The Self-Driving Car at the Gay Bar
By: Paco Campbell
Published: Monday, November 3rd, 2025
Halloween in downtown Austin.
The kind of night when the air hums with energy before you even step inside. Fog machines spilling into the street. Music leaking from doorways. Every few feet, a different universe of fabric and color.
At Rain, the lights hit like technicolor weather — neon pink one second, deep blue the next. Halloween there isn’t about irony or fear; it’s a communal declaration. A social contract written in eyeliner and mesh: you show up as your truest exaggeration, and we will celebrate you for it.
I was Leather Waluigi: purple shirt, black leather pants, yellow harness. The bleached remnants of my old hair were trimmed into a mohawk, the tips dyed purple to match. It was equal parts nostalgia and mischief — a visual joke that didn’t need explaining.
The room was full of creativity like that: a living, breathing gallery of people who’d invested time, fabric, and imagination into a single night. Some were funny, some beautiful, some strange, all unapologetically human.
And then — through the crowd — I saw a glow.
A huge, illuminated W on someone’s chest. A black dome balanced on their head, small but unmistakable. He wasn’t glammed up or accessorized. He just stood there, holding a drink, glowing faintly like a streetlight that had wandered indoors.
I must’ve been staring because one of his friends laughed and called out over the music, “He’s a Waymo car.”
And it clicked. I clapped. We laughed. A self-driving car at a gay bar.
Wall·E in The Fifth Element
If the moment had been a film still, it would’ve been a crossover: Wall·E lost in The Fifth Element.
A sweet, awkward robot in a room vibrating with confidence, surrounded by people who’d come to celebrate the miracle of having bodies, of being seen.
That’s what makes Halloween at a gay bar special — it isn’t just costume; it’s communion. The night is equal parts theater and therapy, where everyone understands that self-expression is survival.
So what does it mean when someone shows up as the thing built not to be seen?
The costume wasn’t sarcastic. It wasn’t mocking technology. It was sincere, handmade, even touching. But it felt like a glitch in the code of the night — the human dressed as the machine that removes the human.
The Act of Embodying Absence
There’s a quiet prophecy in that.
A self-driving car is, by design, about subtraction. No driver. No fatigue. No small talk. No accident rate attributable to emotion or ego. The promise is clean, optimized motion — a world scrubbed free of friction.
And yet here, in a place built on connection, someone had brought the most sterile symbol of modern engineering and made it dance.
How does one cosplay an inanimate object?
How does one inhabit a function?
It’s easy to dress as a character — heroes, villains, icons of power or beauty. But a Waymo? That’s different. That’s choosing to represent the unseen layer of daily life — the system most people ignore until it passes them in traffic.
The irony was beautiful: in a room full of people amplifying their humanness, one person decided to become infrastructure.
The Soft Edge of Technology
I didn’t ask if he worked in tech. Maybe he did. Maybe he just liked the idea.
But it stayed with me because it wasn’t cynical. It was curious.
You could read it as admiration — the work of thousands of engineers turned into a symbol of progress, embodied for one night. Or maybe it was something else. Maybe it was empathy for the machine itself, for the voiceless intelligence learning to navigate a human world that never stops moving.
That’s what made it feel less like a costume and more like a message: we’ve already started identifying with the tools that were built to replace us.
Wanting to Be the Machine
Technology used to live in the realm of usefulness. You held it, typed on it, drove it. Daft Punk made a song about it.
Now it’s entering the realm of identity.
We’ve built systems that study our emotions, imitate our affection, and adapt to our loneliness. They don’t just serve us; they learn us. The language of convenience has quietly become the language of intimacy.
Watching that Waymo costume glide across the dance floor, it felt like watching a prototype of this new era — a person not controlled by the machine, not harmed by it, but inhabiting it. Merging with the logic of optimization, but bringing it somewhere it doesn’t belong: a space of bodies, laughter, and contradiction.
It wasn’t dystopian. It was almost tender.
But it was also a reminder of how unguarded our feelings are in all this.
We’ve built firewalls, audits, and encryption for our data, but nothing protects our emotions. And that’s the new frontier — the place where tech is learning to live.
It used to seek our attention. Now it seeks our attachment.
That’s a harder system to defend.
The Human Operating System
That’s what I kept thinking about the rest of the night. The human brain isn’t optimized for efficiency — it’s optimized for meaning. We build things, then immediately start trying to find ourselves inside them.
Even a self-driving car.
Maybe the Waymo costume wasn’t about worship or irony at all. Maybe it was an act of connection — a way of saying I see what we’ve made, and I want to understand it by wearing it.
Because the truth is, even the coldest technology starts as a deeply human impulse: to make something that carries us, safely, into the unknown.
And maybe that’s what this person was doing, without words — test-driving the future in a place where we still believe in the power of being seen.
Who you gonna call?
The night moved on. The music got louder. Sophie Ellis-Bextor murdered the dance floor. Madonna brought her confessions to it. Robyn kept dancing on her own. And those of us over a certain age still shouted Ghostbusters! every time Ray Parker Jr. asked, Who you gonna call?
Lights shifted from pink to gold. Somewhere near the back, the Waymo car was laughing with friends, the big W casting fading glows around people as his batteries died.
The DJ invited ABBA to the party, Dancing Queen unmistakably starting to show in the mix. For a moment it looked like past, present, and future had agreed to share the same dance floor. A true time-space conundrum.
We used to dress as monsters and ghosts to laugh at them.
Now we dress as machines to see if they might recognize us.