Over two hundred thousand people rally on March 30, 2014 in Taipei against the cross-strait service trade agreement with China. Credit: Lam Yik Fei / Getty images
Audrey Tang had all the hallmarks of a child prodigy. By the first grade she was reading classical literature in several languages and solving simultaneous equations. Aged eight, without a computer at home, she’d draw a keyboard on a piece of paper and, pressing the paper buttons, imagine what the computer would have produced.
By 12, Audrey had left school in order to learn more about technology, and by 15, she had founded her first company, a start-up that built a search engine for Mandarin-language song lyrics. She moved to Silicon Valley and worked as a consultant for Apple, reportedly earning one bitcoin, or by today’s prices about £5,000, an hour.
Then in her early thirties, she announced her ‘retirement’ and moved back to her native Taiwan. It was 2012, the world economy was gripped by recession, and the Taiwanese government announced a massive stimulus package aimed at reinvigorating the economy: the Economic Power-up Plan.
To promote the Economic Power-up Plan, the government produced an advert. “What exactly is the Economic Power-up Plan?” the advert asks. “We would very much like to explain it to you in simple words,” a voice continues, “but it is impossible due to the complexity . . . We might as well run until our legs break instead of just simply talking.”
“It was insulting,” said Audrey, when interviewed about it later. For most of her life, she had been involved in a culture that had formed on the internet called the Open Source Movement. It valued consensus, and especially consensus produced by having as many people as possible involved in the process. Applied to democracy, it meant that top-down decisions should not just be announced by the government; ideas should be cultivated and encouraged. The opposite, in fact, to the Economic Power-up plan.
The advert appeared online, but it was so unpopular that Taiwanese YouTubers began to flag it as fraudulent. So many, indeed, that YouTube removed the video, and suspended the government’s account.
In the wake of the advert, a group was formed, including Audrey, with a call to “fork the government”. It was a call for reform in the language of software developers: for government to take a different path, forking off from the current one. They called themselves Gov Zero – or just G0v – and with increasing volume and urgency demanded open politics as well as open source. The values of the Open Source Movement were morphing in to demands for mainstream political reform.
It wasn’t, however, for another two years until the call for civic engagement sparked serious reform. The trigger was the Cross-Strait Service Trade Agreement (CSSTA). Tabled in the Taiwanese parliament in 2014, it aimed to increase trade between China and Taiwan, but there had been simmering concerns about the bill among the public. Activists, academics and others feared it was laying the groundwork for the eventual unification of the two countries. In response the government promised that it would open the bill up to careful scrutiny through public hearings, line-by-line review and citizen assemblies.
But before that review had even begun, the ruling Kuomintang Party forced the agreement onto the floor of the parliament for a final vote. It was a unilateral, politically aggressive move and by the next evening thousands of protestors had gathered around the parliament. A few hundred of them, many students, climbed over the fence, broke a window, and burst onto the floor of the legislative chamber itself.
Rather than just protest, however, G0v and others began to guide participants towards making a new law. Online, outside on the streets, as well as on the floor of the parliament itself, they began to demonstrate another way that the CSSTA decision could have been made: by scalable listening, empathy-building, and consensus-making. The values, indeed, of the Open Source Movement.
Predictably, in the face of ongoing protest, the Government eventually capitulated, but by now the crisis had spread beyond the CSSTA. It, like the Economic Power-up Plan a few years before, was a sign of a deeper malaise: a democratically elected government uninterested in including its electorate in the decisions it was making. In the municipal elections that followed, the Kuomintang Party suffered heavy defeats and city-level elections brought many occupiers into local government. The premier, Jiang Yi-huah – the old foe of the occupiers – had resigned by the end of the year.
Then something extraordinary happened. Jaclyn Tsai, a minister in the new government, came to a G0v hackathon. “We need a platform to allow the entire society to engage in rational discussion”, she told them. The government never wanted to see another ‘Sunflower Revolution’ again. They didn’t want citizens to feel so shut out of parliament that they felt they needed to break in – and so they turned to the civic hackers for help.
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.
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.
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.
Carl is the co-founder and Research Director of the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media at Demos and author of The Death of the Gods: The New Global Power Grab, out on 23rd August in hardback from William Heinemann. You can read more of Carl’s work at www.carlmiller.co.
carljackmiller 
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Subscribe“Leading politicians from all parties seem to be terrified of them…”
They are, and I’d really like to know why. Every single poll shows that the majority of the public – which means most voters – are rationalists who understand that men can’t be women (or vice versa). So why not align with the majority on this issue?
Why are all leading politicians terrified of those few people whose ideas only resonate with an electoral minority?
I agree, but can a Prime Minister be “cancelled”?* It’s a huge shame that he doesn’t have the cojones to find out.
*other than by electoral means.
We’ve created this vast swamp of NGOs and activist orgs that have an outsized influence on politicians. I can only speculate that elected leaders simply don’t interact enough with everyday people – that even their social circles are dominated by people with divergent opinions.
“Why are all leading politicians terrified of those few people whose ideas only resonate with an electoral minority?”
It’s very simple. Leading politicians are ruled not by their voters, but by powerful financial interests. Wealthy NGOs and corporations have a vested interest in backing the trans lobby, making it disproportionately powerful compared to its constituent base. Despite being a supposedly oppressed minority trans rights activists are backed by some of the wealthiest and powerful organisations on Earth, such as Soros’ Open Society Foundation, the Bill Gates Foundation, the Tides Foundation, Arcus Foundation etc. etc. Rishi Sunak fears them over you.
See https://archive.ph/9vaRd – the now deleted from Medium article ‘Inauthentic Selves: The modern LGBTQ+ Movement Is Run By Philanthropic Astroturf And Based On Junk Science’ from 2018 which gives a great overview of how fake all of this nonsense is.
Thanks for the link! Another aspect of this madness is that it provides an opportunity for intra-elite vetting and selection of “useful idiots” and a way for elites to compete and weed out people who may not be “loyal” to the cause of the .1%.
Conversion is changing one set of beliefs for another. The vast majority of people don’t care what others believe as long as the beliefs do not negatively impact on their lives. People generally tend to be live and let live. They have busy lives and don’t have time to stay up to date on current trends. It is the trans activists who have been infiltrating the government, the civil service, schools, not for profits, businesses, etc. to spread their doctrine and are using the power of the law to force their beliefs on the majority and silence objections by having all objections classified as hate speech. Using the power of the law to attempt to force beliefs upon the people should be illegal.
Yes, quite. The ‘infiltration’ has been cleverly orchestrated. Everyone has paid Stonewall to ‘train’ them (with our money, tbh) and to give them brownie points for being good, inclusive organisations. One way to comply was to bring in EDI experts (trans advocates – has anyone heard them advocating loudly for disabled employees?) Jobs for the boys – all those ‘gender’ graduates, with one world view, brought in at management level to devastate women’s rights in industry and government. There aren’t that many of them, but they punch above their weight, because they’re not brought in as office juniors.
Quite an effective tactic, it turns out, and massively difficult to undo.
Transgenderism is an occult movement with billions of dollars behind it. It’s a Trojan horse for those with nefarious intentions toward children and provides a convenient path through which the state can circumnavigate parental protections in order to indoctrinate children.
Politicians are not scared of trans activists but those financially backing them.
Do the Tories ever actually want to win again? Being 5% less radical than the radical left seems like a strategy for party annihilation. At what point do the actual conservatives and moderates in the party jump ship?
Who would they vote for? Increasingly moderate and conservative views are being literally banned. Rishi Sunak doesn’t care about women, doesn’t care about children, doesn’t care about the Conservative Party, and doesn’t care about the next election, because he knows he will lose anyway. He’s just focussed on his own employability after that happens.
Rishi Sunak just fancied being prime minister of a country. He had no loyalty to the U.K. as demonstrated by the US green card scandal. The position will have profited him greatly and enhanced his global profile.
In fact, that probably explains why Rishi Sunak has crumbled. He cares most about his position amongst the global elites, especially if he does not expect to win the next election, and they are mostly behind the the indoctrination of the masses with woke ideology.
How about Farage?
I don’t think they want to be elected and I don’t blame them. The next administration will only be issuing WEF directives to usher in Agenda 2030. This is why we are about to have a member of the Trilateral Commission installed. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see several members of the next parliament assassinated as people finally wake up to what’s been done to them.
I think the current Tory ‘elite’ are not Conservatives and have no interest whatsoever in those who elected them.
I do wonder if some of the problem here is the tortuous language used by the radical trans lot.
Is conversion therapy what the GIDS at the Tavistock were doing or is conversion therapy talking to a worried teen about their feelings?
If the NHS gives clinical advice on child development, then why are these politicians contradicting medical experts?
They are all, without exception, sinister ideologues pursuing the same neoliberal transhuman creed.
Politics in the UK are getting increasingly surreal. For Mr. Sunak ‘it looks as though the Government intends to go ahead with a complete ban on “conversion therapy”. Presumably this is election jitters, not wanting to disturb the trans lobby wasps’ nest.
Meanwhile, here in Scotland, Mr Youseless plans to SCRAP the current conversion therapy ban, not because Mr Youseless thinks this is a good thing, but in order to save the SNP’s skin at the next election.
So both Mr Sunak and Mr Youseless are doing synchronised volte-faces, but in the opposite direction, both hoping to avoid political oblivion.
It’s crazy. The Tories might even win against the odds if they went full berserker against gender bullish*t – and in fact the whole DEI. They are not conservatives basically. Woke-LITE.
Have you considered running for leadership of the Tory party? I’m pretty sure “full beserker” is exactly what they are going for now!
Bonne chance, cherie!
People can never change sexes. But it seems politicians will always change positions, if it’s perceived to serve their interests.
It’s maddening that — at a time when popular sentiment (even in the United States!) seems to slowly be awakening to the delusion of gender ideology — spineless politicians still kow-tow to transactivism rather than standing for the real and pressing needs of women.
Keir Starmer has been having another of his moments about gender self-identification. But who cares what this creature thinks? It is a war crime to aid or abet a war crime, so that without ever having been a Minister, or even an MP for the governing party, Starmer is already a war criminal, thereby matching his foreign policies to his domestic policies. He is the Kid Starver of Gaza and Gospel Oak, and his White Phosphorus Party would privatise the hospitals at home having already bombed them abroad.
More broadly, with its concept of the self-made man or the self-made woman, Thatcherism has inevitably ended up as gender self-identification, which was unknown in 2010, and which has therefore arisen entirely under a Conservative Government. Margaret Thatcher was last depicted on British television, for the first time in quite a while, in December’s Prince Andrew: The Musical, the title of which spoke for itself, and in which she was played by one Baga Chipz, a drag queen. Well, of course. A figure comparable to Thatcher, emerging in the Britain of the 2020s, would be assumed to be a transwoman, just as Thatcher herself emerged in the Britain of everything from Danny La Rue and d**k Emery to David Bowie and The Rocky Horror Show.
Hence Thatcher’s destruction of the stockades of male employment, which were the economic basis of paternal authority in the family and in the wider community, an authority that cannot be restored before the restoration of that basis. Thatcher created the modern Labour Party, the party of middle-class women who used the power of the State to control everyone else, but especially working-class men. Truly, as she herself said, her greatest achievement was New Labour. Leo Abse, who had had the measure of the milk-snatcher, also had the measure of Tony Blair’s androgyny.
And if this is a culture war, then where is the culture on our side? At 46, I had always assumed that we would win this one in my lifetime. But I am less and less certain. The other side enjoys the full force of the State and of a cultural sector that the State very largely funds. That double force was what turned the England of 1530, an extravagantly Catholic country of many centuries’ standing, into the England of 1560, a country that would define itself as fundamentally anti-Catholic for the next 400 years. Again I say that that State is the Tory State, there having been no other for as long as the notion of gender self-identification has existed. There is no suggestion of a Government Bill or amendment to give statutory effect to the rhetoric of Kemi Badenoch or Suella Braverman, which is pointedly never quite echoed by Rishi Sunak, whose choice of words to the Conservative Party Conference was very careful indeed.
Does everyone get put into moderation, or is it just me? I pay for this. Do you?
I do. Every time. Sometimes it takes hours for my comments to appear. I have emailed numerous times and asked for an explanation but have never received one.
This comment took about ten minutes to appear.
My latest has now been waiting an hour.
You must be considered more threatening/ dangerous than I am.
It no longer even appears as “awaiting for approval”. Hey, ho. See here.
Happens way too often.
“Awaiting for approval.” Pidgin English.
We no longer have proper political representation we have a uni party interested only in promoting the globalist agenda. US is exactly the same.
“People pride themselves on “speaking truth to power” – leaders, big shots. In a democracy, this is easy to do. Usually, you get nothing but applause for it. What is hard is speaking truth to “the people” – for in a democracy, that’s where the power lies.”
Jay Nordlinger in the current issue of National Review, “Cooper’s Union”
“The constant appeals to public opinion in a democracy… induce private hypocrisy, causing men to conceal their own opinions when opposed to those of the mass… A want of national manliness is a vice to be guarded against, for the man who would dare to resist a monarch shrinks from opposing an entire community.”
James Fenimore Cooper in “The American Democrat” c. 1835