The Datafication of Everyday Life: Niessen Challenges the Big Tech World View

Lindsey Skaggs reviews a new book on the problems of datafication

Posted on April 15, 2026 in Featured Reviews

As a part of our efforts to support scholarly work on the ethical and creative usage of technology in libraries and higher education, Choice highlights new and upcoming titles on this urgent topic through long-form reviews. In doing so, we hope to emphasize the importance of these issues and promising resources for addressing them. The following review, written by Lindsey Skaggs, considers Resisting Big Tech: The Personalized is Political (Bloomsbury Academic, 2025) and also appears in the June 2026 issue of Choice and online. We hope these reviews will introduce new titles to our audience for their personal or institutional collections.

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By Lindsey Skaggs

Niessen, Niels. Resisting big tech: the personalized is political. Bloomsbury Academic, 2025. 295p bibl index ISBN 9781350504103, $90.00; ISBN 9781350504097 pbk, $29.95.

In Resisting Big Tech: The Personalized is Political, Niels Niessen (culture studies, Tilburg Univ., Netherlands) examines Big Tech’s invasion of public and private spaces, critiquing the datafication of everyday life and calling for resistance to Big Tech colonialism.

Niessen opens by exploring how Big Tech’s personalization and datafication blurs the line between public and private life, contributing to a loss of individual freedoms and the undermining of public infrastructures. Activities that once occurred in the public sphere are increasingly mediated through online platforms accessible from anywhere, providing a personalized and arguably private experience for the user. While users may feel an increased sense of privacy by engaging with technology in physically private spaces, Big Tech extracts user data, commodifying the lived experience and using that data to keep users engaged and “attached to Big Tech’s addiction machine” (p. 13). By targeting the unconscious, these personalized streams shape user behavior while treating the user as raw data. Quoting Deleuze, Niessen writes that Big Tech renders individuals as scattered “dividuals” driven by nudges and alerts through their feeds. He acknowledges that network platforms can empower users, enable genuine connection, and facilitate progressive social movements, but he encourages readers to imagine what personal and communal life could look like in a future that rejects transhumanist fantasies of optimization.

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The book is divided into four thematic parts, corresponding to four domains of life: Home, City, Learning, and Love. Each chapter may be read independently and incorporates an “experiment without tech” to encourage the reader to consider the impacts of profit-driven platforms on their everyday thoughts and actions. Throughout the volume, Niessen weaves together cultural theory, personal observations, and materials produced by tech companies to analyze and critique Big Tech’s world view, suggesting alternatives that center connection, solidarity, and consent.

The first chapter, “Home,” opens with the question, “How do home and people’s sense of home change with Wi-Fi?” With digital technologies, including virtual reality and Zoom, home transforms into other spaces and becomes a site of data extraction, blurring the domains of work and private life. Citing feminist theory, Niessen acknowledges that the line between work and home has always been blurred for those engaged in reproductive labor, but argues that the integration of technology into the home strips us of the ability to slow down and let our bodies and minds wander. The chapter also explores the transhumanist ideology of “home,” which situates it in the metaverse or the cloud, a digital space that one can access from anywhere. Instead, Niessen conceptualizes home as a place “with the relative freedom to associate, alone and with others” (p. 64), and free from constant datafication.

The second chapter, “City,” uses the Sidewalk Toronto urban development project as a case study to discuss Big Tech’s co-optation of public spaces. Sidewalk Toronto was a collaboration between Waterfront Toronto and the Google subsidiary Sidewalk Labs, envisioned as a neighborhood that would be built “from the internet up,” to quote CEO Daniel Doctoroff (p. 86). The project drew significant criticism over data privacy and the corporatization of public goods, and was ultimately cancelled in 2020. Throughout the chapter, Niessen critiques the Big Tech ideology of “optimized” cities, which “public-washes” corporate interests, blurring private and public interests. He explores how datafication affects the human condition and reimagines an open city that doesn’t extract value from those living in it.

While the other three chapters are divided into seven sections oriented around keywords, the third chapter, “Learning,” is organized as an abecedarium as a nod to Google’s parent company, Alphabet Inc. It contains 26 entries, from Anyone to Zen, that collectively question Google’s platformization and standardization of modern learning environments. Together, the entries explore Google classroom technology, the datafication of teaching and learning, and the outcomes of integrating Big Tech into public education, among other topics. Although the arrangement of the chapter is novel, several of the entries read as though they were added solely to complete the abecedarium.

The final chapter, ”Love,” investigates how Big Tech capitalizes on the human desire for connection. Niessen focuses on OkCupid, a dating site that promotes a culture of consent while “compel[ling] users to consent to conditions that erode the space from which consent can be given” through their extractive data practices (p. 184). Throughout this chapter, Niessen considers what it means to consent, tracing the word’s etymological routes to the Latin consentire, which means “to feel together.” He argues that a culture of consent enables us to state our borders and have our borders be respected, including against Big Tech’s infiltration.

Niessen ends with an epilogue urging readers to resist Big Tech’s transhumanist ideology and embrace degrowth as an alternative to “an obsession with economic and individual growth” (p. 235), revisiting earlier themes in the book to suggest how to self-organize against Big Tech. Throughout, the text incorporates a lot of critical theory and is best suited for upper-level students and scholars with a background in cultural studies. In line with the author’s views on open data, this book is available open access. While the volume could have been improved with closer copyediting for typos and missed words, and some of the images do not aid in understanding the text, the work overall is an engaging exploration of how Big Tech shapes everyday life and our human experience.

Summing up: Recommended. Graduate students and faculty.

Subject: Science & Technology – Information & Computer Science

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