Ngaire Woods, Dean of the Blavatnik School of Government, is joined by writer Marietje Schaake to discuss her new book The Tech Coup: How to Save Democracy from Silicon Valley.

In The Tech Coup, Marietje Schaake offers a behind-the-scenes account of how technology companies crept into nearly every corner of our lives and our governments. She writes that for too long, a romanticised view of what technology might mean for democratisation has paralysed the political process in democratic countries towards regulation, investment and governance, reaching a point where companies play an outsize role in making key decisions about people’s lives, freedoms, rights and geopolitics. Marietje suggests this worrying trend needs to be stopped, and there are many offers ways in which democratically elected and accountable leaders can win back control.

Author biography:
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.