Digital Manure Is the Point of Technocratic Debauchery

On Saturday, December 20, the infamously unreliable PG&E infrastructure again failed to prevent a fire, and a third of San Francisco was left in darkness.

Traffic lights didn’t light. The city’s Department of Emergency Management naturally urged restraint, asking everyone to stay home so emergency responders could be unfettered.

Instead, across the city, Waymo’s fleet of 800 to 1,000 robotaxis blocked streets by doing the exact opposite: stopping in intersections, impeding buses, and according to city officials, delaying fire department response to the substation blaze itself and a second fire in Chinatown.

Waymo logic was to make the disaster worse, and become another disaster itself, as if massive PG&E failures aren’t a known and expected annual pain in California.

…Waymo vehicles didn’t pull over to the side of the road or seek out a parking space. Nor did they treat intersections as four-way stops, as a human would have. Instead, they just … sat there with their hazard lights on, like a student driver freezing up before their big parallel-parking test. Several Waymo vehicles got stuck in the middle of a busy intersection, causing a traffic jam. Another robotaxi blocked a city bus.

The company then dropped a disinformation bomb from the corporate blog three days later.

Waymo described itself as “the world’s most trusted driver” in the aftermath of being completely untrustworthy. It tried to distract readers how it “successfully traversed more than 7,000 dark signals.” That would be like saying only look at all the cats and dogs it hasn’t murdered yet. Finally, Waymo promised that it was “undaunted”, in a post explaining why it just manually pulled its entire fleet off the streets. Sounds daunted to me.

The ironies are irresistible, as evidence of cognitive dissonance driving their groundless rhetoric, but the deeper story is why their technology exists, who it serves, and what its presence on public streets reveals about political corruption in California.

Big Tech’s Prancing Princes

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, aristocratic carriages were an unfortunate and toxic fixture of European cities. The overly large and heavy boxes moved unaccountably through streets built and maintained by public taxation and peasant labor. They spread manure for public workers or the conscripted poor to chase and clean. When the elites ran over pedestrians, which happened regularly, there was no legal recourse. Commoners stepped in fear and bore costs, as the privileged passed without paying.

The carriage was far more than transportation. It was the physical assertion of hierarchy in public spaces. Its externalities of the manure, the danger, the congestion, and the noise were all pushed out to be absorbed by everyone else. Its benefits accrued to one among many.

The term “car” is rooted in this ideology of inconvenience to others as status, where overpriced cages for the few consume public space with wasteful and harmful outcomes to the many.

Waymo’s cars are a mistake in history pulled forward, to function identically to the worst carriages. They move through streets built and maintained by public funds. When they fail, when they kill, emergency responders and traffic police manage the consequences. When they impede ambulances and fire trucks, the costs are measured in delayed response times and lives lost. The company operates under regulatory protection from a captured state agency, the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), which forced corporate control and expansion into public spaces over the unanimous objection of public servants including San Francisco’s fire chief, city attorney, and transportation officials.

The parallel is not metaphorical.

It is structural.

Algorithms That Can’t Predict Probable Disasters Should Be Accountable for Causing Disasters

Waymo’s blog post falsely tries to spin PG&E disaster as “a unique challenge for autonomous technology.”

Unique? A power outage in California?

This is false.

It’s so false, it makes Waymo look like they can’t be trusted with automation, let alone operations.

Imagine Waymo saying they see stop signs and moisture as unique challenges. Yeah, Tesla has literally failed at both of those “challenges”, to give you an idea of how clueless the tech “elites” are these days.

Power outages in California are not unique or rare. They are a heavily documented and often recurring feature of the state’s privatized infrastructure. Enron very cruelly, as you may remember, intentionally caused brownouts in California in order to artificially raise prices and spike profits. Silicon Valley veterans build disaster recovery plans around outages, due to recurring events like this, which absolutely forecast PG&E failures. It’s engineering 101.

In October 2019, PG&E cancelled power to over three million Californians in a cynically titled “Public Safety Power Shutoff”. This is the equivalent of someone telling you to pull the power plug on your computer if you are worried about malware. The utility has conducted such shutoffs every year since, as a means of delaying and avoiding basic safety upgrades to infrastructure. A federal judge overseeing PG&E’s criminal probation explained the situation with candor that isn’t even shocking anymore:

…cheated on maintenance of its grid—to the point that the grid became unsafe to operate during our annual high winds.

A year later, with this environmental reality of annual outages in full view, Waymo opened operations in San Francisco. It received approval for commercial service in August 2023. In that time, the company boasted that it accumulated what it calls “100 million miles of fully autonomous driving experience.”

Uh-huh. It created a calculator that could do 2+2=4 around 100 million times. But apparently the engineers never thought about subtraction. Outcomes are different than just measuring outputs.

When the lights went out, in an event that happens so regularly in California it’s become normal, the vehicles froze, requiring human remote confirmation to navigate dark traffic signals.

Dare I ask if Waymo ever considered an earthquake as a possibility in the state famous for its earthquakes and… power outages?

The company describes its baseline confirmation requirements as if it made “an abundance of caution during our early deployment.”

Anyone can now plainly see that, after seven years, such a disinformation phrase strains all credulity. What it reveals is Waymo is deploying an ivory tower system designed for a few gilded elites expecting idealized infrastructure, which doesn’t exist in the state where it operates.

Waymo Benefits, But Who Pays

Waymo is as unprofitable as a San Francisco cheese store in December.

“PG&E fucked us,” Lovett said. “We’re not talking about 120 bucks worth of cheese, dude. We’re talking about anywhere between 12 and 15 grand in sales that I’m not getting back.”

Bank of America estimates Waymo burned $1.5 billion in 2024 against a revenue stream of $50 to $75 million. Alphabet’s “Other Bets” segment reported losses of $1.12 billion in Q3 2024 alone across all their gambling with public safety. The company is valued at $45 billion because of investor confidence in privatisation and monopolization of public mobility (rent seeking streets, taxation without representation), and not current earnings.

The beneficiaries are no mystery: Alphabet shareholders, venture capital, the 2,500 employees at Waymo, and well-heeled lazy riders seeking exclusion and novelty.

The payers are equally clear: emergency responders forced to deal with stalled vehicles, taxpayers who fund infrastructure and regulatory agencies, other road users stuck in gridlock, and potential victims of delayed emergency response.

This is like the days of the giant double-decker empty idling Google Bus parked at public bus stops blocking transit and delaying city workers, because… Google execs DGAF about the public.

Research on Big Tech privatization of streets as harmful to the public is unambiguous. Fire damage doubles every 30-60 seconds per NFPA research on active suppression delay. For cardiac emergencies, each minute of delayed response translates to significant additional hospital costs and measurable increases in mortality.

During Saturday’s blackout, Waymo vehicles contributed to delays at two active fires and created gridlock that impeded bus transit for hours. It’s the Google Bus denial of service disaster all over again, yet hundreds of times worse because a distributed denial of service.

No penalty has been assessed yet. The CPUC, which regulates both PG&E and Waymo, responded by saying it has “staff looking into both incidents.” Water is apparently wet. The agency has a history of “looking” that doesn’t look good. It is most known for unanimously waiving a $200 million fine against PG&E in 2020 for electrical equipment failures linked to fires that killed more than 100 people.

Waymo could murder a hundred people in the streets and no one would be surprised if the CPUC said hopes and prayers, looking into it, ad nauseam.

Reverse Exclusion

Traditional exclusion takes the form of barriers. It would be a control that says you cannot enter a space, access a service, or participate in an opportunity. Reverse exclusion operates, well, in reverse. It is the imposition of externalities onto public spaces that cannot be escaped.

Before California’s 1998 bar smoking ban, 74% of San Francisco bartenders had respiratory symptoms of wheezing, coughing, and shortness of breath from being forced to inhale secondhand smoke for 28 hours a week. They couldn’t opt out. The smoke wasn’t their choice. The JAMA study that documented this found symptoms resolved in 59% of workers within weeks of the ban taking effect. The externality was measurable, the harm was real, and the workers had no escape until the government intervened.

Waymo operates the same structure of harm. You can decline to patronize an elite restaurant. You cannot opt out of the surveillance conducted by Waymo mapping every neighborhood, and all the objects around it, for private profit. You cannot choose to have a fire truck not blocked by a Waymo. At this point expect Waymo radar to start looking inside of homes, moving beyond cameras already recording everything outside 24 hours a day.

Waymo claims there is a mobility problem it wants to fix. This is misdirection.

San Francisco is tiny and has BART, Muni, buses, bike lanes, and walkable neighborhoods. A walk across the entire city is a reality, honored for decades by events that do exactly that. The population most likely to use Waymo are outsiders who work in tech, visiting tourists who don’t walk where they come from, and affluent residents who want exclusivity of a carriage experience. The city already has abundant transportation options that would deliver far more than Waymo can for less cost. What Waymo provides is not mobility but class conflict, imposing an ability to move through the city without employing human labor, without negotiating social interaction, without participating in inherently shared efficiency experience of urban spaces.

The royal carriage served a similar function of class conflict. It was never an efficient or safe way to move through a city. It was the physical demonstration of superiority, displaying who mattered and who didn’t.

CPUC Legalized Negligent Homicide

The truth is the technology is not a transportation product. It is a class technology that externalizes harms for its users by privatizing spaces and removing accountability.

Its function was never to move people efficiently or safely since trams and buses do that far better for lower cost. Its function is to assert elitism into physical spaces to redistribute power, extract data from public commons, establish monopoly position for future rent extraction, normalize corporate sovereignty over democratic governance, and transfer huge risk from private capital into public infrastructure.

It’s a ruse. Waymo is murder.

The CPUC approved Waymo’s expansion over explicit warnings from San Francisco officials that the vehicles “drove over fire hoses, interfered with active emergency scenes, and otherwise impeded first responders more than 50 times” as of August 2023. The agency imposed no requirements to track, report, avoid, or limit such incidents.

The captured corrupted CPUC simply approved unsafe expansion against the public interest and moved on.

The structure is the same one that allowed nobles to deposit loads of manure on public streets while commoners cleaned, if they didn’t die from being run over. Privatized benefits, socialized costs, and institutional arrangements that prevent accountability.

In the 1890s, major cities faced a “horse manure crisis” as the predictable consequence of a transportation system designed to serve elite mobility at public expense. The crisis could have easily been solved by regulating carriages and building public waste infrastructure (e.g. Golden Gate Park is literally horse manure from San Francisco dumped onto the huge empty Ocean Beach neighborhood). Instead it was switched to automobiles, which created far more unsafe externalities: highways intentionally built through Black neighborhoods to destroy prosperity, pedestrian deaths, pollution, congestion from suburban isolation.

Waymo is marketed falsely against human error, when it is the biggest example of human error. It delivers opaque surveillance, regulatory capture, emergency response interference, and reduced quality of life due to physical assertion of tech supremacy (externality) into public space.

The royal carriage existed because it demonstrated hierarchy. The ride share system (e.g. “hackers”) that evolved from it by the 1800s was so toxic it forced evolution of street lights to maintain public safety. The frozen Waymo blocking a fire truck isn’t a bug. It’s the mistake in history rising again, a flawed system returning when it shouldn’t: elite mobility, public costs, zero accountability.

On Monday, Supervisor Bilal Mahmood called for a hearing into Waymo’s blackout failures. Mayor Daniel Lurie disclosed that he had personally called a Waymo executive on Saturday demanding the company remove its vehicles from the streets. That’s the right call.

Waymo’s roadmap for 2026 includes expansion of harms to more freeways, airports, and cities across the United States.

This post was written during the 5:00AM widespread PG&E power outages of Thursday, December 25, 2025.

…we are now estimating to have power on by Dec 26 11:00PM.

December 3rd, Rinaldo Nazzaro—founder of The Base, ex-Pentagon contractor, current St. Petersburg resident, alleged Russian intelligence asset—released an audio message calling for “acceleration teams” to conduct “targeted attacks on essential infrastructure” in the United States.

December 20-21, a fire at PG&E’s Mission Street substation knocked out power to 130,000 San Francisco customers. One of the largest urban blackouts San Francisco has experienced.

The Base, fundamentally a Nazi group operated from Russia, is a designated terrorist organization in Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, and the European Union.

It is not designated in the United States.

The FBI under President Trump, as a matter of historical fact, is acting today like how President Wilson did 100 years ago. Director Patel has expressly refused to investigate foreign assets and domestic terrorists threatening Americans:

…openly rerouted resources away from investigations of far-right extremists.

The following is an analytical case that San Francisco just experienced a Russian-directed domestic (insider) infrastructure attack.

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Context

The Bay Area has been hit by sophisticated infrastructure attacks for sixteen years. None of the related and wider major incidents have been solved:

• 2009: Coordinated fiber optic cuts at four locations. 52,000 customers affected, 911 knocked out across three counties. Required specialized tools, heavy equipment, knowledge of underground vault locations. $250,000 reward. Never solved.
• 2013: Metcalf substation. Fiber cables cut first, then 100+ rifle rounds fired at 17 transformers over 19 minutes. $15 million in damage. DHS assessed “likely an insider.” $250,000 reward. Never solved.
• 2014-2015: Eleven to fourteen fiber optic cuts over 14 months. Attackers dressed as telecom workers. FBI insisted attacks were “not linked” to Metcalf despite identical methods. Never solved.
• 2022: Moore County, North Carolina. Two substations hit with rifle fire. 45,000 without power for five days. One woman died when her oxygen machine failed. DHS had issued a warning three days prior. $100,000 reward. Never solved.

The attacks that have been solved share a common feature: amateur tradecraft.

Peter Karasev googled “explosive materials” and “infrastructure attacks” before bombing two PG&E transformers—and got ten years. The Washington Christmas attack was an ATM robbery scheme. Brandon Russell recruited a co-conspirator who turned out to be an informant.

Professional operations with insider knowledge remain ghosts.

Europe Knows

Europe is experiencing identical attacks. The difference: they’re investigating.

Russian sabotage operations in Europe nearly tripled between 2023 and 2024, after quadrupling between 2022 and 2023. Targets include energy infrastructure, communications cables, defense manufacturing, and transportation systems.

The operational signature matches: low-tech, high-impact, plausible deniability, locally recruited perpetrators, communications cut before primary attacks.

The institutional response differs entirely. European governments attribute attacks to GRU coordination. They arrest perpetrators. They designate The Base as terrorists. NATO describes the threat level as “record high.”

The United States has the same attack signature, the same organization openly calling for infrastructure attacks, the same founder operating from Russian soil—and the FBI response is to deprioritize.

The Base is Foreign Run Domestic Terrorism

The Base recruits through a Russian email address. It operates cells in Appalachia, the Mid-Atlantic, and the Midwest—photos from 2025 show masked men with rifles and skull masks in American forests. Its Ukrainian wing claimed the July assassination of an intelligence officer in Kyiv. Its Spanish cell was just rolled up by Europol.

Nazzaro’s December audio was explicit:

Our long-term strategic goal is to accomplish something similar to what al-Qaida and IS accomplished in Syria. Form an organized, armed insurgency to take and hold territory.

He named only two countries with the “necessary prerequisites”: Ukraine and the United States.

The VKontakte post was operational doctrine:

…targeted attacks on essential infrastructure and resources [that] contribute to the political fragmentation of the country over time if the attacks remain consistent.

Less than three weeks later, 130,000 San Francisco customers lost power.

American Accountability Gap

PG&E’s response to the December 20th fire: hire Exponent.

Exponent is the infamous firm that defended tobacco companies, manufactured doubt about asbestos to deny cancer, and specializes in producing uncertainty for clients facing liability. They have even argued, to block crash victim claims, that seatbelts don’t reduce injuries. Exponent means this is not an investigation. This is PG&E narrative preparation, where the underlying pattern is clear:

• The infrastructure is undefended (55,000 substations, effectively zero guards)
• The threats are explicit (Nazzaro’s audio, The Base’s VKontakte posts)
• The agency responsible has been captured (FBI deprioritizing under Patel)
• The accountability mechanism has been privatized (Exponent)

We know the 1990 OTA (Putin KGB timeframe) found that losing three substations could blackout a region. A later leaked FERC assessment concluded losing nine substations plus a transformer manufacturer would collapse the entire grid for eighteen months.

We know from industry reports that intentional infrastructure attacks exceeded 15,000 incidents between June 2024 and June 2025 (Putin President timeframe).

We know The Base, a Nazi front group for Russian assets, called for exactly this kind of attack, from Russian soil, days before it happened.

Back to Preparedness Day

On July 22, 1916, a bomb exploded during San Francisco’s Preparedness Day parade, killing ten people. The attack was never solved.

But it was used.

Tom Mooney and Warren Billings, political organizers with no connection to the bombing, were targeted and convicted by President Wilson’s corrupted justice department on fabricated evidence and unfairly imprisoned for decades.

The institutional utility of the unsolved attack, for President Wilson, was it could be attributed to whoever served under his white nationalist agenda, which aligned at the time with German assets infiltrating America to bomb infrastructure.

The December 2025 blackout will likely follow the same trajectory.

Not solved, but enabled and used.

Exponent’s track record speaks for itself: 500 automotive lawsuits, zero findings of defect. Over $100 million from Ford for litigation defense. Tobacco industry work in the 1990s to keep people smoking. It will produce a shallow report that creates reasonable doubt about any specific cause to protect PG&E from any real investigation. The FBI will no longer hunt Nazis while ignoring The Base’s explicit calls for this exact attack. The pattern of unsolved professional operations is expected to continue under Trump’s puppet-like performances.

So don’t bother asking whether we can prove The Base conducted this specific attack or any others.

Ask instead why is a Nazi group openly calling for American infrastructure attacks from Russian territory, through Russian communications channels, led by an alleged Russian intelligence asset while sitting undesignated as a terrorist organization in the country that it explicitly targets.

The answer is the same as it was in 1916 when the KKK ran the White House as “America First”: the unsolved attack by foreign assets is more useful than the solved one.

The conventional narrative frames President Wilson and Henry Ford as naive pacifists, when they were the exact opposite. Ford refused to sell munitions to Britain and France, and “disappeared” millions in taxpayer money, while Germany couldn’t buy anyway due to the blockade; proving functional support aligned with the German war machine.

Ford received over $21 million in government contracts during WWI and delivered effectively nothing; $14 million for Eagle boats that were “either useless or not constructed,” $1.3 million for tractors never delivered, $5.5 million for spare parts never delivered. That’s not pacifism, because it’s sabotage through contract fraud, exactly paralleling what German military intelligence was doing with shell companies during the same period. Ford redirected $30,000 into Wilson’s 1916 re-election campaign at Joe Tumulty’s personal request, which nobody denied when challenged in the Congressional Record.

The history clearly shows that Wilson and Ford actively undermined America by sabotaging infrastructure for Allied preparedness, even enabling German agents to bomb San Francisco to kill Americans. Wilson knew. He was briefed. His fake “neutrality” rhetoric, funded by Ford, was disinformation to cover their foreign alignments.

The “America First” administrations, both then and now, know foreign-directed sabotage is spreading, suppress investigations, and use overheated “immigrant” rhetoric to obscure right-wing extremist domestic terror cells operating with impunity.