Data subjects of big tech The cultural logic of contemporary surveillance cultures

What does it mean to be a person who is constantly translated into data? In a world shaped by the platform ecosystems of Alphabet, Meta, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft, everyday life unfolds through infrastructures that do more than monitor behavior: they steer how reality is perceived, how choices take shape, and how people come to know themselves. Combining critical theory, cultural analysis, and media ethnography, this dissertation analyzes how contemporary surveillance cultures turn lived experience into computable traces and feed them back as if they reveal who we truly are. Out of this process emerges the data subject: a subject formed through datafication, for whom prediction feels like personal relevance, responsiveness feels like freedom, and participation becomes inseparable from data extraction.
By moving between conspiracy communities and the alternative platform ecosystem of the Fediverse, the dissertation follows how the data subject is lived, intensified, and at times unsettled in practice. On the one hand, Big Tech systems capture distrust, irony, and intimacy, fold them back into participation, and reinforce the conditions through which the data subject is made. On the other hand, moments also arise in which those conditions become visible and contestable, opening space to negotiate and reshape the infrastructures through which collective life takes shape. What comes into view is how everyday life in contemporary surveillance cultures is made, how it makes us, and how it can be remade through struggle over the infrastructures that organize participation.