On May 14th, 2025, we wrapped up our political education series, WTF: The Rise of the Tech Broligarchy, with a powerful finale: WTF Do We Do Now? Over the course of seven sessions, more than 1,200 comrades came together to confront the corporate takeover unfolding before us.
Looking back on our series, here are five bold takeaways to fuel the fight ahead:
Lesson One: Corporate-State Collusion has Gone into Overdrive.
Corporate-state collusion has gone into overdrive. This isn’t just about campaign cash or backroom lobbying—this is something far more dangerous. The Tech Broligarchy isn’t just pulling strings behind the scenes; they’re stepping directly into the halls of power to protect and expand their profits. Musk didn’t just drop $290 million to help elect Trump — he’s now part of the Trump team gutting the federal agencies that could hold him and the other Tech Broligarchs accountable. And Meta? They ditched fact-checking, disbanded their DEI team and hiring practices, and loosened their Hateful Conduct policy the moment the election ended. These billionaires are no longer just influencing policy — they’re writing it, executing it, and rigging the system in their favor. This is a hostile takeover of our democracy and it’s happening in real time.
Check out Episode 2: WTF Is the Tech Broligarchy Up To? where Erie Meyer, former Chief Technologist and Senior Advisor to the Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), explains how the gutting of federal agencies is about cutting oversight and accountability, not efficiency.
Lesson Two: Tech Infrastructure Is Being Weaponized Against Us
Tech companies are seizing unprecedented control over our world — both physical and digital. They’re devouring land, water, and energy to power AI-driven data centers, often polluting local communities and pocketing massive tax breaks in the process.
Watch Episode 6: WTF are Data Centers? where KeShaun Pearson, Vincent Acuña, and Michael Connor share their thoughts on this pivotal moment of resistance against data centers.
But the damage does not stop there. AI systems, built on the backs of exploited data workers in the Global South, fuel a global data economy. This data economy enables mass deportations, political repression, genocide, and censorship worldwide. Tech infrastructure is a dual system of extraction and control designed to profit from our data and quell our resistance. We cannot afford to fight just one piece of this machine — we have to challenge the whole system.
Check out Episode 4: WTF is Tech Doing on Immigration? where Nana Gyamfi, Executive Director of Black Alliance for Just Immigration, breaks down how to understand surveillance and anti-Blackness.
Lesson Three: The Chaos Is Calculated
The chaos we’ve experienced over the first 100 days of Trump is by design. The constant barrage of shocking headlines and policy changes isn’t incompetence or a lack of preparation on their part — It’s intentional. The administration’s approach has been to overwhelm the news cycle while destroying the public safety net so that multiple crises are unleashed onto our communities, making our unified resistance difficult. While the public bounces from crisis to crisis, the Tech Broligarchy secures more tax breaks, subsidies, and regulatory rollbacks. We unpacked this in Episode 1: WTF is the Tech Broligarchy?, where MediaJustice Executive Director Steven Renderos explains the parallels between oligarchy in the United States and El Salvador.
Watch Episode 1: WTF is the Tech Broligarchy? where we outline the chaos and collusion at the start of Trump 2.0.
Lesson Four: Resistance Works
The fourth lesson gives us hope: resistance is happening and getting results — from the Tesla Takedown’s national protest movement to Memphis Communities Against Pollution who are blocking the expansion of data centers. People are demonstrating that targeted resistance can be effective. As we learned in Episode 7: WTF Do We Do Now?, one of the most potent forms of people power we’ve seen in Trump’s first 100 days is community resistance. We saw this resistance in response to ICE raids by community-led ICE monitoring, local signal groups sharing information to help families evade deportations, and know your rights trainings. We are seeing students willing to protest across college campuses despite being targeted by the Trump administration and whose organizing helped free Rumeysa Ozturk and Mohsen Mahdawi from ICE detention. Law firms are defying Trump’s orders to comply with his executive order on DEI and are instead pushing back against this administration’s agenda. There is a growing momentum of people who are fighting back and organizing — and they are winning.
Check out Episode 7: WTF Do We Do Now?, where we discuss the importance of holding our ground with bold stances like our speakers Irma Shauf-Bajar, Executive Director of 18 Million Rising, and long-time activist and former Co-Executive Director of Highlander Center, Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson.
Lesson Five: Tech Oligarch Power Is Built on Lies
And our final lesson, and perhaps the most empowering one: the Tech Oligarchy’s power is built on myths we can challenge. Their influence depends on narratives about innovation, efficiency, and inevitability that simply don’t match reality. We’ve seen this repeatedly. The jobs promised by data centers don’t materialize. The biggest data center being built right now is Stargate in Abilene, TX. The companies building it, Open AI, Softbank, and Oracle, promise the project will generate 100,000 new jobs. However, according to documents reviewed by Bloomberg, they are actually only required to offer 57 jobs that pay around $57,000 a year. That’s barely a living wage for a single adult, let alone a family.
View Episode 5: WTF is the Deal with AI? where Dr. Alex Hanna, Director of Research at the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR) and author of The AI Con, breaks down the hype and myths regarding artificial intelligence and what we can actionably do to deal with AI creeping into our everyday lives.
By exposing the contradictions of the Tech Broligarchy, we create organizing opportunities. We know that when we expose the gap between the hype and the reality, we crack open new space to organize. Tech is not neutral. It’s shaped by power—and we have the power to imagine something better.
These five lessons are helping us cultivate the clarity and strategy we need to face what’s coming — exposing the power plays we’ll keep seeing under Trump and fueling resistance that’s smart, sharp, and grounded.
Did you miss any of the sessions, want to dive back in, or even set up a viewing party with your community? You can catch the whole series now on MediaJustice’s WTF YouTube playlist and check out our viewing guides that break down each episode:
- WTF is the Tech Broligarchy?
- WTF is the Broligracy Up to?
- WTF is Happening with the TikTok Ban?
- WTF is Tech Doing on Immigration? (Versión en Español)
- WTF is the Deal with AI?
- WTF are Data Centers?
- WTF Do We Do Now?
To the thousands who tuned in, rewatched, and dove into the guides: thank you. You’ve started something powerful — now let’s take it to the next level with two offerings for you and your community:
🔥 The WTF Toolkit – Two hands-on workshops and a Jeopardy-style game to bring WTF: The Rise of the Tech Broligarchy to life.
💥 The Data Center Organizer Guide – Created with Kairos, this myth-busting, action-packed resource breaks down the real costs of data centers — and shows you how to fight back.
The tools are here. The moment is now. Let’s organize.
