Resisting Big Tech : The Personalized is Political

Abstract

How does Google Maps reorient our city travels? How do matching algorithms affect how we seek love? And how does artificial “intelligence” prompt how we think? Engaging these and similar questions, this open access book critiques Big Tech’s colonization of everyday life. Although #MeToo and Black Lives Matter would not have happened the way they did without so-called “social” media, these platforms are not designed for emancipation but to maximize data extraction. Inspired by the feminist rallying cry that “the personal is political,” Resisting Big Tech calls for a collective consciousness of how Big Tech’s increasingly personalized streams colonize our associations (how we wander in our bodyminds and how we cohere as groups). Articulating a degrowth perspective on Big Tech, the book argues the need to be much more vigilant for how the transhumanist ideology that drives corporations like Google, Meta, and OpenAI accelerates life, burning out people and the planet. Focusing on four domains of life—home, city, learning, love— Niels Niessen advocates for the de-Googling of life and the need to foster truly communal spaces, online but especially offline. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the European Research Council.