Tech Won't Save Us - Tech Won’t Fix the Transport System w/ Paris Marx

Episode Date: July 7, 2022

In a special episode to celebrate the release of host Paris Marx’s new book Road to Nowhere, Brian Merchant takes over as guest host to interview Paris about the book, the tech industry’s visions for transportation, and why they don’t solve our mobility challenges. Paris is the host of Tech Won’t Save Us and the author of Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong about the Future of Transportation. Brian Merchant is a tech journalist, author of The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone, and co-editor of Terraform: Watch/Worlds/Burn. Follow Brian on Twitter at @bcmerchant. Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter, and support the show on Patreon. Find out more about Harbinger Media Network at harbingermedianetwork.com.  Also mentioned in this episode:Road to Nowhere is available anywhere you buy books, but Verso has it discounted until July 8 as part of its Summer Reads sale.An excerpt of Road to Nowhere about the dystopian future the tech industry is creating was recently published in Wired.Paris recently spoke to StreetsBlog USA about the problem with Apple CarPlay.Support the show

We had to look at the car because if we're talking about disruption in the way that these tech companies that Silicon Valley has sold us in the past decade or so, like the car really was this technology that disrupted the American city, but the city more broadly in the transportation system. Hello, and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. My name is not Paris Marks. I am Brian Merchant. If you're a regular listener of the show, you might recognize my voice. I've been on here a few times before, but if not, I am a technology journalist and author, and now your first ever guest host. Yes, this week I am turning the tables on Paris and interviewing them about their new book, Road to Nowhere, What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About the Future of Transportation. The book is out this week.

It's great. I was fortunate enough to read an early draft. I gave Paris some notes, which they mostly, fortunately, ignored. And the book is better for it. It's really just a great synopsis of how Silicon Valley has tried to address transportation, all of its for-profit schemes around mobility from Tesla to Uber to the Boring Company to the Cybertruck. It's all in there and it's really a great sort of distillation of why we need to be wary of Silicon Valley when it says it's going to set out to do the common good. It's a really useful area to look at transportation. And Paris just expertly shows why that is and piece by piece by piece unravels the mythologies of its techno

utopian dreams of driverless cars and underground tunnels and so on and so forth so if you like my interview with paris which i'm sure you will it is delightful make sure to share it on social media so more and more people tune in as a listener the show, please go out and pick up a copy of the book. Again, it's Road to Nowhere. It's really good. I promise you. It's available at all major booksellers. And Verso Books has it discounted until July 8th as part of its summer read sale.

You can find the link to that in the show notes as well as all other pertinent links. Do get it. It's great. Now, enjoy my conversation with Paris Marks about Road to Nowhere. Okay, Paris Marks, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. Thank you so much, Brian Merchant. It's weird to be on the other side of it, so we'll see how I do. I'm going to put you in the hot seat here. Yeah, it's really fun to be able to do this. Thanks for asking me.

I feel like I've been along for the ride with you for the show. It's been great. So it's fun to get to turn the tables on you here. And I've got some real zingers for you. So get ready. Yeah, no, I totally appreciate it. You know, you've obviously been a guest on the show more times than anyone else. So I figured if someone was going to interview me about my own book, it should obviously be Brian Merchant.

Well, I am honored. And yeah, let's dig in. Because for those unaware, this book, The Road to Nowhere, What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About the Future of Transportation, I may have just said that in the intro. I'm new at this. You'll have to excuse me, listeners. It's a great book. It's a great survey of the various adventures and misadventures that Silicon Valley has had over the last decade plus. And I also really appreciated how it puts into historical context many of its tendencies. And it's, to me, a really interesting way to sort of look at what you call the Silicon Valley mindset, which maybe at this point,

there are better known instances of this. But I think mobility and transportation and what Silicon Valley has tried to do and most often failed to do in this space offers a clear and sort of very tangible, very sort of visceral portrait of where it so often comes short and what it gets right and what it more often gets wrong. So I wanted to ask you just the basic questions, dig in from the beginning. Why this book right now? Why sort of put the lens on Silicon Valley's sort of techno-utopian, neo-future, often revivalist transit dreams? Why not? Yeah, it's a good question. And when I started writing the book, when I pitched the book to my publisher, like one of my concerns, I'd never written something that was like, you know, over such a long period of time. And, you know, by the time I finished writing, it would be out like a

year later. I was like, is this still going to be relevant by the time it like hits the bookshelves? Are people still going to care about what Silicon Valley is proposing for transportation? And yeah, very much, this is still like an incredibly relevant conversation. And, you know, I think it's good book for this moment, because we're at kind of the end of a decade, a decade and a half of the Silicon Valley kind of thinking and engaging with transportation in this way in trying to alter the transportation system and the way that we move around. And many of the proposals that they have made for that have utterly failed, as we can see from this vantage point, right? At the times that they were announced,

it was easy to believe in what they were selling about electric cars and Tesla, what they were selling about ride hailing services and Uber and Lyft, what they were announced, it was easy to believe in what they were selling about electric cars and Tesla, what they were selling about ride hailing services and Uber and Lyft, what they were selling about autonomous vehicles with Waymo and these other companies that they were at it. And now we can see that time and time again, they have made these promises to us and they have failed to follow through on that. And so I think that we need a reckoning with that, both to understand what we need to fix our transportation system right now, but also so we don't fall for these things again and again and again. And I think I would also say, if we're thinking about the book in this moment, there are other reasons why it's relevant, right? We're at this kind of pivotal moment where we need to decide what we're going to do with our transportation system to address the climate impact of it, you know, how it's contributing to climate change and the need to reckon with that world as well. The car dependency that we have been left with after over a century of promotion of the automobile

is something that we also need to reckon with right now. And is the solution to those problems and our reliance on gasoline altogether, is it just that we make the switch from these internal combustion vehicles to electric vehicles? Or do we think much more fundamentally about the transportation system that has been built up around that and try to change the way that we move so we don't need to be reliant on cars altogether? all completely true. And I think I would add, and we can just put a pin in it for now, but like, this is another moment where the world's richest man has sort of reemerged on the scene as his attempt to buy Twitter. But Elon Musk, who's a recurring character in this book, he's always popping up with one harebrained transit scheme or another. There's like a spectrum of harebrainedness that they occupy. And some he just kind of lets blow in the wind and some he tries and fails and others he, you know, as we know, puts his resources and capital into. But at this moment, when he is

sort of, you know, is both sort of in command of the, of both sort of the cultural and imagination in terms of what a tech titan in the 2020s stands for. I think we are offered a real window into his thinking and why it's important we understand it through this book. But you were talking about cars and the dominance of cars, and you explore that a little bit in the first chapter. And I think that's a good place to start because the behavior of a lot of these early sort of automakers in sort of pushing for the automobile as sort of the dominant mode of transportation in the American city, I think has a lot of lessons that hopefully you can peel apart for us a little bit. And I'm just going to quote you to say which, you know, there was a moment when it was contested, right? When it was uncertain whether

or not the automobile was going to be the dominant way that we organize our urban areas and our cities and roads and all that. And yet they won out. And you wrote, the automobile provided few benefits to the average city dweller, yet their children and family members were being killed in the street, their access was being revoked, and the benefits of this dangerous new technology were almost exclusively captured by the wealthiest residents. So in spite of all of this, and we now know anybody who lives in North America or most any other place in the world, automobile one, how did that happen? What did, you know, that's part A of the question. Part B is, you know, what does that say about where we're at now? So can you take us through like the bullet points of, you know, how, how we got here? Absolutely. You know, I think when I was approaching the book, it was so important

to bring that historical perspective into it, right? Like criticizing what Silicon Valley has proposed in the past 10 years and kind of what has happened over that period was important, but I thought that it was going to help the book by bringing in the historical perspective as well, right? So we could look more broadly at these trends over a much longer period of time. And naturally, because we're talking about transportation,

especially in the North American context, because that's what I'm most familiar with, you know, it kind of had to start with the car. Like we had to look at the car because if we're talking about disruption in the way that these tech companies that Silicon Valley has sold us in the past decade or so, like the car really was this technology that disrupted the American city, but the city more broadly in the transportation system, because early on, you know, before the car emerged, people were reliant on walking, on cycling, on, you know, horse and buggy or whatever you want to call it, street carriages, also street cars. You know, the city and the street looked much different than they do today because the automobile

was not there and it was not reoriented toward it. And I think that can be a bit difficult to imagine and think about when the car has been so normalized today. And so the car emerges and it's very much a luxury product. It's something that a small number of people own and it's a wealthy piece of the population who are able to do that. And it gives them certain benefits. It allows them to go faster than other people. And it allows them to go to places that might be more difficult for regular city dwellers to reach, right? But because that is very different from what is happening on the street at the time where things are moving pretty slow, that the street is like a shared space between all these different modes of transportation. There's no such thing as jaywalking. People are just walking across the street because that's a normal thing to do.

Well, the car enters and really changes that because it makes it much more dangerous for people to be in the street in that way, because it starts to kill a lot of people, in particular, children and young women. And then that starts a debate around whether this is what people want to see on their streets, right? Whether the automobile should be welcomed on the streets or whether it is changing too much, whether it's too dangerous. And so naturally there are people within cities who push back against this, who don't want to see the automobile take over, who want to see them restricted, not go very fast, like, you know, to fit within the existing status quo of how transportation worked. But there was a very powerful industry behind the automobile that did not want that, that wanted the automobile to be

entrenched, that wanted to sell a lot of automobiles to a lot of people. And most importantly, there were a lot of other commercial interests who lined up behind it because it was not just the auto companies making these automobiles. It was all the other companies that were supplying the parts to build them. It was the oil companies who were providing the product that would power all of these vehicles. It was the construction and real estate industries, the developers who were building out all the roads and later the highways and suburbs that people would go to live in that would remake the city for the automobile. And really, labor got behind this as well, because that also created jobs, and in particular, manufacturing union jobs, right? So, you know, less thinking about the larger impacts

of automobility and more, you know, this is providing good jobs, of course, we're going to embrace this. So what happens is that the automobile gets entrenched because there are so many companies, so many industries that are going to benefit from making that happen. And so then like, you know, if we twist that to today, if we think about the push to change the way that we move now, who is going to benefit from that, right? Like if we think about a public transportation system, what companies are really benefiting from that? Like's much fewer. There's much less profit that is generated from a collective transportation system like that. And so when we see these tech companies enter into it, they're bringing their particular business models that they have developed in the tech sector to the automobile, to the way that

transportation moves. And their solution is not to move away from this status quo that has been very popular, but to add new technologies to it that allow them to extract value and profit from it without really disrupting what already exists. It's hard to kind of imagine a more sort of violent and visceral example of a technology, like a consumer technology arriving on the scene. It's literally plowing through children and women. It's literally killing people. It's literally leaving bodies in the street. And it seems that that would, that's something that might even be beyond the pale for Silicon Valley today. I mean, we still have an Uber, you know, famously has an autopilot has

led to crashes and so forth, but how I'm wondering if in your research, if there was any particularly sort of effective, because I know, like you said, neighborhood groups and different associations sort of banded together to try to contest the power of the automobile. And there were, you know, there were some successes in some limited capacities you get decades later down the road to sort of, you know, Jane Jacobs and Ralph Nader, where like there are we were able to pump the brakes occasionally, but still end up sort of serving the car. So I'm wondering if there's anything as we go forward in the conversation that we can keep in mind about the tactics used early on that were sort of successful that really did sort of put a needle in the automaker's eyes early on? Yeah, I think there are two pieces of this. And first of all, some of the history that I talk about early on in the book is really inspired by the work of

historian Peter Norton, who wrote this fantastic book about that early period of the automobile in the American city in particular, but also other academics and people who I'm citing, but his work is really essential there. And what he describes is really these people who are forming organizations to push back against the automobile by holding funeral parades for children who have died to really show how much opposition there is to this, but also how bad it is. Ringing the bells in fire halls and churches when people die on the streets so people know that this is happening. You can't deny it. Putting up statues to people who had died to recognize it. Making really visceral posters that call the automobile the modern Moloch or that show a little girl asking her mom where

daddy is because daddy's been killed by an automobile like all of these examples to really kind of draw out the emotions of people when they're thinking about automobility and then later as you're saying after you know world war two when there's greater push to entrench the automobile in both the american city but also the european city you also see more examples of this. As you were saying, Jane Jacobs is really key to pushing back against highways. She wasn't the only one, but helping this movement gain attention, particularly in New York City and in Toronto, and ultimately defeating in New York City. And then Ralph Nader trying to push for

safety standards for vehicles. I say in the book that I think that these were important events, important developments to make people think about the automobile in another way. But ultimately, they weren't pushing back against the whole of automobility, right? Just one kind of feature of it, which I think, you know, we need to approach it from a more totalizing perspective. But then I think Europe is also very instructive, like in the 1970s, when they have these oil shocks, when the prices of oil are going through the roof, as you know, we're seeing today. Once again, there are so associated with the bicycle,

back in that period in the 1970s, a lot of buildings were being torn down for roads. A lot of public squares were being turned into parking spaces. It was like what we know from the American cities and North American cities, right? And people pushed back against that. And that was how they really got these kind of bicycle-oriented cities. And in particular, like there's one group, that's name is just so striking, which is stop the child murder in the Netherlands. And so like, again, like it's really drawing on this kind of visceral emotional response, like in the early American city, to try to get people on side to make these changes to the city and to push the automobile out once again. Yeah. I mean, and it's

striking. Those are those are striking tactics. But what's maybe equally striking, I mean, I guess, after a century or so of normalization, it might, but it is it is a little dissonant to even consider that we could ever become accustomed to such a reality. And I always sort of balk, I you know, I live in Los Angeles, the world capital of the automobile. And, you know, every news program goes through the traffic crash, but they never mentioned any more details where it's like, oh, blocked up on I-5, something's going on there, car on the side of the road. But each and every instance, I'm always asking what percentage of these instances is that it's just somebody just died

and now it's like a problem because somebody else has to try to get to work or is late for a meeting or something. And we've completely sort of extricated that element of what's actually happening, this daily carnage. I can hear the I-10 from my house and I don't know, maybe monthly, maybe more frequently than that because I'm tuning it out. I hear a violent crash. I don't know, maybe monthly, maybe more frequently than that, because I'm tuning it out. I hear a violent crash. I don't, you know, so it's, we had, I think it speaks to how normalized this has become and how it maybe it would be worth exploring the reintroduction of some of those tactics. Because as you said, I think, and I think you mentioned in the book as well, how it, you know, even more recently, there have been cities that have opened up spaces to car-free zones, like in Spain and so on. But I think we're going to save the solution

part to the end. And I want to sort of connect this lineage of the car sort of to the modern day Silicon Valley movement. They're pulling on a lot of these same impulses, where they're sort of aligning a bunch of different interests. They have maybe like historical levels of capital that they can now pour into these things. And I think another thing that's interesting about your book is, as you said, you reach back to that history and we see that so many of these ideas, whether it's Uber or a self driving car or an electric car, they're each and every one of them is like 100 years old. It's like the Silicon Valley's great innovations are just like, well, maybe we should try that thing that flopped in the 1910s.

I think it's instructive to me as well. When I first heard about the example of Douglas Engelbart's show in the 60s, I think, where he's showing off all these different like technologies associated with the computer and like the original mouse is there and like something that is like similar to Google talks, like a collaborative thing like that. And then you think about how so many of like the aspects of like computing and software today are sold to us as like so novel and so new. And then you see like how long these ideas of like what, what computing should be have existed. And I feel like going back and looking at the history of transportation, it was similar, right? Like looking back and seeing how they were proposing autonomous vehicles in the 1920s and how they were supposed to be like only a couple decades away and stuff and how electric cars were back in like the 1890s.

And now like it's something that we are adopting today and how, you know, as you mentioned, like Uber is really just a taxi service that offers you a new way to hail the taxi instead of instead of calling in. And so none of these things are really new. It's just like adding a new layer onto them. So let's take a second and let's let's go through them. So I think there are there are a few I guess you could call them categories of Silicon Valley's transit exploits here. There's Uber, as you mentioned, which is sort of its app-based transit service. And there's its forays into the electric car, probably best exemplified by Tesla. And there's this great self-driving car failure, which has been going on for a decade.

What else do you sort of view? And what do these categories kind of have in common? What am I missing here? And what sort of common threads do they all have? And often it's like the same company that's pursuing the, you know, Uber and Google have been in bed together and Google has tried to do self-driving cars and so has Uber. So what's the common thread? Yeah. I think maybe a little like example, like historical example to kind of draw this together, right, is related to Uber. And Uber CEO, Travis Kalanick used to make a lot of calls back to the Jitneys, which he would always talk about were like the early Uber that were defeated. And if they weren't defeated, like we would have had Uber so much longer ago,

and we would have had this very different history of transportation, right? And like, it's just so blatantly false. It's like hilarious when you actually look into the details of it. And like the jitneys are these like early taxi cabs that emerge, you know, after an economic downturn, like Uber did, and that take advantage of the fact that these drivers, you know, are looking for an income and don't have many places to turn to them. You know, it's very early in the history of automobility. So they get these early like Ford Model Ts with running boards to drive people around the cities. And they're kind of like a mix of a taxi and like an omnibus or a bus at the time. They usually run a set route. You usually

pay like, I think it was a nickel or something to take your ride with it. And they get regulated out of existence essentially. And Travis Kalanick used to talk about this as though it was like the early streetcar bosses ensured that this like entrepreneurial force was like pushed off the streets. And it was this terrible development, right? And we can't allow Uber to be regulated in this way. It works really well for them, right? But actually what happened in that time is like, these were just individual people who were offering these services. There wasn't some overarching company. And the issue with them was that most of them were operating around at cost. People

weren't really making much money with them. Because there was so much competition, people were even losing money. And the problem was that the streetcars, which were existing at the time, were offering a lot of benefits because they did pay taxes. They had to ensure that the streets were paved and well-kept right up to the sidewalk. Sometimes they had to provide street lighting. There were all these things in the contract that had to be provided. And so when they started to lose business because of these jitneys, that not only created problems for the streetcar companies, which at the time would have been private, but also created problems for the city, right? And the jitneys didn't have like an organization to push for their rights and to

lobby for their rights. And so it was easy then for the city government to pass regulations and say, look, you need to pay taxes as well and contribute to the city and ensure that these roads are being well kept. And they weren't able to do that because they didn't have the margins and they certainly didn't have the money from some really wealthy investors. They keep losing money while offering their services for a long time. And so Travis Kalanick used to say that this was an example of how these really powerful interests defeated these upstarts, right? And if that hadn't happened, we would have had a shared history of mobility instead of this personal ownership of the automobile. But that makes no sense because if theoretically this had been allowed to happen and if these had existed, there's no benefit to the automaker for that because that still had to be defeated for the automobile to take over.

And for Uber to prosper in the way that it has and to avoid regulation, the key difference with the Jitneys is that it controlled all of these services all around the world, right? And it had this huge lobbying arm. It had all of this money to undercut these other services. And so it could, in the same way or in a similar way, that the automobile lobby had these interests behind it. So it could push for its vision of transportation to be realized. Uber not only had this war chest from venture capitalists, but it also had support from libertarian organizations that wanted to see broad deregulation of the taxi

industry. And so it had the resources to actually push this onto the rest of us, even if it wasn't serving workers, even if it wasn't serving the cities, even if it wasn't broadly serving the public and just like a narrow class of users that were like people like Travis Kalanick. And so I don't know if that fully answers your questions around the different categories, but I think it's an interesting like comparison and bringing that historical piece. Yeah, no, it's a great, it's a great point. I mean, it's funny that it's, it's, it's funny because in a lot of ways, the ways that they are similar are the ones that you would not want.

Like they're unsafe, they're unregulated. Like they're, you know, people are just kind of cramming into these vehicles. I did a piece on the, on the Jinnies a while back. I remember a little bit and they were, you know, they are just kind of cramming into these vehicles. I did a piece on the jinnies a while back. I remember a little bit. And they were, you know, they would get in crashes and like you were kind of on your own. And the way that what they didn't have was, as you said, was Uber's great centralization. Like Uber had an app that could be accessed from anywhere. Uber was, it was and is, continues to like siphon a percentage of the profits off. It's not for the

little guy at all. It's organized to, you know, funnel profits to the C-suite. These jitneys were completely, I mean, I think they had, they eventually formed into little cartels where they would, right, where they would sort of compete to their advantage. But yeah, it is a great point, I think, to say how ridiculous it is to say like the future should be an unregulated mob of informal vehicles that sort of patrol the streets at their whim. Like it's such a, it speaks to like the recklessness and sort of carelessness, which undergirds sort of the Silicon Valley mindset, which I think we should define here also, because if we're moving through the book a little bit, then I think it's chapter two that really goes into why are all of these mobility dreams of a similar stripe? Like,

why do they kind of keep having the same limitations? And why are they of the same texture? And you define this, you know, pulling from like Fred Turner, who it's been nice to see his work become, have kind of a resurgence and his work sort of connecting the Stewart brand and countercultural types to the cyber culture. But I think it's interesting the way that you position it with regards to transit in particular. So what is the Silicon Valley mindset as you define it? I mean, we could talk about Elon Musk. We could not talk about Elon Musk. He seems to sort of embody a lot of this. I know he's one

of your faves. He's one of your big boys. So what is this mindset? How is it propelling the techno utopian dreams of transportation? Yeah, just briefly on Musk before I answer your larger question. I got a laugh recently. Leo Hollis, who's an editor at Verso Books, who was the editor of my book, sent out a newsletter recently and has kind of dubbed me the left's leading Muskologist. And I was like, do I accept this term? Like, is this positive? But I think it's very kind. So I'll accept it. We could put that under your title on the cover of the book there. We should, yeah. Maybe the paperback. But yeah, so the broader question on like the Silicon Valley approach and what that means for transportation.

You know, I think there are many different ways to look at it. As you said, you know, Fred Turner did great work on this. You know, Richard Barbrook and the Californian ideology, I think, is really important to understanding this approach. I think I would say two different things, right? When we look at Silicon Valley's general approach to problems, it's very much focused on how can technology solve this problem, technology deployed within the free market. And so you're not really looking at what are the political angles of this,

what caused this problem in the first place from a political and social perspective. It's how does this problem exist today? And how can we imagine a technology that would potentially rectify this problem without dealing with know, connections and social issues that surround the problem that created the problem in the first place, the idea is we just need some better technology, and this can be solved. And I think time and time again, we see that the technology does not actually solve the problems in the way that, you know, in some ways, the people who develop these technologies who are, you know, idealistic, maybe, maybe sometimes naive as well, originally imagined.

And we can see that with transportation as well. But I think that there's another piece of this too, right? Which is something that Jarrett Walker talks about, which is elite projection. This idea that the people coming up with these ideas are in these really privileged places in society, right? Many of them come from wealth. Many of them are white men who have a particular experience of the world. And so the ideas that they come up with, the solutions, the problems that they come up with are shaped by their experience of the world and how they have lived. And so when we think about transportation then, and we can apply this to many different areas, naturally, that is going

to affect the way that they think about how we solve our transportation problems, how we fix the system that we've created. And so for someone like Elon Musk, who looks at the transportation system, it's not, oh, wow, the car sucks. Maybe we shouldn't have this because it's killing a lot of people. It's causing all of these environmental issues. People are stuck in traffic all the time. It's destroyed our communities by creating this suburban mess. Rather, it's much more narrow because he likes the car. He doesn't want to be around strangers, as he says, who could possibly be serial killers on transit. He wants to be in his car away from everyone else, but he doesn't want to waste his

time being stuck in traffic. And this was the original promise of the automobile all the way back in the 1910s and 20s, that by buying this thing, you can escape from, you can go as fast as you want, you can go where you want, you don't need to be stuck with all of these people. But as the automobile becomes this mass consumer product, you can't escape the traffic because there's just a, the geometry of it doesn't make sense. And the rich driver is right next to the poor driver. You just can't escape. Right. And so when these rich people look at transportation with Elon Musk, it's how do I get out of traffic? The boring company is one solution to that tunnels under the ground with a really naive solution. And of course the precursor to that was an extra level on top of highways that gets forgotten by many people today.

Alyssa Walker has done some great work on this over at Curbed. But also, you know, the autonomous vehicles, which are supposed to be a way to kind of rationalize traffic so that automobiles work better together and you won't be stuck in traffic anymore. Or Travis Kalanick, you know, the kind of inciting moment behind Uber, the kind of inciting moment behind Uber, the creation of that company is that, oh, it sucks to get like a black car or a taxi in San Francisco. So we need a solution to that very narrow problem and then to sell it as something that is going to help so many more people. And so those are really the key points, right? Technology can solve these problems without dealing with the politics and the social aspects of it. But also, the solution to these problems come from a particular position in society that sees the problems in a very narrow way and doesn't recognize the full extent of them, but will still sell those very narrow solutions as solving the problem for everybody. Would you include in that definition that the technology not only

must be new technology in and of itself, but would it have to be consumer facing technology? The ongoing joke is that Silicon Valley keeps, you know, reinventing the bus, like, oh, great. Like, you know, what if we got an electric transport vehicle that made multiple stops while people could look at it's like, okay, yeah the bus again so they all i mean is there is it limited to to certain kinds of technologies and if so like what are those constraints yeah i think it's really interesting right because the way that these technologies are deployed like i think we could look at the electric car in a different way right it's changing the way that the car is propelled but once again you, electric cars have been around for over a century. It's just popularizing them and using new battery technologies that have been developed, right? But I think when we look at more of these more popular

tech solutions to transportation and the ones that have been more associated with Silicon Valley, in particular, ride hailing autonomous vehicles, micro mobility services, you know, getting a scooter or a dockless bike through your phone. It's all about changing the way that we access things that already exist. Basically, you just add a layer of technology in between that is controlled by one of these major companies. And so with ride hailing, it's still a taxi service. Okay, you change some of the fundamentals and the regulation. So, you know, the driver isn't driving one of these cars in a fleet and no longer has regulations on fares and the number of drivers that can be on the road. But the real change on the consumer side is you're just clicking a button on an app instead of calling for a taxi to come get you or whatever.

Autonomous vehicles, it's similar. It's the car. It's like the extension of ride hailing because you want to get rid of the human driver because that's an unacceptable labor cost or whatever. And so it's ride hailing, but with this extra layer of technology on top of it to drive the car. And of course, as we know, the original thinking of the geniuses behind autonomous vehicles was that this is going to be pretty easy to solve. We'd have it sorted in a few years. And then computers could drive cars everywhere. And what we've seen over a decade later is that it didn't work out like that at all. And even the industry admits it now. And then when we look at the micromobility services, this is one of the most perplexing ones to me, right? And how people even really fell for

it in the sense that, okay, so you have these dockless bikes and these dockless scooters. We already had existing docked bike systems in many cities that worked pretty well. The business model behind these docked bikeless- There was no app that unlocked them, Paris. Exactly. You need to extract a rent from them. So yeah. Yeah. It's just the transformation of the model so that the tech company is in between your interaction with this bike or scooter. And like, it's not even thinking about whether this is what's best to promote active mobility and cycling. It's what

is best for a tech company to get some sort of cut and get some interaction with it, get some sort of data out of it. Because if we were really thinking about what would promote cycling and, you know, getting people out of cars in this way, it wouldn't be about turning bikes and scooters into a rentier service that's like really expensive if you use it frequently, but rather just ensuring like it's really easy and cheap for people to own a bike and use a bike and park their bike when they're taking it out and stuff. So yeah, like I think we could extend this even further and look at like how Apple is trying to put CarPlay in all the cars and expand the screens on that. Like there are all these elements to it, but it's really like adding this kind of digital technology, internet enabled layer to all of these

aspects of transportation so they can extract rents and data from it. And that's kind of digital technology, internet enabled layer to all of these aspects of transportation so they can extract rents and data from it. And that's kind of their business model. Oh, yeah. I think they're not insignificant. I mean, it would be somebody should try to try to do a study of every major like well-heeled startup that has an app and see what percentage are just basically a rentier business. That's the vast majority, it seems, are just new. And you can kind of see the limits of that a little bit, because with Bird, people were like, well, why am I paying for that? I know a lot of people who just kind of like, okay, if I take a Bird scooter 10 times, I might as well just have my own scooter, right? Like, if it's cheap enough, then you're eating into that. And it also just speaks to the dearth

of imagination that you see time and again when Silicon Valley enters the arena of transit. I mean, self-driving cars, I would love to see someone, again, make like a timeline of every promise that it was going to be here in the next few years, starting with Google and with brand. And just look at where we are now, nowhere near. As you said, it seems like they've kind of accepted that we aren't going to be getting them anytime soon. But I wonder if you could talk a little bit about like, it's silly and we can laugh about it. But as you point out in the book, there's a real detriment to this kind of thinking and the fact that like, oh, well, you know, this is going to be a transportation solution. And it's kind of limped on, attracted new investment, tried by different competitors for nearly 10 years.

What do we lose when Silicon Valley sort of circles its wagons around one of these shitty transit ideas and keeps sort of beating on with it, even when it looks pretty clear to everyone else that this isn't going to happen. Yeah, I think the real issue there is distraction, right? People want to believe, and we've been sold this for well over a decade now, that the tech industry is delivering progress, right? It's delivering the future. And so if they say that this is the future of transportation, we should believe that that's what It's delivering the future. And so if they say that this is the future of transportation, we should believe that that's what it's going to be. That's what they're going to deliver. And this is something that we should want, right? And the issue there is that not only do they fail to deliver, as we've been talking about on what they actually promise,

but then they don't actually solve the real transportation problems that affect most people, right? People who are waiting for a bus and it's not coming. People who are stuck in traffic and need to get where they want to go. People who are paying outrageous costs for gasoline and really just to own a car altogether. That's incredibly expensive actually to rely on a car and have to pay all the costs of that for someone who is not earning very much money, but, to rely on a car and have to pay all the costs of that for someone who, you know, is not earning very much money, but has to because of the construction of their city, right? And so the issue here is that we have these companies making these promises about how they are going to solve car ownership and traffic and the carbon emissions of transportation and all of

these things, then they don't deliver on it. And because we have been distracted for a decade by these promises, it kind of seeps the desire to act from the political leaders or gives them a reason not to, right? And we even see it utilized in some campaigns like For Better Transit and things like that. In the United States, in Nashville, the Koch brothers used the prospect of autonomous vehicles to push back against a ballot measure for better transit funding, right? And I'm sure that has happened in many more places. And in Elon Musk's first biography, his biographer, Ashley Vance, wrote that Elon Musk told him that the whole idea behind the Hyperloop and why he put it out in that moment

was to try to stymie or defeat California's proposed high-speed rail system. And I think we should think a bit deeper about that. This is an automaker who wants people to buy automobiles and is trying to defeat train infrastructure. And even with the Boring Company, it's like, don't extend the subway or don't make the buses better because I'm going to make these tunnels where we can just all drive our cars. And for a bit, he even said he would have some form of like individualized public transportation in it. And so those are many examples, just to come back to the point of your question, which is that it distracts people from the real solutions that can actually fix these transportation problems by making people think that these new technologies and these tech solutions pushed by Silicon Valley are going to deliver things that they don't deliver.

And that then leave people stuck in traffic, that leave people dealing with these high costs for automobiles that don't solve the climate problem of our transportation system and all these other issues. Yeah, that's true. And I think maybe we even underestimate the effect that that has had over the last 10 years because, you know, transit policy is notoriously something that like not a whole lot of people have the stomach to wade into or the time to wade into. And so even sometimes just being able to kind of wave it off and say, oh, we're trying this thing now is enough to sort of disrupt a coalition that may be forming around an alternative solution. And I'm thinking of Uber, too, where Uber explicitly

pitched itself as a way to reduce congestion, right? Like in cities like New York, where is notoriously awful traffic congestion. And we find out, you know, 10 years down the road that it would be closer to the opposite. It just inspired more people to take Ubers instead of more climate friendly transit, like the subway. And, you know, like the trend you were talking about earlier, helped decrease subway ridership and all these other things. So I do think that really, as time goes on, it's what another great service your book does by laying this all out beat by beat by beat, case by case, that, you know, we really had a lost decade or two in terms of transit policy where we were distracted by all these bells and whistles. And I feel a little foolish in hindsight with some of them. I mean, again, it seems to run the gamut

because believing that self-driving cars were going to solve anything looks foolish now. The scooters are silly. The boring company seemed like a joke from the beginning. On the other end of the spectrum, you do have a Tesla, which looks is like maybe you could kind of make the case that it's kind of like an iPhone of the cars. It has some vague futurity around it. It's electric. And we also can't understate, I think, how like alluring that was.

I would love to hear you talk a little bit about, again, we keep sort of running up into Musk here, and maybe we should finally just kind of zero in because he really is in a lot of ways sort of like the avatar figure for the Silicon Valley transit guru wannabe. And he got his start buying an electric car. This phase, there's the PayPal backstory, but he bought an electric car company at around the there's the paypal backstory but he bought you know an electric car company at around the same time as you mentioned that there were these that there was like a real sort of awakening and consciousness among sort of american liberals as to climate change and sort of the latter half of the aughts there was al gore's inconvenient

truth and there's these documentaries of who killedilled the Electric Car and Who Killed the Electric Car Part Two, Revenge of the Electric Car. So I don't remember exactly. You'll have to correct me. But so into this climate, Elon, you write in your book about how Elon Musk really sort of built his mythology and the extent to which it was sort of strategic from the beginning? Yeah, I'll put my Muskologist hat on and get into this part of the conversation. But yeah, you know, I think it's fascinating what's happening in that period, right? And I also like, one of the things that I'm pretty sure I say it in the book, and I'm sure I've written it elsewhere before, but I'm not sure how I feel about this narrative that like, Elon Musk has done a lot to like, drive the electric vehicle. Like he's certainly interested in the electric vehicle, but I feel like Elon Musk is

more of a person who happened to come along, was like in the right place at the right time. There were these other inventors, innovators, whatever you want to call them, who had already founded this electric car company, had come up with the idea, had developed like the core technology. And so he comes and puts his money into it and then rebrands himself as the Tesla guy, as he even says he's the founder of the company and then later has to settle with the guys who actually founded it. And they say he can call himself a co founder at that point. And so, you know, in that moment, he is taking on this electric car company and saying he's going to save the climate. And then he's also investing in SpaceX, starting that up with his PayPal money,

as you said, and saying he's going to take us to Mars, right? And especially this is happening in a moment where, you know, it's a very neoliberal moment. I think that there's not a lot of hope in the future, especially as we hit around 2008 and the recession and all of this sort of stuff. And Elon Musk, you know, he gets compared to Iron Man, the portrayal of Iron Man by Robert Downey Jr. is apparently inspired by Elon Musk, which, I don't know, I think that can say quite a bit about Elon Musk, actually, even though it was presented as a very positive thing at the time. But he really takes advantage of this desire among the public, but also among the media for someone who is presenting the future, who is thinking

about the future, who is driving us forward, right? And he becomes the avatar for that. There's a very kind of mutual relationship going on between the media and Elon Musk. The media is getting someone that they can kind of pump up as the avatar of the future, while Elon Musk is getting this profile. And that gives him access to funding, to people, to everything that he needs to ensure that these companies keep operating and really to escape accountability for his negative actions, especially as we've been seeing in recent years. I have to come clean real quick here, Paris, because I was part of the problem. My first job as a journalist, I was a blogger for the Discovery Channels, had bought all these green

properties again like it was a real for anyone who isn't uh wasn't it wasn't old enough to remember those those days it was environmentalism like entered the scene in a real sort of neoliberal sort of way where like there was an al gore documentary it was like nominated for an oscar suddenly everybody was talking this to discovery Channel, bought a whole cable channel. And it was going to be like a parallel running one called Planet Green. And so my one of my first jobs was to blog for that and its properties. And Elon Musk was like a mascot over there. This was the kind of environmentalism that was very much in vogue at the time. Like,

I remember I was sent to the New York premiere of that documentary in which he is like very much lionized as like laying it all on the line. And in hindsight, like he was given so much credit for all of this. Like he had this plan to bring down the cost of electric cars where he's going to introduce the Roadster that was like a fancy sports car. And then next was like the Model S. And so he would slowly bring, so he would bring electric cars to the masses

and people were like, this is so great. And meanwhile, he gets, that didn't, as you mentioned in the book, Tesla gets heavily subsidized. And he really just like, it's hard to, for someone who wasn't there, it's hard to overstate how heroic he seemed to a certain kind of liberal. And I don't remember like having a strong opinion about it one way or another, but certainly like my colleagues,

like Elon Musk could do no wrong. And it wasn't until sort of people's politics got a little more progressive in general, and he started running into the labor issues at his plants that started to arise that that landscape seemed to change. But it is whatever he did, if it was right place, right time, as you said, or he recognized it on some intuitive level that he had this opportunity. Like, I think a lot of his mystique to this day is generated from the credit that he got. Like you said, he got investment, he got in the room with like, you know, Barack Obama, he's still just like, you know, a tech company, he's still got some of that halo. Yeah, I totally stepped on the point you were about to make there. Because I want to know now, like, what, what do we do about this? Like, how, you know, do you think it's clear to most people now that he's kind of full of shit a lot of the time? I mean, obviously he has his haters, but he also has this insane fan base that is unlike any other sort of cult of personality around a billionaire.

Jeff Bezos doesn't have that at all. It's, you know, a unique thing. And what does that say about other sort of tit Titans who try to enter the Silicon Valley transit sphere? Yeah. Well, you know, I think that his halo kind of comes out of that moment, right?

Not to, not to say that you're a bad person or anything. That's, that's not my goal. No, I wrote some blogs or whatever, but I, it wasn't,

I wasn't influential enough to make any real difference, but like, it was just reflective of where he was at. It it really was sort of uh he won the goodwill yeah and that was a whole thing at the moment right with electrotech and these other kind of green blogs that were showing up at that time and that were very much like especially in like the independent blogosphere that would have been separate from discovery channel that were very much like reliant on tesla Tesla because Tesla had an affiliate program where they could make a lot of money if their readers went ahead and bought Tesla.

So that created the incentive for like a whole range of independent media to kind of praise Elon Musk and Tesla. And then, you know, that filters out into the broader media as this gets built up. And yeah, so I think his halo very much comes out of that moment. And that's why it's so distinct from people like Jeff Bezos, right? Jeff Bezos didn't have that same sort of thing

going on for him. And I think you've seen him kind of recognize it recently, how he needs that for Blue Origin to get the kind of subsidies that SpaceX has been getting from NASA and the Defense Department and stuff like that for their rocket businesses. And that's why he's pivoted to start doing these like public rocket launches with like celebrities and stuff like that. So people get like a better goodwill toward him and the rocket company, all that, right.

And so I think it can seem like maybe electric cars like aren't a natural fit for a book like this that is going after Silicon Valley and transportation and what have you. But I think it's really key because Elon Musk is so central to it. And he really kind of treats it as though he is bringing the Silicon Valley kind of model and mindset to the automotive industry. This like move fast and break things kind of approach to innovation and creating a product and the type of marketing that happens around it. And he's very much creating like a car for tech people very much because he's adding these tech features to it. He's adding these big kind of touchscreen displays that make it seem futuristic, even if they don't last very long. And it like causes all these quality issues with the cars. You know, it's a whole thing around Tesla and the electric vehicles. But I think that it's really instructive, because, as you were saying, he is kind of a figure that represents neoliberal environmentalism. And at this time,

that Al Gore is telling us that we just need to change our light bulbs and what have you. And these environmental documentaries are telling us that if we buy electric cars, we can save the climate and also stop wars for foreign oil in Iraq, because that was that whole moment as well, that he really presented an image that really worked, right? And that sold what the people in power wanted to be sold. And he certainly benefited from that as well. And so if we think about what we need to do to respond to that, I think we need to think more critically about what is being proposed, right? Like the electric car, yes, is good in some ways. It will be essential to

addressing the climate problem of transportation. But if, as Elon Musk wants us to believe, we need to replace every car that's powered by gas or diesel today with an electric vehicle that's powered by batteries, that's just not going to work out. That's not going to be sustainable because the part of the electric vehicle that gets kind of hidden, I think, in a lot of the discourse around the electric car, whether that's coming from Elon Musk or increasingly from the government, other automakers, mining companies, is that there's a really dirty supply chain that goes into this. And even though the life scale emissions of the electric vehicle tends to be less than, you know, a gas or diesel powered vehicle, there's still a huge environmental footprint

that comes out of that, that gets ignored in the language of zero emissions and what have you. And I think we need to pay more attention to that if we are actually serious about addressing, once again, as I've been saying, the real problems that the car created, rather than just the ones that are more convenient to create the narrative for a new kind of industry or product or what have you. Right. Because ultimately, the electric car, I mean, cars are very expensive and very lucrative products. You're really not moving the needle that much. It's a different kind of product that you can buy. And yeah, the supply chain is incredibly problematic. And it also feeds into all these other issues that you address in the book.

And I think now's a good time to note that, as you point out, we are still intensely reliant on the automobile. It has sort of come to dominate our transit life. You can't even compare it to anything else, to most people. I mean, if you live in a European city or a handful of cities in North America and other places in Asia, maybe you can get around without an automobile. But for a lot of the people that live in the modern world, the car is just an intractable part of life. So we are at a point where as bleak as things are, we're spending more time than ever in our automobiles. Like this Cybertruck is now sort of the premier automobile luxury tech product. And it just looks like something out of

Road Warrior, a slightly more luxurious Road Warrior. And yet people are excited about this. I mean, to be fair, people are equally enraged and are calling it out too. So how do we respond to this moment where like a cyber truck is coming out from some of like the richest man in the world is presenting the public a Cybertruck. How do we get away from that at this moment where traffic fatalities, pedestrian fatalities, cyclist fatalities are all inching up in this sort of world of automobile-dominated carnage? How do we put the brakes on it? How do we get off the road to nowhere? It's an essential question, right? And really key if we think about how we're going to build a better transportation system

for everybody. And so I think the first step of that is to stop really being distracted by what Silicon Valley is selling us as the future of transportation. And I think that there's a few pieces of that, right? I think we need the media to be a bit more skeptical of what they're presenting to us from these companies instead of just repeating what they tell us and accepting that as fact rather than really challenging it. And I think we have seen a bit more of that in recent years, which is really positive. But there is still the side of it where this company said this today, and we're just going to report that as though that is something

people should know. And then I think the other part of that is on the side of regulators to really be stepping in much earlier to assess these claims that the companies are making. You know, we've seen, as you mentioned earlier with autopilot, which is Tesla's purportedly like assisted driving system has been having a lot of crashes and killing its drivers. Even as Elon Musk keeps saying that it's safer than human driving, even though there's no actual real evidence of that. And we are finally seeing in the United States, the regulators starting to investigate it and starting to look into it, which is really positive. But I'd say it's kind of late, like it should have happened much earlier. And you know, I think there needs to

be a bit more skepticism from the public as well. And certainly, I think I'm preaching to the audience on this podcast, certainly who would be feeling that way. But then I think we also need to think about the kind of transportation system that we actually want to build the kind of transportation system that actually addresses these problems of the lack of access to mobility that a lot of people have the high cost of mobility to mobility that a lot of people have, the high cost of mobility and transportation for a lot of people, the many problems that auto dependence has created, and then obviously the climate problem that has emerged out of the kind of transportation system that we've created. And so my argument would be not that we need to take all the technology out

of it, because let's be real, buses are technology, bikes are technology. There will even be roles for digital technology in planning such a system. But I think one of the contributions of the book by looking back at the history of automobility and just showing the way that that was intentionally created by public investment, by a real commitment by the government to actually remake the shape of society, the shape of cities, the shape of the transportation system to serve the interests of these auto companies and the other companies that were benefiting from it. We need to learn from that and say that instead of just kind of tweaking the types of automobiles that are on the road,

we need to think much more fundamentally about the type of infrastructure that we have, the type of communities that we have, and how government policy and government investment is shaping those things, right? Because they can be reoriented towards something else if the commitment is actually there. And so what that would look like, I would argue a much greater focus on better transit services instead of individualized solutions, as Elon Musk would say, much better cycling infrastructure so that people can feel safe when they're riding their bikes, so that there's places for people to park their bikes when they need to drop them off and go somewhere and not fear that they're going to be stolen or anything

like that, and even more walkable communities. And the key to that, because this isn't just about transportation, right, is that the actual communities themselves will need to change to reorient around that. And as we've seen, especially in the past few years, but even more broadly than that, when you start to make those changes that make cities more livable, that make communities more livable, the cost of living in them tends to go up. And so even, you know, a private housing system is really going against these goals of equity that we should be striving for these goals of better communities. And so it really forces us to have this broader kind of reconsideration of the society that we've built, how transportation fits in it, but also how we change these broader structures to create a better

world and a better city and a better transportation system and better technology too, I guess. I think that's probably a great place to leave it. I mean, I think that the book does a really admirable job of painting a total picture of how it is really that Silicon Valley mindset, how it is this misplaced faith in technology that animates all of these very shallow solutions. And it has over the years, whether it's now or in the early 1900s, if you have a bad solution, it's going to continue to be a bad solution no matter how much technology you pack into it. going to continue to be a bad solution, no matter how much technology you pack into it. There do need to be social solutions to these things. And I would just recommend everybody check out this book. Anybody that is still skeptical that Silicon Valley has

the best vector for accomplishing anything, I think it's just such a fruitful arena to look at how it just, in transportation, it just comes up short time and time again. And just take note of all of the different areas that you document, Paris. I would just give this book a good read. It's also, you know, you'll find yourself shaking your head a lot. I think by peeling away all of these misbegotten utopian and sub-utopian dreams, you can really see what's needed. You're left with a picture of what we have to do and what we can do once that clutters out of the way. It's pretty simple. Pedestrian areas, more bike lanes, like you said. And so thanks for writing this book. Thanks for having me on here. I'll give you the last word.

No, thanks so much for taking the time to, you know, read the book, engage with the book, give me feedback on the book, of course, through the process. Obviously I have appreciated that immensely and, you know, for taking the time to come on the show, as always, as my, I wouldn't, I can't say favorite guest, but let's be real. I love chatting with you. The guy who picks up the phone most frequently when you call. We can put it that way. No, I'm always happy to. I think it's a real service that you do here on the podcast and with the book.

So I'm always, always happy to chat. It's always a good time. Brian Merchant is the author of The One Device, The Secret History of the iPhone and the co-editor of Terraform, Watch Worlds Burn. I hope you enjoyed this episode where we talked about my new book, Road to Nowhere, What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About the Future of Transportation. If you do want to pick up a copy, you can go to any major bookseller anywhere you buy your books. You can go get it from Verso Books directly, and you'll get the e-book if you also buy the physical book.

Or you can find a link in the show notes with more information. Tech Won't Save Us is produced by Eric Wickham and is part of the Harbinger Media Network. If you want to support the work that goes into making the show every week, you can go to patreon.com slash tech won't save us and become a supporter. Thanks for listening. Thank you.