[P2P-F] Fwd: [Networkedlabour] Fwd: <nettime> report of recent google protest in bay area

Sat Jul 19 07:30:39 CEST 2014

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Orsan Senalp <orsan1234 at gmail.com>
Date: Mon, Jun 30, 2014 at 9:03 PM
Subject: [Networkedlabour] Fwd: <nettime> report of recent google protest
in bay area
To: networkedlabour at lists.contrast.org

Google, don't be evil! Protest

Begin forwarded message:

*Resent-From:* nettime at kein.org
*From:* Geert Lovink <geert at xs4all.nl>
*Date:* 30 Jun 2014 14:43:55 GMT+2
*Resent-To:* Nettime <nettime-l at kein.org>
*To:* nettime-l at kein.org
*Subject:* *<nettime> report of recent google protest in bay area*

http://fireworksbayarea.com/newswire/google-will-never-be-a-good-neighbor-we-need-to-be-our-own-best-hope/

Google Will Never Be a ?Good Neighbor?; We Need to Be Our Own Best Hope

Cindy Milstein

06.27.14 - There has been a Star-Wars-themed demonstration ?Google: Don?t
Be Evil? on Wednesday, June 25, 2014 outside the incredibly well-attended,
$900 per participant Google I/O code development gathering at the  Moscone
Center in San Francisco. Organized by Eviction Free SF, SF Jobs with
Justice, SEIU-USWW, San Francisco Rising Alliance, and San Francisco Rising
Action Fund, the rally involved maybe a hundred people ? a generous
estimate ? at its peak, coming face-to-Google-glass with thousands and
thousands of the prototypical ? or is it androidish ? app-happy new
generation of elites and wanna-be elites, meaning mostly white/Asian males
under thirty with a sprinkling of white/Asian females under thirty.

The protest could have illustrated the systemic logic of Google as exemplar
#1 of a neocapitalism that?s creating global ungated cities for the rich,
displacing and impoverishing millions worldwide, setting up suprastates
capable of profoundly deep as well as expansive surveillance, destroying
any sort of safety net with its cruel joke of a ?sharing economy,?
restructuring human communication and culture for the worse, and perhaps,
likely, increasingly dehumanizing us all, among other transformations now
in light-speed process.

But too many of the comparatively tiny group of eviction resisters, tenants
rights folks, and labor organizers were chanting and speaking about an
?evil? versus ?good? Google, as if it?s simply a matter of a few bad eggs.
Too many were asking Google to be respectful, to do the right thing, to
?develop a conscience not an app,? as if it were a person who had briefly
strayed from the path of goodness. Too many were asking the same force, the
same lord and master, that is ruining most of the planet in the interest of
power for the few to suddenly, somehow, create a world for us all, with
food, homes, health care, dignity, etc., for all. Indeed, the overarching
demand for this protest was, ?We call upon Google to be a good neighbor,?
as if cozy coexistence with some of the greatest power consolidation in
human history, and greatest inequality and injustice, is the neighborly aim.

I am, perhaps, overstating how disturbing it was, but it honestly felt
embarrassing to be at a demonstration with such a naive demand. It?s far
more ?utopian? in the caricatured sense of the word to ask that top-down
power hand over the goods it is amassing (including its power) than it is
to demand (and work toward) the much more possible utopia of things like
collective rent strikes, land and building occupations, autonomous
communities, collective eviction resistance, land trusts, expropriations
and encampments to stake out commons, neighborhood assemblies, experiments
in the cooperative redistribution of wealth and resources, and things that
emanate from our own power-together. Hard as that is to imagine in a
quickly vanishing San Francisco, it?s a lot more likely than Google (or its
actual neighbor, capitalism!) ?reforming? itself, which would mean
abolishing private property and giving up hierarchy, patriarchy, racism,
ableism, ageism, . . .

Things are only getting worse. We are losing ground, homes, and lives by
the day, by the hour. We?re losing almost faster than we can comprehend.
It?s dispiriting enough to bear weakness, and harder still to be a
participant in that loss. It?s near debilitating, moreover, to be awake to
the precariousness and suffering all around one on a daily basis in this
city in a city, where one half sees only what it wants to see within its
comfy, self-insulated digs ? say, the awesomeness of money,
quirky-delicious luxury food trend, or excitement that the next android
will be called lollipop, since it is, after all, brain candy! ? and the
other half is written off, dehumanized to the point of being expendable
garbage; where one half are thoroughly pampered and babied, and the other
half are driven mad. Each insult adds extra injury. Examples are abundant,
even if housing isn?t. It?s troubling, to say the least ? or should be ? to
watch Google give away some of its charity crumbs to outfit a f
ormer Google bus into a mobile shower unit so that the homeless can bathe
once a week after being made and/or kept homeless through entities like
Google in particular ? one if the key infrastructural players in the
eviction epidemic in San Francisco and elsewhere.

But it?s downright depressing to live in a la-la land of thinking that
megamonsters like Google can be shamed into being nice. Capitalism is
shameless by definition, and it is dynamic as well as creative in
continually reinventing itself. It?s just as glad to put a smiling face on
itself, or a caring/sharing one, even as it wrecks havoc for most of the
human and nonhuman world. That?s why it keeps winning, and why thousands
crowded eagerly, unabashedly, in Google glasses and munching their free
Google doughnuts, with tablets, smartphones, and other new devices in their
hands as well as app ideas swirling in their heads, into a convention
center boasting an enormous ?I/O? on its sleek-glass exterior. Techies, in
fact, understand themselves to be ?a force for good,? to already be doing
?better? for the world precisely through their inventions, entrepreurial
spirit, and start-ups. The magic of today?s capitalism, particularly in the
Bay Area, is that this do-gooder ethos, its ethic, dra
ws from the progressive, ecological history of subcultures and social
movements, bringing it into the brutal logic of commodification,
alienation, and appropriation that makes capitalism a recognizable system
that only, always, benefits a small segment of the population, and
increasingly wants to displace, erase, and even kill off the rest.

Where is our dynamism and creativity, not to come up with easy answers or
tired, impossible themes and slogans, but to boldly envision new,
collective strategies of solidarity, mutual aid, care, and especially,
being our own best hope to and for each other?

p.s.

A shining star of the Google I/O protest, in contrast, was Claudia Tirado,
who braved the thousands-of-techies-long line, armed with a donated entry
pass, to get into the Moscone Center ? by herself ? in order to
single-handedly disrupt the keynote talk. As all attendees? eyes were on
her, she stood up to talk about Google lawyer Jack Halprin?s eviction of
the seven apartments of people ? including her (an SF teacher) and her
two-year-old son ? from the huge house that Halprin recently bought on
Guerrero Street in San Francisco?s Mission. More than ever, it seems to me,
caring women hold up the world, and are courageous and clear-eyed enough to
boldly contest its many injustices. Bravo, Claudia! (For one news story,
among many, on her direct action, see here.)

FireWorks: Anarchist Counterinformation Project for the Bay Area Contact

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