As Elon Musk yoked his public persona to far-right politics, there was consternation in the liberal media. How could an entrepreneur who builds electric cars in California turn into a Trump-saluting Texan? Numerous think pieces offered to disentangle the threads of his psychology, his fascist family history, or whatever else might explain the otherwise inexplicable. In reality, the answer is fairly straightforward. The rightward turn is in no way limited to Musk, and it doesn’t end with his recent spat with Trump. Leading figures across greater Silicon Valley have turned right for the same reason business elites always have: they want more power over their workers.
The last Trump administration was a time of historic mobilization in and around the tech industry. Highly prized engineers used their leverage to resist sexist workplace culture and declared that #TechWontBuildIt against attempts to develop technologies for militaries or immigration enforcement. The misinformation blitz of the 2016 elections spurred the growth of “trust and safety” as a profession within the profession, which made attempts at pro-social moderation policies a norm on social media and served as a check against profit motives. Workers walked out and joined unions. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, tech companies led—and profited from—the rise of flexible, remote workplaces.
As they began to recognize the threat of collective power, tech CEOs pushed back. They locked down the “all hands” meetings and open chat channels that represented the free-wheeling culture of tech startups. Elon Musk bought Twitter and took it private. Twitter was vulnerable to a takeover because it had a strong employee culture that ran the company more like public infrastructure than a profit-centered business. (A few years earlier, I co-led an effort to limit that vulnerability with a shareholder proposal on community ownership at the company.) Musk fired the trust-and-safety teams, and anyone who survived his layoffs had to return to in-person work or lose their jobs. His layoffs prefigured similar workforce cuts across the industry after COVID-era valuations deflated.
Musk took things so far that other CEOs could look moderate by being only slightly less toxic. Meta’s subsequent mass layoffs—and its post-election genuflections to MAGA culture, such as forcing staff to move to Texas—don’t compare to Musk’s unbridled campaign spending and Trump fandom. The Overton window of acceptable labor relations in tech has moved considerably lower.
Yet again, these oligarchs remind us that reaping vast wealth from the work of others is an unlikely precursor for general benevolence. It is an old story. But, because of the phenomenon I call “innovation amnesia,” they try to convince us that this time things will be different, and that new technology will change basic power dynamics. We were told that an app-based gig economy would bring workers freedom rather than continuing the march of precarity; the advent of AI is now being used to justify slashing the federal bureaucracy. The truth is, new technology mostly accelerates flows of power that were already underway. In Donald Trump, the tech elite found an ally who has little regard for workers and is prepared to spend many billions of dollars on immigration crackdowns and AI weaponry. Trump’s lifelong penchant for chaos, his new backers have discovered, is not so different from Silicon Valley’s affection for “disruption.”
If we’re to have a healthier, labor-centered approach to building technology, other kinds of disruptions will be needed, as well as different kinds of continuity. Workers can start by recognizing the power that tech-worker organizing has had, if in nothing else than in motivating the rightward backlash. From there, they should adopt durable labor-organizing strategies that deepen their capacity to challenge the power of tech elites. Finally, they don’t need to take for granted that elite tech oligarchs need to exist. Cooperative ownership of tech companies is a longer-term strategy for making innovation accountable to workers and the common good.
Labor organizing in and around tech companies must recognize the forces they are up against. To begin, this means building solidarity beyond tech workers alone. Last time around, Silicon Valley organizing tended to occur through niche organizations rather than by joining established unions that include workers of other sectors and social classes. That’s innovation amnesia again—the belief that building magical new machines somehow renders foregoing institutions no longer relevant. Tech workers sometimes imagine that their industry has nothing in common with any other. But when confronting a more challenging political environment, broader unions bring strength and experience. They can also be a way for tech workers to find common cause with others’ struggles. Today, almost all workers are tech workers in one way or another.
I am proud that my own union, the Communication Workers of America, has been helping to make that solidarity possible. In addition to representing utility workers at major telecoms and educators like me, CWA has been organizing video game workers and the Alphabet Workers Union across Google’s parent company. This kind of union helps us see common cause and build strategies together.
The attack on remote work and other forms of flexibility presents an opportunity. Struggles for shorter working hours and more control over workplace conditions galvanized the early labor movement. Winning on these fronts makes life sweeter and work more rewarding. But for decades, these demands have largely been forgotten. Rather than liberating us, advancing technology has instead enabled work to creep into more hours of many of our lives. The gain and then loss of flexible work-time arrangements could be a chance to revive the demand for control over time and to expose the “extremely hardcore” ethic for the danger that it is to healthy lives and societies. The struggle for control over time resonates across the economy, from high-income engineers to low-income gig workers.
Regardless of its strategy, organized labor power is essential for containing the threat that tech oligarchs pose across society. The more their workers keep them on notice, the harder it will be for them to recklessly eliminate policies that protect user safety and throw their weight behind authoritarian politicians. But this will only be possible if labor power is also ready for exit from oligarchic workplaces. Just as millions of X users have migrated to Bluesky and Mastodon to escape Musk’s musings and moderation policies, workers and citizens must begin building tools more under their control. The open protocols that underlie those alternative platforms open the door for a new generation of tech companies that don’t have to pursue totalizing monopolies but can instead identify sustainable niches on open networks. The declining cost of building and running open-access AI models also makes it possible to imagine an AI revolution controlled by the people who build and use these tools. We don’t have to assume that winner-take-all business models are the only way to build useful technology.
For the past decade, I have worked with people trying to build cooperative platforms. I co-lead an accelerator for these efforts, Start.coop, which has supported dozens of teams across industries to build ambitious new companies, blending lessons from innovation-centric startup culture and long experience with self-governance in the cooperative movement. Many entrepreneurs want to steer their companies toward an “exit to community,” rather than the typical destinations that startups pursue, like acquisition or a public stock offering. Frustratingly, however, current legal frameworks don’t suffice for enabling these kinds of efforts to access capital at the scale they need. The most promising co-ops exhaust themselves to raise up to $1 million or so in equity crowdfunding, while their competitors can raise tens of millions from venture capitalists.
We need policy designed for communities to build the solutions they know they need. Groups of ordinary people with a reasonable common need should be able to access capital to meet that need, whether it is building a platform around their shared interest or deploying affordable broadband. For instance, the 1936 Rural Electrification Act enabled financing for hundreds of customer-owned electric companies across rural America, thanks to the federal Farm Credit System, a cooperative-friendly parallel banking system that serves the agricultural sector. These success stories should be—and can be—generalized across the economy, including in tech. With appropriate tax treatment, for instance, venture capitalists could sell their startups not just to investment markets but also to leveraged buyouts by workers or users. Pension funds could encourage their investments to mature toward public accountability, not just private returns.
An eloquent new book by software developer Coraline Ada Ehmke, We Just Build Hammers, reminds her fellow technologists that engineering has never been a neutral profession. When they are asked to do something immoral, workers have a responsibility to resist and possibly to quit. The new alliance of tech and politics is hoping workers will forget that until it is too late.
