For many people who thought technology was the way of the future, the tech sector remained a desirable place to work even after the “dot-com crash” in 2000. With the widespread adoption of the digital age, which is characterized by computers and worldwide communication, the IT sector gradually became a major player in the job market. High-paying positions for experts in a variety of professions, including engineers and designers, became more prevalent.
JS Tan SM ’22, an MIT PhD student, was one among several who entered the IT sector after earning degrees from Brown University and Rhode Island School of Design in 2015.
“Many of us believed that technology, especially internet-related technologies, could lead to a more progressive world,” Tan explains.
Google’s once-famous motto, “don’t be evil,” served as both an informal company philosophy and a code of behavior for its employees. Since then, they have abandoned the slogan.
However, over time, especially with the beginning of the first Trump administration, some workers in the tech sector began to wonder if their companies were truly committed to promoting ideas that would help create a more democratic world. Tan claims that an anti-worker backlash is currently occurring as a result of their willingness to publicly protest their bosses’ behavior, initially with success.
Tan and Clarissa Redwine, a former colleague in the IT sector, have now written a book about the growth and decline of the tech worker labor movement. The book “Against Tech Oligarchy: Worker Resistance in the World’s Most Powerful Industry” (Haymarket Books, 2026) details how tech workers banded together, the successful tactics they employed, and the impact the campaign had on labor politics in Silicon Valley over the previous ten years.
Recording An Internal Movement
Tan was employed by Microsoft and Redwine for Kickstarter in 2017 when President Donald Trump issued an executive order prohibiting citizens of seven countries with a large Muslim population from entering the United States for ninety days and prohibiting Syrian refugees from doing so indefinitely.
“I think the tech industry as a whole really pushed back against this,” Tan says. “[OpenAI co-founder] Sam Altman participated in protests of this ban at the airport.” In fact, he wrote on his blog the day before he participated in these demonstrations that the tech sector ought to oppose the Trump administration, especially its immigration policy.
Part of Altman’s blog post from January 28, 2017, stated, “Tech companies go to extraordinary lengths to recruit and retain employees; those employees have a lot of leverage.” I think businesses will have to do something if workers demand it. Businesses should, at the very least, adopt a public position. However, employees should encourage their employers to determine what steps they can take because talking is only partially effective.
According to Tan, Altman’s remarks encouraged IT workers to openly express their disapproval and “push for the values they believed in.” Workers staged walkouts and opposed workplace rules they believed to be sexist, as well as their employers’ relationships with U.S. military and immigration enforcement organizations, throughout the course of the following few years.
According to Tan, “many tech workers felt that their companies were walking back the values that they had initially promised.”
At first, their criticisms were somewhat successful. Google chose not to extend its contract for Project Maven, a Pentagon project that uses artificial intelligence to examine drone surveillance footage, in 2018 in response to employee objections. “Google should not be in the business of war,” almost 4,000 employees wrote in an open letter to their CEO.
Eight years later. More than 600 workers signed an open letter earlier this year pleading with Google’s CEO to reject sensitive AI work with the Pentagon due to worries about possible applications such as domestic surveillance and deadly autonomous weaponry.
“This time, Google basically said, ‘Too bad, we’re committed to working with the Pentagon,'” Tan explains. “As a result, Google’s political stance and that of its employees are changing.”
What became of employee leverage in the tech sector?
Tan claims in his book that a number of incidents have had a detrimental effect on their formerly powerful influence. First, once interest rates were raised in 2022, the IT sector lost hundreds of billions in market value and decided to reduce expenses, the most important of which was its high staff pay. According to Tan, the labor market soured for computer workers, allowing companies to regain control.
Second, he highlights how agentic AI coding systems have drastically changed the nature of their employment, contending that these tools have deskilled workers and increased everyone’s concern about job security.
Tech employees were left to deal with these shocks alone. They could have had more strength to truly push back if they had a union or the capacity to organize among employees and engage in collective bargaining, according to Tan.
Recording The History To Help The Future
Tan enrolled at MIT in 2020 and graduated from the MIT Media Lab with a master’s degree. He is presently pursuing a doctorate in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning, concentrating on the political economy of the technology industry.
Tan and his co-author had participated in IT sector organizing at different stages of their careers. Redwine had a significant role in the Kickstarter union drive. In 2019, she was let go from the company; Redwine claimed that this was because of her organizational efforts, although Kickstarter refuted that. Tan and Redwine realized that the bandwidth for labor organization among computer workers had reached a new low, which is one of the reasons they published this book.
According to Tan, “tech workers want to have a say over how their technologies are designed.” “They want to be able to advocate for appropriate safeguards for the technologies they are developing.” We wanted to utilize this book as a chance to examine the reasons behind the tech worker movement’s apparent paralysis within eight years.
Reliving the highs and lows of the previous ten years, they started writing the book in 2024. Tan’s first novel is this one. He claims that writing it was a deeply enjoyable and “exhilarating experience.”
I’m drawn to academia in part because of this. I firmly believe in the power of writing and research. It has been an incredible experience to get the chance to work on a topic that is really important to me.
On October 26, the Department of Urban Studies and Planning will co-host a book launch and discussion on “Against Tech Oligarchy.”