Take Back Tech (MediaJustice and Mijente, 2019–ongoing)

In July 2019 Mijente, the then-Center for Media Justice, and the Tech Workers Coalition co-convened the first Take Back Tech summit in San Jose, California — a three-day "people's summit to free our futures from surveillance and state violence" anchored on tech companies' role in profiting from criminal-justice and immigration-enforcement systems. After a pandemic-driven pause the series resumed at scale in June 2024 with Take Back Tech II in Chicago (450 participants from 136 U.S. cities and four other countries; 40 workshops; four plenary panels), and extended a third time in April 2026 with Take Back Tech III in Atlanta (500+ organisers). The series is co-anchored by MediaJustice — the Oakland-headquartered Black-led grassroots organisation that succeeded the Center for Media Justice in the 2019 rebrand and that anchors the Media Action Grassroots Network (MAG-Net) coalition of hundreds of U.S. social-justice groups — and by Mijente, the Latinx and Chicanx national grassroots membership organisation whose #NoTechForICE campaign has anchored the U.S. movement-side opposition to data-broker contracting with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Three editions in, Take Back Tech is the principal recurring U.S. national grassroots tech-justice convening in the corpus's frame, and the convening-side complement through which the U.S. Black-led and Latine-led tech-justice organising base coordinates across surveillance, carceral-tech, AI bias, immigration-enforcement automation, AI-and-data-centre infrastructure, and tech-worker organising.

Name disambiguation

A separate but unrelated international campaign of the same name — the APC-launched Take Back the Tech! campaign (2006–ongoing) — operates in the feminist-internet and technology-facilitated-gender-based-violence register and anchors a Global-South-rooted annual mobilisation on the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence calendar. The two campaigns are distinct: APC's Take Back the Tech! is a 2006-launched feminist-tech annual mobilisation against TFGBV operating through a Global-South partner-organisation network; MediaJustice and Mijente's Take Back Tech is a 2019-launched U.S. racial-justice-and-carceral-tech recurring multi-day national convening series. References to "Take Back the Tech!" or "TBTT" in international, feminist, or Global-South digital-rights contexts are virtually always to APC's campaign; references to "Take Back Tech" in U.S. racial-justice, abolitionist, or carceral-tech contexts are typically to MediaJustice and Mijente's series. The convening-line lineage tracked in this entry — Take Back Tech I San Jose 2019, Take Back Tech II Chicago 2024, Take Back Tech III Atlanta 2026 — is the MediaJustice / Mijente series, not the APC campaign.

Take Back Tech I — San Jose, 26–28 July 2019

The inaugural Take Back Tech ran in San Jose, California from Friday 26 to Sunday 28 July 2019, co-organised by Mijente, the Center for Media Justice, and the Tech Workers Coalition. The convening's framing was a "people's summit to free our futures from surveillance and state violence" focused on the role of tech companies in profiting from criminal-justice and immigration-enforcement systems — the convening landed inside the same window as Mijente's #NoTechForICE direct-action campaign against the data-broker contracting that routed Amazon Web Services, Palantir, and Salesforce infrastructure into U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations, and built the convening's substantive frame on the data-and-policing supply chain through which Silicon Valley tech firms had become operational partners in U.S. carceral and immigration-enforcement infrastructure. The San Jose location was deliberate: the convening was located inside the geographic core of the U.S. tech industry and explicitly named the industry's role in supplying the surveillance, predictive-policing, and immigration-enforcement systems against which the convening's organising base was mobilising. The 2019 edition established the series' working architecture — three days, multi-track workshop programme, plenary frame on surveillance and state violence, co-host pairing of a Black-led national tech-justice organisation with a Latinx and Chicanx national grassroots membership organisation — that the 2024 and 2026 editions have carried forward.

Take Back Tech II — Chicago, 21–23 June 2024

The second edition ran at the Chicago Teachers Union Center in Chicago, Illinois from Friday 21 to Sunday 23 June 2024, the first post-pandemic Take Back Tech and the moment at which the convening line resumed at scale. The Chicago edition drew nearly 450 participants from 136 U.S. cities and four other countries into a programme of 40 workshops with 70+ presenters and four plenary panels across three days, organised around six focus areas: surveillance and state violence against marginalised communities; AI bias and discriminatory applications; reproductive freedom in the age of surveillance; border technology and immigration-enforcement automation; carceral tech and police surveillance; and tech-worker organising. Named coalition partners on the 2024 programme included the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, the Carceral Tech Resistance Network, Accountable Tech, the Advancement Project, Just Futures Law, and the Athena Coalition. Plenary participants included Tawana Petty of Petty Propolis (Saturday's Attack of the Killer Robots plenary on the post-ChatGPT generative-AI hype cycle), Alex Hanna of the Distributed AI Research Institute (Sunday's Here, There, and Everywhere cross-regional plenary), No Tech For Apartheid organiser Mohammad Khatami (Friday's opening Genocide, Powered by Tech plenary on Palestine and the Israeli use of automated targeting), and Mijente Policy Director Jacinta Gonzalez (Sunday's closing Resisting Borders and Technologies of Violence plenary). The convening's four-plenary substantive arc — Palestine, generative-AI hype, cross-regional anti-surveillance, immigration borderlands — supplied the corpus's clearest single articulation of the U.S. tech-justice grassroots field's joint analytical position that AI bias, biometric surveillance, electronic monitoring, predictive policing, immigration-enforcement automation, workplace surveillance, and the Israeli use of automated military-targeting systems are not separate phenomena to be addressed in separate policy lanes but a single surveillance-and-control infrastructure whose grassroots opposition has to be cross-issue and cross-community. The full session-by-session detail of the Chicago edition is carried in the corpus's Take Back Tech 2024 event entry.

Take Back Tech III — Atlanta, April 2026

The third edition ran in Atlanta, Georgia in April 2026 and drew 500+ organisers — a step up in scale from the Chicago edition's 450 — and extended the convening's geographic footprint into the U.S. Southeast, broadening from the West Coast (2019 San Jose) and Midwest (2024 Chicago) staging that the first two editions had anchored. The Atlanta edition, also co-hosted by MediaJustice and Mijente, has confirmed the series' roughly biennial post-pandemic cadence (2024 Chicago → 2026 Atlanta) and supplies the corpus's evidence that the convening has stabilised as an ongoing recurring summit rather than a single 2024-Chicago revival. The Atlanta location placed the convening in the U.S. Southeast Black-organising geographic core — the same regional infrastructure through which the Civil Rights movement and the contemporary Movement for Black Lives have been carried — and inside the broader U.S. data-centre buildout corridor (Georgia, Northern Virginia, Texas, Tennessee) that has become a frontline of the corpus's data-centre-fight grassroots organising.

Coalition shape and the convening's organising form

Take Back Tech's working structure is a co-hosted multi-day convening with a coalition-partner programme structure: the two lead organisations supply the convening's coordination, framing, and host-side infrastructure, and a named roster of coalition partners contribute panels, workshops, and field-side content. The MediaJustice / Mijente co-host structure pairs the corpus's principal Black-led U.S. tech-justice movement-organising hub — MediaJustice, led by Steven Renderos — with the corpus's principal Latinx and Chicanx U.S. national grassroots membership organisation, anchoring the convening on the structural-affinity premise that U.S. Black communities and U.S. Latinx and Chicanx communities are the principal U.S. communities of colour onto whom surveillance, predictive-policing, immigration-enforcement, and carceral-tech systems are deployed at scale, and that the organising response has to be co-led by organisations rooted in those communities. The 2024 Chicago coalition-partner roster — the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition (the Skid Row-based Los Angeles community coalition anchored on police-surveillance abolition), the Carceral Tech Resistance Network, Accountable Tech, the Advancement Project, Just Futures Law, and the Athena Coalition — supplies a working snapshot of the field-shape the convening assembles: a mix of city-rooted abolitionist local groups, national tech-and-civil-rights advocacy organisations, immigration-enforcement-resistance legal organisations, and worker-organising coalitions. Plenary speakers from DAIR (Alex Hanna) and from outside the U.S. (Paula Guerra Cáceres from Spain; Paz Peña from Chile) place the convening in conversation with the wider international tech-and-AI critical research and movement field without ceding the convening's primary anchoring on U.S. grassroots organising. The convening's track structure — across the 2024 edition's Patterns / Seeds / Skills three-track design — operationalises the framing that analysis, resistance, and craft each have to be present for the field to scale.

Place in the make-AI-good movement

Take Back Tech matters to the wider make-AI-good corpus on four connected counts. First, it is the corpus's principal recurring U.S. national grassroots tech-justice convening — the U.S. national-grassroots-organising-hub instance of the multi-day movement-side convening form that the corpus also tracks through the Digital Rights Asia-Pacific Assembly for the Asia-Pacific civil-society digital-rights register, through the Paradigm Initiative DRIF26 Abidjan convening for the pan-African register, and through the SMEX Bread & Net unconference cadence for the West Asia and North Africa register. The Take Back Tech form is structurally different from the international regional-assembly form (national rather than regional in scope; U.S.-based; co-hosted by two specific Black-led and Latine-led organisations rather than a regional civil-society coalition; explicitly anchored on tech-justice-as-racial-justice rather than on the broader digital-rights frame) but it is recognisably the same kind of artefact. Second, it is the campaign-entity anchor for MediaJustice's Take Back Tech programme — supplying the campaign-side container that holds the series' multiple editions and that the 2024 Chicago event entry and other future per-edition events can be linked into. Third, the series closes the corpus's principal U.S.-grassroots-tech-justice-convening-series coverage gap, adding a campaign-typed series-anchor entity in the same register that the corpus's existing single-edition event entry on the 2024 Chicago convening anchors. Fourth, the convening's substantive analytical frame — that AI bias, biometric surveillance, electronic monitoring, predictive policing, immigration-enforcement automation, workplace surveillance, and the Israeli use of automated military-targeting systems are a single surveillance-and-control infrastructure whose grassroots opposition has to be cross-issue, cross-community, and cross-regional — is the U.S. movement-side analogue to the policy-level critical-AI positions held by the corpus's litigation and policy-advocacy organisations, and is the position the field-side U.S. partner organisations carry into the year of campaign work between editions.