--- Bruno Latour has passed. We lost a true Wizard, larger than I can write.
I had the pleasure to work with him at the Sciences Po médialab for a few years. I came as an engineer and left as an aspiring researcher.
Here is what Latour's work has to offer to engineers and developers.
It stems from this question: where is the work that makes the lasting things last?
The most controversial of those lasting things is truth, but let me put that aside for a moment.
Think instead of any piece of software one takes for granted. Wikipedia. Google. Photoshop. Firefox. VLC. None of those would last without amounts of work constantly fueled into them. Maintenance is something devs and engineer are painfully aware of.
For me, adulthood came with the realization that everything is maintained, and therefore cannot be taken for granted. Things we depend on only last because work is put into making them last. And it may come to an end.
It is uncomfortable to think of our conditions of existence as precarious, but it is also eye-opening, because it tells how we can change the situation.
One can care for the world by maintaining certain things. That is why I and others put work into Gephi. We think it matters. Open science and open source software are entirely about that. We know that infrastructures can be precarious.
If you maintain anything, you have a good idea of the work necessary to make it last. And as you also know, uninvolved people will always underestimate how much it takes. They don't need to see that work. The maintenance load is invisible.
You can think of it the other way around. You also don't pay attention to the work put into maintaining everything else. Why would you? You may know it must exist, you have no reason to actually look for it. You can afford to forget about it.
We all know the danger of taking our dependencies for granted. Let's not get delusional: our infrastructure does not last because it is robust. On the contrary, it gets called "robust" if enough work is put into making it last.
The digital infrastructure is not robust like a brick. It is not inherently hard. It is robust like a tree: it lasts because it grows, adapts, and repairs. It may also die. We have to keep it alive. It demands care.
Reading Latour is learning how to stop taking the lasting things for granted, and start looking into the work that makes them last, who does it, and why. It helps to inventory our dependencies, and to face the precariousness of our existence.
One of his arguments is that this work does not only come from humans. For the tree, the work is done by a large network of interactions between other living beings like mushrooms, and the soil, the air, the Sun... It is always a network.
If you've heard of actor-network theory (or ANT) it just means that actors are also networks and vice-versa. You can see the tree as a network of interactions. You would do that because that helps you to understand what makes the tree last.
It works in sociology. Right now, the Ukrainians are hard at work maintaining Ukraine into existence. And not just them. We also care for Ukraine in may ways. We are small part of that network that makes it last.
And it works for science. Even truth lasts because work is put into making it last. That claim has been controversial, but people like Trump have since made it clear that even truth can be under attack, and that we must care for it.
That truth may not resist everything should be eye-opening. Nature does not resist everything either. That is what Latour calls "Gaïa": the thin skin of living being at the surface of the Earth, that we must not take for granted, but care for.
It's easier to understand if I present Latour as a wizard. The point in common between Magic and Latour's thinking is that our actions have distant consequences that one cannot see. Spells act, have consequences, yet how it works remains concealed.
Latour shined at dispelling the belief that the things we take for granted last because it is in their nature. For ex. the Earth has to be kept inhabitable to humans. A network of beings used to do that for us, but we have disrupted and damaged it.
Knowing that we are so bad at managing the distant consequences of our actions, like when it comes to buying meat or booking a plane, Latour spent his last years trying to cast a counterspell.
He tried to interfere with the world so that more people get a better grasp of the maintenance work necessary to keep the Earth inhabitable to the humans over the long term. He tried to reconnect us with the distant consequences of our actions.
I think that this should ring a bell to those who put work into infrastructures, digital or not. It certainly did with the engineer I was. If so, I recommend starting with his last major book, Facing Gaia. It's as good as an Alan Moore book.