Democracy of Demand

Because perhaps we have been separating what should never have been separated.

The citizen and the worker have dignity and history. The consumer has, at best, a shopping basket. Even the word itself feels somehow less noble. Yet they are the same person: the person who votes, works, pays an energy bill, uses a platform, hands over data, chooses what to buy and increasingly asks an AI system what to choose.

And power increasingly meets us there.

In 1962, referring to consumers, John F. Kennedy said they were “the largest economic group in the economy” and “the only important group” that was not effectively organised. Sixty-four years later, the irony is striking.

Our searches are tracked, preferences inferred, attention measured, behaviour predicted. Platforms aggregate demand continuously; algorithms make it legible; AI increasingly anticipates and shapes it.

Demand is therefore already organised, but overwhelmingly by supply-side actors rather than by consumers themselves.

That is where a consumer question becomes a democratic one.

Democracy is not only what happens when we vote. It is also about agency: whether people retain a meaningful capacity to influence the systems shaping their lives. And those systems have changed. Markets have become global, infrastructures digital, power increasingly embedded in platforms, data and code.

We should be careful here. Markets are not democracies. Purchasing power is unequal. And, let’s not be naïve: buying the right coffee, clothes or smartphone will not save liberal democracy.

But neither should we become intellectually squeamish about the word consumer. Democracy rarely gains much by looking down on the people it is supposed to empower.

People, wearing their consumer hat, finance markets. In the digital economy they also feed them with their attention, information and data. Yet they still enter most of those systems as isolated individuals: increasingly measurable, predictable and influenceable, but rarely organised where the architecture itself is designed.

This is the intuition behind what I call the Democracy of Demand.

Not another layer of consumer protection. Not a romantic appeal to “vote with your wallet”. And certainly not an attempt to put markets under state direction.

The proposition is simple but radical: to give demand the collective intelligence, institutional form and negotiating capacity needed to influence how information, incentives and choices are increasingly organised. To rebalance capitalism from within.

There is a precedent. Industrial capitalism did not stabilise itself spontaneously. Labour became a primary counterweight to capital during the 20th century; collective bargaining, welfare systems and regulation helped turn productive expansion into social legitimacy. Labour and the state remain indispensable. But power is no longer organised only around production. In the age of artificial intelligence, it increasingly concerns the organisation of information, intelligence and choice.

Perhaps the 21st century needs its next counterweight there too: demand.

AI makes that possibility more urgent and intriguing. The same capabilities that personalise persuasion and organise demand from above can help people identify shared interests, compare outcomes, coordinate choices and make their collective weight visible.

The real question is not whether machines will become more intelligent than us — they will anyhow — but how collectively intelligent we can become around them.

Europe can become a natural prototype for this. Its middle class is not merely a statistical income category. Economic security gives millions of people room to choose, refuse, experiment and participate. It makes them consumers with agency and citizens with a stake in the system. If that room shrinks, though, something more than purchasing power is lost.

Europe’s roughly 450 million consumers sustain one of the world’s largest integrated markets.

That scale matters. We have become extraordinarily sophisticated at trying to regulate power created elsewhere. It is time to devote equal creativity to organising a source of power that is already in our DNA, and to do so proudly and with purpose.

This is why the consumer is not a lesser version of the citizen. In the economy now taking shape, recovering power as consumers may be part of how we recover power as citizens. And rebalancing AI capitalism from within may ultimately help secure the future of liberal democracy.

That is the bet behind the Democracy of Demand: preserving innovation and market dynamism while avoiding a false choice between concentrated technological power and political command.

So on the International Day of Democracy, consumers may not be such inappropriate guests after all.

This December, at the Euroconsumers Forum in Brussels, we want to take the next step: inviting those who shape markets, technology and public policy to explore, through an open and frank dialogue, how Democracy of Demand could actually be built.

Together.