Archive

An Introduction to Infrastructure Fiction

The Someone Else’s Problem Field around infra­struc­ture is, iron­i­cal­ly enough, a mea­sure of infra­struc­ture’s ubiq­ui­ty and suc­cess. You don’t think about infra­struc­ture because you don’t need to. It just works. And when it does­n’t, there’s a phone num­ber you can not both­er call­ing, because they’ll only put you on hold any­way, and by the time you get through it’ll prob­a­bly have fixed itself, so why bother?

Seeing the Stack

It’s this infra­struc­ture that is unseen, because it is infra-structure, it is under the struc­ture. And when you start think­ing about this mas­sive web of tech­nolo­gies that keep you alive, the only inter­faces we have on a day-to-day basis are tap, turn, flush. Everything else is hid­den and unseen.