"A tale of Two Cities" - Austin during the Texas Power Crisis

The above image shows a picture of Austin, Texas during the 2021 polar storms, serving as a powerful representation of the (infra)structural inequality manifested in the City’s system of emergency response. The empty office buildings of downtown Austin are shown lit up. East Austin, by contrast, which is home to much of Austin’s Black and Latinx communities, is a sea of darkness. This image exemplifies how, as an assemblage of desires, technologies, and techniques, the grid both materializes the ethical issues of petro-racial capitalism and promotes its problematic solutions.
The image shown above is at least partially rooted in the history of techno-political developments in energy infrastructure, not only in Austin, but Texas as well. In the discourse of social theory, technopolitics is a concept developed to explain how infrastructures, rather than being value neutral, are always designed and implemented in ways that betray political rationalities. Brian Larkin describes this systematizing property of infrastructures as “objects that create the grounds upon which other objects operate” (2013, 329). Importantly, anthropological and STS-inflected treatments of infrastructure include not only physical, technological objects but also soft technologies such as new methods of accounting, business models, economic policies, or other techniques of power (Hughes 1993). Mike Fischer’s conception of ethical plateaus can help us think about the way these “multiple technologies interact to create a complex terrain or topology of perception and decision making” (Fischer 2003:36). Together these interlocking material and technical infrastructures make up the proverbial “playing field” of daily life while also determining its “un/evenness.” What the above image and discussion of Austin’s energy grid shows is that the field is appreciably askew along class and racial lines.

Similarly, black feminist scholars have long called for the abandonment of additive approaches to understanding oppression for an appreciation of how systems of oppression interlock into a matrix of domination (Collins 1990). Technopolitical critiques of ethical plateaus can be put to this task by delineating how the coordination of technologies and infrastructures into complex ecologies gives systemic racism, classism, and gender oppression a physical underpinning and materiality. Such plateaus, through extended processes of articulation, across socio-natural scales, accrete and become sedimented over time. In Fischer’s rendering of the concept, ethical plateaus both enable and restrict certain modes of thinking, desiring, and judging by the particular material-temporal demands for maintaining the articulations of the assemblages and plateaus of which socio-technical systems are composed. However, these ethics or logics may be radically transformed as the relations between plateaus, assemblages, or the totality of possible plateaus and assemblages themselves change. What is important here is developing a rich understanding of the dynamics of the full ecology of systems; how the discursive, phenomenological, psychological, and material dimensions of oppression respond to and feedback into biological, geological, climactic systems, maintaining a structural integrity over this shifting ground that consistently and measurably impacts the well-being of certain populations instead of others.

Following up on numerous reports of racially biased distributions of risk during Texas' February blackouts, a study by Carvallo and colleagues provides empirical evidence of the degree to which people of color were disadvantaged (Carvallo et al. 2021). The authors identify a general lack of publicly available data on the locations of blackouts, especially at a granularity that would allow scholars, activists, and other interested persons to make correlations to the racial makeup of these communities, or other important demographic factors. Mirroring the argument of Howey and Neale (2022), the authors argue that this lack of data and lack of access to data plays an important role in mystifying--and therefore reproducing--the material conditions that underwrite structural racism in the United States. Controlling for both income level and the presence/absence of critical infrastructure, however, they found that communities of color were four times as likely to experience an outage than predominantly white communities. Furthermore, they argue that current rationales for explaining the locations and distributions of blackouts cannot account for this finding, suggesting the need for further research into how and where racial bias has been baked into the energy system and its methods and strategies of emergency response.