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As tech bosses fall in line with fascism, tech workers are fighting back. This is the rousing inside story of their movement—and how it spawned the right-wing, 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 staging walkouts against ICE contracts and CEOs joining mass mobilizations against the so-called Muslim ban. But it wasn’t long before the tech bosses started to fall in line with the new administration. Using the autonomy afforded to them by the industry’s progressive and mission-driven culture, tens of thousands of tech workers began speaking out against their own executives. This burgeoning resistance included organizing against military contracts, walkouts to protest sexism, agitation about tech’s role in the climate crisis, and even a wave of union drives. By the early 2020s, tech workers had sparked an exciting movement that seemed to hold the potential to check the industry’s rapid growth and reactionary drift.
But as their struggle grew, so did the employers’ backlash. A new class consciousness took root among the billionaire owners. Hellbent 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.
Against Tech Oligarchy provides a gripping account of this inspiring movement’s development and offers a balance sheet of its successes and failures that will prove crucial for anyone looking to challenge right-wing billionaires anywhere.
"JS Tan and Clarissa Redwine's Against Tech Oligarchy offers an illuminating and deeply self-reflective history of the tech worker movement that diagnoses why it struggled to deliver lasting change and how it must reform to hold tech companies accountable. At a time when Silicon Valley is more powerful than ever and threatening the very foundations of democracy, their rallying cry for more radical dissent among the industry's own employees could not have come soon enough."
—Karen Hao, author Empire of AI
“Organizing tech workers is hard, but it offers crucial lessons to everyone, especially as AI begins to transform labor politics. In this valuable new book, JS Tan and Clarissa Redwine explain the successes and failures of the last decade, and lay out the agenda for what comes next."
—Henry Farrell, author of Underground Empire
“At a moment when tech billionaires are openly wielding political power, Tan and Redwine have written the book we desperately need—one that explains not only how we got here, but what it would take to build a credible counterpower from within the industry itself.”
—Nick Srnicek, author of Silicon Empire and Platform Capitalism
“Against Tech Oligarchy is a bracing, strategically serious intervention—clear-eyed, rigorous, and genuinely energizing. An essential read.”
—Eric Blanc, author of We Are The Union and Red State Revolt
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.
Part I
Chapter 1: David vs Goliath
Chapter 2: Wielding Public Pressure
Chapter 3: The Walkout
Part II
Chapter 4: Winning a Union
Chapter 5: The Fight for Recognition
Chapter 6: Billionaire Class Consciousness
Part III
Chapter 7: The Takeover
Chapter 8: The Perils of Delayed Class Conflict
Chapter 9: The Strike