Infrastructure and the Future
Never mind the Buildings: thoughts on an infrastructural future Ian Baldwin A century ago, E.M. Forster published a short story in the Oxford and Cambridge Review. “The Machine Stops” portrays a future in which humanity lives in an automated underground complex known as The Machine.1 Its inhabitants have only to push buttons to summon food, clothing, and remote-controlled medical care. Repulsed by the thought of physical interaction and the “horrible brown earth” above, they live happily in hexagonal cells, alone yet connected through pneumatic mail speaking tubes, and video screens, delivering lectures and calling forth literature and music on demand. Watching the video of Infrastructure and the Future over a broadband connection running at 8.9 megabits per second, reading its participants’ blog posts, tweets, and e-mails while pulling PDFs of their articles off the web, Forster’s future looks uncanny. It suggests an appraisal both ominous and opportune: today’s continuously connected, socially networked public life is more about the networked than the social. We too live within a machine, one woven throughout the industrial era by the ever-evolving networks, processes, and systems that supply the communication, hygiene, mobility, and power upon which modernity rests. This dependency has always come with unease—Forster’s story has human society perishing as the machine slowly breaks down—for infrastructure underpins the very narrative of progress. The floods that recently inundated Pakistan, washing away five thousand miles of roads, bridges, railways, and utility lines, were said to have set back the country by years, if not decades.
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