Audrey Tang Feng was born April 18 in 1981. If you’re into Perl programming, you know them as a community leader. If you’re way into Perl programming and aware of the, um, discussion around Perl 5 versus Perl 6, you know them as the leader of the Pugs project to implement a compiler for Raku (if you have no idea what I’m talking about here, don’t worry about it).
Anyway, if you follow open-source software, you might know Tang for the SVK version control system, or Ethercalc, or even SocialCalc. On the other hand, if you follow politics in Taiwan, you’ll know about Tang from the 2004 Sunflower Student Movement, when they helped protestors broadcast their message. On the basis of that, Taiwan’s prime minister invited Tang to create a media literacy school curriculum — it was adopted in 2017. Then Tang was appointed Minister for Digital Affairs, and finally the Digital Minister of Taiwan in 2016. They were the youngest minister in Taiwanese history. That particular ministry, though, functions a bit differently than all the others. There are no hierarchical relationships and nobody gives or takes orders. Instead, the members collaborate to publish a weekly roadmap.
Two of the initiatives created by Tang’s Digital Affairs Ministry are the g0v project (that’s a zero in the middle) that makes government information more accessible. The term “radically open” comes to mind. Another is vTaiwan, which enables Taiwanese citizens to create digital petitions. Any petition with at least 5,000 signatures are presented to the relevant ministry to be addressed.
Tang is also an e-resident of Lithuania, which they became during a foreign visit to Vilnius, Lithuania. As an aside, anyone can apply for e-residence in Lithuania (and in Estonia as well), and as an e-resident can do things like start a business there.
Regardless of their government activities, though, Tang is an anarchist working for the abolition of all political states. The ultimate goal is to preserve free public spaces — including Internet properties — independent of any government, as well as creating systems to apply technological benefits in a humanistic way. That would enable social media, for example, to benefit everyone, not just enrich a handful of people to the exclusion of others.
Tang was a child prodigy. They read at adult levels before the age of five, worked on advanced math at six, and began programming actually useful, functional digital tools by eight. But they dropped out of school in junior high (probably because of being bored to death). By 19, they had held several programming jobs and moved to Silicon Valley, California, to become an entrepreneur.
I’m using the pronoun “they,” but Tang has said they don’t care about pronouns in the least. “What’s important here is not which pronouns you use, but the experience…about those pronouns… I’m not just non-binary. I’m really whatever, so do whatever.” But keep an eye out for the name Audrey Tang; you’ll be sure to hear more about one of the “ten greatest Taiwanese computing personalities.”
