One fact that repeatedly stands out in the construction world is that all of this building material is incredibly, incredibly heavy. On top of that, it has the attribute of a deep persistence. There are several things to take away from this.
On many projects, the sheer heaviness and scale of the infrastructure either requires extensive and punishing physical labor, or heavy machinery which is incredibly dangerous, and which itself must be produced by either intense physical labor, more heavy machinery, or both, and so on for the natural resources and materials that go into these things.
This is due to not only the sheer physical weight of the materials involved, but the rigid property of the materials involved, which due to the persistence of their physical bonds, require high velocity, sharp, corrosive, and/or extreme temperature processes to bind and separate them, all processes which can easily be applied to things with less strong and persistent bonds, such as human flesh.
The heaviness and rigidness is necessary for both size, scale, structure, reliability, persistence, functionality and a host of other desired attributes in our modern infrastructure.
And so to have the infrastructure that we have, and to have the divisions of labor and disempowerment of labor that we have, it is required that whole classes of laborers are steadily grinded away - or rapidly crushed - underneath the whole of it, while others get to enjoy it to various degrees of advantage.
This is by no means an original observation, and it certainly wasn't original back when Thoreau wrote that the "railroad rides upon us."
And it isn't just that the infrastructure "sits upon us" while we sit upon it. To repeat, concrete is very, very heavy, and this fact is even more impressive when one simply cuts out a trench in a foundation, and removes the little concrete that that involves: just the accumulation of that concrete waste is incredibly heavy, so that by implication, all of that foundation is pressing upon the earth over time, and compacting the soil, removing air pockets and permeability and destroying organic material, and shutting off water from percolation into the soil.
In a way, we're sitting squarely upon the earth's chest. And by doing so, we sit upon our own chest in the process.
