An insider offers a “forceful critique...of Big Tech's steady erosion of democracy” (The New Yorker) and describes what must be done to stop it
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.
"As a member of the European Parliament, author Marietje Schaake was on the vanguard of politicians who recognized that no technology is inherently "democratic"; only with careful regulations can we protect the disruption of democracy from AI and other innovations that might undermine it. And yet, such laws are largely absent, especially in the United States, which lags behind European regulators and has long subscribed to the Silicon Valley mantra that regulation stifles innovation. This problem has become more urgent than ever as an ecosystem of small and invisible tech players are gradually taking over crucial tasks formerly exercised by democratic governments-from intelligence gathering, to policing, voting, and more. Some tech companies have even come to resemble nations in terms of their structure and scale. Tech companies now have the means and the abilities to set policies in the digital world-a world which comprises more of our lives every day. In this book, Schaake illuminates the ways in which democracies around the world are increasingly run on technology that few in government can understand, let alone regulate. Technologies we expected to help boost democracy (such as Twitter during the Arab Spring uprisings) are now being used by authoritarians, and more and more digital products created in democracies are being exported and used for repressive means elsewhere. Schaake also discusses what can be done, pointing to successes within some European counties, as well as ideas not yet in place but necessary for the preservation of democracy moving forward. The result is a book balanced between presenting the dangers we face in clear terms and outlining a vision for a safer, more democratic future"--
"[C]ompelling… both evidence-based and instructional. Schaake deftly tells sobering stories of tech interference in elections, reveals how dictators use surveillance technologies to spy on their citizens and lets readers in on the boardroom shenanigans of Silicon Valley executives….Schaake’s book is a valuable guide to preserving our democratic institutions."
---Rumman Chowdhury, Nature
