Google Bus Vandalized During Protest

[Matsuda]

Activists blocked three buses carrying Bay Area tech workers to their Silicon Valley jobs on Friday, breaking a window of one of the vehicles. It was the second demonstration this month targeting the buses, which are rapidly becoming a symbol of the surging animosity between the tech world and everyone else in the Bay Area.

The protests were relatively small, involving a few dozen people each,according to local media reports. Two of the buses involved, including the one that was attacked, were in Oakland picking up Google employees. The San Francisco bus carried Apple employees.

“We’re here to send a message to the rich tech companies that their business has ramifications and consequences,” a San Francisco protester, Tony Robles, told the San Francisco Chronicle.



The vandalism against one of the Oakland buses, however, will probably have its own consequences, undermining support for the impromptu movement even among those sympathetic to its goals. Google issued a statement that said it did not want the buses to offer any inconvenience but declined to comment further. Apple did not immediately respond to a message for comment.

One likely consequence of Friday’s events: security people will start riding the buses.

If people in the Bay Area are increasingly wishing the tech world would go away — or at least shed its arrogance and stop pushing up rents — the tech community seems to be more frequently toying with ways of doing just that.

Tim Draper, a leading venture capitalist, released a plan late Thursday to create the separate state of Silicon Valley. It is part of his notion to break California into six states. The idea already has a website, although it seems to only have one page.

According to Mr. Draper’s proposal, which was first published on TechCrunch, the state of Silicon Valley would stretch from Monterey in the south through San Francisco to Contra Costa County in the East Bay. The other states are centered on Los Angeles, San Diego, the Central Valley and the north, which would be divided in two.

California, Mr. Draper declares in his manifesto, is too big and ungovernable, and poorly served in Washington. These are complaints that have been made about California almost from the beginning of the state, which does not mean they are not true.

Mr. Draper’s plan comes on the heels of similar breakaway notions. Peter Thiel, another successful venture capitalist, has floated the idea of independent seaborne nations somewhere off the coast of San Francisco. Mr. Draper’s plan, which would involve a ballot initiative, seems just about as unlikely.

“I am putting this out there and letting California go for it,” Mr. Draper said in an interview. “We have a huge problem and everyone in the state knows it. This will allow for a restart. People will be at least closer to their government, and you’ll have a few new senators.”

He said the idea did not come out of Silicon Valley’s current troubles, and declined to talk about what a new tech state would be like. But he said the bad feelings currently embroiling the Bay Area are happening everywhere.

“Everyone needs their own thing. The farmers don’t have the same interests as the Hollywood guys or the people in Silicon Valley or the people way up north,” he said. “California is trying to hold it all together, but it shouldn’t.”





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[Ballistic Gelatin]

Why waste money hiring security guards for the buses? Can't Google just deploy its new Gaggle of robots and equip them with Tasers (and maybe water cannon) to disperse the lunatics? Hiring real humans is just so...2013-ish.