The Book Your Tech Boss Doesn't Want You to Read

Our modern tech oligarch is a distinctly pathetic creature, an uncharismatic dork with a massively inflated ego. These 21st-century robber barons can’t stand the thought that some in society might not bow to their authority — least of all the workers on their payroll. The prominent right-wing venture capitalist Marc Andreessen represented his own class well in a 2025 interview, when he bemoaned that “companies are basically being hijacked to engines of social change, social revolution. The employee base is going feral.”

This is the quote that opens Against Tech Oligarchy, a new book by longtime tech workers and labor organizers JS Tan and Clarissa Redwine. The book analyzes the historical context within which this new tech oligarchy has matured, as told from an underappreciated perspective: the tech worker movement that opposes it. The authors’ motivation with this book is to ensure workers are successful in counteracting an increasingly unhinged tech capitalist class. And they are qualified to do it, both drawing on their personal experiences of the past decade. From Google to Kickstarter, Mapbox, Twitter, and the New York Times, it’s a thrilling history to read. We start with early instances of tech worker success, running public pressure campaigns such as against the militarization of Google through Project Maven, then to positive unionization efforts, such as at Kickstarter, before ending with the recent losses and standstills that characterize tech worker organizing in the past couple years.

The book starts by invoking media theorists Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron’s 1995 concept of the “Californian Ideology” as a sort of bioculture for mid-2010s Silicon Valley. As the authors describe it, the Californian Ideology is a fusion of “the utopian visions of both the New Left and the conservative right — celebrating market power and individual empowerment while refusing to critically examine the contradictions between them.” Think Tesla solving the climate crisis, or Twitter promoting democracy via the Arab Spring. The triumph of market-driven technological advancement over societal woes, the naive optimism that companies could exercise near-monopoly control, provided they agree to “[not] be evil” about the whole thing. This, along with terrific monetary compensation, was pitched to Silicon Valley’s many smart, young, liberal tech workers. But in the mid- to late 2010s, the facade started to wear off: Big Tech became associated with Edward Snowden’s revelations of government surveillance, the Cambridge Analytica political advertising scandal, and the rise of tech monopolies and surveillance capitalism.

Many tech workers began to demand answers and accountability from their employers, leading to what the authors categorize as worker organizing dominated by public pressure campaigns. Worker-organizers, recognizing certain big tech companies’ concern for their public image, brought their employers’ wrongdoings to the public square in hopes of forcing management to change course. Campaigns during this era include the 2018 Google Walkout over sexual harassment and other workplace issues, walkouts against sexual harassment at Riot Games, as well as actions by Amazon Employees for Climate Justice. 

An essential factor that made public pressure campaigns successful was that individual tech workers were experiencing the zenith of their power within the Silicon Valley labor market. Tech firms sought to resolve these PR crises not just to improve their public image, but also to remain desirable for skilled job seekers. During this time, tech oligarchs developed a partisan view of this heightened worker activism, summed up by Andreessen: “Multiple companies were hours away from full-blown riots.”

After the public pressure era of tech worker organizing came another phase of struggle: the “Recognition Playbook” era, defined by the emergence of a standard organizing model for unionization with major labor unions. Tan and Redwine chronicle this shift over several chapters, with an eye toward evolving beyond it. In this approach, workers first win a union — through months or years of underground organizing to gather supermajority support — before securing real gains from their employer in contract negotiations, supported by the looming threat of a strike. In the eyes of the authors, this standard union playbook, which calls for deferring confrontation with the boss until a union is won, is a poor fit for the tech worker movement — both because of the unique conditions of the tech industry and the nature of tech work itself.

Tech work allows for employees across time zones and countries, some even fully remote. Distributed work confers some benefits to workers, but it does not lend itself to the deep relationships required for effective organizing. The nature of remote work means that most spontaneous communication between workers must be facilitated by the boss or their tools. Naturally, this suppresses open and honest communication, leading would-be organizers to experience a deep sense of isolation at work, feeling as though no one else is agitated or motivated to fight for change. Add to this the varying roles, geographies, contracted-out labor, and even visa statuses of workers in a single company, which make it challenging for organizers to find “bread and butter” issues common to all workers. 

Even when workers are able to unite over common issues, the threat of strike is a much less powerful tool for tech workers than for workers in most other industries. As the book eloquently states, “tech companies do not rely on the daily labor power of their workers, but on the rents generated from the [automated] products they own.” A work stoppage does not immediately stop production or revenue generation — it only slows the rate of progress on automation. This upends the power dynamics upon which the Recognition Playbook is based, since tech firms can weather a strike. 

Other organizers have drawn similar lessons. In a recent article for the labor movement magazine Long Haul, John Cruickshank and other New York Times Tech Guild (NYTTG) workers reflect on the Times Tech Guild’s 2024 Election Day strike, and conclude that strikes by tech workers require a longer time to realize financial damage to the company. When the strike started, problems already began to mount: features didn’t ship, ad services broke, and scabs were ineffective at fixing them. Striking workers assessed that these issues would compound dramatically over time — and all it would take is one failure big enough to reverse their fortunes. But this damage was never realized, because union leadership called off the strike after just a week. Management, for its part, had also taken steps to produce this disappointing outcome: in the months before the strike, they required 60-hour work weeks to stress test systems, and a month-long code freeze leading up to the Election Day strike — effectively using pre-strike labor to scab on their own strike. Clearly the bosses had foresight, and, in this moment, we need that too.

Based on the lessons of this strike and other episodes, Tan and Redwine advocate an adjustment of the tech labor strategy, arguing that a slow, conflict-deferred strategy does not adequately address how the work process happens in the tech field. The solution, instead, is to encourage more frequent open confrontation with bosses earlier in the organizing journey, even if workers currently lack a recognized union.

There is already evidence that a more conflict-forward approach is effective. Redwine and Tan show how, at Twitter, the January 6 insurrection shocked workers into taking aggressive action against management eventually leading to the ban of Trump’s account on their platform. 

More recently, tech workers organizing for Palestinian liberation have seen similar pockets of defiance and solidarity. Through a multi-pronged campaign that mixed internal organizing with direct and highly personal targeting of decision makers, No Azure for Apartheid (NOAA) achieved the first real win for divestment from Israel in Big Tech, locking the Israeli spy agency Unit 8200 out of certain Microsoft Cloud services used in the mass surveillance of Palestinians. This campaign, and tech organizing for Palestine more broadly, shows how principled direct action can broaden the tech worker movement’s horizons. When faced with something as horrific as a genocide, power becomes imaginable because powerlessness is unthinkable.

Bread-and-butter issues are also increasingly being tackled outside the context of contract negotiations. In the wake of Google’s new policy of continuous, unannounced “rolling layoffs” starting with the first layoff in 2023, Alphabet Workers Union (AWU) announced a “Job Security Campaign” to protect its members. This multi-campus pressure campaign, involving open letters, email campaigns, and public rallies, secured improved severance packages as well as the option to accept voluntary buyouts in lieu of capricious layoffs.

These campaigns are a good start, but nowhere near sufficient. They can begin to shift the window of possibility and provide fertile soil within which an alternative to the Californian Ideology can blossom. Both traditional and innovative tactics are crucial for tech workers to believe in and actualize their own power through unity. The perception of our fellow workers and the industry in general has become filtered through the haze of our own perceived complicity, our own internalization of the techlash that radicalized our bosses. Books like Against Tech Oligarchy provide an antidote to that. We, as workers, need to create a new vision of the tech worker through confrontational action. Retaliation need not breed withdrawal of worker militancy, and with the right blend of strategy, smarts, and instinct, we can transform this feeling of isolation into solidarity. If billionaires like Marc Andreessen will label any push for workplace democracy a “full-blown violent riot,” then we have no reason not to incite one.