The Technology Cope Is A Bad Idea In Europe, Too

Stop blaming big tech for scary but fundamentally normal political tumult

Writing in the Financial Times (archive here), Marietje Schaake offers a useful example of a myopic but seductive worldview.

Schaake is a fellow at Stanford University’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence and its Cyber Policy Center, as well as the author of The Tech Coup: How to Save Democracy from Silicon Valley. Her FT article is pegged to what has been a pretty depressing last couple of weeks for fans of the European Union and cooperation between democratic countries in general. The United States, which has more power to shape Europe’s future than any other actor, appears to be throwing its sympathies, if not its support, behind both Vladimir Putin and a group of far-right political parties across Europe.

It’s hard to count the number of recent warning alarms. First, there was J.D. Vance’s strange speech at the Munich Security Conference calling attacks on free speech in the EU a bigger threat than China or Russia (I’m curious what the Ukrainians living under Russian occupation think of that). Then there were President Trump’s bizarre statements about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, his insults of Volodymyr Zelensky, and his attempts to try to squeeze mineral resources out of a country facing a live existential threat. Plus, Elon Musk has been regularly caping for the far-right Alternative für Deutschland.

AfD actually just won the second highest number of seats in Germany’s parliament — its best showing ever, as well as an outcome many Germans would have viewed as unthinkable not too long ago. For now the other parties, including the leading Christian Democratic Union, have an agreement in place to refuse to work with the AfD’s members, attenuating its influence within the Bundestag — a “firewall” strategy that Vance described as antidemocratic and that might be at least partially doomed anyway, according to Graeme Wood of The Atlantic.

With all this going on, Schaake’s mind is on one thing: evil tech companies.

Vance’s rhetoric conveyed a deep disdain for Europe, questioning its democracy. Tech companies that have offered unprecedented support for Trump apparently do not see this as a problem. They have aligned themselves as anti-European forces. As Europe reckons with the new transatlantic reality, its leaders should start treating the Silicon Valley giants as adversarial powers.

On Monday, European leaders held an emergency summit to organise their defence capabilities and support for Ukraine. Yet the other emergency should not be forgotten: the role that big tech companies play in supporting Trump’s new order. If Europe hopes to safeguard its own sovereignty and values, it must strategically decouple and dramatically lessen its dependence on companies that are either seeking confrontation or are otherwise vulnerable to being weaponised by Washington.

After listing off a bunch of the purported sins of our tech overlords, Schaake concludes by writing “It is time for Europe to end its debilitating dependence on American tech groups and take concrete steps to shield itself from the growing dangers of this new, tech-fuelled geopolitical landscape.”

What jumped off the screen for me was the similarity between Schaake’s argument and what a lot of mainstream liberal types said following Donald Trump’s first election.

In 2022, Matt Yglesias described what he called “the misinformation cope,” or the idea that misinformation plays an outsize role in generating “bad” political outcomes (he means this from the Democratic/liberal perspective, but of course members of any tribe could use the misinformation cope).