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Torching the Google car: Why the growing revolt against big tech just escalated
- ironmagma 3y ago“Maybe we should become a better moral actor” is a thought that will never be entertained in a corporate meeting room.
- Tommy430 3y agoI hope that more revolts happen. I'm sick of this "trends" BS that Big Tech pushes and makes others follow. Unrelated but IMHO, web bloat will also kill the internet more than IE at this point.
- bluGill 3y agoI'm even more sick of losing friends to human driven cars. I've been to too funerals of children in my life. I see no hope of fixing human drivers while maybe they can make cars work.
- Tommy430 3y ago> I see no hope of fixing human drivers while maybe they can make cars work. 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.
- CityOfThrowaway 3y agoPeople are reading way too much into the Waymo incident. 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.
- cogman10 3y agoYup, similar things happen after major sporting events.
- m463 3y agoA lot of drinkers revolt against "big porcelain" and their control over the aesthetics of sinks and toilets.
- angarg12 3y agoThis. Going from one act of vandalism to an escalating revolt against big tech sounds like quite a stretch.
- armas 3y agoI was there walking through a little over an hour before and didn't see anyone drinking. Police had shown up and tried stopping some of the fireworks in the middle of the intersection. 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.
- nomel 3y ago> 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.
- richrichie 3y agoThis pretty standard in France after a soccer game. A single car destroyed is kinda lame.
- lqet 3y agoThis reminds me of the best Croissant testing video ever posted on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wp84sRpM1Js https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wp84sRpM1Js
- richrichie 3y agoHilarious!
- knorker 3y ago> We don’t yet know exactly why a group of people very publicly graffitied, smashed, and torched a Waymo car in San Francisco 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.
- refulgentis 3y agoI, for one, would be surprised to arrive in SF and find all cars and houses smashed and burned.
- PaulHoule 3y agoIt happens. One German burned 47 cars all by himself in Hollywood https://laist.com/news/serial-hollywood-arsonist-convicted https://laist.com/news/serial-hollywood-arsonist-convicted
- iamdelirium 3y agoNo it isn't? I live in SF and it is not a war zone or anything resembling anarchy.
- ajross 3y agoYou're reciting a meme, informed by a moderate crime wave in and slightly after the pandemic, and amplified by partisan media and echo chambers like the one here on HN. In fact SF crime rates in virtually all categories are at 12+ year lows: https://sfgov.org/scorecards/public-safety/violent-crime-rate-and-property-crime-rate https://sfgov.org/scorecards/public-safety/violent-crime-rat...
- scarmig 3y agoData point: after being physically attacked in the street by a (presumably) homeless man, the SF cops refused to take my report unless I went down to the station. I'd regard these statistics as, very generously, aspirational.
- somewhereoutth 3y agoThat is a such an emblematic, iconic, fantastic image - the carcass of the car and all it represents, surrounded by humans somewhat curious but also somewhat satisfied, much as the first woolly mammoth kill must have been.
- mistrial9 3y agoyes and .. add to that.. years ago there was a parade on a very hot day; many, many people .. perhaps South East Asia (?).. floats in the parade included cars or trucks with large gaudy (sometimes cheap) decoration.. Someone in one of the cars did not get enough fresh air, and succombed apparently, to carbon monoxide poisoning while crawling along at a fixed rate of about 5 mp/h. The auto had some kind of auto-drive activated.. the driver passed out, but no one noticed. The crowd is still chanting and the parade continuing, but the car slowly lost direction, and slowly, unstoppably inched into the crowd. people yelled, no change, too crowded.. people were pushed into each other but at 5 mp/h slow motion. 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.
- throwaway49849 3y agoYou're romanticizing violent antisocial behavior into some kind of art form. Maybe you should see this from the perspective of a young family trying to raise their children here.
- somewhereoutth 3y agoI see it from the perspective of a great photograph.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- throwaway49849 3y agoThe next time you see someone romanticizing the aesthetics of some antisocial behavior that you find repulsive, then you'll know how it feels to be on the other side of this discussion.
- g9yuayon 3y agoThe whole article reads like what I don't like is immoral and what is immoral justifies my action (to a certain degree, at least). So, I really don't understand: why do techies still even go to the city? Just leave it alone and come back to the south bay.
- scarmig 3y agoA single block in SF has more charm than the whole of Sunnyvale. Despite some of the toxic people who live here, there's a reason many people want to.
- geor9e 3y ago>why do techies still even go to the city? 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.
- c_o_n_v_e_x 3y ago>We don’t yet know exactly why a group of people very publicly graffitied, smashed, and torched a Waymo car in San Francisco. Viewed through the lens of Broken Window Theory, perhaps people are more brazen given the current state of SF.
- JKCalhoun 3y agoYeah, when I saw this the other day I figured most people are simply going to dismiss it — anarchists, ne'er-do-wells. 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.
- Animats 3y agoMaybe Google will identify the people and delete their Google accounts for a TOS violation.
- geor9e 3y agoGoogle will delete your account for a bad joke (actually happened to me - they wiped my entire decade-old account, including my GMail/GDrive/etc for a "This comment only viewable with Youtube Gold, comment your credit card number to access" comment back in 2010 which got reported as "phishing". I get it, but wow, I mirror all my clouds to a NAS now.
- joegibbs 3y ago"We know enough to understand that this is an explosive milestone in the growing, if scattershot, revolt against big tech." 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.
- somewhereoutth 3y agoA car driven by a human is an extension of that human (for better or for worse) - and we can relate to that, no matter how much steel, glass and rubber there is. 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.
- paulpauper 3y agonah, it was because there were no people in it and it is assumed as not belonging to anyone.
- Believeben 3y ago[dead]
- thrill 3y agoBecause the consequences are so minimal.
- thiago_fm 3y agoI bet people are frustrated with the fact that those self-driving cars can drive around, smash into cars and kill pedestrians. Despite data showing that it does drive worse than a human. 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.
- hnav 3y agowhat data shows that? Waymo IME is easily in the 90th percentile of drivers in SF.
- satisfice 3y agoI can imagine myself participating in this form of civil disobedience. Self-driving cars are not okay. 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.
- cvalka 3y ago[flagged]
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- phmqk76 3y agoThe “tech revolt” angle is silly. It’s about a casual disregard for the law. With all those cameras all around the car, in an area that cops should be patrolling after years of increased petty crime, nobody has been arrested? The commonplace nature of crime in California in particular is a real problem that needs a muscular response.
- bediger4000 3y agoApparently these are big tech companies: Waymo, Google/Alphabet, Uber, Amazon, Facebook, TikTok, "Silicon Valley", Bird (scooters). 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.
- kkfx 3y agoThe real revolt should be against the end of private property 2030's Agenda goal, well pushed by big tech with the cloud+mobile model. But people do smell rodents, but fails to see them and cyclically fight for their own enemies marching at their own head.