Biz & IT

Protesters show up at the doorstep of Google self-driving car engineer

Backlash against gentrification, surveillance, and Google buses escalates.

Cyrus Farivar – Jan 22, 2014 1:10 pm | 325

This image was distributed by the group Counterforce, protesting Google engineer Anthony Levandowski. Credit: Indymedia

Protests against tech giants and their impact on the San Francisco Bay Area economy just got personal.

According to an anonymous submission on local news site Indybay, an unknown group of protesters targeted a Google engineer best known for helping to develop the company’s self-driving car.

After arriving at the Berkeley home of Anthony Levandowski on Tuesday morning, the protesters distributed a flier (PDF) complaining of his role in developing Google Street View and, more recently, his spearheading a new condominium development in downtown Berkeley. Protesters say this development is linked to a design firm that has done work for the US military.

Ars’ attempts to contact the anonymous group, which calls itself “counterforce,” were unsuccessful. Levandowski and Google also didn’t respond to inquiries.

The protest against Levandowski came the same day that the San Francisco Municipal Transit Authority (SFMTA) voted for the first time to take action regulating Google, Facebook, Apple, and a number of other large tech companies that shuttle workers in private, Wi-Fi-enabled buses from San Francisco and the East Bay to points south in Silicon Valley.

A “cyber-capitalist utopia?”

Levandowski was profiled in a November 2013 article in The New Yorker (which, like Ars Technica, is owned by Condé Nast), detailing his daily 43-mile commute via a Google self-driving car from Berkeley to Mountain View.

“In rush-hour traffic, it can take two hours, but Levandowski doesn’t mind. He thinks of it as research,” the magazine reported.

Counterforce’s main complaint was that Google has recently acquired Boston Dynamics, a military robotics contractor, and that this fact, combined with Levandowski’s background in automated vehicles, is a frightening prospect. Beyond that, they wrote: “Anthony Levandowski is currently trying to create his own cyber-capitalist utopia in the great city of Berkeley,” citing Levandowski’s purchase of a property that he wants to develop into a 77-unit apartment building designed by the Nautilus Group.

Counterforce’s flyer includes paragraphs like these:

The Nautilus Group is composed of designers and builders who have created military installations, malls, and hospitals. Levandowski is now making his contribution to the further sterilization and gentrification of Downtown Berkeley and Shattuck Avenue.

The proposed project is a testament to the arrogance, disconnection, and luxury of the ruling class. Growing their own vegetables in a rooftop garden and selling them to other wealthy people allows them, somehow, to pretend that the planet is not being ravaged by the same economy they depend on for their wealth, comfort, and safety.

The flyer also includes passages that detail the engineer’s morning routine in creepy detail:

Preparing for the action, we watched Levandowski step out of his front door. He had Google Glasses over his eyes, carried his baby in his arm, and held a tablet with his free hand. As he descended the stairs with the baby, his eyes were on the tablet through the prism of his Google Glasses, not on the life against his chest. He appeared in this moment like the robot he admits that he is.

There are men and women in the Congo, slaving away in giant pits in order to extract gold and other precious metals from the earth. This gold will go into phones and tablets made by companies like Google, Apple, and Microsoft. Anthony Levandowski has never worked in a pit mine nor will his children. People like him are exempt from this type of degrading and exploitative labor. Instead, he can casually stare at his screens as if there was not human blood making this technology possible, as if there was not a life in his hands.

After protesting at his home for 45 minutes, the group marched to a Google bus pickup in South Berkeley and blocked it for about 30 minutes.

“We didn’t get any calls from the house,” Officer Jennifer Coats, a Berkeley Police Department spokesperson, told Ars.

“We did get a call at 8:18 am from Google security saying that protesters were blocking a bus at the 3100 block of Adeline St. [at the Ashby BART station], but as we were arriving a BART Police officer had also arrived on the scene. Basically when we were pulling up on scene, there were approximately maybe 10 protesters in front of the bus. As we were approaching, the BART officer told them that they needed to disperse from the roadway. They got out of the roadway and dispersed, they complied. We didn’t have any other further reports or calls for service.”

Officer Coats added that this was the first such anti-Google protest that she was aware of in Berkeley.

Protests heating up

The confrontation occurred against a backdrop of national press attention on the issue of shuttle buses used by tech companies like Google and Facebook to pick up San Francisco-based employees.

In recent months, the buses have again become a tangible lightning rod for people concerned about the impact that the tech boom has on the local economy (protests first began in 2008). In recent years, rents have skyrocketed regionally (especially in San Francisco), and prices continue to go up in many areas. In December 2013, some protesters attacked a Google bus in nearby Oakland. Others have responded by making miniature art.

In response, Google has placed private security on the buses and has experimented with a ferry to take its workers from San Francisco to Redwood City, just 10 miles from its Mountain View campus.

Yesterday, a committee of San Francisco supervisors voted for a proposal in which the companies will have to pay $1 per day for each stop where passengers are picked up or dropped off. SFMTA spokesperson Paul Rose told Ars that this measure won’t take effect until approved by local voters later this spring.

Last week, in a survey (PDF) of 130 San Francisco-based Google commuters conducted by the University of California, Berkeley graduate students found that 40 percent of respondents said they would move out of San Francisco and somewhere closer to their job if the luxury bus program did not exist. The survey also found that respondents were overwhelmingly male (69 percent), unmarried (76 percent), renters (85 percent), and made over $100,000 or more (67 percent).

Listing image: Indymedia

Cyrus Farivar Editor at Large

Cyrus is a former Senior Tech Policy Reporter at Ars Technica, and is also a radio producer and author. His latest book, Habeas Data, about the legal cases over the last 50 years that have had an outsized impact on surveillance and privacy law in America, is out now from Melville House. He is based in Oakland, California.

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