The Invisible Networks Shaping Your Everyday Life | Deb Chachra | TED
Summary
TLDRThe speaker explores the invisible yet pervasive nature of infrastructure in our daily lives, emphasizing its role in providing agency and enabling our actions. They discuss how these systems, powered by energy, connect us globally and historically, highlighting the need for collective infrastructural citizenship. The talk advocates for a transition to renewable energy and resilient, equitable infrastructure to address climate change, suggesting that our infrastructural choices reflect our values and responsibilities to future generations.
Takeaways
- 🏠 The mundane activities at home, like turning on lights or cooking, are underpinned by vast infrastructural systems that make modern life possible.
- ⚡️ Energy is the true currency of the material world, and our access to it is mediated through complex networks that shape our daily lives.
- 🌐 Infrastructure connects us globally, with systems like the internet and shipping now operating on a planetary scale.
- 👷♀️ Thousands of people work behind the scenes to maintain these systems, often invisibly, yet they are crucial for our comfort and agency.
- 💡 Artificial light as an example of infrastructural advancement, providing the 'superpower' of agency to act independently of daylight.
- 🌱 The concept of 'infrastructural citizenship' suggests a collective responsibility towards the systems that support our lives, regardless of geographical or political boundaries.
- 🌳 Transforming infrastructural systems to be resilient and equitable is key to responding to climate change and ensuring a sustainable future.
- 🔄 The shift towards renewable energy allows for closing material loops, moving away from the extractive-pollutive model of the past.
- 🌱 In the 21st century, infrastructure should evolve like a forest ecosystem, enduring and adaptable, rather than static like a monument.
- 🌐 The challenge and solution to climate change must be global, reflecting the scale of the problem and the interconnectedness of our infrastructural systems.
Q & A
What is the main theme of the speaker's discussion about their daily routine?
-The main theme is the invisibility and importance of infrastructural utilities in our daily lives, which provide the agency to live the kind of life we value.
How does the speaker describe the technological systems at their fingertips?
-The speaker describes these systems as continent-spanning and enabling them to be like a cyborg, with access to various utilities such as energy, water, and telecommunications.
What does the speaker mean by 'infrastructural citizenship'?
-Infrastructural citizenship refers to the idea that we have a relationship and responsibility to each other that is independent of our national boundaries, but connected through the shared infrastructural networks that support our lives.
Why does the speaker emphasize the importance of energy in the context of infrastructure?
-The speaker emphasizes energy because it is the true currency of the material world, powering all infrastructural systems and enabling or constraining our actions and lifestyles.
How does the speaker connect the concept of agency to infrastructural networks?
-The speaker connects agency to infrastructural networks by stating that these networks bring resources to us, enabling us to act in the world and live freely, which is the essence of agency.
What is the significance of Amara Sen's view on money in the speaker's narrative?
-Amara Sen's view on money is significant because it supports the idea that money is valued for the agency it provides, not for its own sake, which parallels the speaker's argument about the value of infrastructural systems.
How does the speaker's personal background relate to the broader discussion on infrastructure and agency?
-The speaker's background, having parents who moved from India to Canada, provides a personal perspective on how infrastructural systems can vastly differ and impact individual agency and quality of life.
What challenges do infrastructural systems face in the context of climate change?
-Infrastructural systems face the challenge of becoming less stable due to climate change, which can lead to more frequent and severe disruptions, affecting their reliability and the communities they serve.
What is the speaker's vision for infrastructural systems in the 21st century?
-The speaker envisions infrastructural systems that endure like forests, powered by renewable energy, with no waste, evolving over time, and providing a thriving environment for all.
How does the speaker suggest we approach the transformation of infrastructural systems?
-The speaker suggests a collective approach, starting with small-scale, reversible, and responsive systems that can be connected to form larger, more equitable, and resilient networks.
What role does the speaker see for individuals in the future of infrastructural systems?
-The speaker sees individuals as infrastructural citizens, actively participating in identifying and articulating the benefits and harms of these systems, and working together to shape a shared infrastructural future.
Outlines
🏠 Daily Life and Infrastructure
The speaker begins by describing their mundane evening routine in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which includes turning on lights, streaming music, and cooking dinner. Despite the routine seeming ordinary, they highlight the unseen infrastructure that supports these activities, such as electricity potentially sourced from nuclear reactors or hydroelectric projects, and the gas that heats their home and water. The speaker emphasizes the interconnectedness of these systems, which span continents and involve thousands of people, and how they provide the speaker with agency and the freedom to live a comfortable life. They draw a contrast between their life and those in poorer communities who spend much of their day securing basic necessities like clean water and fuel, illustrating the impact of infrastructure on quality of life. The concept of 'infrastructural citizenship' is introduced, suggesting a collective responsibility to maintain and improve these systems for the benefit of all.
🌐 The Impact of Infrastructure on Agency and Climate
The speaker delves into the concept of 'infrastructural citizenship' further, discussing how our past choices have shaped the current infrastructure we rely on, which in turn affects our present and future. They argue that the distribution of benefits from these systems is often uneven and can be unjust, pointing out the challenges of individual action on climate change due to the collective nature of infrastructure. The speaker suggests that as we decarbonize and transform our infrastructure, we have the opportunity to make it more resilient and equitable. They emphasize the importance of considering the physical reality of our planet, where energy is abundant but matter is limited, and the need to transition from a linear to a circular economy. The speaker calls for a collective effort to build infrastructure that embodies an ethics of care, rather than a utilitarian approach, and to create systems that are small-scale, reversible, and responsive to local needs while addressing global challenges.
🌱 Building Sustainable and Ethical Infrastructure
In the final paragraph, the speaker envisions a future where infrastructure is designed with care and sustainability in mind, akin to a forest ecosystem that is self-sustaining and evolves over time. They argue for the creation of infrastructure that is not just enduring like monuments but is also adaptable and transformative, much like a forest. The speaker calls for a shift from the 20th-century model of massive, monolithic systems to 21st-century systems that are interconnected, responsive, and scalable. They emphasize the importance of building infrastructure that fosters social relationships and global communication, and that reflects a commitment to shared humanity. The speaker concludes by urging collective action to create a world where infrastructure serves to take care of each other at scale, allowing individuals to thrive.
Mindmap
Keywords
💡Infrastructure
💡Agency
💡Energy
💡Decarbonization
💡Resilience
💡Telecommunications
💡Supply Chains
💡Sewage
💡Citizenship
💡Renewable Energy
💡Ethics of Care
Highlights
The speaker describes their mundane evening routine and how it is powered by vast infrastructural systems.
The source of energy and resources in everyday life is often invisible to us, yet it spans continents and involves thousands of people.
Amara Sen's theory on agency and the role of money in providing the freedom to live a valued life is discussed.
The contrast between the speaker's life and their foremothers' struggle for basic needs highlights the impact of infrastructural networks.
Artificial light as a 'superpower' and its role in providing agency and the freedom to act is emphasized.
Infrastructures are collective and connect us to each other and the land around us on a global scale.
The speaker's profession as an engineering professor shapes their perspective on the physical reality of energy and resources.
Infrastructures are described as the most powerful tool for responding to climate change, with the potential for resilience and transformation.
The concept of 'infrastructural citizenship' is introduced, emphasizing our responsibility to each other beyond political borders.
The speaker discusses the constraints of current infrastructural systems on individual actions and the collective challenge of climate change.
The need to decarbonize infrastructural systems and the potential pathways to achieve this are highlighted.
The importance of building infrastructural systems that are small scale, reversible, and responsive is advocated.
The speaker calls for infrastructural networks that embody an ethics of care rather than a utilitarian calculus of harms and benefits.
The potential of renewable energy to close material loops and transform the technological basis of human civilization is discussed.
The 21st century's infrastructural systems should endure like forests, evolving and providing for all who live within them.
A commitment to shared infrastructural future is equated with a commitment to shared humanity and the essence of being human.
Transcripts
I'm going to tell you about the most
boring part of my day so on a typical
evening I come home to my apartment in
Cambridge Massachusetts and I turn on
the lights I stream music to my stereo
from my phone I head into the kitchen to
make dinner for making something like
pasta right I would get water from the
sink and I'd put it on the stove to heat
up I'd get vegetabl out of the fridge I
would get olive oil spices out of the
pantry I can I can have dinner on the
table in about 20 minutes I'm pretty
good at this and then it takes me maybe
another 10 to clean up right so that's
like scraps in the garbage wash the
dishes and I'm done boring right but
here's the thing when I come in the door
and I flip that light switch those
electrodes might be getting their push
from a nuclear reactor from a
hydroelectricity project a th000 miles
away the the gas in my stove comes from
national and local pipelines it Heats my
house it also heats the hot water that I
do the dishes in and then that water
drains to one of the largest wastewater
treatment plants in the country and then
out to Boston Harbor so alone in my
kitchen I am a continent spanning
Colossus right like I am a cyborg I have
these technological systems at my
literal
fingertips the so these are
infrastructural utilities right so
there's energy it's fuel it's
electricity
it's water it's sewage it's
telecommunications it's the supply
chains behind that and these are the
systems that make my life as I know it
possible and on that typical night
they're basically invisible at least
invisible to me right there are
thousands of people whose life and time
and work and Care goes into making sure
these systems function they are the real
world of technology in which we all
live so Amara sen he's a development
Economist and he is known for studying
some of the poorest communities on the
planet he made the case that the reason
why we want money is usually not because
we want it for its own sake but because
it gives us agency in his words it gives
us the freedom to live the kind of life
that we have reason to Value so my
parents moved from India to Canada
before I was born I grew up in
Canada and I think about the way that my
foremothers would have spent
so much of their day getting clean water
getting fuel for
cooking and I actually think about the
fact that a very large fraction of the
planet that is still true today and that
is especially true for the people who
look pretty much like me right this is
the main thing that they do with their
days the difference between my life and
theirs is not so much that I have a bank
account how much I get paid is a lot
more to do with where I am because my
individual a agency my ability to do
things in the world is really
underpinned by these shared
infrastructural networks I'm going to
give you an example because the the most
significant example of this is
artificial light right so having light
on demand means that you can kind of do
what you want when you want to do it
right it's a superpower and this is what
I mean by agency right it's that ability
to act in the world so these
infrastructural networks make our life
possible by bringing these resources to
where we are and to where we use them
so as you heard I'm an engineering
professor and that means I think a lot
about the physical reality of the world
and you know one of the great truths is
that energy is the thing that we need to
for anything to work right like we pay
for it in dollars but energy is the true
currency of the material world and in
many cases the most you know efficient
or the most powerful way to hardness and
distribute resources is through networks
and networks are intrinsically
Collective
right so if you think about like roads
and rails they have to go somewhere
telecommunication systems become more
valuable when more and more people are
connected to them electricity is cheaper
for thousands of years people have had
shared Water Supplies because if you
have a bunch of people living close
together everybody needs water every day
water flows downhill right so it makes
sense to cooperate to build a reservoir
to build an aqueduct to build pipelines
to bring water to where your shed
Community is and of course you have a
bunch of people living close together
the value of some kind of shared sewage
treatment very quickly also becomes
clear so our infrastructural systems
connect us to each other but they also
connect us to the land around us and
this is now true really on a global
scale right so if we think about the
internet we think about mobile phones we
think about particularly so shipping
Transportation Aviation these are now
planetary Networks
and our infrastructural systems also
connect us to our past and to our future
because the networks that we live in
today are the physical manifestation of
the values and choices that were made by
people who came before us right it's
like what are those networks going to be
how would we use them who would benefit
from them and of course who would be
harmed by them and of course you know we
look at these networks today and we're
like that seems like a really uneven
distribution of benefits or even an
unjust distribution of benefits that's
worth keeping in mind because of course
we are the people who are now making the
decisions for those who are going to
come after us right so I think of this
as infrastructural citizenship the idea
that we have a relationship to each
other actually we have a responsibility
to each other that has nothing to do
with what it says on our passport but it
has everything to do with the fact that
we are like physical living beings that
are located somewhere on the
planet so you know I said that
infrastructure is how we get our agency
our freedom to act in the world to do
things and it's all powered by energy
because everything is powered by energy
and that means that for most of us most
of our energy usage is then mediated it
goes through these infrastructural
systems because they shape and they
enable what we can do every day so it's
things like where does the electricity
come from how is it generated what kind
of Transportation options do you have do
you drive do you take public transit do
you fly um things like where does your
water come from or how do you heat or
cool your
home so many of these these physical
systems then they both enable what we
can do but they also make it really hard
to do other things to do alternatives to
those things our infrastructural systems
basically because of the way that we use
enogen because they shape and enable
what we can do it means that they also
constrain the things that we can't do
right it makes it much harder to do
things that are not the things that are
made possible by these systems and what
that means is actually this is a thing
we're all familiar with right because we
know how hard it is to move the needle
on climate change as individuals that
our individual personal decisions like
it's hard for them to do anything
because there's really no such thing as
a personal carbon footprint because
things go through these
systems so what that means is that we
know that we need to decarbonize these
systems right but these are physical
systems that are embedded in the
landscape and that means that we need to
think about these sort of Landscapes as
a whole as we think about decarbonizing
these systems we can think about making
them resilient and transformative the
reason why this matters is that these
physical systems that are embedded in
our Landscapes we think of them as
boring and reliable but our Landscapes
of course have been stable and we know
that that's not the case anymore right
climate change that's what climate
change is it's making our Landscapes
less stable and that means you know this
is uh longer heat waves this is stronger
hurricanes this is fires this is
flooding everything that we think about
as extreme weather events you know this
idea of a natural disaster right the
thing that makes it a disaster is
precisely that it's not natural right
it's that it affects humans and human
communities we you know we talk about
the severity of natural disasters and
what we often feel that severity through
the impact on infrastructural systems so
you know we think about like what
systems go down how long they go down
for how how long it takes for them to
come back back up again how big the
outage is right and then who's affected
and because our Landscapes are becoming
less stable sooner or later the who's
affected will be all of
us but we can flip this
around because as we decarbonize these
systems as we transform them we have the
opportunity to make them resilient to
make them responsive to make them more
Equitable this I mean our
infrastructural systems they are the
most powerful tool that we have for how
we can respond to climate change and we
know that we can do this right because
after Decades of policy commitments
we've done the research we have the
renewable energy technology to transform
this we know that there there's at least
a pathway and once we know that a
pathway exists we know that many
Pathways exist but we can only choose to
walk those Pathways together right this
is no longer an engineering problem to
be solved and this is where being an
infrastructural citizen comes in right
it's this idea that we can sort of stand
together to identify and articulate the
benefits of these systems starting with
the fact that they're really not
economic right the way that these make
our lives work is not just a question of
you know money and that's even more true
for the harms right that we can't think
of these as sort of monetary harms the
harms that we do to each other the harms
that we do to our communities the harms
that we do to our shared ecosystem so I
said I think a lot about the physical it
right so the physical reality of our
planet is that energy is decentralized
it's distributed it's um abundant it's
endlessly
renewing but that's not the case for
matter our planet is mostly a closed
system for matter and we know that we're
really hitting these kind of physical
limits of the idea that we can take
stuff out of the ground and we transform
it and we consume it and then we dump
those atoms somewhere else right because
this is what happens with CO2 in the
atmosphere from fossil fuels it's
E-Waste in landfills um it's
microplastics in the
ocean the thing that's changed is that
we can now make the decision to get off
this one-way conveyor belt from
extraction to pollution because we can
use renewable energy to close these
materials loops and we know that we
really want to this we actually really
need to do this because what we're
looking at doing is transforming the
entire technological basis of human
civilization right no
so this is the work and we are just at
the beginning of this work and let means
we know we don't have all the answers
but we do know that we want
infrastructural networks that embody an
ethics of care and not the utilitarian
calculus of harms and benefits because
we know we don't have all the answers we
actually expect to get better answers it
makes sense for us to build out systems
that are small scale that are reversible
that are responsive that are exploratory
and then to connect these together to
make these larger networks and they need
to make sense for who they're for
because they give us the freedom to live
the kind of lives that we have reason to
Value we want to do this at a local
scale and we also want to do it at a
global scale because if you can't solve
a problem with the same mindset that
created it you also can't solve a
problem if you're not thinking on the
same scale as the problem right so this
is not a do-it-yourself thing this is
about do it together but everywhere
so in the 20th century we built out
these kind of massive monolithic systems
and I have to say like I am a fan of our
charismatic Mega structures so in the US
that's the Golden Gate Bridge it's the
Hoover Dam right these were built as
monuments and they were built to
endure but in the 21st century our
infrastructural systems will need to
endure not like monuments but like
forests so if you think about a forest
ecosystem it's powered by the sun it's
rooted in the Earth
there's no waste everything is basically
used to grow new things it endures but
it actually evolves and changes with
time and of course it provides a place
where all who live there can
Thrive our infrastructure systems are
how we take care of each other at scale
so that we can take care of each other
as individuals they underpin our
agency and they really Foster and allow
us to develop our social relationships
with each other and that's especially
true with things like Global
Communications right that means that
this is now culture on a global
scale all of these are about what it
means to be human right and that means
that a commitment to a shared
infrastructural future is a commitment
to our shared Humanity so this is the
world that we can create together thank
you
浏览更多相关视频
Il ruolo della scienza nel progresso sostenibile con Ruggero Rollini | Audi We Generation S3E1
Welcome to the Anthropocene
Climate change - from one kid to another | Bandi Guan | TEDxYouth@GrandviewHeights
What will happen if we fail to meet the 2030 climate change deadline? | Need to Know
The wonderful world of life in a drop of water | Tom Zimmerman and Simone Bianco
Where Does Your Sense of Self Come From? A Scientific Look | Anil Ananthaswamy | TED
5.0 / 5 (0 votes)