Lately, it seems like every animated movie ever made is getting a live-action remake. In fact, over the last 10 years, remakes account for 15% of Disney's new releases, and another 24% has been sequels. In spite of an incredible pool of talent, and what might as well be all the money in the world, the entertainment industry seems to be struggling to come up with original ideas. Not to be left behind, a little later this month, Netflix is releasing the much-anticipated live-action remake of Shinichiro Watanabe's beloved animated series Cowboy Bebop. I can't comment on the quality of the new version, although I would be lying if I didn't say I had a few concerns, but it does provide us with an excellent opportunity to look back at the original show from 1998. As many of you know, I'm not much of a fan of the genre, and yes, I am still going to call anime a genre, but as an aspiring jazz musician just about to start college for music when I first saw it, Cowboy Bebop will always be one of my all-time favorite series. It was and is outstanding. It features interesting and engaging characters, a fascinating body of actual and implied lore, and one of the best original soundtracks in existence, mostly written by the brilliant composer Yoko Kano and performed by her amazing band, The Seatbelts. What's more, Cowboy Bebop deals with some pretty heavy themes throughout the show, greed, vengeance, nihilism. But the one theme I found to be most prevalent and most interesting is the idea of bravely continuing your own journey to self-improvement even while dealing with the consequences of your past. Scrap in, folks, because we're about to slip into hyperspace and try to find the connection between personal responsibility, good decision making, and finding meaning in your own life on this episode of Out of Frame. The premise of Cowboy Bebop is pretty straightforward. In the not-too-distant future, which often seems a lot more like the really distant future, humans have invented jump gates, which cut down the time to travel to other planets. Instead of months, years, or even decades in a spaceship, it's now a matter of hours or days to skip across the galaxy. Tragically, this technology immediately became a necessity because of an accident that nearly destroyed Earth and made it almost entirely uninhabitable, and which compelled humans to terraform and colonize other planets and moons. In addition to dealing with interplanetary jurisdictional issues, most of the police departments in the solar system are overwhelmingly corrupt. As a result, the difficult job of apprehending criminals and gangsters is often handled by bounty hunters, or cowboys. This last bit is pretty interesting and not entirely far-fetched, and it's in this world that we're introduced to our main characters. We've got Spike Spiegel, a bounty hunter and martial arts expert with a mysterious past, and his partner Jet Black, former inter-solar system police detective and current owner and captain of the spaceship Bebop. They're both pretty good at what they do, but between what often seems like very bad luck or just the result of their own compassion, they rarely seem to get paid and they're chronically broke. Both men have scars, literal and figurative, from their pasts, but they're doing their best to make the solar system a little bit better, one less insane madman or eco-terrorist at a time. They even take in the occasional stray in need of a home. It isn't always easy, and it doesn't always go to plan, but Jet and Spike are both trying to improve themselves and put distance between who they are now and who they were in the past. It's just that their past doesn't always stay where they put it. In spite of everything they've tried to do, both Spike and Jet keep running into ghosts. Spike's former life in the Red Dragon crime syndicate keeps returning to haunt him. His old rival, Vicious, is an omnipresent force of nature, constantly trying to kill Spike and just about everyone else throughout the series. Jet was never a criminal, but he does have to deal with the cost of misplaced trust in his former partner and with his own overly controlling behavior, which eventually drove his ex-girlfriend away. It's stuff like that that makes the show so engaging, deep, and painfully relatable. As Spike and Jet pick up other crew members, like Faye, Ayn, and Ed, it's clear that everyone has issues to deal with. But coming together as the kind of family they actually get to choose helps them all do their best to, well, do better. At least for a while. But I think the difficult and yet very important lesson to learn from all this is that if you want to avoid the kinds of pain that each of our main characters feel, you need to think about the consequences of your actions before you make major decisions. You need to decide how you want to live, knowing that there will be costs and benefits to every choice you make. Look, none of us is perfect. We all make mistakes. You have, I have, everyone has. Even the people you most admire will eventually let you down in some way or another. As part of being human, I'm not going to tell you that it's a good thing necessarily, but it is inevitable. So yeah, we're all going to slip up and make some poor decisions over the course of our lives. Hopefully most of yours will be relatively minor. But sometimes even our smallest mistakes, accidents, and moral lapses can have catastrophic effects, the consequences of which can linger for a long time. Faye Valentine, for example, spent 54 years in cryogenic stasis after a space shuttle accident. Once she's revived, in addition to suffering from amnesia, she's also saddled with the burden of tremendous debt in order to pay back the cost of decades' worth of other people's resources and labor. And here's the part where I'm going to say something some of you aren't going to want to hear. It's easy to think that nobody should have to pay such a debt. But what happened to Faye wasn't the fault of those who worked to keep her alive. They could just as easily have let her die in the frozen vastness of space. It's not always fair, especially when we're talking about accidents and dumb luck, but okay, life isn't fair. More importantly, dumb luck can just as easily benefit people as harm them, and nobody tries to escape the consequences of a random windfall like winning the lottery or stumbling into a great relationship. So I'm less interested in talking about the role of luck here and much more interested in talking about the results of our personal choices. So keep that in mind going forward. In any case, Faye's debt is what it is. No matter what any of us might wish were true, both accidents and poor choices can be a huge setback to our goals. They can wreck our finances, impact our mental health, damage our relationships, and of course, cause physical injury to ourselves and others. A lot of people hope they can delay some of those problems by putting off dealing with them or even running away from them altogether. But eventually, the bill comes to you always. Now for a lot of people, accepting this harsh reality is frustrating. I get it. It's not fun to have to pay the price for choices we already regret. But here's the twist. All things considered, as costly and uncomfortable as all those consequences might be, they're valuable and necessary. You shouldn't want to live in a world without them. It's a good thing when people know that there's a cost to getting things wrong and meaningful benefits to getting them right. This knowledge is an important incentive that should factor into our decision making. Having to ask yourself questions like, can I afford for this action to blow up in my face? Or how much do I stand to gain if this goes well, makes you much more careful about the things you say and do.  Where are you going? Why are you going? You told me once to forget the past because it doesn't matter. But you're the one still tied to the past, Spike. Look at my eyes, Faye. One of them is a fake because I lost it in an accident. Since then, I've been seeing the past in one eye and the present in the other. So I thought I could only see patches of reality, never the whole picture. Oof. Not that you'd know it from how a lot of our societies have been acting in the last couple years, but we're all individuals. And we all have our own unique levels of risk tolerance. Consequences that are acceptable for one person will be a deal breaker for another. But as long as people are free to choose what's best for them and accept the consequences, good or bad, that's fine. If we want a world where people are consistently making more good choices than bad ones, what really matters is that individuals are accountable for their actions, legally, economically, and even socially. We get major problems when people are empowered to make decisions for themselves or on other people's behalf and yet don't have to bear the costs. When an individual person or even a conceptual entity comprised of lots of individual people, like a corporation or a government agency, stands to gain if things go right, but not lose if things go wrong, this creates what economists and political theorists call a moral hazard. Remember, one of the most basic lessons of economics is that everybody responds to incentives. So our incentives matter. Moral hazards create the risk that people will behave badly, potentially unethically, if they're shielded from the negative consequences of their actions. Think about it like this. In a zero gravity environment, people's bones and muscles start to atrophy. Sure, it's fun to be weightless, but over time, you lose the ability to support yourself. Abandoning the metaphor, you can see what happens when kids grow up throwing tantrums without any kind of parental guidance, or when students don't get accurate grades or critical feedback on their work. When there are no social or legal consequences to crime, you're going to get more assault, theft, and murder. We see that in action in almost every episode of Cowboy Peabop. Since the government and the police are so corrupt and people have gotten complacent with violence in their cities, crime seems to be rampant. And of course, we've all seen the difference between how people act online under the cover of anonymity versus how they behave around people who know who they are and whose approval actually matters. Unfortunately, these problems get a lot worse when you scale them up. We see this all the time whenever politicians and government officials get to make rules for millions of people, knowing that they'll never bear any of the costs or face the consequences of failure themselves. Political decision making is full of moral hazards. If you think I'm exaggerating, let's look at the housing bubble that led to the financial crisis and great recession back in 2007. The story you've probably heard is that unregulated investment banks made a bunch of enormous, overleveraged bets that would only pay off if the housing market continued to expand and prices kept going up. But little did they know that the mortgage industry's incredible success was really being fueled by low quality, subprime loans made to poor people who had been duped into believing that they should accept variable interest rate mortgages but who had predictably default when rates went up and they couldn't afford to pay. I'm going to go out on a limb and bet that you were told that this was a consequence of too little regulation as well, but that story isn't actually true. People who blame the supposed lack of regulation are not only factually wrong, they always seem to completely ignore the role that moral hazard and bad incentives played in creating problems for both the investment banks and the mortgage lenders. The reason their story gained traction, apart from the obvious fact that it played directly to the biases of people who work in government and media, is that to really understand what happened, most people would have had to know a lot about the history of regulatory and monetary policy starting more than a decade earlier. For example, the reason that mortgage lenders had so much money tied up in what we now call subprime loans was because the government told them to. Back in the mid-1990s, the Clinton administration decided that home ownership was a keystone of the American dream. They had studies showing that people who owned their own homes had more wealth, they lived in better conditions, they had more family stability, and of course they had a major asset in the home itself. Home ownership was seen as a path out of poverty, but it was also out of reach for a substantial percentage of the population. So in the late 90s, the federal government passed several pieces of legislation pushing banks to lower their lending standards. Of course, both the politicians and the banks knew that these kinds of loans were very risky. So to make up for it, the government promised to cover the debts if and when they went bad through government-sponsored enterprises like the Federal National Mortgage Association and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation. It worked exactly like you'd expect. Banks that weren't making loans to low-income people before were now incentivized to lend out more money, giving a lot of financially unstable people the ability to buy homes for the first time ever. That seemed like a big win for low-income buyers, and it was obviously hugely beneficial to the mortgage banks, the investment banks, and the real estate business. But keep in mind that the only reason lenders were willing to do this is because they knew that although they would profit no matter what, their potential losses would be paid by taxpayers. And at this point, another question you should be asking is, how did the mortgage lenders get all that money to lend out to begin with? I can tell you, it certainly didn't come from any increase in personal savings rates. So in order to understand how this was even possible, we need to skip ahead a couple years and talk about how money gets created. Moral hazard plays a role here, too. It's now the beginning of 2002, and in the wake of the dot-com bubble and the various economic problems created by 9-11, the Bush administration was facing a recession. Predictably, a lot of politicians and perennial supporters of bigger government demanded a massive explosion in spending as the cure. In his August 2002 column for the New York Times, Paul Krugman argued, to fight this recession, the Fed needs more than a snapback. It needs soaring household spending to offset more abundant business investment. And to do that, as Paul McCulley of PIMCO put it, Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble. Yes, he actually wrote that. And well, that's exactly what happened. Oops. In spite of significant opposition from other, I would argue, better economists, Congress and the Bush administration decided to increase spending in order to combat the recession, bail out the banks and airlines, and pay for the newly minted global war on terror. Of course, to do all that, they needed money. And to get it, the Bush administration looked to our central bank, the Federal Reserve, for help. You see, the Federal Reserve basically has three tools for increasing the amount of money in circulation, all of which can be used to raise funds for the government or stimulate the economy. First, they can reduce interest rates, thus encouraging consumers to borrow and spend more money. Second, they can reduce reserve requirements, which allows member banks to loan out more money without needing to simultaneously increase the amount of cash they actually keep on hand in the form of bank deposits. And third, the Federal Reserve Bank can buy government-issued securities or bonds directly, which gives the government and other banks more money in exchange for, essentially, IOUs. Of course, all these actions have a cost, including reducing the value of our money through inflation. But between October of 2000 and February of 2004, Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan reduced the interest rate from 6.5% down to less than 1%, strongly encouraging borrowers to take out loans. So that's what they did. From 2000 to 2007, the US saw the largest explosion in household debt since the Great Depression. It literally doubled over a seven-year period. And with banks only needing to retain 10% of their assets in reserve and the Fed adding billions to the bank's balance sheets, there was a ton of money to go around. This massive expansion of the money supply also enabled big banks to borrow billions of dollars, loan out more money than they actually had on hand and make big bets on increasingly risky investments, such as mortgage-back securities and, eventually, credit default swaps. And they did all this correctly assuming that taxpayers would pick up the tab if anything really bad happened. We ended up with a perfect storm of bad incentives created by government policy. By 2004, some economists were already warning about the impending collapse of the housing market. But the government dismissed the idea as absurd. In fact, they kept saying that everything was perfectly fine right up until everything fell apart. So let's recap. Politicians intentionally pushed banks to lend to low-income, subprime borrowers. To do this, they promised to bail those banks out if those borrowers couldn't pay back their loans. Moral hazard. The government then made it easier for Wall Street firms like Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers to make riskier, high-leverage investments. Moral hazard. Then the Federal Reserve dramatically expanded the money supply, flooding cash into the financial system, making it possible for both the mortgage lenders and the investment banks to sink billions of dollars into increasingly bad loans. Moral hazard. See where I'm going with this? Once the whole house of cards came crashing down, the government did what it's consistently done since the 1940s, bailed everybody out with taxpayer money without fixing any of the structural problems. Politicians learn nothing. Bankers learn nothing. The Federal Reserve learn nothing. Most people in positions of power kept their jobs and went on to make even more bad decisions that continue to affect people today. Meanwhile, we all paid the price. Unfortunately, this is far from the only example of politicians creating terrible incentives that have had severe consequences for everyone else. It's inevitable when they're never held personally accountable when they're wrong. If people never suffer negative consequences for their actions, there's a much greater chance that their behavior will not take risk or costs into account. We've seen this play out in a ton of disturbing ways since last year. I've talked about all that a lot on this series already, so I won't go back over it now, but we would have been much, much better off if all the people in power had to actually pay for the costs they impose on others. This is one of those things about life and growing up that is kind of unpleasant. But the more you think through the role incentives and meaningful feedback play in the quality of our decisions, the more you come to realize how important being accountable for your actions actually is. The fact that we must all own our decisions is what gives meaning to everything we do in life. It's also what provides dramatic stakes to a story like Cowboy Bebop. I'm not going to spoil the series for people who haven't seen it, but everyone in Cowboy Bebop, the clients, the criminals, and the bounty hunters themselves have to deal with the consequences of their choices. And that's a big part of what makes the series so good. Our protagonists get hurt, hurt others, and routinely wish they'd done things differently. But they each own their mistakes, deal with the consequences, and as painful as that is, it's way better than the alternative. Spike and Jet are definitely trying to be better at their profession, better friends to each other and better as human beings. And struggling with the consequences of their actions is what causes them to do better. There's nothing inherently wrong with wanting to avoid suffering and discomfort. Humans have achieved and created some remarkable things because we wanted life to be a little bit easier. The trouble comes with trying to avoid discomfort at all costs. They say humans are social animals. They can't live alone, but you can live pretty well by yourself. I tell you, instead of feeling alone in a group, it's better to have real solitude all by yourself. You were just afraid they'd abandon you, so you abandoned them. You distanced yourself from the whole thing. Faye is constantly running away from the causes of her suffering. She shops and gambles and drinks to distract herself from her problems. The bebop is the closest she's come to having a long-term home. And even it is a spaceship always on the move. She doesn't improve her life because she doesn't take responsibility for the things she should. And she is the unhappiest person on the show. Maybe Spike and Jet aren't the most well-balanced of people or the best with relationships, but they are trying to climb out of their own personal holes instead of digging them deeper. Jet finds peace trimming bonsais. Spike trains in martial arts every day. It's not surprising that each of them has taken up practices that involve a high degree of self-discipline and control. Humans were meant to work and sweat to earn a living. Those that try to get rich quick or live at the expense of others all get divine retribution somewhere along the line. That's the lesson. Unfortunately, we quickly forget the lessons we've learned and then we have to learn them all over again. Despite the chaos of life and the consequences of our inevitable failures, we humans have a remarkable tendency to want to do better today than we did yesterday. We learn, we grow, we improve, or we try to anyway. The world is a complex place. There's not a lot about it that's in our control. What we can control, though, is ourselves, our immediate environment and how we respond to the knowledge that we've made a mistake. Do we acknowledge our errors, accept the consequences, and try to do better next time, like Spike and Jet? Or do we run and avoid and continue to do the exact same things as before, like Fei? There comes a point when you really need to ask yourself, what kind of life do you actually want?  Or will you accept responsibility for your life and the consequences of your decisions, good and bad, finding meaning in the process? That choice will always be yours. It's really important to understand that whenever we sever the connection between choices and consequences, people tend to make really poor decisions. And I'd love to start a conversation about that in the comments. And if you want to participate in even more discussion, join us on Discord. Also, check out our weekly Behind the Scenes podcast, where we discuss movies, TV books, and other content we usually don't get into on this series. And for those of you who support the show on Patreon or SubscribeStar, we do special bonus content where we answer Q&A. Supporters also get a private channel on Discord, Free Swag, and access to other cool stuff. So if you love what we do, please consider a monthly contribution. And speaking of our supporters, I want to give a special shout-out to our associate producers, to Connor McGowan, Richard Lawrence, Matt Tabor, and Vega Starlight. Thank you. Lastly, be sure to like this video and subscribe to the channel. Ring that bell icon. And if you really want to make sure you see everything we publish and get even more exclusive content, join the weekly Out of Frame email list. And as always, don't forget to find us on Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram. I'll see you next time.


Γεια σας, είμαι Vicky εδώ και αυτή είναι η βιντεοχόπηση που χρησιμοποιήσαμε την Οκτομπερκύτητα για να δημιουργήσουμε την σμή μου. Πριν να πω την καρδιά μου, θα σας δημιουργήσω τίποτα τι είναι μέσα στην καρδιά. Οπότε, πρώτα από όλα αυτή αυτή η καλύτερη μπλάστικα μπλάστα, η οποία εγώ really love, είναι πολύ κύριο και καταλαβαίνει όλα τα πράγματα. Υπάρχει also a bag of pretty pink pose sequins, as well as some thread.   Αν όχι αυτή η καλύτερη μπλάστα και σαν καλύτερη μπλάστα, υπάρχει πραγματικά chipboard. Και θα πω αυτά τα πράγματα στην καρδιά μου, ώστε να μπορείτε να δείξετε τι είναι μέσα στην καρδιά αυτή. Create a Smile είναι η Ευρωπαϊκή κομπανή, αλλά παίρνω ότι έχω really cheap international shipping costs σε λίγο από 5 $. Τώρα η καλύτερη μπλάστα also comes with these stickers, a die, a snowflake die, which is really beautiful, stenciled with snowflakes, and it's packed with pattern papers. Τώρα, οι παρνές της παρνής έχουν ένα A and a B side. At the B side, you can see different colors of striped basic papers. Και η A side is the one with the main pattern. So I am going to go through them quickly and I just need to note that the quality of these pattern papers is really great because it's nice and thick and you can use it even as a card base. So for my card today I have cut out a piece of this pattern paper to be slightly smaller than a standard card and I am placing the snowflake on top.  There is a giveaway on the create a smile blog as well as on their facebook page so make sure to join and enter the giveaway. If you visit my blog you will find links to all the appropriate pages and to enter the giveaway and you will also find the full list of all the supplies that I'm using today. I am going to stamp this cute little Santa on a piece of watercolor paper and I am stamping it with archival ink. I am doing so because archival ink is waterproof and it will not react with any watercolors that I am using. These are the ZIG watercolors and notice how I store them just because the cap doesn't have a color isn't color coded. I am storing them upside down so this just makes my life easier and I always know which color I am picking out. I am not going to do any shading just basic coloring and the red color that I am using perfectly matches the pattern paper that I have chosen from the kit. Of course at this stage you can use any of your favorite coloring mediums. It can be watercolor ink, copic markers, alcohol markers in general or pencils or whatever you like and you can do shading if you wish. I just prefer this really cartoonish look just because my card is going to be clean and simple. So once my image is ready I am going to take my time and cut it out with my scissors. The card I am creating today is a standard card that's four and a quarter by five and a half and I am going to cover it up with a piece of pattern paper. I have cut out the pattern paper to be the exact same size as my card base. I have used tape runner at the back and I am covering up my top folding card. There is a lovely sentiment in the kit that says have you been nice which I am stamping it with VersaMarking at the bottom of my panel and I am going to apply some white embossing powder. I am heat setting it with my heat gun and once that's melted it is time to stick it on top of my card. Now to stick this on top of the card I am I want to have some dimension so I am going to use some foam tape at the back. I am going to be generous just because I don't want this to sink while it's in the mail. So once that's there I am going to put some foam tape at the back of my Santa and I am going to stick him at the center of that snowflake as if he is looking through that hole. And once Santa is there you can call this card done but just because this is a Christmas card I just have to add some simmer so I am going to bring in my clear wing of styla glitter pen and I am going to go all over his red areas. So that was the card for today. I hope you had fun and got inspired and if you did don't forget to leave me a comment as well as give me thumbs up on my youtube channel. Here are some close up photos of the card. Go to the next top of this video hop by clicking on your screen right now. If you are watching from a mobile device you will find the link just below in the description area. Thank you all for watching.


For everyone joining right now, welcome, thanks for being on time, even early. Please sit tight. We're going to wait a couple minutes for people who are in the lobby, virtual lobby, to be admitted into the webinar. An important guest has just arrived. Excellent. I'm assuming the important guest you're mentioning is Minister Tang. Welcome. We are waiting currently just for a couple minutes to give people a chance to go from the lobby and enter the webinar formally. Max, I'm going to go ahead and make Minister Tang a presenter. Thank you. As a note for those of you. Hello. Hello and welcome, Mr. Tang. Thank you for being here. We are waiting currently now for people to come into the lobby and then get admitted into the webinar. We can just be patient for one or two more minutes and then we can start our program. Please note that if you require closed captioning, it's possible that Microsoft Teams, as the way you are joining this particular webinar, may not necessarily provide closed captioning. So it's possible that the Microsoft Teams client application will be able to do that for you if you need that. This webinar, by the way, for all of you here is being recorded and admitting people from the lobby is a bit of a labor intensive job. So thank you to our assistants who are doing that work. Okay. Greetings, Minister Tang. How are you? Pretty good. Pretty good. How are you doing? Excellent. Excellent. Is everything good on the tech side of things? Can you hear me okay? Yes, loud and clear. How about you, Wei Ting? Are you okay? Yep, still good. Okay. Hopefully I'm no longer sharing my desktop. No, you're sharing your bookshelves. All right. That's appropriate. I think you're probably good to go. I'll keep letting people in as they arrive, but I think you're all set. Okay. All right. Thank you, Jared. And hello and welcome everyone to today's online event hosted here at Ohio State University. My name is Max Woodworth, and I'm Associate Professor of Geography at Ohio State. And I serve as the head researcher and organizer in partnership with Rick Livingston of the OSU Humanities Institute for the series of events tonight under the title of Asian Futures. Asian Futures is a program supported by the Ohio State Global Arts and Humanities Discovery theme, and it funds public lectures, workshops, community events, reading groups, and curricular research into Asian studies here at Ohio State through 2022. The overarching purpose of Asian Futures is to draw greater attention to Asian studies on campus and to use our resources at OSU to bring greater awareness of the transformations afoot across Asia to broader audiences here in Ohio. With that in mind, I'm delighted to be able to welcome today as our distinguished guests, Taiwan's digital minister, Audrey Tang, who joins us online from Taipei, where it is now early in the morning on Tuesday. Minister Tang has a fascinating and decidedly unorthodox professional trajectory that includes her dropping out of school, cutting her teeth in the high pressure world of Silicon Valley, and then as a so-called hacktivist pushing the Taiwanese government to embrace reforms of radical data transparency. Since 2016, she has been active first advising the government on digital affairs and has now risen to the formal role of minister without portfolio. Thank you, Minister Tang, for taking the time from your busy schedule to be with us today. Good local time and good local time from the future, like literally Tuesday. Yes. Yeah, very, very sci-fi. I also want to welcome as well here, Wei Ting Yan, assistant professor of government at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. She joins us from Savannah, Georgia for some reason. Dr. Yan is a specialist in political economy and politics in Taiwan, and East Asia, and has written recently about Taiwan's COVID-19 management. Dr. Yan is also an Ohio State alumnus, so welcome back virtually to campus, Wei Ting. The theme for today's discussion is digital democracy and COVID-19 in Taiwan. Our time is short, so we have only an hour before the minister must go on with her busy day. So I will be very brief here with my introductory comments so we can move to the discussion and Q&A quickly. As many of you likely know, Taiwan has seen remarkable success in its fight against COVID-19. For us here in the United States, the numbers that Taiwan has recorded are really quite outstanding. Since the outbreak of COVID-19, Taiwan has had fewer than 17,000 cases and as of today, 848 deaths. Moreover, roughly 90% of the cases and deaths recorded occurred in May and June this year before being aggressively contained and returning to trend, which is to say case numbers in the single digits with occasional peaks over that. There is an important story to tell where Taiwan's COVID-19 response is concerned, and shortly we will ask Minister Tang about this experience and the current outlook. But Dr. Yan and I are also curious to inquire as well about Taiwan's recent innovations in what has come to be called digital democracy. Though there are several definitions for this term, we might think of digital democracy broadly as the use of information and communications technology for the purposes of enhancing political democracy and or the participation of citizens in democratic communication. We bring up digital democracy here for two reasons. First, Minister Tang has been active for many years in efforts to use digital tools for policymaking and cross-agency coordination in her work inside government and has, as mentioned, been a proponent and designer of open-source software and of radical transparency. Second, digital tools have been central to the COVID-19 response in Taiwan. So we are eager here to learn about this intersection of these themes and our questions are directed in that way. So our format today is designed to be informal and conversational. Dr. Yan and I have prepared questions that we will ask the minister and we will make sure to reserve 20 minutes or so before the end of the hour for public questions. For those of you who have questions, please make sure to send them through the chat function and we will be curating those questions as they come in. So perhaps first I will yield to Dr. Yan to begin and then I will take turns asking as well and we'll just have to speak conversation. And once again, thank you, Dr. Minister Tang, for joining us. It's a real pleasure. Okay, so I guess we will start with a question about Taiwan's handling of COVID. So Taiwan has been viewed as a very successful case in handling the COVID crisis. And we know one reason behind the success is the usage of digital technology. For example, Taiwan used the QR code system for contact tracing process. When talking about digital tools or digital governance, people may immediately think of privacy violation or digital surveillance. And so in the U.S. there is this argument saying that the public here is more protective of their privacy and does not trust the government to collect personal information. So a high level of digital governance can only work in Asia where people may have different expectations of privacy protection. So we're curious what your thoughts on the statement and do you think there are some prerequisite or even civic virtue needed for digital governance or digital democracy to work? Certainly. And I'd like to share first application from last February that does not involve any privacy tradeoffs. And like the QR code contact tracing, which I'll get to, it's created not by the government, but rather by the social sector. So the prerequisite is a strongly empowered social sector. In the U.S. I believe it's called a civic technology community or the voluntary sector, the charitable sector, the third sector or whatever in Taiwan we call it a social sector. So there is a social sector community called G0V or GOV0 that look at all the digital services that the government does, which is something GOVTW, and make forks, that is to say open source alternatives at G0V, the TW. So just changing O2O0 in your browser bar gets you into this kind of shadow government that tens of thousands of people, unless like China or Telegram or IRC are contributing at any given time. So last February, for example, even before we instituted a mask rationing scheme, people in GOV0 made this map that lets you track your neighborhood's availability of medical grade masks. Now, you see here that, for example, on this particular pharmacy, there's 58 adult masks and there's close to 200 children's masks. And if it runs out of masks, well, it goes red and then finally gray so that people queuing in line can actually reverse audit the system so that they'd see the person queuing before them bought a few masks and after 30 seconds the phone refreshes, right? So on their chatbot or map or whatever, they see that the inventory actually depletes in real time. So this first, of course, quells the fear and certainly endowed because you just go to the farms that still have some masks left. And second, it reveals the bias and distribution issues. For example, we initially saw the population centers overlay exactly with the pharmacies, but not everyone own a helicopter, as the OpenStreetMed community pointed out. So when MP Gao Hong and interpolated our Minister of Health, Chen Xuzhong, about this unfair distribution of urban and rural areas based on this real-time data published every 30 seconds, we changed the distribution overnight and Mr. Chen's Simplice Legislator teach us. So it brings a previously oppositional policy or political relationship through open data in real time into a co-creative relationship. So there really is nothing privacy related in this co-creation. I point this out because it's the same bunch of people in GovZero. This May, when we had our first and real wave, which has passed so far in the past couple of months, we're essentially back to local zero cases. But during the height of that, during May, it took GovZero only a couple of days to roll out this very innovative app-free contact tracing method. And again, with no privacy violation by the state because it's created by the people, right? So basically the volunteers posted this QR code and in your phone's lock screen without downloading any new app, you can point your camera to the QR code. And it pops out a composition screen of a short message to 192 to the well-trusted toll-free number for counter-epidemic work. And you press that and that's it. So like literally just, this doesn't require a tap. So a single tap and about three seconds. And then you finish a check-in. And this has no privacy violations precisely because the five telecom carriers who receive this SMS isn't going to transmit it anywhere. So and they already know your phone number anyway. And the 15 digits is only known to the venue owner and the QR code maker and not known by the telecom carrier. So through a design called multi-party security, no single piece of puzzle will review your whereabouts. So this is not a compromise. Rather, this is a social innovation from the social sector. And through this idea of reverse procurement, we just make sure that we secure the resource to make that happen. But it's actually created by very privacy-minded social sector in the first place as a viable fork of the government's services, which at a time was still based on pen and paper registration. And it doesn't replace pen and paper. You can still use pen and paper if you want to. Okay, thank you. That's a very good answer. I think we'll come back to some of the trust and digital democracy question later. But I think following the previous question, another thing that happened during the pandemic we know is that we observe not just a pandemic. We also observe an infodemic with loads of misinformation circulating both online and offline. And so when tackling misinformation, I know you have mentioned in a lot of interviews that Taiwan uses this humor for rumor approach to fight against information during COVID-19. However, my observation is that during the latest COVID-19 wave in Taiwan back in May 2021, at the time, amid a very high uncertainty and panics among the citizens, the humor for rumor approach seemed ineffective at that time. And the result was that many issues such as vaccines were politicized and people started to disrupt the government. And so we're interested in your opinion, what are the other ways we can use to strengthen the fight against misinformation? Definitely. And it's a really, really good question. So I would still say that if we don't have the very cute Spokes dog to be with us this May and June, then it will actually be much worse. And just for the record here is the cute Spokes dog. Or Zongchai, right? So Zongchai reminds you to, for example, keep three cute dogs distance from one another indoors and two outdoors.  So of course, Zongchai is very effective and mimetic so that people willingly share this public service announcement information and remix it to their heart's desire. And it's true that we had a vaccine appointment system that initially were not that effective in getting the people above 65 years old vaccinated, which is the highest priority group. And simply because the memes and so on doesn't actually translate into a accessible digital service, the way that SMS contact tracing or the mask rationing is accessible for the elderly people. So for the elderly people, we didn't ask them to register for a vaccine appointments on the internet except the type of municipality. I believe all other municipalities simply used the district chief, the Li Zhang system, as well as the local health offices and so on. And the theory is that people above 65 are retired, so they have more time on their hands. So it's easier instead of asking them to call to register for vaccines simply appoint people in a single district going into a single place at some given time so that they may be vaccinated and mask. However, it is true that the primary communication channel to these elderly people were not over the internet and decidedly not mimetic. So there's a lot of rumors that was circulating online about the fairness and timeliness of vaccine availability. So I believe we overcame that through a two-pronged approach. First, when people below 64 years old do actually have a fair access to a vaccine appointment system, that put an end to the kind of panic on the local and national and district level on the unpredictability of vaccine arrival and so on. So that would pretty good deal with it too. It's similar to how the mask rationing map put predictability to the mask rationing which was also initially quite panic inducing and quite scarce as it were last February. So we overcame that in about the most time. And second, and I must also thank the US and Japan for donating the vaccines in time. So when the people felt the scarcity was at its peak at its maximum, the US donated Moderna and Japan donated AstraZeneca so that people preferring those two different doses. Because one of the roots of the panic was that there were people who prefer Moderna far over AstraZeneca and there's people who prefer the BNT Pfizer far over the Medigen, for example, our homebrew and so on. But when we made sure that there's plenty of supply now of all the four different brands despite their social preferences and making the social preferences public by making the vaccine appointment system open data. So in real time, everyone can see the real time preference of the four different levels of the vaccines in each and every municipality or city in the age group of five. So what does social preference as a transparent social object put an end to the speculation? This is all extremely detailed and it's incredibly interesting to follow because as we as we try to grapple with COVID-19 in the United States, the communications, I think it's fair to say the communications around vaccines around masks has been maybe could be described as somewhat muddled and certainly hasn't been driven with the same kind of digital literacy that you seem to be comfortable promoting in Taiwan. So I was curious too, just in response to this, as you're talking about developing open source tools and using civic tech to develop these tools, the implication there is two things. One is the extremely high degree of engagement in the population that appears to be something that you've seen. And then, and second, not just engagement in an analog space, but literacy in the digital space so that people are comfortable in navigating and not just navigating and that's one thing, but to develop and to be able to code and to produce these things from scratch. So I'm curious how you how you work with civic tech groups to to foster this kind of activity to produce actionable, usable tools. So that's really two questions, right? One is about the co-creation and another is about the literacy and I will call it competence in basic education and lifelong education if I get you correctly. So, yeah, these are all very deep questions worthy of three hour seminars, but I will be brief. So in short, the idea here is very simple is to trust our citizens in Taiwan, the Internet and democracy began its roots, both in the late 80s, right? 87, when we lifted out of the martial law, that was the beginning of the BitNet and the local BBS culture. At the time, there's still no free elections. For example, our direct presidential election would come in only 96. So during the decades since 87 to 96, the social sector gained a lot of legitimacy by providing for services through local co-ops, charities and things like that, Not just part of democratization process, but also part of our environmental protection, part of our disaster recovery around the turn of century. We had a really large earthquake that mobilized pretty much all the social sector, all the faith. And to this day, if you have a earthquake in, for example, eastern Taiwan, if the local social sector publish a number and the local municipality publish a number, people are going to trust the social sector number. So they liked Xi's number. So basically, people had made a high legitimacy apparatus on top of which that would bring the technology as a digital kind of assistive tool. But when we, for example, occupy the parliament in 2014, March, totally nonviolent in a deliberative way, half a million people on the street, the real organizers are the 20 or so NGOs, civil society organizations around the parliament. The parliament that took the agenda of the trade deal with staging and deliberated aspect by aspect. And again, this is something that started and defined by the social sector. So a history of the social sector setting the political and social agenda, I believe, is the infrastructure and digital is just a way to amplify their connectivity. But the US also had a really strong, you know, civil liberties unions and cooperatives movement. So credit unions, for example, is an idea we took from the US and applied to Taiwan. So you probably know what I'm talking about. So that's the first thing. And the second thing is that we emphasize in our educational curriculum, a idea of competence, which is making contributions in real time, instead of just literacy, which is consuming information in real time. So, for example, all the, pretty much all the primary schools in Taiwan have this thing called Airbox. And the Airbox is something that measures PM 2.5 levels in your vicinity. It contributes, of course, to climate science. It is part of a distributed ledger maintained by our National Academy, the Zhong Yan Yuan, that's made sure that when people, for example, want to jog outside, they can check their nearby schools and balconies real time PM 2.5.  But at the point here is that the kids, they learn that data stewardship, data bias, things that cannot be taught easily, can be learned easily when you make real time contributions to the society. And when they enter middle school, for example, in addition to the Airbox work, they are now working on media competency project that, for example, fact checks are three presidential candidates debate in real time. But it's not just an exercise. If they find something that is out of, you know, the recorded fact, it actually gets amplified by the public TV network and so on during the debate in real time captions. So they also contribute to the democratic process as part of their learning in a kind of capstone project and they can also start petitions. Actually, more than a quarter of our nationwide petitions were started by people lower than 18 years old that is just not having the right to vote yet. So they can say, for example, ban plastic straws from our takeout of our bubble seats and so on. And that actually resulted in policy change. And when we asked the person who started a young lady just turned 17 when she raised this petition, why are you starting this movement? And she's like, this is our civics class assignment. So obviously competency education is already part of basic education. Great. And it's funny you mentioned the air box because we have someone here in the in joining us today in the webinar. Jian Xu-shan, who has a who has a project and actually I work with him on this air box project in Taiwan. So I know that one of the things that's curious about the air boxes in Taiwan is that actually the air quality is quite good. Yes, definitely. But it's better than when it started. So the fact that people mobilized parades demonstration is one based on air box data actually resulted in policy change that results in better air quality. So it's all very impactful. I think they move to water boxes now. I'm curious to because one of the things that the second question I'd like to ask you, I'd like to ask you so many questions and we have so little time but I given your your your history and working with digital tools you worked with the the it's called the tool that's developed by a group in Seattle, but you've applied them on the ground in Taiwan and I wondering if you could for our audience here if you could explain a little bit how that works and where it was applied and how it demonstrates and was an example of digital democracy and action and then maybe if you could mention some limitations as well of it. Certainly. So here is Polish and in all its glory in 2015 when we first apply it.  There are a lot of tensions at the time inside one because you were ex at the time said it's a right sharing tool, but the taxi fleets doesn't think that this way. There's some people who say it's sharing economy but some people say it's a really good economy. Some people say it would be better for labor conditions. Some people said it will be worse. It's all very controversial. So in 2015 we adopted AI power conversation by AI. We mean assistive intelligence that is aligned with the pro social part of the social media instead of anti social part of social media and it also qualified as a digital public infrastructure because nowadays polis is polis.gov.tw. We run our own instance here so that all the government officials can start a Polish conversation as easy. They can start a survey or poll or something because in the sense it's really like a survey but a we key survey where the survey questions are written by the participants themselves. Instead of focusing only on solutions at the very beginning. We've just focused on sharing the fox and let people know that the If you click agree, you move further to this person. If you disagree, you move away from that person, but there's no reply button. So there's no room for trial to grow. Rather, the reply button is at the bottom where you can't reply directly to any sentiment, but you can propose your own sentiments to gain acceptance across the aisle, across the different groups. And the numbers here are representative, of course, of people who agree with each other, but the area here measures plurality. That is to say, if you get 2,000 people here voting exactly the same way, it doesn't increase the area of any particular group. We really only hold ourselves to account on the multi-stakeholder meeting live streamed after the poll is faced, only on the things that most people agree on, on the consensus statements. So people learn very quickly to not compete or waste too much calories on the ideological device of statements, whether it's gig or sharing economy, but rather on the things that people do agree most of the time with most of their neighbors on the most of the topic. So this, for example, would entail empowering local temples and churches, the social sector, to run their own fleets similar to Uber enjoying search pricing, for example, about registration, about insurance, about not undercutting existing taximeters, and so on and so forth. So those consensus statements were then held as agenda for this inter-agency meeting with taxi and to Uber and some representatives and basically say, this is the will of the people. So let's implement the will of the people together. So this is a way to very quickly form shared goals to collectively define measures of the progress to find what's key in the KPI in a way that's very reliable. And so after quickly forming shared goals, the innovation that they live on those goals can be delivered quickly by the stakeholders. So for quite some time now, Uber is now a legal company register in Taiwan, the Q-taxi, the local temples and churches are empowering in a similar way, everybody wins. And so this is what is possible with digital democracy is to listen to each other at scale instead of just a few elites speaking to the public via broadcasting at scale. And so the agenda setting is Polish strengths. Of course, there is limitations. It's not that easily to be applied to things that are overly abstract. So we had to translate each conversation into something to use a Kesson's term, something of overlapping consensus, meaning instead of deliberating about sharing economy in general, we just talk about one specific case, someone driving to work, pick up a stranger they met on the app and charging them for it and do the same regularly when they drive back home from work. And in this very specific example, people have similar situations and experiences before so they can relate to it. And this relatedness is what allows the resonance to develop. Great. It's a really fascinating development that seems to be employed. I wanna leave some for waiting, waiting if you wanna ask a question at this point. Yes, I mean, like you, I have like so many questions I can ask, but I think we only have eight minutes till 7 o'clock. We'll open the floor. Yes. So I guess I will ask some more broad questions about the potential, the future of digital democracy because at this point, what I've heard is that the reason why COVID works or even how digital democracy works relies on two things. One is a very empowered civil society almost like a tax-heavy civil society. And the second thing is trust, mutual trust, trusting the people, trusting the trust between the government and the people and then trust between the people. And so in a lot of democracy, especially Western democracy, what we know, it's a more and more polarized society. And then misinformation kind of make it even worse. So trust actually has become a very rare commodity in today's public life. And so when you're talking on thinking is in a world with trust, lack of trust and filled with more misinformation, how do we envision the future of digital democracy? And or in places when it's already polarized, what's your view of developing more function in digital democracy? Yeah, but the lack of trust is really a symptom and the root cause is the lack of investment to the public squares, the trust infrastructures, both digitally and of course in the face to face setting. In many areas in Taiwan certainly, but also in the US, the public parks, the campuses, the town halls and so on were probably built in a single generation when people decided that having some baseball fields in the community is very important. And say if people don't make that decision, there may be a lack of community interaction. There will be no such space between work and the family. And people will observe that they'd grow more distance with their neighbors, but instead of overly analyzing that, maybe we should just do more parks. In Taiwan since 2016, we've classified the digital public infrastructure as infrastructure. That is to say previously the special budget which could only be used for tangible, concrete constructions like literally made out of concrete may now be also invested in the digital equivalent of the public square because we realize if we don't invest in the pro-social, social spaces online, our citizens will be forced to take the democratic conversations to some place that decidedly undemocratic, namely to Facebook, which would be like holding a town hall in a smoke field room with addictive drinks and private bouncers, very loud music. You have to shout to get heard selling a lot of advertisement and things like that, right? And it's the same sort of people. And I don't have anything against the entertainment sector. The night clubs in Taiwan are now open, but we're not designating these places as spaces for democracy. And we need to do the same around the world to invest appropriately in the equivalent of the Polish infrastructure in our joint platform, the epitition that I briefly alluded to and many other ways to foster the idea of co-creation online in a space that's more naturally to resonate rather than to divide. Great, if I could, I was curious and something along similar lines is that much of the discussion, so Waitin mentioned the polarization and of course in the United States and in many other countries, there's a lot of controversy around Facebook and other social media platforms and a lot of questions around control over algorithms and such. So I'm curious where you stand on issues of sort of open, you've described yourself as a kind of radical transparency advocate. And so I'm curious where you sort of stand on the issue of algorithmic justice and other issues around digital equality and equity in democracy in the digital space. And especially in the context of today where there seems to be a lot of instrumentalization of digital tools for very non-democratic means. And definitely non-democratic ends. Yeah, definitely. There's another GovZero project, the Covax project that detects disinformation and scams and spams and whatever. When you forward a message from into encrypted channels like reporting a spam, it posts the most viral disinformation at any given time so that the journalists at the time fact-check center and many other in the international fact-checking network can focus their energy on the things that are actually trending. And I believe that a social sector should hold the private sector and the public sector to account. That is to say it's not the state fact-checking the companies and not the other way around, but rather a community's voluntary community, the social sector doing this gatekeeping work. The GovZero people have also literally went into our national auditing office at a control unit and brought out paper copies of the campaign donations and finances and to post them as structural data asking people to collaboratively OCR to Otaku character recognize the printed filings. And it's directly prompted the legislature to enact a law of basically transparency around campaign donations starting 2018. All the campaign donation expense are to be published in open data to enable investigative journalism of this kind that they can distill the campaign donors roster and so on starting 2018 without resorting to crowdsourcing. So it's like the macerationing map adopted by the National Health Insurance Administration to ensure the numbers are timely and correct. And when people analyze that, people discover that the social media campaigns are not, were not disclosed here. It was not filed as campaign donations. The campaign can be only funded by domestic sources but at the time in 2018, the funding came from the extra jurisdictional sources, right? So basically there's a gaping loophole that's revealed by the social sector of zeros opening up of the campaign donation roster. So they then went and applied the same pressure to Facebook saying, I don't care about the norms around the world by in Taiwan, we just occupy the national office to ask for the radical transparency of the political and the social campaigns data, right? So you need to adhere to the norm and have it that is set by the social sector which were recently amplified by the state. So according to a internal Facebook example here with a blower, Taiwan was one of the only jurisdictions back in 2019 that Facebook took seriously and invested in civic integrity and also disclosed in real time as open data the advertisement from the foreign sponsor sources banning them and then disclosing also from domestic sources so that the dark patterns can be reviewed by the zero investigative journalists in real time. So this is really detailed but the point here is that we see ourselves in the state as just a amplifier of the norms in the social sector it's just like a trade negotiation without passing any laws to ban Facebook or anything, we can tremendous negotiating leverage because Facebook knows if they do not conform the way our national audit office conformed then there will be social sanction and there are actually viable alternative to Facebook like PTT or Decard or whatever. So that's the threat of social sanction is real and which is why they also conform to our local norm. Fascinating, great, that's wonderful. Thank you so much for those incredibly detailed answers and sharing those slides, it's really helpful. Sure. I'd like to open it up for questions from the audience. I'm looking here, I'm assuming that people are able to submit questions in the chat. I don't know if- Or raise their hands. Yeah, or raise their hands, that would be great. Let's see here, trying to find out your participants. I don't see hands raising. Jared or Sujan, can either of you confirm to us that people are able to submit questions? They should be, this is Sujan, they should be able to submit questions via chat. The settings haven't changed, maybe they're just taking about a good question to ask. Yeah, yeah, people are welcome to submit one and here we go, let's see here. Hi Jared. I just have a really quick question, hoping you can hear me okay, whoops, hoping you can hear me okay. So the question in some sense is a follow up on the question that Wai Ting asked earlier, which is there's so much that I listen to you talk Minister Tang and I think this sounds like Utopia. This is the techno Utopia I've been dreaming about and reading about in my science fiction novels, but then I think about the world that I live in and the many unique challenges to, for one thing, a population that is, as was suggested earlier, deeply distrustful of each other at this moment, but also the challenge in this comes up in a lot of speculative fiction that I read that deals with questions of digital democracies, which is how do we handle the fundamental challenge of addressing micro democracies or the kind of unique, often very localized communities that have their own need, geographic, cultural ethnic and so on, that will not be reflected in a simple majority vote, for example. Yeah, which is why we don't use majority. Right, we cross to us for innovations, but we do not actually vote down any particular idea, right? On the Polish screen that I just shared, but the minority groups, if they're diverse from every other group's views, that views gets not only preserved, but potentially amplified because people have to talk across aisles in order to have their feelings to resonate and be accounted for. So I think it's all in the design of the system. If the bit rate is small, if each person only have three bits of information uploaded every four years called voting, by the way, then of course we need to compress our social preferences into an impossibly flat degree, and that allows the kind of dynamic of the majority outvoting the minority. But if there are a huge number of people setting their own agenda as we see in Polish, the bit rate is much, much higher and coupled with the real-time live streamed stakeholder consultations, it easily made sure that people feel it's symmetric, right? As much as they receive from the deliberative space, they can also contribute an equal amount, the uplink and the downlink are symmetrical. And this feeling of symmetry, I believe, helps people to feel empowered so that they in any locality cannot just remix the innovations like the contact tracing, they can adopt their own QR code scanner, they can also stamp their way into the venues, they're not bound by the centrally dictated rules, and that's because the Civic Tech are open source. I made a point of displaying their free software licenses, such as like my eyeglass, they're purely assistive technology. If I don't like my eyeglass, I can adjust it however I want without paying a huge amount of license fees and of course it doesn't pop out advertisement every 20 seconds or something. It's entirely aligned to my best interests. It's wonderful, thank you so much. Great, we have, let's see. So we have some questions coming in here, hold one second here. I'm happy to read if that's easier for you, Max. Sure, if you don't mind, yeah. No, no, not at all. So the first question asked, so during the 2021 outbreaks in Taiwan, several public agencies needed to work from home. During that time, we also observed that digital governance for the public sector was not as well-developed as we had hoped. For example, most agencies still relied on hard, a hard copy, yeah, and refused to use digital documents. Based on your experience, how can we push the public sector in Taiwan to do the kind of digital reforms needed for the next crisis? Definitely. So we did not have to work for home for long, right? I'm a teleworking minister, by the way. So starting in 2016, I only entered the cabinet office every Monday and Thursday, I believe. And the other days, I'm just touring around Taiwan on Taiwan high speed rails and so on. And so it all depends on whether the minister in your ministry or if you're in a local municipality, say the section chief or your vice mayor or mayor, prefer to see people in the same room or whether they prefer to work on a shared workspace digitally. This is really of habits. There's many people in Taiwan on the entry level in the public sector that works exclusively online. But when their superiors want to see the hard copies, they have to finally still print out those whatever business intelligence tools that they're using and distill it to something that can be contained by paper. So it's a culture of paper, it is true. So there's two things that we can do to address this. One is they're simply put to get them more positive experiences. If they can't switch out of pencil, then at least use a stylus, right? I use stylus exclusively. And so the senior officials that I work with, when you get them the stylus, they are then more happy to work on a tablet or something because they preserve their kind of thinking out loud habits while digitally annotating the documents. So bring technologies to where the people are instead of asking people to adapt to keyboards or mouse, which is really unfamiliar to the senior policy maker. The same goes for video conferencing. If you made sure that a video conference for them is just sitting in this chair and start talking, most people are actually feeling it's more intimate than having to wear a mask in the same room. But if you ask them to set up their own teams conversation and so on, well, that's a tall ask. So again, bring the technology via assistance to the offices. So in Taiwan, we're very maybe uniquely fortunate in the world that we don't have to digitally transform in the past couple years. We, our schools are in the same room, right? But some teachers are embracing the digital curriculum and so on for the particularly co-creative classes where people coat together, design together and things like that. Then they prefer a digital workspace over a analog whiteboard because it enables more input from the children. A tool called Slido is very popular because it enables children to not be captured by the Instagram and equivalents on their phone. They can still post comment and like each other. But on the way that's pro-social that is actually projecting to the teacher and the students can set agenda for the teachers, but it's not from their home. They are still in the same classroom. For, of course, we've had no COVID for the majority of last year and only for a few months this year so that we still use face-to-face setting we just use digital to amplify that. This is maybe peculiar to Taiwan but that's the state we're in. That's terrific and actually just makes me really think about how unique it is to have a democracy that's kind of evolving and growing up with the digital revolution. And that kind of brings to that. I think the other question that came up on the chat which touches on some issues that were related earlier related to the question of the public trust but particularly in relationship to an issue that is very fraught in a lot of Western countries right now which is the question about private data, this obsession or fetishization of the invasion through the use of data and digital democratic tools for those that have that potential to be seen as an invasion of privacy. Obviously that's not a significant crisis in Taiwan but the questioner asks, how do you think a government might restore public trust with the help of a technology that many people view with certain skepticism around these issues? As I mentioned, if this eyeglass pops out advertisement or government propaganda every 20 minutes when it breaks, I have to pay millions of dollars to reverse engineer a schema to fix it instead of sending it to a repair person down the street. Then of course I wouldn't trust this glass, right? And I think that is really the point here in that if the government develops government technology that did not exist before the pandemic, of course it will be met with a lot of fear uncertainty and doubt for the cybersecurity and privacy perimeters were simply unknown to the people because it didn't exist before the pandemic. And again, Taiwan is somewhat unique because we've never entered a state of emergency. All our intervention or measures must be pre-approved by the parliament and both the budget and the law required to enable it. So it means we are stuck with the already trusted building components like Legos which is why we use some decidedly low tech but appropriate tech components like printed QR code, like manually tweeting the 15 digits to 192 to via SMS which is two G less I check, not five G and the national health insurance card which is the IC card that was issued dates back to 2003, right? So, but these were very familiar components. These were components already well understood by the cybersecurity white hat community as well as the privacy-minded people and the way they're put together are not designed by the government. As I mentioned, it's demanded by the social sector by the very people who are the most privacy aware and even demanding at times basically saying the government should abolish whatever centralized collection and must adopt the latest in privacy enhancing technology. I mentioned multi-party security but they're also demanding federated learning split learning or differential privacy homomorphic encryption as on the latest in the privacy enhancing technology. So us in the government by simply adopting the demand of the social sector gained legitimacy not because we're particularly legitimate but because they are legitimate and we can't feed them we must join them. It is a digital utopia. I'm sorry, I gotta go pack. You're welcome to Taiwan. We issued the GOAT card so you can't get to presidency immediately even before entering Taiwan. There's one new question just came through which is thank you for sharing. Is digital democracy a unique implementation? Are there other locations that you're aware of that have had success with similar models? That's a great question. Yeah, we actually learn most of the systems that we develop are not actually initially started in Taiwan and the moderator already mentioned that Polis started as a Seattle sign and the distribution that I showed you of the divisive and consensual statements that particular screenshot was from Bowling Green, Kentucky. There's actually quite some success in applying Polis-like conversations in a smaller scale within one district or one municipality because people trust each other more and it's easier to have a physical town hall in addition of this digital equivalent of the town hall. The petition platform that I alluded to are a direct adaptation from Bethlehem from Iceland. Iceland is also very well-developed in their ideas of digital democracy. The participatory budgeting part came from Desidema and Consul from Barcelona and Madrid respectively. I can go on, but the point here is that it really is a planetary community of digital democracy and what we are doing essentially is just providing one of the labs, if you will, to try out the latest innovation but we don't come up with all the innovations. The presidential hackathon was from the German Prototype Fund. The way we vote in presidential hacks on the quadratic voting was from Ethereum. Okay, not really a country, but semi-sovereign and so on. So we get the best and better practice from all over the world. If I may, we have the question from Christen, the question here is, how can digital democracy cope with the challenge when a dictatorship also uses digital solutions to control people? Yeah, well, first it's to make sure that we control the terms on all the terms, democratic terms, right? We, for example, the idea of transparency, all the civic tech innovations are based on the idea of the control yuan, with the people, not just for the people, right? Holding the government and the businesses to account. So this control is citizen control and transparency means making the state and the multinationals transparent to the citizens as opposed to in a digital dictatorship, transparency would mean state control, right? Making the citizen transparent to the state. And I mentioned credit unions. In Taiwan, if somebody has a lot of social credit, it means that they enjoy a high degree of trust locally. They can lend a lot from their local co-ops and credit unions, but in digital dictatorships, somebody with a lot of social credit simply means they have a high score in their provincial database, right? So again, the same word means radically different things. So I believe the idea of digital democracy is to disassociate the terms that we usually associate with centralized control and to move from thinking impurely the centralized control terms. When we think of AI, for example, I always assistive intelligence instead of artificial or authoritarian intelligence. And in fact, that is also why I wrote my job description in the form of a prayer to kind of reimagine the possibility. So that the centralized authoritarian community do not monopolize the use of the terms promoted by Silicon Valley and that we can't think of in a much more pro-social. It's very short, so I might as well recite it. It's my job description, the girls like this. Well, 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. And whenever we hear that a singularity is near, well, let's always remember the plurality is here. So the Taiwan model, a part of a pluralistic democracy, inspire, I believe, the world that dictatorship, lockdown, top-down takedowns is not the only model to counter the pandemic and the infodemic. We can encourage plurality and democratic spirit while doing exceedingly well encountering both the pandemic and the infodemic. Well, thank you. That was kind of a tour de force ending. I really appreciate that last bit there. I think it's very inspiring what you've provided for us today. It's really, it's wonderful to hear these detailed answers and really appreciate you taking the time. Waiting, did you have any final comment? No, I think it's great. I'm amazed by all the answers you have. I have way more questions, but I think so far it's been really good. Thank you. Thank you for the conversation. Yeah, thank you so much, Minister Tang. We know that you have a busy day ahead of you and we really appreciate you taking the time and agreeing to this conversation. And we hope that we can have one again soon and maybe we'll all meet in Taiwan soon. I hope so. Yeah, definitely. Go get a gold card and we can meet in Taiwan, but till we meet Liflong and Prosper everyone. Indeed, thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you everyone for joining us. And please be on the lookout for further activities under the Asian futures at Ohio State. Be well, everyone. Take care. All right, thank you. Bye. Bye-bye.