The Death of the Gods by Carl Miller

Author:Carl Miller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House

The Civic Hackers

Audrey Tang had always been fascinated with programming and computers. She came from a family of activists, and her parents said she was reading classical literature in a variety of languages and solving simultaneous equations in first grade.29 With all the hallmarks of a child prodigy, she left school at fourteen, and by sixteen had founded her first company, a start-up that built a search engine for Mandarin-language song lyrics. She moved to Silicon Valley and worked as a consultant for Apple, reportedly earning one bitcoin an hour.10

In 2012, Audrey was back in Taiwan. Then in her early thirties, she announced her ‘retirement’ and moved back to see how the internet could be used for the public good. The world economy was reeling from the recession, and the Taiwanese government announced a massive stimulus package that they hoped would reinvigorate the economy. They called it the Economic Power-up Plan.

To promote the Economic Power-up Plan, the government produced an advert. It showed four people: a young man, a ship owner, a female office worker and an elderly woman, all staring cluelessly at a sign reading: ‘The Economic Power-up Plan’.‘What exactly is the Economic Power-up Plan? We would very much like to explain it to you in simple words,’ a voice cuts in. ‘But it is impossible due to the complexity … The most important thing is that a lot of things are being done. We might as well run until our legs break instead of just simply talking,’ the voice concludes.

‘It was insulting,’ said Audrey. What had really been advertised was a government who saw no value in explaining complicated policies to their citizens, and no way to. It wasn’t just the tone of the message that was insulting; it was the message itself. This wasn’t the way that politics should work.

Taiwanese YouTubers began to flag the video as fraudulent. So many, indeed, that YouTube removed the video, and suspended the government’s account. ‘A government account being suspended by YouTube … Our government has became a global joke,’ a legislator said later.30

In the wake of the video, a group, including Audrey, came together with a call to ‘fork the government’. It was the language of software developers, in which a ‘fork’ means to take a piece of software down a different path, forking off from the main version. They called themselves Gov Zero – or just Gov – and they wanted to build new ways for citizens to understand what government was doing – and to challenge government to become more open to citizens too. It was a fork, in their eyes, towards a government that was more transparent.

Gov was intended to be one button press away from government: a ghost, a shadow to the official websites. Throughout 2013, dozens of new ‘civic remixes’ got off the ground. Often they simply scraped government websites and found ways of making the data they found more accessible to normal users. They set up fact.gov.tw, a website for presenting complicated information in the form of simple timelines.

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