 But I am so inspired by your story and I will start to write directly to the core of my main question is we see for years and years regimes using technology to protect their authoritarianism. For the first time in my life, I see a leader like you yourself who is using technology to protect democracy and advance democracy. So how did this journey in you embracing technology as a fundamental tool to make democracy even a more perfect system and more transparent system? Certainly. And I started with journalism. Both of my parents are journalists working from, I had memory maybe 85 and so. They're already working as frontline journalists covering Taiwan's democratization. You see, at that time, Taiwan is very much an authoritarian society. We're still under martial law at that point, even though it will be lifted pretty quickly around the end of the 80s. And so their work was, I guess, interfered by the kind of political censorship and so on. And my dad would eventually, in 1989, visit the Tiananmen Square around May and June. And you know what happened there. And fortunately for our family, he returned to Taiwan on the 1st of June. And we've seen how technology shaped that particular movement, how the first views for journalism, digital camera, and digital transmission, how the real-time, or at least semi-real-time, broadcasting shaped the international conversations, how the images such as someone stopping the tanks, and so on, shaped the international reactions to that event and so on. My dad was so motivated by that experience, he would then move to Germany for a few years. Also was there to cover the Berlin Wall, the fall of the Berlin Wall, as well as completing his studies at Zachland University, studying on the dynamics of how such modern social technologies of organization shaped the Tiananmen movement, interviewing many people who have fled Beijing and visited Germany and France. And I remember meeting them in our living room. And they're still very young. They're like in their early 20s, still studying, but a few very passionately about the possibility of, especially, communication technology and how it could advance democratization. So I would say it started very early in my life. Amazing. So your generation is the first generation to live post that era of authoritarianism where you have free speech, you have access to technology, so you can see the possibilities. But what is against you is actually regimes that are using this technology for more surveillance, more oppression. I mean, one of my friends was Jamal Khashoggi, who the regime killed him through technology. They bought Pegasus, they spied on his phone, they hunted him, captured him. So what you are up against is powerful regimes. What are the, how can technology actually counter these regimes? How do you think we can together counter and win? I believe that journalism, just like how public health as a profession, is our counter against the virus of the mind. I believe journalism, that is to say, the art and craft of getting the truth out to the public in a way that properly comprehends with perspectives, with investigation, and so one should itself be democratized. That is to say, anyone should, in Taiwan, at least, we strive for our basic education to include what we call media competence, not just media literacy. You see, literacy is when you're a consumer of media, of narratives, of stories, of flowcharts, and statistics. But competence is when you are a producer, you're someone in the field, and you can actually make your own narrative, even if you are one of the most disadvantaged group in the front line. Competence enable you to amplify the story so that more people who care about this cause can join together and highlight the inequality, the injustice, and so on, which is why in Taiwan, after we've seen that the foreign interference, propaganda, and so on, they're not trying to advance one cause or the other. Rather, they're trying to destabilize people's trust in democracy, in the democratic process. What they're ultimately after is to shape their narrative so that people would prefer actually to live under authoritarian rule because it's more effective, or it has a longer time span for caring, or whatever. So they have their narratives. And the best way to counter those narratives, in our experience, is so that the people can actually join democratic process way before they're 18, the primary schoolers. If they can measure air quality and inform their family, whether they should go out for a walk or drive, the air pollution level, participate in distributed ledgers, and data stewardship. If the middle schoolers can fact check the three presidential candidates in real time so that during their debate and their forum, if they say something that's against the fox, the middle schoolers name and their contribution appear on public television and streaming and so on, then that increases the bandwidth of democracy of people's input and also reduce the latency, the time delay before someone who surfaced a injustice into someone thinking of an innovation to address that. And then the entire society thought, oh yeah, we can actually make something better together. That in my knowledge and my experience is the best defense against the authoritarian narrative. So you want participation, mass participation as a very young age, engagement, listening, and you're talking about active involvement, meaning holding these people in power accountable through transparency. Yes, exactly. Yes. There's something that while I was preparing for this interview, I saw that you pointed out to multiple things. And one of the things that I love and you pointed out to is other movements around the world. Obviously, you're not only a Taiwanese leader, at this point, you're a global leader. Sorry. Sorry about this. Oh my God, I don't know what's happened here. Apologies. That's pretty good. To Wall Street, I want to show you three movement, global movement that did not succeed, but inspired the world. Wall Street, Occupy Wall Street 2010, Arab Spring 2011, where a million of people rose up demanding democracy, dignity, and global change, and more representation. And then you have 2011, the anti-austrarity movement in Europe. And then we have the sunflower movement, which is maybe the only movement in my lifetime that really succeeded. Why do you think these other movement failed versus yours that succeeded? I think the main difference really is in the situational applications, the sit-ups, that we co-created during the sunflower movement, learning fully from the scholars such as Manuel Castel, who analyzed very deeply why these previous movements did not reach its original goal. And in these movements that we have studied, what people have expressed really is a kind of outrage. But energy, that is the outrage, could not reliably turn into co-creation, or to good enough consensus that half a million people on the street would readily agree on. Indeed, as time goes on, there's disinformation, there's rumors, there's violence, escalation, and so on, that turned the initial, ultimately non-violent movement into something that even the organizers themselves could not converge on any coherent demands. Of course, for some people, that was the point. That was the point of exposing the way that the powers work and how the structure work and the structurelessness to them is a feature, it's not a bug. But in the sunflower movement, because the Occupy was very specific, people occupied the parliament to deliberate, to demonstrate the cross-strait service and trade agreement. So from the very beginning to three weeks after what were the Occupy, as you said, was a triumph, people focused on the good enough consensus that the society could agree on all aspects of the CSSTA. And here, technology, social technology enters play because it allows us to distill the CSSTA into just the aspect that affects the individual going on the street. If you work in a particular trade, for example, if you're a journalist, we have tools that can show you how exactly would CSSTA affect the publishing industry and the journalism business and the sector, right? So you can then deliberate on the part that you feel comfortable deliberating about. Of course, you can still go into other places around the Occupy parliament and, for example, listen into how people deliberate of our 4G infrastructure and how so-called private sector from the Beijing regime, if we allow them into the core infrastructure of communication, what will happen from the cybersecurity measure and so on. So it allowed cross-pollination in a kind of learning society, but it also, most crucially, allow people who know actually from their first-hand experience about the things that we're deliberate about, not be sidetracked into polarization, into hate speech, into attacking each other and so on, and focus on demonstration as in demo on how actually we can look at CSSTA and to make coherent points that would then eventually be adopted by the head of the parliament. Audrey, you're the first minister of technology. And this is the first time in our lifetime, actually we use technology as a fundamental tool. It's been used as a weapon for a long time, but now it's really a tool. So in this, I would like to understand your vision for the future for this digital world. You know, post, I'm not sure I can call it post COVID, but during COVID we learn how to, our entire life functioned around technology. We don't need to travel anymore. We can do everything through technology and via technology. But from that, you know, from that we can see, I don't think the world still can assemble a true vision around what is a future technological digital world. In your view, what is that world would look like? Yeah, as the first digital minister, I outlined my job description and my vision, if you would, in a prayer, in a poem, when I first become digital minister in 2016. And it's very short, so I might as well recite first. Yeah, it goes like this. When we see the internet of things, let's make it an internet of beings. When we see virtual reality, let's make it a shared reality. When we see machine learning, let's make it collaborative learning. When we see user experience, let's make it about human experience. And whenever we hear that singularity is near, let's always remember that plurality is here. So plurality, I believe, is the vision that I have. But not just me, right? It's pretty much everyone who don't want their values to be hijacked by technology, who want technology to adapt to the societal norms, to the communities that we already trust. So very often you talk about we, and most leaders talk about, most leaders I interviewed are I, I, I, ego, ego, ego. You're talking about the collective human effort, the collective union. And that's what I read in the poem. Can I ask you where this came from? I think one of the very influences of our family really is Taiwan's transcultural background. In my family, people speak different languages. My father's father came from Sichuan, speaking Sichuanese. And my father's mother speaks Holok Taiwanese, Tai Chi, and actually Japanese quite fluently and so on. So it's a story of people who don't readily converse with each other. They, of course, they share the kanji writing the ideographic characters so they can, I don't know, send love letters to one another. But the point here is that they come from very different backgrounds, very, very different cultures, indeed in war too, in different sides of the war. And that, I think, it defines more than anything the Taiwanese capability to look at ideological rifts and gaps in Sichuan and then build a common ground around, for example, democratic practice and contribution to the world's sustainability and prosperity. And so as the common values, despite very, very different ideological and ethnic and cultural backgrounds that's in the society, we have plenty of national languages, more than 16 of which indigenous. And so I think this is my background as being raised in Taiwan from families that comes from four very different places in the world and speaking various different languages. So you talked very often about reaching consensus, quick air faster. So we live in a polarized world where nation within nations, there is a deep rift ideological, racial, social and it seems like the forces of regimes are actually pointing out to those weaknesses to undermine the nations from within. So you're talking that in Taiwan, you're strengthening your nation through the process of consolidating and validating and celebrating these diversities and creating better consensus. Is that where technology plays a role? Yes. The very beginning of the internet centers around this fundamental idea of rough consensus or good enough consensus or consensus that we can live with. So it's not perfect. It's not in the sense that everyone sign an agreement to contract a treaty or things like that. It's this broad values that people agree to honor despite their differences in achieving those values. And I believe this vision, the inter in internet is what allowed the internet to talk to people to various different jurisdictions, different backgrounds and so on because people want to be connected to other people who share their feelings who can understand each other's situation despite they were raised in different places on earth and so on. So this rough consensus of connectivity, not just connectivity of machines but of human communities to human communities powers the early internet. And that's what convinced the pretty monolithic, pretty hierarchical, pretty close silos of local telecommunication carriers and so what to eventually become a global internet. So I do believe that this is not just Taiwan but rather anywhere the internet touches the internet working protocol. It's imbues in itself this idea of good enough consensus of steering to a common values and the innovations that can amplify those values. So Audrey, how did entry into politics materialized? You came from the private sector. I mean, you built basically a career in that direction. When did you decide to enter into politics and what was the driver? Well, I would say I come from the social sector at a time that I entered a cabinet in 2016. I am of course do independent contractor consultant to many large companies but most of my time is already part of the social sector or the civil society or the voluntary sector many different names. The social sector in Taiwan actually have slightly higher legitimacy than the public sector and definitely the private sector for most of my life. That was partly because the public sector would not start democratization before the lifting of the martial law but even during the martial law era, still the local charities, co-ops, especially consumer co-ops are already striving. So people get their taste on democracy, on voting the leaders, not voting for president which would not happen until 96 but voting for their local co-op chapter leader or things like that. And so this community building movement and especially that we have lots of earthquakes and natural disasters, typhoons and so on. So in the recovery and the resilience against such natural disasters build the social solidarity despite people in those charities having very different religions, for example but they still work very closely together in order to rebuild after it's quake and ameliorate their impact, negative impact on the community that they care. So when I say that I come from the social sector, I mean specifically the G0V or GovZero movement which looks at the not-for-profits purpose oriented sector and then look at digital services from our government that did not answer the need of those sectors. My first project in 2013 was just people who want to learn Mandarin or Daigui or any of those languages and then they found that the Ministry of Education is very siloed. Those languages are kept in different websites and the website said all copyright reserved you can't really redistribute that but the problem is that a website does not actually catch up with mobile web so you can't really use it with a phone and then you can't easily share whatever you've looked up and so on. So this very real need by the teachers who want to teach whatever language they want to teach to the church and it's not answered by the Ministry of Education but instead of going on the street to protest we instead just copied everything and then we say we're not violating the copyright it's fair use because we're not saying that we profit from it so we do it entirely voluntarily and then we crowdsource we ask everyone as students and teachers to point out the mistakes, the typos and so on in the national language database within those dictionaries so we're also contributing to the culture and the newest ideas and words that did not get encoded into the Taiwanese dictionary Daigui we also crowdsource that like urban dictionary from the people who care about that language and so on so what I'm trying to say is that the social sector can fill in the public sector's gaps and when we're doing that we're very much doing politics it's just not politics in the cabinet or in the legislature it is politics as in getting people together crowdsourcing their energies and improving the welfare of the public good so I took those ideas and then I joined the cabinet I think because well people have seen how those technologies, those pro-social social media can play a part in the sunflower occupy in getting the good enough consensus so it's not just making dictionary together it could also be making treaties together this crowdsourcing has broad applications so at the end of 2014 I was recruited as a reverse mentor as a young advisor to cabinet minister and two years after I guess I got promoted from intern to a full-time still in the office of the minister Audrey that's inspiring us went very fast and clearly your activism became crucial to also the legitimacy of this new government post the revolution I want to read your data and I was looking at it it's 2019 and 20% of Hong Kong's population population of 7.4 million people protested went to the street by proportion these are the largest protests in modern history in any nation it's not the end game obviously because Hong Kong government and Beijing government managed to turn a whole generation of students from citizens to dissidents many of them are in Taiwan now and exactly you did the reverse you protested those citizens who were very angry became even more active citizens can we say that? yes definitely and that is the difference between a democratic regime and an authoritarian regime so they turned their citizen into dissidents and what we see now in Ukraine and other periods they're turning groups of people like trying to raise the identity of these people how can we look at Taiwan as a successful model how can we implement or any of the advice of how can some of your steps that you are implementing to better your democracy can be implemented and can become global well I don't have much of an ego even in the name Taiwan I was just talking to the new local conference public servants and social sector people from the UK and I said you know if you think Taiwan is too unique too strange in counter-pandemic just call it a New Zealand model because New Zealand adapted the Taiwan playbook in countering the pandemic so it doesn't really need to be called the Taiwan model that said I think there's a couple of things that are broadly applicable the first thing is just trusting your fellow citizens in liberal democracies many people in the career public service see 5,000 counter signatures 50,000 counter signatures and then they immediately think of pressure that these people are here to make demands to hold us accountable and so on but the beauty of digital technology is that it's no longer one way if all you have is radio and television then of course your citizens can only protest and cannot really during their way of protest to demonstrate a better way of doing things but because the internet is symmetrical so you can actually make a very fair counter question to the protesters and that's what we do and we say okay so you call our counter-pandemic mass distribution as biased it's probably biased but we initially thought that the pharmacies where we distribute aligned perfectly with population centers which is true but as you pointed out by the opposition party and the protestors not everyone own a helicopter so the same distance on the map doesn't mean anything when the rural areas people have to wait for an hour to take a bus so by the time they got into those distribution points they're already done for the day so we're being deeply unequal while the numbers look somewhat equal and so it's our fault but say if we only say that it doesn't really improve the matter because we don't actually know how to do better but because we trust the citizens we publish every 30 seconds like a distributed ledger the real-time inventory so the protestors the counter expertise know exactly the same data as we do and so the fair question would then be asked and our minister did ask so legislators teach us you are, you were VP of data analytics at Foxconn you should actually lecture us on how to make the distribution more fair and that's what she did and then 24 hours after what we implemented a much more fair rationing way and we also introduced a preregistration and so on by popular demand now nothing about this is magical or talent specific any government any jurisdiction at any level even local governments can publish real-time data evidence if it's not about privacy or trade secret which is a lot actually most of it is not around privacy and trade secret and then ask the people how would you do better if you are in the digital minister's place so that's the first thing I would advise everyone to do to trust your citizens and the second thing of course is also to amplify those innovations by reducing the latency every week I hold office hours to amplify the best ideas from the social innovators to the entire country and beyond in the counter pandemic every 24 hours at 2 p.m. every day the Center for Epidemic Command Center broadcast and actually answer question from all the journalists until they run out of questions so that we can actually amplify the innovation that happened in the past 24 hours again into national awareness so the other thing you can do is to reduce the latency of democracy so improve the boundaries by trusting the citizens and then reduce the latency by responding faster to the end of the year now I love also what you did to counter basically the pressure from China to exclude and erase Taiwan especially from the consciousness of the international community you advise your government to participate at international meetings UN meeting and other meeting digitally combined with some kind of diplomacy I mean it's brilliant because during COVID everything went digital everything went online so you were ahead of your time to bypass censorship and pressure from government yeah when I did that I think the first time that the media became aware is in the Internet Governance Forum in the UN Geneva building in 2017 actually I was doing that for quite some time but because the... three years before the pandemic three years before COVID well I did that in 2015-16 too but anyway in 2017 because the UN meeting was livestream because it's Internet Governance Forum well they can't really erase the live streaming or the recording so it became popular knowledge and the main reason why they would previously been successful in excluding me is actually on a technicality because to enter a UN building or whatever building that is hosting a UN conference you have to present a passport that belongs to one of the UN member states member nations and because we're not at the moment we used to be a founding member so we're not yet a nation within the UN so I could not enter the passport but on the other hand a robot need to know passport a robot is just a piece of machine and then the meeting was just watching a movie I guess together even though the movie was recorded just half a second ago from Taiwan right that's me so I think this avatar of sorts although the PRC regimes delegates protested they actually did not leave the room so that says that president because previously if their protest was not successful they have to leave the room because otherwise it's dual representation but I guess it says a new norm that it's not representation if it's just a re-presentation right of like a TV or something and so that enable me to attend much more meetings that is affiliated by the UN in the coming years this is really brilliant I must say like way before you bypassed all kind of the censorship and the blockage there's one thing that you talked about majority rule in democracy and also how to find ways for minority to exercise their influence and we see around the world how minorities are whether they are segregated, crushed, demonized, criminalized how can minorities take an example from what you are doing to Taiwan and some of the examples of your movement for social justice, for global justice what do you think the lesson number one I mean I live in the United States we had all kind of protest connected to minorities whether the women march or black life matters and any other minorities what do you advise them to do? Yeah, I think having a safe space where you can form movement around globally people who are in your place in their own jurisdictions that's very important look at the climate movement it started from people who would be adversely affected by climate change maybe they live in such habitats but because their jurisdiction has a large land mass maybe they do not get a sufficient amount of votes so that the legislators care but what they did is that they bonded together I attended some of their summits again through video conference because we don't want to cause carbon emissions and then each island sends their own representative so from our country Taiwan and Penghu is actually two people and that's a very different view because if you just vote within our jurisdiction then the population of Penghu is dwarfed by the population in Taiwan but if you say each island indeed each habitat that suffers from climate change must have their voices heard and smaller islands like Tuvalu and so on they because the emergency is higher for them they deserve higher place on the agenda then that flips the agenda setting power the closest people closest to the pain they must have the higher agenda setting power in such safe spaces and movements so the internet provides new mechanisms to reconfigure democracy so that it's prioritized not by whether you're 18 years old or things like that but rather prioritized as I mentioned during the sunflower occupy how adversely you would be affected by the CSSTA and the more adversely you will be affected you will be given more voice and so my suggestion is just to form such spaces pro-social social media the civic infrastructure on the digital realm and then organize but that's probably the one call to action to organize globally organize globally beautiful we're seeing for example now with the war with Ukraine how a smaller country less militarized actually winning in the court of the public opinion because of social media because of technology because of the exposes of everything the other side is doing but also we're seeing here in the United States an aggressive movement against minorities especially the LGBTQ laws after laws after laws to I mean in Florida where I teach I mean the governor said you're not even allowed to say that you're gay or transgender you're not even allowed to say it you decided to as gender to put if I am not wrong whatever that's my gender yeah whatever exactly and that was seen by the young people as an act of as a brilliant act of non-binary I don't want the world to define me I want to be what I am what I want to be how can you reconcile that with what's happening around the world globally in terms of real bigotry and oppression sorry I have to turn off that alarm thing I don't have anything else but I have to turn off that just a second of course and we're back sorry for the destruction of the flow I would like to if you feel comfortable about your personal you know identification but also about you know what's happening around us globally when it comes to our identities whether it's a racial religious whether we belong to minority or not on even sexual identities and how there's a wave of conservatism that is waging a war on all of us in the name of like that we have to be part of their world that is either black or white that is defined by existing institutional labels exactly first of all I do use those labels but I don't use it in a way that associates my identity with it I would say for example that I experienced a male two birds eye when I was 13, 14 years old and that's when I discovered that my development path isn't quite the same with other boys and later on I would get my test-test-tron level measured and I'm somewhere between an average human male and an average human female anyway and then I would say I had another puberty for a couple of years when I was 24, 25 the female puberty and through hormonal replacement and so on so I would not as you have seen I've not actually said that I was something and I became something I identify as something I said I had this experience and then I discovered that and then I had another experience and so on and this difference is intentional because this is the intersectional way of talking about those labels this is like I learned English then I moved so I spoke Dagi or Mandarin for a couple of years and then I moved back and then spoke English too but nowadays I speak Mandarin to these people and so on so this point is that I don't have in my mind this labeling effect where half a population is closer to me and half a population is farther away from me or that half a population is my people and half a population is not my people and so on I'm like I take all the sides and there are people who I don't yet have a lot of shared experience with but that's my problem and I can always spend some time on a just hanging out really spending time together so that I can also see the world from their experience because I can experience more experiences than I have already experienced right so I think this is a positive way of looking at those labels in that they're not mutually exclusive they're like hashtags and we're not constrained how many hashtags that we can experience and I do believe that this both conserves the existing labels which of course unites community together but stays open so that new hashtags may form and old hashtags cannot cancel new hashtags so how do you cope if I may humbly suggest with this wave of conservatives and macho you know way of trying to impose or try to create fear and suspicion around people who don't want to be identified with all stereotypes well I think it's it's not a projection of strength it's a projection psychological projection of insecurity of vulnerability right from the people who want their identities to matter if they identify as macho or conservative what they're feeling is that they're kind of once secure ideas are being modelled counseled, confused and so on and so they project this insecurity into I guess acting out and then create a more kind of violent conversation around such matters and the thing is I actually take all the sides so I also take their side I'm like so when Taiwan passed marriage equality we didn't actually redefine the civil code or reinterpret through constitutional interpretation the way that many jurisdictions did we actually invented a new relationship and then this new relationship is a wedding between two like homosexual individuals or people who identify as such or whatever and when they are wed this way their families don't so unlike the civil code where the kinship relationship is formed through the heterosexual marriage lineage this new relationship does not carry this kinship connotation but paradoxically it made this new relationship actually preferable if you just look at the burdens that you have to care for the other sides, parents and so on so it's equal rights slightly better privilege I guess for this kind of new relationships and that's why we said okay so we actually have legalized marriage equality the bylaws are exactly the same or slightly better but in-laws as in father-in-law, mother-in-law we didn't legalize that so we legalized the bylaws without touching the in-laws and then the conservative people who are after all respecting their lineage the in-law relationship I wouldn't say they're happy but they lived with it they can live with it and that's how we get marriage equality across the board and people love that it's amazing because two days ago I was watching Vladimir Putin give this speech and behind him there's these big, big missiles like he's a man standing in front of these big missiles as if he needed to stand him and I thought how insecure a man should be to both these big, giant missiles as you give a speech and I think somebody was tweeting all over the internals like how insecure a man that he needs huge missiles and I remember the joke between Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump my missiles are bigger than your missiles and I thought these people these are the same people who want to use majority rule to control minorities and excluding them from any benefits basically, exclusion from benefits but control your life what you're suggesting is the other way around sharing the privileges without control of your life live a life that is free enough tolerant of others and respectful of the thee and basically tolerating and embracing and respecting all of others so and that I could see clearly through COVID I mean the management of the crisis in Taiwan made Taiwan and obviously Australia a leader and you played a major role in that success can you tell us please more about that if you would say what are the main point of success that made Taiwan an example of success unlike other countries around you was so far in the country of 24 million there's less than 1,000 people dead of COVID we've never had a single day of lockdown and the economy has prospered during the COVID actually the only one around our region that prospered in all these years and so that probably counts as success and the main reason why is that we trust the citizens the citizens come up with good ideas and then we amplify those ideas it's not anything top-down because in the COVID virus mutates so quickly there's no expert panel that can actually catch up you have to rely on the collective intelligence you have to rely on a 10-year-old boy that caught this trophy number 1922 and met with someone full of empathy the call center staffed by the very charities that help people on the earthquake and so on who listened to the young boy who said you're a rationale to mask which is great but all the boys in my class caught blue ones but I got pink ones I don't want to wear pink to school I don't want to wear a mask now I'll do something about it and then the very next day 24 hours later the next 2 p.m. Minister Chen Shizhong along with all the medical officers wore pink and the minister Chen he even said that pink panther was his childhood hero so pink became the color of heroes and heroes, heroes, I guess and then all the fashion brands really just turned pink for quite a few weeks and so then after that the mask adoption rate went like skyrocketed because suddenly mask become a way to express ourselves it's not just a way to signal that you protect your own mouse against your own washed hands which is very practical but after that people wear intentionally rainbow mask or whatever mask as a sign of expression and that's undoubtedly thought of the original strain the 2020 strain of the coronavirus so basically you relied on trusting citizens and social responsibility that you gave them enough trust that you knew that they would protect themselves and each other basically that was the formula Yeah, of course and then refrain from doing the sorry refrain from doing the top down shutdown takedowns, lockdowns because the first time you do such a top down lockdown thing it actually decimates it reduced by 10% the agency of the people and then people would not want to think of new measures when they know those measures maybe turned around and cancelled any time if the jurisdiction leaders feel like it but because we very clearly said in the very beginning that we trust the citizens so they see their new ways of visualizing mass distribution of visualizing vaccine distribution of reminding each other to wear a mask of contact tracing all these essential services which in other jurisdictions are either built by the government's technology units or by Google and Apple and then translated by the government here in Taiwan is built by Gov0G0V the civic technologist that's designed with privacy, with care with caring about people who don't use a smartphone people who don't use a phone at all and so on people who care about how they want to reverse audit the contact tracing access in their records and so on to hold them into account people who care that this must never be used for advertisement or criminal investigation and so on so it's designed with democracy baked in it's not voted on and so when the democracy technologists design such systems the states just take a step back and then we say yeah we amplify those very good ideas and trusting your citizens pay dividends in situations like the coronavirus where the experts in the government could not possibly catch up as quickly as the virus mutation So you see with the coronavirus for example you can see next door your neighbors I mean you see what's happening in Shanghai and it's just where people are committing suicide the lockdown is becoming even seems like a police state in a reality where this is the wealthiest city and yet their wealth didn't matter but because what matter it became like a regime like it's it was always a regime but it slipped totally into an authoritarian rule that became so oppressive mm-hmm yeah and the thing is that there are civic technologists in Shanghai they have some of the most brilliant internet entrepreneurs and some of them did help some of them did create the kind of dashboards for people to help each other to visualize the rationing of goods and so on exactly as the Taiwanese people did in 2020 the difference is that the Beijing regime in the Shanghai government shut those websites down right so they would not allow the civic technologists to gain legitimacy through this kind of democratic self-help assembly and so on and that's the crucial difference so they shot themselves in the foot and now they have to run from one crisis to another because they could not trust their and empower their citizens to help them solve the issue I mean unbelievable you know in Italy for example which is a democratic country but there is a huge movement that was anti-vax there is a huge propaganda that basically exploited all those rules about lockdown and covid to instill distrust from government and then you have people protesting in the streets saying this is a dictatorship I don't want lockdown I don't want the vaccine I don't want anything because there was a deep distrust of democracy your model shows actually a democratic country an autocratic country what can work best yes so instead of democracy backsliding all you need is more democracy thank you and regarding democracy I know and tell me if it's right but I read somewhere that on Wednesday your office is open to the public from 10 to 10 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. and anyone who have any proposal for you or for the government regardless of age, occupation social status can come and discuss it is that right? that's right but it needs to fit one of the sustainable demand goals that is to say it needs to be a public good if they come and say that they want to I don't know, want me to lend them some money or something like purely personal request that that wouldn't work so yes all the social innovators as defined by people innovating to a public good conforming to the global goals is eligible how do you feel about the fact that you're in 2016 obviously became a minister you're the only in the world that identify as transgender I mean 2020 you have Petra, the Sutter but in the whole world we have only two people how is that possible in the 21st century and what kind of responsibility this puts on your shoulder? well I think I always am the first openly transgender minister because for all we know everybody else may be transgender which is not open about it you're right and that's my intersectional view and I'm sure that when minister transition put on the pink mask he became a little bit more transgender he defied the mainstreaming stereotypes and so on and so I think this is not a binary thing this non-binary thing is not a self-binary it's not your binary or a non-binary everybody can become a little bit more non-binary and what I'm trying to say is that around the world we're seeing people embracing a different kind of doing politics instead of politicians being someone who is at a distance from the people the traditional ideas of leadership across radio, television and persona and so on nowadays in democratic countries people are looking for politicians that interacts with them in real time and so that their ideas can amplify through this politician so I call myself a poetician because I take good ideas and I write poems about it and contribute to the art world by really questioning my copyright into the comments so there's also people in Japan that remix our interviews like this one with a journalist into rap songs and things like that so I think one can be non-binary not just in gender but in the kind of work that you do whenever people stereotype us as someone who works for the government or for the civic movement and so on I'm like, why not both? I think this is a wider phenomena that we're seeing around the world that it's not this or that this is this and that and I believe gender is just one of the dimensions that these more inclusive ideas can take hold And my final question you talked about in government and civil society and obviously your identity all of it we're looking at all these big tech giants whether Apple or Twitter or Google all of these guys and I know you consulted with Apple and you were involved in high level the artificial intelligence projects and also in the development of Siri but we're seeing less and less transparency from these groups and more, how can I say hijacking of certain platforms and also regimes are exploiting the commercial model to tell them, okay we will sell you money but you sell us basically the secrets so we can monitor, spy on our citizens, et cetera how can we make or make these platforms and these companies more socially responsible or force them to become socially responsible? Yeah, I think there's two things going on here one is as you said, surveillance capitalism there are large companies whose only business model is to sell the attention of their users to the highest bidder and they want to turn their users into users in the drug industry sense addicts so selling manufacturing addiction so that's one problem I don't think Siri does that but I am not working for Apple anymore so I don't know so during the time that I worked with Apple one of the things that we don't do is things like this so people pay for the service or product upfront and then whatever face ID or things that you give to the device stay on the device is supposed to be personal computer as in personal to you of course I've not worked with Apple for many years I don't know, right? But I think some ethics like that in the business model that those companies do need to be identified as socially acceptable patterns and the socially unacceptable patterns need to be identified as such as dark patterns and then treated exactly the same way that we treat other addictive substances I often compare and I'll just pull out Facebook as a nightclub where people, of course people can be socially in nightclub but they have to shout to be heard is very loud, noise, feel the room actually smoke, feel the room too, addictive smoke at that and the addictive drinks being served private bouncers escorting you out and so on so all these are the norm of the entertainment sector within that particular nightclub maybe with some gambling on the side but we don't do our town halls in those places so if a mayor say, oh let's have a town hall let's have a conversation to set the social expectation our new development and so on how to be more inclusive and then they choose the local nightclub as the place to have a deliberation well you won't have a deliberation you will be having a polarization a very rousy shouting march so which is why the city governments invest in places like town halls or public libraries, museums, parks and so on those public infrastructures that is worth people's investment to maintain exactly because we want pro-social social conversations around social issues in those places so that brings me to my second point in addition to identifying the dark patterns and do social sanctions you know stop using those patterns calling that out boycotting them we also need pro-social alternatives that is maintained by the pro-social purpose-oriented communities the social innovators the state may prototype some of it but we must also embrace the open API open source and open data ethics so when the social sector can do better we can just take a step back and say okay now the Wikipedia community runs our public library better maybe we don't bother running a state sponsored public library but we also want this curational oversight by our democratic elected panels on how the cultures are being misrepresented or represented on the Wikipedia community and so on so a more friendly relationship and I call this a people-public-private partnership where the people sets the agenda the norm the public sector amplifies it and the private sector must conform to the agenda that is set by the people amazing so they need rules and they need to respect those rules so you're one of the few people that really is engaged on the far front in changing the world and making it more transparent democracy that protects actually the citizenry and not works against it if you have to identify your inspirational leaders who would you identify who would you point out in the past or present oh yeah definitely the internet community that's my first and foremost inspiration the early internet pioneers and nowadays all the people who are connected to the internet I'm also inspired by people who are not yet connected to the internet whose voice are not yet heard but the community leaders that give them voice that unmute themselves that shares the voice that is enabled by the internet so I'm thinking of the kind of peer-to-peer networks that is started as grassroots in communication especially in disaster areas but also in places suffering censorship because the internet become a censorship tool by their authoritarian regimes and there are people who are working on the protocols and so on to protect the anonymity of the journalistic sources indeed the communication of journalists themselves and then enable the people whose voice was either taken away or not yet taken care of by the internet community and connect them to the as I mentioned the global organization of movements not the global organization of the big corporations that wants to set the norm through code or through data we want the people who set the norms locally and then amplify those norms so that we can produce code and data that is actually a service of those norms I love it I'm so grateful but is there anything else I skipped, forgive me if there's anything else that we did not touch at home Well, everything but I think this is a beginning of a conversation and just for the record for the transparent record we'll make a transcript and feel free to co-edit for 10 days and then we publish but I understand that my non-verbal expressions you want to publish on the later date which is fine, I can do an embargo so if you publish the video later on then I publish the video on my side with just my image but also your voice Publish it already what I will do is as I told Alessandra the three things I will do as Sandra will use it to send it I believe to some people in Hollywood because I think there's really interested in making a feature movie about you which I absolutely would think is important for America it's important for the world for our next generation and above all it's a story that will inspire the world I have no doubt about it whatever after you publish the video I'd love to publish it as well once you give me the permission and I would love also because I'm writing this book about women and the human who are transforming the world changing the world rebels I call them and those rebels are women and transgender obviously but for me you are one of my rebels who are transforming the world I have no doubt about that you are my third interview in that the first was President Eileen Johnson of Liberia who ended the civil war and used sex strike she and Lee McGibody to basically to create a movement where they mobilized, galvanized, organized ended the civil war and elected the first woman African president and I love her story I think it's incredible and obviously you're one of those amazing rebels who are changing our world so it will be included in this book that will come out in a couple of months that's excellent so permission is hereby given so I'll paste you the YouTube link I'll put creative comments on it so just do whatever absolutely with great pleasure I thank you so much and please know that you have allies in the United States and you have people in the media that whatever you ever need to promote anything in the media you have real allies who believe in your mission and would love to import some of the tools to the rest of the world especially for the people who have no voice the people who are crushed under dictatorship so thank you thank you and let's work on this together live long and prosper yes, yes, yes absolutely and if you don't mind I will send you my movie and I made a movie I wrote it and it was released and it's about women in war zones but how they can thrive regardless because one of them raised me and built an orphanage for children and built a school and a university and raised thousands of girls so I'll send you the movie will be my honor to watch it okay thank you thank you have a wonderful evening thank you and please thank your assistant she was so grateful thank you thank you