Don't Scrape Me, Bro + The Activists Sabotaging Self-Driving Cars + How Reddit Beat a Rebellion

Users are protesting Zoom’s liberal data-collection policy. Authors are shutting down websites that scrape their work. And, in a concession to users, OpenAI is allowing websites to opt out of web scraping. The era of A. I. backlash has begun. Then, street activists are deterring self-driving cars by placing traffic cones on the hoods of vehicles. Plus: How Reddit has squashed the Reddit Revolt.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Dell Technologies. It's time to put AI to work. Is your business ready? The challenge isn't getting started with AI. It's scaling beyond pilots while maintaining control of your data, governance, infrastructure, and costs. Dell AI Factory provides the integrated foundation you need to scale AI securely and efficiently with one trusted partner, Dell, AI on your terms. From idea to impact. Learn more at dell.com/yourwaytoAI. That's dell.com/yourwaytoAI.

• 0:35Kevin Roose?

  Are you a cone guy or a cup guy when you get ice cream?

• 0:38Casey Newton?

  Hmm, typically a cup because a cone just feels too indulgent. But if you were to ask me, what is the best way to eat ice cream? Cone, obviously, it's in a cone.

• 0:48Kevin Roose?

  Too indulgent, you're eating ice cream.

• 0:50Casey Newton?

  Well, that's the thing is like if you put it in a cone, then it's a hat on a hat.

• 0:54Kevin Roose?

  Oh, you're no, no, no, no, no. You are fooling yourself, my friend. You're engaging in a moral calculus. This is if I have this thing in a sad cup with a sad spoon.

• 1:03Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 1:04Kevin Roose?

  Then I'm not fully being bad. I'm being, I'm being half bad.

• 1:08Casey Newton?

  No, do you know how many times people order a double cheeseburger with fries and a Diet Coke? Like, that's what this is.

• 1:13Kevin Roose?

  But that's self deception.

• 1:14Casey Newton?

  Of course.

• 1:15Kevin Roose?

  Get the cone.

• 1:15Casey Newton?

  Most of my life is self deception.

• 1:19Kevin Roose?

  Allow yourself to be happy.

• 1:26Kevin Roose?

  I'm Kevin Roose, a tech columnist at The New York Times.

• 1:28Casey Newton?

  I'm Casey Newton from Platformer.

• 1:30Kevin Roose?

  And you're listening to Hard Fork.

• 1:32Casey Newton?

  This week on the show, a growing backlash to AI that has more people saying, don't scrape me, bro. Then organizers from the San Francisco activist group Safe Street Rebels stopped by to tell us why they're disrupting autonomous vehicles by putting traffic cones on their hoods. After that, how Reddit crushed its user uprising. And finally, an update on LK99. And it's not super.

• 2:19Kevin Roose?

  Casey, we have talked on this show about generative AI and how many artists and writers and creative people are starting to get a little freaked out by all of these tools, some of the legal challenges to the companies that are making this stuff. And it has sort of been on a slow boil, but I would say this week, we really saw the first traces of an organized counter movement to the use of generative AI in creative industries.

• 2:47Casey Newton?

  Yeah, the backlash is popping up in many different places at once.

• 2:51Kevin Roose?

  So you suggested calling this segment "Don't scrape me, bro," which I love because it is like what I would call the first shreds of this counter movement, which is like objecting not just to the existence of generative AI and the use of generative AI in creative industries, but to the actual process by which these models are built and trained.

• 3:12Casey Newton?

  Yeah, people want to have some say in how their data is being used to train this stuff. And the more that they learn about that, I think the more questions they're asking.

• 3:20Kevin Roose?

  Right. And this is something that, you know, in the early days of generative AI, like companies would tell you a lot about how they got the data to train their models. You know, they were proud of how clever they were being going out and scraping all these websites to get this data to feed into their neural networks. And then, you know, as they sort of lawyered up and realized that people were going to be mad about this, they have stopped saying nearly as much about how they're actually getting this data.

• 3:43Casey Newton?

  Yeah, I think ChatGPT's FAQ page just says that the data fell off the back of a truck, which was interesting.

• 3:50Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, how'd this end up here? So this week, we had, I would say, three incidents that I think illustrate what is going on in this war over AI data use. And I want to talk about them together because I think they're all related and I think they point to what is going to be a huge and long fight. And they all involve issues around crawling and scraping. Now, Casey, what do you know about crawling and scraping?

• 4:14Casey Newton?

  Well, if I have too many drinks at the club, that's how I get home.

• 4:19Casey Newton?

  No, this is, of course, the sort of automated systems that gather data from the web. So if you've used Google's search engine, for example, that crawls the web. When somebody makes a new webpage, for the most part, Google indexes it. And so that way, if somebody searches for it, they can find it.

• 4:35Kevin Roose?

  Right. So crawling and scraping, they're things that internet companies have been doing forever. Basically, crawling is when you have a bot that travels around the web, just visiting every link it can find. Scraping is related and sometimes goes hand in hand, which is that you actually go download some information from a website and use that for your own purposes.

• 4:54Casey Newton?

  Yeah. You know, it might be worth saying that scraping has been controversial. There are bad actors out there that will try to scrape websites for purposes that we don't like. So, for example, people try to scrape Facebook all the time to gather personal information about people for nefarious purposes. So Facebook has to build defenses against that. There's a case that went all the way to the Supreme Court involving LinkedIn with some firm that was trying to scrape LinkedIn. So scraping is not without controversy.

• 5:19Kevin Roose?

  Right. So I would say crawling is pretty widely accepted standard. Scraping is not, and it's been a lot of controversy around that over the years.

• 5:28Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 5:29Kevin Roose?

  So let's start this week with the story of Zoom.

• 5:32Casey Newton?

  Zoom, of course, is a tool that we used in 2020 to go to the worst birthday parties of our entire lives.

• 5:40Kevin Roose?

  Exactly. And play those, what were those games called that you could play with your friends?

• 5:44Casey Newton?

  No, it's a trauma response I'm getting when you mention those.

• 5:47Kevin Roose?

  Okay. So Zoom, basically, they have some generative AI features that they have been experimenting with, including sort of automated meeting notes. If you're having a Zoom call, you can get like a text summary of what you talked about on the call.

• 6:01Casey Newton?

  Right. It'll be like Kevin had his camera off the whole time. He didn't even seem to be paying attention.

• 6:07Kevin Roose?

  Right. So this week, the publication Stack Diary ran a story, basically calling attention to this update in Zoom's Terms of Service that appeared to give the company very wide latitude to sort of collect customer data from video calls to train its AI models. And it didn't really specify what exactly Zoom was doing with that data, but it did. Sort of opened the possibility that they were taking the contents of customers' video calls, scraping them and feeding them into their AI models in some way. And this report set off a real firestorm. People were so mad. I saw people saying they were canceling their Zoom subscriptions. They were never going to use Zoom again. They were going to go back to like using WebEx or whatever the hell we used before Zoom.

• 6:49Casey Newton?

  Not Citrix, not BlueJeans.

• 6:52Kevin Roose?

  So you know it's serious when people are threatening to use WebEx. So after this, Zoom sort of responded. They said, you know, we're updating our terms of service to clarify that we are not using customer content to train our AI models without people's consent. Basically, like, if you don't mind us using this information, we will ask you to opt in. But if you don't want us to use this to train our models, we won't use it.

• 7:17Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 7:17Kevin Roose?

  So very quick response from Zoom. People were very mad. What did you think of this?

• 7:22Casey Newton?

  Well, I think people are right to be suspicious here. When you think about the kind of things that people do on Zoom, a lot of its paying customers are businesses. They involve sensitive conversations among coworkers, between businesses, people negotiating deals. And the idea that the contents of those meetings were being fed into an AI database and then could just be used for literally any purpose from now until eternity? That's a really scary thing. So it makes sense that people called Zoom out, and I'm glad Zoom walked it back as quickly as it did.

• 7:56Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, I mean, I think the terms of service of a lot of major internet platforms actually already allowed them to do this kind of thing because they're written in such a broad way. You know, we may collect data for the purposes of improving our tools or our systems that would technically allow them to feed them into AI models. So I think what happened with Zoom is going to happen with a lot of other companies. I think any company that sort of runs, frankly, any platform where customer data is being handled or transmitted, even in something as simple seeming as a video call, I think there's going to be a lot of attention paid when those terms of service change in a way that makes it more explicit that they're reserving the right to train an AI model using your face.

• 8:34Casey Newton?

  Yeah, but good for everyone who complained about this because this was something that Zoom needed to address.

• 8:39Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, okay. So second story this week about the war over scraping is about a website called Proscraft. So Casey, have you ever used the website Proscraft?

• 8:49Casey Newton?

  I have not, but I've been reading up on it, and it does sound kind of interesting.

• 8:53Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, I would assume that you've never used it because your prose is not very well crafted. So this is a website created by a guy named Benji Smith. And, you know, he says that he made this while he was trying to write his own memoir. And that he was basically trying to sort of answer questions like, how many words are in the typical book? Or, you know, what percentage of verbs are active versus passive in this classic work of literature or that classic work of literature?

• 9:21Casey Newton?

  Yeah, and apparently he has like a background in computational linguistics. So like, this has just been a sort of pet interest of his for a very long time.

• 9:28Kevin Roose?

  Yes, and he also has a company that makes software for writers. So this was sort of in his professional and personal interest to do something about this. So he makes this website called Proscraft, which he claims is dedicated to the linguistic analysis of literature. And we don't know exactly how he put this together, but essentially, he got more than 25,000 books, and he fed these books into a kind of analytics tool, which allowed users to analyze them in a statistical way, like saying, you know, how much passive voice is used, you know, in Alice in Wonderland? Or which of the Harry Potter books has the most vivid writing? Something like that. And this went mostly unnoticed, because this is a very small website run by a very small company.

• 10:11Kevin Roose?

  But this week, authors figured out that this was happening. Writers like Maureen Johnson, who's a big young adult fiction writer, Celeste Ng, who wrote Little Fires Everywhere, and Hari Kunsru, objected to this, basically said, how did this website get the contents of my copyrighted books without my permission? And why is it using them for this kind of like statistical analysis? And basically pressured Benji Smith to take down the website. And in just a few days, that's what he did. He wrote in a blog post that was very apologetic. He said, "In the future, I would love to rebuild this library with the consent of authors and publishers. I truly believe these tools are useful for creative people, but now is not the right time."

• 10:53Casey Newton?

  Yeah. So on this one, I have to say, I think that the reaction was a little bit overblown.

• 10:59Kevin Roose?

  Totally agree.

• 11:00Casey Newton?

  Like, when you look at what he was doing, he was not allowing you to really do anything with the contents of these books, other than to do, get these sort of short snippets via these little analyses. And, you know, it's like, he was basically like showing you like word clouds, you know, like, this was not the sort of use that if I had written a book, that I would object to. And you've, of course, written books. And my guess is that you wouldn't really object to your book being part of this either.

• 11:29Kevin Roose?

  No, it's fine. And in fact, I've been asked, like, can I do something like this with your book? I'm, you know, building a database or something. And it's generally been fine with me, you know, in part because like, what he was doing was not generative AI. Like, he was just basically feeding these books into a database, and then running some very basic analytics on them, so that you could see, like, you know, how many words should my book have? Or like, what are the, what's the right number of, you know, LY adverbs to have in this paragraph? So it wasn't really even generative AI. He was not training a large language model on these books. He was basically just sort of giving you the chance to zoom out and like, find some patterns in very famous works of literature.

• 12:10Casey Newton?

  Yeah. Now, of course, at the same time, I do think that once people acquire a huge amount of data, at some point, either they themselves or someone else might say to them, you know, that's actually pretty valuable, and you could use that in a different way. That is actually basically what happened to Reddit over the past year, right? Where somebody said, hey, all this data on your website, that'd be really valuable if you actually sold it to these companies that are making large language models. And now I think Reddit's extremely interested in that as a business model. So the risk here, I think, was not so much what Benji was doing already. It's what he might be doing in the future. And because we don't have good data privacy laws, and because I think copyright law is still kind of unsettled on what constitutes fair use in a generative AI context, there was

• 12:52Casey Newton?

  some risk here. And I guess it's not surprising to me that at least some authors said, hey, get me out of that database.

• 12:57Kevin Roose?

  Right. I mean, it does feel a little strange and sort of misdirected all of the anger toward this one, you know, very small website, when-

• 13:05Casey Newton?

  When the real enemy is capitalism.

• 13:09Kevin Roose?

  No, I think the real enemy, if you're an author who worries about AI, is like the companies that are training the large language models that can generate text that sounds like you wrote it and can fill up Amazon with like books that, you know, sound like you wrote them, but actually make money on that. So I think this was a little bit of misdirected anger, but I do think it is a symbol of how on alert people are, especially writers and other creative people. We're seeing this in Hollywood, too. This is in, you know, a place where a lot of people who write for a living are really having their first experience of being radicalized against some kind of technology that they feel presents a threat to their livelihood.

• 13:47Casey Newton?

  Yeah, and also just that they are creating value that they are not capturing in any way, right?

• 13:53Kevin Roose?

  Yeah. So, but now it's down, the website's been taken down. Benji Smith has said that he may rebuild it in the future using permission from the writers.

• 14:01Casey Newton?

  And that's a good idea. Like, that's what I will say. Even though I think the reaction was overblown, I think if you wanted to restart this project and say, "I'm only going to include works from artists who have either consented or the many, many thousands of books that are already in the public domain," that's probably a good way of going about it.

• 14:15Kevin Roose?

  Right. If you want to learn about books published in the 1800s, you can definitely go do that. That is, you know, within bounds.

• 14:22Casey Newton?

  How much of Little Women use the passive voice? I've always wanted to know.

• 14:26Kevin Roose?

  Okay. Third story of this week about the war over scraping.

• 14:30Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 14:31Kevin Roose?

  Is that OpenAI has now given people who run websites the ability to block its web crawler. This is sort of like a fun thing that hearkens back to my days as a GeoCities webmaster. Have you ever run across something called robots.txt?

• 14:47Casey Newton?

  I've used robots.txt, in fact.

• 14:49Kevin Roose?

  Really?

• 14:49Casey Newton?

  When I built my own website, sure.

• 14:50Kevin Roose?

  To do what?

• 14:51Casey Newton?

  Yeah. You would make sure that Google could index it so that you could be in search results.

• 14:56Kevin Roose?

  Right. So robots.txt is basically a file that every website has that's basically like a set of instructions for the robots that are crawling that website, where to go and where not to go.

• 15:06Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 15:07Kevin Roose?

  And now, OpenAI has released a feature that lets you block their web crawler with just like two lines of code. And once you put this little two lines of code on your website, OpenAI can no longer scrape your data and they won't be able to use that to train their models.

• 15:23Casey Newton?

  Right. And of course, this is a good thing, and I imagine a lot of the same sort of people that would get mad about Proscraft will probably be adding this to their robots.txt files. At the same time, OpenAI could have built this bot before it downloaded the entire internet, right? And so could any of these large language models. So there is a little bit of a too little, too late argument against this kind of thing.

• 15:51Kevin Roose?

  Right, it's like, you know, someone ransacked your house and then they're like, well, you know, you could, you could put up a security camera now. You know, I already have.

• 15:59Casey Newton?

  Actually, we'll give you the security camera now.

• 16:01Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, yeah. So, you know, the cynical take on all this is that OpenAI can do this now because it has already crawled and scraped most of the open internet. And that essentially what it is doing now is just giving people sort of a false sense of security.

• 16:15Casey Newton?

  Yeah, and so there has been some discussion this week about, well, for all the reasons that you said, how much does it matter that people can now do this when the entire internet has already been downloaded? And my curiosity is just around the fact that language evolves, right? The way that we talk to each other, the things that we talk about, how we might answer a question. When you just think about the slang that has leapt off of TikTok in the past year. You know, a year ago, nobody was saying riz. And now riz is everywhere.

• 16:44Kevin Roose?

  I always had riz.

• 16:45Casey Newton?

  You always had riz.

• 16:46Kevin Roose?

  Before there was even a word for it.

• 16:48Casey Newton?

  Before we called it riz, we called it mojo. And so there, you know, there's a chance that if everyone added the ChatGPT bot and you said, hey, what is this really charismatic person? Like, how would you describe him? And they would say, well, he's got a lot of mojo. And you would be reading that in 2026 and just be like, I think he means riz.

• 17:07Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, and all the teens would be laughing at you.

• 17:09Casey Newton?

  And the teens would laugh. And everyone knows the, the most hurtful laughter there is is the laughter of teens.

• 17:15Kevin Roose?

  Correct.

• 17:16Casey Newton?

  My point here, and I do have one, is that in order for these companies to have language models that service in the ways they want to, I do believe they are going to need ongoing access to new material, right? It's not just going to be about how did humans sound when all this data was originally being scraped over the past few years. It's going to be about how do they sound today? And for that reason, I think they're going to be incentivized to get as many sites as they can not to use this.

• 17:44Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, I mean, it's telling that they're not saying, you know, we're going to stop crawling. Or stop scraping by default. It's telling that they're forcing people to like, put these two lines of code in their website if they don't want to get scraped. So I think there still is going to be ongoing scraping, but I do think that it's become a much higher stakes proposition to go out and scrape a bunch of websites because the people who run those websites might get real mad. And now there's sort of more awareness that this is going on in the background. And so I think if you are an AI company, the best time to sort of gather your big data set was before everyone started getting mad. I think it's going to be a lot harder now. Yeah. Casey, why do you think this sort of anti-scraping movement is having a moment now? Is it just because people are learning more about how these tools work?

• 18:28Kevin Roose?

  And the fact that they need to go out and ingest a bunch of data? Or is there something else happening?

• 18:35Casey Newton?

  I think that people have a pretty good intuitive sense about what constitutes a good trade of value between themself and a tech company. So when you look at the previous generation of services, something like a Gmail, something like a Google Search, the agreement was, hey, I know you're going to be collecting a lot of data about me, but in exchange, I am going to get a really good free email service. I'm going to get a pretty good web search service. And so I think people are mostly OK with that exchange. Same thing with a social network, right? Yeah, Facebook, you're going to collect a lot of my data, but you're going to let me keep in touch with all of the people I've ever made eye contact with and provide you with entertainment throughout the day.

• 19:19Casey Newton?

  So it's OK that you want to show me ads based on what you know about me. I think with these AI tools, the value of the exchange is a lot less clear for a couple of reasons. One is the fear that this data is going to be used to automate away a lot of jobs, potentially including the job that you yourself have as the user, right? So I think people are nervous about that. And then two, a lot of the large language models that we've seen today have this paid component where a lot of the AI tools that are on the market today want to charge you a subscription fee. And so now we're in this world. Where you're constantly giving up data, often without your express permission, to a large language model,

• 20:03Casey Newton?

  which then wants to turn around and sell it back to you for $20 a month. And I just don't think that those things in combination feel like a fair trade to the average consumer.

• 20:12Kevin Roose?

  I think that's right. I really like this theory because I think we do sort of sense as consumers when the trade has gotten less fair. I mean, I used to get a lot of questions about like, you know, why is everyone mad at Facebook over collecting data for ad targeting when Google does the same thing, but, you know, with your email? And my response was always like, well, with Google, like you get Google Maps out of that. You get Google Search. You get Gmail. Like, you get all these free things. And so, yes, they're collecting your data. And on some level, you know that and it bothers you. But you also kind of like quiet that voice in your head because you're like, well, I'm getting all this free stuff. With Facebook, I think that argument started to break down because all of a sudden, people felt, you know, I don't know when this was, but like, you know, sometime in the last five years,

• 20:57Kevin Roose?

  people sort of said, well, I'm giving away all my data to this thing that is making me sad and angry when I open it up.

• 21:03Casey Newton?

  Well, in particular, not just that, but the backlash started in 2017 when people thought the exchange is, I'm giving them all of my data and people are using that to destroy our democracy. And that's not a fair trade.

• 21:14Kevin Roose?

  So that started to feel like less of a fair trade. And then so that it became like, well, what leverage do I have as the consumer? Can I delete my account? Can I restrict the information it gathers in some way? And so I think that's what we're starting to see with these AI models. But now I think you're starting to see, not just people, but entire websites and corporations saying, well, wait a minute. This isn't a fair trade. It doesn't feel so fair anymore. And we want to actually be compensated for that.

• 21:35Casey Newton?

  Absolutely. You know, particularly when there have been these cases of AI plagiarism, where even in a model that is supposed to be generating ostensibly original content based on the inputs that it's getting, people have been able to tie a lot of keywords and phrases to specific blog posts on the internet that were not that hard to find. And so, again, if somebody wants to charge me a subscription fee so that I can read a free blog post, it's just not a fair exchange.

• 22:03Kevin Roose?

  So, OK, my other question about this anti-scraping backlash is like, does it matter? Matter, right? These companies that are building the largest language models on the planet, they are ingesting trillions of words worth of data. They are ingesting huge percentages of the internet. And, you know, something that you'll hear if you talk to them, because I've asked people at these companies, you know, what happens if people start, you know, saying, "Don't index my site," or "Don't scrape my data." And they basically say like, "This doesn't really matter." Because A, we've got so much already. And B, you know, the number of people who are going to object to that and pull their data out of the training sets, if we allow them to, is so small compared to the overall internet.

• 22:43Casey Newton?

  See, that just smacks of hubris to me. It's like, these people have their wax wings on, and they're flying into the sun if they think that is the case. Like, we already saw with Zoom that, yes, this stuff matters, that you can experience a massive customer backlash within a week that threatens your entire business, right? And then I think this idea that essentially, "Ninny or ninny, we've already downloaded the internet, there's nothing you can do." I don't think it's true. I think they need ongoing access to new material. And when they're telling you that, they are being extremely self-serving and short-sighted at the same time.

• 23:15Kevin Roose?

  I like the idea that in the future, there will be like two versions of the AI models, one that has been kept up to date with the latest teen slang, and the other that is like the dad model that is just hopelessly stuck in like the year 2021. Like, if you want to say, talk in a way that's going to get you respected by your kids, you got to pay up for the new model with fresh data. Otherwise, you're going to be saying "rizz" in the year 2040, and won't that be embarrassing?

• 23:40Casey Newton?

  Well, also, I think a lot of older people would probably like talking to a chatbot that reminds them of their youth.

• 23:45Kevin Roose?

  That's true. Yeah, a lot of our language models have been stuck in the past for a long time. You said the word "mojo" just now. I mean, that was, we got to update your model.

• 23:57Kevin Roose?

  When we come back, we'll talk about another tech backlash that is brewing. This one's about self-driving cars. Beep beep.

• 24:04Casey Newton?

  Toot toot.

• 24:06Kevin Roose?

  Your car is broken. It goes toot toot.

• 24:28Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Dell Technologies. It's time to put AI to work. Is your business ready? The challenge isn't getting started with AI. It's scaling beyond pilots while maintaining control of your data, governance, infrastructure, and costs. Dell AI Factory provides the integrated foundation you need to scale AI securely and efficiently with one trusted partner. Dell, AI on your terms. From idea to impact. Learn more at dell.com/yourwaytoAI. That's dell.com/yourwaytoAI.

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• 26:08Casey Newton?

  Kevin, remember when we took a ride in that self-driving car? I do, that was so fun. And his name was Banana Slug? Yes. It was made by Cruise? Yes. And I think it's fair to say we had a good time. We did. But would it surprise you to learn that there are people who are seeing these cars in the streets of San Francisco, and they're not having a good time?

• 26:23Kevin Roose?

  It would not, in part because people in San Francisco can turn anything into a cause.

• 26:27Casey Newton?

  That's right. We love our democracy here and we love to debate the issues of the day. And I think it's fair to say that the self-driving cars have become a hot topic of discussion as they have spread throughout more and more corners of the city. And, you know, this week, the California Public Utilities Commission held an important vote on whether these things would be allowed to expand, the hours of the day that they're able to drive, or the number of neighborhoods that they're allowed to go into. And they ended up approving that expansion. Frankly, I had just been waiting for them to rubber stamp this and get on with my life so I can start taking a self-driving car to work. But other people said, we're going to put a stop to it.

• 27:05Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, there's been so much activity around this particular vote, because this is sort of seen as like a do or die moment for the self-driving car industry, at least in San Francisco. And, you know, the companies have been out sort of lobbying on this, but there are also like labor unions, like the Teamsters, who are opposed to letting these companies put more self-driving cars in San Francisco, because they worry that it could displace jobs. And then there's kind of been this grassroots activism that I really didn't see coming. And actually, one of those, have you seen this thing called the Week of Cone, where people are disabling self-driving cars using traffic cones?

• 27:41Casey Newton?

  I have not. Let's take a look at this.

• 27:43Kevin Roose?

  Okay, so let me show you this video.

• 27:46Speaker 05

  So what's the deal with the self-driving cars all over SF? These companies promise their cars will reduce traffic and collisions. But instead, they block buses, emergency vehicles, and everyday traffic.

• 27:57Kevin Roose?

  So we've seen this video, self-driving cars sort of getting stuck in traffic.

• 28:01Speaker 05

  But we can do something about it.

• 28:02Kevin Roose?

  And what they're encouraging people to do

• 28:04Speaker 05

  First, find a cone.

• 28:05Kevin Roose?

  Is to pick up orange traffic cones from the street.

• 28:08Speaker 05

  Then gently place it on the car's hood.

• 28:10Kevin Roose?

  And put them on the hood of the self-driving cars.

• 28:12Casey Newton?

  Which presumably disables them by blocking their sensors.

• 28:16Kevin Roose?

  Right.

• 28:17Speaker 05

  It's really fun and anyone can do it.

• 28:19Kevin Roose?

  They're sort of encouraging this kind of guerrilla sabotage of these self-driving cars.

• 28:25Casey Newton?

  Hooliganism, even.

• 28:28Kevin Roose?

  So naturally, the self-driving car companies hate this. They hate that this is going on. They think this is just kind of like vandalizing their property. And this is basically a misguided movement that doesn't understand that self-driving cars are actually going to be way safer than human drivers. But this movement is here. It is happening in San Francisco. And ahead of this big committee vote, we've been seeing more and more cars with cones stuck on their hoods.

• 28:53Casey Newton?

  That's right. And it's from this decentralized activist group called Safe Street Rebel. And I think it's fair to say that they're on the extreme end of the opposition, right?

• 29:03Kevin Roose?

  Right. They're basically for self-driving cars what like Greenpeace is for fossil fuel companies. They do not like self-driving cars. They think there are all kinds of problems with them, safety and otherwise. And in addition to kind of doing the normal grassroots lobbying of like trying to get this vote to sort of strike down these tests by the self-driving car companies, they've also been mounting this sort of cone-based opposition campaign.

• 29:27Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 29:28Kevin Roose?

  So clearly, this is going to be a big fight, not just in San Francisco, but I would say in a lot of cities where self-driving cars are going to be appearing in the next few years. It sort of feels like what's happening in San Francisco now is a preview of some of the civic battles to come. And so I think it's worth digging in and actually getting a sense of what the stakes are here and what the opposition to self-driving cars looks like. So today, we're going to bring in two organizers, Adam Eggleman and Mingwei Samuel, from the group Safe Street Rebel. This is the group that has been putting cones on the hoods of driverless cars in San Francisco. And we're going to talk to them about why they're doing what they're doing and what they think the future of self-driving cars should look like.

• 30:07Casey Newton?

  All right.

• 30:18Kevin Roose?

  Adam and Mingwei, welcome to Hard Fork.

• 30:20Speaker 06

  Thanks for having us.

• 30:20Kevin Roose?

  Thank you. So I want to start with just a basic question, which is just, who are you? And what is Safe Street Rebel?

• 30:27Speaker 06

  Sure. So we are organizers for Safe Street Rebel. Safe Street Rebel is the direct action and anticarceral arm of the larger San Francisco bike and transit community. So we do all sorts of direct actions, sort of leveraging our power through shenanigans, things like bike rides, vigils for people killed by traffic violence, and other sorts of street theater.

• 30:52Speaker 07

  I think that sums it up pretty well.

• 30:54Kevin Roose?

  All right. Okay. I want to get into your mission and why you're doing this kind of direct action against the self-driving cars in San Francisco. But I just want to start with a basic question that I have, which is, why cones? What do the cones do to sort of disable the self-driving cars? And like, why did you decide on that as your form of direct action?

• 31:16Speaker 06

  I'm not sure who originally came up with that, or you know.

• 31:20Speaker 07

  I think I did.

• 31:21Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah?

• 31:22Speaker 07

  There's one dispute, actually. One other guy who also may have figured that out in parallel. But, I mean, traffic cones are something that, you know, all drivers have to be aware of and observe. And part of the idea was like, as we're biking around with my bike trail, I could put a cone on that and see how would AVs respond to a cone moving around on the street? And then at some point, we thought, okay, what if, what if we just put it on the hood of the car? And so it moves around with the AV itself? And, uh, well, it turns out that just makes the AV stop in place. And I'm pretty sure that's because it just gets in the field of view of the sensors. So it just doesn't really know what to do, or maybe thinks that it's like intersecting into the cone.

• 32:03Kevin Roose?

  And what led you to decide to take action against self-driving cars? What are your objections to autonomous vehicles?

• 32:12Speaker 06

  So I think this all came about because a lot of us felt powerless with, you know, the influx of AVs in San Francisco. It's regulated by the CPUC and the DMV, both of which are not run by people who are democratically elected. So I think it came out of like, feeling powerless in sort of the face of these sort of obscure agencies and these very well-funded robotaxi companies. You know, we fundamentally see this as these companies dumping more cars on our streets in an unregulated fashion with no sort of democratic means of accountability.

• 32:43Kevin Roose?

  I want to ask you both to respond. We, um, reached out to Cruz and Waymo for comments before talking to you today. And a Cruz spokesman sent us over a comment, and I just want to read it for you and have you respond. He said, quote, "We have an active dialogue with people about AVs, including those with criticisms, as we try to make our service better and improve our technology. But regardless of your view on AVs, trying to disable cars like this in the middle of the street is an unproductive and potentially dangerous thing to do, and something that has a negative impact on real people." So I guess, who wants to respond to that?

• 33:19Speaker 07

  It has a negative impact on perhaps the person waiting for the crews to show up. However, it's a protest and there's this sort of idea, it seems like that comes up a lot, that when you do a protest, if you inconvenience anyone, you're doing something wrong. A protest is only good if you let no one know about it because no one's going to be bothered about it. So as part of a protest, you're going to turn some heads.

• 33:44Speaker 06

  And Cruise is doing a phenomenal job at proving how unreliable they are without cones.

• 33:50Speaker 07

  Yeah. They stall all the time without cones on them, so we're just adding a little bit to that.

• 33:54Kevin Roose?

  Did you consider other sort of maybe less disruptive protest tactics? I mean, you could, you could do things, you know, you could, you could, I don't know, I don't want to give anyone ideas, but you could, you could do a lot of things to drive, drive attention to your cause without actively disabling the cars or making them stall out in the middle of the road. Did you consider other tactics too?

• 34:14Speaker 07

  I mean, I should say at the very least, we do go through like official channels, do public comments and you know, it's just not exciting though.

• 34:22Speaker 06

  The goal of this, I mean, like the cones are funny and it's great street theater, but the goal was to raise awareness and start a conversation, which we think we did. And then obviously turn up public comments. So we're pretty happy with, with how this went and not really concerned with the impact it has on these companies.

• 34:41Casey Newton?

  Do you want to get more into your objections to automated vehicles overall? It's like, it's weird for me to hear because like, I can't, like to me, it's just so clear that human driven cars are so unsafe that if I could swap all of them out for AVs, I would do it tomorrow, you know?

• 34:57Speaker 06

  I mean, we definitely agree that human driven cars are a huge safety hazard. Our group is fundamentally anti-car, whether there's someone behind the wheel or not.

• 35:05Speaker 07

  Yeah. Personally, all the problems that AV companies claim they're solving, they really don't solve. The big one is, is safety. And the normal conventional ways we measure how often drivers crash, those don't really work on AVs because they fail in new and exciting and different ways. And then all the other things like reducing car ownership, we're really just putting more cars in the road, just like Uber and Lyft.

• 35:30Speaker 06

  Yeah, we see this as a repeat of what happened almost a decade ago with Lyft, when they claimed that their services would render car ownership obsolete. That's obviously not the case. And this is in a, you know, we're in a climate crisis. We need to get as many cars off the street as possible.

• 35:47Kevin Roose?

  So if the form factor for these autonomous vehicles was not cars that are designed to drive one or maybe two or three people around, if they were self-driving buses or vans that could carry multiple people, would you be less opposed to them? Is it, is it the single person occupancy that bothers you most?

• 36:04Speaker 07

  Yeah. So if we imagine if we designed some sort of transit system that was able to like guide these self-driving vehicles around, and maybe we could string a whole bunch of them together.

• 36:13Speaker 06

  On like a route even.

• 36:14Speaker 07

  On a route, maybe a given route, so people could just hop on it whenever they wanted, hop off.

• 36:19Speaker 06

  We could even call it the bus.

• 36:20Speaker 07

  Yeah, the bus or a train.

• 36:22Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 36:22Kevin Roose?

  But buses, self-driving buses would also displace, I get the point you're making, but they would also displace people from their jobs. They would also have all these other associated risks and they would be autonomous. So would that pass muster with you or would that still be something that you would object to?

• 36:39Speaker 07

  I, I agree with that. And really whether or not there's a human driver or a computer driving a bus really doesn't matter because a bus is an efficient form of transportation. So from a labor perspective, we'd object, but from a transit perspective, I think it's, it's the same thing. It's a bus. It's great.

• 36:55Speaker 06

  Yeah. And I mean, I think also we're seeing some pretty dire implications for labor with these robotaxi companies and we're hearing that a lot from the taxi unions. You know, they claim they are driverless and autonomous, but we see, you know, with the KONE campaign that someone has to retrieve these cars. There are people in call centers and the depots that have to respond to these incidents. So they may be self-driving, but there are still people involved in these operations. And they're relegated to the background and they're more invisible positions. So they're easier to exploit.

• 37:31Casey Newton?

  I mean, taxi drivers were massively exploited for their entire existence. I mean, the medallion system was horrible for people, you know? I just, I'm having a hard time understanding why that should be considered a model going forward.

• 37:45Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, it was not like a utopia of labor rights and worker empowerment.

• 37:50Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 37:51Kevin Roose?

  Yeah.

• 37:51Speaker 07

  I can.

• 37:52Speaker 06

  We want to shift most trips to public transit. I think that's pretty clear.

• 37:55Speaker 07

  Unusual that we're aligned with the taxi workers on this one.

• 37:58Speaker 06

  This is a rare, a rare case of solidarity.

• 38:00Kevin Roose?

  My enemy is my friend or whatever.

• 38:02Speaker 06

  I mean, even the fire department union is, we're aligned with, which is pretty rare for us.

• 38:08Kevin Roose?

  So your group, Safe Street Rebel, has a website and on that website, you keep a long sort of tally of incidents that you describe as AV failures.

• 38:19Speaker 07

  I have it out here printed.

• 38:20Kevin Roose?

  Oh, you actually printed it out. Wow. So it's a very long list. I think there are more than 100 incidents that you have catalogued. Everything from like this AV, you know, stopped at a stoplight and didn't go right away to actual crashes where, you know, people are hurt. Many of those have been attributed not to the AVs themselves, but to actually human drivers who bump into the AVs. You know, so I think the companies and the proponents of self-driving cars would dispute a lot of the things on these lists, but there is a big list. And it strikes me that if you kept a similar list of human driver failures, it would be way, way longer, right? You would have no shortage of crashes caused by people looking at their phones or getting

• 39:02Kevin Roose?

  distracted or making a call or listening to music too loud or just being bad drivers in the ways that humans can be bad drivers. And actually, there have been some studies that have shown that self-driving cars, you know, mile for mile, result in fewer collisions than cars driven by humans, at least in the areas where these have been tested so far. So what do you make of the people who say that by opposing self-driving cars, you're actually making the streets of San Francisco less safe?

• 39:27Speaker 07

  I fully agree that human drivers are very bad. But the thing about AVs is it's actually just increasing the total number of cars on the road. It's not eliminating human drivers, really. And also, the way that AVs fail, like I've said, they don't tend to crash. They're very good at almost crashing and creating dangerous situations that are hard to report on a, to a government organization where it sort of externalizes the risk to other road users like pedestrians or bicyclists by sort of stopping randomly in the road or just putting themselves into very awkward situations that sort of force everyone else around them to adapt.

• 40:05Casey Newton?

  I mean, I imagine you guys are big cyclists. So like, I mean, have you encountered this yourself? Like, what does an AV do that creates danger for you?

• 40:13Speaker 07

  Yeah. So, so the most common thing they do that human drivers never do is they just stop wherever they are and turn on their hazards and do nothing for multiple minutes. In some cases, this is, you know, this blocks up the entire road. So you end up with a huge queue of angry car drivers behind. You have to go around when you're biking and the bus gets caught up in it, too.

• 40:34Speaker 06

  And then there's like a fundamental misunderstanding between these robo taxi companies and the city. Whenever a robo taxi comes to a stop at an emergency situation or like is about to like enter a crime scene or an active fire scene, the robo taxi companies want the first responders to follow their procedure and scan a QR code and call the dispatcher and sort of wait and babysit these cars, which is a huge waste of their time. And that also puts people at risk.

• 41:04Speaker 07

  Got it.

• 41:04Casey Newton?

  Yeah. Are you advocating for the AVs to be taken off the road altogether?

• 41:08Speaker 06

  I mean, we want to ban cars.

• 41:10Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 41:11Speaker 06

  Something that really motivated me in this campaign was just the climate crisis angle. At the end of the day, we need to get cars off of our streets, whether they're electric, whether there's someone behind the wheel or not. Cars are car. You know, electric cars will still pollute through tire wear. That's like, it's one of the main sources of plastic pollution in our oceans. So at the end of the day, we need to get cars off our streets and more people on buses and trains. And I just see driverless cars as a huge distraction from that effort.

• 41:38Speaker 07

  I think we've ended up in a sort of classic situation where people who are fans of tech end up pointing to a new tech thing and saying, this is going to solve all our problems, when it's already a solved problem, and the solution is to design streets around people, fund transit, instead of designing them around cars.

• 41:54Casey Newton?

  Yeah, I mean, just to talk about transit for a second, I love transit. I took transit to get here today. I love taking the commute underground. It's wonderful, right? At the same time, there is disinvestment in transit. In part, that is because Uber and Lyft exist, and they sort of reduce pressure on the, on the system. At the same time, every time I read a story about transit, it's like, well, they have no money, and the, the, the project is over budget. It just seems like transit agencies, in San Francisco in particular, are just really struggling to make a good product. So what, what do you see as some of the solutions to actually make transit better?

• 42:33Speaker 07

  So, that's the problem. It's not a product. It's a public service. So, basically, the problem is transit has to compete with roads. And, I mean, we pay for roads via taxes, but no one ever goes to the freeways and looks at, what's their farebox recovery ratio for everyone driving on the roads? So, basically, you put transit in this impossible position where they have to compete with cars, and it just doesn't work out.

• 42:58Casey Newton?

  I'm wondering if you can sort of expand on this vision that you have of a world in which cars, not just autonomous cars, but all cars are banned. What does that look like?

• 43:10Speaker 06

  At least in cities.

• 43:12Casey Newton?

  In cities, okay. So, paint the picture for us. Like, convince us that that would be a more desirable world than the one that we have today. It seems very inconvenient.

• 43:20Speaker 06

  I mean, have you traveled outside of America?

• 43:23Casey Newton?

  Yes, and it's usually more convenient to hail a, a car on your phone than it is to figure out how the transit system works.

• 43:30Speaker 06

  Not in, like, cities like Amsterdam or, or Paris. A lot of cities right now are going through a process where they're rethinking, you know, how should we, like, what, what should we allocate our streets for? And when you, you know, deprioritize cars, you create cities that are quieter, cleaner, easier to get around.

• 43:54Speaker 06

  And they're safer for people who aren't in a car.

• 43:58Kevin Roose?

  I wrote a book about automation a few years ago, and as part of that, I researched how activists responded to the invention of the original automobiles back in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And fascinatingly, a lot of them are sort of making the same criticisms that you all are making today. They said cars are, you know, they're ugly, they would clog the streets and be dangerous for pedestrians, they would destroy jobs for, you know, stagecoach drivers. You know, those movements were, you know, obviously not successful. They didn't stop cars from proliferating. And, you know, actually, if you look back at the history of technology, there aren't

• 44:39Kevin Roose?

  that many successful movements that are trying to sort of sabotage or undermine new technology, especially when that technology makes people's lives, you know, safer or more convenient in some way. So, given the history of these kind of opposition movements, do you think that you may be fighting a losing battle here? Do you think that there's actually a chance that you will help turn the tide against autonomous vehicles?

• 45:03Speaker 07

  Yes. So, that is a very good parallel. And part of it is that a lot of the stuff about cars taking over the streets in modern times now, we are realizing that they had a point with freeways destroying communities and cars clogging up streets and creating pollution everywhere. People are now realizing, in the sort of new urbanist movement, that, you know, the places that did resist the expansion of cars everywhere actually had it right and have a lot better quality of life now because of it. So, in sort of the same way, when like cars appeared, there were like campaigns by the auto manufacturers to introduce the idea of like jaywalking. Now you can no longer walk in your own street. It's a crime now.

• 45:48Speaker 07

  It's sort of the same thing with AVs showing up. And now, first it was going to be, oh, they'll just be like any other driver, but now it's like, okay, if you're a firefighter, if you're a crossing guard, you should go take this training and start making room for the AVs. And when AVs and people get in conflict, it's always, people need to get out of the way, they must have been doing something wrong. And that's just backwards.

• 46:08Speaker 06

  Somehow the burden is always placed on those outside of the car.

• 46:11Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 46:13Casey Newton?

  You know, one place where I think I do agree with you guys is that you've pointed out that the AV companies partner with police and are often sort of just recording us constantly and then that gets used in a variety of ways. Can you talk a little bit about what that relationship is and why that has concerned you?

• 46:32Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, it's technically legal to record anyone in public, but if you imagine like some guy with their phone, holding it up, following you around, that'd make you pretty uncomfortable. And essentially, all the AVs are just cameras facing 360 degrees, filming everyone at all times. And that's not good for society.

• 46:51Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, it's a roving sort of network of always recording cars is not something, you know, synonymous with a democratic society.

• 47:02Kevin Roose?

  Some people in the tech industry have criticized you guys as being Luddites, just sort of reflexively opposed to new technology. Does that bother you?

• 47:13Speaker 06

  People who pay for Twitter really don't like us.

• 47:17Speaker 06

  I think it's funny that they call us Luddites without sort of understanding the full history of that term. Because the original Luddites, we're not really anti-technology. You know, we're not anti-technology either. In fact, a lot of us are tech workers. We're more concerned with the labor and the potential for exploitation, privacy concerns, sort of these second order effects.

• 47:39Speaker 07

  It's very easy to look out into the world and see like technology that exists and say, oh, this technology survived, so it's good. And you forget about all the things that didn't survive because they're not around anymore. So, I mean, things like, you know, flying cars were always supposed to be a thing and vacuum trains and all sorts of ridiculous tech doesn't exist because it just doesn't make sense. And I think AVs are one of those things.

• 48:03Speaker 06

  Yeah, and there's this assumption that AVs, through AI, will

• 48:09Speaker 06

  Automatically improve over time. That's not always the case. And that's not, you know, you can't take that as a guarantee. They can regress. One of our friends was listening to an Adam Conover podcast episode from two years ago about autonomous cars. And they mentioned how Waymo is back even two years ago, were still didn't know what to do with when they saw a cone. So there's no guarantee that they'll improve.

• 48:32Speaker 07

  I guess I'll adjust my statement a little bit. I guess personally, I think that eventually there will be AVs, but I think they're not going to solve any problems and they're just going to create more. But it, I imagine eventually when the tech finally.

• 48:46Casey Newton?

  You don't think they're gonna solve any problems?

• 48:49Speaker 07

  I don't think they'll hit people as much, but I think they will.

• 48:52Casey Newton?

  Isn't that a big problem?

• 48:55Speaker 06

  Well, there's also no guarantee that they will get people out of their cars.

• 48:58Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 48:59Speaker 06

  Like we, like we've seen this happen with, like, that was the promise that they would get people out of their cars. That has not happened. There are just more cars on the streets now.

• 49:07Speaker 07

  And they create different dangers is what I'm saying. And I can talk about specific examples if you want.

• 49:14Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, let's talk about like, what's a specific example of where an AV is less safe than a human driven car would be?

• 49:21Speaker 07

  Yeah. So on, let's see, on Monday, there was over near Golden Gate Park, there was a semi truck making a wide left turn. And any human driver in that situation would know, all right, give the semi truck some space. But AVs are very good at almost crashing. So in this case, a cruise drove up to the side of the semi truck and just stopped there because it saw it was in the way. And the semi driver didn't notice. So the semi driver kept driving and hit the AV. So then the semi driver's at fault. So that's a situation where the AV created a unique danger just by not having intuition about how the world works. Another example is, is AVs just stop in crosswalks all the time. So when you're

• 50:02Speaker 07

  crossing the street, that means you are going to have to go out into traffic to get around the AV. And then, of course, there's the cases of fire and police scenes where the AVs will just drive right up to the back of a fire truck, right next to the side, and just stall there for multiple minutes.

• 50:17Speaker 06

  Or drive over a fire hose during an active fire.

• 50:20Kevin Roose?

  Right, but so far, as I understand it, despite the fact that these vehicles have been running in San Francisco for years now, there are no documented instances in which an AV is at fault for a deadly or serious collision.

• 50:38Speaker 07

  There was a dog that was killed by Waymo.

• 50:41Kevin Roose?

  Okay, so a dog, a dog, but no human. So it does, I mean, and in that same period of time, I'm sure if you went back and looked at the data about human-driven cars, there probably were fatal crashes involving human drivers during that period in San Francisco. So I guess just from a pure safety harm reduction standpoint, shouldn't we be trying to get humans out of the driver's seat in as many cars as possible, as quickly as possible?

• 51:06Casey Newton?

  Like, I feel like...

• 51:07Kevin Roose?

  What am I missing here?

• 51:09Speaker 06

  Dumping private robotaxis onto our streets will not do that.

• 51:12Speaker 07

  The question...

• 51:13Speaker 06

  Making it harder to drive through, you know, infrastructure changes that prioritize transit and biking and walking will do that. Not dumping these cars on our streets without anyone's consent.

• 51:24Casey Newton?

  Well, I mean, I think like the most cynical reading of your project is that the reason that you don't like AVs is that they make your overall project of getting cars off the road harder, and even though it could save thousands of lives, like you're opposing it anyway.

• 51:37Speaker 06

  I mean, I don't really buy that. And also, I think that assumes our standards are just super low.

• 51:44Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 51:45Casey Newton?

  What do you mean?

• 51:46Speaker 07

  So we are fighting overall for street safety, and the thing about AVs is they are a big distraction from actual solutions.

• 51:56Casey Newton?

  But in your mind, the only actual solution is just that cars don't exist anymore.

• 52:00Speaker 06

  Or more that our built environment prioritizes other modes of transportation. Because AVs require our communities and our built environment be designed around cars.

• 52:11Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 52:11Kevin Roose?

  Right. And I've seen transit groups arguing for protected bike lanes and things like that, all of which I think are a good idea. I want to ask, of all of the contexts that we can imagine autonomous vehicles existing in, you know, busy city streets is just one of them, right? There are companies that are trying to do AVs for long haul trucking. Is that a situation where you would support autonomous vehicles if it weren't sort of in these busy areas in urban cores with lots of pedestrians and bicyclists around?

• 52:45Speaker 07

  I think the argument's certainly better there. In cities, it just makes no sense.

• 52:50Kevin Roose?

  Got it. And I think the AV companies have been training in cities because that's where you get a lot of interesting data and that's the highest challenge level for the technology is in a busy urban environment. So I think that's where they've been wanting to test. But I think ultimately, these things will be appearing everywhere. So you're not going on to the freeways and putting cones on the autonomous trucks there, right?

• 53:14Speaker 06

  Not yet.

• 53:19Kevin Roose?

  All right. Yeah. Well, thanks for stopping by. Really interesting to talk with you. And yeah, if you see Banana Slug, Banana Slug was our AV that we took. Just don't do the cone thing up and just spare Banana Slug. The Banana Slug has done nothing wrong.

• 53:34Speaker 06

  Might be a little late there.

• 53:35Kevin Roose?

  Oh, boy. Banana Slug, stand up a flare if you need help.

• 53:40Casey Newton?

  Banana Slug's rolled over in a ditch somewhere.

• 53:44Kevin Roose?

  All right. Thank you both.

• 53:46Speaker 06

  Thank you.

• 54:25Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Dell Technologies. It's time to put AI to work. Is your business ready? The challenge isn't getting started with AI. It's scaling beyond pilots while maintaining control of your data, governance, infrastructure, and costs. Dell AI Factory provides the integrated foundation you need to scale AI securely and efficiently with one trusted partner. Dell, AI on your terms. From idea to impact. Learn more at dell.com/yourwaytoAI. That's dell.com/yourwaytoAI.

• 54:59Speaker 03

  AI spend is growing fast, but most businesses still can't see exactly where that money is going. Ramp gives businesses visibility and control across AI providers with real-time guardrails by team and model, helping ensure spend goes to the highest ROI areas. Stop guessing where your AI spend is going. Get started with Ramp. And if you're new to Ramp, you can get $250 off at ramp.com/hardfork. Go to ramp.com/hardfork. Ramp.com/hardfork.

• 55:31Speaker 08

  Today's AI builders need infrastructure that scales with their ambitions. Iren is a vertically-integrated AI cloud platform, delivering data centers, compute, and software for AI training and inference, underpinned by its expansive portfolio of LAN and grid-connected power in renewable-rich regions globally. Iren's AI cloud gives direct access to Nvidia GPUs, scalable from hundreds to thousands. For builders, that means direct access to AI compute, rapid scaling, and predictable pricing. Iren, AI cloud for the next big thing.

• 56:06Casey Newton?

  All right, Kevin, we have talked a lot today about rebellion and backlash.

• 56:11Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, it's been a big "Power to the People" episode at Hard Fork.

• 56:14Casey Newton?

  Power to the people, and I want to talk now about a case where the people definitively lost. And that was in their uprising against Reddit. And it's another story about folks caught up in the big fight over AI data scraping. So let's get into it.

• 56:30Kevin Roose?

  Yes, so we talked about this story on the show a few weeks ago when the rebellion was sort of in full swing. This was, you know, users of Reddit who protested these changes to the Reddit API that the company said were designed to ward off data scraping by AI companies, but that had the effect of sort of putting a lot of the third-party apps that people use Reddit with out of business.

• 56:51Casey Newton?

  Yeah, so just a quick recap. Earlier this year, Reddit said, hey, we're uncomfortable with these large language models scraping our site. We are going to make changes to our API. Previously, anyone could use their Reddit API basically for free to do a lot of things, including making accessibility tools, making tools for moderators, or even making a third-party Reddit client that didn't show ads and people were selling these in the App Store, in some cases, making pretty healthy sums of money. And Reddit shut it all down, and people really, really did not like that. And there was a huge protest in which subreddits were going dark, or they were labeling themselves as not safe for work, which prevented them from being monetized.

• 57:34Casey Newton?

  And it has been just a huge, huge thing over at Reddit.

• 57:39Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, and the company's CEO, Steve Huffman, stood firm against the protesters and basically said, like, we're gonna wait this one out, and eventually, things will die down. So what happened after that?

• 57:50Casey Newton?

  Well, they waited things out and things died down. But, but I think how they did it is worth talking about because it was, I think, a pretty brutal crackdown. The first thing they did was they threatened to remove moderators. So the reason that all of this was able to happen was that Reddit moderators had the ability to make their Reddit so that nobody could read them, or make them so that they were labeled not safe for work. And Reddit said, hey, if you- You do this past a certain point, we are going to remove you as moderators and we're going to install our own generals.

• 58:21Kevin Roose?

  Do they have that? Like, do they have like this army of like Vichy generals that they can put in to replace the moderators who volunteered to clean up the site?

• 58:30Casey Newton?

  They essentially solicited for scabs and found them and then installed them at these subreddits. And one of the places I noted where they replaced the moderators was the subreddit devoted to canning, you know, like sort of preserving fruits and vegetables.

• 58:45Kevin Roose?

  Is this a big subreddit that you visit a lot?

• 58:48Casey Newton?

  It's a huge subreddit that I visit a lot. And I just couldn't help but notice that the moderators of r/canning were canned. And that just seemed like something worth pointing out. But, you know, they started to reopen these subreddits under new management. There were some continuing protests. So for example, at r/pics, which is just a place to post interesting images, those moderators created a rule that you could only post images of the TV host John Oliver looking sexy.

• 59:17Kevin Roose?

  Wait, this was what? I saw all these John Oliver pictures. This was part of an organized protest?

• 59:22Casey Newton?

  Yes, they were trying to continue the protest by doing that. r/aw, which I think is a subreddit devoted to cute things, only allowed pictures of John Oliver and a cute otter mascot from his show. r/gifts only allowed gifs of John Oliver. So these are really big boards and it was pretty disruptive.

• 59:39Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, they should have put cones on top of the John Oliver gifs.

• 59:42Casey Newton?

  Well, I'm sure they'll be thinking about it after today's episode. There's also this thing that Reddit does every year called r place, which gives each Reddit user the ability to color on a huge digital art mural. And so people always make sort of elaborate creations by collaborating.

• 59:57Kevin Roose?

  This is like community, like crowdsourced graffiti on the internet kind of thing.

• 1:00:00Casey Newton?

  Exactly. And so the, this year, the makers of our place had a message that they spelled out with pixels. And that message was fuck Spez. Spez is the Reddit CEO's username. Steve Huffman goes by Spez on Reddit. And eventually it got to the point where Reddit stopped people from posting or commenting on r place. So, look, about 1,800 subreddits are Still dark today, but it's mostly pretty small ones. And it does seem like the furor is subsiding.

• 1:00:31Kevin Roose?

  Did Reddit make any concessions to the protests? Or did they basically just say like, we're going to replace you as moderators? If you don't shape up and get in line and that kind of worked.

• 1:00:41Casey Newton?

  So I don't know if they would say this was a concession, but they did assure people that the API would continue to be able to be used for free for makers of accessibility and moderation tools. And that did seem to take a lot of sting out of the protests. At the same time, those other third party apps are shutting down. And Reddit has installed new and presumably more pliant moderators who will do its bidding.

• 1:01:09Kevin Roose?

  What's amazing about this to me is that if you'd asked me before this, like, what is the site on the internet where a user rebellion has the biggest chance of succeeding? I probably would have said Reddit because as social media platforms go, it puts a lot of power in the hands of these sort of local moderators, these people who, you know, are moderating the history subreddits and the pics subreddits and the canning subreddits. Like, those people actually do have a lot of power. They are not normal users and they have leverage, in particular, the ability to like shut down or sort of disable their own communities. So it seemed like it was heading for a pretty long stalemate because unlike the users of Facebook or Instagram or X formerly known as Twitter,

• 1:01:52Kevin Roose?

  the people on Reddit, some of them do actually have real power. But it seems like that was not enough to get them what they wanted.

• 1:01:58Casey Newton?

  Well, because in the end Reddit was able to take that power back, right? Because Reddit controls whether a forum is open or closed, who the moderators are, what they're allowed to do, what tools they can use, who can post and comment. And in the end, they decided, you know what? We are going to sort of take these unprecedented actions to remake Reddit the way that we see fit. So, you know, why did Reddit win this? Well, this is how you crush a rebellion, right? Like, if you are invading a country, a lot of local politicians are going to be mad at you. But if you can capture and replace them with leadership that is loyal to you, over time, you will sap the energy of that movement. Because at the end of the day, most people Just want to live their lives. So basically Reddit made the most cynical bet possible and it paid off.

• 1:02:41Kevin Roose?

  Right.

• 1:02:41Casey Newton?

  But people are getting really annoyed at this. And I think, and this kind of segues to what I really want to talk about here. This is why people care about, and we do hate this word, decentralization.

• 1:02:52Kevin Roose?

  I knew you were going here and I've been dreading this moment in the conversation because, you know, I do think that this issue of ownership or the lack of ownership on social media is a really big issue for a small group of people who want to keep, you know, their own subreddit, who want to keep their own handles. I don't think most people care about owning their social media data or information. But for a small number of people, it is a very salient issue.

• 1:03:17Casey Newton?

  Yeah, and, and I think that the existence of these people is a good thing for the internet overall because you're right, most people, they don't care. They didn't care that much about the Reddit stuff. They're still going to keep using Reddit because they want to, you know, know how to can their preserves this summer. But there are other people who are really principled, who believe in good governance and who want to be able to sketch out alternate visions of the internet, you know, that like, these are the people that buy their own web domains and they build their own websites because they want to build a vision of the web that is outside of this kind of corporate control. And as you say, like, this has been a pretty like nichey little cul-de-sac of the internet for a long time.

• 1:04:02Casey Newton?

  But because people keep rebelling against these platforms, because they're keeping these moments where everyone gets so mad, it is pushing more and more attention to some of these alternatives. So in this case, there is an alternative to Reddit known as Lemmy, which you might think of as a kind of mastodon for Reddit. You can set up your own server for it. And I think the vision here is that if you want to run a canning forum that has a lot of Reddit-like aspects, but at the end of the day, no one is going to come along and say, well, you, you, you can't do this or that anymore, or, you know, you don't want someone to come along and start charging for an API or shutting down a tool that you rely on. Well, now you have that opportunity because you have built your own home on the web.

• 1:04:44Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, and I, look, I'm not opposed to decentralized social media. I think it is, in theory, a good idea to have less centralization on popular internet platforms and to give people actual ownership rights and sort of portability rights where you can, you know, if you stop agreeing with the way one social platform is run, you can take your account and all your followers and go to another social platform. I'm on board with that. Where I'm, where I'm sort of left cold on this is just the idea that this is going to be the differentiator in why people would choose to use one product over another. And we saw this with crypto a lot, where people would come along and they would say, you know, crypto solves all these problems for people. It means that the bank can't unilaterally seize your assets.

• 1:05:29Kevin Roose?

  You know, it means that Venmo can't blacklist you from sending certain transactions. And, you know, my response to that was always like, how many people actually have that problem? Right? How many people are actually getting their bank accounts shut down? How many people are actually trying to send wires, you know, to, to, to, through Venmo and getting those transactions canceled because they're on some government list?

• 1:05:48Casey Newton?

  Also, crypto assets are just seized all the time now. If I read about a crypto asset online, it's probably because it was seized.

• 1:05:55Kevin Roose?

  Right. So crypto, this was one of the main points that proponents of crypto would make is like, this is a decentralized form of finance that is accountable to no centralized entity, where it's censorship resistant. And that was the pitch that they made. And guess what? That pitch did not resonate with people. To the extent that it did, the people were actually interested in getting rich. They were not interested in censorship resistant money, for the most part. So I just think that it's very easy to overstate how big a deal this is to normal people. I think that if there is a version of Reddit, or X, or Facebook, or Instagram, or any of these companies that is decentralized, it could take off, but it will not be because it is decentralized. It'll be because it's a better product.

• 1:06:35Casey Newton?

  Right. And I think the only thing I would say in response to that is I think that decentralization can make it a better product, right? So when you look at what is happening on Mastodon right now, Mastodon, as we've talked about before, is built on this standard called Activity Pub. Other services are testing out support for it, including Automatt. Which makes WordPress the most popular blog software. Automattic also owns Tumblr, a social network of its own. There are publishers now, you know, the BBC has now said that it is spinning up a Mastodon server. So what that means is you have this user base, mostly thanks to Meta's Threads product. And if and when Threads ever decides to become interoperable with that broader, what they call the Fediverse,

• 1:07:19Casey Newton?

  then I think you just sort of have some interesting possibilities. Then you're able to build new social experiences, starting from this big user base, but where people have a little bit more control over their little corner of the web. And I can't tell you exactly what it's going to look like, but the idea of all of these things being interoperable and individual users having a little bit more control, it just gets me excited.

• 1:07:42Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, well, you probably also like the California ballot initiatives, where, you know, millions of people are asked to vote on like, you know,

• 1:07:49Casey Newton?

  Dialysis centers.

• 1:07:51Kevin Roose?

  Like, I do think there is such a thing as too much direct democracy.

• 1:07:55Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:56Kevin Roose?

  And when it comes to social media platforms, I think what we've seen with these decentralized platforms is that they just descend into chaos. And there is no centralized force that is able to like stem the tide of entropy and like make it a pleasant and intuitive thing to use.

• 1:08:11Casey Newton?

  Right, so you want to entrust your entire future on the internet to the whims of Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk? That's your pitch? Interesting.

• 1:08:18Kevin Roose?

  I didn't say that. I didn't say that. But I do think that there will be some combination of decentralization and centralization. I don't think it is all one or all the other. I think there may be situations like you've described with Activity Pub, where you have Threads, which is owned by Meta, which is a centralized company that is making centralized decisions about content moderation and rules and things like that, but that is sort of building on this open infrastructure. And I think, you know, that will be a sort of a compromised position that a lot of companies may take, if only. But then I think you get back into this question of what happened at Reddit. Because if Reddit had been decentralized, I think there's a good chance that the site would still be unusable today, that we would still be in this rebellion,

• 1:09:01Kevin Roose?

  that the company and the users and the moderators would have locked And that there'd be sort of no way of resolving that. And as a result, we might lose Reddit. So what is the, what is your take on that? Like, has the Reddit rebellion proved that decentralization is necessary? Or that actually there is some benefit to centralization after all?

• 1:09:19Casey Newton?

  Well, at the end of the day, Reddit is not a profitable company. And so it's hard for me to say that a centralized network is the one that is gonna win, at least in the Reddit space, until it starts making any money, right? I think you're right that a decentralized version of it will have struggles of its own. But like Reddit has existed for a really long time. It's still not making any money. And so this idea of like, well, but would a decentralized version of it work? You know, maybe it would work better.

• 1:09:44Kevin Roose?

  Maybe. I mean, Wikipedia is, is the sort of classic example of something that is sort of decentralized in both the way it operates and the way that users contribute to it. There's, you know, there's the Wikimedia Foundation, which kind of raises money for it and sort of oversees the technical infrastructure. But in all the important ways, like it is a sort of community decentralized project.

• 1:10:06Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:06Kevin Roose?

  And it's worked really well.

• 1:10:07Casey Newton?

  Yeah, and they don't print the Encyclopedia Britannica anymore. So that's how well that worked.

• 1:10:11Kevin Roose?

  Yeah. But at the same time, Wikipedia is also full of drama. I'm sure if you've talked to like Wikipedia editors, there's always some crazy drama going on in Wikipedia. Someone's edits are getting reverted. Someone is being asked to cite a source. Like, it's not, it's not an, you know, contentious process.

• 1:10:26Casey Newton?

  I mean, Kevin, let me tell you about something about the internet. There's gonna be dramas going on, okay? When, when people are speaking to each other on the internet, there's gonna be conflicts and dramas. And that's gonna be true whether things are centralized or decentralized. But look, coming out of the past decade that we had, I really do think a lot of people left it feeling like we have to reset the balance of power a little bit. And some of that power needs to go from these platforms back to the users.

• 1:10:49Kevin Roose?

  And if you believe that, I've got a cryptocurrency to sell you.

• 1:10:51Casey Newton?

  And I have a cone to put on your head.

• 1:11:20Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Dell Technologies. It's time to put AI to work. Is your business ready? The challenge isn't getting started with AI. It's scaling beyond pilots while maintaining control of your data, governance, infrastructure, and costs. Dell AI Factory provides the integrated foundation you need to scale AI securely and efficiently with one trusted partner. Dell, AI on your terms. From idea to impact. Learn more at dell.com/yourwaytoAI. That's dell.com/yourwaytoAI.

• 1:11:55Speaker 03

  AI spend is growing fast, but most businesses still can't see exactly where that money is going. Ramp gives businesses visibility and control across AI providers with real-time guardrails by team and model, helping ensure spend goes to the highest ROI areas. Stop guessing where your AI spend is going. Get started with Ramp. And if you're new to Ramp, you can get $250 off at ramp.com/hardfork. Go to ramp.com/hardfork. Ramp.com/hardfork.

• 1:12:26Speaker 08

  Today's AI builders need infrastructure that scales with their ambitions. iRen is a vertically integrated AI cloud platform, delivering data centers, compute, and software for AI training and inference, underpinned by its expansive portfolio of land and grid-connected power in renewable-rich regions globally. iRen's AI Cloud gives direct access to Nvidia GPUs, scalable from hundreds to thousands. For builders, that means direct access to AI compute, rapid scaling, and predictable pricing. iRen, AI Cloud for the next big thing.

• 1:13:01Casey Newton?

  So Kevin, last week, we talked about LK99, the alleged room temperature superconductor. And I believe you have an update for us about that.

• 1:13:10Kevin Roose?

  So last week, after the show, LK99 got the hard fork bump. Everyone was talking about it. You put on threads that you were snorting LK99 in the club bathroom.

• 1:13:20Casey Newton?

  I just wanted to see what would happen.

• 1:13:23Kevin Roose?

  And I think it's safe to say it has not gone well for LK99. It's not been a good week.

• 1:13:27Casey Newton?

  How did this happen? It's, we were so close to having a room temperature superconductor.

• 1:13:32Kevin Roose?

  Well, we weren't actually that close. It looked from the videos like we might be close, but several labs have finished trying to replicate their LK99 creation process. And all evidence that we have so far points to the fact that this is not actually a room temperature superconductor. No one has been able to replicate this finding. And the betting markets where the gamblers go to wager on whether this will be replicated or not has fallen quite a bit. So the good money is now predicting that this is not a room temperature superconductor, and it looks like we may have had a little bit of false hope.

• 1:14:04Casey Newton?

  Well, that's the last time I'm trusting science. But you know, I read that this LK99, while not a superconductor, there is evidence that it is ferromagnetic. And I guess my question for you is, what does that mean?

• 1:14:17Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, I'm just, I'm gonna ask ChatGPT what ferromagnetic means.

• 1:14:19Casey Newton?

  Yeah, let's see what it has to say.

• 1:14:21Kevin Roose?

  Okay.

• 1:14:23Kevin Roose?

  ChatGPT, explain ferromagnetism to me, an idiot.

• 1:14:37Kevin Roose?

  Okay. Okay, this is already way too complicated.

• 1:14:41Casey Newton?

  Oh, no.

• 1:14:42Kevin Roose?

  Okay.

• 1:14:42Casey Newton?

  Did you make sure to tell it you're an idiot?

• 1:14:44Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, I told it I was an idiot, but it's now drawing like an extended metaphor about teachers and classrooms.

• 1:14:49Casey Newton?

  Really?

• 1:14:50Kevin Roose?

  So imagine a classroom filled with kids.

• 1:14:52Casey Newton?

  Okay.

• 1:14:53Kevin Roose?

  The kids are atoms.

• 1:14:54Casey Newton?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:14:55Kevin Roose?

  Every kid is holding an arrow that can point in one of two directions. This is already like, it's, it's getting, it's giving polarity. It's giving, it's alignment of spins, magnetic domains. The ChatGPT does not understand how big of an idiot I am. The neural network is confused.

• 1:15:11Casey Newton?

  Well, that's, I mean, that would require a lot more training parameters.

• 1:15:17Kevin Roose?

  We're gonna need more GPUs for that.

• 1:15:25Kevin Roose?

  Hard Fork is produced by Davis Land and Rachel Cohn. We're edited by Jen Poyant. This episode was fact-checked by Caitlin Love. Today's show was engineered by Sophia Landman. Original music by Dan Powell, Alicia Baty-Tup, Marian Lozano, and Diane Wong. Special thanks to Paula Schuman, Pluwing Tam, Nuga Logley, Kate LaPresty, and Jeffrey Miranda. You can email us, as always, at [email protected]. And we promise not to use your email to train our AI. Don't make that promise.

• 1:15:58Kevin Roose?

  I am training a language model in my jason as we speak.

• 1:16:49Speaker 03

  You can't undo everything in life, but you can undo prediabetes. More than 2 in 5 adults in the US have prediabetes. Most don't know they have it. But with early diagnosis and action, you can delay or even prevent type 2 diabetes. Visit doihaveprediabetes.org to take the 1-minute risk test and start undoing the things you can. Brought to you by the Ad Council and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.