Capitalism Without Humans
As new technologies (not immigrants) replace human labor, “machine breaking” as a tactic of rebellion is taking on a renewed vitality.
Sarah Jaffe
A Waymo robotaxi ignites as a symbol of resistance on June 8, 2025, in Los Angeles, amid tensions spurred by the Trump administration’s call to use the National Guard for immigration raids. PHOTO BY MARIO TAMA / GETTY IMAGES
Around the United States, the rebellions against President Donald Trump’s militarized Immigration and Customs Enforcement invasions — bolstered by other agencies including the National Guard and, at least in one case, actual Marines—continue. National headlines have mostly skipped over Memphis, perhaps because it’s a smaller city in the South, far from the headquarters of national media. On the ground in Memphis, local policy organizer Amber Sherman explained, the fear— and resistance — are similar to what we see in bigger cities.
It’s not so much the National Guard, she said, but around the city, there are some 1,500 federal agents from the so-called Memphis Safe Task Force working alongside existing police and using traffic stops — reportedly more than 35,000 in two months — as a way to get their hands on people. This is the very issue — pretextual stops— that Memphis activists organized against so effectively after police killed artist and skateboarder Tyre Nichols two years ago. “It’s just scaring the hell out of people,” Sherman said. “A lot of people just aren’t going anywhere, and that’s really impacting all the economics. No one is going out to buy anything. People aren’t taking their kids to school.”
Unlike Illinois and California, Tennessee has a governor who is thrilled to have Trump’s troops. Gov. Bill Lee led the charge to overturn the police reforms that Memphis activists like Sherman had fought for, as I wrote in 2024. Cities under attack by the state government is a common story in the South, but the Memphis activists are also disappointed in their city government, which has offered to cooperate with the federal agents.
“We’re threatened constantly, and some people are susceptible to those threats,” Sherman said.
Activists in the city have fought for social services and youth programs that effectively lowered violent crime to a 25-year low— according to the police themselves. But too often the governor and state legislature overturn that work or its funding.
“Our mayor doesn’t want to push back because he knows that they’ll not fund or not give us grants for different programming,” Sherman said. “That’s how they keep us in check.”
What Memphis does have in common with most other cities on Trump’s list is Black leadership, a large Black population and powerful activist communities. And it’s beginning to fight back, too, against the tech takeover, embodied in Memphis in the form of Elon Musk’s xAI data center. So Trump sent in the task force — which had, between Oct. 1 and early December, made more than 3,100 arrests, and it won’t disclose who it has arrested or why. Local outlet MLK50 analyzed one day’s worth of arrest data to find that, despite the governor’s claims that the force is arresting violent criminals and gang members, “most of the people arrested were not charged with a violent crime, and immigrants are being arrested on administrative — not criminal — warrants.”
“It is meant,” Sherman said, “as a way to quell dissent.”
The rebellions have, so far, given us two iconic images of resistance. In Portland, Ore., we have the inflatable costumes—beginning with the frog and expanding to a whole menagerie. In Los Angeles, the indelible image is that of a string of automated Waymo taxis, put to the torch.
The costumes have quickly been seized on and replicated around the country, most visibly at the massive No Kings marches in October 2025. But as Julia Carrie Wong wrote in the Guardian, clowning in a frog suit is a de-escalatory tactic, designed to make masked agents of the state appear ridiculous.
By contrast, the flaming Waymos express something else: a targeted defiance of tech-enabled Trumpism with material consequences. If you’re going to treat our neighbors as disposable, the burned-to-a-crisp robotaxi says, we’re going to make you pay.
The Waymo is, after all, a privatized, automated taxi run as a subsidiary of Alphabet (Google’s parent company) and rolled out in high-tech hubs like San Francisco, Phoenix and Austin, Texas.
Tech journalist Brian Merchant saw the husks of incinerated Waymos firsthand in Los Angeles and reported, “Protesters were reportedly calling them ‘spy cars’ as they were vandalized and set ablaze, and some noted how the cars can share data with the LAPD.”
Merchant goes on: “ICE raids are carried out using data provided by Silicon Valley companies. … Whether directly or through third party contractors, much of big tech, including Google, has made deals with ICE, too.”
A photo posted of one Waymo, presumably before it was put to the torch, showed it splashed with graffiti, “Eat the Rich” and “Tech Fuels Fascism.”
The same tech hubs in which Waymo has so proudly unfurled its service, after all, were also increasingly unlivable before the camouflaged gun-toting goons marched in, where homelessness is rampant and gig workers sleep in their (non-self-driving) cars.
Driving for one of the various rideshare and delivery apps was one way that working-class people, immigrant or otherwise, could maybe piece together a living; now, robotaxis and a horde of delivery robots cheerily automate their jobs away. The workers so recently called “essential” in the days of Covid-19 lockdowns are tossed aside or fed into the deportation machine.
Communities have been disintegrating under the weight of supposed prosperity. As Eric Garcetti, then-mayor of Los Angeles, famously said in 2020: “In a good economy, homelessness goes up.”
Wealthy residents and visitors to LA can cruise past homeless encampments in a driverless car, ignoring the people rendered surplus when parts of the servant economy are mechanized. California Gov. Gavin Newsom personally joined the clearance of one LA camp, ostentatiously shoving items into a trash bag.
The symbolism couldn’t be clearer: When we no longer value your labor, you will be discarded.
What the Waymo represents, then, is the question of what happens in an increasingly automated economy, when more and more of us will no longer be “workers” at all.
What happens when U.S. capitalism simply needs fewer humans?
The idea of people being superfluous isn’t new, but it’s become a dominant structure of feeling in recent years. Over and over, when I was reporting on the Covid pandemic, workers told me some version of, “They say we’re essential. What they really mean is we’re expendable.”
They felt this way in the middle of lockdown, when suddenly the importance of grocery store clerks, delivery drivers, line cooks and farmworkers was made abundantly clear. Immigrant-dominated industries were suddenly so important that the president demanded they keep working; meanwhile, undocumented people were excluded from most of the benefits offered to Americans to survive the crisis. Five years on, with the government shut down for some six weeks and SNAP benefits for more than 40 million people only recently restored, those suspicions of expendability have been proven correct, and not only about immigrant workers. Sherman noted that Tennessee has a rainy day fund of more than $2 billion, and it would have taken only a fraction of that to cover food aid for the 700,000 estimated residents of the state who rely on SNAP.
The United States has a long history of absorbing workers, particularly from Latin America, when demand is high, and removing them when demand falters. As I recently wrote for In These Times, ICE enforcement can be scarce in the months after a disaster, only to swoop in after cleanup.
But this story goes back further.
Famously, there was the Bracero Program, established in 1942, which brought guest workers from Mexico for the farming season, issuing millions of temporary visas. There was the also the overlapping, repugnantly named Operation Wetback, a crackdown by border agents to deport people back to Mexico or push them into the Bracero standards.
Guest workers were preferable because they could not stay — they were sent back as soon as the need for their labor was done.
This same reason is why Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk have advocated for expanded guest worker programs in tech — cheaper workers are easier to remove if they make trouble. In low-paid farmwork, the excuse is that “Americans won’t do this work”; in tech, the argument is Americans lack the skills. Both arguments offer cover for the continued desire for cheap and easily controlled workers.
Since the end of the Bracero Program, the United States has tightened the border more. Presidents of both parties have targeted Mexican and Latinx immigrants, fast-tracked deportations, and, in Daniel Denvir’s words in All-American Nativism, “us[ed] undocumented workers as leverage.”
The result is the continued dehumanization of migrants — at best, valued as units of labor power rather than human beings, and, at worst, demonized for simply daring to exist in the United States.
Today, it seems, the Trump administration’s smash-and-grab approach to deportations might finally have changed the calculus. Beyond just keeping migrants super-exploitable to drive down wages for us all, ICE has become the shock troops of a regime led by a man who posts AI-generated slop of himself raining shit on the people he governs; they arrest and brutalize citizen and migrant alike, grab children on their way to school, terrorize people in their homes.
This is occurring at a time of skyrocketing inequality, when decent jobs and affordable housing are harder and harder to come by. White Americans, particularly men, who are used to being first in line for the good stuff, are now feeling the loss in status. Meanwhile, demagogues aplenty are telling them their loss has been immigrants’ gain. The reality is that the capitalists, in tech and other industries, care little for any of our lives: White workers, as well as immigrants, are disposable, and the investments being poured into so-called artificial intelligence are in the hope that more expensive workers — whether skilled coders held up so often as the ideal, or Hollywood writers, or journalists — can be replaced by an algorithm.
The gigification of so many jobs by the app-based economy (the Ubers and Lyfts) laid the groundwork. As Emily Bender, co-author of The AI Con, explained, “If the work can be broken down into little replicable units that people can slot into, then you don’t need to see workers as people with expertise, with careers, with relationships. They are just providers of content or annotations or labeling or, in big scare quotes, ‘intelligence.’”
It’s Taylorism for the 21st century, and there is no industry that the tech overlords would not like to apply it to. Whether we are deskilled (and devalued), or literally packed off to prison or a deportation flight, capital will keep flowing into the pockets of the Zuckerbergs and Musks. (Musk, we should recall, is also rolling out supposedly self-driving taxis.)
Rooting for Trump to deport all the immigrants is a desperate bid to stave off one’s own expendability. The better solution, as striking Hollywood writers proved, is organization. Or, as the people of LA and Chicago and everywhere else remind us, to raise hell.
The flaming Waymo, then, is not a symbol of nebulous or even misdirected rage. It is a symbol of the way that more and more people are being rendered surplus, through organized abandonment or deliberate removal. As Merchant wrote, “The Waymo contributes to congestion, surveils neighborhoods, replaces the Uber or cab driver, and sends any resultant future profits upstream to a tech company in Mountain View.”
The protesters know exactly why — and for whom — it exists.
We are in a new age of uprising, as Joshua Clover wrote in Riot. Strike. Riot. These rebellions are often kicked off by state violence, spurred by a recognition of the racial dimension of this disposability. From Memphis, Minneapolis and Ferguson, Mo., to Los Angeles and Chicago, police murder a Black person and are granted impunity; ICE stuffs someone who looks Latinx into an unmarked van as community members film and shout and sometimes succeed in pulling their neighbors back. The forces of so-called order operate above the law, and more and more of us know it.
As Clover also stressed, the return of the riot comes as profitability and “economic growth” have stagnated. He noted that capital’s “tragic flaw” is that, in Marx’s own words, “it presses to reduce labor time to a minimum, while it posits labor time, on the other side, as sole measure and source of wealth.” Capital needs us, even as it needs to replace us. It automates the labor, rendering more people surplus, even as it captures their skill in the machine and the algorithm — what Marx referred to so famously as “dead labor.”
So-called generative AI is a clearer illustration of this principle than Marx could have imagined. As Molly Crabapple and others wrote in an open letter, playing on his words, it is “vampirical, feasting on past generations of artwork even as it sucks the lifeblood from living artists.”
More prosaically: Machine learning sweeps up vast swaths of existing works of art, literature, journalism and scholarship, and vomits it back out in a fraction of the time it took to create the original, but mashed together, sometimes deliberately imitative. As we create and our work is made public, it is vacuumed up by the machine — a machine that requires ever more computing power, electricity and water. Trump uses AI to express his contempt for protests and, by doing so, expresses his contempt not just for the value of human labor but for the planet.
Meanwhile, people are rendered surplus along manufactured, racialized lines: the prison, the police killing, the migrant detention center, the deportation flight. Labor’s long-dear principle of last-hired, first-fired meant Black workers felt deindustrialization’s sting first and fiercest, though the stories we hear today nearly always figure the redundant worker as a white man. Factories moved overseas to wring greater profits from cheaper workers, and those left behind went into services, or gig work, or languished.
This cycle is familiar, and within it, the ICE raids — like the ar - rests of protesters with the movement to end the genocide in Gaza— work, as historian Robin D.G. Kelley told me, like a lynching: a public demonstration to instill fear and compliance. The ICE raid is a tool of discipline. And the bigger the surplus population, the more discipline needed.
Today’s rebellions have usually faced down the state, Clover noted, because “the state is near and the economy far.” The strike was the tactic of choice for the proletariat in the days of industrialized production because most people could reach out and touch the economy. But many cannot do so directly now because they are locked out entirely or their manager is an algorithm, an app, a ghost.
The riot is, as Clover argued, a struggle that “unfolds in the context of consumption, featuring the interruption of commercial circulation.” Protesters have, over and over, in the uprisings of recent years, taken to the streets, shut down transit, destroyed cars and looted shops, taking things because why do they deserve less than the rich? What Clover called the “surplus rebellion” mucks up circulation to be heard.
As humans are increasingly closed out of circulation, the targeting of tech makes more sense. As Brian Merchant noted, tech companies like automation “because it promises not just to remove labor from the equation, but accountability. There is no driver to blame if something goes wrong with the self-driving car, it’s a glitchy algorithm; or better yet, it was probably somebody else’s fault because Google’s algorithm is safe and sophisticated, even if it won’t tell you how that algorithm actually works.”
The protesters, though, turned that setup on its head: “There is no one around to stop them from hailing a Waymo car and destroying it.” The tech company has created a place where they can touch — and torch — what’s killing them.
The destruction of the Waymo also recalls an earlier period of transition, from the first round of riots to the strike. In the early days of industrialization, workers would smash the machine that replaced (or sped up and deskilled) their jobs. The Luddites were the most famous, and a series of books (by Gavin Mueller, Merchant himself, and Jathan Sadowski) have brought them back to public consciousness. The Luddites, far from opposing technology for its own sake, were well aware of who controlled the tech and how their labor was being encoded into it. Breaking the machine was not a symbolic action, but a direct one: The smashed machine can’t work, and the burned car doesn’t run.
“[M]achine-breaking,” Clover wrote, “is what the swing from riot to strike looks like.”
You may not be able to destroy the algorithm, but its avatar, roaming your streets, is still, necessarily, tangible.
AI is not produced out of nowhere. The Cloud is a bad metaphor. All of those searches we plug into ChatGPT or Midjourney are carried out on physical machines, and the mad rush to build more data centers means one of them is likely coming to a community near you.
In Memphis, there are no Waymos, but Elon Musk’s Colossus supercomputer has drawn the ire of many who are angry about its gas turbines and the pollution they bring to already-bad air. “They really weren’t ready for the level of pushback they would get,” Sherman said. The company is building another center and “they have all these private security guards that are everywhere” due to protests, she said.
Tech companies, said Sherman, seem to be “trying to get everything that they have wanted to do done right now because they have this president that’s supporting them.”
Just up the Mississippi, in St. Louis, local organizers are also fighting data centers. A project has been proposed for the middle of the city, at the Armory, a former entertainment venue located conveniently in a district that allows tax incentives and a lot of secrecy. They don’t know whose data center it will be just yet, said Jeremy Al-Haj, executive director of the Missouri Workers Center, but they know the city helped underwrite bonds for it.
The coalition — which includes organizations ranging from SEIU’s healthcare local to the Democratic Socialists of America to Metropolitan Congregations United and the Missouri Sierra Club — held a town hall and packed a local church with voices almost entirely in opposition. Their reasons, Al-Haj said, “ranged from the environmental concerns around the data center, water usage and electrical usage, the increased utility rates and the noise level from the data center,” as well as “just the very idea that this should be in the center of the city. And … outrage about AI and the automation of professional middle-class jobs and human creativity that implies.”
AI has proved a crappy replacement for humans — it’s not an accident that the common term for its digital output is “slop.” But it has contributed to the turning of decent jobs into lousy temporary gigs. In his book Work Without the Worker, Phil Jones noted, “AI does not tend to create fully automated systems but rather systems that partially automate jobs and outsource certain tasks to the crowd.” That crowd, he further pointed out, can be located anywhere that an internet connection can reach: automation and outsourcing continue to go hand in hand.
The Waymo car, Joanne McNeil pointed out, is a perfect example of this phenomenon. Remote contractors do the work that the algorithm and the robot can’t, but they’re hidden from view in what Astra Taylor called “fauxtomation.” Waymo’s co-CEO, McNeil noted, denied the cars have remote drivers, but this, she wrote, contradicted the company’s own filing with the California Public Utilities Commission, which “cited the remote workers in its automation chain as a critical safety feature.” Those workers can move the Waymo if the software fails; the company got its expansion approved because human involvement helps “minimize risk.”
Human workers compiled and cleaned the dataset that trained those workers in the first place — human drivers in Google Street View cars and humans behind computers deciding whether an object in a photo is a stop sign. Humans help train systems about which they know almost nothing; you’ve probably helped it yourself if you’ve ever had to use a reCAPTCHA to access a website. That data can be recycled, whether to train a Waymo or an armed drone. Bombing raids in Gaza were guided by AI; Memphis touts its new AI-powered surveillance hub.
Humans are present in every stage of the system, even as it renders them invisible, as Jones wrote. The AI is vampiric at first the way a mosquito is: a little nibble here and there. But mosquitos transmit viruses that kill.
The data centers are as distributed as the outsourced workers. In Mexico, communities battle the same pollution as Memphis, emitted by the same companies; electric grids falter under Microsoft and Amazon. Water shortages make people sick. The director of industrial development for Querétaro, where many of Mexico’s 110 data centers are, bragged in the New York Times of constructing data centers that would use the same amount of energy as 1.25 million U.S. homes. Meanwhile, the state plans to recycle sewage for drinking water.
This is the growth, domestically and internationally, that late capitalism offers. “Data center construction accounted for 92% of growth in U.S. GDP this year,” Al-Haj noted. “The New York Times just reported that Amazon’s planning to automate 75% of its workforce.” The Missouri Workers Center has been organizing with Amazon warehouse workers for several years, and those workers, he said, are worried: “And while they might create some small number of jobs for certain segments of the working class, for the remainder, they spell the loss of jobs.”
The algorithms and the robots are driven by humans, and their deployment is a human decision. The white supremacists who fear the so-called Great Replacement have their targets all wrong, in other words. The real great replacement they ought to worry about isn’t immigrants, but man (and woman, and everyone else) with machine.
In this economy, then, expect to see more machine-breaking.
Worker groups like the National Day Laborer Organizing Network and community organizations like Organized Communities Against Deportations have been building networks of communication, hosting know-your-rights trainings for migrants and concentric circles of activists who have documents, so they can join a rapid response or a more distant protest, amplify stories, serve as legal observers and more. Such groups, as I wrote in Necessary Trouble and From the Ashes, capture some of the outrage from moments of rebellion and build from it in strategically necessary directions.
In Memphis, Sherman said, as in many other cities, organizers have set up a rapid response hotline to report ICE or police activity. They’re canvassing and sharing information in multiple languages. She and others are organized under “Free the 901,” and their website offers know-your-rights flyers and information. “We post warnings about the different areas to avoid,” Sherman said. The group has also launched a rideshare program — the antithesis of the Waymo, a gesture of explicit human accompaniment — so people don’t have to brave the streets alone.
Organizers in Missouri have found they can indeed defeat the data centers. In St. Charles, community outrage seemed, to Jeremy Al-Haj, “pretty organic,” led by farmers who organized quickly. “It was also the case that the mayor’s cousin owned the plot of land that was going to get purchased, and the city council and the mayor had all signed nondisclosure agreements about the project.” Concerns about corruption, in other words, dovetailed with the anger at the secrecy and culminated in a yearlong construction ban.
Capturing the energy of a rebellion is like capturing lightning in a bottle. It doesn’t hold its form well. Not everyone is willing or able to come to weekly organizing meetings. That does not mean nothing has been learned in the streets, that knowledge-sharing isn’t taking place. During the LA rebellion, social media was overflowing with such sharing: Images from Hong Kong’s protests proliferated, and tips about tear gas were proffered by unlikely suspects, including one dermatologist who went viral.
In such moments, people learn the contours of their power. They learn how it feels to be part of a crowd, to have the scary thing happen and to stand up. In LA, successive generations of workers and organizers have survived police crackdowns and showed up again. Echoes of not just the 1992 LA riots or the 1965 Watts rebellion, but the 1990 police assault on a Justice for Janitors demonstration in Century City, could be seen in LA this summer.
David Huerta was one of those who cut his organizing teeth on the Justice for Janitors campaign. Now the president of SEIU California and of SEIU United Service Workers West, Huerta was arrested attempting to protect his community when the ICE raids began June 6. His arrest helped take the LA story national, as union leaders — even those less inclined than Huerta to put their bodies on the line — denounced his arrest.
Since Huerta’s arrest, ICE has escalated to arresting Brad Lander, the third-highest elected official in New York City, and California Sen. Alex Padilla, among others. Huerta’s original felony charge has been downgraded, though he still faces trial.
The Watts rebellion, Kelley noted, “grew not from chaos but from a mobilized community seeking change.” There were civil rights groups but also arts collectives; after the uprising, activists created more cultural spaces and joined more radical political groups, including the Black Panther Party. They built a network to monitor police abuses.
Communities dispersed by policing, economic displacement, deportations — by all the tendrils of organized abandonment — have a harder time coming together, but history reminds us it’s not impossible. We are seeing in the streets what political theorist Rodrigo Nunes called “distributed action” in Neither Vertical Nor Horizontal, as different forms of organizing “combine, communicate, relate and establish positive and negative feedback loops with one another.” Such action operates at multiple scales and times; it involves the collectivities in the streets as well as the long-term membership organizations that stay when national reporters leave. There is little that is absolutely right or wrong: What matters is whether it works, not whether it proves prior ideas.
To those who ask what good setting a Waymo car on fire does, then, we might reply, “too early to tell.” But there is power when long-term organizing and battle-tested strategists come into contact with the righteous anger sparked by repression. The question is not how to organize every single person, but rather, how to prepare for the moments of explosion while focusing on what people need day to day.
We know this means protecting people in our communities when the masked agents arrive, to the best of our abilities, and that requires getting to know those people ahead of time. We know the issues that will move people to act are the ones that, as Ruth Wilson Gilmore says, bite into their existence: the rent, the workplace, the police, the cost of groceries. Different organizations may focus on each, and when the flashpoints come, may be able to lead — or sometimes, importantly, to follow where the riot goes, and to learn in motion what it is that the people will no longer abide.
“We’re doing everything we can to keep our community safe,” Sherman said. “We want to make sure that we are answering the call of what people need in the moment.”
Sarah Jaffe is a writer and reporter living in New Orleans and on the road. She is the author of Work Won’t Love You Back: How Devotion To Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone; Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt, and her latest book is From the Ashes: Grief and Revolution in a World on Fire, all from Bold Type Books. Her journalism covers the politics of power, from the workplace to the streets, and her writing has been published in The Nation, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The New Republic, the New York Review of Books, and many other outlets. She is a columnist at The Progressive and In These Times. She also co-hosts the Belabored podcast, with Michelle Chen, covering today’s labor movement, and Heart Reacts, with Craig Gent, an advice podcast for the collapse of late capitalism. Sarah has been a waitress, a bicycle mechanic, and a social media consultant, cleaned up trash and scooped ice cream and explained Soviet communism to middle schoolers. Journalism pays better than some of these. You can follow her on Twitter @sarahljaffe.
