Audrey Tang: preference

Transcript context

…You didn’t go through the cycle of being educated in the United States the way many Taiwanese do. Do you think that’s given you a different perspective? I don’t know. The IETF and the internet itself maybe is really the American experiment’s value, the United States’ value — the value the United States written in a ’70, ’80s kind of view in code. By working with internet technologies, by working with the implicit assumption of freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and of press, end-to-end innovation, and permissionless innovation, and things like that, I’m more imbued in the internet scene, more imbued American value in the internet than a traditional education in the States would, I think. Of course, nowadays, the internet governance is multicultural and there’s multicultural internet domain names, but we’re still using ASCII, which the A in ASCII is “American.” The idea that the American values imbued in the internet are somehow universal of course are now being challenged, but it’s not lost. I think the core internet is still very much the values of the United States. In 2014, you were part of a group of activists that occupied Taiwan’s parliament building. What was your thinking behind participation in that activity? What were you hoping to accomplish? What did you see as the tradeoffs?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.