Lefties and techies up ‘against’ Trump
‘Division not helpful’
SAN FRANCISCO, March 13, (AP): Before Donald Trump’s election, Laurence Berland viewed political protest as a sort of curiosity. He was in a good place to see it: San Francisco’s Mission District, once an immigrant enclave in the country’s heartland of radicalism that is increasingly populated by people like him — successful tech workers driving up rents while enjoying a daily commute to Silicon Valley on luxury motor coaches.
Berland regarded the activism of his adopted city with a mix of empathy and bemusement, checking out Occupy Wall Street demonstrations and protests against the gentrification of his own neighborhood. But now there is less distance between him and activists on the street. On a recent day Berland stood with about 100 others — from software engineers like himself to those who work in tech company cafeterias — outside a downtown museum for a rally against President Trump.
“Everyone come closer! We’re going to practice some chanting, and we’re going to get to know each other,” called a woman wearing a union Tshirt with a bullhorn pressed to her lips. The crowd closed in around a banner reading “Workers in Tech Say No Ban No Wall.” A clipboardcarrying organizer approached Berland to ask if he wanted to join a network of grassroots activists, but Berland waved him away. He had already signed up.
In the place that fought against the Vietnam War and for gay rights and, more recently, has been roiled by dissent over the technology industry’s impact on economic inequality, an unlikely alliance has formed in the left’s resistance against Trump. Old-school, anti-capitalist activists and new-school, free-enterprise techies are pushing aside their differences to take on a common foe.
For years, these two strands of liberal America have been at each other’s throats. There’ve been protests against evictions of those who can’t afford the Bay Area’s ever-soaring rents. And think back, not so long ago, to the raucous rallies to block those fancy buses shuttling tech workers from city neighborhoods to the Silicon Valley campuses of Yahoo, Facebook, Apple and Google, where Berland once worked.
Cat Brooks, a Black Lives Matter activist in Oakland, has seen the toll the tech industry has taken on some. Her daughter’s elementary school teacher just moved to a distant suburb after her rent skyrocketed, and Brooks thinks more tech money must find its way into local communities. She nevertheless welcomes the infusion of new energy to the protest arena.
Businesses
“It’s not about the business of we were here first,” Brooks said. “We’re about the business of how can we support? Division at this time is not helpful.”
Such improbable partnerships scramble the historical protest model that used to pit working-class people against everyone else, said Rory McVeigh, director of the Center for the Study of Social Movements at the University of Notre Dame.
“There are new cleavages that can produce alliances that weren’t possible before,” McVeigh said. “When you feel all of you are being threatened but in different ways ... trade-offs are minimized. You realize at times such as that that you need allies more than ever before.”
If all politics is personal, as the saying goes, the moment it got personal for the tech industry was when the Trump administration imposed its initial travel ban on immigrants and refugees from seven majority Muslim nations. The industry prides itself on its openness to immigrants, who comprise about one-quarter of the US technology and science workforce and include the founders of iconic institutions.
Nearly 100 tech companies, including Google, Facebook and Uber, filed a court brief urging suspension of the ban, while Google co-founder Sergey Brin, a Russian immigrant, joined protests at San Francisco International Airport. That was followed by an unprecedented companywide walkout at Google and now, on March 14, nationwide rallies are planned for a “Tech Stands Up” day of protest.
“People in Silicon Valley, it’s really hard to get them excited about things that aren’t technical,” said Anita Rosen, a technology project manager who has started an activist group in the Valley suburb of Mountain View. “But everything that Trump says is the opposite of what we believe. He hates technology. He hates foreigners.”
Election
The morning after the election, Jesse Pickard convened the daily meeting at the technology firm he runs, Elevate. He could see the fear and heartbreak in the faces of his staff of 21, some of whom are legal immigrants. He tried to inspire them to fight for all the things that made them first fall in love with the United States. Then he set about doing that himself.
Pickard wondered if the door-knocking he’d done for Hillary Clinton had been the right use of his talents. “I didn’t feel I was having the impact I could have if I was meaningfully using my design skills,” he said.
And so Pickard launched DeBug Politics, a series of hackathons where teams of software engineers create apps to fight Trump and get more people involved in politics. Winning products include a Chrome browser extension that points viewers to news that doesn’t match their ideological viewpoint, and a tool that allows people to urge followers on social media to contact elected representatives.
Pickard’s company is based out of a three-story converted brewery in San Francisco’s trendy South of Market district. Sitting at a picnic table on the rooftop deck, where the company chef sometimes serves employees lunch and dinner, Pickard acknowledged that tech workers generally had a protected life.
“Prior to the election ... you didn’t have a lot to worry about if you got a six-figure job right out of school and got catered lunches every day,” he said. “They had all these left-leaning and progressive opinions, but they didn’t feel like they had to fight very much.”
He’s been to a couple of demonstrations — his first in years — but Pickard thinks he can make more of an impact through technology.
Kai-Ping Yee feels the same. Yee moved to the Bay Area from Canada in 1998, earned his PhD at the University of California, Berkeley, and landed a job as a software engineer in Google’s philanthropic unit in 2007. Now he works at a startup to help immigrants send cash home.
Though he’s never been to a protest, the 40-yearold Yee sees himself as a kindred spirit with his leftist neighbors. “I do sympathize with a lot of the goals and the values behind these protests,” he said, “but have focused my effort on work.”