When Is a Torched Waymo More Than a Torched Waymo?

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a day ago

In 1867, with the railroad barons steadily gaining power across the United States, a group of angry farmers decided to organize into a trade union known as The Grange. These agricultural workers were tired of the tech magnates who, by controlling the means that their crops moved to markets, could charge whatever they want and essentially decide how much money the farmers made (or if they'd make any money at all).
Their union forced Congress, deeper in the pocket of Big Railroad than your car keys, to form the Interstate Commerce Commission — 20 years later. It would only be 20 years after that when President Theodore Roosevelt finally gave the ICC enough teeth to stop the industry's decades of exploitation.
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A strange invocation. Angry Farmers, some kind of new band?
But you don't need to work too hard to see the modern parallels. A runaway technology controlled by an oligarchical few that thwarts regulation so they can keep reaping profits at the expense of everyday Americans — the narrative floats in the air these days in Hollywood, as it does in media, advertising and other creative fields, where the prospect of AI-foisting tech companies pushing those pesky humans out of work seems more real by the day. (On Wednesday that battle saw a new front open with Disney and Universal following the lead of media companies and suing an AI firm.)
The parallel is teased out by Tom Wheeler — the former chair of the FCC and now a fellow at the Brookings Institution — in his 2023 book Techlash: Who Makes the Rules In the Digital Gilded Age? It came to mind this week with the reports that the anti-ICE protesters in downtown Los Angeles had ordered Waymos — those Google-owned automated taxis that carefully turn in front of you driving down Olympic — so they could burn them to a crisp. An act of 'techlash' you're likely to hear about a lot more in the months ahead, just as you'll hear the term itself. (Though popularized by Wheeler, the portmanteau, which connotes defiant acts against Big Tech, was actually coined by The Economist five years earlier.)
This is a critical, dangerous time in the tech realm, when AI models are grabbing data with consequences little understood much less slowed. A rapidly growing machine intelligence could make companies richer but jobs scarcer; models slicker but privacy looser; life more efficient but human relationships more fragile. A few vehicle husks near the 101 can't carry all that weight. Or can they?
I called Wheeler to ask what he thought of the DTLA acts and where they fit into the techlash movement. Wheeler was skeptical the Waymo-burning was a conscious act of defiance against Big Tech; more likely, he thought, the cars were just an easy vandalism target. I disagree, but it doesn't really matter in the final analysis. Wheeler thinks the sentiment is growing — and he hopes that if everyone from grassroots protesters to D.C. lawmakers will act on it, we can craft a more human-centric tech-regulatory policy than we've had so far, than we seem headed for.
'Thus far we've allowed — and allowed is the key word — the tech bros to craft regulation in a way that benefits themselves,' says Wheeler, who served as FCC chair in the second Obama administration. 'We need to craft regulation in a way that benefits the public interest.'
Wheeler isn't kidding. Just a few months ago Trump revoked Biden's executive order on AI, which wasn't that toothsome to begin with. A provision in the current 'Big Beautiful' bill literally bans or punishes any state that tries to enact AI regulation. We're a long way from sniffing Europe, which has developed an AI Act that actually could regulate harms.
And as Wheeler points out, we don't have the kind of time we did with the railroads — 40 years in transit technology is 400 in modern Silicon Valley given the speed of AI developments. Even four may be too long.
Wheeler puts the most hope in the federal agency proposed by the Democratic senators Michael Bennet and Pete Welch. Such an agency, Wheeler says, is the only way to give meaning to the techlash and to stop companies from running amok. Old industrial-era approaches of micromanaging the process won't work, he says; a new results-based system that looks at the ultimate harms a company does is the only one that will.
The conflation of the anti-ICE riots with anti-Big Tech causes may seem odd, but the two aren't as far apart as you'd think — both offer a lashing back at inequality and a lack of human sympathy. Toss in the fact that the government is working closely with Palantir, the shadowy firm that allows for high-level AI analysis of collected data for potential surveillance ops, and you can see how the causes begin to merge.
'People are starting to see the links between the dark and noxious parts of the tech industry and the current administration,' says Wendy Liu, a programmer-turned-evangelist who wrote the 2020 manifesto Abolish Silicon Valley which argued for a radical de-fanging of the tech industry. (She says an argument that seemed a little radical even to her at the time now feels intuitive.)
'If you see the anti-ICE protests as defending the idea of being human and caring about human values, then destroying the property of a trillion-dollar corporation whose goal is to make human labor obsolete makes perfect sense,' she adds. 'The protests aren't just about immigration — they're about a right-wing anti-human administration.'
A cogent analysis, though I'd argue the partisan lines are not as clear. MAGA figures like Sen. Josh Hawley are coming after swaths of Big Tech. Moderate Republicans like Ohio congressman Warren Davidson are going public with their fears about the Palantir deal. Marjorie Taylor Greene, of all people, has said the AI state restriction is an overreach and wants it out of the bill. And of course there's the exiled Musk, well, X factor. The so-called tech right is not as monolithic as it seems, no matter how many broligarchs shelled out for a ringside seat to Trump's inauguration.
But trying to rally them or other electeds to do more by using techlash tactics like the one we're seeing at the protests could be dicey.
Waymos and those robots that putter down sidewalks delivering coffee have a weirdly anthropomorphic quality; raised in a Hollywood culture of Wall-E and Johnny No. 5, we tend to root for them. When a Waymo turns carefully in front of me while the human driver nearly kills me crossing the street, I admit I feel those same pangs. 'These are gentle creatures, and it's our worst impulses that have us going around bashing them.' I know it's an illusion. But it's a powerful one.
That's the danger with attacking a Waymo — it gives Big Tech the chance to say, even subtextually, 'look at these marginal zealots, attacking these cute robots that didn't hurt anyone.' It lets them play the victim.
A better symbol to the displacing of human Uber drivers might be, well the Uber drivers themselves. Rather than burn a few driverless cars, why not gather thousands of drivers in one massive eye-catching display to show all the people potentially out of work from self-driving taxis? Less destructive, more constructive. (A testimony to how far we've fallen, by the way, when Uber is the humanist good guys, given all the evidence it has been steadily increasing the percentage it takes from drivers.) Or do what Hollywood Guilds did during the strikes two years ago — gather en masse to show the human toll automation could cause, a playbook other industries will no doubt be following for years.
Wheeler agrees that protesting job displacement by attacking the means of automation is misguided.
'Smashing frames doesn't work,' he says, referring to the early 19th-century movement in England to destroy the knitting tools that automated clothing production and edged out humans, named for the (likely fictional) worker Ned Ludd. 'And let's not forget the Luddites failed.'
Liu disagrees. 'I personally lean more conservative in my behavior and wouldn't [attack a car]. But I understand why people feel the need to express their rage by burning something. And this is the best way because it doesn't hurt anyone; it's really just corporate property. And there aren't a lot of symbols to destroy — what are you going to do, go to a tech company's office and burn [it]?'
I noted that this presupposes burning is necessary for a protest movement in the first place. 'Sometimes we need these acts of destruction to get people's attention. Look at the Boston Tea Party,' she said.
I'll leave to protest tacticians the best route here. But I do think Liu is onto something in a crucial regard. The many perils of the computer-model takeover — whether it's displacement, disinformation, bias, an outsourcing of human thought or a reduction in human contact — are not easy to see; unlike looms or railroads, a program that thinks hardly asserts itself physically. In such a world, a self-driving taxi, while an imperfect symbol, may be the best we have.
The coming months will tell the efficacy of torching cars as a protest act — whether it will turn out more like the Boston Tea Party or the Luddite Revolution. But the techlash movement will no doubt grow, burning figuratively if not literally. Let's just hope it can notch some wins before our economy and humanity go up in smoke.
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