How Technology Evolved in Direct, Continuous, Combat with Social Movements
Especially now, we must understand tech in the CONTEXT of our social movements and the rise of tech in the 2nd bubble, both ramping up dramatically in the years following the bank crashes in 2008.
When I got to Silicon Valley in 2009, things were slow in tech, but rapidly picking up pace as “web 2.0” took off; it was in this time that Amazon was, despite great skepticism, emerging as a behemoth, beyond shopping, as one of the fundamental technical infrastructures of the entire world: AWS. Tech gained the ability to scale global sites, applications and other services using commoditized hardware; this enabled a rapid proliferation in the depth and breadth of software development and lowered the barriers to entry for startups. “The cloud” was the primary technical innovation of this time, also making way for a giant explosion of “big data” programs as tech was getting more information on us than ever before and developing new tech to slice and dice it. Collection and use of this data was propelling huge technology developments and leading to absolute fortunes for tech elite.
So, in what social context was this extraordinarily rapid technical change happening? What social trends were we beginning the second bubble in? Well, AWS launched in 2006 and the banks crashed just two years later. Tech was cautious, but never fully stopped investing and went back whole hog the second it became clear they were sufficiently isolated from the crisis. This fits a trend of tech benefiting and succeeding during times when the People are struggling; we saw another example of this in the pandemic, during which tech doubled its wealth and power while one million people unnecessarily died across the country. Tech was finally starting to get its groove back after the dot com crash of 2002, even as the rest of the country was entering some seriously bad times in the wake of the housing market collapse.
In the few years after, as people were losing their life savings and homes, tech went into a critical growth period which created the internet as we know it today. Uber, Snapchat, Airbnb, Slack, Activision, Venmo, Grindr, Twilio, Github were all born during this time; and then in 2011, tech had a fantastic year of IPOs, with over 40 tech companies becoming publicly traded on the stock market… the most of any corporate sector that year, predicting the tech dominance of the NASDAQ that was to come. Facebook IPOed in 2012.
In the years following the housing crash, tech was aggressively growing and aggressively gentrifying San Francisco and Oakland on the back of its rising bubble, during a time when local communities were financially struggling, lost their homes, became vulnerable to real estate speculation, and couldn’t even make a living wage working in roles like culinary, janitorial and transportation roles for the major tech companies, who purposefully kept wages depressed even though they could trivially afford to give all its workers a living wage. It was a perfect recipe for tech invasion and takeover of San Francisco, especially the Tenderloin area, Oakland, and other cities up and down the Peninsula and East Bay. These areas were weak from financial crisis, and tech took advantage in a big way. AirBnB was founded the same year that the banks crashed; as we know AirBnB is a consistent contributor to housing instability, displacement and gentrification. Its first adopters, of course, were Bay-area techies.
So let’s take a look at what else is happening around the world in this time where tech is very active starting companies and IPOs and the money is starting to really come back (you could tell by how nice the parties got) and moving aggressively into San Francisco and the East Bay. Ah ha! Arab Spring, which kicks off in 2010, traveling through social media, ignited by resistance on tech platforms, and SPREADING to different countries; this was overwhelming proof of how social media could be used as a platform for broad-based and even global, cascading political revolution. Tech elite got a first row seat to the Arab Spring, not only seeing what we saw, but seeing a massive wealth of data and information that was flowing through their systems with infinitely more visibility than we have access to, so that they could model these movements, see the patterns in them, see how different things they did could affect the outcomes, and so on. Arab Spring was a direct confrontation with power, and Power, including tech, watched it warily.
Then in 2011, again, a banner year for tech IPOs; the People, acting on the financial wreckage of the bank crashes in 2008, begin the Occupy movement. Remember, the preparations for the Facebook IPO just months later, are already very much in play and have been for years; they are hoping to hit the exchange at over 100 billion dollars in 2012. So Occupy comes during a moment where tech has this insane momentum, this massively growing leverage, this rapid gentrification of revolutionary cities (Oakland, home of the Black Panthers) and they are in the process of making hundreds of billions of dollars, MORE!!!. When Occupy starts there is already a huge host of tech billionaires and there will be more and more by the year. Direct targets of the Occupy platform, tech was a top of the top of the financial strata, tech elite rapidly becoming world leaders in their own right.
When Occupy is beginning to kick off, the starting criteria to be part of the 1%, was a yearly income of $343,927/year. This put not the majority, but certainly a significant number of technologists firmly in the 1%, via compensation packages that included a significant base salary as well as bonuses and stock grants, and often “windfall” payments from startup mergers and acquisitions and IPOs which were all popping at this time. So tech is not only the 1%, it is a MACHINE for producing the 1%, an active machine for it, and it was designed that way, to produce super monopolies and a very small ruling elite and an entire class of technical workers making many multiples of others with no justification.
Just weeks into Occupy, OPD made a new contract with tech company Shotspotter, which installed sound monitors on the tops of buildings supposedly to “detect gunshot and explosives” — they had done a trial a few years prior but it never got anywhere… an early attempt on OPD by tech. The history suggests a tech industry constantly interfacing with police in attempts to get new technology in there, often meeting significant bureaucratic resistance; but that success accelerated significantly with economic unrest. Showing the connection between gentrification and the tech build-up of the police, a 2011 article just weeks after Occupy New York broke out, covers the city council committee meeting where the Shotspotter contract was approved:
“Six members of the public spoke in favor of the system during the meeting. ‘Please reinstall Shotstopper, please,’ said Kim Jackson, a technology sales consultant from East Oakland. ‘I’m terrified, every night I stay in my house after it gets dark. I hear gun shots.’”
These technologies were being implemented specifically to protect the tech industry and its highly-paid workers from the fall-out of antagonism with local communities, and to suppress resistance and residence in areas marked for tech takeover.
So, during this time the cops are working on smashing Occupy dissent and other social unrest in the Bay area, they are being armed by tech in numerous ways: surveillance, privileged access to consumer data, NEIGHBORHOOD level sound monitors, body cameras, license plate readers, tasers (made by a tech company), big data and analysis capabilities, and so on. After all, the cops are doing something very important for the tech empire: Occupy SPECIFICALLY aimed at tech, in which massive numbers of not only the top 1% but the top of the toppest 1%, were directly implicated.
Tech got busy ramping up the collabs with cops that year and over the next several years. NextDoor, a neighborhood watch app, launched to over 200 neighborhoods, many in California and New York, just a month after Occupy started. The Domain Awareness System, the largest digital surveillance system in the world, a collaboration between Microsoft and NYPD, was announced in 2012. NextDoor announced a collaboration with New York City government, in 2013. Through this time usage of drones by police begins to speed up and hits the East Bay through a successful fight to get drones in production in Alameda country. San Francisco’s DroneDeploy, making software for drones, was founded in 2013. Also in 2013, a social media “for cops by cops” launches. Tech was making a number of other efforts to get deeper into policing and to turn it into Terminator: everything from internal IT systems to surveillance systems, field weapons, drones, AI, machine learning, big data analysis and date management systems, crime prediction, increased cooperation with police industry data requests.
When the Snowden leaks happened in 2013, it caused a global PR problem, a local one and an internal one. Of course it upset local residents, after all, Oakland has been ground zero for crushing of social dissidence, and a test ground for police technology; in fact, planning for Oakland’s Domain Awareness Center began in 2009, but was only put into production after the Snowden leaks against PRISM in 2013. That’s when the heat on DAC and the the tech industry more broadly, stepped up big time. It also kicked off a round of new activist strategies against tech, particularly the famous shuttle interruptions beginning in late 2013; activist group, Heart of the City, detained tech busses and disseminated messaging to the public, also making the connection between tech gentrification and policing as this protest grew.
With Ferguson just a few years after Occupy, tech entered into open conflict with the city of Oakland once more. The history of the tech-powered police from there on is much better documented, as tech had been ready and waiting, and never stopped fighting Oakland on any front it could; both the industry and the cops were ready after what had happened with Occupy, and tech had been aggressively loading cops with new tech the whole time. Tech was on the front lines fighting Ferguson. It played a vital role in the fight to push Ferguson down, its systems were the ones helping officers track down protestors using facial recognition technology, and provided “evidence-gathering” for police in the form of social media data. Drones flew above the protests. Cops took videos posted of the protests and used them to take criminal action, also using surveillance tape from Amazon’s Ring, in the first such precedent. One example of the projects that were being funded immediately in the months after Ferguson broke out, is Nixi, a “wearable drone”, started in the Valley in 2014, with a clear anti-dissident program: “Just think, police officers with the ability to instantly survey large crowds, scope out dense residential areas and potentially preempt criminal behaviour. Nixie could change the way we look at technology in policing….” The project was awarded half a million dollars by Intel.
During all of these points of social disruption implicating tech, it needed, and could afford, and could supply, the policing apparatus to transform it in line with what they needed it to be in order to combat all these different threats coming from people in dissent against the 1%: protesting soaring wealth gaps created by tech, underpayment of contract and gig labor by tech, rabid gentrification and surveillance infrastructure by tech. Tech needed cops that could combat digital-age protests through surveillance and video and social media and drones and tasers and destruction of their communities — that could identify and track down protestors and do something about them. It needed cops that could police the neighborhoods that tech was invading, keeping everything quiet and squashing dissent through fear and ever-present monitoring, locking people up and pushing them out, so that this conquest of land and people wouldn’t cause a revolution. Because that is what Arab Spring and Occupy and Ferguson pointed to: revolution, even global revolution.
In the midst of all this social upheaval, in 2014, Tom Perkins of Kleiner Perkins, one of the largest, richest venture capital firms in the Valley, writes a letter to the editor, published in Wall Street Journal, called “Progressive Kristallnacht Coming?”:
“I would call attention to the parallels of Nazi Germany to its war on its "one percent," namely its Jews, to the progressive war on the American one percent, namely the "rich.”
“From the Occupy movement to the demonization of the rich embedded in virtually every word of our local newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle, I perceive a rising tide of hatred of the successful one percent. There is outraged public reaction to the Google buses carrying technology workers from the city to the peninsula high-tech companies which employ them. We have outrage over the rising real-estate prices which these "techno geeks" can pay. We have, for example, libelous and cruel attacks in the Chronicle on our number-one celebrity, the author Danielle Steel, alleging that she is a "snob" despite the millions she has spent on our city's homeless and mentally ill over the past decades.”
The later point echos a recent Tweet from Marc Andreessen, THE most powerful VC in the Bay (12/7/2022): “I’m so old, I remember when Twitter located its headquarters in the Tenderloin to try to help revitalize, and was then blamed for the Tenderloin.”
Wow folks! Lots going on here.
In 2008-2015ish, tech was truly embattled on every front. People were fighting them everywhere they went. Looking back, I remember a special time where there was so much amazing activism happening, when as an analyst working in the field, I had so much hope. As the letter to the editor demonstrates, one thing that we underestimate is that the people who run this shit, this tech shit — the venture capitalists — are well aware that the People pose an existential threat to them and they understand that what they are doing is wrong, and one day the People may come to hold them to account… often in the form of violent revolution, such as those they saw bearing down on them in Arab Spring, in Occupy, in Ferguson. Tech was trying to steal the world, and it hit social conflicts time and time again as their endless appetite brought them to all of our doors. They themselves were causing these disruptions to spring from the ground; it was also them who would crush them down.
The evolution of tech to follow social disruption was happening within the industry itself, incredibly powerful ideas and demands that could have a huge impact on the field even if they weren’t rising to the global proportions of some of the other movements we discussed. For example, from its own hate and rot, tech had a number of really powerful labor movements to contend with during this time. There was huge pressure from underpaid workers in tech, notably food services and transportation workers, to unionize and gain a living wage. You have Facebook and Intel contract drivers and food services working to unionize and one of big tech’s contractors, Baeur’s, was caught in egregious acts of union busting that haven’t stopped to this day. These tech jobs paid so little that people weren’t even making a living wage, and people were living with multiple families in a single apartment, all the while that the people they are driving to work, are probably making $300,000 a year — Facebook engineers are of the best paid in the industry. But you even had those technical employees caught up in labor actions: in 2011, tech workers filed a class action against Apple, Google, Intel and Adobe regarding a wage fixing scheme spearheaded by Steve Jobs while he was still, unfortunately and untimely, with us. Just as new police and surveillance technology was developed in response to threats to tech, tech began developing better strategies and tools for union busting; these were the foundations of what is now widely known thru Amazon’s union busting software. Other forms of tech union busting have since been “tech-i-fied” to include monitoring employees on social media platforms, infiltrating digital organizing spaces, monitoring of internal communications, and various crunching and dicing of data harvested from these workers and People more generally. These are now being used in many industries, but they were tested on tech employees first.
Tech is constantly reacting, in its development of technology, to threats of social change; this must be recognized as a primary driving force of technical innovation.
A last example: Before #MeToo, the tech industry was having very serious issues of industry sexual abuse. In 2013-2014 there were several extremely high-profile cases of sexual abuse in the industry. One blew the whistle at Github and was met with extraordinary attacks by tech’s roving hate groups; the attacks ruined her life for years. Another girl was raped by her boss and when she went public with it, she was absolutely terrorized, doxxed, career hammered, similarly, she struggled a great deal to recover from the attacks. These girls were whistleblowers just a few years before #MeToo happened, and they attracted the attention of VCs, who were furious that the executives in their crown jewel companies, were getting their gilded trajectories delayed to these dumb bitches. Literally, that is the attitude. Tech faced innumerable private settlements and even some high visible lawsuits during this period.
As well as the diversity in tech/women in tech movement, this was something they were feeling not only internally, but tremendous pressure from the outside world as well: Netflix and Amazon, quickly becoming centers of production and content themselves, were under significant pressure to both hire a greater range of people who were working there, but also to change the content itself to be up to date with the People’s demands that they see themselves and their stories and identities in the media we pay for and consume. Women in tech were addressing very serious labor grievances with the industry, addressing economic changes in the allocation of money in the industry, addressing workplace rape, harassment, safer technology for domestic violence and abuse victims, better reproductive health technologies and more.
These whisteblowers from inside tech, catalyzed and cemented the pattern of gang-attacks on women speaking out, using platforms like 4/8 chan, Kiwifarms, Reddit, etc, these techniques were very much innovated by men in tech organizing attacks on women in tech who posed a threat to the hegemony of white men in technology and in particular, their perceived right to violate the women around them. Yet another example of tech “innovation” driven by social movements, these technical attacks on dissidents have been generalized to all forms of political dissent, developed by tech in-house, playing key roles in squashing the Ferguson uprising, reproductive rights movements, the Tara Reade campaign, #MeToo and so much more. And as we are seeing with the Musk purchase of Twitter, these formations and strategies are very much still in play. And you can also see how, consistently, tech platforms and tech elite have ALLOWED and ENCOURAGED these raid-style, life-ruining attacks on progressive activists, ever since the inceptions of these platforms; that the platforms were somehow perfect launching points for these attacks. The policies and ideologies that have allowed this, that now make Twitter a frankly terrifying place to be, have been reinforced in millions of product decisions across hundreds of sites and thousands of underlying platforms, over 10 years, and in direct response to the need to control threats to tech growing on their platforms. They developed a fool proof way to ruin someone’s life and get them to STFU forever: gang stalking, swarming, doxxing, SWATing, hacking, search engine defacing, etc. It weaponized its programmers and aimed that at social movements, particularly focusing on destroying the women who were at the heart of all of this, using indisputably technical attacks.
In summary: For every social movement, tech was always right there, and it could see into what was going on better than any of us, the agitation that was being organized on its social media platforms; tech was deploying armies of people and super computers pumping out infinite insights using the most advanced techniques and algortihms. As social movements post-housing crisis proliferated, tech was an R&D lab and weapons suppliers to help all of its allies, from the CIA to OPD, put change down. Even pre-dating Occupy, Buzzfeed was founded as a way to detect social movement activity breaking out online, in response to the course of social progress the industry was already seeing. All of this has been at the front of their attention since the inception of the industry; there are stories that much predate my arrival in the Valley and I would love to learn more about how this played out in the dot-com bubble. Tech was the first to see the signs of global revolution on its monitors, to them, an ungodly and unmanageable breakout they needed to do something about. You think there were no signs on all of the surveillance systems that something like Occupy was coming? They were already deep in preparations, stepping them up immediately upon the market crash of 2008.
Every single movement we now know as definitive to our generation, was popping off in the Bay in resistance to tech, years before they broke into the mainstream as we know them now. Unionization, gentrification, surveillance, police violence, wealth distribution, the movement against sexual violence; tech was on the front lines of these conflicts before they ever became global phenomenons.
This piece is to continue to establish tech’s role in squashing all of our movements over the past decade, by situating it in a context that shows a direct and ongoing interface between it and social disruption, one defined by adversity and conflict. Tech was never, and has never been in a bubble; it has been actively fighting its users, the cities it invades, protestors and social dissent in general, from the very beginning. One of the most important charters for tech is to build technologies that will protect it from those who would take away their stolen money and stolen power. This is such a deep factor in what they make. They proactively develop technology to stop us.
The way that social movements have changed the industry, the way the industry has adapted to social movements IN ORDER TO PROTECT ITSELF, and the way that technology has been used as a tool in these battles, cannot be left out of our analysis.
On the positive side, this history does demonstrate, that we were fighting and fighting hard, on every front, that at every turn, we were enough of a threat that huge amounts of the technology infrastructure, bears the mark of the conflict between us. Wherever tech has touched us, someone has fought back against it.
Tech grew up in a trial by fire social movements; in grew in opposition to them, it was developed in response to it ands its fundamental architecture and drive, is antagonistic to social progress. It is important to see this in order to see the futility of “changing” or “reforming” an industry that has been fundamentally shaped in opposition to the People. They want the People to be subjugated underneath them, and they are willing to do that with mass, tech-enabled violence on multiple fronts.
They have been at war with us for decades; it is more than time we respond with an echoing cry.