journal
A conversation about platform design for repairing broken systems of mobility with Arthur Röing Baer, founder and co-organiser of Trust.
The world can be observed through many lenses — on its surface, a chaotic sprawl of random cause and effect; or something deeper, as an intricate web of woven systems, designed consciously and reinforced quietly. Arthur and his team at Trust understand it as the latter, and spend their time exploring alternative platform designs and digital infrastructures to try to unpick harmful systems and reformulate them for the benefit of people and the planet.
We sat down with Arthur to learn more about the solidarity-based system proposals he’s been developing at the intersection of mobility, labour rights and ecology.
Hey. I’d say that I’m a researcher with a background in design who focuses on the somewhat ambiguous category of mechanism design, which looks at how to leverage system design and logistical infrastructures for the benefit of people and the environment. My work focuses mainly on labour and climate, especially in my two projects, Commune and UNION SHIFT.
Yes, Trust. That’s where I’m sitting now — it’s our hybrid event, research and co-working space that we formed as a network of aligned ideas. Through member contributions and the co-working space, we finance a certain strand of systemic research that we find overlooked in the world.
Our main focus is on solidarity-based system proposals, by which we mean the types of platform designs, organisational structures or hybrid business models that are aligned with combating some of the negative trade-offs of contemporary capitalism, both in terms of the environmental and global labour forces. It’s basically about how we can leverage system design and digital infrastructures to create structural change with a firm grounding in the reality of labour and climate issues.
But I wouldn't say I’m interested in any single solution that can be multiplied — I’m more interested in asking, ‘What are the strategic applications for some digital infrastructures within different contexts to leverage a better situation for a large group of people that might otherwise be exploited or exposed to the powers of global capital?’
Union Shift was a project I co-developed at the Strelka Insitute, which is a postgrad university and urban think-tank in Moscow. While we were studying there, there were all these news bubbling up about worker protests, which turned out to be the Russian truckers organising at scale for the first time ever. In fact, it was the biggest organised labour movement since the Russian Revolution. And with my focus on both labour issues and logistical infrastructures, this seemed like really fruitful ground to explore.
So we got in touch with the newly formed union and started sketching out a potential strategy for how the union could increase its leverage points against the harsh reality it faced — police harassment, logistical inefficiency, the prospect of automation, just to name a few. The idea was to leverage technology in favour of truck unions.
So it’s the same idea here — if tech companies can’t automate trucks without the data that the trucking union owns, UNION SHIFT would provide them with a strong leverage point in the face of their own automation.
The idea was to kind of scale up the model from like an immediate need, which is just a communications app between the different truck drivers, something that has actually been shut down by the Russian state continuously. Something with the ability to communicate, to share through some sort of news feed, and to increase safety in the form of a panic button. Those three functionalities were intended to be first.
Then, it would start working basically as a marketplace between sellers who need logistic services and truckers who can provide those services. The infrastructure today is still just people writing on WhatsApp groups, so there are a lot of inefficiencies. There’s a lot of trucks driving to Siberia with a load full of watermelons and then driving back empty. So the next step was this simple kind of logistical coordination through a system handled by the union, which seemed like a fairly straightforward or logical thing to implement.
Yeah — the end goal was to use the app to start building some kind of collectively-owned data silo from the dashcams that all Russian trucks have. The idea was that the union and drivers would hold and own the largest data set of Russian driving data, which they could use however they liked.
I’m more interested in asking, ‘What are the strategic applications for some digital infrastructures within different contexts to leverage a better situation for a large group of people that might otherwise be exploited or exposed to the powers of global capital?’
I’d say there are three interesting use cases. The first one is that whenever a company comes into the Russian context and wants to build any technology for driving on the Russian roads, they’ll need a bunch of Russian driving data. And since Russia has the highest density of dashcams anywhere in the world, most truckers actually already have dash cams in their trucks. There is a huge possibility for this already distributed network of drivers to supply that data need.
The idea was inspired by the U.S. when shipping containers arrived in the 60’s. So there were the East Coast and the West Coast longshoremen — the guys who actually carried cargo off boats in the harbour before shipping containers did it all for us. And I think it was on the East Coast that they managed to unionise strongly, and basically calculate what the cost benefits of containerization would be to the port owners. And then they just said, ‘We want a percentage of that to guarantee our pensions, or we're going to strike.’ And of course, containers weren’t quite ready yet, so the port owners still needed the longshoremen and they were able to leverage that and ended up with great pensions. On the West Coast, they didn’t; they just got automated.
So it’s the same idea here — if tech companies can’t automate trucks without the data that the trucking union owns, UNION SHIFT would provide them with a strong leverage point in the face of their own automation.
The second has to do with this more, let’s say, abstract vision of reconfiguring existing trucks with self-driving physical infrastructure. Basically you can take a rig or self-driving kit and deploy it on an existing truck, rather than replacing the whole truck. It feels like 90% of the physical cost of a truck doesn't need to be replaced; it's just a steering mechanism. And most of the modern trucks actually have automated steering mechanisms already in there, for long-distance driving; what you need are just a new software product and a steering module.
So the second would be looking at this idea of installing self-driving kits, where the AI is trained on the union data sets and then there's a partnership between the union, the kit provider and the hardware provider in a new solution that doesn’t squeeze out the union and, consequently, the drivers.
And then the third one is, ‘what are the data?’ What extra data can be pulled out of these data sets that could be used in things like public infrastructure repairs — you know, the general bumpiness of roads, etc. There's a lot of data that if you just had the data combined with GPS data, you can pull out a lot of value, which could be a potential revenue source, or a partnership, possibly.
It’s a tool to get to those futures that we would like to live in, and also to combat some of the negative trade-offs we see happening in the current system.
Sure. For my Master’s project at the Sandburg Insitute in Amsterdam, I came up with this idea for looking at whether there was a new blockchain-based, user-owned transport infrastructure — something that sat between taxi monopolies and Uber that would simultaneously favour cab drivers in the short term, while in the long-term also integrating into a public transport infrastructure.
It was designed to have an inbuilt mechanism that over time transforms a short term incentive for drivers into long term incentive for the general population — in terms of integrating the taxi system into the public transport system, or into public ownership. The basic idea was, ‘Can you distribute ownership shares of a platform to both drivers and users, rather than a centralised body?’
It seems like there's a lack of narratives and futures to build towards outside of the startup model in Silicon Valley, and especially when we see that model falling apart more and more, it feels like there's a need for new narratives or different futures to build towards. So for us, utopian conspiracy is a way of envisioning those futures and starting to model them out and seeing what that would entail, especially looking at different possible futures.
And what are the associated narratives, who are the writers, what are the worlds and what do they look like? And then how does that become a potential future? Do we want to live there? And if we do, what will actually be the way to get there? Is it through policy design? Is it through new platforms? Or is it through local organisation? It’s a tool to get to those futures that we would like to live in, and also to combat some of the negative trade-offs we see happening in the current system along the way.