A Conversation with Deb Chachra, Author of How Infrastructure Works
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Note: Last week we featured Jacob Pleasants’ review of Deb Chachra’s book, How Infrastructure Works: Insides the Systems that Shape our World. This week, we’re sharing his conversation with Deb Chachra.
Q&A with Deb Chachra
by Jacob Pleasants
How Infrastructure Works: Inside the Systems That Shape Our World
By Deb Chachra, 2023
Jacob Pleasants: I’d like to start out with the narrative arc of the book. You begin with an important but somewhat straightforward story about the vital importance of infrastructure and what it does for us. But as you move through the book, you start to tell a more complicated story. At the beginning it's very optimistic. Then as you go along, it doesn’t necessarily get pessimistic, but it does get more complicated. Why did you end up telling the story the way you did?
Deb Chachra: First, I have an excellent editor at Riverhead. It's funny because the thing about nonfiction books is that unless there's a particular thread that you’re hanging it on, the narrative of nonfiction is often “this is what I learned; come along with me on the journey as I learned this.” There's a deep element of that in this book.
To start, the thesis of the book is that you need to understand a certain amount of engineering (the physical reality, the matter and energy networks) to get to the social side of infrastructure. We have a deep understanding that infrastructure is social, political, economic, but we don't necessarily understand how that falls out of the technological stuff. So, I started with the technical pieces, but there was a question: now that you have the technological underpinnings to understand how the social and economic side works, how do I now talk about that other side?
My editor and I mutually realized that the middle chapter was the turning point in the book. And that it paralleled my own experience with infrastructure.
If you had asked me when I was 25, “How does infrastructure work and what is it for?” I'd have said “It's all great.” I grew up with it. For me, it’s amazing, it’s cool. But then I started digging into it. Over the past 20 years there has been a recognition both in general and for me personally that it’s more complicated. I go to places and now I understand the consequences and I realize that my experiences of infrastructure have only been positive by design. I had always been in that privileged group. I hadn't spent time in the places that were the hinterlands for that infrastructure. And of course, my hinterland is someone else's home.
So it was a combination of going myself, digging more deeply into infrastructure, and encountering the narratives that came out in the last couple of decades around things like colonialism, around narratives that hadn't really been heard, hadn't really been as much part of the mainstream discourse. Things like the Robert Moses highways in New York. It was me going and visiting things and learning more. And eventually the thing that I realized was that the highways in New York City are not the exception. Moses was not uniquely terrible. Because the same story exists about the trains in India. And it's the same story about building dams in the wilderness.
And that was what enabled me to put it all together. The structure of the book basically was the same kind of turn that I had, that I think we've had… “as a society” is too strong a word… but certainly there's been a turn in the people who think deeply about this. A realization that infrastructure was an unalloyed good because we only heard it from the point of view of the people who benefited from it. A recognition that not just some of these infrastructural networks have this other side, but all of these infrastructural networks have this other side. Coming to that realization myself led to what in retrospect seems like the natural structure of the book. There is a turning point where now that I've dug deeply enough, I can put all the pieces together. I can understand that it is inherent to infrastructure, in part for technological reasons as well as for social, economic, and political reasons. It ended up that something that took place over many decades basically got turned into a chapter break.
I recognize that it’s an incredibly privileged perspective to not have to think about the other side of these networks. And it is because I grew up in a major urban center. I grew up as the person who these systems were designed for. If I had grown up in an African American neighborhood in the US, if I had grown up in suburban areas, if I had grown up in rural or less developed areas, if I had grown up in India, I would have had a very different perspective on this than I did growing up as an urban Canadian.
JP: One of the phrases you use a few times in the book is that infrastructure is not invisible, but it’s transparent. I really like that phrasing. How did you come to anchor your thinking around that idea?
DC: One thing I do want to say, of course, is that many of my ideas are rooted in those of previous scholars, like Susan Star, who have done so much of the work on infrastructure. So my phrasing has deep roots in the work of other people. I actually love the fact that like a disproportionate number of the citations in the book are to the academic press. Stuff that people have been working on deeply for a long time and I got to learn from what they did and put the pieces together and bring it out in a different way.
But also, I joke that I'm a literal minded person. I was trained as an engineer. And infrastructure is not invisible. In fact, it's the exact opposite! There's hardly a moment in your life that there is not something in your eye line that is connected to infrastructure. I challenge people to like to look around them. I can see a thermostat, I can see a light switch, I can see my light, I can look out the window and see the road and cars. There's no world in which infrastructure is invisible. We just don't have to ever think about it. It’s actually relatively rare that infrastructure is invisible, it's the wiring in the walls and it's the stuff beneath the road. But mostly infrastructure is dramatically visible. And we either don't think about it because we just take it for granted, or we don't know what it is.
JP: A key idea in the book is that our infrastructure technologies provide a lot for us, but they all have some cost to them. There’s an ongoing quest to just hide the cost somewhere else so that we don't see it, that we don't encounter it. I also suspect there's an almost willful ignorance to some of it. So, how can we start to think better about what these infrastructures cost as well as what they benefit?
DC: My modest proposal is that all new infrastructure that brings negative costs needs to be built in the richest neighborhood, the richest part of your town. The reason for that is because it basically means that you have to figure out how to mitigate the costs and harms of that infrastructure, as opposed to just having somebody else deal with it.
I grew up on the East Coast and in Toronto, and when I go to Los Angeles, it freaks me out that there is oil infrastructure everywhere in the city. Until recently, there were a bunch of active oil wells. And they’re across the road from places like Cedar Sinai, which is the super fancy medical center that Hollywood stars go to. They are also in less posh neighborhoods, and there are lots of concerns about the negative health effects of living in proximity to them. So here’s a really great example of the same thing showing up in different types of communities. In some places, we’re going to try to hide it. We're going to try to make it beautiful, we're going to put towers on it. We’ll put in things that mitigate the risk of fumes. We will do that in Beverly Hills, but then we're not going to do that in east LA, right? It's a very stark example.
LA County, to their credit, just in the last year or two, has formally ended oil and grass drilling within county limits. There's a plan to cap wells. That idea has started to reckon with the fact that historically what we've done is displace the harms to other people. Now we’re starting to think about how we can mitigate those harms instead, or how we can have better community discussions about what we're going to build and where. That is going to be really hard. It is way, way easier to say:
“Well, we know what's best and we're going to put it here. We're making the decisions and we're getting the benefits. We’re just going to put a highway through this neighborhood which is ‘blighted’ because no one wants to live there. It's inexpensive because the neighborhood is so terrible we can buy the land cheap. So let’s just eminent domain that land and everyone wins!”
That’s not going to happen again. Now we are going to think about how we actually make those decisions. And a big piece of it is this idea of what is appropriate, sustainable, resilient for the place.
In the book, I used the example of covering train tracks instead of leaving them open. It’s just a matter of making the investment. That’s one of the reasons why I think Dinorwig is a really great example, because it is a place where people who benefit from it and the people who are paying the costs are the same people. And so, they went to extraordinary lengths to mitigate the harms of it. That's the kind of place that I think we need to be. As we're thinking about building new infrastructure to decarbonize, we need to make that kind of serious commitment. The days of “somebody else's problem” need to be over, and that means having serious discussions about what the harms are and who benefits and who pays the cost..
We’re not good at it. We haven't had a lot of practice at having those conversations. But at the same time, I'm starting to see that kind of thing happen in lots of places, especially around things like electricity. So, I don't think it's an impossible thing to do, but there are no easy answers. There aren’t even any actual answers. Because the whole point is that it's going to be specific to the communities in which it is.
JP: Even if we don’t get answers, though, the model you've put forth is very much about forcing us to at least reckon with the questions.
DC: Right, because in the past, there was so much of, “We’re going to build this hydroelectric dam here because it's valueless land.” It’s that colonial notion that “you're using the land wrong.” The notion that if you’re using it as ancestral hunting grounds it is just clearly not a very good use of the land, and so you should do that somewhere else so we can use it for our reservoir. That, essentially, is what Robert Moses did in Niagara Falls, it’s what we did with the Hoover Dam. So, it’s about not making those kinds of decisions anymore.
But it’s also worth thinking about how the technological affordances of fossil fuels were for scale and centralization. There are thermodynamic reasons for that. Large generating plants are more efficient than small ones, but that isn't true for most renewables. A large solar farm is not actually more efficient than individual solar panels. The technological affordances change what we can build and why we would build it, which actually opens up a new set of possibilities for what it means to mitigate harms.
JP: I would like to pivot a bit and think through some of the educational implications of your work. We can start with just how you've integrated some of these perspectives into your own educational practice. When you're working with future engineers at the Olin College of Engineering, how are you trying to raise their awareness of these ideas?
DC: I teach undergraduates, so almost everyone I interact with are 18–21-year-old traditional engineering students. There's a selection bias here, but the students who come talk to me are depressed. They say, “I want to be an engineer, but the world is so comprehensively messed up.” For these students, there’s this narrative that our parents completely screwed over the world and now we have to fix it before it's too late. And if we do not fix it, bad things will happen.
The first piece of this is recognizing that it’s incorrect. The correct narrative is that we have the opportunity to build this better world of abundance, of abundant energy that recognizes the planetary boundaries around scarce matter. If we do that, it actually opens up a whole new world of possibility in terms of human thriving, globally.
The reason why my students have this other depressing narrative is because it serves the interests of, among other things, fossil fuel companies and capitalism. It is in their interest to not decouple the idea of agency, energy and fossil fuels. Fossil fuel companies basically sell their products on the basis that it gives you agency to do what you want. Fossil fuels create energy, and energy gives you agency. But if you can disintermediate the “burning fossil fuels” part, then you just have energy and agency – and their business model is gone. There is this other world of possibility that has not yet been possible in human history. We can now visualize a world where we can have all of the energy we want in a way that aligns with the physical realities of our planet. That’s how I talk to my engineering students. It's suddenly recognizing that your job is not to fix everything and avert catastrophe. Your job is to actually build this new technological world for us to live in.
The second piece of it is the thing that we've already talked about. Another conventional narrative is that there are people who benefit and there are people who are harmed. But we ought to think of it as a distribution of benefits and a distribution of harms. And those have historically aligned with colonialism, capitalism, all those things… but they don't have to, right? That's also where it becomes complicated. You have to think about how you might be in a position where you're disproportionately benefiting relative to the harms. Or you're disproportionately being harmed relative to the benefits. I give my students this vocabulary so that they don’t think of “us versus them” but instead think about how the distribution works.
When you’re trying to design something, and you’re trying to figure out who's going to use it, who's going to benefit, and who's going to be harmed, you can't figure that out yourself. You have your own blinkered perspective on things that necessitates actually understanding who you're building it for. That’s why we need things like collaborative design.
Then the last thing I'm going to throw in there is thinking about alternatives to the implicit, or maybe explicit, utilitarianism that we often see. One alternative is a relational model like an ethics of care. But we really need to make utilitarianism explicit instead of implicit. Only then can you think about whether that’s what you really want, and how you could use something like an ethics of care model to think differently. I try to give people some language and some framings to think about these things.
We're fostering social change, and that's a project that takes time and communication. It’s not a thing that is only going to happen between me and my students in my classroom. It's a thing that many of us are going to be involved in.
JP: As you have been trying to infuse these perspectives into your educational work, are you finding that your students are receptive? Are they eager for this?
DB: I'm at a weird place at Olin College. We're extremely new, since the turn of this century. Our model has always been thinking about engineering in new ways. So, our students definitely come here understanding that they're not just going to be like, “I'm just going to get a job and I'm going to do what they tell me.” That helps.
But also, there is a huge difference between thinking about the technological world as a problem to be solved versus an opportunity to be grasped. My students have been very receptive because they say they don’t feel so depressed about being an engineer anymore. I feel like that's actually one of the best things to communicate to young people. It combats that apathetic nihilism that makes you think, “Why shouldn't I just go get a job that pays me $200,000 a year and do whatever the hell I want, because humanity is doomed?” Frankly, my students and your students are among the most privileged technologists to be in the world. If they think that humanity is doomed, then that is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If they act as if there's no possibility of saving human kind, then we will take the rest of the world with us. And so we need a positive message, other than just having to avert catastrophe.
The other place where my students are receptive is just seeing infrastructure for what it is. What I hear more than anything else is, “I'm never going to see the world the same way again.” That is what going to university is about. Every scrap of learning that you do means that you do not see the world the same way again.
But the hardest thing about trying to build a new world is that you have to live in the current one while you're doing it. The question that I get more than anything else is from students who want to figure out how to do this stuff, but they need to have a job, they need to pay their student debt. They want to know: How do I try to do this work? How do I square getting a job at an engineering company or a tech company with these types of things? How do I make it work?
One of the things I tell my students is that they should consider joining a union. My friend Ethan Marcotte just wrote a book called You Deserve a Tech Union. I've been saying for years that you don't need to join a union so that you get weekends off. You should think about joining a union so that you and your fellow workers can help shape decisions around what gets built and why.
The other thing I say is, look, if it was 1980 and you wanted to go get a job in computing, there would be no job ads. You would just have to dig and find people who are doing stuff that you're interested in and figure out how to go work for them because no one is going to give it to you on a platter. And this new tech stuff is in the same space. You can find a clean tech start up and go work for them. But there aren’t going to be any monster.com listings for that. You're going to have to figure it out yourself. It is 100% there, but it just isn't codified as a pathway yet.
I also point out that there is enough stuff that needs to happen on enough different timescales that you don’t all have to do the same thing. I have a student who dropped out of engineering school to do direct climate action, which is a pretty immediate timescale. Then I have students who want to go get a Ph.D. to do research that's going to lead to new things. That's a much longer timescale and we need all of it. The narrative that we have to do things right now before it's too late is only half the story. The other half of the story is we're going to be rethinking and rebuilding at least for the next 20 to 50 years – essentially for my students’ working lives. So, there isn’t just one right thing or wrong thing to do. There are millions of people in the world. We can all do different things. Do the thing that is fulfilling to you that makes the rest of your life possible on the timescale that you think makes sense.
JP: Teaching engineers about all of this is obviously very important. But we also need everybody to be educated about how infrastructure works and the roles that it plays in our societies. So, how could we be doing a better job within our public education system to prepare young people for this world?
DC: As Susan Star says, infrastructure is visible upon failure. There are probably not too many people in the K 12 system right now who are not going to have to deal with infrastructure failure. Because of climate change, we have systems that were built for landscapes that no longer exist. I think that if you're in K 12 now, you don't get to ignore infrastructure, the way I got to a few decades ago. Just open The New York Times or The LA Times or any major newspaper. Go to their home page. It won’t take long to find something infrastructure related.
JP: So is it just a matter of tapping into these issues? Taking advantage of the visibility of these things?
DC: Yeah and to a significant extent I think it’s a thing that kids actually care about. It could start with just learning about where your water is coming from, where your electricity comes from. Can we take a field trip to our local water plant? That’s a way into these ideas, even if it starts with an unmitigated public good like public water. It opens up questions of how we actually make sure that we can keep doing it and do it in an equitable way, in a sustainable way. This is all stuff that students are aware of and actually get to understand. That's one way in. It does have the advantage of being everywhere all around us. It's not like you have to do these abstruse things to have access to it, because you can access it everywhere.
There's a book called Hidden Systems that Dan Nott wrote which is a graphic explainer on infrastructure that came out last year. It covers a lot of the same kinds of ideas as How Infrastructure Works and it's aimed at high school age students. It’s full of illustrations, which is a powerful technique for conveying the systems, because they are operating on so many scales that it's hard to do photographically, and it's hard to do in text. He uses diagrams to make things as visible as possible.
So, there are pathways in, but a chunk of it is just deciding that we’re going to do it. I definitely have talked to people who remember visiting places like the local town water treatment plant. Wherever you live, there's stuff to go see, even if it’s just walking around and looking for things. I've done it with my students in the room. Just look around the room and point at all the things that connect the networks.
JP: I think your point about it just being everywhere and being very accessible is the key. We just need to see it in a way it's eminently doable. One of the things you started our conversation with is that you can't fully understand the social and political significance of these things without having at least some comprehension of the technical aspects. From an educational perspective, how much of the technical do we need before we can get into the social?
DC: Think about spiral learning where you learn a thing at one level, and then you go deeper and deeper and deeper. Water infrastructure is a good example because energy is there, matter networks are there, and how that leads to the social world is there. You can have a water system without having any external energy. That’s why, after roads, it's the oldest infrastructure. All the other systems that we use require inputs of energy. Young kids can understand how the water cycle works. If you can understand that, you can understand how it gets to where you live. You can get the town water idea, and the water tower over there. We may not be able to get into how the water gets into that tower, but we can definitely think about how the water tower gets distributed to our houses, like everything else. And it’s infinitely deep! You can get into how we pump the water up the aquifer and add that to the story of how it gets distributed. And then we can get into what's going to happen to the aquifer and where that water came from. You don't have to be an engineer to understand this stuff.