A New Tech Magazine For A New Movement
(AF /Jaafar Ashtiyeh)
Much of what passes for tech journalism is thinly disguised advertising for the latest gadget, so-called artificial intelligence or app. You could easily lay this model of tech journalism-as-marketing at the door of one publication: Wired, the unofficial hype mag of Silicon Valley’s early years – a glossy that never found a video game you didn’t need.
But times have changed, and nobody, especially among the people who work in Silicon Valley, think it’s a utopia anymore. Workers have walked out to demand that their creativity not fuel war and surveillance. The industry has fought unionization campaigns by blue- and white-collar workers alike. CEOs have been hauled before Congress.
This generation even has its own publication, one that captures the conflicts, radicalism and organizing of a new era in the valley: Logic, a small print magazine that was founded in 2016.
Logic publishes a unique mix of tech thinkers and tech workers, a category that covers warehouse workers and data scientists alike. I caught up with two of the founders and editors: Ben Tarnoff and Moira Weigel. They recently published an op-ed taking stock of the state of tech organizing, and we talked about what role their magazine is playing in this new landscape.
What created the explosion in tech organizing over the last few years?
Ben: An important catalyst for the growth of collective action among white-collar tech workers was the 2016 election of Donald Trump … this was a moment that caused a number of people working in the tech industry to reflect more deeply on the social harms of the technologies that they were building or could build.
That process of reflection carried a certain sense of moral urgency with it that eventually led to a series of confrontations with their managers. As white-collar workers began to demand more input into the decisions around what the company was building, they encountered pushback from management and, in turn, began to develop a new way of thinking about themselves, about their position within the company, about who they were, which is primarily workers, but also what kind of tactics they could use to affect change.
So, to summarize, they land on the idea of workplace-based collective action as the most effective tool for pursuing greater control over their work. These mobilizations have not solely been driven by concerns over the social harms of technologies, but also by very real workplace issues. And in particular, the persistence of racist and sexist oppressions within these workplaces. The Google walkout, for instance, which was probably the highest-profile, largest collective action we've seen from white-collar tech workers involving 20,000 workers from 50 Google offices around the world, was explicitly about protesting sexism and racism in the workplace.
There’s been a lot written about the Californian Ideology, that distinctive Silicon Valley blend of hippie values and economic libertarianism. Do these events show that it contained the seeds of its own destruction?
Moira: Yes and no. We're in an authentically different historical conjuncture than the 1990s. In one sense, the collapse of the Californian ideology is connected to the broader crisis of the neoliberal consensus. But at the individual level, yes, you get into the industry, thinking that it's the best way to positively impact the world. And after five years of seeing their friends’ startups fail and stepping over homeless people on the way to Twitter HQ, you start to have a rather different view of it.
Ben: It’s the revenge of the more liberatory aspects of the ‘60s and ‘70s counterculture against the hippie Reaganism that overtakes the industry in the 1980s and ‘90s. A lot of people went into tech because they wanted to change the world – they didn't just want to get rich. So that sense of disillusionment that can occur when you see that your bosses are motivated purely by profit can set in motion the radicalizing dynamic.
Moira: It seems analogous to certain movements within feminism. [COO of Facebook and author of Lean In] Sheryl Sandberg is interesting in this context. The inner contradictions of liberal feminism lead people to socialist feminism. Often people do come in with a sincere commitment to certain values and then realize that the instrument that they inherited is not the right one.
That’s a great analogy. I’m curious about the vulnerabilities of some of these workers you’ve talked about. We know a lot about the risks that warehouse workers run when they organize – are tech workers safer?
Ben: There are obvious advantages to being a senior software engineer at a top tech firm. You have a relatively large amount of labor market power, and it would be relatively easy for someone in that position to find another job. But a lot of people at these firms are not senior software engineers. They might be occupying more entry-level jobs. They might be occupying jobs that are perceived to be less technical. There are a huge number of subcontracted white-collar workers. It's significant for instance that the Alphabet Workers Union is open to both full-time and subcontracted Google workers.
Many of the leaders of these mobilizations have been women of color, people of color, trans people. And these are folks who face obviously more discrimination in the workplace, are generally a higher risk of being terminated and also will generally face a harder time in the labor market looking for another position. So I think we have to be attentive to how vulnerability is unevenly distributed within even the most relatively privileged layer of the tech workforce.
Certainly white-collar worker organizers have been fired for organizing both at Google and at Amazon … every indication suggests that they're eager to use the same playbook as they do with their blue-collar or subcontracted workforces, which is to retaliate against organizers.
Logic is sort of symbiotic with the growing tech movement. How does that work?
Moira: I'm always making this corny joke that the only real reason to start a magazine is to throw parties. Any new publication, especially a little publication, is trying to call its public into existence, call its readers into existence as a community. One of the reasons that we had for wanting to start it is that we felt there was a gap in discourse that we wanted to try to fill, somewhere between TechCrunch and Jonathan Franzen, like a space of talking about technology that wasn't scolding or just totally sycophantic.
Before 2016, you could often read the press about Silicon Valley and be forgiven for thinking that there were like five people in it: Sheryl Sandberg, Peter Thiel and Zuckerberg or whoever. Logic’s constituencies were more academics, activists, rank-and-file tech workers, journalists and artists and creative writers too. As events unfolded, rank-and-file tech workers got caught up in this kind of political activity we're talking about. I don’t think of us as an activist publication with a line we’re pushing – it’s more that the editors and contributors have a common set of questions.
Your latest issue is “Commons.” Any pieces you’d like to shout out?
Ben: There’s a piece by Aaron Benanav called “How to Make a Pencil.” It emerged over a series of conversations with Aaron, as he tried to figure out how you could plan an economy. This question is a very old one and has a particular resonance on the left, as generations of socialists have tried to come up with planning mechanisms that could replace or simulate markets in order to construct a post-capitalist economy. It's an extraordinary piece because it's an intervention into those debates with a very concrete proposal.
Moira: I was closely involved with an anonymous interview with an engineer at Amazon Web Services. Amazon web services is increasingly the infrastructure for the public cloud in general. So part of putting it in the “Commons” issue is to say, this is the common infrastructure of huge amounts of everyday life. It's almost impossible to use the internet without using AWS. There was some experiment a while ago where someone tried to do it and they couldn't.
You might also enjoy
