To follow up to your last comment: as you may know, the idea of an infrastructure being invisible until it breaks down is one of the major themes in academic study of infrastructure.
Gregory Bateson and Merleau-Ponty used the example of a blind person's cane as the paradigm of a tool that disappears to its user. Heidegger talked about similar notions of tools being present or absent from the point of view of perception. See p.208 of this book https://books.google.ie/books?id=U8IPBwAAQBAJ&pg=PA208&lpg=P...
Having said that (I'm not sure why I am saying it) a much more important aspect of infrastructure is the political one: does a given deployment of infrastructure reinforce existing unfair social advantages, or tend to equalize things? Fancy words like "apparatus" and "dispositif" can get you access to that discussion though I'm guessing it has a high ginger-factor for the HN audience.
Gregory Bateson and Merleau-Ponty used the example of a blind person's cane as the paradigm of a tool that disappears to its user. Heidegger talked about similar notions of tools being present or absent from the point of view of perception. See p.208 of this book https://books.google.ie/books?id=U8IPBwAAQBAJ&pg=PA208&lpg=P...
Having said that (I'm not sure why I am saying it) a much more important aspect of infrastructure is the political one: does a given deployment of infrastructure reinforce existing unfair social advantages, or tend to equalize things? Fancy words like "apparatus" and "dispositif" can get you access to that discussion though I'm guessing it has a high ginger-factor for the HN audience.