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.
Awards and Recognition
- A Next Big Idea Book Club Must-Read Book
- A Financial Times Best Book of the Year: Economics
"[A]n excellent, new book. . . .[Schaake] argues for a more precautionary approach to the mass roll out of new technologies, with specific limits on technologies like spyware, facial recognition systems and crypto-currencies, and much greater transparency on the uses and finance of AI. These are sensible proposals, but likely the very opposite of what Donald Trump might instigate as a set of policies."—Mike O'Sullivan, Forbes
"Marietje Schaake sees the intersection of Big Tech and government with a clarity few others can match. Her book 'The Tech Coup: How to Save Democracy from Silicon Valley' is extraordinarily frightening and important. Everyone who cares about the future of individual freedom should read it."—Ian Bremmer, Eurasia Group President
"I highly recommend [THE TECH COUP]. . . . It’s something we all need to be thinking about as we enter into a new era where AI and technology continues to increase in sophistication and impact."—Rick Wilson, The Enemies List
"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
"Loved reading all of those stories. It really brings up all of the issues, the thorny issues, and brings them to life in a tangible way. . . . We are so excited for people to read THE TECH COUP, even people working in and on technology. Marietje got her arms around everything in THE TECH COUP. She’s such a well informed and credible voice on these issues…I really enjoyed the book."—Paul Samson, Policy Prompt Podcast
"The Tech Coup is easily one of the best books I've read this year. It presents a compelling argument for why democracies should push back against the growing influence of the tech industry—and how they can do so."—Mark Goldberg, Global Dispatches podcast
"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
"As a Dutch liberal party member of the European Parliament, Marietje Schaake became an influential advocate for more rigorous regulation of the world’s biggest technology companies…to safeguard privacy, individual rights, and the integrity of democratic systems in the face of ever more sophisticated systems of data appropriation, surveillance, and information manipulation."—Stephen Sackur, BBC HARDtalk
"[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
"Stanford’s Schaake is a renowned expert on the consequences of the rise of the tech sector. In this book, she analyses one of the most important consequences of all — that for democracy. . . The result is what she calls the “tech coup”, the shift of power from public and democratic institutions to companies. This, she insists, “must stop”. She is right. We are citizens, not only consumers."—Martin Wolf, Financial Times
“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
