The cycle that opened with [YOU] on AI describes the experience of building from the inside: twenty engineers in Trivandrum discovering a twenty-fold productivity multiplier, the imagination-to-artifact ratio collapsing toward the duration of a conversation. Schaake would not dispute any of this. She would point out what the builder’s vantage cannot easily see: that every collapsed timeline represents a decision moved out of public deliberation and into private execution, and that the speed which thrills the builder is precisely what makes democratic oversight impossible. A parliament cannot deliberate at the speed of a deployment. The faster the capability moves, the further it outruns the institutions designed to hold it accountable.
Her concept of the tech coup provides the political vocabulary the cycle needs at its most serious moments. Where Mazzucato diagnoses the distributional injustice of public risk and private reward, Schaake diagnoses the sovereignty injustice of public functions and private power. The two diagnoses are complementary and neither is sufficient without the other. Mazzucato asks who captures the economic returns; Schaake asks who makes the governing decisions. Both questions point to the same concentration.
She also provides the cycle with its most precise account of the difference between a consumer and a citizen. The technology economy addresses us as consumers, offering products in exchange for our attention and data, and the relationship it constructs is fundamentally commercial. The citizen’s relationship to power is different: participation in governing the conditions of collective life, the right to demand justification, the standing to contest. When matters that properly belong to the citizen’s domain—the governance of essential infrastructure, the protection of fundamental rights, the shaping of the information environment—are reframed as matters of consumer choice, the citizen is reduced to a chooser among products where she should be a participant in governance. Democratic legitimacy depends on maintaining that distinction.
Her deepest contribution to the cycle’s concerns is the insight that markets are not inevitable. The current configuration of technological power is not a natural outcome of technological progress; it resulted from specific choices by democratic governments—the explicit laissez-faire posture toward the digital economy—and different choices were and remain possible. The privatisation of the digital substrate was not stolen; it was handed over. What was handed over can be reclaimed. That conviction, held against the weight of existing concentrations of power, is the most important political claim the cycle can make.
Born in the Netherlands in 1979, Schaake was elected to the European Parliament in 2009 at thirty, representing Democrats 66 within the liberal democratic group. Her portfolio covered technology, trade, foreign affairs, and human rights, and her particular expertise was the export of surveillance and interception technology by European companies to authoritarian regimes. This was not an abstract concern: she documented specific cases in which tools marketed as neutral instruments of security had been used to track and arrest dissidents, and she fought for the export control regimes that would apply to such technologies the same framework applied to other dangerous goods. That origin gives her analysis of AI a sobering specificity that newer entrants to the debate often lack: surveillance is not a misuse of AI to be guarded against at the margins but one of its central and most commercially significant applications, and the infrastructure of repression does not announce itself as such. It arrives as a feature.
She left the Parliament in 2019 and moved to Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center and the Human-Centered AI Institute, writing for the Financial Times and advising governments and international institutions on technology governance. The Tech Coup: How to Save Democracy from Silicon Valley appeared in 2024 and brought her decade of parliamentary experience and post-parliamentary analysis into a sustained argument for why democratic governance of technology is not merely desirable but necessary for the survival of self-government. She has since served on the UN Secretary-General’s High-Level Advisory Body on AI, where her consistent argument has been for governance grounded in democratic accountability rather than voluntary corporate self-regulation.
The Tech Coup. The most consequential transfer of governing power in the contemporary democratic world has none of the features a coup ordinarily requires: no rupture, no tanks, no moment everyone recognises. It happens one convenience at a time, each individual surrender of public authority feeling rational. The coup is the aggregate: the migration of decisions about national security, critical infrastructure, the information environment, and something close to foreign policy into private firms that answer to shareholders rather than citizens. AI is the accelerant because it concentrates these functions further and exercises them faster.
Power without accountability. The central distinction in Schaake’s thought is between power and accountability. Every functioning democracy rests on the premise that these must travel together: whoever wields consequential power must be answerable to those it governs. The technology sector has accumulated enormous power while systematically escaping the accountability mechanisms—elections, courts, transparency requirements—that democracy uses to constrain it. AI widens this gap to its breaking point because AI systems are opaque in ways that defeat the mechanisms accountability depends upon: a system that cannot explain its decision cannot be held to account for it.
Principle-based regulation. Against both the counsel to wait and the impulse to micromanage specific technical implementations, Schaake argues for regulation grounded in durable principles: that individuals have a right to understand and contest consequential decisions made about them; that those who deploy powerful systems bear responsibility for the harms those systems cause; that certain decisions affecting fundamental rights must remain subject to meaningful human judgment. Such principles do not go obsolete when the technology advances. They adapt to any system, including ones not yet invented.
The expertise asymmetry. The staggering gap in technical understanding between technology companies and the public institutions charged with governing them is not incidental to the tech coup; it is one of its enabling conditions. A regulator who cannot independently assess the systems it oversees is not a regulator. Schaake’s remedy is institutional: dedicated technical capacity in legislatures and regulatory agencies, staffed by people who understand the technology deeply, whose job is to provide the public with the independent comprehension it needs to govern. Without this capacity, oversight remains a performance conducted on the industry’s own terms.
Markets are not inevitable. The sense of technological inevitability is one of the most powerful forces protecting the status quo. Schaake’s historical argument is a direct assault on this fatalism: the concentration of power, the privatisation of infrastructure, the absence of accountability were produced by specific policy choices—the explicit laissez-faire posture of democratic governments toward the digital economy—and what was chosen can be chosen differently. Surveillance capitalism is not a law of nature. It is a design.