The name of our podcast, TechSequences, is really a mashup of two words: technology and consequences. We are fascinated by the consequences, intended or unintended, of the internet and related technologies for the way we live, play, and work. We are your hosts, Leslie Daigle and Alexa Raad. We started our careers at the dawn of the internet and have been friends, colleagues, and comrades in arms for the better part of 20 years. In this podcast, we examine the impact internet-related technologies have made or may make in our lives.
I'm Alexa Raad.
And I'm Leslie Daigle.
Welcome to TechSequences. On December 30th, 2019, a 34-year-old Chinese ophthalmologist named Li Wenliang wrote a message to his medical school alumni on the Chinese messaging app WeChat. This otherwise unremarkable exchange between university alumni would come to mark the beginning of a global public health crisis and define the inadequacy of the response that danger had posed. Dr. Wenliang later said that all he wanted to do was to remind his university classmates to be careful. In the WeChat post, he warned his classmates about a SARS-like illness that he had observed in seven patients who happened to work in the same seafood market in Wuhan. Dr. Wenliang's warning was ignored, and he was silenced by both medical officials and the police. Exactly a month later, the World Health Organization would declare a public health emergency, and just six days later, Dr. Wenliang would succumb to the very same virus he had warned about.
It took another two months before the Trump administration would declare COVID-19 a national health emergency on March 13th, 2020. Historians will not find much to admire in the US response to the COVID-19 crisis, nor the response of many other Western governments. In the US, not only did the government fail to acknowledge the reality and severity of the crisis in time, but it also failed to ensure dissemination of accurate information, as well as the procurement and distribution of essential medical and health supplies. For many in the West, recollections of the early part of 2020 and the pandemic are punctuated by images of shortages of basic supplies like masks and disinfectants, and images of mounting death tolls.
However, Taiwan may well provide the lesson not only in battling a public health crisis, but also in civic engagement, innovation, and digital democracy. Informed by lessons from a 2003 SARS epidemic, Taiwan employed rigorous contact tracing and technology to communicate and solicit innovative ideas. Taiwan also had remarkable transparency on the availability of vital public health supplies like masks. Much of this response can be traced to an avowed conservative anarchist, Taoist, and a fierce champion of digital democracy.
In 2016, at the behest of President Tsai Ing-wen, Audrey Tang became Taiwan's minister in charge of social innovation. Only 35 years old, Audrey was the youngest and the first-ever transgender minister in Taiwan's history. A child prodigy and largely self-taught, Audrey is known as one of the world's top open source software developers and for revitalizing the computer languages Perl and Haskell, as well as for building the online spreadsheet system EtherCalc in collaboration with Dan Bricklin.
In the public sector, Audrey served on Taiwan's National Development Council's Open Data Committee and the 12-year Basic Education Curriculum Committee, and led the country's first e-rulemaking project. In the private sector, Audrey worked as a consultant with Apple on computational linguistics, with Oxford University Press on crowd lexicography, and with Socialtext on social interaction design. In the social sector, Audrey actively contributes to g0v, a vibrant community focusing on creating tools for the civil society with a call to fork the government.
In 2019, Audrey made the list of 100 Global Thinkers published by Foreign Policy Magazine. Audrey is acknowledged globally for innovation and leadership in steering Taiwan's response to the COVID-19 crisis, and for successful integration of civil society, technological innovation, and democratic governance. Welcome, Audrey.
Hello, and good local time, everyone.
So what was so different about Taiwan's response to the COVID crisis?
Well, it's our second time around. We had a SARS epidemic in 2003, so this is SARS 2.0 for us. And the main difference compared to 2003 is that we were ready. In 2003, we had communication breakdown between municipal and central governments. We had to lock down an entire hospital unannounced. We had no idea how to ration the PPE. The healthcare IC card is only rolled out in a very small island of Penghu, not the main Taiwan island. So while we had universal healthcare at that time, we did not have universal broadband, and people were using paper-based cards and so on. It was very chaotic. So people above 30 years old, that includes myself, in Taiwan all remember how bad it was.
So this time we are committed to play the SARS playbook that we established in 2004, and which was institutionalized not just in the laws and so on, but also in yearly drills and really in the civil society's mind. After the SARS epidemic, we work on the civic infrastructure digitally that would prevent something like that from happening again.
And as you describe it, it's so very different from what we experienced here in the West. And how would you say managing the pandemic such as COVID-19 changed the role technology plays in the government, especially in Taiwan?
Well, first of all, I think that's your first time with SARS, so you'll probably do better the next time too. And so, sorry—
Hopefully there's no next time.
There will be SARS 3.0.
There will be. Yes.
Mark my words. Okay. Great.
Yes, sadly.
So, I think technology really plays an assistive role in Taiwan, and I think it elevates people's imagination about technology so that it's not just about industrial applications of natural science, but it could also be social applications. For example, the idea that a daily 2:00 PM ask me anything press conference coupled with a toll-free number 1922, where there was more than 2 million calls last year alone where people can just ask for clarification, but also suggest idea. Or the use of humor over rumor: viral memes that spread essential knowledge about epidemiology and so on.
These are also technologies and the idea of social technology or really democracy as a form of social technology that really took off during the pandemic in Taiwan.
In the US we've had, particularly with COVID, we've had a huge crisis in terms of disinformation around COVID-19. You mentioned that you have an interesting approach to that same problem in Taiwan, which is humor over rumor. What do you mean by that, and how did that work? Can you give us some examples?
Certainly. So we counter the infodemic with no takedowns because Taiwan, according to the CIVICUS Monitor, a human rights watch group, is the only jurisdiction in all of Asia that has a completely free and open society in terms of freedom of the press, assembly, and so on.
So while many other jurisdictions in our vicinity resorted to, I don't know, censorship, harmonization, or some other ways to deal with the infodemic, which is defined by WHO as, and I quote, "Too much information including false or misleading information during a disease outbreak." End of quote. We solved this TMI problem using memes. And memes, we found are really, really potent if we design such that it makes fun of the person making the meme, not making fun of any ethnic group or any part of the society, so that all parts of society will be able to then remix and share this meme to their own benefit.
For example, there was a physical distancing poster, not by our Minister of Health and Welfare, but rather by the ministry's participation officer, a team of people charged to engage hashtags, but not featuring the officer, but featuring the dog that lives with the officer, which is a very cute Shiba Inu. And this very cute Shiba dog poses like the Doge meme and shows that, and I quote, "When you're indoor, keep three Shibas away or wear a mask." "If you're outdoors, keep two Shibas away or wear a mask." So it's all good fun and people spread it like wildfire.
And then when we want to make sure that people wear the mask, we put the Shiba's foot into her mouth and take a photo of that and say, "The mask prevents you from touching your face with your own unwashed hands." Again, it appeals to rational self-interest, and it's just so very cute that people just share it both digitally and also on posters.
I assume it's also much more memorable, isn't it? The meme.
It's not just memorable. The point is that it's co-creative. People volunteer to translate it to just like internet memes, right? Use it outside its original design and things like that. So it has a much higher basic reproduction rate, I guess, compared to press releases or press conferences and things like that.
So you actually use the viral approach to it. I mean, you use the viral part of it to your own advantage.
That's correct.
But it's also less combative and less... It, it plays to people's good sense and makes them part of the solution, not just, "You must do this."
And divisive.
Yeah, that's the Taoist part, right? If people are much more willing to co-create and innovate together in social innovation, then it's everyone's business with everyone's help. And when you ask people on the street of Taiwan who is responsible for the very successful counter pandemic effort, they're like, "Of course, it's us, the people. The government... they do a little bit, but it's mostly the people," they would say.
So is it fair to say that you're a fierce proponent of participatory democracy and collaboration? And, assuming it is fair to say that, what are some of the technologies that you're optimistic about or have experimented with?
Sure. So I call the spaces that we design pro-social media. So of course, social media could be antisocial. Of course, in the advanced democratic country like the US, you don't have that, but in our nearby jurisdictions, there's a lot of conspiracy theories, incivility, and polarization on social media. And so what we're seeing is that when we design the space very carefully such that it doesn't pay to troll, like troll control, right? It doesn't pay to troll if, for example, you have no reply button.
For example, if you have a real-time visualization based on upvotes and downvotes using K-means clustering to find similar sentiments, using principal component analysis to find the most divisive, but also the most unifying sentiments and so on, then without any exception for all the controversial matters, ranging from UberX in the so-called sharing or gig economy, or Airbnb, or really anything emerging, self-driving vehicles or anything like that, we always get a point where people find out via the visualization that most of them agree with most of their neighbors on most of the points.
So people's idea about we being a polity get flipped when you design a space for pro-social interaction. And this is actually the design that the PTT, sometime called the Taiwanese equivalent of Reddit, took when triaging Dr.
Li Wenliang's message. So when PTT people upvoted and triaged the message and so on, they were very effective in just surfacing the signal, not the noise, and that's partly because PTT doesn't have any single advertiser. It doesn't have any single shareholders. It's a state-subsidized, National Taiwan University-run, Taiwan Academic Network pet project — by a few students in the beginning, but now a lot of students — in an open source, open governance manner for the past 25 years.
So it's a firm kind of bedrock of our social sector that is well understood by at least two generations of innovators, and that's what enabled us to triage that message so that we began health inspections for all passengers coming in from Wuhan the very next day of Dr. Li Wenliang's message, which is at the night of December 31st, 2019.
Your, the example that you mentioned, sort of the Taiwanese equivalent of Reddit, you said that it does not have a profit motive, I understand. Right? So the business model. This is what we're struggling with in the West with the social media platforms and some of the big tech, in that their whole business model is around a profit motive, is around user engagement, which of course, in a disinformation sort of laden society, is all about getting that user engaged and disseminating some of these more harmful memes.
So am I to understand, you've got a very, very interesting philosophy about not just technology, but also about government. So can you, A, first talk about that philosophy as a conservative anarchist, and two, if, I'm sorry to make this a more complicated question, do you think that what we have in the West, the way that our social media is set up is wrong? That these business models are harmful?
Well, there's more Facebook accounts in Taiwan than there are people in Taiwan. So it's not like Taiwanese people don't use Facebook. It's just we don't use Facebook for the purpose of the public sector agenda setting, deliberation on policies, right? I mean, there is room for the nightlife district for very loud nightclubs that people have to shout to get heard, where addictive drink is served, private bouncers are abound, and things like that. It, it's just you're not going to run your town hall there. I'm not saying that nightlife district is bad.
Right. That's a very vivid image.
So I think the philosophy really is to make sure that we discover shared values out of the different positions without any form of coercion. That's the conservative part. Lower C conservative, meaning that we're not harming the traditions of any of the 20 national languages, and therefore the many cultures in Taiwan, in the name of progress of any one particular culture. So that's the most important part. And the second part is that we need to deliver innovations that works for everyone, that leaves no one behind based on those shared values.
So once, for example, we had a same shared value about getting as much people as possible wearing mask and washing their hands, thanks to the very cute Shiba Inu, we did not, for example, use mobile payments to do rationing. We instead used the universal health IC card in local pharmacies, and that's because the universal healthcare covers immigrant workers also.
Covers very young persons also, covers people with disabilities and with existing pharmacy support groups and social workers. People know exactly how to renew their prescription, pharmacy drugs, like, recurring fashion. So we just piggyback on that system because we trust the local community to support themselves if they know exactly what the interaction would be.
Imagine if we use instead the ATM or the mobile payments. Both are considerably easier to manage actually because they already have this existing payment authentication system. That will actually leave a lot of people behind, and in many rural or remote areas, maybe we don't have three-quarters of people building that sort of habit of mobile payment or ATM use, and in which case, we will not reduce the R-value of this shared value of pandemic prevention. So maximal inclusion, I think that's also important, not just participation.
So a lot of what you're describing is, I won't say it's particular to Taiwan, but it is certainly different than most of the United States.
And, but I have to say, I live in Vermont in the United States, which is a very rural state. I think it's the second smallest population of the 50 states. And it has a governor who was very on top of doing the right thing for the state from the get-go, including having daily press briefings, "Ask Me Anything." And, and we also had a lot much lower case rate here, I mean, partly 'cause we're so spread out, but partly because some of the principles that you're outlining were applied in a very different fashion. But I just wanna sort of highlight that to say that, you know, these really are, you are illustrating the important principles, no matter how they get implemented in different parts of the world.
But I wonder if some of the critics might say, "Well, okay, you know, number one, Taiwan is much smaller. You're dealing with a much more complex system like, you know, the United States, multiple states where you can't enforce a uniform." For example, contact tracing here, every state had their own type of app and their own level of permission set. And so I wonder if folks are gonna bring that up as a criticism as well as saying, "Well, you know, there's a culture element, too." What do you say to that?
Well, I mean, I've played the simulation game, Plague Inc., Plague Incorporated. And so I'm not a professional epidemiologist. I just play the video game. It's not like the epidemiologists at the WHO with the gaming company.
But in Plague Inc., the cure mode, I would definitely say that Taiwan isn't a place with particular advantage. With 23 million, and in our not just city, but also some rural areas, we still have the highest population density in our vicinity certainly, but also among the most dense packed on Earth. And we, just when Dr. Li Wenliang was posting the message, I think we had the most kind of human-to-human traffic with the PRC for business travels and things like that. So the initial models definitely predict that Taiwan will be the worst hit place just after the PRC and Wuhan, right?
So I don't think we're playing the easy mode, so to speak, to the critiques. But I would definitely say having a experience in 2003 I think made all the difference because it made shared value communication very, very easy. People had a same memory of people rushing to buy PPEs and not getting the PPEs. So anything that ameliorates that can be communicated very easily, and we can iterate very fast now that we know that people have the same values. So I think after this pandemic, for example, the culture around mask use will probably also change for the US. So for the next time around, it will actually be much easier.
Well, right now we're all rushing to the gas station to fill out our cars. Not me, I have no gas, but yeah, we... The rush for various—
But that's a different problem.
That's a different problem.
So you have said that of thinking about government, which is centralized, we should instead reframe it as a question of governance. For example, like the governance model for the internet, where there is no central government, rather a series of interlocking mechanisms for allowing for multi-stakeholder involvement. How close is Taiwan's government to this model?
Well, maybe not as close as Switzerland is for this model, which also had a very complex interlocking mechanism for intergenerational, cross-cultural, really trans-cultural conversation about democracy and direct participatory democracy. But we're getting there.
I think the main insight that the internet brings is that the government should work with the people, not for the people, and sometimes after the people. That is to say, when the social innovators discover something that's genuinely good, the government should act as the RFC editors and the RFC editor community to amplify the rough consensus, or as I explain it to my fellow ministers, good enough consensus, so that people can actually innovate without first getting bogged down to the very fine consensus or getting bogged down to the top-down enforcement measures for those very fine consensus, right? So I think the point here is just to relax our expectation of what consensus means in a governance setting so that with something that's more or less good enough, then we just work on the running code in this case, well, legal code or norms.
Doesn't that presume that you have an informed electorate, though? Because one of the problems, certainly in a democracy is that if the electorate isn't informed, or if they're easily manipulated, like some section of the electorate was in 2016, you could have secure ballot boxes, you could have the most, the best infrastructure, but your problem is this electorate that in a participatory democracy could in fact vote against their own interests.
Well, the main issue that I see is the very limiting bit rate of the original voting design, which is I keep referring to democracy as a form of social technology because it could also use some bandwidth upgrading, right? With the ballot box, which you just mentioned, that's essentially, what, three bits per person every four years?
And it's very limited in terms of preference expression and so on. And before the universal broadband, any advance in digital democracy could be seen as elitist for excluding the people who don't have the broadband bidirectional communication and so on. So that's definitely a prerequisite, right? If you have universal broadband, if like in Taiwan, I publicly say that any place in Taiwan, even top of Taiwan, almost 4,000 meters, you're guaranteed to have two megabits per second for just 16 US dollars per month for no limits on your bandwidth use and so on. If you don't, it's my fault, like personally my fault, and people hold me to account, right?
There was a person who just emailed me saying, "It took me half a day to send this email from this quarantine place near the Beitou Mountains. You promised human right. Well, during those 14 days, I have no human rights," and so on. It was a veritable rant.
After just a couple weeks, we work with the telecom company and the National Communications Commission to set up a tower there. So problem solved. Of course, by that time, he's already out of quarantine. But he made a point of driving back to measure using speed test, and then posting on social media. So that's how accountable we are. And once we, right, once we have that, then of course the bedrock of digital democracy can actually grow because people would not make this exclusionary argument.
And that's a radical transparency, what you just described. And radical and immediate transparency.
So if you were advising the US government with regards to digital strategy and even the role of big tech, what issues would you prioritize and what would you advise?
Well, interestingly, I am part of the curriculum on the crowd law for Congress, or congress.crowd.law. If you go to that website, I think the crowd law interviews, the first one is yours truly. So I actually—
—did make some advice.
Excellent.
So I think the idea, very simply put, is that we need to, as I mentioned, work with the people, to engage with the public, to improve the quality and legitimacy of the entire governance system. So we're not saying that, hey, just use online participation in the place of face-to-face participation. I'm not saying that. I'm saying using online participation and learn about internet governance as a way to inspire new possibilities that augments or assists the existing kind of physical face-to-face town hall process.
And it will radically enhance the level of information, not just in the legislative or the regulation-making process, but really in responding to any emergent situations. As I mentioned, 2 million phone calls, that's a lot of bitrate uplink really from the people closest to the pain, empowered to report whatever is happening today.
So there was, for example, young boy that called saying, "You ration our mask. All I get is pink medical mask. I don't get to pick the color, but all the boys on my class have navy blue ones. I don't want to wear pink to school." And then the very next day, the participation officer suggested all the medical officers wore pink mask to show solidarity. And the participation officer even told the minister, Chen Shih-chung, that he should share publicly that Pink Panther was his childhood hero. And which was true, and he did share it.
And so the boy become the most hip boy in the class, where only he had the color that hero and hero's film wear, right? So that's a way to enhance the quality. And people, as you observed, really find this kind of non-divisive communication, really caring communication, empathy-based communication. That's also a core part of this open multi-stakeholder process.
It's empowering because it really, you know, it brings everybody on board, and this is our problem to solve. It's not somebody else's.
So I have to believe that a lot of your views are informed by just your background. And, and researching your background, I mean, it is, it's stuff for a Hollywood movie. You know, drop out at 14, decided to teach yourself. Worked with Apple on Siri, and asked to be paid in Bitcoin back in what, 2014? If only we had thought of negotiating that into our employment agreements. There's just so much. The youngest minister in Taiwan. Does that in effect, does your really interesting sort of varied background, does it really inform a lot of your sort of ideas on governance and technology?
Yeah. I think it enabled me to take all the sides. Being a high school dropout, for example, I don't take the side of well-educated people, well-informed people, right? And having gone through two puberties, I don't have this idea that half a population is more similar to me and half population less similar to me. I don't have that. And it goes on, right?
It also applies to kind of partisanship. I don't belong to any particular party. The only party that I supported was the Very Happy Party, the unstoppable party of a few random YouTubers, and they just freshly dissolved. But anyway, the point is that if we take all the sides, if we say very publicly that if I can't empathize with your point of argument, then it's my fault. It's not your fault.
Then it enable us to build shared values much more easily, and allows us to kind of hum, right, in a frequency that would resonate with the room. Humming is also something I learned from the internet's governance community.
That's right. That's right. I wonder if what you're saying is that by labeling ourselves in a particular way, then we are then in a way doomed to act in the norms of that particular tribe or that particular way, which then makes it a lot more easier for us to engage in conflict because it's us versus them. Is that a good way of putting it?
Yeah. So I would say that I have experienced dropping out of high school, but I'm not labeling myself like I am a high school dropout, right?
I said I have experienced two puberties, but I'm not saying that I'm a man in the second, I'm a woman on the other. I'm not saying that. So having experiences is fine because people can have a multitude of overlapping experiences. But limiting oneself to just a taste of a slice of the total possible experience, that is what prevents this kind of shared understanding to build.
Love it. What a fascinating way of thinking. Yep, and in a, in a different context earlier this week, I found myself observing that, you know, the real power of the multi-stakeholder approach that has been used in internet governance is when you, when you know you are all coming to solve the same problem, and you're bringing the different perspectives to bear so that they're accounted for in the solution of the problem, not just so that you are beating each other over the head with, "My way must work." "No, my way must work." That's not it at all.
What tech- I mean, there are folks that are very concerned about technologies like AI. Elon Musk has raised the alarm about — Stephen Hawking, same thing — about the potential horrible consequences of AI. Are there techn- do you agree, Number One, and are there technologies that you, you're concerned about, that give you pause?
Well, Elon Musk just raised alarm about the consequence of climate emergency of Bitcoin mining, which is great. Thanks him for doing that. And so I think the externalities of technology, of course, is now being discussed a lot, both positive and very negative ones. And I think the point here is that if we make sure that the technologists know that we're kind of literally playing with fire, and in terms of AI, that's doubly true, because AI is batch processing of cognitive functions, much like fire is batch processing of the digestive functions. Of course, it builds civilization, but fire also destroys entire cities, even entire civilizations.
But a solution is not to ban the use of fire and limit it to just a few practitioners. Rather, it's teaching responsible fire use at a tender age of maybe seven years old. It's called cooking class, by the way, and sharing the recipes and so on. And of course, hiring professional fire-making people to test every tunnel, right, to improve our building inspection rules and so on. And so the society learned to live with fire, and that's how civilization is built.
So I call AI assistive intelligence or augmented collective intelligence for that reason. For if we don't keep remind ourself that, of course, there's a real chance for it to become authoritarian intelligence, where power is taken from the edges into some new center. And of course, that would be detrimental, just as it would be for fire.
Well, it's been a fascinating discussion, and I have to say for myself, it's been particularly delightful to hear sort of positive and constructive views of where we can go from here with technology and technology working for people, and people working better together. So thank you so much for joining us. Thank you so much.
Thank you, and thank you for making the internet possible. Live long and prosper.
Live long and prosper.
Thanks for listening to this TechSequences podcast. We are Leslie Daigle and Alexa Raad. You can reach us by email, techsequences@techsequences.org. We'd love to hear from you to know what you thought about this episode or ideas for future episodes. TechSequences, follow us on Twitter and Facebook, and subscribe through your favorite podcasting service.