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The first Trump administration, and the tech industry that stood up to it, are both looking quainter by the day.
Here’s one example: In 2017, when President Trump issued a series of executive orders instituting a travel ban on foreigners from certain countries (predominantly Muslim-majority ones), people from across the United States vigorously protested the policy. They included some of tech’s most elite: Google cofounder Sergey Brin, who joined a demonstration at the San Francisco airport; Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who wrote a company-wide email outlining “legal options” that Amazon was considering to fight the ban; and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who took to Instagram to describe his own family’s immigrant roots.
How times have changed. On Saturday, hours after federal agents shot and killed ICU nurse Alex Pretti in the streets of Minneapolis, several prominent tech executives attended a private White House screening of Melania, a documentary being released by (of course) Amazon MGM Studios. The timing was not lost on the group of Silicon Valley workers who recently launched ICEout.tech, essentially an open letter to their bosses. The letter, posted following Renee Nicole Good’s killing earlier this month, has now been signed by more than 1,000 tech employees. Those workers, who come from across the spectrum of Big Tech companies and startups, are asking that executives use their clout to demand Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents leave American cities, that they cancel company contracts with the agency, and that they speak publicly about ICE’s violent and deadly tactics.
Worker-led demands like those were commonplace during Trump 1.0, when tech employees at the world’s biggest companies often spoke out—internally and externally—about the cruelty of the US administration and the industry’s role in facilitating or tempering its most craven policies. Today, though, a movement like ICEout.tech feels downright revolutionary: Tech employees have been notably quiet this past year, as the power dynamic within their companies tilted to favor management versus frontline workers. Meanwhile, the executives leading those companies have been busy kissing the ring—over dinner at the White House or with outlandishly expensive documentaries nobody’s watching—at every opportunity.
Is the dam finally breaking? This week, Silicon Valley leaders including Anthropic heads Dario and Daniela Amodei, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and Apple CEO Tim Cook finally spoke out about ICE’s outrageous overreach. It’s a start, but I wanted to know more about what was happening inside tech circles, and where the industry goes from here. So I asked two early ICEout.tech signatories, Moonshine AI CEO Pete Warden and Gatheround cofounder Lisa Conn, to sit down for an emergency episode of The Big Interview.
Here’s 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 thrilled that you’re able to be here.
PETE WARDEN: It’s great to be here.
LISA CONN: Thank you for having us.
You both work in the tech industry, and you have for a long time. You’re among the many who’ve signed the ICEout.tech letter that has now been widely circulated in Silicon Valley.
That movement and the website actually launched earlier this month after the tragic shooting of Renee Nicole Good. What made you decide to put your name on this letter? At this moment in the tech industry, it is no small thing to put your name out there on a document like this.
Conn: I signed the letter for a bunch of reasons. I think one of the primary ones is that it feels like we are entering an economic and governance crisis when the government starts killing people on the streets and then denying or reframing what is clearly documented. It’s really a bad situation.
