This book focuses on our increasing dependence upon Big Tech to live, manage, and enjoy our lives. The author examines how we freely exchange our personal data for access to online platforms, services, and devices without proper consideration of the implications of this trade. Our personal data is the defining resource of the emerging digital economy, and it is increasingly concentrated in a few data enclaves controlled by Big Tech firms, cementing an increasingly parasitic form of technoscientific innovation. Big Tech controls access to these data, dictates the terms of our use of their services and products, and controls the future development of key technologies like artificial intelligence. The contention of this book is that we need to rethink our political and policy approach to data governance and to do so requires unpacking the peculiarities of personal data and how personal data are transformed into a valuable asset.
Kean Birch is Director of the Institutefor Technoscience & Society and Professor in the Science & Technology Studies Graduate Program at York University, Canada. He has been a Visiting Scholar at Copenhagen Business School and the Munich Center for Technology & Society, Technical University Munich. He is especially interested in understanding how different things are transformed into assets and what this means for our increasingly technoscientific economies and societies.
