A tech insider who has been hailed by The New Yorker for her forceful critique of Big Tech describes what must be done to stop its erosion of democracy

Over the past decades, 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 personal savings of millions and threatens the stability of the global financial system. Spyware companies sell digital intelligence tools to anyone who can afford them. This new reality--where unregulated technology has become a forceful instrument for autocrats around the world--is terrible news for democracies and citizens.

In The Tech Coup, Marietje Schaake offers a behind-the-scenes account of 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--from social media to artificial intelligence--have gone from being heralded as utopian to undermining the pillars of our democracies. To reverse this existential power imbalance, Schaake outlines game-changing 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.

Drawing on her experiences in the halls of the European Parliament and among Silicon Valley insiders, 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.

Three of the world's most accomplished and deep thinkers come together to explore Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the way it is transforming human society--and what this technology means for us all.

Generative AI is filling the internet with false information. Artists, writers, and many other professionals are in fear of their jobs. AI is discovering new medicines, running military drones, and transforming the world around us--yet we do not understand the decisions it makes, and we don't know how to control them.

In The Age of AI, three leading thinkers have come together to consider how AI will change our relationships with knowledge, politics, and the societies in which we live. The Age of AI is an essential roadmap to our present and our future, an era unlike any that has come before.

Named one of NPR's Best Books of 2023
Named one of Ezra Klein's Books That Explain Where We Are in 2023, The New York Times

Learn more about Jennifer Pahlka's work at recodingamerica.us.

The book I wish every policymaker would read.
--Ezra Klein, The New York Times

A bold call to reexamine how our government operates--and sometimes fails to--from President Obama's former deputy chief technology officer and the founder of Code for America

Just when we most need our government to work--to decarbonize our infrastructure and economy, to help the vulnerable through a pandemic, to defend ourselves against global threats--it is faltering. Government at all levels has limped into the digital age, offering online services that can feel even more cumbersome than the paperwork that preceded them and widening the gap between the policy outcomes we intend and what we get.

But it's not more money or more tech we need. Government is hamstrung by a rigid, industrial-era culture, in which elites dictate policy from on high, disconnected from and too often disdainful of the details of implementation. Lofty goals morph unrecognizably as they cascade through a complex hierarchy. But there is an approach taking hold that keeps pace with today's world and reclaims government for the people it is supposed to serve. Jennifer Pahlka shows why we must stop trying to move the government we have today onto new technology and instead consider what it would mean to truly recode American government.

Billions of people around the world lack internet access. No one cared until the whole world had to go online.

President Joe Biden has repeatedly said that the United States would close the digital divide under his leadership. However, the divide still affects people and communities across the country. The complex and persistent reality is that millions of residents live in digital deserts, and many more face disproportionate difficulties when it comes to getting and staying online, especially people of color, seniors, rural residents, and farmers in remote areas.

Economic and health disparities are worsening in rural communities without available internet access. Students living in urban digital deserts with little technology exposure are ill prepared to compete for emerging occupations. Even seniors struggle to navigate the aging process without access to online information and remote care.

In this book, Nicol Turner Lee, a leading expert on the American digital divide, uses personal stories from individuals around the country to show how the emerging digital underclass is navigating the spiraling online economy, while sharing their joys and hopes for an equitable and just future.

Turner Lee argues that achieving digital equity is crucial for the future of America's global competitiveness and requires radical responses to offset the unintended consequences of increasing digitization. In the end, Digitally Invisible proposes a pathway to more equitable access to existing and emerging technologies, while encouraging readers to weigh in on this shared goal.

Named one of NPR's Best Books of 2023
Named one of Ezra Klein's Books That Explain Where We Are in 2023, The New York Times

Learn more about Jennifer Pahlka's work at recodingamerica.us.

The book I wish every policymaker would read.
--Ezra Klein, The New York Times

A bold call to reexamine how our government operates--and sometimes fails to--from President Obama's former deputy chief technology officer and the founder of Code for America

Just when we most need our government to work--to decarbonize our infrastructure and economy, to help the vulnerable through a pandemic, to defend ourselves against global threats--it is faltering. Government at all levels has limped into the digital age, offering online services that can feel even more cumbersome than the paperwork that preceded them and widening the gap between the policy outcomes we intend and what we get.

But it's not more money or more tech we need. Government is hamstrung by a rigid, industrial-era culture, in which elites dictate policy from on high, disconnected from and too often disdainful of the details of implementation. Lofty goals morph unrecognizably as they cascade through a complex hierarchy. But there is an approach taking hold that keeps pace with today's world and reclaims government for the people it is supposed to serve. Jennifer Pahlka shows why we must stop trying to move the government we have today onto new technology and instead consider what it would mean to truly recode American government.

A novel theory of how technological revolutions affect the rise and fall of great powers

When scholars and policymakers consider how technological advances affect the rise and fall of great powers, they draw on theories that center the moment of innovation--the eureka moment that sparks astonishing technological feats. In this book, Jeffrey Ding offers a different explanation of how technological revolutions affect competition among great powers. Rather than focusing on which state first introduced major innovations, he investigates why some states were more successful than others at adapting and embracing new technologies at scale. Drawing on historical case studies of past industrial revolutions as well as statistical analysis, Ding develops a theory that emphasizes institutional adaptations oriented around diffusing technological advances throughout the entire economy.

Examining Britain's rise to preeminence in the First Industrial Revolution, America and Germany's overtaking of Britain in the Second Industrial Revolution, and Japan's challenge to America's technological dominance in the Third Industrial Revolution (also known as the information revolution), Ding illuminates the pathway by which these technological revolutions influenced the global distribution of power and explores the generalizability of his theory beyond the given set of great powers. His findings bear directly on current concerns about how emerging technologies such as AI could influence the US-China power balance.

A USA TODAY BESTSELLER

Winner of the 2024 Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity

An essential read for anyone that wants to understand how we lost control of our digital spaces and infrastructure to Silicon Valley's tech giants, and how we can start fighting to get it back. -Tim Maughan, author of INFINITE DETAIL

A brilliant barn burner of a book. -Kate Crawford, author of The Atlas of AI

When the tech platforms promised a future of connection, they were lying. They said their walled gardens would keep us safe, but those were prison walls.

The platforms locked us into their systems and made us easy pickings, ripe for extraction. Twitter, Facebook and other Big Tech platforms hard to leave by design. They hold hostage the people we love, the communities that matter to us, the audiences and customers we rely on. The impossibility of staying connected to these people after you delete your account has nothing to do with technological limitations: it's a business strategy in service to commodifying your personal life and relationships.

We can - we must - dismantle the tech platforms. In The Internet Con, Cory Doctorow explains how to seize the means of computation, by forcing Silicon Valley to do the thing it fears most: interoperate. Interoperability will tear down the walls between technologies, allowing users leave platforms, remix their media, and reconfigure their devices without corporate permission.

Interoperability is the only route to the rapid and enduring annihilation of the platforms. The Internet Con is the disassembly manual we need to take back our internet.

A USA TODAY BESTSELLER

Winner of the 2024 Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity

An essential read for anyone that wants to understand how we lost control of our digital spaces and infrastructure to Silicon Valley's tech giants, and how we can start fighting to get it back. -Tim Maughan, author of INFINITE DETAIL

A brilliant barn burner of a book. -Kate Crawford, author of The Atlas of AI

When the tech platforms promised a future of connection, they were lying. They said their walled gardens would keep us safe, but those were prison walls.

The platforms locked us into their systems and made us easy pickings, ripe for extraction. Twitter, Facebook and other Big Tech platforms hard to leave by design. They hold hostage the people we love, the communities that matter to us, the audiences and customers we rely on. The impossibility of staying connected to these people after you delete your account has nothing to do with technological limitations: it's a business strategy in service to commodifying your personal life and relationships.

We can - we must - dismantle the tech platforms. In The Internet Con, Cory Doctorow explains how to seize the means of computation, by forcing Silicon Valley to do the thing it fears most: interoperate. Interoperability will tear down the walls between technologies, allowing users leave platforms, remix their media, and reconfigure their devices without corporate permission.

Interoperability is the only route to the rapid and enduring annihilation of the platforms. The Internet Con is the disassembly manual we need to take back our internet.

In The Drone Age, Michael J. Boyle addresses some of the biggest questions surrounding the impact of drones on our world today and the risks that we might face tomorrow. Will drones produce a safer world because they reduce risk to pilots, or will the prospect of clean, remote warfare lead governments to engage in more conflicts? Will drones begin to replace humans on the battlefield? Will they empower soldiers and peacekeepers to act more precisely and humanely in crisis zones? How will terrorist organizations turn this technology back on the governments that fight them? And how are drones enhancing surveillance capabilities, both at war and at home?

As advanced drones come into the hands of new actors-foreign governments, local law enforcement, terrorist organizations, humanitarian organizations, and even UN peacekeepers-it is even more important to understand what kind of world they might produce. The Drone Age explores how the unique features of drone technology are altering the decision-making processes of governments and non-state actors alike by transforming their risk calculations and expanding their capacities both on and off the battlefield. By changing what these actors are willing and ready to do, drones are quietly transforming the dynamics of wars, humanitarian crises, and peacekeeping missions while generating new risks to security and privacy.

An essential guide to a potentially disruptive force in modern world politics, The Drone Age shows how the innovative use of drone technology will become central to the ways that governments and non-state actors compete for power and influence in the future.

An engaging and comprehensive exploration of how fundamental ideas in political and legal thought shape the governance of blockchain communities, and are, in turn, shaped by blockchain technology.

How can digital cash truly be trustless? What does it mean that blockchain offers a new paradigm of the rule of code? How are decisions made when a blockchain system faces an emergency, and who gets to make those decisions? In Blockchain Governance, Primavera De Filippi, Wessel Reijers, and Morshed Mannan offer answers to these questions and more, in an accessible, critical overview of legal and political issues related to blockchain technology, now the foundation of a multi-billion-dollar industry. Moving beyond the hype, they show how blockchain offers fertile ground for experimentation with radically new ways to govern people and institutions.

Blockchain-based systems, like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Tezos, and countless others, offer new ways of organizing digital cash, smart contracts to execute transactions, non-fungible tokens (NFTs) to collect art, and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) to coordinate humans and machines. What these applications have in common is that they govern the behavior of people and artificial agents through distributed systems. Drawing from their extensive experience in researching blockchain technologies and communities, the authors discuss the origins of Bitcoin in cypher-anarchism and extropianism, spectacular events like the million-dollar theft of the DAO Attack, and the hostile takeover of the Steem platform. While engaging with political and legal thinkers such as Hobbes, Kelsen, and the Ostroms, these narratives explore how blockchain governance problematizes fundamental concepts such as rule of law, sovereignty, legality, legitimacy, and polycentric governance.

The aim of most public sector digitization programmes is the status quo, delivered more cheaply. Rather than saving the public from bureaucracy, digital has created new administrative burdens. The public are engaged as consumers in a way that misunderstands the nature of what makes public services public. Instead of digital being recognised as critical to the operation of a modern state, it is too often an afterthought.

It's time to share the benefits of digital with the public more fully.

This book describes the types of interaction we should expect from the next generation of public services, the digital platforms and infrastructure they will be built with, and the public sector design values needed to make them a reality.

It includes thirty illustrated design patterns, ten strategic interventions, and global examples of emerging patterns in digital government. It also highlights some foundational ideas in computer science, design and public policy to show how the challenges posed by the digital state are neither novel nor new. The book will enable more policy professionals to think like technologists and designers, and it will help more technologists and designers to think about public policy.

The path forward to rein in online surveillance, AI, and tech monopolies

​Technology is a gift and a curse. The five Big Tech companies--Meta, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google--have built innovative products that improve many aspects of our lives. But their intrusiveness and our dependence on them have created pressing threats to our civil rights, economy, and democracy.

Coming from an extensive background building Silicon Valley-based tech startups, Tom Kemp eloquently and precisely weaves together the threats posed by Big Tech:
- the overcollection and weaponization of our most sensitive data
- the problematic ways Big Tech uses AI to process and act upon our data
- the stifling of competition and entrepreneurship due to Big Tech's dominant market position

This richly detailed book exposes the consequences of Big Tech's digital surveillance, exploitative use of AI, and monopolistic and anticompetitive practices. It offers actionable solutions to these problems and a clear path forward for individuals and policymakers to advocate for change. By containing the excesses of Big Tech, we will ensure our civil rights are respected and preserved, our economy is competitive, and our democracy is protected.

World leaders have made a forceful statement that climate change is the greatest challenge facing humanity in the 21st century. However, little progress has been made in implementing policies to address climate change. In Climate Uncertainty and Risk, eminent climate scientist Judith Curry shows how we can break through this stalemate. This book helps us rethink the climate change problem, the risks we are facing and our response. It helps us strategize on how we can best engage with our environment and support human well-being while responding to climate change. Climate Uncertainty and Risk provides a comprehensive framework for understanding the climate change debate. It shows how both the climate change problem and its solution have been oversimplified. It explains how understanding the uncertainties helps us to better assess the risks. It describes how uncertainty and disagreement can be part of the decision-making process. It provides a road map formulating pragmatic solutions that can improve our well-being in the 21st century. Judith Curry brings a unique perspective to the debate on climate change. She has engaged extensively with decision makers in both the private and public sectors on a range of issues related to weather and climate. She engages with scientists, activists and politicians on both sides of the climate change debate. In her search for wisdom in this debate, she incorporates the philosophy and sociology of science, ethics, risk management and politics. Climate Uncertainty and Risk is essential reading for those concerned about the environment, professionals dealing with climate change and our national leaders.

A searing insight into the political radicalization of Silicon Valley, from Elon Musk to Peter Thiel, JD Vance and Donald Trump, and how it will affect the future of all our lives.

From the pursuit of apocalyptic artificial intelligence to life-extension start-ups that promise billionaires eternal youth to Elon Musk subsidizing the political far right around the world, the Silicon Valley techno-utopian dream has curdled. Rage-posting on social media from their hilltop mansions and private jets, the global innovator class has the world in their hands, but they can't stand the touch.

In Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley, New York Times bestselling author Jacob Silverman leads us on a critical investigation into the radicalization of Silicon Valley and the increasingly weird billionaires that run our lives, shape the global economy, and advise Donald Trump, who they helped to re-elect as president of the United States. At the centre of this book lies Elon Musk, bent on imposing his political vision on the rest of us. But this is about more than just one man and his obsession with the woke mind virus, as Silverman reveals a network of tech and finance oligarchs, emboldened by the zero-interest rate years, now using their wealth to exert an increasingly radical political program.

Transiting San Francisco and Silicon Valley, Austin and Miami, New York, Washington DC, and various global capitals of tech, finance, and political power, Silverman talks to the people who are already living with the real-life consequences of the political revolution underway. It's a bizarre, sometimes frightening, darkly humorous world where moguls preach populist revolt while dismantling the few remaining checks on their influence. Gilded Rage offers essential reporting and insight for anyone who wants to know what's happened to hopeful Silicon Valley. As the erratic influence of tech elites continues to spread around the world, the story that Jacob has to tell will have a profound relevance for us all.
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The promise of the New Economy gone, we have regressed into the age of techno-feudalism

The rise of the IT industry in the nineties promised a new era of freedom and prosperity. It didn't deliver. Certainly, algorithms are everywhere, but capitalism is no more civilised than ever.

In fact, in the hands of private corporations, the digitalisation of the world drives us towards a darker future. The return of monopolies, the dominance of a few platforms, the blurred distinction between the economic and the political all epitomise a systemic mutation. Information and data networks push the digital economy in the direction of the feudal logic of rent, dispossession, and personal domination.

How Silicon Valley Unleashed Techno-feudalism offers a fresh genealogy of the Silicon Valley consensus and its contradictions. It disentangles the principles of an emerging systemwide rationale. Large firms compete in cyberspace to gain control over data, and ordinary people are increasingly at the mercy of tech giants. In this new economic order, capital is moving away from production to focus on predation.

The United States, Taiwan, and China are bound within a silicon triangle. Semiconductors link our geopolitics, our ongoing economic prosperity, and our technological competitiveness. This book draws on the deliberations of a multidisciplinary Hoover Institution-Asia Society working group of technologists, economists, military strategists, industry players, and regional policy experts to contemplate the dynamic global supply chain in semiconductors--one in which US industry faces growing vulnerabilities, China aggressively promotes home-grown semiconductor mastery, and Taiwan finds itself with a crucial monopoly on high-end logic chips sought by buyers globally. Silicon Triangle seeks to present a balanced view of how policies of the United States and its partners around semiconductors can increase the resilience of shared supply chains--and contribute to deterring conflict in the Taiwan Strait.

A foundational, accessible overview of
space policy in the United States

This
book provides readers with the first comprehensive overview of major space
policies in the United States and a framework through which to analyze them. It
examines all facets of space policy--civilian, military, and commercial--and
presents this material accessibly for use by readers at multiple levels, from undergraduate
courses to government practitioners making and implementing policy.

The
first section offers a history of space exploration, focusing on the US
within a global context. The second section looks at the actors and
institutions involved in setting space policy in a government based on the
separation of powers, including the president, Congress, NASA, and the
Department of Defense. The book concludes with chapters on the different
sectors of space policy, as well as questions this field will face in the future.

As
policymakers and business leaders become increasingly aware of the everyday
systems that depend on space technologies, such as communications, mapping, and
weather monitoring, and as space becomes a more visible arena for commercial
competition, potential humanitarian gain, and military threats, Space Policy
for the Twenty-First Century helps students and professionals navigate the
complexity of space as a policy area.

The history of exploration and establishment of new lands, science and technologies has always entailed risk to the health and lives of the explorers. Yet, when it comes to exploring and developing the high frontier of space, the harshest frontier ever, the highest value is apparently not the accomplishment of those goals, but of minimizing, if not eliminating, the possibility of injury or death of the humans carrying them out. For decades since the end of Apollo, human spaceflight has been very expensive and relatively rare (about 500 people total, with a death rate of about 4%), largely because of this risk aversion on the part of the federal government and culture. From the Space Shuttle, to the International Space Station, the new commercial crew program to deliver astronauts to it, and the regulatory approach for commercial spaceflight providers, our attitude toward safety has been fundamentally irrational, expensive and even dangerous, while generating minimal accomplishment for maximal cost. This book entertainingly explains why this means that we must regulate passenger safety in the new commercial spaceflight industry with a lighter hand than many might instinctively prefer, that NASA must more carefully evaluate rewards from a planned mission to rationally determine how much should be spent to avoid the loss of participants, and that Congress must stop insisting that safety is the highest priority, for such insistence is an eloquent testament to how unimportant they and the nation consider the opening of this new frontier. About the Author Rand Simberg is a recovering aerospace engineer with over a third of a century of experience in the space industry. Early in his career, he accumulated over a decade of experience in engineering and management at the Aerospace Corporation in El Segundo, California and Rockwell International in Downey, California. Since leaving Rockwell in 1993, he has been a consultant in space technology and business development as well as a technology entrepreneur. He also advises on regulatory and market issues pertaining to commercial and personal spaceflight. Mr. Simberg holds multiple engineering degrees from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and a Masters degree in Technical Management from West Coast University in Los Angeles. He is an adjunct scholar with the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and has written many pieces for Popular Mechanics, Fox News, America Online, PJMedia, National Review, Reason magazine, The Weekly Standard, The Washington Times, and TCSDaily, among others. He has also written extensive essays on space policy and technology for the quarterly journal, The New Atlantis.

This book seeks to promote ideas and actions to manage digital transformation and the latest advances in artificial intelligence with foresight and purpose to shape a more prosperous and inclusive future.