Described as one of the “ten greatest Taiwanese computing personalities,” and the former Digital Minister of Taiwan, Audrey Tang has made it her mission to align technology with democracy, and to counteract the polarization, inequality, loneliness, and fear that digital technology has catalyzed.
Q&A with Community Curated Series director Ted Chiang.
Digital technology threatens to tear free and open societies apart through polarization, inequality, and loneliness. But in the decade since the weeks-long occupation of their parliament, a diverse island of resilience has shown another way is possible.
Plurality, Tang’s open-source self-governed project, co-written by E. Glen Weyl and a global community of dozens of contributors, details how Taiwan achieved inclusive, technology-fueled growth, overcame the pandemic without lockdowns and the infodemic without takedowns, entrusted its people to tackle shared challenges like environmental protection while capitalizing on a culture of innovation to “hack the government.”
Digital Minister Audrey Tang and her collaborators – architects of Taiwan’s internationally acclaimed digital democracy – achieved inclusive, technology-fueled growth that harnesses digital tools to strengthen both social unity and diversity. From intimate digitally empowered telepathy to global trade running on social networks rather than money, Plurality offers tools to radically enrich relationships while making sure we leave no one behind. The ideas promise to transform every sector from health care to media, as illustrated by the way it has been written: as a chorus of open, self-governing collaboration of voices from around the globe.
Audrey Tang is a software programmer known for revitalizing the computer languages Perl and Haskell and for building the online spreadsheet system EtherCalc in collaboration with Dan Bricklin. Audrey Tang served as Taiwan’s first Minister of Digital Affairs—making her the first non-binary official in the top executive cabinet—where she was tasked with helping government agencies communicate policy goals and managing information published by the government, both via digital means.
Audrey Tang served on Taiwan’s National Development Council’s Open Data committee and K-12 curriculum committee, and she led the country’s first e-Rulemaking project. She has also worked as a consultant with Apple on computational linguistics, with Oxford University Press on crowd lexicography and with Socialtext on social interaction design. She actively contributes to g0v (“gov zero”), a vibrant community that focuses on creating tools for the civil society with the call to “fork the government.”
Ted Chiang, this year’s Community Curated Series director, has won four Hugo, four Nebula, and six Locus Awards, and his fiction has been reprinted in Best American Short Stories. His first collection Stories of Your Life and Others has been translated into twenty-one languages, and the title story was the basis for the Oscar-nominated film Arrival. His second collection Exhalation was chosen by The New York Times as one of the 10 Best Books of 2019.
