During this lecture, Lotje Siffels examines the expansion of Big Tech in the Dutch health sector. She argues that by buying into the technologies of Big Tech, we also adopt their underlying logics and values. How should we respond to this?

For over a decade, Big Tech companies have been expanding their presence in nearly all societal domains in countries across the globe. The demand for digitalization increases the need for experts in developing these technologies, creating opportunities for Big Tech to expand into specific sectors such as health, education, agriculture, and media (Sharon, 2021b).

While most scholarly research on Big Tech expansionism focuses on the ways in which Big Tech is pushing itself into all sectors in society (Geiger, 2020; Schaake, 2024; Sharon, 2016; L. Taylor, 2021; Vaidhyanathan, 2012; van Dijck et al., 2018; Zuboff, 2019), she argues that we need to start recognizing the ways in which Big Tech companies are pulled into societal sectors such as health.

In this presentation, Siffels will focus on the expansion of Big Tech in the Dutch health sector. She argues that our dependency on Big Tech increases not only because we are buying into their technologies, but also because we are buying into their logics and values. In her research, she describes how the introduction of digital technologies disrupts the moral practices of healthcare and public health, through the introduction of a technosolutionist logic, and the growing prominence of values of innovation, efficiency, and privacy. This overtaking of Big Tech’s values as well as their technologies is an important thing to keep in mind in our current discussions about establishing “digital sovereignty” on a national level or “digital autonomy” on an institutional and individual level.

We should ask ourselves in what way we want to become independent from Big Tech: if we only replace their technologies with our own, we will still buy into the digital values that have disrupted our societal sectors, and may fail to protect the core values of healthcare, and other societal sectors.

About the speaker

Lotje Siffels is a postdoc at the National Education Lab AI (NOLAI) and the department of ethics and political philosophy at Radboud University. Her work examines the ethical and societal implications of AI, with a focus on how digital technologies reshape educational values and the risks of technosolutionism. Her PhD explored the growing role of Big Tech in healthcare.