Way mo' burning
A note on the burning Waymos in LA everyone was talking about.
I first encountered them when we briefly moved to SF a few years back and saw these cars cause havoc on the road — comically shutting down, packs of them getting stuck in one location, blocking fire trucks, trapping people at the local Whole Foods parking lot… Now they’ve expanded to more cities: Austin, LA, Phoenix.
But Waymo isn’t some cute little company. Waymo is Google. These are Google cars. And Google is integrated into all aspects of the U.S. national security state — that includes ICE, whose raids launched the protests and the blowback rioting in LA.1 Google even designs AI tools to help militaries target/kill people and sells this tech to Israel, which is deploying it in Gaza.2
When Google rebranded as “Alphabet” in 2015, it was trying to tell us something. Most of the services under the Google-Alphabet umbrella have a dual function, providing consumer products while also underpinning parts of America’s technocratic security apparatus. So Alphabet was signaling that it’s just another agency in Washington DC’s “alphabet soup.” The CIA, the NSA, the FBI, Google AI…
Also, Waymo cars are being trained by Google to destroy what’s left of the taxi industry, which would gut a big source of jobs for people already on the edge, including LA.
I’m not a fan of burning cars and releasing even more pollution into the air above an already toxic world. And yet… I didn’t talk to the kids who put those cars to the torch about why they did it, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they know more about Waymo than people give them credit for.
—Yasha
It'd sure be interesting to hear from those involved. I haven't succeeded in contacting the author of the Electrek article about it but it looks like he was working from 2nd hand sources. Another interesting bit I found out was that they were throwing lime scooters into the blaze. I've been annoyed enough by limes (and the damn google bikes) that I can see that on impulse. All of these self driving cars and every tesla and probably chevy cruise system on the road are pumping enormous amounts of video into the cloud. Here's the article I saw that gathered some photos and etc https://electrek.co/2025/06/09/several-waymo-self-driving-i-pace-electric-cars-set-on-fire-in-la-riots/
To be more perfectly precise, the "rioting" in LA was kicked off by the cops and national guard announcements.
But I completely agree with this: "I wouldn’t be surprised if they know more about Waymo than people give them credit for."
No way(mo) these cars would have become such regular vandalism targets without some deeper or more symbolic meaning to the perpetrators.