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JS Tan & Clarissa Redwine — Against Tech Oligarchy: Worker Resistance in the World's Most Powerful Industry - with Dave Karpf — at the Wharf
Past event
About This Event
As tech bosses fall in line with fascism, tech workers are fighting back. This is the rousing inside story of their movement—and how it spawned the right-wing, anti-worker backlash now reshaping the industry.After Donald Trump’s election in 2016, the tech industry sprang into action to oppose his right-wing agenda, with workers staging walkouts against ICE contracts and CEOs joining mass mobilizations against the so-called Muslim ban. But it wasn’t long before the tech bosses started to fall in line with the new administration. Using the autonomy afforded to them by the industry’s progressive and mission-driven culture, tens of thousands of tech workers began speaking out against their own executives. This burgeoning resistance included organizing against military contracts, walkouts to protest sexism, agitation about tech’s role in the climate crisis, and even a wave of union drives. By the early 2020s, tech workers had sparked an exciting movement that seemed to hold the potential to check the industry’s rapid growth and reactionary drift.But as their struggle grew, so did the employers’ backlash. A new class consciousness took root among the billionaire owners. Hellbent on stamping out any and all dissent, tech executives embraced Trumpism, fired organizers, and began lashing out against the “woke” ideology they blamed for turning their once loyal employees against them.Against Tech Oligarchy provides a gripping account of this inspiring movement’s development and offers a balance sheet of its successes and failures that will prove crucial for anyone looking to challenge right-wing billionaires anywhere.JS Tan is getting his PhD at MIT and formerly worked in tech. His work has been featured in The New York Times, MIT Technology Review, Dissent, Jacobin, Foreign Policy, The Baffler, and The Guardian, among other outlets.Clarissa Redwine helped organize the Kickstarter union and cofounded the tech organizing conference Circuit Breakers. Her organizing work has been featured in The New York Times, the BBC, The Guardian, The Verge, TechCrunch, and elsewhere.Moderating this event will be Dave Karpf, an Associate Professor in the School of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University and author of The MoveOn Effect: The Unexpected Transformation of American Political Advocacy. His research explores the internet’s impact on political associations — both in the formation of novel organizational structures seen in MoveOn and DailyKos, and also tracing implications for more traditional advocacy organizations. This event is free with first come, first serve seating.To request accommodations for this event or to inquire about accessibility please email events@politics-prose.com ideally one week in advance of the event date. We will make an effort to accommodate all requests up until the time of the event.
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Lindsay Owens — Gouged: The End of a Fair Price–and What That Means for Your Wallet - with Greg Rosalsky — at The Wharf
A searing exposé of the new tools of corporate profiteering and a field guide to the deceptive tactics companies are using to cheat consumers out of their money—and how we can get ahead of them—from a leading voice in economic policy and executive director of a corporate watchdog think tankEverywhere you turn, Americans are getting ripped off: Online ticket sellers hide behind exorbitant extra fees. Landlords use software to band together and organize artificial rent hikes. Ride-sharing apps spike the fare when it rains. And car companies install software that reports your driving behavior to insurance companies so that they can hike your premiums. Surveillance pricing, algorithmic price fixing, and other high-tech forms of price gouging are the latest frontiers in corporate profiteering—and they’re gutting the American economy and your wallet.In Gouged, economic expert and veteran consumer advocate Lindsay Owens takes us inside the corporate boardrooms where pricing decisions are made, uncovering the tricks, traps, and grifts corporations use to jack up the price you pay at checkout. From data collection to drone surveillance, modern technology provides companies a staggering arsenal of sophisticated tools to squeeze as much money out of consumers as possible, resulting in record profits. Drawing on original reporting, shareholder meeting transcripts, and rigorous economic analysis, Owens takes aim at Big Tech behemoths, airlines, health insurance companies, and others to pull back the curtain on how price going is coming for almost every line item in your household budget, from doctor visits to rent, groceries to diapers, and even your summer vacation.Gouged arms us with the essential knowledge we need to first recognize, then sidestep the traps that corporations try to conceal from us. In a world where price gouging has become ubiquitous, Gouged is necessary reading for anyone looking to stay an informed consumer, save money rather than surrender it to greedy CEOs, and stand up for fair prices in America.Lindsay Owens is president and CEO of the Groundwork Collaborative, a leading economic think tank and corporate watchdog in Washington, D.C. A nationally recognized public policy expert, she is widely sought after for media commentary, congressional testimony, and innovative investigative research on corporate malfeasance, financial markets, consumer protection, and affordability. She regularly advises government officials, candidates for elected office, and members of Congress and has served as a senior advisor to lawmakers including Senator Elizabeth Warren. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Rolling Stone, and she frequently contributes to CNN, CNBC, CBS, Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal, Planet Money, and Marketplace. Owens holds a PhD in sociology from Stanford University and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania.Owens will be in conversation with Greg Rosalsky, who, since 2018 has been a writer and reporter at NPR's Planet Money. Before joining NPR, he spent more than five years at Freakonomics Radio, where he produced 60 episodes that were downloaded nearly 100 million times. Rosalsky has also written freelance articles for a number of publications, including The Behavioral Scientist and Pacific Standard. This event is free with first come, first serve seating.To request accommodations for this event or to inquire about accessibility please email events@politics-prose.com ideally one week in advance of the event date. We will make an effort to accommodate all requests up until the time of the event.
Jim Emison — Murder on the Hatchie: The NAACP's First Martyr - with Aderson Francois — at the Wharf
The forgotten lynching that launched America's fight for Black voting rights--and the federal cover-up that followed.Murder on the Hatchie uncovers one of the earliest and most consequential crimes in America's long struggle for Black voting rights: the 1940 lynching of Elbert Williams in Brownsville, Tennessee. A founding member of the local NAACP, Williams was murdered for attempting to register Black voters, decades before the more famous murders of Emmett Till and Medgar Evers.Through rigorous research and gripping narrative, retired trial attorney Jim Emison reconstructs the events surrounding Williams's lynching and the federal government's failure to prosecute his killers. Drawing on FBI files, Department of Justice correspondence, and eyewitness accounts, Emison reconstructs how white officials conspired to silence a community, implicating local law enforcement, federal agents, and even national NAACP leadership.Emison repositions Brownsville as a pivotal site in civil rights history and exposes how voter suppression, racial terror, and government complicity shaped the American democracy we inherit today. With a foreword by Margaret A. Burnham, Murder on the Hatchie challenges liberal assumptions about justice and the embedded character of Jim Crow. For readers of Blood Done Sign My Name and By Hands Now Known, this is both a gripping true-crime investigation and a vital work of historical restoration.Jim Emison, after forty-three years as a Tennessee trial attorney, devoted his retirement to investigating the 1940 murder of NAACP leader Elbert Williams. Emison’s work has been featured by the Associated Press, NPR, and Nashville Public Television, and led to a renewed Department of Justice review under the Emmett Till Act. Emison is the cofounder of Tennesseans for Historical Justice and a board member of the Tennessee Historical Society. Murder on the Hatchie: The NAACP’s First Martyr is his first book.Emison will be in conversation with Aderson Francois, a Professor of Law at Georgetown where he directs the Civil Rights Section of the Institute for Public Representation (IPR) and the Voting Rights Institute. His scholarly interests include voting rights, education law, and the history of slavery and Reconstruction. He has testified before Congress on civil rights issues and drafted numerous briefs to the US Supreme Court. Prior to joining the Georgetown faculty, Francois directed the Civil Rights Clinic at Howard University School of Law, where he also taught Constitutional Law, Federal Civil Rights, and Supreme Court Jurisprudence.This event is free with first come, first serve seating.To request accommodations for this event or to inquire about accessibility please email events@politics-prose.com ideally one week in advance of the event date. We will make an effort to accommodate all requests up until the time of the event.
Elisabeth Braw — Undersea War: The Battle to Control the Cables and Pipelines That Connect Our World - with Amy Mackinnon — at the Wharf
How sabotage and disorder threaten the fragile network of undersea cables and pipelines that makes modern life possible—and how it may already be drawing the world into an all-out underwater warThe world depends on a tangle of underwater tubes on the ocean floor. Every day undersea cables transmit ninety-nine percent of the world’s data, while intercontinental pipelines convey two-thirds of the world’s oil and gas. These do their jobs so reliably that few would guess that “the cloud” is actually underwater, or that the stability of the global economy relies on pipelines on the seafloor. But as award-winning security expert Elisabeth Braw reveals, an invisible battle over those cables and pipelines is already ramping up.Undersea War tells the history of the underwater infrastructure that supports everyday life. After decades of apparent harmony, in 2022 two pipelines in the Baltic Sea mysteriously exploded. Within months, the cutting of Taiwan’s Matsu Islands’ data links to the world and the subsequent destruction of additional Baltic pipelines and cables signaled that peace in the ocean depths was over. Superpowers are now racing to protect themselves as the seabed itself becomes a battlefield.Blending engrossing historical narrative with acute strategic analysis, Undersea War shows that the next battle for global supremacy may unfold on the ocean floor.Elisabeth Braw is a senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Transatlantic Security Initiative in the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security. A columnist with Foreign Policy and Politico Europe, she also writes regularly for the Financial Times and The Times (London). She is the author of the award-winning Goodbye, Globalization.Braw will be in conversation with Amy Mackinnon, who covers the US relationship with Europe, including transatlantic diplomacy, evolving ties with NATO and the EU, the US role in the ongoing war in Ukraine and tensions with Russia for the Financial Times. Amy previously worked at POLITICO and Foreign Policy magazine, where she covered the waterfront of US intelligence and national security. She began her journalism career in Moscow and is the recipient of the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia award for her reporting on homophobic vigilantes in Russia. Originally from Scotland, she is a graduate of the Craig Newmark School of Journalism at CUNY and the University of Glasgow.This event is free with first come, first serve seating.To request accommodations for this event or to inquire about accessibility please email events@politics-prose.com ideally one week in advance of the event date. We will make an effort to accommodate all requests up until the time of the event.