I had been super-excited for this book, pre-ordered it, and then it languished in my TBR pile for a year. But perhaps now was the right moment to absorb it, in a political landscape that will likely see increased deregulation, new investments in non-renewable energy, and overall deprioritization of infrastructure.
I really had to sit with this line post-election:
It’s why good infrastructure is strongly correlated with not only access to resources, but with equitable, stable political systems.1
[lolsob]
This may be the most impactful book I’ve read this year—it crystallized many loose ideas that I was familiar with—public goods, positive/negative externalities, the futility of plastics recycling—and situated them within a technological, social, and political framework. It felt like completing a mind-expanding class in college.2 According to Readwise I highlighted 67 passages in the book.3
There’s too many ideas swirling in my head, but I recently started a new job so I’ll focus on that. I often have to think about the balance of humans and the work that has to be done, and I really appreciated how Deb Chachra illustrated the tension between optimization and resilience:
Making systems resilient is fundamentally at odds with optimization, because optimizing a system means taking out any slack. A truly optimized, and thus efficient, system is only possible with near-perfect knowledge about the system, together with the ability to observe and implement a response. For a system to be reliable, on the other hand, there have to be some unused resources to draw on when the unexpected happens, which, well, happens predictably.4
To capitalism, sustainability always looks like underutilization.5
Of all the lessons that I drew from this book, the biggest one is familiar: capitalism and profit-seeking are such deficient ways to guide our investments in the systems that we all rely on.
Reading this book I swung between fist-pumping idealism and deep despair, but ultimately I hold out hope for a global movement towards equitable, sustainable, resilient infrastructure that will serve us now and deep into the future.