This Is What Happens When a Writer Gets Obsessed

Hi Backchannel braintrust,

Sandra here, with two stories for you.

Last May, Mark Harris noticed something strange in a video he was watching. I’d given him a routine assignment, to produce a quick Q&A with the founders of a self-driving truck startup that was coming out of stealth. That company, founded by ex-Googlers, was Otto, and it had produced a stunning video in an undisclosed location of a truck barreling down a highway on its own, with no one visible in the cab. (Otto, by the way, was soon snapped up by Uber for a cool $680 million.)

As Mark watched and rewatched the video, he saw road signs that revealed the test had taken place in Nevada. Because he’d been covering self-driving cars for years, he happened to know that in Nevada, self-driving vehicles needed to have a special red license plate, to show they were approved for testing. This truck didn’t have those plates.

We published his Q&A, timed with Otto’s official launch. But Mark couldn’t shake the question of why Otto’s truck didn’t have the proper plates, so he filed a public records request. When those documents came in, he discovered what had really happened behind the scenes. The details here may seem mundane — after all, they boil down to paperwork that Otto declined to file, against the demands of the Nevada DMV. But the bigger issue is of supreme relevance to us all.

Autonomous vehicles are transforming the world. They are in active testing on our roads. They are barreling toward us like a self-driving truck on a desolate Nevada highway. And we have every reason to worry whether those cars and trucks will be safe. Will the companies building them take full responsibility for the sanctity of their code? Do we trust the startups reshaping our roads to do their absolute best to keep us safe? These are essential questions that we need to keep asking. This week, I’m proud to bring you Mark’s dispatch from inside the state departments tasked with regulating this exciting, nerve-wracking technology.

Meanwhile, Andrew Zaleski was working on a different investigation for Backchannel — this one into the darling of desktop 3D printing, MakerBot. He’d first heard about MakerBot several years earlier, while covering a Baltimore after-school program in which kids were learning to use a 3D printer. He grew interested in the company, and began covering it regularly. MakerBot’s vision, he soon learned, was intoxicating: to revolutionize manufacturing, empowering everyone to print at home anything they might need. The machines were open-source, so they would in a sense be owned by everyone, too. MakerBot cofounder Bre Pettis called it “the beginning of the age of sharing.” A passionate community of DIYers sprang up around these highly hackable machines.

Andrew visited MakerBot’s factory in the summer of 2015, and came to respect its current CEO, Jonathan Jaglom. Yet the vibrant optimism of the early years wasn’t there. The company weathered waves of layoffs and a lawsuit over a 3D printer part.

Curious to learn what had gone wrong, Andrew dug into the company’s backstory, including watching a film whose promotional poster featured Pettis’s face on a coin, in the spot typically occupied by George Washington. “I watched the documentary, Print the Legend, and just thought people were holding back in their answers,” Andrew recalls. “And then once I started talking to people, their own stories just started pouring out.” What he unearthed was an Icarus tale: the company had aimed too high, and in its quest to engineer its revolutionary — perhaps impossible — dream, MakerBot ended up turning against the very community that had fueled its rise.

Yesterday we published Andrew’s account, meticulously composed from more than a dozen interviews of current and former employees conducted over many months. It’s a heart-wrenching business tale relevant to any startup trying to do something really bold, and really new. I hope you find it as revealing as I did.

With affection,

Sandra

Also in Backchannel:

Podcasts! We recently collaborated with Marketplace, the public radio news program, on a segment for their tech podcast, Codebreaker. If you’re into podcasts, we highly recommend this series, which is asking this season (only half-jokingly), “Can technology save us?” In this week’s episode, I visit a robot in Palo Alto whose job it is to transplant hair, and I meet some clients who are using it to restore their receding hairlines.

Alexa, tell it like it is. Earlier this week, Steven spoke with Amazon’s head scientist and vice president of Alexa, Rohit Prasad. They talked about where Alexa is going, and discussed how Prasad is recruiting for Jeff Bezos’s arsenal without drying up the AI pipeline. (They also got into privacy. Says Prasad: “The cloud is not listening to you. It’s only on the device, acting as a detector, not a recognizer recognizing all words.”)