On the same day that Volkswagen's MOIA subsidiary began testing self-driving microbuses in Los Angeles ahead of a planned Uber partnership, Hyperallergic reported that trustees of a major West Coast artist residency had visited Jeffrey Epstein's island. One story is about asking people to get into a vehicle controlled by an algorithm. The other is about discovering that the people who controlled a cultural institution were connected to one of the worst actors of the century. Both are, at base, crises of institutional trust.
Autonomy Requires Trust Infrastructure, Not Just Tech
The MOIA rollout faces what every robotaxi company faces: a long regulatory road that has nothing to do with whether the technology works and everything to do with whether the public believes it works. Kyle Chayka's piece on techno-negativity this week is useful here. Resistance to new technology is rarely about the technology itself. It is about who controls it, who profits, and who gets hurt when it fails. The Djerassi residency story follows the same logic: the institution's programming, its support for artists, its reputation for fostering creative risk, none of that disappears overnight. But the revelation that board members attended Epstein's island poisons the trust infrastructure that holds everything else up. As TurboFund's breakdown of investor research mistakes notes, founders who skip due diligence on who is actually in the room often pay for it later. Institutions, apparently, have the same problem.
Los Angeles as a Laboratory for Both Crises
It is not incidental that both stories are, in different ways, Los Angeles stories. MOIA chose LA for testing partly because the city's sprawl makes autonomous transit compelling and partly because LA's regulatory environment is navigable. The Djerassi residency is a Bay Area institution, but its cultural gravity extends down the coast. PUMA and NAHMIAS this week dropped a motorsport-inspired West Coast collection, which is, on its surface, unrelated. But the LA-as-brand machinery keeps churning: mobility, culture, aspiration. The question both the robotaxi and the residency now have to answer is the same: after the trust breaks, how do you rebuild the case for getting in?