Whether it’s a telephone or a T-shirt, most modern goods are made possible by cooperation and standards, the products of humans working together to make use of technologies that no one person can understand in their entirety.
Page 10, Behind the Lights
My dad was a electrical engineer. He spent basically his entire career working for a power company responsible for the electrical grid of a city. Through him I learned bits and pieces of how electrical infrastructure worked and I gained an appreciation for the marvels of electricity and all the things it provided.
One of the first concepts this book talks about is the invisibility of infrastructure. When all of our infrastructure whether that be electricity, water or the Internet work as expected we tend to forget about its existence. It melds into the fabric of reality until it suddenly doesn’t.
I remember being in Bangladesh and experiencing something called load shedding. I doubt many people who have lived their entire lives in locales where electrical power is stable and abundant have ever heard of this term. Load shedding is what happens is when the demand for electrical power outstrips supply. As a result, the operators of the grid strategically cut off power to parts of the grid to bring demand down. The grid sheds the load.
The availability and stability of various bits of infrastructure shape our world in ways both small and big. How might your day look like if you didn’t have electricity for several hours a day? What if you had to obtain drinking water from a well? What if your internet access was sporadic and unstable? These are the kind of questions that were on my mind as I read this book.
The book also made me think about the extremely political nature of infrastructure. Who has access to well maintained infrastructure? Who doesn’t? Who bears the harms generated from various bits of infrastructure?
Infrastructural networks could be fairly described as vast constructions whose purpose is to centralize resources and agency to a small fraction of extremely privileged humans and to displace the harms to many others.
page 134, The Political Context of Infrastructure
Of course, this book talks about anthropogenic climate change and what that means for all our infrastructure. How we need to radically rethink how and infrastructure we build for the sake of our collective futures. Like a lot of non-fiction I’ve read recently, this book doesn’t offer specific solutions but modes of thinking for the future.
If the twentieth century was about building infrastructural systems that could manage or even just displace risks, the twenty-first century is going to be about building out systems–humans as well as technological–that are resilient enough to sustain our communities during conditions of ongoing uncertainty.
page 211, An Emerging Future of Infrastructure
While The Mushroom at the End of the World felt a little abstract in its talk of precarity. This book tackles it in the more concrete world of infrastructure that is increasingly under constant siege from the climate changing around us. What do solar powered micro grids look like? What does sustainable and resilient public transportation of the future look like? What happens when infrastructure is a thing we all have to actively think about on communal basis?
While the changing climate increasingly makes infrastructure visible to more of us, this book shines a light on what that actually means for us and for our descendants. As such, I recommend everyone give this book a read. As I tend to do with these non-fiction book reviews, I’ll leave y’all with another quote from the book.
Infrastructure is how we collectively dream about our future and then bring it into existence.
page 276, Infrastructural Citizenship