Technology’s take-over of our lives, our privacy, our norms, and our government has grown exponentially in recent years. In the past decade 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.”

Like the author of a new book that provides evidence-based and instructional stories—sobering as they are—of these atrocities, “I do not want to live in a world dictated by technology companies and their executives.” Tech leaders, it can be shown, “do not have the mandate or, frankly, the ethics necessary to govern so much of our societies.”

The Tech Coup: How to Save Democracy from Silicon Valley (2024) by Marietje Schaake is an extraordinarily frightening and important new work on how the tech giants of Silicon Valley have become “too big to fail and thus too big to regulate, causing harm to all of us.” With a subject that is large and technically complex, Schaake has written a book that is both engaging and readable, even for the non-expert. Which is a good thing, because what she describes affects each one of us. The ultimate result of this coup is “the fundamental erosion of personal freedom and democratic norms” all for the benefit of American oligarchs.

We think of oligarchs as Gilded Age tycoons or current-day Russians who built their fortunes on mineral extraction and transportation monopolies. As Mother Jones senior reporter Tim Murphy describes it, however, American oligarchs offer “a twist on the pilfering of the commons that produced Russia’s. It is built on a different kind of resource, not nickel or potash, but you—your data, your attention, your money, your public square.”

Jeff Bezos has famously used all of those things—our data, attention, and money—to enrich himself and destroy local economies, entire industries, and now the public square that was the free press. The resignation of Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post cartoonist Ann Telnaes after one of her cartoons was killed by the editorial board led me to finally pull the plug on our decades-long Post subscription.

“The cartoon that was killed criticizes the billionaire tech and media chief executives who have been doing their best to curry favor with incoming President-elect Trump. There have been multiple articles recently about these men with lucrative government contracts and an interest in eliminating regulations making their way to Mar-a-lago. The group in the cartoon included Mark Zuckerberg/Facebook & Meta founder and CEO, Sam Altman/AI CEO, Patrick Soon-Shiong/LA Times publisher, the Walt Disney Company/ABC News, and Jeff Bezos/Washington Post owner.”

Other principled and contrarian voices have also left the Washington Post in protest in recent days.

Bezos, Mark Zuckerburg, and Elon Musk are just the most visible of the tech billionaires who do not have allegiance to our country or to democracy. And frankly, we’ve no one to blame for their takeover of our lives and our government but ourselves. The “great outsourcing of our government,” writes Schaake, “is fundamentally rewriting the social contract between the democratic state and its citizens.”

A single very wealthy man (Musk) largely controls United States space capabilities. “And that happened because the U.S. pretty much just … handed it over to him.”

“He has no loyalty to any particular government, and often acts directly against the interests of his own. He single-handedly sabotaged a Ukrainian naval attack on invading Russian forces, despite the United States’ firm support for Ukraine, and was later revealed to be in “regular contact” with murderous Russian strongman Vladimir Putin while making such decisions.

He controls a major means of public communication, which he uses primarily as propaganda machine for misleading the public and boosting destabilizing—and often violent—anti-government voices.”

Hunter Lazzaro, Uncharted Blue

In her book, Schaake provides detail—in straightforward language without the hyperbole found on the internet—about why she wants governments to proactively prevent companies from harming citizens. Such a notion is seen by many of our tech oligarchs as quaint and old-fashioned, but Schaake describes why this is critical for democracy’s survival. Her chapter on cryptocurrency alone should be required reading for all thinking citizens of the world.

To provide another example she turns to Palantir, an analytics company that gets data directly from law enforcement and other government agencies and then analysis it with little transparency before repackaging it to sell to governments into “actionable insights.” This business model means that the company . . .

“profits handsomely—sometimes tens of millions of dollars per contract—on processes that cannot be scrutinized or interrogated by citizens. Why, exactly, should democracies put up with that?”

Schaake provides a road map for how governments and their citizens, can survive. As Mike O’Sullivan wrote in Forbes, “These are sensible proposals, but likely the very opposite of what Donald Trump might instigate as a set of policies.” And therein lies our newest challenge.

Brian Gardiner writes in a review of the book in the MIT Technology Review that the group of men (and they are almost all men) who are pilfering our public square are “seemingly incapable of serious self-reflection—men who believe unequivocally in their own greatness and who are comfortable making decisions on behalf of hundreds of millions of people who did not elect them, and who do not necessarily share their values.” How do you deal with them? “You regulate them, of course. Or at least you regulate the companies they run and fund.”

That may seem like a hopeless task in today’s world, but fortunately, history shows that there are ways we can stand up for our rights.

Both the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Declaration of Independence affirm that “legitimacy presumes consent—that the consent of the governed as at the heart of the notion of a social contract between citizens and their governments, which sees citizens give up some of their freedoms in favor of shared rules of the commons.” Democratic governments “must extend norms and rules to ensure safety in the digital world.”

It is up to us. Our democracy depends upon it.

More to come . . .

DJB

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NOTE: I’ve been highlighting worries about technology’s over-reach for twelve years. Here’s a sampling of MORE TO COME essays on the topic.

• Farewell Facebook (January 20, 2013)
• It all depends on the objectives we choose (March 1, 2017)
• The search for who we really are (December 9, 2021)
• Digital Declutter (April 26, 2021)
• Another look at boundaries (February 9, 2022)
• Fighting for a people-powered future (October 11, 2023)

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Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay.