Hi! And welcome to Hard Reset.
We are grateful and excited to bring you this new venture. If you are reading, there’s a decent chance you might be familiar with us. But we want to use this first letter to introduce ourselves and our purpose for launching.
Hard Reset will be a twice weekly newsletter on labor, technology, politics and media authored by journalist Eli Rosenberg and writer Ariella Steinhorn. We hope to fill a void. We have watched as the once robust world of tech activism and dissent — walkouts, internal protests, defections — has gone underground, along with the thriving media ecosystem that used to shine a light on it. We have seen how the mainstream press, slow-footed by design and under threat, has failed at times to capture the new political, cultural and technological era we’re in.
Newsletters feel well suited to this moment; we have been impressed by the legitimately exciting new reporting energy coalescing here. We hope to use our space to highlight commentary, analysis, and reporting on these critical topics, taking advantage of our backgrounds and networks to cut through the noise and bring you something of value. And we will also welcome and bring forward new voices and perspectives–not always the loudest voices on BlueSky or X, but people with unique information about the systems and psychologies that determine how we live, work, and consume every day.
This newsletter will be an insider’s look at the conversations behind closed doors, an analysis of the tug-of-war between billionaires and the labor that fuel their companies. Where is the money flowing between billionaires and workers? What is the push and pull between manual and automated work looking like? What is really happening behind the statements and reports that comms teams at Meta, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, Tesla, and Amazon are putting out? Where is the energy around labor rights and organizing coalescing?
You can trust that the writing will be 100% ours and independent; there will be no masthead overseeing sensitive story topics and language, sanitizing and censoring to preserve old notions of decorum, institutionality, or worse. We will work hard to avoid jargon or clichéd turns of phrase so often used reflexively by the media to prop up a tattered national status quo. And this will not be a showcase for the antiquated “view from nowhere,” once celebrated in media; we will let you know who we are and where we are coming from, operating with the understanding that a new era requires new rules.
We want to get to know you, as well. You can reach us at @elirosenberg.30 and @aristeinhorn.17 on the encrypted messaging app Signal. And know that you can reach out to discuss things confidentially. Or just give us your feedback as we grow this new project.
Ariella is a writer and media entrepreneur. She has built two ghostwriting and media relations companies focused on exposing power imbalances not picked up on by the mainstream media, called Superposition and Lioness. Ariella’s personal writing on relationships, power, love, and free speech have been published in the New York Times, Fortune, Business Insider, the Boston Globe, The Hill, and Newsweek. Several first-person essays she has published breaking open news about workplace culture and abuse of power have seen tens of millions of views, and became known among journalists as a significant source of untold information.
Eli has been a journalist for the last dozen years at some of the country’s largest news outlets. Most recently, he covered labor, economics and technology as a reporter at the Washington Post and NBC News. Before that, he reported on politics and news in New York City for many years, at the Daily News and the New York Times. He lives in the Bay Area with his partner and two children.
Here are some stories we’re following right now:
SALARY CHAT: Workers have a protected right to disclose compensation figures to co-workers, but historically that hasn’t stopped many companies from discouraging or even prohibiting them from doing so. Still, employee campaigns for salary transparency have made for a growing trend in tech and beyond, with questions about pay equity continuing to animate workplaces. At Google, a group of AI contract staffers just filed a complaint against the subsidiary of the contract company they work for, Hitachi, saying that a worker, Richard Levario, was fired after circulating such a spreadsheet. The Alphabet Workers Union, which is representing the worker, has a recording of a manager telling employees that “talk around what’s fair, money and days off and you know benefits and stuff like that, that’s not really something that is really work-appropriate to share with everyone – that’s more of a one-on-one thing,” according to Bloomberg.
The VERGE has a deep feature on the history of pollution and catastrophic chemical exposure associated with micro-chip manufacturing in Silicon Valley in the 1970s and 80s — looking at some workers who say they suffered health effects, including miscarriages and giving birth to children with developmental issues. The report is particularly salient as the US tries to reshore chip manufacturing in places like Ohio and Arizona and amid fears that the Trump administration will gut worker protections at the Department of Labor and OSHA.
SAVINGS? NPR says DOGE’s numbers for the amount of money it’s saving by cancelling government contracts is massively overinflated. A thorough fact-check they ran estimated DOGE has cut just $2 billion — a drop in the bucket for a nearly $7 trillion budget — from terminated contracts, well under the $16.5 billion it initially claimed.
There are those who derive no small amount of joy from videos of Tesla Cybertruck’s struggling at routine off-roading that your average Subaru could handle like a beast. This week? “100 grand to watch a little Honda drive by you” — a Cybertruck struggling in the snow. Flawless caption, perfect video, no notes.
MILITARY VETS’ THERAPY SESSIONS NO LONGER PRIVATE? The former head of information security at VA.gov told WIRED that he was fired after speaking out critically about DOGE. The former employee, Jonathan Kamens, was responsible for the website where veterans access their medical benefits—and also the data security for their medical records. He is worried that information about diagnoses or private matters revealed in therapy could now be in the wrong hands, leading to inadvertent hacks or even more malicious leaks to to the dark web.
ORACLE AND TIKTOK? Larry Ellison was sitting next to Rupert Murdoch in early February when Trump created a fund to purchase TikTok. His company Oracle has told employees they must be for America or Israel—and clamped down on pro-Palestine activism inside the company. Oracle has offered cloud services to Israel, and also reportedly works on secret projects with the Israeli military. The Intercept has more.
WORLD EATERS. A new book, written by civic technologist Catherine Bracy, breaks down the problem with venture capital: not what it is funding, but what it isn’t funding. Instead of focusing on critical issues to humans like housing affordability, venture capital is creating companies that don’t have any real tech innovation at their core, such as fast-casual restaurants and direct-to-consumer mattress companies. She writes about the human role in artificial intelligence—mostly through offshore teams—and her concern for the future of labor. Bloomberg has the interview.
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