For Big Tech and academic publishers, mind-boggling wealth is accompanied by all kinds of privileges such as:

• controlling and constraining access to information;
• lobbying governments to influence favourable government policy, tax laws, and (de)regulations;
• exploiting the unpaid labour of users or academics; and
• harvesting, collecting, and accumulating personal and behavioural data to be sold or used to generate more products, profits, and shareholder value.

All without direct accountability to the public. The systems, tools, and practices developed by Big Tech and academic publishers that we use daily in our personal and professional lives have created inequitable and unjust information environments and societies. This is due to the concentrated power, extreme wealth, and influence in the hands of the few.

More worryingly, these accumulated privileges have resulted in Big Tech and academic publishers playing an outsized role in shaping content and information access. This directly impacts what and how we know, what we think about, how we behave, and shapes what is viewed as possible or impossible—these are epistemological concerns. It is the ultimate information privilege to wield power to colonize minds and behaviour. The concept of information privilege—“the ability of people to access information that others cannot” can be extended to account for how and what we know and ways of knowing. Focusing on the epistemologies at work in the systems, tools, and activities of Big Tech and academic publishers allow us to understand, critique, and counter how information (and other privileges) are generated and supported in the first place. In order to respond to unjust and inequitable information environments we can start by thinking about the world differently through epistemological pluralism—different ways of knowing. In addition, we can engage in deep self-reflection about our positionality—who am I and what do I bring with me in relation to knowledge?—and epistemic responsibilities—what are my ethical and intellectual responsibilities in relation to knowledge?

How we come to know and our beliefs about the world—epistemologies and ideologies—uphold the systems that allow Big Tech and academic publishers to maintain unjust and unequal practices in service of wealth accumulation for themselves and their shareholders. Epistemologies do a great deal of work. They must convince people of things. They have consequences in the real world. Epistemologies can:

• turn people and land into resources;
• disappear land and people;
• justify violence, heteropatriarchy, and the existence of billionaires and obscene wealth inequality;
• exploit labour and convert labour into data;
• uplift the “heroic” researcher;
• exclude certain kinds of knowledge and people as inferior;
• dictate how and what people know, what knowledge is valuable; and
• uphold the belief that all knowledge is extractable and should be made accessible.

Epistemological pluralism or different ways of knowing can be deployed to counter all forms of privilege in the Big Tech and academic publishing sectors and to help us to imagine otherwise. In particular, epistemologies of resistance such as anti-colonial, feminist, critical, and ecological can help us to question the taken for granted ways of knowing and assumptions about the world that underpin the inequities in Big Tech and academic publishing. For example, what does an anti-colonial epistemology surface when we think about information privilege in unjust information environments such as Big Tech and academic publishing? The environmental costs? The wealth disparities? Exploitation of labour and union busting? How do we make sense of these questions and answers? And what are one’s epistemic responsibilities and obligations, of knowing well, in light of these realities?

Big Tech and academic publishers have used their immense privilege to create unjust and inequitable information environments, all while espousing humanistic virtues of “progress,” “connection,” and “doing good.” We are left fighting for our minds, our livelihoods, our communities, our planet, and our future. To make sense of the existential and epistemological questions about information privilege inherent in these two sectors, sustained self-reflection and consideration of one’s positionality is required. This kind of self-reflection is hard, difficult, and lifelong work and extends beyond identifying one’s own information privilege. It requires generosity with oneself, open-mindedness, and deep reflection to examine how one is complicit in these systems. Not only will “taken for granted” values and beliefs be challenged, but so might beliefs deemed “good,” “just,” and “right.” This kind of self-reflection challenges our assumptions about how we come to know, what we know, and how the world works . . . and for whom.

Although we are entangled with these unjust information environments, the field has sustained a critical response to the immense wealth, concentration of power, information privilege, injustice, and inequities in the Big Tech and academic publishing sectors. The field of LIS promotes fairness in knowledge production, dissemination, and use as well as upholds the professional values of privacy, democracy, and civic engagement. Rethinking information privilege from access to epistemology surfaces how assumed ways of knowing underpinning the Big Tech and academic publishing sectors foster inequitable and unjust information environments and societies. To counter, resist, and critique all of the privileges that Big Tech and academic publishers wield we can deploy epistemological pluralism, particularly epistemologies of resistance. This work requires that we take our positionality and epistemic responsibilities seriously, and that we engage in deep self-reflection about our own beliefs and values in order to take action.