It’s not just me. Any public servant can now do that. The culture of doing a side job that enable you to connect more with the social sector, that then empower your main day job work by bringing new fresh perspective, that needs time to grow. That culture is not yet the norm in Taiwan.
10 years. [laughs] It’s just like designing a K-12 curriculum. You have to wait for 12 years, for that to take effect. It’s like art. There’s no speeding up.
My experience in Taiwan, 30 years ago, Taiwan was still under semi dictatorship. The Martial Law was still lifted, being lifted, and so on. We went through this whole decade of gradually having more freedom of assembly, freedom of speech, and things like that.
A lot of people, especially senior people, still have this tendency of trusting the authority to make all the, not just decisions, but also agenda setting and problem definition.
It is the norm around our part of the world in the East Asian context. People care a lot more about social harmony than individualized expression. Taiwan is somewhat weird in the sense that we keep this common understanding culture, but still managed to legalize marriage equality and so on.
That’s only by figuring out a way together that legalized the bylaws but not the in-laws. We really have to walk a very fine balance between the different generational expectations, even more so for other jurisdictions around us.
My main observation is the public service there, even when they want to innovate, they are burdened by the social expectations for them to act essentially as arbiters and not as facilitators. That is an extra burden on them that is very difficult to shake off. That’s my observation. That’s the drawback part.
The good part, of course, is now public service nowadays really understood that there are things, for example, truly cross-border issues like disinformation, social media abuse, but also public health issues, and also, of course, climate.
Those are things that the governments really cannot take a local arbiter’s role any more. They have to at least give in somewhat to collaborative governance. Maybe the best thing is these global problems, because without those, it’s almost impossible to install a collaborative governance culture into highly authoritarian societies.
Now some part of them at least have to start shifting their culture this way. That may be a silver lining. I’m not saying climate change is a good thing. I’m saying it’s having good effect on many governance systems.
I think there’s plenty of public servants that are system-focused. When it’s actually kind of a criteria if you want to get into senior leadership, you have to be a structural systems thinker, because in a senior leadership position all you deal with day to day are wicked problems. If you’re not a systems thinker you don’t survive for very long, so that’s the thing.
I’m talking about liberal democracies, of course. [laughs] In any case, what I’m getting at is I think it’s not a lack of systems thinking, I think it’s the lack of time for the outside, for the social sector, and small, medium MSMEs.
Everybody but the largest lobbyists and journalists to have a access of the context, the why of policymaking. I think that’s the main thing that’s lacking, because if you only give out done policies for the public, of course all they can do is to organize protests.
If you share the entire policymaking context, then everybody can become a cocreator, even if they’re unhappy with you. If they don’t want to cooperate with you, at least they can collaborate with what you have done.
That kind of culture change, this kind of open innovation, is what every government can already do just by adopting a creative commons license, an open government data license, it’s as simple as that.
It’s a good idea even in authoritarian societies, like with the branding of social innovation. Nobody is against that. I think then it creates a circle of what we call working groups, or special interest groups around any particular sustainable goal that can then serve as collaborators to the collaborative governance system.
I don’t think it’s a good idea to hire them all into the government proper, it may be a good idea to kind of invite fellows to try for a while, or to send interns into each other’s camps, and so on. Some kind of circulation is good, but permanent employment by the government for all the social innovators, I think that again, destroys the diversity.
Just go ahead.
The best thing of my work as a transgender in the cabinet, is that I didn’t receive special treatment, it’s all the same. That I think is the best I can say about Taiwan’s public service, is that people simply don’t care much. That’s also my experience in the early Internet community.
When I entered Internet community in 1993, was 12 years old, I didn’t specifically mention any gender, and Internet community is fine with it. The computer, the algorithm, your compilers, don’t are about your gender. [laughs]
What they care is your volunteer contributions, what are common values, not stereotypes or labels, those don’t even make any sense in the early Internet. There’s simply no bandwidth to transmit these kind of things.
Therefore, because I kind of spend my adolescence on the Internet, I never felt that I must choose between being only boy, and only a girl. Physically I have gone through two puberties, I can empathize with peoples’ experience more.
That’s one level, but on the expression level, it just gives me a wider range instead of saying that I must choose between stereotypes. That’s the same in Internet culture as the culture in the Taiwan public service.
That’s all I want to say about it, I think it’s very symbolic that we pass marriage equality on the International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia, Biphobia, because then gender inclusivity, it’s not just about marriage equality, but it’s about diversity and equality in all walks of life.
If you go to my Twitter, I said asterisk/asterisk, as in whatever/whatever. It’s a very techie humor, because when you are making a download request from a browser to a server, the browser sends, “Accept what and what?” Some browser accept JavaScript. Some browser accept other computer languages.
The header called “Accept: / “ means that anything I can work with. What’s important here is not which pronouns you use, but the experience that we have discussed about those pronouns.
I met a Hebrew journalist that found it really, really difficult because it’s impossible in Hebrew to avoid the use of gender. They don’t only have gendered nouns, but also gendered verbs for everything. When they finally wrote about me, they alternated he and she every other pronoun, which creates an interesting cadence in Hebrew that I very much enjoyed.
I’m not just non-binary. I’m really whatever, so do whatever.
In addition to those law changes, of course, in Taiwan we just had our very large LGBTIQ+ Pride, but also a transgender parade the day before. Our cabinet-level youth council also proposed about a gender-inclusive bathroom program.
All those things gets rolled out really quickly, partly because all the 12 ministries in the Social Innovation plan now has two or so social entrepreneurs as their reverse mentors.
We have the younger people, who are much more at ease with designing new cultural norms, informing their mentees, that’s ministers, like a minister of education, saying that if we design this way it will not divide the society, everybody will think that people who have different needs can use it more, and things like that.
Basically, once the young people figure the norms out the elderly people, as I have stressed again, should look at the visibility criteria and implement it well, because that’s what the young people don’t have experience about.
Within a year, now more than half of the colleges and universities in Taiwan have then implemented the gender-inclusive bathroom guidelines by the minister of internal affairs, with the guidance of their reverse mentor, as well.
This cabinet-level youth council is a really good design for not only transgender, but also anything intersectional, indigenous, and so on. All the marginalized people can find their voice within the youth council and then have the premier say, “OK, these are good directions, so why don’t the reverse mentees of that minister just go ahead and implement it?”
It’s one future. Each of us brings a version of future through us to the present, but the idea of plurality means there’s many possible futures.
I have no illusions about digital as a force of good. It’s a force of amplification. If you start with plurality, it amplify plurality. If you start with singularity, it is amplifying singularity. If you start with liberal democracy, it emphasizes liberalism, but if it is about surveillance capitalism or surveillance state it amplify those, as well.
I wouldn’t say that this is the only future. All the different futures are being amplified equally. The main point here is that which starting direction you want to go, instead of being caught in arbitrary linear metrics like the short-term GDP.
I’m fine with “20 years down the road” GDP. That usually aligns with all the social and environmental incentives, but if you are measuring GDP by the month or by the quarter, then it actually creates a kind of perverse short-term gain versus long-term commons issue, which is what got us into climate change in the first place.
In any case, that’s the kind of point I want to make.
Globally, that means that instead of guessing your micro expressions, I could be looking at your micro expressions. [laughs] Instead of guessing and using psychological projection to feel out each other’s theory of mind.
With 5G and 10 gigabit backbone it’s then approaching what our brain is actually receiving from our sensorimotor systems, which is roughly 10 gigabits per second, which is the bandwidth of Neo’s “Matrix’ connection. [laughs]
With that, then we can view co-presence. Nowadays it’s not only because two-dimensionality, but mostly because the lack of bandwidth we understand this is a simulacra of what your true state is. That creates all sort of issues, not the least manufactured addiction representations on social media, but many other things, as well.
With 10 years down the line most of the countries that rolled out 10 gigabit and 5G backbones will enjoy true proximity, meaning that they will feel socially close, not just in transferring movies, but also in real-time interactions, more directly following each other’s gaze, and so on.
This kind of psychological proximity, back to the talking and listening part, instead of a simulated, asynchronous, or pseudo-asynchronous part, will redefine communication as we know, because currently it’s still segregated between F2F and non-F2F modes. 10 years down the line these two modes will merge.
Let me just quote again Leonard Cohen, “There’s a crack in everything and that’s how the light gets in.” The crack, that is for example the subpar quality we’re having in this video conference, is what motivates our infrastructure work, what motivates our social innovation work.
As long as there are still gaps in communication, I think there’s a reason for public sector to continue to exist to innovate with the people, not for the people, with the people, and that’s how the light gets in.
OK.
Mm-hmm.
A day abroad?
Sorry, but did you send that in the outline?
