Techbros think Europe is a product that needs to be fixed, don't let them

We have quietly allowed a dangerous assumption to take root in Europe: the idea that the "tech mindset" (the philosophy of Venture Capital and startup scaling) is the superior operating system for governing a society.

We see a growing class of tech-founders-turned-policymakers who look at the European map and see a product that needs to be fixed. They view the continent through lenses ground in Silicon Valley, designed to maximize efficiency, optimize processes, and deliver shareholder value.

But when you look at a society solely through the lens of optimization, the messy reality of democracy (public debate, opposition, compromise, and consensus) starts to look like "inefficiency." To a product manager, a national parliament looks like a bug in the code that needs to be deleted.

This is a fundamental category error. These policymakers operate under the illusion that logic rules the world. They believe that if a policy is mathematically efficient and increases GDP, the population will simply upload the update and be happy. But that is not how human societies work, certainly not in Europe.

Logic does not bind a nation together; trust does. A sense of fairness, community, and transparency does. We are bound by our shared history and our national identities, our feelings of belonging and safety. These are not variables in an equation; they are the foundation of our social contract. When we strip away sovereignty to make commerce "frictionless," we are tearing at the fabric of trust that holds us together.

The core of the issue is that we have essentially outsourced our collective imagination regarding economic and social policy to the Venture Capital class. We must look at this with clear eyes: VCs and investors may be brilliant at identifying market gaps, but they possess a profound and undeniable conflict of interest. Their primary incentive structure is the maximization of profit and the growth of Assets Under Management (AUM).

What is good for a fund’s portfolio is not necessarily good for a single mother in Athens, a farmer in Bordeaux, or a teacher in Berlin. Even assuming they have the best of intentions, their training tells them to prioritize scale over stability, disruption over cohesion and their shareholders over citizens.

We need to remember that citizens are not users, and a country is not a platform. People want to feel that they are contributing to a shared project, not that a project is being imposed upon them by a strange agent. People want to be the main characters of their own stories, not just efficient workers or soldiers in a centralized system.

It is time to stop outsourcing our future to the asset managers. We need to expose the myth that efficiency automatically leads to growth, or that financial capital is the only source of innovation.

Real prosperity comes from building a society we actually trust. It comes from maximizing the number of citizens who are active participants in creating value.

From the imagination of our future to the building of it, this belongs to all of us.

It is a collective mission.