What Will We Do When Our Infrastructure Breaks Down?

Posted on January 2, 2008 by Dave Pollard

Larry W. Smith/European Pressphoto Agency

Lately I’ve been on a rant about the declining quality of products, services and infrastructure in our society, as corporations and governments alike cut corners to try to reduce costs. It’s slow and inexorable, and the strategy seems to be that if the quality of everything declines, no one will be able to complain about anything in particular, and if it declines slowly enough, we won’t notice.

Well, we notice. Cheap, toxic Chinese crap that breaks as soon as you open it. Electronics that are designed to be replaced after two years with something newer. Non-existent, indifferent, dreadful, ignorant service. Infrastructure services like phone networks and utilities that are constantly failing. Health and insurance services that suddenly, after obscene price escalation, aren’t available at all. Oligopoly and warranty price-gouging. CDs and DVDs and low-energy lightbulbs and rechargeable batteries that break down in a month. Roads and bridges and water-pipes that are collapsing before our eyes.

The objective is to get you to throw everything away and buy a new one as quickly as possible, by making the products themselves cheaper to buy than to repair. It is all part of the process of getting us addicted to consumption, by requiring us to do more and more of it. It is also part of a process of continuously lowering expectations, so you get used to crappy products, crappy services and crappy infrastructure, and accept that this is how it must be, and how it has always been.

I’ve been in 400-year-old houses that, with next to no maintenance, look better and are in better shape than 20-year-old houses that have been money pits since they were built. So there is no question in my mind that, if we had governments with the balls to make it unlawful (and hence unprofitable) to sell crappy products and provide crappy service and infrastructure, we would all live better, and more responsibly, and have a lot more time on our hands for things other than buying crap.

But there’s a bigger problem looming with shoddy goods, services and infrastructure. They have an extraordinarily high maintenance and replacement cost, measured both in dollars and in hours of work. When the economy is humming, this is manageable. But what happens when an economic collapse occurs or a permanent resource scarcity emerges? What if suddenly people cannot afford to replace last year’s load of crap with this year’s? What happens when the cost to transport the raw materials stolen from struggling nations to the Chinese slave-labour factories, and then to transport the manufactured crap from China to centralized super-warehouses and then to super-stores in distant mega-malls and then to your home and then to the toxic landfill sites back in struggling nations, suddenly becomes prohibitively high? What happens when the phone lines and servers and networks and power grids go down and the utilities can’t afford to pay workers to fix them because none of the customers can afford to pay their bills? Or because some new disease has so spooked everyone that the people who maintain the shoddy, vulnerable, fragile, under-serviced infrastructure on which we depend so heavily just refuse to show up for work at any price?

I’ve done some study of the impact on infrastructure of economic collapses (depressions, currency collapses, runaway inflation etc.) and also the impact on infrastructure of severe disease outbreaks throughout history — and the lesson is that maintenance of infrastructure shuts down when either occurs. In past that hasn’t been too bad, because the infrastructure was built to last and because people weren’t that dependent on it anyway. But today, with shoddy, under-maintained infrastructure and our utter dependence on it, and on each other, globally, to do anything and everything, we have a disaster waiting to happen. Simulations suggest that in a pandemic 60% of infrastructure maintenance people would refuse to show up for work. In a depression, infrastructure is just left to crumble until the depression ends and there’s money in governnment coffers to start maintaining it again. Telephone lifelines therefore become unusable, not because workers aren’t available to fix broken lines, but because the utilities can’t afford to pay them and they can’t afford to work for nothing.

Imagine how your life would change if you suddenly had to make do without telephone lines, without Internet connections, without reliable electricity to power your information and entertainment devices (not to mention your kitchen appliances), without access to all the files on hard drives and servers, without home delivery of fuels. How dependent is your livelihood, your connection to the people you love, your every activity that brings joy and meaning to your life, your very ability to exist, on infrastructure we all take for granted?

I live in a community well outside the city, where phone and Internet and power go off at least once a month. It’s infuriating. It makes you feel completely helpless. In the dead of winter, it’s terrifying.

What will we do when the infrastructure breaks down, not just intermittently but regularly, for extended periods of days, weeks, months at a time?

We will, of course, do what we must. We will find ways to do without. We will regretfully abandon the people we love who are not in walking distance, and hope that someone who is in walking distance to them will connect with them, and we will likewise look for people close at hand to live with, love, work with, help out and be helped by. We will, many if not most of us, cease to be employed, and have to find new employment that is not dependent on communication and transportation infrastructure. We will dress for comfort rather than fashion. We will relearn to do things ‘by hand’.

We will learn to take care of ourselves and each other, and our electronic and virtual communities will gradually be supplanted by physical communities.

Physically, we can do all these things. The problem is that we are now addicted to so many of the activities, conveniences and pleasures that only a functioning infrastructure can offer. So we are going to go through a massive, collective withdrawal. It is not our physical ability to transition to a different way of living that I’m worried about, arduous though that will be (read The Long Emergency for some scenarios). It is our psychological ability to make such a transition. I’m not sure most of us are up for it. Just as few of us could survive in the wilderness by ourselves today, I suspect few of us could survive in an electronically and rapid-transport-disabled world.

It will be like suddenly waking up blind. For many, it will be devastating, just too hard, more trouble than it’s worth. For them, a life without all the things our civilization has addicted us to, simply won’t be worth living.

Are you ready for this? Is it even possible to be ready for this?

Category: Why Civilization is Unsustainable

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8 Responses to What Will We Do When Our Infrastructure Breaks Down?

Srinath Vellure says:

January 2, 2008 at 19:53

Hi Dave,This is already a reality for some Third-world nations, its only the affluent nations which might not yet have got a taste of this, sooner or later everybody is going to get a taste of this unfortunately!Live Simple! The Mantra its easy to say, its living in simplicity that causes problems. Ask any American to give up his Gasoline gusling(forgive my spelling) SUV, now how many are willing to do that? Make do with less lighting/gas who is interested in that? I pay and I enjoy! That is the philosophy.Community living will reduce wastage by atleast 50% by having shared kitchen, car, housing, but that will lead to loss of privacy, are we willing to do that.I dont think we are ready for that yet.Thought provoking!Thanks,Srinath
Bill P says:

January 3, 2008 at 09:49

An interesting idea of how we are being displaced with a sense of loss and loneliness.
Barbara Rubin says:

January 3, 2008 at 12:53

Actually, loss and loneliness preceded the addiction of the population to internet and entertainments like TV. It was easier to replace loss of human contact with its simulations, particularly as Americans were forced to increase productivity even as wages and benefits fell. So many work hours lessened accessibility of contacts to phones initially and even those are fading as people want silence at the end of a 10-12 hour workday spent largely on phones.Emotions numbed through loss of contact are re-created in dramas and internet games etc. Keeps the masses stimulated without actually producing anything from those emotions. Relationships begin to crumble when emotions are so removed from real interaction since behavior changes with the repsonses of others to feelings expressed in action. But if there is no one there…why work so hard to keep the one coveniently near but inconveniently demanding?As far as infrastructure goes, it is a multi-level problem that needs to be broken up. I begin at the level of information. If consumers knew how much of their money was being thrown away on poison, legally and lethally missing from product labels, consumption would decline markedly. What individuals failed to learn for themselves could be learned from consumer protection groups. Currently, given the fact that labels lie to us or tell us nothing, consumer groups are ignored largely with the public believing that the EPA and FDA actually test or review products for their safety. They don’t.So I would begin with truth in labeling first to get people used to the idea that they need to know what they are doing – mindfulness about what you wear, ingest, use to beautify, furnish, build etc. This would release many businesses from the prison of imoral trade associations which exist solely to lobby for maintaining consumer ignorance and cut out competitors with better products. In this day and age of very successful corporations setting the tone of unbridled greed(really, IBM had no need to cut worker benefits to continue to thrive), resulting low salaries and frequent job changes have led consumers to believe they can’t afford to buy products not sold at Walmart. Realistically, most necessities can be made economically or be home made (like cleaning solutions) at little cost. Long hours at bad jobs leave people buying crap without questions being asked. But they would read labels if shown how much they don’t know about the real source of their medical bills – the pollution in their homes.Modern construction is not the same as American construction. In Europe, you aren’t allowed to make or sell formaldehyde filled sheetrock, insulation, cabinetry etc. But the lie about our being an ownership society (which led to the sub-prime lending crash) has been revealed, though blamed again on consumers, keeps people buying badly made homes or cheaply renovated older homes – and more sick buildings. I have tested many residences toxicologically and found them uninhabitable. We are walking into gas chambers these days – only they are often called ‘home’ or ‘school’ or ‘office’. Yet these structures are rented and sold with none the wiser until diseases crop up and the home is lost from resulting disability and destitution.We may have to allow that more landlords able to invest in better quality, more expensive housing will benefit renters more than widespread ownership of cheap crap. It is also important to remember that “Green” housing is not the same as “healthy” housing. Just because something isn’t petrochemically based, doesn’t make it healthy. As consumers get used to taking control of the marketplace based upon knowledge (lobby for full disclosure), they will take more control of their lives. Ignorance becomes habit but any high school level student is more than capable of learning the essentials life requires. Of course, it is now a race to make those changes quickly so all our efforts are needed. Most of our worst systems are based upon lies -teaching people the philosophy of checking premises (good old Aristotle) is of primary importance. Example – Social Security is in danger. Nope, that is medicare and medicaid but the first one is believed since conservatives want private accounts over public safety insurance nets and a lowering of the tax involved. And the main danger to the economy from medical costs is all the badly made/designed/misused drugs that cost the system 180 billion annually in direct purchases. An additional 177+ billion goes to deaths and injuries DUE to the use of drugs. (2001 statistics from pharmacuetical journal).The premises have to be revealed. We need to write for more than just one another.Barbara
Jay, writer MemberSpeed.com says:

January 4, 2008 at 08:20

We have gotten so used to technology and all the accessories that come with it that it seems impossible to live without phones and electricity, etc. I don’t think we will ever be ready for such a scenario. But this doesn’t mean that we will never be able to adapt. Just that we won’t be able to prepare.
Mariella says:

January 4, 2008 at 17:30

Today I read in a local newspaper that in California, an experimental robot that can substitute Internet in emergencies where the internet and cell phones lines collapse, has been developed…
Siona says:

January 4, 2008 at 17:31

We’ll never be ready, but if and when it happens, as Jay wrote, we’ll adapt and make do. I’ve lived in many homes without amenities like running water or indoor heat, or with only the most sporadic power, and it’s merely different–not, I’d say, much better or worse. Again, we can’t prepare, but we can trust that we’ll learn. In any case, given the usual bent of your arguments, I’d wonder that we wouldn’t learn far more easily how to thrive in this infrastructure-free ‘devastation’, given that right now we need to learn how to navigate a world for which our biology and ancestry, arguably, is wholly unequipped. :)
Hash says:

January 5, 2008 at 08:20

As Dave’s post suggests, those who do survive, or are in a position to survive, may not want to. It’s not just a matter of failing to cope with material privations. Clive Thompson’s final column at Wired magazine describes the concept of solastalgia: “It’s a mashup of the roots solacium (comfort) and algia (pain), which together aptly conjure the word nostalgia. In essence, it’s pining for a lost environment.” – http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/16-01/st_thompsonPerhaps, as climate change hits home, we’re in for a collective spell of homesickness, 21st Century global blues.
Nathan Shepperd says:

January 10, 2008 at 05:53

I believe a few of you should be reading Kevin Carson’s work: http://mutualist.blogspot.com/The “governments aren’t doing enough” complaint is a bit silly, considering that almost all policies have been geared towards bringing about the results we see. State power has been used to impose a system aligned to the goals of large corporations, and it has worked very well so far, but the unsustainabilty problem will catch up with it.Survival is dependent on people such as Dave trying to figure out alternatives to replace what we have now with something better before a crisis hits. At least that’s the way I see it. Certainly a lot more positive than the “humans are a disease” train of thought which is just depressing and probably not very helpful ultimately – more likely to provoke a head in the sand reaction…