Occupy founder calls on Obama to appoint Eric Schmidt 'CEO of America'
Justine Tunney, a Google software engineer, is demanding that the tech industry take over the US government
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One of the co-founders of the Occupy Wall Street movement has called on Barack Obama to resign as president, and “appoint Eric Schmidt CEO of America”.
Justine Tunney, a self-styled “champagne tranarchist”, is now a software engineer at Google, but remains involved with Occupy Wall Street, through the occupywallst.org website, which she created.
In the petition, which currently has two signatures (a far cry from the 195,000 who follow the Occupy Wall Street twitter account Tunney started in 2011), she calls on Obama to arrange a national referendum to:
- Retire all government employees with full pensions.
- Transfer administrative authority to the tech industry.
- Appoint Eric Schmidt CEO of America.
Tunney previously hit headlines when she reclaimed control of the Occupy Wall Street twitter account in February, and mooted the possibility of raising $1m to form a “non-violent militia”. Yasha Levine, a reporter for Silicon Valley publication Pando Daily, noted the seeming discrepancy between Tunney’s former anarchist beliefs and her current role at Google. Since her arrival at the firm, he writes, “she has become an astroturfer par excellence for the company, including showing up in a comment section to bash my reporting on Google’s vast for-profit surveillance operation.”
“It never ceases to amaze me how far people have to stretch in order to denounce the one corporation that gives away everything for free,” she wrote. Explaining on Twitter why she thinks anti-capitalism is compatible with promotion of her employers, she argued that “Tech companies expropriate ad money from capitalists to build a superintelligence & don’t pay dividends!”
“Silicon Valley is firmly post-capitalist. There just isn’t a name for it yet, nor an intellectual [assessment],” she continued.
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