from Hacker News

Google drops plans for Berlin campus after protests

by cyphunk on 10/26/18, 8:55 AM with 220 comments

  • by jschuur on 10/26/18, 11:45 AM

    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 because of what the term 'campus' is typically associated with. I live in London, and when I say 'I'm going to Google's Campus', I often need to qualify that I'm not going to their main office complex at King's Cross.

    There may still be very valid reasons to protest Google in Berlin, but I wonder if the people objecting understood the distinction: that this wasn't a hub for all of Google's employees, but rather a place that would help diversify the tech ecosystem in Berlin and give them access to facilities and other resources.

    The kind of smaller startups that would be home at a Campus style incubator would not be fueling high paid Google salaries and would be a lot less likely to drive up rents e.g..

  • by keiferski on 10/26/18, 12:50 PM

    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 a western suburb.
  • by woodpanel on 10/26/18, 11:32 AM

    Rightly so.

    Berlin has an amazing start up scene, certainly unique for and unrivaled in Germany. That being said, Berlin hosts a lot of NIMBYism. Particularly by people who gentrified the city in the first place and immediately turned to become fierce gentrification enemies. Essentially locking in their gains.

  • by simonh on 10/26/18, 11:33 AM

    I'd be interested to hear the opinions of any Berlin residents. Vocal NIMBY minority driving away new jobs and beneficial development? Genuine victory in preserving local culture and character? Bit of both? Other?
  • by doombolt on 10/26/18, 11:34 AM

    Why not build in e.g. Leipzig or other beautiful but jobs-starved city?

    Come to think of it, why no campuses in Italy or Spain? Those countries have kinda lowish expenses, good weather and people will pay a premium to be able to move there. Instead everybody is opening in London and Switzerland which are overpriced and kinda meh.

  • by sarabande on 10/26/18, 1:49 PM

    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, Zusammenarbeit mit Militär und Geheimdiensten sowie Steuertricks macht.“
    
    > Ulrike Schneider, an activist at the initiative group "Stop Google-Campus & Co", criticized the company even more drastically: "Google is and will always be a shit company, that makes its profit through monitoring, snooping, working with the military and secret services, and tax [evasion] tricks."

    I'm sure most local residents mostly care about rent prices going up in that area, though, rather than a specific anti-Google sentiment. They probably don't want it to be gentrified as another district, similar to what happened/is happening to Prenzlauer Berg.

  • by m23khan on 10/26/18, 1:57 PM

    There is a city called Hamilton in Ontario, Canada. Houses a good University called McMaster and is near Waterloo University - premier Computer Science university in Canada.

    City (Hamilton) is fairly well developed with a functioning International Airport and since it was initially built around manufacturing, its prestige within Canada has suffered somewhat in last 20-25 years. If firms like Google would be so kind to invest there, the locals and the children of locals and other Canadians would welcome them with open arms.

  • by cyphunk on 10/26/18, 7:36 PM

    The problem with "guess they don't want jobs" argument is that Google is not like Ford Motor Company. When they move into your town and your rents double you can't just be retrained. When a company that requires special skills moves in they kick people that do not have those skills out.
  • by forkLding on 10/27/18, 12:40 AM

    Interesting to see tech globalization increasingly at the crosshairs, used to be McDonalds, etc.
  • by nkkollaw on 10/26/18, 11:26 PM

    As cool as Berlin art is, so is a Google campus for tech people and business in general?

    If I picture a gentrification activist I think about a purple-haired kid that wouldn't get a job if his life depended on it, making people that might be interested and have the skills to work at Google miss an opportunity.

    On the other hand, Google could have picked another spot instead of giving up?

    How is it..?

  • by narrator on 10/26/18, 12:55 PM

    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 completely decontextualized and drops all the other dimensions of the context in which these photos were taken.

    In the same way, Google employees lack context because everything is a component, they moved from somewhere else and have been assimilated into the great corporate standardization. They crave things with context, but when they try and coexist with it, their enormous economic superiority draws the interest of the whole world to extract from that environment that which promotes their ability to decontextualize and conform the world around them and the decontextualization whirlwind grows around them.