The Tech Coup: A New Book Shows How the Unchecked Power of Companies Is Destabilizing Governance
The Tech Coup: A New Book Shows How the Unchecked Power of Companies Is Destabilizing Governance
In The Tech Coup: How to Save Democracy from Silicon Valley, Marietje Schaake, a Stanford HAI Policy Fellow, reveals how tech companies are encroaching on governmental roles, posing a threat to the democratic rule of law.
Not only governance suffers.
Entertain me for a moment. Imagine a utopia in which you don’t need to distrust technology or guard yourself against the companies that control it. No data harvesting or sharing; your privacy, likes and preferences safe and your own. No schemes to come up with algorithms that enrage you and dominate your attention. Imagine that you could trust LLMs to be trained with only the best, curated sources and where their operation is completely open and transparent. Imagine how we would express ourselves through our tech and through social media. Technology would become deeply, deeply personal, benign, helpful and at the service of humankind... as it should be.
The idea is so crazy that it is borderline unthinkable, right?
We're just living in 1984.
Nah that's was like 40 years ago now /s
I’m going wait for the follow up: showing how CEOs don’t prioritize human welfare over profits
That's unironically a very interesting topic. There was actually a landmark court case which insisted that a CEO must prioritize profits over human welfare.
That very page says it's not a must.
Third party campaigning is BS. All campaigning should be done by the candidate and all donations should go through their campaign. All donors should be public or the list should be available to the government for auditing. Companies aren't people, they don't have rights from the Constitution, they shouldn't be allowed to campaign or contribute.
As far as I’m aware, all donors are public, and have been for quite some time. Anyone can get exact numbers down to the dollar of each contributor a major politician took money from.
On one hand this is obvious, on the other hand when I mentioned to my friends that rising inequality leads to a rise in fascism they looked at me like I was an idiot, so the more info is out there the better.
Me: "DUUUUUHHHHHH!!!!!!!!"
Seriously. How many centuries has this been basic fucking common sense???!!!
About 2.
Where's that Shockface emoji when I need it?!
Shock face? You mean like when you get tazered by the police? As you do, in the modern day....
What's the point of this book? It's nothing new, and would never change anything about the situation.
This situation has come to be, through the ignorance and inaction of ordinary people. Your attitude is part of the problem.
Research and organized information on a topic, however obvious it might be, is an important step towards policy changes. We also see those changes from time to time, for example some recent EU decisions
And sourcing for it to be written elsewhere, such as citations in Wikipedia
