These systems—including water, sewage, electricity, telecommunications, transportation and supply chains, and other networks—have worked astonishingly well, making possible many lives of comfort and self-determination that include social, civic, and economic agency.

As physical networks, these systems need energy to function, and the vast majority of that energy comes from combustion of fossil fuels. At the same time, these networks traverse a landscape that is already changing in unprecedented ways as a result of anthropogenic climate change. That means that these collective systems are both the primary contributors to greenhouse gas emissions, and are highly vulnerable to increasing climate variability, with devastating human costs. We’re already seeing this happening, with droughts, wildfires, powerful storms, and more. But the converse is also true: we now have the opportunity to transform these systems in ways that not only mitigate their contribution to climate change, but which also take advantage of them. They are our most powerful tools to take care of our shared needs in the face of a changing climate. These systems can be—indeed, they must be—resilient and equitable in addition to functional and sustainable. This transformation is made possible by the development of a critical mass of technologies that allow us to harness renewable energy sources, including solar, wind, hydropower, and geothermal, at scale. This energy is abundant, decentralised, and freely available nearly everywhere on the planet – characteristics that make it technologically, economically, and politically very different than energy from combustion. It both enables and requires a reconsideration of how we use energy, which basically means how we do everything in the physical world. And that means a rethink of our infrastructural networks. We are still in the early stages of this transformation from a civilisation that can only get energy from setting something on fire, to one that can effectively harness the energy all around us so that everyone can thrive. That means that we don’t have a roadmap for how to get from here to there. But we can establish some principles to guide our navigation.

1. Transforming infrastructure is transforming culture.
These systems shape what we can do, and how we do it, often in ways that we never think about. To change these systems, we need to change how we think.

2. Plan for a future of abundance and thriving, not scarcity and strife.
Both are self-fulfilling prophecies.

3. Build infrastructural systems to meet needs.
The purpose of infrastructure is to make it possible to take care of each other, at scale. They underpin our individual agency by providing for our needs collectively. They are part of how we invest in ourselves.

4. The most important benefits and harms of infrastructural systems can’t be measured in money.
Money is just one measure of value; it shouldn’t be the only one, nor should it set the terms for every discussion.

5: Defend the public good.
Infrastructural systems draw on and are embedded in the natural environment. They will serve people who are not yet born. Work to sustain a shared commons for the future. Think for posterity.

6: Avoid lock-in.
Infrastructural systems facilitate some ways of doing things and disincentivise alternative ways, in equal measure and into the future. Try very, very hard not to recommit doing things that you’d rather do differently. That often means either pre-planning or additional resources, or both, to facilitate the transition and avoid the easy ‘default’ option of continuing to do things the same way.

7: Be flexible and exploratory; favour reversibility.
We are in the earliest stages of a total transformation of these systems, and we know that we will have better options in the future. Small-scale systems, radual roll-outs, and reversibility are all good! Invest in research (and learn from others) to find ways to do even better.

8: Build systems that are decentralised but federated.
The economics of capital and the thermodynamics of fossil fuels favour centralisation, but now there is an opportunity to build out infrastructural networks that don’t concentrate power and resources in the same way, particularly by leveraging new sensor and communications technologies to share information and decision making across the network. Infrastructural networks often lend themselves to being composed of smaller elements, which are modular and interoperable.

9: Use renewable energy to recover and reuse materials, to avoid extraction and waste.
On a planetary scale, energy is abundant and infinitely renewing, but the Earth is a nearly-closed system for matter: every atom has to come from somewhere and end up somewhere. We can use energy inputs to close materials loops. Think about a forest: the leaves of trees capture solar energy, then fall to the ground, decay, and become the raw material for new leaves. We can do this for our technological systems too.

10: Don’t displace harms onto others.
If you can’t live with them, find ways to mitigate them. Any networks that can deliver benefits to communities can be—and historically have been—used to displace the harms to other communities, whether that it’s through extraction of resources or displacement or concentration of pollution of all kinds. Reject the implicit utilitarianism—some people have to suffer so others benefit—in favour of an ethics of care, where everyone gets what they need to thrive.

11: Make it public.
Infrastructural systems are often network monopolies that deliver necessary resources, which are not market goods. This produces an intense moral hazard for investor-owned utilities, which are incentivised to charge more for poor provision, and to push damages to the commons (like the environment) and the future. Public provision (including co-operatives and other community-led modes) serves to align all the incentives of these systems and has accountability to the people they serve.

12: Infrastructural networks are inherently collective.
We are all in this together.

How Infrastructure Works

All of these ideas are explored in greater detail in How Infrastructure Works: Inside the Systems that Shape Our World Riverhead Books/Torva, 2023 – (available in Media Evolution's Futures Library). This list owes an intellectual debt to Ursula Franklin’s ‘checklist for public decsion-making’ in her 1989 CBC Massey Lectures, The Real World of Technology (revised edition, House of Anansi Press, 2004).