In Defense Of Direct Action
Google and the banality of “don’t be evil.”
The man waiting next to you at the bus stop is wearing casually tailored designer jeans, artificially weathered Oxford brown shoes, and a T-shirt. He’s a little out of place in this part of Oakland, but people like him are increasingly common here now. He’s sipping coffee from a re-usable cup and scrolling through his over-sized smart phone, oblivious to his surroundings. Hidden in the messenger bag slung over his shoulder is a compact Thinkpad computer. In an obscure sub-directory of this machine are several files containing the code this man will begin editing as soon as the private bus owned by his employer arrives. That code is part of a human terrain mapping project he’s working on with his team at the office; the final product is to be sold to the Department of Defense, to better categorize, control, and target people for execution in conflict zones worldwide. The man standing next to you is a war criminal. He also works for Google.
Recently, there have been several protests staged against Google’s private flotilla of company buses, which sweep through the streets of San Fransisco and Oakland, ferrying young tech professionals from the hip and gentrifying parts of both cities to Google’s Mountain View corporate headquarters. Google has not paid either city government for the use of its municipal bus stops, even though the daily rounds of their private bus fleet frequently impede the progress of public buses and their passengers. The activists protesting the Google buses have employed street theater, blockades, and parody to convey their dissent. A recent protest at the home of a Google employee, however, was both an escalation in tactics for the protestors and a broadening of the burgeoning critique of Google, whose ties to the defense industry and role in maintaining the surveillance state have so far mostly flown under the radar, in the shade of the company’s sunny, “do no evil” veneer.
The Google employee the activists targeted, Anthony Levandowski, is an engineer involved with developing Google’s self-driving car, as well as Google street view- made possible by the cars that crawl the world’s roads, mapping wireless networks and photographing everything in sight. He had recently purchased property in downtown Berkeley, as well, with the intention of establishing a 77-unit luxury apartment building there, in a city whose stock of affordable housing is rapidly shrinking. Protesters held a rally outside of his house for about forty-five minutes, before marching to a local bus stop where they briefly blocked a Google company bus, and then dispersed. Their actions raise essential questions about culpability and individual responsibility; is it legitimate to target private individuals for the effect their work may have upon the world? When all of us are, in one way or another, caught up in a global web of dependence and exploitation, at what point does is it become ethically coherent to throw stones at the morally-questionable glass houses of others?
While the man described in the opening paragraph of this piece is fictional, he is also emblematic of the moral ambiguity that comes with condemning individuals for the small part they play within larger architectures of power, systems over which they often have little independent control. When is it legitimate or effective for people as a public to demand accountability of ordinary individuals? This question is especially relevant to ask of those who work at Google, a company that projects an image of social conscience, corporate responsibility, and likes to behave as though centralizing all of the world’s information and bringing about liberatory social transformation were somehow one and the same thing. Levandowski himself, before protesters met him at his door, was featured in a New Yorker piece in which he claims that “he wants to fix the world and make a fortune doing it.” This could easily be a slogan for Google itself; the delusion that massive wealth accumulation and positive social transformation are complimentary objectives is one of the dearest held beliefs of the tech elite. This party line can be found everywhere power and wealth are concentrated or represented today, from the chattering venture capitalists attending the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, to the front pages of “The Economist,” to the trendier elements of the Washington think tank set. It’s all part of the plan for twenty-first century global supremacy: everyone gets richer, innovation and talent are rewarded on a meritocratic basis, and helping yourself is just a way of helping others. It’s the end of history and a beautiful new world, so long as you don’t bother to look out the window.
Outside of the window, San Fransisco’s affordable housing crisis is forcing more and more people onto the street, into lives of poverty, homelessness, addiction, and desperation. Outside the window, the share of income going to the top 1% in America has risen from around 9% in the 1970s to 22% today. The United States has imprisoned the largest portion of its population out of any country in the world. Unemployment and student debt remain dangerously high across Europe and North America. Outside of the window of a C-130 Hercules transport aircraft, thousands of feet above the ground in north-western Pakistan, in Yemen, in North Africa, and elsewhere, drones circle silently, looking for targets. In a world where the centralization and exploitation of information has become the basis upon which economic and military power is accumulated and manifested, Google will not be the sunny optimistic figure of its own shallow self image. As their recent acquisition of the military robotics firm Boston Dynamics indicates, Google’s future is several shades darker, and more ambiguous. If anything, they will be the East India Company of our age, the private partners of global empire.
Where does this leave the individual? Does it make sense to go to the home of a Google engineer, to bang on their window and make reality inescapable, if only for a moment? The more I think about this question, the more complicated it becomes. I’m instinctively distrustful of moral absolutes and simple binaries of good and evil, even if those laying claim to these ethical simplicities are well intentioned activists. I’m reminded of myself at seventeen, working my first job at the Naval Postgraduate School, in the Department of Defense Analysis. As a kid from a complacently liberal family, I had pretty facile ideas about military people. As the occupation of Iraq descended into civil war, I expected my colleagues to be simple minded cut-outs of neoconservative ideology. Instead I found myself working with some of the most eminently practical and brilliant people I had ever met. The faculty was made up of ex-special forces soldiers with PhDs from Princeton and Johns Hopkins. They were largely thoughtful, introspective, and caring individuals who shared a wry sense of humor and a commitment to looking out for each other, no matter the cost. Nearly every one of them had most likely killed numerous people, or given orders that took the lives of many more.
I remember, in particular, a young air force major who was there to get his masters degree in counter-insurgency (yes, you can get a degree in that). He had spent most of his career deployed, and was struggling to re-adjust to academic life. I enjoyed joking with him and reading along with his coursework, so that we could compare notes over coffee. He was an A-10 warthog pilot. The A-10 is an anti-tank, anti-personell, close air support platform that specializes in hanging at low altitudes for extended periods of time to sweep the ground with its primary weapon, a 30 mm rotary machine gun capable of firing 6,000 rounds per minute. The A-10 has been mostly replaced now, by the Apache helicopter, which sports the same weapon and has the same mission; it was an Apache that shot the footage leaked by Chelsea Manning to Wikileaks, the film that quickly became infamous around the world as “Collateral Murder.”
It’s the human being in front of us that grounds any understanding of ethics; the rest of it is just an imaginative universalizing projection from that one leap across the ontological void- the belief that the person in front of you feels joy, pain, and experiences the world, in some ways, as you do. Watching “Collateral Murder,” it is the soldiers’ inability to empathize and their complete dehumanization of the people they are massacring on the ground that is the most jarring, even when they learn that they have been shooting at children. Recalling my acquaintance with the A-10 pilot, I’m reminded of the taboo against challenging the ethical basis of other people’s careers in polite society, the taboo against confronting the human being facing me with the obvious question: why do you do it?
Sometimes, the people in front of us can take advantage of this fundamental norm of civility to keep their actions invisible, to avoid social consequences for their self interested and destructive choices. We don’t talk about rape, we don’t talk about money, just don’t talk about it. Oftentimes, people deceive themselves about what they do and what they have done. I didn’t create the world, they’ll say, I just live in it. Some things are too horrible to think about. It’s best not to bother, to not look out the window of the bus at the thousands of homeless, desperate, and dying people, at the horror.
One way to look at the protesters who came to Anthony Levandowski’s door is to paint them as anti-social, even dangerous people. Many commentators in the media have already done so, because they find it easier to identify with an upwardly mobile tech worker than with the people they push out of the city, into the margins. Another way to view the protestors’ action is as one that is fundamentally social, based the idea that powerful members of a community should not be allowed to displace and harm their neighbors with impunity, without being called to account, without being made to look upon their works, and despair.
