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—where 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 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.
“The growing power of digital technologies, especially AI, requires urgent innovation in democratic governance to counterbalance corporate influence. Instead of opposing regulation, we must uphold human rights, protect democracy, and support the development and deployment of technology for the common good. This book offers an essential reflection in this regard.”—Yoshua Bengio, Université de Montréal and Mila-Quebec AI Institute
“A thorough and necessary explanation of the parade of policy failures that enshittified the internet—and a sound prescription for its disenshittification.”—Cory Doctorow, author of The Internet Con and Red Team Blues
“Marietje Schaake is one of the most acute contemporary observers of digital technology. In The Tech Coup, she explains how the tech industry has escaped democratic oversight despite the many problems it has created for modern societies. She alerts us to critical problems and points to some ways out of them.”—Francis Fukuyama, author of Liberalism and Its Discontents
“A twenty-first century Tocqueville, Schaake looks at Silicon Valley and its impact on democratic society with an outsider’s gimlet eye. She unflinchingly shows how technologies like AI tip the scales of power and justice threatening our freedoms, values, and rights. The Tech Coup is an essential roadmap for deploying policy innovation to guard the public interest and reinvigorate democracy.”—Alondra Nelson, Science, Technology, and Social Values Lab, Institute for Advanced Study
“A must-read from a former European lawmaker turned Silicon Valley expert! Marietje Schaake pulls together the different strands that we now call Big Tech, from chips and satellites to addictive design and virality to, more importantly, how its business model —surveillance for profit—created the dystopia we are living in today. Marietje exposes the unchecked, corrosive power that is undermining democracy, human rights, and our global order. She rightfully calls it the ‘tech coup.’”—Maria Ressa, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021 and author of How to Stand Up to a Dictator
