Confirmation they should be scared of their own workers

Last October, it looked as if the San Francisco Bay Area was to be next target of Donald Trump's Rambo/ICE thugs.

And then we weren't. And the thugs were redirected to such unfortunate locations as Memphis and eventually Minnesota's Twin Cities.

Why did Trump/Miller/Noem back off then? San Francisco's mayor, Daniel Lurie, whose promise is to eradicate any vestiges of the historically weird and anti-corporate character of the City by the Bay, claimed to have talked Trump out of it. It may have helped that the federal forces had located on an isolated Coast Guard island where they might have been expected to shoot their way out when protesters inevitably blocked their way.

But I've always suspected that the tech barons who support both Lurie and Trump were the deciders. They don't mind beating up on poor Central American and East Asian migrants, but they didn't want their work force seeing the carnage. And some of their companies depend on immigrants. Lots of tech jobs have moved on from the Bay, partially because the pandemic encouraged remote work, but there are still legions of ambitious, not-yet billionaire techies who locate here for the promise of natural beauty, each other, and hope for start-up riches. 

And if the Bay were a fascist target, these might be confronted by the ugly violence of the state for themselves. They are part of labor; their work still matters to their bosses -- hence our (momentary?) reprieve. 

WIRED has confirmed stirrings among the lower and mid-level tech workers and the response of their oligarch employers. Notably, the rustlings of dissent are within the company what seems to be the fascist Dark Star -- Peter Thiel's Palantir.

After federal agents shot and killed Minneapolis nurse Alex Pretti on Saturday, Palantir workers pressed for answers from leadership on the company’s work with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)—and many questioned whether Palantir should be involved with the agency at all. Leadership defended its work as in part improving “ICE’s operational effectiveness.” 

Internal Slack messages reviewed by WIRED reveal growing frustration within Palantir over its relationship with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and in particular, ICE’s enforcement and investigations teams. In response, Palantir’s privacy and civil liberties team published an update to the company’s internal wiki detailing its work on federal immigration enforcement, arguing that the “technology is making a difference in mitigating risks while enabling targeted outcomes.” 

In a Saturday thread on Slack discussing Pretti’s killing, Palantir workers questioned both the ethics and the business logic of continuing the company’s work with ICE. 

“Our involvement with ice has been internally swept under the rug under Trump2 too much. We need an understanding of our involvement here,” one person wrote. 

“Can Palantir put any pressure on ICE at all?” wrote another. “I’ve read stories of folks rounded up who were seeking asylum with no order to leave the country, no criminal record, and consistently check in with authorities. Literally no reason to be rounded up. Surely we aren’t helping do that?” 

The discussion was held in a company-wide Slack channel dedicated to general world news coverage. ... 

... [A corporate] wiki acknowledges “increasing reporting around U.S. Citizens being swept up in enforcement action and held, as well as reports of racial profiling allegedly applied as pretense for the detention of some U.S. Citizens,” but argues that Palantir’s customers at ICE “remain committed to avoiding the unlawful/unnecessary targeting, apprehension, and detention of U.S. Citizens wherever and however possible.”

Yeah -- and where's the evidence for that? Dead civilians?

Here too, among tech workers, is where resistance will rise and must be welcomed by those of us with a more skeptical response to their world. Working techies are people too and they don't like ugly.

We're in this together, trying to save the aspirations of the country from the monsters currently in power.