newrepublic.com
The Stark Political Divide Between Tech CEOs and Their
Employees
By Moira Weigel and Ben Tarnoff
8-9 minutes
February 7, 2019
Two years ago, two Stanford professors teamed up with a
journalist to survey more than 600 “elite technology company leaders and
founders” about their political views. The aver-age executive, they found,
believes in free markets, supports gay marriage, likes environ-mental
protection, hates unions, and distrusts regulation. He says he wants higher
taxes to fund social programs, but he’d prefer it if entrepreneurs ran such
programs instead of the government. (This may explain his fondness for charter
schools.) Countless newspaper or magazine profiles have described his
lifestyle. He microdoses LSD. Each year, he travels to Burning Man. He may well
have attended the Women’s March or protested the Muslim ban. These, we often
hear, are the politics of Silicon Valley—a distinctive mix of liberalism and
libertarianism.
Decades ago, two British media theorists came up with a term
that encapsulates this set of views: “the Californian Ideology.” In an
influential essay first published in 1995, Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron
described the politics of Silicon Valley as a synthesis of socially liberal
attitudes inherited from the Bay Area counterculture with “an anti-statist
gospel of cybernetic libertarianism.” The philosophy “promiscuously combines
the free-wheeling spirit of the hippies and the entrepreneurial zeal of the
yuppies,” Barbrook and Cameron wrote, while mixing “the social liberalism of
New Left and the economic liberalism of New Right.” It’s why Wired magazine
could run a flattering interview with Newt Gingrich on its cover.
Since the 2016 election, politicians and pundits have begun to
question the longstanding assumption that the internet is always and everywhere
a force for good. But the “tech back-lash” has yet to overturn another
assumption: that the Californian Ideology still governs the tech industry as a
whole. The upper rungs still clearly subscribe to its tenets. Yet those ten-ets
are nowhere near as dominant among the workers who make up the majority. And a
failure to differentiate the people who own the industry from the people who
work in it is causing the media to misread the rising wave of rank-and-file
rebellion.
Employees at companies like Google and Amazon are
challenging their employers to drop contracts with the Pentagon, ICE, and other
government agencies. They are organizing for workplaces free from sexual
harassment and discrimination. They are demanding better wages, benefits, and
working conditions for the contractors who supply much of the labor that makes
the industry run.
As they do, they are invoking a very different language than
their bosses are. Indeed, they are creating a whole new paradigm.
In their essay on the Californian Ideology, Barbrook and
Cameron described the people who worked in Silicon Valley as “digital
artisans.” Today they are more likely to be called “entre-preneurs” or
“creatives,” but the idea remains the same: engineers, designers, and product
managers are driven by passion and purpose. As Steve Jobs exhorted them, they
do what they love.
Lately, however, this cohort has begun to talk about
themselves in a different way, as “tech workers.” Popularized by organizations
like the Tech Workers Coalition—which was co-founded in San Francisco in 2014
by a labor organizer and a software engineer—the term challenges the
Californian Ideology at several levels. As we usually understand them, work-ers
are not “creatives,” inspired by a higher calling. Most people are workers by
necessity, and sell their labor to make a living. By calling themselves
workers, members of the new movement are staking a claim to this common
identity.
This common identity, in turn, has enabled tech workers to
build alliances across roles with the shuttle drivers, security guards,
janitors, and cafeteria staff who make up the industry’s “invisible workforce.”
In 2017, food service workers at Facebook voted to unionize after white-collar
employees distributed materials on campus, did house-to-house visits, and asked
pointed questions at “all hands” meetings. The recent Google walkout—which saw
20,000 people stop work in offices all over the world—also involved both full-time
and con-tract employees. In the months since, the organizers have demanded
better wages and bene-fits for the contractors, who make up more than half of
Google’s workforce.
If elite paternalism is the preferred mode of Silicon Valley
leaders—evident in their belief that people like them should run social
programs—tech workers are taking a different tack. While they recognize that
different kinds of workers wield different levels of power within a company,
they are forging relationships around what binds them rather than what does
not.
As Stephanie Parker, one of the organizers of the Google
walkout, explained to Wired, “Seeing the cafeteria workers and security guards
at Silicon Valley companies bravely de-mand access to benefits and respect was
a deeply inspiring experience.” The tech worker movement has also drawn
inspiration from organizing in other sectors. Leaders of the Google walkout
hailed as a model protests by McDonald’s workers against sexual harass-ment. A
Google worker who helped lead the anti-Pentagon campaign last year cited the
in-fluence of ongoing teacher strikes: “It’s time for us to join the new labor
movement,” the worker told Jacobin.
Tech workers are also claiming greater control over their
work—control that the Californi-an Ideology suggested they should have already,
but which recent confrontations with their bosses have made clear they do not.
At Amazon, employees have petitioned CEO Jeff Bezos for “a choice in what
[they] build, and a say in how it is used.” At Google, they have de-manded “a
say in decisions that affect their lives and the world around them.” To that
end, Google organizers want to create a seat for a worker representative on the
board, as compa-nies regularly do in many European countries.
These members of the new tech worker movement don’t sound
like the “hippie yuppies” of the Californian Ideology. They are embracing a
more collective, worker-driven politics—one that owes less to Ayn Rand than it
does to Eugene Debs.
Until recently, media outlets have failed to register this
shift, because they have let tech ex-ecutives speak for the industry as a
whole. A piece in The New York Times, based on the Stanford study cited above,
purported to express the views of “Silicon Valley.” In the twelfth paragraph,
the author revealed that “Silicon Valley” meant executives. It’s roughly
equiva-lent to interviewing a handful of Wall Street hedge fund managers and
claiming the results speak for New York.
Several journalists have skillfully reported on the tech
worker actions. But their colleagues in the opinion pages have mostly failed to
understand these actions’ nature and significance. In The New York Times, Susan
Fowler wondered whether the campaigns against the Pen-tagon and other
government agencies reflected “Silicon Valley’s strong libertarian leanings.”
An editorial in The Wall Street Journal condemned “the rise of campus-style
political activ-ism among Silicon Valley employees.”
These analyses fail to register that the tech worker
movements are creating a new para-digm—a paradigm that breaks with the mix of
libertarian anti-statism and hippie-inflected liberalism that continues to
dominate tech’s leadership class. The leaders of the tech worker movement are
making a new and paradoxical gambit—that by claiming a common identity as
workers, they can exercise their special power. Rather than waiting to be saved
by CEOs, they are threatening the profit engine. They are betting that when
tech workers who are expensive to hire and train join in collective action,
CEOs must pay attention.
