There has been an intentional and systematic narrative push that tells governments they are not good enough to provide their own public infrastructure or regulate tech companies that provide it for them.

Shocking: these narratives stem from large tech companies, and this represents what Marietje Schaake refers to as a Tech Coup — which is the title of her book (which you should buy!).

The Tech Coup refers to the inability of democratic policymakers to provide oversight, regulation, and even visibility into the structural systems that big tech is building, managing, and selling. Marietje and Alix discuss what happens when you have a system of states whose knowledge and confidence have been gutted over decades — hindering them from providing good services, and understanding how to meaningfully regulate the tech space.

Further Reading & Resources:

• Buy The Tech Coup by Marietje Schaake

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Marietje Schaake is a non-resident Fellow at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center and at the Institute for Human-Centered AI. She is a columnist for the Financial Times and serves on a number of not-for-profit Boards as well as the UN's High Level Advisory Body on AI. Between 2009-2019 she served as a Member of European Parliament where she worked on trade-, foreign- and tech policy. She is the author of **The Tech Coup.**