I found out about the Global Justice Now ‘Resisting Big Tech Empires’ conference through a message in my local Green Party group chat. There has recently been quite a few articles and concerns being shared amongst members about the NHS’s contract with Palantir, and it seems to me that Big Tech overreach is no longer a fringe concern but something in the repertoire of causes to care about for a growing number of people. The conference was held at London South Bank University and had speakers I was excited to hear from including Rosa Curling from Foxglove, and Cory Doctorow, a consultant at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and author of ‘Enshittifiation’. It was the first conference I have attended that I wasn’t also presenting at but also the first that I did not have to cross the Thames for, and the free admission meant that I wasn’t too sad to give up my sunny Saturday.
Global Justice Now, the conference host is a UK-based campaign organisation that focuses on fighting various forms of injustice, particularly in the global south and seem to increasingly be turning their gaze towards the technology sector. The conference had 6 panels and opening and closing plenaries, and focused on community and institutional resistance to Big Tech.
Opening talk ‘The Empire of Big Tech’ – Anita Gurumurthy from IT for Change, Dan McQuillan lecturer in ‘Critical AI’ at Goldsmiths, UofL, and Nick Dearden director of Global Justice Now
When I sat down for the opening talk, I noticed that the large lecture theatre was definitely full to capacity. The panel began with the question ‘What do we mean when we talk about Big Tech Empires?’.
Anita Gurumurthy explained that the rapid expansion of extractive Cloud Capitalism (a term coined by Tan & Thelen, 2025[1]) and the datafication of human lifeworlds will impact the global south the most severely. She used the example of Indian workers wearing GoPro cameras on their heads whilst folding towels, the footage from which would be used to train AI, thereby forcing the workers complicit in their own economic suicide. She also explained how the use of popular LLMs uphold American monoculturalism through language.
Dan McQuillan, while disagreeing with the use of the term ‘Empire’ did state that the business models of Big Tech mirror that of the East India Company in that they are interventionist, ideological and increasingly militaristic. He explains that we are currently at a tipping point, an interregnum, of important power shifts, a point I heard mirrored by all speakers today, and that the growth and scaling of these industries must be rejected via ‘decomputing’. Dan made his argument clear that he is firmly of the belief that any use of AI is extractive, ‘sociopathic’ and ‘an engine of precaritisation and necropolitics’[2]. Perhaps controversially for some, he said that any arguments made for defending the potential usefulness of AI in any form, are excusing its harms.
Nick Dearden from Global Justice Now gave another equally powerful argument for resisting Big Tech saying that the entire industry has become synonymous with wealth disparity. He said that the UK government’s response to this is ‘as dangerous as it is embarrassing’ and that our overreliance on tech companies in our economic growth models means that we have become ‘little more than an aircraft carrier for Big Tech’.
The second question to the panel was ‘what should our strategies be for resisting these big tech empires?’
Anita suggested abolishing human-led content moderation which we know is most often outsourced to the global south and leaves workers with conditions like PTSD. This would be part of a ‘human-dignity first’ approach which would also include internationally taxing tech corporations, and looking into decentralised and locally-controlled and accountable AI systems.
Dan on the other hand says that we must all stop drinking the KoolAid and choose a technopolitics of degrowth in order to ensure rights and futures for workers and the planet.
Nick said that actions such as challenging the building of new datacentres is a good step towards resisting.
‘How to resist a data centre’ with Rosa Curling from Foxglove and Tim Bierley from Global Justice Now and Owen Espley from Global Action Plan
I was interested in going to this panel discussion to hear about the community activism that was being carried out now to resist the development of data centres. It is something that I have been following Foxglove’s legal work on and was keen to hear more.
The panel began by laying out some of the arguments against data centre developments and the work they had already done to resist them. The main arguments are the major environmental impacts which make Ed Miliband’s targets completely defunct, the disruption these developments cause to house building schemes which again put a major spanner in the works for the government’s targets, and the distinct lack of job creation which these developments would like to extol, in reality data centres employ very few people, as little as a handful per site. Project proposals like the Brick Lane Truman Brewery data centre would take up space that could and should be used for vitally necessary social housing, particularly in a borough like Tower Hamlets which has around 24,000 households on social housing wait lists.
The panel then turned to the audience to work in groups to answer the questions:
Why do we oppose data centres?
How can we build support to oppose data centres?
How do we push back on government’s rush to build DCs?
What weight should we give to political, legal, and community work? How do they relate?
The general feeling of the room was that NIMBYism is not necessarily a bad thing and can be used to create coalitions and that Luddite should not be a slur as of course, this was a movement to protect workers rights. Unfortunately, there wasn’t enough time to hear each groups thoughts at the end which would have been interesting.
‘Is this Technofascism? Rethinking the far right in the age of AI’ with Nafeez Ahmed author of Alt-Riech and Dan McQuillan
Nafeez started his talk by saying he believes that the current iteration of the far right is not a break from the system but rather a product of it. He laid out this argument by giving a short history of the Nazi propaganda machine of the Pioneer Fund in America as a straight line towards figures today like Peter Thiel- backed Curtis Yarvin, Nick Land and their ‘Dark Enlightenment’.
While the proliferation of Big Tech outputs and the growth of far-right politics both have been framed as inevitable, Nafeez said that we must instead rethink these technologies to unleash their emancipatory potentials, rather than allow them to exist to create power and profit for the select few.
Dan sees technology and fascism as inseparable, as systems like AI are wedded to ‘fascistic solutionism’. He sees the teleological endpoint of these technologies as used by governments to be eugenics, as allowing them into national systems to decide welfare allocation amongst other things lays the groundwork for Arendt’s ‘thoughtlessness’.
During the Q&A portion of the panel Dan was asked about why he does not acknowledge that AI could have some positive uses such as in climate science. To which he responded that this was just a fetishisation of datafication and that the science already exists, the answer is to act on it.
Dan’s opinions proved to be quite controversial and ended in the most heated conference discussion I have seen (which is to say, not very heated), with an audience member heckling him about why he was wrong to ignore the potential virtues of gen-AI. Despite the pushback I think Dan made his point very clearly and without wavering on his strong stance of decomputing.
‘Beyond Big Tech Empires’ with Cory Doctorow author of Enshittification and consultant for the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Sofia Scasserra, a digital advisor to the international trade union movement
To be quite honest, the detail in my note taking was dwindling at this point, but it was a great choice to put speakers like Cory and Sofia on the closing plenary as both gave exciting and impassioned addresses.
Cory began by drawing the parallels between digital rights activism and climate activism. Both are abstract and have consequences in the seemingly far future which mean we must find ways to raise the salience of these issues as waiting until the consequences are felt mean it is already too late.
He then explained in brief the main arguments for his ‘Enshittification’ argument, despite having heard this spiel on a number of podcast appearances and in the book already, his rhetorical style and humour meant it was still very enjoyable to hear.
Sofia then explained how digital rights are a matter of urgency for Trade Unions, as the impacts of Big Tech are felt by workers. She laid out an argument for how we might take back control from these corporations, only through organised labour unions.
Concluding Thoughts….
My main takeaways from the day were that I could see that issues like data centres have become a source of bi-partisan politicisation or mobilisation for some because of them being a clear, big and physical intrusion of the tech sector into our human landscape. The cloud is difficult to conceptualise until it is being built in your back garden, but for other issues of Big Tech creep we do not have these large physical markers.
It made me think about how the creative research methods that me and my co-researcher Liv Owens have been using, such as our Data Sculptures workshops[3], have potential to be used as part of a community education outreach to give physical shape to these intangible political struggles. It seems that we might be at a tipping point where the public are asking, is this really right for us? Silicon Valley has always operated on a ‘move fast and break things’ or rather a ‘do now, apologise/donate later’ basis. It is important as digital researchers, and generally as affected parties, that we use this to gain momentum in asking politicians to take a step back and put a pause on the contract rollouts to weigh up who the winners and losers are, before it’s too late.
I really enjoyed the discussions held at the conference and was uplifted by the large audience that came out on a Saturday in London to take part. It was great to hear some differences of opinion and to see people from across disciplines working towards the same fight. Thanks to Global Justice Now and the Balanced Economy Project for organising it.
[1] Tan, J. and Thelen, K. (2025). Cloud Capitalism and the AI Transition. Politics & Society. doi:https://doi.org/10.1177/00323292251396395.
[2] ‘Necropolitics’ is a term coined by Cameroonian historian Achille Mbembe to build on Foucault’s concept of ‘biopower’, describing the social and political powers that decide who may live and who dies.
[3] This method was developed by Liv as an expansion on the work of Bhargava – Bhargava, R., & D’Ignazio, C. (2017). Data Sculptures as a Playful and Low-Tech Introduction to Working with Data. Presented at the Designing Interactive Systems, Edinburgh, Scotland.
Our last workshop was at the ‘Information Lives in DIY Culture’ conference and we hope to write up an article on this method soon.
Lily Bichard Collins 