Website concept by Stoa · Not the official TechEquity website
Three focus areas, twelve issues

Our Work

We work on how technology affects people in their roles as workers and as consumers, and on the corporate and market power that shapes how they experience the economy.

A TechEquity walking tour on Market Street in San Francisco

Across all three areas, these are lenses on one economy, not separate bodies of work. The people at the center of our work are not just workers or consumers. They are both at once, and more—and concentrated corporate power shapes their lives in every one of those roles. Our work moves across these areas, each informing and reinforcing the others.

Twelve issues, three lenses

Confronting corporate power is the foundation on which the other two areas rest, because when power concentrates, a handful of companies decide who shares in the wealth technology creates, what people can afford, and which jobs exist and on what terms.

What each focus area covers

Work and Livelihoods

Workers have real power to shape how technology is developed, deployed, and experienced, both in the workplace and across the labor market.

  • Prohibiting abusive forms of worker data collection and creating enforceable guardrails to prevent automated systems from determining people’s access to a livelihood.
  • Bringing the workers who build and train AI systems, including data labeling and content moderation, into policy conversations to hold tech companies accountable for improving their labor conditions.
  • Tracking how employers’ use of AI and other workplace technology is reshaping jobs across the labor market, and grounding policy responses in the shifting needs of workers.

Economic Agency

People can see, understand, and contest the technological systems that shape what they can afford, where they can live, how their data is used, and whether they can get ahead.

  • Ending surveillance pricing, where what a company knows about you sets what you pay.
  • Defending and strengthening data privacy protections.
  • Ensuring government acts to safeguard people from unfair algorithmic systems that decide what they can afford and where they can live.

Confronting Corporate Power and Capital Concentration

The rules governing corporations, capital, and markets are strengthened and enforced, so that new entrants and new ideas have room to compete, and concentrated tech and financial power is reshaped in the public interest.

  • Expanding state antitrust authority so regulators can act on concentration.
  • Resourcing the agencies that enforce these rules.
  • Advocating for access to public technology to support public interest innovation.
  • Reforming tax structures to ensure a more equitable public finance system.

Why now

Technology companies, especially those developing AI, are concentrating wealth and power and reshaping work, markets, communities, and democracy faster than the rules can keep up. The rules that govern our economy were built for an earlier economic era and are straining under each new wave of technology.

At the same time, the overwhelming concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a very few tech companies and their executives is eroding democracy. People feel this as a creeping loss of control that manifests in rising energy and water bills, expanding surveillance, and the fear of losing their jobs. That has opened a window of public attention and a fast-moving contest over who will govern this technology, and in whose interest. Our work is to modernize the rules of the economy so that innovation works for people rather than against them.

For the next several years, the rules that matter will be written in the states. What gets proven there is what a future administration can act on when the opening comes. That makes the next three years decisive.

Our websites need to meet this moment. They should help us reach people while public attention is high, move quickly as issues and campaigns develop, and make our research, tools, and policy work easy for partners, advocates, and policymakers to find and use.

A supporter signing a petition on a clipboard outside a storefront

Our approach

We build trust across worlds that do not usually work together, and we galvanize it into change.

  1. Build coalitions and convene stakeholders, including partners who do not usually sit at the same table, to advance bold ideas.

    Collaborative Action

  2. Translate across technical, policy, and political worlds to spur action.

    Collaborative

  3. Share research, data, tools, and strategy as infrastructure for the field of advocates fighting for people-first technology.

    Collaborative

  4. Advocate for and refine policy proposals as they move through the political process, and ensure they are implemented and enforced.

    Action Collaborative

TechEquity Action (c4) leads the activities that build political will and power and that advocate directly; TechEquity Collaborative (c3) leads research, translation, and equipping the field.

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