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The first Trump administration, and the tech industry that stood behind it, both looked amazing on the day.
Here is an example: In 2017, when President Trump issued a series of executive orders promoting the ban on the travel of foreigners from certain countries (mostly Muslim), people from all over the United States strongly protested the policy. They include some of the most elite in technology: Google cofounder Sergey Brin, who participated in a demonstration at the San Francisco airport; Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who wrote a company-wide email outlining “legal options” Amazon is considering to fight the ban; and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who took to Instagram to describe his own family’s immigrant origins.
How times have changed. On Saturday, hours after federal agents shot and killed ICU nurse Alex Pretti on the streets of Minneapolis, several prominent tech executives attended a private White House screening of Melaniaa documentary released by (of course) Amazon MGM Studios. Time has not been lost on the group of Silicon Valley workers who have just launched ICEout.techan open letter to their employers. The letter, posted next The murder of Renee Nicole Good earlier this month, it 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 demanding that executives use their clout to ask Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to leave American cities, that they cancel the agency’s company contracts, and that they speak out publicly about ICE’s brutal and deadly tactics.
Labor-led demands are as usual in the era of Trump 1.0, when tech employees of the world’s largest companies are constantly speaking – internally and externally – about the brutality of the US administration and the role of industry in facilitating or preventing its most desirable policies. Now, however, a movement like ICEout.tech feels completely revolutionary: Tech employees have been more silent this past year, because the strong forces within their companies are tilting in favor of management against frontline workers. Meanwhile, executives leading companies are busy kissing the ring—at the White House dinner or with incredibly expensive documentaries that no one watches—every time.
Has the dam broken? 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 violent overreach. It’s a start, but I want to know more about what’s going on within tech circles, and where the industry is going from here. That’s why I asked two early ICEout.tech signatories, Moonshine AI CEO Pete Warden and Gatherround cofounder Lisa Conn, to sit down for an emergency session at The Great 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 here.
PETE WARDEN: It’s great to be here.
LISA CONN: Thanks for having us.
You both work in the tech industry, and you have for a long time. You are one of the many signatories to the ICEout.tech letter that has been widely circulated in Silicon Valley.
The event and the website were actually launched earlier this month after the tragedy shooting by Renee Nicole Good. What made you decide to put your name on this letter? In this day and age of the tech industry, it’s no small thing to put your name out there on a document like this.
Conn: I signed the letter for several reasons. I think one of the main ones is the feeling that we will enter an economic and management crisis when the government starts killing people in the streets and then denies or changes what is clearly documented. This is a really bad situation.
