Moderation: Moderation: Lina Schmid, Jakob Scherer

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.

Cecilia Rikap (PhD in economics from the Universidad de Buenos Aires) is an Associate Professor in Economics and the Head of Research at IIPP- UCL. Until joining UCL, she was a permanent Senior Lecturer in International Political Economy (IPE) at City, University of London and programme director of the BSc in IPE at the same university. She is a tenure researcher of the CONICET, Argentina’s national research council, and associate researcher at COSTECH lab, Université de Technologie de Compiègne.

Her work analyses corporate power and how knowledge extractivism leads to intellectual monopolisation. Her most recent research focuses on artificial intelligence, the cloud, Big Tech dominance, AI-driven geopolitical tensions, digital sovereignty and how digital dependence constrains development.
https://profiles.ucl.ac.uk/94616-cecilia-rikap

Cooperation: Research Group Latin America, Department of Sociology, Department of Science and Technology Studies, Department of Development Studies, Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology