Taiwan Tried to Digitize Democracy. It Was a Huge Flop
In 2014, when hundreds of student protesters occupied Taiwan’s legislature for 23 days to protest a proposed trade agreement with China, a young civic hacker named Audrey Tang helped the students livestream their protests—giving the public an ad hoc forum to debate the merits of the trade pact. The victory of Taiwan’s Sunflower Student Movement was seismic: Not only was the pact scrapped, but it showed citizens that creating and nurturing civic spaces could bring participatory democracy down to the grassroots while also bringing it online.
In the wake of the protests, Tang and a group of civic hackers involved in the movement called g0v (pronounced gov-zero) launched vTaiwan, an online discussion platform that solicits public comment on policy issues. (To facilitate this, the platform uses a surveying tool called Pol.is, which maps opinions and draws participants toward finding a consensus.) After Tang joined the government in 2016 as Taiwan’s first digital minister, vTaiwan was used to make dozens of policy recommendations such as regulating online alcohol sales and resolving an impasse between Uber and taxi drivers.
At first, it appeared to be a promising weapon against the polarized, engagement-driven infrastructure of the modern internet, used to “track the root and derive shared wisdom from flame wars, turning flame wars into co-creation,” Tang said in a September speech at the Concordia Summit.