The Techlash Has Come to Stanford
The Techlash
Has Come to Stanford
Even in the famed computer science program, students are no
longer sure they’d go to work for Facebook or Google (and definitely not
Palantir).
Palantir is about a
15-minute walk from Stanford University. That stone’s-throw convenience helped
one morning in June when a group of Stanford students perched on the third
story of a parking garage across the street from the data-analytics company’s
entrance and unfurled a banner to greet employees as they walked into work:
“OUR SOFTWARE IS SO POWERFUL IT SEPARATES FAMILIES.”
The students were protesting
Palantir software that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement uses to log information on asylum-seekers,
helping the agency make arrests of undocumented family members who
come to pick them up. The activists are members of a campus group called
SLAP—Students for the Liberation of All People—that was founded by Stanford
freshmen the winter after Donald Trump was elected president. At first, the
group focused on concerns shared by leftist activists around the country: On
the day of Trump’s inauguration, for example, members blocked the doors of a
Wells Fargo near campus to protest the bank’s funding of the Dakota Access
Pipeline and its history of racist lending practices. These
days, though, SLAP has turned its attention to the industry in its backyard:
Big Tech.
When it’s not getting in
Palantir’s face, SLAP wants to convince other Stanford students that they
shouldn’t go to work at big technology companies that they see as
unethical—places that rely on Stanford’s famed computer science program as a
recruiting ground. “Working inside these tech companies is not going to build
the future we want to see,” two SLAP organizers who are seniors at the
university told me. (They asked not to be named because of their involvement in
direct actions, like the banner drop, and a decision by the group to only speak
to the press as a collective, of which there are about two dozen core members.)
To persuade their fellow pupils, they’ve handed out literature and hosted
talks. They’ve also disrupted a tech-recruiting job fair and nearly been
arrested in the process.
A competing dream appears to be growing in fervor: to use
technical skills as an insurance policy against dystopia.
This might all sound like
standard campus activism. But many of SLAP’s peers don’t see the group—and
another, softer-edged student organization called CS+Social Good—as marginal or
a nuisance. Even computer science students whom I interviewed told me they were
grateful SLAP is making noise about Silicon Valley, and that their concerns
reflect a growing campus skepticism of the technology industry, even among
students training to join it.
Stanford’s computer science
program, and the university as a whole, may be Silicon Valley’s most important
breeding ground of talent. The school’s ranks of famous former students include
Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, Instagram’s Kevin
Systrom and Mike Krieger, former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, and Palantir founder
Peter Thiel as well as current CEO Alex Karp.
The dream of starting a
company in your dorm room to solve the world’s problems and make billions in
the process is still thriving on campus. But a competing dream, perhaps just as
old, appears to be growing in fervor now, too: to use technical skills as an
insurance policy against dystopia. Students have not failed to notice the
unflattering headlines that have dogged Silicon Valley over the past several
years—the seemingly unending scandals in which the biggest technology companies
in the world have mishandled user data, facilitated the spread of
misinformation, and sold software to the agencies enforcing the Trump
administration’s harsh immigration agenda. All of this has sparked new
conversations inside and outside the classroom, and there are signs that the once-reliable
pipeline between Stanford and Silicon Valley is narrowing—at least a tiny bit.
This can be seen across
universities: Recruiters at Facebook have reportedly clocked a dramatic
decrease in the acceptance of job offers among top-ranked schools for tech
talent. In May, CNBC found that the acceptance
rate for full-time positions at Facebook from recent graduates of top-tier
schools had fallen between 35 and 55 percent as of last December, down from an
85 percent acceptance rate for the 2017–18 school year. “Students don’t feel
that [working at Facebook] has the same cachet,” a San Francisco–based tech
recruiter with 15 years of experience (who asked not to be named because
Facebook is currently one of his clients) told me in an interview. “It doesn’t
seem like the kind of name that students want to have on their résumé for their
first go, and because they have optionality, there becomes very few reasons to
go to Facebook, especially feeling like that brand is a little tarnished right
now.” After all, he added, students are getting very attractive compensation
packages elsewhere from other multibillion-dollar tech firms that aren’t courting
such negative headlines.
Many of the computer science
students at Stanford I talked to oscillated as they described how they feel
about companies like Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google. Some told me they
would never work for one of these companies. Others would but hope to push for
change from within. Some students don’t care at all, but even the ones who
would never think twice about taking a job at Facebook aren’t blind to how the
company is perceived. “It probably varies person to person, but I’m at least
hopeful that more of the Stanford CS community is thoughtful and critical of
the morality of choosing a place to work these days, rather than just chasing
prestige,” Neel Rao, a computer science undergrad at Stanford, told me in an
online chat. “And that a lot of this is due to increasing coverage of major
tech scandals, and its effect on mainstream public sentiment and distrust.”
Other students were quick to
point out that students’ feelings about problems fueling distrust of the
technology industry vary person to person—that there’s not a clear political or
moral line on whether major tech companies are good or bad. “While I am fully
skeptical myself, I believe that I would still apply to these jobs,” said
Amanda Jacquez, a senior in computer science at Stanford. “But like, I would
never work for or apply to Palantir, actually,” Jacquez said, citing its work
for federal immigration agencies. “There are some lines, but for me it’s
personal because I am Mexican.”
Like SLAP, CS+Social Good is
trying to harness these worries. Founded by students in 2014, the group helps
find paid internships for computer science students to work at nonprofits in
need of tech expertise, promoting the opportunities as alternatives to taking
internships at places like Facebook or Google. These groups aren’t the first at
Stanford focused on ethics and technology, but in previous decades that impetus
primarily took the form of opposition to military funding in tech. It was in a
classroom at Stanford in 1983 that the first meeting of Computer Professionals
for Social Responsibility took place. Members of that group were active in the
anti–nuclear weapons movement, and it’s remembered as an important early
example of technologists using their talent to resist the status quo. Just as
Stanford is a cradle of the modern technology industry, it’s also incubated
some of its discontents.
But unlike Computer
Professionals for Social Responsibility—and in contrast with the current
direct-action approach of SLAP—CS+Social Good is primarily focused on changing
computer science higher education from the inside. The organization has worked
with the university to create new electives in Stanford’s CS department, like
“A.I. for Social Good” and studio classes that allow students to partner with
nonprofits on tech projects and get credits. And CS+Social Good has expanded to
other campuses too—there are now more than a dozen chapters at campuses across
the country. At Stanford, CS+Social Good counts more than 70 core members,
though well over 1,000 students have attended its events or are enrolled in the
classes it’s helped design.
“When I was a freshman there
was more of a culture, like, ‘Oh, so exciting, I’m going to work at Facebook,’
” Belce Dogru, a co-leader of CS+Social Good, told me, explaining why her group
has found a receptive audience, “But now it’s more like, ‘Oh,
I’m going to work at Facebook.’ And then another person asks, ‘How do you feel
about the data breach?’ And the other person is like, ‘I try not to think about
it.’ ” This January, CS+Social Good members invited
the two whistleblowers from Theranos, the disgraced blood-testing
startup, to give a talk on campus. Hundreds of students packed the auditorium
hoping to learn what to do if they find themselves working at an unethical
company after college. The talk was titled “Spilling the Blood of a Silicon
Valley Unicorn.”
SLAP published a
zine last month titled “Stop Coding State Violence” that explains why
the group is currently focused on calling out tech companies that sell products
or services to agencies carrying out federal immigration policies. The booklet
spells out, with citations, how decades of racial profiling by police has
resulted in datasets that, when fed into predictive policing technologies like
those built by Palantir, could further perpetuate racial biases. It names the
tech companies that work with ICE and Border Patrol and describes Stanford’s
deep history of innovating for the military. The organization plans to hand
more out to first-year students in the fall.
Immigration enforcement isn’t
SLAP’s only issue with Big Tech at the moment. Last month, the group invited a
panel of speakers, including Stephanie Parker, who works at YouTube and is one
of the organizers of the Google walkout and a member
of the Tech Workers Coalition and also a Stanford alum, to come to campus to
talk to students about her experience organizing within Google over the
company’s policies for dealing with sexual harassment. More than 100 people
attended the panel.
You don’t have to frustrate a
Salesforce recruiter or attend a lecture to find yourself tech-skeptical. While
the techlash may be visible on Stanford’s campus, it’s yet unclear what it
means for students who are concerned about the technology industry’s problems
but not exactly outraged.
“It’s early to say if the
tide is shifting with Stanford CS students, but I think there’s momentum that’s
building,” said Janna Huang, a sociology grad student and teaching assistant.
“Back in 2014, people were so excited to enter the tech industry, like they
were excited to wear Facebook-issued clothing.” Now, Huang says students are
coming to class a bit more skeptical and are more seriously grappling with
concepts around privacy and fairness in algorithms. And in some cases, even
professors are finding some educational value in students’ concerns.
If you’ve taken a class on
computer security, you know Alice and Bob. They’re the fictional characters
whom professors like to use to teach students how to hack out of dicey digital
scenarios. When Bob gets hacked, Alice comes to the rescue. When Bob needs to
send an encrypted email to Alice, she’s got the key to decrypt it. But in the
past couple of years, a new nemesis has joined the ranks of Alice and Bob in
computer science classrooms: Facebook. “In classes I’ve taken recently about
security and networking, you imagine this evil attacker in your security model
and now professors and Ph.D. students teaching classes are like, ‘Imagine
Facebook is trying to steal your data,’ ” Dogru, of CS+Social Good, said. “The
whole class starts laughing and we discuss.”
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