August 31, 2017
This summer the INSEAD Alumni Association of Switzerland welcomed forty-five guests at the elegant Zunfthaus zur Waag to engage with Alumnus Costa Vayenas, IEP01Feb, who had just published his new book, Democracy in the Digital Age: How we’ll vote and what we’ll vote about.
That evening, he talked about the observation that sparked the book project. Digitalisation is changing all aspects of how modern societies operate, he thought, but one sector appears to have been left untouched: democracy.
Disintermediation, “cutting out the intermediary or middle man between two parties”, seemed to be happening everywhere, except in arguably the most important arena of all – democracy. Was there a special reason, he wondered, why the job of the lawmaker had not changed in the digital age?
“How long would the grand buildings housing parliaments still have activity on their floors while the grand buildings housing the once lively stock exchanges had already gone quiet?”, he asked. Read on to learn what he discovered in pursuit of the answers….FINAL Costa Democracy LIVE EVENT REPORT (pdf)