...start. Can you just draw on this iPad Pro?
Yes, and I am going to sit by you so we can be on the same page. Here is your text (Hackers: Au cœur de la résistance numérique), so I can refer back to the text whenever I want. This is how I look.
(laughter)
Then, I just make annotations on it. This Goodreads app is not my normal note-taking app. I use this because this works with PDF files. Normally, I take notes with Zen Brush, which is the calligraphic Chinese way of... This is too ceremonial, maybe, but you get the idea. [laughs] Let’s use this. Let’s just start talking... and write notes in the background, on the margin of your book. It’s funny.
(1. Personal Background)
How did you get into code, at first?
I think that was pretty well documented. I got into coding when I was eight, and I saw those programming books. I was very into mathematics at that time, so it looked like an extension to mathematics, except it’s repeatable mathematics. It’s a mathematics that is done outside of one’s mind.
It’s like a blackboard that does math for you. That was my initial idea. I started to just use pen and paper, which is actually why I always preferred pen-based devices.
(laughter)
Stylus. I started with the very early Palm Pilot, and then Zaurus. Every generation of devices with stylus, because that’s how I started, with a pencil and a paper, and an actual keyboard, and then simulate how the computer would respond before my parents bought me real computer. I was already programming before that with pen and paper, which explained this affection.
You had, I would say a first career. I don’t know if it’s the good word but as an entrepreneur, and then you got involved in politics. When did you get this sense that maybe there was something to do with code and politics?
That was back in, I would say 1987. I was six at that time. You know the entire Apple II personal computer history. I would not have to tell you that. You wrote this book. I know what you already know.
(laughter)
That was when Wozniak and Gates were doing their work mostly. On the same year, it was the lifting of the Martial Law in Taiwan, so think Spain and Franco. Before that, it’s impossible to have a press like the Libération. Back then, it’s just government-run presses, as well as the presses that walks a very fine line on censorship and self-censorship, and so on. But after ’87, because the Martial Law was lifted, an emphasis on freedom of speech has been going on for 30-something years.
People started to have the freedom of press, I think around ’88, freedom to make parties around ’89. You know, all those things. They are in the psychology of the Taiwan generation — not just for me — that personal computing and political freedom happen in the same year.
Internet and democratisation, the direct election of presidents, the first one in ’96, happened in the first year. Then the social media, as in both Wikipedia and the other kind of blogging around 2002 or 2003, appeared at the same time as the modernisation of the other election levels. Then it’s further democratic innovations, like referendums, or participatory budgeting, and things like that.
They could be discussed now, while as before, it was not even on the agenda because there was Martial Law and the dictatorship. What I’m saying, is that it’s not about me. It’s a very particular timeline.
It was quite natural for you to get involved, for instance, in open source?
Yes, because the freedom of speech in the IETF coincides with the freedom of speech in the new constitution that took effect after the lifting of the Martial Law. Actually — defined with the exactly same words.
What do you mean? With the same words.
Meaning that, for example, in the Tao of IETF. I don’t know if you have read this document. This is one of the RFCs that defines the way of the Internet Engineering Task Force. This is where they said, “we reject votes and kings and presidents; we believe in rough consensus and running code.”
Rough consensus and running code.
Then there’s a section in there called security implications, because all the RFCs by that time are required to have a section that says security implications. All the section says is a quote from Laozi, the Chinese philosopher who says, basically, “one who defends with love and care has no enemies,” or something like that.
But words from that scripture was quoted in the democratisation slogans, too, because Taiwan is very heavy in traditional Chinese culture. Our written language is literally called “Traditional Chinese.”
The idea, the Tao of IETF, well, even this quote, is very familiar to the political rhetoric in modern Taiwan. It is the saying that the traditional Chinese culture, which promotes political intelligence, harmony, whatever, must prevail against the dictatorship that has fallen down and so on. A gradual democratisation.
When I say same words, I mean literally same words, that they quote from the same sources.
When exactly are you getting involved in the IETF?
As an IETF participant in the working groups, that was very late. That was 2004. It was the Atom WG. But that was also only because W3C before that time operated independently of IETF, and I was mostly working with web technologies.
But I did of course, as an implementer, have to read all the relevant new RFCs and give feedback. At the vicinity of IETF are us implementers, from the very early beginning to the later ones like...I don’t know. WebDAV was developed in IETF I think, and then later OAuth. In W3C there is now OpenSocial, of course. There’s a lot, actually.
Those work were from my career in the private sector, but also from the voluntary sector. So I have to work with the RFC folks. But I wasn’t an editor for anything. I was just implementing, giving my feedback saying "this draft sucks; that doesn’t work."
[laughs] You say that very early you had this sense that there was something in common between personal computers and Taiwan’s democratisation. When did you really get practically involved in that?
Practically, as in...?
I don’t know how to say that, but trying to promote democracy through technical terms?
Now I have to introduce my family, because that was their work. Both of my parents worked in the media. My dad was deputy editor-in-chief for the "China Times," which was the more liberal newspaper that existed in the Martial Law era. My mom was a journalist there, covering politics and later ecology and social movements.
What I would like to say, is the amount of time they could have spent training me to work with the system that existed before, they spent that energy instead to change the system, so I don’t have to adapt to it. Am I making sense?
Yes, I think so.
Because they were around my age at that time, for example, when my dad helped covering the Tiananmen incident, they were the first generation to use a digital camera and digital modem lines to transfer the images. Before that it was not possible — there was no modem for cameras.
So that’s kind of their work. It’s very difficult to say when did I start, because we talk about this all the time in our family.
You were immersed.
Immersed in the activities and the work in the extended family. One of my uncles is also a judge who cares about judiciary reforms.
(2. g0v.tw)
Can you explain what g0v is?
Gov-zero, yes. Ready?
Yeah.
Should I use the Portuguese slides? I gave workshops and distributed three versions of the talk. Just a second... [switched to French slides] Very, very briefly. So g0v is three groups of people who didn’t necessarily talk to each other. There are two chapters in your book that talk about this: sometimes the NGO moves too slow, because they don’t trust strangers.
The media people are too hands-off, because although they use the technologies to ensure the communication, sometimes is they who sever the deeper link to hacktivism, because they don’t want to get too much into the activist agenda.
That was your argument, not mine... But, of course, you also mentioned that many people in the hacker movement are not necessarily hacktivists. Activists are actually just a small fraction of the entire hacker movement, meaning that most of hackers didn’t actually care that much about public interest.
I think more and more of them do.
Yes, definitely! What we are saying is that the amount of people who care about this, in the media circles about hands-on concerns, were a minority, and the people in activist circles that cares about open-source is minority, and the free-software people that cares about civic hacking is a minority. That’s what I am saying.
Yes. OK.
So g0v is a way for us to get these three groups of people and to form a series of spaces, with open space technology — online and offline — to become an organism, so that we learn from the activists and the media people what are really in the public interests. The media people learn from us on how to actually make an impact, and activists learn from us on how to trust strangers.
This is basically what g0v is, without going in too much detail.
The idea is to put a global focus on transparencies in it?
There are two things — I made a poem about it. Have you read it?
I don’t think so.
(1.1. Poetry)
It was commissioned by this republican assembly member of yours, Frédéric Lefebvre. He invited me to give a talk to the assembly, but I was in Taiwan so I couldn’t make it, so he asked for a recording. So I only have five minutes or so of time, because of the setup.
That recording was required because I am not in person, I can’t answer questions, so I thought it’s best if I just transmit all my ideas in that single recording. So in this sense, he commissioned the poem.
It’s a lovely story.
He commissioned this work. Yeah. Then, of course, your minister of foreign affairs also asked me to do a public performance in the "La Nuit des Idées," the Night of Ideas, which I also read the same poem. The idea here, we will skip the intro, and go to the poetry. It’s this:
Through radio and television,
Just a question on the side. Is that Frédéric Lefebvre who got in touch with you?
To commission this? Yes.
Because that’s an anecdote, but it’s really funny. When he was the spokesman of the government, well, no, he was Secretary of State at that time.
Also at Ministry of Economy, I think.
Yeah, it was years ago, maybe 10 years ago. He made an intervention in the HADOPI law, which was completely against the Internet.
I know. He won the Big Brother award for that. I’m aware of the history.
For me, this guy is a mystery because I think he really changed, something changed. We had two months ago a big discussion in the parliament about a new law, digital law. He was one of the most precise and aware...
... and his proposal is on GitHub. That’s for everything that the administration sends to the assembly, he tells the administration to come out with a report about how to make all the bureau-proposed laws go through a national digital platform, like the Digital Public Bureau itself did. It was voted into law. I don’t know how your administration would do this, because there were things with the economy, with the Internet that was just as easy to work. But there was also agriculture, there were also labor issues.
I’m not exactly sure how that would work. I have ideas, but no government so far have made that work. In the US it was done by the White House. They don’t have to answer to the parliament or the senate. In the UK, it’s done by the parliament, so they don’t have to answer to the administration. But if this law that Frédéric proposed works, then this becomes more Estonian than Estonia.
It would create a new assembly below the assembly, between the administration and the assembly and the senate. It becomes this level. I don’t know whether or how it will work. But it’s a very interesting idea.
(1.2. Myth of Origin)
Can you tell me the story of g0v, when it was created before the Sunflower movement? But it was very active during the Sunflower movement. How did it happen exactly?
The myth of origin is...
(laughter)
No, seriously, the myth of origin is that there’s this advertisement, which I will spare you, about the economic boosting plan that the Taiwan administration did in late 2012. In this advertisement, what it looks like is this huge banner saying this economic plan on top and a lot of people looking very confused under it, and a lot of keywords flying through over their head literally.
Then this, which is also broadcast on YouTube for five minutes long, the voiceover says, "The economic boosting plan is a very complex plan. Because of that we wish we can explain five minutes, but we cannot but the important thing to remember is trust your government. We have everything figured out and as for economy the debate does not do people any good. What’s important is just to follow the plan and do it."
This is like back to the ’80s. Wow! Such a retro advertisement. The director was fired immediately after this for obvious reasons. We are, after all, a democratic country. He has exclamations saying that he actually plans to file upwards more advertisement. This is just to talk to people how complex it is. Nobody listened to him.
When this went on YouTube people used the "report spam" button and so the Taiwan administration become the first YouTube account to get classified as a junk account and got banned from YouTube because hundreds of people, thousands of people clicked the "report spam" button on this YouTube.
That was so bad.
As you can see this is a very insulting advertisement and the central message is that the administration is so complex normal citizen has no chance of understanding it so we don’t even try. This is the core message.
g0v was founded, not by me but by my very good friend. He was at a hackathon at that time, and they were just already doing some e-shopping, normal kind of hackathon stuff, but because this account was restored on the day before their hackathon and it was aired again on YouTube they got so insulted that they decided to change their hackathon subject at the last time. They build this website instead, which is why I asked for WiFi because if you had WiFi you can go there and check.
What this does though is it used the standard open spending trademark model to show the national, but they improved it showing also the bubble graph, so we can see which is getting cut, that falls down and which is getting increased, which goes up.
They also provide unit converters because people when they hear one million they don’t have an idea, but they convert it to how many iPhone 5s, how many minutes of space travel, how many average national salary, and how many Icelands, because Iceland was bankrupt at that time it was the price of Iceland.
(laughter)
At a glance, understand what the budget is about. Then they could say they want more or this is not explained clearly, or they want it reduced or they want it cut. They have a discussion thread in each specific item of the national budget. It won some award in the hackathon. They used that money to have their own hackathon, and to register this very important domain name.
The problem with new civic startups is always the website name. People cannot remember so many website names — something citoyenne dot fr — and so on. I say this not with any disrespect to others at the hacking communities in France, but all these websites here ends with citoyenne, and I can sometimes not tell between the senate or the parliament or the other different things that all ends with citoyenne…
The g0v.tw domain name is important because if you want to go to the environmental agency data in Taiwan is env.g0v.tw. If you want to look at the visualisation of environmental agencies data and open data, GitHub and Fork, you just, in your browser bar, change the O to a zero and then you get into the shadow government. We solved the problem of discovering, because people know their parliament website is ly.g0v.tw. To get into the shadow government, you just add a zero.
Here for example you see all the bills in a shopping cart like a progression. You see the link of all the legislators. Basically what you people are doing here also, but the thing is that every system here is linked so you can link to their donation records, to the companies who donated to them, to the company funding those companies, and triage it with their voting records and so on.
Because there is one government agency doing all this so there is one g0v agency doing that also, except we’re linked using data, and ministries I know linking their data together. This is why call our Fork government. I hope I’m clear.
Completely. This is a way to get more transparency in what you’re saying.
More reflectiveness.
More reflectiveness. How do you get people involved in it?
(1.3. Hackathons)
With food. For every hackathon which we have every month, maybe 100 to 600 people, and then the next month 50 people, 30 to 50, and then the next month 100 people and then the next month 50. Then it’s very regular. Every two years we have a summit that brings all the usual suspect that you have in the book to Taiwan to talk about their agenda for the next year.
Then we go back to this rhythm. Everybody knows where and when to finance those first, and then when they go to this open space they see top class food. This is actually our only regular expense. All the donation that we get are transferred into top class food catering. We have a professional catering team, volunteers of course.
The point is that the funding we get by selling tickets after they were sold out to the hackathon because they were very hot. That’s our only funding first, and then we spend all of it on catering. We don’t keep money. Then two months after that we do another round of fundraising, and buy very good food.
Basically, because one month from a open space hackathon you will not remember any of the agenda or the people, but you will remember the food if it’s good enough or if it’s bad enough. That’s how human long-term memory works. It links a fact to the space, to the situation. This is positive effect, and then the procedure.
After the great food you’re seeing stickers. For example, for you I know you’re a great storyteller, I know maybe you’re a designer, I know maybe that you work in the media. Maybe you care about human right, so then you will take these four stickers. There’s these huge badges you could then put it down your shoulder.
Supposed you’re the first time here, you’ll use this deer button and put it in front of you. If you’ve been here many times you use this bear button, veterans. Then everybody who has an idea goes on the podium, there’s maybe 20 different ideas, and then they announce in three minutes’ time sometimes with slides or PowerPoint saying, "I want to do a transparency campaign finance. I want to do a recall campaign. I want to do a civic media, whatever, I’ve got a dream."
Then for this screen this is what I have -- usually just some hand-drawn things. I have already solved that I will need two engineers, one designer, one storyteller and one legal people. They can make their HR requirements up front.
Then because it’s an open space, all the 20 projects go to different corners, and then you as a participant, you just choose which team you’re interested in but if they’re already full of engineers or designers or writers you go to some other team. You can look at a glance whether they’re full because of the stickers. We have a very even distribution of expertise of projects.
Now, of course a lot of the deer will stand there, caught in the headlights, not sure where to go and then the bears will come and slowly ask, "What do you care about? What do you usually work for? What’s your passion? Walk with me." By the end of the walk you’ll find yourself in the project. That’s our way of getting people involved.
Now after you discover those through this hackathon, discover these projects which will be called gaps or holes on the ground. We don’t call projects, and then you will meet more people. By the whole day or two days of hacking usually everybody would have their prototype by the end of the day or the two days.
Then they go on the podium to take five minutes to present this is what we have built in a day. Then we will meet every other Friday, or we will meet on a selection or something to make this actually work for the public. Usually, people set on a weekly or biweekly schedule.
After that, that becomes the meet-ups just for that project or sibling project. Through meeting those people, you know more meet-ups or more hackathons, but in that meet-ups eventually people will come up with new ideas. You get involved into more projects and then you meet more people.
So g0v really is not an organisation or a team or anything; it’s just a space of doing this like this. Every time in 100 people we have maybe 40 or so new people. That actually means when a project is mature enough, they would just send one or two people to the large hackathon just to get to know what the new ideas are. Because they are mature sometimes they become a social enterprise or sometimes they become its own movement and that’s great.
This is the zero stage, incubator, where you only need to bring your ideas and you need people with very large, diverse professions, and it starts with maybe 40, 50 percent engineers, but now we are 20 percent, 25 percent.
Really?
Yeah. Then 20 percent designers, and the other people are all sorts of people.
That’s really interesting because, well, most hackathons in Europe it’s mostly coders.
They eventually homogenize, but what we have found a way is that once they form a team they don’t need to go this large hackathon anymore. It’s natural, it’s usual that people from NGOs or any other parties that are interested in working with hackers to come. They are the majority, but there’s still maybe 30, 40 hackers or veterans, in the hackathon, so it’s mostly mixed.
That’s quite interesting. What did g0v do during the Sunflower movement?
We promote this counter-cultural idea in Asia — because in Asia people care about face. It’s a shame-based culture, not a guilt-based one, if you know the difference. People were very afraid of throwing out something imperfect. The way we counter this culture is by designing, deliberately, very ugly logos, like this was the g0v logo. I’m sure you can do better than that, everybody can do it.
(laughter)
This is with text editor. It’s just 10 seconds time. I wasn’t part of the movement. I joined two months later but they had the guts of printing it and hanging it on the Open Space. Then one of the designers said, he is paralysed, because he sees something so ugly, he feels powerless, he has to do something better otherwise his face is gone. He spends the whole day redesigning a better logo, which is talking and inspecting and what have you, which is better.
But then, because they relinquished the copyright and he also abandoned the copyright using this device that I’m very glad I don’t have to explain to you...All the other designers then cried out and said, "Our mobile device just looks like a Q." We actually had to register gQv.tw, because some people typed it wrong, so we did a redesign, and now we look like this.
On a mobile device it’s just this, so it’s very identifiable now, but without the shameless people who do this, this will not happen. This helps explaining the Sunflower movement because this is how g0v does things.
(3. Situational Applications)
We do what Clay Shirky calls situational applications, meaning that for every day of Occupy, we code just for the next day of Occupy, and then the next day, and then the next day.
It’s not re-purposing Twitter, it’s not re-purposing Facebook. It’s just doing what the movement needs on that day. That’s the ideological kind of thing. The actual implementation, which we don’t call the Sunflower. We call it the Digital Camp, because it was a demonstration, but a demonstration not as in demonstration of raw numbers, but as a demo in the demoscene — I’m very glad I don’t have to explain that to you.
Because the site we occupy is the parliament, and the reason why we occupy it is they refuse to deliberate a trade deal. The demo is to how to deliberate things like this. That was the goal of the Occupy.
I think something very similar happened in ’68 here: People said that it’s a theatre what the parliaments are doing but in the theatre we do the parliamentary things. But in here, the theatre is the parliament itself — but it’s the same idea. We used, I’m sure you’re familiar with this, Occupy Wall Street deliberation methods to talk about a cross-strait service deal, and demonstrated to the legislatures how we should talk about things like that.
This is a demo, but not a demonstration, and the system was exploited a few months after that, again with the world’s politest protesters. You probably know Occupy Central.
Yes, and this was another question. The link between people in Taiwan and people in Hong Kong. At that time, I interviewed a developer in Hong Kong, and he said that they were inspired by what happened in Taiwan a few months ago.
Yeah. They re-forked the repository. Yeah, look at this. This is very technological events. His friends are saying, but I’ve seen this before. Then Chia-Liang, one of co-founders of g0v, says well because they just forked the GitHub repository.
(laughter)
You have interviewed Code4HK, so you know their system. It’s crowd-sourced bookmarking, and with the geo-positioning of news and real-time broadcast and the logistics spreadsheet. This is what we built during the entire movement, and they fought it and of course, improved on it. It started with the anti-nuke protest, that was our first test of this kind of methodology. I’ll give you the short version.
This is ’14, and one year ago before that, there is a anti-nuke protest that’s very large, 100 million people. I’m sorry, 100,000 people or something like that. That’s because of Fukushima — all around the world people are doing the same thing. Taiwan was considering building its first nuclear plant. People were generally OK with that, but after Fukushima, some people went to the street saying, we don’t want that now, especially if it’s Japanese technology. [laughs] We have earthquakes, just like in Japan.
But the problem is that the journalists who went to the parade could not send their news out because there’s so many people, the entire 3G spectrum was gone.
That’s a common problem these days.
Yes, yes. We have solutions for it now, but we didn’t have high bandwidth connection at that time. Everybody has to wait until the next day to see the news, which weakens the movement, for obvious reasons. That year, they decided not to repeat the same mistake. They asked the g0v people they met at one of the g0v Hackathons to say whether we could have a CPR (cable-power-radio) hackathon? This is just another g0v project, except that we’ll have the hackathon in the street.
Our project, we need to know our engineers, we need the intranet people, we need a fallback planning, disaster recovery. These experts that we gathered around. We brought our APs, this is typical hacktivism but then we issued a request for I think 50 megabits per second line to the demonstration street. This was all pre-planned.
We did get the fiber-optic line. This is very high speed Internet we have and we plan to share with all the journalists, and as they parade, as they go, we go with the video streaming team, and they have their own 5Ghz WiFi or something.
We had it all planned out, and the typhoon came. A hurricane, and nobody showed up. The turnout was maybe 50,000, not even 50,000, low number of people, because it was raining cats and dogs. C’est la vie, right? [laughs]
But we still were there, and the rain was pouring down, and we have a lot of bandwidth but nothing to use it with. Of course, the media people had to come, that’s their job, but they used maybe one-hundredth of our bandwidth. [laughs] We have a lot of spare bandwidth and we don’t have a lot of people. What do we do? Just two weeks before that, YouTube Live was introduced. That is to say, everybody can broadcast on YouTube with live streaming.
We connected those two bits to the SDI in line that was broadcasting on the main show stage, where they have important people doing speaking, rallying, that sort of thing. Then we routed into my computer here, which is conveniently having a fiber-optic uplink. It can then use all the bandwidth. We have nothing to use it anyway but for a real time broadcast to the nation.
Basically, we become a media at that point, because some people feel guilty for not coming out to the rally because of the weather. So they dialled in to this live stream. Even though we did not pre-announce it, and we did not plan it, still, like within minutes, there are more people watching than people around the stage. Because you really want to join, but there’s really raining.
The fun thing is that on the stage, it looks great, because the camera is not taking the empty chairs, it’s not taking the surroundings that shows not many people are showing up, but on the stage it looks just like very eventful rallying, convincing charismatic, environmental activists talking and so on.
People, through Internet participation, saw it’s a successful, great event through telepresence. This is our first time really intervening in this regard. Then we documented the entire process, then shared it with other hacktivists, but even before we could pack our equipment, the Occupy happened. There was just 10 days between the two rally. That night, there was a street protest.
We thought maybe it was just protesting for one night, or until the next morning. The professional camera crew are covering it and they, because it was not pre-planned, we don’t have a high-speed Internet connection, so I just used my phone to serve as the HD live streaming. The camera crew use this desktop computer that connects to the SDI line, and what I have is just a film, there’s no way for them to use the WiFi signal because their WiFi card is broken.
A random student just showed up, saying, I have this laptop here and then, you can just use WiFi and I’ll just use Windows Internet Sharing to share into Internet, so that the signal can go out to the country about the protest. I’m like, OK, but are you not using your laptop, you look like a young student. He’s like, "No, no, this is my administrator password. I’m not going to use my laptop anymore. You can have it as your station." I’m like, what?
Then it turns out that he climbs over the walls here and break into the parliament. Later I’d learn that all the student Occupiers would only bring Macbook Air. Anything that’s heavier than that, is not possible for them to climb over walls, and break glasses. They’re too, too heavy. His is a 15-inch, it’s heavy, so he just left it there. We have a live YouTube going, but they broke into the parliament and then set up what we call a sandal-mounted live-streaming station.
Because there were no police, maybe two or three police, people were not anticipating this kind of Occupy. It was actually kind of peaceful, and because we have g0v people there filming here already, so there’s a mobile team that took the entire footage of their going into and negotiating the supplies, and so on. Police soon came to surround the parliament, but because we had this going on first, even more people counter-surrounded the police.
New police cannot get in anymore. This becomes a counter-surrounding situation. Police then try to break in, and they were setting up barricades, of course, but the point is that all the barricades were filmed back here. All these police trying to break into the barricades and so on, were then broadcast to even more people who joined even more.
(laughter)
It’s impossible then for the police to outnumber the crowd, and the crowd say, we will not attack you, if you stop attacking the students. It was a settlement, and has been like that for the next 20 days. That’s the basic situation of the Occupy. The g0v’s doing is mostly in the first 24 hours setting up two WiMax stations and then broadcast what they have inside — including the original station which was not our doing — into this Hackpad, which is a transcript platform, and we ask everybody to hear those three channels and type whatever they have heard.
Another team of occupiers coordinates translation into 12 different languages based on this text or transcript. This is a spreadsheet that I helped maintaining, well, I coded it, with Dan Brickllin. It was the backbone of a crowdsource bookmark of everything that’s related to the Occupy. Here comes the covert Hong Kong system that you saw. The same designer who designed the g0v logo designed a main learning page so that people can print a bracelet to show their support, for example, our movement.
That’s what we did the first day. Does that answer your question?
Yeah, completely. That’s quite fascinating, because this idea of documenting what’s happening in real time, it’s also a way to change the balance of forces, obviously.
This is just a transparent part. The reflective part came three days. In any Occupy, by the third day, when things are stabilising, you run into people who are, I don’t know, mobsters, gangs, vagabonds, I don’t know but you know that happens. What they do is that their most effective weapon is not violence, it’s rumours.
In any Occupy, you have a lot of rumours going around. There’s no efficient way because the rumour does this, "Police is attacking the station," is expressed faster than the fact, even though the fact is filmed, transmitted, you still have to check your phone.
But when the person next to you shouts, "They’re being attacked over there," it’s more viral than your phone. What we did then, at that time, because of this kind of rumour start to spread, is we set up on the street, remember there are three streets around the parliament, this street, this street, and this street...We set out on this street, a projection screen. This is very makeshift, as you can see. Yeah, sure. Go ahead.
(phone rings)
Yes, I don’t know. [French] . OK. Sorry.
It’s OK. This is what we did. We set out a projector like this. This is the occupied place, it’s the parliament, but there’s a stenographer, three actually, rotating. There’s a stenographer in the parliament sitting here, typing everything she heard. Here, in real-time, a stenographer. You don’t have to trust what she writes, of course, buy anybody with a phone, or a headphone can check whether she’s actually being factual. She has to be factual.
But because this is projected, any rumour that is about the occupied area, is slower than this, because anybody on the street can check, just by reading, what’s happening.
Because...
It was projected on the wall.
You just have to look at the projection.
The wall, that is the prototype of the Occupy Central, of this one. Same, same idea. Basically, this then completely eliminates rumour on that street, so the other streets set up the same projection screen. Then the occupiers inside saw it was such a good idea that they also set up two screens showing each street. The walls now become transparent. It’s as if the police are not there. It’s as if people can just talk to each other through those mutually transparent walls.
Eventually, we upgraded our equipment because some IT companies in Taiwan, they donate, they re-synthesise actually, the movement. They donate new screens that are two stories high or something, but that comes a few days later. The basic idea is that we eliminate rumours using this kind of what we call reflective space. It’s not enough that people know that they’re being filmed, it’s that we show people that they’re being filmed. That changed human behaviour completely.
In some sense, what is public has to be completely transparent. Is that also the idea?
Yeah. The public sphere is by definition transparent, but what is transparent is not enough. Transparency just means that all the raw data are there, but to make sense of the transparency, you have to derive what we call expertise networks. You know all the theory. It’s not enough because you don’t magically have a dialogue, just because of transparency.
You have a dialogue because the experts are able to converge on some kind of blended discussion in a way that the lay people and other experts are lay people in other fields, in the shared social sphere.
This is what France does. Frequently, you have those television debates that with smart writers that both know the layperson’s language and the expert’s language. That’s what you do very well. In Taiwan, what we specialise, is on the transparency in the policy level. For example, we have a law that says any information system that is built in less than €1 million have to publish all their data completely open by the government.
It’s not even a choice. It’s the default. Now, once you have that default, the expertise network start to grow. It’s like participator budgeting. There’s no NGOs in some area, but because of PB it starts to grow around the budget. The same idea because the data is now flowing.
It’s an opt out system, you have to prove this is sensitive data, otherwise it’s flowing out. Then people start to gather around that, and become a gradual ladder of expertise around it, but without that guaranteed source of information or transparency you cannot build reflection outside of that.
How is it today? What do you do today? Do you have some examples or...?
Yeah, I have the interview with Amaëlle Guiton at Libération, literally.
(laughter)
(2.1. vTaiwan.tw)
[laughs] What I do nowadays is, for example, I’m a facilitator, and moderator, and architect to the what we call rule-making, on those topics. For those topics we take opinions of others. Decoders will do a face-to-face deliberation, but powered by Sunflower technology so that the entire nation see it and it has transcript that you can link to any arguments and so on.
Basically, a parliament in the administration. You get this idea?
Yeah.
But the parliament was built in a bottom-up way, so it’s a bazaar. A bazaar with the cathedral, in the cathedral. [laughs]
One very concrete example. We know that this is a difficult thing because most people don’t know they’re being affected, and that most people don’t know how to commentate. They are better at posting their pictures, and most people find loss to be overwhelming, but to deliberate, you really need people who have that experience.
For example, this is the closely-held company law that you also passed trough a hearing in France a few years ago, about a new company type of company that takes agreements between the shareholders above the law, in a sense, so that it’s limited in the stakeholder amount, that’s more flexible so you could retain multiple votes per share, or something like that.
That law was generally seen as — I don’t mean in France — in Taiwan, as something that runs counter to the civil law tradition that we inherited from Germany, because that is a very US thing, a very UK thing maybe, because that’s private agreement above the law, basically, is what it’s saying.
There’s a lot of debate and they were, how do you call it here, ideological sides on this kind of thing, and the problem is that they agreed to never agree.
[laughs]
You know what I’m saying?
Yeah.
The civil law people, and the case law people, and the entrepreneurs, and so on, they agree to disagree very, very, very early on, like three years or four years ago, and so this law never even really passed the public hearing because you’re not even sure who to invite to the public hearing.
Some people would say, "If that professor come, I will not come." Do you have this problem here? [laughs]
Sometimes it can happen, yeah.
Very divided things. Then, the Nationalists lost the election on all its cities, but one, one city, the New Taipei City, in the election here, so basically, everybody knows the Nationalist government has one year to live till the presidential election this year at that time.
The entire sentiment of government changed, and the prime minister was forced to resign because he was the one who refused to negotiate with the occupiers, and was generally seen as the reason why Nationalists lost this election so completely, and why we have a independent, nonpartisan mayor as the Taipei city mayor, the capital mayor.
He was elected in a very five-star movement kind of way. A hacker-mayor, basically. The prime minister was replaced with an engineer, and the prime minister said, “Engineers cannot choose to avoid problems. We still have to solve it."
He recruited his vice prime minister as the ex-Google engineer, Simon, who recruited Jaclyn, who was ex-IBM Asia, head of IBM’s Asian Law Department. What they are, are basically technical savvy and cyber-educated. If you disagree with them, you’d call them technocrats.
But what I see is that in Sunflower movement the demo really worked. They say, "OK, you say you’re better than the parliament at debating, so prove it to the nation." You said that during those 20 days — so prove it. What the parliament could not agree on, you proved it to get us a way to agree.
For example, for telecommuting regulations or the closely-held company law, like this, usually they invite the union people, the syndicate people, but there is no syndicate for teleworkers, because it’s impossible.
There is no association of Kickstarter companies in Taiwan. There is no coalition of Taiwan companies registering in Cayman Island. These are oxymoron. It’s not possible. The problem is that if they invite just people they know to the public hearing, everybody else will say this is lobbying. This is something that could never solve with the original legislative public hearing methodology.
Jaclyn, she came to the hackathon. She took stickers. Hers was law and text. She went on the podium, take three minutes to explain that they want to reach everybody who want or is already registering in Cayman Islands, and suggest to the government what kind of law are we going to make to make people go back to Taiwan and register. This is a hackathon project. She needed law people, engineers, and designers.
We can gather around this open space. We design the system. The system invites everybody who is a stakeholder to comment. Anyone who commented is marked as constructive, gets invited to the face to face deliberation with all the ministry people and other academics in the civil law and the case law traditions. We extract promise out of them based on the discussion here. It was live streamed and transcribed using the same Sunflower technology.
This is the key. We use the IETF-style working groups, meaning that these people are exactly the people who made constructive comments here or here. My role is just the facilitator, the editor for the request of comment. We actually call you that. The RFC document that we proposed are we are not legal people, so we don’t speak legalese.
We go through all the debates points, and said if the nation doesn’t pass this law it’s fine, but if it does, it must include multiple laws per share. It must not limit the crowdfunding in coming.
It should allow telecommunication for the board meetings. It should not, it may not. This is the RFC language. It was exactly the same definition. We are like the editors for RFC. The ministry of the economy are like the coders, the implementers. They coded into legalese, and must answer to us whether they’re conforming to the spec or not. If they are not conforming, they have to justify it saying, "OK, this outside our scope, or this is up to the local governments. Otherwise, they have to translate very faithfully the RFC into their implementation.
Most after that, it’s sent to the parliament. The parliament at that time was filibustering each other. A party want to change their constitution. They are not passing any bills at that point. They stopped it two days after that. For this particular bill, they have to pass it. Because first, all the major parties, people, have already participated in the process. Second, if they don’t discover any new facts that through their working to process has been discovered, they have no good reason to block this law. There’s already consensus.
Any party that blocks this bill will be seen as the enemy of the entire process. They pass the bill. It’s signed to the law, whatever. The point is that we use this Focused Conversation Method technology that says, "These are the facts. These are the feelings. These are the ideas." We use a font with six different weights to show strengths of consensus.
Then we talk about one aspect of their law each time. Then, for 20 minutes, face to face for 20 minutes to the cyber-participation. Whether you’re offline or online, you get the same amount of time to deliberate. All this is standard deliberative technology, where we use it is tele-communicatively. We keep the word of everybody using Hackpad and SayIt.
The idea is that the consensus is built in this way. It’s very difficult for other political power to refute. This is our tool kit. The point here is that we changed our methodology a little bit when we’re faced with a entity that does not even have to answer to the national consensus, even if we could reach national consensus.
Am I going too long or is it OK?
No, it’s perfect. It raises a lot of questions.
Because you asked what I do and this is what I do, right?
Yeah.
(2.2. The Uber Case)
This entity, Uber, is very good at lobbying. You know what they did in NYC. They had a mayor’s feel that they were considering, and then they built in the app Uber, Black Uber, Luxury Uber X, and then Uber was the mayor’s loss. Then if you swipe to here, you will see eight minutes, but if you swipe to here, you will see 61 minute.
This is their lobbying tool, because then everybody in the city will get the impression that if the mayor’s regulation passes, you will not be able to get Uber anymore, and then of course, the celebrities love it. They were tweeting it, creating a lot of pressures, so the idea had to be rejected. From a social computing perspective, this is genius. From a deliberative perspective, this is a nightmare.
(laughter)
This kind of effect, it’s mobilisation exactly, so they did not usually answer to deliberation — they just showed up. The thing is that they don’t even have an office that’s operating in Taiwan. They only have a PR office in Taiwan. There’s very little our existing process can do with this entity, so we redesigned the process.
Now, we want to talk with the transport ministry, which is already fining €1 million from Uber. We talked with the economy ministry, which Uber argues it’s their job, because they’re just a ride share platform on the Internet, so it’s up to the economy.
The Minister thinks it’s actually the finance ministry’s job because it’s about insurance and taxing. But none of the ministries want to take responsibility of proposing analysis and putting a call for deliberation, because of obvious reasons. The same dynamics you can see in any other country. It’s about ideology. It’s about which side of sharing economy, ideology you’re on.
For them to even just publish a word of analysis, they risk getting occupied and surrounded or like here — burning tires in the streets, [laughs] so they did nothing. Doing nothing is not an option for things like that. It just escalates.
What we did was that we asked people who have connections to the taxi fleets and to have them work with the ministry of economy on what they actually want out of Uber, just one simple point, but internally, the outside doesn’t have to see it. It’s that they reach something here and through the taxi fleets, we get through to the independent drivers. They are not a single organisation, which is why this is dotted, the P means private section and C means civic sector.
Then, through connection with the transport industry, we get hold of the local governments, and through them, they own sometimes illegal rights sharing platforms that’s existing before Uber. There’s already right sharing platforms, which is voluntary. They are not really making a profit, and also illegal or grey-zone Uber-like operations. It’s just never raised to the same amount, but this is city specific, so we have to reach the city.
The way vTaiwan surveying works is that we have one elected official representative from the ministry, one civil servant, an elected normal civic people, one or two hackers and then one or two private sector people from the Information Institute. Whenever we do a survey like this, it’s always four to six people in doing a survey.
This means there is minimal lobbying, because each force is counterbalanced by the other two forces and second that people are more willing to say authentic things about them because they know at least one of the people understands the language they are talking about. That’s what we call expertise ladder.
Now, we collect what they really care about the Uber case, and then we say, "We have the entire nations driver talk about this." The way we do it is bottom-up, asking what do you want to talk about? Most people want to talk about Uber and the Airbnb. The next one is Bitcoin by the way [laughs] and so we say, "People want to talk about Uber."
We talk about Uber, and we have already defined a specific question which is phrased as, "What if you have not a professional driver’s license that you carry passenger in your car, and by the time they get out your car, you charge them for it?" This is not ideological. This is very specific.
This is what Uber is doing, but also a lot of other people are doing and we say, "What do the stake holders care about is behaviour?" We say, "We will have a deliberation with all the stakeholders that I just described face-to-face a month from now." But what we will talk about, the agenda setting power, the most important power in civil deliberation is crowdsourced.
We say that we leave to all the drivers and your passengers to decide what we will talk about, and then everything is open data, so that people can make independent analysis to make sure we’re not cheating. Then we ask people’s feelings are there, what do you think?
This is the interface, designed for drivers. We only have one red light time. No voting while driving, but [laughs] they all use mobile phones. They don’t really have computers in their cars. This is a mobile phone. On your phone, you just see one single sentiment like insurance for passengers is important, and then you say whether you disagree or agree.
That’s it. We just ask for five seconds of your time and when you answer that, your position starts to change in visualisation, which is your friends actually. If you sign in on Facebook, you see your friends belonging to four different groups. They are not really your enemies. They are your friends. It’s just you never talk about Uber over dinner. [laughs] Also that people’s position can change, because all these is crowdsourced.
People can write new sentiments to try to win more consensuses in their own group and there’s a visualisation of other groups, and this is published. On the first week, there were Uber drivers, taxi drivers, Uber passengers, other passengers, and then a significant fraction of people thinks it’s already illegal. It is on the court already, so it should be canceled immediately.
This group of people says, "Even if there’s a lot of taxi in front of me, I always call a Uber." These are the Uber addicts, so to speak and these are the anti-Uber people, but if you multiply the numbers, none of this is in majority.
It’s true.
We say only ideas with more than 80 percent in global maturity gets to the agenda. These are not good for the agenda. They have to come up with something to convince more people in their group. Are you taking this?
Yeah.
By the end of first week, group one revised their position saying, "OK, so maybe all their ride sharing platforms should be fined." MOTC maybe too specific to Uber, but it’s do their job. This is more moderate so it gets more support.
Group two says, "But now all the taxis are forced to join the fleet because the capital is an engine used advertisement and more ways to earn money than just the cab. If you don’t join a fleet you don’t get those extra incomes, so the independent driver in union are getting weakened. But with Uber you can join many different platforms like Uber, Lyft, or whatever so it’s a way to strengthen union power." This is ingenious argument.
You can see that they convinced most of the people, including group two, and just like saying this they gained two percent of people because some taxi drivers jumped here. They want to present in the global population, but even this is not good enough. This is just 52 globally. This is not 80 globally. We say 80 globally is the agenda. Their job is not only to convince people who think like them but also people who don’t think like them.
By the second week things start to appear that convince everybody because this is shown randomly. Out of maybe 4,000 people, only 400 people saw this comment, but almost everybody who saw this comment saying that the law should change with time agrees. This is the general, why don’t you agree? For example, the driver everything is important but the security is the most important of course everybody agrees to their reflections.
Somebody from Mozilla Taiwan, actually a hacker, a hacktivist, wins the trophy for the most consensus by saying, "The government should introduce the same five-star rating system to regular taxis, so that the quality would improve, you can report bad taxis, so that a taxi get the same quality as Uber, and so nobody would have to take Uber anymore."
This argument convinced even the Uber people. For Uber, when it’s legalised it becomes the first company to satisfy this requirement, so this is a win for everybody. He wins the trophy. His idea was the most consensus.
Then this sentiment saying we don’t argue with terrorists started maybe 70 percent plus, but by third week it’s now just 35 percent plus. On the fourth week it dropped again. As the time goes on people says, "OK, maybe we should sit down and talk." Now by the fourth week we start, finally, seeing what we’re looking for. That is both consensus and actionable consensus. It should be fair. It should be taxed.
If they’re registered, their registration should be visible, like a medallion maybe on the front of the windshield or something and display inside so you know who you’re calling. This is about public safety, like food and medicine so it warrants being more strict, not just economic issue.
The registration is mandatory, but if you want to avoid tax, then you can maybe carry two passengers per day because you go to work and you’re back to work. If you’re using Uber as a ride share then naturally you can avoid tax because it’s ride sharing. if you’re taking 50 passengers per day you’re obviously not ride sharing and so by that time you better pay tax, and do it professionally, registration.
Finally, the drivers should be able to join multiple platforms. These are the six suggestions that has global consensus that are actual suggestions and not just feelings. These become our agenda.
Then we did an analysis on all those six things across countries, and then we sit down with everybody and starting extracting comments out of those six things and the three sentiments. What do you feel about that? Would you agree? This is the association for independent drivers, fleets, other fleets, Uber, Uber Asia, Uber Hong Kong, CEO of Uber, the Ministry of Transport and also Finance and Economy and the leading scholars on Asian economy.
When I was deliberating this, for example, the CEO of Uber Taiwan says, "We will actually claim for insurance if the passenger gets damaged." That’s one of the six points. I asked, "How many claims has happened so far?" It was two years or so of operation and Ku said, "None." Ben Jai, an ex-Google engineer asks, "So, which insurance company is that? Can I see the terms? Do people have to fly to Amsterdam to claim?"
Then the association says, "I just checked with the CEO. The CEO doesn’t have insurance term printed with him today," but then their lawyer says, "We will provide insurance terms to the ministry right after the meeting and they can happily share that if they want." That’s one checked.
I asked the Ministry of Transport, "When you said they’re illegal, did you actually run any interview with Uber about their action or their operation or did you just do a legalistic literal interpretation?" They said, "We just did a legalistic interpretation. We did not actually talk so we’re happy to learn what their mode of operation," so that’s something checked.
The fleet people said, "We actually just hear about surge pricing. One of the six consensus when they join multiple fleets we are at a disadvantage if we agree to that but they could have surge pricing on rainy days and we can’t. If the government is willing to relax that, we’re willing to compete with Uber on that term." The government says, "Why not?" They’re working on that.
Then the independent association says, "Uber takes us 20 percent cut. If they do two percent, we’ll work with them tomorrow." It’s a matter of economics. Basically, what they’re saying if they’re plus tax they’re willing to share their profit then we can have Uber taxi in Taiwan as long as the local government agrees. That’s another point checked.
There is some other points that are not checked. For example, they don’t want to register as a local company to file with the local city government’s tax purposes. It’s like a progress fire. There’s six consensuses and there’s three or four sentiments.
The sentiments everybody agrees and we can see Uber is maybe here, and the government now says, "It’s totally half the mandate to keep punishing them until they agree on those final two points that is agreed by all passengers and drivers in Taiwan, so once they are here they become just a regular company."
They could be legalised, but because they are not here yet they could get fined, but no demonstration process will change this anymore because people had a very thorough discussion about this problem already.
One of the side effects of that is that when we do next Airbnb their people know that we’re using Wikipedia for the fact presentation, so they edited Wikipedia, their sympathisers, I have no proof it’s them, to add more facts.
This Airbnb deliberation, the thee group of people who argue for different kind of strictness of Airbnb are actually all Airbnb users because they send an email to all the Airbnb telling people who have used Airbnb before, saying, "Go to the Taiwan. Go to your support for Airbnb." Whereas we only have this number of participation after they sent this email... [laughs]
Of course most people in Taiwan did not take Airbnb, which is why we’re just collecting facts and reflections and not building on decisions. The people who have not used Airbnb before has a very strong consensus already. That’s Group 4. We said theirs are at least as important as the people who have used Airbnb. These seven become the consensus items for deliberation.
We discovered that while people could agree being a landlord is great, people don’t actually want to live in Airbnb because there is no insurance protection Airbnb introduced for the tenants and so on.
Again, we did this analysis but the magical thing is that Airbnb people have said, "We will study your Uber case. We know exactly what you’re going to do so for Taiwan specifically we’re going to introduce the insurance program that protects the tenants. Also for Taiwan specifically, their co-founder fly to Taiwan saying, "We change our code to work with the ministry to report people who say that they have 10 different homes, but they all look alike." That’s one of the consensus items that people want to prevent that.
Basically, for each of the seven items that were shown Airbnb says, "Yes, we have considered. We agree our program already changed. We were willing," so on. There’s nothing to deliberate. By the end of it the hotel, hostel and youth hotel association people said, "Welcome to Taiwan and booking and all that takes 15 percent cut. I know that you only take five percent and even after the VAT that’s still less than booking.com, so here’s the complete catalogue of our hotels, help us to comment tourism."
They were able to work together. That’s what I’m doing nowadays basically, is by transforming this kind of lobbying that happened before with ideological sites and try to do some kind of a scene of the mind that gets people into the mental state of seeing each other’s positions on specific terms so they can share those links.
Once they start share those links they could form meaningful discussions by asking first and then by receiving timely replies. Finally, by doing real deliberation like face-to-face one we had before, and if they have a lot of time to go into this general setting power. That’s a very long answer of what I’m doing.
(2.3. On Consensus)
It raises two different sets of questions. The first one is that maybe because I was entrusted in politics even before spending a lot of time on the Internet I still believe that there are things that cannot be resolved by consensus. Is the idea of what you’re putting in place, maybe there should be a time for trying to get consensus, to have people talking with each other and sharing their point of view, but is there also a time for...?
When you say things can’t be solved by consensus what are you thinking? What’s in your mind?
I’m going to take a very French example. It’s the, how do you call that, work law?
Labor law.
The labor law, sometimes you have to decide whether you, for example, whether you think the legal, the labor week, how many hours, for example? Is it 35?
Work hours?
Yeah. Sometimes you have to decide between 35 hours a week or 48.
Yeah, and also other points in the style like disability claims and things like that. Anything else you have on your mind?
One of the question that this label raises is what should come first. Is it negotiation inside companies, or is it the national law?
Correct. Whether the private sector or the public sector should take precedence.
Precisely on this point, you have two different points of view. You have two different stances.
But this is not about work hour. What you were talking about is agenda-setting power and everything related to labor.
That’s two different examples, because we have a very specific point, how many work hours there are in a week, and what I was saying about, should the law come first? Or private negotiations come first? It’s also something that could be in the law. The issue is about hierarchy.
We have the individual employees or whatever, and they have a labor union or something, or they don’t have a union, but there is some sort of links. What you’re saying is whether the negotiation here takes precedence or, for example, this is the labor ministry, for example, or whether it should be able to set the terms for the negotiation here. Am I getting you right?
Yes, but the thing is that what is in discussion is this question of norm hierarchy, is also in discussion in the law. There are people who think that it could be good to have the private negotiations come first and there are people who think that we have to keep our national norms first.
Yeah, yeah, but we had that discussion actually, in the telework deliberation, because one of the main points here is whether the negotiation between the shareholders and the star up-funders to value their reputation, because reputation cannot be evaluated, not like patents or anything. There’s no reputation certification agency.
For some entrepreneurs, they would say, just because I am Zuckerberg, I’m automatically worth this many voting power and this many shares. Some VCs will believe that, so they will enter a private negotiation with compatible bonds or something that, in effect, gives all the voting power to this guy who is, or girl with a lot of reputation.
The problem is that from the traditional civil law viewpoint, this is inflating the entire share out of thin air, not backed by anything that has property or insurance or anything behind it.
If you allow this completely, like in Cayman Islands, you will have billion-dollar companies in Taiwan, but it means nothing, but it will be very confusing to the market and also to people. The ministry of economics think very strongly that we shouldn’t allow reputation stocks, because it will violate the norm of the law, so to speak.
We reached consensus, actually, on that point, saying the reputation stock must not be more than 49 percent of the total capital of the company, meaning that they’re not going to get majority voting power just because they’re Zuckerberg.
But it’s OK. It’s like a warrant that’s vouched by the other side of the capital. What I’m saying is that when you’re specific enough, it’s always possible to reach consensus.
You really think so?
Yes, and if you cannot reach consensus, it’s because you’re not being specific enough. There’s a whole theory about that. It’s called overlapping consensus.
But on the other hand, consensus also means more moderate opinions.
Yeah. So? What’s wrong with moderate opinions?
It’s not wrong per se, but I mean, when you have social movements and there’s an entire movement towards the social movement, it’s not moderate opinions?
But they are.
One time it’s about occupying a building, or occupying the parliament.
But the Occupy had support by 91 percent of Taiwan population.
Yeah?
It is a consensus.
Maybe it was not at the very beginning.
It was. The mainstream media tried to paint us as mobsters, of course.
It happens all the time when there is a social movement.
But we have video coverage from the first to second, showing that it was peaceful and non-violent. It becomes a battle between civic media and mainstream media on the first day, and we start ahead, because it was at night. The journalists were sleeping.
I’m not saying it was violent.
What I’m saying is that agenda-setting power. Once the civic media gets the agenda-setting power from day two, onward, it could be very short that this is what everybody in Taiwan actually wants. The core argument of the Sunflower movement, which has this amount of consensus versus the official presidential and prime minister position, which has nine percent support, is whether Beijing is a domestic city of Taiwan. That was the issue.
The trade law was able to bypass parliament because the Taiwan constitution says that any deal that the administration signs with a local city government, does not have to pass through the parliament, because otherwise parliament won’t have anything else to do. But because constitutionally Beijing is just a city of Taiwan, so any trade deal signed with Beijing are not like signing those forms from New Zealand. The congress has no oversight.
The administration can just pass it, like with any Taipei or Taichung government. This is a ridiculous constitutional view. The things that came back when the nationalists ruled the entire China, but because the constitution was jointly done by representatives of all the province in China, they’re still running in Taiwan, so they consider Beijing just a city of Taiwan.
On this core argument of the Sunflower movement, this amount of people said, this is not the case, here, now. The Sunflower movement has the entire consensus in the nation, at the very beginning of the day.
But let’s say, for example, you know there’s a slogan from the American Occupy movement, "We’re the 99 percent." That means there’s one percent with which you cannot gain consensus, because there are competing interests.
This is, we "like" this opinion. The Occupy Wall Street people are saying, we "are like" each other. This is two different idea of representation. One says that, like the president only represents less than 10 percent of people in representational democracy, but this is saying that we are representation of 99 percent of the nation against the one percent.
Always with percentage, it’s very alluring to confuse the units, but these symbols are measuring different things.
Yeah. I see what you mean.
If you say, “we are like,” you of course never get consensus because this is not a ratio of agreement. This is a ratio of similarity. But if you are instead measuring the level of agreement, then you can have these people join specific issues. But if you’re operating on the "we are like" kind of representation, then of course you’ll always have people who are not alike with each other, who can nevertheless, like each other.
I’d like to try your method on...Did you hear about the digital law, which is a discussion...?
Yeah, the République Numérique.
There is a point that created a very hot debate. Not everyone’s inference was aware of it.
In the civic scene.
It’s the question of common goods. Between people who are convinced that this question of common goods is very important for sharing culture and science and information. There were a lot of people from the cultural industry who were completely against it. They were even against defining the public domain. Here we had completely antagonistic point of view.
I think that the point you passed on that view, was that any scientific or art culture that was funded by the government that was more than some percentage must be released after six months or a period of time.
Six months for hard sciences — I don’t like the expression — and one year...
One year for the soft sciences. Yeah. That’s what I remember. I actually read that law. [laughs] You managed to agree at least on the parliament level. It looks to me like a very good agreement.
That came after, also, a hard debate, and a lot of, do you say editors? Scientific editors?
Yeah.
Completely disagreed with that, and we don’t know what’s going to happen at the senate. I hope it will last, but I’m not sure that will be the case. There is no consensus because there is a majority and a minority I would say.
Yeah, but that’s because, as you said, there were people who ideologically cannot see from this viewpoint. They were blind, for example.
That’s part of the answer, but I’m not sure it’s only that. For scientific editors, for example, when you say, after six months or one year, the publications can be released in Open Science, for them it means there are people who will not buy the reviews.
So?
For them, for editors it’s a loss.
So?
That’s one of the reasons they were against this article.
Yeah, but that’s just financial loss. It’s not a loss to their dignity as citizens.
Of course.
So they could be re-compensated. There’s nothing that couldn’t be balanced when you’re talking quantitatively instead of qualitatively, but the problem is whether there is a process of reaching that. With no process of reaching that and then you vote, every time you vote, you create divides in the society. It’s what I’m saying.
There was also another question. I know that in Taiwan, a lot of people use Internet. In France, a lot of people use the Internet, of course.
83.5%, precisely.
It’s always difficult to have them involved in processes like that. How do you resolve the digital gap?
In Taiwan or in France?
First in Taiwan, and how would it eventually work in other countries?
Spain and Taiwan, as I mentioned, and Estonia, were lucky, in a sense, because their constitution and the Internet were very close together. In Estonia especially, the constitution was written around the Internet, because it was founded on that time. The thing is that, what I like is to say that there is a paper culture that revolves around paper. If I can take just five minutes of your time...
Yeah, yeah. Sure.
(4. Bits and Papers)
Before the paper culture, we have the not-so-long-lasting papyrus culture, of course, and a much-more-longer-lasting stone and bamboo culture. The problem with the stone and bamboo culture is that copy is very expensive, and the problem with paper is that it dissolves very quickly.
Then paper took the best properties of stone and bamboos and it became the dominating culture. In China, of course, it had much more time to experiment with paper compared to the Europe. In Europe, when paper was introduced through the Arab people, they had some time to experiment with paper but after that a very quickly movable type, or just typing, gets implemented. This is just two centuries or something.
Then you have Gutenberg. Then once you have Gutenberg, paper gets into this whole machine-ized thing where you can read much slower than machines can print, whereas you can read at the same speed that people are writing. The point I’m making is that the Chinese culture had a very long time working with this technology that requires some amount of attention of people writing and people reading, because movable type was not invented many, many centuries before paper was introduced in China around 200 BC or something.
The problem with that is that a lot of people in the Chinese language are ingrained with the paper metaphor. We say, the paper gets expensive when a good new idea comes. There’s a lot of language and idioms that center around this. The digital divide, as we like to say, is basically saying that now we have something that is both better and worse than paper. It’s better because it copies even quicker than paper, it disseminates quicker.
The worse thing is that it lose the fidelity of paper. Facebook, for example, or Twitter, we’re blind or handicapped, in the sense that we can transfer only a very small part of the non-verbal information, whereas with calligraphy, all that is imbued with how you write. That was one of the very important criteria in Chinese examination. The examiners in ancient Chinese courts look at how people use their calligraphic pen to assess the character of the person, in addition to the word they’re writing.
But if they’re reading from blogs, you don’t know whether they write, this character was five seconds, or? They lose non-verbal information. The second thing they lose is that they lose the complete attention, because to read calligraphy, you really have to put all your brainpower into processing what that ideogram really means in that context.
But to read a Facebook post, you can skim instead of read. That is saying, putting just five percent of your brainpower into reading it, which is not really reading it. It’s trying to see whether there’s something in there that evokes your emotions, and if not, you swipe to something else. With paper it’s very hard because to swipe a paper takes a lot of time. You can’t help, but enter the more rational intellectual part of your brain.
The digital media, they’re good at zero-cost copying, but they’re worse at pretty much everything else, compared to the paper culture. For us to cross the digital divide, is to convince people who are invested and experts thousands of years of experience working with paper, saying there is now in the digital world, the same immersion, the same understanding, the same transmission of non-verbal information, the same togetherness that calligraphy brings you.
Before we can get that, we will never cross the digital divide because the paper people who have thousands of years of observation, can use any of those idioms to say that this is not there yet. This is as close as we get now, but it’s still not so good, but it’s close. The thing is that, in Taiwan, all we have to solve is the technological problem that brings the paper culture entirely to the digital world with virtual reality and everything.
In France, of course, you have a very old republican tradition, so it’s not 20 years of representative democracy versus 20 years of direct democracy. You’re not on the same terms. This is 10 times more, so you have also to solve the priority issue here to change the discourse. I like to say that, I think it was Holland who said that financialisation was his personal enemy, or something like that?
Yes, absolutely.
He liked challenging it to a duel, or something. I don’t know the rhetoric, but the thing is that there is no stakeholder behind that word, financialisation, just as there is no real stakeholder behind the word "representative democracy," because it’s a state of mind.
There’s no a thousand people who if they disappear on the earth tomorrow, will put an end to representative democracy or to financialisation. What we really need to do is to get people in that state of mind where they see financialisation as boring, or people to see this kind of evocation, of lobbying, of the way it was doing in capitalism — was boring.
Until people can enter that state of mind, there is no hope of convincing them because people were drawn more strongly through either dopamine cycle or serotonin cycle to this state of mind. What we really need to do is to invest time in theatres, in affection, in movies, in whatever that put people in that state of mind, where it vaccinates against this kind of state of mind.
What do you mean, vaccinates them?
(3.1. Vaccines of the Mind)
I will use a very simple example. Before the election, presidential election in Taiwan, before Dr. Tsai Ing-wen was elected, she had a agenda platform running with open-source, maker-spirit, whatever, it’s very progressive — human right, animal right even, because she has a family of cats.
The idea is that everybody knows she will win, but not by much, by maybe three million or less than three million, but the night before the election, there was this campaign that went viral. It came from a Korean company, called JYP. It’s one of the largest K-pop studios. One of the Taiwanese girl, Zhou Zi-Yu, is a singer in one of the JYP’s bands. In JYP, they did a show on a television a couple years ago of all their team members waving a flag, their national flag.
That’s how K-pop is trying to market into nearby nations. The Chinese people did not like the fact that Zhou was waving the Republic of China — which is Taiwan — flag, and the idea that this appears on national television in their country, in People’s Republic of China.
The Taiwan media reported Zhou as one of the prides of Taiwan, for example. So some Chinese people see it as something separatist and not something very good for Korean people to do. South Korea and the UN officially doesn’t recognise Taiwan, so why is there K-pop people promoting the Taiwan flag?
Then, the Chinese mob, on the social Internet created a massive campaign, to boycott this entire show and then JYP itself, which derives a majority of the revenue came from China. The Chinese television said, "OK, we will not play JYP’s shows, because of this violation of our national pride."
Then JYP did something magic. They have chosen Zhou, the singer, to be filmed in a white room with very grey, dark lights, looking very pale, holding a sheet of paper, looking downward in a very sorrowful emotion state, with no decorations and filmed in 240p, which is...for the pop studio to film in 240p...
She was reading from the line, almost crying, says, "I regret my mistakes for hurting the feeling of the Chinese people. Taiwan is a part of China. I am a Chinese. Chinese national pride and the unity of the nation, of course always come before the local interest, and I apologise for the feeling that I caused to the great Chinese people."
She read that in exactly the same way as people were already seeing those videos, because those were the Daesh or ISIS videos. There were filmed in the same setting as ISIS were filming their videos, you have seen those.
Not a lot, because it’s really...but I see what...
The same camera angle, same setting, same light. JYP formally did what China or the Chinese public asked them to do. In the same time, Dr. Tsai Ing-Wen and the pro-independence parties, gained, many people say half a million votes, just because of that, because it was the night before the election, nobody had time to respond. JYP won both the favour of Chinese people and Taiwanese people.
It’s brilliant, it’s great, so sharp operation. They got unbanned, and this entire singer band now enjoys a much better popularity because of this in both China and Taiwan — genius. The problem of that is, before the election night, all my friends, they were ablaze. They were firing, people were ordering train tickets, plane tickets to fly back to vote, to show China that what an unreasonable thing they had did to us, even though it’s a thing and so on.
That was the night when I received this VR gear. I was watching the Earth from the International Space Station. I was watching the solar system. I was on the moon. I was watching the constellations, the Milky Way. When I watched this JYP video, I see all the manipulations in it. I see the low resolution that skips her micro-muscle movements that invites the viewer to project the emotion to it. This wouldn’t work in a high definition, and I see the lighting, and I see the quality of sound recording, and so on.
I see it as an artefact that it is — maybe a craft that to be admired even — but I don’t feel any emotion inside that was evoked by it. That is to say, I was vaccinated, because I was seeing the Earth in three dimensions just an hour before. It appear more real than these two dimensional representatives of national politics. This seemed to be more boring after watching the Earth from the outside.
I’m not saying that watching the earth from the outside is a vaccination against everything, but it is a vaccination against nationalistic evocation of pride and hurt pride. Are you getting what I mean?
Yeah, completely. Oh my, two hours. I only have a last question.
Sure.
(3.2. Post-Genre)
I read the interesting portrait of you in Rue89. What you call post-gender, because obviously you don’t like opposition.
Post gender. Actually, I think Claire Richard wrote "Post-Genre" which is not exactly just post gender, because genre is also a music genre or a genre of literature, a genre of science. It’s post divisions. It’s larger than just post gender. What do I mean by that? There was a French writer. I’m trying to think of his name. The one who wrote the postmodern manifesto... was it Derrida...?
Yes, Jacques Derrida.
He said, I think at the end of the postmodern manifesto. It was a report I think to some university where he ends with, "It’s open both to fairness and curiosity," and that is the definition of the postmodernist agenda, meaning that it’s both open to different possibilities, but also tries to be fair against all of them, not to explore one path at the expense of the other path. I think that explains my position in this post-genre kind of thinking.
It’s that I don’t know whether it’s useful or not to label people with genres or genders or race or something. Maybe it’s sometimes useful. I’m not denying it’s usefulness, but if for fairness we sacrifice curiosity or for curiosity we sacrifice fairness, I think it’s great loss overall.
I don’t know how to ask that, but...
It’s OK, just say what’s on your mind.
What does it mean concretely in your everyday life?
My everyday life?
Yeah. You mean following two paths.
Many paths.
Many paths?
There’s of course fiction and non-fiction, but this is just for books, stories. Everybody knows there’re many genres of literature, so not just two paths. If you think in two parts, you’re in the fiction vs. non-fiction way of thinking.
To respond more directly, in everyday it means that I don’t try when I see a book to think first whether it’s fiction or non-fiction. I read your book not thinking whether it’s fiction or non-fiction, whether some part was just your opinion or some part it was facts. Of course, you provide citations, but I actually followed the links instead of just trying to say, "OK, this is in a certain format, so I read it like a paper." you know what I’m saying?
Mm-hmm.
It’s that I don’t have a redefined framework of defining your work as a paper, report, a blog or something, and just take the text as a text. I do the same with people and with environments, and so on. That’s my everyday life.
How do you mean you do the same with people? It’s kind of interesting.
I don’t gender people, for obvious reasons. People are taken as what they interact with me and I don’t have a social script that I expect you to follow just because you’re labeled something, a journalist or something. Then the idea is that we have a social program like a code of conduct in g0v, that says, certain fixed kind of social scripts are not welcome here.
If you judge people, or say to people certain words based on stereotypes — things that they have not said — it’s a taboo, really, in g0v events. It’s something that you could be escorted out of the conference room for. The idea behind this very strong code of conduct, is just interacting people by the way they want to be interacted with. This implies not gendering people, of course. But also not profiling people in other ways.
I suppose it has something to do with the hacker ethic also.
It has everything with hacker ethics. It is one of the old hacker ethic that says, hackers should only be judged by their hacking. The hacking is something they consciously do, and put into the public sphere. That’s what hacking is. That implies then, anything that is not consciously put into a public sphere, cannot be used to judge the person.
On the other hand, I also had lots of discussions with hackers from different countries. Obviously, by not wanting to label people, either with racial label or gender label, and stuff like that, it took a long time for a lot of hackers or engineer communities to see that they had been for years only white males.
The question, of asking themselves, why are we only males, and there are no women in hacker communities? They had to think about it.
Yeah. I was of course part of the Geek Feminism Wiki, and then later donor to the Ada Initiative. I know all this rhetoric in western countries. In Taiwan we don’t actually have that. We had in the very beginning, in the IT industry, about 50/50 ratio in IT practitioners.
The open source people in Taiwan that has a GitHub account, there’s at least...in g0v, of the people who are in the core, or we say, the steering community for our biannual g0v Summit, there are more women actually. It’s not even thought about, because it’s not a problem actually.
Yes. I see what you mean.
[laughs] Not because of ignorance, but we never had this problem in g0v. What surprised me though, when I went on the international hacker community in ’96, I see on IRC channels a lot of nicknames that are obviously male names, by western standards. You know, Bob, Bill, whatever.
But when I start talking with them, sometimes I discover they were women. They were not women performing the male gender. They just don’t want to be harassed.
They don’t want to be...?
Harassed. Because if they call themselves Audrey, or something, they will get harassed. It occurred to me at that time, in ’96 — I have been already a programmer for a very long time by then, there’s something wrong with this international face of the community, that we probably should fix it.
Personally, we were very conscious of that in Taiwan, and so now we don’t really have that problem.
It varies from one country to another, and from one group to another. For example, you know what the CCC...? Yes, of course you know what the CCC is. In the CCC meetings, there are very strict guidelines on that question. You must not harass people. You must not discriminate anybody…
Yeah. But that’s reactionary, because that used to happen a lot…
Of course.
I have a friend, Stefanie Wuschitz. One of the early MetaLab people, who did her PhD, called "Feminist Hackerspaces." The thesis went into a long detail about how to run a feminist hackerspace. Because she runs one in Vienna. We talk actually a lot about this. Do you know the difference between taxonomy and folksonomy?
Taxonomy is something that is hierarchical. If you’re in Paris, you’re also in France. OK?
OK. Yeah.
(3.3. Folksonomy)
"If you’re Homo Sapience, then you’re a human." Folksonomy is hashtags. #Hashtags. If you hashtag something, and then something that has absolutely nothing to do with it, except being tagged by something else with the same hashtag, then they have some correlation. You can then have tag clouds, that have "family resemblances" between people who tag differently.
On Twitter people will sometimes, always tag the same three things together. Just to get the attention of different groups of people. You know that, right? This is called folksonomy. When you’re saying I’m not labelling people, that’s not entirely true. I’m OK with labelling people. But the precondition is, it’s done in the folksonomy style: People choosing their own labels.
Meaning that, they identify with a word like #g0v. Then they were willing to respond to the tweets with the content tagged #g0v. But without saying, "g0v is a kind of social movement of the leftist veneer that belongs to the 21st Century." [laughs] You see what I mean.
So I’m not against labelling people, as long as this is done in an "open-world web ontology" — There is a technical definition for that.
Nice. Thank you very much. Do you have anything to add?
We can talk about your book. I have a lot of questions for you to answer. Making it a counter-interview. Let me see my bookmarks. Sorry. All right, yes.
(laughter)
(4. Counter-Interview)
Do you mind if I use my electronic cigarette?
No. Go ahead. Go ahead. Sure. Someday we’ll have to deliberate on that in Taiwan.
Yes. Probably.
It’s not currently legal… There’s many topics. But let’s proceed in order of my bookmarks. All right. This is, I think, a very, very important observation. First, I don’t really know what’s informing the specificity up here. Maybe it’s a mistranslation of the machine translation.
The text says: “Any political process involving a hacker will slow them down, because the process relies on the existing body of knowledge, and hacker community is to pass — as soon as possible — to the next thing.” I know this is a quote, but this is your word: “To be an integral part of the debate while retaining who’s, what’s, the specificity.“
(4.1. Two Temporalities)
The specificity of the hacker movement. Let me tell you an example. I have done a lot of crypto parties with hacker people, and that’s do-cracy. We think we can meet and discuss a little bit of what you could do and invite people to join, and etc. That’s the way hacker communities work.
By doing work.
On the other hand, I really think there should be a public and democratic debate about this question of encryption. We see it with the Apple controversy. There is a big debate in the United States, also in France and in Great Britain and a lot of other countries. For me it’s exactly the point meaning on the one hand you have to be part of the democratic debate because it has to be discussed.
By the people, yes.
One the other hand you also have to do things. Not only crypto parties, people who can code they write software.
I see what you’re saying. Richard Stallman is not coding nowadays. He is lobbying 100 percent of his time. What you’re saying is that Richard’s code should still get maintained and basically the idea is that people shouldn’t...the hacker community should still do what Richard started doing, but also maintain what Richard is now doing.
They have to be part of the political answer to a lot of issues, but they, it’s my point of view, I assume it, they also have to provide technical answers even before having the democratic debate, because sometimes it takes a lot of time. I’m really happy that, for instance, a lot of people wrote software to improve privacy of communications, and after the Snowden revelations, even if the political discussion is still going on through different temporalities.
I see exactly what you’re talking about.
Through different temporalities.
Basically, what you’re saying is that it’s important to have communication with people and particularly in the democratic process but on a firm ground while doing that, while the firm ground is, for example, Telegram or something even stronger than Telegram, like a right to privacy and things that implementing the code of computers, before it was implementing the code of jurisdiction instead. Is that something or am I misinterpreting?
No, no. It’s a complicated issue, because there are other cases because I think crowd is too fast and law is obviously too slow…
One is not as quickly as something else...
Uber is good example, you see?
Yes.
I think that’s part of the world we’re living in.
For the Uber deliberation we only took a month. We’re actually faster than Uber.
That’s impressive.
It’s possible first of all to be as fast as the Asian companies.
There are different temporalities in there as well. What I like in the hacker culture is this capacity to address issues, and try to find answers even if they’re not perfect. It’s...
It is warm here as you said.
(knock at door)
It’s also the idea...
Somebody’s knocking.
[French]
Do you have a lot of questions or it’s just to know if the photographer has the time to go and eat something and come back?
For the photographer, hi. You said about a projection screening, do you have that ready?
Yeah, I’ve been waiting.
I’m sorry.
Oh, it’s OK. I just didn’t have phone reception down there so I didn’t know what was going on so I wasn’t sure...
The thing is that I have a counter-interview going...
(laughter)
How about we do the counter-interview on the place where you have set up, where you can maybe take some photos of me interviewing her?
I’m super-hungry at this point so if you want to continue your interview here then I’ll just go and eat.
Go ahead and return. We’ll finish in half an hour or something.
Thank you.
Thanks for taking your time, but I really wanted to take you through the text.
That’s nice. What was I saying? Yes, there is something very, it’s not only that’s fast, it’s also, I don’t know the word. There’s an issue and you try to find an answer and even if it doesn’t work you debug it and...
Redo it.
That’s something I really like in the hacker mentality because I have spent some time in more traditional organisations...
NGOs.
You have to see lots and lots of meetings and you vote and it takes a lot of time and hacking is fast and sometimes more efficient, but you have to... These are two legs, I would say.
These are two what?
Two legs.
Two legs.
To walk on two legs.
Yes. That answers my question. The specificity, you mentioned, is actually very close to what I talked with Clay Shirky when he visited Taiwan in 2014. He was saying that in the traditional NGOs all the stakeholders must know everybody else in the committee. When they introduce one new person to the meeting they have to spend two-to-four-times, as much time as it’s needed, to know everybody.
Once the committee goes to about 20 people, the wetware restriction enters and nobody can really know each other’s non-verbal expression means anymore. Above that number you start to see hierarchies, but not because they’re bad people, but because humans are wired like that in hardware.
What we talk about then is the way they were in the Occupy movements, not just Occupy Central by the way, but Occupy Central were consciously modelling the sites as gateways — in which they had seven Occupy sites, and each one tried a different approach, and then some of them would erect a statue of Guan Gong the martial god. Then he would block mobsters and police because they worship the same god. Some other site will erect a statue of Saint Mary, but it will only ward off the police, the mobsters don’t care.
All of this was livestreamed and transcribed, so it evolved. More, better ideas get adopted in more sites. The fringe ideas where they can continue to play by themselves, but eventually the good ideas prevailed and they were able to work something like that. This is specifically something that is very much a hacker community mentality, so thanks for your answer.
(4.2. Hacker’s Parties)
My next bookmark. Just a second. This whole section is very CCC-influenced. When I was reading the text I see a lot of ethos of the Chaos Computing Club getting through this narrative. My question to you is, for example this is obviously a mistranslation, this cannot really be “gold,” but what really was it? The green in the link.
It’s a mistranslation. I don’t know what the good word would be. Let me check. That’s very funny.
(laughter)
It really means "gold," right?
The word is “Or”, which is "yet."
Yet. [laughs]
They translated...
As the primary meaning in the dictionary.
It’s the same word, but with two very different meanings.
This is actually a known word. So this has nothing to do with the semantics. I was thinking something about Bitcoin or something and I was going to...
No, not at all.
My real question — now that the Bitcoin misunderstanding is out of the way — is this: You said the German people is critical of this ideology, due to it anchoring this way of hacker into politics into the hacktivism, into the politics.
It was relegated — meaning that the digital tools are good for the existing system to broadcast your message to reach more people or something, but the reverse is not happening — or it doesn’t really have a counter-ideology, is the feeling I’m getting from the text. I’m not sure whether that’s the core argument, in the sense that the thing is that...
It was about the pirate party which is, well, actually a good example because a party is not only about tools to improve democracy, it’s being part of the political scene.
It’s representative.
The Pirate Party was founded on very digital concepts. The question of intellectual property or file sharing, the question of transparency, the question of privacy, but the problem is that when they are part of the political team, they have to be part of parliament and they have to vote on texts about labor laws, or... It’s complicated because as a party they’re supposed to have an ideological core.
This is where it comes about, and this has to be something that’s framed in every presentative narrative, not something like the Flying Spaghetti Monster, which is also a pirate party, by the way. It’s a religion of pirates.
Yeah.
(laughter)
But you mean that it has to enter the narrative as serious about political system, and not do anything as Flying Spaghetti Monster narratives?
But I think it’s also because I’m quite convinced we are in a transitional period, and the pirate party is in-between. That’s quite interesting to see, but one way or another they have to be a party like the others. If they want people to vote for them. That’s complicated because they are also supposed to be different. But it was quite the same way for environmental parties that appeared in the 1970s in Western United States.
Yeah, I see what you’re saying. Yes, it was the same with the Green people. Then there’s still Greenpeace, but there is now the Green Party. For that I have just one word to add. The way g0v works, every time there is a 100-people hackathon nowadays, maybe 12 people or 20 are civil servants. There are a lot of incentives for professional civil servants to participate.
Meaning that, in the current Taiwan system, they get all the blame if they do something wrong, because we are not totally anonymous to public servants like in the UK. But elected officials get a praise if they do something right, because we are a young democracy. Everybody is claiming for the next election. They are in a very unenviable position.
(laughter)
Yes, that’s quite true.
Through joining g0v, what we do is, we have civil servants with practically all the industries because we fork their websites. They join g0v hackathons and propose why they cannot get approval from the electorate officials as a fault against our own ministry. Then lobby through mainstream media, their elective official boss to adopt the agenda.
This is counter-power but within the government. This is exactly because of that g0v does not have to be a party because we are not relying on our representative power. We are subverting, so to speak, the representative power from within the administrative power.
That’s really interesting.
It’s all done by forking the government.
It’s a nice hack.
Yes, so instead of the public sector, private sector or the voluntary sector, we say we say we are the boot sector.
Boot sector?
You know what a boot sector is?
It’s when you are...
...rebooting your computer, it first reads a piece of code that tells the computer how to read the rest of the operating system. Without a boot sector, none of the other sectors make sense. It would be just data and not code.
OK.
Because it just data on the disk, and the boot sector tells the computer, tells the CPU, what the data means in terms of what CPU can understand. We say that we are the bootstrapping sector that links the public, private and the voluntary sector together so that they can understand each other’s language and data. This is the only thing I’d like to add.
Nice metaphor.
(4.3. On Trolling)
Next, trolling. This I think is very original. I don’t see this in the analysis of other hacker narratives. Meaning that people who are exploring the limits or the tolerance of the community, because they want to determine the border of the hacking, so to speak. As if they’re trolling but with a purpose. It’s like gaming with a purpose.
They are trolling you to test how much of... The text seems to say at times it is actually something positive, because it helps to delineate the community’s code of conduct, or standards, or behaviours and the trolls are in a sense like the explorers in a social setting. Is that your message?
Yes. I am not completely fond of trolls personally. It was interesting to see someone who was...I don’t know if he was really doing it on purpose at the beginning, but by experiencing the...
Limits.
...the limits of tolerance not only the law because, of course, there were a lot of concerns on censorship, a lot of laws about limiting the freedom of expression, maybe too much. Obviously, yes.
For me it’s a big question. You really have to repress expression? That’s a philosophical question. By experiencing the tolerance of the community, he had to think about it means. Think about what freedom of expression is. It’s a process of politicisation, and maybe I would say that it’s globally what happened with the Anonymous.
Because at very beginning it was a bunch of people making fun of other people, obviously, on 4chan. One step after the other it began a new form of social movement.
What you’re saying is they are not just testing it at their own community like for a change, but once they build this habit of kind of exploring and negotiating the boundaries of their own community, they start to grow and explore other systems and other communities, which then transformed a narrative or the discourse of politicisation within the outer or external community.
What do you mean?
I mean that when Anonymous says that, "We don’t forgive and we don’t forget." Whatever they are trolling, whatever that’s happening now in the political and the media agenda. It’s very sensational, but the media again catches up on that and change the narrative by saying, "Oh! The Anonymous are threatening to reveal the secrets of something because of the human right or something." But it had nothing to do with human right, but because of this trolling they become linked...
Sometimes it has…
Yeah, sure. But it doesn’t have to…
That’s the real paradox of Anonymous, because you cannot really separate what is serious and what is not.
Yeah, and this is a hacker thing. It’s in the Jargon Files — called “ha-ha only serious.” I know completely what you are saying. It’s the serious way to troll the governments.
(laughter)
I got the idea. I think this is really original and we did not have this discussion in Taiwan, so thank you. I’ll be using it in my talks.
(laughter)
Oh, Jesus. The card is full.
Oh wow! It took that long?
Yeah.
OK. My computer is out of battery.