I’m at an open meeting held by Maciej Ceglowski, co-hosted by Heather Gold, for techies to get together to think about how we can ameliorate the Trump Effect. It’s being held under the Chatham House Rule. It’s a packed house of 100+ people. Most are programmers. Probably under 15% are women. Almost all are white. We know from a show of hands that a healthy number were not born in this country. Few thought Trump would win. I seem to be the oldest person in the room. As usual.

Maciej says that we have a month before the inauguration and we shouldn’t waste it. “…hear from people from outside of our community who know how to organize”He characterizes the recent meeting of Silicon Valley CEOs with Trump as a knuckling under by the participants. We should be pushing from below, he says. Maciej says we are here tonight also to hear from people from outside of our community who know how to organize and have an effect.

The first speaker is Bruce Schneier, who gave me permission to name him; no Chatham House Rule was harmed with this entry. (Bruce’s comments are drawn from a recent post.) The election was so close that you can’t draw conclusions, but the outcome sure changed the narrative, he says. Bruce talks about four things to do in the Trump years: 1. Fight the fights. That means playing whack-a-mole. We’re going to lose a lot of those battles, but our goal should be to lose as few and as little as possible. 2. Prepare for the fight. “The more we can convince corporate America to disarm, the safer we’ll be.” 3. Prepare the groundwork for the future. 4. Solve the actual problems — the ones that are coming despite or because of Trump. “If things go really bad really fast, a lot of this becomes irrelevant.,” he notes. “The hardest thing is to not fall into despair…The election exposed some really deep problems in society.” We need to address those problems now. “Treat this as if the nation caught cowpox, not smallpox”“Treat this [Trump’s presidency] as if the nation caught cowpox, not smallpox,” i.e. a disease that inoculates us against the fatal version.

The second speaker is a refugee advocate. There are about 400 sanctuary cities/towns/states. “Not Massachusetts. Not yet.” Sanctuaries limit police collaboration with ICE. The fight is at the state level, and many states are ahead of Massachusetts in this. It now becomes more important to provide tuition to any student who graduates from HS no matter their immigration status. Mass. Gov. Baker in June aligned himself with Pres. Obama’s massive deportation policy. There’s a Boston initiative to provide public defenders for people in immigration court. People should contact their local legislators and ask them to support the TRUST act.

The third speaker is a civil liberties activist. S/he agrees with the first two speakers that the action is going to be in the states. Her/His TL;DR: “We’re fucked.” The Mass. legislature is Democratic but conservative. S/he urges us to send messages to our legislators. Especially important: Call them on the phone. “Pick one thing that matters to you a lot. Get people in your neighborhood together, and have a meeting” with your legislator. S/he suggests we support the CCOPS
(“Community Control Over Police Surveillance”) bill that Cambridge is considering. She ends by saying that while federal action will primarily be defensive, we can still build power. Also, support the ACLU.

The fourth speaker is from a domestic workers activist group. S/he has us say as one that we’re ready to fight. “It’s good to remember how mopey privileged people like me allow ourselves to be.”(It’s good to remember how mopey privileged people like me allow ourselves to be. Of course, as a stalwart introvert I could not bring myself to join the chant. But anyway.) S/he works on building alliances between labor and tech. “This is a moment when we can really come together.” Massachusetts has the most advanced bill supporting domestic workers. S/he wants to know how many of us have friends, actual friends, who are undocumented. If so, we should understand the forces that cause people to uproot themselves. “The day after the election, everyone was crying, because hope had been taken away from them.” Over 60% of undocumented workers pay income taxes on their own, with no help from their employers. “We need your help because tech is everything. Also, you’re white.” [Laughter] “It’s really important for tech to lead, and to represent Mass as a kind of liberation zone across the nation. We have to build an alternative to the tech CEOs who normalized Trump. We need to be building alternative leaders and reps and not cede the ground of who is speaking for tech. We need distributed resistance across the country, and where’s the infrastructure for that? “We need you guys to do that.” E.g., How do we make our membership lists and databases secure?“ Should we be talking about sanctuary companies where people feel safe when they come to work?” Should we be talking about sanctuary companies where people feel safe when they come to work?

Maciej: How do we build tools that let people organize without being weapons that can be used against them?

The fifth is a labor lawyer. Three pieces of good news: 1. The national labor laws will survive Trump. 2. Because Trump says he’s a champion of the working class, it will be hard for him to attack unions. 3. Tech workers have more knowledge and power than most workers; it’s harder to replace them. S/he explains how you can form a union. You should be able to have an election within a month of filing. S/he also talks about whistleblowing: If you can find a statute being violated, you can assert that and refuse to do it. “This is a good time for people to start joining unions.”

Now there are lightning talks, introduced by Heather Gold (See TummelVision). I’m not going to try to capture them with any completeness. Some points made:

• A union organizer says that the only way forward is to have in-person conversations. “We’re motivated by emotions…It’s about the relationships.”

• “Make sure that the people working on tech in govt are in part of this conversation.”

• The rubber hits the road with the local immigrant worker groups

• “Rally to the defense of workers.”

• Support SURJ
  : Showing Up for Racial Justice. From the site: “SURJ is a national network of groups and individuals organizing White people for racial justice.”

• “A lot of work gets hindered by well-meaning white people who want to help but don’t know how to do it.”

• Support ActSecure, helping activists learn how to secure their information and communication.

• “Run for town meeting. Run for town clerk.”

• Before you build the great idea you have, engage with tech activist communities to learn what they’ve done already. When you don’t, “honestly, it hurts.”

• Onion Browser
  for iPhone and VPN for iPhone are on the way.

• Most of the progress in Trans* rights have been done through executive actions and can thus be rolled back. Much of Trump’s cabinet comes from “what I call anti-LGBTQ hate groups.”

• Most computer systems were designed by people who weren’t thinking about trans people, and it shows in profile choices, etc.

• Go to a monthly CryptoParty

• Engineering Activism: Tech training for organizers, and organizing training for techies.

Now there’s open conversation, ably and actively moderated by Heather, which I will not record.

Categories: politics dw