The November 2016 election caused an existential crisis for Leigh Honeywell, a Canadian security engineer who was working for Slack in the Bay Area. “After the election, I felt really strongly the call to act. And I wasn’t sure what that action [should be],” says Honeywell, who had donated technical assistance to the Hillary Clinton campaign. “Is this something where I go home and work on election security back home?"
But she was soon encouraged at the end of the month by seeing “a lot of new faces” at a meeting of tech workers and activists for a new organization called Tech Solidarity. From there, Honeywell brought together other techies to craft the Never Again pledge, signed by over 2,800 tech-industry workers in December 2016. Each promised to not work on projects they found to be immoral.
Honeywell emphasizes that Never Again was not a petition, which she derides as a supplication. “It being a pledge, it’s a statement of people’s values, a statement of actions that people are going to take, or not take, given a particular circumstance.” Those actions have gone as far as quitting, as engineers from Google have done this year over an AI project for the Pentagon and a censored search engine for the Chinese government.
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