Which brings us back to Audrey. In 2016 she was appointed minister without portfolio, and shortly after became the Digital Minister of Taiwan. She was the youngest minister in the cabinet, and the first transgender politician ever to hold office in Taiwan, but the thing that really set Audrey apart was that she was a completely new kind of politician. One who wanted to change not only what government did, but what government actually was.
Audrey brought G0v into government. They called their new organisation the Public Digital Innovation Service (PDIS) and saw the challenge of democracy as a problem of information. Voting is a single opportunity for a citizen to give a political signal, and an incredibly weak signal at that. Usually held years apart, elections don’t tell government enough about what citizens feel about any issue, and citizens don’t feel they are being involved enough in decisions being made on their behalf.
Around the time PDIS got going, Uber opened in Taiwan, providing the new organisation’s first real test. The usual chorus of conflict and division followed the taxi platform’s arrival. The government needed a way to collect the vast array of opinions held across Taiwanese society, and, beyond that, to learn what all these different groups had in common. They needed a way to build consensus on which a decision about Uber could be based. Their answer was ‘vTaiwan’, and the process was simple, but powerful.
Audrey, herself, is a completely new kind of politician. She doesn’t see her job as making decisions at all. Instead, she sees herself as a “channel for collective intelligence”
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The first stage was to lay out the basic facts about Uber, which were put onto a Wikipedia timeline, and independently validated. The next stage, the most difficult, was to bring people together from all sides to share their feelings. To do this vTaiwan used a platform called pol.is. Taipei taxi drivers, representatives of Uber, members of the government, business leaders, trade unions and taxi users were all asked to log on. People were asked to draft statements beginning with “My feeling is . . .” and everyone else was asked to abstain, agree, or disagree with them.
As they did so, each person’s little avatar bounced around the map, staying close to the people they kept agreeing with, and moving away from others when disagreements emerged. The software created and analysed a matrix comprising what each person thought about every comment. “The aim,” Colin told me, one of the inventors of pol.is, “was to give the agenda-setting power to the people. In voting, the cake is baked. The goal is to engage citizens far earlier, when everyone is arguing over the ingredients.”
Over the first few days, pol.is kept visualising how opinions emerged, clustered, responded, divided and recombined. Eventually two groups emerged. Group One clustered around a statement in support of banning Uber. Group Two clustered around a statement expressing a preference for using Uber.
This, of course, is the opposite of a consensus – it is polarisation. And if we were talking about Twitter or Facebook, we’d see echo chambers, spats, competing online petitions and massively contradictory information flowing to politicians. But pol.is produced something more useful than just feedback: “we found that it became a consensus-generating mechanism”, said Colin. People were asked to continue to draft statements, but the ones that were given visibility were those that garnered support from both sides.
The process itself encouraged people to start posting more nuanced statements, and by the fourth week a consensus statement had emerged: “The government should leverage this opportunity to challenge the taxi industry to improve their management and quality control systems so that drivers and riders would enjoy the same quality service as Uber” (95% of participants agreed).
On 23 May 2016, the Taiwanese government pledged to ratify all the pol.is consensus items: taxis no longer needed to be painted yellow, app-based taxis were free to operate as long as they didn’t undercut existing meters, and so on. vTaiwan had succeeded in putting the people at the heart of decision-making.
Just two months later, Taiwan’s new premier declared that “all substantial national issues should go through a vTaiwan-like process”. It was used to break a six-year deadlock over the sale of alcohol online, and has now been applied to problems as diverse as cyber-bullying, telemedicine, tax and information security. In all, 19 topics have gone through the process, largely relating to online and digital regulation, and 16 have resulted in decisive Government action.
It was hardly the storming of the Winter Palace. No king has lost his head. But this is nonetheless a revolutionary moment. For centuries, democracy has pretty much meant one thing: elected representatives sitting in sovereign Parliaments. But vTaiwan challenged that basic vision of how democracy should work.
Audrey, herself, is a completely new kind of politician. She doesn’t see her job as making decisions at all. Instead, she sees herself as a “channel for collective intelligence” – a convenor, moderator or chairperson within a much wider discussion. “I bring what we do in the open source communities . . . I don’t take commands. I don’t give commands”, she told me. Every meeting that she has is recorded, transcribed and published for anyone to see. I communicated with Audrey – a minister – on an open website, accessible to anyone with internet access.
vTaiwan is the first digital democracy, but the idea is spreading. Sometimes triggered by crisis, sometimes by generalised democratic discontent, groups of people around the world have begun to experiment with new systems. The philosophy of open source, joined with the technology that can make it happen, has begun to slowly shift government.
The message of radically opening up politics and doing democracy differently – at a time when so many feel so distant from it – will only become louder
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It’s happening in South Korea, where every day 25,000 digital complaints flow into the City Hall’s servers in Seoul. It’s happening in Iceland, where a platform called ‘Better Reykjavik’ crowd sources ideas for public spending priorities. ‘Parlement et Citoyens’ in France is a website which brings together representatives and citizens to discuss policy issues and collaboratively draft legislation. In Finland, a new Citizens’ Initiative Act enshrined the right of Finnish citizens to submit proposals for new legislation.
Across all these cases, there have been failures and problems. Some have struggled to get busy citizens interested enough to plunge into the onerous task of policy-making. Others are little more than check-box exercises. And all schemes that rely on the internet are open to the charge that the poorest, most vulnerable people in their society are least likely to use technology to become politically engaged.
However, this is also a moment when people feel democracy, as it exists today, isn’t working. Within the UK, for the last 50 years, there has been a growing gap between political institutions and the people that they represent and serve. Voter turnout in elections continues to decline; mass membership of political parties (albeit with some recent upswings), once the most important bridge between the people and the political elite, continues to fall; and trust in and contact with politicians is at a historic all-time low
The pressure on governments to radically transform how democracy works will, I think, quickly grow. The message of radically opening up politics and doing democracy differently – at a time when so many feel so distant from it – will only become louder. And amid the discontentment and anger with mainstream politics, there are people like Audrey who have an answer. Democracy has been one of the least disrupted things of the digital age so far, but it will be one of the most in the years to come.
Carl Miller’s The Death of the Gods: The New Global Power Grab is out now.
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SubscribeSo that’s exactly the same picture you used a month or so ago to illustrate a piece about how the young all love Boris (as it clearly demonstrates).
The lockdown was, and is, monumentally bad advice essentially pushed on the Government by advisors who are mostly younger than the Boomers (or just at the tail end). They have all been educated in the privilege-oppressor narrative by an education system designed to promote the psychology of dependence, which so afflicts all younger generations.
The establishment hates the idea of an independent populace. The bad advice is pure sabotage.
‘the fact that the lockdown has disproportionately protected the over 55s’
Now read Ian Birrell’s piece about how the over-50s are having their careers destroyed.
The “bill” for this extraordinary war-like effort is not meaningfully a future thing. When the whole economy is involved, debt ceases to be meaningful. It is being paid now, by people giving real things in return for fiat currency generated by bits in a computerised balance sheet. As with other war “debts” (or even the slavery ending “debt”) it should be “paid” in bonds with super long maturities – de facto write off.
I simply regard the bunk that so-called experts like Max Hastings put out as personally offensive. I have not or would not fight tooth and nail to keep what I have rather than share it with my children’s generation and their kids. I do not believe most others in my generation would either so where is the basis for all this nonsense? Hastings has fallen into the same pit of false supposition as Matthew Paris. Let them fight tooth and nail for sole ownership of it.
The boomer/millennial story preceded the covid lockdown right or wrong story and they’ve become a bit muddled up. Both stories are misleading, because they oversimplify. There are complacent baby boomers around, and flaky millennials, and stoical people who lived through WW2 and have been abandoned in care homes. All this is true but the story doesn’t address the appalling income inequalities that exist in Boris Johnson’s England.
Very fine article, and points about ego and self well made. Though occasionally the conflation of an interesting life and a thoughful knowledge of an aspect of nature do work well. But that should be a rare beast!
lovely piece,
Woke Millenials, aka Marxists are an entirely different beast to Conservative Millenials who abhor the Marxists and their Left Liberal allies.
Conservative Millenials are much more grounded and centred in their own sense of power and only require the government to facilitate their ingenuity and ambition to be independently minded socially aware individuals.
The opposite is true for the Marxists and their Left Liberal allies, they seek to forfeit their power to a Marxist ideology in order to control others.
Conservative Millenials will resist these Marxists in exactly the same way as boomers do now and for exactly the same reason, the love of liberty and democracy.
As such, multi-generational Conservatives are not seduced into delusional thinking like Marxists and their Left Liberal allies, they see reality for what it is, including the extraordinary workload that has been inflicted on our government. Unlike the Marxists whose only reality is their delusional mental constructs.
Why is nature writing all about egos?
Because anthropocentrism is the norm.
Consequently, eco-anthropocentrism simultaneously embodies the Misery Me and the Heroic Me with cognitive dissonance cojoining the two. One destroys, the other tries to preserve. These two egos are then projected on to the Left and Right. Thus, the ecological competition between human animals and wild animals is then projected as political competition between the Left and Right.
At the moment, I think the only solution to our human growth crisis is ecocentrism which requires we scientifically identify all the drivers of the human growth crisis, beyond the competition between the Left and Right, and then collectively work towards ecological cooperation between human animals, tamed animals and wild animals.
Unherd, you have deleted nearly all the comments, and I am disappointed in you. They were hardly awful, and the commenters are your friends, for the most part. Those comparing you to The Guardian have an edge now, that they did not before. Please reconsider your policies.
Not a good article. This situation has been caused by advisors/quangos SAGE, PHE, NHS providers/improvers etc but ultimately poor judgement by the DoHSV and cabinet office and government. The model we should have and should be following is Sweden. Our way out needs to be low tax and less regulations. Except for housing where a number of radical changes are needed, stop holiday properties, stop ABNB, stop overseas ownership, stop buy to let.
Boris was initially on the right track. It’s fear mongering populist screamers, screaming “MASKS” screaming “STAY HOME” that have pressured all governments. It is interesting that in Sweden there seem to be no populists. Populism is never a good trend.
Boris was initially on the right track, but he caved to populist aged fear mongerers
GenX, Millennials, and genZ will all pay very dearly for this shit. It’s NOT the wealthy who’ll pay for this. We’ll be paying for this through program austerity, Big Business will remain mostly untouched.