The nuclear breakfast of digital champions
How Taiwan’s digital revolution ties in with viruses, Chernobyl, Jesus and breakfast
Humans are a very strange species, there is no mammal on our planet that has as many behavioural variations as Homo sapiens. We vary in our diet, in the way we consume our relationships, in our use of language, the way we sleep and our approach to danger, among many. As such it should come as no surprise that one of the most effective collective responses to the covid pandemic came from a country that is one of the most sophisticated societies on Earth. Let's investigate how this came about and why Chernobyl and Kellogg’s corn flakes feature prominently in this story.
When it comes to running an efficient and functionally democratic government, especially one that befits the 21st century with all of her vast technological advances, it is hard to overlook the island nation of Taiwan.
Taiwan has leveraged citizen engagement and IT in a unique and powerful way. Having been the first country outside of China to detect the Covid virus and with only seven deaths from it over the span of an entire year, it might be important for the world to take note of what Taiwan does differently.
In order to understand the exceptionalism that is Taiwan and its digital bravado, we need to first look at Italian rice dishes and why this country had no choice but to create an advanced society.
Taiwan was founded after the end of the Chinese civil war that ended in 1949. Even though the nation formed part of the losing contingent in that war, its isolation and relative independence soon saw it blossom into a fully functional country, one that sometime played ally to the west, especially during the chilier periods of the cold war of the last century - one that's rearing its ugly head once again.
Taiwan's universal fear of China and the overbearing authoritarian nature of the newly formed Chinese Communist Party, resulted in the evolution of an extremely literate and technically gifted governing body that, contrary to most conventions, was highly trusted by its people. This allowed for Taiwan to become a leader in technological innovation and lateral minded thinking which ultimately saw it fend off multiple clandestine takeover attempts by the Chinese government in the last 70 years. The Taiwanese government's tendency to think strategically when under duress and simultaneously keep an open minded and a somewhat liberal society running smoothly, is nothing short of admirable. Moreover, in the west we should be taking notes, and detailed ones at that.
How this country managed to create such a technically literate government and subsequently fend off Covid so effectively is an amazing story that is almost hard to believe.
It's a story that sprung from humanity’s deep desire for anarchy just like the universe according to the second law of thermodynamics is constantly moving towards chaos - Taiwan’s story was formed through hard work, radicalism, activism and sheer, unabated genius.
As mentioned, this story is outrageous, it takes us from Chernobyl to computer viruses, to believe it or not, fanatical Jesus worship and breakfast cereals. I know, very weird, but you kinda wanna keep reading am I right?
Hold on to your hats for this ride is going to get wild. But first let us take a look at the unfathomable:
A tiny Asian nation beating Italy at its own game?
No, not football, nor coffee nor even sleazy pick up lines for women. It might come to a surprise to many (especially Italians), that if you Google the phrase “best risotto in the world,” that Taipei comes up repeatedly. Yes this difficult to get right specialty dish from northern Italy has grabbed quite a foothold in Taiwan, whose cooks have not only mastered it, but many would say, perfected it.
(Vaffanculo! shouts every Italian on Earth in response to this revelation)
In fact risotto is so popular in Taiwan, that it has become a breakfast staple for most parts of the country. Breakfasts are an interesting meal that vary hugely between countries and cultures. In the aforementioned Italy for instance, the inventor of risotto, breakfast is something of an anomaly where most people actually opt out and usually just go for a shot or two of espresso instead.
Many Japanese love eating cooked salmon and rice for breakfast and Mexicans traditionally have egg filled tacos with beans. When it comes to the USA, UK, Australia and New Zealand it is hard to look past Cornflakes in the US and Weet-bix or spelt Weetabix in the UK and its two antipodean counterparts.
Well, did you know that the 7th Day Adventists started breakfast cereal companies Kellog’s and Sanitarium in both hemispheres nearly simultaneously?
One, the maker of Cornflakes and the other, the maker of weetbix, one a breakfast staple in North America, the other in antipodea. Weird huh? In fact, the reason the maker of weetabix is called Sanitarium has to do with the fact that the founder had worked in Kellog’s original Seventh Day Adventist US headquarters in Battle Creek Sanitarium in Michigan. But more to that later.
There is actually a huge trademark dispute in effect regarding the naming of Weet-bix and Weetabix with the former's parent company Sanitarium arguing that the latter is infringing on its copyright by its naming similarity. Anyway enough on that, the more interesting story develops when we move to 1986 and .. a what?!
A Radioactive Elephant’s Foot
1986 was quite a year, good and bad, it all started when the Space Shuttle Challenger blew up after its launch killing all 7 astronauts in Florida, a TWA flight on its way to Athens had a bomb detonated in it killing 4 people yet the pilot still managed to successfully land the blown up plane (step aside Sullenberger,) Spike Lee brought out the brilliant film “She’s gotta have it,” Sir Alex Ferguson became manager of Manchester United and the nuclear power plant at Chernobyl experienced a major meltdown. A nuclear meltdown with catastrophic repercussions that would reach all around the globe in the next years.
The temperature in the uranium core of Reactor 4 nearly hit 2000 ˚C - it was so hot that the walls separating the fuel from the cooling liquid melted and combined with the sand, steel, concrete, zirconium and uranium to form the hottest and most radioactive lava the world has ever known. Like in the movie Aliens, this hot glass-like lava started melting through all the different floors of the reactor like the alien blood after the dissection goes awry in the genius James Cameron film.
Mimicking a sort of radioactive honey, floor by floor this hot gooey gunk dropped to the basement where it eventually settled, cooled and solidified into a weird looking mess (see original Russian photo above) and became known simply as the “Elephant’s foot.”
The Elephant’s foot isn’t very large, it takes up a space roughly 2m squared but it weighs a tonne, in fact two tonnes to be precise - and if any human ventured within a 10m radius of it, they would be dead within less than 5 minutes, melted down past their skeletal framework much like the Nazi soldiers at the end of Indiana Jones: Raiders of the Lost Ark. In fact this occasion was so unbelievable and the scene with the molten lava that I am amazed that Spielberg never thought of placing Indy in Chernobyl for one of the films, probably largely due to the fact that Indiana Jones would have had to join the Marvel franchise after this, playing a character half Spiderman/ half the Incredible Hulk due to this intense gamma radiation poisoning. Enough with the jokes..
Chernobyl turns Digital
What has all this to do with Taiwan and the 7th Day adventists you ask? Well, hold your horses, we’re getting there. This event at Chernobyl was so massive and unprecedented that it evoked awe and fear in a whole generation of youngsters who grew up during and after this auspicious year. For one, I remember we weren’t allowed to play soccer outside when it rained or eat mushrooms for months after the meltdown while I was growing up in Munich in the 80s.
The event really did affect the global consciousness, and nowhere more so than in one 10 year old computer genius named Chen Ing-hau in Taipei. Chen had been so affected by Chernobyl partly because Taiwan was the most vigilant country on Earth at the time (surprise, surprise,) diligently monitoring atmospheric radiation levels post- meltdown and having a sophisticated warning system that triggered lockdowns when the levels reached a certain peak and partly because his beloved aunt died from thyroid cancer when he was 15. Though it was never proven conclusively, the main culprit in this type of cancer is usually concluded to be acute radiation poisoning.
From being a mild mannered amicable kid, Chen became increasingly antisocial with an intense hatred toward nuclear energy and multinational corporations as a whole. Now a student at Tatung University, he joined a fledgling group of hackers and in 1998 developed one of the world’s most sophisticated computer viruses which he named Chernobyl in honour of his dead aunt. This virus was programmed to overwrite information on critical system drives and to only infect Microsoft Windows operating systems. If you were around during the late 90s and operating a PC, there is a high likelihood you came into contact with a computer infected by this malware.
At its height, Chernobyl infected somewhere between 60 and 100 million computers and wreaked such havoc that it wiped billions of dollars off global stock markets. A different type of pandemic for sure but one that taught the Taiwanese government at the time a lot about how to prepare themselves for future crises, all thanks to the vengeful acts of a young, reckless hacker named Chen Ing-hau, who brought the world to its knees for a brief moment toward the end of the last millennium.
From computer pandemics to real life pandemics - David fights a virtual Goliath
How on Earth did Taiwan manage to deal with the Covid virus so much quicker than other nations? The answer lies in the nature of the Taiwanese government’s encouragement of civic hacking.
It appears that Taiwan took that famous Abraham Lincoln line “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth” quite literally and made their internet so transparent, that even ordinary people could monitor everything happening and write source code for many government programmes where required.
So when the outbreak happened in Wuhan, Taiwanese citizens were on it like a flash and the civic hacker brigade jumped into action; organising mass hygiene awareness events in conjunction with local government, bulk mask assembling production lines, creating “infection maps” that were updated in real time and scoping the open market for available respirators, predicting a global shortage once this outbreak went global.
All of these civic minded hackers organise around a government initiative termed the “G0v” programme which began 10 years ago in 2012 by Taiwanese hackers who were unimpressed by the then government’s slow embrace of digital technologies and the internet, so they decided to build a digital governing infrastructure themselves. Instead of complaining and lamenting about the government’s failures, like is all the rage in the youthful revolts in the west, these people decided to take their fate into their own hands and assist the government. It is perhaps this bipartisan approach of the concept of “revolution” or “rebellion” that the west stands the most to gain from, by mimicking. It might seem counterintuitive to work together with your supposed “enemy” but in Taiwanese terms the government is not viewed as the enemy, it’s neighbour China on the other hand, is. Taiwan had to get digitally savvy if it wanted to maintain its independence from mainland China. With nearly 40 million attempted attacks a month, Taiwan is the most digitally under threat country on Earth. And with ISP tags showing these attacks coming 80% from mainland China, everyone knows who the real enemy is. Hence the concept of civic minded hacking is not a luxury for Taiwanese citizens, it was born out of necessity.
One of the main players in the country’s historic civic hacking movement is a non-binary person named Audrey Tang, who refers to themself as a “conservative anarchist.” A child prodigy who worked together with Chernobyl creator Chen Ing-hau and then spent some time learning with hackers in Germany and finally ended up on the boards of some early Silicon Valley start-ups, Audrey found their way back to Taiwan and was headhunted by the prime minister to become the country’s first “Digital Minister.”
Their goal was simple, to further solidify the “G0v” programme, to promote education and democracy and to seal up Taiwan’s digital infrastructure from future attacks by the Chinese. One of the first things Tang implemented as digital minister was the remote voting by citizens, where instead of having to elect representatives to vote on issues in parliament, Taiwanese citizens can directly access all the information being voted on and cast their vote directly, online, via the “G0v” programme - this is something every “mature” democracy in the world should be implementing straight away, for it is the purest form of democracy, free from corruption and political tampering.
Back to Jesus and breakfast foods
The Seventh Day Adventists (SDA) were founded in 1854 by a husband and wife duo who were bored with mainstream protestantism in Battle Creek, Michigan. Battle Creek, for nearly half a century, acted as the Vatican for SDA around the world. The town was even further cemented in SDA folklore when the brothers Kellog eventually set up a state-of-the-art hospital/ hotel/ spa/ wellness retreat called the Battle Creek Sanitarium. It was here that they were to revolutionise breakfasting around the world. There is a rumour that has been going around for some time that John Kellog invented corn flakes to stop people, particularly men, from eating red meat such as salty ham or bacon, in the morning, because he erroneously believed that meat made men masturbate. Take from that what you want, This story was brought up again in contemporary pop culture during one of the interviews on Dave Chappelle’s genius podcast “The Midnight Miracle,” when Talib Kweli made reference to it in hilarious fashion (if you haven’t heard that podcast yet, stop reading and go have a listen - it is way more entertaining than this two bit fishing trip down less traveled history lanes, but anyway, each to their own. Anyway, where were we? Oh right, corn flakes took the world by storm and quickly became the number one household breakfast item world wide.
Eventually an Australian by the name of Edward Halsey, who had been working as a corn flakes baker at Battle Creek Sanitarium came back to Australia in 1898 and started making another type of breakfast food, named Weetbix. This started selling so successfully that he founded a company and named this after the SDA breakfast founding company in Battle Creek whom he had worked for all those years as a baker; namely Sanitarium. Weetbix proved so popular in Australia and New Zealand that it eventually found its way to the UK where it became marketed as Weet-a-Bix.
Eat whatever you want for Breakfast, but can we all be a bit more like Taiwan?
How does this story of digital democracy, hacking, nuclear radiation, Jesus and breakfast cereal finally come to an end you may ask?
Where is the kicker, the loop or the proverbial twist?
Well, on the one hand I wrote this to inspire people reading to check out Taiwan and see if their risotto is really all it's stacked up to be and to do further research into Taiwan’s “G0v'' approach and their whole “civic minded rebellion” because I think the western world has a lot to learn from this country, particularly when it comes to digital democracy and transparent governing. Instead of focusing on making money, wouldn't it be beautiful if our best and brightest in the west would take heed of this philosophy and focus their immense craniums on fixing our flayling government infrastructures first and then sorting themselves out? Hope springs eternal.
And yes, there is also a kicker of sorts, here goes:
Jesus Saves! (your cashflow)
Contrary to his antipodean colleague John Kellog the founder of Kellog’s, saw the light (or didn’t depending on your perspective) and stepped out of the SDA, precisely why Kellogs is now a publicly traded company on the New York Stock Exchange and Sanitarium isn’t. In fact, Halsey was such a believer that he donated his company to the church and to this day Sanitarium is wholly owned by the SDA and pays zero income tax on over $500 million of annual revenue.
Up until 2015, outside of NZ and Australia, Taiwan was the biggest consumer of Weetbix in the world (though China has now caught up on them.) The population of Taiwan is roughly 23 million, the number of Seventh Day Adventists in the world is 22.5 million by latest counts, the SDA is by far the most popular branch of protestantism in Taiwan.
And do you remember that young rebel hacker in Taiwan, Chen Ing-hau, who created havoc on the world with the Chernobyl virus inspired by his favourite auntie’s death of cancer in 1996? Well, she was a card carrying member of the Seventh Day Adventist church and ate weetbix every morning of her life. There you have it.
Truth really is stranger than fiction.
Thanks for reading this newsletter. You really are a champion, the next post will be about poetry, so get ready for that.
Be well.
And never forget what Oscar Wilde said about love and romance, words to be cherished:
“To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.”
Good morning, good evening and good night. Love yourself.
And if you're a religious organisation with hundreds of millions of dollars in profits, maybe start thinking about paying some taxes? The rest of us have to, it's only fair and Jesus was all about the fair, for real..
[oh and if you happen to find yourself in northeastern Ukraine, don't go anywhere that elephant's foot]
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Thank you very much.
Mauri Ora.
“It takes generosity to discover the whole through others. If you realize you are only a violin, you can open yourself up to the world by playing your role in the concert.”
The legend himself, Jacques Yves Cousteau.