This excerpt and the image that follows are from Bug Report! Issue 1.



The tech industry is broken.



For a while, it mostly went unnoticed. From tech startups to the Frightful Five, venture capital and new markets made the industry willfully blind to the damage inflicted by their products and services. Tech bros dominated workplaces, making offices havens for sexual harassment, assault, and discrimination, as well as just plain old crappy places to work. For a while, most of us bought into the Californian Ideology, that notion—peddled hardest by “thought leaders” and CEOs—that technology is unconditionally good and would mean wealth and opportunity for everyone.



But the tech industry broke itself and the cracks are starting to show. As its hunger for labor grows and as it destroys other jobs through automation, more workers are working in tech for lack of other options. The industry is so big, it’s harder to justify the definition of "tech worker" as solely the well-paid software engineer; it's now also the fulfillment center worker, the cafeteria staff, the rideshare driver, the independent contractor. Increasingly, we tech workers are women, leftists, immigrants, people of color, queer and trans folks. Many of us came of age during the recession, and we don't like what we're seeing.



That's why workers at Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Salesforce have been saying #TechWontBuildIt. That’s why they demand that our employers end contracts with law enforcement, ICE, and the military. That's why Amazon warehouse workers in Europe went on strike on Prime Day, sparking boycotts worldwide. That's why somewhere, a team of devs will go out for beers after work today and confide to each other that they all hate the insane deadlines, what they're creating, how they're treated... and they will begin imagining ways to organize.



Bug Report! is about working in tech. The fixes aren't trivial. Technocapitalism uses tech and labor to concentrate wealth in the hands of the few, to intensify surveillance and control of all aspects of life, to invent new forms of exploitation, and drive workers into the ground. We refuse to drink the Soylent. Fundamentally, we are all workers, and it is as workers that we share our honest stories and experiences here.