Last week I gave a talk for The Walrus, a gem of a Canadian magazine. I was invited to contribute the tech angle to a Walrus Talks panel “The Billionaire Problem” (spoilers: I’m anti) so of course I talked about tech worker organizing.

The talk is nine minutes long, I’m quite happy with how it went1, and you should watch it and share it with your colleagues and also boss, probably. If you’d prefer to read rather than watch, I’ve included a lightly edited transcript below.

My name is Jenny, and I’m a writer and organizer. I’m the founder of Show Up Toronto, a weekly newsletter that aggregates community organizing, mutual aid, protests, and advocacy events all around the city so it’s easy to get involved. We feature events such as this one!

I’ve also been a professional software developer for about fifteen years, which is what I want to talk to you about.

So first, raise your hand if you’re feeling optimistic about the internet right now.

[laughter]2

Raise your hand if you used to feel optimistic about the internet.

Yeah, me too.

I know the internet was never as rosy as my elder millennial nostalgia tells me it was, going all the way back to its origins in the Department of Defense, but there was a time when it seemed like we were actually trying to reach for an ideal. Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web, wanted to empower and democratize people all around the world. Google’s famous “Don’t Be Evil” motto was in its IPO filing and the employee handbook. I remember watching the Arab Spring unfold on Twitter in 2010 and I thought I was watching the future.

These days, our experience with technology is primarily one of surveillance and extraction. Our public spaces are surveilled by private cameras with a direct line to law enforcement, our every move is tracked by our phones, practically everything you do online is logged by some analytics system that’s trying to figure out how to better sell you things, and every six months you get an email with a coupon that says, “Hey, here’s a free credit check because we accidentally lost your data. Sorry.”

We’ve gone from Arab Spring to Facebook disinformation enabling the Rohingya genocide in less than a decade. At that same time, tech profits have gone through the roof. In 2025 alone, America’s 10 wealthiest tech billionaires saw their combined wealth increase by 550 billion dollars. In the last fifteen minutes Mark Zuckerberg’s personal wealth has increased by more than what a nurse at a long-term care home in Ontario makes in an entire year (note: I got my math wrong and it’s actually way worse than that, see footnote3). And for what? A website that makes us all mad at our neighbours and also creates war crimes.

Tech companies have become so good at regulatory capture, where even when we try to hold them accountable, they get what they want. For example, age verification laws for social media seem reasonable and are very popular, but it really gives tech companies legislative cover to ask every single user for their government ID, which is very valuable data they would never otherwise get. It’s just the same old surveillance and censorship, not to mention these systems almost all immediately get hacked.

Tech companies wreaking havoc on democracy is a problem abroad—in America and Silicon Valley—but also here at home. We’ve all seen Elon Musk literally insert himself into the US government and use DOGE for wanton destruction. But what we are paying less attention to, unfortunately, is tech CEOs in Canada who openly admire Musk and DOGE, rallying behind Build Canada to advocate for many of the same things. We cheer the incredible resistance movement in Minnesota against ICE while Canadian tech company Thomson Reuters signs a hundred million dollar contract selling user data to ICE. And Shopify’s CEO Tobi Lutke is saying the quiet part out loud when he says people who pay more income tax should get more votes.

These dynamics are symptoms of wealth inequality and increasing militarization, and not tech per se. But the sheer scale of the systems we’ve built with technology amplifies the problem because we’ve removed all frictions and all safeguards that could have prevented some of these worst impulses. It’s also now, of course, being further accelerated by AI, which is a political project as much as a technological one, and which has the explicit goal of replacing people, increasing surveillance, eroding shared consensus reality through slop generated on demand, and concentrating even more power in the hands of a few dozen people.

So… Cheerful.

If we want to safeguard democracy, we have to change the balance of power between regular people and the billionaires, and there are so many of us! The billionaires’ allegiance is only to their wealth; democracy answers to us. This also means we have to change the balance of power between labour and capital, by significantly strengthening the power of organized labour and unions.

If unions didn’t work, there wouldn’t be so much effort spent on crushing them. Just this week, the federal government announced new legislation that allows the labour minister to unilaterally order pre-emptive binding arbitration, which essentially guts the right to strike. We’ve all seen the great, heartwarming news stories about high-profile strikes in Canada that won worker demands, and the government was like, “that’s enough of that”. CUPE and other unions have vowed to fight this, which is great. But also, revitalizing and growing union power means we can’t just defend existing unions. We have to really invest in organizing new ones to start growing union density again, especially in historically ununionized sectors like tech.

When I started in tech fifteen years ago, most tech workers still thought of themselves mostly as “tech people” or even “founders in waiting” than as “workers”. We saw the cushy work conditions that some of us had and we thought it was a reflection of our intrinsic value, as opposed to just an expression of supply and demand. These days, with regular mass layoffs at tech companies despite record profits, and executives openly bragging about replacing their entire teams with AI, tech workers are finally waking up to the “worker” part of that title. We’re learning the lesson that artisan guilds learned before us during the industrial revolution, that our craft means nothing in the face of profit and automation, and the only way forward is to organize.

The challenge and joy of tech worker organizing is how much we both have to, and get to, reimagine our relationship to labour power. The shop floor models developed during the heyday of the industrial labour movements may not be quite optimized for the tech movement - our workplaces tend to be fragmented, remote, very international, it’s disembodied, and that’s before you even get to the contract and platform economy workers who don’t even know who their coworkers are. What does it mean to go on strike when your job is to build resilient systems that operate when you’re not there? How do you hold union elections when your bargaining unit spans dozens of countries? We haven’t quite figured out the answers to these questions yet, and we’ll have to get creative with our levers of power. But the core of organizing is the same: building relationships between workers, face to face.

Tech Workers Coalition Canada, which I organize with, is the Canadian chapter of a global organization that started in San Francisco in 2014 when Google engineers walked off the job in solidarity with cafeteria workers. You see those origins in how we think about solidarity as a wall-to-wall effort. We believe anyone who works to maintain digital technologies is a tech worker, not just the people writing software, but also data labellers, content moderators, customer support, warehouse staff, couriers, facilities staff. Tech billionaires love to talk about technological inevitability, which necessarily requires hiding the humans behind their systems. I have lost count of how many tech company announcements I’ve seen of some cool new AI feature, where a day or two later they have to admit that it was actually a person behind the scenes making a call to the restaurant to make your reservation. These systems cannot advance without our collective labour, no matter how much they pretend otherwise, and our job as organizers is to make that loud and clear.

I’m personally really heartened and inspired by the efforts I see from tech worker organizing around the world: the Data Labellers Association in Kenya, the Verizon call centre workers who went on strike and then the contractors in the Philippines who picketed in solidarity, Kickstarter United just won their second collective bargaining agreement, Epic (I misspoke) Ubisoft workers are fighting layoffs, Gig Workers United here in Canada are supporting platform couriers, and Amazon warehouse workers around the world are organizing in record numbers4. And I’ve also loved watching communities come together against hyperscale data centres, because it means we’re truly re-imagining what the chokepoints are and where we can exercise our power.

Tech worker unions often don’t look the way you might expect them to look: we have different demands, we have different interests. And honestly? That’s great. Because at its heart, a union is just the workers fighting for one another. No more, and no less.5 The tech billionaires are invested in the narrative that it’s their individual genius that earned them the right to run roughshod over all our democratic institutions. The thing we can never, ever forget, is that it’s the workers who built the machines that enabled their billions, and so it’s the workers who can take it apart. Thank you.

Thanks to Ethan, Chris, and Andrew for providing extremely quick day-of feedback on my rough draft, and also Amiee for proofing the trascript so I didn’t have to listen to myself talk. You’re the best.

  1. This isn’t the most important part but I was subbing in for someone who dropped out so I wrote this talk in approximately 24 hours, and maybe I should give talks on no sleep and two days’ notice more often? ↩

  2. I don’t know what it says that I truly did not expect this to be a laugh line. ↩

  3. On the day I was finalizing numbers for my talk, September 24th 2026, Zuckerberg’s net worth had gone up by about $2.5b USD since the previous trading day, per Forbes. I thought that worked out to about $71k USD every 15 minutes. It turns out, my math was off by a factor of 365, because I had mentally account for $2.5b USD a year, not a day. $2.5b USD a day is $1.74m every minute, meaning Zuckerberg actually out-earns a long-term care nurse in Ontario every two seconds. Of course, wealth fluctuates day by day, but even if you take the average of his 2025 wealth increase of $33b, that’s $63k USD every minute, which is about $85k CAD with the exchange rate. Even when I was trying to confront how big a billion is, I still diminished it, because the number is just too fucking big. Which is of course why we must [redacted]. ↩

  4. There are so many more examples here I wanted to include but ran out of time - technically this was supposed to be a 7 minute talk. I’d also flag Alphabet Worker Union’s wall to wall model, Worker’s Observatory in Edinburgh, the Global Platform Worker Solidarity Project, CODE-CWA which is an initiative specifically to organize digital workers, Game Workers Unite, United Tech and Allied Workers in the UK which actually grew out of the London chapter of the Tech Workers’ Coalition, and so many more. I bet there’s already stuff happening near you. If not, you can start one! ↩

  5. Another thing I cut for time is a point about union democracy. I think many currently unionized people have had bad experiences with their unions not going to bat for them, and that sucks. But it’s also a symptom of the institutionalization of unions as their own bureaucracy, where workers start to think of their unions as a third party service organization where the relationship is a purely transactional “dues-for-advocacy” model. That is bad! Unions are crucial to strengthening democracy, sure, but they must also themselves be the site of democracy, where rank and file workers get to participate in the process of deliberation and decision-making. A union is what the workers make of it, and if union bosses aren’t willing to listen to the workers, they should be treated the same as any other boss. For more on rank-and-file unionism, check out this guide from the Emergency Workers Organizing Committee, which has tremendous resources. ↩