Transcript: America This Week, Episode 80: “A Circle of Censorious Friends”
Walter and Matt sound the alarm on the unexpectedly horrifying TikTok bill, and laugh over Vladimir Voinovich’s classic Samizdat satire, “A Circle of Friends.”
Matt Taibbi: All right. Welcome to America This Week. I’m Matt Taibbi.
Walter Kirn: And I’m Walter Kirn.
Matt Taibbi: Walter, it’s good to see you.
Walter Kirn: Yeah, it’s good to be here. I’m glad to be alive, frankly. Have you ever driven a Tesla? Have you ever driven one?
Matt Taibbi: I have not. No. No. Have you?
Walter Kirn: Okay. So here I am in Silicon Valley, at the very heart of America’s brain, and in Palo Alto, I get to the San Francisco airport. Hertz has this system by which you just choose your own car, right? You go out, and there are a bunch of cars parked in the lot that corresponds to your level of membership in Hertz, and you can take any one. And there are four horrible hatchbacks that look like they’ve been run over rough roads and a brand new Tesla. Now, I’ve never driven a Tesla, but my eyes like sort of Bugs Bunny go ka-ching. It’s either a Mazda or a Tesla. So I’m thinking that Tesla must be drivable by any guy who just wanders in to Hertz’s garage. I get in it, and I get out of the garage, and I realize something that you probably don’t know, and people who don’t drive Teslas don’t know. They don’t really have mirrors, Matt. Did you know that?
Matt Taibbi: No. Well, who needs that?
Walter Kirn: On either side of the car are these small rearview mirrors that are poorly adjusted. They’re basically facing down in this case, and they’re about the size of the bottom of a coffee cup. Also, the rearview mirror in the windshield is tiny and shows you the view through a quite tiny back mirror, back window of the Tesla. How do I adjust the mirrors? I wonder as I am about to enter freeway traffic.
Matt Taibbi: I love that.
Walter Kirn: I have no idea because the Tesla dashboard doesn’t exist. It’s just a giant tablet computer screen with all of these icons on it, none of which look like rearview mirror adjustments. Since they’re so small anyway, I figure they won’t help much. And if I can crouch down in my seat, I can sort of see into them at an angle that will show me the traffic behind me. I’ve given up completely on navigating the tablet, like hunting around, trying to find out what the icons mean while I’m going 60, no, because by now I am going 60. It’s then that I discover, once I get into traffic, that the way you navigate a Tesla is by watching a video of yourself with the cars that are actually around you represented as shapes. Did you understand that?
Matt Taibbi: I mean, I understand the concept, but it’s horrifying. But go ahead.
Walter Kirn: Dude, so you drive a Tesla by basically playing a video game that involves representations of cars rather than looking into your mirrors and seeing them. You can basically confirm that they’re there with the mirrors, but you can’t really get a flow going unless you just watch this computer and keep your car in its lane vis-à-vis the other computerized cars. And this is a difficult lesson to learn on a San Francisco freeway at 5:30 P.M. on a weekday.
Matt Taibbi: That is horrifying and perfectly expresses a whole lot of things. I mean, remember there was that moment when suddenly cars became impossible for an ordinary person to fix in any way? So they made things that didn’t need to be electronic or computerized, electronic or computerized. For instance, illuminating the window that you could actually roll down. I’m not sure that was an improvement, right? It’s more convenient, but you would like to have actually full control over that whole thing. The transmission, things like that. That was just more, okay, now whenever anything breaks, you got to bring it to the garage, and you’re going to pay more because this is inaccessible to you. But what you’re describing actually makes driving far more dangerous.
Walter Kirn: I may as well have been, for all practical purposes, in a sealed room driving down a road, inferring from a screen what was around me, okay? And various graphics show how close you are to the other cars. Sometimes a yellow line will appear that shows you’re getting close, and so on. But at one point, a guy on a motorcycle came weaving between traffic going right down the middle of the freeway, and it showed up perfectly on the screen. But I went, I am now, my life now hangs on the functionality of this screen and its ability to, I don’t know, pick up moving objects. And that’s a strange feeling that you’re no longer connected by your own senses, but by this extra step because the mirror isn’t going to become unreliable suddenly. But my sense of computers is that they can get unreliable. And when they’re representing other cars that might hit me at 70 miles an hour, I really hope they stay functional.
Matt Taibbi: Just think of the contrast. When we were first taught to drive even mirrors, we were told to check first visually, right?
Walter Kirn: Right.
Matt Taibbi: Like, okay, the mirrors are there, you can use them, but before you change lanes, you should actually look first, and you should be feeling the road through the steering wheel. You should try to be as sensually in touch with the driving experience as possible because your life is on the line every second. This is crazy.
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