I want to tell you about a night in San Francisco.
A white car is stopped at a red light.
Everything is normal.
Suddenly... someone throws a rock through the window.
Then another.
Then a flare goes through the broken glass. The car bursts into flames. And a real crowd of real people smashing the car.
Nobody calls 911. Nobody tries to stop it.
Instead, people start cheering. People film it, laughing. Fireworks go off as the Waymo burns into dust.
As you can tell, this isn't my usual Monday email.
I write about AI tools and workflows. That's what you signed up for, and I'll be back to that next week.
But I spent the last few days writing something I couldn't not send. It's about what's happening around AI right now, not the technology, but the reaction to it. And I think the people on this list deserve to read it before everyone else does.
Warning:
Some of these people actually want pro-AIs like you and me to die: viewer discretion is advised.
Here it is:
I keep thinking about that night.
Not because of the car... Because of the crowd.
I'm writing this because there are people in my life, friends, family, colleagues, who can't see whats coming.
And how could they?
Most people, when they heard about that story, filed it away as a weird San Francisco thing. A quirky local news moment, nothing special.
I couldn't move on.
Because I've spent years researching what happens when technology advances faster than people accept. And that crowd scares me.
I keep having the polite version of this conversation. The version where I don't say what I actually think is coming. I'm done with the polite version.
What You Should Know About The Luddites
They weren't idiots. They weren't technophobes. They were skilled craftsmen who looked at what was coming and correctly understood that it would destroy their lives. They were right. Their jobs did disappear. The "new jobs will come" argument took fifty years to materialize.
That means fifty years of poverty, child labor, and working conditions we now consider criminal.
So what did they do?
They smashed machines, burned factories and sent death threats to factory owners.
Some owners were even murdered.
So what did they do?
The British government deployed thousands of soldiers to stop the Luddites.
More than they had facing Napoleon in Spain.
Then they hanged seventeen Luddites of them in a single day.
Now I want you to read something. This is from Reddit. A community of 674,000 people, right now, today, reacting to news that someone threw a Molotov cocktail at Sam Altman's house:
"Better luck next time!"
"House is still standing. Cringe."
"Amazing, hope that the next time it gets him."
"I have a lot to say about Sam Altman but I really don't want to be perma banned again."
One comment just said: "More."
These aren't edge cases. These are the top comments. Upvoted by thousands.
The only comment that said "this is too far" had 7 down votes.
And here is the fact that I cannot stop thinking about:
This is happening before a single mass layoff has been announced.
You probably remember Luigi Mangione.
The man who shot and killed a health insurance CEO in broad daylight. The reaction wasn't universal condemnation. A significant portion of the internet celebrated it. People made fan art. He got a nickname. And without any announcement, several major insurance companies started approving claims they had been denying for years.
The anti-AI crowd noticed.
Infact they have a name for it now: "the Church of Luigi." They talk about it openly and they reference it constantly.
On the same Reddit thread about the Molotov cocktail, one user wrote:
"I would add to this that the argument of one death not changing things is also short sighted. Because its only one... We now have that, this, a politicians house shot up with a note saying no data centers, and a warehouse set on fire. I would be surprised if these all stopped. So if one wasnt enough..."
They won't stop.
Here is the math people are avoiding:
A $60,000-a-year job - a call center worker, a paralegal, an entry-level analyst - can now be replaced by AI for $600 a year.
Next year, that number is $60.
The Industrial Revolution unfolded over eighty years. Entire generations were born, lived through the disruption, and died before a new equilibrium arrived.
This is happening in five.
When 45,000 dock workers threatened to shut down every major port on the U.S. East and Gulf coasts over automation, they won. The government flinched. Port automation was banned by contract.
New York City just banned Waymo.
A politician's house was shot up. The note left behind said: No data centers.
A warehouse was set on fire.
A Molotov cocktail was thrown at the home of the most powerful man in AI.
And I need you to understand something: all of this happened before anyone lost their job.
This is the pre-game. This is the crowd arriving at the stadium. The match hasn't started.
The people who study this pattern say the sequence is always the same.
First comes the disruption. Then the protests. Then the death threats. Then the targeted violence. Then the riots. Then, eventually, the government picks a side.
In 1819, the British cavalry charged into a crowd of 80,000 peaceful workers protesting economic conditions. Eighteen dead. Seven hundred injured. The government called it a success.
History calls it the Peterloo Massacre.
We are somewhere around step four. What's going to happen this time?
The Luddites had maybe ten thousand members at their peak.
The anti-AI movement has 674,000 on one Reddit forum alone. Growing daily.
And then, yesterday, this appeared.
A group called PauseAI - one of the most prominent anti-AI organizations in the world - activated something called their "Warning Shot Protocol." First time in their history. They built it, they said, for moments when the world crosses a genuinely dangerous threshold.
Their announcement:
Screenshot from the PauseAI Discord
They called it a weapon of mass destruction.
This is what's being poured onto the fire that's already burning.
The people throwing Molotov cocktails at Sam Altman's house haven't even heard about this yet.
The dock workers who banned port automation don't know yet.
The 674,000 people on Reddit celebrating the burning Waymo don't know yet.
When they find out - and they will - the people who think step four is the ceiling haven't been paying attention to history.
I'm not writing this to take a side on AI. That debate bores me and I think most people having it are looking at the wrong thing entirely.
I'm writing this because the pattern doesn't care about the debate. The pattern ran in 1812 and it's running now and the people closest to me deserve to understand what they're actually looking at when they see a burning car on their timeline and scroll past it.
That $60,000 job becoming $60 hasn't happened yet. The mass displacement hasn't landed yet. The thing that historically turns thousands of frightened people into millions of furious ones... is the only part still ahead of us.
And it's approaching Fast.
What you're watching right now is the warning tremor. The moment before.
The crowd around that burning Waymo weren't monsters. They were people who did the math on their own future and didn't like what they found. There will be more of them. A lot more. Some will be voting. Some will be organizing. Some are people you know, quietly watching their industry hollow out, with no framework for what they're seeing.
Most people won't connect these dots until the dots are impossible to ignore. By then, understanding it won't give you much of an advantage.
Think about the people in your life right now. The ones whose job happens on a computer. The ones who've been saying "AI won't affect me." The ones who scrolled past the burning Waymo and kept going.
They're not going to hear this from the news. The news will cover it when it's already too late to do anything except react. They're not going to hear it from their employer. And they're probably not going to go looking for it themselves.
That leaves you.
I'm not asking you to share this to go viral. I'm asking because there are people in your life who deserve to know the shape of what's coming before it arrives at their door. The ones who saw it early had options. The ones who didn't history has a word for what happened to them.
You already know who needs to read this.
Use this link to share:
Stay Safe,
- MSA
P.S. I’m not going to cover this ongoing thing, but if you’d like real-time updates on what’s going on (like how Sam Altman was almost killed two times in a row… in only three days), have a look at 1440 Media.
It’s the newsletter I read with my morning coffee, and you’re genuinely missing out if you haven’t been reading this:
Tired of news that feels like noise?
Every day, 4.5 million readers turn to 1440 for their factual news fix. We sift through 100+ sources to bring you a complete summary of politics, global events, business, and culture — all in a brief 5-minute email. No spin. No slant. Just clarity.