The Symbolic Power of Burning Waymo Robotaxis

Thousands of National Guard troops are now deployed on the streets of America’s second-largest city, armed with rubber bullets, tear gas, and automatic weapons. They’re officially tasked with protecting federal agents, who are, without warrants, kidnapping people of all ages from court hearings, churches, schools, convenience stores, hospitals, and street corners, on orders to arrest 3,000 per day nationwide. Without due process, those snatched up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement will be disappeared into its secretive network of detention centers and flown to a hellish Salvadoran prison or to countries they’ve never visited. Seven hundred U.S. Marines are standing by to join them this week on the streets of Los Angeles.

It seems silly, in this context, when the stakes are so high, to talk about Waymo, a robotaxi company most of the country doesn’t know exists because its driverless, for-hire electric vehicles operate only in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Austin, and Phoenix. It is silly. But Waymo has popped up repeatedly in press coverage of the government’s ongoing mass abduction operation, which has left children orphaned, and the sizable protests that began in L.A. and have started spreading around the country. That’s because protesters destroyed some of the cars. It’s not clear exactly how many have been torched and graffitied. Time counted six as of Tuesday. Waymo has suspended service around the area where protests are happening and has not commented on how much of its fleet of 300 electric vehicles in Los Angeles was damaged.

There’s no telling precisely why protesters have targeted Waymos in recent days; people tend not to publicly volunteer explanations for their illegal activities. But there are any number of possible practical and political reasons why they might. Some taking to the streets have reportedly dubbed Waymos “spy cars,” thanks to surveillance footage collected by 360-degree cameras that, as 404 News reported, has previously been obtained and published by the Los Angeles Police Department. Google—Waymo’s parent company—hands over that data upon request, typically via court order, warrant, or subpoena. Like other Silicon Valley firms, Google and its parent company, Alphabet, have either directly or through third parties entered lucrative contracts with the federal government, including ICE. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai attended Trump’s inauguration, to which Google donated $1 million. That company also recently removed a pledge in its AI principles to not develop or deploy products that “cause or are likely to cause overall harm.” Alphabet’s cloud computing unit in April expanded its partnership with fellow defense contractor Palantir to allow for the “reliable and responsible deployment of AI solutions” from Anthropic “for sensitive government use cases.” Andreessen Horowitz—the venture capital fund run by Trump ally Marc Andreessen, known as a16z—was also an early investor in Waymo.

Again, nobody really knows why Waymos were vandalized. Maybe they offered a convenient, on-demand way to block traffic that would inconvenience Google executives rather than regular people who need their cars to get to work and the grocery store. While less common in the United States, burning cars are a ubiquitous part of large-scale protests just about everywhere else on the planet. Waymos were vandalized well before recent protests in Los Angeles for a number of reasons laid out by Brian Merchant, the author of Blood in the Machine. Among them seems to be their tendency to honk at each other outside of apartment buildings at 4 a.m.

But you don’t need to look into the mind of a protester to see the symbolic power of a robotaxi. It’s easy to comprehend what they stand for: an effort by the richest people on earth to eliminate employees and any other human friction that might get in the way of profit or interrupt their efforts to cozy up to the Trump administration and aid in its quest to terrorize millions of people. Robotaxis can also just be really fucking annoying. These aren’t unrelated phenomena.

As tech companies try to build the case for artificial intelligence—and its outsize demand for water and electricity—they’ve resorted to increasingly grandiose claims. On one hand are the apocalyptic dangers of “misaligned” AI and its potential to enslave and torture humanity forever; on the other is the promise of a utopian fantasy wherein large language models turned thinking machines eliminate climate change, cancer, poverty, and human toil. The claims seem hard to square with what the products are currently doing for us, namely helping college students cheat, offering to summarize two-line emails, making photos of your pets look like Studio Ghibli films, and hailing a cheaper ride to the bar.

For the last several months, companies in the AI business have pitched their products to policymakers as an urgent necessity for national security, whether as a means of making the government more efficient or of beating China in the race toward a slippery concept known as “artificial general intelligence.” If OpenAI, Meta, and Alphabet can’t slurp up unlimited amounts of power and resources, override state and local regulations, and steamroll antitrust rules—an especially sore spot for Google—then who’s to say what fresh hell awaits in our inevitable AI future?

None of this, though, is inevitable. The scary/exciting stories companies like Google and Open AI proffer about our horrifying/glorious future mainly serve to obscure the more ho-hum realities of what they’re actually doing: clogging up our digital lives with fake and useless junk while helping the Trump administration tear apart families and communities. Waymos might help them do that, but the cars are neither all-powerful sentinels nor a transportation revolution; they certainly don’t matter any more than the people whose lives are being upended by ICE. Waymos are vehicles with cameras peddled by a stubbornly unprofitable company that could fizzle out if it doesn’t figure out how to make money. As Kyla Scanlon wrote on Wednesday of burning Waymos and the disconnect between our bleak, infinite-scrolling present and imagined corporate futures, the “abundance of intelligence” that AI companies create is currently hiding the truth: “The same systems that will solve humanity’s problems are being used to obscure the very real human cost of current policies.”

Those companies’ success—the reason we’re supposed to give in to all their demands—rests on their promise that the products that are making a lot of people’s lives either more annoying or objectively worse will, at some point, render our shared future “almost unimaginably bright,” according to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Or else!

Our futures don’t depend on AI developers’ continued existence. Real-world evidence seems to indicate that a world of their making is one that’s worse to live in. And their bubble could burst soon enough. Like their allies in Silicon Valley, Republicans promise an apocalypse that only Donald Trump can protect us against. Trump’s ghoulish deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, points to burned-out Waymos as “all the proof you need that mass migration unravels societies.” The people actively unraveling society for Angelenos, though, are the masked ICE agents who are abducting children from school, not a few protesters torching robotaxis. The hellish future Stephen Miller warns about—of an alleged “invasion of the United States”—is already here. His goons are the invaders.