The Tech Naivety Undermining Democracy - Erdem Ovacik (EP 32)

🎙️ with Erdem OvacikAI trust in our institutions is falling, and Erdem Ovacik argues it will keep falling. The technology is not what fails him here. The governance underneath it was never built to earn that trust, and pouring more AI into unfit democratic institutions is like adding fuel to a fire no one has learned to contain. This is for anyone watching their organisation or their government absorb technology faster than it can govern it.🎧 Episode overviewOvacik has spent his career at the point where technology meets public life, and he starts from an uncomfortable claim: we are becoming more capable of trusting our institutions, and we won't. He walks through why representative democracy - one national representative for every fifty thousand people - concentrates power in a way that markets and modern tech companies solved for long ago, and asks what democracy would look like if it learned from them. Eva presses him on where technology solves the problem and where it amplifies it, on what he means by "tech naivety," and on the danger of handing decisions to an AI that becomes its own black box. The conversation sits with Europe's harder bind: build real technological competence, or live inside infrastructure and decisions shaped by those who did. It closes on what daily life might feel like if the next democracy actually arrived.🔑 Key themesWhy adding more technology to a broken institution accelerates the loss of trust rather than repairing itWhether a system built for fifty thousand people per representative can be governed at all in an age of AIThe line between AI as a consulted voice and AI as a new black box that decides for usEurope's choice between building its own AI competence and depending on decisions made elsewhereWhat it means to keep human agency when the machine could, in theory, write better policy than we can👤 About the guestErdem Ovacik is a social innovator, entrepreneur, and author of The Next Democracy. He built Donkey Republic, one of the first app-based bike-share systems, which is the detail that matters most here: he argues from inside the technology industry, not against it. His warning that technology "almost necessarily" harms society because addiction is good business carries weight precisely because he has spent years building the kind of product he now scrutinises.🕒 Chapter markers[01:22] Why we could trust our institutions more, and won't[02:52] Fifty thousand to one: the power concentration inside representative democracy[06:39] Tech naivety, and the fire you keep adding fuel to[11:42] The handlebar problem: who sets the priorities, and where AI belongs[13:35] Europe's bind, and what happens when the black box is built elsewhere[17:48] What the next democracy would feel like to live in🔗 LinksErdem Ovacik on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/erdemovacik/Eva Simone Lihotzky on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/evalihotzky/The Next Democracy book - https://nextdemocracy.comRelated episode - Tech & Democracy and how both can be connected to create trust with Nexus Politics - https://open.spotify.com/episode/3WVnBsaz3LfFPwn6xsX1N6