Why Big Tech is incompatible with democracy | Bruno Giussani

0:03You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. How much of your day is shaped by technology you don't really control and from a country you don't live in? The apps you open, the feeds you scroll, the cloud services you rely on, the AI tools that now seem to show up everywhere. Almost all important software and digital services, they all now run on the cloud, as we say, which means that both the data and the processing are not in our machines controlled by us locally, but they are on distant machines, on remote servers to which we buy access and which are controlled by the providers.

0:56That's author and journalist Bruno Giussani. In this talk, he shares why these technologies aren't just products anymore. They've become the invisible architecture of daily life for governments, hospitals, businesses, the public forums and our individual day to day work. And that gives the companies behind them enormous power. Bruno shares why he is especially concerned about what this means for Europe, where so much digital infrastructure depends on American platforms, American companies, and American law. Their utility is real, and that's why we have adopted them, and that's why it's so difficult to imagine doing without them.

1:33But all that comes at a price. You cannot build a healthy economy and a strong society on somebody else's digital infrastructure. He makes the case for what he calls Europe's digital difference, technology that doesn't spy on you, and infrastructure that gives people more choice, more control, and more accountability. It raises questions that reach far beyond any continent or country. How much autonomy do we really have right now? And what would it take to build a digital world we actually have a say in? That's coming up right after a short break.

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4:25And now, our TED Talk of the day. How many algorithms are part of your daily life? How many sensors? How many screens? In fact, interacting with screens and other digital interfaces has become the main daily activity of almost all of us. But how many of those interactions are actually really of our choosing? Our lives and our societies are increasingly structured around and by algorithms and digital networks. And this algorithmization of life, I think, is a problem. for different reasons, and I want to touch upon two of them tonight. The first one is the nature of these technologies. We think they are products, and we buy them, and once we own them, we can do with them as we please.

5:34But in the last couple of decades, digital technologies have actually become platforms. invisible digital architectures within which we live. And that changes absolutely everything. Almost all important software and digital services think of office and industrial applications, information and entertainment feeds, payments, artificial intelligence chatbots, they all now run on the cloud, as we say. Which means that both the data and the processing are not in our machines controlled by us locally, but they are on distant machines, on remote servers, to which we buy access and which are controlled by the providers.

6:39And that gives them an immense power over our lives. It allows them to decide what we can and cannot do, what ideas get visibility and what don't, what information we can access, and also to influence our public debates. Of course, these technologies are efficient, useful, practical, well-integrated, easy to use, often even free. Their utility is real, and that's why we have adopted them, and that's why it's so difficult to imagine doing without them. But all that comes at a price. And finally, we are starting to understand it. Data extraction, privacy loss, fragmentation of attention, dependency, mental health.

7:36We can do a very long list. And now, for the past three years, a little bit more, generative artificial intelligence is infiltrating itself everywhere. is popping up on all sorts of applications and programs, talking to us like friends, giving us sometimes the impression that we have superpowers. And indeed, AI chatbots can seem magical because they offer something almost irresistible, the opportunity to delegate to a machine the effort of thinking, learning, writing, even deciding. They are like cognitive baby bottles. And every day, tens of millions of people rush to the nipple. But the more we delegate thinking and deciding, the less we will be able to think and decide by ourselves.

8:44And indeed, we are increasingly surrounded by machines that, under the cover of optimization and practicality, diminish our ability to understand reality and to act upon it. And they algorithmically reprogram, change our societies. We think we control them, but actually it's they who hypnotize us and domesticate us. And I know that's not a happy profile of our current situation that I just described. And for us Europeans, and that's the second point, for us Europeans, this problem is compounded by the fact that almost all these digital technologies are American. For a long time, for a mix of economic opportunism and strategic naivete and comfort and lack of imagination, we have accumulated a substantial technological lag.

9:52We have given up on our digital autonomy. And it didn't seem such a huge deal. Because these technologies were coming from a country that was a friend and an ally. But now the United States are undergoing an internal revolution with fascist tendencies, and they're engaging in a rogue and destabilizing external activism. Old, established friendships are being replaced by openly hostile postures, by brazen interferences. And forced threats are becoming tools of foreign policy. And we must not fool ourselves. This is not just temporary. This is a profound systemic transformation. And the big tech companies, the big American tech companies, the ones that we carry in our pockets, the ones that are on our desk, on whose digital services we depend, they are aligned with the priorities of their government.

11:03We are actually seeing a convergence of military and political power and of cloud power. When the CEOs are invited to accompany the president to a dinner, for example, with the King of England, That's not so that they can take a selfie with the king, right? That's a signal. It's a signal that digital technology is today central to American power projection. In fact, we should start looking at their data centers in the same way we look at the military bases that the U.S. is maintaining around the world. And in this context, the fact that large parts of Europe run on American servers and software, owned by American companies, encoding American values and worldviews and subject to American law, of course, creates a huge systemic vulnerability.

12:11You cannot build a healthy economy and a strong society on somebody else's digital infrastructure. And our dependence is actually substantial. We may not realize it in our daily use, but somewhere between two-thirds and three-quarters of all digital technologies we use are American. And tech dependence is both a political and an economic risk. Should our access to American digital infrastructure be cut off for technical reasons, for an accident, for economic reasons, or for political reasons, it would cause a nearly immediate paralysis of nearly everything. Administration, hospitals, energy systems, businesses, of course, the military, payments, social networks, all our messaging apps.

13:15And yet, we continue to transfer segments of our companies, of our governments, and our social and private lives onto American clouds every day, deepening our dependence. And dependencies, every dependence, can be turned into coercion and into submission. And so I think it's urgent, very urgent, to find another way. To de-Americanize as much as possible our digital uses and infrastructures. now don't take me for an anti-american i spent the last 30 years building bridges between the two sides of the atlantic there is nothing anti-american in what i'm saying here tonight but there is everything anti-technological submission so how do we go about it obviously I'm not advocating for shifting to the other technological track of the world, the Chinese, nor for an autarchic approach, which in today's technological reality would be impossible.

14:39I'm talking about taking back control, about re-establishing, restoring a level of choice, of autonomy, of digital sovereignty. Some will say, but we don't really have alternatives to the American tech giants. We hear that all the time. But it's only half true. Because, yes, we don't have giants. We don't have a European Google or a European Microsoft.

15:15Bruno Giussani: But we do have alternatives. Not for everything, but for many things. They may be small, national, perhaps not perfect, but they're rather good. And there are really many. And what we need to do is to make them grow, to make them scale in a deliberate way. And there are many ways of doing that. One, for example, is to prioritize them in public procurement. We cannot go to private companies and dictate what kind of technology they should use to run their business. Although companies should wake up and realize that every time they store data on an American cloud, every time they integrate an American AI, every time they make their business model contingent upon accessing American digital technology, They're putting themselves in a position of dependence and weakening their operational robustness and resilience.

16:26But public procurement, we can decide where we direct taxpayers' money. And I'm talking about tens, many tens of billions of euros that every year, European public administrations sent to the other side of the Atlantic to buy digital technology. And so we should start to take into account not only economic criteria, but also strategic considerations when we choose technology. And at least partially favoring national and European providers, which would help them grow. And note that that's exactly what the Americans and the Chinese do with their companies. And note also that I'm not talking about subsidies.

17:17I'm talking about markets, about purchases, about bids, about offer and supply. And if we help them grow, then there are cascading effects. They will have resources to invest in assets and capabilities. They will have the capacity to build new technologies, to retain talent, to dynamize the market, to become themselves internationally competitive. Further, we also need to establish a distinct European model, a new kind of industrial policy that can foster a different kind of technological innovation and relaunch the European tech industry. An approach, for example, that favors transparency, interoperability, respect for essential values.

18:10A business model that does not rely on the often abusive exploitation of personal data, but favors technology that does not spy on people. A regime of competition rather than monopoly. Federated rather than centralized, diverse, and above all, democratic. Because the big tech platforms we use today, by nature, are authoritarian, based as they are on surveillance and control. It seems to me that technology that does not spy on you, that should be Europe's digital difference. And it also needs to be an approach that is not only defensive, but is competitive. That builds technology, not only integrates or regulates it.

19:13Of course, emancipating ourselves even just partially won't be easy. There is no quick fix, there is no one-for-one replacement. It will take time. But many have already done it. The city of Lyon in France, cities in Denmark, the state of Schleswig-Holstein in Germany, ministries in Austria, the French national police, the Swiss Supreme Court of Justice, both of those run on open source software. The German government, just a couple of days ago, put forward a policy framework for a German tech stack. And there are many, many others which show that it is possible. And then there is us, each and every one of us here tonight, who hand over entire parts of our private and social lives to American platforms every day, including today, without asking enough questions.

20:18Sometimes we do have a moment of doubt. We feel uneasy when we realize that our messages are read and our images are viewed by AIs, that the information we receive is filtered and often invented by algorithms, that the machines we use are programmed to manipulate us. But then the apps are so convenient, free, easy, our friends are there, our followers are there, the chatbots present themselves as friends. And so we convince ourselves that it's okay and continue to use them. But it's not okay. In fact, I believe that the existence of big tech, given their size, their concentration of capital, their growing technological grip into our lives, their almost direct access to our minds and to our emotions, the existence of big tech is no longer compatible with our freedoms and with democracy.

21:32The control they have over the development of artificial intelligence, one of the most astounding technologies ever created, further entrenches that power, projects it into the future. However, that power, algorithmic power, cloud power, rests at least in part on our consent, on our compliance, on our passive and silent acceptance. And there is where we have a choice. We can, of course, decide that autonomy and digital sovereignty are too expensive or too complicated or that it is too late and accept technological submission. And that seems to be the path we are on right now. Or we can resist.

22:34We can decide that we want to remain free and democratic and do everything we can, gradually but aggressively and with urgency, to regain control of our cloud and our data. It's possible. It will be difficult. It may hurt. It will require a surge of pride and of will, collaborative effort, pooled resources, courage, imagination. But to me, the path is absolutely clear. We need to de-Americanize our technological uses and infrastructure. And we need to start now. Thank you.

23:28That was Bruno Giussani at TEDxPorto in Portugal in 2026. If you're curious about TED's curation, visit ted.com slash curation guidelines. And that's it for today. TED Talks Daily is a podcast from TED. This episode was fact-checked by the TED Research Team and produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Lucy Little, Emma Taubner, and Tansika Sungmarnivong. Additional support from Daniela Ballarezzo, Christopher Faze-Bogan, Valentina Bohanini, Banban Chang, Brian Green, and Lainey Lott. Learn more at podcasts.ted.com. I am Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed.

24:10Thanks for listening. Thank you.

24:40Bruno Giussani: Access to over 1 ,000 airport lounges worldwide. The Capital One Venture X card. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. Lounge access is subject to change. See CapitalOne.com for details.