Why We All Need to Pay More Attention to Infrastructure: A Review of How Infrastructure Works
Civics of Technology Announcements
Next Monthly Tech Talk on Tuesday, 02/06/24. Join our monthly tech talks to discuss current events, articles, books, podcast, or whatever we choose related to technology and education. There is no agenda or schedule. Our next Tech Talk will be on Tuesday, February 6th, 2023 at 8-9pm EST/7-8pm CST/6-7pm MST/5-6pm PST. Learn more on our Events page and register to participate.
Spring Book Clubs Announcement!: We will hold three book clubs in spring 2024, including two of the books which most influenced our Civics of Tech project, and a new book sandwiched in between them. We often talk about how Neil Postman’s work influenced our ecological perspective and Ruha Benjamin’s work has influenced our critical perspective. Yet, we’ve never held book clubs to discuss either. We’re excited to return to those two classics and also dive into Joy Buolamwini’s highly anticipated new book. You can find all our book clubs on our Events page.
Register to join us on February 15th as we discuss Neil Postman’s classic, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology;
Register to join us on March 21st as we discuss Joy Buolamwini’s new book, Unmasking AI: My Mission to Protect What is Human in a World of Machines.
Register to join us on April 25th as we discuss Ruha Benjamin’s instant classic, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code.
by Jacob Pleasants
NOTE: This week Dr. Pleasants reviews the book, and next week we’ll post his question and answer with the author, Dr. Deb Chachra.
Infrastructure has been getting more attention than usual these days, largely as a result of climate change. If we want to find ways to reduce our collective carbon output, we need to take a hard look at the systems that provide us energy, food, transportation, water, construction materials, and so much more. Issues of infrastructure are plainly not just technical, but social and political. What should our infrastructural systems do? Who will benefit? Who will bear the costs? Who will get to decide how we answer those questions?
Chachra, D. (2023). How Infrastructure Works: Inside the Systems that Shape our World. Riverhead Books. 320 pages. ISBN 9780593086599.
by Jacob Pleasants
These questions, among others, lie at the heart of How Infrastructure Works. Deb Chachra wants us all to pay more attention to our infrastructural systems and better understand what they do and how they work in both social and technical terms. Chachra argues that, at its core, infrastructure promotes (or ought to promote) human agency. Infrastructure, she argues, is enabling. Infrastructural technologies are not the ones that will make your coffee in the morning; they’re the ones that allow you to use other technologies to make your coffee. They provide you with the safe water you use, the electricity to grind your beans and heat your water, the transportation networks that got you those beans in the first place. And unlike your coffeemaker and beans, infrastructure is a public good that benefits all who can access the network.
There are, of course, costs to be paid for what infrastructure enables. The networks require material inputs (human labor, raw materials) and create undesirable outputs (carbon dioxide, noise, toxic chemicals). They leave disruptive footprints on the landscape. A core insight that Chachra offers is that all infrastructural networks concentrate the benefits in certain places while displacing the costs and harms elsewhere. It is a fundamental aspect of how they work.
This does not mean that our infrastructure will inevitably result in unjust outcomes, or will inevitably be unsustainable. Chachra presents strong critiques of many systems that are currently in place (because many of them are deeply problematic), but also offers up many possibilities for more just and sustainable futures. A key point, though, is that we can’t fully comprehend either the present issues or those brighter futures unless we gain a deeper understanding of how these systems work in technical terms as well as social and political ones.
As an engineer, Chachra has a deep interest and fascination in the technical aspects of infrastructure, and she brings her passion to the examples that she describes throughout the book. Perhaps most illustrative is her discussion of the Dinorwig pumped-storage electric power station in Wales, aka “electric mountain.” It is truly a marvelous piece of technology. Two lakes, one higher than the other, are connected such that electricity can be generated when water is drained from the upper lake to the lower one. When the demand is high, the electric mountain can rapidly meet the need. But if demand is low and production is high, the whole system can simply be run in reverse: excess electricity is used to pump water back up to the higher lake and “recharge” the system. It is essentially a massive and highly efficient battery. If that all sounds rather mundane, trust that Chachra’s description is far more compelling than mine!
Whether or not you find these technical details as fascinating as Chachra (and I), her point is that these details matter. They make an enormous difference when it comes to the social and political dimensions of our infrastructure. Dinorwig is an instructive example. If electricity is to be a public good, then our electricity systems need to be able to accommodate dramatic ebbs and flows in demand (for a variety of sociocultural reasons). Renewables are notoriously bad at this kind of thing; we can’t ramp the wind or sunlight up or down. And so we often build lots of fuel-burning power plants that can be throttled up or down as needed. Dinorwig is an alternative technical possibility that can meet fluctuating demand without a constant input of fossil fuels. Not enough wind/solar power coming through? Drain the lake! Have some excess wind/solar production? Recharge the lake!
It’s not without costs, of course. Dinorwig required substantial economic and material resources for its construction and was bound to leave a mark on the landscape. What is really interesting are the technical choices that were made to mitigate those costs. The power station itself is located deep inside the mountain so as not to mar the landscape, and even the power lines are buried. Digging into a mountain is normally very resource-intensive, but they situated the power station in an old quarry, which minimized the need for new digging. Those decisions were costly in monetary terms, but the decision-makers decided to take on those monetary costs rather than offload problems to the environment or downstream communities.
If we want better infrastructure, and if we want the benefits of infrastructure to be more widely accessible, we need to pursue projects that don’t just displace the costs. That means bringing more voices into the decision-making process. That means expanding the scope of concerns to ensure that costs aren’t tucked out of sight (and mind). Dare I say that it requires a real… civics of technology?
Let’s return to an example that we love to talk about here in the Civics of Tech community: transportation infrastructure. Chachra argues that infrastructure promotes autonomy - or at least it should. But transportation infrastructure is notorious for the ways that it frustrates the facile assumption that more infrastructure necessarily enables more autonomy. In the book, she discusses how cities often designed mass transit systems (and major highways) to quickly bring workers into the city center from the suburbs - a “spoke” model. Arguably, that system did promote the autonomy of the relatively affluent men who needed to make those commutes. But what about everyone else? And what happens when the employment model changes? Transportation systems might be enabling for some, but they constrain the autonomy of others.
Our societies need more infrastructure. But they also need better infrastructure. “More” and “better” are not synonymous. It’s a timely message in light of the large investments that countries like the United States are making in infrastructural projects.
Pay attention to our infrastructure, because it matters. And give this book a read.