The Waning Democratic Allure of Digital Technologies

Abstract In The Tech Coup: How to Save Democracy from Silicon Valley, the Dutch former Member of the European Parliament Marietje Schaake develops an extensive critique of contemporary democracies’ failure to regulate new digital technologies such as social media and cryptocurrencies, as well as remote sensing tools such as facial recognition, by drawing on her extensive experience as a potential regulator. On her account, the failure to regulate is not just a failure of democracy but has the downstream effect of undermining democratic norms. An impassioned protest to the effect that democracies are losing ground to both multinational technology firms and authoritarian regimes thanks to new digital technologies, Schaake's book issues a call for a dramatic overhaul of digital technology's regulation. While much of her critique of regulatory deficiency largely treads familiar ground, Schaake's narrative-driven, heavily autobiographical rendition offers new insight if one reads between the lines. Her otherwise familiar liberal critique of new digital technologies implicitly illuminates a sharp, albeit not absolute, contrast between democratic states’ feckless and relatively futile efforts to discipline digital technologies on the one hand, and autocratic states’ more effective both at intervention and also harnessing of the private wellsprings of digital technology on the other. Stated otherwise, The Tech Coup is interesting less because of the ground it covers and more because of the underlying puzzles it inadvertently reveals. In particular, Schaake's narrative points to an unsettled and unsettling question of why the democratic regulation of technology, albeit not its autocratic parallel, has been such a disappointment. This puzzle, in turn, precipitates new questions about the intrinsic limits of democratic regulation of new technologies more generally and the likely trajectory of geopolitical competition, given the ensuing gap in comparative competences.