Open Conversations: Healing Democracy (Audrey Tang)

[Music] hello I'm Audrey Tong uh I served as taiwan's digital Minister for8 years nowadays I'm touring around the world with a new book called plurality it is a uh distillation of the work we did in the past 10 years in Taiwan whereas many democracies are facing the challenge of polarization of populism of people feeling lonely and angry uh we're showing if you use the technology to build Bridges not tear people apart then those Technologies can help to heal democracy so plurality means there are many many different people with different ideas different religions different ethnicities and so on but instead of seeing the conflict that is the result of those differences is something you need to put out something you need to suppress something you need to harmonize you can think of it like energy before we see fire on the ground and we say oh it's fire let's put it out but now we say oh there's oil underneath let's drill for energy right so the same goes for a Democratic [Music] Society instead of building something that is perfect and then showing it what I really like about the funding the commer Community is that people openly talk about failures talking about issues that are instrumental uh things that really didn't work right um and so this particular venue funding the commos brings together not just The Visionaries but also the actual Engineers that can make such Visions even more feasible for the future Generations because usually the first time you try something it is very costly very expensive a lot of trial and error but with the fundings that Commons Community we can then bring the practitioners in other places and they learn oh this is possible and then they use their resources to scale it up to scale it out to scale it more deeply and it is very rare that in a single event we have like people in a very rural very uh place-based communities talking about scaling relationship deeply we have people who are in the decentralized uh governance Community uh to talk about scale in out very quickly with open Technologies and we have entrepreneurs and investors and so on to talk about how to scale up such ideas and so I think it is really a multi-dimensional view that can take a good idea a good adjacent possible a new future and then very quickly find all different dimensions that can bring it into a near-term [Music] reality I often like to put quot L Cohen uh in one of his poems and it goes like this uh ring the bells that still can ring forget your perfect offering there is a crack a crack in everything and that is how the light gets in if we can build the bridges that bring the diversity of perspectives together then we can make policies we can make Futures that are much better because of the creative potential of those differences