A man tried to fight a Waymo over the weekend. Footage captured him working to disembowel the soulless contraption with his bare hands at a busy intersection in Los Angeles. It could have been a scene out of Cyberpunk 2077, but it wasn’t. Whether it was performance art or someone experiencing a mental health crisis, it produced the kind of unhinged clip that makes complete sense in 2026.
“Video from the Citizen App shows the man on the crushed windshield of the Waymo, holding a bent windshield wiper while screaming at the sensor on the top of the vehicle,” reported the local affiliate ABC 7 News. Traffic came to a halt and police eventually arrived to arrest the man for vandalism. The TV station’s news story includes photos of other notable Waymo happenings, including an incident in which teens arrested for “underaged drinking and shooting Orbeez gel blasters” during a ride.
I only just saw my first Waymo in person earlier this year. I was in San Francisco for the Game Developers Conference 2026 and saw the driverless vehicles, which look like something Rick Moranis’ character from Honey I Shrunk The Kids would have invented, circling downtown for their fares. I spotted a few more on my recent trip to L.A. for Summer Game Fest. At one point a Waymo pulled over to the side of the road right next to an AI-controlled delivery robot with ads for The Boys Season 5 plastered across its sides.
It’s the kind of human-less snapshot that can shake you from your late capitalist slumber and make you wonder what the hell it was all for as we barrel toward an economy built on fraud and gambling whose end goal is not flying cars but the disintermediation of humanity itself by algorithms.
“The entire world economy is being steered in the direction of generating as many of this type of guy as possible,” wrote one person on Bluesky of the East Hollywood Waymo Vandal. Frank Herbert could never have guessed how much harder his famous Dune quote would hit a half century after he wrote it.