The good hacker: can Taiwanese activist turned politician Audrey Tang detoxify the internet?

Audrey Tang didn’t have the easiest of starts in life. The Taiwanese hacker turned government minister was told at the age of four that she had a 50-50 chance of dying unless she had a major operation to fix a hole in her heart. Her doctor told her she could drop down dead at any moment if she got overexcited – and she had to wait eight more years for the op. This kind of news might bring out someone’s selfish side – if your life is going to be so truncated, live for yourself. Not Tang, though. She was a tiny child with a whopping IQ and a precocious capacity to think. She decided she wanted to learn everything she could and share it with the world. At five, living with her family in Taipei, she started reading prodigiously – mainly classical Chinese literature. Huge tomes. Then she’d recount her own version of the stories to her classmates. “I liked storytelling. When I was seven I’d speak to the entire school about stories I’d learned from a book and retell them in a way I found more interesting.” Did she realise she was super bright back then? She shakes her head. “No, I realised I was super ill.”

By six Tang was studying advanced mathematics; at eight she started writing code for video games, using pencil and paper because she didn’t yet own a computer. And whatever she learned, it was with the intention of sharing her knowledge. Before long it became apparent she was a digital genius. Tang, 43, is roughly the same age as the internet (1 January 1983 is considered its birthday). She grew up alongside the world wide web; it was her playmate. In her teens, Tang believed the internet was there to bring her vision to fruition: to democratise knowledge, to make everything accessible, to make the world a better place. But then she saw it changing, being used to spread falsehoods and generate all-powerful companies that made digital capitalism’s founding fathers unfeasibly rich while creating unimagined levels of inequality.

“You saw lots of spontaneous self-expression on the early web, expressions of community,” she tells me when we meet on her brief trip to London. “Now the web has been centralised, with a few dominant places where you go to feed your addiction.” Tang is talking of the likes of X (formerly Twitter) and how so many of us live in social media bubbles that reinforce our own prejudices. Social media, she says, has become antisocial media

– and she isn’t having any of it. She is determined that digital technology will once again become a force for good – a supreme listening tool for humanity, bringing us together by celebrating difference and uniting over what we have in common. “There are different ways we can have pro-social social media, not antisocial social media, allowing people to be heard and understood, instead of just driving anger and resentment.”

Tang spent eight years in Taiwan’s government (the last two as the world’s first minister of digital affairs), putting her theory into practice – and it has worked, from a fantastically efficient response to Covid to countering misinformation about electoral fraud. All of it has been achieved online with the support of citizens eager to share information and ideas. Now the rest of the world is beginning to listen to Audrey Tang. The evening before we meet, she has been talking to Labour bigwigs about how to boost participatory democracy in Britain. Could her philosophy of openness and collaboration be a means of seeing off the populists doing their best to sow global discord?

My first language is Java Script! My second and third are LOCO and Basic

Tang is on a world tour with her new book, Plurality: The Future of Collaborative Technology and Democracy. Collaboration is not just a word for her; it’s a way of being. The book, written primarily with American economist E Glen Weyl, is also co-authored by dozens of writers. And behind that, she says, there are hundreds of contributors. Plurality is open-source, meaning anyone can take the ideas in the book and inspect, modify or enhance them (as with Wikipedia). The concept of plurality in technology is collaborating to bridge cultural and social divides. Tang has spent much of her life devising digital tools, with others, to improve access to data in the public domain and to enable us to chat more easily online. This is known as civic hacking.

For all the seriousness and complexity of her work, Tang is quietly playful. When she and her community of software programmers first began to organise and agitate for more open government in 2012, they did so by creating parallel, or forked, websites to present information more clearly. They said their aim was to “ fork the government ” – a deliberate play on words. Tang is a whiz at branding her ideas and has an astonishing vocabulary: she learned English only after German (her family lived in Germany for a while when she was a child), French and Swedish. What is her first language? “JavaScript!” She giggles. “My second and third languages are LOCO and Basic.”

Her strategy to counter the Covid pandemic in Taiwan by using digital tools to call on the collective wisdom of its people was based on three principles: “Fast, fair, fun.” To counter fake news, she created a strategy called “ humour over rumour ”. When it was suggested all the masks made for the pandemic meant Taiwan was running out of toilet paper, a cartoon of premier Lai Ching-te wiping his bottom was produced, captioned “We only have one butt” alongside an explanation of the different sources of toilet paper and masks to reassure people there was enough for everyone.

Today, she hands me a copy of Plurality. Inside, she has written “Share and enjoy!!!” It’s very Tang. Sharing and enjoying are central planks of her philosophy. After eight years in government, she has just left politics. Did you achieve what you wanted to? “If that’s a plural you, yes, certainly. You all . The trust level feels very different now. Ten years ago it was at 9%. At the height of counter-pandemic measures, there was 91% of trust in the government. We cherish the 9% [who mistrusted during Covid] because they point out the vulnerabilities, the issues we’ve missed. It’s important to talk to the 9%.”

Tang’s priority had always been to make the people more trusted by the government – what true participatory democracy is all about. She believes she has helped achieve this and, in doing so, the government has become more trusted. She says it all goes back to philosopher Laozi’s maxim “to give no trust is to get no trust”.

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Tang was born into a Taiwan under martial law, to journalist parents. Her mother, Lee Ya-ching, helped develop Taiwan’s first consumer cooperative. In 1987, when Tang was six, Taiwan began its transformation into a democracy. She spent much of her early life visiting hospitals; often when she got upset or excited her heart would beat too fast and she’d faint and wake up in intensive care. How did she feel about her odds of surviving? “I still feel the same way. Every time I go to sleep I think I may not wake up. It felt like a coin flick.”

Tang was nevertheless a happy child, until she was put in a class for gifted children. Back then she was a he. “I didn’t behave very boyish,” Tang says. She was the brightest child in a horrifically competitive class, and was bullied from the off, particularly by the second smartest boy who was desperate to usurp Tang. “The idea in his head was that if I died, he would become the first in the class, and his parents would be pleased.” Do you really think they wanted you to die, I ask, shocked. “They expressed that intention,” she says calmly.

Things came to a head when she refused to cheat by sharing answers in an exam – one of the few times she hasn’t wanted to share her knowledge, because her fellow pupils were trying to force it out of her. “I was beat really hard. My mum saw a wound and she said maybe it’s best not to go to school for a while.” Tang never went back. Instead she went to a remote non-academic school in the mountains twice a week, studying with tea farmers’ children, and spent the other days attending philosophy clubs. She was never bullied again.

Tang read psychology textbooks to try to make sense of the bullying. “I started reading Piaget and Winnicott, who were into child psychology. I wanted to know why my classmates behaved in such a way. My understanding was that they were under tremendous anxiety because the value their parents placed on them was based on relative status. If you build your self-esteem on that, it tends to be shaky and you tend to project outwards the violence, so I was the target of them acting it out.”

During adolescence, another difference emerged. “I never developed fully like other boys do. When I was 20 I got a testosterone test and it was that of a 70-year-old man.” Tang had never felt right male. In her 20s, she transitioned. “When I was 24 I had a second puberty after taking oestrogen.” She describes it in a matter-of-fact way, and says she is relaxed about how people refer to her. “My pronouns are any, all, whatever!”

Were her parents supportive of her transition? “Yeah, sure!” she says, as if to say: why on earth wouldn’t they be? Tang explains that transitioning is not a big issue in Taiwan, partly, she believes, because the language is not so gender-specific as English. “Mandarin is more flexible. There is no sound difference when you say the three main pronouns.” She doesn’t understand why trans people have become such a source of rage in Britain’s culture wars. “There’s a lack of chill!” She smiles, with consummate chill. Tang is regarded as a trans icon by some, cited as the world’s first non-binary government minister, but again it’s no big deal to her.

Tang is proud of the manner in which Taiwan has evolved, and says it’s the perfect place to practise broad listening. “Taiwan actually means the place where the sea and mountains converge. We have 20 different languages and 16 indigenous nations. So many cultures intersect and we don’t have a dominant religion.”

She left school at 14 with no qualifications. Her head teacher encouraged her to go to university so she could later do research at Harvard in America. But university seemed pointless to Tang. She was already collaborating online informally with academics from Harvard and Stanford on research, which was all of a piece with her later work. “I was interested in swift trust – why we trust strangers we meet online more readily than face to face and why it’s easier to break such relationships online.”

Her understanding of swift trust led to her search for a more profound version of trust online “where we can build places that seem more safe to face uncertainty together”. She went on to work with startups in San Jose in her late teens before returning to Taiwan to work as a free software developer – her software was always distributed under terms that allow users to run it for any purpose and adapt it how they wish.

Related: ‘A polarisation engine’: how social media has created a ‘perfect storm’ for UK’s far-right riots

The longer she and her fellow civic hackers worked on free software, the more aware she became of the shortcomings of government digital technology. Tang stresses the difference between civic hacking and cybersecurity hacking, which exposes state secrets. “Civic hacking was never about finding security vulnerabilities; it was always about thinking out of the box to present information or to listen in a way that the traditional way of politics would not. It’s about creating more possibilities.” So she did nothing illegal? “ Noooo! ” Tang pauses. “But I was somewhat OK in terms of cybersecurity knowledge,” she says with a twinkle.

In 2012, she was part of the digital community that created g0v , pronounced Gov Zero. The project ran in parallel with the official government and was there to support it, even if ministers didn’t initially think so. Through g0v, government websites were examined and rewritten to make them more comprehensible and reachable. “We created a parallel web around which citizens could have a normal conversation. For example, when we did the ministry of education dictionary project, we copied everything from the official website, but turned it into something more accessible to people on phones, and integrated other Chinese languages.” The thinking is simple, she says: the more clearly information is displayed, the more people will know, and the easier it becomes to have a conversation about what is and isn’t working in a democracy.

Was the government suspicious of what they were doing? “Of course. Because if you’re the ministry, you say all rights reserved, then somebody comes along and takes a copy, flagrantly violating the copyright. What do you do?” What did they do? “Well, they can’t sue all of us. So we were invited to have a conversation and we said we’re just converting official dictionaries which are in the public domain, trying to make it friendlier for kids with mobile phones, and we didn’t derive any commercial benefit from the parallel version of the dictionary we set up.” Through talking, they convinced the government that it was a good thing.

After g0v came vTaiwan , an online forum allowing people to discuss and petition on issues of public interest. Once there were 5,000 signatures, the petition was taken to the government to be addressed. What kind of changes has vTaiwan led to? Tang mentions Uber and her face lights up. “All sorts of people took part and lots of different views were heard: people who felt the taxi association union must be respected, people who thought the efficiency and convenience of Uber is very good, people who felt rural areas were underserved.”

The one thing most people agreed on is they disliked Uber’s pricing structure. “Uber had this algorithm that said when demand is high you pay drivers more but when it’s low, you pay less. Both passengers and drivers felt this was bad.”

The online discussion lasted three weeks. “Then you could see people who strongly disagreed starting to meet in the middle. And see the feelings that bring people together across those differences. And we changed the law .” In October 2016 a number of new laws came into effect, including one stating Uber could not charge less than the standard taxi fare. vTaiwan, using a real-time platform called Polis, has been embraced worldwide as a model for participatory democracy. Earlier this year, Grimsby’s local authority used it for a mass online conversation about what the Lincolnshire port town should look like 10 years from now.

In 2014, the Sunflower protest movement was started by students who felt democracy was under threat because the then ruling KMT party was trying to fast-track a major trade deal with China. (Taiwan’s relationship with China is complex – Taiwan is officially known as the Republic of China, China claims it is a province of the People’s Republic of China, whereas the Taiwanese government says it is an independent country.) The students occupied parliament ; g0v gave them the tools to livestream the occupation and debates about the deal. “We provided screens so people outside on the street could see what was happening inside and set up websites so people knew what deliberations were going on. The whole country could pay attention to it. Many people arrived at the parliament counter-surrounding the police to ensure the students were not evacuated because we had proof there was no violence involved; that it was peaceful.” After three weeks, the government caved in. “The speaker simply said, ‘You’ve got a point. We agree.’ And that was it; the trade deal went nowhere.”

Broad listening, which Tang likes to contrast with broad casting , means listening to those you disagree with. Not surprisingly, it doesn’t always provide results she would favour. In 2017, 26,771 “netizens” signed a petition calling on the government to impose caning as an additional punishment for drunk driving, sex offences and violence against children. What happened next is enlightening. The more people talked, the more the conversation moved away from corporal punishment to how to prevent such crimes in the first place. Participants concluded “To cane or not to cane?” had been the wrong question, something that wouldn’t have emerged from a traditional online petition with a yes/no voting option.

After the Sunflower movement, Tang was asked to mentor a government minister. She calls this reverse mentoring and says it’s becoming commonplace. “There is now much more appetite for young people to advise senior leadership on digital or environmental issues.” In 2016, she was made a full-time minister without portfolio, and in 2022 minister of digital affairs.

Was it strange when she was invited to become part of the establishment? “No, it’s very logical,” she says. She had always seen herself as helping the government reach the right solutions (even when supporting the Sunflower protest); now she was just doing it in an official capacity.

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When Covid hit, Taiwan’s remarkable response set it apart from other countries – and Tang was at its heart. Information was crowdsourced rapidly and efficiently. While the World Health Organization was still a month away from declaring a global pandemic, Taiwan had already implemented its mask-making programme.

There was pressure on the government to respond effectively to the pandemic after a chaotic response to the 2003 Sars epidemic. From March to May 2020, mask supply was ramped up, from 2m to 20m items a day, but masks had to be rationed in the short term. It led to huge queues outside stores, which posed a risk of contagion.

This is when Tang and her civic hacking community came to the rescue. They built a series of real-time mask maps, showing stores where they were available and where they had run out. The maps were open-source, so anybody could contribute and they were constantly updated. This transformed the public’s response to the outbreak. By June 2020 more than 10 million people out of a population of 23.5 million had used the mask maps.

At this point there had already been more than seven years of information sharing between the government and the public. Trust was high which meant an efficient mass contact tracing programme could be introduced using QR codes. Tang ensured privacy was protected as much as possible by decentralising data, deleting it after 28 days and keeping it out of prosecutors’ hands. Taiwan never went into a full lockdown and, despite its proximity to China, there were only seven deaths from Covid-19 in 2020. This figure rose dramatically after a breakout among airline staff, but by April 2024, it still compared favourably with Britain – 19,005 deaths in Taiwan, 232,112 in the UK, which has a population only three times bigger.

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Tang’s techniques are also a powerful tool to fight misinformation. When earlier this year Taiwan was accused of rigging elections – assumed by many to be spread on social media by agents of China – she was ready. “We prebunked the attacks by inviting people to film the counting – it’s paper ballot only – so we could show what happened.” When the public effectively become citizen journalists, “you don’t automatically say people are rigging the election. You instead ask who do I trust?”

I ask Tang what the Chinese government thinks of her. “Well, I’m not under sanction. Many people in China pay attention to the work we’ve been doing because they are trying out this kind of deliberative conversational democracy.” But she says it’s safer for her to make digital rather than physical visits to China, not least because she has been involved in national security conversations during her time in government.

Does she think AI poses a threat to world stability? “If you mean authoritarian intelligence, of course it’s something to be worried about. AI is intelligence, but not in the same way as our brain is. It’s intelligence that can produce coherent language with no lived experience.”

The important thing to remember, she says, is that AI is there to serve us, not vice versa. Tang distinguishes between artificial general intelligence (creating a machine smarter than humans) and augmented collective intelligence (using these technologies to enhance human decision-making). “If AI is used in an authoritarian way, we have to demand it is steered into something more assisting. We need to recognise our power as people to say no or yes to technology.”

Tang calls herself a conservative anarchist. “Anarchism to me means voluntary cooperation rather than resorting to coercion. And conservative means respecting the traditions of the 20 languages and 16 nations of Taiwan, but more generally respecting the institutional norms, no matter where you are, and innovating within them instead of destroying them.”

Now, her work in politics is done – for the time being. In June, she resigned from government – peacefully and collaboratively, of course – to focus on taking her vision to a wider audience. She wants us all to start listening, talking, bearing witness to truths, exposing non-truths and changing the world for the better.

Her dream is an open-source world without physical borders where we all share data and information for the common good. Taiwan has adopted her philosophy so wholeheartedly that it now offers residency to anybody who has made open-source contributions on the internet for eight years. As Tang talks, the song Imagine starts playing in my head: “You may say I’m a dreamer / But I’m not the only one / I hope someday you’ll join us / And the world will be as one.” I tell her I think she’s got a touch of the John Lennons about her. She smiles and nods. “It’s easy if you try,” she says.

• Plurality by Audrey Tang, E Glen Weyl and others is available to download at plurality.net