Letters, power lines, and other dangerous things : the politics of infrastructure security / Ryan Ellis.

9780262357777 (electronic bk.)
0262357771 (electronic bk.)
9780262538541
0262538547

Cambridge, Massachusetts : The MIT Press, [2020]

English

1 online resource.

HC110.C3 E456 2020eb

363.11/93880973

"In the long-shadow of September 11, 2001, infrastructures have undergone a significant reorganization. Letters, Power Lines, and Other Dangerous Things examines how new fears and worries over security have transformed the material and social outlines of infrastructure. The book follows three infrastructures-the postal system, freight rail, and the electric power system-and documents the subtle and explicit changes that have remade these systems. The book places the rise of "critical infrastructure protection"-a buzzword, a governing logic, and a multi-billion dollar funding priority-within a larger historical framework. Drawing from thousands of pages of regulatory filings, court documents, and other governmental documents, the book pieces together a larger story about risk and infrastructure. It identifies the political origins of infrastructure vulnerability-demonstrating how decades of political and economic restructuring ("deregulation") created system that were both politically unaccountable and vulnerable to systemic failure; and it examines how a cross-section of actors-including workers, civic groups, city councils, bureaucrats, and others-attempted to leverage new fears about infrastructure danger into reinvigorated systems of public accountability. Put another way, it examines the social and technical processes that made infrastructure dangerous; and then follows the ways in which these "dangerous things" were made safe and secure. The book offers a reminder that infrastructures always order they organize different publics, uses, ideas about what and who a system is for, into a tentative hierarchy. And security presents an opportunity to revisit and in some case remake these orders. The book provides a window into how infrastructures are made and remade sometimes in surprising and contradictory ways"-- Provided by publisher.

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