I am a sociologist of technology who studies how power is exercised over open technological systems. My research addresses broad questions related to the effects of and solutions to the privatization of technical infrastructures, corporate influence over the Internet and the data economy in which tech companies operate.
My dissertation is a case study of IBM’s adoption of free and open source (FOSS) software in the late 1990s, with a focus on the company’s embrace of the GNU/Linux operating system. Drawing from science and technology studies and economic sociology, I show how IBM’s transition away from proprietary computing architectures and embrace of open systems in the 1990s presaged the business model and methods of control used by contemporary tech companies.
