This project analyzes the image of human life generated by tech companies including Google, Apple, and Facebook. The project does so by studying those texts, images, and films produce by these companies including corporate blogs, manifestos, product presentations, and advertising. This research is important because major tech companies increasingly present their platforms as services for the public or common good. This project is critical of this development given these tech companies' market-driven interests. The project's objective is to develop a critical and cohesive framework to understand how tech companies present themselves and also position themselves in relation to for example the climate crisis.
The project has resulted into the following three main publications and their conclusions:
- The monograph "Resisting Big Tech: The Personalized Is Political" (Niels Niessen), forthcoming 2025 at Bloomsbury Academic. Inspired by the feminist rallying cry that “the personal is political,” this book calls for a collective consciousness of how Big Tech's increasingly personalized streams colonize our associations (how we wander in our bodyminds, and 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.
- The PhD dissertation "Digital Voice Assistants as Theatre: Apostrophic Interaction in Platform Discourses" (2025, Nuno Atalaia). This thesis frames digital voice assistants including Apple's Siri and Google's Assistant as as discursive
interventions which have aided the expansion of platform infrastructures onto the everyday lives of individuals. The vocally performed fiction of benevolent assistance was aimed at naturalizing the infiltration
of our lives and their spaces by digital infrastructures such as cloud computing and artificial intelligence (AI). At the same time, this expansion imposes on individuals a precarious condition, in which they are less and less equipped to understand the technologies they depend on. DVAs and apostrophic interaction are key in the historical shift in perception of platforms and digital technologies from located silent objects to ubiquitous interpellating agents. The thesis claims that a critique of technological novelty, informed by the methods and practices of the arts and humanities, is vital in critiquing the current practices of Big Tech corporations.
- The PhD dissertation "Platform Earth: Ecomodernism in Tech-on-Climate Discourse" (2025, Rianne Riemens). This thesis argues that the ecological reconfiguration of Silicon Valley is underpinned by an ecomodernist ideology: a vision of the future focused on green growth, in which human progress is “decoupled” from environmental decline. The dissertation shows how Silicon Valley’s eco-modernism propagates that the Earth and its ecosystems are best governed by platform infrastructures. This conviction leads to an instrumental valuation of nature, a unilateral, masculine understanding of the human subject, and an imperialistic vision of progress deeply rooted in the history of the United States. The dissertation critiques the ecomodernist, transhuman narrative that “we” as a humanity can “upgrade” humans and nature and achieve a greener future without making uncomfortable decisions and sociopolitical changes. This is the myth of “Platform Earth”: a strategic narrative that favors only certain lives, solutions and forms of knowledge and legitimizes the continuation of extractivism.
