At 12, Audrey Tang left school to code; at 15, she created her own start-up. Today, this retired 34 year-old, who describes herself as a "conservative anarchist," creates tools to reinvent democracy.

Article published on Rue89 "Audrey Tang, programmeuse géniale, « hacke » la politique à Taïwan" by Claire Richard, translated by: Nico {at} nicophotography.com

中文版 - 傑出程式員唐鳳「駭進」臺灣政治

She has a sweet voice, oval face and black hair gathered at the back of her neck. When she enters the "coworking" space where we rendezvous, she takes off her sandals and settles in the lotus position on a chair.

Gifted, self-taught programmer (she left school at 12), early entrepreneur (first start-up before she was 15) she grew up with one foot in the world of Silicon Valley and the other in the free Internet.

Born man, she changed gender and name in 2005. Having been "Retired" for two years, now 34, she devotes herself to political action and is working to create tools for social change.

The following is a meeting between Rue89 and a "civic hacker" as she describes herself.

"I drew a computer on paper"

Audrey Tang fell in programming like others in reading or drawing : with passion and wonder at age 8.

"I already loved math, and one day I came across programming books at home. I was immediately hooked by the logical and mathematical side, but I did not have a computer so I drew on sheets of paper. I pressed the buttons and wrote what the computer would have produced.

So I learned programming without a machine. It is very educational : programing became right then a way of thinking."

Soon, her parents bought her a real computer. A few months later, she wrote her first program: an educational game for her little brother.

Audrey Tang did not grow solely in Taiwan. Her father is a PhD candidate in Germany. He studies the Tiananmen student movement, which he found by chance in 1989 and which has had great impact:

"I grew up among activists who struggled a lot, especially with the democratic process."

Little, Audrey traveled a lot : the family moved almost every year, according to the movements of her father.

A (very) young self-taught entrepreneur

In 1993, they returned to Taiwan. Audrey was 12 years old, it was time for her to enter high-school. At the same time, in Switzerland, Tim Berners-Lee and his team invented the World Wide Web. The young programmer had already dragged on the Internet, but the arrival of the Web suddenly opened up immense horizons. And it is hard to see how it could be explored at school:

"With the Web, it was suddenly obvious that I was going to learn everything I wanted directly from the researchers themselves. At school it was going to take ten years for it to be taught! The researchers that I contacted were very enthusiastic.

And so, in consultation with the director of the school and my family, I left school."

She said that without affectation, as if it were the simplest thing in the world. She did not return.

Then everything went very fast. She created a start-up with some friends, a search engine for Mandarin lyrics. It worked very well very quickly, and Intel invested in the young company:

"This was the era of dot-com. The software industry was not highly developed in Taiwan and we received a lot of attention. "

"I wanted to give back to the Web"

The web in the 90s was a time of excitement: all was to build, governments were still not present, and all the dreams of self-management were permitted. Audrey Tang was very active in several Web communities:

"I learned a lot from the web and wanted to give back. "

She invested herself in the communities of open source code developers:

"Our entire start-up was coded in Perl [a programming language] and there was a lot of collaboration and mutual support among programmers. And we already wondered how we could transfer this kind of behavior into the city. "

She translated in Mandarin several programming books and got involved in Wikipedia, Freenet ...

In the open source movement, she discovered "a safe space where we can learn from each other, rather than impose our desires or wishes to others. The results are not perfect. But it's okay because it's an iterative process, where one constantly takes things, we go back on it ... "

A policy of consensus and coding

At the same time, she discovered The Internet Engineering Task Force, a group of engineers and programmers, informal but very important in the construction and development of the Internet.

There is no formal membership, one becomes a member by participating in it, everyone is a volunteer and documents published by the organization are extensively discussed online, in the form of RFC "Request for Comments".

The motto of the group is: "We believe in rough consensus and working code. "

Audrey:

"This is the first political system that I heard off, everything was very organic and interactive. "

In 1997, she left her start-up to become a consultant (she was then 17 ). And she plunged into works of philosophy, social studies, literature. She wanted to understand "the complex behaviors that we see in space that we build online".

The Internet of that time still serves as a model to think the current policy - self-management, cooperation, trust in the collective intelligence and the role the right tools to create places of talk and consensus:

"These are the values that have fed me for the last twenty years, and nourish my approach to technology. "

So much so that she sees herself as "conservative" ultimately from the point of view of the history of the Web:

"I am a conservative anarchist. It may seem contradictory: anarchy is often associated with utopia, a dream world set in the future. But I've experienced this "utopia" for over twenty years: it is the anarchy of the Net I want to keep. "

g0v: open data

After twenty years of "normal life as an entrepreneur from Silicon Valley" ("I created a new start-up and I sold it, and yet another that I sold again ...") she decided to retire. She was 33 years old. When you widen your eyes a little, she said:

"I completely skipped higher education, I worked twenty years and then I'm retired. Seen like that, it's not that crazy. "

Then she laughs like a delighted child.

Today, she has returned to Taiwan. She continues to do consulting for some companies (including Apple) and especially works remotely. Most of her time, she goes to much political projects.

The first coordinated actions began when the Taiwanese government launched a video on the occasion of a complex economic reform in 2012. The video showed citizens overwhelmed by law (that appears above their heads):

Audrey recalls:

"The message was essentially:" It's too complicated for you, but do not worry, trust us. "

It was really insulting. "

In response, a group of hackers decided to release government budget data and make them available to the public on a website clear, readable and pretty. Audrey joined two months later. They were soon called "g0v.tw".

The name comes from a diversion of the extension of government sites, ".gov". To find the site "open data" corresponding to any site of a ministry, just change the "o" to "O" (zero) in the URL)

How to motivate lazy people ?

To create visualisations, you have to scan a lot of data. "g0v" appealed to "crowdsourcing", but they had to find a technical solution for people involved:

"If we had asked people to copy an entire page of numbers in an Excel table, that would have taken maybe four minutes.

On the Internet, it is already too long : people can find instant gratification elsewhere, they can simply "like" or "share" on Facebook in seconds.

It should not take more than a minute: it is the limit on the Internet. "

So they cut the huge amount of data in very small tasks that take a few seconds to transcribe as "captchas". To motivate people, they add badges, measuring rods that count the number of completed captchas ...

"It takes five seconds and it really feels like you're helping the country! This is both useful, simple, rewarding and fun. This is the key of crowdsourcing: whenever there is a way to measure the progress of the player, people can spend hours without sleep to finish the game! "

The project attracted approximately 9000 people within 24 hours. Today, there are versions "g0v" of all the major sites of Taiwanese ministries: Educational, Labour, Health, etc. All code is open source:

"For we want the government to merge with the project, if it works. And besides, it was incorporated by the city of Taipei, which just announced it would make public the budget data in a format compatible with "g0v". "

Offline, g0v organises regular hackathons for intellectuals, activists and hackers to meet-up. They are also open to beginners and non-specialists:

"People want to learn from each other. They do not care a lot of ideology or politics behind, but they really want to learn from each other. "

The Sunflower Movement

The news would soon give g0v the opportunity to invest more directly in politics.

In Spring 2014, Taipei students took to the streets to protest against the ratification by the Parliament of a trade treaty with China, allowing China to invest heavily in several sectors. The vote took place without debate and students denounced both the denial of democracy and the risk of Chinese interference.

On March 18, students occupied the parliament. Very quickly, mobilizing images unfurled on social networks, occupants took the sunflower, symbol of hope, as their emblem.

Audrey Tang immediately got involved with the movement - but not in the Parliament:

"I stayed in Parliament a few hours, the time to install some cables and tweeter. But in Parliament, there were five cameras constantly filming and were broadcasting images. It was the "Truman Show"! All that was happening was a pure performance, ritual and very conscious of itself.

The real debate, the real action, this was happening in the streets around Parliament. "

In this movement, Tang does not see her role as that of a rebel. What interests her is not going to occupy the Parliament nor take position herself - but to create tools to promote this great freedom of speech which was in the making.

"Most of the technologies we have deployed in Taiwan were neutral: they were intended to encourage people to talk, that's all. We had a very strong code of neutrality. "

She created with a group of hackers a website where these discussions were broadcasted live, recorded and archived (transcripts were also crowdsourced). She says these tools allowed the gradual emergence of a consensus:

"Every day, people saw on the site how in the streets surrounding Parliament, very different people could live together. Separatists, leftists, environmentalists ... They deliberated and exchanged ideas.

There has emerged a louder consensus. And this convergence was reflected in the elections this fall. "

A movement in front of the cameras

The movement was largely filmed. Tang suggested the field team install a screen on the facade of the Parliament, which retransmited the debates that took place. There were cameras everywhere, to what Tang attributed the general calm of the movement:

"Police and demonstrators behaved reasonably. They knew that 60,000 people were watching. There were slogans, songs, but it did not get out of control. "

On March 25, 500,000 people took to the streets, a sunflower in hand. Every 500 meters, screens retransmited the event live:

"It was a demonstration of power - but citizen power. "

The government announced that the treaty would not be signed. Immediately, protesters started to clean the streets.

Former Google employee at the head of government

Tang explains:

"The political landscape has changed after that. People began to demand that political decisions are the result of a deliberative democracy, not just elected officials. "

At the following election in the fall, new political heads emerged. The capital, Taipei, elected as mayor a doctor who campaigned as an independent. The Prime Minister of Taiwan is replaced by a former engineer. His Deputy Prime Minister is also an engineer, who worked at Google several years. In the cabinet, there is a minister who headed the legal department of IBM Asia.

"This new political generation speaks the language of "Occupiers". They said: "You said you could do better than legislators. Prove it now. "And that's what we have been doing since. "

Since the beginning of the year, in the wake of occupations and in a context where other activists work to maintain hope of a revolution, Tang strives to create ways to make the voice of the citizens heard in the political space.

So, inspired by the RegulationRoom project of Cornell University, g0v volunteers built a platform of "e-rulemaking" participatory democracy allows individuals concerned to discuss some law-making projects and bills.

"We use only for subjects where Internet users are most concerned. "

In these debates (filmed, transmitted, transcribed ...), Tang is moderator ("As I am retired, I am neutral: I have no interest in play") and ensures the smooth flow of the debate.

To encourage debate on other complex issues related to digital (Uber, Airbnb, Bitcoin), she has also helped designing a platform for debate:

"This is a platform to explore issues and find solutions, to say" yes "or" no "to proposals already made. "

The idea of the platform is to allow constructive debate. All design decisions of the platform are designed to facilitate inclusion in the discussion - which is for example, to make all the discussions easily accessible and contextualized:

"The centralization of power does not come from its concentration in one place, but because the latest arrived are less familiar with the context than those who make the laws. We try to bridge this process: in two hours, anyone interested can understand the whole context of the discussion. "

"Making people talk authentically"

Would she like to invest in traditional politics?

" Not at all ! We're looking at alternatives. We do not need to be perfect – We just need to be better than what already exists "

Platform after platform, site after site, she works for the advent of a more inclusive democracy, open, more representative and more just.

And finally this position has very intimate consequences. The idea:

"Making people talk authentically, allowing them to express their feelings without fear of repercussions.

Censorship, including self-censorship is a malfunction. Refusing censorship is an inherently political and radical position. "

She applies this position in her life. For Audrey was born Autrijus, a boy. In recent years, she has transgendered:

"I'm post-genre. I do not want to take sides in the war of the sexes. It's not that I think it is not important, but I think that war will not solve anything."

Audrey Tang, in many ways, seems to embody a face of the possible future: peaceful and humane, with tools that do not isolate but bring closer, do not promote consumerism but politics, does not look for controversy but actual dialogue and mutual aid.

Fifty years ago, she might have been a hippie. Today she's a hacker.

And it's reassuring about the world to come.