 Okay, hi everyone. Let's let's get started. Thank you for coming to this Berkman Klein lunch and talk. My name is Jardin Katz. I used to be a fellow here at the Berkman Klein Center Now just a guy I guess So I have a couple of announcements before we get started This is being live streamed on the web now and it's going to be recorded for posterity It'll appear on the Berkman Klein website. So just know that if you ask a question It's going to be it's going to be online forever. I want to thank the events team especially Kerry Anderson for making this happen and Dan and Ruben as well and It's really my pleasure to introduce more a waggle my colleague and friend. She's currently a Junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows She graduated from Harvard as an undergrad and then went to Yale for a PhD in comparative literature And she's really a remarkable person. So while many graduate students myself included Find it generally difficult to get out of bed in the morning Mora managed to write a popular book called Labor of Love the invention of dating while still a graduate student and I believe this is an entirely different topic from your dissertation on top of it But in many ways Mora doesn't need an introduction to many of you She's a prolific commentator on the politics and culture of science technology in academia. She writes regularly for the Guardian Many of you probably read her 2017 article on what some people call the tech left titled coders of the world unite She's also the co-founder of logic magazine which covers the politics of computing and technology And I'm sure many of you are readers Mora brings a critical feminist perspective to her analysis of computing and politics She's inspired by thinkers such as the political theorist Sylvia Federici When Mora examines the social movements forming in major tech companies, for example, she looks for the connections between gender Race and class. She pays attention to who is laboring and how who is precarious and crucially who? Profits from precarity and various labor conditions This is reflected for instance in her a wonderful piece called the internet of women in logic magazine, which I urge you all to read Finally just another note Mora is obviously not just an academic but a public intellectual in the non derogatory sense of that term And like good public intellectuals in history, she also has to pay the price So recently Mora wrote a very perceptive critique of some Fashionable but deeply flawed book on the so-called coddling of American college students on campus She was then harassed Sorry, okay, she was then harassed up until now apparently by a slew of trolls on social media Ironically those very same people who lament the death of rational argumentation Anyway, so it's great to have you here today Especially because I think the last major Berkman event was Mark Zuckerberg So this is an infinite step up for us and so Thank you. So Mora will present and then afterwards I'll start with a couple of brief questions and then we'll open it up to all of you Thanks. Let me get myself organized Yeah, so I wanted to say thank you Yarden for that generous introduction and for shouting out my trolls Like Beyonce daddy taught me to love my haters. So Anyway, thank you so much for that very generous introduction and thank you to the Berkman Center team especially Carrie for making this possible dealing with the endless emails and logistics and Thank you above all to you all for being here. I'm told I'm told that there are some other talks happening at the time and I'm honored that you that you chose to spend the time with us Given the subject matter. I'm going to be talking about New kinds of political organizing in the tech industry. I'm especially eager to hear from you all So I'm going to try to keep my remarks relatively brief and leave a lot of time for conversation I've called my talk today. Goodbye, California, but with a question mark. Goodbye, California I've voiced the title this way because my central argument is not that anything has been settled But that we are right now entering a moment of new questions Recent developments have cast long-held beliefs about the politics of technology of the tech industry and of digital networks themselves Into doubt and it's precisely this uncertainty and possibility that I want us to as it were lean into Yeah, if it seems like I'm trying to be funny I probably am I invite you to laugh despite the seriousness of much of the subject matter For decades the view has prevailed that tech workers are predominantly liberal and libertarian So too is the idea that online engagement is democratic and democratizing and therefore serves politically progressive agendas This is the hegemony that the media theorist Richard Barbrook Nate and Cameron named in 1995 the California ideology hence. Goodbye, California However recent reports about the growing number of Both white nationalist the folks remember that article in the stranger that this graphic comes from white nationalist and Socialist engineers challenge previous assumptions about their political views and a series of crises regarding Disinformation and hate speech have raised the question of whether such problems are as the same goes bugs or features There's also a geographic geopolitical aspect to this question That's part of my work, but I won't really get into today about GDPR the rise of the Chinese internet Which I think also calls us to reevaluate our received ideas The ongoing so-called tech backlash demands a reevaluation of both the politics of networks and the people who build and maintain them Such a reevaluation itself raises the question. Were the dominant accounts always wrong or did something change? Did they become wrong? Some of the new tendencies recently foregrounded in media have in fact existed for a long time I recommend that Jesse Daniels book cyber racism from 2009 and sections of Kathleen Beluz bring the war home that deal with white nationalist organizing on use net as early as the early 1980s Other parts of my research also look at what I call right cyber utopianism in the 90s Where there's the use not there's the idea not only of a kind of right-wing counter public sphere, but also Enthusiasm for using data to sort of renaturalize race and gender categories But other tendencies the tendencies I'm going to focus on seem more authentically new Today I'm going to talk mostly about the the new network of activists. I named as Yarden mentioned the tech left I've been covering this movement in a variety of places logic the magazine I started also published a record sorry I co-started Published a record of some of their early actions in June 2017 in a book called tech against Trump And I imagine that a lot of folks here have read at least a little bit about them my yes So I want to situate recent big media stories about the Google walkout and other actions in a longer and deeper Trajectory and in order to do that. I'm going to do two things First I'm going to run pretty quickly through a sort of timeline of events that give us a shared context about these organizing efforts over the past few years and Then I'm going to step back and talk about a few new attempts to theorize this conjuncture Which the organizers and activists I've spent time with are in some cases actively studying ideas like platform capitalism data colonialism and perhaps most Influentially the search on a zoo box work on surveillance capitalism so Introducing the tech left who actually jumped ahead So activists that we interviewed for the 2017 logic book tech against Trump when they started to talk to us about their experience of being politicized Often pointed to one date December 9th 2016 and even specifically to one image Do y'all remember this day? This was the tech so-called tech summit brokered by by Peter teal to bring tech executives to speak to Trump at Trump Tower Because many tech executives who had opposed Trump seemed to be cozying up to him this baffled The people we interviewed the people who mentioned it because they were in an industry where they tend to think of their bosses as liberal And their values as liberal tended to think also that they had a high degree of freedom and control over their work Images like this and the prospect of the industry fulfilling were you know making tools that could be used to fulfill some of Trump's campaign process Promises raise the troubling prospect for engineers that they might be working on projects whose political effects they directly opposed New concerns in the wake of the Trump election Intersected with ongoing concerns of community organizers and activists in the Bay area About how the tech industry was affecting the region including soaring costs of living the epidemic of homelessness So in some cases again activists we spoke to for tech against Trump's cited specific examples of these of these features of life in the Bay area Negatively impacting people they knew and people in their companies not to mention many of the people they worked with the other tech Workers non-engineers who will talk about more later Historically there's been relatively little organizing labor organizing in Silicon Valley There were some efforts to organize engineers in the 1980s with traditional unions like CWA and SEI you they were mostly Unsuccessful Leslie Berlin the historian of Silicon Valley in an interview talked to me about Efforts and a slightly earlier period to organize low-wage women of color who worked making computer chips Many of them Mexican and Vietnamese and the difficulties that those intercultural and linguistic challenges posed Historically Scholars of the Valley like Annalisa Xenian have talked about how its work structures and rhythms make it an unusually difficult Place to organize people have short job tenures are generally friendly relations among tech workers and their managers and And the sort of what she called named the ecology of Silicon Valley Valley She argued made it very difficult to organize In a sort of binary way workers against management Nonetheless, I think in the past few years We've seen that these same properties of fluidity and sort of socializing among tech workers can actually catalyze large actions Building building very fast Employee resource groups ERGs have also played an important role So in response to new concerns that developed following the Trump election a series of actions have taken place Focus both on internal issues so issues internal to the dynamics of tech companies and external problems Ways that their products are impacting the world and I think part of what's especially novel about what's happening has been the connections That tech worker activists are drawing between these two categories of concern So this the first the first major Point I want to highlight with the never again pledged if folks remember this going up. Did anyone see this at the time? Think it was January 2017. This was put up by a group. I think it was signed by over 1300 Workers at various tech companies the title of course never again pledge was meant to evoke the history of IBM's work with the Nazi regime As well as South African apartheid at the time I remember they were reading groups at least in the Bay Area who are reading IBM Edwin Blacks book IBM and the Holocaust together about the IBM punch card systems that were crucial for Data services for the Nazis there the deportation extermination of the Jews in Europe The contemporary issues that the pledge Foregrounded had to do with the use of social media and other data to construct and maintain databases related concerns about encryption data logs scrubbing and a history of policing databases Another action set of actions were staged early by a group with some overlapping membership the tech workers coalition Talk workers coalition often abbreviated TWC was co-founded in fact in 2014 before this sort of latest wave of organizing I described by a cafeteria worker turned unite here organizer and by an engineer Initially the organization focused on conditions of service work in Silicon Valley So primarily cafeteria workers and security workers on tech campuses and workers at hotels Frequented by tech conferences, but after the election they too turned to issues related to software and surveillance And here are some photos from an action they stage at Palantir headquarters in January 2017. I believe Right before the Trump inauguration and from an action a block party that some of their group attended at Peter Teal's house a few months later Tech workers coalition has been has continued sort of stood out I think in the landscape in that it continues to emphasize Solidarity with not just engineers, but other tech workers service workers engage in ongoing unionization efforts and Here's a photo from a Mayday parade in 2017 and a flyer that was released when they won their union 2018 I think was official it became official And there were also a series of more spontaneously organized events again with overlapping Organization and participation tech stands up Which grew out of a Facebook post that someone put up in early 2017 and led to an event with thousands of people on pie day in March 2017 we're all dorks And here too I have a photo from from an early event called the abortion access hackathon that was put together by Feminist organizers in San Francisco Last summer in 2018 a new cycle of worker-led actions captured media attention These were focused primarily on algorithmic warfare Project Maven at Google and these by the way are memes that circulated internally at Google that Google workers made To promote and draw attention to their opposition to the project see This was an especially especially a widely shared one according to the folks. I've talked to you there and It other companies they were also protests from employees Demanding that their bosses and cooperation with customs and border protection and immigration and customs Enforcement saying that they did not want to build tools that would be used to harass deport arrest incarcerate migrants and this really escalated Last July in a series of public actions or science for the people doing a solidarity action and a protest at Microsoft Just last week. Oh, this is also from sales force. Let's see Actions at sales force last summer And how could I forget? This is about recognition Amazon's facial recognition cloud service, which also became the subject of an open letter I think it was last November from Amazon employees to Bezos. I Think Yarden said he's gonna mention getting to more detail about the most recent one of these public statements a letter from From Microsoft employees that went up just last week Regarding IVAS integrated a visual augmentation system. So I'll save that for our Q&A So two things have been striking throughout these actions Sorry One is a new kind of relationship between tech worker activists and the media Many of these actions took place at the same time and sometimes directly in response to media reports From publications like the Intercept and the New York Times like this New York Times story About how Google protected a high-level executive from charges of sexual harassment That directly led to the organizing and the Google walkout last November When 20,000 people walked out of various Google offices around the world But in addition and more significantly more deeply probably than this Relationship to the media the thing that strikes me as new is the philosophy that's being used to frame these actions It's being articulated in relation to them The organizers of these actions are framing their demands using this phrase tech worker Which is a kind of provocation I'd say in itself a kind of has a solid heuristic overtone and that they're not Self-describing as engineers necessarily but as people in an industry in this Capacity the tech worker movement is articulating this is a wall even though it's playing out in all these different areas a fairly Coherent philosophy I would argue demanding more control over their work and more transparency about the purposes of what they build and Finally insisting that the conditions of their own workplaces have an important relationship to that so insisting That the conditions inside a tech company are related to its effects in the world And I recently heard when organizers say you know the people who are treated badly within Google Probably tend to look like the people who are impacted most negatively by by products we create Well the absolute number of people involved in organizing these actions may be relatively small It's clear that they're affecting the opinions of their colleagues just a few days ago a Survey conducted by Buzzfeed news and lucid came out that showed that I thought this was striking only 31% of tech workers quote somewhat agree or strongly agree that US US base tech companies should operate in China And I think that reflects a lot of the organizing around the dragonfly search engine and then this statistic Which was that only 59% agree or believe that their company should work with the US military Which I thought you know while it's still in a majority is a strikingly low number to say that 41% of all Tech employees say they should not work the military particularly when you think of the history of Silicon Valley so I'll wrap up in just a few minutes, but I wanted to briefly say a bit about the broader sort of theoretical or intellectual frame for thinking about these questions How do these actions break with the received image of the politics of technology? Both the politics of the people who build and maintain networks and the politics as I was saying in my opening remarks of the networks themselves This is the larger intellectual or theoretical challenge that I'm trying to work out through my own research on these movements As I mentioned earlier, I named this talk good by California in honor of an influential essay that to British academics published in 1995 the California Nidiology Do folks know that I say is that some people have read? Like 30% of guy and the teacher in me is gonna lecture about this essay for just a minute At the time they were affiliated with the center called the Center for hypermedia research in London They were for briefly to French Minitel and I feel like part of the context of the essay Implicitly is about wanting Possibilities for different kinds of networks different kinds of webs than they see rising in the United States at the time in Europe Anyway, Barbroke and Cameron described the politics of Silicon Valley This is what the Californian ideology as a phrase is supposed to capture as a synthesis of socially liberal attitudes inherited from Bay Area countercultures with a quote anti-statist gospel of cybernetic libertarianism The philosophy they wrote promiscuously combines the freewheeling spirit of the hippies and the entrepreneurial zeal of the yuppies While mixing the social liberalism of the new left and the economic liberalism of the new right It's why they propose wired magazine could put a flattering interview relatively of Newt Gingrich on their cover The authors of the Californian ideology Emphasized that this hybrid this kind of new hybrid ideology and you could think of you know My predecessor apparently in this role Mark Zuckerberg distributing the little red book to all Facebook employees You know this sort of curious assimilation of of libertarian and supposedly liberal politics They argued is made possible It's a hybrid made possible through quote a nearly universal belief in technological determinism a Faith that digital technologies would on their own lead back to a kind of idealized individualized liberalism of the past They cited also the strong influence of Marshall McLuhan These restyled McLuhanites the Californian ideology reads vigorously argued that big government should stay off the backs of Resourceful entrepreneurs who are the only people cool and courageous enough to take risks Following the election of Gingrich They concluded the a right wing version of the Californian ideology was ascendant a free market anti-status version that conveniently forgot neglected the fact that these technologies only Existed because of massive state investments historically they quipped quote the Americans have always had state planning Only they called it the defense budget So of course those of us who study these questions in an academic context or from will be familiar with other scholars who have Articulated versions of this argument Fred Turner's counterculture to cyber culture comes to mind So too does Wendy tunes trilogy program visions freedom and control and updating to remain the same This idea that computers became central to a logic of neoliberalism that they embodied a certain vision I like to say, you know, there's no such thing as society only men and women in the network That this is an idea that an academic circles has become pretty familiar If the key characteristic of this ideology However, was the idea was a certain kind of technological determinism idea that better design tools could could fix it Could supplant politics then I would argue that this is precisely What the new tech worker movement is calling into questions sort of insisting on seeing Technology as embedded in an expressive of social relations Could say they leave at the marketplace of ideas on the web and descend into the workshop of digital production Of course various theorists have been trying to talk about the nature of accumulation and power on the web for a long time It's really in the 90s already. You see autonomous Marxist trying to theorize the nature of value accumulation in the digital sphere Tiziana Terra Nova's account of free labor a free labor User-generated content as free labor comes to mind and maybe in the Q&A we could get into a little bit Why I think Marxist feminists actually have some of the best Ideas for talking about this topic, but in just the past couple of years It's striking that we've seen a number of influential works Trying to formulate a new name for this kind of capitalism that we're in so there's Nick Cernichek's platform capitalism Julie Cohen is maybe more familiar to folks at the law school her concept of the bio political public domain Nick Kuldry annulices may houses data colonialism which Joanna Raiden also talks about in her work on digital natives But I suggested earlier one of the most influential Formulations has been the concept of surveillance capitalism. That's the one. I've heard come up with the organizers I spend time with and talk to which provides an account of how a new economy around data extraction and analysis and new kinds of contractual forms is Emerging without getting into the details of any of these accounts because I said I want to leave time for us to Have a conversation. I think what's very interesting about about this new scholarship That's being cited on digital capitalism is both that it's non technologically Deterministic in the way that I was saying and also that it provides It provides a kind of model of a chain of value accumulation Online that I think the tech new the new tech worker movements are using to situate themselves and relate to other in relation to other Users of technology think there's an argument to be made that we're all tech workers And so far as we all are part of the processes that generate value for companies like Facebook and Google So in conclusion and to lighten things up a little I wanted to play a short video that some of you may have seen the other night Did anyone watch the Oscars? No one. Oh good for you So I thought I would I thought I would just quickly play a short short film that appeared During the Oscars and if you've seen it Let's watch it. Oh How's the sound? Sorry Janelle is breaking my heart Let's see Good for the world. Oh good But I feel like you have the potential to do so much more Are you working for all of us or just a few of us? Can we build AI without bias AI that fights life? AI that helps us see the bias in ourselves. We need tech that helps people understand each other that understands my business dear Dear tech dear tech dear tech Let's champion data rights as human rights. Let's use blockchain to help reduce poverty Let's develop new solutions with the help of quantum technology. Let's show girls that STEM isn't just a boys club Let's make a difference in people's lives. Let's do it all together. Let's expect more from technology Let's put smart to work Man the longer versions had as part where someone says can we use the blockchain to solve poverty? Oh, she said it Oh good. I must have just spaced out Reduced poverty fair enough So anyway in conclusion I wanted to say I think the fact that IBM is sponsoring an ad like this during the Oscars does indicate that There's a real shift happening in the conversation The industry as well as the public is reaching a consensus that we do need to talk and Yet I think what would be interesting for us all to consider a is we who and be what exactly do we need to talk about What agendas are being set by the new movement and by this new momentum? Criticism and questioning around technology so with that I want to thank you for your attention I look forward very much to talking with you ardent and hopefully hearing from all of you I'm very upset that you subjected me Just for you and you said you hadn't seen it. I combined as multiple types of awfulness into one. I Think it means we're winning I'm still recovering but So I want to talk about capitalism a little bit In the context of the things you've raised so Social movements are heterogeneous things obviously and you know they have Disagreements internal disagreements questions about their goals and agendas and I want to talk a little bit about the the heterogeneity within this Tech left let's go with that. So I'm curious to what extent are some of these Workers Questioning the capitalist agenda and I want to the capitalist agenda of their employers and I want to talk about that in the context of this recent Microsoft action that you brought up so last week Microsoft employees protested a contract that the company has with the with the US Army and the group calls itself quote Microsoft workers for like the number four good and They say on their page that they are quotes driving to make Microsoft the corporate leader for ethical accountability and quote And it's framed around these very abstract goals like working for the good of all doing things ethically and that kind of framing is Adopted left and right, you know the IBM working with MIT is going to use you know quote AI for the benefit of everyone You know every you know everyone is adopting this kind of framing even if they're hosting Henry Kissinger as MIT will be hosting later this week So it seems to me that this framing is is both abstract and committed to a corporate structure So in their open letter, they also say Open letter to Brad Smith the Microsoft president. They write quote We did not sign up to develop weapons and we demand to say in our how our work is used and To me this gets to the crux of the matter right because companies like Microsoft have been servicing the military and US imperial interests for decades and As to the you know workers having no say in how their work is used isn't that the essence of wage labor? So my question is to what extent are people questioning that and moving away from these abstract? idealizations, and maybe you can tie that into Data colonialism and other proposals, but we can save that for another question, too But yeah, it's a great kid. So there's a micro at this microphone on me works even though I feel like it does Yeah, okay It's a great question And I think that the only way to answer is that there's a very wide spectrum of opinions that I've heard expressed by people Involved in tech worker actions, and I think that those run the gamut have run the gamut from everyone saying I should prefer not to be sexually harassed at Work, you know, it feels like a very minimal minimal claim to To people who are absolutely voicing their criticisms of their companies in the kind of language You're using a language of wage labor Capitalistic appropriation Exploitation so I think that just empirically speaking in terms of the actors involved There's a pretty wide range from liberal to, you know, full Maoist order, you know There's like we're in a new generational moment here I think in terms of this question of how easily Appropriated some of the some of the language of these statements are how appropriate bullet potentially steam seems I'm of two minds about that because I think on the one hand It is true that a certain kind of General sort of doing good language can be very easily assimilated Into industry aims that perhaps don't serve whatever the original definition of the good is at all on the other hand I will say and this really came up in the interviews that we did for that logic book tech against Trump that that That either idealizing rhetoric and then the gap between rhetoric and reality Actually serves a really important politicizing function for certain people. I think that You know as sarcastic East Coast academics, it's very easy, you know, perhaps it's easy to have said Well, of course, it was always ridiculous to say your goal was don't be evil or something like that But people do enter the industry shaped by this very idealistic rhetoric and actually a sense of disappointment When it doesn't seem to be fulfilled, I think can be a very powerful force for change so yes and no on that second part of the question and So I guess I should be actually standing up. So I'm wondering What do you think are the most? successful instances of of actually questioning the term tech worker even right because You've you've alluded to people building alliances across different types of laborers and there are real differences. I mean, it's nice that People who believed in kind of a liberal politics that are very highly paid programmers are coming to see, you know Different kinds of truths, but there's still in a very different positions from the people who work in the cafeteria and so on So what are the examples that you think are most successful of actual? Solidarity and and to Is it maybe time then in light of such a solidarity to drop the tech worker Term to retire it and what I mean by that is, you know when we say tech everyone thinks of You know Google and Facebook in this sphere and it's kind of like Companies you know if you have a startup company that's writing some Python code that's really valorized as technology Even if it's very derivative or nonsensical or whatever But you know plumbers are not in that category or people who make parts for vacuum cleaners or for agricultural instruments so maybe that the Maybe the tech worker actually has a negative side to it because you're right in on the one hand It says you're part of an industry but on the other hand it valorizes technology And then that sort of sets up a stage for people to say well, how can we use this for good? Which presumes that the tools of of tech defined as you know code whatever Has the potential to do a lot of good. Maybe it doesn't maybe a lot of social problems Just don't really require that or it's a minor component So great question. Yarden is making me look naive and optimistic Comparison so I'm I'm always pleased again when I'm not the east coast sitting. I'm just I'm just teasing you Yarden Okay, so this question of tech worker I was I think that this you're raising a really two sets. I think actually a really important question So in the first part of your question What I hear is this sort of unavoidable question of like how how far does solid already go or how? What are the actual strategies for building meaningful kinds of cooperation collaboration solidarity across very different categories of workers? I think often when I think of the phrase tech worker to this thing that Rachel Melendez Who's one of the co-founders of tech workers coalition said to me? I think the first time I interviewed her and she said you know actually tech companies are always very worried about their diversity They talk about concerns about diversity, but actually there are a majority of women and majority of people of color on this I forget which specific tech campus it was they just don't count most of those people as workers And I think that what the phrase tech worker has been useful to do as a kind of polemical intervention is Precisely to force that paradigm shift this sense that there is a kind of unity or solidarity to the industry And that and to sort of deprivalage the kinds of you know if you are coding a little bit in python So certain kinds of work in relation to other because it's because of course They're also Temporary and contract workers who work with code as well and a lot of discrepancies Some of them highlighted around the Google walkout between different categories of technical workers I think in terms of those questions of solidarity across different roles It is striking how much race and gender in the ways in which I think race and gender can Catalyze certain sorts of solidarity because if you're a woman Working on an engineering team at a company or you're a woman working in the cafeteria You may actually share certain kinds of experience of harassment that are more that are similar And in certain ways I remember talking to Folks involved in one of the early organizing efforts around Google who also talked about immigration concerns You have a lot of h1b visa workers in the tech industry and of course being anxious about your immigration status is something that They can share in common with with other kinds of workers at their companies in terms of this question of The well there I sort of have tried to address this question of the potential limits to solidarity I think the other point you raise is really interesting about like what is the tech industry or where is the tech industry? My co-founder Ben Tarnoff likes to say, you know tech is not a coherent industry anymore It's like a data layer distributed across across every industry and actually I think J.P. Morgan Employee is far more engineers than Facebook for instance So there it raises this question of like how do we define the tech company and is there a sense in which in light of that That J.P. Morgan has more engineers than Facebook that sort of the coherence of this idea of the tech worker is stretched Past what it can bear. I think that at least for the time being because of the kinds Well a because of the rhetorical significance or the symbolic significance that's been attributed According to tech companies and because of their real power I mean their Monopolistic power over certain digital infrastructures of our lives that it is useful to have a working concept That's meant to Catalyze solidarity at the at those companies even if there are sort of fuzzy edges in the way that you bring up Open it up now to I mean I have a bazillion questions, but I'd like to hear from other people. So yes Thank you so much for your talk. I have a question about the relationship between these tech worker activists and The various social responsibility or ethics boards of these companies What is that relationship exactly have they worked together? Could you foresee a future where they're working together? I Think thank you. It's a good. It's a good question I think that as usual it's sort of hard for me to generalize because I think I've spoken to people who do and I've Spoken to people who don't I think that if I had to characterize very very broadly The tech worker activists I've interviewed or spent time with I'd say there's a fair bit of skepticism About sort of official company attempts to establish ethics boards I think there is an anxiety among many people that It's a form of co-optation that those boards and I think the Microsoft letter actually talked about this the most recent Microsoft letter said Explicitly, you know, we now have an ethics board, but its procedures are not transparent to us So I think that among many of them there is a kind of skepticism and anxiety on the other hand I certainly also can think of examples of people who had worked with such internal boards I mentioned employee resource groups briefly I feel like there are sort of company organizations that have been important sites for people to meet and articulate concerns as well So I can't speak for the the movement in general. I think there's a range of opinion Hello, how are you good? How are you? I want to know if there is like a big divide between the engineers and the non-engineers in this Tech workers organizations and how do they deal with that if you if you interpret people that know about this Because it seems to me that the non-engineers are less concerned There's some issues than the engineers, but maybe it's just like a prejudice, but I just want to know what what you think about that Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, it's certainly a division that is relevant In so far as I think tech companies tend to really privilege privilege, you know the idea of being technical I think we could critique and question and get into what it means to be technical versus non-technical And as I mentioned there are also these big sort of discrepancies among contract and full-time Technical roles that said what I've encountered is actually real attempts to forge bonds across that division So again, I keep coming back to this but the fact that Tech Workers Coalition Was co-founded by a cafeteria worker an engineer It seems very important to their identity and the idea of the sort of both sides of that equation have things to learn From each other is something that's very important to how they talk about their work Of course that said I think another part and perhaps I should have said this when we were talking about the definition of tech worker earlier another part of sort of this paradigm is Recognizing that different people have different levels of power to affect change depending where they are in the digital production process and that you know, it's Much more expensive and difficult to to train a new engineer if they're threatening to withhold their work Then it is to train certain other kinds of workers. So there are sort of significant differences there I think the final thing I'd say is that actually In the work I've done on the Google walkout My impression is that actually a lot of people in non-technical roles played played important roles in the action I think sometimes Again because of those differences of privilege that I mentioned different people feel a different level of confidence being public About their role and who can speak in public isn't always Everyone who was involved in an action. So I think there are There are certain differences of power and privilege and ability to voice in public, but my My findings in my research on this topic has been that there's actually a fair bit of collaboration across roles Thank you very much very interesting and very informative I Guess I have a question. I don't know. It's kind of a convoluted thought But what is the importance of the worker part in? The tech worker movement because it seems like a lot of these movements have to do with Issues that concern us as citizens. So they don't necessarily only concern workers There might be things that workers are best placed to raise and best placed to kind of be active and engaged in and other things that are more You know perhaps so maybe maybe workers have access to more information and serve a sort of Awareness building role for society. I don't know Yeah, it's a wonderful question I think that and I sort of tried to allude to this too with my lame joke that we're all you know We're all tech workers and so far as we produce value for for large tech companies. I think that These concerns and sort of aspirations to have more control over our digital lives I think these are universal or at least as you say concern us as citizens and humans and not necessarily just as as Workers, so I think that that's absolutely true. I think in a sense I think the emphasis on on workers is Pragmatic, I mean, I think it's on the one hand. It's trying to activate Another tradition a sort of more leftist or socialist tradition of thinking about what democracy is and democracy Not just as the right to go cast a vote every two years But also to control the conditions of your life and the conditions of your work again That's not something that's unique to people working in tech companies, but I do think That that label the word the emphasis on the word worker is partially trying to activate that tradition That said I think that for at least some of these groups and people part of the urgency around tech workers has been in Recognition of the fact that ordinary citizens may have very limited ability to to influence these kinds of decisions at big companies So I think that it's less I certainly don't think it's a rejection of the idea of Regulation or pressure from outside or activism by citizen groups. I think it's simply a recognition of who given that given these kinds of Privileges or sort of given the power in the in the production process that certain kinds of tech workers have who's in a position to Quickly compel change on issues that seem to be of urgent and pressing interest Great talk Can you tell us a little bit about the history of labor? Inserting ethics demands into their overall labor demands Yeah It's a great question. I feel like there are probably other people in the room who are more expert on this specific topic than I am Although the one friend I was sleeping up seems to have just run away. I think that What I will say is that I think this Asper and I'm seriously if anyone else has something they want to say to it, please please come in I think that in the United States in the past two decades. We've come to have a very impoverished notion Of what labor organizing is for you know, this idea that it's just for maybe a little bit more money or a little bit more Benefits and I think that this broader notion that these activists are trying to activate that it's also about controlling the Conditions of your work and your life is something that we've probably lost a lot of the sense of in the United States In the past few decades and I should say organizers of the Google walkout and also Organizers involved at actions that some other companies have said both privately to me And I believe in one case at least and interviews to the press publicly that they are directly inspired by the workers walking out at McDonald's in relation to sexual harassment inspired by the recent teacher strikes So I think that there is This broader Moment that they're plugging into and participating in I think that the framework that the activists I spend time with would use to talk about making ethical demands would fall under this broad idea of deserving Assay and how your work is used and that being kind of a fundamental I was gonna say fundamental human right to shape your labor and what it does in the world so I think that it's very much part of This sort of more leftist framework of thinking about the Democratic did you have something specifically in mind? No, I was just curious. I think the internal side of it seems to fall closer to traditional labor demands But I think the external piece. I was just curious if anybody had examples of the external demand as well There's some antecedent and I haven't done as much of the research on this as I should But I know there's a magazine called programmed world that's published in the Bay Area in the 80s that I often think of as a kind of Ancestor to logic that tries to One of many ancestors But that tries was focused on trying to get engineers to care about opposing military projects opposing Star Wars That kind of thing other than that specific antecedents in the tech industry don't come to mind But maybe others have ideas about it in the room Oh Yeah, I'm going to mention the bulletin of atomic scientists that it tries As you obviously know the science for the people but they had a subset of people working in industry there, too So it wasn't just full-time activists not just academics and they also addressed some of these issues Yeah, I think and there's also a sense I think that they're and this is something that I know gets talked about here at the Berkeley But the idea that there are special areas of expertise or certain kinds of work that have because of their particularly profound Consequences for other people that there need to be Ways that for folks who have the specific technical or scientific expertise to there need to be standards and kind of regulations That they that they are held to it's funny I know that one of the one of the early groups that was active in the Bay Area and actually in a number of cities hosting events tech Solidarity would talk about needing an organization for engineers on the lines of like Librarians or an American Medical Association some kind of and they weren't framing it precisely as in these sort of labor terms But that there needed to be like a professional association that could impose certain certain codes of contact And I definitely see continuities there with work and other kinds of science science industries Hi, thanks for your talk I'm just wondering if you are aware of any attempts to codify these demands these organizing demands into either either federal law or state law because it seems to me little short-sighted to just rely on The benevolence of a corporation and not not getting anything long-term Yeah, I think I mean there are sorry. Did you already want to? No, I was gonna say again I think that a lot of the emphasis on the ability of workers to influence what's happening and the company is Pragmatic and it's sort of you know, it is Recognizing the fact that for various reasons it's been hard to regulate these industries and and in some cases also Anyway, it's curious. I think the triangulation of sort of workers companies and government is a bit is a bit complicated To in the case of the military contracts anyway, but I absolutely don't think I'm running through my head of folks I've interviewed and talked to and I can't think of anyone who would be opposed To citizen organizing to try to pass laws on some of these matters. I think that it's It's an in addition a sort of in addition to not in place of or in opposition to kind of proposition Hi, um, thank you for your talk. I read logic magazine and I really love it. So thank you Thank you for that so my question was I guess kind of returning back to the idea of Tech worker being really a range of identities like a range of socio-economic positions And I'm wondering in your interviews or in your observations if you Have seen like people negotiating that kind of tension I guess even within the tech workers coalition where you know, someone who's working as a cafeteria worker is making a significantly different income than someone who's working as a software engineer and I'm wondering how that impacts kind of even like the power structures within that organization and also just the negotiation that has to happen between understanding the kinds of unevenness of wages and even exploitation within a company versus What they're trying to fight for in solidarity against bigger institutions yeah well, I think that that process of Negotiation in many ways like in any organizing environment plays out to like really pragmatic and concrete strategies for fostering conversation and trying to make sure that there are Good procedures for lots of different people to be involved in the conversation and for those powered differentials Which are so real and pressing in the world not to over determine or structure what's happening within an organization Of course, there is the problem Which I don't know of any solution to in any volunteer or activist organization of you know Who has time who has time to come to come to a lot of meetings and be involved and of course In tech worker organizing as in any any kind of organizing that's going to tend to favor more more privileged people with more resources And time to do it so I think that it's again It's hard to give a sort of broader intellectualized answer to the question I feel like it often plays out in these very sort of day to day Pragmatics of facilitation ways and all I can say is that it's a different It's a real and difficult question like how how in the long term to negotiate These real power differences within a movement, but it's not a question It's not a question without precedence and I think that you know I think of the feminist movement or other kinds of political movements that cross a lot of different power positions and identity Categories, and I think that in the end it's about framing things in terms of shared interests and coalition building and solidarity and not sort of Patronizing or these more privileged people are going to do something Alptuistic or philanthropic or something for other people. I think that it's about finding the points of shared interest and connection Sorry, if I can jump in here for I think it's a it's relevant to what we're just discussing You mentioned before that you think Feminist Marxists have some of the most interesting things to say about this and since we're talking about frameworks and ethics I'd like to hear more about that how to think about all these diverse identities and I was Really struck by your analysis of the me to movement and the movement becoming a hashtag in your piece The internet of women in logic magazine again So when you write and I think this is interesting because it exemplifies the kind of approach One would need to make sense of all these different identities and forms of labor. You're right As legacy media meaning in this context magazines is legacy media desperately tried to snatch clicks with Hashtag me to content they continue to hemorrhage eyeballs and money to big tech as they throw young women to the internet Is clickbait the companies that own the internet companies bigger and more male than any major male magazine will ever be circle them I think if you could just say more about that how you see Marxist feminism or whatever framework you you like to work with fitting into this these discussions, yeah, absolutely And I feel this is a nice opportunity for me because I was as I was sort of half reading and half talking my talk I felt I was going on too long So I cut out a bunch of stuff about theory towards the end I think so End of the day and I think this actually maybe is less Specifically relevant to the tech worker organizing within companies then like broadly relevant to how we think about Power and digital accumulation in this moment in general I think that the Marxist feminist tradition by which I'm thinking of you know wages for housework people also likely a Pulbina Fortunati there's actually a book by a scholar named Kylie Jarrett called the digital housewife that gets into a lot of this That frameworks frameworks for thinking about activities that produce value But aren't quite labor and aren't quite natural resource extraction You know like care work and family work and all sorts of all kinds of unwavered domestic activities These are things that feminists have been thinking about for a long time I think that it's very striking a lot of scholarship In the 90s early 2000s through today about the web and the forms of wealth and power that the web made it possible For a few tech companies to accumulate Describe this as novel it's sort of that it's sort of novel that parts of life that aren't part of contracted wage labor Have a relationship to capital and are now producing value I think that the the precise use of a more Marxist feminist tradition is to say well No, actually this is as old as capitalism itself. So it's a very broad sort of intellectual point That's what I'm trying to get at in that context Hi, thank you so much for this talk I have a question about So one way you might think that the one way you might interpret the tech worker organization is that it's a post end of post ideology reaction Given it's sort of like genealogical relationship to The 60s and 70s in counterculture and an escape from politics and it's a realization that we that's never going to be successful and I'm wondering what the whether you can understand What the final ends of a movement like this is seeking? I think one of the main critiques about Frameworks like surveillance capitalism and platform capitalism is that they have a lot to say about surveillance and platform and almost nothing to say about and I Wonder since many of these demands are emerging out of concerns about survey like ice type surveillance There's a there does seem to be a lack of being maybe deeper questioning about the Systemic structural Reliance on exploitation and de-skilling that capitalism requires and I'm wondering whether that's also on the table Within these tech worker movements as well. Yeah, it's a great question. I think with so many of these questions I'm sort of toggling between what I think intellectually and theoretically and then what I've heard other people say I think that your line that But I mean I think actually an external checkbook on platform capitalism is quite concerned with capitalism But I think the criticism of Shoshana Zuboff's book that that it's not Feels I think she's a giant. I really appreciate a lot of her work But I do think that that's a fair a fair criticism and that Her account of the harms of surveillance capitalism seems to presuppose that there was sort of a good capitalism That was based on reciprocity. I think another another aspect of all this that's very interesting to me is sort of the The focus maybe I think in scholarship certainly in the media on sort of the attention economy and Sort of the specific focus on the harms to the attention of Individual users as opposed to the harms of other kinds of technology So I think that in some of these accounts of surveillance a focus on you know, the dehumanizing effects or the sort of disempowering effects of having your attention directed are perhaps overstated in relation to Other other kinds of harms I think that for most most people probably the algorithms that schedule their work or determine whether they get health care or more Of more pressing importance to their lives than whether or not, you know, a Facebook algorithm showed them a fake news story So I think that your point That it's really important for the critique of surveillance capitalism to be not just about surveillance But about capitalism is absolutely right. I think seeing this as an end of post-ideology is also absolutely Absolutely, right if we think of that sort of Californian ideology moment as the apotheosis of something I see starting in the white counterculture in the 60s of sort of letting personal expression replace politics and think that you can have a kind of expressive politics without Infrastructure or without collective movements that the what we're seeing is absolutely a recognition that that model does not work Or at least not for most people I think finally that they're absolutely activists within this movement who would share the the feelings We just articulated about the limitations of the surveillance capitalism account and the sense that Capitalism needs to be challenged that there isn't sort of a rosy good market capitalism That only recently has gone a little bit astray But that it's part of a much longer history of gendered and racialized violent exploitation I think again, I hesitate to make a very broad Generalization about all the people involved in this movement because it's a wide wide range of people But I think there absolutely are people who would share the kinds of criticisms that you're raising Really enjoyed this talk. I was just wondering about the let's say looking being a bit of a futurist and Thinking about the people who sign petitions or you know do walkouts and the effects on their career When you think about whistleblowers, you see what happens to their careers and you know, maybe a tech person a highly skilled Software engineer has less concern about well if you get rid of me I can get a job versus someone who's a tech work, you know, like a contract workers like if you get rid of me I'm gonna be homeless, you know that kind of thing. I'm just curious about You know, does it put a mark even though they're doing quote-unquote the right thing Does it put a mark on their relationship to the larger ecosystem? Yeah, I think it's a complicated question and to me it seems like a sort of tactical question that each person has to think about for themselves There are certainly workers like highly skilled engineers and I think in some cases Highly visible engineers who can use that privilege to their to their advantage I think that there are examples of people Liz Fong Jones comes to mind But people who are engineers with a large sort of Twitter presence and and following who are actually it's this curious Calculation, but how do you use that level of visibility, which could be a liability? Also to protect you in a certain sense and again, I think that's sort of an individual calculation in the long run the thing I will say at risk again of sounding naively optimistic is that I think that there is a way in which the more of these actions There are the more people feel empowered to participate in them I feel as if particularly in some of the debates around military contracts You often hear this argument that you know well if you don't build it other people will And and so you should just build it and I think that on the contrary what we're seeing is is this moment Where because some people are saying they're not going to do it actually people at other companies can say that too So I think that you know the pragmatic answer is that people with more privilege and who feel for whatever set of reasons That they have the resources to do so can kind of take the risks on behalf of the person who might be homeless next week They're not working and then in the long term I do think you know the power of collective action is that they can't fire all of you and is as more and more of these of These actions take place and succeed in their immediate aims more people feel empowered to participate in them Was there a specific backlash that you know of against particularly lower paid employees at these companies for Signing petitions for striking for walking out. I haven't followed it Closely enough to not that I'm aware of I think I can think of one specific instance at one of the large companies where there's been organizing Around unionizing lower wage workers where they were Trying to think how to put this they were told they could do something and then their Contracting company was like no you can't do that and they were sort of frightened by all coming to work and finding leaflets It said that they would get in trouble if they did this thing that they'd said they were going to do But other than that one example I shouldn't say authoritatively that there haven't been instances of backlash, but nothing comes to mind I think there's also an interesting dynamics in so many of the lower wage positions The people in question work for contract companies not for the big famous tech company where that difference can be kind of leveraged So for instance, I think when the Facebook workers won their union I believe there were certain dynamics where you know Engineers at Facebook sort of pressured Facebook to say that certain conditions should be met Actually, I don't remember the very specific details of that incident But I think that that difference between the you know cafeteria contracting company and the large tech company and the relatively more idealistic Public-facing rhetoric of the large tech company has been used to try to protect contract workers