I think that your observation about a shift from an “extensive” model of infrastructure modernization to an “intensive” model of optimization is right. I would even hazard that this is what I tried to conceptualize in that little piece I wrote (but never did anything with) on “Infrastructure and Reflexive Modernization.”

As for the infrastructure/flows question: I think that we have always seen flows as the real problem — or perhaps circulation, which, we should remember, was what Foucault identified as the object of population security. I feel like the question you raise goes back to these debates we had a long time ago in New York. We all agreed that VSS is also concerned with the circulatory mechanisms of population security that Foucault identified. So the question was to think about VSS as — again — a kind of reflexive problematization of the same questions.

One question that I think is worth raising is whether, exactly, this is a case of VSS. I actually think that this guy is dealing with classic PS problems. So to me, we might want to argue that what is being described here is the remapping or redeploying of techniques of VSS — invented to deal with exigent situations that disrupt a network — back onto the field of the social and its regular patterns. What is interesting about this particular system is that, as you note, it seems to be able to function in both registers, as simultaneously a VSS apparatus (dealing with catastrophic disruption) and a PS apparatus (dealing with regular and anticipatable patterns).

In a way, I think it would not be wrong to identify traffic congestion as a process of over-flow of the capacity of the infrastructure systems that not only make the flow of particular objects, in this case cars, possible, but also allow the very volume of the flow itself. The traditional response to this tendency of overflow seems to be capacity expansion (in case of traffic, just add more lanes and build new roads), and not surprisingly only within few more years the system adopts and starts to push the boundaries of its capacity once again. However, what seems to be interesting as this video highlights there is an alternative solution: rather than expanding the capacity, first re-structure the internal elements of the system (optimize) and then create a surveillance system that can continue this re-structuring process continuously thanks to artificial intelligence and therefore allow the system to adopt to both cyclical temporal changes and unexpected shocks.

Apart from regulating flows, another norm seems to be the restoration of flows in the face of catastrophic events such as earthquakes. The website puts this as: “In 1994, the Department received the ITE Transportation Achievement Award for our work in quickly restoring mobility in the wake of the Northridge Earthquake. The presence of ATSAC along the Santa Monica Freeway Corridor was cited as a key component in maintaining circulation despite the loss of the nation’s busiest freeway.” Uninterrupted continuity of flows and crisis management practices directed at ensuring this norm seems to be one of the main themes running through the domains in which we find practices of VSS. OEP’s work on infrastructure resilience was for sure one, and more recently I have been seeing similar concerns in the work I am doing on financial system security in the Fed and National Infrastructure Simulation and Analysis Center of DHS.

I am wondering to what extend we can generalize on the basis of these observations regarding VSS as a form of power being primarily concerned with an ontological figure such as “flows” whether they are human or non-human. So far, Andy and you seem to imply that “infrastructure” is the object of intervention and security for VSS. I wonder to what extent infrastructure is the real object of intervention of VSS and to what extent it is the proxy through which one can intervene in the figure of “flows”. If we probably take this new ontological figure seriously, our contemporary might be seeing the enfiguration of a new figure apart from the human…