On September 13 more than a hundred activists participated in a bicoastal protest at Palantir’s two headquarters, in New York City and in Palo Alto, California. The intent of the protest was to bring awareness to the tech company’s involvement with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which Palantir provides with data-mining software that’s been used to screen undocumented immigrants and plan raids.

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But you could also look farther back, or even beyond Palantir’s partnership with ICE, at a slowly layering movement, in which each siloed group of workers watches every new protest action and wonders, “If them, why not us?”

You could say these actions were at the end of a timeline that began a week prior, when Karp wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post explaining his decision to continue working with ICE. Or you could wind the clock back a few weeks farther, to when Palantir officially renewed its contract with ICE. Or before that, when the photo of the bodies of Óscar Alberto Martínez and his 23-month-old daughter, Valeria, who’d both washed up on the banks of the Rio Grande after a failed border crossing attempt, went viral.

“During the Holocaust, IBM used the latest technology to aggregate census information, which was used to identify Jews around Europe,” said Abby Stein, one of the organizers, to the crowd. “What if the workers at IBM had said no? How many lives would have been saved? What if the workers at Palantir say no now? How many families would be kept whole?”

While the events put pressure on such Palantir higher-ups as the CEO, Alex Karp, and its co-founder Peter Thiel, the billionaire investor and Donald Trump ally, the messaging was geared to Palantir workers themselves. At the Palo Alto action, concentration camp–style barbed wire fencing was placed outside the company’s offices, and then an afternoon rally was held in front of one of Karp’s houses. “Palantir, you know it’s true / The crimes of ICE depend on you,” chanted marchers. The Manhattan action, led by the group Jews for Economic and Racial Justice, called on Karp, who is Jewish, to honor the approaching high holidays by not repeating mistakes of the past.

There was the great Uber and Lyft strike of 2019, when drivers around the world turned off their apps for 24 hours. And the Google walkout of late 2018, when more than 20,000 Google employees left work to protest sexual harassment within the company. And, earlier that year, the series of actions at Twitter and Stripe HQs after their CEOs funded a campaign countering Prop C, a San Francisco measure levying a small tax on huge corporations in order to pay for homeless services within the city. (The measure passed, albeit without the two-thirds supermajority needed to keep it from delays via legal challenges.)

As these truths become more blatant, a diverse group of workers—programmers and coders, drivers and cafeteria staff—are beginning to bond as a sort of cohesive class. If they get there, it’ll finally force tech to do what it’s been claiming it does all along: make the world a better place.

As with the public school wildcat strikes that rolled through the United States in 2018, each action has seemed to lead to the next as workers at all levels watch tech’s tendrils wind through nearly every sector of work and wreak consequences: Disruption often leads to dysfunction, the profits of innovation don’t trickle down, and technology brings the world together while it tears families apart.

Gonzalez explained that as ICE raids have increased, Mijente has begun fielding questions about technology’s expanding role with things like data mining, GPS location, and facial recognition software. “All of that is going to be used in the next stage of racial incarceration in the U.S.,” Gonzalez said. “There was a lot of hype and excitement about how technology was going to bring us closer together, but we’re starting to see the negative consequences. It brings up a bunch of ethical questions for people who are affected by it, and also for tech workers themselves.”

“I’m not the savviest tech person—people make fun of me because I can’t even figure out Facebook,” said Jacinta Gonzalez, the field director for Mijente , a grassroots hub for Latinx and Chicanx organizing—they helped organize the Palantir actions. “But we’re interested in it now because it’s affecting our communities.”

The key moment wasn’t necessarily Election Night, when everyone was still in a state of shock and confusion, but rather a few weeks after that, in late 2016, when the future president met with tech’s biggest CEOs . That moment, workers have told me, was when they realized their bosses would compromise with, rather than fight against, the incoming administration. The years since have proved this analysis correct—in 2017, Google began building out the Pentagon’s artificial intelligence program under Project Maven, while more recently, Microsoft won the contract to handle their cloud computing.

This self-examination seems new to the tech industry. Tech ideology has always trended in the direction of achieving broadly socially liberal aims through crypto-libertarian means—working toward an “open” society through “disruption.” In practice, this has largely translated into replicating previous experiences, but more quickly and without worker protections, exploiting gaps in a regulatory state that moves too slowly. The tech-optimist view that has dominated has been based on a sort of vulgar reading of the efficient-markets hypothesis, the idea that efficiency is not just desirable in itself but will definitionally lead to good ends, so that creating more tools to that end is a worthy aim. But what that has missed is how efficiency’s inherent result is more wealth and power trickling up to ownership, and how making more productive tools means further draining the disenfranchised.

Edan Alva is a 49-year-old tech worker. Originally from Israel, he’s been in the United States for the past 19 years, working as a contract freelancer for financial institutions, schools, and other tech companies. A few years back, he downloaded Lyft as a little side gig to get some extra money picking up passengers as he drove to and from work. But when he got terminated from his steady gigs, he turned to driving full-time, and it changed his perspective.

“Pay went down significantly, and meanwhile, you’re paying more to service the car,” he explained. “Most drivers don’t notice they’re losing money instead of earning it because those costs are spread over time.” Further shifting him into action was seeing firsthand how wide the gap was between the lifestyles of the rich and how the drivers themselves lived. “You find very quickly that you can barely make a living in the Bay Area, and it causes resentment, especially when the CEOs are making $45 million a year,” he said.

Alva heard about the organizing coalition Gig Workers Rising (GWR)—a group largely composed of Uber and Lyft drivers fighting for a living wage and benefits, transparency, and a voice at the workplace—and decided to join. Part of it is fighting for a better life now. “I enjoy talking with people and having unique situations that occur,” he said, when I asked him why he still drives. “But that has nothing to do with the company of Lyft.”