The Future Is (Literally!) Bright - How Infrastructure Works, by Deb Chachra - Climate, Energy, & the Future
Download MP3We talked a little bit about about people finding the book optimistic. And I wondered if the publisher, like, maybe, you know, should have marketed this book as, like, how we are going to survive and thrive in the 21st century.
Deb:I actually worked really hard to go away from the framing of, we need to understand these systems before it's too late. I spend a lot of my time with 18 to 22 year olds, and I don't want to tell them that, like, your entire life is going to be cleaning up the mess that the adults made. What I'm asking them to do is to build this better world for themselves, for everyone else on the planet, for all other life on the planet. And as a side effect, they will address the issue of climate change. And as a side effect, they will issue address the issue of pollution.
Deb:And we now have, we've done so much of this work. It's not like it is the tools we need is the pathway forward, but we have a set of tools and a pathway forward, and that's enough to get going.
Kevin:Howdy, folks. I recently had the opportunity to interview Deb Chotra, professor of engineering at Olin College and author of How Infrastructure Works, just out from Riverhead Books here in the US. If you wanna buy a copy for yourself, all of the links are at criticalpoint.tvforward/infrastructure. Now here's the episode. Yeah.
Kevin:This book, just came out, about 6 months ago, Deb?
Deb:Yeah. Last October.
Kevin:Okay. Yeah. Yeah. And I've been trying to make this interview happen. I realized since January, based on our email conversation.
Kevin:So we finally we finally got on, the call. And with that, we will roll the titles and get started. And we're back. Once again, this is the War Stories podcast with Deb Chhatra. Deb is a professor at Olin College of Engineering.
Deb:Olin College Engineering.
Kevin:Olin College of Engineering. Awesome. In the Greater Boston area. Remind me where exactly.
Deb:We are in Needham, Massachusetts, which is, like, 15 miles, 25 kilometers, southwest of the city.
Kevin:I have a bunch of friends who went to Olin, and they all said lovely things about it. In fact, I ran into, one of them at my eclipse watching party. I was like, wait a minute. Do you do you know Deb Chakra? Because I'm interviewing her.
Kevin:He was like, oh, yeah. I was a student of hers, like, in one of the very early classes. And so, that was fun.
Deb:Yeah. I mean, you know, I I because I've been here since I first last graduated, I pretty much know every Olin student, and certainly pretty much every Olin student knows me.
Kevin:Okay. Yes. Yes. Yes. Because how big are class sizes?
Deb:Well, there's about, kind of 75 to 90 students every class. So, yeah. And so I, you know, I started here when the first class were sophomores. So that means that I, I've I've been here for every every every student who's passed through our doors.
Kevin:For the last was it it's about 15, 20 years that it is now?
Deb:We grad our 1st class graduated exactly 15 to 20. Our 1st class graduated in 2006.
Kevin:Okay. So
Deb:and and our 2024 class just graduated last week, just a few days ago.
Kevin:You were mentioning the the quiet the post commencement quiet on campus, which yes. Welcome. I'm sure. This is an incredibly meaty book. As you can see, I if you're watching the video, and it's not too blown out, I have, like an enormous number of, like sticky notes in the book, just like to way find, my way around it, because it is like, it's good.
Kevin:It's chewy. It's like, we're sinking your teeth into. But since we are, you know, since the audience for this is primarily people working in software, One of the conversations that came up when we were, you know, chatting about this over the, like, now 5 months that took us to put this, interview together is kind of what it means for something to be a system to be infrastructural and, you know, how how as software people we might, you know, realize that we have become infrastructure. I think there are some places where it's really obvious to us, like, you know, you know, people who, put together the modern Internet are very clear that they are building, you know, infrastructure. And whereas I think, other of us, like, find ourselves becoming infrastructure accidentally.
Kevin:The discord folks who discovered that they were being used by Ukraine to coordinate, the response to the Russian invasion, I think may have, been a little bit surprised by that. So, yeah, Dem, take it away. Like, what what does it mean for something to be infrastructure?
Deb:You know, it's funny because, I mean, you do definitely hear infrastructure is thrown around a lot, and it means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. So, Susan Lee Starr, who's a science and technology studies researcher, wrote, a really great paper, a number of years ago now called The Ethnography of Infrastructure, where they did a great job of laying out, kind of the things that make infrastructure, infrastructure. And I mean, I, you know, I sort of I just recommend the paper itself, but among the things that included is infrastructure is the stuff that you take for granted, when you start a project, like where you just expect to be there. Infrastructure is the stuff that most of us never think about, but other people, like their daily life is looking at that infrastructure, which I'm sure is something that's familiar to most of the people who are listening, right? To be the people who are looking straight at the infrastructure as part of their daily life.
Deb:Infrastructure Infrastructure is typically most visible on failure because it is the thing that we don't notice until. That's right, so it's taken for granted. Yes. Infrastructure is fundamentally relational, right? You mentioned that the people who did the backbone, the HCI backbone are like, Oh, we're fairly sure that that is infrastructure because that sort of underlies a bunch of other things.
Deb:But I remember talking to, the CTO of our college who, at his previous institution, he said, I knew that Wi Fi went from being kind of a nice to have to being infrastructured from the first time I got a call in the middle of the night when it went down, right? That it was like the transition between, oh, well, like, you know, everyone uses the ethernet lines, and the Wi Fi is like, if you just have it, to, No, we actually rely on, we expect to have the Wi Fi, not just the plugged in lines. And so, he was kind of like there for the transition where that extra layer went in between the college and, or the university where he was at and the sort of concrete infrastructure, of the networks, right? The Wi Fi layer now just got interpolated in between. So, those are just a few, kind of a few of the main ways in which infrastructure is infrastructure.
Deb:And depending on what space you're looking at, I mean, people think about the monetary system as infrastructure as health care, education, sort of social services, the legal system, right, things you'd like, if you start a company, the things you take for granted, right, is that that contract law applies, and people will be able to pay you. And so so what what is infrastructure for a particular you know, when I said, like, what you take for granted when you start a project, depends what is infrastructure depends on what the project is. And so, my particular focus on the focus of the book, as Kevin, as you sort of implied, is not the digital infrastructure particularly, right? My particular focus is the technological networks that make up our infrastructure. We often think of these as utilities, right?
Deb:So I'm most interested in the sort of physical networks of the internet rather than like, you know, the Wi Fi or like the, you know, the, how do we figure out what the standards are, although those are closely related, you know, water, sewage, electricity, energy, because that turns out to be the thing that underpins all these systems, transportation. So all of the things that we think about as like, kind of utilities and sort of big, serious infrastructure, but it is really worth per Susan Lee Star's point, it is really worth remembering that lots of infrastructure behaves in similar ways to things like water and sewage.
Kevin:Yeah. The point you make in the book, like, repeatedly the and the you know, using the framing of net infrastructure as networks was something that I found really incredibly appealing, partly because network theory is a thing that has interested me for a long time in the ways that networks grow and evolve. And also from having worked at companies like Akamai, where we ran we delivered by the quarter of the traffic on the web, in my era, and nobody had ever heard of us, except when we went down, and at Stripe where we were working on payments networks and how hard, you know, getting a three sided, network there, was for the card networks to set up and then, you know, us interacting with that. But thinking about, you know, so I'm very used to thinking of networks in the computer context and applying that thinking to things like water, and power. And, you know, you talk about food distribution.
Kevin:Although you make the really interesting point that, like, water will continue flowing downhill, like, kind of regardless of what we do. The the network, you know, works without our continuous input of, like, electrical or chemical energy, at least, whereas the food network, like, requires that continuous input of electrical and chemical energy to make it work. And so the idea that, like, things move in networks, but the networks are more active or passive depending on, the thing they're doing was interesting to me.
Deb:Yeah. I mean, that's where really the idea of the the sort of physical technological networks really is important. Right? Because, that means I'm really focused on things like matter and energy, and if water like, water flows downhill because gravitational energy is enough to keep it flowing downhill. That is not enough to deliver food from distribution centers to our, you know, to our, you know, to our grocery stores.
Deb:It's also, I mean, until we built the pipelines that bring water to where we use it, because water flows downhill, right? Up until that point, it would be like, if you wanna get fresh water, you could have it delivered to your house, right? And it's like and it took, like, it took actual physical labor to, like, bring barrels of water, right, to to your house and then bring it up. And, of course, people have, I mean, have long since tried to find ways of not doing that. And so it might be bringing water up from wells, it might be collecting rainwater.
Kevin:Well, cities are already located where they are in no small part because water flows downhill. They're, you know, almost always sited at places where there is a confluence of water.
Deb:Per that point, everyone's always like, why is Los Angeles downtown not on the coast? And, and part of the answer is because when the city was originally built, the sort of the policy that the Spanish had for where they said the cities was that it needed to be at the confluence of fresh water. So it's actually at the confluence of rivers as opposed to on the coast. And it also needed to be I think their policy to avoid, for like military reasons was that it couldn't be like right on the coast, it had to be inland. So it's like, we're gonna put it inland of the ocean, where there's fresh water available.
Deb:So hence, the LA River and, like, De Arroyo Seco and and all of that. But also, it's like why we're sort of not used to thinking of, cities on coastlines as actually having as having their sort of center of gravity located inside. And then, like, you know, Mexico City was built on a lake, right, which ended up basically essentially getting filled in when the European colonizers arrived. So, yes, like, often that that's true, right, that you can sort of see how, you know, basically because, like, if you have a whole bunch of people living near each other, and every one of them needs water every day, and also every one of them contaminates the water. It's not the You know, they're sort of euphemistically around them every day.
Deb:And also everyone can make everyone else sick because of waterborne diseases, right? It's sort of collectively figuring out how to deal with water is really important. And there's a reason, you know, basically one of the things I sort of think about is, that the one of the reasons why water has been around forever, right, in terms of like, as soon as basically people started living in close proximity, they started building aqueducts and reservoirs and ways to get water is because water does flow downhill. That once you actually set up the system, you don't have to put energy into it to keep it going, which is not true. As someone who works in, like, you know, digital communications, that is not true of the networks you set up, right?
Deb:If they did not have a continuous input of energy, they would just fall over.
Kevin:Right. The packets do not flow by themselves.
Deb:That's right. And, like, transportation does not happen by itself. Yeah. Right? And, but water so the 2 things that that you basically get for free, one is one is, like, roads, right, is pathways, which are in fact the oldest human technology.
Deb:Right? That if you just keep walking where other people are walking, you will have a trail, and it will be more passable. And the next oldest thing that we recognize as infrastructure is water, because if you actually build it, then water will flow and gravity will take care of it. You don't need to have input of energy, and all of the other types of infrastructure are real are things that really do require energy, to kinda keep going. And so, so those that for, you know, most of human history and certainly most of the of sort of the industrial era, the determinant of why these are networks is because networks sort of officially move things around with a minimum investment of energy, a minimum amount of energy.
Deb:And of course, what changed, what makes digital communication different, is that things like Metcalfe's law, where you're like, Oh, the value of a network is related to the number of nodes on a network, right, is kind of you can sort of see that retroactively applies to road and transportation and transit, Right? But it's funny, you know, it was only named for the internet, or for the ethernet rather, right? Because it was like, oh, yeah, these systems are, like, you know, valuable because more people are connected. You know, it was like, that's when it's like I mean, this is true for phones. To me, it's most obvious for fax machines, right?
Deb:Where if you have 1 like, how many people do you know who have a fax machine? And is it 1 or 2 or 3? And it was only when you had sort of a critical mass of fax machines that it was useful as a general purpose tool. And then, of course, it got very quickly supplanted, by well, yes and no. Right?
Kevin:In some places. Yes. Unfortunately, the state of Delaware still has a fax machine, and the state of Delaware is very important.
Deb:Yeah. And I wanna say it was Kevin Kelly who said that technologies almost never disappear entirely.
Kevin:Yes.
Deb:Right? They just they basically just become more and more niche. And so the type of network, right, the kind of water flows downhill, or the sort of last mile problem for electricity, which really in the US, the rural electrification administration was in the 1930s, right, was a way of solving the last mile problem, was, it's kind of a slightly different network issue, but also has a lot in common with sort of the digital networks. Cause if you think about them, as I said, as technological systems, then you think about them not just as networks and connectivity, but the nature of the kinds of networks, and also the sort of physical, the amount of energy that's required for those networks to function, And that turns out to be a really useful, to me anyway, a really useful framing that all of these infrastructural networks have in common, not just digital networks, but also not just like the sort of, you know, water sewage, you know, physical networks.
Kevin:Yeah. Yeah. Understanding energy as maybe the key input to all of these is something that is like, yeah, really valuable to me, something I've been chewing on for a while. And seeing you put it this way, it was like, ah, yes. Finally, someone else could get this problem from the same angle that I am.
Deb:Right, and it's also why, like, when people sort of think about, I mean, I'm fundamentally, I mean, my undergraduate degree is in engineering physics, and then, but all my graduate work is in both bioengineering and material science. So like I sort of half jokingly, half for real, say that I, the 3 things that my entire, like, literally since I was a teenager that I've cared about has been embodiment, materiality, and metacognition, because the other major thing I've done is around teaching. And But also, you can already be like, how we think about things is a piece of how I think about things. And, so like really, you know, I think a lot of the digital world is because we many of us live lives where we do not have to think about the physical needs of our body because they're so well supplied by these infrastructural systems that it's super easy for us to think, oh, like, everything that happens on a screen is just ephemeral. Right?
Deb:It doesn't take any energy. It's just moving lights and not, like, actually, it is, like, an incredibly, you know, materials and energy intensive process. It's just that all of that work happens far away from us, right? All of the mining, all of the batteries, all of the building of things, everything that happens to them after we're done with them. And then also all the electricity that, like, paid for like, that is used to power networks and data centers, none of that happens in our living rooms or our offices.
Deb:So we kind of think it doesn't it isn't actually happening, but it really is. So, like and this is you know, I feel like, you know, like, even if you're like, oh, I do digital infrastructure stuff, and it's like, yes. The thing that underpins that, because these are physical systems in a physical world, and we are material beings, is matter and energy. And being aware of where that matter and energy comes from is you know, I mean, I feel like it's, You know that sort of thing about, it's like, oh, where does your meat come? It comes from the grocery store, and we think that's really childish.
Deb:We understand that there is, like, there's considerable, do not. I grew
Kevin:up in rural Iowa. I grew up downwind of a number of hog and cattle confinements, So I have a very different perspective on this even the people who understand intellectually that there be comes from an animal. I know what that smells like.
Deb:Right. And that's actually an excellent, excellent point. Right? Like there's so there's there's there's the there's the sort of childish idea that, like, it just comes to the grocery store. And so people who are just like, Oh, it's like digital, it's like ephemeral, it's the cloud, right?
Deb:Like the immateriality of the digital world. It's kind of like thinking that your meat comes from the grocery store, right? And then there's a sort of intellectual understanding of what it actually takes to, like, get it to you. And then there's the real embodied lived experience, Kevin, of like, where does our e waste go? Of like, where does What is like mountain top removal mining for coal?
Deb:Like, what are the impacts of the energy that's used to produce these systems? And mostly that's far away from most of us, right? Like most of us do not live downwind of the feedlots. And, so that really sort of highlights that there's these kind of three kinds of experiences. And I think it's very easy for people to basically have the It comes from the grocery store, people who work in the digital field, and I see this in tech all the time, right, have the like, oh, it comes to the grocery store.
Deb:And at the you know, I don't want anyone to be living downwind of feedlots and be affected by that. And in order for that, you know, the the environmental, the energy, and the matter equivalent of that, and in order for that to happen, a lot more of us need to understand that the energy and matter underpin the digital world because it's the physical it's the same physical world that we all live in.
Kevin:Yeah. Yeah. Well, even I don't know what it's, you know, really what it's like to rack and stack a data center's worth of servers. I know that that is, you know, an enormous undertaking, but also it it all happens in Reston, Virginia. And, you know, by the time I visited, you know, that had been done.
Kevin:And, you know, although I can, you know although most of us will also never visit a data center in our lives.
Deb:Right. But we understand that there's, like and that's that's the other point. Right? Not only is it the sort of energy and matter, but there's the actual human care and skilled. And this is the part because if you're responsible for doing the maintenance and care for other people, right, you can sort of understand that like, yes, somebody else is like making sure my water gets delivered.
Deb:Someone else is making sure that like, you know, the sewage treatment plant keeps running. Someone collects my garbage, someone makes sure that potholes get filled. And in fact, actually, you may know that the, the Francis Scott Key Bridge, in Baltimore, the people who who were lost in that were the work crew who were fixing potholes.
Kevin:Oh, yeah. Right?
Deb:So the the basically, because as soon as, you know, as soon as the SOS went out, they basically stopped. It was and, you know, an incredible people responding in the moment. Right? The that they realized that the the the ship was out of control. They immediately started stopping people from from entering, from going onto the bridge.
Deb:Good. So that no one went onto the bridge. And they they realized that they did not, they were not able to get the work crew off the bridge. And because there was a crew literally repairing potholes that night, because it was the middle of the night, And, you know,
Kevin:that's the right hand side
Deb:of the hands on right. That hands on labor. And and I gotta say, like, man, I do not wanna ever I do not wanna hear anyone complain about potholes on their street for, like, a good long time. Yeah. Right?
Deb:Yeah.
Kevin:It's seriously sad.
Deb:Right? Yeah. Like, so, so, yes. So, like, all of these systems require significant amounts of human care, expertise, and labor to keep functioning because entropy is a thing. Right?
Deb:Without that, they will stop functioning. So, and again, that's the piece that I know that the people who are listening to this understand really well, and just recognizing that it's true for everything in the world.
Kevin:I think we also believe that entropy doesn't apply to software systems. And that's, like, in some sense, true. But the problem is that the rest of the world is changing around our software systems. And so one of the things that I find a lot, you know, both with my own infrastructure systems and do not ask me about their state of repair. It is dire.
Kevin:Like standards keep evolving, you know, in order to cope with, you know, both, you know, the increasing demands on our systems, as well as, you know, increasingly exciting adversarial behavior. So, you know, the, SSL certificates that I deployed, you know, 10 years ago are no longer good enough for the modern Internet.
Deb:Right.
Kevin:And, so the way that despite the fact that software doesn't rot, basically, we still need to update it on an ongoing basis to, cope cope with the changes in the rest of the environment. And so I often, like, wish that we would stop talking about technical debt and start talking about technical depreciation because Right. Everybody Right. Un understands when you, you know, buy a, you know, machine in a manufacturing plant that, you know, like, you know, old printing presses, for example, are still in use and still great. Although, you know, that becomes increasingly a niche thing, but, like, you know, there's you are going to need to replace them after some period of time because, you know, they're no longer sufficient to the demands of the market.
Kevin:And
Deb:Right. So first of all, I mean, the old printing presses, I promise you, have been maintained. So if at least for them to still function. Right? They haven't they haven't just been sort of, like, set aside, but they are certainly more robust.
Deb:So the thing that you're sort of describing, I think of as there's actually 2 pieces to it. There's sort of the red queen effect, the running to stay in place, piece of it. Right? That everything is changing around you, and you can't just be like, well, I'm just gonna stay here because you actually do need to run to stay in place. But the other thing that I'm actually going to point out, and this is the one that I know how it applies in the physical world, and I suspect you can tell me how it applies in your world, which is that our standards get higher, right?
Deb:So a lot of what's changed with our infrastructural systems has been because our understanding and our sort of expectations for the world around us, have in fact changed, and we have higher standards. So, you know, I one of the ways to describe it is, like, in my lifetime, like, the water that I drink, for example, or like the bodies of water around me have gotten noticeably cleaner. And so, like, the EPA was, it's just about 50 years old. I want to say it was like in 1970 or so. And, you know, I mean, Boston is famous for how dirty the, I mean, actually, many American cities, right?
Deb:You can think about how dirty, like, the rivers were or how dirty the, the nearby sort of the harbor water was.
Kevin:There is literally the song in Boston. You know, love that dirty water or Boston going
Deb:home. And, like, when I moved when I first moved to Boston, actually, I used to live I was doing my post doc at MIT, and I lived across the river in Back Bay. So, like, my walk every day was down the river to the nearest bridge and then over the river and then down the river to campus. And I remember the first time I saw a bird that I didn't recognize, which turned out to be a night heron, which is like a really striking bird. And it's like, I don't know what that bird is, but I know that bird eats fish, because I could tell because it has, like, the the sort of spearing beak.
Deb:And and there was an instant indication, like, I mean, you know, I'm used to I live in the city. I'm used to seeing seagulls and sparrows and robins and pigeons and not much else. Right? But seeing this bird was like, okay, there is fish in this river. Right?
Deb:Because that bird is is definitely eating those fish. And so the idea, you know, basically, that would not have been true, you know, 20 years ago, 30 years ago, and certainly not in whatever the sixties, whatever, dirty water was written. The harbor was kind of a mess, And, and it's only because of these sort of increasingly high standards for, like, like, we you know, things like, things like stormwater separation projects, right? Where, so lots of places, the water- like, if there's, a major storm, it overwhelms the sewage treatment plant. And so that means that extremely dilute sewage gets released, and it doesn't smell, and it doesn't look like much, but it can have significant amount of E.
Deb:Coli and other sort of pathogens. And I grew up in a place where it was like, if there was a bad rainstorm, you knew that you weren't supposed to go swimming in the water in the beach. And you might hear warnings on the radio not to do that. And so lots of places are like actually figuring out how to do stormwater separation, so that's no longer the case. And so that really is just like, we have higher standards now, right?
Deb:It's not a running to you know, it's not a running to stand place thing. There are those 2. But it's like, we think that places should be quieter. We think that water should be cleaner. You know, we think that So, yeah, there's kind of 2 sides to it, right?
Deb:One is the red queen effect that you described, but the other is, like, we rightly have higher standards.
Kevin:Yeah. Sometimes we struggle to enact them. I'm living here in San Francisco, and, you know, public toilets, would be Yeah. A, a, would be a massive infrastructural improvement, and we cannot get out of our own way, it seems, to make them happen.
Deb:And, actually, one of the things that I have talked about is that our primary locus of interacting with infrastructural systems is through our housing. And, you know, for many of us during the pandemic, this has really hit home because there was like, Oh, infrastructure systems that are embedded in our housing. What that means is if you do not have housing, you do not have reliable access to those systems. And we're not talking broadband, right? We're talking water and sewage.
Deb:I mean, it really is appalling, but it really you know, it's not just like, oh, we need more public toilets. It's like we do not have adequate housing, right? So people do not have that sort of locus of interaction with these systems.
Kevin:Yeah, exactly. Yeah. We have 9,000 people who need a bed on any given night, and we have 3,000 beds, and so you do the math.
Deb:Yeah. And like what they actually need is like toilets and showers, and right? In addition to, like, a place to sleep. So but we just, you know, we just sort of take it for granted that that
Kevin:All of that stuff comes along with that roof.
Deb:That's right. If you have, like yeah. People talk about, like, you know, a bed, but it's actually the 4 walls and everything that's in those 4 walls is also really, really important.
Kevin:Well, and bringing people together in those places makes it easy to provide them with all of the other services that they might need around, you know, abandon a roof and, you know, water and sewer, you know, things like food and, you know, access to health care and, you know, all that kind of stuff.
Deb:Yeah. But even, like, leaving that, you know, like even leaving aside, like, sort of the larger things around, how the US basically provides or does not treat housing as a public good, but instead treats it as a private good and as really an investment vehicle. And of course, you know, there are people who are who are actively working very hard to move away from that model, from the sort of, like, housing as a as a private good and and moving towards a housing, as a public good model. But, we, you know, we no. We don't we think of housing as a public good in the social sense, and we don't really think of it as a public good in the sort of economic sense of a thing that we want everyone to have access to, that everyone is better for having access to it, and that we don't want to exclude anyone from it.
Kevin:Right. The point you make in the book about, I think, you know, the residents of Boston, realizing, you know, even the wealthy residents of Boston realizing that their lives were going to be much, much, much better if everybody had access to water and sewer was I thought really trenchant because that's a thing that I think we don't always recognize about infrastructure. The sort of corollary of what you say about it being, you know, taken for granted is that this idea also that, like, you know, it is better when it's shared. It it it it is better when it is shared, and it is better when it is shared more equitably.
Deb:Right. And so that's kind of what well, there's a few there's a kind of a few pieces to it. Right? So there's something like water. You know, I said that part of the reason why water was kind of one of the early infrastructures is because of energy reasons, right, because water runs downhill.
Deb:But it is also one of the early infrastructures because the case for water as a public good is so obvious, right? And that was a case that that basically is what early health campaigners, that was a case that they made to rich Bostonians. It's like, You should pay for this because you personally will benefit, right, from having You know, if everyone has access to clean water, you and your family will also benefit. And because waterborne diseases do not respect where you happen to live, right? And we actually had a really solid lesson in you know, how infectious diseases, right, don't, like, you know, basically these are things that are like public health is a public good, right?
Deb:It's the thing that we all benefit from. The more of us who have access to public health in the form of clean water or clean air, right, the better off we all are. And in fact, actually, I should point out that there was, in the wake of, like, basically, getting clean water was essentially the, like, you know, there is an argument, there's a solid argument that can be made that we collectively basically decided that we wanted to level up our public health by having clean water for everyone, it is entirely feasible for us to do the same thing for clean air, to basically say we have standards for air that will also reduce, will also increase sort of public health in a way that will serve as a public good. So the reason like for water, it's super, super obvious that you personally like your water will be cheaper, your water will be higher quality, and you will get sick less if you pay into a system that it's like win, win, win. That is less true, less obviously true for other systems.
Deb:Right? Like, like, it's clearly the sort of Metcalfe's law for for networks is that the value of a network to you increases the more people are on it. Right? So that is that is a universal that is an argument for universal provision. Right?
Deb:That if everyone has access to the, you know, the Internet, if ever I can sell people's or, like, roads. Right? It's like I can sell more people's stuff. I can, you know, I can distribute it. I can, you know, whatever.
Kevin:And so the reason that the value of the overall network grows exponentially is because that grows as the sum of if everybody values the network more, the more people are on it, then you take the sum of those over the the network, and the value of the network goes exponentially.
Deb:Right. And but also, like, for any individual person, the value increases the more people who are on it. Right? And that's kind of the heart of something being a public good, right? The argument for universal provision is that the more people who are on this or the more towns of the interstate highways go to, the more, you know, like the more valuable the network is to me.
Kevin:Yeah. Exactly.
Deb:Like me, me, me, me, me, me, me, right? Like me personally. Yeah. And, that is Which
Kevin:is why they grow, which is why they're so successful. Correct. They're so they're so relatively easy to grow because the value proposition for any individual person is so obvious. Yes.
Deb:Right. So there's 2, sort of, corollaries that fall out of that, though. So one is, as something goes from being kind of like a niche or a luxury like, so basically, when, you know, when only a handful of people had access to the Internet, it kinda didn't matter whether you had access to the Internet or not. Right? But and, I mean, I I was one of those.
Deb:You might have been too. Right? Like, I remember when, like, me and, like, 5 of my friends had emailed because I was, like, in engineering school, and no one else did. And, but, like, to not have email in, like, 1987 or, like, in the early 19 nineties and to not have email in 2024 is a very different proposition. Right?
Deb:It's, it's like literacy. Right? Like, not, you know, 500 years ago when, like, 20% of Europe could read. If you couldn't read or write, it wasn't that big a deal, right? If you can't read or write in 2024, it is a huge freaking problem.
Deb:And broadband is basically like that, Right? It's like it's gone from it's gone from, like, a thing that is sort of like, oh, if you have it, it's kinda nice to have, to a thing where it's like, you cannot fully participate in society without it. There's that sort of tipping point, right? That sort of that, that inversion that happens. So that's one corollary to like it's not just it's better if you have it.
Deb:It's that your life is materially much, much worse if everyone else has it and you don't. Right? And that's one of the reasons why we think of having access to infrastructural systems in many cases as like a political right. I think that we are like, broadband is a human right, mobility is a human right, right, because we understand that it's not just like, oh, it's like, it's a nice thing to have and you don't have it. It's like, no.
Deb:Now you're actually being excluded from civic society in some way, shape, or form.
Kevin:Now now it's actually worse for civic society in many ways. Like, you know, the city of San Francisco just assumes that there's all sorts of stuff you can do online. There are not offices where you can do it, and they really want you to pay your parking tickets. So they have some incentive to get you access, mostly through libraries, and thank goodness for them. But yes.
Kevin:Yeah.
Deb:Right. And that was that was exactly the thing I was gonna say. Right? It's like it's and like and like I I you probably do too. I know a lot of librarians who are, like, I spend, you know, a significant part of what I have to do is, like, help people negotiate these systems who do not have, like, sort of that level of sort of information literacy and that level of infrastructural access.
Deb:For actually, the other way around. They don't have the infrastructural access, and therefore they don't have the informational literacy to navigate these systems themselves. And, so that's sort of the first corollary to the sort of networks of the public good piece, right? Is that as things become more widespread, there's a there's a tipping point where being excluded becomes much, much worse than it would have been when they were not widespread.
Kevin:Because well, and also because decision makers take the infrastructural networks for granted and so start making decisions which don't consider the abs absent case. And now, yeah.
Deb:And there's no and you know, maybe that there is actually no longer any way to do this without being online, right, which is the issue, that you're now excluded from social provision or from civic services if you don't have this because everyone just is like, Of course you have it, right?
Kevin:You can actually take cash to the, impound lot and, there's an office there, but it's an nervous pain at the office. Right.
Deb:Right. Which is the other thing that infrastructure makes certain pathways easier than other pathways. Right? They take less time, energy, resources to use, which is good, right? Which is what we want.
Deb:But it really does make anything other than the pathways that you use much, much harder. And most of the time, that's fine. When we realize that we want to decarbonize and transition our entire technological society, figuring out how to jump the tracks, right, to move to a different track is is actually the challenge we have ahead of us.
Kevin:Although the point that you make in the book, the interchangeability of electricity, is incredibly powerful for that. We talked a little bit about about people finding the book optimistic, and I wondered if the publisher, like, maybe, you know, should have marketed this book as like, you know, how we are going to survive and thrive in the 21st century.
Deb:Oh, interesting. My brain, you know, you think I would know this offhand. I feel like the UK subtitle is a little bit closer, to that, and, and, like, you think I would actually know what it was, but I actually part of the reason why I can't remember is because I actually worked really hard to go away from the framing of, we need to understand these systems before it's too late. Because the sort of catastrophic framing and that sort of conflict and the sort of, like, bad things will happen is so powerful. And I am personally It's also a lot
Kevin:of books, but it's also exhausting. Especially if you're working on these systems where I'm like, I know all of the problems that you're worried about. I'm worried about, you know, the the day to day problems, which you don't even know about. And then there is, like, you know, trying to get through the day.
Deb:Yeah. I mean, so one, I think, like, the emotional like, the affect of it. But the other thing is, just that I think that the, we everyone kind of knows what the problems are, but I think that for lots of reasons, we are much less tuned into the idea that there's actually a path forward.
Kevin:Yeah. And we're on it.
Deb:Right. And we're absolutely on it, about building something better rather than averting catastrophe. Right? And building something that we feel is better is way more motivating than, like and, you know, part of this is because I spend a lot of my time with, like, undergraduate engineering students. Right?
Deb:So I spend a lot of my time with 18 to 22 year olds, and I don't wanna tell them that, like, your entire life is going to be cleaning up the mess that your the adults made.
Kevin:Your great grandparents and great grandparents left you. Yeah.
Deb:Yeah. And I think I mean, you could you could absolutely frame it that way. Right? Except that I think that that's actually not what I'm asking them to do. What I'm asking them to do is to build this better world for themselves, for everyone else on the planet, for all of their life on the planet.
Deb:And as a side effect, they will they will address the issue of climate change. And as a side effect, they will issue address the issue of, pollution, like actual physical pollution in our environment.
Kevin:Well, and the idea that much of this work is already in progress, and we need to contribute to it, and we need to push it along rather than needing to make it, you know, happen from nothing is
Deb:From nothing. And in fact, actually, because people have been working on it really hard for the last, you know, 40 or so years. So minimally, I think about I mean, the one thing is I mean, I do not I'm not old enough to remember this, but like I know that Jimmy Carter sort of famously said during the oil crisis that you should wear a sweater. It's right. Turn down.
Deb:Turn down. And that's because, in late 1970s, the only way you could get energy was by combustion. And that is not true in 2024 because people put a huge amount of time and energy into developing, like, commercially viable solar panels and things like, you know, the Danish the standard Danish wind turbine, which is the one that we see everywhere, and, things like, you know, like geothermal and and, like, none of these is a silver bullet. Right? And actually, you know, a very sort of little appreciated thing is the concerted amount of energy, of effort that went into going from incandescent lights that basically produce heat and then produce light as a side effect, right, to LEDs, which basically just move around electrons and get photons, Right?
Deb:Like, the the the incredible efficiency of LED lighting compared to incandescents. And, and, like and it basically was, we're gonna, like, support the development. And I like, if you remember compact fluorescents, which could screw into a light bulb, but which were terrible, right? And then it's like and now, like, LED lighting is so great, right? It's like the color ranges that are available, and they use so much less energy, and they look so good.
Deb:And except for, like, very except for very specialized applications, LEDs are almost always a better choice than regular light bulbs. And then, of course, there's a myriad of things you can do with LEDs that you couldn't do. Like, I have a little tiny LED that runs off a button cell. In fact, I use rechargeable button cells, right, that lives on my key chain, right? That's a source of light.
Deb:And like, there's no you know, I would never do that with a flashlight, right? And all of this is because of people who recognize that we want to create these technologies to make the world into a different and better place because of how we handle energy. And we now have we've done so much of this work, and now it's sort of time to figure out, Okay, like, now that we have it's not like it is the tools we need, it's the pathway forward, but we have a set of tools and a pathway forward. And that's enough to get going, right? That's enough to be like, Okay, let's move into renewables, Right?
Deb:Let's like phase out combustion. We don't have to turn the heat down or to right? Because we can get energy and bypass the combustion. But the way that we take care of each other and the way that most of us get our agency to act in the world is through these infrastructural systems, and we have what we need to decarbonize them. Let's do it, right?
Deb:So, yeah. And make it happen for everyone, right? And take advantage of the sort of physical affordances of decentralized, abundant, you know, distributed energy that we turn into electricity and then use for literally kind of whatever we want, right, as opposed to having to pass through the incredible thermodynamic inefficiency of setting it on fire first, right, and then and then doing whatever we want. Right? And, like, it's like yeah.
Deb:Like, solar panels. It's like, here's, like, here's photons and here's electrons, you know, amazing. Not like you set it on fire and you turn a turbine, and then you're like that turbine, like, turns into magnetism, and then it turns into pushing electrons, and then you get photons. Yeah. Right?
Kevin:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think I think you make the point in the book that the biggest problem a lot of these solar farms have is keeping the dust off the panels.
Deb:I would say it's actually, I think the biggest problem is just sort of storing and generating. I mean, the real problem is that it's like I mean, this is kind of hilarious. Right? This idea of, like, oh, it isn't solar panels produce so much electricity that we're not gonna make money because we could only sell the electricity for really, really cheap. And it's like, that is not a problem.
Deb:That is the dream. Right? The dream is like too cheap to meter, right? And just only a problem if you think that someone should be making money off of it. If you think of energy as the thing that underpins our agency in the world, right, that allows us to do things like close materials loops, right, to, like, to, like, not pollute.
Deb:It's like, that is freaking amazing. Like, that is like the best argument for public power I've ever heard. Right? It's like, we have so much power that we can't make money off of it as investors. And it's like, yes.
Deb:Right? That's why we should invest in it as a society. So, so that I would say that is one of the big problems with solar. And we know we're working on things like grid scale storage, but and that what we're really working on is things like the distribution. Right?
Deb:It's like, how do we buffer energy generation over time, and how do we buffer it over space? And again, it's like, we kinda know how to do this. We just need to figure out how to modify, like how to change the sort of social, and economic, and political systems around energy to, it's not like we don't know how to build it out physically, right, as a technology. Like, we can build, we can build a market. We're just trying to figure out, like, who's going to pay for it and how, right?
Deb:And that is a tractable problem. I mean, that is a very different problem than, like, you know, how do we get enough energy to run the world, right? It's like figuring out who pays for it, it's like, we we should be able to figure that out.
Kevin:We should be able to figure that out. Yeah. I do I don't know. That's where I feel the most sort of, like, frustration is around the you know, I was talking about the the San Francisco sanitation issues and our inability to get out of our own way on it. And that's, I think, where, you know, the corollary to infrastructure systems being taken for granted is that, like, any kind of modification to them is seen as enormously threatening because, we have to think about them for the first time in maybe our entire lives.
Kevin:Like, oh, there's a seawall. I I didn't realize there was a seawall. That turned out to be a pretty easy sell. Not getting flooded, turned out to be relatively easy to get a bond measure, passed on. But,
Deb:obviously, the other thing can kinda see the public good element of that. When you
Kevin:can kinda see the public good element of it.
Deb:Yeah. Yeah. I don't
Kevin:want Personally, I
Deb:think just gonna float. Wait. But, I mean, also, I think if you live in San Francisco, you should absolutely see the public good of, like, sanitation and housing at this point. Right? It's like, this thing, right?
Kevin:Of bedding sand.
Deb:Like, I mean, right. Like people I've heard, I mean, I live 3,000 miles away, and I've heard people complain about it enough that you should absolutely a 100% realize that it is a public good that everyone has adequate sanitation. And, like, it is like, you know, it is like the definition. Right? It's like you do not want to exclude people from it, and your life will be better because other people have access to it.
Deb:Right?
Kevin:In a really material way. Right.
Deb:Right. Like, this is the thing. It's like it's like like, what more evidence do you need? So and but this is the thing. It's like we you know, this is this is genuinely unprecedented, not even in human history, but in our like, as humans, as a species.
Deb:Right? We we have only ever gotten energy in huge quantity in, like, significant quantities through combustion. Right? And, I mean, and so the idea that we can bypass combustion to get our energy is, like, a thing we have not fully wrapped our head around the ramifications of that.
Kevin:Or chemical energy. Like, one of the things that I say about the 20th century is that it put more kilowatt hours in more hands than ever before because, you know, even in my grandfather's era, he used a horse drawn plow for, you know, the early part of his farming career in Iowa in the, what was that, like, the forties, like, after he came back from the war, he was still using a horse drawn plow.
Deb:That late forties, early fifties. Yeah. Yeah.
Kevin:Yeah. I I know because I would play on it when I was a small kid and visiting grandma and grandpa. And, it was, you know, the explosion of chemical energy from oil, you know, and the, you know, increasingly ubiquitous ability or availability of the internal combustion engine that, you know, but before before that, you know, it was steam power, and before that
Deb:Which is powered by coal.
Kevin:Which is powered by coal. Yeah. And before that, you were limited by, you know, the chemical energy available to you, your family, and your raft animals. Like
Deb:Yeah. So, I mean, so there's actually a couple of different pieces of it, right? So, there was always the sort of biological chemical energy, right, that comes from food. And, a lot of human history has been basically not even just animals, but actually getting other actual humans to do work for you, right? And, and- To
Kevin:buy better and worse mechanisms, but,
Deb:Yeah, and some of the mechanisms are like, historically the worst mechanisms ever.
Kevin:Yes.
Deb:Right?
Kevin:Yes. And on the flip side, like, the pyramids famously not actually built by slaves. And so you can do enormous things with, human labor.
Deb:Like lot like lots of Europe and, like, lot you know, basically, like, a lot of colonialism and, like, basically slavery was about, like, getting other humans to basically do to to put in those energy inputs that you could then benefit from. The the thing that, you know, the thing that if you actually you know, you can look at the graph of of, the IEA has the graph of energy that's used by humans as a species and it's exponential. It's basically a flat line until about 700, right? And then it becomes exponential. And most of what's powering that, you can sort of see it's like, here's where the coal came in.
Deb:Here's where oil came in. Here's where natural gas came in. And then you can sort of see like nuclear, hydro, you know, renewables. But that baseline was kind of biomass, right? It was like it was powered by, combustion of biomass, and then and, like, you know, the food we eat.
Deb:Like, we you know, humans are basically I mean, the Huddle White light bulbs, which actually don't exist anymore. But, like, we're basically televisions, right? Like, we don't actually use that much energy.
Kevin:No, I say we do everything we do on half a hamburger.
Deb:Right, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely, yeah. So, So, if you think about it, the RDA is like, whatever, 2,000 kilocalories a day, and you can convert that. You can figure out what that means in terms of power consumption. And it is about 100 watts, right? It's about 100 joules a second.
Deb:And, so fossil fuels actually were like the energy the exponential growth of energy usage, and in terms of like how much energy we use as individuals, right? Our energy footprint is mostly powered by fossil fuels, but we're now at the point where it doesn't have to be, right, where we can decouple that. But, yeah, like, I mean, the real When we talk about the global south and we talk about developed countries and we talk about rich countries, right? This is one of those, like, I'm an engineering professor and an economist, because I don't think of that in terms of GDP, right? I think about that in terms of per capita energy footprint.
Kevin:Yeah, yeah. Although they correlate real closely.
Deb:That's correct. And they don't actually correlate perfectly, but they correlate very, very closely because the thing that you do when you have more money is you spend it on more energy so that you have more agency in the world. And really, the thing you spend it on is collective ways in which we use energy, whether that's like electricity generation or transportation. Right? It's like it's not Well,
Kevin:because that level of energy comes and you get the exponential growth curve from that.
Deb:That's right. Right? It's, like, it's not, like, individual people are using so much more energy. It's that you build coal fired electricity generation, and then people use the electricity to do the things that they want to do. I really love Amartya Senz, the development economist.
Deb:He describes it as, We want the freedom to live the kind of lives that we have reason to value. So, it's not a one size fits all. You get to do X, Y, and Z. It's that money, and he's an economist, so for him, money is what lets us do this. I'm an engineer and I study infrastructure.
Deb:So, I think about the energy and infrastructure system that enable us to do this to give us the freedom to live the kinds of lives that we have reason to value. And I really want that for everyone, right? Not just people who happen to be born in places like Canada. And, you know, I I it is now eminently doable, you know, if we figure out how how to actually do it.
Kevin:That analogy you have in the book of the black start where the so, to set the stage, for people who have not read the book, there is, one of the ways it turns out that we store electrical power at grid scale is, what's the name for what's the term for it?
Deb:For, like, pump storage hydroelectricity? Yes. Or do you mean that okay. Yeah.
Kevin:Yeah. Pump storage hydroelectricity. And so in I don't know how you pronounce it. I think it's Welsh, Dinarvik. Dinarvik in Wales.
Deb:I I think. I'm not I'm not a native Welsh speaker, but I think that's yeah.
Kevin:Okay. There is a big mountain with 2 reservoirs, a big reservoir at the top and a big reservoir at the bottom. And when they have excess electricity, they pump water from the reservoir at the bottom to the reservoir at the top. And then when they need electricity, they run it through the turbines, and the following water generates electricity. And, in the event of a total power outage, they have a backup system, basically.
Kevin:I forget if it's a, gas generation or
Deb:So it's like yeah. I'm assuming it's diesel. It's usually like a diesel generator that produces enough energy to open the valve, right? So it's like, this is the water runs downhill thing, right? It's like, you don't have to move the water around, you just have to open the valve, right, at the top.
Deb:So if you can produce enough energy with your diesel generator to open the valve at the top, then you get 6 hours of power by the water, like, rushing from the top reservoir to the bottom. So you and that is enough electricity to reboot the grid as a whole. And so, this is what's called the black start for obvious reasons, right? Because it's dark when you start, and hopefully if you get it right, it isn't. And so, the metaphor that I've used is, you know, you have these diesel generators, and the point of the diesel generators is not to run your grid off them.
Deb:The point is to open that valve so you get the renewable energy and you can boot the whole system up. And the metaphor yeah, right? And so, the metaphor I've used is that fossil fuels were basically the black start for humanity. They gave us enough energy and it concentrated in enough form that enough of us had the leisure to be like engineering professors, right? As opposed to like working in the field.
Deb:And you and I are both not very many generations off, right, subsistence farming. And in my case, most people who look like me on the planet, right, brown, middle aged woman, this actually basically taking care of their daily needs, like water and fuel for cooking, that actually is their life still, right? It's not just my grandparents or my great grandparents. It's like, actually, most women on the planet, this is what they do. But the black start is that if you think about fossil fuels as being the black start for all of humanity, that it gave enough of us the leisure to figure out what the next thing is, and, to get to the point where we have the sort of space and time and knowledge and ability to collaborate, to create these technologies that enable us to move towards, using energy in a way that is aligned with our actual planetary boundaries, right, which is there's an infinite amount there's, like, solar energy arriving at any moment, every moment of every day.
Deb:Right? It's not a thing that we're not, you know,
Kevin:You're never going to run out of it within our lifetimes or a 1000 generations.
Deb:That's right. That's right. In a couple of 1000000000 years, the sun will actually, like, you know, basically turn into, it won't it won't actually go supernova, it'll just burn out. So I think it'll end with a red giant and Brad Wharf.
Kevin:Yes.
Deb:And, I mentioned my undergraduate degrees in engineering physics, and I included a a a decent amount of nuclear astrophysics. So so like, yeah, I think that I mean, you know, I believe that we need to we need to work on, like, long time scales, and I'm okay with that. It's our long time scale.
Kevin:Yeah. Exactly. Yes. Yes.
Deb:I
Kevin:my my grandchildren can work on that. Like, I
Deb:Yeah. And in fact, actually, part of our job is to make sure that our grandchildren get to have that opportunity to
Kevin:work on that.
Deb:To work on things like, what does interplanetary space exploration look like? So so basically, if you think about fossil fuels as the black start for, like, all of humanity to get us to the point where we can actually build out these these renewable systems, this alignment with our planetary boundaries. But, yeah, unlike the diesel generators, you you wanna turn them off. They're, like, loud and expensive and polluting and noisy, and it's like, you do not wanna run those forever. Right?
Deb:You wanna, like, you know, you wanna get the hydro going, you wanna get everything else going. And same thing with fossil fuels, right? It's like that got us up off the ground, gave us like the space and time we need to do stuff, but now it is time to turn them off, right, and to to transition to to our renewable energy. Yeah.
Kevin:I think, also, I think, you know, I grew up reading the, you know, the Jimmy Carter era, just put a sweater on kind of people. And so the vision for a future that was, you know, renewable and sustainable was kind of a pastoral vision. You know, maybe not an entirely realistic one, certainly one which coming from a pastoral place and being able to smell all of the problems with it did not enormously appeal to me. So I, you know, worry when we look at that exponential curve of energy growth that, like, you know, oh, we will just always be able to consume as much energy as there, possibly is. We will never, like, satiate ourselves, basically.
Kevin:But the point you make in the book that at least in terms of human consumption, like, we do find that there's kind of a sigmoid, and, you know, most of us in the the developed world are somewhere towards the top of the sigmoid. You know, people, you know, who are still getting access to these infrastructural systems are still, like, you know, in the exponential part of the sigmoid. But that, like, my my the examples in my head are things like leaf blowers and, jet skis, which are like
Deb:Right.
Kevin:Maybe, you know
Deb:Recreational uses of energy. Yeah.
Kevin:Yes. Yes. Yeah. Recreational uses of energy that that I find really obnoxious, and I'm like, we could do less of that.
Deb:But civil aviation is actually kind of the important one, right? Because as individuals, that actually is a significant amount of your, of your energy usage. It's just that global lease of elimination is not, it's only like a few percent of our global energy usage.
Kevin:Like 3% I think is the number that 6
Deb:in my head. Yeah. It's kinda under 5 for sure. Yeah.
Kevin:Yeah. Yeah.
Deb:And, but as an individual, it can be because, like, you know, it's like I mean, it kind of makes sense when you're like, okay. I mean, it takes it's actually it's not that it uses that much energy. It's just that you just go really far, and you go a lot. Right? And it's because you're sharing that energy, like, compared to a car with, like, 1 or 2 people in it, right?
Deb:Right? You're sharing that energy with, like, you know, a couple 100 other passengers. And of course, you know, everyone has it's not like airlines don't have an incentive to make it efficient, right? Oh my god. Because every jewel you spend costs money and someone has to pay for it.
Kevin:Jet fuel is their biggest expense. They're enormously incentivized to That's right. Right. Yeah. They're enormously incentivized to optimize that.
Kevin:Yeah.
Deb:So, like, you know, unless you have a private jet, right, like, you do kind of max out sort of how much energy that you can use. But I think the point though is that we, you know, I like, I you know, energy is, in a really in a very real sense, agency, right? We're physical beings in a physical world, and that means to do things, we need energy. And so we have recognized by saying, Oh, we're going to use less energy. People, like, intrinsically understand that means they're gonna have less agency in the world.
Deb:Right? They're gonna, like, do less. Don't travel, be cold. Right? You know, all those things.
Deb:And there's 2 ways to get around that.
Kevin:Until aviation is emotionally the thing at which, you know, that's that's the thing you will probably from my cold dead hands. Like, you know Yeah.
Deb:I mean, I you know, I was saying, look, I'm an immigrant. I'm a child of immigrant. And in fact, I actually had, no one in my family, most of the people I love do not live anywhere near where I live, including my family, right? My immediate family, including my niece and nephew, including most of the people who were close to me. And, and I actually had I know what it was like to not see them for 15 months.
Deb:Right? And in like the most traumatic way possible, it was like not-
Kevin:Yes. That sucked.
Deb:I would I Yeah. Yeah. It was And like, I, and I think civil aviation, and actually understanding that we are a single connected polity, right, that we we're all people on the planet is actually really important. The so, like, basically, you know, I don't I mean, I I don't fly to from Boston to Washington, DC. I take the train, but but I'm not gonna stop.
Deb:I mean, I feel like people who say, like, you must stop flying. It's like, do you really understand how big North America is? And, or, like, do you have, like, you know, are there any immigrants in your family who move from the other side of the planet? But, so, like, there's basically 2 things you can do. Right?
Deb:One was always, like, use less. Right? The other piece of it was efficiency, and that's actually where things like LED light bulbs come in. Right? It's like it genuinely is.
Deb:We're not doing less. We're actually doing much, much better. Right? Where light bulb, like light, is genuinely better than it was 30 years ago, and including the fact that you can't burn yourself. I mean, like, yes, your Easy Bake Oven now has to have a heating element because you can't just do it with a 100 watt light bulb.
Deb:It also means you can't burn yourself on a 100 white light bulb. Right? They actually got phased out. You most people probably don't know. They actually got phased out because they're actually dangerous.
Kevin:Yes. Right? Because they're actually like used to be in those tertiary on this wing.
Deb:Oh, god.
Kevin:You know? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They used to
Deb:have that. Like, in this right. In this transition. Right? Yeah.
Deb:Used to have Helligents. Yeah.
Kevin:Used to have the, like, the metal grill over it so that if something fell into
Deb:it touch them.
Kevin:And so that if something fell into it, it would be less likely that it hits on fire. Yes.
Deb:Yeah, yeah. So there were like We went through a couple of really terrible things to go from incandescence to LEDs, and LEDs are great. So that idea of making things efficient is definitely part of it. Like, I'm not saying we should not make things efficient. And moving to public transit instead of cars is a good example of, like, yes.
Deb:It is much more energy it's much less energy intensive to have public transit, but it actually is better in many cases.
Kevin:Coming from Boston to San Francisco has been kind of traumatic because, you know, the the the MBTA in Boston is struggling now more than it was when I live there. But, like, if you have never had the experience of a good public transit system, it is joyous. Like, that is my my uncle was actually talking about, they just built a train system at Denver where he lives, and he was like, the first time he rode the train from his place, you know, to the city to go, you know, he's now got, like, season tickets to the, the opera or something because, you know, he can do that. He can just and he was like, the first time I wrote it, I was, you know, wearing a mask because it was COVID times. But, underneath the mask, I was just grinning ear to ear because it was so joyous to have that agency, like you say, without
Deb:Right. Right. Because it actually genuinely is. Like, I could just walk out the door and, like, give them some you know, whatever, and I don't have to worry about parking, and it's way less expensive. And and, so, actually, it's funny because the reason I'm going to say is I'm going to put a letter of recommendation in for this podcast called The Big Dig that came out of one of the Boston Public Radio Stations that is about burying the big highway, the sort of multi year project.
Deb:And it's like, you know, some parts of it are terrible and it kind of ends with like, and now we've actually made the Rose Greenway, and we've opened the green line, and it is genuinely great. Right? Like, it's like people like and, but in fact, I actually talked to an academic advisee who's actually not one of my students, but is actually a student of a close friend of mine who lives in the Inland Empire, in California. And she went to New York for the first time and she was like, Oh my God, like the subway. And now she's about to go to grad school on the East Coast.
Deb:And like, Justine, like, I don't have to have a car. I can take public transit, sort of joy. Like, it is gen because public transit scales with people, the number of users, in a way that cars do not scale. But it's a perfect example of, like, you can make things more efficient and less energy intensive, but actually also better, right? Public transit is like LED light bulbs, and we have made the investment- But
Kevin:from moving people around.
Deb:That's right. So, we have made the investment to create LED light bulbs, and we're figuring out how to make the investment to do things like more efficient alternatives to our infrastructural system that are also better, but they are out there. Right? It's not like, Oh, we don't know how to do it. It's like, we're figuring out how to pay for it.
Deb:We're figuring out how to get agreement around it without imposing that on people, which is what happened with highways in the 1950s. That's the work. Right? That's the thing we're trying to collectively figure out.
Kevin:And the amount of engineering it took, I there's a PBS special that I watched. I haven't checked out the Big Dig podcast. I will check out the big dig podcast because, like, everybody in my life has recommended it to me at this point, and it's it's obviously on brand. But, like, the amount of engineering they had to do to make the big dig not disrupt, traffic in the city of Boston, they were, like, literally freezing the train yard at at South Station or trying to
Deb:That's right. To drive tunnel and runway. Beneath it. Yes. Absolutely.
Deb:And it that actually real I mean, I'm doing a temp check. That really highlights a really great a really great point, which is the using the energy and the resources that we have to mitigate harms, rather than just making them somebody else's problem. And we are incredibly good at doing that when the people who are benefiting from the system we're building and the people who are being harmed by the system that we're building are the same people. And we have historically been incredibly bad at doing that when we could make other people deal with the harms. And there is no like, there's no way there's no other people.
Deb:We live in a globally connected world. Right? So, but we also have access to energy and technology in ways that were unprecedented. So we can really be like, okay, instead of trying to make systems where like, Well, it's utilitarian, it's like the harms to a few outweigh the benefits to many, or often as the harms to many outweigh the benefits to, you know, or basically consider on par with the benefits to a few, we can actually say, like, we're going to build instead of being utilitarian, we're gonna be an ethics of care. We're gonna think about how do we mitigate the harms.
Deb:We're gonna think about who gets harmed, who is vulnerable, right? What are the things that folks need? And really sort of reframe the implicit, for lack of a better word, philosophical basis behind these systems. And that was hard to do when everything was expensive and scarce. And the sooner we move to a world where we're like, no, actually, we live in a world of abundance and not a world of scarcity, and we have access to all the energy we need, right, the easier it will be for people to recognize that we can actually build a world where we just not just rich people mitigating harms for rich people, but we can actually mitigate harms for all the systems that we build.
Kevin:Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. I like one of the things that has frustrated me a lot out here are the ways that, you know, in the name of, you know, mitigating harms the, you know, a lot of good things like, you know, building housing, you know, building these, you know, building shelter for people who need shelter has been blocked and the you know, I think some of that is mindset shift. Some of that is, you know, I don't immediately see ways, you know, to to use energy to, you know, you know, ameliorate some of these things, although it's probably there.
Kevin:But
Deb:Yeah. I mean, that's things like I my property values are gonna go down if there's more housing.
Kevin:Yeah. Yeah. Or I'm gonna there's it's my window is going to be shadowed now. Shadows are a big thing here in California.
Deb:Yeah. I mean, I and and yeah. And I don't mean to over I mean, the human things are real. Right? I don't mean to oversimplify them.
Deb:Right? But our starting point for how we address them is a very different place, I think, than people largely think it is.
Kevin:Yeah. Well, and the point you make about, I think, you know, the everybody operating out of a scarcity mindset is part of why these conflicts feel so intractable. And to some extent, that's because they're you know, we are still in the the takeoff curve. And, you know, a lot of these these things still are scarce. Apparently, construction costs have gone up, like, 3 or 4 x in, you know, the Bay Area since, you know, 10 years ago.
Kevin:And so, which is, you know, materials availability and all these kinds of things, you know, labor Right.
Deb:But it's also labor. It's also like who's yeah. And as someone who's a professor at an engineering school, boy, do I have opinions on, like, what we like, basically, like, the sort of under appreciation of the trades as, you know, as sort of pathways, but I feel like that's probably a whole other podcast.
Kevin:That's a whole other podcast. Yes. Yes. Yes.
Deb:Right? About sort of the way we we again, you know, I talked about the sort of, you know, the brain on a stick, right? That we can think of the digital world, and like being knowledge workers because our needs are so well met that we don't think of them as physical material, and I think there's absolutely a very similar, sort of hierarchy with the, like, do you do work that's like, you know, like knowledge work that's like ephemeral and digital versus do you do work that is embodied in material? And, and it is a hierarchy that does not and should not, exist for a bunch of reasons, including one that there's, like, like, it's not intrinsically smarter or more one is easier or harder, right? And it's a fully, like, a fully artificial and now, actually, not just as an artificial hierarchy, but I think we are all, doing badly by that hierarchy, Right?
Deb:So
Kevin:It blinds us to the, you know, actual structures of the world, which we need to understand in order to do our those ephemeral, you know, digital jobs better.
Deb:Right. But also, like, there's lots of people who would be well served by, like, having like, doing things like, jobs that are they're, like, solving problems with their hands, and we don't have a lot you know, we don't have very good pathways for people to go into those directions. And we also have the like, Oh, if you're smart, you shouldn't be in the trades. And, I actually took electrical and auto shop when I was in high school, and I didn't I was really aware of the fact that I was the only girl. And I say girl because I was, like, 13, in those classes.
Deb:And it wasn't until a long time after, like literally, probably only like 15 years ago, that I realized that I was actually the only kid in the gifted program at my school who took auto shop and took electrical shop. And that was an actually even more profound difference, right? The idea that if, like, smart kids don't take shop, not just that girls don't take shop. And, and both of those are, like, incredible like, neither of those serves us well. Right?
Deb:And, yeah, as a society or as individuals.
Kevin:I I I don't know about you, but I've found the moments in my career where I have gotten to do things in the physical world, You know, like it's you know, you know, growing up, you know, like you say, you know, the ideal was to have a, you know, a white collar desktop. And now anytime I could get out from behind my desk is an enormous, you know, is is an enormous relief because yeah. Well, and, you know, you know, one of the pathways that a number of my my high school classmates followed was to go into trades or work on farms or, you know, military or all these, you know, like, enlisted military, all these kinds of things. There's a lot of value in that work. And yeah.
Deb:Yeah. And we we we need it. Like, we especially need it right now when we are, like, talking about it, like, rebuilding the entire technological basis of human civilization.
Kevin:Deb, this has been really lovely.
Deb:Thank you.
Kevin:I have I have really appreciated this conversation. I feel like we could have another hour and a half conversation easily, but which makes for absolutely the best kind of, conversations and podcast episodes. Dev's book is how infrastructure works, inside the systems that shape our world. Dev, any parting thoughts?
Deb:You know, I think it's all I mean, I think the most important thing for me is is to never lose sight of the fact that this is about, it's not about averting catastrophe. It's about about creating this better world, but also, to not lose sight of the fact that this is not, these are, infrastructure systems are inherently collective, which means we can only transform them together.
Kevin:Yeah, that's big. Both physically as well as, like, intellectually. Yeah.
Deb:That's right.
Kevin:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Deb:So, Kevin, thank you so much for the invitation to be here today.
Kevin:You're very welcome. Yes. Yes. This has been a ton of fun. Where can people find you online besides on Amazon and other book, things?
Deb:You know, it's it's, so speaking of infrastructure and, like, being, having mind, so I, I have a newsletter called Metafoundry that was on Tanya Letter, which has gone down, and so I'm in the process of migrating it to Button Down. And then similarly, I used to be on Twitter and I'm really not anymore. But if you can find me on Mastodon, right now I would say your best bet is probably finding the book, but fairly soon, I hope, my online presence will be kind of rebuilt from now that my, you know, the things, the systems underneath it that we take for granted.
Kevin:There we go. Exactly. Yes.
Deb:Now I'm finding a new way to build it. But I'm, I mean, I'm eminently Googleable and eminently findable, on on the Internet. And yeah. And I'm also kind of embarrassed that, like, I I mean, to, like, look face on in my infrastructural system. So
Kevin:Exactly. Exactly. There's, the shoemaker's children always go barefoot. Also, all of the links for all of the book, shops will be in the description as well as at criticalpoint.tvforward/infrastructure. So you can find her there in digital, physical, and audio.
Kevin:Thank you so much, Deb. Really appreciate this.
Deb:Thanks. Thanks for having me, Kevin.
Kevin:Yes. Take care.
Deb:Okay. Bye. Thanks so much
Kevin:for watching and listening. If you liked that, please like and subscribe down below, or rate and review us if you're listening to the audio version in your podcast app of choice. If you'd like to buy a copy of Deb's book, links to all the versions, including DRM free audiobook are available at criticalpoint.tvforward/infrastructure. If you have an incident story you'd like to tell, please email us at hello at complex systems dot group. You can find me on Twitter as at Kevin Riggle as well as all the other social networking sites.
Kevin:Intro and outro music is Sempai Funk by Paul t Starr. My consulting company, Complex Systems Group, is on the web at complexsystems.group. And with that folks, till next time.
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