Roads, Bridges and Clouds
You may think that an infrastructure is an organising principle which aims at accelerating the course of events, for example by creating links between different technological and social forms. The rationale is that defining infrastructure separately from the things connected by it creates a new layer of communication which can be taken in isolation and improved to speed up the transmission between the points in space. Yet, comparing the possibilities of infrastructures to ways in which business makes money, it is worth asking - is acceleration the correct understanding of the relationship that infrastructure has with time? Could it be that infrastructures exist to make things happen slower, rather than faster?
The fast connection
Infrastructure, as a means of technological mediation of communications between its nodes such as institutions, people, buildings and information resources, is functioning as a vast network. In its networked capacity, the function of the infrastructure to reproduce the sociotechnical relations (Harvey, 2016:5) by being is equally involved with the inside and outside - its internal matters and the communications it has with the materials, events and relations it mediates. Due to this communicative function, there can be no doubt that the infrastructures are always built to facilitate the flow between its nodes. Political theorist Timothy Mitchell, however, does not take such acceleration of transmission for granted and calls instead for clarifying what is exactly the infrastructure’s character of mediation between space and time. The somewhat unexpected outcome is that the infrastructures yield larger benefits by introducing the dysfunctions that would delay the future, rather than speeding things up.
Infrastructures impede communications in at least two ways. First is the congestion linked to the flow of materials. For example, building a high-speed road may allow travelling cross-country at greater speeds, but at the same time attracts more traffic which may lead to worse congestion than before the highway was introduced. The second kind of delay, which deals with infrastructure as the channel of the flow of finance, is specifically tied to the generation of value. In this sense, Mitchell (citing Wright, 2011) identifies the infrastructure as something which ‘moves paper’, in the form of finance documents - share certificates, bank loans and bonds. In the transportation of these goods, the geographical location is secondary to the effects that the documents have over time. Investment gains its value not from the processes that make things happen faster, but on the contrary, by introducing delays and stretching the flow of time. Infrastructures that carry such products, Mitchell observes, are the high-speed connections which are predominantly used to slow things down.
[Railroads] are built not to transport these financial instruments across space, but to provide the means to create them and carry them through time. - Timothy Mitchell
The space-time conversion
The conversion of temporal durations into distances in space becomes possible by slowing things down within the tangle of infrastructural knots. Software infrastructures require private access keys and user permission schemes in the same way as ports, rail lines and highways require authorisation of access. This in turn necessitates the creation of committees, legal systems and other kinds of authorities which warrant the logistical outcomes by having the right to halt the process at any stage for inspections and approvals. As writer and critic Marina Vishmidt notes, the infrastructure stands contrary to the institution.
The institution here is a mere snapshot of life, an abstract space created by the organisation’s operations. An institution is performative in that it is ‘amenable to re-arrangement through struggle and different forms of inhabitation and dispersal.’(Vishmidt, 2021: 14.) This means that the institution constantly adjusts depending on the current state of negotiations of what it stands for. On the contrary, the infrastructure starts from the concrete conditions of the institution, and due to its durability is capable of bearing with the dysfunction of the institution and its conflicts of interest, making it possible to reveal the underlying political stakes.
The capital captures the future in the present by offering a discount on purchasing the future money today, which essentially means recording the future in terms of space.
By introducing the rights of access to its different parts, infrastructure enables the capital’s accumulation strategy. Capital wants to delay, in Mitchell’s observation, because the future is uncertain, and therefore the revenues grow depending on how far into the future the prospect is extended. At the same time, the capital captures the future in the present by offering a discount on purchasing the future money today, which essentially means recording the future, a temporal notion, in terms of space, as a promise in the form of a physical document. This conversion, Vishmidt admits, introduces the limits by creating a situation of momentum that carries the process of production in a specific direction, making it difficult or unreasonable to change or think about the future outside of the promises already made. The value gets extracted by creating a break, or a discontinuity in the knowledge relay, between the present, where the future is captured and is used to substantiate the value claims and the actual happening of a future event.
@RudeNobot, FREAKSHOW exhibition, Zurich, CH.
Dysfunction of a cloud
Similarly to material infrastructures built with steel and concrete, digital infrastructures are designed with the same purpose of time-space conversion and therefore have to be as durable as roads and bridges. The valorisation mechanism, which has developed a highly nuanced expression in the physical infrastructures, is adopted in the digital sphere both by the public cloud and blockchain-based distributed databases. Due to the computational nature of used resources, cloud infrastructure is a mixed bag of human and non-human relations within the software system, and therefore comes into inevitable friction with the valorisation mechanism enforced via the institutions. In her 2017 report titled Roads and Bridges, the researcher and writer Nadia Eghbal notes that the infrastructure of the internet is crumbling under the pressure of large cloud corporations. She calls for a decentralised and community-centric approach in maintaining the road and bridges of programming code, which would make it easier ‘for institutions to contribute time and money, [by] expanding the pool of open source contributors, and developing best practices and policies across infrastructure projects.’ (Eghbal, 2016:10) Doubtlessly, this is a reasonable proposition. Yet, as we learn from Mitchell, while the infrastructure can be repaired, the key matter of transmission is essentially the same: the main purpose of internet protocols, as of the railroads, is to move paper and spur the new circuits of finance.
References
- Eghbal, Nadia. 2016. “Roads and Bridges: The Unseen Labor Behind Our Digital Infrastructure.”
- Mitchell, Timothy. 2020. Infrastructures Work on Time.
- Vishmidt, Marina. 2021. ““Only as Self-Relating Negativity”: Infrastructure and Critique.” Journal of Science and Technology of the Arts, 13-24 Páginas. .
- Wright. Richard. 2011. Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (New York: Norton, 2011).