Democracy in the Digital Age

Costa Vayenas lives in Switzerland, where ordinary citizens are called upon to be legislators. He has voted in over 200 legislative proposals at all three levels of government: local, cantonal and federal. The insights he gained from this process have been useful as a sovereign credit analyst. He was a member of the Working Group on Crisis Prevention and Crisis Resolution at the Institute of International Finance in Washington, D.C. He is the editor an 800-page book on the emerging markets (Bloomsbury). He was Head of Research for the emerging markets at UBS, and has worked as an analyst in London, New York and Zurich. One of his reports was cited in The Financial Times as having triggered a currency crisis. Another of his reports featured on the front page of The Wall Street Journal under "What's News". He has lectured on international finance at the University of Zurich, at its Institute of Banking and Finance and at the MBA course of the University of Bern-Rochester. He has been a guest lecturer at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. It was an invitation to speak at the latter's Institute of Science, Technology and Policy that was the trigger for this book, which describes how democracy is being disrupted by digitalization and the profound consequences of that disruption.

Preface ix; Foreword xi; Introduction xiii; Chapter 1. A Technological challenge to the founding fathers 1; Chapter 2. Technology and new freedoms 12; Chapter 3. The evolution from who to how and what 21; Chapter 4. A Real-time knowledge and real-time power 35; Chapter 5. Democratic digits and the redistribution of wealth 48; Chapter 6. Shining lights on other hills 63; Chapter 7. The new hybrid model 74; Concluding thoughts: Drivers and scenarios 91; Notes 96; Index 115.