2026-06-14 –, Volksbühne (Saal 4)
Drawing on their shared experience collaborating with Tech Workers Coalition and Cables of Resistance, the speakers consider key questions such as
• Over the past 5-years, collective action within the tech industry has blossomed in response to militarization of tech, mass-layoffs, and growing discontent within the tech industry. More importantly, what are you going to do about it? What role will you place in your workplace and sector?
• How are gentrification and decentralisation connected?
• What learnings and momentum can we take forward from Cables of Resistance, and into the streets, workplaces and digital forums?
PANELISTS: Yonatan Miller, Josephine Shen
MODERATOR: Rainer Rehak
Yonatan Miller is a tech worker and trade union organizer from New York who considers Berlin home. He graduated from a Master’s Programme in Labour Policies and Globalisation, where he furthered his knowledge of the organizing challenges of global solidarity in the tech sector.
Including his own workplace, he cultivated a network of English speaking works councils at 40-different tech companies in Germany where they strategize responses to mass layoffs, changing software and building further capacity through unionization.
The focus of is organizing is local, but he also understands the importance of exchanging lessons and building strategic bridges transnationally.
He co-founded the Berlin Tech Workers Coalition. In his spare time he collects 🦝 memes.
Rainer Rehak is part of the research group “Technology, Power, and Domination” at the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society, he is an associated researcher at the Berlin Social Science Center (WZB), and has completed his PhD on systemic IT security and societal data protection at the TU Berlin.
He studied computer science and philosophy in Berlin and Hong Kong and has been working on the implications of the computerization of society for over 15 years. His research fields include technology impact assessment, collective data protection, systemic IT security, state hacking, computer science and ethics, fictions of technology, digitization and sustainability, convivial and democratic digital technology, epistemics of automation, digital (de-)colonialism, and the implications and limits of AI systems.
He also publishes regularly in non-scientific outlets and is an expert witness for parliaments (e.g., the German Bundestag) and courts (e.g., the German Constitutional Court). Together with other digital policy and environmental organizations, he initiated the “Bits & Bäume” conference series for digitalisation and sustainability. Rainer Rehak is co-chair of the Forum Computer professionals for peace and societal responsibility (FIfF).