Deb Chachra > Quotes

“Decisions made decades or even centuries ago—how we treat wastewater, the use of alternating current instead of direct current for electricity grids, pipelines laid for fossil fuels—all of these shape not just the technologies and systems in use today but those that haven’t yet been built. That continuity means there’s a path dependence—that the kinds of systems we have today depend on the characteristics of the systems that came before—in addition to growth and accumulation, as these systems build on each other. We now live surrounded by technological systems of nearly unimaginable scale, extent, and complexity.”
― Deb Chachra, How Infrastructure Works: Inside the Systems That Shape Our World

“We’re accustomed to thinking about making the transition away from fossil fuels to renewable sources as one that we are doing under duress, making a sacrifice to stave off disaster. But that’s not what we’re doing. What we’re doing is leveling up. We—you, me, anyone who is alive today—we have the opportunity to not just live through but contribute to a species-wide transition from struggle to security, from scarcity to abundance.”
― Deb Chachra, How Infrastructure Works: Inside the Systems That Shape Our World

“Stability of all sorts, including political and economic, makes it feasible to frontload large investments of resources with the expectation of continuing benefits over a long period of time. What we think of as the primary characteristic of infrastructure - that it just works, and works invisibly to support other activities - is made possible by stability. A habitable planet with a stable climate is the infrastructure to our human-made infrastructure.”
― Deb Chachra, How Infrastructure Works: Inside the Systems That Shape Our World

“Economic growth cannot sensibly be treated as an end in itself. Development has to be more concerned with enhancing the lives we lead and the freedoms we enjoy. Expanding the freedoms that we have reason to value not only makes our lives richer and more unfettered, but also allows us to be fuller social persons, exercising our own volitions and interacting with—and influencing—the world in which we live.”
― Deb Chachra, How Infrastructure Works: Inside the Systems That Shape Our World

“The 2021 budget of the U.S. National Weather Service (NWS) was about $1.2 billion dollars. The commercial weather business in the country, most of which is built on the data provided by the NWS, is a seven billion dollar industry, and the direct economic benefit of weather forecasting is estimated at $13 billion.”
― Deb Chachra, How Infrastructure Works: Inside the Systems That Shape Our World

“Instead, infrastructural systems are repaired or rebuilt in modular increments, like steadily working through the replacement of water mains in a neighborhood or fixing potholes every spring. But that continuity has a flip side: it locks us into these ways of doing things. The QWERTY keyboard layout was designed to keep fast typists from jamming the keys on manual typewriters, but it’s still in use on smartphone touchscreens. Decisions made decades or even centuries ago—how we treat wastewater, the use of alternating current instead of direct current for electricity grids, pipelines laid for fossil fuels—all of these shape not just the technologies and systems in use today but those that haven’t yet been built. That continuity means there’s a path dependence—that the kinds of systems we have today depend on the characteristics of the systems that came before—in addition to growth and accumulation, as these systems build on each other. We now live surrounded by technological systems of nearly unimaginable scale, extent, and complexity.”
― Deb Chachra, How Infrastructure Works: Inside the Systems That Shape Our World

“Any sufficiently advanced negligence is indistinguishable from malice.”
― Deb Chachra, How Infrastructure Works: Inside the Systems That Shape Our World

“Infrastructural citizenship is not just care at scale, but care in perpetuity.”
― Deb Chachra, How Infrastructure Works: Inside the Systems That Shape Our World

“But it’s still really clear to me that many of Rand’s ideas are prevalent in culture, especially American culture, and especially in engineering and technology: they prioritize making things over caregiving and maintenance, the new and novel over what’s sustained, ideas and artifacts that can deliver a profit over activities that need an ongoing commitment of money and other resources, and individualism over acting collectively.”
― Deb Chachra, How Infrastructure Works: Inside the Systems That Shape Our World

“...infrastructural systems shape the relationships we have with people who will be in these places in the future and the relationships they might have with each other.”
― Deb Chachra, How Infrastructure Works: Inside the Systems That Shape Our World

“It's the risk a society runs when it falls into the habit of responding to long term risks with short term solutions. What I've been describing here, the sort of underinvestment in infrastructure that leads to poor grades on an infrastructure report card is part of that fifth risk. What societies need instead, argues Lewis, is effective program management - all the actual boring work that needs to happen in the technologically complex world we live in. Building new facilities, with the exciting ribbon-cutting ceremonies that come with them, is a part of this work, but mostly it's having a checklist and a schedule and a cohort of trained staff who can carry out the routine inspections and maintenance of all the bridges in a region, with all of the funding and policy that entails in a program that is stable over a span of decades or longer.”
― Deb Chachra, How Infrastructure Works