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Google drops plans for Berlin campus after protests

bbc.com

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Re: Google drops plans for Berlin campus after protests

#151

Post by cyphunk »

bartman wrote: post #24
jschuur wrote: post #9

If I read the article correctly, this wasn't about building a new 'Google campus' (i.e. a huge building to house a large number of Google employees as their main regional HQ). This was about building Campus Berlin, an incubator for startups like they pioneered first in London and then brought to other cities. See https://www.campus.co/berlin/de and https://www.campus.co/london/en . It's easy to misunderstand this bec…

This could have been a big factor. I live in Berlin and have not followed this topic closely, and only heard about this not being a typical Google office days ago when Google changed plans. The talk on the street over the last months was always centered on Google wanting to create a big office and the residents not wanting any big corporations there.

This could be how the message was advertised by some but most people i met from the protestors understood googles plans were at least recently rather moderated. They all understood google was a symbolic target for a bigger problem.

Re: Google drops plans for Berlin campus after protests

#152

Post by cyphunk »

bko wrote: post #86
mehrdadn wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Saying you do [something I don't like] and I don't want you to do [thing I don't like] in my neighborhood is exactly NIMBY No, that's most definitely not NIMBY. NIMBY means you support something when it's farther away but oppose it happening close to you. It stands for "not in my backyard", not "not in any backyard".

Presumably the residents there use Google services. They likely want Google to exist, but just not in their back yard

Actually a large faction of the protest has been getting local businesses off of google services and educating a thirsty public about alternatives. Most people in kreutzberg already thought of google as evil. their foothold organized people around removing it from their lives, regardless of how impossible that is

Re: Google drops plans for Berlin campus after protests

#153

Post by cyphunk »

walrus01 wrote: post #81
keiferski wrote: post #42

I’m honestly kind of surprised at Google’s complete lack of cultural or diplomatic knowledge about Berlin. Kreuzberg is/was the center of artistic culture in the city, and choosing to have a presence there, no matter how small, would clearly be viewed as a corporate American attack on local countercultural values. As another commenter stated, they could have avoided this entire issue by picking somewhere in Mitte or…

I do not know Berlin very well, I've only spent a few weeks there, but I get the impression they would have faced a lot less backlash if the announcement had been "hey we're gonna build this awesome new office campus at Aleksanderplatz".

Absolutely! Everyone I spoke with and suggested google move into the newly built and absolutely hated Stadtschloss in the center loved the idea.

Re: Google drops plans for Berlin campus after protests

#154

Post by freeflight »

C1sc0cat wrote: post #92
badpun wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The fear was that the incubator would accelerate gentrification. Sort of understood, given that Germans are a nation of life-long renters (as opposed to home-owners). Gentrification is generally great for the owner and terrible for the renter.

well you would have thought that after a while Germans should have realised that renting (long term is a mugs game). - Just entrenches the power of the elites.

It's not like people had or have much of a choice, buying property ain't cheap in Germany, at least outside of completely underdeveloped and remote areas. Even reasonably wealthy people usually have to finance it through a extra credit.

Also ain't helping that over these past decades incomes have stagnated while job security got way worse, so people are less likely to commit to such long-term liabilities.

Re: Google drops plans for Berlin campus after protests

#155

Post by jillesvangurp »

omer_balyali wrote: post #90
jillesvangurp wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I moved to Berlin ten years ago. I live close to Rosenthalerplatz right at the epicenter of the startup scene in Berlin. Gentrification is definitely a thing here. The neighborhood I live in has changed beyond recognition in that timespan. Lots of construction throughout the aftermath of the 2008 economic crisis; most of the local shops have been replaced by hip restaurants, bars, and coffee shops; rents have gone up…

I've also been living in Berlin for the last 2 years. I want to point out that you said "immigrants, these are not the people doing the protesting" is basically wrong. Of course you can not see homogenous group in the protests, and it's easy to pick the people who fits to the stereotypes in your head. ("These guys wearing antifa hoodies, they can't be immigrant they must be leftist germans so the immigrants are not p…

Gentrification is not destroying the local culture, it's simply changing it. Cultures always change. Berlin is a living example of that. There is still plenty of room for artists, creatives, intellectuals, etc. in Berlin. Many of them are actually part of the growth. But yes, everybody is competing for space.

Re: Google drops plans for Berlin campus after protests

#156

Post by freeflight »

woodpanel wrote: post #103
C1sc0cat wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

well you would have thought that after a while Germans should have realised that renting (long term is a mugs game). - Just entrenches the power of the elites.

It's not – at least in Germany. Laws prohibit intense rent hikes, thus you can lock in a low rent, with a delta to new leases that is just ever increasing. Also, the idea to make everyone a landlord while widely accepted in housing economics to be a good thing, I happen to think is shortsighted and contradicts the principle of "economics of scale". Housing companies (can be non-profit co-ops as well) often provide mu…

> It's not – at least in Germany. Laws prohibit intense rent hikes, thus you can lock in a low rent, with a delta to new leases that is just ever increasing.

That's great in theory, but in practice has literally dozens of ways to be bypassed. Rents in Bavaria and Berlin have increased by nearly a quarter over these past 4 years.

One of the problems being that the Mietspiegel only accounts for new rentals, with steady increases in rent prices, it does not reflect the actual "average rent prices" because it's missing data for people who've been living in the same place for years and up to decades, with the same low rent.

Re: Google drops plans for Berlin campus after protests

#157

Post by narrator »

brainwad wrote: post #106
narrator wrote: post #47

Google people want to work where there is culture because they don't have any. They just consume it with algorithms, extract the value, reprocess it and redistribute it. They pull everything out of context so it looses its broader meaning. For instance, if I google image search for "women in bikinis" I get hundreds of thousands of women in bikinis, but not the broader narrative of their lives and personalities. It is…

You see the simple answer to your query because Google decides what to show based on what users will prefer, and most users just don't give a fuck about "the broader narrative of their lives and personalities".

Sure, but the people of Berlin do care about the larger context that produces the creativity. The woman in a bikini didn't generate spontaneously from a generative adversarial neural net.

She had to have good genetics, not overeat and workout. Thus, there was a bigger context that created that woman in a bikini picture that is lost by the algorithm. The algorithm extracts and decontextualizes.

The google algorithm for selecting property is the same. Consume culture, extract, decontextualize, strip mine all the culture off the top but let other people nurture it, until they are priced out of the market.

They should set up the next Google headquarters in the middle of the sahara in shipping containers, preferably one of those places without a lot of sand that's just flat with gravel in all directions.

Watch all the nerds walk back and forth to their shipping containers while looking at their cell phones and drinking their soylent unless the company pays for culture to be brought in.

Re: Google drops plans for Berlin campus after protests

#158

Post by Kalium »

kadendogthing wrote: post #146
pteredactyl wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm bitter and ignorant? I've lived in these communities of 'creatives'. For years. I know its a lot of drugs, idealism and not a lot of action. Except for complaining about how wronged they've been by the system. Is that your 'another world is possible'? So maybe I am bitter... Don't get me wrong, the system is fucked up in many ways. And I agree with your distinction of a grey blandness that permeates the tech cult…

I said the statement reeks of bitterness and ignorance. It wasn't a wholesale description of you as a person. It's not black and white. >Except for complaining about how wronged they've been by the system. You're still operating off of stereotypes instead of actually talking about the people that live in these communities and the work they do. >I'm more interested in how all the enlightened 'creatives' can engage wit…

You're right! The tech community absolutely needs to put forth the effort to engage with people who are unlike them. People who live different lives, have different bodies, and make different choices.

I hate to be the one to say it, but in some cases I can see why some people might be reluctant to engage. I know that for my own part, I am generally disinclined to engage in genuine, kind, compassionate, and empathetic ways with people who treat me with what can feel like open hostility. It's almost always less emotional labor to tell them "Have a nice day" and walk away, putting them out of my mind. My making this choice does nothing at all to further any kind of constructive engagement, and certainly nothing to improve their lives or alleviate their pain and suffering, but it does make my life easier that day.

Again, you're completely right. Techrbos need to engage! It's just that at times it can be challenging to convince people of this basic truth when they find unfriendly receptions.

Re: Google drops plans for Berlin campus after protests

#159

Post by woodpanel »

freeflight wrote: post #156
woodpanel wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not – at least in Germany. Laws prohibit intense rent hikes, thus you can lock in a low rent, with a delta to new leases that is just ever increasing. Also, the idea to make everyone a landlord while widely accepted in housing economics to be a good thing, I happen to think is shortsighted and contradicts the principle of "economics of scale". Housing companies (can be non-profit co-ops as well) often provide mu…

> It's not – at least in Germany. Laws prohibit intense rent hikes, thus you can lock in a low rent, with a delta to new leases that is just ever increasing. That's great in theory, but in practice has literally dozens of ways to be bypassed. Rents in Bavaria and Berlin have increased by nearly a quarter over these past 4 years. One of the problems being that the Mietspiegel only accounts for new rentals, with steady…

You‘re comparing apples to oranges. Or in that case existing to new leases.

The latter has way more room for increase than the former - by law. Add to that, that owners often stop bothering increasing rents for longterm tenants (because the allowed increase is the more miniscule the more years pass by) and concentrate on hikes for new leases.

Re: Google drops plans for Berlin campus after protests

#160

Post by Faark »

expertentipp wrote: post #129
sarabande wrote: post #96

One viewpoint from those who didn't want the start-up campus in Berlin, from the Berliner Morgenpost [ https://www.morgenpost.de/berlin/article215652919/Nach-dem-G... ]: Sehr viel drastischer formulierte es Ulrike Schneider, Aktivistin beim Initiativkreis „Google-Campus & Co verhindern“, die den Konzern beschimpfte: „Google ist und bleibt ein Scheiß-Konzern, der seine Gewinne mit Überwachung, Ausschnüffelei, Zusammen…

Berlin is going nuts in recent times, it's unbearable. There are literally billboards around the city agitating against Facebook and Google (sic!). Somehow, the same activists with dubious motivations don't mind domestic entities like infamous credit rating agency or the debt collection agency collecting the public media fee. The public media debt collection agency has the most complete database of who lives where an…

> public media debt collection agency

You do notice this is kind of government work? (Organized in a way politicians are supposed to have little influence about broadcast content)

I understand the US is special in regard of having very high distrust for the government, something not that pronounced in most European countries. My government does indeed know where I live and I don't have much of a problem with that in principle. That doesn't mean I approve of all the way that data is handled. They at least have some accountability towards us citizens, in contrast to some private company not contractually obliged to the public.

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