Audrey Tang

Historian & Public Intellectual

On the InnoMinds stage Tang opened by quoting back 'what Yuval said to me three years ago': the key is to create stories that serve us without being enslaved by them. Then she showed what that looks like as engineering — Polis, community notes, algorithms tuned to surface the bridge-makers rather than the outraged. Harari answered on his own ground: ethics is ultimately about suffering, and as far as we know AI cannot suffer. A historian and an engineer agreeing on the diagnosis and dividing on the instrument, narrative on one side and infrastructure on the other.

youtube.com

Computer Scientist, VR Pioneer & Tech Philosopher

In 2024 Lanier, Allison Stanger, and Tang co-wrote a proposal to sunset Section 230's liability shield for algorithmic amplification while protecting citizens' direct speech — 'algorithmic amplification is a product, not a public service.' Lanier's blurb for Plurality calls it 'a peek at the humanistic high tech future we suspected was possible,' and elsewhere he names Tang and Glen Weyl as the idea's finest exponents while adding that they do not all agree and should not. The pairing is data dignity meeting plurality: a man who wants people paid for what the models learned from them, beside a woman who put ten years of her own meetings in the public domain so the models could learn her outright.

ash.harvard.edu · dl.acm.org · plurality.net · youtube.com

Co-Founder & President, Center for Humane Technology

Harris and Aza Raskin brought Tang onto Your Undivided Attention in February 2024, election season, to ask how a democracy stays standing under deepfakes and information warfare. Her answer was Taiwan's method in miniature: she had pre-bunked the threat 'by filming myself being deepfaked,' and 'simply investing in increasing that bit rate so the citizen can speak their mind and build bridges together does wonders.' Harris diagnoses the attention economy from outside the state; Tang is the rare interlocutor who ran the counter-experiment from inside one.

humanetech.com · centerforhumanetechnology.substack.com

Philosopher & Cultural Theorist

Read as interpretation. Han's The Transparency Society (2012) holds that total visibility is not freedom but a subtler discipline — the exposed self polices itself. Tang has published transcripts of some two thousand of her official meetings over ten years, and when asked whether she ever wished to be wrong in private, answered with arithmetic: two hours a day documented, twenty-two including sleep not, 'and I think that is a good balance.' The pairing is the sharpest test of Han's thesis — one thinker sees the transparent subject as a captive, the other treats transparency as something a person can ration, and thereby own.

youtube.com · Byung-Chul Han, The Transparency Society (2012)