Audrey Tang, Benjamin Bratton | Gray Area Festival 2021

The opening conversation of Gray Area Festival 2021, recorded on 6 October 2021 and built around Bratton’s The Revenge of the Real. It is about governance and digital public infrastructure rather than AI. Starting from Facebook’s outage and leaks, Tang argues that Taiwan’s civic discussion runs on commons such as PTT rather than Facebook, and explains its pandemic response without lockdowns as maximal trust in the social sector: the 1922 hotline, SMS check-ins held by telecoms and deleted after 28 days, and “humour over rumour” memes answering disinformation within two hours. Bratton reads the pandemic as a crisis of Western governance, and argues that California’s problem was too little sensing, not too much surveillance.