When we were hired by the United Electrical Workers to spearhead the union drive at Twitter, it seemed the tech industry might finally be bending to progressive pressure. It was early in 2022, a year after the historic Capitol attacks of January 6, which saw Donald Trump call on his nearly eighty-eight million Twitter followers in an attempt to overturn his electoral defeat to Joe Biden. More and more public outrage was being directed at the tools that had enabled the president to mobilize his supporters. And Twitter, after deleting a series of Trump’s incendiary posts, had taken the most extreme measure of all the major social media platforms by issuing a permanent ban on the sitting president’s account.
Many outside the industry attributed the decision to Silicon Valley’s then-progressive values—management taking a principled stand against an overt attack on democracy—but in reality, it was almost entirely worker-driven. Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s founder and then-CEO, initially hesitated to take action after the Capitol attack. He said to staff that the company was not “the government,” and it was the responsibility of elected officials—not a private platform—to “do the work to right this and bring the country together.” Twitter’s employees, feeling complicit in enabling Trump’s insurrection, pushed management for decisive action. Two days after the sitting president’s self-coup attempt, hundreds of workers delivered an open letter to their employer that demanded Trump’s permanent suspension. “As Trump’s megaphone,” the letter declared, “we helped fuel the deadly events of January 6th.” That internal revolt proved decisive. Twitter’s leadership caved and permanently removed Trump from the platform.
Emboldened by their success and fueled by a newfound sense of solidarity, the group of employees who penned the letter decided to launch a union drive to codify their collective leverage and ensure the platform would never enable events like January 6 again. They had helped safeguard democracy before. This time, they were determined to win it for themselves—and we, joining their drive as dedicated staff, were determined to help them. Clarissa had helped win one of the first tech unions at Kickstarter. JS, meanwhile, had organized graduate students at MIT. By bringing our experience as organizers to Twitter’s campaign, we hoped we could harness the nascent movement’s energy and steer it with some established labor tactics. We knew we were in for a challenge—but we could never have anticipated how quickly the tech elite would dig up the ground from underneath us.
Traditionally, labor organizing is understood as a weapon of the most exploited workers to fight for better economic and working conditions. From the Fight for Fifteen campaigns that demanded a living wage of fifteen dollars an hour, to the more recent surge in Amazon warehouse workers insisting on better wages, benefits, and job security, most people think of labor organizing as a means for improving basic working conditions—demands commonly known in labor organizing parlance as bread-and-butter issues.
The software engineers, program managers, and designers at Twitter inhabit an entirely different world. They command some of the highest salaries in the country. Many have cushy benefit packages and are showered with office perks like free food, kombucha on tap, cooking classes, and nap rooms. They also have considerable autonomy in how they perform their daily work, often setting their own schedules and working remotely with minimal direct supervision. By all measures, many in tech have a good job.
Unlike most of the workforce, tech professionals view their own labor as creative, innovative, and personally meaningful. Coding, design, and data science are often described as passions rather than a type of labor. This framing is no accident: defining work as a calling encourages long hours, off-the-clock upskilling, and a sense of duty to a higher mission of innovation or craft. It aligns with the ideal of the “entrepreneurial self,” promising not just flexibility and autonomy but self-actualization. As a result, those working in tech are encouraged to see themselves as future founders—part of a lineage of visionary eccentrics changing the world through code.
These features make tech professionals unlikely candidates for labor organizing. Until 2017, workplace activism in the industry was rare and scattered, with fewer than a half dozen documented collective actions during the entire year. But nearing the end of Trump’s first hundred days in office, something shifted. Tech professionals across the industry began mobilizing in a seemingly united fashion, and we were in the thick of it—organizing these actions in our own workplaces and looking to the wider ecosystem of resistance for fresh tactics and burgeoning best practices. By 2020, the number of collective actions in tech had surged to over a hundred and would continue to climb.
What accounts for the emergence of this promising uprising? The timing itself, starting in 2017, gives us reason to think that Trump’s election was the catalyst. Many tech firms were directly implicated in Trump’s agenda—whether through government contracts with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Pentagon, surveillance technologies used at the border, or platforms that amplified far-right extremism. For employees who had long been told their companies were forces for good, leadership’s ambivalent reaction to the Trump administration’s policies and rhetoric was a disappointment. It soon became clear that their labor was now being harnessed to empower the very regime they opposed.
These were also the years of a growing public backlash against the tech industry—a period often described as the “techlash.” Once celebrated as engines of innovation and democracy, companies like Facebook, Google, and Twitter found themselves blamed for the spread of misinformation, the emergence of racially biased algorithms, the erosion of individual privacy, and the widening political polarization. Above all, the Cambridge Analytica scandal revealed that Facebook had allowed the political consulting firm to harvest data from millions of its users without consent, deploying it to influence elections, including Trump’s 2016 victory.
But like a forest fire, a spark on its own cannot set the woods ablaze—not without dry kindling. If Trump’s ascension and the resulting techlash combined to form the spark that ignited the uprising, then this could occur only because the internal dynamics of the tech industry were already highly flammable, making the sector susceptible to destabilization. This means that the roots of the movement must be traced back to the industry-specific conditions—the dry kindling—that made tech combustible.
The early promises that Silicon Valley had established would become this kindling. Starting in the 1980s and even more so from the 2010s, tech companies dressed themselves in a progressive facade and touted lofty missions about making the world more open, more connected, or more democratic. Those promises attracted a workforce that believed in these ideals: people who saw technology as a force for social progress. As young grads, each of us joined mission-driven firms that created the exhilarating feeling of being a part of something bigger than ourselves. Yet, as these same companies went on to build surveillance tools, develop weapons systems, power exploitative gig platforms, and partner with Big Oil, the gap between rhetoric and reality became impossible to ignore.
Of course, the industry’s largely liberal-leaning workforce saw these abuses of corporate power as betrayal. So, as glimmers of class conflict emerged, they began to distance themselves from their leaders, identifying less with their employers and more with the public’s mounting concerns about an industry becoming too big, too concentrated, and too unaccountable. What began as individual unease soon erupted into a series of collective actions as workers started to exercise their own influence on company decisions—first through ad hoc open letters and internal dissent, then through increasingly public battles in the media. By the start of the 2020s, the revolt was both large and visible. Breathless reporting on the countless open letters, walkouts, op-eds, and employee petitions, followed by a steady stream of union victories, left a strong impression on the industry.
This explosion of tech worker activism surprised many labor experts and other observers. The biggest shock was how bold and ambitious the nascent movement’s demands had been. Unlike much of the labor movement, tech workers didn’t start with bread-and-butter issues like pay or hours. Instead, they fought to have a say in deciding what technology gets built and how that technology is deployed. In the span of just a few short years, starting in 2017, they’d protested against multibillion-dollar military contracts, demanded net-zero emission standards, pushed for new labor practices such as the four-day workweek, and organized across divisions to improve working conditions for less privileged workers, including Uber drivers and Amazon warehouse workers.
These fights produced real victories. Amazon office workers forced management into a net-zero pledge, turning one of the world’s biggest companies into one of the most climate-conscious seemingly overnight. Google workers successfully stopped their employer’s involvement in building military weapons. And as we saw above, workers even fought to deplatform right-wing politicians and pundits, including the sitting president himself. The industry’s own workers were suddenly seen as one of the most promising levers for holding the industry accountable.
The uprising was also an expression of the broader culture war playing out across the country. Collective actions and demands from tech employees channeled the spirit of #MeToo; Black Lives Matter and antiracist struggle formed the backbone of countless campaigns for racial equity and divestment from policing contracts; and LGBTQ+ issues reverberated across the uprising. Many of the most visible and militant organizers were women, queer folks, immigrants, or people of color, whose identities infused these collective actions with an unwavering sense of social justice.
Yet while many of these early skirmishes were waged squarely along political battle lines, they also revealed a new formation taking shape inside the industry. As conflicts between leadership and employees intensified, with management in some cases openly retaliating against dissenters for their activism, employees began to recognize their shared position. What had started as moral and political disagreements with their employers gradually evolved into a clearer understanding of power in the workplace. They were, in other words, developing class consciousness and, for the first time, seeing themselves as workers.
It was against this backdrop that Twitter workers pressured their bosses to ban Trump after the January 6 insurrection. By then, such acts of resistance were increasingly legible as part of a shared repertoire of collective action in the industry. As the world watched software engineers, designers, and product managers challenge their employers over war, climate, and democracy itself, more and more people realized that even in the most powerful firms in the world, workers could still fight for what was right. Across companies and campaigns, these fights had coalesced into something unmistakable: a tech worker movement.
Five years later, that once-promising landscape looks nothing like it did. Tech worker organizing now faces formidable opposition: a class of tech billionaires that has banded together and thrown its allegiance to the far right, standing behind the very president whom the industry once condemned. Leading the charge was Musk, who became one of Trump’s most fervent backers, pouring nearly $300 million into Trump’s 2024 campaign, making Twitter’s new owner the largest individual donor in the race. Meanwhile, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg each wrote million-dollar checks to the inaugural committee. Even the liberal old guard, including Google and Microsoft as corporate entities alongside Apple’s Tim Cook and OpenAI’s Sam Altman, all joined in with their own seven-figure donations. The tech oligarchy, as this new alliance has come to be called, emerged from the realization among Silicon Valley’s elite that the Democratic Party had come to view the industry as too big, too powerful, and too unaccountable.
Under the Biden administration, the federal government had cracked down on the tech sector with force. The Federal Trade Commission under Lina Khan, as well as the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division under Jonathan Kanter, revived antitrust enforcement after decades of neglect, launching major cases against Apple, Facebook, Google, and Amazon. These became the most consequential tech lawsuits since the late 1990s, when Microsoft had been accused by the US government of monopolizing web browsers. Meanwhile, the Securities and Exchange Commission and Treasury Department cracked down on crypto markets, sending valuations plunging. The administration also made clear that the industry’s newest obsession—artificial intelligence—would not escape regulatory scrutiny. In October 2022, the White House released the Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights, outlining protections against algorithmic discrimination and data misuse. A year later, Biden issued a sweeping executive order establishing a government-wide framework for “safe, secure, and trustworthy” AI, covering data privacy, consumer protection, and national security. By the 2024 election, executives grew convinced that a second term for Biden would pose a genuine political threat to the industry’s power.
The Democratic Party’s new anti-tech agenda came seemingly out of the blue. For decades, Democrats had been Silicon Valley’s political home; Bill Clinton had cleared the way for its global expansion, and Barack Obama had become the first “social media president,” celebrated for harnessing technology to power his 2012 victory. The alliance had been natural: Democrats had framed their tech donors as the engine of innovation and democracy, while tech firms had embraced the image of themselves as progressive champions, conveniently aligned with political power. That’s why Biden’s much stronger hand in regulating the industry felt, to tech’s billionaires, like an aberration that could be explained only as the political manifestation of the broader techlash that had erupted in the latter half of the 2010s.
At first, the industry tried to ride out the backlash by reaffirming its progressive credentials—funding diversity initiatives, touting commitments to “ethical AI,” and positioning itself as a partner to democratic reform. As the criticism intensified, many leaders turned defensive, lashing out at journalists, regulators, and the liberal critics they once courted. But to the tech elite, the most threatening challenge came not from Washington or the press but from their own employees. If the techlash represented the broader wave of public outrage, then the tech worker movement was the tip of the spear—the most acute manifestation of this broader revolt. In this way, the radicalization of tech’s billionaires can be traced to the moment they saw the public—and, more crucially, their own employees—turn against them.
Few captured this fear more bluntly than Marc Andreessen, one of Silicon Valley’s most prominent venture capitalists, who told The New York Times that, by Trump’s first term, tech workers had become “professional activists.” He complained that “it just turns out the way to exercise professional activism right now, most effectively, is to go and destroy a company from the inside.” He went further still, caricaturing what he saw as these activists’ worldview: “You are all evil. White people are evil. All men are evil. Capitalism is evil. Tech is evil.”
This brewing frustration among Silicon Valley’s billionaires erupted in 2022, when the industry plunged into a recession. Mass layoffs swept across the sector, and hiring freezes became the norm. As employers scrambled to restore profitability, they also seized the moment to reset the balance of power between themselves and their workers. Going beyond the necessary cost cutting, tech’s newly radicalized billionaires used this moment to wage class war on what they saw as an unruly workforce through the reassertion of managerial control.
Part of this counteroffensive meant winning the culture war and dismantling the left-liberal foundations that they believed turned their own workers against them. Nowhere was this clearer than in Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter in October 2022. Without a clear economic case for buying the platform—Twitter had always struggled to turn a profit—many speculated that the billionaire’s intention was to strike a blow against “liberal elites” and progressives while uplifting right-wing discourse. Far-right extremists celebrated the announcement, believing that Musk’s leadership would usher in a new era of unrestrained anti-establishment populism.
Initially, when we were brought on to support Twitter’s underground campaign, we were optimistic that a powerful union drive could counter Musk’s attack. That, however, turned out to be wrong: Musk’s first move was to immediately cut 80 percent of the workforce. He also gutted diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs and the human rights and AI ethics team, and curbed content moderation efforts, framing these cuts as a crusade against “wokeism” and the privileged, liberal-elite culture of tech workers. Those who remained were subjected to public humiliation and arbitrary tests of loyalty. Well-regarded engineers were forced to print out their code for inspection by Tesla engineers. Employees in good standing were told to justify their continued employment in written reports. And everyone was made to work long hours and meet impossible deadlines—with some even sleeping in the office to prove their dedication. Within a couple of weeks of the acquisition, the union met its demise.
For the public, Musk turned the company into a spectacle of domination, which he openly showcased on Twitter itself. And with any hope of internal dissent eliminated, he then reversed the ban on Trump, signaling loud and clear that Twitter no longer belonged to the unruly workers whom he purged from the company.
And for other industry elites who had grown frustrated with dealing with their own mutinous employees, Musk’s assault on Twitter’s workforce opened the floodgates, signaling to the rest of the industry that an all-out attack on its workers was not just possible but necessary. Shortly after, Microsoft followed suit, dismantling its AI ethics teams and cutting funding for DEI initiatives. Zuckerberg likewise clamped down on free expression, issuing new rules to limit political discussion on Facebook’s internal platforms. Dissent, once celebrated by these companies as a close cousin of disruption, was suddenly treated as a threat to be eradicated.
With their new drive to undo the left-liberal foundations that recast them as villains and to avoid another bout of Biden-esque regulation, tech’s billionaires found in Trump the perfect political partner. Together, they forged an alliance that fused deregulation with political repression—accelerating tech’s pursuit of profit, dismantling the very agencies meant to protect workers, and slashing social protections like healthcare, all while eroding the social and political conditions that once fomented the tech workers’ revolt against them. Indeed, what defines the power of the tech oligarchy is precisely their ability to operate not just as economic but as political actors—shaping public discourse, installing politicians, setting policies, and even redefining the terms of governance itself. Ironically, the very class solidarity developed through the countless tech worker protests, open letters, and walkouts helped provoke its own gravest threat: a unified tech elite hell-bent on stamping out the movement.
This essay is adapted with permission from Against Tech Oligarchy: Worker Resistance in the World’s Most Powerful Industry, published in 2026 by Haymarket Books.
Independent and nonprofit, Boston Review relies on reader funding. To support work like this, please donate here.