Big Tech companies are not merely large corporations; they are political actors and economic planners. Their deep pockets and control over social media and personal data are only the surface of what truly explains their dominance. Their power lies in their dominance over today’s control technologies deployed within and beyond the tech sector. Their power grows as artificial intelligence becomes widely adopted and emerges as the mainstream method of invention and creation, one that undermines people’s capacity to think. How did we arrive at a world in which such a handful of megacorporations from the United States – and to a lesser extent, from China – control the production and use of the technologies that define contemporary capitalism? What is different in US Big Tech’s coalition with the Trump administration in comparison to the historical interplay between US corporate and political power? How does this transformation affect the digital peripheries: Latin America, Africa, and even Europe? Who are the peripheries’ local accomplices of digital dependency? What are the ideological discourses and networks of economic power? How are nature’s extractivism and data and knowledge extractivisms connected? How is work being transformed in a world in which new technologies are a powerful mechanism of control and indoctrination? And why is it that, faced with the need to build an alternative, attempts to expand digital sovereignty equally fail? These are the key questions that structure this talk.
When: Monday, 11 May 2026, 18:00-19:30
Where: Hörsaal II, NIG, ground floor, Universitätsstraße 7, 1010 Vienna
Speaker: Cecilia Rikap (Paul Lazarsfeld Guest Professorship, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Vienna)
Moderation: Lina Schmid, Jakob Scherer (both Department of Political Science, University of Vienna)
Cooperation: Department of Sociology, Department of Science and Technology Studies, Department of Development Studies, Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology
