Take Back Tech 2024, Chicago (21-23 June 2024)

From Friday 21 June to Sunday 23 June 2024, MediaJustice and Mijente co-convened Take Back Tech 2024 at the Chicago Teachers Union Center at 1901 W Carroll Avenue in Chicago, Illinois — the second edition of the Take Back Tech summit line and the largest U.S. grassroots tech-justice convening in the corpus's frame, with nearly 450 participants from 136 U.S. cities and four other countries drawn into a programme of 40 workshops with 70+ presenters and four plenary panels across three days. The convening was framed by the two co-hosts as a gathering for "organizers, advocates, academics, and workers looking to deepen connections and strategies to combat technology's worst harms" — the principal annual U.S. movement-organising convening on big-tech accountability, surveillance, carceral technology, immigration-enforcement automation, AI bias, and tech-worker organising, hosted by two Black-led and Latine-led grassroots organisations operating across the same intersecting communities of colour, immigrant, and working-class organising bases.

Context

Take Back Tech sits inside a series lineage that runs from the 26-28 July 2019 San Jose summit — the first Take Back Tech, co-organised by Mijente, the then-Center for Media Justice, and the Tech Workers Coalition as a "people's summit to free our futures from surveillance and state violence" focused on tech companies' role in profiting from criminal-justice and immigration-enforcement systems — through the 2024 Chicago edition and onward to Take Back Tech III in Atlanta in April 2026, which drew 500+ organisers. The 2024 Chicago convening was the first post-pandemic Take Back Tech and the moment at which the convening line resumed at scale; the series has subsequently established a roughly two-yearly cadence as the principal annual U.S. grassroots tech-justice convening.

Mijente and MediaJustice co-host the line on a structural-affinity basis: Mijente is a 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, and MediaJustice is the Oakland-headquartered Black-led grassroots organisation anchoring the Media Action Grassroots Network (MAG-Net) coalition of hundreds of social-justice groups nationwide. The Chicago Teachers Union Center venue placed the convening inside the Chicago labour-movement infrastructure, with public-transit-encouraged access from downtown Chicago and accessibility provisions including Spanish-to-English interpretation for plenaries and selected workshops, wheelchair-accessible facilities, a family restroom and lactation room, and an indoor-masking expectation across the three days.

The programme was 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.

What happened over the three days

The opening plenary on Friday, Genocide, Powered by Tech — What Palestine can teach us about technology, placed Palestine and the Israeli use of automated targeting, biometric surveillance, and the Lavender / Habsora military-AI systems at the centre of the convening's opening frame. Speakers included investigative journalist and filmmaker Assia Boundaoui, human-rights attorney Jumana Musa, #NoTechForApartheid organiser Mohammad Khatami, and Digital Action's Mona Shtaya. Khatami's framing on the panel — that "in the tech world, these technologies are first wielded against working people and the most vulnerable" before being normalised across other populations — supplied the convening's working analytical premise: that the same surveillance and predictive technologies being used to enable the war in Gaza were being deployed against immigrants, against Black communities under police surveillance, against incarcerated and electronically-monitored people, and against workers under algorithmic management — and that grassroots solidarity across those organising fronts was the strategic response.

Saturday's full-day programme at the Chicago Teachers' Union carried the Attack of the Killer Robots plenary, which addressed the post-ChatGPT generative-AI hype cycle and the question of how grassroots organisations should respond. Speakers included podcaster Bridget Todd, Upturn Director Harlan Yu, LSE associate professor Dr Seeta Peña Gangadharan, and Tawana Petty of Petty Propolis. Yu's intervention emphasised that AI systems "are working in the background in ways" most people cannot see and therefore cannot contest; Gangadharan pressed the framing question "why do I need this — why do I need something that's more complicated than the problem it's supposed to solve"; Petty insisted that vulnerable communities affected by these systems must "share their experiences and push back" against the assumption of their inevitability; and Todd named the post-ChatGPT hype cycle as a recurrent pattern of technology marketing that movement organising had previously seen and would see again, with the difference this time being the speed of deployment into consequential decision systems.

Sunday's first plenary, Here, There, and Everywhere, placed the U.S. tech-justice conversation alongside parallel movements in Latin America and Europe. Speakers included Alex Hanna of the Distributed AI Research Institute, civil engineer and PhD student Dhaksh Sooriya, Paula Guerra Cáceres of SOS Racismo Madrid, and independent researcher Paz Peña — supplying the convening with its principal cross-regional analytical frame and connecting the U.S. organising base to Chile and Spain's anti-racist anti-surveillance work. The closing plenary, Resisting Borders and Technologies of Violence — Imagination towards Liberation, returned to the U.S. immigration-enforcement and borderlands frame with Princeton sociologist Ruha Benjamin of the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab, Surveillance Resistance Lab founder Mizue Aizeki, and Mijente Policy Director Jacinta Gonzalez. Benjamin's framing — that "boldness is rationed while 'realness' is mass-produced" and that the movement field "needs all" of its imaginative capacity to construct alternatives — supplied the convening's closing analytical posture: an explicit rejection of the technological-inevitability narrative and an organising case for futures built on care rather than carceral technology.

The 40 workshops were organised across three tracks — Patterns (analytical sessions on how surveillance, social control, and oppression technologies operate), Seeds (community-resistance and movement-building strategy sessions), and Skills (culture, art, storytelling, and direct organising practice) — with named workshops including the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition's session on how public-health data and crises like the COVID-19 pandemic expand the surveillance state, the Carceral Tech Resistance Network's People's History of AI, Accountable Tech's session on reproductive freedom in the age of surveillance, the Advancement Project / Puente Human Rights Movement's Fighting Surveillance in Schools, Just Futures Law's session on data brokers, the Athena Coalition / Missouri Workers Center's Fighting Worker Control at Amazon, Equality Labs's Transnational Tech and Repression — Our Movements for Justice, Spitfire Strategies's Building a Vision for a Just Tech Future, and Pueblos de Lucha y Esperanza's session on the power of art and storytelling to combat e-carceration. The track structure operationalised the convening's working premise that analysis (Patterns), resistance (Seeds), and craft (Skills) each had to be present for the field to scale.

Significance

Take Back Tech 2024 is the corpus's first Event located in the U.S. Midwest, the first U.S. grassroots tech-organising convening event of any kind in the corpus's events register, and the first event in the corpus anchored by two Black-led and Latine-led U.S. grassroots organisations co-hosting at scale — closing the U.S. Black-led grassroots tech-organising event anchor gap (previously zero), the U.S. racial-justice tech-convening event sub-type (previously zero), and the U.S. Midwest event anchor (previously zero) in a single entry. The convening also closes the corpus's MediaJustice-side event-anchor gap: the MediaJustice organisation entry had named Take Back Tech as the organisation's frontline AI-and-surveillance convening but had no event entry standing in for any specific edition.

Inside the corpus's regional shape, Take Back Tech 2024 pairs with the Digital Rights Asia-Pacific Assembly 2023 in Chiang Mai for the Asia-Pacific civil-society digital-rights convening register, with the Paradigm Initiative DRIF26 Abidjan convening for the pan-African register, and with the SMEX Bread & Net unconference cadence for the Arabic-language West Asia and North Africa register — completing a four-region snapshot of the principal grassroots civil-society annual-convening shapes that anchor the make-AI-good movement's organising layer, with Take Back Tech as the U.S. national grassroots-organising-hub instance of the form. The Take Back Tech form is structurally different from the international regional-assembly form: it is national in scope, U.S.-based, co-hosted by two specific Black-led and Latine-led organisations rather than a regional civil-society coalition, and 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 — a multi-day movement-side convening that doubles as analytical session and organising base.

The four-plenary substantive arc — Palestine, generative-AI hype, cross-regional anti-surveillance, and immigration borderlands — supplies the corpus's clearest single articulation of the analytical position the U.S. tech-justice grassroots field carried into 2024: 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 Mohammad Khatami "first wielded against working people and the most vulnerable" framing — placed in the convening's opening plenary — is the corpus's clearest current expression of that joint analytical premise, and the Ruha Benjamin "boldness is rationed while 'realness' is mass-produced" framing in the closing plenary is the corpus's clearest current expression of the organising posture the field takes against the technological-inevitability narrative. The Take Back Tech 2024 Chicago edition is the moment at which this analytical position was most legibly assembled in a single U.S. grassroots tech-justice convening, with the 2026 Atlanta edition's 500+ organisers extending the form.