Siva Vaidhyanathan writes:

Many critics of big technology companies have been cheering as their disgruntled labor forces have risen up to challenge the rich, (mostly) white, (mostly) American men who design and run Facebook, Twitter, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Oracle, Palantir and others. Labor uprisings have forced bosses to confront their poor treatment of women, their complicity with the military and intelligence establishments, the general threat of surveillance and the political affiliations of the companies and their leaders.

This week we saw the first of what will probably be a flood of internal documents and studies blowing open to the public just how bad things are inside the tech industry.

For years, the myth that these companies were making the world “better” served as a kind of non-monetary wage for workers. They could sleep well and smile in the mirror by believing that their services and devices were improving the human condition.

While many of us saw through that nonsense years ago, technology workers took a bit longer. But now they’re clearly ready to revolt, out of sheer disgust. Working for Facebook these days must be a crushing moral and social experience. [Continue reading…]