Announcing the #NoTechforICE War Crimes + Human Rights Abuse Tribunal

Earlier this month, we announced that Model View Culture is coming back after a three-year hiatus. We are so thankful for the community support, and will keep you informed as we build out our full staff and return to publishing in the coming months. (Join our mailing list to be the first to know!) 

While we are excited to return as a vital platform in tech and culture, we are acutely aware that we return in most somber and critical days. The #NoTechforICE movement makes it irrefutably clear that the worst fears of Model View Culture authors and supporters have come true. Our code, our labor, our startups, our open source communities — all have been ruthlessly and senselessly hijacked by corporations and venture capitalists to fuel a murderous hate machine that is detaining and separating families, sexually abusing children, caging mothers and teens and torturing untold numbers of our friends, family and neighbors. All in the name of profit. 

Still, we have been encouraged by huge momentum for the resistance as workers unite and fight back under #NoTechforICE, led fiercely and with great integrity by ConMijente. This movement is large and growing: Students at our CS schools are rising up in unprecedented fashion to kick collaborators off campus and interrupt the CS-to-war-crime pipeline. Workers at top collaborator companies have resigned, walked out, petitioned and pulled code in protest. Fund Club, another MVC project, is back and raising community funding to fuel the resistance. The Ethical Source movement is growing rapidly to ensure workers’ rights to create code, licensed in such a manner that it cannot be used for death, rape and torture. Radical Jewish groups including Never Again Action working under #NeverAgainIsNow have organized dozens of protests in numerous cities across the country. Workers from other industries have joined in solidarity with the #NoMusicforICE and #NoContractsforICE movements. These and others lead our way forward and give us hope. 

Amidst this groundswell, it has become alarmingly clear that as a technology community, we have little to no recourse when our bosses and VCs decide to sell us and our labor out to the war machine. And we have almost no formal avenues and mechanisms to hold even the most flagrant of bad actors to account. 

Where our technology organizations, boards and leaders have failed, we must provide justice. We will be the recourse we so urgently seek. It is with heavy hearts, matched only by the greatest sense of moral duty, that we announce the first-ever #NoTechforICE war crimes and human rights abuses tribunal, coming this August, 2020. 

Through a community and worker-led process, we will bring together evidence against the worst and most powerful collaborators in tech; formulate appropriate charges according to international understanding of human rights; expose and document in detail the crimes of bad actors; deliver verdicts and consequences where indicated; and ultimately enter our findings into the historical record of resistance against genocide, war and torture.  

As the Tribunal’s defendants, we have selected such actors that have been most directly and consistently implicated in the ongoing border crisis, who knowingly fund and profit most from the human rights abuses taking place right now at the US/Mexico border. 

These individuals and corporations are as follows: 

• Marc Andreessen, General Partner, Andreessen Horowitz 
• Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft 
• Peter Thiel, Founder, Palantir 
• Jeff Bezos, Founder and CEO, Amazon

Our first strategic priorities are:

• Build out a crowd-sourced evidence repository that will be used to conduct the Tribunal’s affairs. To this end, we have launched the Tech War Crimes wiki and are actively seeking community contributors to help us build a consolidated public record of evidence against the parties and enterprises. Please contribute to the wiki with evidence such as records detailing ICE contracts and collaboration, news and investigatory articles, and the statements and actions of the parties themselves in alignment with ICE’s myriad abuses. 
• Assemble the prosecuting team with representatives from all major stakeholders. We are already working with a core team of legal scholars, activists and historians to frame the Tribunal’s goals and establish its initial organizing structure and methodologies. A project of this scale and historical import requires the cooperation of many bodies, organizations, and most essentially, the workers of our industry coming together to say no more. We look forward to officially announcing the participation of other groups in the coming days. We are also actively seeking core individual contributors to the prosecuting team; for more information, please visit our website at techwarcrimes.com. 

We will, as in years before, join in allyship with our communities in these earnest efforts to take our power back.

To the defendants, and all others of power and privilege who have knowingly led us to such horrors for the sake of their stolen empires, we have a singular message: 

We are coming for you. 

#NoTechforICE