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..
Another way of looking at that, is "gentrify the vibrant neighbourhood by trucking in techbros to displace the artists". It's not new (1)
I don't necessarily agree with that framing, but it is understandable and coherent, not a misunderstanding
To me, it shows haters' level of intellect. And perhaps explains why they feel left out. They're attached to an ideal of what 'art' (additionally, activism[1]) should be. An outdated, 20th century one.
I personally don't like Google. And I understand your framing is hypothetical.
But why is tech framed the opposite of art?
Why is tech equal to techbro?
Yea there are always bad apples. But I wonder what Da Vinci would think about holding art in the opposite category as tech?
I'd argue they're more synonymous than opposite. To me, there's creativity. Both art and tech are creative. Applied creativity pertains to both code or a paint canvas.
Either way, the best, most valuable work to society is often never been done before.
Can anyone name an art piece (or if I'm being generous, an art movement) in the last 15 years that's made the level of impact as Google? Or cryptocurrency?
Ultimately, to me, the 'artists' need to up their game. Big time.
[1] Protest city hall if you feel gentrified. Especially in SF where it's largely illegal to build housing. Also, regarding gentrification, you don't hear the positive stories of immigrant families whose businesses flourish because of increased capital in an area, or those who feel safer, or even those who cashed out and sold their 50k house for 1.2 million. Again you hear a largely misdirected, dated and one-sided argument.
Your comment shows utter ignorance about what's happening — or already happened — in virtually every major city in every developed country.
>But why is tech framed the opposite of art?
You are fundamentally misunderstanding the issue. It's not tech vs. art. It's a "here's these people that make a lot of money and end up just being really big consumers" vs people that are the "creatives." The type that give a neighborhood flare.
Consider a programmer who perhaps love the "art" of programming and spends the majority of their time coding/tinkering without compensation (a rare prospect these days, admittedly), versus someone who works at a corporate job, does what they need to do, and goes home. Neither is better than the other, but they will end up creating radically different communities.
>Why is tech equal to techbro?
Because it's just the type of people it attracts these days. Name one neighborhood where a group of IT people came into that neighborhood and made it a creative space. Without fail, it just becomes a giant consumer hub with absurd rent prices. Artists tend to congregate in areas with other artists and areas that have cheap rent. Tech tends to drive up rent, and it certainly isn't an industry that attracts artists not centered around digital design.
>Or cryptocurrency?
The technology that did absolutely nothing, soaked up huge amount of raw resources, so techbros could play a game about who's going to be left holding the bag?
This is exactly why I used the term myopic. You might find it interesting and cool, and that's great! But it hasn't done anything for anyone else outside the tech sphere. In fact it's actually pretty easy to argue it's been a net-negative across the board.
So while I’m not surprised (and very much not sad) that the plans didn’t work out for a host of reasons I really don’t think that the campus would have led to substantial gentrification in that region.
Disclosure: we (still) have our office in the complex.
That's the sort of thing that invokes the image of a "tech bro" and this is what people don't want in Berlin. People don't want the local scene replaced with overpriced chain stores and electric scooters and multinationals dictating city development policy.
The CCC has its roots in Germany and we've always had a hacker and nerd friendly culture.
* Gentrification is caused by landlords. If being a landlord was illegal it wouldn't happen (or at least the problems caused by it wouldn't).
It's basically the difference to people living off their parent's money (artists) vs. people living off money they make themselves (tech workers).
Or bring very high paying jobs that Germany desperately needs, and allow great students to actually do something with their education, which would in turn enable a poor neighbourhood to thrive with ancilliary businesses, restaurants, taxis etc. etc..
The good thing is that Google eventually understood their error (you can't buy the friendship of people who will despise you for trying) because any attempt to achieve this through regulation would have been a total shitshow for everyone involved.
It's basically the same story as the Chelsea Market building, but with gritty Berlin punks instead of cute but toothless Greenwich Village and in an environment where even rich conservatives agree with the left that money cannot overrule everything else. It's really not surprising that it turned out differently.
As an aside, I dislike the term "techbro." It's obviously pejorative and I hardly ever see anything kind used to describe men working in the IT/CS sector. Just that and "neckbeard."
Very much so. Been to a panel discussion organized by them.
The fear was that the incubator would accelerate gentrification. Doesn't matter whether the pay checks come from Google at the end of the day.
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.
They main issue to tackle for the Berlin government—from my point of view—is to find the right balance of luxury and affordable housing. People making above average salaries in the growing tech scene should/would pay the higher prices for luxury properties, while the art and counter culture scene would not need to be gentrified if there was a higher supply of affordable housing.
As a Berliner for the past 5 years, I really believe that most the unique vibe of the city comes from the art and left-oriented community here. A lot of us working in the tech world support it, enjoy it and even adapt to their ways (while keeping quiet about how much more money we earn). I really hope that the government makes an effort on affordable housing to keep the balance that makes the city special.
From what I know about the protest - reading public statements, how the protests began, how they now publicly celebrate their 'victory', and from having seen their early campaign websites - they almost certainly had no idea what a Google Campus is about. At some point certain parts of the campaign learned, but many never left the black & white painting behind for a more nuanced assessment.
What they are publicly exhibiting as "creative street art" may be very telling about their capability for nuance: https://fuckoffgoogle.de/2018/04/17/street-art-against-googl...
There is lots of criticism in Germany right now about these protests having chased away a startup campus.
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.
It's a free workspace with a lot of benefits, like wifi, cheap snacks/drinks and meeting other founders for kx.
This is incredibly sad :(
This sort of arrogance is so typical for Germany.
You can argue that we have second most popular operating system thanks to Google but you can’t argue that have not Google someone else would have filled in the void. And now that despicable news came out about Android founder and how Google covered for him, its akward looking at friends devices thinking to yourself: this has been invented by a total creep with a dream of slavery times being back so he can own people. Disgusting! I mean imagine if it came out that Jobs was a big fan of Hitler or enjoyed fantasizing about mass-blanket genocide! Would you still buy Apple products? And then there is that PR spin that it was fun kinky game of two. No it wasnt as she barely knew him! If I email 7 billion individuals with plan to own them and lease them, how many will come back defending me that it was okay because it was “only a kinky game.”
I applaud Germans for not being gullable when it comes to Internet. Germany amongst all European Union nations have the most strict rules and regulations protecting citizens first and foremost, not foreign entities that pay squad of taxes within German borders. Even on email protection alone you cannot email someone without double optins. We need similar protection laws in USA and Google needs to stick to search!
After the selection had occurred, the procurement machine had been tasked and at that point it takes a lot of resistance to stop that machinery.
[1] For some real estate group in Google determining office locations.
but i also wonder: does Google consider itself to be one of the "cool kids?" i mean, when it tries to create a new campus like this, does Google think it will be welcomed with open arms?
As long as the group is following laws and zoning restrictions, there should be nothing preventing them from joining a community
This is "you piss in the pool wherever you go, please stay away from our pool." This isn't NIMBY in any meaningful way and the comparison is downright mendacious.
A place can have a unique culture that’s worth maintaining. How to maintain it - I don’t know. But converting everything to MegaCo offices probably isn’t the solution.
The housing market by its nature has a weak flexibility to adapt to new demand. NIMBYism acts like a lever on that inflexibility.
Otto Bock (market leader in prosthetics and wheelchairs) just bought a old brewery for several hundred million € in Prenzlauer Berg [1] with the goal to convert it into a research center. I don't remember any kind of protest or outrage against that.
1: https://www.ottobock.com/en/press/press-releases/ottobock-re...
2. A prosthetics company is a far cry from the omnipresent, omnipotent entity that is Google. Everyone on planet Earth knows what Google is. Many people take issue with their behavior.
2. That's what I said, and I think it's sad that Google won't open the campus there, as I think the area and the city could profit from it.
Also, this is a personal opinion but I think Kreuzberg is far from being a "haven for artists or counterculture". Already now the district has some of the highest rents in Berlin and many flats are being rented out as AirBnBs (often by the same people that complain about companies gentrifying the area). Also, the counterculture that you're describing can be quite snobbish and exclusive as well, at least for people that don't conform to the Berlin "hipster" ideal. I think Berlin really needs more corporations and large enterprises that set up shop there and create jobs, as the startup ecosystem has so far failed to deliver much in terms of well-paying jobs (at least if you don't want to work for Zalando). Just my 2 cents.
- Most residents in Berlin (and in Germany for that matter) rent their apartments.
- There's a fairly good supply of newly built homes. It's still not enough to absorb the population growth, but it's much better than in many German cities.
People complain because they can see the downside of this influx of tech workers very clearly, while the benefits aren't obvious, at least not yet. Rents have doubled in some areas. Government offices are understaffed. So are kindergartens, schools, ...
While the government is partly to blame, a lot of startups haven taken advantage of Berlin's situation in questionable ways. The time where you could hire cheap developers is definitely over, but it's still very common to underpay and abuse people in non-engineering positions, who very often are interns and freelancers.
Kreuzberg is maybe too emblematic and Google is a scapegoat here, but I can understand the resentment against tech incubators.
Logically you would think as these rich 20-somethings become rich 30-somethings they will start having children, but after 10 years they cannot afford SF either, so they also move away.
Sure, forcing out Google doesn't solve the problem, but it sends a very clear message: Profits are not more important than livable communities.
It will just keep getting harder to hire staff. Candidates know that their purchasing power and quality of life are threatened by the gentrification quicker than the government is willing to raise wages and invest in the infrastructure.
However: I literally cannot confirm or refute the possibility of blame shifting, as my German comprehension is at the level of headlines and 50% of content, I can’t do in-depth news coverage yet.
I would argue it is mostly for the better. But of course it is not necessarily that nice for the locals who are confronted with vastly increased prices for basically anything.
The city has changed a lot and is growing and projected to continue to grow by about 50K people a year for the foreseeable future. This is good for Berlin because it definitely needs economic development as it has been living well beyond its means for some time and because it is still catching up in terms of economic activity that was lost between WW II and the fall of the wall. All this growth is increasing employment opportunities and lots investment money is being spent in this city, which is definitely benefiting local businesses.
Meeting actual Berliners born and raised in Berlin is actually not that common. Change is very much the local culture. Major changes of the 19th and 20th century originated here and were fueled by waves of people moving here. So most people you meet here are part of the problem (in terms of gentrification). So complaining about gentrification is a bit disingenuous for most.
I would say it's a shame that a bunch of anarchists get to push back economic development in what is still one of the poorer neighborhoods. They're a vocal minority and they don't speak for all. They live in Kreuzberg because it used to be a dump before the wall fell and was thus cheap. Basically, this area was heavily damaged in WW II and the West Germans put a lot of cheap housing for immigrants there (these are not the people doing the protesting). After the wall fell, it happened to be conveniently close to the former East German historical center and it became a popular place for young people moving to Berlin to settle and for poor startups to open up cheap offices.
So, most of the protesters moved there because it was cheap and now they feel entitled to live cheaply in the middle of a major world capital that is once again flourishing around them.
This city is not done growing. There is plenty of room to build and expand.
As it's stated by others also, the area was ghetto and the border to East Berlin, separated by the death strip and the wall. So "the unwanted" people located here. (they've been invited by the German government to repair the country after the young working population died in WWII)
Now the wall is gone, the place become hip again, and the people are "unwanted" again. And if you say that the local immigrants (mostly Turkish) doesn't protest, it's basically misinformation and not recognising their efforts to keep the area what it's been for many decades: a cultural hub of the misfits. (immigrants, punks, musicians, artists etc.)
https://www.bizim-kiez.de One of the main initiatives by the local immigrants. (Bizim means "our" in Turkish, and Kiez means "neighbourhood" in German)
Most of the people moved here because it was cheap and the society was welcoming the misfits. But what you say as "economic development" is destroying the culture there and pushing people out of the town. If you create a big startup hub there, all the shops will transform into hipster cafes and restaurants... Which is happening for many years and if you can't see this, open your eyes a bit. How can you expect people who live there for the last 50-60 years to pay the increasing rent, while their income doesn't because they don't work in a Startup? How can you expect a grocery store who sells cheap vegetables to compete with a vegan smoothie store, which sells the exact vegetables for 5 times the price, or even more? And after all the places will be gentrified, the rents will go even more up... then you will start protesting the smoothie prices goes up. (Which you think is happening there, which is not!)
Especially the campus idea - which in London, for example, attracts tens of thousands of techbros and -sises per year - puts more burden on the neighborhood as "just" a regular startup office. Neither google nor the city of Berlin could address any of the concerns, housing costs, general costs of living, traffic situation, just to name a few.
Berlin in general suffers a lot from rising real estate prices and rents - and the area where google wanted to put their campus is even more heavily affected than other parts of the city. This neighborhood - I am living a mere 500 m from that place - suffered from an influx of people probably more than other parts of Berlin. On top of that it turned into one of the hip party areas.
Given that this neighborhood historically houses lower-income families, which won't gain anything from google moving here, but will have to face even faster rising cost of living, and at the same time have no chance to move to other parts of the city - with the housing market being as tight as it is - it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that this move saw local opposition.
I'm happy for a single reason: as long as Berlin startup scene preserves its working culture (that reflects German working culture in general), it will be a better working environment than the Silicon Valley. Big campuses and the presence of foreign corporations in general will have a slow but steady cultural influence on the IT workforce, normalizing the level of individual and systemic exploitation that is acceptable in the USA but not in Germany. Unpaid hours, unclear separation between work time and leisure time, ideological brainwashing, identity politics are all things I wouldn't like to see in the company I work for, but if a majority of my colleagues have worked for American corporations before (because they can afford to offer good salaries), it's more likely for it to happen.
Zalando is enough of a meat-grinder, we don't want more.
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.
I used to know someone that bought a flat in Soho, central London, in the mid-90s. She sold it when she married 8 years later and made over half a million quid. No idea what it would be worth now.
The "gain" in this case is:
1) Getting to transform a neighbourhood (that you weren't a part of before) however it fancies you, while simultaneously prohibiting those that come after you from doing the same.
2) locking in the low rents you have to pay. While keeping supply of housing artificially low you're thus increasing the rent-gap between what you have to pay and those that move in after you.
As the other commenters noted, Germany has a low home-ownership rate (good thing IMO but a whole different story). Because of strict laws on how to increase rents, gentrificators can secure themselves the low rents from before gentrification. It is not uncommon that one neighbour tenant in the same house pays two times your rent.
In the US, it is not uncommon that one neighbor homeowner next door pays two times your mortgage.
I would be interested in your story about home-ownership, but difference in pricing due to time of arrival doesn't seem like a differentiator between renting and buying.
I doubt the concept of gentrification translates as well as a dictionary might suggest.
But building on the idea, that because Germany/Berlin being a tenant place there are no gains to lock in - that logic would then conclude that there can't be gentrification at all. Which is of course nonsensical.
Gentrificators don't need to be property owners, in fact gentrification theory explicitly states the opposite: that it's usually new tenants that change poor/working-class neighborhoods and spark the gentrification process. Those tenants are so called "pioneers", usually high educated, creative class, affluent and thus able to buy property even after the gentrification process has started.
Historically investment in a city has benefited a city. This is the opposite.
I wonder who was behind the protest, was it the established tech players and wanted to keep competition out?
This seems like a mild form of isolationism, and again, if we use history, this seems like a bad idea.
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.
already done: https://www.campus.co/madrid/en
The space in Berlin would have been part of the same setup, not a regular Google office - there's already Google in Munich and Hamburg for that.
Italy in particular is at risk of defaulting on its debts (which are 131% of GDP compared to 87.7% for the U.K and 64.1% in Germany as of 2017) and the ECB and other lenders are going to be reluctant to lend to them. This is turn puts the banks and all kinds of public services at risk.
But I do agree, we export talent to anywhere, where Spanish professionals, executives or researchers lead the way on many fields.
I would easily move to a cheap locale even if tech scene there is not abundant. I'd not move to London or Switzerland since you will always be 2nd class citizen compared to e.g. bankers. Which is just non issue in southern europe.
Weak economic is a thing you leverage.
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.
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.
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.
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.“
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.
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 and with whom in the whole country, probably the most comprehensive database on domestic households that exists in the world, certainly in the EU. What about it, fraudulent privacy zealots?
[citation needed]. The examples you mention are widely disliked and fought too. + of course conflating privacy activists and those protesting Google here likely is not very accurate.
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.
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..?