Sideways by Josh O'Kane

Author:Josh O'Kane [O’Kane, Josh]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House of Canada
Published: 2022-09-13T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 15

Prelude to the Feud

Many months before Sidewalk Labs and Waterfront Toronto grappled with mass resignations, a man in Berlin who used the pseudonym Sundar Panet found himself reading a book about insurrectionism by the Invisible Committee, a far-left group or person whose identity, or identities, was also pseudonymous. Panet was struck by a photograph about a hundred pages in. Seen through the front window of a bus in Oakland, California, the image showed two people blocking that bus’s path while holding up a banner. Fuck Off Google, it read.

In 2004, Google had begun chartering a private, biofuel-powered bus to shuttle employees from across the Bay Area to its suburban office park headquarters. Back then, the service catered to about 150 people a day, who could relax or use its wireless internet to work during their commute. Its success had unintended consequences. By the eve of the global pandemic in 2020, more than a thousand private commuter buses were flooding the Bay Area’s highways, forming an ad hoc transit network that was worth more than $250 million.

This had some benefits—namely, as many as fifty-two thousand fewer commuters sitting alone in cars inching through traffic every day, in turn preventing tens of thousands of tons of carbon dioxide emissions. But Google was accused of taking up space at public bus stops to load passengers into its private luxury buses. The company donated $6.8 million to San Francisco’s bus system in 2014 to cover the cost of rides for low-income youth. Close observers, however, worried that the donation fell short of offsetting the far-reaching consequences of its transit network, which had sent rents surging anywhere near those bus stops. And with fewer riders, the Bay Area’s transit operators produced less revenue to reinvest in the systems everyone else had to use. People went so far as to lie down in front of the buses to protest the power Google was exerting on the Bay Area.

Panet kept staring at that photo. Fuck Off Google. The image had been circulating for a few years, but now he saw it in a new light. Made with a few simple materials, the banner had been noticed around the world. The phrase it bore kept turning in his head. It would make a fine slogan in Berlin, too.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.