Science as Culture
(SaC)
Forum on “Big Tech”
Forum Editor: Kean Birch
Big Tech is
in the spotlight. Usually defined as Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Google/Alphabet,
and Facebook, “Big Tech” has become a watchword for corporate surveillance,
monopoly, and market power. Arguably, they are the defining institutions of our
day, dominating our political economies, societies, and polities as Big Oil or
Big Banks did in their time. Criticism of Big Tech is increasingly evident as
well, cutting across popular books, academic work, film, and journalism: examples
include, Shoshana Zuboff’s 2019 book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism;
recent documentaries like Social Dilemma and Agents of Chaos; and
regular column inches in print media like the Financial Times and The
Economist, this being particularly notable as these two are intellectual bastions
of capitalism. Furthermore, Big Tech has been the subject of critical political
investigations, like the recent US Congressional Hearings on Online Platforms
and Market Power, or the International Grand Committee on Big Data, Privacy and
Democracy.
Although Big
Tech is facing the glare of negative publicity, there is a notable absence of
discussion about it in science and technology studies (STS), with some
exceptions (e.g. Birch et al. 2020a, 2020b; Fourcade and Kluttz 2020; Geiger
2020; Sadowski 2020). Cognate fields – like information science, communication
studies, law, algorithm or data studies, and so forth – have engaged with particular
aspects of Big Tech or its antecedents (e.g. Gillespie 2014; Pasquale 2015; Roseblat
and Stark 2016; O’Neil 2017; Noble 2018). For example, in analyses of how
digital platforms and technologies reinforce social discrimination or disrupt
political process.
