Book Launch | Against Tech Oligarchy by JS Tan and Clarissa Redwine

As tech bosses fall in line with the right, tech workers are fighting back. This is the rousing inside story of their movement—and the way it spawned an anti-worker backlash now reshaping the industry.

After Donald Trump’s election in 2016, the tech industry sprang into action to oppose his right-wing agenda, with workers and CEOs alike joining mass mobilizations against the new president’s anti-immigrant policies. But it wasn’t long before the tech bosses started to fall in line with the new administration.

In response, tens of thousands of tech workers protested against their own employers for betraying the progressive values that once defined the industry—including organizing against military contracts, walking out to protest sexism, and even launching a wave of union drives. By the early 2020s, these workers had sparked what observers were calling the tech worker movement, one that seemed capable of checking the industry’s reckless growth and reactionary drift.

But as their struggle grew, so did the employers’ backlash. A new class consciousness took root among tech's billionaire owners. Hell-bent on stamping out any and all dissent, tech executives embraced Trumpism, fired organizers, and began lashing out against the “woke” ideology they blamed for turning their once loyal employees against them—and replacing the good tech jobs of the 2010s with incessant layoffs, grind culture, and a management style that treats workers as disposable.

AGAINST TECH OLIGARCHY provides a gripping account of this inspiring workers' movement and the rise of the hostile labor politics that define Silicon Valley today.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

JS Tan is getting his PhD at MIT and formerly worked in tech, where he spent years organizing across the industry. His work has been featured in The New York Times, MIT Technology Review, Dissent, Jacobin, Foreign Policy, The Baffler, and The Guardian, among other outlets. More of his work can be found here.

Clarissa Redwine helped organize the Kickstarter union, and has since dedicated herself to organizing the industry. She cofounded and runs the annual 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.

Amba Kak has spent the last fifteen years designing and advocating for technology policy in the public interest, ranging from network neutrality to privacy to algorithmic accountability, across government, industry, and civil society – and in many parts of the world. Amba brings this experience to her current role co-leading AI Now, a US-based research institute where she leads on advancing diagnosis and actionable policy recommendations to tackle concerns with artificial intelligence and concentrated power.

Amba recently completed her term as Senior Advisor on AI at the Federal Trade Commission. Prior to AI Now, she was Global Policy Advisor at Mozilla; and also previously served as legal advisor to India’s telecommunications regulator (TRAI) on net-neutrality rules. She regularly advises members of Congress, the White House, the European Commission, UK government, the City of New York, US and other regulatory agencies worldwide; and has testified before Congress multiple times on AI policy issues.  Amba currently serves on the Board of Directors of the Signal Foundation and is a member of New York City’s Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s transition team. Trained as a lawyer, Amba received her BA LLB (Hons) from the National University of Juridical Sciences in India, and is a former recipient of the Google Policy Fellowship and Mozilla Policy Fellowship. She has a Masters in Law (BCL) and an MSc in the Social Science of the Internet at the University of Oxford, which she attended as a Rhodes Scholar. In 2024 TIME magazine listed Kak among 100 most influential people in AI.