“Had a moment of nostalgia today about when we were just fighting to keep racists from giving talks at programming [conferences] and then got real sad,” Leigh Honeywell tweeted on November 29.A few weeks after that, Honeywell — a security response manager at Slack — Ka-Ping Yee, Valerie Aurora and others organized the Never Again Pledge , a public oath from workers in the technology industry to refuse to participate in the use of tech for racial and religious targeting.“We have educated ourselves on the history of threats like these, and on the roles that technology and technologists played in carrying them out,” the pledge reads. “We see how IBM collaborated to digitize and streamline the Holocaust, contributing to the deaths of six million Jews and millions of others. We recall the internment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War.”In the wake of of Trump's ascendency to the White House, activists within the technology industry are reassessing their priorities. Movements that once focused on proportional representation of marginalized demographic groups in the industry are shifting energies away from diversity work in favor of staving off future complicity in genocide.Danilo Campos, Technical Director for Social Impact at Github, almost wistfully recalls how, prior to the election, he had been planning on making a fun video about workplace inclusivity and Star Trek, based on a wildly popular talk he had given at a javascript meet-up.“The year got busy and I didn’t get around to it, and now it just feels so back-burnered, because the stuff we’ve got to worry about runs so much deeper than inclusion now," said Campos. "We have a president-elect who campaigned on mass deportations and a Muslim registry. And these are all things you could apply technology to.”In recent years, the movement to diversify tech seemed to make huge strides forward, as tech workers and venture capitalists alike began to speak more openly about discrimination in the industry. Perhaps no clearer sign of the changing cultural tide was the sudden explosion in interest in the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing (GHC), a major tech conference by and for women. GHC had been held annually since 1994, but in 2011 it moved to a convention center due to a spike in attendance.Around the time, people began to reexamine inclusivity in all aspects of the industry: Black Girls Code (founded 2011) seeks to teach programming skills to black girls aged 7 to 17. Code2040 (founded 2012) runs programs to help black and Latinx software engineering students land internships and jobs in the tech industry. The Ada Initiative (founded 2011 by Mary Gardiner and Valeria Aurora, one of the co-organizers of the Never Again Pledge), as part of its mission to support women in open technology, developed anti-harassment codes of conduct for conferences, and lobbied conferences to adopt them.Today, codes of conduct with anti-harassment provisions are common in the tech industry. Workshops and unconferences organized by the Ada Initiative led to a flowering of other projects, including the San Francisco women’s hackerspace Double Union Under Double Union’s auspices, Leigh Honeywell created OpenDiversityData.org , a site that tracks which tech companies have published their internal diversity statistics and which ones have not, as a mode of pressuring the latter to release that information.Thanks to activism like hers, the release of diversity data rapidly became a widespread practice across Silicon Valley, with giants like Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter, and more regularly publishing their EEO-1 reports (forms with gender and racial/ethnic data about employees legally required by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission from certain companies) for the public to view. The regular publication of EEO-1s became a way for companies set goalposts for themselves, and to vow to do better.But the push for diversity has seen incremental progress. After Jack Dorsey returned as Twitter’s CEO, the company lost Leslie Miley , its only black engineering manager. By the end of the year, Janet Van Huysee, the company’s VP of diversity, was replaced by a white man Meanwhile, Apple Facebook , and Google all claimed to be moving in the “right direction,” touting improvements such as women making up 21% of new hires, compared to a current population of 19% . Pinterest started out reaching for “ambitious” goals in 2015, then beat a swift retreat, having found that a 30% hiring rate for women engineers was “ too aggressive .”Diversity activism prior to the 2016 election focused heavily on the spread of information — data sets, programming skills, codes of conduct, workplace diversity training — and trusted that the arc of history was long but would bend towards equity.