Why is Taiwan’s Web3 culture so cute?

I noticed that Taiwan’s web3 culture is kind of cute (literally cute) when I saw the hat that Vitalik wore when he attended ETHTaipei. It had “Ether True Beauty Temple” written on it.

In Taiwan, this kind of hat is called a “palace temple hat”. During the pilgrimage activities, the temple authorities sometimes distribute vests, clothes and hats with the temple name printed on them to help identify which temple the believers belong to^[1]. Wearing a religious hat on the head of the crypto world leader is really punk! It is hard for me to imagine a similar scene in mainland China: Vitalik came to mainland China to discuss encryption issues, and the organizer's employees suggested that he wear Hanfu or a hat for the elderly group. The boss of the organizer must think that this employee is crazy.

Encryption represents the future and technology, and underground temples represent history and religion, but when they appear happily together in Taiwan's web3 culture and spread out, I see a deeper level of cuteness - the cuteness that arises from the fusion of thoughts. From the perspective of "cuteness", I see the forest in the trees. I gradually realized that when Taiwan embraces web3 culture, its mentality is more relaxed, its approach is more fresh, and it pays more attention to communicating with the public.

The conclusion of this article, in a sense, is that the trick to embracing diversity is localization.

“TW allows you to rediscover your inner high school student”

The temple hat is just a small clip. Vitalik also sang the Taiwanese song “Only by Working Hard Can You Win” in Taipei, obtained a Taiwan Foreigner Employment and Residence Gold Card[2], and received a pack of puffed snacks called “Guaiguai”, which he said could be placed on computer equipment to make it “operate obediently”.

Vitalik wrote about his views on Taiwan in his blog[3]:

What impressed me most was the self-organization ability and willingness to learn of the people there (TW). Whenever I wrote a document or blog post, I often found that within a day, a study group would form independently and excitedly annotate every paragraph of the article on Google Docs. Paul Graham wrote that every city sends a message: in New York, “you should make more money”; in Boston, “you really should read those books”; in Silicon Valley, “you should become more powerful”. When I visited Taipei, the message sent to me was “you should rediscover the high school student in you”.

The aura of high school students—even elementary school students—is overwhelming in the visual style of Taiwan web3. I rarely see these in mainland web3 culture, so they are very conspicuous.

This is the introduction of Bitcoin in Taiwan’s children’s newspaper Guoyu Daily four years ago^[4].

The main points of the Bitcoin White Paper are explained using one page, two cartoons, and metaphors that children can understand. When the banker said "secretly change some numbers, no one will know", there were evil little faces behind them, and the emotional values ​​were subtly transferred to the children's minds. Although ten-year-olds cannot do anything right away, they don’t have to wait too long. These children who have been implanted with the idea that “centralization is risky” will be the age when Vitalik founded Ethereum.

In addition to educating children, the pictorial also educates adults. The first comment under this electronic poster is:

If a parent buys a bitcoin for his child on the day he sees this pictorial, he will spend less than $9,000, but his child will have assets worth nearly $70,000 today.

Cute comics are not limited to children. The Digital Business Development Department of the Taiwan government released a poster on its official account[5], which shows the diverse changes that crypto culture has brought to democratic society. The poster features nine authentic ACG characters, representing different roles in digital society, such as citizen technologists, connection ferrymen, and online nomads. If someone who doesn’t understand Chinese sees this picture, he or she is more likely to think it is a strategy for passing levels in an anime game.

I gradually discovered that temple hats, comics, ACG, and other cute visual elements are actually an effort to communicate with the public. The most enlightening ideas have been expounded in the Bitcoin White Paper and the Ethereum White Paper, but they are far away from the public. It is precisely those elements that are close to the lives of ordinary people and the behaviors that are connected to the real world that have become the entrance for the spread of cryptographic ideas.

Localization of decentralized thought

The spark of social change may be new technological innovations, but the great power of change must be the people's thoughts. Cryptography has set off a wave of practice for decentralized society, but practice does not have to be confined to cryptography itself. Thoughts that transcend technology are like dandelions that have separated from their mother body. Their meaning is to go further.

TW citizen technology community g0v has incubated two projects, one called "Real or Fake" robot, and the other called "Gov Total Budget Visualization". They are not directly implemented with cryptography, but the former "creates public goods through decentralized collaboration" and the latter "gives ordinary individuals tools to fight against complex times." The crypto trend has borne fruit in a wider range of soil.

"Real or Fake" Robot Cofacts

Cofacts is a robot on the chat software LINE. Anyone who receives a message from a friend or group on LINE and does not know whether it is true or false can forward it to this robot for verification. There is no centralized auditor behind the robot, and it all depends on the self-verification and editing of netizens. In addition to providing verification information, netizens can also evaluate other people's verification information, like or dislike it; ideally, more authentic verification information will emerge on its own.

Surprisingly, in the instructions for use, Cofacts specifically states that it can help the elderly to query information. They try to take care of every group of people in society who are easily deceived by false information. In the directory I recently checked, I saw the following news about the establishment of a new fund, which was marked as "wrong" and "contains personal opinions", specifically, it is a scam. Imagine the middle-aged and elderly investment group who are exposed to this information. Now they only need to forward the message to the LINE robot to get more information. This is really great!

The name of Cofacts means "everyone gathers the evidence to find the truth", which is similar to the Community Notes that Musk tried after acquiring Twitter. Take the verdict of the truth away from the centralized auditing agency, let the community help trace the source and provide information, and let everyone make their own judgment. Both mechanisms rely on other community members to score the verified information, but Twitter goes further in the algorithm: Musk hopes to avoid simply calculating the sum or average of user ratings, and pay more attention to those verifications that have received high ratings from people with different ideologies; that is, if people who usually disagree on the rating of the verification finally agree on a certain verification, then the score of the verification will be particularly high.

I don't know what Vitalik thinks of Cofacts, but he has written about his views on community notes:

Even if less than one percent of misleading tweets receive background information or correction notes, community notes still provide an extremely valuable public service as an educational tool. The goal is not to correct all errors; it is to remind people that there are multiple points of view, that some posts that seem convincing and attractive alone are actually very incorrect, and that you, yes, you, can usually verify its incorrectness through basic Internet searches.

Like community notes, Cofacts is not only about distinguishing the truth from the falsehood of specific messages, but also about exploring a set of "decentralized truth acquisition" mechanisms applicable to decentralized societies. Twitter is more engineered in this direction, while TW's practice is close to local usage scenarios.

「Gov Total Budget Visualization」

This project looks not only simple, but also beautiful. They visualized the gov budget into icons of different styles, so that citizens can see at a glance how much money each department will spend, where it will be spent, and how it compares to other departments. In addition to the charts, there are more intuitive options to help understand: citizens can click on "Daily Expenditure" to find out "What do taxpayers pay every day?", or choose "Unit Conversion" to find out how many cups of milk tea, bowls of braised pork rice, or iPhones can be bought with each part of the expenditure. The idea behind this is that “through information transparency, it is easier for the public to supervise the government and discuss issues based on facts. Information transparency is not limited to the political field. Information transparency in the areas of people’s livelihood and education can also help us shorten the time it takes to collect information and find the solutions we need more quickly [6].” Understanding civil society as a community and the government as a community operation team, the connection between the two suddenly becomes closer. There are more and more decentralized autonomous communities (DAOs), and more and more individuals will participate in the construction of cross-communities. It is difficult for participants to intuitively grasp how so many communities spend money, the basis for budget approval, and the evaluation of the effect of spending. Therefore, the role of "gov total budget visualization" is not limited to traditional gov. In a complex decentralized society, community members need more effective tools to understand the community they are in.

The crypto community emphasizes information disclosure, and any member can see almost all the information in the community; but just like the national gov can disclose budget data, massive information will hinder citizens from understanding the meaning of the data. Therefore, "openness and transparency" is not enough - perhaps it is the most important in an era of information asymmetry - but in an era of massive information, decentralized communities need to explore the mechanism of "making information meaningfully understood".

The significance of "gov total budget visualization" is the same as cofacts. It is not just to solve the problem at hand, but because of the existence of such a solution, people who use it will realize the lack of related solutions in other fields. If it is difficult to determine the authenticity of a piece of information on a platform, and there is no community notes to help me, I would ask who is in control of the power of verification? If it is difficult to see at a glance where a community spends money every day, and there is no visual information to support me, I would like to ask who is judging whether the money is worth spending?

I have always been willing to speculate on centralization with the worst malice, but I did not expect and did not believe that it would be so "brutal".

——Lu·Larri·Xun

Entering gov, surpassing gov

The encryption trend in Taiwan has become different from that in the United States, which shows that Taiwan has added some of its own seasoning.

My Taiwanese designer friend Peng said, “Taiwan is the most open society in East Asia. We are more open to new things, world trends and culture than Japan and South Korea.” Even so, he was still stunned when he saw the long hair of the new Minister of Digital Development.

What’s even more interesting than the long hair is that Audrey Tang calls herself a conservative anarchist. She ultimately hopes to abolish all governments and establish independent and free public spaces^[7]. Strictly speaking, he is a Trojan horse of the centralized government system—and he told the Trojans about it openly!

In most societies, decentralized forces are against centralized government forces, but in January 2023, the Taiwan government's Digital Development Department joined the W3C as an organization to participate in the formulation of standards for the digital world. One of its tasks is to establish a decentralized digital identity (DID).

That's right, a centralized force is spending taxpayers' money to study how to help taxpayers establish "identity services that do not rely on the government": through various certificates issued by various sectors (enterprises, institutions, groups and natural persons), to build citizens' daily de facto identities (de facto identity)[8], complete the basic digital identity services required, and achieve the goal of "personal identity autonomy and data authorization self-determination".

In a sense, the Ministry of Digital Development pursues "taking individuals as the basis, making nationality and enterprises part of the de facto identity. No matter how the country and the enterprise change, they cannot deprive a person of the fact of existence." This idea is inseparable from geopolitics. There are not many regions in the world that face the problem of "what impact will it have on me if my ID card is changed overnight" like Taiwan. It is precisely such problems that prompt them to pay more attention to individuals and explore the concept of identity that transcends the concept of nation-state.

From gov to the market, you will find that Taiwan's web3 culture has less pursuit of grand narratives and more attention to ordinary people. What impact will it have on children, the elderly, ordinary taxpayers, and individuals in the "post-nation-state era" is a real change that they are more willing to see.

The technology and ideas from the crypto world should ultimately benefit local residents. I call this a lovely idea.