As an independent and an anarchist, it is a very strange question to ask. Even now, I still pride the current government as being led by an independent premier. There’s more members of the cabinet that’s independent than members of cabinet of any party.
This is unique, because it enables us to do much more experimental, much more interesting policy‑based discussions directly with the public that would sometimes be considered against the party lines if the premier or the ruling party is playing too big a role in the administration. I’m happy to serve in an independent, balanced administration, just to start saying.
But with any other parties, you can see my talk’s wisdom in the Radical Transparency website, PDIS.tw. I did talk with KMT MPs such as Jason Shu, who did visit; Chiang Wan-an, who did visit; as did DPP’s Karen Yu.
Also we have Hongsheng Zhao, who is now at NPP now, and the latest ones are with the DPP’s spokesperson. I did talk with pretty much across all the...
This is me, my talk in New York, saying I’m literally from the future, which is 12 hours from the other side of this planet, time‑zone‑speaking. This is where I introduced...
Yeah, that’s my PDF talk. There’s also a panel which we’ll publish later. I did talk with all the parties’ MPs or spokespersons and whatever.
My advice is always the same. Just by speak less and listen more. It’s common sense, but how to listen at scale is something that traditional parties are not very good at. They are very good at speaking at scale. To reach millions of people ‑‑ that’s your specialty.
But how to listen to millions of people, how to get millions of people to listen to each other, it is something that especially Leninist parties are not particularly good at, because information flows in one direction only.
Some parties adapt faster, some slower. But they all need to adapt, more or less. I don’t have any specific recommendations, but I do think parties need to be more fun parties, where everyone [laughs] get to speak and everyone gets listened to, and instead of traditional parties, where they speak but don’t listen.
Are there any more questions?
Well, I’m a conservative anarchist.
Conservative means two things. First, that I do want to conserve the recursive public that’s already working. The IETF ‑‑ the Internet Engineering Task Force, the ICANN ‑‑ all those are anarchistic organizations of multi‑stakeholder approach that exist independent of states but still runs the Internet and runs how Internet governance is being done, despite many countries who want to take it into a more UN‑style, multilateral public.
We do have something to conserve ‑‑ an anarchistic tradition that defines the early Internet and the constitution of the early Internet. If I can work with Taiwan to further the conservation of the recursive public, well, that’s what I do. That’s one of the answers.
The other answer is the conservatism in a more traditional sense, and the idea of there’s a long tradition of civilization. Instead of introducing a disruptive change that will render previous history meaningless, like the so‑called technological singularity for one, or some even more unlikely scenarios.
If you render the previous civilization void, because it would be a new species rising of robots or whatever. Instead of the technological singularity happening, as many fear, many friends of mine in Silicon Valley actually believe that this is happening, that the future doesn’t need humans or whatever.
It is my thought that if together we can listen to each other as each technology comes, blockchain, whatever, we can know what to ask of the technology and as a society to step forward, instead of just a few people stepping forward and excluding other people, eventually render the species into two species.
In this humanistic conservation, kind of conservative way is also why I do want to work as a public servant with the public, to make sure that the civilization as we know it still continues. I do this not out of some public duty or whatever, but because it’s fun.
It is very enjoyable to work on this topic, which was one of my main research subject anyway, so it is good that the Taiwan people pay me to work full‑time with the government. [laughs] I will continue to do this same work regardless of whether I hold an official post or not. Any other questions or thoughts?
Yeah, sure. It is audreyt@ey.gov.tw . That’s my official email. Feel free to ask me anything. I’ll answer publicly.
So, all the transcripts is in https://pdis.nat.gov.tw/ .
I think it’s recorded, right? We will make a transcript, I will send it to all of you so that you can correct typos and whatever, and then after 10 days we’ll just publish a copy of this.
Looking forward to...
I am literally from the future...
...12 hours in the future from the other side of this planet.
I’ll talk a little bit about how pol.is, far from being experimental, is now being done daily, seen as part of the administration’s normal working system for the controversial issues.
This is Dr. Tsai Ing-Wen, our president. I voted for her last year. We’re a very young democracy, 23 million people, and 10 percent of the earth’s marine species.
Dr. Tsai Ing-Wen is, in our sixth presidential election, elected the president of human beings, the human species, us.
I keep mentioning this because both she and I are advocates for animal right. I live with seven cats and two dogs, [laughs] and we do believe that the human species doesn’t have an exclusive privilege on Earth, on Taiwan, or anywhere else.
Thank you. She run a platform of radical transparency, of marriage equality, of sustainability, and things like that, so I’m very happy when she was elected.
This is our first family. They’re literally incorruptible.
You can bribe them with catnips, but they won’t interfere with the human species’ affairs.
The sixth presidential election is also remarkable in that it’s very peaceful, the only peaceful transition in Taiwan’s political history. The previous elections we see 49 percent, 50 percent. We see people unfriending each other after election results. We see a lot of people going to the streets, riots even, in the previous elections, but not this one.
Last January, when the ballot opened, Dr. Tsai won by a landslide. But the previous prime minister is an independent. He’s Simon Chang, previously a director of engineering at Google; Taiwan’s first super computer maker; and he’s independent. He doesn’t have any parties.
The new prime minister, the one that’s still now the prime minister, for a year now, Lin Chuan, is also independent. There are two independent prime ministers. Something that was unthinkable in Taiwan’s history is that the transition is public.
Simon asked all the ministries to publish their checkpoint documents, open data, everything, and upload it to the public Internet for the next cabinet to download as the transition team. I didn’t know I would become part of that cabinet a few months after it assembled, but I still looked at exactly the same documents, so that I can learn what’s going on with the island.
This kind of transparent hand-off is borne out of Simon Chang’s idea that all the ICT systems produced in Taiwan under one million US dollars must be made open data, by default.
That put Taiwan into the top spot in the Global Open Data Index for two years running -- take that with a grain of salt, because it doesn’t measure the impact of anything.
But the societal, the cultural impact, I think is much more important. Dr. Tsai was saying her inauguration speech that we know, before in Taiwan, democracy was about a showdown between two different values. Now it must become a conversation with diverse values.
How did we get there, to this post-party system?
Four years ago, if you pulled a random person off the street on Taiwan and say, "We’re going to move into a cabinet where not only a prime minister is independent, but there is more independent cabinet members than members of any party in the cabinet," they’re like, "You’re crazy."
That has happened because of the Occupy back in 2014. Back in the time, the Sunflower Movement students occupied the parliament. The MPs refused to deliberate a trade service agreement with Beijing, because they think, constitutionally, Beijing is part of Taiwan, or something like that.
In any case, they refused to deliberate on the agreement. The occupiers, far from protesting, did a demonstration in the demo scene sense, meaning we take your parliament, and we’re going to deliberate trade service agreement with half a million people on the street, and show you how we can do it.
This is facilitated by professional deliberators and participated in by 20 NGOs -- the Greens, the Labors, all the people in the NGOs -- and was supported by the g0v civic tech community. This community is very interesting, because our call-to-action is to "fork" the government.
We look at all the government websites that we don’t like that ends in gov.tw, and build a shadow website that ends in g0v.tw, so we solved the discoverability problem. You just look at a government website, change the O to a zero, and get to the shadow government, with open data and everything.
Quite a hack, isn’t it? Also, we released, under Creative Commons Zero, our copyright and everything, so that when the next procurement cycle comes, many of the g0v projects then become the official government websites. That was the movement.
During the Occupy, the g0v civic tech people worked as amplifiers to support the professional deliberators inside and on the streets of the occupied site, so that everyone just speaks naturally, but they’re transcribed. There’s translations, logistics, everything is kept on the open source nervous system, just as Colin described.
It is one of those very rare occupies that, by the end of the three weeks, everybody converged on that set of consensus, which the members of the parliament then bought in. It was a victory instead of being more divergent across time.
Why are there literally hundreds of professionals, like me, who spoke to my clients at the time -- Apple, Oxford University Press, Socialtext -- saying, "OK, I have to take a three-week leave, because the island needs me?"
I think it’s because, I’m 36 now, we are the first generation that enjoyed the freedom of speech after three decades of martial law and dictatorship.
It arrived in 1989, with the personal computers. For us, the personal computer revolution and freedom of speech is the same thing. Our first presidential election in 1996 is also the popularization of the World Wide Web, so many of us worked as campaigners back then.
