Civilization
•
Jun 17, 2025
Mobs, Machines, and the American Spirit
Burning Waymos and what technology means to America
I don’t really like riding in Waymos, to tell you the truth. I like talking to drivers. The two places you can learn the most about the world are in the back of a taxi, and in a barber’s chair. I don’t want a robot to cut my hair either, come to think of it. And I’m not a fan of Jaguar or the janky turns that seem to be the signature of autonomous driving (for now). That being said, Waymo is a clear marker of technological progress that can breathe life into a society.
When we replaced propeller planes with jet engines, the streets of America had a vitality to them, despite the planes being 30,000 feet in the sky. When the turbines of the Hoover Dam started spinning, New Yorkers 2,500 miles away could take pride in the engineering wonder. In the past, Americans’ ability to advance our station with technology created a sense of optimism among our people. We must revive that optimism today.
The mass incineration of Waymos by a mob in Los Angeles represents the unwinding of the unique promise of America: the frontier. Whether the mob targeted the cars based on a well developed anti-technology thesis is dubious; more likely, it was the impulse to destroy, and the driverless Waymos were easy targets. But nobody should doubt that mobs will eventually target autonomous vehicles because of the technology.
Technology & New Things
If one were to argue that technology has been a negative force to the American polity, the obvious and correct line of attack would be that information technology (IT), broadly speaking, makes us less human. “It’s the phones,” as people say. The combination of smartphones with the dominant Internet products has drawn us out of our local environments of friends, family, and community into an abstract digital space of people and places where neighbors become numbers. In our own physical world, it has turned many into drones with craned necks fixated on screens.
For many observing these trends, the reaction is to become anti-technology. For America to leverage technology to advance society and lift up our fellow citizens, we have to disambiguate IT and “new things” within technology, otherwise we’ll end up without any of the benefits that new things can provide.
The fear that autonomous taxis and similar technology will displace us is not an illegitimate one, and shouldn’t be quickly dismissed; but it is the wrong way to view new technologies. Properly deployed, new technology allows for two important avenues of wealth creation. The first, on the supply side, is well understood. Any American can build something new and if other people believe it makes their lives better, he or she will have a market. The second is on the demand side — using jet engines instead of propellers is both faster and safer for fliers, and penicillin cures infections a whole lot better than whiskey.
What does “technology” even mean? It can be everything from a new microwave, to robotic agriculture, to autonomous vehicles. There is nothing inherently good or bad about a new piece of technology when it’s born. It’s up to us to use, then assess the costs and benefits.
The leap from horses and buggies to fully autonomous vehicles in less than 150 years is a miracle in the same respect as the transition from horse plows to tractors. People can have all sorts of issues with a view like that — maybe it was more spiritually fulfilling to tend to crops with our bare hands, personally I’d like that — but it is not by mob rule that we decide these things. The first automobiles didn’t come without detractors, but that America believed that inventing new things was at the core of our civilization.
With any new technology, it takes time to assess the costs and benefits. At my first job, there was a middle aged manager who was married with kids. The only problem was, our office was in Washington, DC and he lived in Baltimore. That’s more than an hour of driving during rush hour, each way! If this man was able to spend those two hours doing work, relaxing, or eating breakfast — instead of staying hyper alert in traffic, his life may be dramatically improved. One may also point out that he could have lived in Washington; but that’s the whole point, that autonomous driving can change the constraints we face. So we can judge new technologies, but in due time. And we need to give them a chance to improve things!
When reframing technology to something that can advance a society from the Stone Age to the cosmos — opposed to categorizing it as apps and algorithms that take up more and more of our time — we can start to see how technology can make us more human and more enriched as citizens. It’s up to us to use and assess the costs and benefits. The message of techno-optimism shouldn’t be a monotone endorsement of everything we label as “technology.” We aren’t just shareholders: we’re citizens. How does it help us as a people?
Waymo is building their robotaxis in a 239,000 sq ft factory in Mesa, AZ, not Shenzen. This is no immaterial fact. The aforementioned optimism of the past stems from the subconscious understanding that new technologies are a uniquely American product. We invent them and then we build them. Drawing up a blueprint and writing some code only to ship the real work overseas is not innovation, it’s synthetic evolution — surface level progress that captures the imagination while failing to improve the lot of every American, in the same way the refrigerator did. That’s the point, isn’t it? As GE goes, so goes America.
American governance was carefully constructed to withstand mob rule. It’s what our Founders worried about most when drafting the Constitution. But their ideas aren’t enough. If we lack the ability to evaluate new technologies on their own merits, the mob will make those assessments for us. We’re a young country; what we consider “technology” is even younger.
The default American life for a majority of the 249 years of our republic was on the frontier. Whether that frontier was the Oregon Territory or a bicycle shop owned by two brothers in Dayton, Ohio. If it is the eternal frontier we seek — a place where Americans are free to invent — then we must not just accept but embrace new technologies, American technologies. Our fates are intertwined.
Civilization
•
Jun 17, 2025
Mobs, Machines, and the American Spirit
Burning Waymos and what technology means to America
I don’t really like riding in Waymos, to tell you the truth. I like talking to drivers. The two places you can learn the most about the world are in the back of a taxi, and in a barber’s chair. I don’t want a robot to cut my hair either, come to think of it. And I’m not a fan of Jaguar or the janky turns that seem to be the signature of autonomous driving (for now). That being said, Waymo is a clear marker of technological progress that can breathe life into a society.
When we replaced propeller planes with jet engines, the streets of America had a vitality to them, despite the planes being 30,000 feet in the sky. When the turbines of the Hoover Dam started spinning, New Yorkers 2,500 miles away could take pride in the engineering wonder. In the past, Americans’ ability to advance our station with technology created a sense of optimism among our people. We must revive that optimism today.
The mass incineration of Waymos by a mob in Los Angeles represents the unwinding of the unique promise of America: the frontier. Whether the mob targeted the cars based on a well developed anti-technology thesis is dubious; more likely, it was the impulse to destroy, and the driverless Waymos were easy targets. But nobody should doubt that mobs will eventually target autonomous vehicles because of the technology.
Technology & New Things
If one were to argue that technology has been a negative force to the American polity, the obvious and correct line of attack would be that information technology (IT), broadly speaking, makes us less human. “It’s the phones,” as people say. The combination of smartphones with the dominant Internet products has drawn us out of our local environments of friends, family, and community into an abstract digital space of people and places where neighbors become numbers. In our own physical world, it has turned many into drones with craned necks fixated on screens.
For many observing these trends, the reaction is to become anti-technology. For America to leverage technology to advance society and lift up our fellow citizens, we have to disambiguate IT and “new things” within technology, otherwise we’ll end up without any of the benefits that new things can provide.
The fear that autonomous taxis and similar technology will displace us is not an illegitimate one, and shouldn’t be quickly dismissed; but it is the wrong way to view new technologies. Properly deployed, new technology allows for two important avenues of wealth creation. The first, on the supply side, is well understood. Any American can build something new and if other people believe it makes their lives better, he or she will have a market. The second is on the demand side — using jet engines instead of propellers is both faster and safer for fliers, and penicillin cures infections a whole lot better than whiskey.
What does “technology” even mean? It can be everything from a new microwave, to robotic agriculture, to autonomous vehicles. There is nothing inherently good or bad about a new piece of technology when it’s born. It’s up to us to use, then assess the costs and benefits.
The leap from horses and buggies to fully autonomous vehicles in less than 150 years is a miracle in the same respect as the transition from horse plows to tractors. People can have all sorts of issues with a view like that — maybe it was more spiritually fulfilling to tend to crops with our bare hands, personally I’d like that — but it is not by mob rule that we decide these things. The first automobiles didn’t come without detractors, but that America believed that inventing new things was at the core of our civilization.
With any new technology, it takes time to assess the costs and benefits. At my first job, there was a middle aged manager who was married with kids. The only problem was, our office was in Washington, DC and he lived in Baltimore. That’s more than an hour of driving during rush hour, each way! If this man was able to spend those two hours doing work, relaxing, or eating breakfast — instead of staying hyper alert in traffic, his life may be dramatically improved. One may also point out that he could have lived in Washington; but that’s the whole point, that autonomous driving can change the constraints we face. So we can judge new technologies, but in due time. And we need to give them a chance to improve things!
When reframing technology to something that can advance a society from the Stone Age to the cosmos — opposed to categorizing it as apps and algorithms that take up more and more of our time — we can start to see how technology can make us more human and more enriched as citizens. It’s up to us to use and assess the costs and benefits. The message of techno-optimism shouldn’t be a monotone endorsement of everything we label as “technology.” We aren’t just shareholders: we’re citizens. How does it help us as a people?
Waymo is building their robotaxis in a 239,000 sq ft factory in Mesa, AZ, not Shenzen. This is no immaterial fact. The aforementioned optimism of the past stems from the subconscious understanding that new technologies are a uniquely American product. We invent them and then we build them. Drawing up a blueprint and writing some code only to ship the real work overseas is not innovation, it’s synthetic evolution — surface level progress that captures the imagination while failing to improve the lot of every American, in the same way the refrigerator did. That’s the point, isn’t it? As GE goes, so goes America.
American governance was carefully constructed to withstand mob rule. It’s what our Founders worried about most when drafting the Constitution. But their ideas aren’t enough. If we lack the ability to evaluate new technologies on their own merits, the mob will make those assessments for us. We’re a young country; what we consider “technology” is even younger.
The default American life for a majority of the 249 years of our republic was on the frontier. Whether that frontier was the Oregon Territory or a bicycle shop owned by two brothers in Dayton, Ohio. If it is the eternal frontier we seek — a place where Americans are free to invent — then we must not just accept but embrace new technologies, American technologies. Our fates are intertwined.
Civilization
•
Jun 17, 2025
Mobs, Machines, and the American Spirit
Burning Waymos and what technology means to America
I don’t really like riding in Waymos, to tell you the truth. I like talking to drivers. The two places you can learn the most about the world are in the back of a taxi, and in a barber’s chair. I don’t want a robot to cut my hair either, come to think of it. And I’m not a fan of Jaguar or the janky turns that seem to be the signature of autonomous driving (for now). That being said, Waymo is a clear marker of technological progress that can breathe life into a society.
When we replaced propeller planes with jet engines, the streets of America had a vitality to them, despite the planes being 30,000 feet in the sky. When the turbines of the Hoover Dam started spinning, New Yorkers 2,500 miles away could take pride in the engineering wonder. In the past, Americans’ ability to advance our station with technology created a sense of optimism among our people. We must revive that optimism today.
The mass incineration of Waymos by a mob in Los Angeles represents the unwinding of the unique promise of America: the frontier. Whether the mob targeted the cars based on a well developed anti-technology thesis is dubious; more likely, it was the impulse to destroy, and the driverless Waymos were easy targets. But nobody should doubt that mobs will eventually target autonomous vehicles because of the technology.
Technology & New Things
If one were to argue that technology has been a negative force to the American polity, the obvious and correct line of attack would be that information technology (IT), broadly speaking, makes us less human. “It’s the phones,” as people say. The combination of smartphones with the dominant Internet products has drawn us out of our local environments of friends, family, and community into an abstract digital space of people and places where neighbors become numbers. In our own physical world, it has turned many into drones with craned necks fixated on screens.
For many observing these trends, the reaction is to become anti-technology. For America to leverage technology to advance society and lift up our fellow citizens, we have to disambiguate IT and “new things” within technology, otherwise we’ll end up without any of the benefits that new things can provide.
The fear that autonomous taxis and similar technology will displace us is not an illegitimate one, and shouldn’t be quickly dismissed; but it is the wrong way to view new technologies. Properly deployed, new technology allows for two important avenues of wealth creation. The first, on the supply side, is well understood. Any American can build something new and if other people believe it makes their lives better, he or she will have a market. The second is on the demand side — using jet engines instead of propellers is both faster and safer for fliers, and penicillin cures infections a whole lot better than whiskey.
What does “technology” even mean? It can be everything from a new microwave, to robotic agriculture, to autonomous vehicles. There is nothing inherently good or bad about a new piece of technology when it’s born. It’s up to us to use, then assess the costs and benefits.
The leap from horses and buggies to fully autonomous vehicles in less than 150 years is a miracle in the same respect as the transition from horse plows to tractors. People can have all sorts of issues with a view like that — maybe it was more spiritually fulfilling to tend to crops with our bare hands, personally I’d like that — but it is not by mob rule that we decide these things. The first automobiles didn’t come without detractors, but that America believed that inventing new things was at the core of our civilization.
With any new technology, it takes time to assess the costs and benefits. At my first job, there was a middle aged manager who was married with kids. The only problem was, our office was in Washington, DC and he lived in Baltimore. That’s more than an hour of driving during rush hour, each way! If this man was able to spend those two hours doing work, relaxing, or eating breakfast — instead of staying hyper alert in traffic, his life may be dramatically improved. One may also point out that he could have lived in Washington; but that’s the whole point, that autonomous driving can change the constraints we face. So we can judge new technologies, but in due time. And we need to give them a chance to improve things!
When reframing technology to something that can advance a society from the Stone Age to the cosmos — opposed to categorizing it as apps and algorithms that take up more and more of our time — we can start to see how technology can make us more human and more enriched as citizens. It’s up to us to use and assess the costs and benefits. The message of techno-optimism shouldn’t be a monotone endorsement of everything we label as “technology.” We aren’t just shareholders: we’re citizens. How does it help us as a people?
Waymo is building their robotaxis in a 239,000 sq ft factory in Mesa, AZ, not Shenzen. This is no immaterial fact. The aforementioned optimism of the past stems from the subconscious understanding that new technologies are a uniquely American product. We invent them and then we build them. Drawing up a blueprint and writing some code only to ship the real work overseas is not innovation, it’s synthetic evolution — surface level progress that captures the imagination while failing to improve the lot of every American, in the same way the refrigerator did. That’s the point, isn’t it? As GE goes, so goes America.
American governance was carefully constructed to withstand mob rule. It’s what our Founders worried about most when drafting the Constitution. But their ideas aren’t enough. If we lack the ability to evaluate new technologies on their own merits, the mob will make those assessments for us. We’re a young country; what we consider “technology” is even younger.
The default American life for a majority of the 249 years of our republic was on the frontier. Whether that frontier was the Oregon Territory or a bicycle shop owned by two brothers in Dayton, Ohio. If it is the eternal frontier we seek — a place where Americans are free to invent — then we must not just accept but embrace new technologies, American technologies. Our fates are intertwined.
About the Author
Jeff Feiwell is the COO of Arena Magazine
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