We are delighted to host another in our series of public lectures, delivered by Dr Joanne Gray, Associate Professor and Chair of Discipline, Media and Communications, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Sydney. She is an interdisciplinary academic with expertise in Internet and digital technology policy and governance.

Joanne’s lecture will take place on 14 October at 5:00 pm in the Advanced Research Centre. It will be followed by a conversation with Professor Philip Schlesinger about her forthcoming book, Big Tech Dynasties, to be published by Bloomsbury in the new year. An audience Q&A will follow.

Joanne Gray’s analysis considers the place of Google, Apple, Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon in modern life. She argues that while each company may be a product of platform capitalism, each is also historically familiar. Big Tech is dynastic—and because it is dynastic, Big Tech is inherently undemocratic.

The Big Tech companies sustain their positions of dominance through three interlocking forces: economic management, mythology, and succession. Big Tech rules economically by governing global trade and communication networks and controlling the critical resources of our time—data, platforms, and cloud computing. It legitimates its authority through founder stories and an ideology of innovation that frames private power as moral and inevitable, and democratic constraint as unwise and unnecessary. And it works to preserve its power across generations, leadership changes, and technological shifts.

Joanne will discuss how democracies are beginning—unevenly and imperfectly—to push back, drawing particular attention to Australia’s emergence as an unlikely leader in democratic oversight of Big Tech.