The Great Outsourcing of Government

Lawmakers have never been savvy about technology. In 2006, when then-US senator Ted Stevens described the internet as “a series of tubes,” an army of gleeful meme-makers crowed over a gaffe that seemed the epitome of our out-of-touch government. More than a decade later, little had improved. In 2018, C-SPAN viewers watched in disbelief as Facebook (now Meta) CEO Mark Zuckerberg, in a rare besuited appearance out of his trademark hoodie, politely explained to US Senator Orrin Hatch that social media platforms make their money from selling ads.

Yet politicians’ ignorance of tech is anything but comedy, argues former European Parliament member and United Nations AI Advisory Board member Marietje Schaake in her debut book, The Tech Coup: How to Save Democracy from Silicon Valley. The widening division between the people who make the laws and the companies that disregard them should draw censure and action, not laughter and complicity. Tech companies increasingly operate uninhibited by regulation and more alarmingly have taken on a wildly outsize role in international relations, diplomacy, and the development of cultural norms around individual privacy and the availability of personal data. Because tech operates “almost entirely without guidance or guardrails from democratic authorities,” she argues, our society faces an accountability gap that threatens its foundational democratic principles.

Schaake’s examples of tech’s coup include those prominently discussed in the media as threats to democracy, such as the 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which the consulting firm microtargeted millions of Facebook users by scraping their data without their consent, and the 2023 story of Elon Musk using his Starlink satellites as a geopolitical bargaining chip in Ukraine’s war against the Russian invasion in 2022. She even recounts stories of how tech companies flout attempted regulation. In 2014, Uber created an app called Greyball that offered “ghost cars”—cars that looked available but didn’t exist—to rideshare users near police stations and the Federal Trade Commission. This charade was pure pique; Uber leadership was chafing against state and federal government attempts to force the company to comply with more stringent labor laws governing taxis rather than tech companies.

But, Schaake clarifies, her aim in The Tech Coup is not to “rehash stories” of tech’s unbridled power—despite spending several chapters doing so. Rather, such incidents expose tech’s expansive reach and control over our lives, which are increasingly digitized without adequate legislation to protect our freedom and privacy.

How and why did democratic countries cede their power to massive companies headed by sneaker-wearing, foosball-playing engineers? According to Schaake, politicians have not just passively displayed their ignorance of technological innovation but actively slow-walked regulation to the point where tech companies have usurped the power that should rightly be held by democratic government—power that is not easily recuperated.

“Democratic governments’ outsourcing of key functions [to tech companies] has led to a hollowing out of governments’ core capabilities,” she explains. “These systemic problems are now undermining the core principles of democracy: free and fair elections, the rule of law, the separation of powers, a well-informed public debate, national security and the protection of civil liberties.” This outsourcing has further eroded public trust not just in government but also in the democratic process.

Schaake offers concrete ways that governments could retain their power through the strategy of “prioritizing the public.”

In most issues of public health and safety—from food and drugs to aviation—the American public has relied on the government to provide adequate guidelines and protections. This trust would be misplaced in the tech industry, which has not taken prompt or adequate steps to self-regulate; nor have politicians begun the laborious and time-consuming creation of a government agency to take on this job. Schaake believes that politicians’ leniency on tech is also a matter of self-interest. Lawmakers are reluctant to limit tech’s innovation potential because they “want to use these technologies too, to spy on their citizens,” she claims. Moreover, they are less than eager to slap the hands of companies that may offer them jobs once they’re back in the private sector. In 2019, she observes, “75 percent of newly hired lobbyists for Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google came out of Capitol Hill offices, other government jobs, or political campaigns.”

Schaake partly attributes the lack of government oversight to tech’s initial promise of fully realizing democracy. In their early years, circa 2010, Twitter and other platforms offered seemingly endless possibility: No matter what your wealth or race or nationality was, all you needed was an internet connection to share your voice, find an audience, and join communities around the world. Until the Cambridge Analytica scandal, she says, “many Americans and Europeans thought of social media as merely an amplifier or, perhaps, an online public square.” The development of social media should have been a great social boon. Yet without any consideration for privacy or safety concerns, it has become a quagmire of extremism and surveillance.

The “democratizing potential of new technologies” was further threatened by the fact that “repressive authoritarian regimes [were] tech-savvy too,” Schaake explains. While the activists in Iran’s 2009 Green Movement, for example, had a free channel to organize demonstrations and share photos and videos of their actions, they were also caught and arrested via tracking on the very same cell phones they used to upload their stories online.

Free of any meaningful oversight or legislation, tech companies have made billions by selling their products to ordinary citizens and bad actors alike. Data from unregulated tracking apps is sold to the highest bidder, including the government, and can be used to harass activists, threaten journalists, and surveil ordinary citizens. One of the worst offenders, Schaake claims, is NSO Group’s Pegasus, a zero-click tracking software marketed as a tool against crime and terrorism but often used by governments to surveil dissidents and agitators. It essentially turns a user’s phone into an omnipresent, silent spy. If it had been developed by MI6, the CIA, or another government agency held accountable by existing privacy laws, it would be a valuable weapon against terrorists and violent actors, Schaake contends. But when developed by a private company whose primary goals are profit and influence, it becomes a tool for any wealthy individual, group, or government to meddle in the lives of anyone they wish.

Failing appropriate protections, Americans have had to rely on patchwork solutions—toggling parental limits on streaming services, turning off location trackers, and advocating for school phone-free policies—and on the goodwill of tech companies to act in their best interests. Best interests, of course, take a backseat to profit every time, and Silicon Valley continues to place its own influence and advertising revenue above the mental health of teenage Instagram users and the physical safety of human-rights activists.

The fervor of Schaake, a former member of the European Parliament from 2009 to 2019, for public service is palpable, as she argues that leaving decisions about privacy, human rights, and copyright to the people most invested in profiting over their exploitation was not just unwise but perilous. She is more polite about the average citizens who not only allow but encourage this kind of growth as examples of the free market at its finest. The American demand for unassailable individual freedom requires a government functionally small enough to drown in a bathtub, as lobbyist Grover Glenn Norquist stated in a 2001 NPR interview. Thus the widespread right-wing Republican chafing against regulations, even those that keep salmonella off eggs and bridges from collapsing. Why regulate Instagram, the argument goes, when individuals should rightfully be free to govern their own behavior?

“We live in an era of endless technological progress,” Schaake says, yet “the tech coup does not have to be our destiny.” Schaake points to the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which went into effect in May 2018, as a turning point in government responsibility. The GDPR grants specific rights to online users, including the right to be informed, to import their data, and to erase information about themselves, and levies significant fines against companies that fail to uphold them. Though most civilians may encounter it through those annoying website pop-ups about cookie permissions, the regulation demands compliance with data privacy best practices. And companies occasionally, Schaake notes, use their power for good—when government is failing to act in the public’s best interests. Post Dobbs, some US states are prosecuting people for seeking abortions—so Google now autodeletes the location data for abortion clinics from the seekers’ histories.

Schaake offers concrete ways that governments could regain their power through the strategy of “prioritizing the public,” the title of her final chapter. Her argument is that government must focus on recuperating power in democratic infrastructure, such as elections, technology, and law enforcement. For example, the European Union’s precautionary principle requires that failing scientific agreement on a particular issue, a policy or action regarding that issue should not be carried out. Instead, lawmakers are required to “grasp the consequences of risk before taking it.” She recommends that an independent board of experts assess technology offerings and that “companies should be required to (confidentially) identify products that they plan to bring to market but do not have a sufficient research base.”

Her most promising solution to rebalancing power is what she calls a “public accountability extension,” according to which “any law that applies to governmental organizations to maintain transparency and accountability should be applied equally to technology companies that execute tasks on behalf of the government.” Examples of these include trademark protections and annual reports made available to the public.

Yet, Schaake’s argument that government can rein in tech hits a metaphorical wall for Americans, who know that their elected officials often represent and vote for the interests of more powerful lobbies than their own. And while her ideas for regulation are promising, she offers little advice on how to muster political will to pass such regulation—particularly in a country where the idea of competent, effective government regulation does not command universal appeal.

Schaake censures governments for their subservience to and/or ignorance of tech, but she fails to extend her criticism to those who continue to vote for the politicians who determine government’s course of action—or, here, inaction. Only the ballot box will ultimately force politicians to save democracy.