8 Change
What actually produces change?
- Describe the conditions under which social movements succeed.
- Explain a “policy window” and assess whether one is open.
- Connect a specific social-media or AI harm to each of the day’s six prior lessons.
- Sketch a realistic reform strategy and name their own leverage as a technologist.
Name one thing that is better now than it was fifty years ago. Now ask who made it better, and how. Gay marriage is legal in more places than it was, the ozone hole is closing, cars have seatbelts, and far fewer people die in factory fires than did in 1911. None of these things happened by themselves, and none of them happened because the people with power were persuaded. They happened because organized groups applied sustained pressure over time, and they rarely happen any other way.
8.1 How Change Happens
The historical record is consistent across very different contexts. Change happens when three things come together: organization, opportunity, and framing. The civil rights movement, environmental regulation, seat belts, tobacco control, marriage equality, and worker safety all followed this pattern— slow, non-linear, and won by pressure rather than persuasion alone. The popular story that Rosa Parks was a spontaneous individual is factually wrong: she was the secretary of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP, had recently attended a training center for organizers, and was chosen as a plaintiff deliberately (Beckerman 2022). The bus boycott that followed was coordinated by hundreds of people whose names are not remembered.
John Kingdon gave the pattern a precise description (Kingdon 1995). Change becomes possible when three streams align: a problem defined as a crisis, a politics stream with a constituency and a mood, and a policy stream containing a ready-made solution. The window opens rarely and closes quickly, so the people who want change must have built the solution before the problem becomes undeniable.
Three mechanisms illustrate how this works in practice. ACT UP, founded in 1987, used direct action to accelerate drug approval, targeting the FDA and pharmaceutical companies until they changed their timelines— a demonstration that the process of regulation itself can be shifted by organized pressure. The abolitionist movement distributed slave narratives such as Olaudah Equiano’s 1789 narrative and Frederick Douglass’s 1845 memoir, making suffering imaginable to readers who had never seen it, and ran the 1790s sugar boycott as the first mass consumer boycott in British history (Hochschild 2006). And Kerala, in southern India, won land reform in 1969 not through occupation but through election, breaking the veto of the landlord class and unlocking decades of gains in literacy and life expectancy (Drèze and Sen 2013).
There is also a quieter side to the record. Erica Chenoweth found that campaigns engaging the active participation of roughly 3.5 percent of a population have repeatedly been enough to force change (Chenoweth and Stephan 2011). In a city of half a million people, that is seventeen thousand people doing something instead of just complaining. And the capacity for that something is real. After the 1917 Halifax explosion and Hurricane Katrina, ordinary people organized mutual aid with remarkable speed and generosity, even as authorities and media reported violence that later investigation showed never happened (Solnit 2009; Quarantelli 1998). The capacity is there; the question is whether it is organized.
8.2 Worker Power
Worker power is the clearest example of gains that were won, not conceded. The Combination Acts criminalized unions in Britain; the Tolpuddle Martyrs were transported to Australia for forming one; the 1926 General Strike was defeated; and Thatcher spent a decade breaking what remained. The eight-hour day did not arrive because employers became convinced workers deserved it; it arrived after the First World War, when the fear of revolution made the cost of continued resistance higher than the cost of concession. The Melbourne stonemasons won the first eight-hour day in 1856 not through moral persuasion but by applying collective leverage at a moment of their opponents’ weakness.
The institutions that made these gains stick were deliberately built. German codetermination puts workers on corporate supervisory boards, half of them in large firms. Australia’s Harvester judgment of 1907 established a “basic wage” through a system of arbitration rather than bargaining alone. And COSATU, the South African trade-union federation, was a decisive force in ending apartheid. The pattern persists today. When the Rana Plaza factory collapse killed 1,134 garment workers in 2013, it produced the Bangladesh Accord, a real gain, then weakened, then re-won— two steps forward, one step back.
8.3 The Technologist’s Role
Technologists hold unusual cards. Their skills are scarce, they have access to systems that others cannot see, and they carry inside knowledge of how the machinery actually works. They also face real constraints: contracts, career risk, and the ideology of neutrality that says an engineer’s job is to build, not to choose. Erin Cech calls the ideology the passion principle: “do what you love” is converted into a reason to accept extraction, and its Japanese endpoint is karoshi, death from overwork (Cech 2021). The software-engineering literature is a symptom of the same blind spot: it covers architecture and management extensively but has almost nothing to say about workers’ rights or cooperatives, the way medicine once hid its own error rate.
The leverage is not theoretical. In 2023, the Writers Guild of America struck for five months and won explicit contract language that AI cannot write or rewrite scripts, and that scripts cannot be used to train AI systems (Kelly 2022). No individual writer could have secured that alone. Technologists can refuse, whistleblow, organize, build alternatives, or work on policy, and each of those is a form of pressure.
8.5 Five Tools
The finale of this workshop offers an alternative taxonomy of the reform menu: five tools that have historically done the work. Collective organizing means building institutions that can act in coordination. Regulatory pressure means participating in the slow work of making rules. Alternative structures means building existence proofs that the current arrangement is not the only one: Mondragón has run as a worker cooperative for nearly seventy years, Vienna’s Gemeindebau still houses working-class families a century on, Amul coordinates 3.6 million farmer-members, and Desjardins serves roughly eight million members and survived 2008 in considerably better shape than the big banks. Strategic communication means engaging with the psychology of belief change, because facts do not change contested minds—stories told by trusted messengers do. And sustained participation means showing up for decades: the Federalist Society built its judicial pipeline over forty years, and the labor movement built the eight-hour day over the same span.
This is the hardest part of the message for people accustomed to fast feedback loops. No single action produces structural change; what produces it is organizational capacity built before the political opening arrives, and the willingness to use that capacity when the opening comes. Refusing to vote or join a union is a political act, and refusing to engage simply delegates the decision to whoever will. How society works is knowable, and knowing it is the prerequisite for changing it.
The harms are not mysterious and the responses are not untried. Every tool discussed in the workshop is available to people who organize. Technologists hold real cards; the question is whether they play them.
8.6 Exercises
- Policy-window map.
- Pick one concrete harm. For Kingdon’s three streams: assess whether a window is open and what would open it.
- Coalition design.
- Choose a reform (e.g., mandatory algorithmic audits). List likely supporters, likely opponents, and the unexpected allies (parents, small business, civil-liberty groups, religious communities) that could make it a winning coalition.
- Leverage inventory.
- As a technologist, list your specific sources of leverage (skills, access, capital, community) and one concrete action you could take in each of the next 1, 6, and 12 months.
- Harm-to-lesson mapping.
- Take one harm (e.g., AI-driven hiring discrimination) and write one sentence connecting it to each lesson. The point is to demonstrate that every real harm has structural, economic, psychological, stratificational, regulatory, and ideological dimensions.
- Reform-menu debate.
- Assign groups different positions (e.g., audits only, liability, breakups, public options, worker power, “it cannot be fixed”). Each group argues its case; then the room discusses which combination is realistic and coherent.
- Backward plan.
- Pick a target outcome five years out (e.g., “audits of high-impact models are mandatory and meaningful”). Work backward to name the milestones, coalitions, and political conditions required at each stage.
- Worker-power audit.
- Choose one workplace harm (surveillance, deskilling, on-call exhaustion, pay opacity). Which of the worker-power institutions (codetermination, sectoral bargaining, arbitration, a union) would address it, and who would have to move first?
- Five tools.
- Take a single reform (e.g., algorithmic audits) and map it onto the five tools—collective organizing, regulatory pressure, alternative structures, strategic communication, sustained participation. Which tool is missing from most tech-industry versions of this plan?