When Democracy Can’t Keep Up

I was raised inside a democracy. I was taught it was the fairest system of governance we had. Democracy meant participation, freedom, rights. And for most of my life, I believed that. The alternative was centralized power and inequality. Simply unthinkable. But lately, I’ve found myself asking a question I never imagined I'd ask: Can democracy still function in a world moving this fast?

We talk a lot about political fragmentation. But let’s be honest: wars and power struggles aren’t new.

What is new is this: technology (thanks to AI in particular) is moving faster than any government can think. And that speed is breaking the very rules democracy was built on.

In the last two years, I’ve watched AI go from a niche tool to a global force shaping jobs, education, warfare, identity, law, faster than any policy or election cycle could possibly catch up with. I’ve seen billion-dollar platforms launch, evolve, and disrupt entire sectors in the time it takes most governments to hold one single round of debate. And I’ve realized that we now live in a world where code moves faster than law and where consequences arrive before consensus. 

And that’s where the conflict started for me.

Because I still believe in democratic values. I believe in fairness and inclusion. In giving people a voice. But I also believe in competence. In systems that can make decisions before it's too late. And right now, I’m not sure the system we inherited can keep up with the world we’ve created.

So I want to walk you through the tension I’m sitting with as someone who wants to see democracy work, but is no longer sure that it can unless something fundamental changes.

Let’s Start With the Foundations
Democracy worked because the system was built on a few key pillars, conditions that allowed the process to be slow, inclusive, and still relatively effective. And if we’re going to be honest about what’s breaking, we need to look at those pillars.

1. Civic Literacy
For democracy to work, people need to understand how the system works. I don’t mean ticking a box on voting day, I mean understanding how decisions actually get made. How power moves. How policies are shaped and laws are passed. That used to be taught. Today, it’s gone. In a lot of countries, civic education barely exists. Most political conversation now happens in the form of headlines, memes, outrage clips, or 30-second soundbites. It’s entertainment, but it’s not education.

And here’s my first uncomfortable thought: We’re entering an era where the decisions governments need to make (on AI, energy, biotechnology, planetary risk etc.) require serious understanding and critical thinking. Not opinions or ‘vibes’. And so I keep wondering…What happens when the people deciding the future don’t understand what they’re voting on?

I know how that sounds. I hate that this thought is even in my head. I believe in fairness. I believe every voice should count. But I also believe that if you’re making decisions about something that can’t be reversed you need to actually grasp what’s at stake.

And that leads to a question I really don’t want to ask, but here we are: “In a world this complex, can we keep pretending that every vote carries the same weight, regardless of how informed it is?”

2. Shared Reality
Here’s another thing I didn’t fully appreciate until AI recently reached its current level: Democracy only works if we agree on what’s real.

We can debate values, argue policy and fight over priorities. That’s healthy. But the entire system depends on some shared baseline, a common reality to argue from. And I don’t think we have that anymore.

Now your version of the truth depends entirely on an algorithm. Two people can watch the exact same event and walk away believing opposite things happened. And you can scroll through your feed and see a photo of a protest that never happened, a politician saying something they never said, or a video that’s 100% fake, except it looks real, sounds real, and triggers a real emotional reaction.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot. Until now, technology mostly messed with how we talk and write. Now it’s messing with what we trust. And honestly, it’s scary. I was just having this conversation the other day: we’ve reached the point where technology can actively trick your senses. Literally, your eyes and ears. You can’t trust what you see anymore. And if you can’t trust your own senses, how do you even begin to make an informed decision?

That’s the world we live in now. A single fake clip, designed to provoke just the right reaction, can sway public opinion before anyone knows what’s real. And once it spreads, it sticks. The correction never catches up.

In the end, if we can’t agree on what’s real, democracy doesn’t work.  

3. Trust in Institutions
This one cuts deep. I grew up believing that institutions were what kept democracy stable. Not perfect, but solid. Courts, public health bodies, elections, the media, these were the systems we relied on to hold power in check. 

But frankly, my trust is breaking down.

Some of it is deserved. We’ve seen politicians lie. We’ve seen corruption scandals go unpunished. We’ve watched governments stall on urgent issues, while bureaucracy becomes the excuse. 

But that has always existed. What’s worse is that entire ecosystems now exist to actively destroy trust in these systems. 

There are political actors who’ve realized that if you discredit the system, you don’t have to play by its rules. There are leaders everywhere who claim the media is fake, courts are rigged, elections are stolen. Take Trump for example. He didn’t invent this strategy, but he made it mainstream.

Then you have media personalities and influencers who’ve built entire audiences around telling people that everything is a lie, vaccines, elections, climate science, you name it. There’s a market for distrust. 

And then there’s the tech layer. Social platforms that don’t necessarily want to spread lies, but are financially incentivized to amplify whatever gets clicks. And what gets clicks? Outrage. Conspiracies. Fear. So the system ends up promoting content that chips away at institutional trust, over and over again.

And this is where I feel the tension again. Because I want to believe these institutions can earn trust back. But I’m also watching them move slower and slower, too cautious, too reactive, while the world speeds up.

So here’s what I keep circling back to: If people stop believing the system works for them, they’ll replace it with something that feels faster and clearer, at any cost.

And what we’re seeing now, quietly but consistently, is a shift from systems that asked for trust (courts, media, elections) to systems that demand obedience. 

4. Time
I’ve always thought of the slowness of democracy as the cost of doing things the ‘right’ way. Process over urgency. Fairness over speed. Fine. But that balance only worked when the world moved slowly enough to allow it.

That’s not the world we live in anymore.

Today, decisions need to happen in real time. Technology deploys at a speed we’ve never seen in history. A new AI model can reshape industries before any government has even formed a task force. Supply chains shift overnight. And climate systems are moving from warning to breakdown while we’re still trying to get a vote scheduled.

And the most unsettling thing of all is not even that governments are reacting slowly, it’s that they behave like they have all the time in the world.

You can literally feel the mismatch between the speed of reality and the pace of policy. And when that stretch becomes too wide, people start looking for something that actually moves. 

And once again If people start associating democracy with delay, and delay with danger, they’ll quietly opt out by disengaging and shifting their attention toward faster, simpler models of governance.

And once that starts, it’s hard to stop. Because the trade-off begins to feel logical. If everything’s on fire, do you want a committee or a firefighter?

So Where Do We Turn Now?
The values of democracy - freedom, fairness, dignity - still matter. But the structure built to deliver them is collapsing in ways that are no longer fixable with reform.

The world democracy was built for (local, slow, understandable) is gone. What we have now is a world governed by speed, complexity, and irreversible consequences. And no system designed in another century can keep up.

So maybe it’s time we re-envision it all. If we had to design something from scratch - something that works in this reality - what would it look like?

And to even begin, we’d need to ask questions that are uncomfortable. The kind that feel morally off-limits. 

• What if participation can no longer be universal by default, but must be tied to understanding context and consequences?
• What if we’ve treated equality of input as sacred, but ignored the damage of uninformed input in systems that now govern nuclear policy, AI development, or planetary risk?
• What if the right to vote, in certain domains, must be earned and not given?
• What if certain decisions (climate, health, intergenerational debt) need to be shielded from four-year election cycles, even if that means limiting public reversal?

These questions clash with the principles many of us were taught to defend at all costs: one person, one vote. Equal say. Full inclusion.

But if the world we live in no longer makes those ideas workable (at least not at this scale and speed) then the real danger is pretending the system still works when it doesn’t.

Look, I don’t have the answer. But what I know is that we’ve reached a moment where the old frameworks can’t keep up with our current speed, and we must re-engineer a system to deliver the values we believe in. 

And the first step to do that, is to ask harder questions than we’re used to. Questions that will surely make us flinch and feel wrong in our mouths. 

That’s where I am right now. And if you’re feeling that same tension, maybe that’s where we begin.

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