Product details
- ISBN 9798888908570
- Dimensions: 139 x 215mm
- Publication Date: 15 Sep 2026
- Publisher: Haymarket Books
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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As tech bosses fall in line with fascism, tech workers are fighting back. This is the rousing inside story of their movement—and how it spawned the right-wing, 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 staging walkouts against ICE contracts and CEOs joining mass mobilizations against the so-called Muslim ban. But it wasn’t long before the tech bosses started to fall in line with the new administration. Using the autonomy afforded to them by the industry’s progressive and mission-driven culture, tens of thousands of tech workers began speaking out against their own executives. This burgeoning resistance included organizing against military contracts, walkouts to protest sexism, agitation about tech’s role in the climate crisis, and even a wave of union drives. By the early 2020s, tech workers had sparked an exciting movement that seemed to hold the potential to check the industry’s rapid growth and reactionary drift.
But as their struggle grew, so did the employers’ backlash. A new class consciousness took root among the billionaire owners. Hellbent 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.
Against Tech Oligarchy provides a gripping account of this inspiring movement’s development and offers a balance sheet of its successes and failures that will prove crucial for anyone looking to challenge right-wing billionaires anywhere.
JS Tan is a PhD candidate at MIT and a former Microsoft employee. His work has been featured in The New York Times and MIT Technology Review, among other outlets, and his writing has appeared in Dissent, Jacobin, Foreign Policy, The Baffler, and The Guardian.
Clarissa Redwine is a tech worker and labor activist. She helped organize the industry’s first wall-to-wall union at Kickstarter in 2019 and, as a fellow at NYU Law, she produced a beloved oral history that chronicled the historic win. In 2023, she cofounded Circuit Breakers, the world’s first labor conference dedicated to organizing the tech industry. Her work in the labor movement has been featured in The New York Times, the BBC, The Guardian, The Verge, TechCrunch, and many other news outlets.
