“Steer the Wind:” Audrey Tang is Saving the World with Direct Digital Democracy

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For anyone concerned about the current global state of Democracy, which should be everyone, Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s Digital Minister, may be our greatest hope:

“I’m not here to make citizens transparent to government, I’m here to make government transparent to citizens.”

She has flipped Big Brother, proving that this very same unprecedented internet connectivity can be harnessed to cultivate and manifest the very best of us as well — connecting instead of isolating, confirming truths instead of spreading lies, distributing power instead of consolidating it.

Very much due to Audrey’s work, Taiwan shot from 31st to 11th on the Economist’s Global Democracy Index to become a “Full Democracy,” and Asia's most advanced democracy. At the same time, the U.S. dropped from 8th to 25th, now a “Flawed Democracy,” also due very much to one man.

Here’s a foundational story of how she started down this road. During the 2014 Sunflower Revolution in Taipei, students and dissidents peacefully occupied the Taiwan Yuan, or parliament, for 22 days protesting a trade deal with mainland China, or the PRC. Audrey flew in from Silicon Valley, borrowed a laptop, plugged into 300 meters of ethernet cable, and connected over 500,000 citizens and over twenty NGOs in a real-time dialogue towards what she would ultimately call “rough consensus.” The demonstration won the day and resulted in a new trade agreement, very much due to Audrey’s remarkable and unprecedented real-time connectivity. The students remained completely peaceful throughout and respectfully cleaned up the parliament before they left, unlike other Congressional occupations of late. Powerful people in Taiwan’s conservative government took note of what Audrey was doing, and called her in to talk… and so it began…

I’ve listened to this interview countless times while editing, and I’m still hearing new things, so the odds are she’s going to just lose you, both with the technology and her philosophy. So here are two quick shorthands for each.

Per the tech: Virtually everything referred to, from Distributed and Polycentric ledgers to Multi-dimensional spaces to reverse accountability assures transparency, and empowers citizens, inspiring openness, real-time action, and the deployment of people’s different viewpoints. It all encourages plurality as a way to demonstrate, as she puts it, “our shared values are hiding in plain sight.”     

And all her philosophy, from calling herself a “post-gender, conservative anarchist” to the Lao Tzu and Taoist quotes sprinkled through this interview, are about cycling and returning power and voice to citizens, re-energizing the deepest, most fundamental precept of democracy: Power to the People.

View our complete show notes here: http://zioncanyonmesa.org/podcast-archive/steer-the-wind-audrey-tang-is-saving-the-world
https://oftaiwan.org/social-movements/sunflower-movement/
https://g0v.tw/intl/en/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audrey_Tang
https://theasiadialogue.com/2018/05/23/tsais-second-year-the-emergence-of-non-partisans-in-taiwan/
https://wtfisqf.com/?grant=&grant=&grant=&grant=&match=1000
https://www.snopes.com/articles/386830/misinformation-vs-disinformation/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadratic_voting#:~:text=Quadratic%20voting%20is%20a%20collective,voting%20paradox%20and%20majority%20rule.