, which is unheard of for government services.
That is not because I’m particularly wise or whatever. That’s because literally thousands of people feel that they have at least one post-it note in the stake, and so they are much more willing to give feedbacks and help getting other people on board for the new design.
We applied a same structure of co-creation to a lot of other services recently. The one-stop mountaineering and hiking application interface is done in a very similar manner, and in fact, we work with around 25 interns every year, and they by themselves look at what public service experience they want to improve.
As you can see, they work on…For example, this is health care services, this is labor insurance. This is the NCC portal for flagging inappropriate non fact-checked content.
This the Taiwan Rails, this is the National Palace Museum, Ministry of Science and Education. This is the mountaineering prototype that I mentioned, postal services, trademark application, tax filing – of course always room to be improved more.
Those are the new interfaces that you create?
That the interns co-created with the Ministry of Public Service.
We apply this idea of reverse mentorship pretty much to all the 12 ministries related to social innovation so that each ministry has two social innovators – always under 35 – serving as reverse mentors that points the direction of the future of the future of that ministry, while themselves learning about how public service works.
Because I’m 38 now, I’m no longer a young reverse mentor. I mostly rely on the young interns, the reverse mentors and so on, to point to the future directions. I would say again, none of this is my idea.
It’s a new way of working inside the public sector.
With the public sector, yes.
Do you think it’s already rooted after what you have done or…
Yeah, certainly.
…if the government changes, if a new political majority comes into power, all this, it’s going to disappear?
No. The institutionalization was done in the multiple cabinet under the Ma Ying-jeou presidency. In a sense, we already see a change of power. The fact that in the DPP primary, William Lai, now running as a vice president candidate, used to say Dr. Tsai is doing well on the open government, but I will be more open.
Or Mayor Han’s running mate, Simon Chang saying that he will be even more open. It means that this is firmly rooted in the political zeitgeist. They can only compete by being more open instead of less.
Do you feel a political affiliation to the ruling majority here in Taiwan, or you are just a technician?
My affiliation is to the sustainable goals or the global goals. As you can see, it has 17 colors, and it’s the common will of the entire planet – humanity at least – that takes care of the sustainability of generations to come.
This is important because the next generation, who have not been born yet, do not have voting rights. Someone needs to think in longer timespans in order to take in all these issues in a way that benefits at least the same for future generations as this one. That is my main affiliation.
Let me put it in another way. If the Kuomintang Party asks you to work with them, would you work…?
I’ve worked with a Kuomintang cabinet already, in 2014 and 2015.
The former one. If they win the election, you’re open to work with them?
As I said, I’m working with governments, not for governments.
All the work that I do is in Creative Commons or is open-source, and all the different parties around the world actually are using this mechanism design, social technology to help listening at scale.
This applies to all political parties around the world, not just the Blue or Green in this island, which are just two colors out of a full spectrum.
Do you vote?
You mean voting in elections, in referendums?
I try to vote. When I was visiting Paris, I voted in their participatory budget as well. That was in 2016.
In the participatory budget?
Of the Paris city. I was staying in the 3rd district, the Marais. I remember I voted for a 3D scan and a virtual asset of the Paris city so that it can be freely used by creators in their virtual interactions.
Eventually, that idea was also adopted by our ministry of culture. Now we have the Taiwan Digital Asset Library, and you can very easily look into the historical and the cultural buildings, and even partake in the interactive 360 lift experience there.
It makes like movie making and so on not a one shot thing, because they scan the set and put it to the digital asset library. I first heard this idea in the participatory budget in Paris.
You’re going to vote in one month in the political elections here?
I guess so. Probably.
Let’s talk about this process not for new interfaces, but for new laws. Can you point to a couple of examples of what you’ve done? Not what you’ve done, but you helped.
Again, I didn’t do anything. I empowered. For example…
What you empowered, yeah.
I empowered people who feel a strong need to break existing laws, because they think they’re no good for their society, in the world’s first sandbox system within the continental law system. There is already sandbox systems within common law systems. Like the UK fintech sandbox is quite famous.
In Taiwan, we curved out continental law system sandbox ideas so that people who want to experiment a year with, say, self-driving vehicles, or with fintech, or indeed with any regulation by any ministry, as long as it’s not money laundering or funding terrorism, they are fair game. They can apply for a year of testing.
We are now doing the same for 5G special spectrum as well for one year, challenging existing regulations. If it’s a good idea as considered by the society at the end of that year, then we adopt that back as a new regulation.
We’ve seen a lot of sandbox applications enabling recently telemedicine and telepsychiatry. Just yesterday, I participated in telejudging in a simulated court where I played the role of a judge, one of the three judges, but sitting here and participating as a robot.
What about this platform you…?
Join, join.gov.tw.
Yes, you use. It’s also being used for this last thing you mentioned?
Yes, of course. All the regulatory announcements are posted on Join, no exceptions, usually for 60 days for public commentary, but also for petitions – as I mentioned, the tax filing one – and public budget participation as well. Participatory budget, that is, and the national auditing office.
A lot of cities – 11 cities and counties – all are using the Join platform, which is why it has 10 million visitors out of 23 million residents in Taiwan.
People are allowed to comment on any new law that is proposed?
Publicly, and any new regulation as well.
What do you do with those comments?
If a lot of them raise good points that was missed, sometime we do another regulatory announcement cycle. That is to say, we take in the stakeholder ideas and change it.
Every month, all the participation offices in all ministries vote on which petition and regulatory announcement cases are to have a face-to-face cross-ministry collaboration meeting with the stakeholders that expressed their opinions.
There’s quite a few regulations when in announcement stage we view that they pointed out that we missed something. In a sign of “radically trust the citizens,” we just post that and have a conversation with citizens.
What about this virtual Taiwan?
VTaiwan. Yeah, vTaiwan is operated and owned, co-created, by the civil society. I no longer host vTaiwan meetings. I still participate in online discussions and drop by from time to time.
As I understand, vTaiwan is even more in the beginning of a policymaking, whereas Join is more about the government has this idea and the people has this idea – at least 5,000 people – and then we have a large stakeholder.
VTaiwan is for when the stakeholder is not as well organized, and the government literally knows nothing, or very few things, about a emergent issue. That is for the vTaiwan people to decide the process.
Again, I help facilitate the civil service to participate in the vTaiwan meetings, but we don’t control their agenda. If they want to talk about, say, e-scooters, then I help finding the Ministry of Transportation and Communication to listen to them.
But the stakeholder mapping, the physical location, everything, it’s done by the community, and not as Join is, by public service.
How many people are active in the platform?
In vTaiwan?
I don’t really know, but if you look at info.vtaiwan.tw, there is a few numbers, I’m sure. I think around 200,000 people are engaged.
I’ve read about some laws that have been initiated on this platform.
Yeah. Actually…
The e-scooter…
Yes, e-scooter, of course, but…
…and car-sharing?
Yes, and both of the sandbox laws are initiated on vTaiwan. It’s just after the regulatory work after the discovery stage, which is what vTaiwan is primarily about, and at the end of the final stage where we do have the regulatory drafts, we post them then on the Join platform. You can say that vTaiwan is the beginning of the design thinking diamond, and Join is at the middle.
You said also those sandbox you were talking about are initiated – or some of them or most.
Yeah, the fintech and self-driving are in vTaiwan. Telemedicine, telepsychiatry too, and remote, distance learning also. There’s quite a few that originated from vTaiwan.
Is there an evidence that those systems, those methods, of participative democracy are improving the level of – how can I call it…satisfaction, or legitimacy – of the system, of the institutions here?
We run surveys in the Join platform. They show that people feel that by participation they understand the context more, that they have more solidarity with one another. This is not about the government gaining legitimacy. This is about people, stakeholders from different sides, seeing that they can have creative endeavors that enable common values out of different positions.
That is to say, it is about democracy and not about state instrumentation. The most active groups are 15-years-olds and 65-years-olds.
Sorry, say again?
The most active groups are around 15 years old and 65 years old. We invited a I think 16-years-old when she was proposing the banning, gradual banning, of the one-shot-use utensils like plastic straws for indoor drinking of bubble tea or whatever, and replacing them either with circular material or just designing away the straw altogether.
That was a success and she got 5,000 signatures in no time. She said it’s just her civics class assignment. I think the 15-years-olds mostly because also that they don’t have the right to vote. They don’t really have any other ways to institutionalize their participation, but yet, they are the one most closely linked to, for example, climate change and other sustainable issues.
Sorry, who posted this proposal?
There was a 16-year-old person with the pseudonym iloveelephantandelephantlovesme. Because we allow pseudonyms on the Join platform. We thought that this must be a very senior environmental activist to get such a large following in no time. It turns out she was really good at social media [laughs] and really good at using hashtags, I’m sure.
We invited the makers of those one-shot utensils also who are around 65 years old. They said 30 years ago when they started working, they are also social entrepreneur, because at that time hepatitis B, a liver virus, is prevalent in Taiwan, and only by using single-use utensils can they help fighting this epidemic.
Now hep B is fixed. There’s a pharmacy for it.
They’re also looking at new material. They brainstorm with the younger generation around the coffee leaves or sugarcane or whatever – literally straws, reinforcing straws and so on, that are acceptable and actually leads to a higher margin. The younger generation have a way to promote that through crowdfunding and so on.
They become cross-generational collaborators, instead of one side fighting one another. That is, I think, again, as I said, is about legitimacy, but it’s not about the government’s legitimacy. We’re just holding a space so that the different cultures and generations can build legitimacy around their core values with one another.
We can say it’s about institutions’ legitimacy.
If you say that, participatory budget is an institution that enables local people to co-determine their public work, then of course, it is legitimacy-building. I totally agree that. I’m just saying the legitimacy is distributed. I think everybody who contributes gets legitimacy. This is not about a single state apparatus gaining legitimacy.
Yes. I agree. You allow people to be not anonymous but…
Pseudonymous.
…pseudonymous on this platform?
Of course.
To register to contribute, you have…
You still have to have a SMS number, of course.
With a phone.
Yeah, with a phone, and locally registered SIM card. If you try to get 5,000 of those SIM cards, the anti-money-laundering people will be after you very quickly.
Here in Taiwan, when you take a SIM card, you have to provide a…
Of course.
…document?
The KYC.
Know Your Customer.
We live in representative democracies. It’s not only about democracy. It’s also about representation, right? You pick some representatives for you when you vote. In some ways, you entrust them to act on your behalf.
That’s fine for the development and the delivery stage – the second diamond in the design thinking. Of course, at that point, we’re almost done discovering people’s collective will.
Where participation at that stage is more about ensuring accountability, in the first stage, the discovery stage, it’s more about re-presentation of people’s ideas instead of anyone representing those various dimensions, because there’s simply too much dimensions.
Once people do agree on some common…like “how might we solve this together,” then the representatives of course can act, because there’s fewer dimensions.
You think at the later stage, it’s more about representative power…
Yeah, yeah, of course.
…but you have to take care of accountability.
Of course.
At the first stage, it’s about bringing the ideas together.
Right, because a single MP just cannot contain in their head the various discovery stage thoughts of their constituency. There’s literally hundreds, thousands of dimensions. If you try to do that in a representative system, then you massively oversimplifies the issues at stake.
What we’re focusing on is re-presenting, using their own words, whatever the constituents and stakeholders are thinking. At a later stage, of course, the issue has been clarified, and you only have to ensure the accountability.
In modern societies, there’s this thing. We call it…I don’t know if the term is right in English, but division of work. Some people do furniture because they’re good at doing furniture. I do the journalist because I studied to do that and I’m going to do that. You do what…Everyone does what he does best, and that increases the productivity of the system, in a way. Shouldn’t that be true also for politics?
You mean somebody are good for counting numbers and they must become a computer? Somebody is good at typesetting, so they must be a printer? Now, computers and printers are not people. They are mechanisms. They are automated.
No, I’m not talking about instruments. I’m talking about activities. Like a doctor, for example.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, but…
Everyone has his own specifical knowledge and skills.
Sure, sure.
Is politics also a specific knowledge and skills? My question is, should we expect that all the people, all the citizen, participate in this process, or should we keep some people doing the politicians’ work?
Obviously, we should do both. Computer, as you correctly points out, is a machine, but the data scientists or computer scientists, programmers, is a activity for humans.
The very reason why we teach computational thinking, starting from primary school, is not so that all the children become programmers. It’s that they demystify programming – that they understand that there is nothing mysterious about algorithms, that they can work with a little bit of learning, like Scratch, just like playing legal blocks, automate away the chore in their daily work.
The same for the legal understanding. We are introducing a jury system, not because everybody must be a judge, but because it demystifies the court proceedings and people understand how the legal framework works.
This is a ladder of expertise. If you only have in the system like seven people who know about law, and everybody else is illiterate about law, no matter how good those seven people are, it becomes a dictatorship automatically. The same for computational knowledge, and I would say the same for democracy.
Of course, we need to have people dedicating their time to host the democratic space. These are the career politicians, as you mentioned, but if the everyday people don’t feel that they have at least some way to set the agenda for the politics, and it’s only like three bits every four years, which is called voting, then the distance here is too large.
Three bits?
Every four years.
Bits. Bits is like information uploaded.
Ah, OK.
If on the presidential ticket, there is four candidates, then that’s two bits uploaded from the citizen.
If it’s only that…
The bandwidth is too narrow and people will feel that the government disempowers them in the sense that they cannot set the agenda for the polity. Agenda setting power is because it’s at the very beginning, the define stage, something that should be shared with the entire polity.
The decisional power, of course, the delivery part of the design thinking, is currently specialized, and we are not contesting that it’s specialized. We are mostly reforming deliberation. We are not reforming decision-making.
Do you see this process becoming the standard process in democracies?
Aren’t there any circumstances where a good politician should, how do I say, push people in a direction they don’t see?
Of course, politicians can be advocates. That’s why I write poems.
Politicians can be advocates.
Yeah. That’s why I write poems.
Can you elaborate?
As I mentioned, if people are talking about digital transformation in the language of linear economy of like Internet-of-things, then I write a poem that says we should think about Internet of beings, like connecting rivers, mountains, animals, people who do not have a vote and so are largely suffering from externalities of the democratic process by humans.
Now that we have the Internet of beings, we can actually bring in to a common picture what the air quality is, what the mountains are feeling, what the rivers are feeling into our political discussions. Of course, this constitutes as advocacy.
I’m not saying that politicians are simple automatons, that we don’t have ourselves a poetic vision. The point is that this vision is not owned by us. It just arrived to us, and it is our work to share those visions as poets do.
Yes, that’s what politicians – good politicians – always did, right?
I was more concrete, for example…You probably recognize that so far, your views, those participative process in not in the most important laws or the basis of identity of Taiwan, for example.
Would you use this process to decide, for example, if Taiwan should unify with the PRC or not?
I would say first, that this process itself is a part of Taiwan’s identity. Just by engaging, in listening at scale, in radically trusting the citizen, we are already defining what Taiwan is. This is not because that people in Taiwan believed in any particular political system because the politicians say it, but rather because they have participated in it.
This is especially important now that when you are seeing the PRC’s way of making citizens transparent to the state and using social credit and other systems, making sure the state can set the agenda of the citizens and not the citizens setting the agenda of the states. They use the same words but in opposite direction.
I think the identity question you raised is not something that could be written into a few lines of laws, but rather it’s in the collaborative process that people participate in. When we deliberate…The Uber X issue is a good example. It’s not unimportant. It may be one of the most important issues as seen by media at that time in 2015.
We talk about a specific case of someone driving to work without a professional driver’s license, using an app taking in a stranger that asked them to do a detour and they charging them for it, a very specific use case. We asked people how do you feel about it. That is how we get consensus.
If we start by asking how do you feel about sharing economy, how do you feel about platform economy, the discovery stage may never end. It may never converge. It may go backwards.
The theory of overlapping consensus says that we can talk about the most important issues, but we only talk about it in one specific case after one another.
We can talk about the important issues…
…but only in very specific cases.
So it has to be like if you want to talk about the cross-strait relationships, it has to be in a specific case, for example like trade deals or…?
Yeah, good point. For example, with the AIT, we talk about the specific case like if there is one thing that AIT or Taiwan can do to promote Taiwan’s role in the global community…
Sorry, AIT?
The American in Taiwan, de facto US embassy. This is for diplomacy. We ask are there any specific measures that you think the US or Taiwan can do to promote Taiwan’s role in the global community. We use a AI listening system so that people see both their commonalities but also the divisions.
There is one statement that divides the groups in half.
Exactly one half supported and one half opposed. That is very divisive, but it’s important to know that’s the only divisive statement. Everybody agrees on everything else with all their neighbors most of the time. We take that as the agenda.
For example, where people do agree on this topic?
For example, instead of going through the US, we need to form trilaterals or minilaterals with Japan, South Korea, India, The Philippines, New Zealand, Australia, and other Indo-Pacific countries. That’s actually delivered. Japan just joined the GCDF as a host country.
For example, people thought that we need to invite international teams to the Presidential Hackathon, which is an annual event where the best idea gets a trophy from the president with the promise that their idea gets implemented as national policy within the next year. It’s a very high-level hackathon.
You’re telling me that it’s not appropriate to do the same thing around cross-strait relationship as a general concept?
I’m saying that we are not doing one for US-Taiwan relationship. We are doing four, actually five now, each talking about one very specific aspect around economic collaboration, around security collaboration.
Have you done the same concerning the Peoples Republic of China or not, for example, economic relations with them?
I have not yet received invitations from the PRC to do this together.
You’ve done this because you’ve received an invitation from the…
Yeah, from the AIT. If Italy want to talk about it, we can do so.
What if the government – Taiwan’s government – wants to do it?
The accountability needs to be mutual. In the various consensus points, some is for AIT to do and some is for the Taiwan people to do. All of them pre-committed, just like in vTaiwan or the collaborative meeting process, that whatever consensus is, they have to give an account of when are we doing it.
Unless the participating jurisdictions all have a very similar commitment, this exercise if futile. Like if we start talking about what Italy should do but we involve no Italians, what does that mean?
The point is that Taiwan has actually relationships. Non-accountable, nondemocratic regimes exist and Taiwan has important relationships towards those kinds of regime. You’re saying that those relationships cannot go through this process?
It’s one thing to be democratic as in having democratic elections and so on, and it’s another thing to have an accountability structure by rule of law and so on.
Just an example, Taiwan, before we directly elected the president in 1996, there is already around 10 years when the Martial law was lifted where there is some rule of law but no democratic election of president. You can see it in other jurisdictions as well.
What this method depends on is by an accountability structure. It does not, strictly speaking, have to be democratically, popularly voted in, but someone need to be held into account if they make a promise and there need to be a strong, independent corrective and judiciary system.
Yeah, but the questions remain. The Peoples Republic is not…No one there is accountable. On that topic, which is one of the most important for Taiwan, and the Taiwanese cannot go through this process.
The HKSR has its own accountability structure. People in HKSR have been looking at our methodologies and considering that they just had an election at a local level, participatory budgeting and so on, is actually really good idea, because they are also very eager to listen more to people. We do have exchanges with the…
With the government?
…with HKSR representatives who are firstly voted in, and they did visit me in the Social Innovation Lab here.
Recently?
Yeah. Well, the vote was very recent.
Ah, the local ones, not the…
Yeah, the local ones. We have to start somewhere, right?
Yeah. Do you have a personal vision on the cross-straits relationship and Taiwan’s identity, Taiwan’s status?
I wrote a poem about that. Would you like to…?
(laughter)
Would you like to hear the poem?
I hope I understand it.
No, it’s easy to understand.
Poems need interpretation.
OK. The poem goes like this.
Whirling ocean, beautiful islands, a transcultural republic of citizens.
That is as vision goes, the vision of what I mean.
A transcultural republic of citizens.
Literally, these words means a citizen’s republic, amidst flowers.
“公民之國，在花之中”.
That’s right.
The vision here is that as I…
Do you feel any attachment to the word China?
If we say it’s between flowers, then it is an idea, very old idea starting around the Zhou Dynasty, that we have various different cultures. They don’t quite speak to one another, but we can come up with common mechanisms – they call it 禮, or rites – that can bridge the differences somewhat between the different civilizations.
The different civilizations are called the various flowers, or 諸華. The Zhou Dynasty thinks that through the application of the rites, they can bridge the differences and make new cultures out of the transcultural reality.
Taiwan is certainly between flowers, between various civilizations around the world, including European ones. What we are now doing is to build a transcultural republic out of those different cultures.
Transculture is the freedom to move between cultures, to not be constrained by the single culture that we were raised or educated in. This is what, to me, what the name of the country means. It means a citizen’s republic between flowers.
I will take maybe a picture later or can you send me. I want to touch this one last point, which is very important to me. The PRC trying to influence the public debate here in Taiwan…
…and across the world.
Yeah, but probably here in Taiwan…
Let’s try to take a question out of it. Do you think the PRC government is trying to influence Taiwan’s public discourse and the result of these elections?
They do it between elections as well. Really, there is no holiday. [laughs] You can very easily see their work if you look at the Taiwan FactCheck Center. For example, there was a trending rumor in the domestic social media…
I will talk to them later today.
Maybe you can ask about how they investigate this one, this, “The protestors in Hong Kong are paying young people up to $20 million to murder police.” This is obviously a disinformation campaign, and they have a lot of photos to go with this disinformation.
The Taiwan FactCheck Center very quickly found the origin of this. This is – maybe you already know this account – 中央政法委长安剑, which is one of the main PRC mouthpiece on the Internet.
They invented this rumor and posted a purported comic, but very interestingly, even though they tried to write in Cantonese, they spell something wrong and they use Hanyu Pinyin for the Telegram group, which is quite amateur, because no Cantonese speakers in the protestor will use pinyin for that.
You can trace the origin of this to a media, government media…
It’s not really media. It’s just 长安剑’s Weibo account.
Yes, but still, you probably can trace it back to some government media, and you know how government media work in China. What about non directly government actors like those wumaos? Do you have a smoking gun?
Sure. If you look at the data disclosure from Twitter, that is as close to a smoking gun as you can get.
But that’s about Hong Kong, not about Taiwan.
No, it’s about a set of IP addresses within the PRC that do not need to bypass the Great Firewall to create 200,000 fake accounts on Twitter, and also similar operations on Facebook and on Google.
What’s important is not the message that they post. It’s about the path of connection that the Great Firewall turned a blind eye to those within PRC computers. If it’s not state-sponsored, it’s at least state-blessed. You have to imagine how Great Firewall works. Of course, these IP addresses are precleared by the Great Firewall to do social media manipulation.
I’ve read a lot of analysis on that Twitter data. Most of them tend to say that it’s very artisanal. The Chinese government or whatever state-sponsored, they are not so good at doing this compared, for example, with what Russia does. Do you have the same impression?
They are adapting. The thing that taught me about counter-spam, which I personally worked on 20 years ago, is that spammers only get creative when the counter-spammers come up with new technologies. Otherwise, they can just keep spamming and earn an easy, passive profit.
The Great Firewall did not start that great. It was ridiculously easy to circumvent. Again, I personally worked on circumvention projects. It’s because the countermeasures that they have to invest – I think more than their defense budget now for harmonization – in new innovations that can adapt to those countermeasures.
I think the previous generations of wumaos because they were working relatively friendly to them, ecosystem – and since you’re based in Beijing, you know exactly what I’m talking about – they did not have to be very inventive, but now because all the major social media platforms are taking a governor role when it comes to disinformation…
Are taking a what role?
A governor.
Governor?
A governor role. Instead of saying “We’re merely conduits,” they are taking a actively governing approach, just like counter-spam.
Instead of the email providers saying “Oh, this is just email. We’re just delivering email. We’re not even looking into it,” they’re saying, “Oh, if you flag something as spam, we’re willing to work with Spamhaus and move those most suspect spams into your junk mail folder instead of your inbox.” This is governance.
They’re learning. Those wumaos are learning. The Chinese system is learning.
This is a evolutionary process. The spammers who don’t learn about new counter-spam strategies, we don’t see them anymore. Their work become the content of our junk mail folder. We’re not even aware of them. Only the most adaptive ones become…
This is true on the social media as well.
…become visible to us. It’s true on social media as well.
Do you see a massive campaign going on right now targeting the next elections in January or not?
I’m seeing that there are massive campaigns every day, election or not. If you look at the fact check dashboard in the LINE platform, you will easily see people flag those disinformations voluntarily and in this number of unique messages and how much they are being clarified, now much quicker than before.
The scale is massive any day of the week. It is not about election or non-election.
Is that true for every country in the world right now because we live in the social media age and that’s how elections work? That’s a byproduct of our elections in the media age, in the social media age, or it’s there’s something specific about China and this part of the world?
There’s something specific about Taiwan. According to the the CIVICUS Monitor, we’re the only jurisdiction in Asia that allows complete freedom in terms of freedom of journalism and assembly and expression.
You can imagine if the Internet access is not free, then you have less of this problem, of course. [laughs] There’s software that can automatically censor certain keywords. Again, I don’t have to explain this to you.
In a sense, this is a function of how free the civic space is. The more free, the more prevalent there will be for those campaigns, obviously. Instead of going back to being constricting the freedom of speech and so on, we rely instead on humor and on quick clarification and on social participation.
We rely on…?
Humor to disarm disinformation.
Is it effective?
Yes, because a lot of…
On what basis you respond to this question?
In the cabinet, as coordinated by our spokesperson, Kolas Yotaka, most of the ministries are now equipped with a team of memetic engineers that can package clarifications into something funny within two hours, and usually within one hour now, whenever there’s a trending disinformation campaign.
For example, there was a disinformation that said, “Perming your hair multiple time a week will be subject to a $1 million fine.” It’s not true. A younger version of the prime minister said, “I may be bald now, but I would not punish people with hair.” The fine print said, “What we’ve done is introducing labeling requirement for hair products starting 2021.”
A smaller picture of the prime minister as he looks now said, “But if you keep perming your hair multiple time a week, you will damage your pocket. It will damage your hair. We’re serious. You may look like me.” This is humor because he makes fun of himself, not anybody else. It’s genuinely funny. It goes viral. If you google for these words…
There’s a strategy inside the government to respond to this?
Yes, it’s through humor. A lot of disinformation spread because people feel helpless when they become angry seeing like the state is fining your $1 million when you perm your hair, or that the protestors in Hong Kong is paying young people to kill police. They feel anger, and anger is helplessness.
They seek the easiest remedy, which is the share button that turns anger into outrage. If we see the clarification and it’s funny, then the anger turns into fun. That’s called sublimation. They’re inoculated whenever they see this same rumor again.
Do you have the power to turn a rumor, when a rumor starts is powerful, right? When it’s shared and becomes viral. Do you have the power to then, or the damage is already done?
Within one hour, then of course our clarifications go more viral than the disinformation. If you have to wait for a day or two, of course it’s gone.
Is it appropriate that it’s the government to do those clarification or should be a third-party fact checker organization?
That concerns the ministerial purview, whether the Minister have rolled out a labeling requirement, that’s entirely our purview. No other person can clarify this, but of course if it’s about the Hong Kong message, of course there is the Taiwan FactCheck Center.
That’s a government funded, Taiwan FactCheck Center?
No, not at all. They don’t accept any party or government funding, they rely on small-scale crowd donations.
Do you think most of those campaigns are pro-Kuomintang?
The campaigns, the rumors and the fake news…
They’re anti-democracy. The point is not to get people love or hate any candidate or any political party, it’s about getting people feel so much outrage that they don’t feel part of the polity anymore, and they lose hope of participating in public discourse which is the foundation of liberal democracies.
When people sow discord to each other, they decimate, like literally reducing by 10 percent, the mental willpower to talk about this issue in a deliberative way instead of listening to one another, they will be verbally attacking one another. That is not about political parties, this is entirely about anti-democracy.
It’s not what they do in China.
It’s not what they do in China.
You mean in the PRC?
They are not attacking each other on the Weibo.
The government do not want the citizen to attack each other?
Well, I think when it comes to public debate, there will be different positions. It’s OK to attack each other’s positions and attack each other’s arguments, because that makes democracy stronger by building better arguments.
Of course it’s not a good idea to attack people’s understanding of the democratic process. If you attack that, if people feel that these are a bunch of non-humans, they should not be part of our polity, that is the exclusive, the exclusionary populism. It’s always a bad idea.
If populism is popular and it includes more people, like people younger than 15 years old, future generations, rivers, mountains, and animals, that is good populism. Populism is not good or bad. I understand PRC for harmony purposes don’t want any kind of populism, but to me, if it’s more inclusive then it’s good.
The government actually banned some Chinese platforms, for example iQiyi, the streaming platform, or other platform for PRC?
Just a second. If they use public spectrum, or public land for cable, then of course they have to work on the, for example, the fact checking, the due processing process, but I don’t think iQiyi is banned in any sense. There may be some issues around the renting computational facilities outside of the declared scope. That is not against the company, it is against a specific behavior.
That is part of the purview of an independent council, the National Communication Commission, and because they are independent, I would encourage you to ask them.
In principle do you agree with those measures?
I’ve not seen the NCC measures to the cabinet. As far as I understand, they’re still drafting. If you’re talking about the OTT TV, I have not seen the draft they raised to the cabinet meeting.
Sorry. WeChat. Do you think an app like WeChat it’s dangerous for the quality of Taiwan democracy?
A few things, right? There’s the cyber security angle, and there is of course the censorship, like censorship as normal angle. These two angles of course have to be considered.
It’s very rare that NCC takes actions against end-user devices. NCC mostly say, for example, that no PRC component can be part of the 4G infrastructure, and that was five years ago. Recently there was a conversation…
5G of 4G? 5G.
4G. We reached that conclusion five years ago, which is why you don’t hear the 5G issue being [laughs] debated a lot here, because there was already a consensus five years ago.
For end-user devices the only thing I remember now is they’re at the moment talking to Huawei, because their phone, through a software upgrade, lists Taiwan as a republic of citizens as “Taiwan, China,” and NCC would like Huawei to revert back to the old description, which is just Taiwan.
Huawei is – far as I understand – still working on that, and so for this period the Huawei devices carrying the new software is banned, but that is, again, because of a issue that NCC has purview. It is not targeting the future of the company Huawei. It is about the delineation of Taiwan as a republic citizens and not as “, China.”
Is there a brain drain from Taiwan to Mainland China?
There is a talent circulation.
You’re not afraid by the fact that some talents, for example, in the high tech industries here in Taiwan might be pushed to go to Chinese looking for more opportunities, career, growth, and so on.
If you look at the actual flow of, for example, graduate people or even undergrads, the PRC is not their top 3 – I don’t think it’s even top 10 – choice. There, of course, is people moving abroad, but the PRC is not on the radar.
Even if people move to the EU, to the US, to Japan, to Australia, and so on, they do come back after a while. Talent circulation is very healthy, and as a open society we welcome any culture of scientific and education exchanges. As I said, PRC is not even – I’m pretty sure – it’s not on the top five.
Do you think that this growing PRC will exert more and more political and economical pressure on Taiwan?
Mm-hmm.
Are you afraid by that?
Sorry, you have to be more specific. They have a Taiwan Province, we don’t have Province anymore. If they exert pressure on “their Taiwan Province,” we respect that, but it doesn’t describe any of us, so we don’t feel pressure when they exert pressure on their so-called Taiwan Province. There’s no head of Taiwan Province or for that matter Fujian Province.
They can exert some economical pressure. For example, they can stop their tourists to come here, and of course, we are looking of what is happening to Hong Kong, for example, then there’s no tourists there anymore, which is kind of…My question is should Taiwan be stronger as to defend itself from pressures coming from Mainland China?
Our tourism is diversified enough that the tourists keep growing.
The question was broader about your economy. We hear you have a lot of companies with ties with Mainland China. Mainland China is an important market even for the US companies. They exert pressure on US companies. I can imagine they exert the same, they can…
You mean like the South Park episode?
[laughs] Yeah.
Yeah. [laughs] It is of course a economic trade relationship is going on regardless of the governance differences. We are also increasingly seeing, especially around markets of increasing return including 5G, people start talking about path dependency, about nonmarket forces, and things like that.
Even in purely economic places we’re also seeing, for example, the European governments start to wake up to the fact that they’re not exactly dealing with market players that any so-called private sector company can become de facto state-owned and accountable maybe only internally.
All these are just purely economic terms that the world is waking up to. This is not only Taiwan bearing this transformation of perspective. As I said, we had very similar discussions in 2014 already, as comprehensively reported by people in the Occupy movement.
You’re not afraid that the destiny of Taiwan will be to be swallowed or choked by this PRC economical power?
Taiwan of course had a land bridge to the continent around 8,500 years ago, but then it submerged into the Strait, and so topologically the islands of Taiwan are islands for at least 8,000 years now since the Neolithic Age.
The next time that the swallowing that you refer to I believe is around one hundred million years in the future, give or take a few million. If we do the sustainability strategy right, maybe there will be intelligent life forms like a hundred million years in the future by then. We won’t worry about it now.
Thank you. Do you know of the Five Star Movement in Italy?
I have a friend who I helped publishing his ideas – that was many years ago – named Federico Pistono, I think one of the early Five Star participants.
You still have contacts with him?
No. We had contact now with the g0v.it, and they are really good at taking g0v ideas and implementing in Italy.
I’m asking for their contacts. The Five Star Movement has been highly criticized for how they use this participative decision-making platforms, which are privately owned. It’s a big topic.
Without criticizing anyone, I would say that all our Gov Tech is based on Civic Tech, and all the work that we do is open content and open source. We believe that this is the only way that we can co-create with fellow liberal democracies on a new mechanism that responds to the societal needs of listening at scale.
If this is proprietary technology, then it’s actually very difficult to work with international partners. It at least make internationalizations difficult. I’m also working with, say, the CONSUL Foundation, starting at Madrid but now in all the Spanish-speaking world, for making something like the CONSUL platform that they work in to work with our listening at scale technologies.
By contributing back to the free software movement, it makes sure that people can appropriate this design in the most appropriate way instead of being dictated in a colonizing way by the original designers, in this case in Taiwan.
Thank you.