CONCEPT
The Tech Coup
Marietje Schaake’s term for the gradual, largely welcomed transfer of governing power from democratic institutions to private technology companies—a seizure of public authority that arrives disguised as convenience and accelerates with every AI capability deployed outside democratic accountability.
A coup, in the ordinary imagination, is a loud event. Tanks in the capital, the radio station seized.
Marietje Schaake’s central claim, developed in her decade in the European Parliament and codified in her 2024 book of the same name, is that the most consequential transfer of power in the contemporary democratic world has none of these features. It is silent, gradual, and largely welcomed by the very people it disempowers. Each individual surrender of public authority feels rational: a government outsources its data infrastructure to a cloud provider because the cloud provider is better; a legislature defers on content moderation because the platform understands the technology; a defence ministry integrates AI tools it cannot fully audit because the capability is genuine. The aggregate of these reasonable-seeming deferrals is a transformation of who governs. Democratic institutions that were supposed to hold power over the forces shaping collective life have instead handed that power to firms that answer