Repairing Infrastructures

Abstract

An investigation of the causes and consequences of the strange, ambivalent, and increasingly central role of infrastructure repair in modern life. Infrastructures—communication, food, transportation, energy, and information—are all around us, and their enduring function and influence depend on the constant work of repair. In this book, Christopher Henke and Benjamin Sims explore the causes and consequences of the strange, ambivalent, and increasingly central role of infrastructure repair in modern life. Henke and Sims offer examples, from local to global, to investigate not only the role of repair in maintaining infrastructures themselves but also the social and political orders that are created and sustained through them. Repair can encompass not only the kind of work we most commonly associate with the term but also any set of practices aimed at restoring a sense of normalcy or credibility to the places and institutions we inhabit in everyday life. From cases as diverse as the repair of building systems on a university campus, a conflict over retrofitting a bridge while protecting murals painted on it, and the global challenge posed by climate change, Henke and Sims assemble a range of examples to illustrate key conceptual points about the role of repair. They show that repair is an essential if often overlooked aspect of understanding the broader impact and politics of infrastructures. Understanding repair helps us better understand infrastructures and the scope of their influence on our lives. The open access edition of this book was made possible by generous funding from Arcadia – a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin.

4. Streaming against the Environment: Digital Infrastructures, Video Compression, and the Environmental Footprint of Video Streaming

“…Scholars of science and technology studies emphasize this relationality as well, since the "work of one person is the infrastructure of another" (Bowker et al 2009, 98); see also Star and Ruhleder (1996, 122-23). 5 Repair and maintenance are similar moments that make infrastructures visible; see Henke and Sims (2020). devices are often seen as outside the internet system boundary.…”

Algorithmic Food Justice

“…In the case of smart cities, for example, the responsibility for emissions reduction is delegated to networked infrastructures and big data, which are intended to produce carbon efficiencies through real-time data gathering, analysis and control (Gabrys, 2014). This is a 'repair as maintenance' vision (Henke and Sims, 2020), where computational efficiency is given priority so that existing logics of valuing and exchange can go on (relatively) uninterrupted.…”

Archival infrastructure and the information backlog

“…Given that many archival institutions are publicly funded, it makes sense that the archival profession would look to the public as an essential constituent in the effort to acquire the resources necessary for infrastructural upkeep. It is a reminder that as Henke and Sims state “technical problem solving alone is rarely sufficient to enact a successful repair” ( 2020 , p. 82). The idea that public pressure can change or at least refocus government priorities is a necessary belief in a functioning democracy even if the headwinds against which archives struggle are substantial.…”

“…These accounts contain within them a recognition that power exists in and alongside the archival infrastructure and that it must be revealed, if not outright interrogated, for transformation to occur. According to Henke and Sims ( 2020 ), there are two distinct approaches to repair as it relates to issues of power—repair that preserves the structures of the status quo and repair that corrects or realigns its structures. In the transformative framework, people “often have very different perspectives and beliefs about whether any slippage has occurred at all, whether it warrants repair, and what a possible repair might look like” (Henke and Sims 2020 , p 72).…”

“…In the USA, a 2005 article by Mark Greene and Dennis Meissner was a particular inflection point, with the clarion call that emerged from their work—‘more product less process’ (MPLP)—a direct response to and an attempt to correct this mulish problem. The backlog is a concrete instantiation of slippage , a gap between a system’s current and desired state (Henke and Sims 2020 ). The backlog occurs because the rate of flow between the creator and the archive (the pipeline that feeds the archival infrastructure) is growing exponentially (Greene and Meissner 2005 ).…”