Photoa via this good
Boston Globe piece
Hi everybody,
The series we spent a year on is finally out. An ambitious, surprising, two-part series about the past, present, and rapidly arriving future of driverless cars.
We’re very proud of this work, and it’s prompted an outpouring of thoughtful emails from listeners, across a wide range of perspectives. Which always makes me feel like, “OK, we did something right with this one.”
If you haven’t listened, my promise to you is that even if you don’t think you’re particularly interested in driverless cars, you will be within the first five minutes. What the story will tell you is that they’re about to rapidly transform America, and it’ll tell you how and why and about the fight that’s taking place in a cinematic and entertaining way. If I do say so myself.
I’m going to drop the episodes below, but please read beyond the links because I’ve written a little bit about what I learned about my own biases working on this thing.
Also, our very first ad in our newsletter! Framer, one of our show’s sponsors, surveyed 1,900+ web professionals to figure out how teams build and manage their websites today and included the findings in a report. If you’re curious to see what they found, check it out here. And if you’re interested in advertising with us, shoot us a note at pjvogt85@gmail.com, subj: Advertising.
An under-discussed form of media biasSo, this is something to read once you’re done listening, at least to part one.
While I was thinking through the writing in these pieces, I noticed something about myself. Which is that it’s uncomfortable for me, in 2026, to tell a mostly positive story about a tech company. About Waymo, which has sprung out of Google.
Google is obviously a company that’s done both good and bad things for the internet and for the world. But honestly, I’m annoyed to catch myself writing that previous sentence, because it’s a truth everyone with a pulse already knows. I’m not saying “Google is good and bad” to inform you, I’m saying it to establish my own moral bona fides. I’m signaling.
I am doing this because in 2026, we’re living in a backlash to technology companies. A lot of that can be traced to social media, Silicon Valley’s dubious offering to the world. Some of it’s also about AI. As uncertain as AI’s ultimate effects are, the fact that the companies making it are promising vast job loss and also, maybe the annihilation of the world is not really helping Americans get super comfortable with the new technology.
But how do you report from within that backlash? How do you reasonably try to evaluate new technology when people are so pessimistic about technology’s offerings? And it’s not even just about the products! It’s also about the CEOs.
People who 20 years ago, arrived, presenting themselves as nerds with convenient inventions to make life more pleasant, and who have evolved, often into bulked-up, wannabe oligarchs, deranged and drunk on the internet products they’ve created, trampling through our democracy, destroying our newspapers, generally acting like the kinds of minor Roman tyrants who burned a bunch of stuff down before somebody stopped them.
In the face of all that, many readers and most writers seem to want tech journalism that is almost exclusively critical or pessimistic. But – we also have to just figure out, on a case by case basis, what to think about new technology. The problem is, if you want to read positive or even just neutral and informative coverage of technology, many of the places left to go are just cheerleading conducted by the tech CEOs themselves. Among my tribe, journalists, mostly on the east coast, the acceptable stance is mainly just: adversarial, always.
I struggle with that.
At our core, at Search Engine, we’re not pessimistic people. Our show is not a pessimistic show. We want to hold powerful people and companies to account. But we also recognize that technology often improves our lives. Even now.
Our show is trying to consider not just the downsides of tech, but the real ways it could solve, or at least soften our most intractable problems. We’re especially interested in physical technology. Machines. Tech journalists, me more than most, have just spent too much time treating tech as if it’s synonymous with websites, with social media. It’s not.
I guess the bias I’m circling and should name is this: when it comes to tech, there’s legitimate skepticism, and there’s also what I think of as surplus skepticism. Surplus skepticism comes from wanting to abide by social consensus, to prove you’re not a sucker. Online, it’s always safer to critique than to appreciate. I pride myself on caring less about consensus than I did when I was younger, particularly ill-considered consensus. But I felt social discomfort while I was working on these pieces. And it made me wonder where else I’m feeling it but not admitting it to myself.
I don’t know. Some of the subtext of these two episodes is me and the Search Engine team grappling with all that. The story of autonomous vehicles is really just beginning. In ten years, if the tech succeeds, maybe it’ll become enshittified.
And maybe in ten years, the current Waymo CEOs, Tekedra Mawakana and Dmitri Dolgov, will be bombarding us with ads, or traffic, or maybe they themselves will be gorged on super-peptides and their own egos and be annoying and inescapable.
If it happens, we’ll cover it. But right now, as far as I can tell, they’re people making something new. Something new that we’re trying to evaluate on its own merits.
Thanks for reading,
PJ
subscribe to our newsletter below!
More description
Photoa via this good
Boston Globe piece
Hi everybody,
The series we spent a year on is finally out. An ambitious, surprising, two-part series about the past, present, and rapidly arriving future of driverless cars.
We’re very proud of this work, and it’s prompted an outpouring of thoughtful emails from listeners, across a wide range of perspectives. Which always makes me feel like, “OK, we did something right with this one.”
If you haven’t listened, my promise to you is that even if you don’t think you’re particularly interested in driverless cars, you will be within the first five minutes. What the story will tell you is that they’re about to rapidly transform America, and it’ll tell you how and why and about the fight that’s taking place in a cinematic and entertaining way. If I do say so myself.
I’m going to drop the episodes below, but please read beyond the links because I’ve written a little bit about what I learned about my own biases working on this thing.
Also, our very first ad in our newsletter! Framer, one of our show’s sponsors, surveyed 1,900+ web professionals to figure out how teams build and manage their websites today and included the findings in a report. If you’re curious to see what they found, check it out here. And if you’re interested in advertising with us, shoot us a note at pjvogt85@gmail.com, subj: Advertising.
An under-discussed form of media biasSo, this is something to read once you’re done listening, at least to part one.
While I was thinking through the writing in these pieces, I noticed something about myself. Which is that it’s uncomfortable for me, in 2026, to tell a mostly positive story about a tech company. About Waymo, which has sprung out of Google.
Google is obviously a company that’s done both good and bad things for the internet and for the world. But honestly, I’m annoyed to catch myself writing that previous sentence, because it’s a truth everyone with a pulse already knows. I’m not saying “Google is good and bad” to inform you, I’m saying it to establish my own moral bona fides. I’m signaling.
I am doing this because in 2026, we’re living in a backlash to technology companies. A lot of that can be traced to social media, Silicon Valley’s dubious offering to the world. Some of it’s also about AI. As uncertain as AI’s ultimate effects are, the fact that the companies making it are promising vast job loss and also, maybe the annihilation of the world is not really helping Americans get super comfortable with the new technology.
But how do you report from within that backlash? How do you reasonably try to evaluate new technology when people are so pessimistic about technology’s offerings? And it’s not even just about the products! It’s also about the CEOs.
People who 20 years ago, arrived, presenting themselves as nerds with convenient inventions to make life more pleasant, and who have evolved, often into bulked-up, wannabe oligarchs, deranged and drunk on the internet products they’ve created, trampling through our democracy, destroying our newspapers, generally acting like the kinds of minor Roman tyrants who burned a bunch of stuff down before somebody stopped them.
In the face of all that, many readers and most writers seem to want tech journalism that is almost exclusively critical or pessimistic. But – we also have to just figure out, on a case by case basis, what to think about new technology. The problem is, if you want to read positive or even just neutral and informative coverage of technology, many of the places left to go are just cheerleading conducted by the tech CEOs themselves. Among my tribe, journalists, mostly on the east coast, the acceptable stance is mainly just: adversarial, always.
I struggle with that.
At our core, at Search Engine, we’re not pessimistic people. Our show is not a pessimistic show. We want to hold powerful people and companies to account. But we also recognize that technology often improves our lives. Even now.
Our show is trying to consider not just the downsides of tech, but the real ways it could solve, or at least soften our most intractable problems. We’re especially interested in physical technology. Machines. Tech journalists, me more than most, have just spent too much time treating tech as if it’s synonymous with websites, with social media. It’s not.
I guess the bias I’m circling and should name is this: when it comes to tech, there’s legitimate skepticism, and there’s also what I think of as surplus skepticism. Surplus skepticism comes from wanting to abide by social consensus, to prove you’re not a sucker. Online, it’s always safer to critique than to appreciate. I pride myself on caring less about consensus than I did when I was younger, particularly ill-considered consensus. But I felt social discomfort while I was working on these pieces. And it made me wonder where else I’m feeling it but not admitting it to myself.
I don’t know. Some of the subtext of these two episodes is me and the Search Engine team grappling with all that. The story of autonomous vehicles is really just beginning. In ten years, if the tech succeeds, maybe it’ll become enshittified.
And maybe in ten years, the current Waymo CEOs, Tekedra Mawakana and Dmitri Dolgov, will be bombarding us with ads, or traffic, or maybe they themselves will be gorged on super-peptides and their own egos and be annoying and inescapable.
If it happens, we’ll cover it. But right now, as far as I can tell, they’re people making something new. Something new that we’re trying to evaluate on its own merits.
Thanks for reading,
PJ
subscribe to our newsletter below!
