Meme Brakes on Urban Automation

Viral short videos and meme culture can function as disproportionate political brakes on urban automation projects: single clips framing an autonomous vehicle or robot as 'unsafe' can trigger local outrage, accelerate council debates, and become the pretext for moratoria or bans even when statistical safety data point the other way. The attention economy makes episodic, emotional incidents into durable policy constraints. — If meme virality regularly shapes infrastructure outcomes, technology governance must account for attention dynamics as a core constraint on deployment and public acceptance.