Alex N. Press examines Against Tech Oligarchy, organizers JS Tan and Clarissa Redwine’s reckoning with strategies they once practiced. Tech workers won important fights, but publicity, formal recognition, and contracts rarely became lasting power over what the industry builds.
The movement’s trajectory exposed several limits:
- Open letters and walkouts generated attention that often vanished within forty-eight hours
- Public campaigns made a few visible organizers easy targets for retaliation
- Quietly building toward union recognition created durable organizations, but narrowed demands toward pay, benefits, and job security
- Waiting for a supermajority postponed the conflicts through which workers learn how to act together
- Conventional strikes struggle against systems designed to keep running after their builders stop working
The early movement had broader ambitions. Google workers opposed Pentagon drone analysis; others challenged fossil-fuel tools, immigration enforcement, sexual harassment, and the social purpose of their work. By 2022, however, fewer than one in five documented tech-worker actions concerned issues beyond the workplace, down from roughly 80 percent in 2018.
AI sharpens the problem by capturing workers’ tacit knowledge in employer-owned systems. But it also makes tech more physical and less mobile:
- Data centers require fixed sites, vast electricity and water supplies, permits, and public support
- Chips, power infrastructure, construction, and maintenance bind software workers to a much larger workforce
- Those dependencies may offer leverage that programmers alone cannot exercise
The lesson is not that unions failed or that ethical protest was enough. It is that organization needs action, and tech workers need alliances across the whole material system—from code and chips to construction, utilities, and communities. Workers were discovering themselves as workers just as their bosses were learning to act as a class; the next movement has to close that gap.