Audrey Tang

Biology. [laughter]

And why is that? Because what the bridging algorithm does is it makes something more prominent. If it's more bridging, it's not making virality go away, it's just making sure that we only produce viral vaccines or viral cures rather than viral hazards.

I see what you mean, yes.

That stems from the upper bound of chasms in our imagination that bridges can cross. If we are now reasonably sure that there is no chasm too wide to build bridges, that argument would not make sense because it just takes longer to build a bridge. But we can always build a bridge, right? Even across a tunnel, whatever.

I think it depends on the competence of everyday citizens and practitioners when it comes to bridge building. And whenever the social divide feels insurmountable or impossible, I would say that it's because our competencies need development, not because there's something fundamentally against this kind of diversity.

It's all that. As I mentioned, as long as the spaces are generative in the sense that it fosters newer bridge-making skills to be demonstrated, then it's a kind of learning space.

Because by definition, bridges are composable. If you bridge community A to B and B to C, it increases the possibility that A and C will also be bridged.

Exactly. Yes. It's conflict-free, replicable data types all the time. I can do natural transformation, but let's not go there. Category theory, right? Exactly. So the homographic movements that the bridge makers do, as long as it's in a space that increases cultural transmissibility, the space itself doesn't need to figure out how to cross the chasm. It just gives rise to more and more modular and composable bridge-making narratives.

I think we sometimes feel a little bit hopeless because the spaces online are not conducive to that composition. Rather, they flatten things, decontextualize things, so that the only things that go across are massively simplified sound bites or dunks, retweets with comments, and things like that.

And when only those things cross the community chasms, these increase the hate of both communities. And so it fosters a kind of connection, but of a negative valence. So that's, I think, the main problem of today's intersocial social media. If we change the algorithm so that only pro-social valence gets viral, I think they are naturally composable.

Many? [laughs]

Well, if you look at how Gov Zero is organized around Slack or IRC or Telegram or whatever, most of the online part is just to capture what's happened in the physical or synchronous spaces, like with VR or Google Meet, so that the newcomers do not need to go through hundreds and hundreds of pages, but rather can join in a productive way. So the online space is just there to make entering the next synchronous meeting or hackathon easier for a newcomer.

It's more like a summarizer than anything. It's not there to replace the synchronous co-production. So something that is anchored in iterative, continuous social co-production, something that is definitely a social object that everybody can just patch, just fix and fork, and so on. I think that is a good space.

And of course, Microsoft now sponsors GitHub, which is another such place. And in both cases, the social co-production and the code co-production, the importance is on lowering the threshold of initial entry and also making each synchronous meeting or hackathon or meetup or whatever composable. And again, it goes back to the initial two pillars we talked about.

Of course, yes. If you check my GitHub profile, it's all green.

Not bad for an active minister.

Of course, the ways to publicly give kudos to someone, to attribute credit in a way that celebrates a community instead of just a hashtag somewhere and so on, all these are important. And I think the great thing about the open source movement is that from the very beginning, it's built upon people who understand how difficult it is to convey positive valence over written media.

With well-known personalities like Linus Torvalds, who publicly repented so that he now only says "hug you" instead of something else. The care people put into online communication is indicative of how easy it is to troll a mailing list, to troll IRC, and so on.

Because of this evolutionary pressure, the open-source community that did not have robust community resilience ended up getting forked. By classic evolution, now we see the outcome of that selection. All the larger communities in the open-source space have some sort of communal resilience.

Of course.

Yeah, Wikipedia is just an excuse for editors and curators and nerds to meet each other.

Increase the ventilation?

Yes, infodemic without takedowns.

Yeah. So during the three years of the pandemic, you could always freely move from Taipei to Tainan. There was no domestic movement restriction. On the other hand, that's because we had one of the strongest border quarantines.

So it's not "no freedom without borders." That doesn't work. The very fact that we can maintain freedom of movement, freedom to play baseball, or whatever during the three years of the pandemic is because we have a very strong border quarantine policy.

In the infodemic, it is equally important to distinguish foreign sources from domestic sources. We usually don't do attributions beyond saying it's foreign, mostly because, well, physically we can see something transmitted through the subsea cables to Taiwan. So we know it's foreign, but how many hops they jump through, we don't know. So it's hard to attribute to a particular regime or jurisdiction.

On the other hand, having this distinction is important because then the freedom of movement or speech or assembly and so on is extended only to residents and citizens, like people who have a claim or have a stake in our polity. We're not blindly saying that everybody else needs to have a vote. This is suicidal to say that. And this is very Ostrom, right? A clear community boundary that is safeguarded recursively across many levels. This is the precondition to this: without lockdown, without takedown, always with a big caveat of except at a border.

Yes. So for example, why the Facebook civil integrity team can implement this kind of advertisement transparency with the incentive of not getting fined by collateral liability is that we have a very robust way to prove that you're a local business or you're a local citizen and so on.

We have the capability of not just a national ID card for universal healthcare, but also the TW Fido or the citizen's digital certificate that is also given to residents. So if you're a resident, you also have two chips, one for your residency card and one for your health card. Even if you're abroad, it is not difficult to prove that you are a Taiwanese resident or a citizen.

So it then becomes easy by simply requiring that you need a local SMS number, basically, which requires this kind of two photo ID to basically identify that you're a resident. It's not without vulnerabilities. For example, a few months back, it was discovered that Hong Kong telecom abused their roaming arrangements or whatever. So you can manufacture SIM cards or eSIM cards from thin air or whatever, but those are exceptions. Once it's discovered, and again, it's for a scam ring. So it's always first discovered there. Then we, of course, clamp down and so on.

So now we can, with reasonable accuracy, say that if you authenticate using SMS or TW FidO or something, we can tell an actor that is domestic versus it is foreign. And so we don't need to do that on the delivery part. It's attributable to the actor.

Yes.

Yes. And that's how our contact tracing works.

That's really the secret of the Taiwanese contact tracing system, is that it only needs an SMS and nothing else.

Our contact tracing is zero-knowledge in the sense of, it's sometimes called oblivious storage.

The way it works is that if you go to a venue like a restaurant during the pandemic, they will print a 15-digit random number embedded in a QR code, but you can also manually send the digit to a well-known number, 1922. You just scan that, and it's an sms: something that appears on your SMS app of choice, and then it says the contact tracing code, 15 digits, this information is for pandemic control only and not to be used for any other purpose. I personally wrote that.

If you press send and show the screen to the restaurant worker, they only learn the 15-digit number, which they already know anyway. They don't have your phone number, but they know you have sent it on this timestamp. But they already know the time anyway, so they don't learn anything about you except for nothing.

They only know you have sent a message to check in, but they don't know anything about you that they don't already know. So it's zero knowledge on the venue. This message is sent to your telecom company and not to the state.

The telecom company already knows your phone number anyway. They actually already know that you're in the vicinity because of geolocation cells. And they don't know what those 15 digits stand for. So again, they don't learn anything about...

They don't know. They just keep this 15-digit random number for 28 days before deleting them. And we did an interpretation with the Ministry of Justice so that these are not subject to wiretapping because these are not communications. This is just a pandemic measure. It's a check-in. So unlike, I will not name names, but many other nearby jurisdictions...

Exactly. Right. So different from pretty much any other East Asian jurisdiction. The law enforcement, if they're investigating a criminal case or whatever, they gain no knowledge.

And so we get to keep this voluntary. At no point was it mandatory. You can always just manually write your contact and put it into a slip of paper that you get into a physical box and so on, which is good for people with no phones or people with seeing difficulties or whatever. So it was always opt-in. But people opt-in only because they know that the state and telecom don't learn anything that they don't already know.

And when there is a community outbreak, of course, the local contact tracer will go to the venue, they will get the 15-digit code, they will send a command to the five major telecoms, and they will recursively send exposure notifications to people who checked in. And at that point, anyone can go to a well-known website and see in the past 28 days which contact tracers in which city have requested access to their check-in.

So it's mutually accountable. So we have transparency, accountability, and voluntary participation. And that is why this system held until the first Omicron, which is unheard of. Most other places fell after the Delta wave.

Yes.

Because the venues don't want the hassle and the privacy breach repercussions. If they don't post a 15-digit random code, which, by the way, are free software, online generators everywhere to generate a 15-digit random code is not rocket science.

If they don't do that, then all the guests will write their phone number on a piece of paper and put it in. They have to destroy it after 28 days. And if they don't take care, the people queuing down the line will see the phone number of the people queuing before them.

Right? Exactly. If I really like the person queuing before me, now I know their number, and no venue would like that in their name. They become liable for everything and gain nothing.

So the voluntary participation by the vendors, I mean, when we decide that, we only say it's mandatory for MRT and high-speed rails and train stations, which are state-controlled or state standard because rolling a 15-digit number is so easy. So I think the first week, 2 million different vendors just generated their own code.

And to register into the database of receiving exposure notifications, all it takes is their SMS number. So if I'm a small vendor, I don't need to file paperwork or something, I just send an SMS to verify that it's actually my shop.