author’s note: i’m starting a new section in this newsletter to examine more academic case studies on infrastructure and civic systems. the usual thought-daughter writing will continue on annie-thing, anniewhere - but please follow along here for my writing on entropy!!
I grew up in a sleepy Jersey suburb, a stopping point for urban workers before their daily commute into much more entertaining cities. As such, our identity centered around proximity – real estate agents chirp that we’re 1 hour away from NYC by the NJ-18, 1 ½ hour if you took the NJ Transit! My parents commuted regularly, so schedules, delays, and the newest ferry stop popping up were all fair game dinner-table conversation. (My mom even spent a stint at NJ Transit as a software engineer).
I joke that I can’t drive & I can’t pump gas – so I’m at the mercy of public transit, for life! Over time, rushing between bicoastal flights, back-to-back bus-rides and subways, I started noticing the same pattern. A one-hour flight becomes a half-day as a delay from a separate airport cascades.
It’s an elegant butterfly effect: tiny weather changes in one part of the city can lead to traffic build up 300 miles away. But when we pack schedules to the tightest constraints, there is no buffer to absorb shock. We echo a familiar narrative: in an era of immense technical capability, how does our fundamental rules for movement break down for ordinary reasons?
This creates the perception that our systems as broken, when in reality, we have rendered them invisible and modeled them incorrectly.
Infrastructure powers our world: reliable and enduring. It manifests as the public transit that gets us to work, the energy that lights our homes, water that runs when we turn the tap. By design it fades into the background – when we look at a building, we first admire the craft of the architecture and design, and rarely consider the zoning spats and plumbing that made it possible.
Even the software we depend on everyday is grounded in the physical world: data centers, power, cooling, and network routing. We’ve come to expect zero friction, instant responses and infinite retries, and we carry that expectation into real life – ignoring real-world constraints.
There are two headwinds here: life is getting more chaotic at the same time our systems are becoming more tightly coupled. Climate change means stronger storms and more frequent shocks in previously sheltered areas like Texas, where residential pipes burst because they were designed for snow. Interdependence turns small disruptions into butterfly effects, such that when one point fails, a ripple effect cascades.
The word for this drift is entropy: the idea that systems drift toward disorder unless energy, attention, and feedback are applied on purpose.
entropy is a natural state of the world. This newsletter is all about making those hidden systems interpretable, so we can have a better understanding of why things go wrong and what can go better.
I want to turn our attention to the networks and infrastructure that govern everyday life, how years of overuse and strain have pushed them toward their limits. Take a look at the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway that’s crumbling under our feet, or airport meltdowns during government shut downs. And if we look backwards, we can retro failures from the past, like the Texas power grid shutting down during winter storms or the writing on the wall before the Three Mile Island tragedy.
Collapse looks sudden, unless you look at how systems came to be and how they function today. These failures are termed “normal” accidents, which emerge from multiple failures that interact with each other and thus a consequence of a system’s inherent complexity.
Just because entropy is expected does not mean its consequences are inevitable. I believe, optimistically, that with sustained attention we can steer our systems to match the pace of our Cambrian disruptions.
As Gradient Journal puts it:
“We will have to figure out how to rethink the way American settlements are made and how they operate. We have to rethink how we get our water, how we get our power, and how we store and transmit it. We have to rethink how we move, how we eat, how we govern ourselves.”1
Consider: what is the type of city you want to leave behind for your future family? By studying our current state it’ll become clear “that the design standards of the infrastructure we have did not contemplate the climate we are now living within – much of our current infrastructure is too fragile or brittle to survive.”
Ultimately, this is not only an engineering problem – it’s largely societal and institutional. Infrastructure is built to sustain our communities, and thereby should mirror their social structure. We share water with our neighbors. We rely on our local hospitals for vaccines and care. When infra and communities drift in different directions, we need ongoing recalibration to keep incentives, policy, and construction pointed in the same direction.
Along with theory and case studies, I want to start an open conversation on how to create a mini civic stack for our micro-communities: aka, the scaffolding/affordances for us to connect and share our observations with each other
I’d like to explore passion projects on how we can help us feel connected to our neighbors: how we can encourage active data collection of our communities, or encourage stewardship of our shared parks and common spaces, or contribute to art/technology projects that reflect our daily routines.
If we recognize the systems we live within, we can become empowered to enact change within our own local communities.
Follow along for bi-weekly-ish case studies and rabbitholes — perfect to read on your daily commute •ᴗ•
another timely & relevant banger from annie’s mind as per usual. excited for more!!!
This was a really great read. Makes me think about my own career trajectory.