Micro-hegemonic path dependence: How Big Tech power operates through ideological fragmentation and self-reinforcing technologies

Big Tech hearings are high-stakes events that draw in various audiences, and have the potential to reveal and influence the ongoing process of power (re)distribution between various actors, including governments and major tech corporations. In this process, public uptake matters. To gain more insight into the uptake of the political discourses that collide during Big Tech hearings, this article analyzes live chats that were produced in association with 35 YouTube live streams of the 2020 Big Tech antitrust hearing. Using a critical approach towards discourse analysis, this article establishes that the different audiences that watched the hearing on YouTube understood the hearing and its discourse in strikingly different ways. As such, this article finds that different YouTube audiences constitute different ‘micro-populations’ (Maly and Varis, 2016) that adhere to different micro-hegemonic beliefs, which draw on different historical events. To elaborate on this finding, this article introduces the concept of ‘micro-hegemonic path dependence’. This concept draws attention to the notion that different niched ideological groups can develop their ‘paths’ divergingly, causing them to arrive at the same event from different contexts, that lead them to understand the same event in unparalleled ways. Though the audiences’ focus on different historic events might appear to negatively affect the potential uptake of Big Tech discourse, their ideological fragmentation in fact allows for the continued self-reinforcement of Big Tech power.