Take Back Tech I, San Jose (26-28 July 2019)

From Friday 26 to Sunday 28 July 2019, Mijente, the then-Center for Media Justice, and the Tech Workers Coalition co-convened the inaugural Take Back Tech summit in San Jose, California — a three-day "people's summit to free our futures from surveillance and state violence" deliberately staged inside Silicon Valley itself, framed by its co-hosts as an effort to "expose and derail the tech industry's efforts that are increasing surveillance and facilitating war, incarceration and criminalization, with no regard for civil or human rights". The convening launched what would become the principal recurring U.S. national grassroots tech-justice convening series, continued by the 2024 Chicago edition and the April 2026 Atlanta edition, and supplied the field-side meeting point at which the substantive case that Mijente, the Tech Workers Coalition, and the then-Center for Media Justice were building against U.S. tech companies' federal-contracting and data-broker partnerships with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and the wider U.S. carceral and policing apparatus was assembled across organising tendencies.

Context

Take Back Tech I landed nine months after Mijente, the National Immigration Project, and the Immigrant Defense Project's October 2018 report Who's Behind ICE? The Tech and Data Companies Fueling Deportations — the foundational research artefact that had mapped the federal-contracting and data-broker supply chain through which Palantir's Investigative Case Management (ICM) and FALCON systems, Amazon Web Services' federal hosting authorisations, and the LexisNexis, Thomson Reuters, Microsoft, Salesforce, and Northrop Grumman commercial routes had become operational components of U.S. immigration enforcement. The convening operationalised the #NoTechForICE campaign goals — exposing tech's outsized role in law enforcement, educating communities, taking direct action, organising with tech workers and students, and targeting the specifically named contracting companies — as a coalition-building summit that would put the campaign's organising tendencies in the same room.

The San Jose siting was deliberate: the convening was located "at the heart of Silicon Valley", placing the summit physically inside the geographic core of the U.S. tech industry whose federal-contracting role the convening was named to contest. The Center for Media Justice was in the final summer of operating under that name — the 2019 rebrand to MediaJustice followed later that year — and the Tech Workers Coalition supplied the worker-organising leg of the three-cornered co-host structure, anchoring the convening's framing that the supply-chain critique had to be carried jointly by the immigrant-rights base, the racial-justice and media-justice base, and the in-industry worker base whose labour was being routed into the contracts under contest.

What happened over the three days

The convening's programme architecture ran across three days as a hybrid of plenary panels, six themed workshops, interactive activities, a fireside chat, and unconference sessions — a deliberate mixed-format structure intended to combine analytical sessions, partner-organisation skill-sharing, and emergent peer-to-peer organising. Named speakers included Jacinta Gonzalez of Mijente (the campaign's policy-side lead), Mijente co-founder and executive director Marisa Franco, then-Center for Media Justice co-director Steven Renderos, Tech Workers Coalition organiser Brooke Larson, longtime media-justice organiser and Center for Media Justice founder Malkia Cyril, AI Now Institute co-founder Meredith Whittaker, and Silicon Valley De-Bug's Calpulli Coatlicue. Named workshop-facilitating partner organisations included About Face (military-veteran-led anti-war organising), the Media Mobilizing Project (Philadelphia-based working-class media-justice organisation), Community Justice Exchange (carceral-tech and bail-fund coordination), Center on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown Law (algorithmic-surveillance research and litigation), Muslim Justice League (Countering Violent Extremism programme accountability), and the Immigrant Defense Project (a Who's Behind ICE? co-author). The named partner list supplies a working snapshot of the field-shape the convening assembled: a deliberate mix of immigrant-rights legal organisations, carceral-tech research and abolition organisations, Black-led racial-justice organisations, anti-war and veteran organisations, Muslim-community civil-rights organisations, working-class media organisations, and academic critical-AI research centres.

Significance

Take Back Tech I is the corpus's earliest U.S. national grassroots tech-justice convening Event and the founding edition of the Take Back Tech campaign series that the 2024 Chicago and 2026 Atlanta editions extended. It is the corpus's first West Coast U.S. tech-justice convening, the first Event in the corpus's events register anchored on Silicon Valley siting as a deliberate organising tactic against the U.S. tech industry's federal-contracting role, and the founding moment of the Mijente / Center for Media Justice / Tech Workers Coalition three-cornered convening shape — the structural-affinity pairing of Latinx and Chicanx immigrant-rights organising, Black-led racial-justice and media-justice organising, and in-industry tech-worker organising — that the 2024 and 2026 editions have carried forward in the Mijente / MediaJustice two-cornered form.

The convening's principal downstream effect on the public record was to feed the autumn 2019 #NoTechForICE student-organising wave: in November 2019, four months after the convening, coordinated campus actions ran at sixteen U.S. and U.K. universities — Stanford, UC Berkeley, Georgia Tech, Yale, Oxford, Cambridge, the University of Chicago, and others — with students kicking Palantir recruiters out of career fairs, protesting company speakers, and pressuring administrators to drop institutional sponsorship of the campaign's principal corporate target. The 2019 convening sits at the head of that cadence: the July San Jose summit assembled the coalition shape, the autumn campus wave operationalised the campaign's tech-talent-pipeline lever, and the lineage from there ran through the post-pandemic 2024 Chicago resumption and the 2026 Atlanta edition into the principal recurring U.S. grassroots tech-justice convening of the corpus's register.

Inside the corpus's events register, Take Back Tech I sits as the founding convening for the U.S.-national-grassroots-tech-justice-summit form — the form that the 2024 Chicago and 2026 Atlanta editions instantiate at scale — and as the convening-side counterpart to Mijente's #NoTechForICE message and to the Take Back Tech campaign entity that contains the multi-edition series. It is also the corpus's first Event entry in San Jose, and the corpus's first Event entry that places the U.S. tech industry's geographic core itself as the site of grassroots-organising contest rather than as the venue from which the contest is being staged from outside.