The Tech Coup
How to Save Democracy from Silicon Valley
Over the past decades, under the cover of 'innovation', technology companies have successfully resisted regulation and have even begun to seize power from governments themselves. Facial recognition firms track citizens for police surveillance. Cryptocurrency has wiped out the personal savings of millions and threatens the stability of the global financial system. Spyware companies sell digital intelligence tools to anyone who can afford them. This new reality – here unregulated technology has become a forceful instrument for autocrats around the world – is terrible news for democracies and citizens.
In The Tech Coup, Marietje Schaake offers a behind-the-scenes account of how technology companies crept into nearly every corner of our lives and our governments. She takes us beyond the headlines to high-stakes meetings with human rights defenders, business leaders, computer scientists, and politicians to show how technologies – from social media to artificial intelligence – have gone from being heralded as utopian to undermining the pillars of our democracies. To reverse this existential power imbalance, Schaake outlines game-changing solutions to empower elected officials and citizens alike. Democratic leaders can – and must – resist the influence of corporate lobbying and reinvent themselves as dynamic, flexible guardians of our digital world.
Drawing on her experiences in the halls of the European Parliament and among Silicon Valley insiders, Schaake offers a frightening look at our modern tech-obsessed world – and a clear-eyed view of how democracies can build a better future before it is too late.
'Marietje Schaake...is an authoritative figure in the world of Big Tech...Her stance is simple and clearly expressed: The tech giants of Silicon Valley have become too big to fail and thus too big to regulate, causing harm to all of us. The ultimate result, she argues in this engaging and readable book, is the fundamental erosion of personal freedom and democratic norms.' – Kalpana Shankar, Science
'An assessment of the current state of the technology sector, which has avoided accountability for decades – but there are signs of change…. Both alarming and hopeful, Schaake writes with hard-won experience and clear-minded intelligence.' – Kirkus Reviews
Marietje Schaake is international policy director at Stanford University Cyber Policy Center and international policy fellow at Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. Between 2009 and 2019, she served as a member of the European Parliament from the Netherlands. She writes a monthly column for the Financial Times on technology and governance.
