What if we start with Bruno Latour’s point? We are in the era of repair, not revolution; the revolutions have happened and it’s time to repair what we can maintain

Maintenance and repair take center-stage: 1

Maintenance and repair take center-stage: 2

Maintenance and repair take center-stage: 3

Maintenance and repair take center-stage: 1

Proposition. M&R (maintenance and repair) signals an already-established state/stage of infrastructure operations for which there are official and unofficial procedures, routines and protocols.

In this way, M&R provides an officially-recognized period for and expectations about identifying and updating what are or could be precursors to system disruption and failure and their prevention/avoidance strategies. Recurrent M&R is all about continuous building in of precursor resilience (e.g., using M&R for identifying obsolescent and now possibly hazardous software or other components).

Implications. Start at the macro-level but with more granularity. A form of societal regulation occurs when critical infrastructures, like those for energy and water, prioritize systemwide reliability and safety as social values, at least in real time. These values are further differentiated and uniquely so within infrastructures.

Consider the commonplace that regulatory compliance is “the baseline for risk mitigation in infrastructures.” There is no reason to assume that compliance is the same baseline for, inter alios, the infrastructure’s operators on the ground, including the eyes-and-ears field staff; the infrastructure’s headquarters’ compliance staff responsible for monitoring industry practices in order to meet government mandates; the senior officials in the infrastructure who see the need for more and better enterprise risk management; and, last but never least, the infrastructure’s reliability professionals—its real-time control room operators, should they exist, and immediate support staff— in the middle of all this in their role of surmounting any stickiness by way of official procedures and protocols undermining real-time system reliability.

To put it another way, where reliable infrastructures matter to a society, it must be expected that the social values reflected through these infrastructures differ by staff and their duties/responsibilities (e.g., responsibilities of control room operators necessarily go beyond their official duties). This also holds for the operational stage, “maintenance and repair.”

III

So what?

M&R is best seen as providing increased precursor resilience, which is best seen now as a differentiated process–resilience will look very different from the intra-infrastructural perspectives of enterprise risk management and real-time control room operations–and which takes place within a wider framework of social regulation not associated solely with the official infrastructure regulator of record.

Note that infrastructures do convey and instantiate social values, but these values—particularly for systemwide reliability and safety—are not the command and control of “infrastructure power”. In the latter, formal design is the starting point for eventual operations; in the latter actual operations are the informal starting point for real-time redesign. Not only do actual implementation and operations fall short of initial designs, one major function of operations is to redesign in real time what are the inevitably incomplete or defective technologies of infrastructure designers and defective regulations of the regulator of record.

In this way, it’s better to see “maintenance and repair” as part and parcel of normal operations that necessarily follow from and modify formal infrastructure design. M&R’s focus on improving precursor resilience becomes one primary way of maintaining the infrastructure’s process reliability when older forms of high reliability are no longer to be achieved because of inter-infrastructural dependencies and vulnerabilities.

Maintenance and repair take center-stage: 2

One irony of infrastructure analysis is the finding that they and their continuous supply of services are saturated with contingencies, not least of which are task environment shocks and surprises.

First, the fact that infrastructures involve on-the-ground assets has long been recognized as rendering them vulnerable to all manner of wider environmental contingencies:

Once developed, these infrastructural assets are difficult to relocate or repurpose. In effect, capital investments become affixed to specific built environments and localities, forming stable networks of spatial interdependence. These networks, on the one hand, facilitate circulation and accumulation by linking resource frontiers, but on the other, also expose capital to territorial and political contingencies inherent in fixed spatial arrangements. . .

(accessed online at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21622671.2025.2569670)

The same applies to the start of infrastructure development with the lag between investing in new infrastructures and their starting construction:

. . .investments were by their very nature ‘fixed’ at a certain point in time, introducing another source of uncertainty: when money was converted into physical means of production, it took an extended period of time before it began to deliver returns, but it was hard to predict all the changes that could occur while the investor was waiting to realise them.

(accessed online at https://newleftreview.org/?pc=1711, p. 29

That extended period of time includes those much-recorded shocks and surprises that explain those familiar gaps between infrastructure plan and implementation and between implementation and actual operations of what are in practice and on the ground, interconnected critical infrastructures.

It is in this context of unpredictability and contingency that we must understand the role of “infrastructure maintenance and repair”–as actually undertaken during really-existing infrastructure operations. M&R is, if you will, the best proof we have about whether or not infrastructure operations survive the unholy trinity of: the solutionism of designers and planners; “advanced” technologies introduced prematurely only to become obsolete earlier than expected; and our intensified dependence on the resulting kluge and amalgam for actual (interconnected) services in real time and over time.

So what? We now have a different answer to why people seek first to restore the infrastructures they have, even when as bad as they have been.

For example, why doesn’t the persisting prospect of catastrophic failures with catastrophic consequences of a magnitude 9 earthquake in Oregon and Washington State convince the populations concerned that the economic system that puts them in such a position must be changed before the worst happens? Answer: Because critical service restoration–from the Latin restaurare, to repair, re-establish, or rebuild–is the real-time priority for immediate response after a catastrophe.

Yes, let’s talk about replacing or repurposing the infrastructures we have before any catastrophe; yes, let’s talk about alternative systems with entirely different demands for maintenance and repair. But never forget that, when that catastrophe hits, the priority is to get back to where we were before the disaster, if only to repair what we what we are familiar with and know how to maintain thereafter.

Maintenance and repair take center-stage: 3

“Therefore, infrastructure and connectivity, rather than trade and investment, should be the focus in order to understand the specific character of any Chinese sphere of influence among the Mekong states.” (Greg Raymond 2021. Jagged Sphere: China’s Quest for Instructure and Influence in Mainland Southeast Asia. Lowy Institute: Sidney Australia accessed online at https://www.lowyinstitute.org/sites/default/files/RAYMOND%20China%20Infrastructure%20Sphere%20of%20Influence%20COMPLETE%20PDF.pdf)

“What is the first act that creates the economy? It is neither production nor exchange (market or otherwise). It is the storing of wealth over time, with which I associate with investment.” (Daniel Judt 2025. “Storage, Investment, and Desire: An interview with Jonathan Levy,” Journal of the History of Ideas Blog accessed online at https://www.jhiblog.org/2025/02/24/storage-investment-and-desire-an-interview-with-jonathan-levy/)

Greg Raymond makes a convincing case for his point above and I too am among many who emphasize the centrality of infrastructures and their interconnectivities in underwriting economies and the maintenance of market transactions.

The point of this blog entry, however, starts with the argument of economist, Jonathan Levy, in his recent The Real Economy: Contrary to conventional economics with its fulcrum of allocation and exchange, it is investment which creates economies. And it is that association to infrastructure suggested in the above phrase, “storing of wealth,” that prompts the comments below.

Thinking infrastructurally about investment highlights three under-recognized insights that are highly policy-relevant.

First, investments import the long run into infrastructure analysis in ways that a focus on allocation and exchange do not. These ways range from the banal–as described above, it takes time for the infrastructure to be planned, funded, implemented and then operated as constructed and managed. But there are more invisible considerations at work.

The pressures to innovate technologies, in particular, mean that some infrastructure technologies (software and hardware) are rendered obsolete before the infrastructures have been fully depreciated. This brings uncertainty into investing in technology and engineering of infrastructures that are to last, say, two generations or more ahead. The long run ends up meaning another short-run, and those short-runs can look like boom and busts, well short of anything like “infrastructure full capacity.”

And yet, second, there are examples of infrastructures being operated beyond their depreciation cycles. Patches, workarounds and fixes keep the infrastructure in operation, even if that this reliability is achieved at less than always-full capacity. It takes professionals inside the infrastructure to operationally redesign technologies (and defective regulations) so as to maintain critical service provision reliably during the turbulent periods of exogenous and endogenous change. This includes the very diverse panoply of what is termed, unscheduled maintenance and repair.

Third, this professional ability to operationally redesign systems and technologies on the fly and in real time in effect extends what would otherwise be a shortened longer run (e.g., due to always-on innovation)–and one which is extended under the mandate of having to maintain systemwide infrastructure reliability. Introduction of what are premature innovations is countervailed by those professional patches, workaround and fixes that sustain system reliability, at least for the present. These practices are often rendered invisible under the catch-all, “infrastructure maintenance and repair,” where even operations become part and parcel of corrective maintenance. (Indeed, “short-run,” “adaptable” and “flexible” are frequently not granular enough to catch the place-and-time specific–that is, often improvisational–properties of actually-existing maintenance and repair under real-time urgencies.)

The latter means, however–and this is the key point–that maintenance and repair are far from being worthy only of an aside. Really-existing maintenance and repair and their personnel are in fact the core investment strategy for longer term reliable operations of infrastructures faced with uncertainties from the outside (e.g., those external shocks and surprises over the infrastructure’s lifecycle) and from the inside (e.g., those premature engineering innovations).

III

So what?

Since the 2007/2008 financial crisis, we’ve heard and read a great deal about the need for what are called macroprudential policies to ensure interconnected economic stability in the face of globalized challenges, ranging from defective international banking to the climate emergency. These calls have resulted in, e.g., massive QE (quantitative easing) injections by respective central banks and massive new infrastructure construction initiatives by the likes of the EU, the PRC, and the US.

What we haven’t seen are comparable increases in the operational maintenance and repair of critical infrastructures for functioning economies and supply chains, let alone for economic stability. Nor have you seen in the subsequent investments in science, technology and engineering anything like the comparable creation and funding of national academies for the high reliability management of those backbone critical infrastructures. Few if any are imagining national and international institutes, whose new funding would not be primarily directed to innovation as if it were basic science, but rather to applied research and practices for enhanced maintenance and repair, innovation prototyping, and proof for scaling up. (Please also see the call and details to establish and fund a National Academy of Reliable Infrastructure Management.)

If I am right in thinking of longer-term reliability of backbone infrastructures as the resilience of an economy that is undergoing shocks and surprises, then infrastructure maintenance and repair–and their innovations–move center-stage in ways not yet appreciated by politicians, policymakers and the private sector.

Thinking infrastructurally about investment as the central driver of economies: moving maintenance and repair to center-stage

Thinking infrastructurally about investment highlights three under-recognized insights that are highly policy relevant.

First, investments import the long run into infrastructure analysis in ways that a focus on allocation and exchange do not. These ways range from the banal–it takes time for the infrastructure to be planned, funded, implemented and then operated as constructed and managed–to more invisible considerations.

The pressures to innovate technologies, in particular, means that some infrastructure technologies (software and hardware) are rendered obsolete before the infrastructures have been fully depreciated. This brings uncertainty into investing in technology and engineering of infrastructures that can last ahead, say, two generations or more. Here, the long run means another short-run, and those short-runs at times can look like boom and busts, well short of anything like “infrastructure full capacity.”

Third, this professional ability to operationally redesign systems and technologies on the fly and in real time in effect extends what would otherwise be a shortened longer run (e.g., due to always-on innovation and defective design)–and extended under the mandate of having to maintain systemwide infrastructure reliability. Introduction of what are premature innovations is countervailed by those professional patches, workaround and fixes that sustain system reliability, at least for the present. These practices are often rendered invisible under the bland catch-all, “infrastructure maintenance and repair,” where even operations become part and parcel of corrective maintenance..

The latter means, however–and this is the key point of this blog entry–that maintenance and repair are far from being bland and worthy only of mention. Really-existing maintenance and repair and their personnel are in fact the core investment strategy for longer term reliable operations of infrastructures faced with uncertainties induced from the outside (e.g., those external shocks and surprises over the infrastructure’s lifecycle) and from the inside (e.g., those premature engineering innovations).

III

So what?

Since the 2007/2008 financial crisis, we’ve heard and read a great deal about the need for what are called macroprudential policies to ensure interconnected economic stability in the face of globalized challenges, ranging from defective international banking to the climate emergency. These calls have resulted in, e.g., massive QE (quantitative easing) injections by central banks and massive new infrastructure construction initiatives by the likes of the EU, the PRC, and the US.

What we haven’t seen are comparable increases in the operational maintenance and repair of critical infrastructures necessary for functioning economies and supply chains, let alone for “economic stability.” Nor have you seen in the subsequent investments in science, technology and engineering anything like the comparable creation and funding of national academies for the high reliability management of those backbone critical infrastructures. Few if any are imagining national and international institutes, whose new funding would not be primarily directed to innovation as if it were basic science, but rather to applied research and practices for enhanced maintenance and repair, innovation prototyping, and proof of scaling up.

In sum, if I am right in thinking of longer-term reliability of backbone infrastructures as the resilience of an economy that is undergoing shocks and surprises, then infrastructure maintenance and repair–and their innovations–move center-stage in ways not yet appreciated by politicians, policymakers and the private sector.

Please also see the call and details to establish and fund a National Academy of Reliable Infrastructure Management .

Engineering the economy’s soft landing, ensuring large systems fail gracefully, and other ways to slice clouds in half

Engineers talk about the need for large hazardous systems to “fail gracefully.” That assumes a degree of control over technological failure as it is happening and, as far as I can tell, there is nothing “graceful” about a large technical system failing right now.

So what?

It’s not just the sheer hubris expressed in phrases like “engineering a soft landing of the economy.” It also means that even anti-utopians have been delusional at times. Karl Popper, philosopher, was known for contrasting Utopian engineering with what he called the more realistic approach of piecemeal engineering:

It is infinitely more difficult to reason about an ideal society. Social life is so complicated that few men, or none at all, could judge a blueprint for social engineering on the grand scale; whether it is practicable; whether it would result in a real improvement; what kind of suffering it may involve; and what may be the means for its realization. As opposed to this, blueprints for piecemeal engineering are comparatively simple. They are blueprints for single institutions, for health and unemployed insurance, for instance. . . If they go wrong, the damage is not very great, and a re-adjustment not very difficult. They are less risky, and for this very reason less controversial.

“If they go wrong, the damage is not very great”!? It’s the case that blueprints for piecemeal health insurance–and educational reform, government budgeting and financial deregulation, for that matter–have also been damaging. Utopian engineering is the least of our problems here.

How does your version of agrarian reform shift the odds in favor of a prospectively more reliable foundational economy there?

Without the traditional physical assets that make up the foundational types of
infrastructures, such as energy networks, transport, water, waste treatment, and
communications, there is no modern economy or society.

(accessed online at https://bennettschool.cam.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Measurement-of-social-and-cultural-infrastructure.pdf)

An AI-generated definition is good-enough to start: “The ‘foundational economy’ (FE) is the infrastructure of everyday life, including essential services like water, electricity, healthcare, and housing, that are required for society to function.” (The key website is The Foundational Economy.) Even at that level of abstraction, it’s clear there is no one and only FE with one and only one set of critical infrastructures in each.

More important than their numbers and diversity, it’s that “infrastructure” I take up here and expand below: Since critical infrastructures and their operating networks of personnel are required so as to make it possible for a collective to exist and thrive economically let alone societally, so too agrarian reform and the foundational economy are instrumentally linked in ways that commend further elaboration.

How so?

Here are ten propositions by way of answer:

1. By definition, a foundational economy would not exist if it were not for the reliable provision of electricity, water, telecoms, and transportation. Here reliability means the safe and continuous provision of the critical service in question, even during (especially during) turbulent times. This means, for example, that the physical systems as actually managed and interconnected on the ground help establish the spatial limits of the FE in question.

2. By extension, no markets for goods and services in the FE would exist without critical infrastructure reliability supporting their operations. This applies to rural landscapes as well as urban ones.

3. Other infrastructures, including reliable contract and property law, are required for the creation and support of these markets, though this too varies by context. One can, for example, argue healthcare and education are among the other infrastructural prerequisites for many FEs (as above).

4. Preventing disasters in the face existing and prospective uncertainties is what highly reliable infrastructures do. Why? Because when the electricity grid islands, the water supplies cease, and transportation grinds to a halt, then people die and the foundational economy seizes up (Martynovich et al. 2022).

5. Another way to say this is that within a foundational economy you see clearest the tensions between economic transactions and reliability management. Economics assumes substitutability, where goods and services have alternatives in the marketplace; infrastructure reliability assumes practices for ensuring nonfungibility, where nothing can substitute for the high reliability of critical infrastructures without which there would be no markets for goods and services, right now when selecting among those alternative goods and services.

6. Which is to say, if you were to enter the market and arbitrage a price for high reliability of critical infrastructures, the market transactions would be such that you can never be sure you’re getting what you thought you were buying. Much discussion around moral economies and agrarian reform can be described in such terms.

7. This in turn means there are two very different standards of “economic reliability.” The retrospective standard holds the foundational economy–or any economy for that matter–is performing reliably when there have been no major shocks or disruptions from the last time to now. The prospective standard holds the economy is reliable only until the next major shock, where collective dread of that shock is why those networks of reliability professionals try to manage to prevent or otherwise attenuate it. The fact that past droughts have harmed the foundational economy in no way implies people are not managing prospectively to prevent future consequences of drought on their respective FEs–and actually accomplishing that feat.

8. Why does the difference between the two standards matter? In practical terms, the foundational economy is prospectively only as reliable as its critical infrastructures are reliable, right now when it matters for, say, economic productivity or societal sustainability. Indeed, if the latter were equated only with recognizing and capitalizing on retrospective patterns and trends, economic policymakers and managers in the FE could never be reliable prospectively in the Anthropocene.

9. For example, the statement by two well-known economists, “Our contention, therefore, following many others, is that, despite its flaws, the best guide to what the rate of return will be in the future is what it has been in the past” (Riley and Brenner 2025) may be true as far as it goes, but it in no way offers a prospective standard of high reliability in the foundational economy (let alone other economies).

10. So what? A retrospective orientation to where the economy is today is to examine economic and financial patterns and trends since, say, the 2008 financial crisis; a prospective standard would be to ensure that–at a minimum–the 2008 financial recovery could be replicated, if not bettered, for the next global financial crisis. Could the latter be said of the FE in your city, metropolitan area or across the rural landscape of interest?

III

In short, how does your version of agrarian reform shift the odds in favor of the prospective standard for a reliable foundational economy ahead?

Note by way of concluding that the policy-relevant priority isn’t scaling up your reforms beyond the FEs as much as your determining the openness of those FEs to being modified in light of evolving affordances under reforms during the Anthropocene.

Sources.

Martynovich, M., T. Hansen, and K-J Lundquist (2022). “Can foundational economy save regions in crisis?” Journal of Economic Geography, 1–23 (https://doi.org/10.1093/jeg/lbac027)

Riley, D. and R. Brenner (2025). “The long downturn and its political results: a reply to critics.” New Left Review 155, 25–70 (https://newleftreview.org/?pc=1711)

Three cheers for infrastructure maintenance and repair!

One of the ironies of infrastructure analysis is the finding that fixed infrastructures and continuous supply of services are saturated with and by contingencies, not least of which are shocks and surprises.

First, the fact that infrastructures involve on the ground assets has long been recognized as rendering them vulnerable to all manner of wider environmental contingencies:

Once developed, these infrastructural assets are difficult to relocate or repurpose. In effect, capital investments become affixed to specific built environments and localities, forming stable networks of spatial interdependence. These networks, on the one hand, facilitate circulation and accumulation by linking resource frontiers, but on the other, also expose capital to territorial and political contingencies inherent in fixed spatial arrangements. . .

(accessed online at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21622671.2025.2569670)

So too at the start of infrastructure development with the lag between investing in new infrastructures and their provision of critical services:

. . .investments were by their very nature ‘fixed’ at a certain point in time, introducing another source of uncertainty: when money was converted into physical means of production, it took an extended period of time before it began to deliver returns, but it was hard to predict all the changes that could occur while the investor was waiting to realise them.

(accessed online at https://newleftreview.org/?pc=1711, p. 29

That extended period of time includes the shocks and surprises that explain those much-recorded gaps between infrastructure plan and implementation and between implementation and actual operations of what are in practice and on the ground, interconnected critical infrastructures.

It is in this context of unpredictability and contingency that we must understand the role of “infrastructure maintenance and repair”–at least as actually undertaken during really-existing infrastructure operations. M&R is, if you will, the best proof we have about whether or not infrastructure operations survive the unholy trinity of: the solutionism of fool-proof designers and planners; “advanced” technologies introduced prematurely only to become obsolete earlier than expected; and our intensified dependence on the resulting kluge and amalgam for actual services in real time and over time.

So what?

Well, we at least have a different answer to why people seek first to restore the infrastructures they have, even when as bad as they have been. For example, why doesn’t the persisting prospect of catastrophic failures with catastrophic consequences of a magnitude 9 earthquake in Oregon and Washington State convince the populations concerned that the economic system that puts them in such a position must be changed before the worst happens? The answer: Because critical service restoration–from the Latin restaurare, to repair, re-establish, or rebuild–is the real-time priority for immediate response after a catastrophe.

Yes, let’s talk about replacing or repurposing the infrastructures we have before a catastrophe; yes, let’s talk about alternative systems with entirely different demands for maintenance and repair. But never forget that, when that catastrophe hits, the priority is to get back to where we were before the disaster, if only to repair what we what we are familiar with and know how to maintain thereafter.

I become a diehard logical positivist when reading something like this

A huge challenge will be to design an international set of industrial policy standards to avoid the current trend towards highly nationalist policies at the expense of others, e.g. conflictual trade and tariff wars. The ultimate goal should be to develop a cooperative global governance that allows industrial policies on a national or transnational level, for reasons that are commonly seen as legitimate. Having such rules could even be a prerequisite for saving free trade in all other well-defined sectors where markets function to the benefit of the many. https://www.intereconomics.eu/contents/year/2025/number/5/article/winning-back-the-future-preparing-for-a-comeback-of-democracy.html

It’s not just that weasel phrase: “could even be a prerequisite,” which of course entails “may still not be one”. It’s not just that high-altitude floating signifier, “cooperative global governance”–think here the Academy of Lagado’s efforts to extract sunbeams from cucumbers. No, it’s that god-awful “design”.

Are there actually people who believe macro-design produces really-existing necessary and sufficient conditions for this or that human behavior? Design as control of inputs, processes and outputs of this most complex socio-political-economic-ecological globe?

I wish these believers the best, but in the absence of verification criteria for their claims, I’ll treat them as self-refuting propositions as in “everything is relative.”

Shakespeare’s missing lines matter even more

The playhouse manuscript, Sir Thomas More, has been called “an immensely complex palimpsest of composition, scribal transcription, rewriting, censorship and further additions that features multiple hands”. One of those hands was Shakespeare–and that has contemporary relevance.

–The authoritative Arden Shakespeare text renders a passage from Shakespeare’s Scene 6 as follows (this being Thomas More speaking to a crowd of insurrectionists opposing Henry VIII):

What do you, then,
Rising ’gainst him that God Himself installs,
But rise ’gainst God? What do you to your souls
In doing this? O, desperate as you are,
Wash your foul minds with tears, and those same hands,
That you, like rebels, lift against the peace,
Lift up for peace; and your unreverent knees,
Make them your feet to kneel to be forgiven.
Tell me but this: what rebel captain…

The last two lines, however, had been edited by another of the play’s writers (“Hand C”), deleting the bolded lines Shakespeare had originally written,

Make them your feet. To kneel to be forgiven
Is safer wars than ever you can make
Whose discipline is riot.
In, in to your obedience. While even your hurly
Cannot proceed but by obedience.
What rebel captain….

–What has been effaced away by the deletion is, first, the notion that contrition is itself a kind of war and a safer war, at that.

According to the Arden Shakespeare, “The act of contrition might be described as wars because the former rebels would enlist themselves in the struggle of good and evil, and would fight against their own sin of rebellion.” In either case—contrition or rebellion—obedience is required. Actually, nothing was less safe than rebellion whose “discipline is riot”.

–What has also been scored out, in other words, from Shakespeare’s original passage is the clear accent on contrition and peace over continued upheaval. But the absence of contrition by those involved in the formulation and implementation of war policies is precisely what we have seen and are seeing today.

For to prioritize contrition would mean refocusing obedience from battle to a very different struggle in securing peace and security, a mission in which our ministries of interior and defence are notably inferior, be they in Russia, the US, or elsewhere.

Principal sources

Sir Thomas More (2011), ed. John Jowett (Arden Shakespeare, third series. Bloomsbury, London)

Van Es, B. (2019). Troubles of a glorious breath. TLS (March 22)

Rapid technological change and the need for greater granular analysis of “flexible,” “adaptive” and “obsolete”

What do we call the stage of knowledge-making between technological incompletion and delaying completion? Might it be something like learning from prototyping, or from repairing and repairing again?

But what if prototyping and repair seem without end these days? That is, obsolescence more and more precedes completion, which in turn leads us right back to unknowledge? What if no one saw the need to record the processes of prototyping or repair because something new or better always comes along early (or so they thought). Such indeed “is why we know the names of every Roman emperor but don’t know how they mixed their concrete, or why we have thousands of pages of Apollo program documents but couldn’t build a Saturn V today” (https://www.scopeofwork.net/ise-jingu-and-the-pyramid-of-enabling-technologies/).

An important, but under-acknowledged, consequence follows from technologies as well as technological processes always being immanently obsolete. This too supports the temporary and flexible over the permanent and institutional when it comes to organizational structures to handle technological policy and management. If wicked social problems by definition withstand institutional solutionism, then why expect permanent opposition to the short-run and adaptive in organizational response to technology?

The problem with the preceding paragraphs is that they stop short of the needful. “Short-run,” “adaptable” and “flexible” are not granular enough to catch the place-and-time specifics–that is, often improvisational–properties of actually-existing adaptation, flexibility and performance under real-time urgencies. When in the face of complex technological disruption or failure, what you have before you are not distinct and separate probabilities and consequences, but rather the mess of contingencies and aftermaths.

To put the same point positively, we are talking about the requirement to be case-specific in regards to technological change. And just what cases would these be? Let me conclude with one example of what I am trying to describe above:

Like barcodes, QR codes were not originally designed to become components of global information infrastructures: their success as infrastructural gateways was largely unplanned and contingent on unpredictable sociotechnical convergences. Every step of this gradual historical process has been situated in specific national or regional contexts, scaling up “entire infrastructural systems out of situated local needs” (Edwards et al., 2009, p. 370): barcode standardization has shaped the U.S. market economy; the machine-readability of QR codes has enhanced the efficiency of Japanese manufacturing logistics; their uptake as analog portals was made possible by the rapid informatization of East Asian countries; their consolidation as meta-generic gateway was catalyzed by the infrastructuralization of Chinese digital platforms. Lastly, the emergence of QR codes as infrastructural gateways was opportunistic, as they occupied a niche that competing gateways were not flexible enough to cover: through services like Alipay and WeChat Pay, QR codes took on the role of debit and credit cards, which had never achieved the same success as a gateway in China as they did in 20th-century America (Lauer, 2020, p. 11)

(accessed online at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/20594364231183618; highlighted terms by the article’s author)

Also, no one should doubt that obsolescence has been well at work in this domain, e.g., in the transition from barcodes to QR codes (https://www.nrfbigshoweurope.com/en/industry-trends/Barcode-era).

Infrastructure control rooms, African parliaments

Over time I’ve been struck by an institutional contrast in the claim to providing highly reliable services.

On one hand, we have the state and federal regulators and legislators who pass the laws and standards to be followed by critical infrastructures and, on the other hand, the real-time professionals in the respective control rooms who have had to operationalize the standards in order to maintain system reliability in real time. For insiders, this contrast is not surprising: No plan withstands contact with the enemy, and it isn’t news that frequent but unpredictable shocks and surprises require operationally redesigning official procedures and defective technology so to meet these regulatory and legislative mandates for infrastructure reliability.

So what? More formally, the centralized infrastructure control room turns out to be a unique organization formation to balance competing demands under pressures of real-time. You don’t find other institutions able to do this, nor should you expect to. Infrastructure control rooms are centralized for system-wide response and management by their real-time dispatchers and schedulers, but that centralization entails the rapid management by these reliability professionals of system control variables—such as electricity frequency, natural gas pipe pressures, and waterflows—whose movements can have immediate decentralized (localized) interactions.

It’s banal to say the state and federal legislatures are not operational control rooms in the sense just described.

But let’s shift the analysis to Kenya pastoralists, at least those who are equivalent real-time reliability professionals in the drylands, and contrast them to the MPs in the country’s Parliament. Two implications are immediate.

First, it’s also no news that the Kenya Parliament, and its MPs, are criticized for many things, i.e.,

African parliaments present a number of shortcomings, including (i) the commodification of parliamentary seats, (ii) the lack of social representativeness of elected representatives, (iii) the fact that elected representatives can be captured by partisan or illegitimate interests, (iv) their lack of competence on most of the subjects they are supposed to debate, and (v) the fact that they do not necessarily deliberate on urgent matters in a timely fashion. https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/publications/analysis-of-the-nexus-between-democratic-governance-and-economic-justice-in-africa

Fair enough, but nevertheless to underscore that Kenya MPs, like legislators in much of the West, are not as timely in emergencies as are reliability professionals is hardly noteworthy. (The Sámi parliament in Finland was neither consulted nor informed in advance of proposed US troop and weapons activities in 2024, for example [https://www.europe-solidaire.org/spip.php?article72359])

III

More, once you start thinking in terms of African Parliaments as lenses to analyze critical service reliability in their respective countries, you realize how little research, with some notable exceptions, has been done on the topic. When was the last time you read any academic recommending improving development by improving African Parliaments?

Or to put the point more properly and comparatively, it’s the respective President and Cabinet ministers who get more attention and analysis. The assumption, of course, has been that parliaments are subordinate to the president, party, or military. But we risk stigmatizing all parliaments in the same sense others, including some MPs, stigmatize all pastoralists. Really, are African Parliaments to be dismissed that easily?

In any case, it’s problematic for academic researchers to recommend that government officials and NGO staff be in authentic collaboration with pastoralists taking the lead, when those very same researchers wouldn’t be caught dead collaborating with the political elites, including MPs. This “development collaboration,” such as it is, is especially problematic when (1) pastoralists bear all the risks if the resulting research recommendations go pear-shaped and (2) government would be blamed anyway when mistakes in implementing the recommendations were not caught beforehand.

NB. For more on pastoralists as reliability professionals, please see:

Roe, E. 2020. “Pastoralists as reliability professionals.” PASTRES blog (accessed online at https://pastres.org/2020/04/17/pastoralists-as-reliability-professionals/)

———. 2025. https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2025/09/06/update-and-new-implications-of-the-framework-for-reliability-professionals-and-pastoralism-as-infrastructure-updated/

Seven examples of having missed the MOST BLISTERINGLY OBVIOUS FACTS

“Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”

A while ago, a joint statement was issued by the Center for AI Safety. It was the one sentence quoted above. Famously, it was signed by more than 350 AI experts and public figures.

Now, of course, we cannot dismiss the actual and potential harms of artificial intelligence.

But, just as clearly, these 350 people must be among the last people on Earth you’d turn to for pandemic and nuclear war scenarios of sufficient granularity against which to appraise their AI crisis scenarios.

The conventional balance of terror and ecocide

Article 8. . .Ecocide

1. For the purpose of this Statute, “ecocide” means unlawful or wanton acts committed with knowledge that there is a substantial likelihood of severe and either widespread or long-term damage to the environment being caused by those acts. . . .

(accessed online at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5273187)

It’s common enough today to recognize the huge environmental costs of the military (e.g. https://www.securityincontext.org/posts/entropy-economics-of-military-spending). Far less recognized are those ongoing discussions and debates over military strategies as if the environmental damages were irrelevant to the merits or not of the strategies.

Take a 2025 article published in Foreign Affairs by Andrew Lim and James Fearon, “The Conventional Balance of Terror: America Needs a New Triad to Restore Its Eroding Deterrence” (https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/conventional-balance-terror-lim-fearon). Here the authors argue for a US defense strategy of heightened deterrence similar to its USSR strategy in the Cold War but now with respect to the Peoples Republic of China’s military build-up in the Indo-Pacific:

[M]any of the United States’ conventional assets in the Indo-Pacific, such as its surface ships, are highly visible or heavily dependent on fixed facilities that could easily be targeted. If a crisis were to break out, the United States might have to threaten escalation to compensate for its lack of conventional response options—potentially up to the nuclear level. To remedy this problem, the United States should develop a “conventional triad” modeled on its successful nuclear strategy. Such a force structure would both increase U.S. combat credibility and decrease first-strike incentives on both sides.

Threats are mentioned, but the only occasions environment is referenced is with respect to the “threat environment” of China’s precision-strike missiles and related capabilities.

Not a scintilla–not a homeopathic whiff–of the massive environmental costs associated with this new balance of terror, let alone on the US side:

To build an effective conventional triad, the United States must invest in more submarines, bombers, and mobile launch vehicles. This would entail, for example, redoubling current efforts to increase the production of Virginia-class attack submarines; increasing the production of B-21 bombers; accelerating air force efforts to deploy a “palletized” munitions launch system, which enables transport aircraft to launch conventional cruise missiles; and expanding the range and capacity of the Marine Littoral Regiments and the U.S. Army’s Mid-Range Capability, a land-based missile launcher system that was recently deployed to the Philippines.

And so here we are, once again, in a world whose MOST BLISTERINGLY OBVIOUS FACT is that it’s no longer the 1960s and 1970s where military strategies can be debated as if ecocide were beside the point.

“So long as people meet the baseline,” or: Die, so I can be sustainable

To end, I consider the objection that my view, insofar as it sees ecological sustainability as a constraint on a people’s self-determination, could license green colonialism on the basis that new settlers could ecologically sustain a territory better than Indigenous peoples. First, according to my view, the duty of ecological sustainability is sufficientarian and tied to maintaining the material prerequisites for human life, political society, and a people’s capacities to exercise its self-determination. Thus, an outside group cannot violate a people’s self-determination on the basis that it could better ecologically sustain that territory so long as the people meet this baseline. Second, many Indigenous peoples have historically in fact met this threshold by developing effective cultural and political systems to adapt and sustain their ways of life in the ecosystems they have inhabited (Whyte, 2018b). Where Indigenous peoples struggle to ecologically sustain their territories today is generally itself due to colonialism, which would explain why colonialism is wrong and not why green colonialism is justified. [my bold]

The reference to “Whyte, 2018b” is to Kyle Whyte’s “On resilient parasitisms, or why I’m skeptical of Indigenous/settler reconciliation” in the Journal of Global Ethics (accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/17449626.2018.1516693).

Here, however, is another reference to Whyte with an altogether different implication for whose sustainability in the end really matters:

Indigenous ways of knowing and living have never in the history of the planet supported more than fifty million human beings at once; to envision humanity “becoming indigenous” in any real way would mean returning to primary oral societies with low global population density, lacking complex industrial technology, and relying primarily on human, animal, and plant life for energy. . . .

It means “not just our energy use . . . our modes of governance, ongoing racial injustice, and our understandings of ourselves as human”—not only the roots of plantation logic in forced literacy, centralized agriculture, and private property—not only the possibility that it may be “too late for indigenous climate justice,” in the words of Kyle Whyte. . .Thus while pre-modern indigenous social formations are doubtlessly more ecologically sound than the ones offered by progressivist capitalism, the only path to reach them lies through the end of the world. And as much as we may be obliged to accept and even embrace such an inevitability, committing ourselves to bringing it about is another question entirely.

(accessed online at https://thebaffler.com/latest/apocalypse-24-7-scranton)

Underdog metaphysics

“Underdog metaphysics,” coined by sociologist Alvin Gouldner, has been defined as:

On the assumption that truth is nothing more than the point of view of resourceful groups—imposed by these elite groups on everyone else—the conclusion ensues that powerlessness is more truthful than truth itself. That is, the absence of power becomes the new touchstone of what is true and valid. The new foundation is the group affiliation of marginalized identities. The “view-from-nowhere,” idealized by positivists, is replaced with a “view-from-the-margins.”

C. Wilén and Johan Söderberg (2025). “Against Underdog Metaphysics: Alvin Gouldner and the Marxist critique of post-theory.” Acta Sociologica (accessed online at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00016993251356339)

Let’s not forget, however, just who finds powerlessness to be an elite position:

American intellectual and literary culture may or may not abandon its deference to power and wealth and go to that necessary war against itself in order to salvage its dignity and purpose. But there is some cause for hope in the certainty that the best and brightest in the American intelligentsia won’t go looking for crumbs from the presidential table. Spurning breezy despair and jovial resignation, they might even assume the usual condition of writers elsewhere: a bitter but spiritually liberating powerlessness.

P. Mishra (2025). “Speaking Reassurance to Power.” Harpers (accessed online at
https://harpers.org/archive/2025/08/speaking-reassurance-to-power-pankaj-mishra-easy-chair/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email)

Design leadership!

Take a peek at the track record of advisers to their leaders:

Plato and Dionysius II;
Aristotle and Alexander the Great;
Seneca and Nero;
Ibn Rushd (Averroes) and Caliph Abu Yaqub Yusuf;
Petrarch and Emperor Charles IV;
Montaigne and Henri IV;
Descartes and Sweden’s Queen Christina;
Leibnitz and the Dukes of Hanover;
Voltaire and Frederick the Great;
Diderot and Catherine the Great; and
in case you want to add to the list, Adam Smith and the Duke of Buccleuch or Goethe and Prince Carl August, and so on through the centuries. . .
Or if you really want to cringe, consider André Gide recommending against publishing Marcel Proust, Edward Garnett against publishing James Joyce, and T.S. Eliot against publishing George Orwell. . . .

I mean, get real: If these guys didn’t advise effectively, who are we to think we can do better? (And, puhleeese, don’t throw up Kissinger and Nixon as a working template!)

So what? Two things. It’s hard to imagine two words scarier in English than “designing leadership.” And we should take to heart the extensions of, “It was beyond our mental capabilities to predict Bob Dylan winning the Nobel in 2016.”

Sorry to interrupt, but is your point. . .?

. . . .Given the scope and scale of the financing (and divestment) required for mitigation and the support for adaptation, current financing gaps suggest transitions are not happening at the pace or scale they need to cope with catastrophic change. CPI find that global climate finance needs will amount to $6300 billion worldwide in 2030 (Buchner et al., 2023) and should have reached about $4200 bn in 2021. Yet in 2021, total climate finance amounted to $850 bn: a significant sum, but nowhere near what is required. This is hugely challenging, yet needs to be set against the costs of inaction. Without such interventions, warming will exceed 3°C, leading to macroeconomic losses of at least 18% of GDP by 2050 and 20% by 2100 (NFGS, 2022). . . .

(https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/10245294251318468; my bold)

Excuse me, but is your point that the $850bn would have been better spent elsewhere?

You just want to tell him. . .

“Good God, Trump, get a grip! We’re adults here.”