How tech companies like Apple and Airbnb are leading the digital resistance against Donald Trump

The President’s immigration ban has infuriated and united the giants of Silicon Valley. As Apple and Airbnb broadcast their liberal values, Richard Godwin reports on the new digital resistance
Airbnb's Superbowl advert
Richard Godwin8 February 2017

A few days after President Donald Trump signed his executive order to ban all passenger arrivals from seven majority-Muslim nations, 2,000-plus employees of Google’s parent company Alphabet staged walkouts at eight Google campuses across America. They held up signs — “Resist” “No Ban No Wall” “Make America Sane Again” — and tweeted them under the hashtag #GooglersUnite. After a while, Google’s co-founder Sergey Brin and its CEO Sundar Pichai came out to express solidarity.

“There are some values which are really near and dear to your heart,” said Pichai at the firm’s headquarters in Mountain View, California. “It’s foundational and it’s something you should never compromise on.”

He had spent the weekend contacting the firm’s 100 or so employees who were affected by the 90-day travel ban. Brin — whose parents fled Soviet autocracy when he was a boy — joined the protests at San Francisco airport.

If this was a sign that America’s leading technology firms were not going to simply put up with the Trump doctrine, Monday saw a surprise escalation. After a weekend of informal meetings, 97 leading firms — including Apple, Google, Twitter, Facebook and Netflix — filed an official legal paper opposing the immigration order at a San Francisco court. (The number of companies later rose to 127).

In a joint statement they argued that the order violates the US Constitution and and praised the entrepreneurial spirit of immigrants: “People who choose to leave everything that is familiar and journey to an unknown land to make a new life.”

The late Steve Jobs’s father was Syrian. Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, IBM, Yahoo, Uber, eBay and Tesla were all founded by first- or second-generation immigrants. “To see all these companies working together and protesting — it’s extraordinary. But these are also extraordinary times in the US,” was the response of one veteran Silicon Valley reporter. The decision as to whether Trump’s ban is unconstitutional may now go to the Supreme Court.

“Frankly, the election took a lot of people by surprise,” says Jason Suarez, a senior software engineer who works between Portland, Oregon, and the San Francisco Bay Area, when I ask him to sum up the mood in the tech community. “After the election, people were trying to look for signs to predict what would change. After the inauguration and the ban, we got confirmation of how bad it was going to be.”

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He suggests the tech industry is rediscovering an idealism and a sense of purpose that it may have have lost in its quest to disrupt the dry-cleaning industry, or launch ride-sharing apps for dogs. “We get into tech because we want to build a better future. That future respects individuals and believes in science.”

It’s hard to quantify the ways the Trump administration threatens all that Silicon Valley holds dear. His disregard for facts is incomputable to an engineering mindset (there’s an incipient Science vs Trump movement too, coalescing around his denial of climate change). There’s the general culture clash between Trump’s conservative rural heartland and the liberal urban coasts where the tech industry is based. The President’s protectionism is anathema to companies that see themselves as global. He has ensured that no one can use the word “disrupt” in a positive sense again.

Sundar Pichai Google's senior vice president has spoken out against Donald Trump
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“The sentiment in the tech community is representative of progressive and inclusive people the world over: upset, disgusted and embarrassed yet motivated to organise for a positive and meaningful future,” says Joe McCann, CEO of Nodesource.

There’s also the pragmatic consideration that tech companies tend to make most use of the H1B visa for highly skilled immigrant workers. Jeff Sessions, Trump’s proposed Attorney General, takes a particularly dim view of this, believing it costs American jobs. The Silicon Valley Leadership Group calculates that 58 per cent of the engineers and high-skilled employees in Silicon Valley were born outside the US — for many CEOs, to lose the H1B visa would be to set fire to the entire sector.

And there is capital to be made from taking a stand too — tech CEOs haven’t been seen as the good guys for a while. During Sunday’s Super Bowl, Airbnb broadcast an explicitly pro-diversity — and implicitly anti-Trump — advert that soon went viral.

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Brad Stone, author of The Upstarts (Bantam Press), a new book about AirBnB and Uber, holds that this was a smart move. “AirBnB’s customers tend to be based in cities, they lean Left, and they’re likely not to have voted for Trump — there’s not a lot of political risk for them to take a stand. It’s smart advertising.”

And of course, Trump is the world’s most famous hotelier. “He has said in the past that he doesn’t like Airbnb and wouldn’t allow it in his buildings.” (One would like to see a Trump Tower tenant test that resolve.)

Still, CEOs must tread a fine line between protecting their businesses and projecting their values — a single tweet can cause serious damage. Uber’s often pugnacious CEO, Travis Kalanick, was among the elite CEOs invited on to Trump’s business advisory council earlier this year. As rumours emerged that Uber was taking advantage of the chaos around JFK airport on the first night of the travel ban protest, the hashtag #DeleteUber began to spread on social media.

Celebrities such as Lena Dunham and Susan Sarandon encouraged followers to remove the ride-sharing app from their phones — even though the company had already issued a statement condemning the ban. Uber’s closest competitor, Lyft, took advantage of its rival’s adverse publicity, promising to donate $1 million to the American Civil Liberties Union.

Lena Dunham has encouraged people to delete Uber from their phones
Jamie McCarthy/Getty

The following day Kalanick came to the conclusion that even the appearance of siding with the Trump administration had a cost — and resigned from the council. “Travis was on the business council not because he supports Donald Trump, but because he has an agenda,” insists Stone. “He’s interested in infrastructure development, driverless car legislation — and he’ll need to federal government onside for those.”

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According to reports from inside the White House, Kalanick’s phone call with Trump was not cordial. The view from Trump’s inner circle was: “If you want to cut off your access to the White House, f*** you,” according to Axios.com. “It’s interesting how none of the other CEOs on the council paid the political price that he paid,” notes Stone. Elon Musk, the much-fabled CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, remains on the council but hasn’t drawn anything like the same criticism.

Matt Hirst, a British ex-Google employee who’s now a partner at San Francisco technology consultancy West, is heartened by the activity. “For the first time in their entire history, the CEOs of well-known brands are having to take a political stand — and it’s been great to see,” he says. “It’s helping a lot of people here understand politics and clarify their moral compass.”

Apple CEO Tim Cook says Apple would not exist without immigration
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However, he stresses the real groundswell is coming from their workers, just as back in November it was a “secret” task force of Facebook employees who challenged CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s official line that “fake news” didn’t affect the election.

“As soon as Trump got in there was a lot of regrouping within companies. All of the employees were asking: ‘What are we going to do about this?’,” says Hirst. Google employees are famously granted 20 per cent of their time to pursue their own projects; he says a lot of his old colleagues are now devoting theirs to political organisation: “There’s a highly democratic spirit at Google. You have these hugely bright people from all over the world whose aim it is to come up with interesting ideas.”

And in many cases it’s the skilled workers — engineers, coders, designers — who are often recent immigrants, who hold the balance of power. Suarez coded a quick website — wheredotheystand ontheban.info — to provide an easy way of identifying which companies are opposing the ban. “Tech companies need to know that employees and prospective employees are watching and can see how they choose to respond,” he explains. “Competition for software engineering skills is tough. I receive multiple unsolicited contacts from recruiters for major tech companies every week — and so do all of my colleagues. If companies don’t represent workers’ values and aren’t willing to protect their workers, they will take notice. Since the election, many people, not just those in tech, are re-evaluating how their work affects society and asking how they can bring the work more in line with their values.”

Still, Hirst feels that the real battles may be yet to come. Another looming concern is “net neutrality”, a principle introduced in 2015 by the Obama administration. Currently, all internet service providers are required to allow access to all content at the same speed. Trump’s new head of the Federal Communications Commission, Ajit Pai, would like to overturn this ruling — and he’s already cancelled a scheme that would have provided high-speed broadband to low-income families.

On issues such as corporate tax and cash repatriation, the big tech firms may find Trump more in line with their thinking. These are America’s biggest companies, owned by America’s richest men, and they do have shareholders to appease. At which point the tech giants may not get to play the good guys.

“At the end of the day, technology isn’t the problem,” says Hirst. “It’s about how we manage the relentless march forward. All of these businesses need to start thinking about how they can actually start making the world a better place, as it’s not part of the game plans of a lot of the businesses at the moment.”

Follow Richard Godwin on Twitter: @richardjgodwin

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