Welcome to How to Citizen with Baritune Day, a podcast that reimagine citizen as a verb, not a legal status. This season is all about tech and how it can bring us together instead of tearing us apart. We're bringing you the people using technology for so much more than revenue and user growth. They're using it to help us. Citizen Here in the US, the idea of social media and democracy, well, I'm not sure they even belong in the same sentence. Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and read it.
They tend to just be echo chambers with an abundant supply of the most niche groups, so you can be surrounded by your own choir. But there is a country where this isn't necessarily the case. Today. We're going to Taiwan. I repeat thai Wan. The Taiwanese government has essentially put
its entire democratic system online and it works now. Of course, they have some exceptional policies in place, like they've got universal broadband as a human right, virtual town halls and a phone line get this where citizens can talk to real people in the government about their problems. And if that still isn't enough for a Taiwanese citizen to have their voice heard, they can schedule on one on one meeting with the person at the center of all this.
Every Tuesday from ten am to ten pm, the Digital Minister of Taiwan, Audrey Tongue, holds open office hours. Her only request, you got to allow the conversation to be recorded and uploaded online in the name of radical transparency. And look, I'm not a citizen of Taiwan, but she pen sold me in for some office hours of our own. I say this without exaggeration. Audrey's accomplishments started at birth due to a heart defect. As a toddler, she had to train her body to keep her heart rate down
by practicing Daoist meditation techniques as a toddler. And when it came to her education after discovering the Internet, that did drop out once when I was eight, once when I was ten, once when I was twelve. So anyway, yeah, I I've had three kindergarten, six primary schools, and one year of middle high serial drop out, if you will. When I was in middle school, student was for a scene.
I talked to the head of the school saying, look, I discovered this thing called the wild Web, and I found out that the cutting edge knowledge is being created on the web, and my textbooks were willfully out of date. The head of the school, after she listened to me for a couple of minutes describing this new thing called the wild web, she said, okay, tomorrow, and you don't
have to go to my school anymore. Instead of eight hours after school, you can't spend sixteen hours a day during these She started her first company at age fifteen, and that eventually led to her joining a community of civic hackers technologists to innovate without permission, but in this case not for financial gain or to prove they can break into a system, but instead for the public good.
In after a series of protests in Taiwan, she was appointed Taiwan's first Digital Minister, going from outsider to insider hacker to cabinet minister. She's a believer in an advocate for open data, open governance, and civil society government collaboration without further ado. Audrey Tom Hello, Audrey, greetings, good luck at time, good local time. Nice to meet you. Thank you for joining us. You are the first cabinet minister I will have ever had on any show of mine.
This is very exciting for me. Here's too many more so it sounds like you grew up online? Is that a fair way of describing choosing your education to happen this way? Especially? That's right, I would say I I migrated to the Internet when I was fourteen ish, so I'm not a digital native, but a young immigrants, if you will, young digital immigrant, digital migrant. So so what has that meant for you? To have such early, intense and regular access to this new world formerly new world?
And it's time? I was motivated by a open research questions why do people who have never met each other trust each other so quickly online? It's a phenomena called swift trust. Of course, in the more antisocial coiners of social media, it also means swift distrust. People come to hate each other very intensely. Yes, we do. How does that come about? I was very much motivated by that question, so I found it a startup A year after I dropped out and become a kind of serial entrepreneur and
explored through various ways. My first startup was the Taiwanese equivalent of eBay, and later on moved to found many other companies and all explored how to get people trust each other reasonably online instead of on the spaces where it's more antisocial that that's been my research topic for the past twenty five years. I guess what are your conclusions right now about the answer to that question, Well,
it needs to be fast, fair, and fun simultaneously. If a space is fast in getting people's ideas into collective intelligence, if the common good the shared value is derived quickly in a fair fashion. And finally, if for each minute of participation people feel there's an intrinsic fun in it, then the phosphere fun ensures approse social interaction online fast, fair, and fun. They all start with F, so there's like
a poetry to it. Like it the fun part. For example, we apply to our counter disinformation strategy and time when they call it humor over a rumor, Oh oh, I like that one. UM. Early in your career, you were part of the formation of something known as GOV zero. What was GOV zero and why was it needed? So GO zero was and still is. UM this idea of
forking the government. Now fork in free software means taking something, not hitting it off, but taking it to a different direction, with the hope, of course, that one day it's merged back in. So for all the government websites in taide one something that g o V that ke w oh yeah, that gov websites. Yeah right. The zero folks just built
parallel shadow government websites. So for each digital service that the people doesn't quite like, into the protesting they demonstrate by changing oh to a zero in the browser bar, and you get into the shadow government, which is more fast, fair and fun. Okay, I want to play that back
and make sure I'm understanding what you're saying. Everyone listening to this, we understand the concept of a government website at that geo V. As you mentioned, they're not always the greatest websites that many of us have experienced, So go zero with you all. Initially we're doing was building that zero websites, you know, that were mirror versions of these government websites, offering the same information and services, but better, faster, fairer,
and more fun. That's exactly right. So for example, last February, we were rationing out medical great masks. We all remember the mask rationing. Yes, that's right, And and there's there's a government website that tallies the availability of masks in each and every pharmacy. Now, the equivalent of zero website is an interactive map where you can see very quickly which pharmacy near your residents still have some instack. And as you queue in line, there's also chatbots voice assistance
that would ensure this fair distribution of masks. And it is of course more fun. And this entire effort, this this civic hacking effort with all volunteer that's right, Uh, the volunteers. The number in like tens of thousands. And once people think of something that the government isn't doing very well, instead of protesting, we just do a demonstration as a demo, like showing everyone that hey, this could
be done this much better. That's okay. That's a novel, a creative and hyper useful form of activism where you just you show them up and you do it better. I want to know how you got into politics. A big moment for you was the Sunflower Revolution. Right, several hundred Taiwanese students are still occupying the island's parliament. They're protesting against a wide ranging trade deal signed between the Taiwanese government and China. A much seventies. One single congressman declare,
without anything, liberation. We've seen thirty seconds now don't let the name Sunflower Revolution fool you. The path to a digital democracy wasn't easy. As is often the case, big change takes an upright in March, a group of students climbed over the fence and occupied Taiwan's equivalent of the U. S. Capitol building. Now, before your mind goes there is not what you think. They didn't have guns. They had ethernet cads and a plan to talk and be hurt students
far from you know, violently protesting. They occupied the Parliament's t Terrian seat and started to delibrates the C S S T A to trade agreement line by line with anyone who cared to show up. Yeah, they were literally reading through parliamentary decisions line by line in hopes of finding consensus. But law enforcement they didn't see it that way.
M M. Their solution radical transparency. Audrey live stream the occupation to the streets of Taipei for the public to witness, so that people can see before their own eyes on a large projection screen outside the street. Was actually happening was a deliberation led by citizens within the parliament. So there's no room for rumor to grab. Had we not wired up the streets around the parliament. There will be cols because people will believe in for example, the rumors
about the students. We've seen the parliament was being attacked. There's a bunch of people who want to rush the police because they falsely believed that the students were in addenda. But because we weard it up sufficiently quickly, people can check that it's actually not what's happening. This moment was basically analog of zero. Instead of a shadow website, they created a whole shadow parliament, showing the politicians in their
own house how it's done. And they did this day in and day out, working to come up with their own rough consensus on each issue, including the trade agreement. Then, after three weeks of occupation, Parliament agreed to provide oversight for trade deals with China and the occupation ended. But the movement didn't stop there. In fact, many leaders in government got on board. Two years later, the election outsted the ruling party and made history by electing the first
female president sigh England. The government realized they had to listen to the people, and who did they turn to? Audrey Tom. This led to her role as Taiwan's first Digital Minister at just thirty five years old, opening the doors of Parliament to the hackers, the civic hackers, the civic hackers. That's a very important acknowledges. Yes, not all hackers, civic hackers. After the break of poetry reading by Minister Tongue, Yes, poetry.
You're not just a minister in department. You're the digital minister. What does that job mean? And was there a digital minister before you? No, I'm the first digital minister. I wrote my own job description. Can you share your I think I've read some of this job description, but can you share your job description with me? Sure it's pinned on my Twitter actually, so I'll just read it. When we see the Internet of things, let's make it an internet of bees. 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 the singularity is, let us always remember the plurality is here. That's poetry, it is, I mean, politician, you're just call yourself a poetician. You know you are full of innovations and surprises. Minister One of the things that I've heard about and the most excited to spend our time on
today is V Taiwan. Can you define what V Taiwan is and how it's used in your society. V Taiwan was actually the work of Meat as civic hacker UM and I became Digital Minister around two years after which so during those two years, for example, we worked on a way to get people's voices where people can write their own nuanced ideas about emerging issues like at the
time Uber. When Uber first came to Taiwan, they work with drivers with no professional license called sharing economy, and this of course incited many texts chriver to start the protest, and instead of people just shouting at each other like a showdown, we built a space called polish through Echaiwan project where people can say I care about insurance and up voted and downloaded each other, but with no reply button, and then the rough consensus, just like in the Sunflower movement,
end up getting ratified. So Uber is now a legal taxi company in Taiwan. You're describing an online community platform where people are sharing their opinions, their thoughts, their feedback or public services sometimes or private services like Uber, but you're using terms like rough consensus. And I experience a platform that lets me share my opinions about all kinds of things. It's called Twitter, it's called Facebook, but the
word consensus never comes to mind. So can you talk to me about how the Taiwan, in doing this surveying of the public and collecting all kinds of input, doesn't descend into a Twitter or Facebook like disaster zone. Well, as I mentioned, there's no reply button, right, no reply button that'll do it? Okay, Yeah, that that's that's really d D trick um Impolis, which you can check out, is a free software tool instead of the reply button. Uh,
there's a vote down vote, and there's this visualization. Don't worry. I know this is a podcast and you can't see the visualization's Audrey talking about. So I'm gonna help you. V Taiwan uses something called quadratic voting to build rough consensus. Think of two axes, and X that runs horizontally and a Y that runs vertically. Yeah, I'm taking you back to middle school. The X axis is your yea or nay, and the y is how strongly you feel about your yea,
your name. So Let's say your town is voting on a citywide compost collection measure. On one end of your X axis would be a yes. Compost on the other end, Nope, I ain't composting. But it doesn't stop there because the Y axis gauges how strong do you feel about those votes. Maybe you plan to vote no because you don't know that much about composting, but you heard it might stink up the city. You'd probably fall somewhere in the middle of the Y axis. The same could be said for
someone who's voting yes. They don't know much, but they hear it's quote unquote good for the environment, they too would fall some where in the middle of the Y axes. Once again, it doesn't stop there because users can continue to submit statements on composting, and the more you participate by up or down voting those statements, the more refined
your placement gets within this grid. So composting will take the equivalent of one million cars off the road that might lead to an up vote, or the budget will come out of the parks department that could lead to a down vote. The point is, as users start to form opinions on composting, wherever you fall on these scales, you get placed within one of the four quadrants, and as the votes tally up, you start to see clusters of like minded people, clusters that would be invisible to
you in a purely binary guest no world. And that's where the rough consensus begins to form. This moment brought
to you by Edge of Tune day, You're welcome. So it became a challenge, a game to find the things that could convince people at the other aisle, and people managed to agree on so after three weeks or so of unlike deliberation, we would end up always with this picture where people agree to disagree on a few ideological things like whether Ubert qualified as sharing economy or just give economy, But for most of the ideas, most people
agree actually with most of their neighbors. It's just a more antisocial corner of social media or mainstream media does not report those consensus around registration, insurance, not undercutting exist meters, and so on. I've heard many social scientists say that we actually agree a lot more than we know, and it sounds like you've got a system which visualizes that. It shows us how close we are to our neighbors, even if they're not our physical neighbors. Is it fair
to say you've kind of gamified consensus building. Yes, it's fair. And I would also say that people compete to get other people to agree to them, not by posting compromises, but posting innovations like new ideas that would unify people
previously of different aisles. But if people keep shouting at each other on the ideological points and there's no remaining bandwidth to innovate like that, If the government is faced with one hundred decisions and kind of a random easy number legislative policy regulatory for how many of them are you using v Taiwan two be open to citizen input. So the answer is all the petitions, all the regulations, all the budget items are up for public commentary and debate.
After I moved into the cabinet as the Digital Minister, Vita, I want kind of get merged back into the governments and we call it Join Join the g O v the t W. We also have a petition side like we the People, where people can post new ideas. Instead of waiting for the government to propose, people can propose their own ideas, like changing the time zone of Taiwan or banning plastic straws for bubble sees takeouts, which are
a real petitions. Uh. And then um, they get the ministry of point by point answer if they get five joining signature and and how you can since my um, surprise, my incredulity even a little bit, How seriously do people who work in government take all this beautiful visualized consensus of the people who don't work in government. Is it just like, oh, that's cute, the public wants something anyway, I'm gonna do what I want to do? Or is
there accountability to follow through on these public consensus conclusions? Well, if the petition did not get five thousand signatures, then often it gets ignored. That's of course true, because it means it more or less serves only a handful of people, and these people have not yet articulated the common purpose. So the majority of petitions did not meet five thousands thresholds.
But after it meets the five thousand threshold, there is regulatory level commitment from each minister that they will send a team what we call participation officers or pos, and around a hundred of these people in each ministry. They are legally bound to answer it in the point by
point fashion. And if this spuns across different ministries or could only be solved in the inter agency way, then I personally have most collaborative meetings twice amount to get those ideas from the civil society that benefits more than one ministry, because a single ministry cannot promise to answer them all. What type of regulation or rule or government action? More broadly are you most proud of or excited about?
That is the product of a v Taiwan process. One of the earlier successes is, of course the ratification of UBER and later on extending that to a more general platform economic principle. And there's also many environment related issues like banning plastic strolls from take how the public say that's actually something that's ratified And the petitioner was I think not even eighteen, just turned seventeen when she petitioned that. How do you make sure that a system like this
is it gamed or abused? Someone just gets a bunch of bots or a bunch of their friends too jack up the activity on a particular petition point to make sure it gets taken seriously, quote unquote, First of all, one has to register using the SMS number if someone try to get five thousand SIM cards, they will get noticed by the NIM only launching folks very quickly. So I'm not worried about that. And I imagine you know those people. Yeah, I do have those people, that's right.
So each person, of course participate using the SMS number, but they can to student names as so the petitioner, the young one that's this plastic straw banding. We only knew her as I love elephants and elephants love me for a very long time until she decided to show up. This is killing me. This is amazing. Um. What do you think v Taiwan has done for the relationship of the Taiwanese people to each other and to their government. Yeah,
I believe that this idea of social innovation. Previously, people think, oh they can join this community in their neighborhoods and to maybe redesign the park together or things like that. But I guess joint platform show that people who care about the same thing can also get this neighborhood's relationship very quickly online and act in a way that they
would on the physical town hall. We have this digital public infrastructure that functions the same as the town hall so that they're not forced to deliberate about important civic topics in the digital equivalent of nightclubs like Facebook. You
just call Facebook and nightclub. This is just amazing. It's amazing. Um, I don't know how many future forward looking innovations you could put into one person into one position, but you were, you were going for some kind of metal, some kind of gold medal for maximum innovation in civics and people powered government. Uh. We we got blockchain up in here now with the theory, and we got quadratic voting, We've got participatory budgeting, civic hacking. This is like the mecca
of of innovation and government services. But I also I'm trying to understand how within Taiwan do you have a sense for what share of the public is engaged in this new digitally enabled form of self governing. I believe most of the people are aware that they can actually set agenda for the ministry level decisions around pandemic prevention, especially just by picking up the phone. So a lot majority of people, I would say tens of millions of people,
because our ENTI bearer is really low. If you pick up your phone and call it this toll free number one night you too, and speak your mind about how you would like our counter epidemic effort to get better, and a sympathetic listener from the call center records that and write it up, and the next day on the two PM press conference, your idea may be implemented very quickly on this live stream because we've lowered the participation threshold,
and the phone lines just flooded with like foul language and hates because I'm just trying to imagine it's deployed in the US, and I don't hear thoughtful rants, you know people. I just see people screaming falsehoods into their phone all day. Yeah, and that's because of the frustration of not getting properly listened to. Right, it's venting, uh, this previous frustration. But because there's more than two million
cars last year alone, we take them very seriously. Right at last April, there was a young boy that calls saying, hey, you're rationing out mass But all I got was pink ones and all the boys in my class got navy blue. Once I don't want to wear pink to school, I refused to go to school. Do something about it. And then the very next day on two p M press conference, all the medical officers, including Ministruction were Pink and Mstr Chin. That helps. Mr even said Pink Panther was my childhood hero.
So so the boy became the most employing his class for oh, he has the color that the heroes were, and the heroes hero it is there and and our the idea that I could call and leave a voicemail and know that I was heard because a pretty high ranking government official. In fact, many the next day in this case are referencing my message. Do you have have
some very widely deployed natural language processing running too? Makes sense of all this audio not just the texting and the typing I get it's already kind of a machine readable, but just a bunch of audio files as well. How are you processing that? And very large call center and it's not voicemail. Actually I think more than nine of
them get into a sympathetic listener. So um, it's like a human being a human being professional and listening and answering in real time, okay, And we work on the assistant to support them like frequently ask questions and so on. By the end of the day, is that people who want to contribute to the society. Many volunteers actually working
in these call sentens. Okay, okay, this is Um. I I don't know whether I'm very proud of what you're doing in Taiwan or just exceedingly disappointed at what we're not doing in the state. The fact that I'm responding with such shock and awe and your delivery is just the calmest thing, like like it's natural, of course. Yeah, we're just staff, sympathetic people on phone lines for our citizens to talk like. I can't even finish saying that
without laughing. Again. Congratulations, minister, Um. Can you tell me about presidential Hackathan? Sure? And I'm aware that we're in the future. Um, thank you for acknowledging that I'm not entirely on another planet, just in a different time zone.
That's right, we're time zone travelers. So yeah. The presidential Every year, the president gave trophies to five teams, each one working on the sort of good zero like civic innovation for three months and through quadratic voting, Uh, they proved that their ideas has marriage in a smaller region. Helemeta Sin for example, using a app to motivate people instead of buying new plastic bottles using existing bortos to get free refills from the local community to reduce common footprint.
East Monscale experiments, once they received the trophy from the President, certainly become presidential promises, so I, like any executive agenda,
must be implemented within the presidential term. For example, readd our entire universal healthcare system which is pretty to begin with, to allow cure code helen medicine, which is very useful not just during the pandemic, but also for the remote islands, indigenous places and so one and all thanks to a small scale experiment by a very remote island which suffer a helicopter crash and decided to innovate. If you've been running the hakathon for four years and there are five winners,
that's twenty winning ideas. That's right. How many of those twenty have actually been implemented by the president or other parts of the government. UM I believe nineteen are implemented right now. And the other one because it requires collaboration with the anti money laundering people. It's a mission learning algorithm to preemptively, like Minority Report, identify money laundering activities that still in the works. Are there people who are
opposed to what you're doing with within Taiwanese society? Are there folks like this, we don't want this, We don't want the computers use this way, This is too much for government? Like is there resistance to whatso far sounds
like a very happy, very positive, very effective experience. In a sense, we are the resistance so um to to answer a question directly, there are people who initially feel threatened by the vito it's use of deliberative democracy, and they are the professional representatives in the parliament or city council.
They rightfully feel excluded from this crowd law agenda setting thing, and kind of fear that it will create populism to take their well deliberated norms away and just pass whatever the majority of people seems happy with and destroy democracy and things like that. So it was a real fear in twenty four seine. But then after twenty sixteen, which I became the Digital Ministry, introduced those platforms, they start to see that we're not taking over the legislative power.
What we're doing is essentially doing additional research and development before something that's ratified. What we've done is to get people's real feelings which cannot all get passed through the parliament to get people with the real feelings and needs and requirements and want to also join as co creators to propose solution by at the end of the day, the allocation of budget resources, the presidential mandates and so on,
these remain intact and democratically accountable. So in design thinking terms, we take care of the defined and the discovery part the first diamond, but the development and the delivery are still in the representative democracy. We have a similar process here in the US. It doesn't involve as much technology. It's a group of people called lobbyists and they figure
out what the legislators are supposed to do. It doesn't always match the will of the people on the ground, but it's probably just some bugs in the code and we're working it out. I'm sure we'll be as representative as Taiwan sometime in the near future. It's the great American experiment. Now I know it doesn't sound like it, but I can confirm that we do indeed live on
the same planet when we come back. We talked about Audrey's future outlook on the time when the government and how this can hopefully be applied to the United States. Mm hmmm, where do you see Taiwan's government in twenty years, Um, it will be higher, I guess, stronger, faster together, higher by about sixty centimeters. Um. It's a joke because towns caught between the Eurasian plate and the Philippines sea plate on the signs, and we got a lot of earthquakes
when they bumped together. But through yeah, I wasn't. I was like, I got a rising sea levels jokes. It's rising plate tectonics joke. So it's rising faster than sea levels at this moment anyway. So yeah, but but those earthquakes um is metaphoric. Right. We're caught between very different ideologies UM. For example, the privacy and personal data protection. We've got people who strongly believe in a more civiliance capitalism ideas of using data and it's called the US style.
But there's also a sizable chunk who remember and believes in the authority Hearian days in Taiwan, who believe in a more state controlled, state sponsored way of data use and so on. So we have to endure those ideological earthquakes and always innovate. For example, merriage equality, I think we're still the only Asian jurisdiction that implemented merriage quality.
We use the joint platform, among other methods, to get people's collaborative preferences into a new invention where when two same sex people wed, they only wed as individuals, but their families don't wet. There's no kinship relation. And this innovation UH is felt as good enough for everyone. So after twenty yes, after many such innovations at the top of Taiwan the Yushan Mountain, which grows by three sentimentaries every year, I guess we'll just keep growing and pointing
sat work. Where do you see UH the U S government In twenty years, I guess the great American experiment of reinventing democracy digitally will will catch up. I mean, there really is no reason why people have to viciously attack each other online. It's not a function of the people or the water, is the function of the space. UH. In design terms, this is UH an anti social design
or pro social design. So once people get into this um habit of posting online, I guess people will be able to make the difference between the digital equivalent of town halls, the public infrastructure that I've just mentioned, which in TWI sixteen, for the first time in Taiwan's history,
is classified as infrastructure budget. And I understand that the US to doing something very similar at this very moment, and people would not feel natural anymore to have pacivic discussion in the digital nightclubs with you know, people shouting to get heard and smoke field rooms with toxic drinks and private bouncers. Toxic drinks and private bouncers. Again, the best description of Facebook I've ever heard. This idea of
rough consensus. To me, it feels I like it because it's ambitious with humility, right, you know, I think a lot of folks think we want everybody to agree with each other. Will never get that, so why bother and the good enough nature of the consensus. We're in desperate need of even rough consensus here in the US we have a very big political divide. Are there things you think that our political system can learn from what you've
learned in the Timeanese political systems? There was a police conversation of virtual town hall in Bowling Green, Kentucky a couple of years ago Bowling Green, Kentucky. Yes, and regardless of which party they identify, with everyone thinks that we should put the arts into science, technology, engineering, and maths instead of stand let's make esteem. That's something people agree on. There should be more broadband vendor choices for a better service, and so on. So look, I do believe that those
ideologies help shape some of the debates. But there are like the arts teachers or the broadband connections. There are things that are just you know, infrastructure. There are things that in a cultural or scientific or educational sense, that's broadly a rough consensus. It's just that you have to ask about that specifically, and then you get those little hanging fruits. And when the mayors are the township leaders or governors adopt those idea, it also improved their chance
of getting reelected. Mm hmm. Well, how do you think about the the role of technology versus the role of humans in implementing positive, useful, pro social technology to help us govern ourselves better. I believe technologies aren't here to connect people with other people, so which is why I
call a assistive intelligence. They play the role of my eye class for example, which enabled me to see you better, but my eyeglass never pops out A uncle ustible advertised mephor ten seconds, right, that would not be aligned to my values. I'm sure someone is designing you know, sponsored glasses very soon, right, and I can fix it myself or take it to some repaired person uh nearby. And that means that it's accountable to also the person using it.
It's not locking uh in my choice of vendors, and so I don't have to pay someone a million dollar license features to fix my eye glass. So with these important UM guarantees of assistiveness, which includes of course accountability and alignment, it means that technologies stay customizable, which is
why it's not perfect, it's just good enough. And how to make good enough better lines in the edges right, and the people closest to the pain for the people using those technologies, there must be the ultimate arbit of how to modify those technologies. So without that, it's not assistive intelligence anymore, it would be authoritarian intelligence. And I
think both paths are possible into some degree. Both paths will be pursued depending on which part of the world we're talking about, even in the same time zone, yes, yes, even in the same time zone. UM. We call this show how to Citizen. We we interpret it as a verb, as a way of being in society, as a way of being part of a collective and contributing to that.
You are, obviously, to me, someone whose citizens hard right and then the best possible way if you could pass on some advice, how would you define citizen as a verb? What does it mean to do? How does it mean to be? Um? I'm reminded of my favorite quote from the singer songwriter Lenna Cohen from Canada, who said in the poem and a quote ring the bells that still can ring, forget your perfect offering. There is a crack, a crack in everything, and that's how the light gets in.
So to citizen is to be that light Poetician Audrey Tongue with the Leonard Cohen. Okay, okay, minister, thank you, minister Audrey Tongue for your time, pleasure. Is there something else I should have asked you? No, I think this is pretty complete, so I will add to maybe liftloin prosper Yes, I want to let you win on a little context for that interview because of Taiwan being so far a that interview ended for me here in l A at ten pm. And when I tell you that
I was vibrating at ten pm after that conversation. Literally I had to go take a walk afterwards. I don't understand how one person can be so inspiring and also so humble. I think what really moves me is the idea of being able to see, to really to visualize how I connect with someone in an affirmative way, whether it's a friend or a complete stranger. The dopamine from that would so far outweigh a retweet in my echo chamber that is social media. This concept of rough consensus.
It's really beautiful because nothing's perfect right, nothing's one size fits all, but there are overlaps, and in those overlaps that's where we innovate, where we learn, and most of all, where we get excited to come together and use our collective power. Next week, I talked to gen Z climate activists Jamie Markolan about where tech fits into solving climate change. Hint, it's not what I expected from a gen Z ear.
I think that there's a danger in putting too much faith in innovating our way out of this, Like I feel like there also has to be some respect for the natural technologies. And now that I've returned to Earth from Planet Audrey, it's time for some action. First, I want you to think about your personal power. When have you felt justified pushing against an authority in your life? How did you do it and did you achieve your goal? If not, why do you think no? And if so,
were there other unintended consequences? Next, I want you to get informed about this idea of open government. It's all well and good to say that government is we the people, but what could that actually look like. One example is Audrey's work, so we learn more about it at Digital Minister dot t w and if you want to go deeper, read the book Open Democracy by Helene Landmore. It's about
centering ordinary citizens in the democratic process. I actually saw Helene speak recently and she reminded me of some things that our season two guests Astra Taylor was saying about how ancient Greeks conscripted random people into civil service. Let's
regain some imagination about our power. Find Helene's book in our online bookstore at bookshop dot org, slash shop slash how do citizen in search social media for the hashtag open government to find more related thinkers and doers helping us govern ourselves Finally, practice sharing your voice on an issue you care about in a public forum, not just
social media though. For example, did you know you can comment on upcoming federal regulations at regulations dot GOVN I'm just logging in there, like dropping what's up all over these notice for proposed rulemaking. It's exciting, but the real action is local. So join a participatory budgeting initiative by searching online for participatory budgeting near me, or put your town or state's name there. Or try attending a virtual or live city or neighborhood council meeting and offering feedback
during the public comments section. Use your voice to influence a public issue. Flex that power. We've got links to all of this and more at how to citizen dot com and follow us on Instagram at how to Citizen. Tag us in your own posts about your participation. Thanks. How the Citizen with barrettun Day is a production of I Heart Radio Podcasts and dust Light Productions. Our executive producers are Me, barrettun Day, Thurston, Elizabeth Stewart, and Misha Yusuf.
Our senior producer is Tamika Adams, our producer is Ali Kilts, and our assistant producer Sam Paulson, Stephanie Cohne is our editor, Valentino Rivera is our senior engineer, and Matthew Lai as our apprentice. Original music by Andrew Eapen, with additional original music for season three from Andrew Clawson. This episode was produced and sound designed by Ali Kilts. Special thanks to Joel Smith from My Heart Radio and Rachel Garcia at dust Light Productions.