Tech Coup

What Hacker News says

1. mark_l_watsonAug 2025
   When I get fed up with VSCode, I run Emacs and I feel happy until I start working on something else that can be done a little faster on VSCode because of the available extensions.

   I feel like we almost need government intervention to keep GitHub an open commons, but I am a Libertarian and I distrust the government perhaps even more than the tech industry - still an open question for me.

   Lock in and control by huge corporations is almost always uniformly bad. I have accepted the message of great books like Privacy is Power, The Tech Coup, and Surveillance Capitalism, and I feel pretty good about just using Google’s Gemini APIs when I need them, and lean as hard as possible on open models running on Ollama and LM Studio. There are also little things you can do like not installing apps and using web apps.

   Back to test editors: the Lem Emacs-like editor written in Common Lisp is an interesting project https://github.com/lem-project/lem

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2. mark_l_watsonNov 2024
   This is so stupid. I am a fan of the books Privacy is Power and The Tech Coup, both books do a great job arguing for privacy and mitigating the harm of tech giants.

   What should be done is having strong privacy laws, requirements for encrypting user data, 100% transparency on how user data is sold (require all buyer and seller information to be public), prohibiting sale of user data in most cases, super fine control privacy and security settings.

   Google already does a good job on some of these things, and they and other tech giants need to be fenced in by strong privacy and user rights laws.

   Corporations are good at still making profits when they have to follow laws that are inconvenient to them.

   If members of the US Congress were prohibited by law from stock trading, that might help clean up the logjams preventing better laws.

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3. mark_l_watsonOct 2024
   You ask a great question, and I wonder how the push for more privacy will pan out (pardon the gold mining analogy). I am almost done with the very good new book The Tech Coup by Marietje Schaake, and I have also read Privacy is Power and Surveilance Capitalism. I think more of the public is waking up to the benefits of privacy.

   All that said, I am an enthusiastic paying customer of YouTube Prime and Music, Colab (I love Colab), and sometimes GCP. For many years I have happily have told Google my music and YouTube preferences for content. I like to ask myself what I am getting for giving up privacy in a hopefully targeted and controlled way.

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4. belterMay 2025
   https://nltimes.nl/2025/05/20/microsofts-icc-email-block-tri...

   "Government agencies operate on Microsoft systems, hire employees with Microsoft expertise, and those employees, in turn, continue recommending Microsoft.

   “There’s political pressure, but in practice, all they know is Microsoft,” the same person said.

   Marietje Schaake, a technology policy expert and author of The Tech Coup, said Microsoft has strategically positioned itself as the go-to government partner. “The Netherlands has long been transatlantic in orientation and gives commercial parties a lot of space,” Schaake told de Volkskrant. She also pointed to a revolving door between Microsoft and government institutions."

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5. kordlessagainDec 2024
   There's another article on the site discussing Palmer Luckey's moves into military applications (1). Drawing from both articles, there's a concerning convergence that deserves attention: The way military AI development could accelerate the tech industry's disruption of democratic processes discussed in the first article.

   Consider the pattern:

   1. As the first article shows, Silicon Valley has already accumulated unprecedented power over democratic institutions through consumer technologies

   2. Now, through military contracts, companies like Anduril are gaining direct influence over national security infrastructure

   3. The combination of agentic AI systems (that can control interfaces and take actions) with military applications creates a new power dynamic where tech companies aren't just influencing public opinion - they're potentially controlling military capabilities

   This is particularly troubling when viewed alongside Marietje Schaake's observation that Silicon Valley has become "the antithesis of what its early pioneers set out to be: from dismissing government to literally taking on equivalent functions." The military contracts represent an even more direct assumption of government functions.

   The dangerous feedback loop here is clear:

   - Tech companies gain power through consumer platforms

   - They leverage that influence to secure military contracts

   - Military contracts provide both funding and protection from regulation

   - This further increases their power over democratic institutions

   - The cycle continues, with each iteration reducing democratic oversight

   Luckey's casual attitude about using soldiers as compliant test subjects for new technologies perfectly exemplifies the kind of unaccountable power that the first article warns about. It's no longer just about controlling information flows - it's about controlling actual military capabilities without democratic oversight.

   This suggests that military AI contracts aren't just another revenue stream for tech companies - they're potentially a way to bypass democratic constraints altogether, accelerating the "tech coup" that Schaake warns about in her book.

   [1] https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/10/29/1106325/palmer-l...

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