Audrey Tang
Civic hacker, co-author of «Plurality» (with Glen Weyl) and the forthcoming «Civic AI» (with Caroline Green). She is a Carnegie Distinguished Fellow at the Institute of Global Politics, Columbia SIPA and an inaugural Senior Accelerator Fellow at the Oxford Institute for Ethics in AI.
She served as Taiwan's first Minister of Digital Affairs (2022–2024), preceded by six years as Minister without Portfolio for Digital Affairs (2016–2022), and is the world's first nonbinary cabinet minister. Tang was instrumental in the g0v (gov-zero) network and played a pivotal role in the 2014 Sunflower Movement, facilitating digital consensus-building during the occupation of Taiwan's legislature. As Digital Minister, she implemented radical transparency through participatory democracy platforms like vTaiwan and Join, with innovations such as the "Mask Map" during COVID-19 and defenses against cyber interference in the 2024 elections.
In 2025, Tang received the Right Livelihood Award - often called the Alternative Nobel - "for advancing the social use of digital technology to empower citizens, renew democracy and heal divides."
Sessions
This talk is built from the questions you post and upvote in the Meerkat on this page. Audrey Tang, Taiwan's cyber ambassador and first digital minister, sorts them into six clusters: attentiveness, responsibility, competence, responsiveness, solidarity and symbiosis.
Each cluster gets a short take and a link to the next. Two questions run through the whole tour: What should stay private and what should anyone be able to verify? Are shared norms held in code or upheld by people? Votes choose the best question in every cluster. Every cluster gets its turn.
Audrey Tang and Vitalik Buterin climb toward that question one level at a time, taking the questions the room upvotes in the Meerkat they share with Audrey's talk, which runs just before.
Level one covers everyday failures: an agent that makes a mistake, or one tricked from outside. Level two is the hard case, where no one can simply take the model makers' word, and asks what anyone can still check.