The Tech Coup

Origin

Schaake coined the term to capture a dynamic she had observed from inside the institution being displaced. As a Member of the European Parliament she participated in legislative attempts to govern digital technology and watched repeatedly as decisions shaping the digital lives of hundreds of millions of Europeans were made elsewhere—in product meetings, in terms-of-service updates, in the architecture of systems no legislator could read. The coup, she came to understand, was not the result of malign intent by the companies; it was the aggregate consequence of democratic governments adopting an explicit laissez-faire posture toward the digital economy and “willfully enabling the unmitigated growth of the market in digital technologies.” The privatisation of public power was handed over, not seized.

The relevance to artificial intelligence is immediate and structural. Every dynamic Schaake identifies is intensified by AI, because AI concentrates capability in fewer hands while expanding the scope of what that capability can do. The decision about what an AI system will and will not say, whom it serves and whom it refuses, what counts as harmful—these are governance decisions in the most literal sense. They allocate rights, set limits on conduct, adjudicate competing interests. In a democracy such decisions belong, in principle, to accountable public bodies. In the AI economy they are made inside companies by people no citizen elected.

Key Ideas

Sovereignty migrating to infrastructure. The submarine cables that carry global data, the data centres that store and process it, the cloud platforms on which governments increasingly depend—this is the infrastructure of contemporary life, and it is owned almost entirely by private corporations. When a society’s digital infrastructure belongs to private actors, its autonomy is constrained not by persuasion but by architecture. The choices have been made before deliberation begins. Schaake calls this the shift from soft power to hard code: where states once shaped others’ preferences through attraction, private firms now shape societies’ possibilities through the systems they own and operate.

The neutrality myth. Technology companies presented themselves for two decades as neutral platforms—mere conduits for what others said and did. Schaake’s sustained dismantling of this myth is central to the tech coup argument. A platform that ranks, recommends, amplifies, and demotes is an editorial actor exercising consequential judgment. Generative AI makes the myth untenable: a system that produces answers to contested questions, makes choices about what to include and omit, and delivers its outputs with the confident surface of objective computation is not neutral. It embodies the choices of its makers and serves the interests of its owners, whether it acknowledges them or not. The claim to neutrality is an evasion of accountability dressed in the language of objectivity.

The citizen versus the consumer. The technology economy addresses people as consumers, offering products in exchange for attention and data. Democratic citizenship is a different relationship: participation in governing the conditions of collective life, the right to demand justification, standing to contest. When governing functions are reframed as consumer choices, the citizen is reduced to a chooser among products where she should be a participant in governance. The reduction is not announced; it is enacted through the daily experience of relating to the most powerful institutions in our lives as customers. The recovery of the citizen from beneath the consumer is, for Schaake, the precondition for resisting the coup. Only from the standpoint of the citizen does the privatisation of public power appear as what it is.