Ethics and Activism in Tech

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This chapter explores the ethical challenges in the tech industry, particularly focusing on partnerships like Project Nimbus between Google and the Israeli military. It discusses the rise of employee activism against militarization and corporate greed, as well as the ways in which the corporate culture at Google has transformed to suppress dissent and disempower workers. The conversation further highlights the impact of layoffs on worker organizing and the increasing precarity within the tech workforce.

Paris Marx is joined by Mohammad Khatami and Gabi Schubiner to discuss the complicity of Google, Amazon, and Microsoft in Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza and how tech workers are organizing to stop it.

Mohammad Khatami and Gabi Schubiner are former Google software engineers and organizers with No Tech for Apartheid.

Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Support the show on Patreon.

The podcast is made in partnership with The Nation. Production is by Eric Wickham. Transcripts are by Brigitte Pawliw-Fry.

Also mentioned in this episode:

Find out more about No Tech for Apartheid from their website. Microsoft workers have also launched No Azure for Apartheid.
Yuval Abraham reported on the Israeli military’s use of Amazon, Google, and Microsoft’s cloud services and AI in Gaza.
Mohammad wrote about being fired by Google in The New Arab.
Gabi refers to JWCC, with is a reference to the Department of Defense Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability contract with Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Oracle.
Google fired 50 workers earlier this year for organizing over its ties to Israel.
The Information reported on how many Arab Americans in tech are scared to speak out in support of Palestinians for fear of retaliation.
In 1970, Polaroid workers under the banner of the Polaroid Revolutionary Workers Movement began the first anti-apartheid boycott of a US company by organizing against their employer’s complicity in South African apartheid.
The IBM Black Workers Alliance was central to the anti-apartheid campaign at that company.