No Tech For Apartheid

No Tech For Apartheid is the worker-and-coalition-side framing through which Google and Amazon employees, and a forty-plus-organisation civil-society coalition launched in their support, name their objection to Project Nimbus — the $1.2 billion April 2021 contract under which Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services provide cloud-computing, artificial-intelligence, and machine-learning services to the Israeli government and military. The framing operates simultaneously as the campaign's name and Instagram / Bluesky handle, as the hashtag #NoTechForApartheid through which the campaign's public-record output is indexed, and as the substantive policy demand for Google and Amazon to drop Project Nimbus and refuse all future contracts that the campaign holds enable Israel's oppression of the Palestinian people. Inside the corpus, the framing's principal carriage to date is the opening plenary of Take Back Tech 2024 — the MediaJustice and Mijente convening at which No Tech For Apartheid organiser and former Google software engineer Mohammad Khatami supplied the convening's working analytical premise.

Origin

The framing's seed was a 12 October 2021 anonymous open letter by more than five hundred Google and Amazon workers — signed internally by more than 90 Google and 300 Amazon workers — published in The Guardian under the title We are Google and Amazon workers. We condemn Project Nimbus. The letter does not itself contain the phrase "no tech for apartheid"; its substantive claim — that the Nimbus contract would "make the systematic discrimination and displacement carried out by the Israeli military and government even crueler and deadlier for Palestinians" and that the workers had "watched Google and Amazon aggressively pursue contracts with institutions like the US Department of Defense, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and state and local police departments" — set up the parallel in which the slogan was coined. The slogan-and-coalition-name was operationalised one day later, on 13 October 2021, when a coalition of more than forty grassroots, faith, civil-liberties, and Palestine-solidarity organisations — among them Jewish Voice for Peace, MPower Change, the Adalah Justice Project, Fight for the Future, the BDS Movement, the Center for Constitutional Rights, Data for Black Lives, the American Friends Service Committee, the Arab Resource and Organizing Center, and MediaJustice — launched the No Tech For Apartheid campaign to amplify the workers' call.

The framing's name was explicitly modelled on Mijente's #NoTechForICE — the 2018-vintage Latinx and Chicanx grassroots-organisation-led campaign against tech-company contracting with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement that the same coalition's coast-to-coast Take Back Tech convening line was built around. The lineage the name signals is structural rather than rhetorical: the campaign treats the cross-border supply of cloud and AI infrastructure to a state-violence system as the same kind of corporate-complicity problem the No Tech For ICE campaign treats the supply of data-broker and case-management infrastructure to ICE — and proposes the same kind of intervention, namely tech-worker dissent paired with coalition pressure on the contracting companies.

The "apartheid" anchor

The framing's load-bearing term is "apartheid" — and the framing locates its substantive ground in the international-law and human-rights vocabulary through which "apartheid" has been increasingly applied to Israel's regime of governance over Palestinians by major international human-rights organisations in the years immediately preceding the campaign's launch. The framing's working architecture is two-step: the first step names the regime ("apartheid") against which the corporate-supply objection is being raised; the second step names the corporate-supply objection itself ("no tech for"). That two-step architecture allows the framing to operate at the scale of the supply relationship — the contract, the cloud infrastructure, the AI / machine-learning stack — rather than at the scale of any particular feature or product, and supplies the campaign with a single-step characterisation that has been more legible across venues than a multi-clause critique of the Nimbus contract's individual components.

The Nimbus contract's contractually mandated non-discrimination clause — under which Amazon and Google are reportedly forbidden from halting services to any Israeli government entity, including the military, on the basis of boycott pressure — is the substantive condition the apartheid framing names. By 2024 the Israeli military's Lavender and "Where's Daddy" automated-targeting systems were operating on the Nimbus cloud, supplying the framing with the empirical predicate it had previously held only on the contract's structural terms.

Travel into tech-worker dissent

The framing's principal organising venue has been tech-worker dissent at the contracting companies. The March 2024 firing of Google Cloud engineer Eddie Hatfield — after he interrupted Google Israel managing director Barak Regev at the Mind the Tech conference in New York with the line "I refuse to build technology that powers genocide" — was the first individual-worker public-protest case to draw substantial press attention. The framing escalated dramatically on 16 April 2024, when Google workers organising with the No Tech For Apartheid campaign staged a coast-to-coast sit-in at Google's New York, Sunnyvale, Seattle, and San Francisco offices, including a ten-hour occupation of Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian's office; nine workers were arrested for trespass.

In the days that followed, Google fired more than fifty workers — 28 initially, then over twenty more by 22 April 2024, including (per the campaign) non-participating bystanders — in what the campaign characterised in its 23 April 2024 statement as "an aggressive and desperate act of retaliation". Mohammad Khatami, a Google software engineer who had joined the company in August 2022 and was among those fired, summarised the firings to Democracy Now! as Google executives "[choosing] to arrest workers for speaking out against the use of our technology to power the first AI-powered genocide". Gabriel Schubiner, a former Google research engineer and No Tech For Apartheid organiser, framed the campaign's strategic premise in the same interview as a tech-worker divestment posture: "technology workers actually have a lot of power to shift this paradigm and to remove technology from this deep complicity with Israeli occupation".

The framing has also carried into a June 2024 student-and-young-worker pledge — more than 1,100 self-identified STEM students and young workers from more than 120 universities committing to refuse employment with Google or Amazon until Project Nimbus ends — and into continuing AWS-Summit-and-shareholder-meeting actions co-organised with the Amazon Labor Union.

Carriage into the corpus's grassroots-organising layer

The framing's principal in-corpus carriage to date is the opening plenary of Take Back Tech 2024 (Chicago, 21–23 June 2024) — the MediaJustice and Mijente co-hosted convening at which the No Tech For Apartheid campaign's working analytical premise was articulated for a U.S. grassroots tech-justice organising audience. The Friday opening plenary, Genocide, Powered by Tech — What Palestine can teach us about technology, placed Khatami alongside investigative journalist Assia Boundaoui, human-rights attorney Jumana Musa, and Digital Action's Mona Shtaya; Khatami's contribution to 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 surveillance and predictive technologies enabling the war in Gaza were the same systems being deployed against immigrants, against Black communities under police surveillance, against incarcerated and electronically-monitored people, and against workers under algorithmic management.

MediaJustice's role in carrying the framing into the corpus is two-track: as a founding signatory of the October 2021 No Tech For Apartheid coalition call, and as the U.S. grassroots tech-justice convening host that subsequently anchored the framing's opening-plenary appearance at scale. The framing's principal corpus-side propagator on the funding-flow / contracting-resistance line is the Take Back Tech series itself; on the worker-dissent line it remains the campaign's own Medium and notechforapartheid.com public output.

Why it has carried

Three features have made the framing durable.

First, it places the corporate-supply objection in the established international-law vocabulary of apartheid — a vocabulary with developed multilateral instruments, international-criminal-law definitions, and a substantial human-rights-organisation evidentiary record — rather than in a contract-specific objection register. That placement has given the framing a single anchoring term legible across faith, civil-liberties, labour, and Palestine-solidarity venues, and has allowed the campaign to recruit a coalition that spans those venues without rewriting.

Second, it builds the campaign's strategic register on a pre-existing tech-worker-dissent model — Mijente's No Tech For ICE — that the same coalition's organising base had already validated. The framing's name signals the lineage rather than constructing a parallel from scratch, and the campaign's principal tactics (anonymous open letters, internal petitions, public resignations, office sit-ins, student-pledge work) draw on that lineage's documented organising shape rather than on improvised tactics.

Third, the framing names the supply chain — Google Cloud, AWS, machine-learning APIs, contractually mandated non-discrimination — rather than any particular Israeli military operation. By doing so it locates the labour-and-corporate-complicity argument at the same scale as the contract itself, and refuses the standard rebuttal that the workers and the coalition lack expertise on the military operational specifics. The 2024 revelations that the Lavender and "Where's Daddy" automated-targeting systems were operating on the Nimbus cloud supplied the framing with operational evidence after the fact, but the framing's argument did not depend on those revelations to make its case.

Structurally parallel to msg-modern-slavery-content-moderation — a worker-side framing whose lead organising vehicle (the African Content Moderators Union) is in corpus but whose corporate counterparties (Meta, Sama) are not — this framing's lead coalition (the No Tech For Apartheid campaign itself) is not yet in corpus; the framing's in-corpus carriage runs through MediaJustice as a founding-call signatory and as the host of the framing's principal in-corpus convening venue.