Living in Tempe now and settling into the amenities I didn't have on the west side. One of those is access to Waymo, a driverless alternative to Lyft and Uber.

As a tech-forward person, this appeals to me, but I paused first because you can't open source a rideshare the way you can other tools. They are inherently connected to venture capital (specifically Google) at least for the foreseeable future.

Can you 3d print cars yet? Somebody vibe code that!!

Anyway, so the calculation becomes this:

1 - Call a human driver so they can get paid, since we know that's why they're out on the road and everyone needs to eat.

or:

2 - Liberate a human driver by calling a Waymo, since nobody should spend their precious time on this planet doing things a machine can do for us.

So if you're deep in political theory you might immediately notice that choice #1 contains a kernel of truth about trade: that free exchange is a form of cooperation and can function as mutual aid.

The problem under capitalism is a pernicious lie that springs from this truth: that we need extractive economic structures to support a "free market" by allowing parasites to use trade as a cash pump to centralize wealth - "capital" - so they can dole it out in the form of "innovation".

You know, innovations like Waymo that cut out the human completely.

This is a central anxiety within leftism right now, one that I think we should take seriously. I've obviously taken the tech-forward side, favoring liberation from toil. But what do we do about the mutual aid piece - the part where trade is a legit means of resource distribution, the one where cooperative exchange means we count on each other to spend money so we can make money?

I'm sure you can guess, I decided to try Waymo even if I might not stick with it. I was too curious not to!! And I noticed something interesting.

I had expected the service would cost less because they didn't have to pay a human driver. But it actually cost more!! A trip that was offered on Lyft for under $8 cost $11 on Waymo. That answers that, I thought. I'd rather pay less and benefit a human, than pay more to a techbro.

But I couldn't stop thinking about it. Why does it cost more?

And that's when it hit me. That's what it costs to maintain the insurance & equipment and pay for the gas!! That is the cost the other services are extracting from their drivers.

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When I pay $8 to Lyft, the driver is subsidizing the other $3 out of pocket, hidden in the unseen cost of maintenance, fuel, and insurance. With Waymo, they have no one to dump those costs on so they have to charge the user.

As soon as I realized this my decision changed. Not only am I liberating a human from the toil of driving me, I'm liberating them from the extractive nature of the industry itself.

I'm refusing to help Lyft offload their cost of doing business onto a working human, and making Waymo pay their own way. And I'm refusing to let them hold the driver's survival hostage as a coercive lever in my calculator as I weigh my choices under actually-existing capitalism.

I'm not sure this logic translates to every form of automation, I haven't really thought it through beyond the rideshare example. But in this context, with this service, to me the choice is obvious.

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Choosing a human driver is only legible as worker solidarity when you accept the lie of capitalism that its extractive structures are an even exchange - a valid form of mutual aid - and that's just not true.

Automation may not be the complete fix, we still need anticapitalist economics to remove the extractive element from the consumer end (the rider) and the production end (the people who make the cars and write the code). But applying the principle of worker solidarity to the service end (the driver) leads to a counter-intuitive conclusion:

The best way to help another worker is to eliminate the opportunity for capitalism to exploit them.

I'll be using Waymo from now on.