My attention keeps drifting toward infrastructure lately. Trains, energy grids, housing. The things that work best when you don’t notice them.
This is a shift. I’ve spent years in software and product design, where the conversation is about interfaces, features, user journeys. But I find myself more interested in why transportation projects run 4x over budget, why energy systems fail when two cables go down, why we debate building another oil plant instead of distributed renewables.
What draws me to infrastructure is this: when it works, it generates trust. It’s what a society decides to build together, made real.
When it doesn’t work, or when we can’t seem to build it anymore, everything else feels worse. The cost of living, the housing shortage, jobs going away. These problems compound. Infrastructure failure doesn’t just inconvenience us. It erodes the sense that we’re in this together.
Estonia has been a success story—e-governance, startups, GDP growth. But as our president Kersti Kaljulaid has observed, not everyone has been part of that success. For some people, it’s not their story.
Rail Baltic could have been different. A high-speed line from Tallinn to Warsaw and Berlin with economic integration, climate-conscious travel, a physical link to the Europe. Infrastructure that would touch everyone. In 2017, the estimate was €5.8 billion. Now it’s approaching €24 billion, only a third of the route has been designed, and the full project may never be completed. I love trains. I use them whenever I can. The idea that I could take a train to Berlin instead of a flight feels obvious, overdue, inevitable and watching it slip away is maddening.
Infrastructure is part of how you write a shared story. The great metros and rail networks were built by societies that experienced the building process itself, not just the outcome. They understood the trade-offs, the sacrifice, the collective effort.
We’ve inherited these marvels without the memory of building. We don’t understand what it took. And maybe we’ve lost the appetite for that kind of difficulty. It’s easier to focus on software, on digital, on things that feel more tractable and immediate.
“Social cohesion develops through repeated human interaction and joint participation in shared projects, not merely from a principled commitment to abstract values and beliefs.” — Eric Klinenberg (Palaces for the People)
For decades, software was the holy grail. The brightest minds, the capital, the cultural attention, all flowing toward bits. Software did remarkable things. But it has limits. It can optimize, coordinate, extract. It cannot generate electricity when cables fail. It cannot move goods across borders. It cannot create the warm corner in a public square where strangers become neighbors.
There’s a version of this thinking I don’t share, the Andreessen “It’s Time to Build” abundance agenda. The idea that the problem is regulation, the solution is private capital, and quantity will sort out the rest.
Quantity isn’t the point. Modernist towers that warehouse people aren’t the same as neighborhoods people want to live in, want to become better in. Private development for the upper-middle class isn’t the same as social housing with livable rents and public squares that belong to everyone. What gets built, for whom, and how, these matter as much as building at all.
Beautiful infrastructure doesn’t mean grand or impressive. Vienna, where 60% of residents live in subsidized housing, not brutalist warehousing, but buildings with courtyards and green space, integrated into neighborhoods. Copenhagen, where decades of consistent investment made cycling the obvious choice, reshaping how an entire city moves. Japanese rail, where punctuality is craft, stations are public spaces, and reliability becomes the backdrop of daily life.
Human-scale. Climate-aware, especially in the north, where you think about sunlight, wind blocks, warm corners. Walkable, bikeable, accessible. Design that draws people out of isolation and into shared space. Infrastructure that just works, that becomes second nature, that you stop noticing. That’s when it generates pride. That’s when it becomes part of the story.
“A beautiful village, a beautiful house, a beautiful city can become a home for all, a universal home. But if we lose this aim we build our own exile here on Earth.” — Leon Krier
I notice where my attention is going. Away from the shiny and toward the boring. Away from bits and toward atoms. Away from what captures attention and toward what generates trust.
If I had to name a direction: work on things that deflate the cost of building beautiful infrastructure. Not cheaper by cutting corners. But finding ways to make human-scale, trust-generating infrastructure accessible to more people, in more places. The same way decentralized energy could rewrite who gets to generate power, or the way Vienna proved social housing doesn’t have to mean ugly housing. Tools and methods that diffuse rather than concentrate. So the shared story includes everyone.