Workshop Overview
This workshops seeks to bring together seasoned and early-career technologists, practitioners, and scholar-activists to improve our sensemaking and strategizing about today’s crises. This workshop explores what Tamara Kneese has deemed the last decade’s shift from “techlash” to “tech fash” (Kneese, 2025). What have we learned from the era of misinformation and bias, of “surveillance capitalism” and tech worker organizing that can inform our struggle against the increasing power of a techno-fascist oligarchy? We will also look towards previous generations of computing professionals and activists, who likewise sought to address the harms of emerging automated systems and the complicity of computing within violent, imperialist projects. This workshop will create space for participants to explore these questions collectively, bridging past and present moments in an effort to devise strategies moving forward.
Our goals are to:
- build our capacity for collective organizing in computing
- explore workplace organizing as an importantq site for contributing to struggle and resistance
- expand our geneologies of computing activism
Themes
We invite papers that reflect on contemporary practice and histories of activism. We are especially interested in reflections on what strategies worked and did not work. Papers can focus on, but are not limited to:
- Reflections on collective resistance and worker organizing, including popular worker-led responses to the tech sector and the subsequent corporate response
- Reflections on the interventions of critical computing scholars and how that has shaped the current techno-fascist moment
- Reflections on potential lessons and strategic insights from prior decades of resistance