Marietje Schaake

A tech insider who has been hailed by The New Yorker for her “forceful critique” of Big Tech describes what must be done to stop its erosion of democracy 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.

How to Save Democracy from Silicon Valley

The Tech Coup

Bastien Vaucher

Those who praised the democratizing possibilities of technology and social media platforms failed to appreciate that repressive authoritarian regimes could be tech-savvy too.

I felt shocked—not by the behavior of these repressive gov-ernments, from whom I expected little else, but by our own double standards. The monitoring and surveillance technology these regimes were using came from Europe: Italian-made hacking systems were the technology of choice for the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, while French technologies helped Muammar al-Gaddhafi in Libya and British systems facilitated the Mubarak regime in Egypt.

Corporate giants did not feel accountable to lawmakers like me. They thought that they could dodge real policy and enforcement questions with free frozen yogurt and inspirational buzzwords-and we hadn't yet proven them wrong. As democratic governance long failed to impose guardrails on companies like Facebook, they had grown to believe that they operated above the law.

In June 2022, in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the previous landmark case, Roe v.

Wade. The ruling made it legal for individual states to ban abortion, which is now the case in over a dozen of them? In this new legal land-scape, a novel digital threat emerged: casually collected location data could end up revealing that someone visited an abortion clinic. When we surf, pay, or chat, we are subconsciously leaving digital footprints, and it may be hard to imagine how innocent web surfing or online searching could become a hammer in the hands of law enforcement.

When tens of millions of jobs end up displaced by Al, shareholders of companies will benefit, while the price of unemployment or reeducation will fall to societies to shoulder.

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