Torching the Google car: Why the growing revolt against big tech just escalated
bloodinthemachine.com
bloodinthemachine.com
It was Chinese new year. There was a bunch of drunk people in the street. Somebody messed with the car, and then somebody else did, and so on. Until somebody threw a firework in there out of memetic one upmanship and it caught the thing on fire.
You can see this in the videos. This was not ideological, it was just mob revelry gone awry.
It's really obvious in the videos in my opinion. The kid smashing the windows with the skate board shortly before the car is lit on fire even has this ridiculous body language where he turns around after every strike waiting for encouragement from the crowd before doing it again. Vandalism in the age of Instagram influencers.
Contemporary with that era, a Muni bus was burned in the aftermath of the Giants winning the world series. https://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/Knuckleheads-run-amok-a.... This was not interpreted as a stand against Muni.
Waymo cars are perhaps conveniently unoccupied and associated with an organization that can afford a loss. But I've seen very few 2012-like vibes about them (as a pedestrian and cyclist, and much more occasional customer, I basically like Waymo: its reaction speed to my presence is superhuman). They seem to keep their safety records open. I know about that recent unfortunate case involving a cyclist trying to ride tandem with a truck in an intersection, I suspect they'll be changing their programming.
I'm also a big fan of the collision avoidance on my normal Subaru. It's little doubt to me that computers are already mostly better than people at least collision avoidance, where alertness is often the element in shortest supply.
I think it's important to consider why of all the cars passing through and parked on the street it was the Waymo car that got vandalized.
An obvious possibility is: no immediate risk and no mechanism for empathy. If you vandalize a person's car, that person might come at you, out of the crowd, possibly with a weapon. And, some people might even feel bad, knowing that they're ruining someone's day.
It could have been fueled by Waymo hatred, but it also had the least risk.
Just don’t want anyone to get the wrong sinophobic impression
As you point out these kind of excess happen all the time at festive events, someone drunkyard will kick a car, steal a street plate or deface a poster. But it stops there, as a random mischief. People piling up on the same thing isn't random or just a natural behavior, and nobody telling them to just move on goes along that line.
Vehicles that are owned by large apersonal organizations seem like a common target in this type of thing.
France had that in spades in some suburbs, where bus is the most viable public transportation, yet bus drivers would get harrassed or straight beaten up.
I think it comes down to the only "authority" figure they deal with on a daily basis, and it's so unfair to bus drivers who are usually the most duty driven and community conscious people on the block.
Like how many of those revealers espouse clean energy and EVs and so on and then go and uselessly and wastefully light a car on fire?
It seems so counter message.
https://www.salon.com/2018/10/16/googles-self-driving-cars-i...
But it struck a kind chord with me that there is more to it then cowardly vandalism. I don't think all of the vented angst is toward Big Tech specifically but I think that is part of it. I think big tech have come to represent wealthy corporations that serve only themselves and their uber-rich patrons.
Society is in an upheaval, and in no small part due to changes brought on by the internet and now mobile (and soon AI). But in all the other ways the world is also changing for the worse I think people will quickly turn to scapegoating and rich tech is an easy target.
I guess it depends what you're into. I work in south bay, and go out there, and try to find fun stuff there, but in general I find it a boring place. I take a company bus back to SF where I live. I get a lot of work done on my laptop, at the big bus desks that I usually get all to myself. Something about being trapped in one place for an hour is essential to me being productive.
On Saturday, I started getting phone notifications from friends who heard the booms in Chinatown and wandered over. We all have ~40+ mile range ebikes/scooters/electric unicycles that go 40+ mph, so the city is our playground. Citizen app sent me an alert as well. Tons of illegal fireworks were going off, massive mortar style ones in Portsmouth square, loud M80 style ones on Grant street. It took me ~10 minutes to cross the city on Van Ness's bus lane and thru the broadway tunnel on an electric unicycle. It was basically the 4th of July down there. The Waymo was sitting there trapped for a long time, as was every driver who turned onto the wrong street from Stockton. Two drunk guys, who has already been yelled at by the crowd for throwing firecrackers into crowds of people, smashed it up with skateboards after noticing it was totall unoccupied, a mortar was thrown in, and the rest is history. Obviously they face arrest and are jackasses for it. But it certainly didn't make me say "I hate the city, I wish I lived in south bay". I had fun, my friends had fun, and there's often fun to be had on any given day. It's not like housing is any cheaper in south bay. My friends live in every part of the bay, and SF is always the epicenter everyone travels to to hang out. The media camps in the tenderloin's hellholes, but if you know someone who lives in SF please have them show you a good time, the city is gorgeous if you're with the right people.
In any civilized country, either the local or federal government wouldn't allow such thing.
But as it's America, its leaders believe it needs to be the forefront of everything in the world, so some sacrifices are allowed to be made in the name of the "greater good"(aka, corporate profits without regards into societal impact).
I bet those companies could be driving cars inside a closed space and still teach the car to drive in about the same timeframe, it's just because it's cheaper to do it in the streets while it hits humans and disrupt ambulances and the overall traffic. Those things can only happen in America.
Technocracy at its finest.
Having been to San Francisco lately, I would not be surprised to see all cars and houses smashed and burned. The city is basically that CHAZ thing in Seattle.
I'd regard these statistics as, very generously, aspirational.
(Also: I guess I don't understand your demand here? A police report is testimony. The officer needs to verify your identity, record what you said, and do so in a standard and traceable way. It's not like "there's an app for that", if you want to deal with law enforcement you have to do it in person.)
It makes sense to have a reasonable set of barriers if you're talking about making sure evidence would stand up in trial. That same set of barriers, however, makes the statistics understate the true crime level. "The officer needs to verify your identity, record what you said, and do so in a standard and traceable way" makes sense for trial, but at the same time it would cause an understatement in crime. Particularly for marginalized groups (of which I'm not part, at least for the sake of this discussion) e.g. undocumented immigrants, rape victims, people who don't have time to go through the process because they have to spend every waking hour trying to survive.
I have no opinion on whether underreporting is higher or lower than it was five years ago. It's genuinely impossible to say, without a secondary, more reliable measure (beyond anecdotes). Someone stole my laundry in 2015, and SFPD also weren't interested in me reporting that.
yeah, thats not fake SF
SF is a hellhole. I've visited many times over the last decade, and it's getting worse and worse. And it wasn't good in 2010 either.
Wandering into stores I couldn't even buy stuff, without getting an employee to unlock just about any shelf.
As for crime being down: there are many people saying they've stopped reporting crimes. Hell, "shoplifting" is completely ignored.
I want SF to be good. I don't trust Fox&friends further than I can throw them. But I have eyes (and more importantly a nose), so don't you deny what's plainly visible.
Viewed through the lens of Broken Window Theory, perhaps people are more brazen given the current state of SF.
Mentioned: Instagram, Hewlett Packard
Notably not mentioned: Apple, Microsoft.
If Apple had been listed as "big tech", I'd write this article off as yet another Microsoft submarine PR hit. As it stands, I'm not sure.
The entire scene was so vivid from an art point of view -- the mindless mob, the auto-power of gasoline, the heat, the useless reactions.. this was in the TV news long ago.
Do we really know this? Drunken mobs often smash up regular cars and break into shopfronts, but they're not doing that to protest a car-based society or speak out against capitalism, they're just smashing something because they're drunk.
Unrelated but IMHO, web bloat will also kill the internet more than IE at this point.
Sadly that won't be the case for some time to a while. Most people only care about the moment of the trend rather than what the future will look like.
A car that drives itself is something alien, an abomination, a threat, a dangerous animal, small wonder we want to kill it - that is our most primal instinct.
The streets are for people, not for escaped algorithms.
I am saying this because a lot of commenters appear to dismiss people who feel this way. Just wanted to raise my hand and be counted among the resistance.