Taiwan: Earthquakes, Resilience and People Power
A life-changing trip and conversation with Audrey Tang
“Earthquakes don’t kill people, buildings do.”
Why we need to be thinking about strengthening and diversifying our societal roots and how we can all learn a few lessons from Taiwan.
An earthquake
On the 2nd April I was woken up by my room violently trembling and the building swaying from side to side. It lasted a full-on minute, had a magnitude of 7.4, and it was bloody terrifying. Having spent the vast majority of my life in London, I was not used to earthquakes. Yet the people of Taiwan experience them regularly (though I am assured very rarely as intensely as this).
Taiwan is an island with a fascinating history and an equally fascinating present. Relentlessly colonised since the 1600s, Taiwan is currently seen by many as the pressure point that could cause World War Three.
Which is why it’s all the more important that as many of us as possible understand the incredible things that Taiwan has achieved in the name of democracy and how we can use their example to make the changes we so desperately need to make in the West.
And we’ll come back to earthquakes later.
Why Taiwan?
Why was I in Taiwan in the first place?
As you may or may not know, I recently quit my job so that I could spend more time exploring what a more active, engaged and ‘2024’ response to the polycrisis might be. Part of the pre-actually-quitting-exploration involved having coffee with Jon Alexander. We talked about citizenship, technology, public health, democracy and our decaying institutions and, of course most importantly of all, what I should do with my life. At one point, Jon said that if I was going to have some time on my hands, I should visit Taiwan and learn a bit more about the cool things that have been happening there in the last decade or so.
Now, in some areas of my life I’m prone to being indecisive - ask me which mini magnum I want and you’ll be waiting until the end of the holiday for an answer, by which time they’ll all have been eaten and I’ll be sad and ice-creamless. But for once, I decided not to think too much and I acted on Jon’s recommendation, my gut-instinct and the fact that my half-Taiwanese friend said that she’d come with me and help me to find and eat the best local food. I booked a month-long trip, leaving less than 48 hours after my final day at work.
So what are these ‘cool things’ that have been happening in Taiwan and why haven’t more of us heard about them? Before I went, I knew shamefully little about the country and its history and why its very existence is contentious. Writing a history of Taiwan here would be a complex undertaking and one I wouldn’t do justice to, so here are some horrendously oversimplified statements that are nonetheless important for you to know to engage with the rest of this piece and, perhaps more importantly, with geopolitics in general:
Taiwan has been colonised by various occupiers since the 17th century, first the Dutch and the Spanish, then the Chinese and then the Japanese (who remained there until they surrendered in 1945).
After the end of World War Two, and as a result of losing the Chinese Civil War, a person called Chiang Kai-shek, leader of a party called the Kuomintang (or KMT), fled mainland China and established ‘The Republic of China’ in Taiwan. Taiwan is still officially called the Republic of China (ROC) to this day.
What followed was a period of brutal authoritarian rule, which didn’t end until the mid 1980s when the first opposition party, the Democratic Progressive Party (or DPP) was formed (and legalised in 1991).
Throughout this period, i.e. the latter half of the twentieth century, China has claimed that Taiwan is part of China and has not recognised it as its own independent country. Other countries pursuing diplomatic relations with China have followed suit.
This means that Taiwan’s democracy is comparatively very new and very hard-won.
Which is part of the reason that in 2014, students occupied the parliament building in protest at undemocratic methods being used by the government, in what has become known as ‘The Sunflower Student Movement’.
Enter Audrey Tang
A key figure in this movement was Audrey Tang, who entered the fray having set aside her job in a California-based software company with the legendary line: “Democracy needs me”. It’s a level of cool I can only aspire to be.
Audrey joined the students and started broadcasting what was happening to spread the message further. She and the movement had such an impact that she was later asked to join the government as cabinet-level Digital Minister in 2016 before leading Taiwan’s very first Ministry of Digital Affairs in 2022.
Audrey Tang is a name that you all need to know, remember and share as widely as you can. Because Audrey is a person who has not only shown that we can think about democracy differently but that we can actually do democracy differently.
A new kind of democracy
For too much of my life I have taken democracy for granted. It is perhaps unsurprising that as a privileged UK-born millennial, living in London for the better part of 30 years, I had a fairly deep-rooted sense that our right to vote freely in elections was longstanding and would continue throughout my lifetime. And also that voting once every few years for a party that may not represent everything you think, or even most of what you think, or really any of what you think at all, constituted a ‘democracy’ because that party was broadly better than the other one.
Now, that latter part I began to question a long time ago (a story for another time) but the idea of my right to vote being safe and sufficient for the time being, and likely to continue into the future, was something that I believed for far longer than I probably should have.
As we emerge from what has, to me, felt like a fairly dispiriting election in the UK and as we all have to sit by and watch two geriatric white men vie for control over one of the most powerful countries in the world, we have to realise that our democracies are no longer fit for purpose. In fact, they’re in dire need of an upgrade.
Most of us live under what is called a ‘representative democracy’, i.e. we elect representatives and give them the power to make decisions for us. What I’m going to talk about here is the idea of ‘deliberative democracy’, which is also something that is going to become a major theme of my writing and thinking. I’ve come to believe that it’s a fundamental, if not the underlying, pillar of how we are going to make change and navigate the polycrisis.
So what is it? In a nutshell, deliberative democracy does what it says on the tin: it puts deliberation and discussion at the heart of decision making, rather than simply voting on decisions that have largely already been made or will be made by those elected representatives. It brings citizens right into the heart of shaping the future and gives people a voice and a chance to genuinely and thoughtfully engage in a way that is just impossible in our current system. It treats people like adults, and assumes that we have valuable contributions to make, rather than assuming that all we have the intellectual capacity to engage with is endless social media campaigns taking jabs at the opposition.
And this isn’t some pipedream or some utopia, it’s happening all over the world already. In practice as it currently works, deliberative democracy often looks like gathering a smaller representative group (i.e. not the whole electorate on voting day) in what is often called a ‘Citizens’ Assembly’ and deliberating extensively on a specific issue to reach some kind of majority consensus that can then be taken forward into policy making.
Some well-known examples of where this has been done effectively include the Irish Citizens’ Assembly and the Paris Citizens’ Assembly. One of the most famous decisions to come out of the former was a repeal of the eighth amendment, i.e. a legalisation of abortion, which just goes to show the potential power of these things. And the Paris Assembly was recently in the news for its successful deliberation and consensus building on the topic of assisted dying. What’s so good about them is that you can gather together people who might think that they have completely opposing views and who might normally just insult each other on social media, or, perhaps worse, never even engage with each other at all, and help them to find some common ground.
There is a lot more to say on this topic and I’m still fairly early in my learning journey about the whole thing but suffice to say, there is a huge amount of potential here for a genuinely new way of structuring and conducting our collective decision making and it’s very exciting and you should all be very excited.
This is also why I believe that it is so important that more of us understand what has been going on in Taiwan and how they have managed to take concrete steps towards putting deliberative democracy at the heart of their political system.
Plurality: Technology and Democracy
“When we see the Internet of Things, let’s make it an Internet of beings.
When we see virtual reality, let’s make it a shared reality.
When we see machine learning, let’s make it collaborative learning.
When we see user experience, let’s make it about human experience.
Whenever we hear that a singularity is near, let us always remember that plurality is here."
This is Audrey Tang’s job description, which she wrote herself. Because she’s cool (did I say that already?). In all seriousness though, I think the fact that a civic hacker was invited into government and allowed to write a job description like this, perfectly encapsulates how and why Taiwan has been able to become an example of doing things differently.
There are two initiatives that are important for you to know about and that were a huge part of the draw for my visit.
The first is g0v (pronounced gov-zero), which is essentially a model/initiative that gets citizens to create innovations that are alternatives to a public service that can then be adopted by the government. g0v began in 2012, when a group of civic hackers decided to create a website visualising how the government’s budget was being spent as part of Yahoo’s Open Hack Day. They won the prize money and purchased the domain g0v.tw, which has since enabled the community to expand and to build all sorts of useful things very quickly, such as a platform tracking the real time availability of masks during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The second is vTaiwan, which actually came out of g0v. vTaiwan is a platform that enables deliberative democracy to happen digitally. It does this by facilitating a several stage process, including an initial ‘objective’ stage for crowdsourcing facts and evidence, and a ‘reflective’ stage using mass deliberation tool Pol.is, which encourages the formation of ‘rough consensus’. Finally, key stakeholders are invited to a live-streamed, face-to-face meeting to draw up specific recommendations.
vTaiwan has been used a number of times but most famously it was used to reach a decision about what to do about regulating Uber in Taiwan, bringing together representatives from government, drivers, passengers, Uber and other taxi companies and eventually reaching a recommendation that the majority agreed with.
As you may be able to tell from her job description, Audrey has been instrumental in both of these initiatives. Audrey manages to blend a capacity to think holistically about the future of society and democracy with the ability to design practical and concrete steps to get there, which is a pretty rare combination and one that I am in great admiration of.
In Conversation
Which is why I still can’t quite believe that I was lucky enough to spend a fairly significant chunk of time with Audrey while I was in Taiwan. Not many people get to spend hours with one of the world’s foremost thinkers on democracy and technology, especially when all they’ve done so far in that space is start a Substack that they post on once every four months saying that they’ll start posting more regularly soon, pinky promise. That’s me, not Audrey, just in case you were confused.
Part of the reason that I’ve taken so long to write this up is that it feels like such a precious and special thing to have done that I’ve had no idea how to do justice to the conversation or the experience.
But I am fortunate enough to be helping to coordinate Audrey’s visit to London next week as part of our campaign to get people excited and engaged with democracy again, so it feels like now or never to get this piece out into the world. So here goes, my experience of an evening with Audrey Tang:
I arrive in the middle of a torrential thunderstorm, common in Taiwan, but atmospheric nonetheless. I am nervous and intimidated and compulsively looking through my extensive prep notes to make sure that I don’t miss anything. I needn’t be or do any of these things in the end.
We discuss the recent earthquake and the response and how Taiwan had learned from the disaster of the 1999 earthquake to make sure that they would never suffer that badly again.
We talk about the importance of the state subsidising social enterprise and of incentivising people to use their skills and knowledge for the good of their fellow citizens rather than purely for the profit of private enterprises.
We talk about how we are living in the carcass of neoliberalism.
We think about how to establish trust anchors; and the differences between a new, energetic yet threatened democracy like Taiwan and what can often feel like an old, decaying, listless democracy in the US and UK. We talk about how to re-energise the people in those places.
We talk about the role of technology and activism in reshaping our societies, the tensions that often exist between the two and how I can use my new venture to play marriage counsellor to those communities: “you need to work on this relationship, for the kids…quite literally!” We laugh.
We move from Hitchikers’ Guide to the Galaxy to procurement law and the purported role of ISO accreditations as a shortcut to trust. I try Audrey’s new Vision Pro headset and experience extended reality for the first time, scrolling through a virtual gallery and finding an artist specialising in surrealist female empowerment.
We talk about how this kind of technology will bring people together across oceans, both metaphorical and physical and we think about the importance of building bridges across what can seem like insurmountable divides. That there is no bridge too small.
We connect on a human level, sharing food and ideas, sharing space and stories.
Rooting down not scaling up
From all of this there is one thread of our conversation that stays with me not only as I sit at my desk later, frantically writing up notes and trying to hold on to the complexity, richness and breadth of our conversation. It stays with me as I sit listening to the cacophony of birds in the forest park in Taipei, a haven of ecology in the heart of one of the most important technological cities in the world. It stays with me as I get on the plane home and it stays with me as I embark on this new chapter of my life and put writing it down off and off because I can’t quite find the words.
But the thought is this:
Earthquakes are coming for us, both literal and metaphorical. Seismic shifts in the way that we live our lives that are going to send tremors through everything that we think we know. And right now, our systems are brittle and fragile and they’re going to crack and fall over. To go back to the quote at the top of this article, “earthquakes don’t kill people, buildings do.”
Our current globalised systems mean that we are surrounded by buildings that are outdated, patched together and fragile. And currently our plan to get us out of this predicament and to survive these oncoming earthquakes is to design and build newer, shinier buildings. If we can just spec the perfect earthquake-proof blueprint then we can replicate it everywhere and we can all climb in and be safe. Or so the architects say. The architects with the money and the power and the mechanisms to control the story.
But we know that our real resilience will not come from skyscrapers and from building up and up and away from this earth. It will come from rooting deep into the ground, from recognising that our power comes from our collective intelligence, both human and more than human.
Start with a shoot, it doesn’t need to be perfectly formed or strong or deep just yet. That shoot can form another, and that one another, and some will get stronger over time and some won’t and we won’t know what direction they’re going to go in and they’ll meet each other and cross over each other and some will keep on going and going and some will stay small and some will sprout saplings and others will form great oaks.
The resilience will come from creating the conditions that allow every single one of us to contribute to this network and to root that network in the earth. This is what I think of when I think of plurality. This is where democracy, in a much truer sense of the word, can flourish.
So, what’s the one thing you can do today?
The most important thing you can do is go and learn more about Audrey and her work and tell other people about her too. Because her interests and thinking are so wide-ranging, every single one of you will be able to find something that resonates deeply with you.
The second thing you can do, If what you’re most interested in is the tech side of things, is read Audrey’s new book Plurality, co-authored with E. Glen Weyl and a community of contributors. Plurality gives us hope for how we can use technology to augment and support human flourishing and democratic systems, rather than continuing down the destructive path that we’re currently on.
The third thing you can do if:
You’re interested in Plurality
You’re in London
You’re free next Wednesday (17th July)
Is to come to the launch of the Plurality London Chapter at Newspeak House.