Hack the Pandemic: Lessons from How the Taiwan Government Embraced the Hacker Mindset to Subvert COVID-19

Kelsie Nabben, written July, 2020

If “cypherpunks write code”, what do civic tech hacktivists do?

Taiwan’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic has been among the world’s best. With a population almost the size of Australia’s, the island nation has reported only 496 confirmed cases of the disease and no locally acquired infections for months.

The unlikely heroes of Taiwan’s success are “civic tech hacktivists”: coders and activists who the country’s celebrity digital minister Audrey Tang describes as the “nobodies” who “hack democracy”.

What began with the hackers of the “open source, open government” movement g0v and student protesters has grown into an experiment in radical democracy that is yielding astonishing results.

Premier Su Tseng-chang’s figure with the slogan: “We have only one butt,” to counter toilet paper stockpiling

Embracing a strategy of “fast, fair and fun”, as well as a culture of “humour over rumour”, Taiwan’s enduring ‘ civic tech hacktivist’ initiatives demonstrate important lessons about public policy, public trust and seeking a balance between technocracy and techphobia.

Read the full op-ed at The Conversation and academic paper here.

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