Really?
What kind of collaboration are you looking at?
It’s a thing.
The idea is that it’s still arable land, and they’re still growing plants on it.
I understand that.
I’ve been to the Taromak. It’s an indigenous community doing their own solar, and also some wind and also some water, all renewable self-sufficient powering. They do use a co-op-like structure for it.
It’s called the Taromak, T-A-R-O-M-A-K.
It’s quite close to the city center of Taitung.
Especially in Taitung, there is a strong sense of community renewal, when it comes to not only the Taromak, which is I think Rukai, but in Taitung there’s Amis, Paiwan, Bunun, Puyuma, Kavalan, also Tao — on the island — and so on.
There’s more than 183 different indigenous places. That’s actually easier, because for the ethnic Han changing the land’s purpose from arable to industrial or, as you said, part-time, like timesharing between arable and industrial, it is a very instrumental thing, utilitarian thing.
Exactly.
Exactly, exactly. In the indigenous use, we already have existing laws and regulations that promotes the forming of co-ops, especially labor co-ops. For example, like fixing the electricity setting up, those GST wires and things like that.
If it is a certain percentage, like a majority or something of indigenous people within that co-op, then it qualifies also for an additional types of benefit and so on.
Maybe you can just join one of those co-ops of powering up. There are existing structures like the Homemakers’ Union. They are setting up co-ops for this kind of work. There’s also a social enterprise, the name is 陽光伏特家.
It’s called Sunny Founder. Sunny, as in lots of sun, founder, as in a founder. [laughs] They’re not quite co-op. The idea is like crowdfunding.
You pay upload a bit to own a stake at one of the sites of the solar panels, and you eventually earn back, or if you want, you can also donate to a charity. Instead on one-time donation, you can try to help them to set up those photovoltaic panels, and then of course as a fellow donor you can visit them and share them up.
Either through the Homemakers’ Union front or through the Sunny Founder front that gets you immediate access to this co-op or co-op-like structure. Of course, you can also visit Taromak. [laughs] They’ve got quite a few visitors.
Sure. No worries.
Maybe you can talk to the three, the indigenous part, the co-op part, and also the social enterprise part, and explore whether that feels like an agreeable lifestyle to you, and make your own decisions.
It’s true that in Taiwan we are still at a piloting phase, but that’s also because the photovoltaic arrays along the coast becomes bearable or even competitive only in the past few years. This is a very new thing for all of us, actually for around the world, too.
Nobody knows whether this will turn out to be widely adopted everywhere, or because of Taiwan’s unique landscape, or only applicable in some places where it’s more sunny than others.
It’s a great idea. I don’t think there’s any holes in it.
Yeah. I think they’re quite OK talking in English, too. Especially at Sunny Founder, they’re very eloquent.
No, really happy to contribute to sustainability.
There’s a fair going on.
Every year I go out and give award to the organizations, including companies and public sector organizations, that have bought a lot of products and services from the sustainable suppliers. Those suppliers, including circular economy and things like that, all have to make their impact reports, and so…
This is a way of saying upcycling. Instead of recycling down, we can recycle up. For example, this jacket is made out of like 5 cups worth of coffee bean waste, and also 12 recycled plastic bottles.
Exactly. So sourcing instead of from freshly cut trees or something. Just source from what used to be called waste, but it’s actually upcycling.
It’s mostly the people. The people here, as I mentioned, there’s a lot of different national languages, so the indigenous perspectives, the ethnic Han have at least three or more perspectives and so on.
In order to make progress, it has to be transcultural meaning that we can’t do what some other jurisdiction does, which is to appoint a sector or a certain industry and say, “You know, you’re going to be our bet, and everybody sacrifice for you.”
In Taiwan there’s nothing like that. There’s more than 90 percent small and medium enterprises, and each one work on different cultural perspective. The improvement tends to be truly cross-sectoral.
Definitely.
Yeah, check it out.
Thank you.
Thank you, cheers.
Greetings. Hello. Greetings. Is the sound, and voice — which is the same thing I guess — and video getting through? OK, excellent. That’s awesome.
Yeah, really glad to. We are definitely the future — just a few hours in the future. Feel free to make that trip to the future soon. [laughs]
I think I’ll leave more time to the Q&A than the initial pitch because most of the materials that I will cover is already covered in the written summaries. I do want to try the screen-share thing, just to make sure that…
Sure, of course. Please do. Yeah.
Yeah, I’m wearing an earphone. You can see that it only records when my side has the voice. When Glen was saying anything, there’s no voice here.
Really, I just want to share the cute dog, that’s the only thing I want to share. Do you see a cute dog? If you do, your Apache installation… [laughs]
Let’s get started. This is Zongchai, a Shiba Inu, literally a spokesdog of the Central Epidemic Command Center, the CECC, and the key figure in getting not only the pandemic countered with no lockdown, but also the infodemic countered with no takedown.
When the Zongchai reminds you to wear a mask, the Zongchai uses a very particular way of saying this. This is in Mandarin, but I hope that you can see the dog is putting literally foot in the mouth. This is saying in no unambiguous words that, “Wear a mask to protect yourself from your own unwashed hands.”
This is very powerful, because it appeals to rational self-interest. It works even when there’s no vulnerable people around. It works even if there’s no elderly people around. Had we said anything else about respecting others, this would not have a R value above one, I mean this message.
Because this sets self-interest in a rational way, in a very cute way, it appeals to all political inclinations, to all age groups, and to all nationalities when we translate this. People actually wore a mask and washed their hands, because this is actually in their best interest doing so.
There’s a system doing this, remember to cover your mouth and nose when sneezing, when outdoor, keep two Shiba Inus away from one another, otherwise wear a mask. When indoors, keep three Shiba Inus away from one another, otherwise wear a mask, and so on.
There’s name for this technique. It’s called humor over rumor, and indeed when we work on the counter disinformation work, we are constrained by a lot of people still remembering the martial law, me included. We don’t want to go back to censorship, to administrative takedown, because it’s really bad.
Just like when we counter the pandemic, we don’t want to go to lockdown, because we understood in 2003, when SARS 1.0 was released in Taiwan, there really is [laughs] no good thing that will result from a lockdown for economy and also for the mental health of the citizens.
This time around, we have to do this with no lockdown and takedown. When we detect there’s trending misinformation, we discovered that instead of taking things down, which enrages people – and this misinformation treating outrage anyway, and that will further increase our value, we might as well just use humor.
We started prototyping this humor-over-rumor thing before the pandemic. A few months before the pandemic, our Premier, Su Tseng-chang, the Head of the Cabinet, has always been sharing that there’s a lot of meddling to undermine the democratic process.
