Anti-Tech Protestors Hit Another Googler at His Home
Tom Fallows works as a product director at Google. He's also—if you believe the words of San Francisco's "Counterforce" protest group—a "capitalist shit bag," and everything wrong with techie gentrification. To prove their point, The Counterforce is denouncing Fallows on his own doorstep.
The anti-eviction activists say Fallows is responsible for the ousting of 24 residential units under California's highly controversial Ellis Act, part of a bid to exploit the city's spiking property market. A blog post by The Counterforce describes yesterday's "demonstration," which as you can see in the above video, was really just a few people standing with a banner:
On Sunday, June 8th, 2014, a group of people found their way to the penthouse of one Thomas Fallows, Google employee and predatory landlord. He is responsible for evicting four buildings using the Ellis Act. These buildings are in North Beach, Nob Hill, and the Marina.
While people chanted "Thomas Fallows, you can't hide! We can see your greedy side!" outside, Fallows hid inside his opulent penthouse overlooking the Golden Gate. The group held a banner that read GTFO! ROW UR ASS BACK 2 HARVARD. As they chanted "Your bubble's about to bust, your Google belongs to us!" on the sidewalk, multiple neighbors witnessed the spectacle and took a flier, the text of which is reproduced below.
The neighborhood that Fallows lives in is extremely wealthy. One uber-rich denizen plugged her ears and mouthed "I'm not listening." Another old-money fossil said he is explicitly FOR eviction, without qualification. A class war is truly unfolding in San Francisco, and in this regard the demonstration brought the chaos to one of the most opulent enclaves of the city.
Even though sparsely attended, this petite, Piketty-inspired gathering is far from the first time anti-tech agitators have gone straight to a tech exec's home address. They may not be the most threatening lot so far, but if it's your home, reading "the revolution that is coming will be vast, so expect no pity from it" is still going to make you gulp.