Against Tech Oligarchy: Worker Resistance in the World's Most Powerful Industry

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.

JS Tan is a PhD candidate at MIT and a former Microsoft employee. His work has been featured in The New York Times and MIT Technology Review, among other outlets, and his writing has appeared in Dissent, Jacobin, Foreign Policy, The Baffler, and The Guardian.

Clarissa Redwine is a tech worker and labor activist. She helped organize the industry's first wall-to-wall union at Kickstarter in 2019 and, as a fellow at NYU Law, she produced a beloved oral history that chronicled the historic win. In 2023, she cofounded Circuit Breakers, the world's first labor conference dedicated to organizing the tech industry. Her work in the labor movement has been featured in The New York Times, the BBC, The Guardian, The Verge, TechCrunch, and many other news outlets.