Tech workers are defying concentrated power to create their own ecosystems

More and more people are caught in between wanting to work in tech, and wanting to completely reinvent. Is there a middle ground?

The other week, we found a TikTok from Trinity Wasp, a tech worker who launched a Discord for other “morally burnt out” tech workers. Trinity says that 250 people joined the Discord overnight, and 1,000 people joined in the first two days. The common thread of the Discord members is their desire to contribute skills to society in ways other than solely lining shareholder pockets.

For years, the decision to leave tech publicly has been synonymous with career suicide, and no one would perhaps even privately affiliate with a Discord about moral burnout because it would be a warning sign to future employers that they are “difficult.” When I worked with whistleblowers in any industry, for that matter, there was a lot of characterization of them as disgruntled outsiders on the fringe. They were the “opposite of team players,” or “seeking attention.”

For select cases that certainly could be true, but the reality was much more complicated: many people actually desperately wanted to continue to work in their industry and solve hard problems, but they were disturbed by the systems, the incentives, and the power that they felt was concentrating in the hands of a select few. Whether they were salespeople or software developers, they felt increasingly uneasy about what their direct labor was contributing to.

But something interesting may be happening now, where the decision feels less black-and-white. Becoming a Luddite or moving to a farm doesn’t work for a lot of people. They still want to work in tech, or apply their skills within modern-day society. But they are now gravitating to workplaces and products with different incentives around profit and power. And if those don’t exist, well, then maybe they’ll create them.

I found Trinity’s videos interesting because of how she describes her psychological trajectory to where she is now. She says she was raised by conservative, “pick yourself up by your bootstraps” type of parents, and internalized a lot of that ideology–including the notion that if you’re poor, it’s your fault—until she came to the conclusion that this dogmatism was actually a lifelong suppression of childhood trauma.

The trauma then came “crashing down,” in her words, in the form of depression. She felt scattered, tired, and burnt out, and started pursuing various artistic endeavors. Now, she has ultimately come to the conclusion that she doesn’t need rest but needs purpose–maybe still in a field like computer science or artificial intelligence, but surrounded by a community more motivated by purpose than by greed.

One woman who I worked with at a very big tech company ten years ago reached out to me last week with a related story. She describes similar recognition of her trauma to Trinity–that she has come to the conclusion that being a survivor of sexual violence made her hyper-vigilant in her day-to-day work, and that this perversely made her the perfect tech worker. She was eager to please, constantly working to the bone because past circumstances had led her to feel like she was under “threat” at all times. In many ways, this type of psychology is ripe for exploitation–by companies who depend on all of us feeling threatened or scared for our livelihoods, and also who depend on us feeling that there are no other options for how work or power structures could look like.

But these are all stories we tell ourselves of course, perpetuated by the powerful to serve their interests. More options for part-time employment, portfolio careers, and joining smaller companies are being created by the day. And the reality is that talent and the ability to be inventive will always exist for many tech workers who leave–it’s just a question of whether they want to harness those skills to produce immense profits for a small group of people who played the current game well, or whether they want to create new games altogether.

Those new “games” are coming to be in the form of new fundraising mechanisms outside of venture capital, employee activism and pressure from the outside to change policies, and a creator economy allowing for more “small businesses” to crop up and promote themselves without massive funds for PR or marketing.

Many tech workers who I talk with still want community, and to work on something that feels productive, community-oriented, and innovative. (See some of them in the Hard Reset Awards here, actually!) They don’t want to be alone, shouting criticism righteously from the rooftops. But when productivity in tech turns into a craven march towards scale and profit before literally anything else, it can be difficult for many people who have a backbone or a soul to blindly continue on. And now, they may have options for how to proceed.

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Here’s what else we’re paying attention to this week:

Tech industry pledge: Members of the tech community are circulating a letter pledging not to work on tech for ICE, to deny warrantless entry to offices, and calling on company leadership to push the administration to get ICE off our streets. Read and sign here: StandWithOurCities.tech

CNBC: Palantir communications chief calls the company’s political shift ‘concerning’ “You don’t get fired for having a different position, but you will leave if you’re not aligned, ultimately, like if you don’t support Israel,” Gordon said, referring to Karp’s staunch support of Israel amid the conflict in Gaza. Tech publication The Information later removed videos of Gordon’s remarks from its YouTube, X, and Instagram pages.

Some xAI staffers pushed back when Elon Musk asked them to use biometric data to train an AI girlfriend bot. Some great reporting from the Wall Street Journal: “[Musk] personally oversaw the design of a racy chatbot called Ani, an animated character with blonde pigtails and revealing outfits.

SF Gate: Sam Altman apparently subpoenaed moments into SF talk with Steve Kerr. StopAI, the civil disobedience group behind the subpoena, wrote on X: “All of our non-violent actions against OpenAI were an attempt to slow OpenAI down in their attempted murder of everyone and every living thing on earth. This trial will be the first time in human history where a jury of normal people are asked about the extinction threat that AI poses to humanity.”

The Atlantic: For more than a decade, a nonprofit called the Common Crawl Foundation has been scraping billions of webpages to build a massive archive of the internet. The foundation appears to be lying to publishers about this—as well as masking the actual contents of its archives.

Former FTC chair and anti-monopolist Lina Khan will serve as co-chair of Zohran’s mayoral transition team.

Speaking of Discord: over 30 UK staff at Rockstar Games, the developers of the Grand Theft Auto series, were fired due to their trade union activity on a Discord channel. The Grand Theft Auto series is the most profitable video game franchise in the world, with the last installment generating $1 billion in its first three days of sales and going on to make over $7 billion.

Teen Vogue, which took in-depth looks at politics and social justice issues, has laid off several of its staffers. Condé Nast is moving it underneath Vogue.com.