Infrastructure Bill Needs to Succeed Where Tech Failed

As the multitrillion-dollar infrastructure bill wends its way through Congress, its exact parameters and legislative outcome remain uncertain. But whatever the eventual contours of the final bill, a certain ideological argument has already been put forward—and it should be a winner in the public imagination. Whereas the private sector and the efficiencies of the profit motive were once hailed as the key to good governance—“run the government like a business,” went the tired logic of privatization—that consensus may now be falling apart like a pothole-ridden Midwestern highway. As years of economic decay, a devastating pandemic, and the rise of China have proved, we cannot simply trust the self-interest of private capitalists to furnish the basic infrastructure and essential services of public life. And yet, for decades, we have ceded that territory to the commercial sector, with private equity and Silicon Valley, relying on the ethos of disruption, remaking whole industries in their image: technologically advanced, rent-seeking, profit-focused, and divorced from any sense of public good. The result is we have far too many impoverished, surveilled Uber drivers and far too few unionized, pensioned municipal train operators.

Two decades of glittering tech industry success have left us no closer to solving some of society’s infrastructure problems. As Lyft attempts to reinvent the city bus, Amazon colonizes health care, Elon Musk’s hyperloop and other dubious tunnel projects absorb chunks of city transport budgets, and shoddy contact-tracing apps fail to help contain the pandemic, the lesson should be clear: Big tech doesn’t fix our problems, it monetizes them. Even in the midst of a devastating public health crisis, instead of free universal health care, we have an increasing number of pharmacy apps, telehealth specialists, and well-capitalized biotech startups. Somehow tech has narrowed our civic ambitions, as we send billionaires to space instead of astronauts. The internet itself, once a great digital commons, has become irreparably commercialized and surveilled, and even accessing it is a challenge for millions of Americans lacking reliable, affordable broadband.