Who Is Organizing the Tech Workforce?

A few weeks ago in the IX community, we were talking about the tech workforce, particularly in light of recent mass layoffs and protests over Big Tech’s role in supporting Israel’s occupation of Gaza. There was a time when employees at the world’s most powerful tech companies could influence major decisions about ethics, government contracts, and product development. But those ties seemed weaker now. Why?
So we asked some of those workers to share their story.
In our main story today: the answer we got from a group of workers organizing with No Tech for Apartheid.
But first...
Mallory Knodel Joins Yerevan Dialogue
IX's Mallory Knodel attended the second edition of the Yerevan Dialogue, held May 26–27, 2025 in partnership with Armenia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Taking place in Yerevan, a regional leader for internet freedom in the South Caucasus, the event focused on the theme Navigating the Unknown, exploring shifting geopolitics, peace and security, AI politics, connectivity, and trade.
Mallory spoke on the panel Deep Dive Into the Unknown: Exploring the Depths of Artificial Intelligence and also contributed to a Freedom Online Coalition side event on Digital Public Infrastructure and Human Rights.
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This Week's Links
Related To Our Main Story: Decentralizing Power in Tech
- Microsoft employees discovered that emails with a variety of terms related to Gaza and Palestine have been blocked internally after employee protests. https://www.theverge.com/tech/672312/microsoft-block-palestine-gaza-email
- A U.S. sanctions order forced Microsoft to cut off the International Criminal Court’s accounts, crippling war crimes investigations and exposing global civil society’s dangerous reliance on American tech. https://www.thedissident.news/international-civil-societys-tech-stack-is-in-extreme-danger
- Mayfirst introduces Cutting the Cord an initial road map for reducing the movement's dependence on Big Tech by growing our autonomous technology ecosystem. https://mayfirst.coop/en/post/2025/cutting-the-cord
- Gig worker unions in India are using electoral politics to push for legal protections, signaling the adoption of direct political interventionism as a bargaining strategy for gig and platform workers’ rights. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/10245294251339391
Internet Governance
- Study examining the evolving landscape of digital sovereignty through the lens of Threema. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5192550
- Is a social media ban the most efficient way of keeping children safe online? Guernsey Data Protection Commissioner Brent Homan sits down with Australian Privacy Commissioner Carly Kind to tackle this and many other thorny privacy-related issues. https://www.odpa.gg/project-bijou/the-bijou-lecture/the-bijou-lecture-2025
- This article seeks to explain the notion of “glue” in the Domain Name System (DNS). Why is glue needed in the DNS? Doesn’t it hold by itself? What are the consequences of this gluing? Is it mandatory? https://www.afnic.fr/en/observatory-and-resources/expert-papers/dns-records-a-sticky-subject
- The dominance of Amazon, Google, and Microsoft in the cloud computing market poses risks to national security, innovation, and public oversight. https://www.ft.com/content/5c930686-9119-402d-8b9b-4c3f6233164e
- With the fall of Assad’s regime, Syrians now face a historic opportunity to rebuild their digital future. Doing so will require lifting sanctions, overhauling repressive laws, and restoring shattered internet infrastructure. https://www.accessnow.org/syria-sanctions-digital-future
- At the IETF 122 meeting in Bangkok, the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) held a special session about Internet Governance – specifically, the upcoming World Summit on Information Security (WSIS) 20 year review. https://www.ietf.org/blog/technical-community-involvement-in-internet-governance
- This report explores how the global rise of AI and cloud-driven data centers impacts economies, environments, and communities, drawing on case studies from five countries to examine power dynamics and advocacy needs. https://www.themaybe.org/research/data-center-report-where-cloud-meets-cement
- Brazil is handing out generous incentives for data centers, but what it stands togain is still unclear. https://www.techpolicy.press/brazil-is-handing-out-generous-incentives-for-data-centers-but-what-it-stands-to-gain-from-it-is-still-unclear
- The 2025 State of Open Infrastructure Report by Invest in Open Infrastructure (IOI) is an in-depth annual assessment of the sustainability, funding, and global context surrounding the tools and systems that underpin open research and scholarship. https://investinopen.org/state-of-open-infrastructure-2025/sooi-foreword-2025
- The 13th annual African School on Internet Governance (AfriSIG) took place from 23 to 28 May in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. https://afrisig.org/afrisig-2025
- The IPTC has released a set of guidelines expressing best practices that publishers can follow to express the fact that they reserve data-mining rights on their copyrighted content. https://iptc.org/news/iptc-publishes-best-practice-guidance-on-generative-ai-opt-out-for-publishers
Digital Rights
- 89 civil society groups, companies, and experts are urging the European Commission to rethink the Protect EU strategy, warning it threatens end-to-end encryption and could make Europeans less safe. https://www.globalencryption.org/2025/05/joint-letter-on-the-european-internal-security-strategy-protecteu
- A controversial site-blocking order in Spain, initiated by LaLiga and Telefónica to combat piracy of live sports streams, has sparked a significant backlash due to its sweeping collateral damage. https://torrentfreak.com/constitutional-court-urged-to-end-piracy-blockades-now-hurting-millions-250519
- Related: The ICANN Security and Stability Advisory Committee (SSAC) revisits DNS blocking, warning that it’s often misused or poorly implemented by policymakers. https://itp.cdn.icann.org/en/files/security-and-stability-advisory-committee-ssac-reports/sac127-dns-blocking-revisited-16-05-2025-en.pdf
- Regulators are investigating whether Media Matters colluded with advertisers, following Elon Musk’s lawsuit accusing the group of trying to harm X’s ties with ad partners. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/22/technology/ftc-investigates-media-matters.html
- Techno-diplomacy, inside the battleground for your right to connect, and the decisions about who controls the infrastructure that makes the internet work. https://pitg.gitlab.io/news/2025/05/02/connectivity-spectrum.html
Technology for Society
- The Observatory on Social Media is excited to introduce three new tools that will make it easier to study and engage with social media data: NewsBridge, Barney’s Tavern, and OSoMeNet. https://osome.iu.edu/research/blog/three-new-tools-to-explore-social-media
- Trump isn’t just attacking the press as an authoritarian. He’s treating it like a business rival, using deceptive litigation tactics to undercut competition. https://freedom.press/issues/trump-attacks-the-press-not-just-as-an-authoritarian-but-as-a-business-rival
- Some signs of AI model collapse begin to reveal themselves, writes Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, who predicts that general purpose AI could start getting worse. https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/27/opinion_column_ai_model_collapse
- PeerTube is raising funds to grow its mobile app and decentralised video platform that offers a community-driven alternative to Big Tech’s dominance in video sharing. https://support.joinpeertube.org
- A new paper explores how government use of AI may erode citizens’ sense of recognition and respect, shifting the focus from system performance to the deeper impacts on the citizen-state relationship. https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/pua4s_v1
- Starlink is stitching together a pan-African footprint by targeting niche, high-value users across multiple countries. https://www.semafor.com/article/05/21/2025/starlink-is-stitching-together-a-pan-african-strategy-in-small-bytes
- A guide to understanding and navigating the increasingly complex and challenging job market in “Responsible Tech.” https://alltechishuman.org/all-tech-is-human-blog/navigating-the-complex-field-of-responsible-tech
- Announcing the launch of the Coalition on Digital Impact (CODI), a new alliance working to make the Internet accessible in every language. https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20250520781786/en/Coalition-on-Digital-Impact-Launches-Global-Alliance-to-Create-a-Multilingual-Internet
- After more than four decades as a writer and technologist, Bill Thompson reflects on his lifelong work on the internet. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/writing-internet-bill-thompson-0wdoe
- Flipboard reaffirms its commitment to truth, quality journalism, and human-curated content moderation in an era dominated by algorithmic amplification and misinformation. https://about.flipboard.com/inside-flipboard/flipboard-commitment-to-truth-and-quality-journalism
Privacy and Security
- New report from Noor examines how digital spaces across the SWANA region are being weaponized by states and aligned actors to enforce authoritarian control, suppress dissent, and target marginalized groups. https://wearenoor.org/fascism-in-practice-digital-spheres-as-landscape-by-moussa-saleh
- Failures in cybersecurity practices at a software company that helps federal agencies manage investigations and FOIA requests allowed two convicted hackers to delete databases, according to internal documents. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-05-21/security-failures-behind-us-contractor-s-data-breach
- Hacker who breached communications app used by Trump national security adviser Mike Waltz earlier this month intercepted messages from a broader swathe of American officials than has previously been reported. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/hacker-who-breached-communications-app-used-by-trump-aide-stole-data-across-us-2025-05-21
- The NCSC and DSIT have collaborated with ETSI on a new standard designed to protect AI systems from evolving cyber threats, setting a benchmark for AI security. https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/blog-post/new-etsi-standard-protects-ai-systems-from-evolving-cyber-threats; Read more about the standard and how AI systems might help against evolving cyber threats. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-025-04464-0
Upcoming Events
- First meeting of the Telecommunication Standardization Advisory Group (TSAG), May 26-30, Geneva, Switzerland. https://www.itu.int/md/T25-TSAG-COL-0001/en
- Detecting Unwanted Trackers IETF meeting, note that you need a datatracker account to participate, but otherwise participation is available to all. June 6, 12pm ET. Online. https://meetecho-interims.ietf.org/client/?group=a0bc4167-d962-4b1d-924b-35672622f700
- Inaugural meeting of ITU trustworthy AI testing and knowledge platform at AI for Good Global Summit. July 9, 15:30 CEST. Geneva, Switzerland. https://aiforgood.itu.int
- Derechos Digitales is holding a webinar: "Fundamental rights for working on platforms." June 3, 11:00 EST. Online. https://www.derechosdigitales.org/25280/webinario-y-campana-global-derechos-fundamentales-para-el-trabajo-en-plataformas
Career Opportunities
- EFF is hiring a Policy and Research Staff Technologist. San Francisco, CA. https://www.paycomonline.net/v4/ats/web.php/jobs/ViewJobDetails?clientkey=28620672D234BF368306CEB4A2746667&job=262470
- New_ Public is hiring a Staff UX Researcher, Local Lab. U.S. or Canada. Remote. https://newpublic.org/jobs/staff-researcher
- People Vs BigTech is recruiting an Executive Director. UK or EU. Remote. https://peoplevsbig.tech/job-advertisement-people-vs-bigtech-executive-director
- Internet Systems Consortium (ISC) is hiring for two remote roles. Remote.
- Open Source Software Engineer for Stork https://isc.recruitee.com/o/stork-dev
- QA Engineer for Stork https://isc.recruitee.com/o/stork-qa
- Digital Action is hiring a Communication Manager. Remote. https://digitalaction.co/join-our-team
- Hasso Plattner Institute is looking for a Postdoctoral Researcher (m/f/x) in Technology and Regulation. Potsdam, Germany. https://jobs.plattnerfoundation.org/HPI/job/Potsdam-Postdoctoral-Researcher-%28mfx%29-in-Technology-and-Regulation-14482/1158083155
- Cognizant is hiring a Responsible AI Governance and Compliance Lead. San Francisco, CA. https://careers.cognizant.com/us-en/jobs/00063669401/senior-director-responsible-ai-governance-and-compliance-lead
- Amgen is recruiting a Director of Responsible AI. Lisbon, Portugal. https://careers.amgen.com/en/job/lisbon/director-of-responsible-ai/87/81177628480
- Warner Bros. Discovery is hiring a Lead - Responsible AI. Hyderabad, India. https://warnerbros.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/global/job/Lead---Responsible-AI--RAI-_R000093294
- Thomson Reuters is looking for a Manager, AI Enablement. Toronto, Canada. https://careers.thomsonreuters.com/us/en/job/JREQ191162/Manager-Responsible-AI
- Thomson Reuters is also recruiting a Digital Director. New York, NY. https://careers.thomsonreuters.com/us/en/job/JREQ191561/Digital-Director-Reuters
- Salesforce is recruiting for two roles, both offer flexible working in San Francisco or Palo Alto, CA. New York, NY. Seattle or Bellevue, WA.
- Senior or Principal Data Scientist - Technical AI Ethicist https://salesforce.wd12.myworkdayjobs.com/External_Career_Site/job/California---San-Francisco/Senior-Technical-AI-Ethicist---AI-Red-Teamer_JR268693
- Lead Applied Research Scientist - Responsible AI https://salesforce.wd12.myworkdayjobs.com/External_Career_Site/job/California—San-Francisco/Lead-Applied-Research-Scientist—Responsible-AI_JR268691
- Pinterest is hiring a Staff Machine Learning Engineer - Responsible AI. Palo Alto or San Francisco, CA or Remote. https://www.pinterestcareers.com/jobs/6371685/staff-machine-learning-engineer-responsible-ai/?gh_jid=6371685
- Rivian is hiring a Lead, AI Governance. Irvine or Palo Alto, CA. Plymouth, MI. Normal, IL or Atlanta, GA. https://careers.rivian.com/careers-home/jobs/23989?lang=en-us
- Microsoft is looking for a Senior AI Security Researcher. Redmond, WA. https://jobs.careers.microsoft.com/global/en/job/1819983/Senior-AI-Security-Researcher
Funding and Opportunities to Get Involved
- The Spyware Accountability Initiative (SAI) is offering grants to support civil society organizations, journalists, and others working to investigate, expose, and prevent the abuse of commercial spyware. Apply by June 13. https://stopspyware.fund/apply
- Are you interested in pursuing a Masters or PhD in an AI-related field but unsure where to start? Apply to Black In AI’s Emerging Leaders In AI Grad Prep Program by July 3. https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfBzvzj6ySaMNG85Eav5m1IflEB_uaroZ2jmmSHEVh8zRXLLQ/viewform
- If you are part of a research community at a UK university, consider taking this survey on the impact of the U.S. government deleting research data. https://forms.office.com/pages/responsepage.aspx?id=sAafLmkWiUWHiRCgaTTcYfKo8CxWpglJkWOtNlgusW9URjRCMlFOSUQzS1pVTEhNRTJZWU9PSkZDSC4u&route=shorturl
- Bread&Net is the region’s leading annual unconference on digital rights. Their call for proposals is now open. https://breadandnet.secure-platform.com/site
- A new ITU training programme will equip indigenous and rural African community leaders with the technical and policy skills needed to build and sustain their own ICT networks. https://share2.apc.org/s/sg6gmFb87p5rsm6
What did we miss? Please send us a reply or write to editor@exchangepoint.tech.
The Myth of a Progressive Silicon Valley
By workers organizing with No Tech for Apartheid
Silicon Valley used to be progressive. At least, that’s what the tech oligarchy would like us to think. During the industry’s ascent, Big Tech execs like Sheryl Sandberg encouraged people to “bring your authentic self to work,” and Google prided itself on its since-discarded motto: “Don’t be evil.” Tech workers with a conscience looking to build for good felt empowered to influence company policies by organizing petitions and walkouts.
But the days when billionaire tech executives feigned to care for their workers are long gone. Silicon Valley’s pivot from “woke identity politics” to realpolitik was on full display at President Trump’s inauguration, where top executives from Google, Amazon, Meta, and Apple were in prominent attendance. Despite Google cofounder Sergey Brin and CEO Sundar Pichai attending and speaking at employee-organized walkouts in protest of anti-immigration executive orders during Trump’s first presidency in 2017, eight years later, we watched Google donate $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund, joining other companies hoping for a more favorable regulatory regime. Among them fossil fuel giants, crypto firms and a vaping industry trade group. Is this a departure from Big Tech’s “progressive values”—or simply a revelation of what has always been true?
Tech's Increasing Retaliation
Some of us have become all too familiar with Silicon Valley’s real political alliances. We bore the brunt of them. In April 2024, Google workers organizing with No Tech for Apartheid (NOTA) staged sit-ins at company offices to protest how our labor was being used to support the genocide in Gaza, to demand an end to the harassment and discrimination of our Palestinian, Muslim, and Arab colleagues, and to demand executives address the workplace health and safety crisis caused by Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion contract that provides cloud computing services and AI tools to the Israeli military and government. In response, Google illegally fired 50 of their workers in what amounted to mass retaliation—including many who had not participated directly in the protest.
Deepening Military Ties
In the year since this prominent display of direct, collective worker action, Google has only deepened its commitment to military contracting. Three months ago, in order to take advantage of the federal contracts available via the U.S. Department of Defense, Google abandoned its pledge not to build AI for weapons or surveillance. In the months since, Google has acquired Israeli cloud security start-up Wiz for $32 billion, pursued partnerships with U.S. Customs and Border Patrol to update towers by Israeli war contractor Elbit Systems with AI at the U.S.-Mexico border, launched an AI partnership with the largest war profiteer in the world, Lockheed Martin, and announced a Google Cloud collaboration with the tech defense contracting company Palantir (whose focus includes “making America more lethal”).
Why the Shift?
Companies like Google and Microsoft have always viewed workers as means to achieve capital and favorable stock prices for their shareholders rather than living and breathing humans whose time, effort, and humanity shape the fabric of the company. This has revealed itself slowly through quiet, media-suppressed retaliation against dissenting workers, then rapidly with yearly mass layoffs of thousands of employees at the behest of shareholder and investor interest even when market conditions didn’t justify such job losses. What may have mattered to these companies in the past—a positive PR campaign, user satisfaction in their products—were only pursued to the extent that they improved shareholder perception and boosted the stock price.
So why the shift? Big tech has revealed the hand they were always playing with, as well as its cost: leadership answers to shareholders and investors. If investors are influenced more by the prospect of holding a definitive stake in the defense industry, in being crowned the winner of cloud infrastructure as well as of the AI race—which has now become synonymous with the global arms race—than they care about the voice of workers, or even the violation of basic human dignities, then tech leadership will always fall in line.
Big tech oligarchs have assessed the risk and made the move to be more transparent about their allegiance to the fascist state. This alignment between billionaire capitalists and state power is a defining marker of imperialism. With the job market difficult for engineers, workers are more easily scared into keeping their heads down even as their employers become transparent about their immorality. However, it’s critical to note that these are ripe conditions to organize mass movements in. Through political education, the high-income working class must come to terms with the fact that they are disposable to capitalism, and wield collective power to turn these conditions around. When workers can become active agents in the structure of the corporation, the structure of the corporation becomes theirs, and they are able to do with it what they are willing. As long as workers do not make this shift, capitalist broligarchs will continue deepening their ties to self-destructive capitalist systems and enactingviolence on class-oppressed and marginalized people.
Organizing Against Oppression
We, the workers organizing with No Tech for Apartheid, understand that we are living in a time shaped by a tech oligarchy that wields unprecedented technological, political, and capitalist power. In the past, Google was careful to protect its public image, and negative press could serve as a check on its actions. But today, legacy media outlets manufacture consent for the genocide of Palestinians, making “bad press” a far less effective tool.
Tech corporations like Google feel less pressure to respond to public backlash when their reward comes from securing partnerships with dominant, oppressive powers. No Tech for Apartheid centers our labor organizing on Palestine––it is our refusal to build technology to facilitate apartheid and genocide that draws clear lines of resistance against contracts with the U.S. Department of Defense, Customs and Border Patrol, Lockheed Martin, Palantir, and the UAE. Moreover, normalizing tech labor in service of necropolitical power sets the stage for worsening workplace conditions, such as the end of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives, and persistent mass layoffs.
In fact, a closer look at this moment reveals that tech giants have undermined collective power since the industry’s inception: union busting tactics, emphasis on exclusionary and classist prestige, and atomized, multi-tier labor forces have all been designed to keep us, as workers, from developing coalitions and building community. As Big Tech’s strategies repeatedly fail to prevent worker organizing, these companies increasingly resort to repressive tactics to silence, intimidate, and repress workers of conscience, especially when those same workers threaten what they value most: endless, free flowing capital.
In "No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the Gilded Age" Jane McElevey writes:
“In the organizing approach, specific injustice and outrage are the immediate motivation, but the primary goal is to transfer power from the elite to the majority, from the 1 percent to the 99 percent... [organizing] relies on mass negotiations to win, rather than the closed-door deal making typical of both advocacy and mobilizing. Ordinary people help make the power analysis, design the strategy, and achieve the outcome. They are essential and they know it.”
No Tech for Apartheid is organizing a mass movement of workers prepared to demand just, ethical work and care for the common good in our workplaces, and who are prepared to withhold our labor through collective power if our demands are not met.
This is what guides our strategy: a focus on deep base-building by talking to fellow workers in one-on-one conversations and through tabling at our workplaces. We listen to their concerns, and make them our own, knowing that we are driven by the same collective struggle. We are building a movement that steps off the feeds of social media and into the spaces where our labor takes place.
Reclaiming Our Collective Power
We must reclaim our shared agency united as workers, and in doing so remind ourselves that our labor is not only our power––but also our responsibility. Tech workers must resist complicity.
We invite all tech workers to join our cause: to remain steadfast in the belief of a world where workers are liberated from oppression. Building trust among the masses begins with each of us, as we strengthen our ties to one another in meaningful, lasting ways. Organizing is simply about building genuine relationships through which we can build collective action. The next time you speak to your coworkers, have a vulnerable conversation about the world. Ask them what they care about in the workplace, and ask yourself how you can show them the ways it connects to a shared struggle.
This is how we resist the rise of the techno-fascist state, and reclaim what is ours: our time, our creativity, and our labor, in solidarity with those who have much to lose, and the world to gain: like farmworkers and migrants organizing under the thumb of the U.S. detention-deportation machine, and our Palestinian siblings and martyrs united in the struggle for liberation.