Covid: An Alternative Reality From Another Tea-Drinking Island Nation

Part 7. Audrey

Architect of Taiwan’s pandemic strategy is the extraordinary Audrey Tang. In 1996, aged 15, Tang convinced her teachers that she’d be better off learning from the internet, quit school and started teaching herself online. A year later Tang launched her first start-up. Many more followed, in diverse fields, but they all featured open-source software and sought to empower ordinary people. In 2016, aged 35, Tang became Taiwan’s youngest cabinet minister, when she was named Digital Minister.

It may be true that intelligence isn’t a useful or meaningful measure of ability in leading or governing. Some experience of politics is probably more useful than not, unless you’re independent-minded or a quick learner. Still, I can’t help thinking that our own government would be improved by the addition of maybe one or two cabinet members with an exceptional intellect and/or a hinterland that stretched beyond hedge funds. If nothing else, it would provide a helpful diversity of perspective.

For example, like many democracies, Taiwan put their №2 in charge of pandemic response. In the US, this was Mike Pence, in the UK, Michael Gove (though Johnson routinely rugby-tackled him aside if there was some limelight to perform in). So, radio talk-show host, newspaper columnist, newspaper columnist.

Taiwan’s pandemic panjandrum was Vice-President Chen Chien-jen, who by a stroke of luck had entered politics after a distinguished career as a world-leading epidemiologist. And if you reckon all that power must have corrupted him, Professor Chen recently stood down after one term because he considered his work done, and wanted to return to research. But not before waiving his right to his Vice-Presidential pension.

Of course, smart people can be too clever by half, but some of things that emerge from the mouths of our cabinet ministers do make me seriously question whether they really are driven by powerful sense of ideology. A more obvious explanation would be a lack of the mental capacity to handle basic scientific concepts, or arithmetic. Half as clever as Tang wouldn’t actually be too bad (an IQ of 100 is average and Tang’s is reckoned to be 180), but when they count new nurses or hospitals, or appear to be negotiating with a virus, I do wonder if all of our current ministers would crack double figures.

I don’t think our cabinet has a ‘Digital Minister without portfolio’, but if it did I suspect it would be a very minor role, involving a very narrow remit of broadband rollout, or incubating the next Google or something. In Taiwan’s cabinet, however, Tang collaborates across a broad range of government departments, with the basic mandate of bridging the gap between Taiwan’s technically savvy young and its governing old, and using the internet to innovate new forms of democracy. It sounds almost naïve, as innocent as the hopeful early days of the internet, as if the rise of social media and the Dark Side of the Web never happened.

Yet, in this official role, Tang has pioneered an astonishing array of progressive democratic experiments. There’s g0v.tw, an open source social media platform that makes government websites so much easier to access and interact with, that more than 6 million citizens, especially young ones, now use it every month. This ‘shadow government website’ is much more than a one-way, top-down information conduit, it’s packed with opportunities for feedback, interaction, commentary, suggestions and proposing concrete improvements. It’s a back-of-the-envelope guesstimate and not directly comparable, but it’s just struck me that as a percentage of the voting population, the number of Taiwan’s citizens who choose to interact with their government every month to improve democracy in granular detail, is almost exactly the same proportion of British voters who tick a box with a stubby pencil in a local election polling station every couple of years, i.e. around 1 in 3. If Westminster is the Mother of All Parliaments, always banging on about Magna Carta in 1215, what does that make Taiwan, which emerged from martial law in 1987? Which is more democratic?

Another Tang innovation is vTaiwan, a kind of official Facebook for digital petitions. Anyone can start an online petition, and, if it amasses more than 5,000 signatures the Premier and relevant minister are obliged to formally consider it. vTaiwan has also proved hugely popular. Real policy changes implemented include everything from access to income tax software for non-Windows computers, to changes to cancer treatment regulations. Some of Taiwan’s elected Parliamentarians complain vTaiwan is sidelining them, with ordinary citizens now having a better chance to change laws than they do (and the problem is…?).

Tang’s current democratic wheezes include developing sharing economy software that makes it easier for citizens with a glut of resources of some kind, to freely exchange goods or services with each other, bypassing conventional middlemen like traders, government, and even the money economy. From what I can work out, its a kind of online mashup of Swap Shop, Amazon, Facebook, Uber and AirBnB, except no one owns your data, and our Silicon Valley Overlords, and government, are cut out of the loop.

If you, like Private Eye and most of its readers, find yourself frustrated by the opacity and knee-jerk secrecy that shrouds any attempt to shed light on how the government spends our tax money, and how they decide who gets it, you might like the sound of Tang’s philosophy of ‘Radical Transparency’. All of Tang’s meetings are recorded, transcribed and uploaded on a public website Should that not clear up any of your questions or concerns, you can just email Tang, and they’ll publicly respond.

If you’re curious about what happens when all this airy-fairy idealism meets the real world, just take a look. You can literally view it from anywhere on the planet. Everyone in Taiwan knows that every Wednesday from 10am to 10am, anyone can go to Tang’s funky office in Taipei and have a chat about a law or regulation they’d like to introduce, tweak, or abolish. Tang’s only condition is that they consent to having the meeting filmed and uploaded. That’s Radical Transparency in action — no more smoke-filled rooms or brown envelopes. And if you can’t make it to the capital, it won’t be long before Tang comes to you, because every Tuesday she takes one of Taiwan’s high-speed trains to visit somewhere on the island, the remoter and more underrepresented the better, to see things for herself and listen to local opinions, ideas and grievances.

Tang has even come up with a jaw-droppingly simple solution to the torrent of abuse, meted out with impunity be armies of online trolls, about which we seem to be incapable of doing anything more than wring our hands. On Tang’s interactive sites, there’s a broad menu of options from which to select one that best expresses your area of disagreement, but there’s no Reply button. That’s it. It turns out that when you have to attack the idea, and not the person, internet trolls just lose interest. Or if you’re still wringing your hands about how polarized everything is nowadays, but we’re powerless to do anything about it, check out Tang’s Pol.is AI-driven conversation moderator, an algorithm used to aggregate public opinion. By focusing on areas of agreement before hiving off points of difference, participants realize they agree on most things. Once you realise that, the few things you disagree on suddenly don’t seem to be such a big deal in the great scheme of things after all. Take that, Twitter.

All in all, Tang is re-drawing a vision of the internet that recalls the excitement of its early democratic promise, rather than the oppression of its current authoritarian darkness. It’s only technology, after all. We’re the ones who decide how to use it.

All of this puts a bit of downer on Britain’s much-trumpeted, but little-heeded, first trial of a Citizens Assembly on Climate Change. Have you heard about it? You may well have missed it, as the report was published in September, just about the time that the consequences of Dishy Rishi’s Eat Out To Peg Out scheme, and all those summer holidays the travel industry was so relieved to have finally flogged, were beginning to dawn on us. So, let me fill you in.

By all accounts, it was a life-changing experience for the Assembly’s 108 participants. They were carefully selected to fully represent Britain’s diversity, covering all ages, genders, ethnicities, regions, political affiliations and degrees of climate scepticism or acceptance. Over six weekends in 2020, they all heard lectures from 47 expert speakers from academia, industry and policy-making, and got to question them, back and forth, in as much detail as they wanted. Then, they had to come up with a slate of policies that would get Britain to zero carbon by 2050. They voted on their own proposals by secret ballot, and their final report was so bursting with radical policy proposals, the organizers were every bit as surprised as the participants.

The media lapped up inspiring stories of former climate sceptic participants who now wanted to ditch their day jobs and start planting trees, set up car clubs and grow organic veg for their local communities. Government representatives warmly congratulated these ordinary citizens on their collective wisdom, thanked them for their sacrifice for the common good, and generally declared themselves humbled and inspired by this revolution in participatory democracy.

After posing for the money-shot grip-and-grin with Sir David, they tossed down the dregs of the champers, and bunged the report in the bin on their way to the club. A recycling bin, mind you, even if the report would probably end in landfill because there aren’t enough reclamation plants. Over more champers at the club, the boys reckoned the Attenborough photo-op alone was worth every penny of the half million quid the Assembly had cost. It was just as well they’d made sure the report was non-binding, or they’d all be eating raw lentils and mung beans instead of tucking into their game stew and sirloin steaks. How they guffawed.

**

So, here we are at last. I started this series of articles walking along the real Ring Road in Salisbury, and have ended up in an imaginary private gentlemen’s club in Mayfair.

Along the way, via our separated-at-birth tea-drinking island nation twins, we’ve seen two very different visions of how we can govern ourselves. These alternatives may not have been so apparent back in 2016, when David Cameron announced a referendum, and Audrey Tang was appointed to Taiwan’s cabinet. But for me, and I hope now for you, the pandemic has now turned a bloody great spotlight on them.

Do you want to shiver outside a cave, impotently watching a scrum of portly Union Jack-suited Old Etonians inside tell each other off-colour jokes and quaff champagne, mocking a couple of grammar school clever clogs as they crouch at their feet, taking desultory turns to try to ignite a pile of coal with a flint and steel?

Or would you rather warm your hands at the roaring fire in the eco-house next door, laughing in delight with Audrey and their staff of fifteen prodigies, when with a flick on their solar-powered iPad, they reveal the fire to be a 3-D hologram image that they’d coded for a bit of fun while you were in the compost toilet.

So who will it be; Audrey Tang, or Dominic Cummings?

There’s nothing wrong with patriotism if it reflects values you can be proud of, nor of optimism if it’s based on reality. Underpromising and over-delivering is OK. Speaking to citizens like adults can work. The antidote to the common enemy may be the common good. Being an island is a massive advantage in a pandemic, as Taiwan, New Zealand, Australia and Japan can testify, but only if you control your borders. I won’t even start on that irony.

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