Audrey Tang

Cool.

Thank you. Feel free to write anytime.

Cheers.

Thank you.

Let’s get started.

Oh, more recorders. It’s like three recorders now.

Sure.

Exactly, because I told the offices that my Wednesday is open for everybody, and my weekends are off limits. These are the time structure that we pre agreed on.

Because I think the topic warrants more than 40 minutes of conversation, which is what my Wednesday office hours are all about, I just short circuited that. It’s interesting because precisely, as you mentioned, the idea of having an open office hour. Here, it would be where we meet if we meet on a Wednesday.

It’s the Social Innovation Lab. It is pretty radical already, because people can walk in in the morning without having to have a reservation. They don’t guarantee any time block. It’s just whatever time I have.

In the afternoon, they have a booking system where they can book for 40 minutes at a time and a transcript or video recording, what kind of recording that they prefer.

Because the exoskeletal arrangements are already in place, it’s always easier for offices to say, "Here is the system. Go to register in the system, and you will find the chance."

Of course, there is always a competing need of saying, "Wait, this warrants more than the pre allocated time." I think both need to happen, but I do need to work on synchronizing with my team more. [laughs]

Right. That’s from 10:00 to 2:00. From 2:00 to 5:00, that’s the pre booking time where there’s an online system conveniently called AU.pdis.tw, which is my handle. You can already see clearly who is going to meet me on those time slots. There’s an English version, as well.

If you want to book, then it just says who you are, your email, would you prefer some kind of recording mode, and then you automatically get 40 minutes of my time.

Of course.

Not at all.

Of course. We do have people who, after receiving the transcript, took out many parts that they considered premature or sensitive. Everybody’s free to edit, to co-edit, as I put it, for 10 days.

During those 10 days, sometimes people change their mind. Sometimes they, after talking to me, decide it’s not a good idea after all. Then, they went back, changed and, frankly, just delete entire parts of their speech, which is always allowed. We made it very clear, as well.

In the most extreme case, a journalist, who I will not name, considered the questions she asks as proprietary information. She went back and took out everything she said. In the transcript, it’s me monologuing. That is also accepted.

Yeah, but we don’t know what she asked about.

How is that?

Not at all.

Not at all. There’s people who advocate for building an embassy for extraterrestrial beings, the Rael Movement. There are people who are convinced that they invented a never ending machine, the perpetual motion machine, and there are people who believe in some kind of extreme views, but I was always very sympathetic to their views, and so it’s fine.

I’m sure that if I start arguing, they’d become violent perhaps, but because I was just very sympathetic...

No, no. That’s because I described you to security guard.

That’s right.

That’s the first thing I did this morning actually.

And then I’m always accompanied, of course, by a colleague or in the Social Innovation Lab by a security guard, so we’re not completely naive.

Or indeed encouraged to fail.

That’s right. In the Confucius culture, which all dates back to the I Ching, and I can talk about I Ching for days... [laughs] I will just say that in the I Ching there’s this idea of 蒙or the state before enlightenment. Usually it’s in conjunction with the child like 童蒙, meaning that someone who is pre teens and in need of enlightenment.

Confucius’ tradition always says that that is the state that has the most potential. When we frame someone as in that state, they’re allowed or indeed encouraged to explore.

Traditionally, when a child was really, really young, they have this ritual called 抓周, where they put all sort of different objects representing all the different trades and expertises in the world, and have the child climb over to whichever that they’re most interested in.

In that there is no pressure to succeed at all, because it is just seen as the way to seize out the potential of the child. When someone is in childhood, in the Confucius culture, there is absolutely no obligation for perfection and things like that.

Of course there is another thing called filial piety, which we will not go into, [laughs] but what I’m just saying is that it is perfectly OK to experiment if someone is childlike. This is what we capitalize on.

Exactly. There’s a French professor, Stephane Corcuff, that describes Taiwan’s democracy as in the liminal stage, which is not quite childhood but the same thing, the liminal stage meaning that we’re not part of the so called the Continent, but we’re not quite Pacific Islands either.

We’re of course the ancestry of the Pacific islanders culture wise, the Austronesian culture, but we’re also descendants of the various different ethnic Han cultures with those of Japanese philosophy. In all these relationships we’re liminal, in the sense that it’s not fully developed in terms of our Taiwanese culture identity. In this stage, experimentation is indeed encouraged is what I’m saying.

Of course. Actually, the most often quoted part of Confucian thought by Dr. Sun Yat sen, which you see in the Sun Yat sen Memorial Hall, is a calligraphy rendering of 天下為公, "everyone for the public." There’s a famous chapter that says, "Everyone for the public," and describes a Confucian Utopia where everyone is for the public.

There is no squandered resources. When people see goods on the street, useful things, they take it up, but they don’t use it for themselves, instead for public benefit. It describes not quite radical transparency, but radical trust between the various stakeholders in the society.

The radical trust is really what I’m after, and transparency is one of the various instruments of achieving this public trust.

How is so?

The difference, as you said, is control. Transparency is a way of instrumenting control.

It’s an interesting line of thought. In the Mandarin language, we’re having the hardest time translating the term "accountability." I think accountability earns trust. Nobody starts trusting a doctor, a lawyer, or whatever as acting in their best interests.

Of course, that kind of relationship develop over time by having that someone being accountable to you. Accountability doesn’t have a natural translation. We tried various other translations, but the one that I’m going with is 交代, not duct tape, which is the same sound...

...but rather 交, as in giving, in communicating, in exchanging, crossing over, and 代 as in representing, so giving you the right to represent me. 交代 also means, when I say 給個交代, to give an account, meaning coming clear of how one has or has not abused that trust relationship, which is crucial when we think about GDPR or the various rights.

It’s all about giving this kind of account. To me, transparency is one of the ways to build a culture where, when one asks for an account, one can readily give that account. It is not by default. We’re not live streaming this. We’re not recording our micro expressions or whatever.

This conversation is between you and me. It’s just we agree to co-author a paper afterwards [laughs] that summarizes the points that we made for the public benefit. I think having this co-creative relationship also builds trust. Whereas, if I insist on putting a hovering drone that is 360 recording our micro expressions, that would be control.

There is a limit above which it’s above the social norm that you will have for a friend. There’s a social norm under which you would describe as clandestine. I think there’s plenty of room between those two thresholds.

I totally agree.

As I would say that when we do public participation, I always frame it as an instrument for inclusion, inclusion being the ideal and participation being the instrument.