A number of Silicon Valley crosswalks were hacked to sound like U.S. big-tech broligarchs, according to reports published by local media this weekend. Palo Alto Online reports that folks pressing crosswalk wait buttons in Redwood City, Menlo Park, and Palo Alto areas heard messages featuring Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg sound-a-likes. It isn’t just the voices that have been changed - instead of the possibly useful warnings about traffic, vocal caricatures of these famous tech leaders deliver messages laced with satire.
A spokesperson for the City of Palo Alto indicated that the crosswalk button hacking was limited to 12 locations downtown, and probably occurred sometime on Friday. Meanwhile, officials from Redwood City and Menlo Park (the two other areas known to be affected by the hacking) confirmed they were aware of and were working on fixing these voice hacks. However, we don’t have any indication of the number of crosswalks hacked in these other two areas.
Understandably, city officials have disabled the voice announcement features of the crosswalks, for now. Thankfully, the traffic signalling wasn’t affected by the hacked messages, but we would guess the voice functionality was put there for a safety reason, and may have been appreciated by those with impaired sight. The hacked messages certainly weren’t very situationally helpful for those intending to cross the road.
Zuckerberg and Musk satirical messages - hit or miss?
So, what were the satirical messages installed at crosswalks to ape Musk and Zuck? The source embedded several videos that showed the crosswalks with the messages being played.
The Zuckerberg parody messages included one where he stated, “it’s normal to feel uncomfortable or even violated as we forcefully insert AI into every facet of your conscious experience. And I just want to assure you, you don’t need to worry because there’s absolutely nothing you can do to stop it.” Other Zuckerberg flavored messages feature jokes about “undermining democracy” and delivering “AI slop.”
An example of a Musk sound-a-like message shared by Palo Alto Online was: “You know, people keep saying cancer is bad, but have you tried being a cancer? It’s f—— awesome.” Other messages tease Musk’s apparent readiness to pay folks to be his friends, and the Tesla and xAI boss’s singular conviction being to self-aggrandizement.
We aren’t surprised that neither Meta nor Tesla spokespersons wished to comment on the crosswalk hacks.
