BY RAYA WARD

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As university students, one of the strongest assets we have in swaying the decision in big tech companies is our potential labor.

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As sought after talent, we can refuse jobs at Amazon and Google in response to the companies’ direct relationships and contract with the Israeli military and government.

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This digital zine is the result of conversations with over a dozen young professionals and students who have at some point considered, recruited with, interned for, or worked for big tech companies, primarily Google and Amazon. Building off of these conversations, I explore the dynamics of big tech recruiting, the draws of big tech, and the possibly viable career alternatives.

**SETTING THE SCENE:

WHY REFUSE, WHY MAKE DEMANDS**

Let’s set the basis: all artifacts have politics. Technology cannot be apolitical.

As political theorist, Langdon Winner expresses, “the things we call technologies’ are ways of building order in our world...inadvertently or deliberately societies chose structures for technologies...in the process by which structuring decisions are made, different people are differently situated and poses unequal degrees of power as well as unequal levels of awareness.”[1] All technologies have politics in that they (1) become a way of settling an issue in a particular community or (2) are inherently political in that the technology requires particular kinds of political relationships to be maintain. For example, many large sophisticated technological systems are highly compatible with centralized, hierarchical managerial control.

To argue that technology is not political or that a tool can be separated from its applications is too simple and discounts the very calculated design of the structures that allow for and maintain the prominence of dominant technologies. Google and Amazon intentionally hire and recruit expansive legal, marketing, press, and policy teams; their technologies require particular infrastructures and relationships of power. In this way we can see “internet technologies as sociopolitical regimes. Platforms produce new forms of currency (i.e., data) and new forms of exchange (e.g., cryptocurrencies), and they structure new organizational arrangements among owners, workers, and consumers.“ [2]