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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 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 threatens 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 of Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI
“An indispensable analysis of the tech worker movement from two of its luminaries. This is an essential book for understanding class struggle under digital capitalism.”
—Ben Tarnoff, coauthor of Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed
“Silicon Valley’s image as a worker’s paradise—generous salaries, lavish perks, and a ‘bring your whole self to work’ ethos—has given way to grinding hours, mass layoffs, and extractive labor practices. Against Tech Oligarchy traces this shift and tells the story of how tech workers are fighting back.”
—Zoë Schiffer, author of Extremely Hardcore: Inside Elon Musk’s Twitter
“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, coauthor of Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy
“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
“The good news is that we’re not helpless in the face of the tech industry’s corruption. We can do something about it—workers have the power to fight back, and this awesome book shows you how!”
—Adam Conover, host of Factually! and Adam Ruins Everything
“In the 2010s, tech workers demanded their employers live up to the values they claimed to hold, but where is that movement now? Against Tech Oligarchy provides essential insight into worker organizing in the tech industry through firsthand experience of its highs and lows over the past decade and what happened when it came into conflict with a radicalizing class of tech billionaires.”
—Paris Marx, host of Tech Won’t Save Us and author of Hyperscale
“Against Tech Oligarchy is a rare, searing account of the tech worker movement told by two of its own organizers. Drawing on their firsthand experience inside campaigns with employees from Google to Twitter, Tan and Redwine reveal how a generation of ‘idealists’ found their worker consciousness—and why the strategies they built fell short. At a moment when Silicon Valley’s power is hardening into an oligarchy, their clear-eyed reckoning with both victories and failures is as urgent as it is indispensable.”
—Mary L. Gray, MacArthur Fellow and coauthor of Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Underclass
“According to cliché, Silicon Valley is devoid of class struggle—the opposite is true. JS Tan and Clarissa Redwine report from inside the black box, bringing us workers’ dispatches from the leading fraction of American capitalism, narrating a head-spinning decade where Sam Altman and Sergey Brin went from participants in protests against the Muslim Ban in Trump’s first term to cozy collaborators with him in his second. Most authors balk at the question ‘what is to be done?’ Tan and Redwine have written an entire book in response to it.”
—Quinn Slobodian, author of Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right
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