Sylwia Czubkowska wins the 2026 Marcin Król Award
During the gala held at the Palace of the Commonwealth on Thursday, 28 May 2026, the winner of this year’s Marcin Król Award was announced. In the fifth edition of the prize, awarded by the Stefan Batory Foundation, the award went to Sylwia Czubkowska for her book Bóg techy. Jak wielkie firmy technologiczne przejmują władzę nad Polską i światem (The God of Tech: How Big Technology Companies Are Taking Power over Poland and the World), published by Znak Literanova.
The Marcin Król Award ceremony was an opportunity to honour the best Polish book in the fields of the history of ideas and future studies, philosophy, social and political thought, and reflection on civilisation and culture. This year’s laureate was recognised for a publication analysing the growing power of major technology companies and their influence on democracy, the state, and citizens’ everyday lives.
In the laudation delivered during the ceremony, Professor Andrzej Rychard stressed that the book is “misleading and sets a trap for the reader – a good trap. It appears to be journalistic reportage, but in fact, beneath that form, it contains a deep analysis based on numerous data and pieces of information, firmly grounded in the scholarly works it cites.”
In her book, Sylwia Czubkowska offers a bold translation of global diagnoses of “surveillance capitalism” and “technofeudalism” into the Polish context, where transnational corporations enter as new digital sovereigns. The author skilfully uses a historical analogy to the British East India Company to show how today’s “network states” colonise our democracy by exploiting asymmetries of knowledge and the institutional weakness of the state.
This is not another theoretical treatise on the power of algorithms, but a deeply analytical case study exposing lobbying mechanisms and the limited imagination of decision-makers who hand over successive areas of life to the control of technological giants, according to the Stefan Batory Foundation on its website.
The Award ceremony was accompanied by the debate “Capitalism: Correction or End?”, devoted to the limits of the contemporary socio-economic order, the condition of democracy, and the possibilities of reclaiming agency in a world dominated by the logic of profit and global technological processes.
The Marcin Król Award was established in 2022. It is awarded annually for the best book written and published in Polish in the preceding year that introduces new ideas, concepts, or ways of thinking. Its aim is to support public debate, in-depth reflection on the present and the future, and the search for answers to the crisis of democracy and democratic values.