Jessica Ratcliff: Monopolizing Knowledge
Historian of science Jessica Ratcliff examines how states, corporations, and institutions have monopolized knowledge from the early modern period to today.
Why we picked this
This talk connects the East India Company's control of navigational knowledge in the 1600s to Big Tech's data monopolies today. The historical argument makes the contemporary moment legible in a way current commentary rarely does.
Who gets to know things, and who controls access to that knowledge? Jessica Ratcliff’s research traces a consistent pattern across centuries: the entities with the most power, whether early modern states, colonial trading companies, or today’s technology platforms, have systematically enclosed knowledge that might otherwise circulate freely. The mechanisms change; the logic doesn’t.
Ratcliff is a historian of science at Cornell whose work examines how knowledge production has been shaped by institutional interests from the scientific revolution forward. This lecture draws on that research to build a long-duration argument about the relationship between information control and power, one that illuminates contemporary debates about AI, data, and intellectual property by placing them in a much longer context.
Free and open to the public at Columbia, this is the kind of lecture that reframes how you read the technology news. The historical distance Ratcliff brings is exactly what most current discourse about knowledge monopolies lacks.