— Why Citizens Can No Longer Wait —
Four years ago I interviewed Audrey Tang — Taiwan’s first Digital Minister and one of the most original thinkers on democracy alive today. We talked about radical transparency, citizen participation, and what it actually takes to build trust between people and their institutions.
This conversation stayed with me.
Today, watching democracies fray at the edges, watching algorithms decide what we see and what we think, watching citizens grow more passive precisely as the stakes grow higher — I feel the urgency of that conversation more sharply than ever. Not as a political argument. As a personal obligation.
Audrey Tang’s core insight is deceptively simple: radical transparency means making government transparent to the people — not the people transparent to the state. In Taiwan, this meant publishing meeting transcripts, livestreaming policy debates, opening petitions to anyone — even under a pseudonym. It meant building vTaiwan, a participatory platform that used AI not to sort people into camps but to find where they actually agreed. Trust in government climbed from 9% in 2014 to over 70% by 2020. Not because politicians became more trustworthy. Because citizens became more present.
That distinction matters. Tang didn’t wait for government to invite participation. Civil society built its own tools, its own platforms, its own legitimacy — and then the government had to respond. “The civil society really takes full responsibility,” Tang told me, “instead of relying on the government.” That sentence has stayed with me ever since.
We are living in a moment when AI is accelerating faster than democratic institutions can respond. When disinformation is not an occasional disruption but a daily operating environment. When the algorithms that shape what we see, what we believe, who we think we are — are owned by a handful of companies with no democratic mandate whatsoever. In this context, waiting for governments to act is not patience. It is surrender.
The obligation is ours. Not as an abstract civic duty — but as something each of us must practise in our daily lives:
- Demand transparency from the institutions that govern you.
- Participate in public consultations, even when they feel performative.
- Support platforms and tools that elevate bridging ideas rather than outrage.
- Refuse to outsource your thinking to an algorithm.
- Question the frame before you accept the argument.
This is not comfortable. Conditioning — the invisible architecture of habit, convenience and deference — makes passivity feel natural. It takes active, ongoing effort to stay awake inside a democracy. To insist on seeing clearly. To act from what you actually find rather than from what you have been handed.
Audrey Tang calls democracy a social technology. Like any technology, it needs people who know how to use it — and who refuse to let it fall into disuse. The question is not whether our democracies are worth saving. The question is whether enough of us are willing to do the daily, unglamorous, necessary work of being citizens rather than consumers.
We cannot wait any longer to start.