1. Recasting infrastructure scale: distinguishing between international and global
2. Legal certainty in the Anthropocene
3. Infrastructure control rooms as crisis leadership
4. Infrastructure reliability as an intervening variable in the trade-off between equality and efficiency?
5. The infrastructure crisis no one talks about: suicide for fear of death
6. These two infrastructure systems are not to be confused for one another.
7. The interference of advanced telecommunications with major weather and climate forecasting: This is not a trade-off!
1. Recasting infrastructure scale: distinguishing between international and global
Most scholars attending to the material dimensions of politics either tend to focus on the local, looking at particular infrastructures such as a road, a dam, or a power grid, or at the global, often assessing the capitalist reordering of the world, but overseeing or ignoring the international (Salter 2015, xiii). This oversight, we argue, is not accidental, as infrastructures bring to the fore conceptual problems of space, scale, and agency that constitute the international as a distinct lens for academic inquiry, delineating it from the global, national, or local. . . Infrastructures, we argue, have a generative role in constituting the international as a distinct realm of inquiry that is different from the local and the global. However, we also show how the contemporary infrastructural boom blurs the very same distinctions that infrastructures once helped in setting up. . . .
In other words, infrastructures are at the heart of contention between dynamics of crafting the unevenness between societies that constitute the international on the one hand, and contributing to boundary erosions, driven by an expansionist capitalist logic, on the other hand. https://academic.oup.com/isr/article/26/4/viae046/7831266
An example?
The astonishing thing about the Chinese Communist Party is that it really doesn’t want to rule the world, nor even to be a second hegemonic pole countering the first one. What they want is to rule China – plus the places they feel they’ve lost, like Hong Kong, Taiwan – and to trade freely with other countries. They would genuinely like a multipolar world, in which they would share power with their trading partners, but the problem is that they have only one way of achieving that, which is to use their tech sector, in concert with big finance, to create something like the Bretton Woods system within the BRICs. This would involve fixed exchange rates, essentially a common currency backed by the yuan. It would be a major project, equivalent to the New Dealers planning the world order in 1944 at the Bretton Woods Conference. The rest of BRICs are not ready for it, as we can see from the huge tensions between India and China. Much of the global south is not ready for this kind of multipolarity either. . .But if they don’t start pushing in that direction, then they will be stuck with a bipolar US–Chinese world, with all the risks that this entails. https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/quantity-to-quality?pc=1643
Or in recasted terms: thus, the international dilemma of big tech and global finance.
2. Legal certainty in the Anthropocene
If I were asked to fill in the blank of “When conditions of uncertainty, complexity, conflict and incompletion are increasing, also increasing are pressures for _____________” I’d write: “legal certainty.” Others would instead, I believe, opt for something like: better political arrangements.
Which raises a question: How are the quests for politics and legal certainty inter-related?
II
By legal certainty, I mean not just contracts but licenses, public tenders, procurement agreements and the like. These exist in the domain of reliability professionals in critical infrastructures who don’t operate at the level of macro-principles for legal certainty nor do they operate at the street-level with respect to an individual license, tender or procurement issues. Their domain instead spans (1) from having to modify broad contract principles in light of inevitably different contexts (2) to those systemwide patterns and practices that, while they do not match macro-principles, nonetheless are emerging across a range of spatial and cultural contexts with respect to more reliable licenses, tenders and procurement.
Now, of course, each node–macro, micro, localized design scenarios, and systemwide patterns and practices–can be labelled “political.” That would, however, miss the point here: Differentiating the nodes and domains necessarily differentiates “politics”.
III
So what? At least one point becomes clearer when legal certainty is the pathway into discussing politics under turbulent times: Cities and municipalities, not just nations and the planet, become an obvious unit and level of analysis. It’s cities and their infrastructures that work to ensure legal compliance and bear legal liability in many of the contract specifics just mentioned.
Again, so what?
Take degrowth. Currently, the focus is on the economics and politics of degrowth at the national and international levels. Instead ask: What are the implications for legal certainty in cities that are environmental innovators through their infrastructures in the face of unpredictable change, including but not limited to degrowth strategies?
The answers (plural) would point to track records (plural) upon which then to assess the more fine-grained politics involved, let alone required.
3. Infrastructure control rooms as crisis leadership
When it comes to the crisis management literature, leadership is largely top down (officials direct) or bottom up (self-organizing crisis response), where networks are said to be vertical (hierarchical and chain of command) or horizontal (laterally interacting, official and unofficial).
We add a third category: control rooms. And not just in terms of Incident Command Centers during the emergency but already-existing infrastructure control rooms whose staff continue to operate during the emergency.
Paul Schulman and I argue infrastructure control rooms are a unique organizational formation meriting society protection, even during (especially during) continued turbulence. They have evolved to take hard systemwide decisions under difficult conditions that require a decision, now. Adding this third is to insist on real-time large-system management as the prevention of major failures and thus crises that would have happened had not control room managers, operators and support staff prevented them.
More, a major reason for this high reliability management in a large socio-technical system is to ensure that when errors do happen, they are less likely to be because of this management than to have been forced by other factors, particularly exogenous shocks. High reliability management seeks to isolate the field of blame and root causes, not least of which relate to “bad leadership.”
4. Infrastructure reliability as an intervening variable in the trade-off between equality and efficiency?
I
A good deal has been written arguing that economic efficiency and equality in economic well-being can move in the same direction (e.g., healthier people are more economically productive). The dominant view, however, remains the two are in The Big Tradeoff: more equality means less efficiency.
All this is curious from the perspective of the social sciences: Why would anyone take a movement in efficiency (or equality) to be caused by a movement in the other rather than caused by some intervening variable affecting both efficiency and equality independently?
II
More institutionally-informed economists say they do talk about intervening variables, at least in the form of secure property rights that underpin gains in economic efficiency. Yet those are no more second-order considerations. For when economists talk about the necessity of “secure property rights,” they rarely see any need to underscore a hugely reliable contract law, insurance and title registration infrastructure in place and “always on.”
Could it be, for example, that consumption is less unequally distributed than income precisely because critical infrastructures have been more reliable in the delivery and distribution of goods and services than they have been in the creation and generation of income opportunities for those doing the consuming?
5. The infrastructure crisis no one talks about: suicide for fear of death
I
What else can we do, senior executives and company boards tell themselves, when the entire business is on the line? In this emergency, we have to risk failure in order to succeed!
But what if the business is in a critical service sector? Here, when upper management seeks to implement risk-taking changes, they rely on middle-level reliability professionals, who, when they take risks, only do so in order to reduce the chances of failure. To reliability-seeking professionals, the risk-taking activities of their upper management look like a form of suicide for fear of death.
II
When professionals are compelled to reverse practices they know and find to be reliable, the results are deadly. Famously in the Challenger accident, engineers had been required up to the day of that flight to show why the shuttle could launch; on that day, the decision rule was reversed to one showing why launch couldn’t take place.
Once it was good bank practice to hold capital as a cushion against unexpected losses; capital security arrangements now mandate they hold capital against losses expected from their high-risk lending. Mortgage brokers traditionally made money on the performance and quality of mortgages they made; in the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis, their compensation changed to one based on the volume of loans originated but passed on.
Originally, the Deepwater Horizon rig had been drilling an exploration well; that status changed when on April 15 2010 BP applied to the U.S. Minerals Management Service (MMS) to convert the site to a production well. The MMS approved by the change. The explosion occurred five days later.
In brief, ample evidence exists that decision rule reversals that required professionals in high-stakes situations to turn inside out the way they managed for reliability have instead led to system failures: NASA was never the same; we are still trying to get out of the 2008 financial mess and the Great Recession that followed; the MMS disappeared from the face of the earth.
Forcing cognitive flips on the part of reliability operators and operators—that is, exile them to conditions they do not know but are told they must nonetheless be skilled for—is the surest way to throw acid into face of high reliability management.
III
“But, that’s a strawman,” you counter. “Of course, we wouldn’t deliberately push reliability professionals into unstudied conditions, if we could avoid it.”
Really?
The oft-recommended approach, Be-Prepared-for-All-Hazards, looks like the counsel of wisdom. It however is dangerous if it flips mandates around to requiring emergency organizations to cooperate around many more variables, using information they will not have or cannot obtain, for all manner of interconnected scenarios, which if treated with equal seriousness, produce considerable modeling and analytic uncertainties.
6. These two infrastructure systems are not to be confused for one another.
A huge category mistake is committed when conflating (1) the unfolding and interrelated consequences on life, property and markets of, say, a hazardous liquids pipeline explosion on populations and property and (2) the explosion’s consequences for the interconnected critical infrastructure system (ICIS) for those hazardous liquids, which includes not just these pipelines and associated refineries, but also–just as significantly–the electricity and water infrastructures that the former depend upon in real time.
So what? To equate “the system” with the impacts of the spread and interaction of knock-on population-and-property consequences of failure (Cf) is to identify the chief problem as one the lack of systemwide management of Cf. It is as if many official units (jurisdictional, administrative) were not or are not doing their job.
Yet the ICIS is in fact manage in real time by the control rooms of the respective infrastructures (which in turn are regulated systemwide by fewer regulators of record). That is, “coordination” can be taking place within the ICIS around shared overlapping system control variables, albeit not (or to a lesser) extent in the “system” of interconnected impacts (Cfs) from the explosion.
7. The interference of advanced telecommunications with major weather and climate forecasting: This is not a trade-off!
The wireless industry quickly agreed to 5G standards and started building out infrastructure, requiring more spectrum real estate to support the growing demand. This led to a campaign by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to. . .sell bands of frequencies between 24–25 GHz to companies invested in 5G technology.
Terrestrial radio systems emitting 5G signals into this defined spectrum range, so close to the bands allocated for weather sensing (23.8– 24GHz), are a formidable threat to weather forecast and warning services. This is due to the much louder nature of 5G waves compared to those emitted by the atmosphere, and the relatively quiet movements of water vapor molecules that satellites observe. According to federal agencies and meteorologists worldwide, if the 5G signal remains contained between 24–25 GHz, it can coexist alongside existing meteorological operations. However, if it becomes louder, it will bleed over into the weather sensing space, drowning out any noise—invaluable for climate models—emitted by water particles. . . .
A 5G station transmitting at nearly the same frequency as water vapor can be mistaken for actual moisture, leading to confusion and the misinterpretation of weather patterns. This interference is particularly concerning in high-band 5G frequencies, where signals closely overlap with those used for water vapor detection. High-band 5G operates at much higher frequencies, typically in the millimeter-wave range (24GHz to 40GHz), allowing for faster data speeds but also presenting challenges in signal propagation. These high frequencies are absorbed more readily by atmospheric gases, including water vapor, resulting in significant signal attenuation. Consequently, the potential for interference with weather sensing is heightened in high-band G due to the proximity of its frequencies to those critical for water vapor detection.
https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/spatial-computing/604501/unpredictable-atmosphere/
Of course, economists will insist this represents a trade-off. It is no such thing. At least, not as long as society mandates high reliability both in advanced telecommunications and in advanced forecasting of weather and climate.
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 
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