Self-Driving Safari

The AV SIGKILL on the Streets of San Francisco

In February 2024, a small crowd in Chinatown burned a Waymo Autonomous Vehicle (AV).

From what I’ve read, the unoccupied Jaguar got spooked over some Lunar New Year fireworks and locked up in traffic. A handful of bystanders converged on the car, tagged it, and broke out a window with a skateboard. Someone tossed a lit firework inside. At that point, the kill was in. It’s a good thing the car didn’t decide to make a break for it, and hurdle off into the night like a flaming cockroach. Photos show the carcass of the melted AV. The tribe took the white bull down to its chassis.

I’m zero percent surprised this happened. If anything, I’m surprised it didn’t happen sooner. When the streets of San Francisco were rife with Cruise’s fleet of cheerful, reckless rollerskates, people were already testing the cars for reactions, provoking them with exploratory lunges and paralyzing them with traffic cones plopped on their hoods.

It isn’t that the engineering and coding experiments aren’t a marvel—clearly they must be, as they’ve consumed thousands of expensive hours of elite human intelligence to execute—it’s that we, as a city, no longer accept that the future shaped by these experiments are inevitable upgrades to reality. Huh-huh-cool isn’t enough anymore. The torrent of wonders are becoming pedestrian, if not irrelevant, and with the death of tech’s reliable dazzle comes increasing clarity around its pattern of promise-and-exploit. The kudzu business plan of “spread before they can stop you” no longer plays as reliably as it once did. The AV race is arguably the most sci-fi magic to weave around the corner in some time, yet it’s been hit with a potent autoimmune response.

Will this be the end of big-game-AV hunting in the Bay Area? I doubt it. Antagonizing, vandalizing, and burning the competing flocks of self-driving cars feels like a restless native reaction to the corporate interests—both tech and automotive—which have colonized thoroughfares and cul-de-sacs throughout the city. Pedestrians, skateboarders, cyclists, first responders, rideshare and taxi drivers, scooter delivery hacks, and dog walkers have all  experienced the ill effects of AVs transforming traffic lanes into their personal habitrails. 

Perhaps the physical size and visibility of the AV startups have exposed them to such a strong resistance, unlike the privacy-abusing, dopamine slot machine apps conveniently hidden from view inside our phones. Though social media and ecommerce platforms certainly do more damage with their disregard for transparency, conflict-engagement model, and widespread inability to keep anyone’s data safe, their victims are broadly distributed and may never know for sure how their lives have been traded, abused, targeted, and manipulated. But when a Cruise AV runs over a woman and stops on her leg, the blood stains the pavement for all to see.

Why Do You Even Drive, Bro?

Sharks. Today I’m coming to you with a once-in-a-generation opportunity to invest in the future. What if I told you about our vision to transform the most car-centric culture on Earth into a society where everyone willingly abandons their personal vehicles in favor of a fleet of identical, self-driving robocars?

Mark Cuban: Do they fly?

No. 

And yet: Why is the AV revolution worth hundreds of millions of dollars to VC and corporate investors? There are, of course, the PR reasons, clustered around safety and greenhouse gas emissions (plus a specious sprinkling of disability access), but these reasons have not driven a corresponding investment in refining public transportation. The core driver in this driverless vision of our future is the one in which our attention isn’t wasted on the road. A strong segment of device addicts already butcher one another texting, video chatting, and scrolling through social media while operating motor vehicles. How could we free up a larger, non-lethal reservoir of monetizable attention by ensuring everyone is free to consume their own screen while on the go? 

I’ll pass on the lyric essay here about road trips and the underappreciated benefits of their semi-structured reverie—surely Cal Newport can squeeze a book out of it—but the upsides of the AV revolution favor the corporate conglomerates in the attention commodification market. If only all of those squandered brain cycles spent reflecting on life through the windshield could be channeled back into a funnel of productive consumption! More engagement! More influencers influencing! More binge metrics on the latest AI-driven storyboard of reheated IP! (And probably a fresh fleet of mobile OnlyFans studios.)

And let’s not forget all the untapped labor potential. The pioneers in the WFH (Work From Home) movement are eager to scale WFC (Work From Commute), a —convenience?—previously reserved for those with access to WiFi-enabled tech shuttles. When the offices are fully revived (at least to an occupancy rate high enough to satisfy Real Estate Investment Trust shareholders) the cycle will be complete: WFH, WFC, WFO, WFC, WFH: Treadmill unlocked.

What’s Our Burn Rate?

Huh-huh-cool cuts both ways. That a skateboard was used to crack the fragile AV egg is fitting. Skateboarding, like tech, embraces a similar huh-huh-cool ethos. “Move fast and break things” is tech’s version of “Skate & Destroy.” To come at a vehicle covered in cameras, owned by Alphabet-née-Google—the company at the epicenter of mining and monetizing identity—you need a hearty helping of DILLIGAF when it comes to consequences. There’s a reason why the AV startups didn’t flood the streets of Oakland. Fuck around and find out… within reason, of course.

Cruise may or may not buy their training wheels back. While legislators toil to regulate the AV industry (read: devise structures for maximal grift and the auctioning of public infrastructure) it could be the threat of public resistance is already too real. AVs aren’t Bird or Lime scooters, disposable in a way that makes market dominance worth the cost of replacement. How many kitted out Jaguars or Chevy Bolts do you have to lose in a month, or a week, to make it a really tough quarter? How deep do your pockets need to be to make solving a problem we don’t have worth it?

It’s easy to imagine AV hunting becoming a kind of street sport in the city, the sort of spectacle which plays well on TikTok. Corralling the empty cars into sideshows, pinning them down like bulls in the arena, branding them with well-placed sprays of MTN 94 paint, taking trophies from their arrays of sensors and lenses—all of it part of some ancient, cathartic violence. Let the LiDAR hood replace the stag’s head above the mantle.

The death of the Great White Waymo in Chinatown has been framed as an outlier event of hooliganism. I don’t know. With the techtopian buzz surging once more in the city around AI, the fuck you, Skynet! vibe feels in equal ascension. It’s not that the AVs are evil so much as they will become the target of a collective anxiety and anger around tech’s default setting of without consent. The violence almost seems like an inevitable progression, unless the startups decide to fill their self-driving cars with human shields. Which, well, is simply too expensive.

A word of advice to the MBAs in the AV sector asking themselves if San Francisco is worth it: Take that shit to Austin or Miami. In the Bay Area, people prefer to ghost ride their own whips.

END TRANSMISSION.

-ERR