When activism shines through
Protests over Microsoft's ties to the Gaza conflict harken back to a more vibrant era of internal resistance in the tech industry. Is that dissent mostly dormant, or has it just gone underground?
Where has tech activism gone? That was one of the many questions my colleagues and I had started to ask ourselves when we began this newsletter earlier this year.
We remembered a time in the not-too-distant past, when it was an active beat: employees were pressuring their bosses at places like Google, Facebook, and Amazon over questionable government and military contracts, environmental issues around energy and climate change, and internal debates about sexual harassment and racial equity, in very public and effective ways. East Coast media outlets were standing up new desks and shipping reporters out to California to cover this. And talk about labor organizing was beginning to percolate and show influence.
The public pressure had real impact at the time, both internally at tech firms and beyond, as the general public and elected officials began to cast a more skeptical eye on the industry.
It seemed like we had entered a new era, where tech companies were going to have to answer harder questions and take more responsibility for their products, now that they had come of age. And in the Biden administration, these companies did.
But fast forward to today, and we see a very different landscape. Many companies and their CEOs are openly appealing to the new administration. The weirder, darker, right-wing philosophies that animate some of Silicon Valley appear to be driving some of the most controversial aspects of policy at the moment. Deregulation around critical issues such as AI seems to be the flavor of the day. And much of the public dissent has disappeared, or as we hypothesized early in this newsletter’s run, gone underground.
That’s why the story, which Ariella included as a link on Tuesday, about a Microsoft engineer who interrupted company CEO Satya Nadella during a keynote speech this week to protest the company’s work with the Israeli government, felt like such a throwback.
The protest occurred during Microsoft’s annual Build conference, when employee Joe Lopez stood up and started shouting at Nadella. “How about you show how Israeli war crimes are powered by Azure,” the employee yelled, according to The Verge and video of the incident on social media, naming the company’s cloud-computing software, which it recently admitted to providing to the Israeli military. Lopez later sent a mass email to colleagues that disputed the company’s claims about how Azure was being used in Gaza, according to the AP.
This was one of several pro-Palestinian demonstrations at the conference, following other protests in recent months, organized in part with the help of an activist group of employees and former employees called No Azure for Apartheid. The group seems to be one of the few activist employee groups to be openly organizing at a major tech company currently.
What happened after Lopez’s protest shows why: the employee was fired swiftly by the company. On top of that, the company also started blocking emails being sent with the terms like “Palestine,” “Gaza,” and “genocide,” the Verge reported.
These companies no longer have qualms about silencing dissent forcefully and publicly. This cultural shift is perhaps the biggest change since that period during Trump’s first term. The law has always given private companies pretty wide latitude to police employee speech as they see fit. But now they’re not afraid to exercise that right. In a deep dive into this sea change, The Washington Post attributes the cultural shift in part to the recent years of layoffs in Silicon Valley, resulting in a tighter jobs market that has given employers a stronger hand.
Here’s what else we’re reading this week:
My friend Jacob Ward, who runs the Rip Current newsletter, had a great piece recently that looked at the copyright issues raised by AI, amid a purge at the office that regulates IP in Washington. On that note, this piece from Bloomberg is especially relevant. The outlet notes that there was at least some discussion at Google about giving publishers the ability to opt out of having their intellectual property used in Google’s AI products. AI of course, draws from primary sources but often obscures where that information is coming from when it answers questions. Instead of giving publishers an out, Google decided to require that they opt in if they also wanted their sites and material to be included as results in the company’s all-powerful search engine. “Site owners that rely on traffic can’t afford to skip listing on Google, which still holds more than 90% of the search market, making it a gateway to the modern web,” the reporters note.
The FTC’s antitrust case against Meta for its acquisitions of WhatsApp and Instagram is ongoing. The Verge has running coverage.
According to some new projections from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, more than half of the electricity going to data centers will be used for AI by 2028. That means that AI could consume as much electricity annually as nearly a quarter of all US households, according to this detailed report about AI and energy usage in the MIT Tech Review.
The GOP tax bill, which we wrote about last week, was able to squeak through razor-thin margins in the House in part because of the deaths of three septuagenarian Democratic representatives this year. h/t Jacobin’s Branko Marcetic. That meant the bill could pass with just 215 votes, eking past the 214 no votes, instead of the 218 votes required to win a majority with full participation in the 435-member body. Anger continues to simmer over recent decisions by some of the biggest officials in Democratic politics — Joe Biden, Dianne Feinstein, Ruth Bader Ginsburg — to stay in office past their ability to effectively govern, with great consequences. Joe Garofoli at the San Francisco Chronicle penned a good look at how efforts to create an age limit within the Democratic Party in California are faltering, even as youth support for the party declines.
Inside the Trump Family’s “Money-making machine” from Bloomberg.
The richest 10 Americans grew $365 billion richer over the past year, according to Oxfam. This story in the Financial Times looks at economist Gabriel Zucman and the push for a global billionaire tax.
Elsewhere, a good piece in the New York Times about AI’s growing role in the world of Hollywood animation. I wonder if there’s a societal line to be drawn between AI as an assistant helping Real Humans™ with small tasks, versus AI as creator, which aside from the weird ethical issues, it’s just bad at. It’s a blurry line admittedly, and one that still raises plenty of questions about job displacement: Jeffrey Katzenberg, former chairman of Walt Disney Studios and a co-founder of DreamWorks Animation, has predicted that, by next year, it will take only about 50 people to make a major animated movie, compared to 500 a decade ago, according to the NYT.
See you next week.