Marietje Schaake

Marietje Schaake (born 1978) served as a Dutch member of the European Parliament for the liberal D66 party from 2009 to 2019, earning a reputation as Europe’s most digitally fluent legislator on trade, surveillance exports and internet freedom. She then crossed to Silicon Valley’s doorstep as international policy director at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center and a fellow at the Institute for Human-Centered AI, and served on the UN secretary-general’s AI Advisory Body.

The Tech Coup

Her 2024 book “The Tech Coup: How to Save Democracy from Silicon Valley” (Princeton University Press) distills fifteen years of watching the industry from both sides: technologies from social media to AI, she argues, have shifted core public functions — from election infrastructure to warfare — into the hands of companies that answer to shareholders rather than citizens. AI accelerates the coup, in her telling, because governments increasingly cannot even understand the systems they outsource decisions to. Her prescriptions run from mandatory transparency and independent audits to bans on the most invasive tools, and a more principle-based form of regulating that does not chase each new product cycle.

Reviewers across the political spectrum treated the book as one of the sharpest statements of the democratic case against Big Tech; critics countered that her remedy assumes a regulatory competence governments have rarely demonstrated. Schaake is no relic of techno-pessimism — she writes as a self-described tech optimist disillusioned by watching power concentrate — which is precisely what makes her indictment sting.