You have to keep in mind that the shortage that many are talking about right now, a lack of money, competence and confidence, is something amazingly new. If the 19th century had been as faint-hearted as our present, the railway would never have been built. There would also be no power lines, sewage treatment plants, water and gas pipes, almost the entire infrastructure, street lamps, parks, pedestrian bridges, is due to a collective will and the belief that you have to think, plan and build something today so that tomorrow or even the day after tomorrow the world will look different. Infrastructure sounds like technology, but what is meant is selflessness: the general willingness to put something into action that will only pay off for future generations.

Something else was added in the 19th century: the resolute will to praise one’s own selflessness. Although railway stations, bridges and water towers owed their existence to a rationally minded inventive spirit, no one saw them merely as functional buildings, cold and lacking in emotion. Infrastructure was called a frenzy of forms, meant storytelling. Railway stations were supposed to look like cathedrals or castles, and even outhouses were sometimes built as small Renaissance palaces. Because infrastructure meant pride: a social exuberance was celebrated here. And although historical styles were often used for this purpose, they nevertheless spoke of the certainty of being able to see an even greater future in the forms of great history. Technology was beauty, and beauty was supposed to awaken undreamt-of powers.

The present has hardly any time for such forces. Because although our society is much richer than that of the 19th century, it is at the same time poor and stingy when it comes to intangible values. What once showed itself in the beauty of the useful, in the bold station halls and majestic bridges, was not merely confidence or pride. It was above all an experience of freedom.

This is exactly what infrastructure means: a lot is taken off my hands. I can move more freely because there are bridges and I don’t need a boat to get to the other bank. Freedom also includes not having to constantly trudge through faeces and sewage on my way through the world, because there are sewers, sewage treatment plants, an infrastructure that keeps many germs away from me. Only infrastructure enables a majority of people to lead a relaxed, emancipated existence.

You have to put it so pathetically because the freedom effects of technology are often suppressed. It is one of the rather unpleasant characteristics of man that he gets used to everything: to the unbearable, but even more to the pleasant, to that which gives him freedom. The water comes from the tap, I take it for granted. Until it doesn’t work anymore. Or until I realize abroad that tap water can also taste completely different, namely like a swimming pool, terribly chlorinated.

But if freedom is only felt as soon as we reach its limits or someone robs us of our freedom, then the focus is on the limiting and restrictive. And this, in turn, is easily accompanied by an insulting effect. Nothing displeases the modern individual more than the experience of dependence. The individual wants to experience himself as autonomous, as sovereign. The infrastructure enables him to have this sovereignty because, as I said, it takes a lot off his hands.

However – and this is the paradox – it has a price: it is a sovereignty of integration and connection. And this in the literal sense: Only those who connect to the electricity or water grid can perceive the advantages of the infrastructure and its liberating effects. But if they don’t work, the feeling of dependence is all the greater. Freedom is experienced as a lack of freedom. And no one has to be surprised about a growing irritability.

So the displeasure about no longer being able to reliably plan one’s own travels and thus one’s own life is completely justified. But strangely, while even hard-to-stow car journeys are often accepted with equanimity, resigned to fate, it seems to many as if the failure of the railway also reflects a social failure. The collective means of transport makes us feel first-hand that infrastructure is always a structure for everyone by everyone. It creates cohesion in an invisible way. And if this cohesion fails, then the individual is thrown back on himself and feels particularly dependent for this very reason.

This makes it all the more obvious to invest more in everything that connects society in a technical and at the same time social way. But appeals alone, even with many more billions, will not be able to remedy the actual reason for defective signal boxes, holey roads or collapsing bridges. The misery is not only a technical problem, it is also a spiritual problem. It testifies to ignorance, to the growing disdain for what makes a modern society possible in the first place. And so, above all, something has to change about this, about ignorance.

In dealing with nature, we are currently experiencing how difficult such a redefinition is. Nature should and can no longer be what is available to us at will. No longer a resource that seems inexhaustible and that we are allowed to exploit. The situation is similar with technology, which has become second nature to us. It too has always been understood as a means to an end, without intrinsic value, without intrinsic logic, aimed solely at advancing progress and thus freedom. Here, however, as in dealing with nature, a different awareness is needed: a different idea of its intrinsic value, its dignity.

It sounds strange to talk about the dignity of infrastructure. It should work, it should be cheap, flexible, in short: it should serve people, that’s what it is for. And yet dignity could be a helpful term. It opens people’s eyes to what is going wrong right now and contributes to the disdain for infrastructure. We maintain an instrumental relationship with technology. And thus – without really suspecting it – also to ourselves.

Technology is not something completely different, rather it is a part of us, it determines our view of the world and what makes up our lives. For many people, the mobile phone has long since become the third eye, and if they lose it or even if the network does not work, then they feel blind and defenceless, as if in free fall. So if we look at technology and with it the infrastructure only in a functional way, we also look at ourselves in a functional way. But let us ask about their dignity, let us ask about what also makes life dignified.

This is a strange, perhaps even strange thought, because we have become accustomed to understanding the art of infrastructure merely as serving. But the sheer exploitation devalues the infrastructure, degrades it – and thus leads to exactly the contempt that the many dilapidated stations and bridges tell us about.

But how could a different, more dignified relationship to technology emerge? There is an obvious solution for this – again with a view to the 19th century – the aesthetic appeal must gain new meaning. Aestheticizing the infrastructure does not mean superficially sprucing it up, making it look somehow beautiful or at least visually bearable. Aestheticization means first and foremost: wanting to look at the infrastructure with appreciation and curiosity. To finally recognize their often overlooked achievement. And not only to bestow this recognition on individual inventors or engineers, but also to understand it as recognition of a society that produces it, that recognizes itself in it – or at least could recognize it.

At the moment, the more people look with curiosity at what surrounds them and determines their existence, at the bridges, the power boxes, the radio masts, the more they will notice how ugly they often look. And what disinterest speaks from this ugliness. A disinterest that also tells of how indifferent society has become to itself.

Because, yes, infrastructure serves to provide services of general interest. But why is public welfare understood solely as something material? If we think differently about technology, look at it differently, we could also look at the immaterial values of public services. And thus debate how infrastructure affects our perception of reality. In other words, to what we value and what unites us as a collective, or more cautiously: should unite us.

But what happens if we continue as before? When infrastructure is misunderstood as something necessary, but tends to be annoying and expensive – always broken, always expensive, always complicated? Then ego thinking continues, which in any case has a corrosive effect on the democratic community. And there is no end to the ignorance.

To rely solely on a purely functionally determined concept of technology is misleading. In other words, to where we already are. What are we supposed to care about infrastructure if infrastructure is not interested in itself? Where should the hoped-for appreciation come from if it does not also express its value in design, but is content with an aesthetic of indifference? Such an infrastructure of non-perception and zero perception subsequently creates an indifference to the world, and therefore it should not surprise anyone if human beings also behave indifferently, if they are no longer accessible to everything that was and could be the future again.

Only an infrastructure that takes itself seriously, that is not only committed to the old formula of faster, higher, further, will live up to its true meaning. And only then can it produce the solidarity and commitment to which it owes itself at the same time.