If you would prefer to listen to this essay, you can do so on Spotify. My uniquely grating voice pairs perfectly with a morning commute. —Evan
Last weekend, a crowd of revelers in San Francisco’s Chinatown burned an autonomous vehicle from Waymo down to its frame.
Let’s ignore that this is, like, a crime. And let’s also ignore that destroying cars is a proud American tradition—one practiced by my fellow Bostonians, whether our teams win or lose.
What I would like to call attention to is the misunderstanding that this event begat. Some in tech struggled to empathize with why people were upset. In the opposing corner, on Twitter and in private conversations with me, others expressed a gleeful sentiment about the car’s destruction, with some people unable to grok the humanity-advancing technology these cars represent.
This single incident of arson is a broader signal for what has gone wrong with how the technology industry manages its public perception in America.
During the boom years of the 2010s, when Facebook was uniting the world during events like the Arab Spring and people were generally optimistic that the new internet companies would make the world better, polling indicated that the average American loved tech. People had more confidence in Amazon than the press, college, non-profits, the FBI, or organized religion. The popular media embraced nearly everything we did under a halo of goodwill and good faith.
Starting with Donald Trump’s election and shifting dramatically during the pandemic, the general public started to turn against the tech industry.
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Well, son, a lot has changed since 2010. Quintupling your net worth (in some cases) at the expense of US might have something to do with it. For one, I don't think the criminati denizens of the Barbary Coast even gave a rat's patoot whether the vehicle was autonomous or not. If you asked 20 synapse-less San Frannies to use WayMo in a sentence, you'd be giving them "way-mo" credit than they deserve. Hell, they probably couldn't spell "autonomous" if you spotted them the "autonomous." What probably happened was a vehicle was moseying by with no one on board. In today's post-accountability world, that was good enough to immolate the eff out of it. I wouldn't give the crowd any more credit than that.
It seems odd to frame this around the idea that it’s some kind of inconvenience that people no longer blindly accept that tech companies are working for the betterment of society, because they have proven that in many instances, they aren’t. Research has even shown that the idea that FB was a critical, positive tool during the Arab Spring was a false perception. The tech industry was given the benefit of the doubt, and having shown that they don’t deserve it, people are asking questions. Jon Stewart said it best in his recent return to The Daily Show: it is not the public’s job to stop having concerns and asking questions, it is the job of the people asking for the public’s support to assuage those fears and answer those questions. Bemoaning that lack of public goodwill towards tech seems like a strange position to hold.
@pn Good feedback! I would argue that companies should front run those questions and clearly discuss the risk, while strenuously making the case for the future. You could believe (and I would probably agree with you) that tech companies shouldn't of had such a hall pass in the 2010s, however, in the backlash we've gone too negative while companies have simultaneously not updated their corporate comms.