
The Tech Coup
How to Save Democracy from Silicon Valley
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Narrated by:
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Lorna Bennett
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By:
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Marietje Schaake
About this listen
Under the cover of "innovation," technology companies have successfully resisted regulation and have even begun to seize power from governments themselves. Facial recognition firms track citizens for police surveillance. Cryptocurrency has wiped out the savings of millions and threatens the stability of the global financial system. Spyware companies sell intelligence tools to anyone who can afford them. This new reality—where unregulated technology has become a forceful instrument for autocrats worldwide—is terrible news for democracies and citizens.
In The Tech Coup, Marietje Schaake explains how technology companies crept into nearly every corner of our lives and our governments. She takes us beyond the headlines to high-stakes meetings with human rights defenders, business leaders, computer scientists, and politicians to show how technologies have gone from being heralded as utopian to undermining the pillars of our democracies. To reverse this existential power imbalance, Schaake outlines solutions to empower elected officials and citizens alike. Democratic leaders can-and must-resist the influence of corporate lobbying and reinvent themselves as dynamic, flexible guardians of our digital world. Schaake offers a frightening look at our modern tech-obsessed world—and a clear-eyed view of how democracies can build a better future before it is too late.
©2024 Marietje Schaake (P)2024 KaloramaListeners also enjoyed...
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By: Dorsey Armstrong, and others
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The Autobiography of Malcolm X
- As Told to Alex Haley
- By: Malcolm X, Alex Haley
- Narrated by: Laurence Fishburne
- Length: 16 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Experience a bold take on this classic autobiography as it’s performed by Oscar-nominated Laurence Fishburne. In this searing classic autobiography, originally published in 1965, Malcolm X, the Muslim leader, firebrand, and Black empowerment activist, tells the extraordinary story of his life and the growth of the Human Rights movement. His fascinating perspective on the lies and limitations of the American dream and the inherent racism in a society that denies its non-White citizens the opportunity to dream, gives extraordinary insight into the most urgent issues of our own time.
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it's Nearly perfect
- By Kerry on 09-16-20
By: Malcolm X, and others
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The Man Who Killed Kennedy
- The Case Against LBJ
- By: Roger Stone
- Narrated by: David Rapkin
- Length: 11 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Lyndon Baines Johnson was a man of great ambition and enormous greed, both of which, in 1963, would threaten to destroy him. In the end, President Johnson would use power from his personal connections in Texas and from the underworld and from the government to escape an untimely end in politics and to seize even greater power. President Johnson, the thirty-sixth president of the United States, was the driving force behind a conspiracy to murder President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963. In The Man Who Killed Kennedy, you will find out how and why he did it. Political consultant, strategist, and Libertarian Roger Stone has gathered documents and used his firsthand knowledge to construct the ultimate tome to prove that LBJ was not only involved in JFK's assassination, but was in fact the mastermind. With 2013 being the fiftieth anniversary of JFK's assassination, this is the perfect time for The Man Who Killed Kennedy to be available to readers. The research and information in this book is unprecedented, and as Roger Stone lived through it, he's the perfect person to bring it to everyone's attention.
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COMPELLING BOOK - THE CROOKS ARE IN POWER
- By Theo Tsourdalakis on 12-01-13
By: Roger Stone
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Mythology: Mega Collection
- Classic Stories from the Greek, Celtic, Norse, Japanese, Hindu, Chinese, Mesopotamian and Egyptian Mythology
- By: Scott Lewis
- Narrated by: Madison Niederhauser, Oliver Hunt
- Length: 31 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Do you know how many wives Zeus had? Or how the famous Trojan War was caused by one beautiful lady? Or how Thor got his hammer? Give your imagination a real treat. This Mega Mythology Collection of eight audiobooks is for you....
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An interesting set of introductions.
- By Kevin Potter on 05-30-19
By: Scott Lewis
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Caffeine
- How Caffeine Created the Modern World
- By: Michael Pollan
- Narrated by: Michael Pollan
- Length: 2 hrs and 2 mins
- Original Recording
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Michael Pollan, known for his best-selling nonfiction audio, including The Omnivores Dilemma and How to Change Your Mind, conceived and wrote Caffeine: How Caffeine Created the Modern World as an Audible Original. In this controversial and exciting listen, Pollan explores caffeine’s power as the most-used drug in the world - and the only one we give to children (in soda pop) as a treat.
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Leaves much to be desired
- By Melody H on 02-02-20
By: Michael Pollan
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My Big TOE: Awakening
- Book One of a Trilogy Unifying Philosophy, Physics, and Metaphysics
- By: Thomas Campbell
- Narrated by: Thomas Campbell
- Length: 11 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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My Big TOE: Awakening, written by a nuclear physicist in the language of contemporary culture, unifies science and philosophy, physics and metaphysics, mind and matter, purpose and meaning, the normal and the paranormal. The entirety of human experience (mind, body, and spirit) including both our objective and subjective worlds is brought together under one seamless scientific understanding.
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What a Trip (but to where?)
- By Michael on 11-26-13
By: Thomas Campbell
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The Complete Book of Five Rings
- By: Miyamoto Musashi, Kenji Tokitsu - editor/translator
- Narrated by: Brian Nishii
- Length: 5 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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The Complete Book of Five Rings is an authoritative version of Musashi's classic The Book of Five Rings, translated and annotated by a modern martial arts master, Kenji Tokitsu. Tokitsu has spent most of his life researching the legendary samurai swordsman and his works, and in this book he illuminates this seminal text, along with several other works by Musashi.
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Best translation I have encountered.
- By DW on 05-27-16
By: Miyamoto Musashi, and others
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The Scheme
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The Code
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Long before Margaret O'Mara became one of our most consequential historians of the American-led digital revolution, she worked in the White House of Bill Clinton and Al Gore in the earliest days of the commercial Internet. There, she saw firsthand how deeply intertwined Silicon Valley was with the federal government - and always had been - and how shallow the common understanding of the secrets of the Valley's success actually was.
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Mostly good, but also irrating
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Woke nonsense
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Since the end of the Second World War, the US dollar has been the global reserve currency, which has ensured American dominance of the world economy. But no longer. More than a hundred countries are developing Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs), digital equivalents to cash that will utterly transform how we do business at home and abroad. Urgent, clear-eyed and groundbreaking, Smart Money shows us how CBDCs are going to impact all of our futures in ways that most of us have failed to even consider.
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The mob that stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, represented an extreme form of the central danger facing American democracy today: a blatant disregard for the will of the majority. Through voter suppression, election subversion, gerrymandering, dark money, the takeover of the courts, and the whitewashing of history, reactionary white conservatives have strategically entrenched power in the face of a massive demographic and political shift.
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SO much great information!
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Book Editors failed to trim the word count
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To understand world politics, you need to understand how states think. Are states rational? Much of international relations theory assumes that they are. But many scholars believe that political leaders rarely act rationally. The issue is crucial for both the study and practice of international politics. John J. Mearsheimer and Sebastian Rosato argue that rational decisions in international politics rest on credible theories about how the world works and emerge from deliberative decision‑making processes.
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2hours of content crammed into 8 hours of listening
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You don't have to be a computer scientist to have discerning conversations about artificial intelligence and technology. We all wonder where we're headed. Even now, technological innovations and machine learning have a daily impact on our lives, and many of us see good reasons to dread the future. Are we doomed to the surveillance society imagined in George Orwell's 1984? Mathematician and philosopher John Lennox believes that there are credible responses to the daunting questions that AI poses.
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5 start is not enough! Bravo!
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Confused about AI and worried about what it means for your future and the future of the world? You’re not alone. AI is everywhere—and few things are surrounded by so much hype, misinformation, and misunderstanding. In AI Snake Oil, computer scientists Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor cut through the confusion to give you an essential understanding of how AI works, why it often doesn’t, where it might be useful or harmful, and when you should suspect that companies are using AI hype to sell AI snake oil—products that don’t work, and probably never will.
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Basic level information nothing new here
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For over half a century, Banco Popular was one of the most profitable banks in the world—until one day, in 2017, when the Spanish bank suddenly collapsed overnight. When investigative journalist Gareth Gore was dispatched to report on the story, he expected to find yet another case of unbridled capitalist ambition gone wrong. Instead, he uncovered decades of deception that hid one of the most brazen cases of corporate pillaging in history, perpetrated by a group of men sworn to celibacy and self-flagellation who had secretly controlled Popular and abused their positions there.
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fascinating and disturbing
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Climate / Population Alarmism in a Mask
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The Alignment Problem
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- Narrated by: Brian Christian
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Today's "machine-learning" systems, trained by data, are so effective that we've invited them to see and hear for us - and to make decisions on our behalf. But alarm bells are ringing. Systems cull résumés until, years later, we discover that they have inherent gender biases. Algorithms decide bail and parole - and appear to assess black and white defendants differently. We can no longer assume that our mortgage application, or even our medical tests, will be seen by human eyes. And autonomous vehicles on our streets can injure or kill.
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Required reading for any AI course
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We Have Never Been Woke
- The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite
- By: Musa al-Gharbi
- Narrated by: Musa al-Gharbi
- Length: 14 hrs and 34 mins
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Society has never been more egalitarian—in theory. Prejudice is taboo, and diversity is strongly valued. At the same time, social and economic inequality have exploded. In We Have Never Been Woke, Musa al-Gharbi argues that these trends are closely related, each tied to the rise of a new elite—the symbolic capitalists.
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Insightful view into “symbolic capitalists”
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By: Musa al-Gharbi
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Offshore
- Stealth Wealth and the New Colonialism
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How do the rich keep getting richer, while dodging the long arm of the law? The ultra-rich seem to live in a different world from the rest of us. That world is called offshore. Hidden from view, the world's ultra-rich can use offshore finance to escape tax obligations, labor and environmental safety regulations, campaign finance rules, and other laws that get in their way.
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Informative
- By Seattle mom on 03-02-25
What listeners say about The Tech Coup
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Amazon Customer
- 12-31-24
The accuracy and detail
It was very detailed. The world needs to wake up and focus on big tech companies taking over.
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- marwalk
- 03-09-25
We need a public tech stack
The lives of most people worldwide are dominated by information technology in an inescapable way—even the poorest people (or perhaps especially the poorest people) need their smart phones to survive. Beyond just the end devices, the back end processing and telecommunications connections that technology companies control are integral to what happens on people's phones, including yours. In this book, Marietje Schaake presents in both intricate and overarching detail how the tech companies have taken over everything—from individuals' personal experiences to the governments that people assume are protecting them. Although it's been an open secret that corporate foxes have been having their way with the chickens in the public hen house for multiple decades, Schaake provides decisive illustrations of how this situation in the area of technology is especially detrimental to the economy and to public safety and welfare.
The author identifies four specific technological manifestations that need to be curbed: commercial spyware, data brokerage, facial recognition technologies, and crypto-currencies. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is an increasingly relevant technology that requires regulation to keep it from running amok to dangerous effect—especially as AI aggregates vast amounts of private data for processing in Large Language Models (LLM). Schaake names some of the companies and corporate executives who are unjustly profiting off of their theft and illicit use of private information, and illustrates how they have captured governments for their own advancement at the expense of the public interest. The profit motive also overrides any scruples about dealing with authoritarian governments, and in yielding to their demands that the tech companies become tools of autocratic oppression.
Schaake demonstrates how government service can provide better technology deliveries without unacceptable dependency on private entities, and suggests the way to do that is to build a public stack—that is, build a public tech infrastructure through civic initiatives (after all, the Internet itself originated from public research). The Declaration for the Future of the Internet (DFI) provides good directions to the way forward. The DFI is a global initiative signed by 61 nations promoting an open, free, secure, and inclusive internet, which reflects a collective commitment to counter digital authoritarianism and uphold democratic principles in the digital space.
However, as Schaake aptly points out, governments cannot be trusted to do the right thing on their own—new coalitions of people are needed to reverse the tech coup, and recover from the corruption of the current order. As part of doing that, we'll need to free those caught in the cult of right wing ideology and its associated false emotional manipulation—although they may want a Daddy to set things straight, what they get instead is an alcoholic father who abuses his family to satisfy his own whims and those of his following (who are not you). Even authoritarian governments have to bend to public pressure—we have the road map, let's start driving.
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