Counter-Engineering: Designing for Liberation

Lecture at the Keller Center, Princeton University

February 27, 2023

By Dean Chahim

Introduction

Hello everyone and thanks so much for having me here today. A special thanks to Professor Rouse and the Keller Center for the invitation and specifically to Amanda and Gina for organizing such a seamless visit.

In recent years, there has been an outpouring of work on the complicity of design practice with white supremacy, settler colonialism, ableism, and environmental destruction – among many other injustices – and designers have begun to examine how to design differently, often under the broad banner of “design justice,” or “decolonizing” design.

Engineering is normally considered one of the core “design” professions. But in most engineering departments and design firms, however, you would not know this critical conversation was happening at all.  By and large, as engineers we are not trained to ask - and are in fact actively discouraged from asking - political questions about what engineering does. 

We learn, instead, that our work is objective- that it uses math and science to “benefit humanity,” as Princeton’s engineering school puts it, or to contribute to the “vitality of our community” as my own alma mater, UW, puts it.

But what do such concepts actually mean given that humanity is so divided – so unequal? We live, after all, in a society riven by relations of domination, in which the ruling class – a minority of mostly White males in the global North - exploit the labor and resources of the majority, condemning them to material destitution, enduring trauma, and premature death along radicalized and gendered lines.

What I hope to convince you of today is, first, that engineering does not magically transcend these relations of domination, but reflects, reproduces, and even augments them. Engineering has historically been – and continues to be – central to expanding the power of the ruling class that they quite literally work for.

But I also want to convince you that this is not the end of the story: engineering could be used subversively, to undermine those relations of domination – to diminish the power of the rulers and strengthen the counter-power of the ruled: to promote the liberation of the working classes, women, sexual and gender minorities, racialized peoples, the disabled, and so on.

Engineering Domination

Historians trace the origins of engineering – as a formal profession and codified form of expertise – to 18th century. It expanded rapidly in the 19th and early 20th centuries in response to the needs of the intertwined projects of industrial capitalism and colonialism. Engineers were central to making not only the arms used to subjugate the colonies, but the infrastructures used to extract their resources, and the industrial machinery used at home to turn those resources into products for public consumption.

This close marriage of engineering to the projects of racial capitalism and empire has persisted into our present, if in different guises, and permeates not only the uses of engineering designs, but the very process of design itself.

As historian David Noble memorably put it, engineering reason has long been synonymous with capitalist reason: the best engineering design is not the one that minimizes resource use, pollutes the least, or maximizes worker autonomy, but the one that produces the most profit. In other words, the optimization problem has always been oriented towards the maximization of shareholder value within the bounds of political and legal possibility.[1]

To be sure, at times, this objective of profit and benefits for certain sectors of the public have aligned, due to the pressures of maintaining the consent and health of the governed.[2] Such is the case with clean water for the peasants forced off their land and into overcrowded cities to advance industrial capitalism, to take just one example. (Cholera outbreaks that kill your workers eventually dip into profits and promote social unrest.) Nevertheless, such benefits are always, as we know, limited, and unequally distributed – often the bare minimum required for the ruling class to maintain power.

This is not to say that engineers do not intend to work in the public interest, to make good on the promises of engineering. One of the core insights of theories of hegemonic power is that our very cultural notions of the “humanity,” “community,” “progress,” and so on, are deeply shaped by those already in power – that is, by the racist and patriarchal ruling class.[3] There is thus no need for the goal of maximizing ruling class power to be explicit – instead, it can be embedded in the seemingly objective engineering processes of defining a problem and designing a solution.[4]

***

To illustrate how this works, I want to offer an example from my research into the history and contemporary politics of Mexico City’s vast flood control engineering works. My treatment here will be schematic, but those interested in more ethnographic and technical detail can consult my dissertation and articles, available online.[5]

Mexico City was built on a series of lakes that technicians and, later, professional engineers desiccated over the course of centuries.

Despite these enormous works of hydraulic engineering, which Vera Candiani here at Princeton has documented in her magnificent book,[6] downtown Mexico City continued to suffer from recurrent floods throughout its history. In the 1940s and 1950s in particular, floods left downtown underwater for weeks at a time, sparking a political crisis and provoking many to question the very viability of the city’s continued growth.

Engineers in the 1960s dreamt up a solution to the city’s flooding woes: a massive underground tunnel system for sewage and stormwater known as the Deep Drainage, with tunnels 5-7m in diameter that now snake deep under the metropolis. They concentrate flows of wastewater and expel them northwards, towards the Mezquital Valley, where they are used in agriculture.

As I learned digging through state archives, the project was justified as the only way to protect Mexico City’s inhabitants from flooding, but behind the scenes, engineers debated several other alternatives, including creating large regulation basins and recycling water in the basin for agricultural – and even potable – uses. This made a great deal of social end ecological sense: the city was, at the same time, struggling to supply its own inhabitants with water and was building and planning new aqueducts to bring distant water to the city.

Nevertheless, this proposal, was ultimately rejected on the grounds that it would take up valuable land that might be urbanized and put to more profitable use. (This debate about recycling water in the basin – and the role of land – continues to reverberate today, as we’ll see a little later in the talk – so hold on to this point.)

I bring up this example to illustrate a point I made earlier: the blurring of engineering and capitalist reason, of technology and politics. The political aim of the ruling class – to create a vast industrial city on the high plains – was paramount and was made possible through engineers’ technical work to eject water from the basin.

Let’s fast forward to today: the downtown floods of the 1950s are now largely unimaginable, thanks to the Deep Drainage. Instead, flooding occurs almost invariably on the urban periphery, in poor, working-class, and largely mestizo neighborhoods. These floods cause extraordinary, if largely diffuse, forms of suffering: hours lost in already interminable commutes to the distant urban periphery, infections from wading through sewage, ruined property, underwater mortgages, and lasting psychological trauma. These costs, furthermore, are deeply gendered as women are typically responsible for scrubbing the sewage from walls and out of clothes.

After spending a year and half following the engineers and workers of the city’s flood control engineering bureaucracy as they operated the Deep Drainage tunnels and its ancillary system of reservoirs, canals, and pump stations, I came to understand that the distribution of flooding in Mexico City had much less to do with topography or weather than with power; a kind of power effected through engineering work.

During heavy rains, I watched as engineers and field crews worked tirelessly to redirect the flows of water in the system using an elaborate system of controls over floodgates and pumps that could channel the water in different directions. Because the city’s growth had far outpaced the expansions of the drainage system, there was often no way to drain the entire city at once – to protect everyone equally. When the system filled to the brim, they had to make what were ultimately political choices, choosing who to flood – who to sacrifice – and who to protect.

It may come as little surprise that engineers routinely flooded the poor worst and first, while strategically avoiding flooding the urban core. Such floods which would affect both government installations and wealthy residents and businesses, who inevitably had the ear of the political class – that is, of their bosses.

This practice is largely unknown outside the engineering bureaucracy, yet it has a tremendous impact on the distribution of flooding in the city.

While at times expressing discomfort with such discriminatory operations, engineers justified such decisions in part through the same logic of land values that drove the construction of the Deep Drainage in the first place: flooding areas of high property values would imply not only more political blowback as wealthy and well-connected businesses and residents complained, but also higher payouts for flood damage.

Engineering here responds to, and reproduces, the extraordinary imbalance of power in Mexico City between the impoverished periphery and the astoundingly wealthy urban core. And even more importantly, it makes possible the overriding political and economic objective of the ruling class, which is – still – to further the growth of Mexico City at any cost.

It is crucial to emphasize that this form of operating the drainage system was not cynically planned in advance: while always designed to protect the urban core first and foremost, there is no evidence that engineers imagined ever using it to transfer hazards across the space of the metropolis in this way. Nevertheless, this was made possible through their designs, which link the entire city together in a way that defies local topography. This possibility is, as design theorists would suggest, an unseen affordance of the technology that would make possible a different kind of political redistribution of hazards decades later.[7] I say “make possible” because it was not – and is not – inevitable; there are other affordances, other politics, that the tunnel system also opens up, as we’ll see in a moment.

Challenging Power

What could designers, and particularly engineers, do about the situation of flooding in Mexico City that I just described? Could engineers play a role in not just making marginal improvements to living conditions for the poor and marginalized, but undermine, if in incremental ways, the structures of power that dominate and oppress them? Could they, for instance, help residents challenge state engineers’ operations of the system – and in so doing, undercut the power of the real estate and construction lobby?

Engineers are often stumped when I push them on this. We design – we build things, they tell me. We don’t “do” politics – and what you’re describing is political, they tell me.

But it isn’t just “political.” The situation I’ve described here – like so many other cases of social and environmental injustice – are what Gabrielle Hecht would call technopolitical; this is politics mediated – made possible through, strategically effected through – technology, through the designs and operations of engineers.[8]

In the case of Mexico City, it is engineers’ technopolitical work – their strategic design and operations of the drainage system to protect the wealthy central areas of the city - that make possible a politics of endless growth, which in turn continuously bolsters the fortunes of the ruling class, even at the cost of continuously flooding the poor.

Technopolitics, at least in the scholarly literature, is almost invariably shown as a tool of the powerful – of the ruling class who pay engineers to design systems that further their power.[9] Engineers, at times, deviate and work towards their own interests through their designs, but such deviations seldom challenge the overall effect.[10] Rarely do we hear of a technopolitics from below, a technopolitics of the oppressed, so to speak, which uses engineering to strategically undermine, rather than reinforce, systems of domination.

My provocation is that such a technopolitics from below, what I will call “counter-engineering” for short (a portmanteau of counter-hegemonic and engineering), is not only urgently needed, but eminently possible. At its simplest, I would define counter-engineering as the strategic use – or collective refusal to use – engineering expertise, methods, and tools in order to undermine hegemonic power and/or build popular power in its place.[11]

As we will see, such an approach would involve, first and foremost, a kind of interrogation of power relations rarely done in conventional engineering design. But rather than a conventional “power analysis” commonly done by movement activists that examines who has the power over this or that policy, the question for counter-engineers is to understand which technologies mediate power, and how those technologies might be interrupted, bypassed, hacked, or dismantled – and how, in their place, we might build radically different alternatives that “hold” the ground we gain, preventing the further encroachment by the ruling class.[12]

I know this sounds quite abstract, but I promise we’ll get into a few examples – some real and some speculative – in just a moment.

But first, I want to be clear that my contention is not that there are magical counter-engineering “innovations” that will suddenly bring systems of domination to their knees. This would rarely, if ever, be the case. Rather, my point is that counter-engineering is a necessary component of broader movements for liberation given that our collective subjugation is now, more than ever, mediated by technology that often poses extraordinary barriers for everyday people to understand, let alone contest.

Indeed, in interviews with flood victims in Mexico City, I often found the tables were turned on me once residents learned I was an engineer; suddenly I was the interviewee, being peppered with questions about how the system works and why – questions that, despite their best efforts, were exceedingly hard to answer coherently without engineering training.[13]

This is not an accident: systems like the Deep Drainage were designed to be inscrutable: their technical complexity and abstraction serves to, whether implicitly or explicitly, maintain the power and status of engineers over the skilled trades and insulate their work from outside scrutiny – especially public opposition.[14] Contesting these engineering designs does not always require engineering training – and there are incredible examples of laypeople doing just that, from the Luddites smashing alienating machinery at work[15] to Indigenous activists shutting down fossil fuel pipelines. But in many cases, a committed cadre of counter-engineers willing to walk alongside – rather than leading – movements for justice could make a world of difference.[16]

Counter-Engineering

Just like the movements themselves, the specific modes (or tactics) of counter-engineering are necessarily wide-ranging, based on shifting balances of power in society and the range of possibilities available to movements. What I want to do in this final section is to schematically outline a few of these possible modes of counter-engineering as they apply to Mexico City’s case.

Counter-Analysis

The first tactic is analysis that undermines ruling class truths about technology, making evident the politics embedded within them; and thereby the possibility that they might be otherwise.

Let me offer an example from my own experience. In September 2021, a devastating flood struck Tula, Hidalgo, a city thirty miles north of Mexico City, when the Tula River overflowed. 30,000 residents were flooded and 14 were killed. The flood was completely unprecedented.

Initial news reports repeated government propaganda lines, calling the flood a “natural disaster,” a claim that would conveniently allow them to escape liability for paying damages to residents. Based on everything I had researched, this seemed extremely improbable. In the days afterwards, to understand what happened, I began analyzing data rainfall patterns, poring over maps of the system, and stitching that together the fragments of data about water flows that slipped out of government officials’ mouths.

In short, I realized that the flood was a technopolitical decision to eject water from the Valley of Mexico; this was a decision that was made possible through the use of a giant new drainage tunnel, inaugurated just a couple of years prior.

As you can see here, most of the wastewater ejected from the Valley of Mexico is dumped directly into the Tula River, meaning that it is, in effect, an extension of Mexico City’s drainage network. And flows in that network, as I had learned, are tightly controlled by engineers. This meant that the amount of water flowing towards Tula was not in any way inevitable. Instead, it was the result of either a grievous error in engineering judgement or, much more likely, a deliberate decision to sacrifice the much poorer Tula in order to protect Mexico City. One way or another, it was the government’s responsibility.

I published this argument in a Spanish op-ed in the Washington Post a few weeks after the disaster. The op-ed went viral and led to a flurry of media requests. But most importantly, my arguments were taken up by organizers on the ground, which they used to change the popular narrative around flooding from a natural disaster to a political decision. This put the government on the defensive, and inspired lawsuits that – while still unresolved – may force the state to both pay millions in damages and redesign its infrastructures and operational protocols.

What I did – piecing together this data, trying to make an argument about a disastrous event involving a technological system – might be called “forensic engineering.” But my efforts were inspired more by the work of forensic architecture, which, as Eyal Weizman puts it, uses the tools of architecture to reverse the “forensic gaze,” placing under scrutiny the very state and corporate entities that usually wield forensic tools to evade blame.[17]

The difference between my work and conventional forensic engineering was not only an explicit attentiveness to how political power operated to produce the disastrous outcome, but also my positionality as an engineer outside the apparatuses of state and corporate power, where forensic engineering usually operates. There is no assumption of access to complete datasets or to the physical sites and infrastructures involved, and little in the ways of conventional material support. This is the work of engineering from the outside and against power – and for that reason, I think of it as an example of counter-engineering analysis.

Counter-Planning

The second tactic, which almost invariably builds on the first, is (counter-)planning, which uses engineering expertise to demonstrate the viability of alternative technological arrangements exposed through counter-analysis.

Let me continue here with the example of Tula. After the publication of my op-ed, organizers reached out to me and we began a research collaboration that I am continuing now, working with both them and a former student of mine here at Princeton – Juan Pablo, who is here today! – to analyze alternative ways of managing water in the basin.

We are focusing especially on the possibility of radically expanding the capacity of the metropolitan region to regulate – that is, temporarily hold on to – its floodwaters, rather than ejecting them violently towards Tula in the midst of a storm – causing the disaster of September 2021. Our focus is the vast area of federal lands at the heart of what was once the Lake Texcoco, which is located just east of Mexico City.

This 4000-hectare tract of land has been the site of continual social struggle – and violent state repression - over the past two decades, as successive presidents have sought to use it to create an airport and vast urban redevelopment scheme, with correspondingly enormous profits for local and foreign capitalists and their political allies. Local residents – and activists across the basin – have opposed these schemes, arguing that Lake Texcoco’s lands serve a crucial ecological and hydrological purpose. Because of public opposition, the land is now earmarked for a park, but it remains unclear how much of its land the government will allow to be inundated during heavy storms.

This question, however, is vitally important. What Juan Pablo’s thesis offers to do is to show whether a flood like the one that devastated Tula could have been prevented (or at least radically reduced) by inundating Lake Texcoco, and if so, precisely how much land would need to be set aside for this purpose.

Such a counter-plan, necessarily, runs against the interests of the ruling class, who continue – just as in the 1950s – to promote the strategy of expulsion of water from the basin in order to facilitate continued urban development, which is highly profitable.

But importantly, the role of counter-engineering here is not to create a heroic plan from nowhere, but rather to provide the technical solidarity needed to support the work activists are already doing. And indeed, Juan Pablo’s analysis offers to provide a crucial data point that buttresses the plans already being put forward by local activists, who have long argued for the restoration of Lake Texcoco.

At the same time, by showing the centrality of Lake Texcoco to the disaster in Tula, this counter- planning links together two otherwise seemingly disconnected social struggles – in Tula and in Texcoco – into a broader movement - and plan - for a radical reorientation of Mexico City’s relationship to its land and water. Such a reorientation would, crucially, put a wrench in the growth agenda of the ruling class by reserving large areas of the basin for water – rather than urbanization.

Counter-Interventions

The last tactic is perhaps the most recognizable in the world of “design” – the counter-intervention. The intervention – which likely builds on the previous tactics, but not necessarily – is a targeted action that modifies (or indeed disables outright – “monkey wrenching”) the functioning of a given technological system in ways that diminish ruling class power and/or increase popular power.

I want to give an example drawn, again, from the struggle over the Texcoco lakebed, which I was not involved in but nonetheless exemplifies what I am describing well: In 2021, local activists from the region who had been involved in struggling against the airport used hand tools to break a modest hole in the side of a levee in the federally managed Lake Texcoco area.

The levee had been originally built as part of the ancillary works for the planned airport, designed to prevent water from one of the rivers that flows into Lake Texcoco from inundating the area of the airport. Instead, the levee would channel it towards a massive concrete drain (the Canal Colector), which would in turn speed it towards the Deep Drainage tunnels, and ultimately out of the basin.

This intervention – reminiscent of so-called “guerrilla architecture” – allowed water to flow out of the river during subsequent storms and spread out over a wide area of the lakebed. The activists – a few of whom are themselves engineers – did not do this randomly. Rather, it was a calculated effort informed by their understanding of hydrology and hydraulics. Its purpose was to show the viability of their plan to restore Lake Texcoco – a plan that the government had, thus far, roundly rejected.

The effect of this intervention – and broader mobilizations – has been a gradual, and begrudging, acceptance on the part of the state to consider how to restore at least parts of Lake Texcoco to their historic role as a receiving body for the waters of the eastern rivers of the basin.

This counter-intervention, of course, was directly confrontational – a sign of the activists’ relative strength. But there are of course other moments in which the balance of forces suggests the need to take actions that frustrate or disable the machinery of power in more subtle, covert ways. And there are other interventions that might serve to avoid confrontation altogether, but instead build the capacities of everyday people to evade or avoid ruling class power altogether, ultimately weakening its hold on us – all things I’m happy to discuss further after the talk.

***

What unites these different tactics is that they are all intended, explicitly, to undermine ruling class power as part of a broader social struggle. They do not serve much purpose alone; in the case of my op-ed, I was lucky that it was picked up by local movements (whom I did not know of at the time) or else it would have done very little.

This is a very different model of engineering than we are used to, one which does not take for granted what is, ordinarily, an essential unspoken requirement of engineering: power. Engineers ordinarily work from and for those in power, with access to capital and permissions that are only accessible within state and corporate engineering apparatuses.

By and large, counter-engineering is done, necessarily, from the outside and from below. The point is not to romanticize this, but rather recognize that even if it is far from ideal, this is the situation in which we must work if we want to do engineering that actually undermines systems of domination.

Another difference with engineering as we know it is that here, engineers take the backseat. They are not the spectacular innovators whose faces will be plastered on social entrepreneurship magazines, or whose designs will be studied in engineering classrooms. The work of counter-engineering is often profoundly unglamorous, involving little in the way of tangible design products to be circulated. (Indeed, its most profound effect might be the opposite of creative design; it may be the dismantling of a design, a negative design.) And yet my point is that it might play a crucial supporting role in the forward march of movements for liberation.

Conclusion

So, to conclude: I have made the case that engineering is a central means of expanding ruling class power – of expanding modes of social domination, which I think many of you would agree are deeply unjust. And I have argued for the necessity (and possibility) of a different kind of engineering – counter-engineering - that uses engineering against engineering, that uses engineering to undermine ruling class power and build, instead, popular counter-power.

At this point, the engineering students and educators in the audience might be asking themselves: where can I (or my students) get a job doing any of this? To be quite frank, such a job isn’t really possible to find, even in the non-profit sector, which largely depends on the generosity of capitalists and the state. And there’s a reason, a quite obvious reason: would we really expect the ruling class to invest in – or donate to - anything that explicitly challenges its power? They might, of course, unwittingly do so, and there are fractures within the ruling class that we might productively exploit, for a time, but these have limits.[18]

What does this mean for doing counter-engineering, then? That it is likely to be unpaid labor done in your “free” time, perhaps compensated at times by meager donations raised from the community directly. This is, of course, the way radical social movements have always worked – they’ve been led by everyday people, not non-profit professionals or academics.[19]

But what about the rest of your time? We all need a day job.

Refusal (and Organizing)

That brings us to the last, and perhaps most deceptively simple, tactic of counter-engineering: refusal. The ruling class depends fundamentally to develop technologies that expand their power and have often paid engineers handsomely to maintain their compliance. Nevertheless, this dependency means engineers also have the possibility of exerting tremendous power through their refusal to further the interests of the ruling class.[20]

Refusals might be individual and, in the aggregate, have some effect as industries struggle to attract and retain talented engineers. [21] But they are much more powerful as collective actions. While the examples are not numerous, there are some: tech workers have recently organized walkouts under the banner #TechWontBuildIt when their employers have sought contracts with ICE, for example.[22] Reaching back farther, the 1960s saw a plethora of militant protests on university campuses – including right here – against defense-related research in science and engineering. These had some lasting effects, including banning classified research at Stanford, for instance.[23] In the 1970s, workers – including engineers! - at the Lucas aerospace company in the UK drafted a plan to retool their production from arms to human needs.

The so-called “Lucas Plan” did not come to fruition. But around the same time, however, a different group of workers – not engineers, but rather the construction trades – in Sydney began working in solidarity with local resident organizers and announced their collective refusal to work on projects that harmed their community or the environment. Their so-called “Green Bans” shut down major redevelopment schemes across Sydney, which would have destroyed green spaces and uprooted historic neighborhoods of working-class people. They offered instead to build things with social purpose, like schools, clinics, and affordable housing. The leftist union leadership behind the bans were eventually ousted, but the material legacy of their collective refusal can be read in the landscape of Sydney today, and these workers offer a model engineers might learn from.

The common objection to any suggestion of refusal on the part of engineers is that if we don’t do it, somebody else will. The response of tech workers and the Sydney trade unionists to this argument is clear and resounding: not if we all say ‘no.’

So, coming back to the individual engineer, what does this mean about the relationship between counter-engineering and your job? It means that one way to practice counter-engineering is by organizing on the job. The kind of counter-power that the workers in Sydney were able to wield against developers and the municipal government did not come from nowhere: it came from years of grueling, on the job organizing that created a militant labor union that looked out not only for the interests of its members, but of their community as a whole. The point is to build the power necessary to be able to refuse collectively.

If engineers in Mexico City were sufficiently organized (and politicized) to enact such a collective refusal, there is no technical reason they would have to continue to operate the drainage system to the benefit of the ruling class. The system’s very interconnectedness offers tantalizing alternative possibilities - affordances - such as redirecting floodwaters towards wealthy neighborhoods, out of recognition that they have the most means to restore their lost property and rarely live on lower floors.

The recent wave of strike actions by the French CGT trade union’s electrical workers offers a potential point of inspiration, as they have provided free electricity and gas for the poor while cutting off power to politicians supporting pension reforms that would deepen the exploitation of the working class.[24]

But collective organizing and refusal are not just about liberating our communities from systems of domination. They are also the only means of liberating engineers, from the straitjacket of serving the ruling class.[25] Engineers who want to actually practice “humanistic design” will find few outlets to do so in today’s capitalist world. Instead, they are far more likely to find themselves denuding Indigenous lands for lithium batteries, creating hypersonic missiles to threaten China, and designing ever-more sophisticated robots to discipline labor. The lucky ones will be well-paid and working on technically “interesting” problems, but they will likely find themselves increasingly disaffected with the constraints the profit imperative puts on their work.

Building popular power and creating autonomous spaces within capitalism and within states – or dismantling capitalism itself – are the only ways that engineers will have the resources and time to design otherwise. Counter-engineering is thus not an end, but a means to an end – to a world beyond capitalism and beyond state violence, in which engineering might make good on its promise to design for humanity. Thank you.