Control maniacs, asocials or just challange lovers; who are these infrastructure discontents?
When I was reading the "Infrastructures and Their Discontents......" paper, I was clearly surprised with how discontent people be to the everyday infrastructures. Trying to emulate a school in a house room, converting your actual life to a 60 year long survivor episode in the middle of nowhere, turning into a nosy freak that is thinking about putting a camera into neighbors house, etc. All these seem to crazy to me but, they have some initiative ideas behind them which may worth investigating further.
I like going to camping or hiking and resting in an environment that is far away from everyday distractions, but I see it as a vacation not a whole lifestyle. Although I can understand why people would go such a vacation, I cannot comprehend why they would willingly live in an environment that is miles away from any infrastructure. All these granted services and infrastructures (such as electricity, supermarkets, etc) may make us lazy and ignorant in actively fighting against the nature but they certainly increase our productivity in our profession and make life easier for us. Moreover, infrastructures are built around where the people live and being away from infrastructures means being away from other people. When we look at the interviewed couple in the paper, they are actually producing electricity whenever they need, they use laptops, they have a plumbing system so they are actually setting up all the infrastructures they escaped from in a smaller scale. So, they are either escaping from other people (maybe because they are asocial or afraid of other people) or they are challenge or control freaks looking for adventure or absolute control in their environment. But on the other hand, having a distant house that we can escape on weekends sounds good to almost everybody. So, maybe its the freedom that drives for being discontent and the fear of being alone that connects us back to the infrastructures.
But what about being nosy and monitoring the neighbors. Hmm, again it is crazy at first but nobody wants a murderer or sex-offender as a neighbor as well. So, it is just an extreme of something that we all have. But I don't agree the authors classification of "security seekers" as discontent from the infrastructures. They are actually connected to the infrastructures but they just want their connection to be under control. They want cameras on their doors, alarms on their windows and their phone number to be not published. I think this is just resulting from the bad infrastructure itself, security infrastructure is not satisfactory and people are looking for improvements. However, in its later stages it results in disconnection from the infrastructures. Gated community residents and home-schoolers exemplifies the case where people gets disconnected from the infrastructures just because they think they can do better than the public service. Gated community thinks they can manage security and order better than the police and public authorities, home-schoolers think that they can provide better education than the public schools. I personally disagree to all such enterprises since they would encourage social classes, discourage social thinking and would result in social disorder in its later stages. The correct approach should be improving the already available common infrastructure instead of everybody building its own.