How Infrastructure Works

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.