But age and decay aren’t the only causes of infrastructural collapse. A portion of Interstate 85 in Atlanta collapsed in 2017 after a fire lit underneath it by a homeless man raged into an inferno. And earlier this year, a pedestrian bridge at Florida International University in Miami collapsed, killing six people. The bridge was brand new, making its collapse a failure of engineering, not of maintenance.

It’s not just bridges and roads breaking. Mark Zuckerberg has claimed that Facebook is a kind of social infrastructure, but it feels broken now, too. This week, at the Defcon computer-security conference, hackers demonstrated how to gain back-door access to voting machines used in 18 states. There’s evidence that Russia has hacked the U.S. power grid, along with nuclear and commercial infrastructure, too. The prevalence of badly secured internet-connected data, from emails to DNA samples to credit reports, has made all information vulnerable. Last year, 143 million Americans’ personal information, including Social Security numbers, were lifted from the credit agency Equifax’s servers.

The banality of the Equifax breach

When these incidents become so frequent and so pervasive—or even just when they feel like they do—the meaning of infrastructure changes. As I wrote in the wake of the Equifax breach, “With over half of the entire U.S. adult population potentially exposed, what’s left to do but shrug and sigh?” Once they become perceived as generally untrustworthy, bridges and voting systems and utilities and the rest don’t recede into the background so easily anymore. If infrastructure always fails, you always notice it. Will this bridge I’m driving over hold? Will this vote I’m casting be counted? Will this personal data remain private?

No longer is infrastructure something invisible, something you can take for granted. Instead, it’s something that might work, or might not. Not plainly calamitous—most bridges don’t fall—but something precarious. Something that might not be trustworthy, that might wind up biting you for having put faith in it.

The same feelings of uncertainty and vulnerability that now accompany employment, education, health care, and so many other aspects of contemporary life have seeped into the foundational structures in which that life operates. That condition is not necessarily an undesirable one either, for those who might benefit from precariousness as a means of social control. It’s funny to laugh about the ongoing, unrealized promise of President Donald Trump’s “infrastructure week,” even while an estimated $123 billion backlog mounts for U.S. bridge repairs alone. But withholding solutions to infrastructural precariousness produces confusion and fear, which agitate bitterness, blame, and, sometimes, zealotry. In the case of the Miami pedestrian bridge, some focused scorn on an all-woman engineering team employed by the Cuban-American–owned contractor responsible for construction. In Flint, Michigan, a public official blamed black people who “don’t pay their bills” for the city’s ongoing water crisis.