Towards a political economy of technical systems: The case of Google

This research commentary proposes a conceptual framework for studying big tech companies as “technical systems” that organize much of their operation around the mastery and operationalization of key technologies that facilitate and drive their continuous expansion. Drawing on the study of Large Technical Systems (LTS), on the work of historian Bertrand Gille, and on the economics of General Purpose Technologies (GPTs), it outlines a way to study the “tech” in “big tech” more attentively, looking for compatibilities, synergies, and dependencies between the technologies created and deployed by these companies. Using Google as example, the paper shows how to interrogate software and hardware through the lens of transversal applicability, discusses software and hardware integration, and proposes the notion of “data amalgams” to contextualize and complicate the notion of data. The goal is to complement existing vectors of “big tech” critique with a perspective sensitive to the specific materialities of specific technologies and their possible consequences.