Tech Won't Save Us - No Tech for Apartheid w/ Mohammad Khatami & Gabi Schubiner

Episode Date: August 29, 2024

Paris Marx is joined by Mohammad Khatami and Gabi Schubiner to discuss the complicity of Google, Amazon, and Microsoft in Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza and how tech workers are organizing to stop it.Mohammad Khatami and Gabi Schubiner are former Google software engineers and organizers with No Tech for Apartheid.Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Support the show on Patreon.The podcast is made in partnership with The Nation. Production is by Eric Wickham. Transcripts are by Brigitte Pawliw-Fry.Also mentioned in this episode:Find out more about No Tech for Apartheid from their website. Microsoft workers have also launched No Azure for Apartheid.Yuval Abraham reported on the Israeli military’s use of Amazon, Google, and Microsoft’s cloud services and AI in Gaza.Mohammad wrote about being fired by Google in The New Arab.Gabi refers to JWCC, with is a reference to the Department of Defense Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability contract with Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Oracle.Google fired 50 workers earlier this year for organizing over its ties to Israel.The Information reported on how many Arab Americans in tech are scared to speak out in support of Palestinians for fear of retaliation.In 1970, Polaroid workers under the banner of the Polaroid Revolutionary Workers Movement began the first anti-apartheid boycott of a US company by organizing against their employer’s complicity in South African apartheid.The IBM Black Workers Alliance was central to the anti-apartheid campaign at that company.Support the show

if you aren't organizing in tech, there's many opportunities to do so. And also, if you aren't, you are frankly just as complicit as your company is in the genocide that's taking place in partnership with The Nation magazine. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guests are Mohamed Khatami and Gabby Schubiner. Mohamed and Gabby are former Google software engineers and are now organizers with No Tech for Apartheid. We're now over 10 months into the Israeli military campaign in Gaza that it's hard to deny is a genocide at this point. We've seen death figures that officially are over 40,000, but a recent report in The Lancet put them at actually over 180,000 over that period of time. We know that the amount of bombs that have been dropped

are just hard to imagine. And the photos of dead amount of bombs that have been dropped are just hard to imagine. And the photos of dead children and babies that have been all over our social media feeds for most of that time, it's just hard to stomach. It's hard to imagine how this can seriously continue. And there are many reasons that it does, in particular, the support of the American government, but also because the Israeli government and the Israeli military can rely on technological support from major American tech companies, in particular companies like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. And workers at those companies have been pushing back against those relationships and those contracts since long before October 7th of last year. It's been pretty clear for quite some time that the Israeli military has been relying on the that cloud infrastructure and AI technologies

provided by Google and Amazon in order to carry out its campaign in Gaza that has killed so many. So this week, I've decided to check in with some of the organizers at No Tech for Apartheid, who used to be Google workers, and so their expertise is more on the Google side of things, to learn about their organizing, to learn about the need for tech workers to be pushing back on the relationships that their companies have with the Israeli government, and how these major tech companies have been pushing back on them as their organizing efforts have been increasing, and as they have been demanding contracts like Project Nimbus be terminated. I think this is an important conversation, and hopefully you learn from hearing Mohamed and Gabi's perspectives on all of these things as they continue to do really important work that deserves our support so that we can not only see the end of the genocide in Gaza, but also of the larger apartheid system that Israel uses against Palestinian civilians every single day. So with that said, if you learn from this conversation, feel free to share it on social media or with any friends or colleagues who you think would learn from it.

And if you do want to support the work that goes into making Tech Won't Save Us every single week, you can join supporters like Pamela Montes, David from Umeå in northern Sweden, and Mango from Oakland, California by going to patreon.com slash tech won't save us, where you can become a supporter as well. And of course, if you want to support the work of No Tech for Apartheid, I'll put information in the show notes about that. Thanks so much, and enjoy this week's conversation. Mohamed, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. Hi, Faris. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. And Gabby, great to talk to you.

Yeah, very glad to be here. Thanks. Looking forward to talking to both of you. I wish we could be talking about a more uplifting topic, but it's still things that are very important for us to understand, to be discussing, to be understanding, especially when we're talking about the tech industry and the culpability that it has in a lot of these issues. And of course, how it's treating its workers that are trying to force it to be a better actor in the world. So I was hoping that I could start with each of you by asking what you did at Google and when you left or when you were fired. So we understand that. Yeah, I used to be a software engineer at Google. I worked in core data. I also worked in YouTube music. And I was fired after April 16th when we had a direct action in the office.

I worked at Google for about seven years. Most of my time was in research, so focused on AI applications and privacy-focused AI. So when did you each get started organizing at Google? And was it around Project Nimbus that you first got started? Or was it something else at the company that got you organizing about how it was acting in relation to the things that you were concerned about? Yeah, I started organizing at Google really, I guess, in 2020, following the George Floyd uprising, I think that moment really asked everyone to really take seriously and consider the spaces you're holding.

So I started to try to have more conversations on the internal network, try to really take seriously that I am a tech worker, that the space does come with privilege and that there are things I can do there to have an impact as a worker. And those conversations kind of ultimately formed the relationships that led into my involvement, both in Alphabet Workers Union and then eventually in No Tech for Apartheid. Yeah. And for me, I started organizing in 2022, which was actually the same year that I started at Google. Started in like August. In September or October, there was actually a No Tech for Apartheid rally outside of the Google office. And that was the

first time I'd heard about Nimbus or like heard about No Tech for Apartheid in any capacity. And I actually met Gabby at that rally outside the office and learned about what was going on. And then right off the bat, I just knew that I couldn't really continue working there unless I was involved in organizing and speaking out against the ethical concerns that we were having. So pretty much right from my start at the company, I started organizing. Yeah, no, that makes sense. You know, for people listening, they might not have heard of Project Nimbus before. How would you describe that? How is this project forming a relationship between Google and Amazon and the Israeli government and military? Yeah, so Project Nimbus is a $1.2 billion

contract that's shared between Amazon and Google and is a contract with the Israeli government and military. The contract defines specific responsibilities for Amazon and Google. They require them to build data centers in Israel that can be sovereign data centers. So all of the hardware data access is owned by the government. And then also both Amazon and Google furnish their full cloud products to the Israeli government as well as the Israeli military. Yeah. I guess like another aspect of it that I've always found to be very concerning and sort

of radicalizing as far as organizing in the workspaces is that the nature and specific level of relationship and level of jurisdiction that we're sort of giving a government that is accused of apartheid and genocide and is committing both of those crimes is something that we've never even afforded. I say we, but like that Google has never even afforded to another government. So it's a completely unprecedented level of security that we're just relinquishing to a government that is internationally condemned for like their crimes against humanity. So that's one of the things that always really, you know, affected our perception and has definitely radicalized me in terms of making sure that I was speaking out against it. And how do you understand, you know, why a company like Google is making a contract like this, say, with the Israeli government?

Why is it pursuing this specific relationship? Yeah, I mean, from my understanding, it's nothing more interesting or nothing more than just like corporate greed. I think if there is money in military and you are a sellout, you will probably follow that money. So Google's leadership is just entirely built and made up of sellouts that have completely foregone and abandoned the initial hopes and dreams of what the company stood for and are now interested in just like making as much money as possible. So I think there's just too much money in militarizing the tech industry. And because of that, they will follow that. I think it's like super straightforward, honestly, sometimes when I think about it, just why they would pursue a contract like that. I would also note, like, this isn't something new.

Google specifically has been trying to move into military contracting for many years, going back all the way to Maven. I think what's new about this particular type of contract is that the military relationship is filtered through a cloud contract. So Google gets to say that they are selling, quote unquote, generic services. They get to avoid responsibility for the impacts that those services have because Google engineers maybe aren't working specifically with the drone data, right? But this has been actually a very long, many years in the making. Project Nimbus specifically, and I think to speak to the reason that the contract with Israel was the first contract of this type, that follows a trend of many military technologies that are developed in

Israel that are tested on Palestinians and then are exported around the world. This is the same type of thing where this contract framework is kind of tested with Israel before it's replicated around the world. And we've seen other instances of this type of relationship between tech and the military spin up since Project Nimbus, including JWCC, which is a contract with the U.S. Department of Defense, contracts with the U.K. military, and it's going to continue to replicate. Yeah, what you were saying about the Israeli government and the Israeli military testing all these technologies is something I've talked to Antony Low in the past, you know, who's written a book really going into this. Do you find that something has like notably shifted with Google? Obviously, we used to have this kind of idea that Google was don't be evil. You know, this was the slogan that they were putting out there,

trying to suggest that they were like a different kind of company. You know, Muhammad, you were saying how the company is just going after money wherever it can make the most money, right? Do you feel that there has been a shift, though, in seeing how the company operates today versus how it was operating in the past where you saw this desire to build Project Maven kind of get defeated, this desire to build a Chinese search engine get defeated, but now they seem to be much more kind of dug in and they are going to do these things regardless of what workers say, what the public says. Do you notice that change or but now they seem to be much more kind of dug in and they are going to do these things regardless of what workers say, what the public says. You know, do you notice that change or did you feel that maybe Google was kind of always like this to a certain degree as well? I think like Gabby was

saying, sort of direction the company has taken with this contract specifically is sort of unique in that they've hidden the military aspect of it significantly more in this case. And they've tried to filter that military relationship out and hide that from their workers as much as possible. And I think that sort of points to the change that I think has taken place as far as my understanding of Google is, is that prior to this, especially with Project Maven, I think that workers felt at least that they had some level of influence and voice in the company. And from that point up until now, there has been severe levels of repression and silencing and just attacking workers for speaking up against contracts. I think probably the lessons that were learned and how Maven fell through, those lessons are being

sort of taken into account by Google's leadership now and being used to mask the true meaning and the true effects of Project Nimbus to workers right now. I wasn't at the company as long as Gabby was. So I think maybe Gabby, you can speak more to like kind of how the culture has shifted. But as far as I had been there, the culture was entirely surrounded in fear. It was entirely surrounded in silence. It was entirely surrounded in keeping workers silent by placating them with stupid amenities, frankly. So that's kind of the relationship that I had with Google at the time. But yeah, I think Gabby, maybe you can speak more to the culture that had shifted, maybe. Yeah, I definitely think the culture shifted a lot.

And you can actually tie that back directly to a lot of the organizing against military contracts, right? You mentioned Maven, which was a contract that Google had signed with the Department of Defense, where Google engineers were directly analyzing and building AI models on drone data. So that contract, actually, they didn't cancel the contract, but they chose not to renew it. And that was a result. They chose not to renew it due to a combination of broad worker alignment against the project, really bad press across the board, as well as workers who were working kind of close to the project, threatening a work stoppage, right? So there were actually like

many different aspects that really showed how workers could have power within the company. After that, I think that Google leadership and Google executives really actually understood they needed to rein in worker power if they wanted to pursue military contracts again. And you can see increasing retaliation against organizers who worked to try to get Google to pull out of contracts with Customs and Border Patrol. You saw that with retaliation against the organizers of the Women's Walkout, and as well as now retaliation against organizers with No Tech for Apartheid. One more point that I'll mention, right, is that it's like very clear that Google execs are aware of the risk of worker organizing because they put in the contract with Israel. They put in the Project Nimbus contract with Israel provisions that attempt to limit worker power. So the contract actually states that Google can't pull out of the contract due to worker pressure. Now, those provisions don't really mean anything.

Ultimately, if Google wanted to drop the contract, they could. There might be consequences. No, that's a fair point. And I guess based on what you're saying there, what you're really seeing is this development among Google executives, among Google leadership, where they have seen that kind of initial pushback, you know, that was happening a number of years ago, especially as, you know, Google workers started to get more organized, started forming a union, things like that, and figured out, okay, we need to really start taking measures to ensure that on the one hand, we try to disempower these workers so they can't stop us from doing things, but really

put things directly in the contracts that makes it much more difficult for Google workers to have real impacts on, especially these aspects of Google's business that clearly a lot of people are going to have problems with. Yeah, exactly. And you can see the cultural impact on the Google workplace pretty directly. At some point, Google leadership hired a classic union busting consultant firm. And following that, there were a number of very significant changes around like data access policies. Google used to have a very open culture around accessing information from other projects. That's no longer the case. There have been multiple emails from execs that are effectively threats, threatening retaliation

for accessing documents labeled in a certain way. And so they've really ultimately tried to kind of segment the workforce, prevent workers from reaching each other, prevent workers from understanding what's going on in the company outside of their own PA. And that has had a huge cultural impact on how workers experience the workplace, right? So Mohamed mentioned that there's a ton of fear around speaking up. There's no longer a sense that execs are accessible, that execs listen, that kind of all company or all hands meetings have really become effectively internal PR meetings. They no longer answer questions like posed by an audience. All of the questions asked through the question submission site are heavily filtered and moderated.

The moderation policies on on-corp channels have gotten very severe. Many of the organizers with no tech for apartheid have been pulled into HR meetings, etc., because of how they've spoken up for Palestinian lives. I do want to get back to Project Nimbus in just a second, but just based off what you were saying there, you know, we've obviously seen these massive layoffs that have happened at many tech companies over the past couple of years. Google in particular has laid off many thousands of workers. Do you feel that in doing those layoffs, that executives at the company, that management were also able to kind of further increase their grip and further, you know, kind of tamp down on worker organizing that's happening at the company? Yeah, I mean, I have no doubt that that is also part of like their considerations whenever laying off massive amounts of workers. And I think like what Gabby

was pointing out with the fact that the Project Nimbus contract stipulates like provisions and sort of like a plan for how the contract can survive in the face of like worker organizing and workers speaking out. I think the fact that just shows how conscious leadership is about internal organizing and internal questioning to the point where I, yeah, I have no doubt that that has part of the consideration has been this will frankly inflict a ton of fear in our workers because they don't want to lose their benefits. They don't want to lose the things that they're receiving as a function of working at this company. So that's definitely some sort of added benefit to letting

people go. And I know it worked. That's the other thing is that in conversations with workers, whenever we talk about layoffs, and whenever we try to get people to consider joining the union and various sort of organizing opportunities in the company, one of the biggest reasons for pushback and like reasons for silence and reasons for people ignoring me that I got was just fear around, oh, like, I mean, they just laid off a bunch of workers. So I don't know if I really want to join the union right now. So I experienced that firsthand. So I have no doubt that it is working as well. Yeah, I often talk about the layoffs as a form of workplace discipline, right, or worker

discipline. They do introduce a sense of precarity. They introduce the threat of losing the prestige of working at Google, of losing the benefits, of being cast into, frankly, quite difficult job market right now. So yeah, I definitely think the layoffs are part of repression against organizing, but it's also part of a larger trend where tech work is becoming more and more precarious. Full-time tech work, right? There are many tech workers, contract workers, temps, vendors who have felt precarity for a long time despite working in one of the richest industries globally. But that kind of precarity is coming to full-time tech workers now as well.

We've seen that with the layoffs. There have been massive efforts to relocate jobs to India, to other places around the world where those are no longer full-time positions, but contract positions. So they're moving a lot of work to places with fewer labor protections. It's part of a larger trend. And I think we're kind of in a place right now where the precarity has been introduced. So there's increased fear. But tech workers don't have a history of labor organizing in the industry. So I think we're kind of seeing right now more tech workers start to understand and start to be kind of build that class consciousness as workers and understand that organizing is really the only way that we can actually remove ourselves from precarity. Yeah, I think that's a really important point. And I'm happy that you made it. You know, it's worrying to see this trend in the industry and how the companies are able to change the nature of the work so that they can have more control over what the workers are doing and make them more fearful of trying to push back against what

these companies are doing. I want to put a pin in our conversation around workplace organizing and what is happening with workers at these companies for just a minute to go back to Project Nimbus. You were talking about what Project Nimbus is and the relationship between Google, Amazon, and the Israeli government and military as a result of this contract. Do we know how having access to this cloud infrastructure and these AI tools from Google and Amazon actually aids the Israeli military? Yeah. So as I mentioned before, Project Nimbus furnishes the Israeli military with the full suite of cloud technologies available to the public.

So that includes large-scale data processing, data warehousing, AI, including access to the more recent foundation models or large language models that Google's been pushing like Gemini. So effectively all of those technologies, which were built by Google engineers and workers, are now available to the Israeli military.

The nature of the cloud contract and cloud technology means that even Google itself doesn't actually have insight into exactly how that technology is being used. So we can't say right now whether, for instance, Lavender or any of the kind of AI models that we know the Israeli military is using in the genocide in Gaza or specifically run on Google Cloud. But we do know that the military has been using Google Cloud. They've been using AWS to the point where, you know, at a recent conference called the IT for IDF conference, speakers indicated that the Israeli military would not have been able to scale to the current intensity of the genocide without moving to these cloud platforms.

So following October 7th, the IOF systems really became bogged down with the addition of so many new soldiers needing access, with the increase in target generation, with all of the increased computing capacity that they needed in order to wage this genocide. And their solution was Project Nimbus. So they moved a ton of their services, including their direct wartime services to the cloud. And just for people who might not be as familiar with the term, can you tell us what IOF means? I'm sorry. Yeah. Israeli Occupation Forces, the term that tries to counter the implicit messaging of the IDF, of Israeli Defense Forces, because we know that actually Israel is an occupying power in Palestine. I'm sure some people will be familiar with it, but just for those who aren't, just so they'll know what you're referring to there. Yeah. And as you say,

there has been reporting recently on how it seems like, especially during the genocidal campaign that Israel is carrying out in Gaza, they have been relying specifically on the Google, Amazon, and Microsoft cloud services and cloud servers in order to store a lot of this data that they need, that they use to track the population of Gaza. And potentially there have even been operations that have been carried out with the capacity that they're making use of. It was interesting reading that story and previously hearing stories of bookstores and major book, like moving on to cloud services and saying like, oh, it's so easy to just expand the computation that we need at busy times. And then seeing like people in a military kind of referring

to cloud services in the same way, like, oh, we're carrying out this campaign. We have so much extra data and, you know, now we need this extra cloud compute from these major companies in order to carry this out. It really kind of turns your stomach. It's shocking, right? I think that really indicates both why this type of contract is so powerful because it offers the military the type of scale, the type of global scale that Google and Amazon have built and that really the Google workers and Amazon workers have built over the past decade. So it's kind of this compounding and scaling force to their already existing high-tech military operations. I also feel it kind of points to, I think,

what is Google leadership's naive nature to think that tech workers wouldn't be able to discern the fact that their contract with the Israeli government is going to be used to wage a genocide. Just given how much literature and discussion there is on how efficient cloud technology is for military purposes, and just given how much information is available from the Israeli government themselves talking about how efficient and helpful like cloud technology is for the genocide that they're waging. So I think that's another thing that has been really frustrating for a lot of workers is just like, it's so disrespectful, honestly, the level to which leadership thinks that their workers are not

paying attention to what they're doing or what they're saying. And yeah, I think about that every time we talk about like what it is, like how cloud technology is being used, because we're literally building it, you know what I mean? So it's just really frustrating. Yeah. And as you say, like, you know, we're obviously rightfully focused on how these technologies are being used in Gaza because of the genocide that is going on there. But we also know that there's an apartheid system that exists across Gaza and the West Bank that is being implemented by the Israeli government. And these tools and these services are very much being used for that system to continue. Yeah, I mean, I would note also that the IOF is not the only beneficiary of Project Nimbus.

There are ministries across the Israeli government that are able to take advantage of this, including ministries like the Israeli Land Authority that is primarily responsible for the dispossession of Palestinians in the West Bank, as well as Gaza, along with other violent ministries, like given that Google and Amazon executives are unable to have insight into exactly how the contract is being used, the only information we have and that they could have had prior to signing this about how the technology would be used is by looking at the actions, the past actions of the client, right?

Of the Israeli government, of the military that they're selling it to, is very clear that this is just a full abdication of responsibility for the impact of the technology that their workers are building. As a person who is pretty visible and opinionated online, I'm hyper aware of safety and security. It's easier than ever to find personal information about people online and all that data can have actual consequences in the real world. Delete Me is designed to stop that from happening, and that's why I've been using it. Delete Me is a subscription service that removes your personal info from the largest people search databases on the web and in the process helps prevent potential ID theft, doxing and phishing scams. To put it simply, Delete Me does all of the hard work of wiping you and your family's personal info off the web.

Data brokers hate Delete.me. When you sign up, Delete.me immediately goes to work scrubbing all of your personal information from data broker platforms. Your personal profile is no longer theirs to sell. Take control of your data and keep your private life private by signing up for Delete.me, now at a special discount for our listeners. Today, get 20% off your Delete.me plan by texting TECH to 64000. That's TECH to 64000. The only way to get 20%

off is to text TECH to 64000. Once again, that's TECH to 64000. Disclaimer, message and data rates may apply. See terms for details. I wonder when you're doing this organizing, you know, against Google's relationship with the Israeli government, you know, and the Project Nimbus contract specifically, if you ever look at, you know, we were talking about the campaign against Project Maven, the campaign against the Chinese search engine, and some of these other contracts that companies like Google have had with, whether it's other governments or with institutions of the American government. But also, you know, we have these historical examples of workers that say IBM trying to impose its relationship with apartheid South Africa back in the day. In doing this organizing against what Google and Amazon are doing, do you ever look back at those historical examples and take lessons from what people were doing then?

Yeah, definitely. One of the kind of major examples of a campaign like that that we often reference and look back to is the Polaroid Workers Campaign against Polaroid's investment in South African apartheid. At that time, Polaroid was furnishing technology used to make the ID books and passports that helped the government implement and track the apartheid system. The revolutionary Polaroid Workers Movement led a long campaign to try to get Polaroid to pull out of South Africa. They were ultimately successful. We really looked at that campaign both as inspiration, as hope. And through conversations with some of the organizers there, I personally have learned a lot about some of the strategies they use in

organizing. They had a really strong focus on education as an organizing tool. And I think that's something that we have tried to live up to and are still trying to live up to because, honestly, a lot of the relationship between technology and the concrete impacts that it has can be somewhat opaque, especially for people outside of tech. So we try to put a lot of time into educating communities about how this technology works and how the technology can have these impacts, as well as into educating tech workers about labor and about how we can kind of stand together. And I think there's a lot of examples from history that

show that the strategy can be effective, even if it's been used only in like limited ways in tech. I think that's so important, right? I think it's always so important to look back at these historical examples, because so often we forget so much of this history, right? And how often even within tech, you know, you talked about how there's not, you know, a strong labor movement within the tech industry, but there are these historical examples that you can look to for at least some degree of inspiration that, you know, it's not wholly new, like it has happened before. And it can very much happen again. And people can work together to change the actions of these companies, especially, you know, supporting some of the absolute worst regimes in the world. Right. So, yeah, I think I take a lot of hope from that, seeing what's happening today and comparing it back to what was happening then. Coming back to this question of what it is like to be a worker at one of these companies

today and trying to stop, you know, whether it's the relationship with the Israeli military or the other kind of actions that a company like Google is taking against its workers. You know, what is it actually like to organize at one of these companies and how difficult is that with the way that management is today? Yeah. I mean, I think one of the biggest difficulties that I think we face is trying to cut through a lot of the barriers that management and leadership is setting. So I think that tech workers as a demographic are just like any other demographic on the planet. Like we all have a conscience. We all want to feel like our work is being used to make a positive impact on the world. And I think that's something that people try to diminish oftentimes. I feel like

there's a stereotype of like the apathetics or a tech worker that just wants to collect their checks. And I don't think that is at all the case with most people. I think the difficulty comes in when leadership sets barriers and sets a sort of culture of fear where as an organizer, it's hard to have even conversations about Project Nimbus or about any sort of abuses that Google is involved in because it's pretty much a non-starter for a lot of people that have fear of financial or job insecurity. That's definitely been the biggest difficulty that I've experienced while trying to organize or while trying to get other people invested in organizing the company. Yeah, I think another big issue also is a general feeling of

disempowerment. I think the scale of the companies and the distance between workers and leadership has really created a culture where workers no longer feel like they have a voice and they feel like the company is too big for them to have an impact even by organizing. So that's something that we try to counter. We have to end up countering a lot. And I think really the answer to that is to try to build relationships with people, right? I see organizing as practice. Organizing is the way that I show up fully in my workplace with my values and try to improve the workplace that I feel like I'm working in at a company that is not having these intense, intense negative impacts on the world. I agree with Mohamed. I think most tech workers generally feel like they want their work to be impactful in a positive way. But there's also a lot of tech narratives that people are very steeped in around how tech is beneficial to the world and how tech is improving people's lives by making things easier, by increasing access to information, right? So it's kind of this balance of understanding that trying to bring people into an understanding of that also tech has these negative impacts,

right? Trying to like build this political consciousness amongst workers. Yeah. And I think, you know, yeah, there's a number of different things to counter, right? Like it's those things. It's also, I think, the golden handcuffs, right? Full-time tech workers kind of hold a position within the broader labor movement that's maybe not unique, but somewhat, I think, distinct. Tech workers are, you know, relatively well-paid. Full-time tech workers are relatively well-paid. You know, they're building technology that also has kind of negatively impacted other parts of the labor movement, other parts of the workforce, right? So they're kind of in this in-between position

between like kind of traditional labor movement profile and like executives or management or the capitalist class. So I think it's difficult to kind of counter those narratives, like bring people into this like alignment with the working class. I think what I talked about before, the increased precarity around tech was going to really accelerate that. But there's still a lot of kind of narrative and identity aspects of being a tech worker that I think make it difficult to organize. That makes a lot of sense. And I can see that being a difficult thing to get over, especially after, you know, we've heard so much about what tech work is and what it means to be a tech worker for so long. And the benefits that come of that,

of course, as the companies slowly erode those benefits, it takes some of that away. I wonder how you've seen this evolve over the years, both Gabby, I know that you were at Google a little longer. So I guess on the longer time horizon, how you've seen kind of organizing at Google evolve and whether you think that's stronger today or has kind of been hit by the recent layoffs and the pushback from management. And then more specifically on the question of organizing around Project Nimbus, do you feel like since October of last year, there has been a real kind of surge in the number of workers at Google who are organizing around

this or has the company been effective at trying to suppress that? Yeah, I think similarly to how the company has changed a lot and the company culture has changed a lot, including the increased repression for organizing, naturally the organizing has changed a lot as well. Organizing used to be more kind of informal networks, one-time, one-purpose groups of people that would see an issue and then start to organize around that. And then the issue would either be addressed or fail to be addressed, but time would pass and those people would move on through attrition, et cetera. So that's really no longer sustainable, right? Like with the change in culture towards retaliation, towards repression of worker organizing, the organizing's had to become much more resilient. I think both Alphabet Workers Union and New Tech for Apartheid are good examples of that, where we've formed actual unions and organizations that's responsible for holding up everything. And if those people get laid off or fired, the whole thing will collapse, right? So there's more resiliency, definitely. From my perspective, I think because I was at the company like slightly

less time, all I ever sort of knew was Noda and all I ever sort of knew in terms of organizing was Project Nimbus. So No Tech for Apartheid organizing began and immediately it was met with a significant, significant amount of pushback from the company and a significant amount of rage from leadership. Immediately workers were retaliated against. So my introduction to the company and my introduction to organizing at the company was one where throughout my entire time there, it was marred by, you know, repression, silencing, retaliation, and thing that organizers experienced was this sort of weaponization of anti-Semitism coming at us from both leadership and from counter-protesters and people that were trying to detract from the anti-militarism nature of the organizing we were doing. So I was even called a terrorist. I was called into HR and accused of supporting

terrorism, which is something that I hadn't experienced since probably elementary school, of being called like a terrorist. And it's sort of ironic that it would happen at the, you know, premier tech company in the country and the world. And so there was such a boldness and such an openness about anti-Arabness, anti-Muslim, anti-Palestinian, anti-pro-Palestinian movement to the point where the sort of nature of the rules and the nature of what it meant to be googly and nice to your co-workers completely was thrown out the window when it came to interacting with myself and other organizers at the company. So pre-October, all I ever knew was like, okay, the company really doesn't want you to talk about this and they will silence you at any chance they get. And post-October,

it was like, not only will the company silence you, but if other workers are literally stalking you or if other workers are accusing you of terrorism and just straight up being racist to you, the company will not do anything about that and will protect those workers are accusing you of terrorism and just straight up being racist to you, the company will not do anything about that and will protect those workers from any sort of discipline or anything. So needless to say, I was very disillusioned by the time of this. And I was frankly felt betrayed by the company and betrayed by the values that they had apparently set up to honor. Just to add to that, the repression has pretty drastically increased since October, and especially, as Mohamed mentioned, repression by co-workers, right, by other Google employees.

But on the flip side, including many workers being doxxed publicly for supporting Palestine internally with no repercussions from any of that investigation. Workers have been falsely accused of violence for attending pro-Palestine rallies and protests. And on the flip side of that, we've seen a huge influx of workers who want to organize with No Tech for Apartheid, right? Watching this genocide unfold in real time online has really agitated so many workers that have come to understand that not only is America directly funding and resourcing this genocide, but their work is directly tied to the military capability to carry out the genocide. I think no tech for apartheid has grown by an

order of magnitude. We've seen workers really step up, become much more confident in speaking out on core, become much more confident in taking action. And we've seen that kind of spread throughout the industry, right? So now it's not just Google and Amazon workers that are organizing internally against this contract. The contract is kind of widely known in the tech sector. We have workers from other companies that are helping to support the organizing effort. And other companies have also started their own campaigns, right? I think there's been a huge increase in the awareness that the entire tech sector is very complicit in the Israeli occupation and genocide.

So workers at Microsoft just started a campaign called No Azure for Apartheid. That campaign, as you mentioned, the 972 article, like Microsoft also supplies Azure directly to the IOF, the Israeli government. Workers at Cisco, workers at Oracle, workers at Intel have all started organizing campaigns to address the deep complicity of their specific companies in the Israeli occupation. So I think we're seeing not just a massive swell in pro-Palestine organizing, both inside and outside of the tech sector, but we're seeing this understanding that tech companies, all major tech companies, are heavily tied to Israel, that those companies form the financial and technical underpinnings of the occupation. And we've seen a massive increase in specifically labor organizing to address that,

which I think is a really powerful thing right now, not only for the pro-Palestine movement, but also for the labor movement, right? So we're actually seeing that Palestine is kind of a way in to organizing for so many workers because this genocide is so horrific, right? It's so agitating. And the knowledge that we as workers are directly connected to this is really moving people to action, right? So I think we're seeing a swell in the labor organizing. I think the labor movement, especially in tech, is gaining a lot of strength in this moment. And we're seeing that labor power being applied to the Palestinian cause. Yeah, that is good to hear. And it's been positive to see that, you know, in the tech industry, but also beyond as well, right? Like

seeing the auto workers and other unions being very clear that they're supporting Palestinians, that they're against the continuation of the Israeli genocide in Gaza, and that they want the government to act on it, right? Mohamed, you were mentioning what it was like at Google, especially after October 7th, as you were organizing around Google's relationship with the Israeli military and its complicit nature in everything that's going on there. I know that you sent a letter in early October that resulted in you kind of having a meeting with HR at Google. Can you talk a bit more about what it was like at Google to be organizing, you know, against Project Nimbus and against

Google's broader relationship with the Israeli government, but also did it feel, or I guess quite obviously, how they were specifically targeting Palestinian and Muslim workers who were doing that organizing? Yeah. So broadly speaking, like the immediate response to the organizing, as we've said, was like this silencing and sort of a callback to the tactics that they had been using throughout their time of repressing no tech for apartheid. But I think where it turned for the worst was for my case, for example, I sent out this email that was practically identical, almost entirely identical to emails sent out by other worker organizers, you know, to workers at the company, basically asking them to sign a petition, calling for the Project Nimbus to get dropped. After that happened, I was obviously the sole Middle Eastern Muslim in the cohort of organizers that sent out those emails. I was the

only one accused of terrorism. I was called into this meeting, berated, and basically told that I was supporting terrorism. And that sort of language was validated by the employee relations group. And I think in the immediate aftermath of that, what we saw was like there was a lot of outrage from organizers and sort of people of like Arab, Palestinian, Muslim background. But on the flip side, there was also what I felt was a sort of an emboldened nature in detractors from our organizing where that sort of language became okay and commonplace at the company to the point where I remember someone literally responding to our emails saying that people in Gaza, if they really cared about their posterity, they shouldn't be having children, which is straight up eugenics.

It's a eugenics email that was broadcasted to people at Google. And that person still works at the company. And then I don't, that's the basic example. So yeah, whenever you look at sort of how the culture has shifted, it's like that language and repression and violent nature toward Palestinian, Muslim, Arab Googlers and workers was something that started, was not shot down or diminished by the company, then was emboldened by the company. And then, you know, similar cases were just not followed up on and not, how do you say, reprimanded in the way that they ought to have been. And I think because of that, like I said, a lot of people were radicalized and brought to organizing. But I think for a lot of people that also just enhanced the fear that was already

prevalent throughout that company of, if I speak out, I'm also risking just having racial slurs hurled at me. And maybe that's something that I don't want to experience. So yeah, I struggle to talk about it because sometimes I think about like the situation and I am like, okay, you know, what I experienced isn't nearly as bad as maybe what other people have experienced. But, you know, this kind of pain and like hatred associated with like racism is like the pain that's felt and like the effects that are felt are so relative to like different people. So I just know for a fact that many, many people were probably just silenced just by hearing something like that taking place. Yeah, I don't know if that fully

answered the question, but that's kind of my experience and what I took away from it in the time there. I appreciate you outlining that so that listeners know what that's actually like internally. Gabby, I wonder, as a Jewish organizer, I know that you were obviously outside of Google by the time October 7th happened and what came after, but what it's been like organizing before Gaza against Project Nimbus before that and whatnot. But what that's been like as a Jewish organizer, when I feel like, I'm sure that you've encountered this, but a lot of the way that the Jewish relationship to what is happening is covered is kind of treating all Jewish people as though they're Zionists and supporting what's happening there. And if you oppose it, then,

you know, like Muhammad was saying, you're anti-Semitic or something. What's your relationship with that been like? Yeah, it's been very interesting. I think to maybe just go back a little bit, I would say that actually No Talk for Apartheid and kind of the initial efforts of organizing against Project Nimbus started with myself and other Jewish anti-Zionist organizers on court. And I think that's because of the repression that Mohammed talked about, right? Because we were Jews, you know, we had a past, right? Like we couldn't be accused of anti-Semitism as easily. We could use our positionality to try to counter the deep Zionism that pervaded the, for example, the Jewish ERG on Corp.

So actually, you know, the repression and identity politics of being on Corp actually meant that, right, that it was Jewish anti-Zionist organizers that helped start this initiative. And, you know, rightfully so, right? Like from the beginning, we organized with Palestinian co-workers, with Muslim co-workers, but often they were unable to or couldn't risk speaking up, right? So that's been kind of a consistent dynamic that really, I think, helped me understand how disparate the bias is on a corp. It really helped me understand, yeah, how inequitable the HR policies are weaponized and how much more risk there is for speaking up as a Muslim or Palestinian tech worker. Since October know my organizing home since October has been mainly with no tech for

apartheid you know organizing in New York I guess like within no tech for apartheid because I'm no longer at Google directly that actually comes up a lot less right like mainly just kind of helping coordinate things and like organizing with, the kind of identity politics that really shape how on-court organizing happens due to the like intense Zionism and repression there is a little bit less relevant in like the broader New Tech for Apartheid work. But kind of outside that in my personal life, I've actually, the fact that so many people have become so much more activated around this actually really helped me broaden the like anti-Zionist Jewish community that I have here and find a lot of comrades who share my perspective and create more of a Jewish anti-Zionist home in my organizing community, organizing outside

of no tech for apartheid as well. That's right. I appreciate you both sharing those, those experiences of what it's been like doing this organizing. And, you know, to close off our interview, I was just wondering, is there anything else that you want people to know about No Tech for Apartheid and the work that it's been doing? And also, you know, is there anything that you're asking people generally to do to support the campaigns that you have? Or is it just really focused on trying to change corporate policy? Yeah, I guess I can start there.

My main thing that I would sort of want to push out about, you know, tech for apartheid is sort of the assurance that the work is still ongoing. The organizing is still ongoing. The campaign is still growing very quickly. I mean, that's something that we're not only very proud of, but something that we've been trying to sort of relay to other tech workers in different companies is that regardless of what fear and position they're in, the campaign is still growing and the opportunity to start organizing is always going to be available for people that are in the

tech world and like tech adjacent, I guess. And then also just, I think there's a lot of people at Google that I knew at least that were understanding of the dire need for organizing, but from a combination of fear and also this sort of feeling that, oh, you know, like the specific product that I'm working on isn't specifically being used by that in this contract. Like a combination of those two things, a lot of people are able to divert themselves from feeling complicity in the genocide. But I think it's really important for everyone in tech to understand that the work that they're doing is actively enabling the apartheid and the genocide. These things aren't separable. In fact, for the most part, they're entirely linked.

And only on some occasions can you say that they're only tangentially related. But in Google's case, I mean, we're literally seeing invoices being sent from Google to the Israeli occupation forces. So just broadly speaking, I feel like all tech workers sort of need to understand, like, if you aren't organizing in tech, there's many opportunities to do so. And also, if you aren't, you are frankly, just as complicit as your company is in the genocide that's taking place in Palestine, as you know, anyone else's. the repression and retaliation, and especially the firing of 50 workers for participating in this direct action sit-in in New York and Sunnyvale. That said, to date, at Google, people don't get fired for talking to their co-workers. People don't get fired for sending messages on core. People don't get fired for joining New Tech for Apartheid. There's a lot of safe ways to organize and start to learn about this.

And I think that organizing has actually a ton of benefits, both personally as well as structurally. I agree with Mohamed that I think really everyone should be organizing wherever they are. That's how we win, both as a campaign and as workers. That's how we gain the benefits of stability. That's how we gain the benefits of ethical work. I think another dimension of organizing that really doesn't get talked about very much is that it helps to counter the deep alienation of being a tech worker, working at a company at the scale of Google, having all of your work be heavily abstracted, heavily mediated by technology, I think makes a lot of tech workers feel very distanced from their work, right? Very alienated from their labor.

And actually organizing is a way to counter that directly by building relationships with other people who see the things that you see building relationships with other people who see the things that you see on court, right? They see the impacts in the same way you see that impact. So organizing is really this relational practice of getting to know your co-workers, of asking the question of how can we make this better together? So it's really actually quite simple and quite safe to start to learn more and start to take some steps to really help yourself, your co-workers, and ultimately the world. I love that. And I think that's a great place to leave it. I would thank you both for taking the

time to speak to me about this organizing that you're doing and about the need for it to continue and to really stop these relationships and to improve the lot of workers at these tech companies. Gabby, Mohamed, thanks so much for taking the time. Thank you, Paris. Really appreciate it. Yeah, thank you so much. Really appreciate having chatted. Mohamed Khatami and Gabby Schubiner are former Google software engineers and No Tech for Apartheid organizers. Tech Won't Save Us is made in partnership with The Nation magazine and is hosted by me, Paris Marks. Production is by Eric Wickham and transcripts are by Bridget Palou-Fry. Tech Won't Save Us is made in partnership with The Nation magazine and is hosted by me, Paris Marks. Production is by Eric Wickham and transcripts are by Bridget Palou-Fry. Tech Won't Save Us relies on the support of listeners like you to keep providing critical

perspectives on the tech industry. You can join hundreds of other supporters by going to patreon.com slash tech won't save us and making a pledge of your own. Thanks for listening and make sure to come back next week. Thank you.