Why do we need more boring stuff?
About stability and infrastructures
We all rely on boring things until they stop working. In the words of Bill Brown, professor at the University of Chicago and author of “Thing Theory”:
We begin to confront the thingness of objects when they stop working for us; when the drill breaks, when the car stalls, when the windows get filthy, when the flow within the circuits of production and distribution, consumption and exhibition, has been arrested, however momentarily.
Some of these boring things are called “infrastructures” — they can be physical things but can have different functions based on your situations or perspectives. Susan Leigh Star calls this aspect of infrastructure relational. For instance, a staircase for one person could be an infrastructure that is reliable and functional but for a wheelchair user, they are a barrier. In her works, she gives various other characteristic of infrastructure (such as “embeddedness”, and “Links with conventions of practice”) and calls for studying these boring things.
Our current news cycle and social media feeds, dominated by stories of AI breakthroughs along with financial scandals and of course ongoing war and the recent pandemic got me thinking about “things” such as bridges, hospitals, schools, roads, electricity, water — the boring things that we take for granted until a crisis hits. But are they really that boring? They seem boring compared to disruptive mode of techno utopia — from blockchain to NFT to web3 to generative AI. A Sept 2022, Wired article by Paul Ford (a writer and entrepreneur) echoed similar sentiment while looking at technological disruptions:
The world of technology is infinite and exhausting, and everyone will tell you their giant thing is the real next thing. But you can always see the big, boring, true future of the field by looking at the on-ramps—the code schools, the certificate programs, the “master it in 30 days” books. One year everyone was learning Rails at coding boot camps. Then it was JavaScript. Then many of the boot camps closed, and now it's DevOps (software development plus IT operations). These are the things the industry needs right now, on a two- to five-year horizon. And stick around long enough and you'll find a lot of old Unix code and Java beneath the new stuff—dull systems, a stable stack of technologies so reliable that we forget them.
The Unix codes and Java stuff are like the boring roads and bridges — the stable stuff that we forgot. Another article that was written during the pandemic mentions COBOL and brings up the idea of stable infrastructures:
Indeed, present-day tech could use more of the sort of resilience and accessibility that COBOL brought to computing—especially for systems that have broad impacts, will be widely used, and will be long-term infrastructure that needs to be maintained by many hands in the future. In this sense, COBOL and its scapegoating show us an important aspect of high tech that few in Silicon Valley, or in government, seem to understand. Older systems have value, and constantly building new technological systems for short-term profit at the expense of existing infrastructure is not progress. In fact, it is among the most regressive paths a society can take.
This is not to say that technology and all sorts of technological disruption are bad. Often radical changes and disruptions are needed but these changes do not necessarily turn into progress. Our current mode of technological investment is regressive. While I was researching this topic and looking through my old notes from grad school — found obvious and well known take on infrastructure studies and critics like Bill Brown, Geoffrey Bowker, Susan Leigh Star among others. Then found old notes of “Xenofeminist Manifesto” by a collective called Laboria Cuboniks that looks into the inherent challenges of a techno-futurist disruptive mindset:
The real emancipatory potential of technology remains unrealized. Fed by the market, its rapid growth is offset by bloat, and elegant innovation is surrendered to the buyer, whose stagnant world it decorates. Beyond the noisy clutter of commodified cruft, the ultimate task lies in engineering technologies to combat unequal access to reproductive and pharmacological tools, environmental cataclysm, economic instability, as well as dangerous forms of unpaid/underpaid labour. Gender inequality still characterizes the fields in which our technologies are conceived, built, and legislated for, while female workers in electronics (to name just one industry) perform some of the worst paid, monotonous and debilitating labour. Such injustice demands structural, machinic and ideological correction.
One reason why things can become and remain boring is that they avoid falling into the speculative and financialisation trap that characterises the current economic system. While real estate, bridges, and other infrastructure, along with their related supply chains, are integral parts of the financial market, they are also always situated within socio-political systems. Despite this, there are examples of impressive infrastructure projects that have been completed. No one went apeshit crazy when for instance one of the longest cycling and pedestrian bridge (800 metres long, 3.5 metres wide ) opened in the province of Groningen in the Netherlands.
Things do go apeshit when infrastructure fails. There were so many examples in different parts of the world during the first few months of the pandemic — even in the wealthy, developed, supposedly affluent global north. Wealth did not necessarily turn into health (from Pieterse, J.N., 2021. Learning from Covid: Three Key Variables. ProtoSociology, 38, pp.211-228. https://doi.org/10.5840/protosociology20213811)
“A high concentration of wealth doesn’t bode well for public services and public health,” said Pieterse. Rather, when he examined Covid response in 26 different countries across the world, he was able to identify traits shared by nations who have handled the pandemic with relative ease. What do nations with low numbers of deaths and a high percentage of vaccines have in common? According to Pieterse, “knowledge, state capability and people’s trust in government were positive and aligned.”
In other words — boring stuff.
In April 2020, I remember reading an article by Siddhartha Mukherjee (author of The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer (highly recommend his books!) in the New Yorker where he wrote about how hard it was to find N95 masks in the United States (it was a supply chain and planning problem), how billion dollar electronic record management systems were basically useless and doctors and nurses resorted to Twitter.
From “What the Coronavirus Crisis Reveals About American Medicine” (The New Yorker, April 27, 2020):
The way clinicians have made use of Twitter and Facebook during this crisis has been a heartening development. We’ve cobbled together an informal medical bulletin board for the pandemic; even as we wade through the muddy slop of fake news, we have a forum of exchange that is flexible, versatile, and timely. This is a story of something that’s gone right—and of something that’s gone very wrong.
[…]
The promise of bringing medical recordkeeping into the digital age was to maintain a live record of a live patient, enabling clinicians to track patient care across hospital systems and over time. Instead, we’ve been saddled with systems that cut into patient care (clinicians typically spend an hour feeding documentation into a computer for every hour they spend with patients) and, often, are too fragmented to allow a patient’s file to follow her from one medical center to another. The E.M.R., as a colleague of mine put it, is “electronic in the same sense that your grandfather’s radio is electronic.” The energized, improvisatory role of medical Twitter inevitably draws attention to what our balky, billion-dollar systems should have been providing—to the cost, in dollars and lives, of the rapid clinical learning that we’ve forgone.
I re-read this article and looked at my pandemic journal entries. Dr. Mukherjee does not use the term boring but I noted in my diary about his use of the world “Slack” as things that are under utilised — in other words “boring things”.
For decades, consultants had taught the virtues of taut business practices. “Slack”—underutilized resources, inventory waiting to be put to use—was shunned. I spoke to David Simchi-Levi, an M.I.T. professor who studies supply-chain economics and how enterprises respond to disasters. “Cost is easy to measure,” he told me. “But resilience is much harder.” So we reward managers for efficiencies—and overlook any attendant fragilities. His view can be summarized simply: we’ve been overtaught to be overtaut.
“We’ve been teaching these finance guys how to squeeze,” Willy Shih, an operations expert at Harvard Business School, told me, emphasizing the word. “Squeeze more efficiency, squeeze cost, squeeze more products out at the same cost, squeeze out storage costs, squeeze out inventory. We really need to educate them about the value of slack.”
On one hand, seemingly mundane things like the medical supply chain for masks may appear unexciting compared to the flashy technologies of generative AI and blockchain. However, during a crisis, these "boring" elements become essential. On the other hand, infrastructure is never boring; it is continually politicised and part of the financial system that turns every commodity into a speculative object for future investment. Every bridge and road project has been sold somewhere even before the first brick was laid. This financialisation process involves the accumulation of value in stocks, debts, and bonds, transforming commodities such as grains, silicon, copper, cobalt, iron, and steel into numbers. Financialisation is thus not limited to banks and financial industries; it has permeated the production process at the most fundamental level which includes aspects of infrastructure. The financialisation of commodities and its crises are too crucial to be overlooked. Thus infrastructures are too crucial to be marked boring. We cannot wait for another crisis.