Class
Class is the official podcast of the National Political Education Committee of the Democratic Socialists of America. We believe working people should run both the economy and society democratically to meet human needs, not to make profits for a few. Class is a podcast where we ask socialists about why they are socialists, what socialism looks like, and how we, as the working class, can become the ruling class.
Class
Against Tech Oligarchy
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Clarissa Redwine and JS Tan, authors of Against Tech Oligarchy: Worker Resistance in the World’s Most Powerful Industry, discuss the political and economic motivations behind their organizing and writing, and the class-conscious role tech workers can play in building a truly democratic society.
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Hi comrades, and welcome to CLASS, the podcast of Democratic Socialists of America's National Political Education Commission, our NPEC. My name is Michaela, current chair of NPEC, and a member of North New Jersey DSA. In this episode, I'll be talking with Clarissa Redwine and J.S. Tan, the authors of Against Tech Oligarchy, Worker Resistance in the World's Most Powerful Industry. But before we dive in, a reminder that CLAS is available on all major podcast platforms. Please consider becoming a DSA member by following the link in the podcast description. You can also send us a message about the episode and sign up for Red Letter, NPEC's monthly newsletter, using the provided links. It used to be that referring to technology was almost always in connection to how it affects the processes of human labor, and in turn was assumed to be created through the mental and physical processes of human labor, literally by definition. Techne in Greek means craft, which implies a human and intentional process, that it has a specific use that whatever human who crafted it for thought. The crafting of new technologies to ease the way to some human goal, make it faster or easier to achieve an acceptable or even better scaled end, is as old as pre-civilization. The human hand, directed by human thought, makes the hoe, then makes the plow, then makes the backhoe. But the human is never taken out of the equation. Human labor, the creative, intellectual, physical power of people, is still integral to techne, its value direct and clear. The craft's true and obvious use to human beings inseparable from the thing itself. Now we call an entire industry tech, and it's massive, and as against tech oligarchies' authors argue, along with the tech oligarchs they write against, incomparably powerful and important in human history. That power stemmed from, well, a massive workforce trained in STEM, often from elite schools and with a sense of exceptionalism that they were both smart enough to make the difficult cut, and that their vision for their work was not mere labor, but passion. They're not workers, but makers, creators, agents of the future. Of course, not all STEM majors are that persuaded by their own passions. I've personally taught young computer science undergraduates less compelled by idealism and personal passions than material demands, such as their parents threatening to cut them off if they majored in a humanities discipline. Learn to code, they said. So it goes. But regardless of idealistic or material motivations, what are the true uses of all this new tech? And what fruits of the work do its makers see, much less the rest of us? In recent years, the makers of tech, the millions of coders, computer engineers, data scientists, information security architects, and others who make up the tech industry's workforce, are facing the reality that they are, first of all, industrialized workers. And second of all, their value is considered secondary to the prospective valuations of the increasingly harmful tech products they make, sometimes unwittingly and then against their will. In a word, tech's labor forces are finding themselves proletarianized, both devalued and de-skilled as the idealization and marketability of technological skills, the craft, the techne, are stripped back by the techno-capitalists to leave standing these new creations, hyper-constant capital, dehumanized technologies designed to run independently of human intervention, and now without the truly valuable uses that clearly connect to human needs and social wants. Another industry like this would usually go out of business, but the appetite for new and more tech with speculative future profits has not abated among the oligarchs, which brute force use and production, whether we or tech workers want it, need it, or not. How can these newly class conscious workers fight back? I'm happy to have Clarissa and JS on to speak with me about just that and discuss their new book, Against Tech Oligarchy. And I'm happy to tell you that NPEC, DSA's National Labor Commission, and our National Tech Committee, along with the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee or Ewok, and Haymarket Books are all sponsoring a reading group on the book kicking off this Monday, September 14th at 1230 Pacific, 330 Eastern. We encourage you to attend the kickoff event online where you can get a free copy of the book. The RSVP is in the notes. But if you can't make the event, you can still attend the reading group over the course of the next couple of months. Clarissa Redwine helped organize the Kickstarter Union and co-founded the Tech Organizing Conference Circuit Breakers. Her organizing work has been featured in the New York Times, The BBC, The Guardian, The Verge, TechCrunch, and elsewhere. J.S. Tan is getting his PhD at MIT and formerly worked in tech. His work has been featured in the New York Times, MIT Technology Review, Descent, Jacobin, Foreign Policy, The Baffler, and The Guardian, among other outlets. Welcome, Clarissa and J.S.
SPEAKER_01Thank you for having us.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, so good to be here. Good to see you again after socialism.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, it was great meeting you there. And uh I loved you guys as panel. So um just wanted to say thanks for coming and uh we'll get right into it. And we always ask uh first-time folks um a question about how they got into socialism or DSA, but we're gonna ask a slightly different question for you guys. Um, how did your politics and why did your politics start moving to the left?
SPEAKER_01Maybe I can start. Um so for me, you know, I I uh studied computer science in college. And, you know, at that time, you know, I graduated in the mid-2010s. At that time, I think a lot of a lot of students studying computer science um were you know sort of bought into the idea that the tech industry was sort of this force for good in the world, especially coming out of the financial crisis. And, you know, they explicitly marketed themselves as so, right? You know, you have companies like Facebook saying uh their goal is to make the world more connected, more open, more democratic, even. Um, and so you know, this was the kind of beliefs that was kind of floating around in a lot of computer science departments, um, at least at that time. And so, you know, when I graduated, I got a job um in tech, um, working for one of these big tech companies. And, you know, over time, what we saw happen was that these companies were actually the ones responsible for misinformation, for increasing polarization, and in my case, uh collaborating with organizations like ICE or or building, you know, weapons, weapon systems for the Pentagon. And so I think part of it for me was kind of this disillusionment with um, you know, what I expected coming into the tech sector and and then seeing actually what was happening, what the technology was being used for, and who it was being used by. And so, yeah, you know, that was part of my radicalization story. And I think, you know, as we'll talk about later, I'm sure, uh, also the case for many other people who were participants in tech organizing.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, much like much like JS, you know, I I left college for the tech industry, brimming with the idea that, you know, entrepreneurship and tech specifically was a place where people could make the world materially better. You know, they could put ideas into action and make products and services that yeah, make people's lives better. And the first job I got out of college was actually in an accelerator, which was essentially a little VC playground. And um after that experience, I got a job at Kickstarter. And the real moment that pushed me to the left and radicalized me was the experience of a union drive at Kickstarter. You know, this was um catalyzed by a moment where leadership decided to censor a project called Always Punch Nazis. It was a little comic book with the little superhero library product. I don't know what their problem was. We thought so as well. And, you know, Breitbart sent in um an article that was saying that Kickstarter was inciting violence. And this was part of the project of the alt-right at the time, right? Yeah. And Kickstarter's leadership made a call to take down the project, and workers revolted, myself included. And we actually won. You know, that was a collective action, the first collective action I had ever experienced in the workplace. And it changed how I understand not only the workplace, but society in general.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, that's really interesting. There's a couple strains there. One is this idea that people were idealistic and maybe had like a social justice impulse, but it still wasn't um sort of class-based, right? Like it was more like we are the class that's going to save the world. Like this idea that we're we, because of our training, because of our you know, education, we're the ones who are gonna lead um this, this sort of like new world order. Or I guess the way you put it in your book too is that people saw were encouraged to see themselves as future founders, like not just future founders of companies, but potentially future founders of a new society, which is powerful ideology, right? And Clarissa, I totally get it. That's how I went from being kind of a, you know, sort of a, I would say left liberal, but still not really a class conscious person, to actually realizing both my power as well as the power of collective action was through unionization. And JS, I know that you also helped to um lead uh grad student unionization drive at MIT. Was that something that obviously maybe it came later? Um, or maybe you're still doing it uh right now. But how did that unionization experience also kind of maybe concretize things for you or give you some more insight?
SPEAKER_01Oh, yeah. I mean, that was an extremely um profound and important experience for me. I think it, you know, in terms of my timeline, it happened a little bit later. And so I was already committed to the project of building worker power. Um, but in terms of, you know, how it affected the way I thought about strategy and the way I thought about, you know, exactly what kinds of worker power we need to be building, yeah, it was hugely important. Um and you know, we we write up, we end up writing about this in in the book where we talk about how this kind of model of building majority support um ends up becoming a major part of our work in trying to organize tech, um, which we, you know, both of us after leaving the tech sector end up um, you know, contributing to this, to this group that we started called Collective Action in Tech, um, with the explicit goal of helping tech workers to unionize and and later on also joined a uh international union as staffers to sort of push this project even further.
SPEAKER_02Amazing. Yeah, we'll talk more about that too. I'm curious also about like um the specificity of deciding to start like a tech workers, almost like a tech workers' labor notes or a tech workers ewok, um, instead of um linking it up because I do think that there's a lot to be said about the barriers that still remain of um tech workers, especially as everything is shifting, especially in the political uh climate that we're in right now. Um before we get to that though, I just wanted to ask, how did you guys meet each other? Like, you know, um what caused you to decide to work together and and write together?
SPEAKER_03I tell this story all the time because I think it's first of all, it's emblematic of the tech worker movement at the time, but also I think it's so funny. Um so JS was um working at Microsoft and decided to blow the whistle. Um, do you wanna do you wanna share that story real quick, JS?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so I mean basically I was, you know, this was a time where Microsoft was really pushing this image of being this climate conscious, this champion for sustainability. And, you know, I was working in the cloud division at Microsoft, and um I could see sort of the, you know, internally the kinds of projects that were being worked on. And one such project was this project that Microsoft had with Chevron, um, where they wanted to, you know, specifically an oil field that they had out in Kazakhstan. And um and so they they wanted to use cloud computing and AI to essentially uh intensify the drilling out in Kazakhstan. And so I flew over to Kazakhstan, I sort of saw the project, um, gave some demos and helped, you know, answer some technical questions. Um, but when I came back, I was you know, obviously appalled by the sort of contradiction of the way Microsoft was presenting itself and what was actually happening um with the kind of work that they were doing. And so, yeah, so I blew the whistle, I wrote this essay about um about that experience and and sort of looking a bit more closely at that collaboration.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. And, you know, right around that time, I had recently been fired from Kickstarter for organizing the union, along with a third of our organizing committee in the same week. They just decided, let's try and stop this thing now. And um, we were put on a phone call by another comrade in the movement, thinking maybe I had some sage wisdom or advice for JS. And we ended that call by me being like, good luck, man. I don't know what to do. Um yeah, but that's that's when we met each other and we started working together um pretty soon after that. We just, yeah, really were aligned in how we viewed the movement.
SPEAKER_02Cool. And then the decision to write the book, like why a book? I mean, is this coming out of your prior work? I assume so. But organizing materials you've done. And also I'm curious about what you feel a book accomplishes, especially in maybe this age of post-literacy. But the decision to write a book and to co-write a book is is a major feat. And congrats on that. But why? Why a book?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I mean, that's that's a great question and maybe something we should be asking ourselves.
SPEAKER_02Well, you're doing great promoting it. I feel like I see it everywhere.
SPEAKER_01So that's great.
SPEAKER_02Definitely soaking into at least my zeitgeist, my little zeitgeist over here in the corner.
SPEAKER_01Awesome. Well, I mean, maybe to to explain why we ended up writing a book, because you know, uh as as you said, a book is kind of this, you know, it's this bigger document. It's sort of usually years in the making. Um, it was for us at least. Um and so there's this question of, you know, why a book? Why not an article? Why not, you know, getting on more podcasts? And not a documentary.
SPEAKER_02Fair. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Our documentary, right. To be fair, we we did do a lot of these, we did try to do a lot of these um these things. You know, I wrote uh a lot about tech worker organizing, for instance, um, for various outlet outlets like Jacobin. But for the book itself, I mean, I think, you know, we needed this larger document because, you know, we started, we came to the idea of writing a book in in sort of mid-2024 or maybe yeah, around 2024. And that was after, you know, years of organizing between the two of us, and and especially organizing, um, you know, in in organizing together and organizing as union staffers across many campaigns. And, you know, this was a period in which we thought that the movement was kind of in decline, um, you know, just based on the number of collective actions, right, which is part of actually what our group, Collective Action and Tech, traces, based on just the number of collective actions over the years, we had started to see a decline in that. And also we had started to see kind of a shift in in the broader environment, you know, the broader sort of attitudes towards organizing, right? Companies started laying off a lot of tech workers. There was just a lot more fear in the air. And and, you know, the strategies that we were applying, um, you know, which we can get more into in a bit, um, felt like they were were coming up against the wall. And so by the time of 2024, um, you know, we had lost several campaigns or or some of them had just petered out. Um, a lot of our, you know, a lot of our friends in the tech worker movement felt extremely demoralized. And and it happened to be that Clarissa and I were together at a conference in Rio where we got a lot of time to walk on the beaches of Rio and talk to each other about some of the challenges that we'd we'd sort of experience over the years.
SPEAKER_02That's that's a really great way to muse. I mean, I that's awesome that you guys had that uh that beautiful setting to figure out what you wanted to do next.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, we owe it to the beaches. But um, but that was really the moment. That was sort of the context in which we decided that okay, we really need to sort of have a sort of longer think and sort of a more holistic analysis of class struggle as a whole in the tech sector, sort of going, you know, play by play. Here's how tech workers did it, here's how the boss was pushed back, here's how the sort of broader political economy shaped what was happening. Um, to really make sense of this moment where it felt like tech worker organizing was kind of in this moment of crisis. Um, and so yeah, that's that is you know why we decided to write a book.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, this was this was also just yeah, adding a bit more context. So this was also on the heels of our union drive at Twitter just being decimated by Elon Musk. And the big, you know, that was a radicalizing event that was so instructive to see how our strategies fared with an extremely antagonistic and vindictive boss. And that was so that was a, as Jay S said, that was a shift we were seeing all across the industry. It was becoming more hostile to workers. And the key insight that we were having a difficult time communicating without so much context is that the strategies that we were using were fundamentally conflict avoidant. And we we can get into that more in our discussion. But what we found was when we came up against uh a really hard fight, a really mean boss, the practice that we had had prior couldn't meet the moment. And the strategy we were using couldn't meet the moment. And we felt like it was critical for us to share that insight with other workers across the industry who we actually saw coming to the same conclusion.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I want to get really into that because the the idea of fomenting class consciousness, I mean, it's about realizing what side of a conflict you're on. And one of the things that, you know, mentioned before, this idea that everyone's encouraged to see themselves as a future founder and even their own boss in some ways, because the way that a lot of these workplaces are organized is like horizontal. And, you know, there's this idea, or at least in the past they have been. I'm not, I'm I'm sure there are a lot, people are kind of seeing the onion layers peel back and realize the real material hierarchies that exist. But I just know that just to kind of go along with what you were saying earlier about the idealism, a lot of a lot of people who I knew, my students, um, because I taught students who were at Cornell, which a lot of people would say is an engineering school with an arts quad in the middle. You know, I had I taught a lot of students that were either computer scientists or or otherwise like connected to um to tech uh as engineers. And they just kind of thought of themselves as both a cog and like a collective, you know, kind of project of like, you know, tech solving everything, but also like I have a voice, I have agency, I am an equal to the person who happens to currently be my boss, but they didn't have that same kind of antagonism that, you know, you kind of have to fom at because in a lot of ways, tech is not totally unique. I mean, part of this is like maybe belatedly coming to the realization that they are workers. Um, but in a way, the idea of a calling becoming more consciously work due to being treated like workers and even denigrated by their bosses. You point out the way Mark Andreessen, you know, that incredibly intelligent and uh, you know, completely insightful man, um, you know, yelling out the window at people, calling them feral. So tech workers aren't necessarily exceptional in this, and the Communist Manifesto even talks about it. I'll just quote the bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, the coder into its paid wage leader. laborers. So let's talk about that because it sounds like maybe definitely want to talk about the history of the, of the, of the Twitter fight, because we have Elon being like, you know, ideologically and almost like, you know, virally opposed to the idea that he cannot, you know, dominate, right? We know that in all of what we know of his life. But also the struggle of overcoming this kind of false consciousness that maybe tech workers have that they are equal to each other, even if they have to compete in the marketplace, but also equal to their bosses. And maybe equal is not the right word. I'm just using it to kind of stand in for something that maybe was very jarring for someone to be like, oh my God, it's worse than I thought. We're not just being temporarily mistreated. This is actually our class position here.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I mean that that's a great question. And I, you know, I remember back some 10 years ago the conversation that um you know the conversation that that we were having with tech workers to you know sort of to encourage them to participate in organizing was really around um you know the idea that a tech worker was in fact a worker right you know back then we wouldn't even say tech worker because a lot of people would sort of uh cringe at that at that phrase um but I think now that's totally changed right and I I think I think there may be two reasons that I can that I can start to lay out for this. So the first one is is that you know class consciousness can come I think from sort of this from sort of these external forces right you know what we've seen over the past five six years is that tech workers went from this position of you know highly you know uh uh uh a professional with a lot of latitude in their work a lot of autonomy in their work you know getting showered with perks to all of a sudden you know facing an industry that is constantly trying to lay them off that is sort of increasing the sort of forms of managerial control um it's a much tighter labor market and and obviously now with the rise of AI coding tools um you know the set of technologies that bosses are pushing heavily that effectively de-skills them and so you know I think that that this has a tremendous impact on sort of the proletarian of of tech workers um but the other thing that that um we saw especially in our time organizing was that this actually happened um for quite a few tech workers even before these sort of external changes took place right and and part of that story comes directly to the the tech worker movement itself right initially tech workers they very much saw their activism as kind of holding their bosses accountable to the kinds of mission statements that their bosses themselves were saying and um and oftentimes you know you know especially kind of in that late 2010s period this kind of fell on on sort of culture war territory right we're pushing back against uh building building software for weapons we're pushing back against collaboration of oil companies we're fighting for LGBTQ rights in the workplace you know or or or pro-LGBTQ policies on YouTube for instance right um and the thing is as tech workers participated in these cases of activism writing open letters participating in these walkouts um you know even talking to their coworkers and trying to push out this message internally um that I think is a transformative process itself right and especially when the boss comes back and then retaliates against those organizers right in some cases uh disciplining them putting them on pips in other cases outright firing them right that itself becomes a process in which the culture war all of a sudden becomes a class war right it becomes very clear to the workers participating in this that their act their class interests are actually quite different. And so you know I I think we can come with this question of proletarianization in in sort of these two ways. And I'm sure Clarissa has a ton more to add to this.
SPEAKER_03Yeah I think just to just to sum it up like I think our core belief and something that we support in the book is that moments of class conflict um gender moments of class consciousness you know so like these are these are moments where tech workers and I think the first the first chapter or two of the book sort of you know shows you what the mask looked like at the time and then the following chapters show it sort of like falling in slow motion where you see like the stages of betrayal that tech workers were experiencing. And you know I I myself experienced that at Kickstarter where not only did we have this amazing sort of euphoric moment of winning, you know, and keeping this project up on the site, which by the way many people argued the reason to keep that project up on the site was not just because it was the right thing to do, but also because it was according to Kickstarter's own policies, the project should stay up like that's a theme that we see running through the tech worker movement. And it was it was really the moment that I got more active in resistance was when I saw our bosses retaliating against my coworkers and how that affected them. You know, they fired someone for speaking up they also just flat out yelled at people which we had never experienced before. And we sort of tried to illustrate in the book that every successful drive in the tech industry started out with these moments where workers were trying to win something material. And those are the moments that created this sense of solidarity and sense of possibility that fueled interest in union drives. So we just see them as absolutely critical.
SPEAKER_02Yeah and identifying what can be thought of as material is really interesting because what it sounds like and you can tell me if I'm totally all wet here just like course correct me, but often and you you talk about this in in the book, right? Like often and also according to labor law, contracts are supposed to be about bread and butter issues or wages, hours, working conditions is what they've often been kind of framed as and a lot of radical unions, a lot of reform caucuses have worked to try to expand that outward, right? Like the idea that for example class sizes never used to be negotiable. It was considered to be a management right in teacher in teachers' contracts and it took CTU Chicago Teachers Union um you know historically a radical union to be able to fight for those things to strike over those things to get them included and now they're considered you know maybe not totally in line with wages, hours and working but they're not they're not outrageous. So like expanding the scope of what is considered to be negotiable is actually something that is you know a risk. But if you have majority support if you have a radicalized union you guys, you know, whether you have a union or not of course you need to kind of fight for that first and then get there. But there's a lot to be kind of happen on the workplace floor and in those kinds of negotiations that can expand the idea of the good society outward and be able to put workers in the driver's seat for trying to get that and contrast that with kind of this betrayed idea that everyone is going to be equal at the workplace and have a part in like leading this bright new tech future that turned out to be kind of not true, right? Like it it also turned out that at the minute that workers started realizing talking to each other, agitating like I don't want to make these tools right like I don't want to surveil immigrants. I don't want to you know contribute to drone weaponry. I don't want to do these things then that's when it became like material to them because it's like this is the work that we thought that we had control over, right? That we came into this industry thinking we're here because we're so good at this and they want us to make stuff, right? The whole makers culture that like kind of is also around that. So yeah, maybe you can speak a little bit to people you've talked to or like kind of like what you found to be the case because to the extent we're also talking about like people who are extremely talented and now they're just realizing like oh I'm considered a drone by these people. I'm considered to be someone who's supposed to both be um you know doing what I'm told but then also be training my replacements um you know doing the same kind of stuff that like a lot of um industrialized workers have have faced and radicalized around so that was maybe a a lot but I just wanted to kind of turn that turn towards that as something to to maybe think about like what is a material interest whenever you're being paid you know upper six figures or or something like that and you have all these benefits has to be something outside, right?
SPEAKER_03Yeah yeah just to just to rewind to something that you said um yeah when you were introducing this topic I I think something that's really really important that we try to stress in the book is at the beginning of the tech worker movement, no one had any concept of management rights. No, no tech worker who was participating in um worker organizing understood that some topics are off limits. You know like everything was up for grabs to be able to steer the entire company was uh yeah was everyone's right at that company partially because of how the boss had conditioned everyone to believe that they had a say and their voice was important. And yeah, um and and something that we you know we talk about in the book is whenever we joined the Twitter union drive, um one of our main drum beats and also something that the workers themselves were incredibly interested in is setting precedent once again that would challenge management rights. And before we joined that union drive uh the very first or one of the one of the opening actions that those workers took was to force management to kick Trump off the platform after January 6th. Like that that is something that you would never see in a contract. So we came to believe um but what we're what we're trying to challenge tech workers in the book to do is to return to the ambitious demands at the start of the movement where we had no concept of you know what is appropriate at the bargaining table.
SPEAKER_01That's a great point I don't have too much more to add on on that um I I I do I it is worth saying however that that kind of over this period of organizing there has been I think quite a few sort of traditional issues that have come up in our um in our experience um you know some some of it is sort of like um maybe what you'd expect software engineers fighting for better on-call hours for instance um uh or you know especially in in the in the in more recent few years sort of this fight for for job security has become a a huge issue kind of in in sort of this new era of of layoffs um and so you know there are certainly issues of those types and those are equally important obviously to pursue um you know because also that you know they contribute to sort of these moments where workers can engage in in direct class conflict and sort of have that transformative experience. But I wanted to touch on something that you also said earlier which is you know this idea that the bosses had sort of you know they that that they sort of always had sort of seen these tech workers as these drones and and that was sort of this that's sort of this moment in which a lot of workers um you know realize that you know their class position um I I think that is for the most part true and you know I I think there's been a lot of new literature coming out um you know Gil Duran's new book The Nerd Reich is a good example of this where he sort of connects the current sort of tech oligarchy to sort of really deep um right wing ideology and anti-democratic ideology and and so you know just to plug that book for for a minute but but but I think there was this moment in in the 2010s where a lot of tech companies did kind of um come out with their with their founders with their CEOs um in some ways really believing in sort of technology and the internet in particular as kind of this force for democracy this force for the open flow of information and um and part and parcel of that was this idea that they needed to sort of have these flat hierarchies hierarchies within their companies that they needed to sort of practice um you know practice kind of a kind of equality within their workforce and you know even when when when Google uh IPO'd back in you know the early 2020 uh the early 2000s um in in their uh uh SEC filing you know they write explicitly about how important and how uh crucial their employees are to their business model and and that investors should in fact be expecting them to to to see the company compensate these workers accordingly and so that you know kind of kicked off this era of where tech companies were were treating tech workers amazingly right you know we all we've all heard of these stories of tech workers going on wellness walks or getting their laundry done by you know by folks at the the company or free lunches of course that's that's part of it um but but what I want to get to is that is that you know yeah it's it it is about it is this kind of manage managerial control but also tech bosses themselves have moved to the right right and and and you know there are many reasons for this earlier I mentioned sort of the spread of right wing ideology and that's definitely part of it. Part of it is also the fact that a lot of tech bosses were fed up with the kind of Biden sort of more regulatory stance in terms of technology. So that's part of it. But a key part of it that I think a lot of people miss is that it is the tech worker movement. It is sort of this process of class struggle itself in which tech bosses had become radicalized right and um you know when tech bosses started to see their own employees um sort of you know using the sort of language of progressivism of sort of this techno-utopianism to push back against their boss against themselves that became a moment in which a lot of tech bosses became radicalized and radicalized to the right right and you know we talk about this in our book as this process of billionaire class consciousness and and so you know right now a lot of these tech bosses have this perspective of of we need to crush the kind of progressive values the utopian values or what they would call the woke values um that that spawned this rebellion against them in the first place.
SPEAKER_02Yeah I want to get into that because what you've just described I've I've sometimes called it with some pushback is um ruling class solidarity like another way of putting it and people are like no you can't use solidarity to talk about it because that's a that's our word and it's like if we're talking about class struggle we have to actually talk about what they're doing because it may be a temporary solidarity right they're still often in competition with each other but whenever it comes to their interests right um their interests do lie in um ensuring that uh labor is disciplined and um you know there's a steady supply of it or when there isn't that they are able to um control it and and the way that you just I mean yes like I was super interested in all the ways that there were all of these associative perks that were almost like company towns honestly right like if you were to think about it in terms of kind of the old gilded age and the old way of industrial kind of monopolies treating their workers people were living in relative good conditions um so long as they stayed within the company town. You had to be in the company town in order to work for these companies. And we think of it we look back at that time now and realize like how awful it was but a lot of these um workers were living in much better conditions than um workers who were um struggling outside of you know say uh pullman or or these these big places and I'm I don't I'm not saying the Google campus and uh pullman are the same right but what what it does look like is that labor has value. We know that right like labor does have value and therefore treating labor as a precious resource especially when the build the the business is booming um or like trying to kind of like take over I mean those guys are completely right right like that um labor is an expense um and this kind of skilled labor is an expense that needs to be cared for and needs to be um paid paid well but now we're in a different moment right now we are in a different kind of um both political and economic moment when the the sort of push to to brute force technology the technology of um AI I'm just gonna call it AI even though I don't think it will ever be intelligent but go ahead we'll just call it AI um but this idea that this is an industrial technology that can in fact reduce the expense of labor. And there's been mixed reviews right like I I do know that some coders have found it to be yeah it speeds my work along but then what speed like what's what are the priorities of speed? How much code do you need to do things? It's like and what is it going to be used for kind of gets us gets us back to like what's considered to be a if not negotiable a conflict position because when we're talking about the replacement or the um augmentation of labor this is a long history of struggle right um and this is this is what the now called the Luddites but the followers of Ned Ludd and the textile workers did. This is what um agricultural workers did in the 1820s in England um not the peasants but the actual wage laborers smashing threshers and and that kind of thing. And what's really fascinating too is that you know we talk about this idea of the calling and a lot of people they're just like we could be using this for good right like we could be doing this for good but now we have a tech oligarchy which we're against just to be clear um a tech oligarchy that is collaborating more intensely and and with a lot more um kind of intent than they had in the past right like the kinds of lobbying the kinds of associations that they're making with the right and you know I just want to get to this because it's a super interesting topic because now we have a lot of people who have these skills but they don't necessarily have um steady employment and they're becoming angry hopefully not completely demoralized but ready to maybe see something come out of it. So maybe we can talk a little bit about tech optimism and kind of like the good and the bad because there's long been a fascistic side to tech optimism and its role in creating a new world, right? A new world for that is good for some and and um immiserating for others. And we can actually see it really plainly now because tech oligarchs aren't even hiding their desire to rid the world of pesky humans and their insistence on democracy and agency and they fascinate around ideas of tech contributing to eternal perfection for some and then more efficient exploitation of the masses. I'm wondering what you guys think about workers organizing in tech, combating that maybe not culture, but like combating that kind of thing because so much of it is about allocation of resources as well as like who has control over these things. And it's a political question as well as an economic one.
SPEAKER_03Yeah I think this this is a great opportunity for us to share a bit about what we're trying to illustrate in the book when it comes to class struggle. So I I mentioned earlier that you know our experience at Twitter and that you know pretty horrifying event of Elon Musk coming in, decimating our union drive but also making like a theater of crushing workers. You know he he lambasted workers on Twitter, he fired them openly Like it was just a horrifying show of dominance that became somewhat of a norm across tech. What we're trying to say in the book is that in these moments of increased class conflict, workers need to be prepared to respond. And just to give you an idea of sort of the movement's trajectory or, you know, the various stages of the movement, like we mentioned at the beginning, when we saw these big walkouts at Google, you know, and and Microsoft and Amazon, um, and we saw open letters, these were all strategies that workers correctly assumed would put pressure on the boss because the boss cared about the brand. They cared about looking like a benevolent actor in the world. When when bosses saw that that was radicalizing their workers, you know, like Google, for example, quietly sunsetted don't be evil from their cultural materials. Um that was a moment where tech workers lost leverage to some degree. You know, when their bosses stopped um caring so much about how they looked to the outside world and having this like altruistic veneer, that stopped being a strategy that worked for tech workers. And that was part of why tech workers shifted to um structural power, you know, to the power of majority support within the workplace. And what we saw, what JS and I try desperately to communicate in the book is that the project of building unions, recognized unions specifically, where you say, okay, we'll ask permission from the boss and from the US government to consider us a union before we actually do any bargaining or we go on strike. That process actually delayed these critical moments of conflict where workers were earnestly trying to put pressure on their bosses to win material gains. And what we found is over the period of a few years, tech workers got rusty. You know, we we stopped understanding how to put pressure on our bosses. We didn't get the chance to practice. And now that we're in this moment of increased antagonism from our bosses, uh we're unprepared. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. And you know, I I think, you know, to your question, uh, what is the fight against tech oligarchy? I mean, I think I think uh maybe broadly speaking, uh, you know, class solidarity has the ability to um has the ability to play a coordinating function that I think is missing in a lot of the tech sector today. Right. When we kind of think of the 2010s, platform firms, um, you know, inter intercapitalist competition is what I'm talking about, is what I'm talking about. But when we think of 2010s, you know, the competition among platforms was so cutthroat that you know it was all about driving towards building these monopolistic platforms that that sort of can benefit off um strong network effects and and whatnot. And you know, today we sort of see a similar dynamic across the AI companies, right? There's kind of they're kind of just speeding ahead um with with little ability to actually uh uh build proper safety tools um into their products. You know, when I think of what happened over the summer with Anthropic pushing back against the use of their AI models um for the Pentagon, specifically for the use of domestic surveillance and autonomous weapons, you know, Google and XAI and OpenAI swooped in and they very readily said, like, you know, we're down, use our models. And and and I think uh, you know, a core part of this problem is that these firms under capitalist relations are fundamentally competing with each other and they have to kind of just go, go, go, right. Um whereas whereas I think what what workers have the possibility of doing is to through class solidarity be able to coordinate in in a way that isn't this kind of um you know race to the end kind of mode of building technology. Um and I think what that means is that we can actually start to build technologies that aren't entirely just for the sake of profits, right? Technologies that the world actually wants, right? You know, using AI, for instance, not for weapons, but for maybe, you know, figuring out how to cure cancer or or or you know figuring out things that that people, workers, and just people across the country actually want. And so I think that really is the opportunity.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I mean, just this whole idea of a of a bad future and a good future. I mean, this is this is the stuff of every popular TV show. I mean, on, you know, whatever, Apple TV. It's just kind of like the dystopian future that that the tech oligarchs are not just they're they're they're not just saying you'll survive this. They're saying you have you have to live here. Like they're they're saying like you don't have a choice because we're gonna get rid of democracy. And also, unless you are, I mean, I can tell you the whole you have to learn how to use AI or you're going to be left behind meme um or whatever repeated mantra. Um, to me, it's coded as there's going to be, you know, as as stratified as the class system out is now, it's going to be even wider. And that's going to be the future. But socialists and, you know, the labor movement and socialists are historically bound. Um, you know, socialists believe that worker power and worker struggle, class struggle is what is going to bring us to the point of actually winning and seeing the end of capitalism. Hard to imagine now, but of course, we try. That's the point of trying to do this work. You mentioned, JS, like stuff that people not just can use, but also want. I mean, this is the thing, too, that is really creating a lot of the backlash with AI. Of course, people don't want to live next to a data center for all these reasons, but also people are like, we never asked for this. And we never asked to be sort of subjected to, you know, on the funnier side, like just the AI menu slop signs, but then on the scarier side, surveillance, right? And and now there's also this um, I don't know, news report, I guess that I saw that um Anthropic is creating kind of a pre-crime AI-powered database that, especially to watch people who are doing the activism that is uh key to try to doing this pushback here. It's terrifying, right? Because I can just say I'm not a person who believes that AI is going to destroy us by 2030. I think that's very Y2K sounding and very like, you know, if not intentionally meant to boost stocks, it's also a lot of people in echo chambers talking to each other about the potential of their own collective thinking. And I do think that we can, on the one hand, realize that that's not going to happen, while on the other hand, realize that in the hands of the wrong people, capitalists, tech oligarchs, there is a high possibility of this doing incredible damage. It already is starting to do incredible social damage and incredible environmental damage. So talk a little bit about your hopes for the future. Like, what would an egalitarian socialist tech future look like in contrast to what the tech oligarchs are telling us? You got it, you're gonna eat this and we don't care if you like it or not.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, yeah. I think you're bringing up the idea of this like AI-driven algorithmic pre-crime database or project. You know, what we're seeing AI do, especially putting people in echo chambers, is closing futures, you know, limiting our possibilities and our imaginations. And that is the capitalists' project, right? To keep us trapped in the status quo and to continue to centralize their power. And you're exactly right that worker power and class struggle is the only way out. And, you know, something that I love about the DSA is constantly imagining what a future could look like and doing the work to get there. And something that JS and I try to present in the book is that this conundrum that tech workers are faced with, where you know, we've never really had a successful labor stoppage. You know, we have never taken down a platform by walking out. And that is a huge problem that we need to confront. Every worker that's come before us has had to learn the specificity of their power on the job. You know, we we, you know, cite the sit-down strikes and the flying pickets and you know, the flight attendance chaos model. Like these are all things that when workers truly engage with where their leverage is and try to win something now, that is when we see the most progress and when we see the most possibility. Um, and and and that that's what we think is like on the cusp of the tech worker movement is that breakthrough of identifying where our leverage is.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I mean that that is the perfect answer. I don't know how I'm gonna follow up for that, but but maybe I'll I'll say something really quickly about about AI since since you you know since you brought it up. I you know, I suppose that I I would think that in a a world that is not kind of driven by these profit-maximizing tech bosses, there there may not even be a term AI, right? Which was originally this marketing term used kind of elusively to sort of repackage different technologies together.
SPEAKER_03Um to get money.
SPEAKER_01Exactly. To get money, to get that funding. Um I would I would imagine that, you know, given a sort of co-op model or a worker-driven model that actually has some democratic accountability, we would be perhaps we would still have things that look like AI models, but I would think that they would be much smaller. I would think that they would be trying to solve more local problems. Um, I certainly do not think that they would be requiring the kind of you know, hundreds of billions of dollars of breakneck build-out that's happening across the country at the expense of people all over the country. Um, and so, you know, I don't know. If Clarissa's vision does come true, maybe that is just a small slice of the difference that we might see.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and I mean, it's it would be truly democratic, right? Like the idea that we could live in a democratic society where people get to decide what industries are essential for their actual lives. Like this is you mentioned what we're doing in DSA. We just published our program, Workers Deserve More, that has a section on economic democracy. We have a whole section on democracy, but economic democracy and worker democracy, democracy at work, are both not siloed off into their own economic sections, but it's part of how we think of really living in a true democracy, what it would be like to actually have power in our workplace, power in the public, and also be able to have accountable elected leaders, um, many of them ones who are like actually talking to you and like are compelled because they're of you to listen about the things you really want. I mean, what one of the things that has been really striking, I think, for a lot of members of the public is how these city councils or you know, their state reps or um even their congresspeople are supporting tech um kind of speculative finance, essentially, um, without any reference to what they need, what they want, you know, and the widening inequalities that we see, the costs of food, housing, gas, even though now that we've made a horrible deal with Venezuela, maybe that will go down in time for the elections. I don't know. But the our lives really are like, I think a lot of people are terrified because it seems like we're we're being put in suspension by the tech industry. And what your book does, I think, really well is talks about how just like any other industry, the workers do have power. It just needs to be organized, right? Like that we actually making workers or showing workers um their own power through collective action. It's like it can happen anywhere, really. The idea that any everyone deserves a union is also everyone deserves to know the power, the political agency, the the sort of democratic potential of their own power. Because labor power is our creative and intellectual power, right? It's it's physical power, but it's also us, right? And, you know, I talk about this in the intro, but as an educator, as somebody who um has taught a lot of people who have been um either aspirationally wanting to be part of sort of the tech elite, but then also people who felt like this is the future and therefore I can't be left behind. What would it be like if we lived in a future where people could decide, I want to do this because I love it. And I want to do it because it it contributes to the social good. And, you know, just to kind of go full circle, that's kind of how you started, right? Like talking about your own desire to contribute good and how the disappointment really comes from realizing that can be exploited, that that good like impulse, that human impulse can be exploited.
SPEAKER_03That's so so well said, Michaela. Yeah, I think yeah, just to yeah, just to maybe add on just a bit, um, you know, we we wrote this book partially in a moment where we felt like our movement was in crisis, right? And we were very worried. But you know, a week before we turned in the manuscript for this book, we were at a conference surrounded by other tech workers who were organizing. And the conclusion that we have in our book was being mentioned or expressed in various ways across all of these different shops in the tech industry. You know, there were new organizers coming in and saying, you know, how do I fight for material wins today? And that is incredibly heartening to us and inspiring. And what what we hope is that tech workers who pick up this book or anyone who's, you know, working uh in tech in some capacity is inspired to fight and knows that they have the tools to do it. And then anyone who is outside of tech, but who is increasingly concerned about the growing power of the tech oligarchy gets a glimpse of how these oligarchs treat their own workers. These are the people that they have arguably the most control over within their empires. You know, what do they want society to look like? The best example that we have is how they treat their own workers. So I think this is an incredible book for anyone who's building resistance anywhere in the movement.
SPEAKER_02Thanks as always to our guests and our production crew, Emma, Michael, and Tim, who put this all together. CLASS is a podcast of DSA's National Political Education Commission, or NPEC, which works to expand the knowledge of DSA members and non-members in the service of winning the struggle for socialism and democracy. You can find out more about NPEC by searching for us online or following us on social media. But the best way to find out about what our commission's up to is by signing up for Red Letter, NPEC's monthly newsletter. If you aren't already, you can become a DSA member by following the link in the podcast description. And don't forget to join NPEC, the Labor Commission, the Tech Committee, Haymarket Books, and Ewok on Monday, September 14th at 12 30 Pacific, 3 30 Eastern, to kick off the Against Tech Oligarchy Reading Group and get a free copy of the book by using the link in the show notes. Okay, until next time, Solidarity.