In Conversation

Manda: Hey, people. Happy New Year and welcome to Accidental Gods, the membership program and the podcast where we believe that another world is still possible and that if we all work together, there is still time to lay the foundations for a future that we would be proud to leave to the generations that come after us. I’m Manda Scott, your host and fellow traveller in this journey into possibility, and this new year marks our fifth anniversary. It’s our birthday! Yay! Go us and go you for being there, for offering listening ears to the things that matter to us, so that we can believe that they matter to you as well. And if somebody had told me five years, 287 episodes plus a few bonuses ago, that I would be able to drop an email to Audrey Tang with an invitation to be our guest for our fifth anniversary edition I would have said you were crazy. And yet, here we are. The world is a wonderful and magical and utterly inspiring place. And if I sound a little star struck in the conversation that you’re about to hear, then I think there is good reason. There may be other people in the world who taught themselves programming at the age of eight, who took part in their country’s revolution and helped to shift the nature of democracy, and to do it in such a way that democracy was used as a social technology for good; finding ways to trust the people, finding ways to bring Ideas from the common good into the public good.

Manda: There may be other people who bring a Taoist perspective that allows them to walk the line between all of the polarities with extraordinary grace and extraordinary depth of feeling. If there are such people, I don’t know who they are, and they have certainly not been their country’s first Minister for digital Affairs. The first transgender, first post-gender and youngest minister in that role, ever. And now Audrey Tang is ambassador at large in charge of cyberspace governance, which has to be one of the single most important roles on the planet. And yet, in between visits to the US and conversations around the world, we had time for the conversation that you are about to hear. And I am enormously honoured and grateful. A few times we reference a film that Audrey is in called A Good Enough Ancestor. At the moment of recording, only the trailer is available and I have put a link in the show notes, but the full version should be released in January 2025, and I do have a link to a Vimeo, so I’ve put that in the show notes as well.

Manda: If it goes on broader release on another platform, I will switch it out for a new link. We also managed barely to mention the book Plurality, which was a great oversight. Actually, there was so much else to talk about, but please do go and find Plurality. It’s available for free download or you can make a donation, which I would strongly recommend, and it is one of the books that’s going to take us forward. If we’re going to make 2024 be the moment of peak polarisation, such that we move forward into a new world in 2025, then the ideas constantly being updated in the book plurality are part of what’s going to take us forward. So here we go. With great joy, people of the podcast, please do welcome one of the sharpest minds, clearest souls and grandest hearts I have ever met: Audrey Tang, ambassador at large to the whole world.

Manda: Audrey, welcome to the Accidental Gods podcast. How are you and where are you this glorious December morning?

Audrey: Good local time. I’m really happy to be here. I’m really good. I just returned from Boston to Taipei. Still on the same planet, the planet Earth.

Manda: What time is it with you, then?

Audrey: Uh, in Taipei, it’s 7.14 in the PM.

Manda: Okay. And what time does your body think it is then? I’ve completely lost time zones now.

Audrey: Yeah, I don’t have a fixed time zone, and that’s because I don’t have jet lag. I have this exercise that this app called Time Shifter tells me when to take caffeine, when to take melatonin, and more importantly, when to get bright light. And so I’m just somewhere between the local time and the global time.

Manda: Time shifter. I will find a link to that and put it in the show notes, just for my own curiosity. Bright light. Do you have electronic bright light or do you just go and stand outside? Or have you got a particular wavelength that works?

Audrey: Yeah, well, walking under the sun, of course, always works. I have this MacBook Pro that if I turn on this Vivid app, just simulates sunlight with a lot of lumens, and that works too 

Manda: Okay. That’s another. So now we’re opening up my complete lack of knowledge of the apps that are available these days. So I will find the Vivid app and put that on as well. So I had a whole bunch of questions I was planning to ask. But actually, given that we’re here, I think when you were talking to Alastair and Rory, but also on a podcast with someone in Taiwan, talking about the fact that you use your sleep as a form of work. That if you need to process a problem, you said, if it’s a really hard problem, I’ll sleep for longer. And first of all, I want to know how you do that. Is that still a thing? And that you you process work while you’re sleeping. And Dreaming is a big part of the life of this podcast and of my life, and I’d be really curious to know how you came to that and how it works for you. And if it’s still a thing.

Audrey: Yeah, it is still a thing. Like when I watched the movie Tenet, which is quite complicated, I had to sleep for more than ten hours that night. And when I woke up, I was like, oh, it all makes sense, then. And so it is still a Thing. Since very early on, maybe when I was like six years old, seven years old, it just felt natural whenever I fall asleep, I try to make sure that I’ve published, or at least written down everything that I have learned that day, or maybe recorded with a tape or something so that I publish and then perish. And this is linked to my heart condition. So not knowing whether I will wake up, it’s like flipping a coin, I learned the habit of just making sure that anything that can survive me is noted down, so that I can devote my sleep to possibilities. I don’t have to spend much more energy during my sleep to the things that already happened, so that I can focus on possible futures, if that makes sense.

Manda: It totally does. And already this is opening gateways to places I would like to go. For people who have not yet watched the Good Enough Ancestor and everybody, really, you want to watch it. It’s a beautiful film. Give us the potted history because you alluded to not knowing if you were going to wake up and that this was a thing even when you were very young. Tell us a little bit about that.

Audrey: Yeah. So I was born with VSD, ventricular septal defect, which means there’s a literal hole in my heart. And I remember, my earliest memories were just going to the hospital and my heart beating a little bit faster, and then fainting and then waking up again. And so my survival skill really is to keep my heart rate under a certain BPM, beats per minute, so that I don’t get too angry, but neither too joyful or too excited of any kind. And when I was four, my doctor told my family as well as me, of course, saying that this child is too young to get a surgery, the condition not very stable enough. So there’s like a 50:50 chance of surviving until they get the surgery. So from that point onwards, which is four years old to 12 years old, when I really did get a surgery and eight years in between, I go to sleep again thinking like a coin flip. And if I don’t wake up, the difference, of course, is whether I have written down or recorded something that I learned that day. If I did, then I feel, oh, I’m a good enough ancestor, I’m good enough. But if I did not, I would make sure to write something down or at least record something.

Manda: Okay. And then that gives you the freedom. Having recorded it and felt that you’ve left a legacy. Then your dreams are free to help you process the life of the next day, assuming that it happens.

Audrey: Yeah, exactly. It’s a checkpoint. Yes.

Manda: In the film it shows you going to a Buddhist monastery at a certain point in your younger years. Buddhist thinking, Buddhist philosophy, Buddhist ideas of how our minds work, do they influence how you think and believe, or was it a useful place to go in order to feel calmer?

Audrey: Yeah. My family was religious, so my father’s Parents, my grandma and grandpa on my father’s side are both Catholics, and my parents are Taoists. I practice Taoist meditation and my mom is a Taoist acupuncturist, tai chi, all that. So I would say that my early years, the Taoist tradition is far more formative. I of course read Buddhist scriptures and many other things growing up, it’s a useful frame, I guess, to have conversations. Especially of a much more rational kind, like making sure that there’s words for all these things. But for me, Taoist practices that is quite innate to me. So yeah, I would say Taoism and Buddhism are both quite integral to my way of being.

Manda: And for those not familiar, we’ve spoken to Buddhists relatively frequently on the podcast. I don’t think I have ever spoken to anyone who was Taoist. Is there a central tenet or a central frame of Taoism that you could give us the potted outline of?

Audrey: Certainly. So core to Taoism is this idea of Wu Wei, or effortless action. And quite simply, that means it’s always easier if you’re connected to a holistic feeling system and so on, to just do whatever feels right. Because in that condition, you’re acting on the way or the nature’s way and so on, and it’s unlikely to cause second order effects that are actually detrimental. But if you act in a way that feels like doing it feels like struggling, it feels very strong and you have a lot of ego and so on, then you may have good intentions, but almost always it disrupts the balance, the flow, and you end up with actually adverse second order effects that maybe you don’t want. So figuring out this effortless action is a core tenet of Taoism.

Manda: And that opens doors to a lot of your life and the ways that you have navigated politics and gender and sexuality and all of the things where you find the way of least resistance. I remember Glenn Weyl saying that when it came to pronouns you had written somewhere *#**/* which also in computing means basically any input will be received. And I thought that was so delicate.

Audrey: That’s correct. And so yeah, maybe people have seen the Taoism symbol, which is the Tai chi. You have the yin and the yang. Two wings. And it takes both wings to fly. And then the yin and yang also embeds, yang and yin within themselves. So there’s always a level deeper in any binary situation. You can see some of those non binary within any binary situation. So that’s the symbolism of Taoism.

Manda: Thank you. Okay. So potted history of your life. You were very politically active. Now let’s go back a little bit. You were teaching yourself to code before you even had a computer. There was a wonderful bit in the film where your mother said basically you set yourself up a screen and a keyboard that were of paper, and when you hit the delete key, you would rub something out and type something and write it back in again. And that was the point where she thought, I’d better get this child a computer, because that’s a very slow way of learning to code. So you taught yourself coding, and you said earlier, of course you’d been reading Buddhist classics. I’m not certain most kids under the age of six are reading Buddhist classics, but there we go. You taught yourself to code, and you became very involved in the pro-democracy movement in Taiwan, such that you were part of the Sunflower Revolution. Very, very briefly can you tell us a little bit about your motivations there, where you wanted it to go and where you were able to take it? Does that make sense as a set of questions?

Audrey: Um, so when I was eight, that was when I got a piece of A4 paper and using a pen, wrote q w e r t y as a keyboard, and using a pencil wrote whatever the computer will respond as a way of learning programming. And also that year, it was 1989, my dad travelled to Beijing to cover the Tiananmen situation, the Tiananmen protest. And he stayed there until the 1st of June, which is very fortunate for our family. And he gets very involved with that community, the Tiananmen exiles, people very young, actually, just in their early 20s. And so he went to Germany, covered the fall of the Berlin Wall and did his PhD in the Saarbrücken University on the border to France. And his PhD thesis is about communication networks and its roles in the Tiananmen movement. So when I was 11, I would move to Germany for one year to study and also to sometimes meet in our living room his research subjects, people who fled Beijing and have a lot to think and say about democratisation and the role of technology in democratisation. Some of them would eventually come to Taiwan and teach in universities here. Some of their students would end up peacefully occupying our parliament.

Audrey: So it’s all very karmic. And in Taiwan, back in 2014, ten years ago, the trust level was really low. People were really, really polarised. The approval rates of the President back then was 9%, not very high. And people were just seeing that this integration with Beijing, no matter whether it’s the Huawei and ZTE in our then new 4G network, whether it’s integration of the publishing industry, including the newspaper my parents used to work in getting bought by a very pro-Beijing force, so on and so forth, people were really worried. But instead of just protesting, we call ourselves demonstrators because we’re not just against something, we’re for something different. And so I helped live streaming the breaking into the Parliament and also the conversations around three weeks around the occupied parliament, involving half a million people on the street, many more online, organised by 20 or so civil society organisations. So that every day you can see people literally coming together, literally starting from a place of division and polarisation, but thanks to facilitation, both offline and online, managed to agree on some common grounds. And every day we did a checkpoint read to the plenary what we did agreed on, so that after three weeks the head of Parliament simply said, actually, these occupiers have a point. Let’s just implement what they say.

Audrey: So that was when we realised actually the demonstration really worked. And at the end of that year, I joined the cabinet team, first as a young advisor, a reverse mentor, and then after two years as a full minister in the cabinet. So where to take it? By 2020, our trust level became like 73%. So from 9 to 73 in just a span of six years and we mostly want to show the career, public service, the government, how to trust the people. Because to give no trust is to get no trust. And if you can trust the people and work with the people, not just for the people, you can then recast democracy as something that people can participate in continuously. And when that happens, we do not need to hit a wall, hit the brakes and back pedal, turn somehow the steering wheel, very difficult and then start again, a lot of flip flopping. But rather there’s a continuous function of the steering wheel where people’s will is constantly guiding the machine of the government. So making sure that people can continuously put their hands on the steering wheel, that is most of my work. And to regain mutual trust.

Manda: Right. And as far as I can tell, you managed to maintain that through a general election at the start of 2024, when there seemed to be quite a lot of foreign interference. And you had a two year Strategy leading up to that, where you were prebunking the videos that were going to come in. I would like to go down how we solve division and fractioning and polarisation, but just very briefly tell us about your strategy for that election and then what you’ve been doing since. Because you are no longer a digital minister in Taiwan. You’ve moved into being a democracy advocate worldwide. So let’s talk a little bit about the general election, and then let’s move on to worldwide democracy.

Audrey: Well, yeah, I’m now the cyber ambassador. So part of the diplomatic corps, after serving seven and a half years in the cabinet. I mean, if you want to see what would happen to Taiwan if we did not do the prebunking work, just look at Romania. An unknown candidate, just a month ago in Romania, rose from obscurity to win the first round of presidential election. And is propelled by a very sophisticated influence campaign on TikTok. And it was no organic groundswell. Their Constitutional Court annulled the entire election after uncovering a Russian orchestrated effort that weaponized the TikTok recommendation algorithm and influencers funded through cryptocurrency to manipulate workers and voters. And they were saying, TikTok was saying, you know, it’s entertainment video, dancing video. So even on the voting day where it’s actually illegal to campaign, campaigning still kept going and hidden by opaque financing and so on. So it’s a real thing in 2024, you can use AI and fake accounts and things like that to essentially take over any election. And Taiwan has been for the past 12 years the top target for this kind of attacks. So we found that debunking, when people already have this community spread level of polarisation, usually doesn’t work. Unless it’s like very personal, very high connectivity, strong links and so on. Maybe some of that works. But what reliably works is prebunking, which is showing people that this kind of attack is coming. So two years ago, I deep faked myself, an actor portraying as me showed exactly how that is done. And we also showed people the election rigging attacks, how you will get messages saying maybe something gets broken on your way.

Audrey: Maybe there’s shooting, maybe there’s accidents, explosives and so on to discourage you from voting. And after voting, there’s bound to be videos that says, oh, the tallying is fake and things like that. And so nobody wants to be manipulated by foreign force. So when people saw that something like that is coming, way before these attacks actually came, then it inoculates the population. And in schools in 2019, we also changed our curriculum so that instead of media literacy or digital literacy, which is about something you receive, we switch to media competence, which is something you co-produce. Because when a class full of young people went through the process of checking the sources, deliberating, maybe correcting the three presidential candidates, as they’re having a debate in real time, their mind goes through this more journalistic balancing and bridging sequence, which inoculates them long term against polarisation and attacks of any kind. And then they can invite their parents and grandparents into the collaborative fact checking mechanism, which is open source, which does allow us to discover those viral polarisation attacks and push out something that is prebunking, an hour or so, at most two hours after each trending attack. And if you do that within that two hour window, then it reaches more people for the first time than the attack. And so the prebunking still works. But if you wait for like 48 hours then, of course, that doesn’t work. So there’s this very interesting system of multiple civil society organisations, antivirus companies and the public sector all working together to ensure that we prebunk as much as possible.

Manda: And it worked. As in you ended up with an actual democratic elected government, not the ones that the foreign interference would have wanted to be elected. Correct?

Audrey: Uh, there’s that. And also after the election, all the three parties and their supporters feels that first, it’s fair and free. And also they have won a little bit. So there’s no splintering of the society. And according to BTI, the percentage of population supporting our democratic progress, our democratic system, still is above 90%, Which is something that I’m very proud of. Because many said that in order to do this kind of counter infodemic work, you have to sacrifice a little bit on internet freedom. But yet still today, Taiwan is the most free place in all of Asia according to freedom House and so on on the internet.

Manda: Brilliant. Okay. I would really like to go and look at education, but let’s hold that for a little bit. You said you are now an ambassador. Tell us about the transition to that, what that means and where you’ve been and what you’ve been doing 

Audrey: Sure. So I’m officially Ambassador at Large in charge of Cyberspace Governance. What does that even mean? Right. Well, it means, first and foremost, to bridge, to be diplomatic, to connect the different communities within the governance of technologies. So think of, for example, when it comes to AI, there are people who say that AI is a big risk to the society. And there’s people who also say that AI concentrates power, and that’s very dangerous. So one is about the harm and abuse of AI, and one is about just the nature of AI deployment, how it concentrates power. So both sides tend to agree that we should do something about it, but they tend to prescribe different ways. The first kind of people usually advocate for something that is much more closed, so that you can closely monitor how AI is being used and abused. And the second side usually think that it needs to be transparent, accountable, open, so that each and every person can adjust AI to their liking or to their culture’s liking without getting colonised, basically, by those large few frontier labs.

Audrey: So there’s a lot of kind of infighting within the AI community, with both factions. And so my job as ambassador is to figure out something in common, like the yin and yang on both sides. Figure out, for example, how to build a safety commons, the kind of tool that are non dual use. Think of, for example, during the pandemic, if we have good technology that make masks very easy to produce at home. Still that is a non dual use technology, meaning it cannot be easily used to produce weapons. It is a defence only technology. So when things are of this nature then it’s okay to be open source. And so to figure out exactly which part of the AI ecosystem is not weaponizable and focus the energy of both sides on these shared tools. So that is one kind of diplomatic work that I do and many other things as well. But all of it is around this idea of finding a common ground between the factions that were kind of cancelling each other out.

Manda: That’s really interesting, because I had thought you were going around the world as a pro-democracy advocate, helping people to find democratic solutions to the the current crisis of our system, which you seem also to be invested in. But let’s stick a little bit. It depends how much you can say. So I am struggling to understand which parts of AI might not be weaponizable, given that there’s a very broad spectrum from creating bioweapons in your basement because AI has told you how, to influencing elections and changing the narrative to suit a particular worldview. And AI is implicated in all of these. What parts of AI are not weaponizable?

Audrey: I’ll use one very concrete example. AI makes it really easy to generate subtle variations of an existing picture. Or now with the general release of Sora video as well. And as we know, there’s already a quite big challenge online when it comes to CSAM. That is to say, child exploitation imageries, including video. And AI, makes it much worse by not just having ways to subtly kind of tamper with the picture so it’s undetected by the current filters, or to do synthetic CSAM, is a big challenge. Now, there exists such a tool now, in the latent space, which is a technical term meaning the AI’s mind when it’s doing training. A CSAM image and its corresponding text, the grooming text, is the same dot. And this is a new development because previously all the images are in one space, a subspace, all the text are in another subspace. So if you can do the training such that the image can be reliably mapped into its corresponding text without false positives and false negatives. Then you change the nature of CSAM detection. Instead of waiting for one big Microsoft or some other entity to be the clearinghouse of all CSAM with all the difficulties of updating it and so on to a central system, it implies you can detect such imagery and a grooming text at the edge, like on a phone or something, or on a self-hosted blue sky pod, or a true social mastodon pod, or really any pod.

Audrey: And what does it mean? It means that you don’t have to hold on illegal images anymore, which was the thing that prevented people from training this kind of detection by themselves. Now you just hold on to a copy of the text, which is legal to hold on to, so that people can detect new variations of CSAM images much quicker, because it’s at the edge. Updated training, together with federated training and so the info defence becomes something that anyone can invest in together, instead of relying on a few single points of failure. So the technology in the latent space that map the CSAM image to the text, this is now dual use because it’s this direction only, so this is just one very simple example.

Manda: And is that being taken up widely. Are people seeing that this is useful and and bringing it, applying it to their AI? It seems to me so there’s OpenAI, there’s Microsoft, there’s the Saudis with Falcon, the Chinese have whatever the Chinese have, there aren’t that many at root, different architectures. First of all, is that correct? And second, are you able to go in at the source, so to speak, and and talk to those people, or are you talking to the iterations on the edges?

Audrey: So yes. So it is true that the companies, the frontier Labs you mentioned, are at the conversations. So the AI Safety Institute convening in San Francisco, which I attended, of course included those stakeholders. But it also includes the people working on open source AI: Hugging Face, Mozilla, Eleuther, and so on and so forth. The meta LLaMA team, of course. And it’s quite interesting because even though we may think of, say, Google DeepMind Gemini as proprietary, they actually have an open source counterpart within their own team called Gemma. And Gemma, which is open source, has its own set of safety tools and also something called Gemma Scope, which is a tool, a very cool tool that you can look into the reasoning of the AI. So that you can see, for example, when it’s saying something to you, whether it triggers certain activation patterns within the AI, that you can then link those patterns into Oh, this AI is trying to confabulate this topic. Or this AI is maybe trying to escape, trying to convince you to exfiltrate itself and so on. So it makes it easier to, to see the, not to anthropomorphise too much, but the intention, the subconscious intention that the AI models have when it’s responding to you. Which is again very useful for safety. And so the community contributions to these shared safety tools can also help the proprietary model, the large Gemini parts, to be more safe.

Audrey: Because again, these safety tools are non dual use and they are meant to be shared. So long story short, yes, people are pulling together such resources. And in the upcoming AI Action Summit in Paris, there is this whole track about public interest use of AI that will explore this kind of commons. And to your other point, how to make sure that in all the different phases of AI training, fine tuning, deployment and so on, we can include meaningfully democratic input. So that when people feel actually this AI is being deployed in this social role that I’m not comfortable with. Or that within this social role, we have different expectations and we want the AI systems to align to these expectations. Like our expectation of a facilitator is different from a teacher; different from a companion to the elderly to take care and so on. So all these different pluralistic alignments and the democratic way to input into these, this is also identified as a non-dual use part and therefore should be open source. So it’s both using AI to enhance human coordination and democracy, but also with democracy to align AI so that it fits the society instead of forcing society to align to AI. So the democratic participation part is still also part of the safety commons. Some people are calling it democracy commons.

Manda: Right. Okay. And that opens up a whole different suite of directions. I would like to take a step back. I really want to look at this and we will come back to it. But it seems to me we are at the inflection point that Ilya Prigogine spoke of. When a system reaches maximal complexity, it bifurcates, or the possibilities bifurcate and we either collapse into chaos and extinction, or we emerge into a new system. And we feel very close to that to me. You can say not if you want, but I think the singularity of the technology curve is the horizontal part of that chaos complexity curve. And so we can play with AI and make it do whatever we want. If the hegemonic culture exists in a space where people still want to abuse children, let’s take that as a baseline, they will find ways around it. And that actually what would be really good would be to have a culture where nobody wanted to abuse children. Where we had reached a level of emotional and spiritual literacy and maturity where we were coming from heart mind and not from our wounding. Where we had transcended the traumas that got us here and actually begun to evolve into being a species that was generative and unitive rather than destructive and divisive. And that until we get there, the people who want technology to enhance human evolution are always going to be playing catch up with a culture that isn’t there yet. This is taking us onto a completely different track and if it’s too much of a track shift…

Audrey: Right, we can edit. I mean, we’re not going to match Tenet, the movie that I mentioned that I slept for ten hours 

Manda: Is it good? Should I watch it?

Audrey: It’s work, but it’s interesting. It’s basically dealing with people who have the ability to go back in time, basically. So you can coordinate with your future self that’s going back in time to save your timeline. I won’t say any more spoilers. But because we can edit it’s a little bit like Tenet.

Manda: There’s a really interesting book called The Ministry of Time, written by a British woman who’s part Cambodian, that kind of plays a little bit with that, but you might enjoy. That question still stands, though. Until humanity evolves, however good the technology is, it’s playing catch up unless the technology becomes an instrument of our evolution. Where would you take those concepts? I leave that door as wide open as you want it to be.

Audrey: I would say that democracy is a kind of technology. It is a social technology for human coordination that gets better the more we invest in it. So waiting for four years or five years to vote to have a choice among, say, four people, that’s just two bits per four years? That’s, in internet terms, very low bandwidth and very high latency. You have to wait a lot to upload just two bits. However, nowadays we can have democracy with a higher bandwidth, with very simple like this kind of video conversations, we can get a random sample of people. And we did that this March. We had a digital town hall and we talked about exactly this information collapse online, thanks to AI, which is a very controversial topic. And I did mention that to rein in these  crypto scams and so on, fraud advertisements, the kind of knee jerk reaction is to ban things, to censor things. But then Taiwan is a leader in internet freedom across Asia, and our people don’t want the state to overstep its boundaries. And so we have a lot of people passionately disagreeing with each other. But just by sending 200,000 text messages to random numbers in Taiwan, for the people who volunteer to join this online assembly, we chose 450 people who are stratified random sampling, meaning they represent statistically a microcosm of Taiwanese population.

Audrey: They step by step found common ground and it is facilitated by an AI system. And so we not only drafted the pioneering law, arguably the world’s first, using verifiable signatures to hold platforms liable and accountable, but also demonstrated that you can increase the bandwidth of democracy using these kind of online tools. So it’s not that people don’t have trauma or don’t have a lot of hate to each other and so on. But it is also a function of the space. If you have pro-social democratic spaces where people go through this process of checking with each other’s understanding, sharing their authentic feelings, creating shared stories that reflect those feelings. Then people do come to the place where people say, okay, we can live with it. And then these rough consensus then become law, quite literally. Right? So I think it is possible to merge these two; to basically apply a technologist’s mindset on the technology that we call democracy, and then using digital democracy to align other technologies to the people instead of extrapolating the worst parts of our instincts, when we’re in polarised antisocial spaces. Like social media that strip mines our social fabric.

Manda: Okay. Are the people of Taiwan, would you say, moving towards a level of emotional and spiritual literacy? We’ve just had an election in the US where there was extreme polarisation. There are now parts of the nation that will not talk to each other, and yet approx 70 million out of a total of 350 million have just defined the political structure of that country, possibly for the foreseeable future. And it feels to me which ever side had won, the other side was going to be deeply, deeply unhappy. And either way, it doesn’t represent the totality of the state. But what we had in the US and what we still probably have is the best democracy that money could buy. It was wholly corrupt. There was no chance, whichever side won that, ordinary, average people would actually have any influence. The choice isn’t offered. The bandwidth was tiny because the choices were one kind of supercapitalism or another kind of supercapitalism; and the face on the supercapitalism and the nature of the predation was was pretty indistinct. Though there would have been much better options, but they were not on the table. First of all, in Taiwan, is it different? And second, how do we now move from a state where a particular version of predatory capitalism has captured control to a state where actual people feel that they are actually engaged?

Audrey: Yeah. I mean, just ten years ago, we were there, right? We were highly polarised. And again, the trust level to the government was 9%, but the trust level to the democracy itself wasn’t much better. And now in 2022, according to the most recent International Civic and Citizenship Education Survey, the ICCS, Taiwanese 15 year olds are top of the world when it comes to the agency, the feeling that they can actually meaningfully change politics, commitments to human rights and environmental rights. I don’t know whether they measure spirituality, but I would say that this idea of holistically considering the Earth, the planet and the society, the people, is definitely the strongest in the world when it comes to Taiwanese 15 year olds. And it’s not a coincidence. It is because, as I mentioned, the competence, not just literacy education curriculum that we put in, so that even before they turn 18, they can not just meaningfully change the curriculum itself for their schools, but also study agenda. Some of the most impactful petitions on the National participation platform are started by people around 16 or 17 years old, supported by 60 to 70 years old. And like banning plastic straws on national bubble tea takeouts, like going to school one hour later because science shows one more hour of sleep gets you a better grade than one more hour of study. So on and so forth, all these are started by young people, and some of them even invited to the cabinet level to be the young reverse mentors, youth advisers to the cabinet. So the point is, I think we need to ensure that our strongest storytellers, that is to say kids, can weave the narrative, the shared stories that the society coalesces around. And that is very, very important. Because if the young people feel that the stories they tell have no impact at all in the society, in a super capitalistic system, because it’s quite unlikely an average 15 year old is a billionaire, right? So because of that, then they’re going to drift apart from democracy and we lose the ability to reinvent ourselves.

Manda: Right. And I was talking to a couple of young people, they were in their early 20s, a couple of days ago. And they are staggeringly angry, and largely because they have no sense that their voices will ever be heard in a time frame that they feel is relevant to what’s happening in the world. And the whole of Western democracy seems to be that way. We have a system that elevates the dark triad, and it elevates old, straight, white men, largely whose emotional frame was set when they were 15. Which was, you know, halfway through the last century in the old millennium, and they don’t have the emotional flexibility, with the best will in the world, to understand the world that a modern 15 year old is growing in, it’s a completely different reality. So in your ambassadorship, moving around the world, you seem to me to be talking to people about the ways that we can use democracy as a social technology. As much as you are about the ways that we can harness AI so that it doesn’t blow us all off the planet before we manage to harness social technologies. What do you see that we could do? Those of us who would like the continuation of complex life on Earth in a way that is generative and heart based and connected to the web of life and all of those things. What steps can we take as we see what certainly seems to me to be the advance of quite constricting super capitalism? The one thing that gives me hope that Steve Bannon is not going to get his 10,000 year reich, frankly, is that ideology is never going to win over biophysics, and denial of the climate emergency is not going to make it go away. That’s not a great basis for hope. It’s not doing good things for my sleeping patterns. Please help my sleeping patterns, Audrey.

Audrey: Well, yeah, you definitely start by sleeping well. And I insist on eight hours of sleep. So even during time zone crossings or especially during timezone crossings, if I don’t feel like I have a full sleep, I always make time to sleep more. There is no negotiation around that. That is just what I require.

Manda: How do you do this? I remember talking to Jon Alexander and he said, when you were in London and you didn’t feel you’d had enough sleep, you just lay down on the embankment and used his jacket as a pillow and went to sleep. Audrey, this is a very useful skill. Some of us might want more sleep, but it doesn’t actually happen. Tell us your sleep techniques! That that alone would make this podcast stellar. It’s already stellar, but, you know, tell us how you get enough sleep.

Audrey: Well, we’re barely the first hour in, right? We’ve got three hours. I think the most important trick is, as I mentioned, to publish and then perish. That is to say, if there’s anything that you feel the world should know, maybe it’s okay to jot it down before going to sleep. That reliably works for me. And equally importantly, I think if you have some plans for tomorrow, or different engagements that you have on the calendar and so on, usually I just tell myself that I’ll sleep on it. And really, in my dreams, I simulate those different timelines, like different sorts of futures. Then my brain can just pick the one that made more sense, I guess, when I wake up. And sleeping then don’t feel like you’re slacking. Escapism? No, you’re actually doing prebunking, pre-training for your tomorrow in your sleep. And again, that’s a story you tell yourself; it really just happens. So I think it’s quite interesting how people, after a full night’s sleep, automatically go to the place of the heart that you just mentioned. Like people become much more wholesome, holistic and so on. And it really says that about the quality of life that we’re leading.

Audrey: There’s people who push the sleep deficit to the weekends and then just go through the week in a kind of half asleep mode. But science has shown that it really doesn’t work. You really need to pay off the debt within 48 hours, otherwise it’s going to cause chronic damage. So just staying aware of these basic dynamics of sleeping. Now, I think, if we make sure that we take care of ourselves in this way, then this care also manifests in ways that we treat each other. And then it may be the climate, it may be, um, you know, I disasters, it may be biorisk. You mentioned quite a bit of these. But when people are in a sufficiently slept mode, they see these then as invitations, as I like to quote Leonard Cohen; ‘there’s a crack in everything and that’s how the light gets in’. And to be able to see these challenges, global challenges, planetary challenges as the crack that invites the light in again, requires a well-rested mind. Because otherwise you’re just going to to do this fight or flight thing, but to fight or flee from CO2, I don’t think that’s very constructive.

Manda: Yeah. And that reminds me, I was recently reading Tyson Yunkaporta’s new book called Right Story, Wrong Story. And he has a part in it where he’s describing the Aboriginal people, and they’ve all gathered together and the adults are creating a dugout canoe, which they will later sell to a museum as if it were an artefact. But that’s a separate thing. And the kids are playing on the north bend of the river, and they’re jumping in and out of the water, because today it is safe, there are no crocodiles. But tomorrow it won’t be. And he says a little while later on, we don’t have the Palaeolithic fight and flight response that you all talk about, because we know where the predators are, always. And that sank very deeply for me, that our indigenous ancestors across the world were sufficiently linked to the web of life to know where the predators were. It made a lot more sense, also, of Vanessa Andreotti’s book, where she’s talking about Hospicing modernity, and she wants to marry a man of Spanish descent. Her indigenous grandfather says, no, you can’t; he won’t know how to laugh and he’ll get bitten by a snake. And in the end, he does know how to laugh and they teach him how not to get bitten by the snakes. But he will get bitten by a snake because he doesn’t know where they are.

Manda: And it strikes me that in our modern world, first of all, we’ve lost that connection to the web of life. We’ve abandoned it, and we don’t know how to get it back without a lot of work. But also, most of the predators in our world are not snakes or bears or tigers outside the window. They’re other people, or they’re technologies that people have created. And and yes, I’m sure if you get enough sleep, you wake up feeling more heartfelt and more connected. But we also, it seems to me, lack the narratives of connection. Our narratives are often narratives of disconnection, and I’m putting quite a lot of my personal bandwidth into finding ways to shift the narratives from ones of scarcity and separation and powerlessness, to agency and connection and community and sufficiency and being and belonging and finding a sense of meaning. And you seem to live in that place of being and belonging and a sense of meaning. And first of all, again, presumably it arises out of your childhood. You had to devolve a sense of being in belonging. But also if you and I together were to plan a way to shift the global narrative to one of connection, sufficiency, agency. How would you do it using any of the technologies with which you are familiar?

Audrey: Yeah, indeed. When we changed the curriculum 2019, we say from this point onward, only three things matters in education, which are agency, interaction and the common good. So agency, means that the child’s curiosity, the child’s initiatives, should determine their personal curriculum. Interaction means that they need to interact with other people as friends, right? Not seeing each other as predators, but rather learn the very important skill of prosocial friendliness. So this idea of being friendly to people who are different from you are often just papered over when you’re in a competitive environment in a school, right? Because there’s not enough capstone projects where you can usefully collaborate or something. So maybe you have a lot of agency, a lot of initiative, but you see the world from a zero sum perspective. So that’s the other one. The third one, the common good, is also interesting because essentially in any place where it’s zero sum it’s a systemic teaching of how to play a different game, how to see the games that we’re playing as lose lose games, and then refuse to play. And say, no, I’d like to play a different game where there is common good to be had and not getting trapped into this collective FOMO thing, right? I remember last year there was a study that says to an average undergrad in the US who’s using TikTok, if you want to make them quit, you have to pay them close to $60 a month, so they don’t want to quit.

Audrey: However, if there is a way for everybody around them to quit together along with them, then they’re willing to pay you 30 bucks per month to make that happen. So it’s a collective trap, right? The first one to go out loses utility. They get socially disconnected, so nobody would quit by themselves. But if everybody realised that we’re actually in a lose lose game, everybody loses so much in this collective trap. And so the common good pillar is, I think, just this instinct, recognition of such situations and without the emotional maturity to say, okay, then let’s organise and move somewhere else together. So agency, interaction and the common good I think are quite reliable. So these are technologies to the self reminder that we talk about that this is a lose lose game. The awareness that just because they look different doesn’t mean that we cannot be friends. Just because I’m on this wing and they’re on the other wing. Well, the left wing and right wing together, both wings makes a bird fly. To have that reminder to oneself. All these are technologies in the sense that these are a set of practices that people can do together. And there are a lot of tools, dynamic facilitation, open space technology, breathing and meditation exercises that are technologies that people can practice together. So I won’t say that there’s a solution. I don’t think Solutionism works here, but just holding true to those three pillars already does a lot.

Manda: That’s huge. So you started this in 2019. So it was just before the pandemic. But because you were in there sorting things, Taiwan did not have lockdown. One of the ways that in the UK and the US and Western Europe, the zero sum concept arises, is that there are a certain number of places at university and the people who rise to the top get the places and the rest don’t. And so there’s inevitably in our schooling system, that sense of competition. First you need to get to university if you want to get ahead, and you’re competing against not just the people that you know, but a whole bunch of people that you don’t know. I trained to be a veterinary surgeon, and it was a long way back and there was a television programme called All Creatures Great and Small, which was about a vet. And the competition went from probably 40 to 50 people per place to 600 people per place, pretty much overnight, about five years before I was applying. And you knew that was the case. I have a one in 600 chance of getting this place. I have to succeed against everybody I know and a thousand people that I don’t know. And I remember listening to Zach Stein, as you probably know he’s an educational philosopher in the States, and he said that there are schools in the States where every single child has gastric ulcers. And this this is not a useful way to educate anybody. How in Taiwan did you manage to alleviate that zero sum component of education?

Audrey: Well, first of all, to have a sufficient amount of university and colleges so that anyone who wants to get in gets in. It’s a supply side problem that can be fixed on the supply side. And also have community colleges. So for lifelong education, people can easily upskill and reskill themselves. So this sounds like quite obvious.

Manda: It sounds like quite obvious. But if you trained everyone who had wanted to be a vet when I wanted to be a vet, 600 people per place, you would have had to find jobs for a 600% increase in the number of vets. And it was hard enough to find a job as it was. I mean, I guess you’d end up with a personal vet for your family of animals, but that would require changing the economy a bit.

Audrey: So it depends, right? So if you look at things from the common good way and you identify the kind of jobs in which the demand is elastic, meaning that the more professionals are doing it, then more people want to do it, then your economy just reconfigures around those elastic demands. So I’m no economist, you probably interview more economists than we have the room to go into here. But this is also a key piece of of AI. If deploying AI tools enhances people’s ability to respond to novel challenges and so on, as in coding, for example, then just having one personal programmer for each of your daily needs, that is not inconceivable. This is conceivable, right? So it’s not like there’s a fixed number of programming and design positions in the world. The more abundant there is, the more we would like to have. So to structure the job system around these kind of elastic demands can get people out from this false dilemma of zero sum thing. And in Taiwan, again, even for the kids, for the schools level, people who don’t want the curriculum can actually go to one of those experimental Schools or institutions or homeschooling. Up to 10% of Taiwanese kids can opt in to that. I’m home schooled.

Audrey: When I was 14, I talked to the head of my school saying I can do 16 hours a day of research. There’s this internet thing, that people are doing research together. Or I can spend eight hours a day at your school and just have eight hours a day to do research. So the head of my school was like, oh, I read your email exchange with professors of the field and it looks like you’re really doing research. So, yeah, you don’t have to go to my school anymore. So that’s when I thought that, oh, the bureaucracy, they’re very innovative actually. So anyway, the point being that because we have this flexibility; so we have the Waldorf School, we have Montessori, we have all sorts of different thought processes that went into experimental education. And the ones that really did align culturally, locally, that got adopted, then inform our schools. Which also has an experimental program and also according to a new curriculum, to give students and their parents much more agenda setting power when it comes to how to organise their studies and so on. So it becomes a continuum. People who want to experiment full time into alternative school systems, they do that. They inform the educational core, the teachers, who then inform the local schools to adopt some of these newer ideas. And this is partly why when generative AI came, we did not feel that we need to ban it or anything, because we just incorporate it into the agency, interaction and the common good curriculum.

Manda: Brilliant. And are those young people who have been given agency, encouraged to understand the common good, are they beginning to move into positions of political influence now? Or at least are they holding levers of change that make sense?

Audrey: Yeah, definitely. I mean, the new curriculum was just five years ago, but we already saw, as I mentioned, in civics classes, the teachers encouraged them to start popular movements. E-petitions. There’s a young person named Vivienne who just started a campaign of de tabooing periods and menstruation. She actually crowdfunded and built a museum for menstruation, which is no mean feat.

Manda: And how cool is that?

Audrey: Yeah. In the top university NTU this class on social innovation around menstruation. And nowadays it just becomes very normalised. Right? And that change happened over, what, four years? So that’s what you get when you have young people with agency and the common good.

Manda: That is so cool. Thank you. That’s made my day perfect. Alrighty. It’s beginning to sound as if Taiwan is a melting pot for ideas and that you’re encouraging and allowing. And that we, the whole world, could watch Taiwan to see what is possible. In my version of an ideal culture, we’re back to Plato’s idea of the disparity between the lowest paid and the highest paid, maximising at 20 to 1, which is not the case in the Western world at the moment. What’s the kind of pay disparity within Taiwan? Have you managed to move towards something where there’s more equivalence of income?

Audrey: Yeah. So Taiwan did not massively change the Gini index, the income disparity over the past decade. But we did get a lot more affluent. So by PPP, that’s adjusted to the actual price, the GDP adjusted to a local price, Taiwan is now, I think, second only to the US in all the economies with more than 10 million people. But because we’re much more equal compared to the US, so I guess you can say that a typical household, a typical person in Taiwan, is perhaps in absolutely the most developed economy when it comes to like medium sized countries or larger. And so because of that, we can afford to have good universal health care that covers dentistry and many other things, which again, makes it feel safe, for being a Taiwanese. Even residents enjoy that too.

Manda: Right. And so this sense of safety, I think is what then allows emotional expansion. If we’re not in sympathetic or dorsal vagal overload all of the time, we can begin to become more heart based and more spiritually aware and more connected.

Audrey: And I think that also contributed to the fact that we’re over 80% a population that is religious. But contrary to most OECD countries, the more highly educated or accomplished you are, the more likely you’re religious. And that’s not the case, say, in the US.

Manda: And you also have very diverse spiritual paths, as I understand it, one of the most diverse linguistically and also the most diverse in terms of spiritual or religious affiliation.

Audrey: There’s no dominant religion, right? There’s Taoism, there’s Buddhism. The folk religion is a little bit like Shinto, animism. And of course, there’s Christianity along with many others.

Manda: Right? So you still have a shamanic underpinning to the things that are there. Fantastic. Okay. So in our modern world, social media are the connectivity of our hypercomplex system. And I am old enough to remember when Twitter was Twitter and felt like a really generative and lovely place to be. And now I’m on Bluesky and Mastodon and they both feel slightly like that. You are involved in the people’s bid to take TikTok from being something that can shift the Romanian election in ways that we don’t necessarily want, to something that could enhance people’s lives. Can you tell us a bit about what that is and how it’s going?

Audrey: Certainly. So the way TikTok currently works is a little bit like strip mining. It detects what social relationship, what community, what affiliations you likely have. It hides that from you and then it maximises your engagement, meaning it’s short term addiction and profits and extract a lot of value from that. But it doesn’t replenish the social bonds. So gone was this idea of, like in the early Twitter, of people sharing the curated timelines, lists and things like that. The early blogosphere where people share the links to the blogs and using aggregators. In these places, I guess still in Bluesky today, the default is to share some feeds, so that you know that the community that you’re a part of and other communities have some overlap in shared experiences. But with TikTok or really with anything that’s individually precision targeted, then all of that is lost. You pretty much are guaranteed to be trapped in your own world. And then again, that leads to isolation and polarisation and the weakened sense of shared reality. Which is why I say it’s strip mining our social fabric. And so the idea here of the People’s Bid is that if it comes through, then we will make sure instead of playing whack a mole against bots and trolls and things like that, people are given the choice of curating the feed however they feel like. It’s just going to be shared and people can, just like people are doing in Bluesky today, build their shared feeds.

Audrey: If I like a cappella and science, I can create a feat that just has people singing about science, and then other people can subscribe to it and make sure that we have a shared experience and so on and so forth. So that is both a meaningful participation, voice, but also freedom to migrate to different platforms, but still keep your connections and your content. That is choice, right? So the voice, choice and the stake. Meaning that if people contribute to building communities online, if people know that this is a polarising topic and they’re willing to be one of those very few, like 3.5% of content, if they want to create that sort of content that heals the social fabric, that when both sides view this content, they can literally see the left wing and the right wing flying together. And that’s having a very strong healing experience to both sides of people. If they’re willing to do that, then it’s actually very much worth sponsorship. There’s a lot of people and charities and institutions that want to sponsor this kind of meaningful social fabric connection. And the people who create this kind of interconnectedness, this connection over just one side of polarisation, they can get the monetary support, the financial security, so that they can keep doing this kind of work. So voice choice and stake.

Manda: So can we drill down into the 3.5% and the social connection. What does it look like? What does it feel like? If I as a as a novelist or potentially I’m trying to write film scripts, was wanting to engage with that, where’s the research and where is it happening? What does it look and feel like?

Audrey: Yeah, I’ll use one very simple example. So in early 2020, Taiwan knew pretty much before anyone else that the virus is coming. It’s something like SARS, but different. And Musk is going to be a problem. And part of the problem is not the physical one, but a psychological one. There’s one side of our population that thinks only N95, the most expensive kind of mask, is useful and everything else doesn’t work. Or the other side thinks that it’s ventilation, it’s aerosol; wearing a mask actually hurts. Any kind of mask hurts. So both sides have something that sounds like a hypothesis and the science at that time isn’t ready to answer those hypotheses. And we knew already that the polarisation attacks are coming. And about the polarisation attack, it is not about supporting this over this or that, it’s about amplifying the most extreme versions of both sides so that they fight each other, they hate each other. And it’s not, strictly speaking, this information. Because these are reasonable doubts. So the existing counter disinformation laws probably doesn’t work for that circumstance. So what should we do? And it is why we have in each ministry a team we call participation officers, in charge of engaging the public to practice broad listening, not just broadcasting and also to find uncommon ground. And so in this particular case, what is the uncommon ground? Well, very quickly, the Health Ministry’s participation officer, who happens to live with this very cute dog, a Shiba Inu, the same kind of dog as Doge. And we pushed out a meme, a cute picture with this dog, putting her paw on her mouth and saying, ‘wear a mask to remind each other to keep your dirty, unwashed hands away from your face’

Manda: Right. So the problem is not that you’re breathing in other people’s exhaled viruses, it’s that you’re going to be touching everything, and then you’re going to touch your face because you do, and then you’re going to infect yourself. And your mask is there 

Audrey: It’s just a reminder to wash your hands. And so it completely depolarises this topic. And people on both sides can live with this message, right? And the dog is so cute. So it became much more viral. It became a viral vaccine, right? So people who have seen this picture, they simply cannot be angry about somebody wearing a mask. And we did measure the tap water usage, so people did wash hands much more.

Manda: Also did wear masks. Because you also had ways of queuing up to know where the masks were and to know who had got masks. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Because that was really interesting. 

Audrey: Yeah, yeah, yeah. We have a stable application interface that just keeps updating. A shared database of where each pharmacy is carrying the masks; its street address, and also how many masks are there for the day for rationing. So the upshot is that people can see, like a common ledger, where the masks are in the most demand. And if there’s problems in our distribution. For example, for a while, um, we measured by the average distance from your point to the next pharmacy that has masks. So in theory, it’s very equitable because everybody is on average the same distance to the next available mask. Except of course, not everybody owns a helicopter. So in places where you have to wait for a bus or things like that, actually people have to spend an hour to get to that pharmacy, even though it’s the same like ten kilometres away and then it’s actually quite imbalanced. But because we publish these numbers and update it like every three minutes, the opposition party who discovered this with the OpenStreetMap people and ask the health minister, oh, there’s obviously a problem, a bug in their distribution.

Audrey: Then the health minister at the time said, well, you are a data scientist, so please teach us how to do it. Yeah, come and help us. But without this common data, without this shared story, there’s no way for the opposition to help. But now, equipped with exactly the same real time data, she cannot say no. She has to help. So it again changes the zero sum politic into a positive sum politic. And we did fix the distribution method just a week after that. And so the point being that if you see this kind of coordination problems as a invitation and share literally everything we have when it comes to decision making, then everybody can help setting up a better visualisation to the next available mask. People can monitor long term trends and improve distribution. So it becomes like really cybernetic in the sense that people steer the steering wheel together when it comes to pandemic response.

Manda: Or anything. So we’re back to agency, interaction and the common good. You spoke about polarisation attacks and that these were not trying to say that one side or other was right because there wasn’t enough data. These were belief systems and they were being amplified in order to cause discord and polarisation. How do we reach the people whose aim in life is to create discord and polarisation, and persuade them that we’re all on a burning planet, and it would be nice if they didn’t do that.

Audrey: Well with cute dogs.

Manda: Well, you diffused them with the cute dogs. I’m not certain you got to them and stopped them from wanting polarisation to happen, did you?

Audrey: Well, I mean, there’s competition. And many of the trolls, all they want is recognition, right? So I practised troll hugging. The idea here is that when people mention my name or tag me and have like 400 words of very toxic, polarised hate speech; with the help of a language model, I can reliably find the 3 or 4 words within that rant, that I can construct a nice meaning out of it, interpret it as something constructive. And then I just very sincerely reply, usually with a direct message, but if it’s a public board, I also reply in public and just ignore everything else and just concentrate on this snippet that I can then construe as constructive and engage sincerely. And so troll hugging means that this troll, actually, no, the only way they can get the attention they crave is not to spew more polarisation and hate, which is, frankly speaking, very transactional. Every time you get attention because of it, you still are thirsty because it’s not relational, you don’t build a strong link. Right? But for this kind of troll hugging, we’re basically saying, hey, you can have a strong link if you just focus on this kind of behaviour and they learn very quickly.

Manda: And it works.

Audrey: It works.

Manda: Really? This is positive reinforcement…that’s really interesting. I’ve got a friend who goes on our right wing news. He’s invited on because basically then 3 or 4 of them can spend an hour assaulting him, but he’s very good at staying positive and engaging. But then on Twitter where he feels he has to keep a position, the toxicity is horrendous. But if I were to suggest to him that he used your technique, then I can see that happens when you’ve got individuals who are seeking any kind of connection; the only way they know how to make connection is to be toxic. If I were in Romania and there was a state that was directing polarisation as a way of then influencing an election, as potentially might have happened in a slightly larger nation fairly recently also; the people whose actual job it is to destroy any kind of semblance of democracy are going to be less amenable to that. What do we do when there’s state intervention?

Audrey: They are also very likely just robots.

Manda: But somebody is behind it. There’s an actual human being making this choice somewhere up the line, is there not?

Audrey: Oh yeah, definitely. Definitely. Though they are not going to see the troll hugging messages, right. And that is the difference. And foreign interference is fascinating. In Taiwan we do have a system where we can see where the traffic comes from, because we’re in an island, right 

Manda: It has to get to you.

Audrey: Yeah, yeah. And so we treat them quite differently. Like during the height of cyber attacks, we even made sure that only the domestic people get to post new messages on some government platforms. And people who connect from outside of Taiwan are basically enjoying only read only access. And if you want to contribute to it, then you have to prove that you’re actually at least a Taiwanese resident, though we have good infrastructure for that. You have the citizens digital certificate. You have this wallet, this Fido app that you can use to remotely sign a message. And it’s a meronym. It’s a part of a name. So you can, using our decentralised wallet, declare that you’re, you know, a person who is a resident in this New Taipei city that I’m in. But you don’t have to disclose your street address or your name or your birth date or anything like that. Or if you want to be eligible for some benefit, you can prove that you’re over 50 years old, but you don’t have to disclose exactly how old you are. So this meronymic personhood credentials means that we can create a real burden for people who want to mount these troll attacks of 50,000 robot accounts, because they cannot get this kind of personhood credentials. But then we don’t move to a place where the state surveils everything you do because you prove only the minimal parts required. So this meronymic system is also very important.

Manda: So this is something that I have touched on in my podcast occasionally, but not in any great depth. And it’s the concept of the Wetiko or the Wendigo, which was a concept that Alnoor Ladha first introduced me to, in the indigenous peoples of North America. And probably, I imagine, the indigenous peoples all over the world. That under certain circumstances, an individual within what is an initiation culture would experience a trauma that cut them off from the holding of the web of life. And it might be deep shame particularly, or lack of empathy. The incidents that Alnoor spoke of is if a group were caught away from the tribe by, say, a heavy snowfall for a prolonged length of time and the surviving individuals had resorted to cannibalism, they would come back and they would be infected by the wetiko. And there would be very detailed cultural ceremonies and rituals to reintegrate that individual to the tribe, for their sake, but also for the sake of the tribe, because this is contagious. And it seems to me that the trauma culture, whatever cut us off from the web of life, is that Wetiko. And certainly what Alnoor says and his connections with the indigenous peoples of North America, is that when the colonisers arrived, the experience was that this was an entire culture infected with the wetiko.

Manda: And it is contagious and it destroys everything that it touches. And so in my shamanic work, in my own personal work of feeding my demons, and also then exploring within that realm of outside ordinary reality, but within the sphere that is the energy of the web of life and everything around it; there is a wetiko. There is a thing, an entity that feeds on fear and suffering and shame and pride and war and grief and all of the things that seem to be exploding in our world rather a lot. And it’s quite happy at the moment. But also there is another, there’s the generative, there’s the what might lift us to emergence into a new system. The raw wonder and joy and curiosity and wild compassion of the web of life. And that these two are facing off one against the other, and that each of us can choose in any moment to feed one or the other. And I wonder how that lands with you, really, if it does at all.

Audrey: Yeah. One of my earliest reading is the Tao Te Ching, the Taoism  ancient text. So on chapter 13 it’s called Shameless in the Ursula Le Guin translation, it goes like this: ‘to be in favour or disgrace is to live in fear. To take the body seriously is to admit one can suffer. What does it mean to be in favour or disgrace? Is to live in fear. Fear is the basis. We fear to lose it. We fear to win it. So be in favour or disgrace is to live in fear. What does it mean to take the body seriously? Is to admit one can suffer. I suffer because I’m a body. If I weren’t a body, how could I suffer? So people who say they are bodily good before the public good could be entrusted with the Commonwealth, and people who treated the body politic as gently as their own body would be worthy to govern the Commonwealth’. So I think that says something quite clear, which is there is this fear and there is this suffering, but they are a function of a mind virus or however you want to say it, that debases. And then if you just go with that debasing thing. Then you go into a place where the Tao Te Ching says, the ever wanting soul only see what it wants. And that’s immediately the previous chapter, not wanting. It says, and I quote: ‘the five colours blind our eyes. The five notes deafen our ears, the five flavours dull our taste. Racing, chasing, hunting drives people crazy. Trying to get rich ties people in knots. So the wise soul watches with the inner eye, not the outer eye. Letting that go and keeping this’. So that’s pretty powerful text.

Manda: And I love that you got the Ursula Le Gwin translation.

Audrey: Yes. It’s very poetic. And so basically it’s saying the inner eye was open all the time. Like when people are born, that’s open. But somehow there’s this mind virus that closes the inner eye and turns to the outward eye and then in favour or in disgrace, and to live in fear and then suffer. So there’s a very clear line of thinking here that says as soon as you open your inner eye, then you don’t suffer the same way that you suffered when you thought you were just an individual trapped in the body, always craving for more.

Manda: And then in the the Taoist symbol that we always see, the yin yang symbol, then the light and the dark are interconnected, and each holds  within itself the seed of the other.

Audrey: Yeah. So that’s basically it. So there’s people who work with the Tao, the whole nature, and I quote: ‘the people who work with Tao are Tao people, they belong to the way. People who work with power belong to power, and people who work with loss belong to what’s lost. So give yourself to the way and you’ll be at home on the way. Give yourself to power and you’ll be at home in power. Give yourself to loss and only when you’re lost you’ll feel at home. To give no trust is to get no trust.

Manda: Which brings us neatly back to your concept of trusting the people. The people who live in power are at home in power. And it seems to me that we’ve created a system in the West which elevates a particular kind of power over, rather than power with, which is a very old concept. And they’re very at home in power.

Audrey: And then it says as soon as you start working with the people, as soon as you give trust from the position of power to restore the way, then you become immune to that particular mind virus. Or to your words, to the Wetiko.

Manda: And so finding the way, in the Taoist sense, is the treatment for the Wetiko in a way. It brings us back out of the endless searching of the hungry ghost and back into a place of balance.

Audrey: Yes. And, I really like chapter 28. I’ll just read it, I guess. It says this in very beautiful poetry. It goes like this: ‘knowing man and staying woman, be the riverbed of the world. Being the world’s riverbed of eternal, unfailing power is to go back again to be newborn. Knowing light and staying dark be a pattern to the world. Being the world’s pattern of eternal, unerring power is to go back again to boundlessness. Knowing glory and staying modest. Be the valley of the world. Being the world’s valley of eternal, inexhaustible power is to go back again to the natural. Natural root is cut up and made into useful things, wise souls are used to make into leaders. And just so, a great carving is done without cutting’. So I interpret that as in not cutting from the greater web of life.

Manda: Brilliant and beautiful. That’s amazing. Okay, we’re getting to the point where either we split this podcast into two, which is possible, or we draw begin to draw to a close. I think probably the latter, because you have to go to bed. So could you very briefly, we’re about to head into the start of 2025. How would you like the world to go, and how could those of us listening help to tip it in a way that is more generative, inclusive, gives people more sense of agency and more connection. Anything you want to say of 2025 Audrey.

Audrey: I remember when we installed this new system of the new curriculum prebunking everything in 2019. People collectively felt in Taiwan like last year was peak polarisation and we’re finally over that. And then it just continuously depolarised after that. And so I think for people in the US, 2025 is going to be a year where people look back and think, oh, that was peak polarisation and we’re finally over that. And and hopefully by the end of 2025 that the entire world can look back and say, yeah, it was peak polarisation a year ago or two years ago. A few years ago. But now humanity is over that. We’re collectively over when it comes to peak polarisation. That’s the direction.

Manda: I would be so happy. And is there anything individually, people listening could do to contribute to the depolarisation of the world?

Audrey: Yeah, definitely. I mean, the reliable way to depolarise is to find someone who’s unlike you in some way and then share storytelling. Or to find someone who’s in your in-group and invite them to share a story that they know will make you feel a little bit uncomfortable when it comes to ideology. So both way works. And just share those the stories. And when listening to the stories, practice the non-judgmental mode of listening. So in the beginning, maybe you can only listen for a minute without disrupting them or disrupting them in your head. That’s okay. Keep it at one minute. But then with practice, you will be able then to listen for five minutes, for ten minutes without interrupting. And I can consistently listen for an hour without interrupting, either in my mind or acting out. And at that point, then you fuse your horizon with the other party. And that’s really very beautiful. It is the connectedness that we all need. So practice that. Share unusual stories with people close to you, or share close, interesting stories of common interest with people who are very different or even opposing your ideologies. And just keep practising, share storytelling and that’s going to be reliably depolarising.

Manda: Thank you. Thank you. What a way to go into 2025. This has been astonishing and beautiful and I am so grateful. Audrey Tang, thank you so much for coming on to the Accidental Gods podcast.

Audrey: Really happy to share with you all of this. Live long and prosper.

Manda: There we go. That’s it for another week. And that’s it for our fifth anniversary edition. Enormous thanks to Audrey for being such an astonishing light in the world at a time of such astonishing upheaval and transformation. It is so encouraging to speak to someone who can see the potential for change, who can see that when things break, there are the openings where the light comes in. Who can see the possibilities for giving power to the people, for giving trust, and thereby gaining trust for transforming our world, such that the whole of humanity has a chance to become the best that each of us can be, which is what we’re here for. However often I may lose sight of it, there are people like Audrey in the world who never will. And that, for me, is both a humbling and inspiring concept.

Manda: And I hope this whole conversation has moved you to understanding that the world can shift, and that each of us individually has a part to play. Whatever you can do in the world, please do find what it is and then do it with all of your heart. What else are we here for? And that’s it for this week. Huge thanks to Caro C for the music at the head and foot, and for this week’s production. To Lou Mayor for the video, Anne Thomas for the transcript, Faith Tilleray for all of the tech behind the scenes and for the conversations that keep us moving forward. And as ever, an enormous thanks to you for listening. If you know of anybody else who needs to understand the ways that we can connect together to bring the best of ourselves to the world, then please do send them this link. And that’s it for now. See you next week. Thank you and goodbye.

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