## Reference [Chachra, Debbie. "Care at Scale" (August 5, 2021), *Comment*](https://comment.org/care-at-scale/) > But the real difference between money and infrastructural systems as general-purpose providers of freedom is that money is individual and our infrastructural systems are, by their nature, collective. If municipal water systems mean that we are enduringly connected to each other through the landscape where our bodies are, our other systems ratchet this up by orders of magnitude. Behind the wheel of a car, we are a cyborg: our human body controls a powered exoskeleton that lets us move further and faster than we ever could without it. But this freedom depends on roads and supply chains for fuels, to say nothing of traffic laws and safety regulations. **In researcher Paul Graham Raven's memorable formulation, infrastructural systems make us all into collective cyborgs.** Alone in my apartment, when I reach out my hand to flip a switch or turn on a tap, I am a continent-spanning colossus, tapping into vast systems that span thousands of miles to bring energy, atoms, and information to my household. But I'm only the slenderest tranche of these collective systems, constituting the whole with all the other members of our federated infrastructural cyborg bodies. [Chachra, Debra. Newsletter. "Metafoundry 73: Our Cyborg Collective Body, Ourselves" (July 8, 2020).](https://tinyletter.com/metafoundry/letters/metafoundry-73-our-cyborg-collective-body-ourselves) > The infrastructure researcher and science fiction writer [Paul Graham Raven](https://paulgrahamraven.com/) has offered up a surprising and insightful way of thinking about our infrastructural systems: he describes them as making us a 'cyborg collective'. Not an _individual_ cyborg, in the 'Ellen Ripley operating a power loader' sense, and not a collective _of_ individual cyborgs, but a single cyborg collective: > > Infrastructures are a sort of tool: they’re a prosthesis, an extension of baseline human abilities. … But it’s not just you that’s dependent on infrastructure, the way an earlier you was dependent on being able to knap flint and whittle bone. No—you’re dependent on infrastructure as a community. The prostheses upon which your life now depends are augmentations not of your own body, but of the collective body of your tribe or village. > > > > Congratulations: you’ve just transitioned from being a collective of cyborgs to being a cyborg collective. > > Alone in my apartment, at dusk, I flip a switch to turn on a light. In that instant, not only are my individual senses augmented (now I can see at night), but I become part of a continent-spanning colossus. My reach extends out for thousands of miles, across a national border, encompassing a nuclear power plant, a massive hydroelectric project, scores of substations, thousands of pylons, and an incalculable amount of human expertise, skill, and labour. As an individual, I only call on the tiniest sliver of everything this system produces, but it couldn’t exist were it not collective. As Paul notes, this system binds me to my neighbors, and to the place where we all live. [Raven, Paul Graham. Research article. "(Re)narrating the societal cyborg: a definition of infrastructure, an interrogation of integration" (July 2017), People, Place and Policy, 11 (1), 51-64.](https://extra.shu.ac.uk/ppp-online/renarrating-the-societal-cyborg-a-definition-of-infrastructure-an-interrogation-of-integration/)