UC Riverside

In recent years the power of technology has increased dramatically. From tech companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon expanding their control over the online marketplace through their flagship products like Google Search, to their increasing desire to conquer new markets, like Amazon’s foray into brick-and-mortar shops, and Facebook’s currency projects their power over our lives has only gotten more complete. Similarly, we see the power of the state growing in conjunction with its new technological capacity. The revelations of Edward Snowden provide an account of the burgeoning surveillance apparatus of the state, a mechanism that has only continued to advance. In the academy too, the power of technology has become essential for research within the social science, with ever more complicated forms of statistical and causal interference becoming all but required for the completion of a graduate degree, and success as a scholar. The thread that ties all these elements together is the development of a complex infrastructure of big data. Big data, colloquially understood as the presentation of datasets too large for conventional or consumer-oriented computing to handle, has become the backbone of the tech industry, the state and of cutting-edge scholarly research. However, the social and political implication of the collection, management and usage of big data and its associated analytics has been understudied. To help address this problem I propose a new critical theory of technology, focusing on the power of big data aimed at understanding its political outcomes. I explore the power of big data as a new form of biopolitical control over our lives, trace the ontological impact of big data on the form of the enlightenment era person, and bring to light the epistemological commitments of big data. In this way this dissertation addresses a growing problem in society, the usage of big data to increasingly manage our political and social lives and adds to the existing critical theory literature on technology.