In considering this week’s reading on infrastructure, I have been thinking about how we find ourselves within, break from, graft onto, and are in part co-constituted through infrastructure. Returning to Paul Edward’s work, "Infrastructure and Modernity: Force, Time, and Social Organization in the History of Sociotechnical Systems” and encountering Lisa Parks’s piece, “"Water, Energy, Access: Materializing the Internet in Rural Zambia” were particularly helpful in thinking through the complicated though coterminous relationship between the social, technical, and historical.
Edwards argues that infrastructure is a seminal ordering structure of modernity. More specifically he claims, "Close study of these multi-scalar linkages reveals not only co-construction, but codeconstruction of supposedly dominant modernist ideologies.” (Edwards 2). Through a focus on the multiscalar (micro, meso, macro) Edwards positions scale as a method through which to understand the co-constitutive effects of force, time, and social organization within infrastructural development. Elaborating on this method he outlines a brief description of the developmental pattern of infrastructure, beginning from unorganized tinkerers, to system builders, to standardization, and finally to some forms of deregulation. While I find Edwards assumptions of modernity as a flat point of arrival within the “developed” world under thought (uneven development has always materialized along lines of race, class, gender, sexuality, and citizenship yielding an efficiency of modern functionality in some places and “pre-modern” infrastructural neglect in others; the Flint water crisis, disproportional flooding during Katrina, or the role of planned shrinkage and the burins of the South Bronx) I appreciate that infrastructure for Edwards never remains as a totalizing, fixed, and impenetrable system but is thoroughly co-constructed and deconstructed by the social. This is most evident in the first developmental phase that he lays out recalling Fisher’s work on the social history of the telephone, and the ways that sociality was imbued as a use for the telephone that overtook its intended purpose as a system for business coordination. This potential to imbue new functions that live in excess of the conception of an infrastructure is powerful. While it is admittedly more difficult as infrastructure moves through developmental phases towards standardization, Parks shows us that this potential is still present.
In her ethnographic work on internet infrastructure in Zambia, Parks comes to some poignant reflections that question some of Edwards assumptions about the progressive telos of infrastructure. One of the key takeaways from the reading comes at the end in which she states,
"The women we spoke with seemed somewhat disinterested in the question and relatively content without the technology, foregrounding the reality that the digital divide may be as much an invention of Western humanitarianism and/or digital capitalism as it is a salient concern among Macha’s rural residents. That so many women have never heard of the Internet caused me to reassess the very purpose of our project and to question whether or not we should be in Macha at all, particularly since the Dutch-supported ICT initiative had fallen apart and caused conflict in the community that led to a federal lawsuit in Zambia. Since there is no way for Westerners to engage in collaborative ICT work without the baggage of colonial pasts, development ideologies, and class and power hierarchies, and since we inherit and, in some cases, unwittingly evoke or reenact these conditions, how can international research collaboration be organized to craft imaginings and uses of ICTs that will expose, recalibrate, and reorder such relations?” (Parks 132).
This reflection is important in that it brings to the forefront the constitutive outside that Edward’s “modernity” takes for granted. Modernity in this sense can’t be assumed as ahistorical in the same ways that infrastructure is not. The preconditions for modernity are based in an asymmetric history of colonial expansion and extraction. Parks article is engaging in the continuation of that legacy. While she acknowledges and details certain desires for ICT as a developmental indicator from Machans, it is still notable how non essential it is for a large portion of the population. This opens the space for asking a different set of questions not premised on the assumption of high tech infrastructural development as akin to modernity, but rather in what ways do we seek to be modern, and what is gained or lost in the process? What types of development and communication are better suited for ICT and in what ways are they built upon and dwarfed by oral traditions + analog social networks?
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