2022-07-22 Interview with Vanessa Hope

camera is rolling okay hi audrey oh no you have to quite quite speck again all right um so nice to be here and to meet you i'm honored and i would love to ask you about your philosophy of government actually in the united states um we find you to be this incredible phenomenon and it's very exciting to meet you so what how do you look at the openness and transparency idea of government what is your thinking um in 2016 when i first become digital minister i wrote a poem a prayer it's called job description and it's literally my job description which 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 the singularity is near let's always remember the plurality is here plurality means collaboration across diversity just as taiwan is caught between the eurasian plate on one side the philippine sea plate on the other when they bump into each other we got earthquakes but as long as we're resilient not just in our buildings but also in the way that we think then we create this situation where the tension of the bumping together actually the tip of taiwan the jade mountain or savia grows a couple centimeters every year because of this earthquake so you see that when we legalize marriage equality when we counter to the pandemic with no lockdowns when we counter the info damage without take downs it's taking all the different sites creating the social innovation environment so that we can deliver the responses to the emerging challenges by utilizing all those very different diverse viewpoints thank you that's beautiful that's sound bite-ish i love it um a lot to think about that in some ways i'm sure there's a i'm sure there's a solution for taiwan's future within that yeah um so specifically you have actually put this into practice through creating apps and technology and can you describe some of that like how does this manifest in actual government because we're all jealous because you're it's so cutting-edge so smart how you handled the pandemic how you've opened up government what what what are you doing yeah um so a year before i entered the cabinet i was already here as a reverse mentor to a previous minister in the previous cabinet and in 2015 uh when uber first entered taiwan uh people thought very differently right there's people who think it's oh sharing economy there's people think no it's geek extractive economy right ideologically there's this tension bumping together but we were able to deploy a public code called polis that lets people visualize what they feel about in a very funny way is a gamification of a deliberative democracy online so thousands of people taxi drivers the uber drivers their passengers unions and so on all came to this online space to share how they feel but there's no reply button so there's no way for trolls to grow and after three weeks everybody saw that actually most people agree with most of each other or most of the things there could be search pricing but not undercutting meters there should be proper insurance and so on so after three weeks we held this online live streamed multi-stakeholder meeting where we went over those top 10 consensus online one by one as the agenda so by crowdsourcing the agenda uber and the taxi union and so they all agreed to support the common rough consensus of the people and then for a couple years now uber is already a legal taiwanese taxi company the q taxi but because we changed the multi-purpose taxi act so even local temples local churches they can also form their own uber like fleets to serve the people where the uber fleet doesn't go to so it's a kind of coordination wind that increases the experience for everyone without leaving anyone behind wow that's fine you need to take that in i want to close when i'm speaking that's totally fine um does this apply to voting do you have a way to better understand the population like how they would vote definitely every year we hold a annual presidential hackathon that surfaces those new innovations such as polis that may be worked on a township a municipality on a smaller scale but each year we choose five teams and the president herself gives a trophy the trophy is shaped like taiwan with a microprojector underneath and if you turn it on it projects the president giving you the trophy very meta and promising you that whatever you did on a local level will become public code the next fiscal year with all the budgetary personnel and regulatory support needed and how to get from more than 200 ideas to the final five teams where we use a new voting method called quadratic voting quadratic voting means that people instead of waiting for two years or four years to vote for people people vote for ideas they rank those ideas and this new way of voting lets people express their synergies better so that when we choose the top 20 out of the 200 or so the other 180 actually know which of those 20 has the most energy with them and they can dynamically recombine to be working groups with those 20 winners and so everybody feel they have won because in quadratic voting you would not put all your votes into a single project everybody's got 99 points and if you support a project with one vote that's one point two votes four points three votes nine points so with 99 points you can vote nine votes uh 81 and you still have 18 left but you cannot vote 10 because you don't have 100 points right so most people choose another vote four maybe another two and maybe they pull some back a seven and seven so their preferences are best expressed when they vote truthfully according to their synergy experiences right and then once people see the top 20 everybody feel they have one because chances are they supported one in those top 20 and the other one that didn't make the cuts actually find a way to recombine into the 20 working synergies so by making sure that democracy itself is seen as a sort of technology we increase the bandwidth of voting lower the latency and connects to more people so do you know because i know that in the ranking of democracies around the world the united states is actually not a functioning democracy right now taiwan is a functioning probably highly functioning democracy and when i listen to you and with all the people who i've met who are in the government in taiwan i would be attracted to work in government in taiwan and so i wonder how that works here does that strengthen democracy to have people diverse backgrounds and ages wanting to actually enter the government have you experienced probably you're attracting a whole segment of the population to want to get engaged definitely so in the upcoming ministry of digital affairs already we've got a lot of job applicants from multinationals from our unicorns and so on and it's not that they were not earning a lot from the public market but they are willing to join the government if just for three years or four years not as a career public servant but as a ambassador from the digital world to the government and this is important because this idea of reverse mentorship the young people join but they are not interns they are mentors to the older cabinet members including me i'm above 35 so i'm old so we really need people younger than 35 to be here and guide us toward this vision of peer-to-peer web 3 and things like that to make sure that we not just catch up but can actually set a trend to make sure that the technology work where our values are instead of adapting our norms and values to fit the technologists beautiful okay now let's go to statements um unless i've missed something is there anything else you want to share about what you've accomplished that's fine that's fine okay i think it's pretty impressive um china's cyber warfare against taiwan um what are you learning about that and what is their strategy or their goal maybe undermining taiwan's credibility on the world stage and all of that yeah the prc does the information manipulation in taiwan not to support any party or faction against any party or affection what they're trying to do is to lower people's trust in the democratic process because they also have an agenda they want to push this idea that only authoritarian societies achieve efficiency achieve economic growth and things like that so they have something to prove too and so to that end we see consistently that before our elections or during the pandemic and things like that they want to amplify the narrative that says democracy lead to chaos democracy lead to polarization democracy lead to people hating each other and only authoritarian societies are free from these chaotic externalities and those authoritarian societies are the most harmonious that is the main narrative now we counter this narrative not through taking anything down because if our administration starts taking things down we become authoritarian we prove their point so during this whole envodemic this disinformation crisis the administration never takes anything down instead what we did is called humor over rumor we make sure that we work closely with comedians and also with civic technologists that can surface what is the trending information manipulation and just targeting those for example there was leading to our 2020 presidential election there was a this information that says the hong kong protesters the young people with a very scary-looking like photo of young protesters they were being paid two million dollars to murder police of course that is not true but it's very scary but instead of taking anything down we work with international fact-checkers who pinpointed that picture to the reuter photo so the photo is true but the caption uh initially from reuters was just there are young protesters in hong kong so where does the new caption come from it came from chong yang chung fah way the chang and sort the weibo account of the central political and legal unit from the chinese communist party and so uh we basically just put on a public notice so that when you're trying to share this on social media and things like that there's this mandatory label that says this message caption is probably sponsored by the weibo account of the chinese communist party so taking things down actually refuse conspiracy theories but when you put it on public notice anyone who share it understand where the caption come from it certainly did not come from um the reuters now what we're also looking at is also to push our counter narratives to outmim um things right so for example uh during the pandemic there was a panic run for a couple days for toilet papers and why because there was a disinformation campaign that says the taiwan state is nationalizing mass production and toilet paper's materials are going to be confiscated to make medical masks and so it's going to run out soon and rush out and buy and of course people believe that in russia and bought it and then there's some photos of people you know panicking and then the disinformation campaign uh says democracy only leads to chaos it's not orderly it's not harmonious and so on but within just a couple hours our premier head of our cabinet pushed out this meme of himself wiggling his bottom and saying in very large fonts which is a word play because twin to stockpile sounds the same as to and bottom and so it is basically saying it doesn't pay to stockpile because we cannot use that much toilet paper anyway and then with a table that says the masks are plastic materials domestically sourced by the toilet paper are from south america they're paper they're very different materials if we just clarify with this table nobody will listen to us but the premier wiggling his bottom is hilarious so it reached the entire darling population in just a couple days with a very high basic reproduction rate so it's like a viral vaccine people who saw it and laughed about it become immune to the disinformation attack so just a couple days afterward nobody uh go panic by and people understand it's not the same the masks and the toilet paper brilliant and that is so strangely in sync with what we were looking at today when i mentioned we were looking at my grandmother's movie it's called the man i married and the story is she's a magazine executive in new york city she's married to a german man they have a son this husband of hers needs to go back to germany during the rise of hitler there are questions about what that means exactly although someone comes into the office and basically says to my grandmother's character i have a relative in dachau and can you help get them out so that's sort of horrifying she goes with her husband he's supposed to be checking on his father and their factories in germany the father wants to close the factories and just have the money for his retirement but when they arrive there is a woman who kind of seduces my grandmother's husband into basically becoming a nazi so and it used real recordings of uh goebbels it used uh like real uh real documentary footage of hitler's rise and um that's totally upsetting to talk to you about that um there's an american journalist who my grandmother kind of seeks refuge with and he basically tells her humor hitler has no sense of humor no government can last that doesn't have a sense of humor about itself so like the winnie the pooh stuff with with xi jinping doesn't work or what what do you think i think humor really is thailand's antidote to this entire disinformation crisis do you like a some tissue paper there's tissue paper which is totally not plastic all right sorry but that's fine we have an authoritarian in the united states and we voted him out but the republican party has become very authoritarian and terrible towards women and it's terrible that they repealed roe v made it has huge implications and um actually i didn't put this in the questions but um there's a saying that it's not a saying that it's a fact that uh it's actually violence against women it's the single biggest indicator of whether a country will be violent on the world stage it's not about um economics or level of democracy or anything else it's violence against women and we know the united states is incredibly warmongering and militaristic and and terrible toward women it's not surprising and they're mass shootings like every day and in china it's also bad towards women maybe you could talk about how people are good towards women here or something yeah our um parliament is more than 40 women and our president 100 women so um i think in taiwan really um when i was a child um there was a veritable glass stealing uh my dad and my mom worked as journalists in the same newspaper and at that time in the 80s my mom was still told that she cannot earn a higher salary than her husband so we've been there but i think things really changed in taiwan mostly because i think this mainstreaming of this gender awareness come from the public sector the public sector started doing gender impact assessment on every single policy on every single budgetary item and so even the ministry is totally unrelated to economic development and so on soon become aware of the gender impact of a negative of their previous budgets and legislations so after more than a decade of doing this our entire career public service now internalizes these values like you simply cannot have a committee uh with any agenda represented less than one third and this is just like internalized for everyone and and then i believe that paved the way for taiwan to be friendly to 20 national languages now including the sign language it paved the way to the lgbt iqa plus communities the marriage equality and i'm proud to say that in 2016 onwards to now i've never been discriminated against just because i'm queer i'm post-gender or transgender so i think it takes decades of action but the public sector need to start and to trust its citizens the civil society organizations uh to follow through yeah okay so i think my next question might have to do with how do we protect taiwan because authoritarianism is on the rise around the world uh putin has invaded ukraine uh xi jinping has declared a no limits friendship with putin he's also said that the taiwan strait is no longer international waters there are all these kind of ways to read indications that he's planning a potential invasion of taiwan um we're trying to figure out how to get the story out if that will help how to prevent an invasion from china and i'd love to know your thoughts we we spoke before filming about how this idea of democracies coming together to stand up for a democracy in peril for example hong kong's system um didn't work has its limits yeah so maybe maybe we can talk about that and then what you think we can do yeah um i think the ukrainian experience showed that um the situation uh back in the crimea uh situation and the situation with the kiev the main difference was this uh internet enabled mass communication and the same principles actually noticed in public notice humor over rumor was deployed very successfully in the kiev experience and so usually people think that the authoritarians are great at funding disinformation campaigns information manipulation and so on but this time not like that the liberal democracies reacted very proactively even my grandma almost 90 years old when they asked me was it true that a grandma her age used a can of cucumbers in kiev to smudge a drum and i'm like according to our fact checkers the international network she actually used a can of tomatoes but i mean of course there's nothing funny about the war but by making that it's trending on the mimetic front that the ukrainian sounds yeah yeah sure we don't we don't want to lose okay it was actually okay it wasn't that obvious oh it wasn't it can fix that in post-production but it wasn't annoying okay and you were very clear so okay okay it's okay still okay it will pass just just a second yeah okay okay yeah i'm fine i don't know i have tears much okay so with international support yeah it's not just about standing with uh ukraine but actually for example the web three world three through cryptocurrency uh they actually funded a lot of efforts uh from kiev the previous civilian e-government app the dia app has been transformed overnight through a network of resilience into ways for people to crowdsource intelligence that has a real effect on the battlefield and so on and so forth right so by identifying not with this abstract thing that democracy must not fail but very concrete things like joining in a democratic network that shares the observations about countering this information counter propaganda and things like that it makes everyone involved and so making sure that everyone is involved in not taiwanese democracy or the talent model but rather in this networked alliance of democracies by sharing actively the public code by weaving taiwan into the public infrastructure of the democratic world as we have signed on the future of the internet statement and so on i believe that takes a proactive stance not just a defensive reactionary stance we've both read a book by david wengrow and david graver called the dawn of everything the new history of humanity and maybe it also connects with the poem that you began with uh your job description um but what i like about the book is it allows us to imagine new ways of organizing society what you like about that book i understand you've also spoken with the author and all of that so what were your takeaways from the book that might apply to taiwan or the world yeah when i quit middle school when i was 14 15 years old i spent quite some time in the atayala indigenous nation and i learned two things first they don't put that much trust in written text or scripture but rather this whole body experience of community together for them is important and that includes the spirits that are very old like older than a single human lifespan including the forests the rivers and things like that or beings like that right so the internet of beings actually came from from that and the second is that the worth the value of a person lies in how many lives they support rather than how much wealth they accumulate so just by these two very simple ideas um identifying with this community experience rather than written text one's self-worth is the network that you support rather than anything you hoard together they form this cultural economic viewpoint that are really in line with the internet that was just developing at a time they share the same root of the commons of the entire rivalry of how we both gains when we share something instead of having to make sacrifices and so on so that experience gave me this whole new vocabulary of describing a new sort of community relationships on the international network so i do believe that books such as the new dawn of everything serves not just as some anthropomorphical proof of existence but rather important new vocabularies that we can start talking about democracy as a social technology that you can change the layout just like semiconductor design and then we can start imagine new ways of doing democracy together that's not a ritual that we repeat every four years but rather something creative like canvas that we paint together beautiful technically those are the questions i had written down but you've made me think of one more if that's okay do you have treasure which is to follow up on your points about uh the chinese communist party suggesting that democracy leads to chaos or it's been it's a weapon of the western world to try to undermine their regime another narrative they use is that it just doesn't work for asian people uh can you address that what is that i i don't know i mean yeah um so truth to be told i do believe that democracy is not about following the greek protocol or following the washington dc protocol or things like that it is just opening to the possibility that our new generations may actually know better than we do and then opening up the possibilities so they have the capacity to change the way the state functions with checks and balances of course to respond to the emerging challenges of next decade and so on conversely many authoritarians may be at their prime at their peak they actually function really well but by centralizing power centralizing data centralizing knowledge it creates a real information asymmetry so that if they want to know what's actually going on in the field because the journalism is decimated because free speech assembly is decimated there's no accurate view on things so they tend to interpret new emerging issues from the old frame and that only works to a certain extent beyond which it's very easy to make strategic mistakes simply because the lens wasn't there right so i think on the long run democracy is an attitude that faces the plurality and say it's good it's not chaos they should be shaped into a singularity and say there are collaboration across the diversity so we shouldn't um decimate diversity we should celebrate diversity to me that's what democracy means exactly thank you that's beautiful because yes just do you have time for one more sure yeah i mean so i think it was lee kuan yew who said something about asian values and i feel like what you're describing is the difference between kind of moving forward with an open mind about the future versus holding people back and using the past to control the present so in the case of china it could be confucian values in the case of the united states it could be fundamentalist christian values and it's a very um i mean the authoritarian model it works on domination control and hierarchy and competition [Music] i don't know what i'm saying but i guess you're saying that those are that this idea that there are asian values what what is that i'm i'm following i'm i'm following you yeah so um so i i would say that i'm a adherent of traditional taoist values which goes back at least uh as long as the confusion values uh and the taoist values uh are anything but institutional right they did always idea that yin and yang basically said that plurality opposition tension and so on creates new possibilities all the new possibilities are created at the intersection between existing institutions and new networks and we should celebrate the in and the young together instead of just uh saying that it doesn't conform to the young or something like that right so uh and i think those taoist insights uh and amplified by buddhism into zen and into other thoughts are as popular in asia as confucianism or as any other traditions and in taiwan we celebrate all of them and i think that is why we were able to for example in doing marriage equality and so on invent genuine new ways of looking at social configurations uh saying the individuals wet the bylaws but not the in-laws the families don't wet and so on so to respect the confusion idea of family order but then celebrating this taoist free spirit of individual to individual engagements and then eventually marriage and so that is a very different dialogue compared to more western dialogues about the religious view on marriage equality in taiwan once we passed the marriage equality law and so on actually people on all sides start celebrating it more it doesn't lead to more polarization as i mentioned it leads to the jade mountain growing a couple centimeters after a clash beautiful i can i can i can see where all this is putting in the film um final question are you worried about trying one of the one of the reasons i think in addition to russia's invasion of ukraine that people are concerned for the future of taiwan is because the power balance is shifting between the united states and china and if it's basically historically been the united states offering the greatest guarantee of defending taiwan but now china has the capability to truly invade and keep the united states away um should do you feel worried for taiwan should we be worried or or do you not worry how do you handle that yeah i'll quote um danica when ring the bells that still can bring forget your perfect offering there's a crack a crack in everything and that's how the light gets in the vulnerability of the taiwanese democracy becomes a crack through which that the light is now shining very bright we have uh visitors from the european parliament from all over the world really time after time proving that they care about not just the liberal democratic order in the abstract but this taiwanese manifestation that provides a veritable lab that pushes advances the capability of the democratic model and it shares around the world taiwan can help is our slogan so that nobody would want this lab to disappear because this is the place where you produce the vaccination against this information against conspiracy theories against polarization and so on and so of course people also talk about the chips thomas and michael doctor that's another thing that people cannot afford to lose but i think over time by making the taiwanese model of democracy essential to the infrastructure to the liberal democratic world i believe we're among very good and trustworthy company thank you so much that was i'm doing the praying now that was absolutely outstanding and beautiful and thank you for your time thank you that would have been one thing when you talked about technology um and because technology is always like a two-sided sword right you can it's a tool that you can use for the guru for the better so you think it that is also one of the fundamental chances for taiwan and to to create limelight on taiwan because in china they're using technology as well but they're using it to control the people yeah well you actually said you used uh the the technology for the people to kind of control the government yeah yes yeah so um it's the most clear during the pandemic um in taiwan when we say transparency we mean making the state transparent to people but in the prc jurisdiction when they say transparency it always means making people transparent to the state but if you look at the actual code it's probably the same open source code however it's used in diametrically oppositing fashions when we're developing assistive intelligence ai to restore capabilities to people who are less natural to communicate one way or another taiwan is the place where personal computing uh was become really popular right in the early 80s uh we're called the kingdom of personal computers so there's a very strong ethos of personal computing the ai needs to be personal privacy needs to be a extension of your own agency on the other hand the prc uses the same ai algorithms for authoritarian intelligence right informing only the authoritarians about where people are what uh crime think uh they are committing and so on uh again same algorithm uh they're metrically opposing uses um but during the pandemic for a while especially during 2020. there was a narrative that says it's a necessary evil for the surveillance authoritarian intelligence to work this way in the prc it's mentioned the same breath that says the lockdowns are a necessary evil it's inevitable it's the only efficient model to counter the corona virus and then the prc narrative of course wasn't universally accepted but many people seriously considered that it may be true and so it falls to taiwan or new zealand or other democracies that practices uh this way of what we call this civil intelligence civic intelligence collective intelligence that relies on a well-informed citizenry to invent new ways to do contact tracing to do masquerading and things like that to prove that it is not a trade-off between human rights on one side and public health on the other it's not a dial that you just go full lock down or just everybody gets infected but you can't actually keep your economy running while keeping the coronavirus at bay and the only condition is that you have a well-informed citizenry that are creative so that is to me the taiwan model and in places that doesn't like to use the word taiwan model for political reasons i'm totally fine calling a new zealand model because it's the same model but what's important is to prove that a pro-social social media a pro-democratic use of ai is not just possible but also desirable to the international community thank you brilliant beautiful thank you so much thank you great yeah thank you that was great yeah really wonderful okay maybe the first interview in my life that i've cried in the middle of it's weird i didn't know i had that emotion