On June 8, 2025, Los Angeles caught fire—again. The catalyst this time was a series of federal immigration raids. But it wasn’t just government buildings or police cruisers that bore the brunt of public rage. In the thick of the chaos, Waymo’s autonomous vehicles—driverless, silent, clinical—were pulled from their loops and set ablaze. Their driverless bodies attacked, spray-painted, burned. It looked less like opportunistic vandalism and more like ritual desecration.

In some ways it echoed 1992, when after the acquittal of officers in the Rodney King beating, South Central erupted. At the time it was TVs and stereos—symbols of a consumerist dream beamed nightly into homes that could rarely afford it—that were destroyed. Not always stolen but often just smashed amidst the chaos.

What ties 1992 and 2025 together isn’t just urban unrest or race or economics—though all three play their parts. It’s something quieter but more foundational: a rejection of the future being sold. This is the case when people set fire to frontier technology; they aren’t just breaking things. They’re expressing something close to a political theology. They're saying: this future is not ours.

Progress Becomes the Provocation

Progress has always been positioned as neutral, inevitable, even benevolent. But to the people most often excluded from its dividends, progress can look like a system of managed displacements. In 1992, the consumer electronics boom had reached its apex. Sony, Panasonic, RCA were the glossy brands promising modernity, tantalizing those who couldn't partake in that future. For most, modernity was a mirage, as it often is.

In 2025, Waymo rides through that same city, but without even a driver to make eye contact. It doesn't just signal modernity; it signals a suffocating absence of agency.

When protesters set fire to those vehicles, they weren't merely rejecting the ICE raids that sparked the riots. They were rejecting the future as it had been presented to them—an automated, impersonal one, built for someone else’s benefit. And in this sense, Waymo’s cars weren’t targeted instead of power structures. They were the power structures.

The Economics of Erasure

Both 1992 and 2025 reflect economies designed to function around the people now rioting. In '92, it was a low-wage service economy under siege by racialized policing and corporate consolidation. In 2025, it's a digitized, gigified city—divided by those who ride Waymos and those who watch them pass by.

Modernity hasn't always felt impersonal, although it has marched towards that slowly but steadily. A driverless taxi isn’t just a marvel of engineering, it’s a sign of a new system arriving, without consent or consultation. In so many of these cases, what looks like chaos is often, in fact, a referendum.

Capitalism’s Reflective Surface

It would be too easy to blame technology alone. Machines are not evil. But they are emissaries. And in a system where technological advancement is an inevitability of capital accumulation, those emissaries begin to represent something far larger. They become stand-ins for a kind of progress that feels unilateral, top-down, extractive.

And so it is that technology becomes for better or worse, the most visible expression of capitalist directionality. It is sleek. It is automated. It is scalable. It asks for no permission; this is why it gets targeted during unrest.

What’s happening isn’t nihilism. It’s ritual. It’s spectacle. And it’s protest, even when no demands are issued.

Between Symbol and System

None of this is to say that technology deserves destruction. Nor should these acts be read purely as justified revolution. But they are instructive. They reveal where the circuit breaks—between aspiration and access, between innovation and inclusion.

Tech companies today are far more powerful than the electronics giants of the early ’90s. They don't just sell devices; they rewire labor markets, surveil behavior, reshape cities. Their role in society is no longer optional—it’s infrastructural. But with that power comes the burden of listening. Because when a car is set on fire, what’s really being torched is the idea that we are all on the same ride.

So when we see the flames of 1992 mirrored in the smoldering wreckage of a 2025 Waymo, we should not look away. We should listen. Because in the crackle of those fires, there is a message.

It says: progress without consent is not progress. It’s imposition.

And eventually, it burns.