Infrastructure

I love industry. Pipes. I love fluid and smoke. I love man-made things. I like to see people hard at work, and I like to see sludge and man-made waste.

A scientifically accurate version of The Core (or The Journey to the Center of the Earth, for that matter) wouldn’t have been very exciting to watch. The Kola Superdeep Borehole, the deepest hole ever drilled into the real Earth, only penetrated a third of the way through the continental crust somewhere just shy of the Finnish border. That’s a little under eight miles; the Earth’s core, for reference, is 4,000 miles deep. Although it surfaced plenty of surprises from deep below the permafrost—boiling hydrogen-rich mud, a shock of liquid water, and even microscopic Plankton fossils as far as three miles below the surface—it was hardly the stuff of adventure tales.

Even before the Russians welded it shut in the ‘90s, the Kola Superdeep Borehole was only 9 inches wide, and in photos, its opening peters immediately away into darkness, a blank slate that has been enthusiastically filled in by eldritch creepypasta authors, clickbait farms, and evangelical memelords suggesting that the Soviet Union opened the gates to hell. Images taken by urban explorers of the abandoned site could not look more like outtakes from Stalker, adding to its postlapsarian Soviet spook factor.

...Although both make us feel very small, the challenges of inner-space exploration are, in every way, inverse to those presented by outer-space travel: tremendous pressure and heat make it impossible to dig beyond a certain point. The mantle is yet to be breached; pending some miraculous advance in materials science, it’s unlikely that it ever will.

Any individual trying to use the Internet for community use at the South Pole, as of October 2023, likely faced:

• Round-trip latency averaging around 750 milliseconds, with jitter between packets sometimes exceeding several seconds.
• Available speeds, to the end-user device, that range from a couple kbps (yes, you read that right), up to 2 mbps on a really good day.
• Extreme congestion, queueing, and dropped packets, far in excess of even the worst oversaturated ISP links or bufferbloat-infested routers back home.
• Limited availability, frequent dropouts, and occasional service preemptions.

These constraints drastically impact the modern web experience! Some of it is unavoidable. The link characteristics described above are truly bleak. But – a lot of the end-user impact is caused by web and app engineering which fails to take slow/intermittent links into consideration.

If you’re an app developer reading this, can you tell me, off the top of your head, how your app behaves on a link with 40 kbps available bandwidth, 1,000 ms latency, occasional jitter of up to 2,000 ms, packet loss of 10%, and a complete 15-second connectivity dropout every few minutes?

The world’s emails, TikToks, classified memos, bank transfers, satellite surveillance, and FaceTime calls travel on cables that are about as thin as a garden hose. There are about 800,000 miles of these skinny tubes crisscrossing the Earth’s oceans, representing nearly 600 different systems, according to the industry tracking organization TeleGeography. The cables are buried near shore, but for the vast majority of their length, they just sit amid the gray ooze and alien creatures of the ocean floor, the hair-thin strands of glass at their center glowing with lasers encoding the world’s data.

I’ve led infrastructure at a startup for the past 4 years that has had to scale quickly. From the beginning I made some core decisions that the company has had to stick to, for better or worse, these past four years. This post will list some of the major decisions made and if I endorse them for your startup, or if I regret them and advise you to pick something else.

According to Emma Ailes of BBC News, the first pylons in the UK were designed by architect Sir Reginald Blomfield in 1928, with a “lattice” approach that “sought to be more delicate than the brutalist structures used in Europe and the United States.” Reportedly, he was “inspired by the root of the word pylon – meaning an Egyptian gateway to the sun.”

Critical Minerals – Geography of Energy is a multi-chapter project that explores the profound transformation in the global energy landscape – the shift towards renewable energy sources. The story delves into the intricate geopolitical, social, and environmental implications of the exponential demand for minerals necessary to achieve renewable energy goals.

...The project currently has four chapters, each focusing on a different critical mineral. It consists of four, possibly five chapters, each dedicated to a specific critical mineral: copper, lithium, cobalt, nickel, and we are planning to include a fifth chapter on rare earth elements.

Four years ago, I wrote that the SLS was a cripplingly embarrassing national failure and a tragedy waiting to happen. That remains true, of course, but now I will go further and underscore that by continuing to humor this monstrosity, NASA has squandered its technical integrity and credibility.

...Just imagine the mental agility required to actually want to work for an agency that continues to insist on technical doctrine no less absurd than “2+2=5” from top to bottom, from onboarding documentation all the way up to press releases, bilateral agreements and policy papers. Everyone at NASA knows the SLS is a looming catastrophe, but no-one can say it.

Air travel is an interesting dichotomy. On the one hand, building the infrastructure for it is unbelievably difficult. Airports are incredibly hard to build, aircraft are incredibly hard to make a profit selling, airlines are frequently going bankrupt. And yet this hasn’t stopped air travel from steadily becoming cheaper, safer, more convenient and more ubiquitous. The pre-jet era, when aircraft and airports could be developed without spending billions of dollars, was also the era where air travel was noisy, inconvenient, and reserved for a relatively small number of people. It was somehow brought to the masses, transformed from a miracle to a modern convenience even as every aspect of it steadily got closer and closer to being impossible to achieve.

In every world city, midsized and above, there are always one or two neighborhoods where you can get everything you need, either by walking, or paying for delivery. This is almost always the same part of the city where tourists go, so not surprisingly, everyone thinks every city is more walkable than their own.

Yet, that to me isn’t what walkability is, which shouldn’t be a function of a resident’s wealth or location, rather it should reflect the modal experience, or what most residents experience on a daily basis.

What is walkability?

• Density
• Localized distribution
• Proper Infrastructure
• An extensive public transportation system
• Connectedness
• Good climate / low crime /low pollution
• Cool things to want to walk to

We simulate over 2.4 billion trips across every urban area in the world to measure street network vulnerability to disasters, then measure the relationships between street network design and these vulnerability indicators.

...All else equal, networks with higher connectivity, fewer chokepoints, and less circuity are less vulnerable to disruption. But (for example) even the otherwise dense, connected Amsterdam is easy to disconnect by targeting its chokepoints (like canal bridges).

When the Smithsons placed the water heater for the Hunstanton Secondary School prominently above the school’s roofline, they weren’t just revealing the building’s infrastructure, they were reveling in it. What does it look like to do this on the web?

Of course there’s no single answer, because the web is simultaneously a physical and digital medium. It is material and it isn’t. It depends on how literally you interpret the question. But taking it somewhere in-between, seeing the web as primarily an information medium, we can ask the question a little differently: what does it look like to design something that is true to the material of digital information?

Fulfillment is a multimedia installation that examines aspects of the “hidden-in-plain-sight” landscapes of e-commerce, cloud computing, crypto-mining, as well as the legal contracts that bind us to these technological systems. Both horrified and fascinated by the dematerialized digital systems of transaction and communication, Linder uses pen and paper to critically reconnect the digital world to one of tangible nature.

Bowellism is a modern architectural style heavily associated with Richard Rogers. The premise is that the services for the building, such as ducts, sewage pipes and lifts, are located on the exterior to maximise space in the interior.

RENE: Tell me what we have. Of value.

GAEL: Whatever we've bought in cargo so far. I don't know what you want me—

RENE: Anyone can buy goods. What do we really have? What do we sell?

GAEL (realizing): The route.

RENE: Yes. The navigation is our property. To copy a man's route is to steal it.

The MIT Electron-conductive Cement-based Materials Hub (EC^3 Hub), an outgrowth of the MIT Concrete Sustainability Hub (CSHub), has been established by a five-year sponsored research agreement with the Aizawa Concrete Corp. In particular, the EC^3 Hub will investigate the infrastructure applications of multifunctional concrete — concrete having capacities beyond serving as a structural element, such as functioning as a “battery” for renewable energy.

...By running current through carbon black-doped concrete pavements, the EC^3 Hub’s technology could allow cities and municipalities to de-ice road and sidewalk surfaces at scale, improving safety for drivers and pedestrians in icy conditions. The potential for concrete to store energy from renewable sources — a topic widely covered by news outlets — could allow concrete to serve as a “battery” for technologies such as solar, wind, and tidal power generation, which cannot produce a consistent amount of energy (for example, when a cloudy day inhibits a solar panel’s output). Due to the scarcity of the ingredients used in many batteries, such as lithium-ion cells, this technology offers an alternative for renewable energy storage at scale.

Another thought from our chat was to extend the geological metaphor to the layers.

Geologists and earth scientists often find the most interesting things at the interstices of the layers. Deposits or thin layers that tell a rich tale of the past. Tell-tale indicators of calamity suck as the K–Pg/K-T boundary. Annals of a former world.

The laminar boundary between infrastructure and institutions is perhaps the layer that gets the least examination in our current obsession with “product”…

I’ve often discussed with folks the many situations where infrastructure (capex) is mistaken for something that can replace institutions/labour (opex) – and where the role of service design interventions or strategic design prototypes can help mitigate.

In the pace layers, perhaps we can call that the “Dan Hill Interstitial Latencies Layer” – pleasingly recurrent in its acronymic form (D-HILL) and make it irregular and gnarly to indicate the difficulties there…

It's simple: the Pylon Appreciation Society is a club for people who appreciate electricity pylons.

These disused gas cylinders occupy a site on the outskirts of Stockholm. For the first ten years after moving to London, the view west across the train tracks was of a similar pair of monumental structures, transfigured by every sunset. One has since been dismantled to make way for the expanding national and international railway stations.

Our continued survival here at the South Pole, as temperatures dip below -100°F, is enabled by a series of primary, secondary, and tertiary systems for keeping the station warm, lights on, water flowing, communication links healthy, and food cooking.

In this post, I’m going to talk about the infrastructure for generating and distributing power at the South Pole. I won’t sugarcoat it – we burn a lot of fossil fuel here, and we burn plenty more in the supply chain along the way. It’s my sincere hope that we continue working, with urgency, to reduce the environmental footprint of US Antarctic research, both point-of-use and in the supply chains along the way.

Enthusiasm for the Apollo program tends to be focused on the astronauts who piloted the spacecraft, and on the NASA mission control staff that managed the flights from the ground. Comparatively less focus is placed on the actual construction of the Apollo spacecraft and the rockets that put them into orbit. Everyone knows who Neil Armstrong is, but almost no one knows who built the Eagle lander that carried him to the lunar surface (it was Grumman Aerospace). In fictional treatments like the movie First Man, the rocket is simply there, ready and waiting for the astronauts to take their historic flight.

But the astronauts, and NASA, were just the tip of an enormous iceberg of industrial infrastructure, made up of 400,000 workers and 20,000 individual contractors that designed and built the various rockets and spacecraft of the Apollo program.

The form and possibility of the "modern infrastructural ideal" is increasingly under threat, as cracks (sometimes literal ones) show up in our bridges, our highways, our airports, and the nets of our social welfare systems. For these and other reasons, broken world thinking asserts that breakdown, dissolution, and change, rather than innovation, development, or design as conventionally practices and thought about are the key themes and problems facing new media and technology scholarship today.

Attached to this, however, comes a second and more hopeful approach: namely, a deep wonder and appreciation for the ongoing activities by which stability (such as it is) is maintained, the subtle arts of repair by which rich and robust lives are sustained against the weight of centrifugal odds, and how sociotechnical forms and infrastructures, large and small, get not only broken but restored, one not-so-metaphoric brick at a time.

For a long time, global supply of energy was limited by the total number of humans in the world. We could only put more energy to work by creating more humans, or by each human working more.

And then we mechanized it.

...If we are approaching the slow but certain mechanization of intellectual labor, it’s natural to ask, “What would we ever do with a billion times the intelligence?”

I think the vast majority of intelligence supply in the future will be consumed by use cases we can’t foresee yet. It won’t be doing a billion times the same intellectual work we do today, or doing it a billion times faster, but something structurally different.

...Scaled, mechanized supply is like water....Once you figure out how to rein in water to do useful work, you simply construct a way to channel the flow of water, and then go out to any river or ocean and find some water. All water is the same, and having twice the water gives you twice as much of whatever you want to use the water for. A billion times the water, a billion times the output.

There’s a movement called the circular economy which is about designing services that don’t include throwing things away. There is no “away.”

A non-extractive economy is going to look very different to today’s economy. These points feel opposed somehow but they are part of the same movement:

• With CupClub, it’s all about infrastructure.
• With the battery-free Game Boy, it’s untethered from infrastructure: once manufactured, no nationwide electricity grid is required to play.

We’ll need better tools to track and measure. There will be new patterns for new types of services. New technologies to build new products. New language. So it’s fascinating seeing the pieces gradually come together.

Electricity is the everyday manifestation of vestal fire: a cool, clean, quick current coursing through infrastructures, rather than the raging messy snapping terror of uncontrolled fire; but at one end or the other of the electrical gastrointestinal tract, there is inevitably smoke and ash. Electricity is repressed fire, as we see in the supposedly eco-friendly idea of cloud computing.

Maintenance could serve as a useful framework for addressing climate change and other pressing planetary constraints that, if left unaddressed, could recreate on a global scale the localized austerity of a cash-strapped transit agency. Indeed, maintenance as a concept could encompass both the built environment and the so-called natural world. Perhaps maintenance, rather than sustainability, is the more useful framework for a green transition, because it can account for how human infrastructure is now deeply entangled with the environment in the age of the Anthropocene.

It would be great if the U.S. had a giant company that could do for energy tech what Bell did for electronics and Google did for AI. But how could such a company be willed into existence? Perhaps the U.S. could create a national private electrical company.

...A key feature of Energy Bell would be price controls on the electricity the company provided.

...A second requirement for Energy Bell would be that it would have to create its own equivalent of Bell Labs, and spend a certain amount of money on research.

Every building had its rhythms. These service corridors were the internal hinterlands—the architectural dark matter—so beloved by Bill Mason.

Very few people are looking closely at the illegal sand system or calling for changes, however, because sand is a mundane resource. Yet sand mining is the world's largest extraction industry because sand is a main ingredient in concrete, and the global construction industry has been soaring for decades. Every year the world uses up to 50 billion metric tons of sand, according to a United Nations Environment Program report. The only natural resource more widely consumed is water. A 2022 study by researchers at the University of Amsterdam concluded that we are dredging river sand at rates that far outstrip nature's ability to replace it, so much so that the world could run out of construction-grade sand by 2050. The U.N. report confirms that sand mining at current rates is unsustainable.

Despite our lofty expectations, the defining material of the 21st century so far has probably been cardboard: the consumer-facing surface of a logistically administered world; the last mile made visible and tangible; what we scan for, in box form, on our porches and in our mailrooms and lobbies, hastily gathering it all into our homes as we find it and then ripping each package open in a postmodern daily harvest ritual. Cardboard—unboxed, flattened, bundled, discarded, recirculated—is the disposable but essential outer sheath of the global economy in its physical state.

Cardboard embodies the actual values of our era—not the harmonious perfection of a high modernist sci-fi monolith like the Starship Enterprise or even a humanoid robot (the iPhone may be the maximum scale at which the “future” has delivered this quality to consumers), but instead flexibility, ephemerality, lightness, and modularity, all qualities that enable tiny parts to circulate within sprawling invisible systems.

In the twenty-first century, the question most of us ask when disaster strikes is not "How could God let that happen?" but "Who screwed up?" This is a salutary development: We take responsibility for the world we live in. Whether or not our world is the best of all possible worlds, it is a world we have made for ourselves. We live in an engineered landscape, on an engineered planet. Our cities and farms, our dwellings and vehicles, our power plans and communication networks—these are all creations of human artifice. If we don't like it here, we have only ourselves to blame.

Some may find puzzling or distasteful the parallel I am drawing between the study of nature and the study of technology. After all, nature is good and good for you, whereas everyone knows that technology is ugly, evil, and dangerous.

A few centuries ago—say, on the American western frontier—a quite different view prevailed. Nature was seen as savage, hostile, cruel. Mountains and forests were barriers, not refuges. The lights of civilization were a comforting sight. We took our charter from the book of Genesis, which grants mankind dominion over the beasts, and felt it was both our entitlement and our duty to tame the wilderness, fell the trees, plow the land, and dam the rivers.

In the automobile's technological middle age, it is hard, if not impossible, to tune or repair one's own vehicle. Technical standardization of cars has occurred, and with it the elimination of the user's access to the machine itself. At the same time, the infrastructures that once served those who did not use automobiles atrophied and vanished. Some may say they were deliberately starved out. Railways gave way to more and more roadways. And thus a technology that had been perceived to liberate its users began to enslave them.

The bipartisan deal contains a pot of money to repair America’s roads and bridges, and build a few more besides. This is the way we usually do infrastructure in America. First we build a ton of roads and bridges that are highly expensive to maintain, especially with our ruinously high construction costs (see this recent article by Jerusalem Demsas). Then, because costs are so high, we wait for a long time to repair the roads and bridges, until civil engineers start screeching, roads get potholed, and there’s a bridge collapse or two. Then we muster up the political will to throw the requisite shit-ton of money at the problem, the potholes and weak bridges get repaired for twice the amount it would have cost had we done it on a regular schedule and three times the amount it would cost if we were a normal rich country. And the whole cycle begins again.

The Maintainers, a global research network interested in the concepts of maintenance, infrastructure, repair, and the myriad forms of labor and expertise that sustain our human-built world. Our members come from a variety of backgrounds, including engineers and business leaders, academic historians and social scientists, government and non-profit agencies, artists, activists, coders, and more.

Difficulties in getting Scotch tape off the roll, for example, prompted the development of a dispenser with a built-in serrated edge to cut off a piece squarely and leave a neat edge handy for the next use. (This provides an excellent example of how the need to dispense a product properly and conveniently can give rise to a highly specialized infrastructure.)

In residential neighborhoods some sewage-pumping stations are trompe l'oeil fantasies, dressed up to look like the split-level or colonial houses that surround them. If you look closely, it's not hard to spot these disguised pumphouses: the heavy-duty power connections, the big ventilating fans, and the diesel generator in the backyard are all tip-offs. Furthermore, the windows are often fakes, with sash and shutters adorning a blank wall.