Audrey Tang

Or whatever. Anyone who wants to be an example of somebody else, of course, is holding themselves to an integrity standard. It’s a good thing, psychologically speaking.

For people who believe in that. There’s very similar things of being chosen people in, also, the Chinese culture.

We see this kind of sentiments around the world in different periods of history. In pretty much all these types of cultures it has a unifying effect, of course, but it also enable much more sophisticated morality to ensue.

It’s a formative thing. I wouldn’t say it’s the only way to achieve this higher, more integrated thing, but it’s one of the very valid ways.

The United part is pretty good. The States part, I’m not so sure. [laughs]

My education is from the Project Gutenberg, which is mostly writings before the First World War, when humanity was largely optimistic. That’s my early readings.

I don’t have access to public domain work that’s written after the First World War, because it’s still in copyright.

No matter which culture you’re on, because of this very successful enlightenment project, the world will one day see the same light, generally just from a different perspective.

The united part, I refer to this as the united part, meaning that, despite the different origin, the different states’ interests, the different around position and other relationships for example, the early founding of the US was built on these ideas that people can resolve their different views over time, through a proper procedure and not escalated violence.

It’s a pretty enlightened view of the united part. I don’t know that much about individual states around the US formation, so I wouldn’t comment on that.

I read it, yeah.

That’s right. I remember that.

Internet is not just a way for bi‑directional communications to occur synchronously. It’s like many‑to‑many television or many‑to‑many radio. In a sense, this is why we call it digital convergence. The Internet is also a space.

The thing with the Internet is that copying something is the only way to transmit that on the Internet. On a border between two networks that speak different protocol, that has to interact through the Internet protocol, the only way for me to still carry your message forward is to convert your format into my format and keep this local storing forward, and then forward it to the other hubs down the line.

Copying becomes the norm. Then transmission, actually it’s very hard to imagine transmission without copying. You have to put a lot of DRM or whatever to artificially reduce it to the idea of transmission.

This also means that, traditionally, humans ‑‑ I don’t know about other animals ‑‑ could perceive being in the same space by seeing that we have the same tangible objects around us. That we’re in between the same space, meaning that we can look at the same table, and then we can share the coexistence, the part of space.

Even though, through telephone or through the other communication technologies, we can say, "OK, we’re on the same time." We wouldn’t say we’re in the same room or we’re in the same space.

But because the Internet forces pretty much the copying of everything that’s being brought on, people get this feeling that they’re in the same space, by having the same copy of social objects on their personal computers.

For example, when we’re typing in the same pool of documents, it’s technically, actually a copy on your side and a copy on my side. But because I see a representation of your cursor and you mine, we very easily fall into the illusion that we are in the same space and, literally, on the same page.

That’s something that’s unique, I think, around Internet. It gives the idea of belonging to the same space, even if we are apart in time. I join the Google document and I leave it, and you join one hour after. You will still see that it’s in the same space, and then live across the asynchronicity as if we’re still on the same time, because you will read through what I have written, what we have dialogued and commented, and so on.

Basically continue the time line, personally, and there reflect your inputs into this space.

It’s a dynamic that allows people to build communities that gives the feeling of being in the same time and in the same space but without having actually to be in the same time or in the same physical space. It was at this coexistence the main application of Internet. It’s a state in itself I would say.

It’s a new governance system that allows people to make collective decisions but without an intermediary system. Of course, Google Docs is itself an intermediary, but we also have ways to make it entirely decentralized. That’s the main effect.

It’s showing that collective action is possible and collective distribution of resources ‑‑ cognitive or not ‑‑ can happen without a hierarchical structure to back it up.

Even the states or the largest private sector companies are also saying that, which is why internal collaboration, a startup, or what we call the refactoring or reformation of visible service is happening around the world because even internally this is also in a much more effective way to break out a silo system.

I wouldn’t say that. What I’ve said is that it’s a more palatable, the more acceptable term for anarchy in this century. People tend to not think you’re weird if you say direct democracy...

Anarchism in this course much more than direct democracy. I, of course, work on direct‑democracy tools, process, playbooks, and so on. To build an anarchistic collective or so, it requires not just the decision‑making part, which is the direct democracy, but also the transparency, the accountability, the general inclusion, and diversity.

It’s an entire link and the participation that direct democracy is just one link of at least four aspects.

Of the American system?

Like constitutionally?

Well I can quote a few observations from Kurt Gödel. I don’t think that would be very productive, though.

Anyway, I think the strengths as I see it is that it’s pretty adaptive. It’s not something that the Constitution itself was seen for much of the history in the US as a living document. There’s a lot of adaptability in each state and even sub‑state governments.

A lot of autonomy, a lot of room for experiments, and a lot of ways for the best experiment to be seen by the other units and by the states so that the federal government plays a role of highlighting the innovations that have been going on in the states and so on. I think that’s a pretty good system.

I don’t know actually. I haven’t participated a lot in the daily level of political activism in the US. I voted in the Paris participation budget, but I haven’t voted in an US one.

After the advent of Internet and even before it had television or radio, there’s a danger of people stereotyping each other and not going through the roots of those values by the symptoms of each other’s values and fragments the public discourse.

I read that because of the gerrymandering, and even in the Twitter sphere, people tend to choose their messages so that it creates a bubble effect so that gradually people...

Right. People reinforce their confirmation bias, which is part of the normal private sphere. Among families there’s always confirmation bias. That’s how families are formed, but because the social media and popular media before that used much of the same words that we use for private‑sphere things like our friends or [laughs] favorites.

These were words that originally only has a meaning on the private sphere and not a public sphere. We then turn it into something of a semi‑public sphere. A lot of those fears gets conflated. Then people tend to take an us‑versus‑them attitude in many of those dimensions. That’s very useful on the private sphere, but then this is actually a private sphere now.

It’s a confusion that’s going on not necessarily just in the US. In the US, I think the polarization and advancement of technology tend to happen first [laughs] just on the virtue of a lot of those new innovations being first introduced by US commons.

We see its most interesting form [laughs] first around US politics and so on before it reaches the rest of the world. I wouldn’t say it’s a weakness. I would say that it’s just a phase in development.

The Taiwan is the forefront of being Taiwan.

That’s a fair question. I still look at the ICANN and IETF as a small dose. I understand that they’re a government only in the sense of a modest stakeholder governance more around how Internet is working. It does work on a radical, transparent, and fully accountable agenda that makes it having on par or even more legitimacy than, say, the United Nations.

It does this by including as much as they could as possible and being radically transparent and being fully participatory. There are people who say this is because that the Internet society only deal with techies, but it’s not true because we have activists. We have journalists. We have a lot of governments’ representatives and so on in the Internet community now.

We can’t just say it’s for techies anymore, but still its integrity is still somewhat high. There’s no sign of whether we can make this model work in the everyday politics just building a park thing which includes children and other stakeholders who would not necessarily be a part of Internet society’s decision‑making.

I still look toward that, but it’s not a straight adaptation.

We take bits and pieces that we know that works in this model and then try to work in the current political system around a different set of stakeholders. This is pretty much what every other similar units around the world is doing.

The GDS in Singapore, in UK the GDS and the PolicyLabs, in France the ETALab, and pretty much everybody that I know who are in this community of bringing the Internet society’s values into traditional governance systems. This loose coalition, I would say, is I think in itself a model stakeholder community. We share stories, tools, and personnel even a lot.

No, we don’t vote. We don’t ever vote. There’s no majority rule.

We deliberate. If we vote, it’s just straw votes to make people rank the priority of the agenda like which need to be talked first. We don’t vote in the...

Yeah. A referendum, of course, is one example. If you had a referendum, it is the idea that the ultimate implementation of majority rule of the common system. It’s not what I mean by direct democracy. It’s certainly one part of direct democracy, but as I said it’s just a voting by itself.