Resisting Big Tech: The Personalized is Political

by Niels Niessen, Anthony Mandal (Editor), Jenny Kidd (Editor)

Overview

How does Google Maps reorient our city travels? How do matching algorithms affect how we seek love? And how does artificial “intelligence” prompt how we think? Engaging these and similar questions, this open access book critiques Big Tech's colonization of everyday life.

Although #MeToo and Black Lives Matter would not have happened the way they did without so-called “social” media, these platforms are not designed for emancipation but to maximize data extraction. Inspired by the feminist rallying cry that “the personal is political,” Resisting Big Tech calls for a collective consciousness of how Big Tech's increasingly personalized streams colonize our associations (how we wander in our bodyminds and how 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.

Focusing on four domains of life-home, city, learning, love- Niels Niessen advocates for the de-Googling of life and the need to foster truly communal spaces, online but especially offline.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the European Research Council.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781350504103
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	08/21/2025
Series:	Bloomsbury Studies in Digital Cultures
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	5.75(w) x 8.70(h) x 0.85(d)

About the Author

Niels Niessen is Assistant Professor of Culture Studies at Tilburg University, Netherlands.

Anthony Mandal is Lecturer in English Literature at Cardiff University.

Jenny Kidd is a Reader at Cardiff University, UK, researching across the fields of digital media, culture and the creative industries. She has a particular interest in digital cultural heritage, transmedia, self-representation and immersive storytelling, and has published widely on these themes in, for example, Museums in the New Mediascape (Ashgate 2014), Representation (Routledge 2015), and Critical Encounters with Immersive Storytelling (Routledge 2018). She has published in related journals including Information, Technology and People and Continuum, and on related themes in International Journal of Heritage Studies, The Journal of Curatorial Studies and Museum and Society. Jenny is Co-Director of the Digital Media and Society research group in the School of Journalism, Media and Culture, a committee member of the UK Digital Learning Network and in 2016 was elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society of Arts. She has been an advisor for Welsh Government on digital culture in the curriculum (2018) and has worked closely with the creative sector since 2002 including with BBC Wales, Amguedfa Cymru - National Museum Wales, Tate, yello brick, the Tower of London and Imperial War Museums. Jenny has led collaborative immersive media projects including With New Eyes I See (2013) and Traces-Olion (2016).

Table of Contents

Introduction : How Life Became a Stream
Chapter 1. Dreams and Dishes home
Chapter 2. Sidewalk Colonialism (land acknowledgment) city
Chapter 3. An ABC to de-Google Learning school
Chapter 4. Is Everything OK, Cupid love
Epilogue: Against the Stream for Climate Justice
Bibliography

Editorial Reviews

Niessen urges readers to look beyond the seductions of seamless connectivity and workflow productivity offered by corporate tech, to reflect on how personalised technologies are radically reshaping what it means to be human today. A timely and urgent account that draws on a wide range of ideas from politics, philosophy, urban geography and feminist studies, advancing a new politics of resistance that recalls technology's emancipatory potentials.” —Sarah Barns, Vice Chancellor's Senior Research Fellow, The Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Australia

“This ground-breaking book offers a truly much-needed vocabulary to understand and navigate these strange, technocolonial times. I was stunned and alarmed learning more about how smartphones, algorithms and AI are embedded into our lives in unimaginable ways, but also invigorated by the thoughtful, beautifully written and conscientious writing. Niessen integrates feminist values into the book's insightful explorations, and offers a powerful call to resist and to rethink how we live in the digital age.” —Minna Salami, Author of Sensuous Knowledge: A Black Feminist Approach for Everyone

From the Publisher