Abstract

The world has become saturated with Big Tech dominance. Google answers 92% of the world's search queries, 50% of all e-commerce goes through Amazon and over 70% of internet referral traffic goes via sites owned and/or operated by Google and Facebook. Big Tech is causing long-lasting damage to young people’s mental health, continues to jeopardise national and civil cyber security through intrusive data collection, bankrupts and acquires smaller businesses, monopolises our digital communication avenues and remains a huge risk to our digital and physical worlds. Yet, as a society, we have become completely dependent and entrusting on these five companies to continue operating large parts of our lives. This thesis explores the alternative solutions to dependency on Big Tech products and services, and investigates why the situation has gotten so serious, so quickly.

Accompanying the research are two practical projects, both of which further explore our dependency on Big Tech within our daily lives, by using a case study analysis of people with multiple age groups and professions using a network in which Big Tech is no longer accessible from the rest of the internet.

Resilience Engineering in the Age of Big Tech Dependency