Universal (And Unconditional) Basic Infrastructure

Building The Alternative To Omelas

Power flows through water pipes. You may have heard something about a barrel of a gun being the source, but that’s wrong. Who controls the infrastructure controls the world. If your water can be switched off by someone at a moments notice, they are the ones in charge. Physical creatures have physical needs, and those physical needs can be used to control them. The hydraulic empire. Power flows through water pipes.

This constrains human action significantly. If the alternative to a bad situation is to die on the streets, most people will choose to remain in the bad situation. The concept of F* You money is based on this. If you can’t walk away, the person who has what you need controls you. This happens at all scales, from abusive households to oppressive petrostates. It doesn’t even need to be the absolute floor of survival, either. It may be you can walk away, but to do so would severely impact your quality of life, and you judge it a better fate to let someone keep you upon a leash than to live in a tent and beg for food. I’m not judging; I did not choose the tent option either.

Access to resources determines quality of life. But more than that, access to infrastructure determines quality of life. You may have a powerful waterfall, but without a hydroelectric plant and wires to transmit the power you don’t have a way to use that resource. Having vast quantities of gas doesn’t help you at all if you don’t have a boiler. There may be water, water, everywhere, but you don’t own the desalination plant, leaving you at the mercy of whoever does. Infrastructure is key to human freedom – and so we must make it available to all, without condition, with bottom up control and enough provision that it does remain available to all without condition. All must have a true choice to walk away.

What is the basic infrastructure that is needed? Vinay Gupta (@leashless) offers the Six Ways To Die model (https://www.appropedia.org/Six_ways_to_die). Too hot, too cold, hunger, thirst, injury, illness. We have built up multiple shells of infrastructure to protect us from these. Houses, with gas boilers to provide heat in winter and air conditioning to keep it out in summer. A logistics chain that stretches around the world to ensure our supermarket shelves are stocked with food. Water treatment plants and pipes to distribute it. Walls and fences to keep out the bears. Showers and sanitation systems to prevent us dying of cholera and other things. On top of this we add transport systems that allow us to travel and communication systems that give us near instant conversation with people anywhere in the world (and a little bit off it). We build machines to take much of the drudgery out of life, freeing us up for other things and immensely improving our standard of living – yes, I am talking about the washing machine, and also the oven. All these things are taken for granted in the more economically developed parts of the world; but even here not everyone has access to all of these things, for various reasons, and those in other parts the number who lack is far greater. What we would consider an incredibly basic standard of living is one that a large number of our kin have not and perhaps cannot attain.

I aim to change that. In the world I aim to build, everyone – all eight billion and counting of us – will have access to toilets, to showers, to washing machines. To have clean water and low cost food from a cafeteria. To have at a minimum somewhere dry to sleep at night. To have a bicycle and a network to get to places without the need of a license or a fuel station, and to have a phone and a network to enable them to connect to others. This, here, is my goal.

Toilets, of course, are in much of the world already publicly available conveniences. In some contexts, such as motorway service stations, showers are also provided. Public conveniences are not alien to us, and there are ways we can reduce their costs – showers can be fitted with heat exchanges to recycle heat instead of wasting it down the drain, and toilet functions can be separated; it is much easier, and less wasteful of water, to provide a urine only toilet, which makes up most of the usage, than it is to provide one that can handle excrement. We already do this, it’s a matter of improving and scaling.

The washing machine is underrated as a contributor to life quality and particularly gender equality. Washing clothes by hand is hard work; hard work that usually falls upon women to perform. It should not be ignored how valuable launderettes are to living standards. This is not a novel concept I am proposing here; many places where in-unit laundry isn’t the norm already rely upon them. But it is a concept that is key infrastructure. Centralised washing facilities will benefit from greater economies of scale to invest in cheap hot water vs domestic washing machines, also, reducing costs.

Shelter. The Hexayurt will be familiar to many who know of Burning Man. Shepherd huts familiar to many who don’t. The oldest constructed thing on the list by far, predating even land animals, and a relatively cheap thing to provide in a very basic form (the politics of being allowed to provide it, however, is… rather more expensive). The easiest to provide materially, by far the hardest to provide politically. But in an automobile dominant society, those who own cars already have it.

Food and water are of course even older than shelter in the list of needs. Drinkable water in a world where £20 hiking water filters exist is not a terribly difficult thing to provide. Food will be more expensive, likely the most expensive thing on this list; the Sikhs are to be admired for their practice of feeding all who ask for a meal. Community cafeterias that cook in bulk should be able to reduce this cost to the minimum possible, being significantly more efficient than home cooking and able to utilise cheap hot water for much of the cooking. It’s important to note the difference between a cafeteria and a restaurant here – I am talking here about self service from a counter, not something incredibly labour intensive and hence expensive. Likewise the meal choice will not be extensive, and meat may not be on the menu. Absolute minimum cost is the goal here, whilst achieving a fully balanced and nutritious diet that ideally caters to people’s various dietary requirements.

Transport. Whilst it would be great to have a functioning and extensive railway and tram system, the focus here is on options that are (1) very simple and (2) by nature decentralised (remember, who controls the infrastructure controls the world). Cycle paths fit these requirements. Cheap, low maintenance (relative to roads), and electric options are available for those with limited mobility – a track that can take a bike can take a scooter. Bicycles can be maintained by the individual owner with a few tools and dramatically extend range versus walking.

Finally, the internet. Being connected to others is possibly the most important thing for humans, with a higher priority than even survival. Being connected to human knowledge and knowing where to turn for help is an incredibly useful thing. This, fortunately, is something that we are not far from achieving, thanks to the proliferation of smartphones, public WiFi hotspots, and portable off-grid chargers. Thanks to Starlink, it’s possible even to have WiFi hotspots in areas where the internet does not otherwise reach for political or physical reasons.

So, this is my plan. We will make the world resilient, we will make the world free. We will make it easier to walk away from Omelas, and the ones who can walk away from Omelas have the upper hand in negotiating an end to it. There is load bearing evil here, holding up the world, and much harm will come from simply knocking it down without care for the consequences. And that is how they get us – like the Architect of the matrix, they threaten mass death should we not comply. We must underpin the basics of living before we start digging out the rotten foundation if we are to avoid this fate.

This is my plan, this is my goal. This is the world through which my heirs will dance. They all will sit under their own vine and fig tree, and none shall make them afraid. Help is appreciated – but if no-one shows up, I suppose it will just take a little while longer.