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First Trump The American administration, and the technology industry that confronted it, seem more bizarre by the day.
Here’s one example: In 2017, when President Trump issued a series of executive orders that imposed a travel ban on foreigners from certain (majority-Muslim) countries, people from all over the United States vehemently protested the policy. They included some of the tech elite: Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who joined a demonstration at the San Francisco airport; Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who wrote a company-wide email outlining “legal options” Amazon was considering to fight the ban; And Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who took to Instagram to describe his family’s immigrant roots.
How times have changed. on Saturday, hours after federal agents ICU nurse Alex Pretty was shot and killed On the streets of Minneapolis, several prominent tech executives attended a private White House screening of the film Melaniaa documentary released by (of course) Amazon MGM Studios. The timing was not lost on the group of Silicon Valley workers who recently launched ICEout.techbasically an open letter to their bosses. The message, posted next The murder of Renee Nicole Goode Earlier this month, it was signed by more than 1,000 tech employees. These workers, who come from across major tech companies and startups, are calling on the executives to use their influence to demand that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents leave U.S. cities, to cancel the company’s contracts with the agency, and to speak out about ICE’s violent and deadly tactics.
Labor-led demands like these were common during Trump 1.0, when technology employees at the world’s largest companies often spoke out — internally and externally — about the cruelty of the US administration and the role of industry in facilitating or softening its more cowardly policies. Today, however, a movement like ICEout.tech seems quite revolutionary: Tech employees have been noticeably quiet over the past year, as the power dynamic within their companies has tilted in favor of management versus front-line workers. Meanwhile, the executives leading those companies were busy kissing the ring.At dinner at the White House Or with expensive documentaries that no one watches — at every opportunity.
Will the dam finally break? This week, Silicon Valley leaders, including Anthropic Presidents Dario and Daniela Amodei, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and Apple CEO Tim Cook, finally spoke out about ICE’s egregious transgressions. It’s a start, but I wanted to know more about what’s happening within tech circles, and where the industry goes from here. So I asked two of ICEout.tech’s early signatories, Moonshine AI CEO Pete Warden and Gatheround co-founder Lisa Kuhn, to sit down for an emergency panel of The big interview.
Here is our conversation.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Katie Drummond: Pete and Lisa, thank you so much for joining me. I’m glad you’re able to be here.
House Warden: It’s great to be here.
Lisa Kuhn: Thank you for having us.
You both work in technology, and have done so for a long time. You are among many who signed the ICEout.tech letter that has now been widely circulated in Silicon Valley.
This movement and site were actually launched earlier this month following the tragedy The shooting of Renee Nicole Goode. What made you decide to put your name on this letter? At this moment in the technology industry, it’s not easy to put your name on a document like this.
being: I signed the letter for several reasons. I think one of the fundamental reasons is that we feel like we are entering into an economic crisis and a governance crisis when the government starts killing people in the streets and then denies or reframes what has been clearly documented. It’s really a bad situation.