3 August

This dam in Derbyshire is threatening to fail, dumping 300 million tonnes of water onto the town below. You could see this as an engineering or infrastructure problem, but our infrastructure is a group of social relations too. We tear our hair out over politics for example being so short-term in its thinking - here's why I think, the 'long-term' in society *is* infrastructure. For example there are about 2000 dams in the UK, and their average age? 110 years. They were mostly built when Queen Victoria was on the throne. Climate change may smash many of them. I don't think these are engineering problems. Every technology is also an agreement between thousands or even millions of people, across centuries, it's what holds society together. We need a politics where infrastructure is the central topic, not just humans, because infrastructure is human society looked at through a lens going centuries backwards and forwards. Our traditions and institutions are our infrastructure, they're the same thing and we're not seeing it. If we realised non-humans (technologies, infrastructure) are the most social part of our societies, our societies would change. Instead we focus only on humans, like sport, splitting every issue into two sides and barracking for our side. And we say morality is broken, how dreadful is the world, all you need is love etc. Drivel. We're focused only on the present day and the humans living in it, and how much tax they can avoid paying. Infrastructure is the only way to bring everybody together, with a long-term focus. Notice the Chinese, a society saturated with long-term tradition, are obsessed with infrastructure. It's not a coincidence.