Over the past few days, the band of roving activists have taken to the streets of San Francisco (by bicycle, of course) to protest driverless cars by using orange traffic cones to stop them in their tracks. — AFP
But one anti-car group, Safe Street Rebel, isn't letting this happen without a fight.
Over the past few days, the band of roving activists have taken to the streets of San Francisco (by bicycle, of course) to protest driverless cars by using orange traffic cones to stop them in their tracks. When a cone is placed on the hood of a driverless car, the vehicles halt and flick on their hazard lights, seemingly paralysed by the obstruction. After all, there's no one in the cars who can come out and knock the cones off.
Safe Street Rebel has thoroughly documented its "Week of Cone" campaign on social media, garnering millions of impressions, national news coverage and plenty of debate over the means and ends of their protest. By the standards of awareness campaigns, the Week of Cone is a success.
Activists say they worry that the high-growth profit motives of private equity-backed tech startups like Waymo and Cruise will force self-driving car companies to expand fast, thus putting more vehicles on public streets, clogging traffic and sidelining mass transit even more than it already is. In response, pro-tech voices and venture capitalists have taken to calling the activists "Luddites," invoking the 19th century movement in which British artisans smashed up machinery – wide knitting frames and mechanized looms – to protest the devaluation of their labour in the midst of an industrialising economy.
The Luddite label is apt - and maybe wouldn't be thought of as a derogatory gotcha if people had a better sense of what the actual Luddites were about.
In the 21st century, the term Luddite typically operates as a shorthand for technophobes: people who refuse to use email, for instance. But the actual Luddites weren't against progress per se. Really, the looms were incidental. Scholars of Luddism, including "Writings of the Luddites" editor Kevin Binfield, note that the machine-breaking campaign came about in a time of not just technical innovation but broad economic distress. As factory owners adopted new technologies to produce cloth and yarn more cheaply and efficiently, they also swapped out highly skilled workers for low-skill workers (often children) that they didn't have to pay well (if at all). At the same time, working-class Brits starved as staple grains like oats and wheat reached astronomical prices.
For tradespeople, the stakes of industrialisation were dramatically clear: "You had better be content with a moderate profit," wrote one Luddite to a factory owner in 1812, "than have your mills destroyed."
Similarly, opposition to self-driving cars isn't entirely about the vehicles themselves, though the cones might indicate otherwise. The San Francisco Taxi Workers Alliance, already in dire straits due to their hard-won licenses becoming near-useless in the age of rideshares, plans to demonstrate outside the California Public Utilities Commission office in San Francisco on Thursday.
"If cab drivers had to pay US$250,000 (RM1.1mil) for a taxi medallion to operate a taxicab in San Francisco, why are these companies getting a free ride?" the alliance tweeted.
"We're not anti-technology," one Safe Street Rebel told me. "We're just pro-labour."
I'm not naming the activist in accordance with The Chronicle's policy on anonymous sources because, in statements to news media, Waymo has threatened to involve law enforcement, though it's unclear which laws are being broken in this case. The activist group opposes self-driving car companies' automobile-centric tech solutions, which they say will threaten the viability of mass transit, promote more car dependence, and do little to protect pedestrians and bicyclists. Waymo and Cruise put their concern about pedestrian safety to the forefront of their promotions, though they have little to say about their impact on labor.
Tellingly, Uber, a company that has long had an oppositional relationship with its human workers, has been chasing the self-driving dream since 2015 and just struck a deal with Motional, a driverless tech company, to offer taxi service in Las Vegas. This is the same company that spent millions on California's Proposition 22 in 2020 to keep its drivers from receiving employee benefits and forming unions, and it continues to push for anti-worker policies in other states.
Gig workers are already in a precarious position, liable to be soft-fired by an algorithm for not shopping or driving quickly enough. When Instacart, DoorDash, Uber and other gig companies automate them away, where do they go? What do they do? An autonomous car will never get tired, and it'll certainly never try to unionise.
In sci-fi visions of tech utopias and smart cities, artificial intelligence takes over the boring stuff involved with living so humans can cavort freely, make art and do what they will with all that free time. The troubling disconnect between real life and utopia is that we haven't yet figured out how to marshal that liberated time and labour into an economy that actually distributes the rewards of innovation to everyone - especially those whose jobs have been subsumed by machines. – San Francisco Chronicle/Tribune News Service
