gy as politically neutral, the zeros and ones of binary code that operate independently of partisanship.

But today's guest says that increasingly private technology companies are usurping the functions of government and thereby, posing a real threat to the health of Western democracies.

She's Marietje Schaake, this week on Story in the Public Square.

(gentle music) Hello and welcome to Story in the Public Square where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from the Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

- And I'm G. Wayne Miller, also with Salve's Pell Center.

- And our guest this week is Marietje Schaake, a former member of the European Parliament, who is now a fellow at Stanford University, and the author of a critically important new book, "Tech Coup: How to Save Democracy from Silicon Valley."

She's joining us today from the Netherlands.

Marietje, thank you so much for being with us.

- Thanks for having me.

- Well, I gotta tell you, "The Tech Coup" is, I think, as timely and as precious a book as we've read for this show.

We'll get into it in some detail, but why don't you give us a quick overview.

- So "The Tech Coup" is really about what got us to the enormous power that Elon Musk now has as a key advisor to President Trump, because it talks about the way in which technology companies, larger and smaller, in mostly invisible ways have accumulated enormous power without countervailing powers, and how that is a threat to democracy.

- Well, so I mentioned that you are a former elected official, a former member of the European Parliament.

Did that experience influence your decision to ultimately write this book?

- Absolutely, so I began writing based on, you know, two big blocks of my career.

being in political office, being responsible for technology policies, and seeing tech companies grow at a rapid pace between 2009, when I was first elected, and 2019, when I stepped down, and then moved to the belly of the beast, Silicon Valley, and continued to focus on the way in which democracies need to put up guardrails, organize independent oversight and accountability over these tech companies.

And so, you know, written for a general audience, not for academic experts, this book really lays out how we got here and also how we need to make our democracy more robust to avoid a further power grab by unelected corporates, the tech companies, at the expense of the public interest and, you know, basically all of our lives.

- So who are the other tech titans in addition to Elon Musk?

And you laid them all out in the book, but just give us a quick look at who we're talking about, the companies and the people.

- Well, we saw a number of people lining up behind President Trump at his inauguration, a scene that I would've never imagined.

I mean, I describe in "The Tech Coup" how Silicon Valley has a lot of power over politics because we've all become so dependent on technology, because they lobby with, you know, enormous amounts of dollars, you know, over 100 million spent in Washington, same in Brussels, the hub in the European Union where tech policy is made.

And so, we're thinking about Amazon, Microsoft, Meta that includes Facebook, for example, but also Microsoft, that was not on the podium with Donald Trump, is an enormously large company that has strong ties to OpenAI that listeners may have have heard about.

So it's really the whole suite of large tech companies that are, you know, gaining more and more governance, so to say, over our lives, our societies, our economies, our national security, our civil liberties because of the technologies that they make, because of the market cap so the enormous capital that these companies have because we're so dependent on them they are, in many ways, overtaking roles that used to be the exclusive domain of states.

So think about critical infrastructure, or think about intelligence gathering that is now often a role for companies providing security, scanning critical infrastructure for risk, and so on.

The kinds of activities in the domain of national security, very sensitive geopolitical implications that are now operated and run by companies, who have an information advantage compared to states.

And so, all of this combined really sketches a very worrying picture about how an ecosystem of tech companies, it's not necessarily one or the other, but it's really, you know, a whole suite of companies that also are very much linked together that are now incredibly powerful.

And unfortunately, I don't foresee that the US, under this administration, is going to be a leader in adopting rules to course correct, to strengthen the rule of law, and to make sure that this out sized power, this coup is actually pushed back against.

- So how do the worldviews and the views of democracy and government among the tech titans, how does that deviate from the traditions of the West in those areas, government and democracy, clearly they do.

- So I think there are a couple of areas to point to understand what is happening.

One, I think the whole narrative that may be familiar for listeners to this program, that technology would sort of create a self-fulfilling prophecy of democratization was always highly naive about how hard it is to actually have a democracy.

If you are up against authoritarian regimes, for example, you know, the idea that just putting a mobile phone into people's hands and connecting them to social media would somehow magically push through all this aggressive repression and censorship was, of course, a naive narrative, but one that held a lot of promise and that a lot of people actually believed in, and made politicians decide not to regulate these companies that would, you know, allegedly lead to this democratization around the world.

So that's one part of the story.

The other part of the story is that there's a relatively small group of people, think about, you know, the Peter Thiels of this world, the Elon Musks of this world, who actually have an idea that not any political group or party, not any sort of state government is the best to serve citizens, but rather some sort of corporate structure that actually needs to be created after destroying state institutions, and hollowing out government as we know it.

And I think that's what you're witnessing right now with this so-called Department of Government Efficiency that Elon Musk is responsible for, but not in the official way that we know in the US where if somebody gets an appointment, you know, they're heard before Congress, they have to distance themselves from their business interests.

There are checks and balances, there's transparency over decision making.

So while this mission that he's on is called a department, it's not an actual department.

And as we've seen a lot of hollowing out, rapid firings, you know, all in the name of efficiency.

But ultimately what it does is that it really, you know, pulls apart the institutional infrastructure of the United States and I think people around the country are beginning to feel it, whether they're in universities and research resources are drying up, or whether we're thinking about, you know, aviation oversight, or the whole question of how to deal with epidemics and vaccines.

There are so many areas where there are dramatic changes happening in the United States in the name of efficiency, but where those who are in charge don't mind if the government fails because they believe that a corporate structure can actually replace it.

And I think it's a sort of radical thought that is hard for people to grasp because typically, you know, whether it was Republican or Democratic governments, the parameters within which the game of politics was played were within the US Constitution.

And there was a sort of area for fierce competition between ideas, and styles, and approaches but at least within those boundaries.

Right now, the game far exceeds, or the activities, I shouldn't call it a game because it's actually dead serious and very dangerous, but far exceeds the parameters within which US politics has always been fought out.

- Yeah, Marietje you know, I wonder sometimes if... You know, so some people might dismiss what these companies are trying to do as just business development, right?

There's a data-driven dynamic to modern governance, and so these tech companies are trying to get in there and sell their wares.

But the question in my mind is simply, is it just business development, or is it something more nefarious?

And the way you're describing it sounds much more nefarious than just business.

- Well, I think it's an agenda where business interests or, you know, profit for that matter are probably not even the most important.

So let's take two examples that are illustrative from my point of view.

You may remember when Elon Musk bought Twitter, now X, the social media platform where a lot of people were sort of laughing that he got a bad deal from a business perspective, right?

That he may have paid too much, that he, through the decisions he made about the platform, lowered its value, for example advertisement dollars and so on.

But when you think about it as a tool of power, and not as something that is even considered to be necessarily profitable, then it all makes a whole lot more sense because Elon Musk, being the richest or one of the richest business people in the world, can actually lose an entire company.

You know, or as he's facing now, you know, Tesla is doing very poorly, particularly in Europe because people don't wanna be associated with that brand.

They don't wanna buy cars from someone who has supported the far right in Europe and who is destroying the US government.

So the business incentives that might typically, actually persuade a CEO to act in a certain way don't matter for the ultra wealthy billionaires.

The other example is, of course, Jeff Bezos and his ownership of The Washington Post, where he took a dramatic intervention, did a dramatic intervention this week where he basically dictated that the opinion pages could only be part... You know, could only deal with certain topics, so would really narrow the scope of opinion pieces could be placed in The Washington Post.

While of course, previously, he had promised never to intervene over such editorial decisions.

But the point is, even if a lot of people, including myself, immediately canceled their subscription to The Washington Post after this move in protest, or in dismay, or a combination of the two, from a business point of view it doesn't hurt Jeff Bezos.

He has so much money that even if The Washington Post would sort of drop dead today, it would not hurt his business empire.

And this is of course, the problem because if independent media are no longer independent because they're owners, or if social media platforms are really becoming the platforms of influencing politics, steering people towards the far rights, you know, giving platforms, as Elon Musk has done, to the leader of the far right in Germany, who knows what the algorithmic settings are doing to steer people in a certain direction, then that is what matters to these tech giants and not so much the business case.

So I would also encourage people who have heard over and over that Silicon Valley is about innovation, that regulation stifles innovation, that Silicon Valley is about free speech, another one of those traps that we hear so much but is actually not true that when they hear that Donald Trump, or Elon Musk, or other tech moguls are in this to do good business, that they also question whether it is about business, or whether it's about power?

And power to take into their own hands and to really go above, or underneath our democratic system.

So to really circumvent constitutional and democratic mandates, checks and balances, and accountability.

And to me, I studied American studies in university, believe it or not, this whole promise of checks and balances is so integral to the story of what American politics is all about, why it is robust.

But if you destroy these checks and balances, well, what's gonna save American democracy then?

- Yeah, you know, I don't know if you're familiar with the work of Yascha Mounk up at Harvard, and he's looked at the appeal of democracy in Western countries since the World War II generation.

And the further those generations get away from 1945, it seems like there's greater openness to non-democratic solutions to governing.

Is this part of that, is this sort of what we're headed towards because the people are now more open to undemocratic solutions to governing?

- Well, it looks like it.

I mean, you know, a lot of people argue Donald Trump has been democratically elected and therefore, he cannot undermine democracy.

But of course, democracy is about much more than elections.

And we're actually seeing significant undermining of the US democracy as it was known.

Obviously very dramatic geopolitical decisions, you know, betraying the Ukrainians, which is top of mind here in Europe, and which is actually really angering people here.

JD Vance making derogatory comments about the UK and France as though, you know, they don't really have the will to fight even if soldiers served alongside Americans in wars that the United States dragged European countries into in Iraq, in Afghanistan.

So the kinds of choices that are made have deep impact on US democracy, but also on the collective strength of democracies worldwide on the notion that there should be rules that actually also constrain the behavior of states when they're very powerful, which some people call the rules-based order.

It's a little bit abstract, but the idea is that there should be agreed rules, whether it's large or small countries, that rights should be protected and that certain behavior is just not acceptable, such as the invasion of another country.

But, you know, the US administration, baffling as it is, now siding with Vladimir Putin and not with the victim of a war of aggression, Ukraine, goes to show how deep these changes are and how rapid.

You know, we've only had the Trump administration for around six weeks out of four years.

So, you know, we really have to worry about what will remain of the rule of law and that rules-based order after this pace of destruction and the will to actually throw overboard a lot of the pillars that for decades have actually defined what was considered the US' position of power.

So, you know, I don't wanna glorify that because we've also seen excesses that are an abuse of that power.

- [Jim] Sure.

- A lot of wars that shouldn't have been started have dragged people into it.

Obviously, abuse of power in the US itself with phenomena like Guantanamo, for example, or mass surveillance of people through tech.

So I don't want to romanticize the US that we came from, but certainly, where things are heading now is doing enormous damage to the promise of American democracy and the collective strength of democracies around the world.

- So Marietje, there's another party here, and that is the consumer, if you go globally there are literally billions of people who subscribe to Meta products, Instagram and Facebook, to Apple, to Amazon, break that down for us.

- So, in almost every interview that I do, or talk that I give people ask what can consumers do?

- [G. Wayne] Yeah.

- And of course, voting with the feet, you know, walking from products to others is a helpful thing.

So to step away from, let's say WhatsApp and go to Signal, or to step away from, you know, the very surveillance capitalism driven social media platforms to go to others, more decentralized, less profit driven is great.

To protect children from addictive tech products, good.

But my concern, and I also lay that out in "The Tech Coup," is that really the power asymmetry between that individual tech, internet, mobile phone, social media user and the tech companies that are designing and crafting very, very sophisticated terms of use, the way in which they nudge, or suggest that you just click Accept to the terms of use, or you just wanna, you know, try out that cool generative AI tool to just be entertained.

You wanna see a funny image, you wanna hear a funny text, you wanna get some inspiration for, you know, a poem that you're gonna write.

The entertainment, the ease of use, the promise of more efficiency is very, very much on the front and it's really hard for the individual tech user to appreciate all the consequences that come with clicking, Yes.

Or stepping, stepping into this so-called free service.

So while I'm a big believer in empowering individuals and bringing people along in making the change, I really think that we need more collective action.

That's why regulation is a part, investing in alternatives, which is very much a huge discussion in Europe right now.

You know, we need to break our dependence on US tech companies because it's dangerous for Europeans.

Tech companies are going to be swept up in the trade war that Donald Trump is starting, but they can also be instrumentalized against national security and this is now very much a concern if we look at the direction that the US administration is going towards.

If you look at Elon Musk, who's also clearly against a strong EU, the same as Donald Trump, probably because rules are coming out of European legislative processes that actually impact these tech companies.

So the point is that you need to have some guardrails that are coming from rules, or investments in alternatives, or different ways of using procurement.

And you cannot rely on the individual internet user for creating sufficient collective critical mass vis-a-vis these incredibly powerful tech companies that are basically capable of changing our behavior without us even realizing how they do it.

- You know, Marietje you write really compellingly about cryptocurrency and the blockchain in "The Tech Coup."

President Trump recently announced an intention to create a US national reserve of cryptocurrency.

What's at stake with this decentralization of finance and with a proposal like the one that President Trump recently made?

- So the challenge with cryptocurrencies is one, that they're called currencies because they're actually not a currency the way the dollar and the euro are currency, but they're an investment product with all the risks that come with them.

And on top of that, because they are kind of operating in a parallel structure where scarcity is created artificially, they operate below the radar.

Viewers of this program probably know that cryptocurrencies are really the means of choice for a lot of criminals and terror organizations as well, because it can be used without being traced so easily.

And so, because there is more and more appetite on the part of the Trump administration to have more power for crypto investors and pro crypto products that evades monetary policies and actually challenges them.

So what it means is if you create so much value that operates outside of the regular space within which monetary and fiscal policies apply, that they can be undermined very easily.

And, you know, it's unheard of to see a US president bringing to the market what is now called a meme so some kind of, you know, crypto product that people can invest in, but that create personal wealth for the president himself.

And so, there are all kinds of very perverse dynamics around what the crypto investors hope to achieve, what the president hopes to gain from this, and how that would impact monetary policy.

So I think the move by President Trump to, you know, strengthen basically the institutional use of cryptocurrencies is all going to contribute to an eroding of the ability of monetary policies to really steer financial streams, and will give more room for the kinds of schemes that he likes for personal wealth and probably also, for many others.

So I think it is a risky thing he's doing, but it would fit entirely with this agenda of, you know, weakening the state to replace it with something else.

So we're not talking about different politics in the same institutions, we're talking about pushing aside the institutions, replacing it with some kind of, you know, corporate or now crypto model that is much harder to apply oversight and accountability over.

- You write very eloquently about the history of the internet, of course, which is the backbone of everything that we're talking about here and the initial promise of it.

And I remember in the '90s when I first went on the internet during the dial up era, it was just this wonderful thing, you could share stories, you could meet people, what happened?

Again, we only have a couple of minutes and you write a lot about it - Yeah.

- In the book, but what happened?

- Well, I mean, I remember that time too.

I actually was an exchange student in the United States in 1996 when I also used dial up internet to, you know, connect back home.

And we saw these websites popping up, even the city that I was born in.

So it was all very nascent, but it was mesmerizing.

You know, all this connectivity, all this knowledge that could be exchanged.

I remember it was incredibly exciting and it just seemed like such a progressive step to be taking, you know, in just the evolution of our societies.

But what happened is that corporate interests very quickly sort of occupied the internet and became what a lot of people are now considering the internet.

You know, a lot of people will only go online through the Facebooks, the Googles, the Amazons of this world and not in other ways.

And now also through generative AI which, you know, they're using for search and other kinds of functions.

So corporate interests took over, they became incredibly powerful on the internet and pushed aside these sort of public interest goals of connecting people and unlocking knowledge, you know, the very scientific origins of the internet, and replace it with corporate interests with blitz scaling that I talk about in the book with, you know, this cutthroat competition that we now also see between AI companies where they wanna push out their latest products and models despite concerns and risks, but just to be quicker than the competitor.

And so, that means that any benefits are for the companies and any risks are for society.

And, you know, that's where we are now with what the internet has become.

- Marietje Schaake, the book is "The Tech Coup."

We could talk to you for another hour but we're, unfortunately, out of time.

That is all we have this week for Story in the Public Square.

If you wanna know more about the show, you can find us on social media or visit pellcenter.org where you can always catch up on previous episodes.

For G. Wayne Miller, I'm Jim Ludes asking you to join us again next time for more Story in the Public Square.

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