Last week, something unusual happened in Silicon Valley. Dozens of tech workers stood in the rain in downtown Palo Alto and staged a protest. They held signs and chanted slogans outside the headquarters of Palantir, the $20bn data-analytics company co-founded by Peter Thiel, one of Donald Trump’s closest advisers.
Palantir builds software that helps various federal agencies track and deport Americans. It’s poised to profit handily from the incoming administration, given Thiel’s central role in the transition team and Trump’s desire to create a Muslim registry and accelerate mass deportations. That rainy day in Palo Alto, the protesters made a simple demand: Palantir should refuse to help Trump enact his agenda.
They’re not alone. The Palantir protest is part of a rising tide of resistance organized by tech workers in the weeks since the election. They represent a powerful weapon in the fight against Trump: a bloc with the economic power and technical expertise to disrupt the new president’s long-promised campaign of domestic repression. They’re determined to stop their companies from collaborating with the incoming administration – and they might just transform the tech industry in the process.
Not long ago, the prospect of Silicon Valley teaming up with Trump seemed absurd. With the notable exception of Thiel, tech leaders overwhelmingly backed Hillary Clinton and blasted Trump as a dangerous bigot. After the election, however, they abruptly reversed course. Since 8 November, they’ve treated Trump to a constant stream of conciliation and flattery. When Trump seemed certain to lose, denouncing him carried no cost; now that he’s in the White House, even mild criticism is evidently too risky. After all, antagonizing the most powerful man in America might be bad for business. It might even jeopardize the kind of lucrative government contracts that make Palantir’s investors rich.
Fortunately, tech workers don’t share their bosses’ politics. During the Democratic presidential primaries, while Silicon Valley CEOs were throwing $50,000-a-plate fundraisers for Clinton, their employees were pouring money into the Bernie Sanders campaign. Now, with tech leaders swiftly capitulating to Trump, tech workers are building a rank-and-file movement against Trumpism.
One of the loudest voices in this movement belongs to Maciej Ceglowski, a Polish-American developer and entrepreneur. Ceglowski has long enjoyed a loyal following for his sharp insider critiques of Silicon Valley. Since the election, he has emerged as a withering critic of the tech industry’s rapid accommodation to the new administration. He is also the main force behind Tech Solidarity, a new group that has become the leading hub for tech organizing against Trump.
The first meeting of Tech Solidarity took place in San Francisco on 28 November. Since then, they’ve expanded to Boston, New York, Chicago, Seattle, Portland, and Washington DC. The meetings aren’t entirely public – to obtain an invitation, attendees must contact Ceglowski via email or the encrypted messaging service Signal. Crucially, participants are asked not to disclose the identity of anyone else in attendance. This promise of anonymity is indispensable for fostering candid conversations among tech workers, who tend to be heavily bound by nondisclosure agreements.
These gatherings are already proving to be important incubators for grassroots initiatives. The inaugural Tech Solidarity meeting in San Francisco helped produce the Never Again pledge, a public declaration by tech workers that they will refuse to build a database identifying people by race, religion, or national origin. The pledge went live on 13 December – the day before Silicon Valley’s top executives made the pilgrimage to Trump Tower to sit down for a summit with the president-elect.
The organizers of the pledge are keenly aware of their industry’s history. The Never Again site refers to IBM’s well-documented role in providing the punch-card machines that streamlined the Holocaust – a history the company has never fully acknowledged or apologized for. Which makes it all the more chilling that IBM has gone out of its way to court Trump since his victory. Days after the election, IBM’s CEO, Ginni Rometty, wrote a congratulatory letter to the president-elect personally offering her company’s services to his administration.
Many tech workers are disgusted by such sycophancy – and afraid of what it might lead to. To date, the Never Again pledge has gathered almost three thousand signatures, with employees from nearly every major tech company represented. It played a key role in forcing several big tech firms to finally promise not to build a Muslim registry, after weeks of silence and equivocation on the subject.
But the word of a corporate spokesperson isn’t worth much. And the pledge itself, while immensely valuable as an organizing tool, is hard to uphold in practice. An engineer can vow not to build tools for Trump, but making good on that promise will be difficult. She often won’t know how the software she’s writing will be used, much less whether it’ll be used for purposes she disagrees with. And even if she does discover that she’s coding some contrivance of Trumpist repression, she probably won’t be able to stop its development. She can quit, or take the courageous step of becoming a whistleblower, but she has little chance of halting her company’s collusion with the administration all by herself.
This is why collective action is critical. When I reached Ceglowski by email, he said building a tech workers’ union is the next step. “I’m focusing all my energy on unionizing right now,” he wrote. A union might seem like an odd choice for tech workers, who already enjoy high salaries and good benefits. But it’s precisely this leverage that would make a tech union so powerful. Unionized tech workers could flex their collective muscle in a way that, say, low-paid and precarious fast-food workers couldn’t.
Moreover, tech workers may occupy a privileged position, but there’s no guarantee they’ll do so indefinitely. Now’s the time to unionize, while they still have a good deal of bargaining power. Software engineers like to think of themselves as special, but they’re subject to the same capitalist forces as nurses and auto workers.
If they unionize, tech workers could do more than protect their material interests. They could also determine the future of their industry. For too long, the Musks and Ellisons and Zuckerbergs have dominated the discourse and set the agenda. A unionized tech sector might push Silicon Valley in a different direction, with its workers standing up for the public interest on issues like surveillance, data monopolies, and the corporate domination of the digital sphere. If that happens, then the catastrophe of Trump’s election will have yielded at least one good result – and the tech executives who appeased him will have paid a heavy price.