City Lights and Haymarket Books celebrate the publication of
Against Tech Oligarchy: Worker Resistance in the World’s Most Powerful Industry
by Clarissa Redwine and JS Tan
Published by Haymarket Books
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.
JS Tan is getting his PhD at MIT and formerly worked in tech. 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.
Clarissa Redwine helped organize the Kickstarter union and cofounded the 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.
What has been said about Against Tech Oligarchy
“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
This event is made possible by support from the City Lights Foundation