We have a quick sequence in our video where the interviewee just introduce himself or herself. If you can say, in quick sentences, “My name is,” “I live in,”, who you are, in three or four sentences?
My name is Audrey Tang, I live on the Internet. Physically, for two months every year, I’m in Paris. For the rest of the months, I’m usually based in Taipei, Taiwan. That’s it.
Thank you very much. I read in an interview, when you were eight years old, you used to draw a computer on paper sheets, in an attempt to learn programming. Is this true?
Yes, it is true.
What gave you that idea to draw?
There were books about computer programming, but back then computers were expensive. We were not a rich family, so my parents were not exactly sure whether to buy this very expensive gadget. That was back in 1989.
Do you remember when you first discovered the Web, and the first time you connected?
Certainly. The Web came actually much later. It’s around 1993-1994. I was on computer networks before that. In 1992, there was already Internet coverage. That was when I lived in Germany. When I moved back to Taiwan, that was in 1993.
How was the early days of the Web in Taiwan?
Like most of the rest of the world, the first Internet users were people in the academic community. People who study computer science, people who have this very powerful computing center in many of Taiwan’s universities, especially in Taipei and Hsinchu.
Did you feel as a privilege to be one of the Internet pioneers, I would say, in your country, or did you feel like there was something really new there? Did you immediately see the potential of the Internet?
I was 13 years old at the time. It was actually very democratizing. The initial setup fees were not that high. The telecom did not charge special fees for access to international forums. It was a flat rate. As we were not a rich family, I don’t think it’s a privilege, actually.
Let’s talk about your childhood in Europe with Chinese activists after your father visited China in 1989. How was it? What did you learn from all these experiences to be among this kind of people when you were young?
They were exiled! They couldn’t return to their country anymore. They were locked out from their country — because they believed that there is a better way for the people to communicate with the government, which they perceived as not taking the input from the people.
Talking about sharing information, you were an early adopter of Wikipedia. How was it to discover this kind of knowledge? How did you share the info? Did you write some articles on Wikipedia, on Taiwan, or maybe other as a subject or as a topic? Tell us more about that.
Wikipedia came very late. My history working with the Internet, my first project when I participate in the Internet, and that was before the Web, was the Gutenberg Project. It’s still very much alive today — anybody can read public domain books, usually published before the First World War, because that’s how the copyright system works.
Talking about a lot of projects you were on, you joined the Internet Engineering Task Force, is that right? You were working with them? Can you explain what it is? What was your role then?
The fun thing about Internet Engineering Task Force is that really, there’s no joining or leaving. It is just a space. It has two components. First, it has an online space. Mostly, I joined mailing lists — that is to say people emailing each other and copying everybody else. Aside from that, they also have face-to-face meetings where people can look and then talk to each other and learn from each other face-to-face in a high-bandwidth way.
When did the work take place?
It was in the early 2000s.
Do you still have contacts with the IETF community?
Certainly. The way IETF works, it is not only for people who have lots of ideas; the work does not stop when RFCs are published. Instead, they want everybody to test-drive it. Again, just like my early role with the Gutenberg Project, my current role is to look at the newest RFCs, try to implement the drafts, try to put them into action, and see if it actually works, or is actually contradicting each other.
Was it through this collaboration that you found the Gov-Zero (g0v) Project? Can you explain what this is and what we can do about this?
I did not start the g0v movement. It was started late 2012 by my very good friend CL Kao and three of his friends. The way g0v works is this — we have a slogan, called “Fork the Government.” Fork has a very specific meaning in open-source development. It means take whatever is here, not rejecting it, but taking it to a different direction.
Hacking politics, in a way.
It is.
Talking about politics, when we think about Taiwan, we think about the Sunflower Movement. There was a link between the Internet, the Web and this student movement. Can you briefly explain it to a public who doesn’t know anything about that? Maybe then when you explain the link with the old Internet thing and the occupy movement...
Yes. The Sunflower Movement was in March 2014. Around that time already the Occupy Movement, the Arab Spring, the work from others organizers had already taken place, and researchers like Manuel Castells had already wrote analyses about them.
Yeah, it seems this time the political landscape really changed in Taiwan. For instance, the new mayor of Taipei, he was elected thanks to social media. Can you tell us according to you, why is it possible in Taiwan to be elected through social media?
As I explained, 80 percent of Taiwan’s population is on Internet, which is coming very close to the literacy rate. It just enabled a very rapid dissemination of ideas, of critiques, of conversations, of dialogues.
Would you say that Taiwan is maybe a really great and unique example of new politics, if you have to compare with Europe, with this strong growth of social media, and this as an example in particular? Would you say that Taiwan is maybe a new symbol for young users on the Internet maybe to empower themselves in this era, in the few sentences if you can?
Taiwan is a very unique place. I see Taiwan has a lot of innovation, on civic legislation, and social media, because it is very tightly bound. Pretty much everybody is online, everybody understands more or less the same language, so it’s very easy for ideas to spread, and to experiment.
Do you think this trust will be strengthened in May when your new president will be in charge officially?
Yeah, certainly. Dr. Tsai’s campaign team did a great job! She ran a campaign modeled as a public and civic education process. She published her campaign’s visual design assets as an open source project — that is straight from Mayor Ko’s campaign, of course, she didn’t have to reinvent this.
Which social media, in Taiwan, maybe is the most used or the most efficient to communicate and share information about politics or maybe the critiques about China?
There are two main social media outlets in Taiwan, and they complement each other. There is one where the entire world uses, it’s Facebook. Pretty much everybody on Taiwan is on Facebook. There’s a projection like in a little bit more than 10 years, there may be more Taiwanese Facebook accounts than Taiwanese population, [laughs] because people have multiple accounts. There’s a lot of people on Facebook.
How would you see the future of the Web in Taiwan? Would it be a space which is relating both freedom to its users, maybe even be more used to make a political campaign, or to distribute information? If you were to compare it with the early beginnings in Taiwan, what is evolution and how do you see it in the near future?
There is a project called Mozilla which is the makers of the Firefox browser and a lot of other Web technologies, they are one of the main innovators of the Web...
(Recording interrupted by noise in the cafe)
The Web has a bright future in Taiwan. First, everybody’s on the Web, and everybody recognized the ideas of the early Web — the hyperlinks and distributed publishing — things like that which makes the Web unique. There’s a lot of very interesting experiments, such as twreporter.org, an entirely crowd-funded media for investigative journalism, in the form of not-for-profit Web publication.
There’ll be one last question. Is it OK?
Mm-hmm.
You describe yourself as a "conservative anarchist," and, at the same time, you still do consulting work with Apple and other big companies. How do you respond to criticism you were maybe facing about that little paradox between these two things of using that is complementary?
I work "with" Apple. I don’t work "for" Apple. My title — independent contractor — reflects this distinction. My main work at Apple or at the Oxford University Press is, actually, introducing them to works from the open source society, and people who reached out to me from those organizations — such as Socialtext — were already friends that I trusted. They are fellows in the open source and free software movements.
Thank you very much.