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

23:55Kevin, 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 Cruz. 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? It would not, in part because people in San Francisco can turn anything into a cause. 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.

24:26And, 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. 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.

25:02and, 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? I have not. Let's take a look at this. Okay, so let me show you this video. So what's the deal with the self-driving cars all over SF?

25:36These companies promise their cars will reduce traffic and collisions. But instead they block buses, emergency vehicles, and everyday traffic. So we see in this video self-driving cars sort of getting stuck in traffic. But we can do something about it. And what they're encouraging people to do is to pick up orange traffic cones from the street and put them on the hood of the self-driving cars. which presumably disables them by blocking their sensors. Right. It's really fun and anyone can do it. They're sort of encouraging this kind of guerrilla sabotage of these self-driving cars. Hooliganism even.

26:14So, you know, 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. 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?

26:50Right, they're basically, for self-driving cars, what 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. 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.

27:24It 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 Eggelman 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.

27:54All right.

28:04Adam and Ming Wei, welcome to Hard Fork. Thanks for having us. So I want to start with just a basic question, which is just, who are you and what is Safe Street Rebel? Sure. So we are organizers for Safe Street Rebel. Safe Street Rebel is the direct action and anti-carceral 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. Yeah. I think that sums it up pretty well. 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.

28:51But 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? I'm not sure who originally came up with that. I think I did. Oh, yeah? 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.

29:29And then at some point we thought, OK, what if what if we just put it on the hood of the car? And so it moves around with the AV itself. And 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. And what led you to decide to take action against self-driving cars? What are your objections to autonomous vehicles? So I think this all came about because a lot of us felt powerless with the influx of AVs in San Francisco.

30:05It'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 feeling powerless in sort of the face of these sort of obscure agencies and these very well-funded robo-taxi 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. I want to ask you both to respond. We reached out to Cruz and Waymo for a comment before talking to you today. And a Cruz spokesman sent us over a comment. I just want to read it for you and have you respond.

30:42He 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? It has a negative impact on perhaps the person waiting for the cruise 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.

31:22A 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. And Cruz is doing a phenomenal job at proving how unreliable they are without cones. Yeah. They stall all the time without cones on them. So we're just adding a little bit to that. Did you consider other sort of maybe less disruptive protest tactics? I mean, you could do things, you know, you could, I don't know, I don't want to give anyone ideas, but you could do a lot of things to drive attention to your cause without actively disabling the cars or making them stall out in the middle of the road.

31:59Did you consider other tactics too? I mean, I should say at the very least, we do go through official channels, do public comments, and it's just not exciting, though. The goal of this, 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 out public comments. So we're pretty happy with how this went and not really concerned with the impact it has on these companies. Do you want to get more into your objections to automated vehicles overall? It's weird for me to hear because I can't. 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.

32:43We 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. But yeah, personally, all the problems that AV companies claim they're solving, they really don't solve. The big one 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. 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.

33:27That's obviously not the case. And this is, you know, we're in a climate crisis. We need to get as many cars off the street as possible. 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 the single person occupancy that bothers you most? Yeah, so if we imagine if we designed some sort of transit system that was able to guide these self-driving vehicles around, and maybe we could string a whole bunch of them together.

34:00On like a route, even. On a route, maybe a given route, so people could just hop on whenever they wanted, hop off. We could even call it the bus. Yeah, the bus or a train. Yeah. But 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? 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.

34:35So from a labor perspective, we'd object. But from a transit perspective, I think it's the same thing. It's a bus. It's great. Yeah, I mean, I think also we're seeing some pretty dire implications for labor with these robo-taxi 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 Cone 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, you know, they may be self-driving, but there are still people involved in these operations.

35:11and they're relegated to the background and they're more invisible positions, so they're easier to exploit. 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. Yeah, it was not like a utopia of labor rights and worker empowerment. Yeah. Yeah. I can agree with that. We want to shift most trips to public transit. I think that's pretty clear. Unusual that we're aligned with the taxi workers on this one. Yeah, this is a rare case of solidarity.

35:48My enemy is my friend or whatever they say. I mean, even the fire department union we're aligned with, which is pretty rare for us. 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. I have it out here printed. Oh, you actually printed it out. So it's a very long list. I think there are more than 100 incidents that you have cataloged. 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, you know, attributed not to the AVs themselves, but to actually human drivers who bump into the AVs.

36:30You 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 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.

37:07So 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? 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 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.

37:51I 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? Yeah, 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. And then there's like a fundamental misunderstanding between these robo-taxi companies and the city.

38:27Whenever a robo-taxi comes to a stop at an emergency situation or like is about to 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. Got it. Yeah. Are you advocating for the AVs to be taken off the road altogether? I mean, we want to ban cars. Yeah. 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.

39:08Car's a car. You know, electric cars will still pollute through tire wear. That's like 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. 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.

39:41I mean, just to talk about transit for a second, I love transit. I took transit to get here today. I love taking community 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 system. At the same time, every time I read a story about transit, it's like, well, they have no money, and 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 do you see as some of the solutions to actually make transit better?

40:20So 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. 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? At least in cities.

40:59In 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. I mean, have you traveled outside of America? Yes, and it's usually more convenient to hail a car on your phone than it is to figure out how the transit system works. Not in cities like Amsterdam or Paris. A lot of cities right now are going through a process where they're rethinking what should we allocate our streets for. and when you deprioritize cars you create cities that are quieter, cleaner easier to get around and they're safer for people who aren't in a car 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.

42:04They said cars are ugly. They would clog the streets and be dangerous for pedestrians. They would destroy jobs for stagecoach drivers. Those movements were 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 that many successful movements that are trying to sort of sabotage or undermine new technology, especially when that technology makes people's lives 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?

42:44Do you think that there's actually a chance that you will help turn the tide against autonomous vehicles? Yes. 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. where 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.

43:22So 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. It's sort of the same thing with AVs showing up. and now first it was going to be able to 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.

43:54And that's just backwards. Somehow the burden is always placed on those outside of the car. Yeah. 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? 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.

44:28And essentially, all the AVs are just cameras facing 360 degrees filming everyone at all times, and that's not good for society. Yeah, I mean, it's a roving sort of network of always recording cars. It's not something, you know, synonymous with a democratic society. 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? People who pay for Twitter really don't like us. 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.

45:13We'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. It's very easy to look out into the world and see 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 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.

45:50Yeah, and there's this assumption that AVs through AI will automatically improve over time. That's not always the case. 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 still didn't know what to do with when they saw a cone. So there's no guarantee that they'll improve. 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.

46:30But I imagine eventually when the tech finally is better. You don't think they're going to solve any problems? I don't think they'll hit people as much, but I think they will. Isn't that a big problem? Well, there's also no guarantee that they will get people out of their cars. Yes. We've seen this happen with left. 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. And they create different dangers is what I'm saying. And I can talk about specific examples if you want. Yeah, let's talk about it. Like what's a specific example of where an AV is less safe than a human-driven car would be?

47:08Yeah, 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.

47:44Another example is AVs just stop in crosswalks all the time. So when you're 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. Or drive over a fire hose during an active fire. 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.

48:25There was a dog that was killed by Waymo. Okay, so a dog, but no humans. 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? Like, I feel like— What am I missing here? Dumping private robo-taxis onto our streets will not do that. Making it harder to drive through infrastructure changes that prioritize transit and biking and walking will do that.

49:07Not dumping these cars on our streets without anyone's consent. Well, I mean, I think 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, you're opposing it anyway. I mean, I don't really buy that. And also, I think that assumes our standards are just super low. Yeah. What do you mean? So, we are fighting overall for street safety. And the thing about AVs is they are a big distraction from actual solutions. But in your mind, the only actual solution is just that cars don't exist anymore.

49:47Or more that our built environment prioritizes other modes of transportation. because, you know, AVs require our communities and our built environment be designed around cars. Yeah, right. And I've seen transit groups arguing for, you know, protected bike lanes and things like that, all of which I think are a good idea. I want to ask, like, 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?

50:32I think the argument's certainly better there. In cities, it just makes no sense. 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 sort of 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 onto the freeways and putting cones on the autonomous trucks there, right? Not yet. Okay.

51:06All 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. Banana Slug has done nothing wrong. Might be a little late there. Oh, boy. Banana Slug, send up a flare if you need help. Banana Slug's rolled over in a ditch somewhere. All right. Thank you both. Thank you.

51:44Thank you.

52:13All right, Kevin, we have talked a lot today about rebellion and backlash. Yeah, it's been a big Power to the People episode. 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. 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.

52:53But they had the effect of sort of putting a lot of the third party apps that people use Reddit with out of business. 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 the 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.

53:27And 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. And it has been just a huge, huge thing over at Reddit. Yeah, and the company's CEO, Steve Huffman, stood firm against the protesters and basically said, like, we're going to wait this one out and eventually things will die down. So what happened after that? Well, they waited things out and things died down. But I think how they did it is worth talking about because it was, I think, a pretty brutal crackdown.

54:08The first thing they did was they threatened to remove moderators. So the reason that all this was able to happen was that Reddit moderators have 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 do this past a certain point, we are going to remove you as moderators and we're going to install our own generals. 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 volunteer to clean up the site? They essentially solicited for scabs and found them and then installed them at these subreddits.

54:43And 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. Is this a big subreddit that you visit a lot? It's a huge subreddit that I visit a lot. And I just couldn't help but notice that the moderators of r slash 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 slash 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.

55:25Wait, this was what I saw all these John Oliver pictures. This was part of an organized protest. Yes, they were trying to continue the protest by doing that. R slash awe, which I think is a subreddit to vote acute things, only allowed pictures of John Oliver and a cute otter mascot from his show. Our gifts only allowed gifts of John Oliver. So these are really big boards and it was pretty disruptive. Yeah, they should have put cones on top of the John Oliver. 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 slash place, which gives each Reddit user the ability to color on a huge digital art mural.

56:01And so people always make sort of elaborate creations by collaborating. This is like community, like crowdsourced graffiti on the internet kind of thing. Exactly. And so this year, the makers of ArtPlace had a message that they spelled out with pixels. And that message was, fuck Spez. Uh, Spez is the Reddit CEO's username, Steve Huffman. It goes by Spez on Reddit. And, um, eventually it got to the point where Reddit stopped people from posting or commenting on r slash 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.

56:38Did 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? 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 betting.

57:16What's amazing about this to me is that if you had 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 shut down or disable their own communities.

57:49So 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, 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. 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.

58:26So, 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. 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.

59:00I 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. 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.

59:33They didn't care that much about the Reddit stuff. They're still going to keep using Reddit because they want to 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. 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 niche little cul-de-sac of the internet for a long time.

1:00:09But 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 can't do this or that anymore, or you don't want someone to come along and start charging for an API or shutting down a tool that you rely on.

1:00:47Well, now you have that opportunity because you have built your own home on the web. 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 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.

1:01:26And 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. 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 through Venmo and getting those transactions canceled because they're on some government list?

1:01:56Like 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. 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.

1:02:29I 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. 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 ActivityPub. Other services are testing out support for it, including Automatic, which makes WordPress the most popular blog software.

1:03:05Automatic also owns Tumblr, a social network of its own. There are publishers now. 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 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.

1:03:48It just gets me excited. Yeah, well, you probably also like the California ballot initiatives where, you know, millions of people are asked to vote on like, you know, the fate of dialysis centers. Like, I do think there is such a thing as too much direct democracy. 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. Right, so you want to entrust your entire future on the internet to the whims of Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk.

1:04:24That's your pitch. Interesting. 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 ActivityPub 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 compromise 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, that the company and the users and the moderators would have locked horns and that there'd be sort of no way of resolving that.

1:05:15And as a result, we might lose Reddit. So 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? 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, Red Hat has existed for a really long time. It's still not making any money.

1:05:47And so this idea of like, well, but would a decentralized version of it work? You know, maybe it would work better. Maybe. I mean, Wikipedia 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, It is a sort of community decentralized project. Yeah. And it's worked really well. Yeah, and they don't print the Encyclopedia Britannica anymore.

1:06:17So that's how well that worked. But at the same time, Wikipedia is also full of drama. I'm sure if you've talked to 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. It's not an uncontentious process. I mean, Kevin, let me tell you something about the internet. There's going to be dramas going on, okay? When people are speaking to each other on the internet, there's going to be conflicts and dramas. And that's going to 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.

1:06:53And some of that power needs to go from these platforms back to the users. And if you believe that, I've got a cryptocurrency to sell you. And I have a cone to put on your head.

1:07:29So, Kevin, last week we talked about LK99, the alleged room temperature superconductor, And I believe you have an update for us about that. 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 over the weekend. I just wanted to see what would happen. And I think it's safe to say it has not gone well for LK99. It's not been a good week. How did this happen? We were so close to having a room temperature superconductor. Well, we weren't actually that close. It looked from the videos like we might be close.

1:08:04but 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. 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.

1:08:43And I guess my question for you is, what does that mean? I'm going to ask ChatGPT what ferromagnetic is. Yeah, let's see what it has to say. Okay. ChatGPT, explain ferromagnetism to me, an idiot.

1:09:06Okay Okay, this is already way too complicated Oh no Okay Did you make sure to tell it you're an idiot? Yeah, I told it I was an idiot But it's now drawing like an extended metaphor About teachers and classrooms Really? So imagine a classroom filled with kids Okay The kids are atoms Every kid is holding an arrow That can point in one of two directions This is already like It's giving polarity It's alignment of spins magnetic domains ChatJBT does not understand how big of an idiot I am the neural network is confused that would require a lot more training parameters we're going to need more GPUs for that

1:09:53Hard 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 Butyutube, Marion Lozano, and Diane Wong. Special thanks to Paula Schumann, Pui Wing Tam, Nelga Logli, Kate Lepresti, and Jeffrey Miranda. You can email us, as always, at hardfork at nytimes.com. And we promise not to use your email to train our AI. Don't make that promise. I am training a language model in my basement as we speak.

1:10:33Thank you.

1:11:02Thank you.