Big Tech Research Articles

Cornelius Castoriadis’ agonistic theory of the future of work at Amazon Mechanical Turk

ABSTRACT Digital innovations are rapidly changing the contemporary workplace. Big Tech companies marketing algorithmic management increasingly decide on the Future of Work. Political responses, however, often focus on managing the impact of these technologies on workers. They leave the question of how these technologies are designed or how workers can determine their own futures unanswered. This approach risks surrendering the Future of Work debate to techno-determinist imaginaries aligned with corporate interests. Using Cornelius Castoriadis’ early writings on worker struggles in French Tayloristic factories and his later oeuvre on conflictual social imaginaries, I propose an agonistic approach to the Future of Work. Not merely companies implementing workplace technologies, but also workers themselves possess agency in determining the Future of Work. Workers’ frequent contestations against machinic surveillance and technologically mediated coordination of the labour process disclose an alternative Future of Work in which technologies are used to enhance worker autonomy rather than bureaucratic control. Worker struggles at Amazon Mechanical Turk illustrate this agonistic dynamic: Amazon mobilizes algorithmic management to fragment and control a workforce of globally dispersed remote workers, but the latter form online social communities and create counter-technologies to reappropriate control over the labour process.

Access Rules: Freeing Data from Big Tech for a Better Future

Access Rules: Freeing Data from Big Tech for a Better Future

THE DONALD TRUMP CASE AND BIG TECHS: THE PERMANENT EXCLUSION OF SOCIAL MEDIA ACCOUNTS ANALYZED FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF THE BRAZILIAN CONSTITUTION

Technological development, more specifically, for the purpose of this work, those linked to information technology, have significantly impacted the social, political, and economic fields in recent decades. In the political and economic realm, advancements in information technology have led to the emergence of the so-called Big Techs (Technology Giants), which, in addition to being at the top of the list of the world's most valuable companies, have become extremely important players in the political arena due to their high degree of control over the available information flow and the large scale at which they provide access to information. In the social sphere, accounts created on social networks have become tools for the legitimate exercise of various fundamental rights, among which the rights to freedom of expression and free enterprise stand out

Technology is a wish your heart makes: How Disney harnesses practical magic discourse to legitimize MyMagic+

This article explores how Disney employs magical discourse to legitimize its MyMagic+ system. Through an analysis of the Disney Parks blog, we introduce the concept practical magic discourse, which entices users to indulge in the fantasy of transcending the constraints of reality, while obscuring the labor involved in the system’s development and maintenance. Practical magic discourse differs from existing conceptualizations of magical discourse, emphasizing experiential aspects of technology rather than capabilities; its mundane, rather than grandiose aesthetic; and individual level, rather than societal effects. Like existing conceptualizations, it is performative in willing a particular kind of relationship with a technology. Consequently, it holds the potential to enhance the allure of data-intensive systems, while diverting attention away from negative consequences. We discuss implications of practical magic discourse and underscore the need for critical examination of the enchanting narratives surrounding technological advancements beyond the realm of Big Tech.

The business revolution: Economy‐wide impacts of artificial intelligence and digital platforms

AbstractIn this essay, we identify several themes of the digital business transformation, with a particular focus on the economy‐wide impacts of artificial intelligence and digital platforms. In doing so, we highlight specific industries, beyond just the high‐profile “Big Tech” firms, where the digital business revolution is having, or promises to have, significant impact. The papers in this special issue (flagged with bold font below) provide a deeper analysis of the themes and applications we touch on here.

ESSAY ON LAW AND POLITICS, IN SURVEILLANCE APITALISM

In “surveillance capitalism”, – politics and culture are being shaped by some big tech, but most people don’t realize it. Society has moved from the information age to the misinformation. The tools created began to unbalance Democracy and the relationships and functioning of society. These big techs only care about how to capture users' attention on their platforms, without thinking about the impacts. In this scenario that the State produces the laws that materialize the law. It is in this chaos that the application of the theory of dialogue and legislative rationality is suggested as a means of improving the design of the formation of law in the State, reducing the current crisis, crediting politics, maintaining peace and the current system in force.

The use of tracker technologies on branded prescription drug websites: privacy, data acquisition and programmatic advertising

PurposeThe purpose of this study was to examine consumer data acquired by branded prescription drug websites and the ethics of privacy related to the interconnected web of personal information accessed, packaged and resold by tracker technologies.Design/methodology/approachThe research used the DMI Tracker Tool to collect data on the top 17 branded prescription drug websites, with a specific interest in the tracker technologies embedded in those websites. That data was analyzed using Gephi, an open-source data visualization tool, to map the network of trackers embedded in those branded prescription drug websites.FindingsFindings visualize the interconnections between tracker technologies and prescription drug websites that undergird a system of personal data acquisition and programmatic advertising vehicles that serve the interests of prescription drug marketers and Big Tech. Based on the theory of platform ethics, the study demonstrated the presence of a technostructural ecosystem dominated by Big Tech, a system that goes unseen by consumers and serves the interests of advertisers and resellers of consumer data.Research limitations/implicationsThe 17 websites used in this study were limited to the top-selling prescription drugs or those with the highest ad expenditures. As such this study is not based on a random sampling of branded prescription drug websites. The popularity of these prescription drugs or the expanse of advertising associated with the drugs makes them appropriate to study the presence of tracking devices that collect data from consumers and serve advertising to them. It is also noted that websites are dynamic spaces, and some trackers within their infrastructures are apt to change over time.Practical implicationsBranded prescription drug information has over the past three decades become part of consumers’ routine search for information regarding what ails them. As drug promotion moved from print to TV and the Web, searching for drug information has become a part of everyday life. The implications of embedded trackers on branded prescription drug websites are the subject of this research.Social implicationsThis study has significant social implications as consumers who are searching for information regarding prescription medications may not want drug companies tracking them in a way that many perceive to be an invasion of privacy. Yet, as the Web is dominated by Big Tech, web developers have little choice but to remain a part of this technostructural ecosystem.Originality/valueThis study sheds light on branded prescription drug websites, exploring the imbalance between the websites under study, Big Tech and consumers who lack awareness of the system that operates backstage.

Not a Blank Slate: The Role of Big Tech in Misinformation and Radicalization

Not a Blank Slate: The Role of Big Tech in Misinformation and Radicalization

AI for social good and the corporate capture of global development

ABSTRACT This article focuses on the AI for Social Good (AI4SG) movement, which aims to leverage Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to achieve the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs). It argues that, through AI4SG, Big Tech is attempting to advance AI-driven technosolutionism within the development policy and scholarly space creating new opportunities for rent extraction. The article situates AI4SG, within the history of ICT4D. It also highlights the contiguity of AI4SG with the so-called 4th Industrial Revolution (4IR), a framework that places AI and other digital innovations at the center of national and international development and industrial policy agendas. By exploring how Big Tech has attempted to depoliticize datafication, we thus suggest that AI4SG and 4IR are mutually reinforcing discourses that serve the purpose of depoliticizing the development arena by bestowing legitimacy and authority to Big Tech to reshape policy spaces and epistemic infrastructures while inserting themselves, to an unprecedented degree, between the citizen (data) and the state (development and policy).

Gathering round Big Tech: How the market for acquisitions concentrates the digital sector

Abstract Small businesses within the digital sector are spread across the USA. However, a significant number of promising small businesses concentrate in major technology hubs, either initially or through relocation. This phenomenon can be attributed to the influential role played by localized markets for financing and acquisition, which is, in turn, driven by the dominant market positions held by major digital platforms. Our research demonstrates a clear pattern of localized acquisition markets, particularly in sectors frequently targeted by the seven largest American digital giants—Amazon, Alphabet (Google), Apple, Microsoft, Meta (Facebook), Oracle, and Adobe, collectively known as ‘Big Tech’. This localization trend has become more pronounced between 2000 and 2020. Our analysis indicates that the gravitational pull of these acquisition markets poses challenges to local initiatives aimed at fostering digital businesses. These efforts would be more successful if measures were taken to limit the market influence of digital platforms.

Consumer neuro devices within EU product safety law: Are we prepared for big tech ante portas?

Previously confined to the distinct medical market, neurotechnologies are expanding rapidly into the consumer market, driven by technological advancements and substantial investments. While offering promising benefits, concerns have emerged regarding the suitability of existing legal frameworks to adequately address the risks they present. Against the background of an ongoing global debate on new policies or new ‘neurorights’ regulating neurotechnology, this paper delves into the regulation of consumer Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) in the European Union (EU), focusing on the pertinent product safety legislation.The analysis will primarily examine the sector-specific product safety law for medical devices, the Medical Devices Regulation (MDR). It will meticulously delineate which consumer BCIs fall within its scope and are obliged to comply with the requirements outlined. The tech-based approach of Annex XVI MDR, coupled with recent amendments, show that the EU has adopted a forward-thinking rationale towards regulating health-related risks associated with consumer BCIs within existing EU medical devices legislation, while abstaining from over-regulating aspects therein that are beyond its core objectives.Supplementary, the paper will discuss developments in EU horizontal product safety law, regulating all consumer BCIs that are not subject to sector-specific product safety legislation. In their recently adopted General Product Safety Regulation (GPSR), the EU has introduced several provisions addressing digital products. Inter alia, these changes will enhance the horizontal regulation of consumer BCIs.Overall, within the context of product safety law, the recent adaptations affirm notable efforts by the EU to refine the legal framework that governs consumer BCIs, striking a delicate balance between effective technology regulation and not impeding innovation.

Official statistics and big data in Latin America: Data enclosures and counter-movements

With the rise of the data-driven economy, the state-owned sector of official statistics has been pressurised to ‘modernise’ and engage with big data. However, most of these data sources are controlled by tech corporations. We address the conflicts this brings about from a Latin American perspective through three case studies involving national statistical offices, international organisations, and the private sector. We investigate strategies for enabling data markets for official statistics and analyse how the statistical field has acted in this context. In doing so, we contribute to understanding the political economy of big data in Latin America and debates on how digitalisation encompasses the reshaping of state-business relations. Supported by secondary data and semi-structured interviews, we appraise Bourdieu's theory of fields, Marxian readings on the enclosure of commons, and Polanyi's double movement to analyse how data commodification challenges data as public goods – a fundamental principle for official statistics. The findings demonstrate that data enclosures have prevented the state's access to compiling official statistics and show that the initiatives for introducing big data in Latin American national statistical offices have involved testing data markets through public–private partnerships supported by international organisations and big tech. As a result, the statistical field has reacted to the data market with a ‘double movement’: mobilising symbolic capital such as ‘trust’ for partnering with businesses to access data and technologies and, conversely, defending the public value of data in counter-movements protective of the relative autonomy of the national statistical offices and the state's control over informational capital.

Technological sovereignty in Germany: techno-industrial policy as a form of economic statecraft?

Technological sovereignty has emerged as a prominent topic, with states positioning themselves to ensure security and economic competitiveness. However, German economic policy rarely involved strategic government interventions and industrial policies due to its deep-rooted adherence to ordoliberalism. In response to the influence of foreign big tech companies and growing economic competition from China, the German state is now formulating a strategic techno-industrial policy agenda, advocating interventions for the preservation of sovereignty. This article analyses the proposed agenda using an inductive process-tracing approach (Trampusch and Palier, 2016) and document analysis (Bowen, 2009) of strategy papers, policy documents and selected media reports. Drawing on the concepts of structural power (Strange, 2004 [1988]) and economic statecraft (Weiss and Thurbon, 2021), we argue that Germany’s pursuit of technological sovereignty represents a distinctive form of (geo-)economically motivated statecraft, primarily directed at enhancing commercial competitiveness rather than prioritising security. However, we identify limitations to this approach where the regulatory regime and institutional legacy, both at the national and EU levels, impede strategic government interventions in the economy, thus constraining the pursuit of technological sovereignty.

Subverting or preserving the institution: Competing IT firm and foundation discourses about open source

The data economy depends on digital infrastructure produced in self-managed projects and communities. To understand how information technology (IT) firms communicate to a volunteer workforce, we examine IT firm and foundation employee discourses about open source. We posit that organizations employ rhetorical strategies to advocate for or resist changing the meaning of this institution. Our analysis of discourses collected at three open source professional conferences in 2019 is complemented by computational methods, which generate semantic clusters from presentation summaries. In terms of defining digital infrastructure, business models, and the firm-community relationship, we find a clear division between the discourses of large firm and consortia foundation employees, on one hand, and small firm and non-profit foundation employees, on the other. These divisions reflect these entities’ roles in the data economy and levels of concern about predatory “Big Tech” practices, which transform common goods to be shared into proprietary assets to be sold.

The making of critical data center studies

In this article, the authors demonstrate how the data center has become a key site, object, and metaphor for interdisciplinary scholarship of the internet. While the data center is a fabrication of engineering, computer science, and cognate fields, it has been the critical gaze of scholars outside of those industries. Together, this scholarship has established the field of Critical Data Center Studies. Critiques of the data center – often thought of more generally as ‘internet infrastructure’, and more evocatively as ‘the cloud’ – have emerged from the social sciences, humanities, journalism, and the arts. The authors do this by answering questions about the current social, cultural, political, and environmental landscapes of the data center. Scrutiny of the foundational imaginaries of the internet, real estate deals by Big Tech, the industry’s enabling policies, their connections to energy and other public infrastructure – among many other factors – serves, at the very least, to situate the data center as a media object, as more than simply a material infrastructure, as more than data warehouse, and as more than ‘the cloud’. Further to this, the authors reflect on how the data center has been and continues to be studied, and why critical interventions have been so fruitful within a vast array of disciplines – from history and anthropology, to media studies, information studies, and science & technology studies – for shifting the focus from questions of infrastructural visibility to questions that weave together concerns of efficiency, policy, popular culture, and planetary devastation.

Establishing altruistic ethics to use technology for Social Welfare—How Japan manages Web3 and self-sovereign identity in local communities

Technologies of self-sovereign identity (SSI) and Web3 tools that strongly protect individual autonomy, combined with the ethics of Asian altruism, can effectively guide the governance of the emerging cyber civilization. In contrast, governance in Western industrial civilization stresses the pursuit of individual self-interest and struggles to balance the benefits of big tech with the protection of individual dignity and the preservation of the common good. We demonstrate, with reference to a local community in Japan, that SSI is successful in encouraging communal collaboration and well-being while providing individuals with greater control over their personal data. We also show that Web3 tools provide incentives for altruistic behaviors while safeguarding SSI. Integration of SSI and social protection demonstrates the potential for building an information society grounded in altruistic values, honoring individual dignity, and recognizing the government’s role in protecting social welfare. Ultimately, this research unveils how altruistic values can be fostered through SSI and Web3.

The changing face of consumer credit: Evidence from a big tech platform in China

We investigate the changi pattern of consumer credit usage following a large, adverse shock. Using a unique dataset comprising the consumption, payment, and investment activities of nearly 100,000 users of a leading Big Tech platform in China, we find that consumers who have access to both FinTech and traditional bank credit reduce their bank credit card usage while increasing their FinTech credit usage. Moreover, FinTech credit works as a complement rather than a substitute for traditional bank credit on the same Big Tech platform, as the amount of FinTech-credit-enabled payments is much lower. This impact is more pronounced among female consumers, younger consumers, and consumers who invest more money in Big Tech platform. Hence, the rise of FinTech credit is potentially driven by (1) the consumption downgrading (i.e., shifting from large amounts and service consumption to small amounts and daily necessity consumption) in the post-COVID era, when people’s income and growth expectations have been reduced and the uncertainties they face have increased, and (2) payment convenience, as people become less likely to access banks after the outbreak of COVID. Our findings provide novel evidence regarding the relationship between FinTech and traditional bank credit and the interplay between consumption and consumer credit, with implications for consumption resilience in the post-COVID-19 era.

Chinese Data Governance and Trade Policy: From Cyber Sovereignty to the Quest for Digital Hegemony?

ABSTRACT The article builds on an up-to-date overview of the data governance framework developed by the People’s Republic of China to gauge its influence over digital trade policy at the global stage. China has developed a peculiar data governance architecture, predicated upon domestic security. The party-state has been open to discuss only trade-related aspects of information flows while shielding national autonomy from international harmonization. This strategy is coupled with the effort to project China’s data governance approach externally both through China’s role in international standard setting and via new digital infrastructure, through the Digital Silk Road initiative. In this respect, China’s attempts to facilitate penetration by its own companies in foreign digital infrastructure needs to be assessed against the large data access power enjoyed by the state-party vis-à-vis domestic big tech companies. The article argues that such a strategy appears in contrast with the explicit commitment to protect national self-determination, especially when host countries lack adequate legal and administrative safeguards to tackle the economic and data protection challenges brought by digitalization.

Fair share of network costs and regulatory myopia: learning from net neutrality mistakes

ABSTRACT To boost the roll-out of the next generation telecommunications infrastructure, EU policy makers have advanced a proposal mandating some large online platforms to compensate network operators with a usage fee. Framed as a matter of large market players paying their fair share of contribution to telecommunications networks, the proposal would represent another unnecessary and harmful regulatory intervention. Indeed, the paper aims to demonstrate that the fair share debate is the poison fruit of a previous intrusive government initiative, that is, the net neutrality regulation. Furthermore, like net neutrality anti-discrimination rules, a fair share Big Tech tax would be a solution that wouldn’t work for a problem that doesn’t exist. Instead of continuing to interfere in market dynamics and private negotiations without any solid evidence of market failures, the EU should learn from past mistakes and acknowledge the limited scope for regulation in these dynamic markets.

The impact of big tech corporate venture capital investments on innovation: Evidence from the equity investment market

Big technology companies have undeniably left an indelible mark on society, shaping it with their groundbreaking products and services. However, concerns have arisen regarding their market dominance and the potential stifling of competition and innovation, resulting in the formation of ominous “kill zones.” As a response to these concerns, regulatory scrutiny has intensified. To contribute to a better understanding of this issue, this paper introduces a distinctive dataset encompassing the years from 2010 to 2018, drawing from the Chinese equity investment market. We conduct an empirical analysis to examine the impact of corporate venture capital investments made by tech giants on the innovation of the recipient firms. Our results unveil a positive and notable influence of these investments on innovation, particularly in the domain of substantial innovations such as invention patents. Additionally, we delve into the underlying mechanisms propelling this effect, identifying that the innovation incentives of tech behemoths primarily stem from the infusion of financial resources, technological synergies, and a wealth of diversified knowledge accrued through joint investments. These findings bear significant implications for policymakers and regulators who must delicately balance the scales of competition and innovation within the technology sector.