Written by Yen Lin (mashbean) Huang.
Image credit: Public domain.
(This article is adapted from the author’s speech at the 2025 Taipei International Peace Forum.)
Digital Platforms Are Receding the Public Square, and Taiwan Is No Exception
The writer Ying-Tai Lung once wrote in her 1985 work The Wild Fire (野火集), “The next generation, blessed without knowing it, keeps on shouting loudly. Perhaps then we will finally see truly great thinkers, artists, and politicians emerge.” Over forty years, amid Taiwan’s noisy chorus of voices, the island did welcome precious democratic transformation. Yet in the past decade, with the rise of social platforms, shouting loudly has become less and less effective.
French thinkers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari once said, “We do not lack communication. On the contrary, we have too much of it. We lack creation. We lack resistance to the present.” This is especially true in the digital world. Algorithms that inflame confrontation, psychological feedback mechanisms that feed the urge to perform, and short videos that keep us endlessly hooked. Between these, there is nothing. What we feel is a public sphere that grows louder while becoming harder to understand one another. The thicker the echo chambers, the easier it is for positions to radicalise. The public square is submerged in dazzling noise, and it becomes ever more difficult to discuss public issues, let alone solve public problems together.
Keyboard Revolutions Are Hard to Sustain, and Digital Social Movements Are Heavily Suppressed
In the 2010s, we believed social platforms could bring about peace evolution. Information could flow more freely, and mass mobilisation could happen faster. Optimists thought keyboard warriors could become a force for street-level change. Examples included the Arab Spring, Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement, and Taiwan’s 318 (Sunflower) Movement; more recently, China’s White Paper Movement and Nepal’s Gen Z protests.
Social platforms can gather crowds within days. But rapid mobilisation does not necessarily equal lasting capacity. The tactics of organising, negotiating, responding, and countering are often strangled before they grow. We may have become adept at digital assembly, yet not at digital association. The peace evolution ultimately failed; digital tools did not bring a qualitative transformation.
I once attended a University of Tokyo lecture on Chinese politics and democratisation. Many Chinese international students showed up masked and unidentifiable, avoiding tracking. Similar patterns occur online. Authoritarian governments raise the cost of public discussion, such as the Great Firewall, unpredictable censorship, and internet shutdowns used against movements. Digital shutdown is now routine. In 2024, there were at least 296 shutdowns across 54 countries, a record high. Iran, since December 2025, has faced ongoing disruptions, with connectivity still restricted.
The terror of digital authoritarianism is not only censorship or shutdown, but its power to induce self-censorship, the chilling effect. Peace evolution through digital technology has not succeeded in authoritarian regions; instead, control over speech has intensified. As the saying goes, when virtue rises a foot, vice rises ten (道高一尺，魔高一丈). Surveillance becomes harsher, and more citizens give up and lie flat.
Platforms also tilt toward technofeudalism. Data is monopolised; algorithms fixate on revenue, bargaining power declines, and public discussion is diluted as the term of “enshitiffication.” Users become doomscrollers. Under this double squeeze, digital space is losing its function as a public square. Yet in Taiwan, people have used digital space differently, finding ways to come together again.
Between Quarrelling and Indifference, Digital Space Can Also Unite
Taiwan’s civic tech community is skilled at using the internet as a base, collaborating to build tools that benefit the public. These volunteers do not seek profit in digital society as corporate employees. They work as members of civil society, creating free tools so that others can respond more effectively to emergencies or to thorny problems in the real world. Over the past decade, Taiwan’s civic tech community has created digital projects that can serve as models of democracy.
Here are several past cases of digital collaboration. During the early phase of COVID-19, when mask supply tightened, Taiwan, while implementing the mask rationing system, released open data such as mask inventory. This enabled civic developers to quickly build lookup tools such as mask maps. Citizens could see in real time the stock levels of nearby pharmacies, reducing uncertainty costs from travelling back and forth and from crowding in lines, and demonstrating the agility of public-private collaboration in a public crisis. In emergency medical response, the Ministry of Health and Welfare built an Automated External Defibrillator (AED) emergency information system for public places and provided an AED map search. Meanwhile, civic groups also built advanced AED maps and notification systems that alerted nearby volunteers with first aid capability to begin CPR or help retrieve an AED, shortening the golden rescue window.
In institutional and political oversight, Taiwan has accumulated practical experience using digital platforms to broaden policy discussion and collect public input. For example, ten years ago, vTaiwan conducted online deliberation and consensus aggregation on regulatory issues using tools such as Pol.is. In addition, to improve the transparency of legislative and budget information, civic tech teams also built platforms to monitor budget review through data cleaning and crowdsourced collaboration, such as using LINE bots to help convert image-based documents into searchable text, lowering the threshold for citizens to understand and supervise public funds. Finally, in the governance of the information environment, Taiwan also has crowdsourced fact-checking platforms run through LINE bots and volunteer communities, such as Cofacts 真的假的, enabling people in everyday messaging contexts to forward suspicious messages and collectively accumulate verification records and cited references.
Island People Who Face Endless Disasters Grow Through Digital Solidarity
Taiwan has long been an island of many hardships. It sits at the junction of tectonic plates and along the track of Northwest Pacific typhoons. Each year, Taiwanese citizens must face the threats of earthquakes and typhoons. Whether official or civic, Taiwan has a strong tradition of rapid mobilisation. And through repeated acts of creativity, it upgrades the social system of disaster response, so that survivors can recover more quickly. This is one of the luminous sides of Taiwanese humanity.
Take the 2025 Tainan disaster damage related to Typhoon Danas as an example. The storm damaged large numbers of asbestos roofing tiles in some areas. Without proper handling, this could create exposure risks from asbestos fibres. Civic tech communities, the Ministry of Environment, and the Tainan City Government, building on existing map data, updated an asbestos map. They combined aerial surveying, field inspection, and volunteer collaboration to verify, report, and remove damaged sites, quickly reducing the risk of exposure to carcinogens.
In the same year, the Guangfu area of Hualien experienced torrential rain brought by Typhoon Wipha. This caused an overflow from a landslide-dammed lake on the Mataian River, triggering severe flooding and massive sludge. In the early phase after the disaster, areas where heavy machinery could not enter depended heavily on manual cleanup. Volunteers from various places rapidly assembled under the name Shovel Heroes. A civilian coordination network emerged that used websites and online forms to consolidate needs, allocate manpower, and announce routes and task information. This helped volunteers and affected residents connect effectively, even as information shifted quickly, reducing friction costs on the ground.
These cases all show that internet users are not necessarily limited to being content consumers who passively accept the allocation logic of algorithms. Before being an internet user, we were also citizens. In disaster settings, digital tools can also serve as civic collaboration infrastructure, supporting mutual aid, division of labour, and resource coordination. Taiwan’s cases prove that digital tools can help people help one another, creating a more united and more resilient society.
Building Social Solidarity Beyond Surveillance Capitalism and Digital Authoritarianism
In Taiwan’s social experience, Taiwanese people are not passive subjects. When earthquakes, typhoons, and sudden crises strike, society can mobilise and repair itself. People step in, share information, and coordinate division of labour, preventing disorder. When this culture enters the digital age, it need not create stronger control or deeper division. Instead, it can become collaborative techniques that make mutual aid easier and reduce information gaps and resource mismatches.
The AI era has lowered the threshold for effective collaboration. Participants used AI tools to build websites, buying time for the rescue window. If digital tools are to become infrastructure for solidarity, the prerequisite is not flashier features. People must access the internet freely, disclose problems safely, and speak without surveillance or arbitrary censorship. In crises, resources and information must flow fast. With these conditions, the public square will not be easily submerged, and people will still have a corner to tell the truth, exchange knowledge, and form decisions.
The true divide lies not in which technology is adopted, but in whether society retains agency. Facing the next wave of networked hegemony, such as digital authoritarianism, surveillance capitalism, or technofeudalism, the key is not only resistance but redesign. Redesigning the digital public infrastructure that protects individuals, activates agency, and reduces polarisation. The best gift the digital world can offer humanity is not more efficient control, but the possibility to pursue what one longs for without fear.
Yen-Lin (mashbean) Huang is a Taiwanese cypherpunk advocate. He had been a medical doctor in Taiwan and currently serves as a general manager of Matters Lab, a censorship-resilience social platform. He is a Policy Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation and a Next Billion Fellow at the Ethereum Foundation.
From 2023 to 2025, he served at Taiwan’s Ministry of Digital Affairs, leading projects on digital civic infrastructure, including digital identity wallets and web3 policy. Yen-Lin founded FAB DAO, a civic tech Web3 collective supporting Taiwanese nonprofits, with works exhibited at the Ars Electronica Festival. He also writes a digital arts column for ARTouch and translates on participatory art and digital activism. He is also a member of the Silviculture Society from the Ethereum Foundation.