Recommended: At Blood in the Machine, Brian Merchant writes of the reasons why self-driving taxi service Waymo has been singled out by some anti-ICE protesters.
[G]iven Silicon Valley’s more obvious alliance with the Trump administration, that ambient anger has only been sharpened. It has sparked backlashes of a different kind, like the protests and firebombing of Teslas and Tesla dealerships. Waymos occupy part of this same nexus; surveillance technology operated by tech giant, undemocratically, opaquely, led by a CEO that visits Mar-a-Lago and donates to Trump. [...]
These are technologies that are at best agnostic to the communities and environments they operate in, and more often are extractive. The Waymo contributes to congestion, surveils neighborhoods, replaces the Uber or cab driver, and sends any resultant future profits upstream to a tech company in Mountain View. The scooters jam up walkways, become e-waste, and scramble local traffic patterns. But it’s hard to blame robots for any of that, and get it to stick.
"[T]he ICE protestors who torched the Waymo cars and hurled Lime scooters onto the flames, are turning what the tech companies see as an asset into a vulnerability, and they’re exploiting it," writes Merchant. "They have turned these indifferent and extractive technologies into instruments of protest. They are weaponizing the accountability sink."
Read it at Blood in the Machine.
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