This TED Talk features physicist Cesar Hidalgo, recorded live at TED-2018.

Is it just me or are there other people here that are a little bit disappointed with democracy?

So let's look at a few numbers.

If we look across the world, the median turnout in presidential elections over the last 30 years

has been just 67%.

Now we go to Europe and we look at people that participated in EU parliamentary elections.

The median turnout in those elections is just 42%.

Now, let's go to New York, and let's see how many people voted in the last election for mayor.

And we'll find that only 24% of people showed up to vote.

What that means is that if friends were still running,

Joey and maybe Phoebe would have shown up to vote.

And you cannot blame them because people are tired of politicians

and people are tired of other people using the data that they have generated

to communicate with their friends and family to target political propaganda at them.

But the thing about this is that this is not new.

Nowadays, people use likes to target propaganda at you

before they use your zip code or your gender or your age.

Because the idea of targeting people with propaganda

for political purpose is as old as politics.

And the reason why that idea is there

is because democracy has a basic vulnerability.

This is the idea of a representative.

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