Excerpted from David Judd and Zakiya Khabir:

“Even in a world where the rich like to be worshipped as “job creators,” the people at the top of the tech industry stand out. It isn’t every CEO who gets multiple hagiographic biographies, but it seems that more tech companies than not have a garage-to-riches version of their origin story, in which individual genius triumphs over adversity–even if the adversity is, say, getting booted as CEO of Apple and having to settle for running Pixar for a few years instead.

There are plenty of less glowing stories to tell about tech’s top executives: narratives of privilege, excess and incestuous ties to the rest of the power structure. The tale of Forrest Hayes, who died of a heroin overdose on his private yacht, triggering dubious manslaughter charges against a sex worker he’d brought aboard, sounds like something that belongs in a movie about the decadence of Wall Street. But in fact, Hayes worked for Google, the geek vanguard.

Tech bosses are just as fond of less-colorful rich-people-things–like buying politicians and busting unions–as their old-economy counterparts. For example, venture capitalist Tim Draper actually tried to get California split into six states by voters’ referendum, though his hubristic initiative failed to qualify for the 2014 ballot.

Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg have both spent tens of millions of dollars more soberly and successfully, buying support for dramatic changes to public education meant to break the power of teachers’ unions. Marissa Meyer, the former Google executive and now Yahoo CEO, spends her spare time serving on the board of Walmart, which has spent years fighting against any kind of organizing by its low-wage workforce.

But regardless of the personal qualities or connections of the people at the top of the tech pyramid, it should be clear that their interests–as members of the 0.01 Percent–will diverge from those of their workers on questions of public policy as well as the simple division of revenue between wages and profits.

A more ambiguous category is the small entrepreneur–the startup “founders” who are now processed in bulk through institutions like Y Combinator and other incubators, as well as hustling on their own. Many of these people have put their whole lives into their businesses, and very few strike it rich. Some are sincerely interested in changing the world for the better.

Nevertheless, at the end of the day, those who take venture capital funding are accountable to their investors, while those who remain independent need their employees to produce surplus value in order to keep the companies afloat. While the venture capital-funded founders, most of whose businesses will never make a profit, are arguably better seen as participants in a big R&D department for their investors than as classic entrepreneurs, their interests as stockholders are still much more clearly aligned with their bankers than with ordinary workers.

In any case, this isn’t a stable group. Many of the “founders” go back and forth between working for themselves, contracting and working as straight-up employees. This fluidity both mitigates the financial risk of a business failure and contributes to the strain of pro-business libertarianism among tech workers with marketable skills.

Among those who do make it big, any rebel spirit more often manifests itself in a disdain for regulation and disregard for social costs than a challenge to the interests of the 1 Percent as a whole. For a prime example of the former, see Uber and Lyft sabotaging one another, arbitrarily slashing pay and plotting to smear journalists–stories like that are far more common than Valve’s much-touted attempt to do away with bosses.

In the current economy, whether the tech sector is best described as a bubble or a genuine boom, it’s undeniable that there are plenty of examples of making it big. That leaves space for some tech workers to get a slice of the pie–even as others, positioned closer to the millions still unemployed, are squeezed.

However, even genuine booms end, and we know all about bubbles deflating. When conditions get worse again for business and margins get tighter, how will tech capital respond? History gives us some evidence.

When they were at the cutting edge of an earlier iteration of Silicon Valley, IBM and HP had reputations as great places to work, much like Google and Facebook today. To be sure, the details differed: rather than over-the-top fringe benefits, the “HP Way” promised employment security, with an explicit no-layoffs policy. But the carefully cultivated sense that labor and management were on the same side was a striking parallel.

That didn’t survive the recession of the early 1990s, and new competition during the boom that followed. IBM and HP laid off hundreds of thousands of workers–leading, among other things, to the formation of Alliance@IBM, a minority union, but still one of the only organizations of its type in tech.

The tech industry, especially in its Silicon Valley locus, has been consciously anti-union for a long time. Intel co-founder Robert Noyce proclaimed that “remaining non-union is essential for survival for most of our companies.”

These days, that sentiment among tech bosses has, if anything, expanded its ambition. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen spoke for many of his ilk when he said in 2012 that “there may have been a time and a place for unions,” but that was once upon a time, it was never in tech, and that world is long gone now.

As for the motivations of the tech bosses themselves, they may stem from a belief that giving employees a say means losing the flexibility to react to new technology and a dynamic market, and not just a desire to cap salaries and benefits. But it’s better taken as a warning that tech’s bosses understand their interests don’t coincide with those of their employees in the long run. Even that neutral-sounding need for flexibility can rapidly translate into a need to fire people and abandon past promises–as it did for the blue chip giants of the 1980s.”