This is part 1 of a 5-part series on the politics of preservation and power. In our field, what is often right in front of us is infrastructure. We treat it as stable, neutral, and purely technical. We act as if the servers, standards, and software we rely on are objective tools. But if you’ve followed my writing here—especially my recent series, The Ecosystem of Possible Futures—you know that I believe infrastructure is never just technical.
In many societies, infrastructure (and I mean all infrastructure, really) has consistently reflected and reinforced deeper civic structures: community, accountability, and shared responsibility. But today, those structures are eroding globally. What happens when community is no longer a given? When open infrastructure is exploited? When does resilience become a human challenge rather than a technical one? I want us to encounter the infrastructure we build not as neutral pipes, but as political and cultural acts.