[field notes] on infrastructures

This is a selection from my new newsletter: field notes from my desktop. You’re welcome to subscribe if you’d like, but this is the most important (and perhaps interesting?) bit, archived here, as per usual.

What’s so important about the infrastructures of our digital lives? For years, I’ve focused on this question in a material, physical sense: the cables, the roads, the satellites, the bridges – the stuff behind the data we share. Perhaps inevitably, this focus on the physical lead me eventually to people: the maintainers, so to speak of the digital world. These are engineers and developers, even deep-sea divers, and they’re the ones keeping us connected, just as much as a fibre optic (or copper) cable is, or a satellite.

Running these monthly walks has often felt like a pulse on how people think about internet infrastructure in their day-to-day lives. In the process, it’s been almost impossible to avoid the elephant in the room: data centers. I’ll be the first to admit that data centers aren’t an infrastructure easily shown in a walking tour, in part because they’re not a kind of infrastructure built to be seen, especially in a city like London. So I’ve tended to take the easy way out: to relegate it to a single stop, and to qualify my own ability to explain what’s at stake.

In truth, to a talk about data centers properly requires another kind of walk entirely – better yet, a book, or at the very least my next newsletter. For more nuance, I tend to point folks towards the Critical Infrastructure Lab in the Netherlands, and other researchers on the topic. Anthropologists and sociologists of infrastructure might point to the politics of energy and power (in multiple senses), and how chokepoints concentrate power (again, in multiple senses), or how speculative investment is shaping another kind of speculative industry (AI, anyone?).

But perhaps I’ll take us in a different direction. I had two conversations with folks this summer that made me think differently about infrastructures, one that retrained my eye away from their politics to their poetics, and what’s at stake when we focus on utility and optimisation alone.

One was at a friend’s bachelorette near Tower Bridge, with a guy who worked in private equity, and whose partner was an artist. He said that they talked all the time about what they saw as the death of beautiful infrastructure. Because of the way investment works nowadays, with a focus on immediate return on investment over long-term work (and this happens as much in art as it does in infrastructure) – they both agreed that we won’t get another Tower Bridge, perhaps ever again.

The other was with an architect, who worked in Pisa, Italy for a small firm. She said that using CAD (computer-aided design) over drawing has changed how architects think about design: transforming it from a series of emergent sketches into ‘drag-and-drop’ shapes. My friend’s father, who has been a landscape designer for over 40 years in Salisbury, said something similar this spring: that the death of drawing has changed the organic shapes of his field into boxes. Perhaps this is the “Zoo Tycoon” or “Sims-ification” of architecture, a physical version of enshittification playing out over a century.

I don’t want to play into the age-old argument that “everything was better then”, a kind of nostalgia that serves no one. But it’s funny how things come full circle, because this often comes up in internet walks. People tend point out what they find beautiful, as if beauty is an unexpected find in a landscape full of facts, rather than an expectation or even a desire from urban life.

Sure, perhaps beauty has no place in an argument about infrastructure. To write about it here feels wildly frivolous, as if I’m telling all my readers here to eat the digital equivalent of cake. But the fact that we don’t value beauty, or think of it as a kind of necessary infrastructure of modern life, says more about us than anything else. Is all we value productivity? Utility? ROI? Or rather, is it all we are allowed to care about, because our own points of view have ringfenced around what is necessary during austerity rather than what we’d like to believe?

There’s no straight line between the infrastructure of stuff that makes life possible to the reasons why we live in the first place (remember that quote from Dead Poets Society?), but from where I stood on a hill this morning in Cornwall, the answers seemed simple. Perhaps the artist and the walker take the infrastructure of beauty – and the frivolity that might require, seriously. But that, too, would be a kind of simplificiation. I strava-ed my own walk, after all. Maybe that’s for another newsletter on self-surveillance, and our desire to be seen.