When Reading Books Means Business

"Technology has been tangled up in modern life for a long time, but the entwinement of Big Tech, as an industry, with our daily habits-everything from tracking friends to hiring cabs-is new. Schaake, a Dutch politician and a former European Parliament member, seeks to shift the spotlight of accountability "from Big Tech's scandals to the systematic erosion of democracy." Even when the industry is behaving well on its own terms, she thinks, it's going against democratic practice. That's just how its incentive structure works."

""In many ways, Silicon Valley has become the antithesis of what its early pioneers set out to be: from dismissing government to literally taking on equivalent functions; from lauding freedom of speech to becoming curators and speech regulators; and from criticizing government overreach and abuse to accelerating it through spyware tools and opaque algorithms," she writes. The task now is not to resist the innovation busines"

Technology's deepening entwinement with daily life creates novel threats to democratic systems. Industry incentives push Big Tech toward functions that resemble governmental power, such as managing information flows and replacing public services. Platforms that curate content increasingly act as speech regulators, while surveillance tools and opaque algorithms amplify state overreach and erode accountability. Even corporate behavior that appears beneficial on business terms can undermine democratic norms. The corrective focus should shift from addressing isolated scandals to confronting systemic institutional effects and realigning incentives to protect democratic practice and public oversight.

Read at The New Yorker