The technologist, one of the winners of the 2025 Right Livelihood Award, promotes the social use of technology, which has led her to create, for example, a system against online child sexual abuse.

Audrey Tang (Taipei, 44) uses her hacker skills, her 180 IQ, and her position as Taiwan's first digital minister, which she has held for almost 10 years , to make the internet a safer place. She wants the network to serve its users, not the other way around. Although she doesn't believe in a democracy without technology, she tries to reduce the time she spends online by keeping her screens grayscale and avoiding compulsive content consumption. She also maintains that "Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a parasite that is dividing humans."

 

For "promoting the social use of digital technology to strengthen citizen participation, renew democracy, and heal divisions," Tang has just won one of the 2025 Right Livelihood Awards, known as the alternative Nobel Prize. The awards ceremony will be held on Tuesday, December 2, in Stockholm.

Tang is the first transgender minister in Taiwan's cabinet history. She emerged from g0V , a collective of technologists working to develop a transparent model of government in Taiwan. Their work laid the groundwork for the 2014 Sunflower Movement , when hundreds of young people took over the Taiwanese parliament in protest of the passage of a secretly negotiated trade deal with China. She believes that the internet—although fraught with conflict and polarization—has the power to give citizens a direct role in policymaking and restore trust in the state: “The first thing I did when I entered the government was to try to gain the trust of the citizens. Taiwan was completely divided, but in 2020, we managed to go from a 9% to a 70% citizen approval rating.”

In nearly a decade in office, Tang declared broadband internet a human right, created a mask map during the coronavirus pandemic to report on mask availability in real time, and has organized several campaigns against misinformation and deepfakes (AI-manipulated videos or images). He also created the Robust Open Online Safety Tools (ROOST) for the 2025 Paris AI Summit, a decentralized and collaborative system that helps detect cases of child sexual abuse through platforms like Bluesky and Roblox.

We don't need a higher intelligence to save us because we're already a super-intelligent species. We just need to move from singularity to plurality.

No democracy is an island

At 15, Tang decided to drop out of school and began working with his father, who at the time was a political advisor to one of the presidential candidates: “I got involved in politics at a very young age and realized that the internet was here to change everything. The network listens to and amplifies the needs of real people, not just opinion leaders .”

Now, Tang is dedicated to training leaders in other countries. In the United States, for example, he helped Gavin Newsom , governor of California, create a platform called Engaged California to generate a collective voice that speaks on behalf of all the citizens affected by the wildfires that devastated the area earlier this year.

She also works with Japan, from where she granted the interview to this newspaper. Takahiro Anno is a Japanese science fiction writer, AI engineer, and political figure who read Tang's book Plurality last year. With one month to go until the Tokyo gubernatorial elections, he decided to run for office. No one knew him, but he created a platform based on Tang's principles to try to address citizens' main problems. Anno obtained more than 1% of the vote, or more than half a million. Many young people believed in his proposal, and he later formed a party called Team Mirai . "I help other countries because, although we seem to have solved the problem of polarization in my country, no democracy is an island, not even Taiwan," says the minister.

Digital democracy as bubble tea

“In Taiwan, the internet and democracy literally emerged at the same time,” Tang explains. The first personal computer was created in the 1980s and coincided with the 1987 lifting of martial law , a dictatorship imposed after World War II when the country returned to the control of the Republic of China after the withdrawal of Japanese forces. In total, it was 38 years of political repression: “Our first presidential election was in 1996, right around the time the first web search engines were created, so for us, one cannot exist without the other.” In a video posted on Instagram, the minister explains while preparing bubble tea , a typical Taiwanese drink: “It's like tapioca and tea, impossible to separate.”

Tang believes that for as long as technology has existed, humans have imagined the future in the same way: “We will create a robot that will then help design new versions. Eventually, those robots will no longer need human help to reproduce, and they will finally dominate us.” Tang calls this type of thinking “singularity,” which, she says, is accepted even in Silicon Valley, where she was already working at 16: “Many people at the world’s leading tech companies believe that the human species is an incubator for future species that will inevitably do whatever they want to us.” But she doesn’t see it that way: “We don’t need a higher intelligence to save us because we are already a super-intelligent species. We just need to move from singularity to plurality.”

The plurality Tang speaks of is cooperation between opposites: “Instead of treating conflict as if it were a volcanic explosion that must be extinguished imminently, we should seek out that magma, that reactive energy that arises from disagreement, to find solutions and create a kind of geothermal plant to withstand the heat.”

Instead of treating conflict as if it were a volcanic explosion that must be extinguished imminently, we must seek that magma, that reactive energy that arises from disagreement, to find solutions.

That's what she did with ROOST , the online anti-child sexual abuse system she co-created: "It emerged from joining forces to improve a very dangerous field." She explains that today anyone can be a producer of Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM), a crime that is very difficult to trace. "In some countries, certain types of images aren't considered profane, but in others they are. Therefore, a single surveillance model would be obsolete," Tang explains.

ROOST seeks to close existing gaps in digital security by providing each community with essential, tailored tools and seeking solutions that provide the necessary protection. For example, to avoid sharing sensitive graphic material, Tang says they decided to convert all images to text, which is legal and protects the victims' privacy. "This is what I mean by plurality: we humans have to unite so that technology becomes our user, not the other way around," he concluded.

Ana Cristina Castellanos Cervantes, El País Spain