We are often told that we cannot live without Big Tech, but what happens when we try? In 2012, as Google, Facebook, and others were inaugurating the personal data economy, Janet Vertesi decided to take matters into her own hands.
Drawing upon her training as a sociologist of science, technology, and organizations, her extended ethnographic work with NASA’s robotic spacecraft teams, and her experience in critical human computer interaction design, Vertesi enacted her own technological lifestyle around creative, critical alternatives to counter the extractive data systems and naturalizing discourses of Silicon Valley. From this standpoint, she observed the rise of mass-scale surveillance technologies under the aegis of commercialization. She witnessed the co-construction of personalized systems and monolithic corporations that would eventually support the rise of AI.
In this talk, recorded at BESI on March 4, 2026, Vertesi describes how her “Opt Out” experiments revealed the accumulating material political economy that undergirds our current sociotechnical landscape, the shifting sociotechnical construction of concepts such as “inconvenience,” “innovation,” and “friendship,” and ways to practically replace these misnomers with alternative guiding philosophies. Her experiments reveal techniques to fight back, providing a hopeful guide for how we might build a better future with each other and our machines.
