The Rise of Tech Worker Fiction

After years of jubilant hiring sprees, luxurious benefits, and florid rhetoric about the value of the people behind the curtain of innovation, the tech industry spent the last eighteen months laying off more than 350,000 of its workers—with more layoffs yet to come. From the outside, this vibe shift may seem abrupt, but workers on the inside have been watching a slow souring of the once outrageous promises the industry offered—both to consumers and to its employees. As internal pushback and unionization have snowballed, tech workers are waking up to the recognition that despite a white collar costume, tech labor is still labor, only at scale. And in the time-honored tradition of American labor, they’re writing about it.