In late November, The New Yorker published a
long feature article about Google’s quest to build a driverless car,
focusing on Anthony Levandowski, the engineer running the project. At
33, the article noted, Mr. Levandowski still looked like a high school
science geek. “He wants to fix the world and make a fortune doing it,” Burkhard Bilger wrote.
High school students have only their dreams.
Mr. Levandowski has the resources of one of the world’s richest and most
ambitious companies. Sergey Brin, the Google co-founder, underlined the
point: “We want to fundamentally change the world with this.”
The idea that a bunch of extremely secretive —
Mr. Bilger noted it took two years for Google to agree to provide him
access for his article — extremely wealthy and extremely smart people
are intent on remaking your life can be unsettling, especially when
those people keep reminding you it’s for your own good. Neither Google
nor Mr. Levandowski showed much awareness of this anywhere in the
article.
Nor was there even a nod that the Street View
mapping project — the crucial precursor to the self-driving car effort —
employed a rogue engineer who casually downloaded data from people’s
computers as the Google cars drove past. His actions set off worldwide outrage,
but Google went from denying it had done anything, to minimizing it, to
calling it ancient history without ever quite coming clean.
Mr. Levandowski was in the news
more recently when a group of protesters showed up one morning in front
of his East Bay house, which he had shown off in the article. The
protesters called themselves the Counterforce, after the last section of
Thomas Pynchon’s epic “Gravity’s Rainbow.” The name was perfectly
chosen: The Counterforce is an alliance of misfits against the
depredations of technology.
Siva Vaidhyanathan’s 2011 book “The Googlization of Everything (And Why We Should Worry)”
was a prescient look at issues of control and agenda-setting in the
tech industry that are now coming to the fore. The Counterforce
demonstration, and the protests against the shuttles used by Google and
other tech companies to ferry their employees from San Francisco to
their Silicon Valley campuses, are, he says, warnings for Google:
“We’ve been perfectly happy to let Google be
the benevolent dictator of our web experience. It has made the web
pleasant and usable as well as navigable, making things like malware and
pornography less obvious. We should be happy with Google becoming the
operating system of our phones as well. But now it is striving to become
the operating system of our lives.
“It is interested in tracking, monitoring and
monetizing everything we do, online and offline, with our cars and
eyeglasses and thermostats. Are you surprised a lot of people are
resisting that vision? It’s a tremendous amount of control by one
company.”
Mr. Vaidhyanathan’s advice for Google:
“Forget this almost robotic tone you’ve used when dealing with
confrontations. Step down and be part of the community. Be better at
listening. The worst thing you can do is pretend you live in the cloud.”
In the months since the bus protests began,
Google’s voice has been largely silent. Asked about assertions like Mr.
Vaidhyanathan’s that Google needs to respond to the unrest, a
spokeswoman said the company “strives to be a good neighbor in the communities where we work and live.”
“Since 2011 we have volunteered thousands of
hours with local organizations and gave $60 million to Bay Area
nonprofits,” she said. “We look forward to doing more.”
Google declined further comment. It hopes the whole conflagration will blow over. But even some Google people think otherwise.
“The technology industries around Silicon
Valley have had a remarkable run in building support among the general
public for our innovations,” Danny Crichton, a former Google engineer, wrote on Techcrunch. “That tide has permanently turned.”
Mr. Pynchon foresaw a different fate. In
“Gravity’s Rainbow,” the Counterforce is destroyed by a V-2 rocket
strike, the crowning achievement of the very technology the renegades
are worried about.