PERSON
Marietje Schaake
The former European parliamentarian and Stanford policy director who named the tech coup—the quiet transfer of governing power from democratic institutions to unaccountable private firms—and whose demand that AI be brought back under democratic accountability is the most rigorous available argument for why freedom sometimes requires friction.
Marietje Schaake spent ten years inside the European Parliament watching public power drain into the hands of technology companies no citizen elected and none can remove. She authored reports on a Digital Freedom Strategy and on press freedom worldwide, helped enshrine net neutrality in European law, and earned the
Wall Street Journal’s designation as “Europe’s most wired politician.” What she learned in that decade is the argument her 2024 book
The Tech Coup makes with unsparing precision: the most consequential transfer of power in the contemporary democratic world is silent, gradual, and largely welcomed by the people it disempowers. Each individual surrender feels rational. The aggregate is a transformation of who governs. Artificial intelligence is the accelerant. It concentrates the power to make consequential decisions about billions of lives inside
opaque private systems—systems that adjudicate what is true, who gets hired, what is amplified and what