🌻 garbage in, garbage out
notes on Taiwan, the US, and civic culture
Dear reader,
Last week, I published a story on Stanford’s defense-tech revival. It was the SF Standard’s most-read story, and prompted a lively campus debate. I didn’t expect this to get so much attention, which was stressful but interesting! Some responses: The Stanford Daily (pro-defense, from quoted student), The Stanford Daily (anti-defense), The Stanford Review (pro-defense), Hard Reset Media (anti-defense, from a NoTechForICE organizer). I also went on NPR’s Marketplace Tech podcast to discuss the article.
Otherwise, here’s an essay about Taiwan, “democracy,” and agency; with nods to Audrey Tang and Abundance by Ezra Klein. Audrey is coming on the podcast soon, so let me know if you have suggested questions!
garbage in, garbage out
Taking out the trash in Taiwan is no easy task. First, you must separate your refuse into different bags: compost, plastic recycling, paper recycling, metal, and trash. Then, try to figure out the 5-minute window that the garbage truck stops near your home. There are different time slots for different waste types—for example, the trash truck might come daily at 5:05 and 9:32pm, except Wednesdays and Sundays, with paper recycling on Mondays and Fridays. Finally, you show up in-person at the designated location and time to dispose of your bags. Trash can’t languish in dumpsters outdoors—it goes straight from home to landfill, never touching the ground.
It took me an hour of studying to climb this learning curve. When I figured it out (or so I thought), I showed up at the evening drop-off point alongside a small flock of neighbors. As the melody of Beethoven’s Fur Elise grew louder, we knew the garbage truck was near. Still, my first attempt at recycling was a failure—the eagle-eyed garbage man had to untie my bags and resort my paper and plastic. He went down the line, examining each person’s trash one by one. Then, in our sweatpants and slippers, we all shuffled back to our respective apartments, civic duty complete.
The first time I visited Taiwan was in July 2018. I had a summer internship at a small climate policy NGO called the ICDI. My work included researching smart building energy management, editing an English-language report on “smart cities” for an upcoming COP, and facilitating Model-UN-style climate negotiations with student advocates.
What surprised me about doing climate work in Taiwan was how much ordinary people cared.1 The elaborate recycling ritual was one telling example. After my initial shame at failing the trash-sort-test—I felt like a stupid toddler shoving a cube into a circular hole—my next thought was: Wow, Americans would never do this. We’re too lazy and insubordinate to separate our refuse so meticulously, walk two blocks to the drop-off, or organize our schedules around these narrow windows of action. Even many climate change believers are lax and cynical about individual behavior. What’s one cross-country flight when Taylor Swift has a private jet? How would one double-double compare to the methane-farting behemoth of industrial ag?
After all, in the American popular imagination circa 2018, global warming still felt like a slow, faraway phenomenon: a tipping point that may or may not ever arrive, unlikely to encroach on everyday life or demand any personal adaptation to deal with it. (Already this description feels outmoded—a slew of devastating wildfires and hurricanes have raised the stakes.)
But on a tiny island nation, everyone had long lived in a simmering soup of climate awareness. Rising sea levels and extreme weather events were real, physical, existential threats. On my third day of work, Super Typhoon Maria hit Taiwan. I woke up to a government communique telling residents to stay home. Taipei, the capital city, was merely pelted with heavy wind and rain, avoiding serious infrastructural damage; while other areas experienced severe flooding, landslides, and power outages. Cyclones like Maria have become more intense as the planet heats up, since warmer ocean temperatures provide more energy for storms.
In an environment like this, it was impossible not to feel the heightened exigency. We were all the boiling frogs in the pot, a hot tub beginning to feel uncomfortably crowded and warm.
This February, I returned to Taipei. This time, I was feeling down on democracy.
I spent my first week at RightsCon, a 3000-person digital rights conference of activists, journalists, and technologists; and my second with a group of 40 cryptographers and researchers building privacy-preserving applications for at-risk groups.
Taiwan is a unique vantage point from which to think about democracy. The island is politically, economically, and militarily critical for the United States. It produces the vast majority of advanced chips used in AI, is central to the East Asian “first island chain,” and is oft-upheld as a precious bulwark of liberalism under the PRC’s authoritarian shadow.
Taiwan also has an unusually vibrant civic sector: in 2014, the pro-democracy Sunflower Movement successfully suspended a trade agreement that would have increased Taiwan’s economic dependence on mainland China. This activist victory built the base for over ten years of progressive DPP rule. Even today, as Taiwan contends with its own institutional dysfunction—it’s currently undergoing a constitutional crisis and the biggest budget cuts in history, freezing critical funds for defense, energy, and broadcasting—a fiery movement is underway to recall the legislators who pushed it through.
On my trip, I asked every Taiwanese person I met why civic culture seemed so strong here. Why were youth so interested in participation and protest? Why do people wear masks when they’re told; why does trust in government seem so high? Or was this just my own myopic illusion as a naive outsider?
Everyone gave me a version of the same answer: Taiwan’s democracy is less than 40 years old. Martial law is still in living memory, and no one wants to return. So Taiwanese people don’t take elections and participation for granted; as cyber ambassador Audrey Tang put it, Taiwan views its government not as a “fossilized” institution, but as malleable software that can get debugged and upgraded every year.
And as with climate change, Taiwan’s democracy is existential. The island is routinely targeted by PRC gray zone operations like cyberattacks, election disinformation, and Chinese fishing boats that “accidentally” damage Taiwan’s undersea cables, cutting off internet access for weeks. Tang explained that she worried less about military invasion and more about the PRC winning the battle over hearts and minds—persuading the Taiwanese public that they’d be happier, richer, and more secure if they gave up their rights for centralized single-party control. In that scenario, key politicians and business leaders might defect, leading to a nonviolent reunification.
It’s this looming threat that encourages many Taiwanese to hold their liberties ever-tighter. You only know what you value when it’s getting taken away.
Back in America, I’ll be the first to cop to zoning out when MSNBC libs start droning on about “saving democracy.” It’s not that I’m apathetic—but that there seems something shallow and untrustworthy about the people who deploy such rhetoric, often in order to coerce the voting public to lower their standards for Democratic electeds, or to rally around “orange man bad” without articulating anything else they supposedly stand for.
But just three months into the second Trump administration, I’ve found myself earnestly worrying about “democratic backsliding” and the “rule of law.” I don’t have cooler, hipper language to describe the way that tech oligarchs are bending the knee on speech, how Elon uses his billions to threaten primary challenges to Republican dissenters, or how Trump is disappearing lawful US residents for pro-Palestine beliefs. DOGE has revealed itself to be more of a political cudgel than a good government initiative, a despot’s purge under the guise of cutting “waste, fraud, and abuse.” The administration sheds no tears about throwing literal babies out with the bathwater.
In re-electing Trump, the public voted to prioritize “improving people’s lives” over “preserving America’s institutions,” per polling from David Shor. But these aren’t independent variables. With the administrative state destroyed, we’re getting neither thing.
The United States today is in a democracy doom loop. On one side lives our dysfunctional institutions, far more powerful than they are effective. On the other is citizens’ declining faith and interest in democracy itself. Less public interest leads to less competent institutions. Worse institutions further depress citizens’ faith. And so it goes, down the drain.
American democracy, which once seemed so secure, is also under existential threat. The question is how we’ll react when we’re feeling the pain.
When I mentioned my interest in recovering democracy, a co-resident recommended Astra Taylor’s book Democracy May Not Exist, but We'll Miss It When It's Gone. I was surprised that Taylor had written about defending democracy—I was more familiar with her work as a democratic socialist advocating for debt jubilees. In the introduction, she writes:
The forces of oligarchy have been enabled, in part, by our tendency to accept a highly proscribed notion of democracy, one that limits popular power to the field of electoral politics, ignoring the other institutions and structures (workplaces, prisons, schools, hospitals, the environment, and the economy itself) that shape people’s lives. This is a mistake. To be substantive and strong, democracy cannot be something that happens only in capitol buildings; self-rule has to be far more widespread.
That is, we suffer from a widening gap between big-D and small-d democracy. People feel gaslit into believing in institutions that they have no meaningful ability to shape. “Free and fair elections” are necessary but not sufficient conditions for democracy—they’re just the criterion that’s easiest for political scientists to measure and scale. (Plenty of elections are manipulated, symbolic, unrepresentative shams.)
But democracy is not a checklist, nor is it an inherent trait of particular institutional designs. Democracy is a culture that must live up to its etymology, demos + kratos, the radical notion that the people ought to rule themselves.
There are two ways out of the democracy doom loop. You fix the institutions or reinvigorate the public.
and Derek Thompson’s abundance agenda focuses on the former: state capacity, good government, and delivering real results to rebuild trust. They want to reform restrictive zoning, build fast trains, and fund healthcare R&D—all great, crucial ideas. Yet abundance, as presently articulated, is still top-down technocracy at its core. It’s about decreasing civil society’s influence rather than increasing it. Within its framework, unions, NGOs, and community input meetings are cumbersome impediments to state and market-led progress.2But I doubt we’ll get a thriving democracy without channels for public voice. Recent history has shown that “trust the experts” and “trust the markets” are not winning political messages, and without checks on executive power, state-capacity-maxxing can end up as authoritarianism-lite. Effective institutions must be complemented with an engaged pluralistic public: How can a passionate citizen, who doesn’t have bags of cash for lawyers and lobbying, act to positively influence the society they live in?
That’s where I turn to folks like Taylor and Tang, who aim to rejuvenate democracy by expanding the sites where it happens. Civic culture is not forged at the ballot box, but in the many non-governmental opportunities to practice “self-rule.” It looks like g0v in Taiwan, the open-source community that builds participatory democracy tools and user-friendly alternatives to government sites. Or the myriad Covid mutual aid efforts that delivered groceries and shared cash assistance among neighbors. Community cornerstones like churches, labor unions, and independent media. The pockets of tech I find most energizing these days are ground-up initiatives like Socratica and Esmeralda; dynamic groups applying startup-style agency to more domains of social life.3
Furthermore, civil society should strengthen institutions, not slow them down. The endpoint of competition can be collaboration. In 1969, the Black Panther Party’s Free Breakfast initiative not only fed over 20,000 kids, but also pushed the USDA to fund more school breakfast programs. The Taiwanese government now collaborates closely with g0v through advising and data-sharing, transforming disgruntled hackers into civic reformers. We can reject the voice-exit dichotomy, and choose pluralism instead.
Each of these is an instance of community agency: self-government not as atomized individualism, but as diverse communities of interest creating the resources they need to thrive. Creation is often the best form of resistance. Solving problems with friends is good for the soul.
Like many left-liberals, I’ve been reflecting on the disappointment that is the US Democratic Party. I can’t help but feel that we deserved the loss we got. Kamala Harris represented a deeply conservative party leadership that made no case but the status quo, while the activist opposition made no case but negation. Even Biden’s successful 2020 campaign ran on a “return to normal.” It’s fundamentally lazy politics—of course it couldn’t last.
Meanwhile, conservatives spread 1950s Stepford tradwife nostalgia, and the Tech Right spams X with AI-generated cyberpunk. Even Trump’s gold-plated decadence is a kind of gaudy aspiration. These aesthetics don’t suit my taste, but I can at least conjure the pictures in my head. I know what daily life looks like in the worlds where they win. The left has no equivalent; we’ve lost the ability to articulate alternatives. The visioning muscle has atrophied after years of disuse.4 All we seem to do now is block and beg for help.
No more excuses: vision and action are the political skills I want strengthened over the next four years. The chaos in the White House does not have to stop us from finding other ways to thrive—neighborhood experiments, policy pilots, beta tests and proofs of concept for whatever comes next. Start a club, a think tank, a cafe, whatever. Pick a collective problem to tackle and see how far you get before you’re stopped. We can’t wait around for national politicians to figure it out; we can’t assume the state will always provide what we need. Individual action is hard and inefficient and it would be more convenient if those in power just did the right thing. But democracy is about living in a society, together; I don’t think we get the good life without some legwork of our own. If the world is on fire, the least you can do is take out your own trash.
links & notes
Taiwan has a truly incredible cafe culture. It’s normal for coffeeshops to open late into the night; with ample seating, fast WiFi, and selections of single-origin beans and unique latte flavors like osmanthus and wine. At this point, I enjoy the coffee more than the boba there. Also, nearly all cafes also have separate dine-in and take-out menus: they charge more for sitting, but won’t shoo you away. I’m surprised that pricing strategy isn’t more common elsewhere.
I stopped by NoVa/DC for a week after Taiwan. DC policy people are more likely to chat with me as a journalist, but I suspect also more likely to be playing 5D chess and manipulating the conversation for their own goals. Meanwhile, SF tech people are more wary and withholding, but I mostly trust what little they say. I think this is attributable to both a gap in social intelligence and the fact that politics has a more symbiotic relationship with the media (e.g. strategic leaks, credit-taking).
Thinking a lot about illiberal democracy (from
) and cultures that build (from ).SFPD officers earn $600k per year?!
An endearing profile of Tyler Cowen in The Economist.
As much as I enjoyed my trip, I’m extremely happy and relieved to be back home (and hopefully on a regular publishing schedule). I missed SF a lot.
Thanks for reading,
Jasmine
Awareness does not always translate into policy action, as my friend Ricky, who works on climate policy advocacy in Taiwan, reminded me. For instance, Taiwan is still unlikely to hit its renewable energy targets for 2025.
To the Abundance authors’ credit, they know this, and likely wrote the book assuming a Democratic presidency. In Ezra’s podcast with Tyler Cowen, he says that the critique he takes most seriously is the lack of space for “voice”—and cites DOGE as an example of “dark abundance.”
Kelsey Piper wrote a great Twitter thread about how municipal regulations hinder small-scale entrepreneurialism:
Converting your garage into a tiny walk in tea shop is barred by municipal regulations in nearly every major US city; even running a home daycare is restricted by zoning laws in many of them. If you want to build a ADU in your backyard for your aging parents, you often need to spend years working through incomprehensible and expensive processes for permission. You need to be a determined, stubborn, bureaucratically fluent person with an absurd amount of time on your hands in order to do things in your own home, in your own community, to make it richer and healthier and better. […] We need a society in which people feel empowered to do stuff, where when they see that their neighborhood isn't thriving they can straightforwardly turn their own efforts towards making that better without running into a wall of 'no'. We don't have that. We easily could.
The last aspirational “image” I can think of is multiracial melting pot liberalism, which peaked in the Obama years. This was a good one for the moment, but we need something new that addresses current concerns.
The challenges for me for revitalizing the public in three assumptions:
1. To break the cultural doom loop around civic participation we need to break "the anti social century" (credit to Derek Thompson)
2. To break the anti social century we need severe changes to our relationship to technology.
3. People (mostly) derive pleasure from their current relationship to the technology, as much as they complain about it.
(I think (2) and (3) are contentious)
This feels like a collective action problem / prisoner's dilemma. I want to live in a society where other people are spending making the world of atoms better, but I want to still be able to spend as much time as I do reading blogs on substack and yapping about ideas.
A civic culture can present a solution to the prisoner's dilemma, but civic cultures also take effort to maintain, and also require people to be present in their community. People have been spending less time in their community (Bowling Alone is as relevant today as ever) and more time alone.
The techno-optimist in me says that what we need is a technology stack that is built from the ground up to be less addictive, to give more value in less time so people feel less need to be ever online. The techno pessimist in me says that a healthy society relies on a degree of boredom in its citizens incompatible with the ever present allure of content.
curious as to thoughts on the assumptions or what follows from them.
This is a trivial aside, but I can report from a locale surrounded on all sides by water; literally built *below sea level,* such that you can see boats on the river that are higher than your house; and semi-recently annihilated by weather disasters; but still within America that practically no amount of personal stake motivates us to actions as rigorous or intensive as those described here. I am pretty sure if given the choice between "organizing my trash to this degree" and "just abandoning everything when the water comes," many in New Orleans would have a revealed preference for the latter.
We're not usually that "American," but in some ways I suppose we really are! (Although it's not as though a former French-Spanish colony with lots of Caribbean cultural influence needs lessons from Americans in "living for this day alone" lmfao).
Great post, as ever! (And in case someone hollers at me: yes, I know some people here care; they are definitely in the minority, though).