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

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

The In-Between Tech and Trust Podcast vor 2 Monaten

0:00

20:46

️ with Erdem Ovacik

AI 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 overview

Ovacik 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 themes

Why adding more technology to a broken institution
accelerates the loss of trust rather than repairing it

Whether a system built for fifty thousand people per
representative can be governed at all in an age of AI

The line between AI as a consulted voice and AI as a new
black box that decides for us

Europe's choice between building its own AI competence and
depending on decisions made elsewhere

What it means to keep human agency when the machine could, in
theory, write better policy than we can

About the guest

Erdem 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

Links

Erdem 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.com

Related episode - Tech & Democracy and how both can be
connected to create trust with Nexus Politics -
https://open.spotify.com/episode/3WVnBsaz3LfFPwn6xsX1N6