Even for fashion workers, for example, like I wear this thing, and I can explain that this is made out of recycled plastic bottles and the coffee bean wastes. It purifies the air, reduce their carbon footprint, and so on, in order to justify why I get to wear this very good-looking clothes.
This applies to all trades of life. This is called circular economy now. Again, this is a great chance for the idea of circular economy to not be something you opt in, but rather something that is the default.
Certainly. For example, in Taiwan, we have the citizens measuring the air quality, and now also, water quality, by themselves.
Instead of a top-down authoritarian intelligence system that monitors the atmosphere, the water quality, agriculture, and so on, people can choose to work with organic farming cooperatives or the farmers that are farming in a much more sustainable fashion through participatory auditing, participatory accountability.
If there are pollutions in the water or in the air and so on, this decentralizes the many of which actually set up by the primary school teachers who are now teaching data stewardship, like GDPR-style concepts.
What’s controllership? What’s portability? These kind of ideas that are just impossible to teach, unless as a student you are a data curator and collector. Instead of media literacy or data literacy we now in Taiwan, starting last year, talk about media competence and data competence.
That is to say, instead of being a consumer, we become a producer, so that we can collectively make initiatives. Like there was a young person, only 16 years old, a couple years ago when she made a citizen’s initiative to ban all the plastic straws and other single-use utensils from our national identity drink, the bubble tea.
This is important, and she immediately collected more than 5,000 signatures. When we met her and asked, “Why did you start this?” she says, “It’s my civics teacher’s assignment.”
She really started a movement, and we really did ban the plastic straws for indoor drinking, and eventually for taking out as well, and worked on more circular materials that biodegrades and is carbon emission-friendly and things like that.
I can have many, many anecdotes, but this shows that, even before they have the right to vote, they already are having a very positive impact to the society.
Wang Hsuan-ju is the name. She is now a councilmember of our Open Government National Action Plan Task Force, but she’s only 19 at the moment.
I think one of the main contribution of vTaiwan is that it shows that, even in a hotly-debated topic, like Uber and so on, even with tens of thousands of people, some with very polarized ideas, with the right design, people can see the common value, despite their initially different positions.
VTaiwan was more like a research project. It’s still being run by the social sector. It’s currently being used to deliberate, for example, the Open Parliament Action Plan, and our National Action Plan may be also be deliberated on vTaiwan. That’s still being discussed.
More and more, this kind of crowdsourcing agenda, or just collective intelligence, or crowd law, or people-powered – many different names – are being picked up by professional public servants. We now, instead of vTaiwan showcasing one Polis conversation or the other, we have now polis.gov.tw, which is a government infrastructure.
We use it for the consultation on the ocean policy, on the open mountaineering policy, on all sort of cross-ministerial policy, even diplomatic. If you look for the digital dialog with the AIT, the American de facto embassy, then that we hold four dialogs on Polis, using the same method as vTaiwan, but extending beyond vTaiwan, because it’s now being run by professional diplomats.
I would say that vTaiwan serve as the inspiring model, but the action may not be only taken on vTaiwan, which remains in the social sector. The private sector, the public sector, we are also learning the same tools that vTaiwan pioneered.
To me, equality means in Taiwan that anyone anywhere in Taiwan have the same right to communicate to health and to learn. These are the fundamental guarantees that the public sector makes to its people.
If anywhere in Taiwan you do not have the capacity to participate with this kind of live streaming or video conferencing that we’re having, then it’s my fault personally. The same applies to the healthcare, which covers 99.99 percent of not just citizen, but also residents.
It’s a single-payer system, so people who show any symptom, it is actually cheaper and easier for them to get a mask and go to a clinic than to pay for a test by themselves, which is unimaginable unless you have a truly socialist, single-payer healthcare system.
The same goes for learning as well. For distance learning, for the learning by doing, by community place-making, things like that, we must ensure that everywhere in Taiwan, people have the same right to learn.
Even in alternative, like Valdev-Schüler, the Montessori system, and things like that, they all have the equal opportunity to work out their own curriculum ideas. I think of equality meaning mainly in these three domains.
Why I stressed learning, health, and communication is because they are all non-rivals relationships. If I am more healthy, if I’m more resistant to COVID, it also means that my neighbors are more resistant.
My being more healthy does not deprive my neighbors’ healthiness. Actually, it improves their healthiness. If I am more able to create Creative Commons material, or to write free software, it does not take away anything from my neighbor.
Actually, they can learn much more easily, because there’s more material to learn, like from OpenStreetMap and Wikipedia. If I have broadband access, then my neighbor actually can benefit from that as well, because it’s likely that I will speak out to represent my neighborhood, or to at least let other people from far away see what my neighborhood is like.
It also improves the participation rights for my community as well. In a sense, these three domains gets better when it’s more equal and more innovative, too. These are open innovation domains of non-rival is good.
I would say definitely it’s communication. Once you have broadband as a human right, once you have equal access to online digital democracy as a human right, even if the health situation or the learning situation is less equal in that neighborhood – maybe it’s indigenous, rural, or remote island – chances are, through a broadband, you can find an assistive intelligence, an AI that translates for you.
Chances are that you can join a learning group online. Chances are that you can receive tele-healthcare from an experienced doctor or nurse who lives physically far away. I think the communication right is the most fundamental of the three.
I think what they their contribution is about striking a balance and then innovate based on that balance of something that’s not left-wing, not right-wing, but what I call as up-wing. That is to say, instead of accepting a zero-sum thing between state control on one side and surveillance capitalism on the other, RadicalxChange said, “Let’s design as a social sector a set of mechanism.”
Once we have the set of mechanism in place, such as quadratic voting, quadratic funding, data dignity, and so on, then we can have a new sector. Let’s call it the social sector or the plural sector, many different names.
This social sector would hold a legitimacy and actually will link the best part of capitalism, which is efficient allocation of resources, and the best part of social welfare, which is the equal opportunity and human right and dignity, and make them reinforce each other instead of canceling each other. This is the positive-sum relationship. That to me is the X in the RadicalxChange.
Sure. First of all, the AirBox, the air quality measurement thing, that’s a real thing. Thousands – actually, now tens of thousands – of Taiwanese people are voluntarily measuring their air quality and dedicating it to a distributed ledger.
People can account for any kind of micro weather, and even collectively form a coalition to bargain with the environment minister, saying, “Hey, our piece of puzzle is not complete without the industrial areas. As a primary school teacher or high school teacher, we really can’t break into industrial areas to measure the air quality there, so you do something.”
Then the environment minister says, “Sure, we own the lamp at the industrial park. Let’s use your design, but set up also tens of thousands of air quality sensors in those industrial parks to complete the puzzle together.”
In GDPR terms, that’s called joint data controllership. It’s not utopia. It’s even written in the GDPR. It’s just very few people actually use it. [laughs] This kind of practice is why we use quadratic voting in the Presidential Hackathon to promote five such data unions every year to make sure whatever they build as a prototype in the past three months, our president will give them a trophy saying, “Whatever you did in the past 3 months, we will do whatever it takes for it to be a national policy with all the budget regulation or personnel required in the next 12 months.”
The Presidential Hackathon is the main enabler of the utopian, because it carries…It’s basically the presidential power as a Hackathon prize. That is also a very important part, piece of the puzzle. Again, think of the labor conditions before unions were invented, before the cooperatives were invented.
Then each individual worker has very little bargaining power, vis-à-vis capitalists. Because of that, some sort of governmental promise saying that, “If you unionize, then if you go to strike, the police will protect you instead of beat you.”
Something like that needs to be said. That is what Presidential Hackathon is saying.
Antisocial media, yes.
I think the term “contribute” is a little bit vague here. What does it mean to contribute with data? In Taiwan, when we say data competence, we mean something like a producer, or a journalist. Why not?
A journalist is actually a very good example, because anyone can write, but not everyone can be journalists. To be a journalist is to have a set of ethics that cares about finding the fact, that cares about checking the fact and its sources, about aware of the framing effect, about being open to corrections, but also protect the people who correct you if they want to remain anonymous.
I can go on, but to be a journalist instead of a writer means a specific kind of work. It’s not just about me writing a tweet means I contribute to journalism. That’s a stretch of the term contribution. If you want to contribute to journalism, first, you accept the journalistic code.
Then you work according to the journalistic framework. That’s how other journalists can work with you, because otherwise, you are not a reliable source.
This is a very important distinction to make, because where this is like saying, “A journalist contribute with text, and more people are going to democratize journalism, because anyone can produce text. Journalists can receive many text from many people,” this is kind of true.
The kind of text, if it’s newsworthy, if it’s journalistic, that’s the kind of text we want. The true work is to make the quality of the text journalistic. It’s not just about the text. When you say contribute data, anyone can contribute data, but they may be noise.
They may not mean anything. They may be heavily biased, just like some text that purports to be news are actually very biased and not journalistic at all. It could actually contribute negative quality, not just zero quality.
When the data is useful to the society, then similar to how journalistic text is of a public value, then we are talking about data competence and data stewardship, just like an editor. An editor in for a journalist is like a steward of data.
Then, when the stewards and the contributors, like the editors and journalists, unionize, of course, it gives them better bargaining power, but this is first based on the idea of quality, accountability, alignment, dignity, and so on.
Media.
Sure. A social media simply means that it makes sure that each person can have a narrative that is seen or heard or experienced by other people. It’s a neutral term. When experienced this way, sometimes, it encourages the more distrusting part about rage and outrage.
Outrage that’s channeled to revenge and discrimination, and these are the destructive part of humanity. When a social media channels mostly these energies, I call it antisocial media.
