That's partly because in Taiwan, democracy is a relatively new thing. We first started the direct presidential election in 1996. That's already after the World Wide Web.
When designing our democracy, we put a lot of emphasis on not just the once-every-four-year or every-two-year voting, but also on participatory budgeting, our referendums, our sandbox applications, presidential hackathon, and many continuous democracy, a deliberative democracy.
The more that people participate in these forums, the more people become inoculated against the propaganda from the autocracies, because the propaganda was always about that democracy only leads to chaos and only authoritarian models can respond to societal challenges.
By practicing democracy, everybody can see that democracy can deliver.
Indeed. In this regard, Taiwan and Ukraine are in a similar situation, that's to say in the frontline, and standing firm against all the attacks. Last August, a couple weeks before Taiwan's moda, Ministry of Digital Affairs, was founded, we were subject to one of the largest denial of service attacks ever.
23 times in a day compared to the previous peak. This is a huge amount of attack. It's not just cyber attack, but it's also in tandem with disinformation, manipulation of information to try to portray, as I mentioned, that democracy only leads to chaos.
We successfully counter against that, engaging the Web3 community using InterPlanetary File System, or IPFS, so people from, say, Ukraine or anywhere in the world can donate spare hard disk and spare bandwidth to help our ministries back up our website to keep the website available.
This is not unlike the help from the cryptocurrency community to Ukraine in the beginning of the war and throughout the war. Engaging this borderless community, enhancing the cyber security, while developing the necessary cryptographic collaboration to allow us, for example, for me to be recognized as a e-resident of Ukraine and you vice versa.
This is very important, both economically and also cybersecurity-wise, so that we do not have to, say, reinvent the wheel, but can instead jointly defend against attacks on our common infrastructure.
Since I was a young child, I've always known that the government of Taiwan insists that broadband is a human right. This is important, because through digital infrastructure, we reduce the cost for private sector and the social sector to come up with new technologies.
Nowadays, our network infrastructure allows anyone to broadcast live from Jade Mountain, Taiwan's highest peak. It also safeguards freedom and openness of expression. The other thing that the state does is that it recognizes and subsidizes the digital public spaces, but without governmental control.
The largest Taiwanese online bulletin board system for 25 years now, the forum PTT, which is like Reddit in the US, is entirely run within the Taiwan Academic network. It's free software, it's governed by its participants, indeed, by a student club, International Taiwan University.
While the operation cost is subsidized by the university and therefore by the state, it is not that the state has any say in the freedom of speech, or censorship, or surveillance when it comes to that forum. Because it has no advertisers and no shareholders, it doesn't serve the interest of surveillance capitalism either.
It is our PTT, for example, that we, before anyone really in the world, detected early 2020, indeed, a day before January 1st, 2020, that there is something going on in Wuhan from Dr. Li Wenliang. Therefore, led to our early pandemic response.
A digital public space that is treated as an infrastructure subsidized but not controlled by the state is also important, in addition to broadband as a human right.
I think you highlighted a very important aspect of Taiwanese politics in that were fundamentally a transcultural, a pluralistic polity. We have 20 national languages, including the sign language now. We recognize emerging equality, the first in Asia.
The political culture in Taiwan is as much as it is about party competition than it is also about finding broad consensus, good enough consensus, things that people can live with, despite our really very different backgrounds.
I understand that many people portray Taiwan along with other East Asian countries as a homogeneous, Confucius-worshipping culture, but it is not like that in Taiwan. We enjoy absolute freedom in terms of religion. Both my grandparents are Catholic, but my dad is a bit of a Taoist. and so on.
This conversation and transcultural co-creation between the different backgrounds that shapes the contemporary Taiwanese culture, and therefore its politics.
Although Taiwan did not have a formal diplomatic relationship with Ukraine, our government wasted no time in complementing the countrywide donation drive by joining international sanctions against Russia.
I think Taiwan and Ukraine stand shoulder-to-shoulder in defending democracy. This is what bonds us together. Our latest collaboration, the #TaiwanCanHelp #FreeTheFuture campaign just started, and the sky truly is the limit.
When the moda was in its planning phases before the war, the plan was for moda to be a motor of digital transformation in the commercial sector. When the situation happened and we have seen the unprovoked brutal invasion from Russia to Ukraine, we immediately adapted our roadmap so that moda, the ministry now, is more about digital resilience for all.
It includes, for example, over this year and next year, 700 non-geostationary satellite receivers in Taiwan and also some abroad, some in fixed places, some in vehicles that's moving.
You probably already know this from first-hand experience, but without high-bandwidth communication to the world during a time of crisis, the world would not know what's actually happening, and propaganda, disinformation, deepfake video, and so on would probably take over the international media landscape.
Keeping communication open, that is the point that we have learned from your experience. We also learned to work with multiple public cloud providers. We engage with Microsoft Azure, Amazon, Google like everyone, and we are also engaging with multiple satellite providers, not to put all our eggs into one basket, so to speak.
Just like earthquake prevention, instead of trying to predict exactly when earthquake would occur, we need to build our buildings and plan our cities with resilience in mind. With this, this clarity does not mean escalation. We're certainly not escalating, and it seems currently that the state of tension is not as high as last August.
With that said, we've received a lot of attention and conversations with not just geopolitical allies in the Indo-Pacific region, but also outside of the region, people who are connected by shared values in cyber security, in protecting freedom of speech online, overcoming online harm, and so on.
Outside of the Indo-Pacific region, because the way we live, and work, and co-create in an open society now, it's not about neighborhood of geopolitical distance, but neighborhood of shared values. In this, we share very closely with Ukraine our values in making sure that digital sphere remains free from the expansionism of autocracies.
Currently, the tension is not that high, and we're not escalating, but we're making all preparation that's needed in case that earthquakes, natural or unnatural, destroy our submarine cables.
As you have demonstrated, I think only with unity against authoritarian expansionism can you truly negotiate and talk as equals. In Taiwan, we are now realizing this more so than ever.
As I mentioned, strategic clarity is not escalation, and we stand ready to have conversations about what cultural, scientific, technological, counter-pandemic, helping on the transparency of the counter-pandemic efforts, about mitigating climate crisis, and many other topics.
To me, the most personal topic I care about is protecting journalism and protecting freedom of speech both online and also in offline gatherings. On these topics, I believe our own experience democratizing from a more authoritarian -- indeed martial-law era -- configuration of society can provide some help, some inspiration perhaps, to the reformers within authoritarian regimes.
Certainly. The number one risk is certainly polarization. If the social media is configured as anti-social media, where it amplifies the retweets, the shares of the messages that drives people to work hatred, towards mutual disbelief, to where app is obscene, like not caring about democratic processes and so on, then it actually amplifying authoritarianism.
On the other hand, if, as I mentioned, in the digital public spaces, we hold ourselves to account as government officials, the rough consensus co-created by people's petitions, by the deliberative democratic town halls, and so on, then the same digital spaces may be repurposed into something that is a pro-social social media. The danger is polarization.
To overcome the danger, we need to commit to build the digital equivalent of town halls, of public parks, of university campuses, of museums, libraries and national parks outlined so as to promote pro-social conversations that furthers democracy. This is every bit as important as the public constructions and infrastructures in other more concrete morbid areas.
Intergenerational solidarity is very important. The young people who are digital natives are like ambassadors, I guess, that helps the digital immigrants, such as me, I migrated when I was 12, to be acquainted with the digital world, which by default knows no borders.
Indeed, people who are aligned value wise, despite their timezone differences, rapidly identify one another and start new projects like Wikipedia and so on that breaks the previous preconceptions of what was possible for working with essentially people you have never met face to face across a large distance.
This is why worldwide co-creation is native to the digital natives. We're very happy that in Taiwan, through lifelong education, through reverse mentorship by young people to the older people in the cabinet, and so on, we've been able to share the wisdom of the elderly generation with the agility of the younger generation together.
I would say that your neighbors are the people who share the same values as you. With the communication infrastructure, with the laptops and notebooks that Taiwan can help provide, I wish that you think beyond the immediate neighborhood, which is, as you said, captured by a feudal era war.
Instead or in addition to that, think about your neighborhood in a worldwide community that really cares about what's happening in Ukraine and your unique experience of both strength and vulnerability is of tremendous importance to the communities worldwide, who would join you in co-creation for a better future together.
Thank you.
Live long and prosper.
Still a hacktivist.
Yeah, definitely. Just like us, they were facing overwhelming odds at the time, but the ideas of societal resilience, that is to say, nonviolent resistance coupled with communication technology — they were defending the TV tower. There was real-time satellite coverage that took the image, the video we just saw, into the living rooms of the world.
Because of that, the world over supported them in their resistance. I would say that it resonated with our own experience in setting up communication resilience for Taiwan.
Freedom is never free. We have to keep innovating to make sure that democracy resonates with not just our people, but also with the democracy network — that is to say, people who believe in democracy and now connected through digital means, so that we're in a sense neighbors, even not on a geopolitical sense, but on the cyberspace. We're joined by shared values.
A couple of years ago, we heard many ideas such as "only authoritarianism top-down social control is able to overcome the pandemic." Nowadays, we know it's not a fact, [laughs] but it's been the rhetoric we've been hearing for quite some time now.
From Taiwan, our work along with Lithuania and many others in the democracy network, is to show that democracy can deliver even better than authoritarian models.
Sure. The moda's call is to enhance the digital resilience for all. By resilience, we mean, for example, communication resilience that enables us to still communicate over satellites even when our submarine cables are cut by large earthquakes, natural, or the societal resilience.
Making sure that the journalists get a fair coverage as well as reasonable pay from the global multinational social media companies to ensure that they could prosper instead of just the global multinational companies dominating social media, taking away their journalists.
