One way to activate your reality-politics filters is when watching films or TV shows, ignoring the human…

One way to activate your reality-politics filters is when watching films or TV shows, ignoring the human characters, and focusing instead on the infrastructure inside which the drama is unfolding. The cities or towns, the cars, the trains etc. /1 https://t.co/LZLA9PaZ31

All of them will easily outlive any of the human characters and their dramas. Like Sydney’s new Central Station. We make the infrastructure a backdrop, but you can reverse that prejudice in an instant. The making and maintaining of that infrastructure is fundamentally human. /2 https://t.co/f33ukOYGmP

How could it not be? Humans commission these structures, humans build them and maintain them. Humans’ lives are lived within them, for generations. The energy and effort needed is enormous. These structures have to endure, for generations. /3

It’s by building things that civilisations even exist. It’s all that gives them continuity. All of the chattering of daily news cycles and fads and fashions, of elections, is hot air by comparison. Disappearing into the void, every single day. /4

Accompanied the entire time by this much deeper human work, of building. Civilisation is engineered into being, not discussed into being. It’s only by building (in the widest meaning of that term) that humans cohere and agree, in historical terms. What they build binds them. /5

The labour of building and then maintaining the infrastructure of civilisation is not a matter of opinion. It’s stuff that needs to be objectively done. Our objects and structures bind us together, in the task of building and maintaining them. /6 https://t.co/H6myFhOBQE

Engineering is much more a social than a technical act. It directly weaves together the competing and conflicting beliefs of humans, into built structures, than then bind people. Nothing else creates lasting agreement. Why Roman civilisation endured for so long. /7

The parliament of Australia, the seat of our democracy, is also a building. The ‘seats’ of parliament are now occupied by entirely different people to this photo. The continuity is the building and the processes it houses. Human debate is usually boring, ephemeral. /8 https://t.co/xhlnzD1nJt

When I’m physically surrounded by it, in some social context, my attention is always drawn instead to the building and other infrastructure that is supposed to be just background. To marvel at the skill and effort that went into it, the invisibility of those who made it. /9

The greatest disempowerment of the ‘working class’ was to stop building things. The great fantasy of the economy shifted much of that work offshore. The skill needed to build things was a fundamental part of the social agency of working class people. /10 https://t.co/8ZopZ14546

It made them much more than just ‘workers’. It made them indispensable. We’re discovering how much right now, when their absence leaves us without basic social goods. Societies that build things succeed and survive. It’s the only path to longevity. /end