Even as digital inclusion was celebrating a peak in interest, long-time practitioners in the space were preparing for what comes next and stressing the importance of thinking sustainability.
Alice Jo: In a 2018
, you argued that social stability is mediated by the everyday work of maintenance and care for physical and social infrastructures. How has the COVID-19 pandemic affected our ability to practice maintenance and care?
Shannon Mattern: The pandemic has revealed the brokenness in many of our infrastructures, including healthcare, education, and access to internet connectivity. The fact that reliable access to the internet informs people’s access to healthcare and education has become blatantly obvious because so many institutions have been virtualized. One of the sayings about infrastructure is that it often doesn’t reveal itself until it breaks; we can conveniently forget about its existence because it flows underneath our everyday activities, except for the people who work to maintain it. I think people came to realize how dependent their daily comforts are on folks in the background: bringing packages to their doors, taking away their trash, delivering f