Waymo has suspended service in Los Angeles after multiple instances of its autonomous cars being set on fire as protests and police violence rock the city.
Is the problem the technology, or is it how our society is organized? If the government guaranteed everyone a job and taxed corporate profits to pay for it, would we care as much about Waymos? What if the law made it illegal for Waymo to record the video?
We can only accept or oppose things as they actually exist in the world. For there to be a possibility of something different, we have to clear room to allow for people to build it.
These platforms expand to new sectors or regions, then use their size to destroy value in all the alternatives, leaving them as the only player left on the field. The extractive rent-seeking, enshitification, and surveillance follows shortly.
Theyre playing for complete capture. If we choose to get stuck musing about half-measures, or to pretend things are other than they are, it’s already game over.
Midwesterner - I didn't know what Waymo was. Thank you for the context. The same people who cry about them also fill facebook threads about so-called "flock cameras" on the road with hardly a fraction of Waymo's surveillance capacity
Flock cameras are awful too from a surveillance standpoint - Denver installed them a couple years ago claiming they would help return stolen vehicles to their owners. They’ve been used to solve maybe 100 car thefts but they have logged hundreds of thousands of license plates, information that could be used for all sorts of nefarious purposes. Denver voted to end the program after this year but the readers are still up sucking up license plates.
My wife and I were in LA recently, where we saw a waymo car for the first time. (We don't have them anywhere close to where we live, fortunately.) Freaked us out, and we weren't even thinking of it from the surveillance capitalism angle. Just the thought of using a robot instead of a person was not okay to us - why deprive a person of the pay, menial though it would be?
Not for nothing, the Lever (and probably other outlets as well) has been talking about the safety record of waymo and uh...it's not great.
Also that 404 media piece is really interesting, albeit pretty scary.
Public transportation trams & light rail > Waymo
100%
Thank you, spot on.
Is the problem the technology, or is it how our society is organized? If the government guaranteed everyone a job and taxed corporate profits to pay for it, would we care as much about Waymos? What if the law made it illegal for Waymo to record the video?
We can only accept or oppose things as they actually exist in the world. For there to be a possibility of something different, we have to clear room to allow for people to build it.
These platforms expand to new sectors or regions, then use their size to destroy value in all the alternatives, leaving them as the only player left on the field. The extractive rent-seeking, enshitification, and surveillance follows shortly.
Theyre playing for complete capture. If we choose to get stuck musing about half-measures, or to pretend things are other than they are, it’s already game over.
That's what's missing in society today, humanity. The human touch can never be replaced by tech or a robot.
Tech and robots are reflections of soulless corporations feeding at the trough of mammon.
As more people realise this, more and more of them will awaken to realise the digital hellscape that is forthcoming.
Mobile phones will be an interesting hurdle to circumnavigate though.
A Waymo is someone’s job. Now they even want to take away shitty gig jobs.
I’m surprised this hasn’t happened before, frankly.
It has, apparently -
https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/torching-the-google-car-why-the-growing
Midwesterner - I didn't know what Waymo was. Thank you for the context. The same people who cry about them also fill facebook threads about so-called "flock cameras" on the road with hardly a fraction of Waymo's surveillance capacity
Flock cameras are awful too from a surveillance standpoint - Denver installed them a couple years ago claiming they would help return stolen vehicles to their owners. They’ve been used to solve maybe 100 car thefts but they have logged hundreds of thousands of license plates, information that could be used for all sorts of nefarious purposes. Denver voted to end the program after this year but the readers are still up sucking up license plates.
Wow that's scary. The officials have been really cagey about them and claim that all the data is safe despite being in a cloud...
Also i should edit my original: the same people who cry about *protesters burning Waymo cars*...
My wife and I were in LA recently, where we saw a waymo car for the first time. (We don't have them anywhere close to where we live, fortunately.) Freaked us out, and we weren't even thinking of it from the surveillance capitalism angle. Just the thought of using a robot instead of a person was not okay to us - why deprive a person of the pay, menial though it would be?
Not for nothing, the Lever (and probably other outlets as well) has been talking about the safety record of waymo and uh...it's not great.
Also that 404 media piece is really interesting, albeit pretty scary.
Thank you for your work.
Bravo!
Excellent 👏