Star transforms infrastructure from a hidden technical background into a relational object of ethnographic inquiry. Infrastructure is not a thing with universal properties but a set of arrangements that becomes visible differently to different communities, often appearing only when it breaks down. The essay’s methodological contribution is its invitation to study apparently boring materials—standards, plugs, classifications, forms, routines and maintenance work—as sites where social order is continuously produced. Its iconic operation is inversion: what appears marginal or mundane becomes analytically central because it sustains the possibility of coordinated action. The bridge to urbanism, information studies and organisational theory is exact. Cities, databases and institutions depend upon systems whose political effects are concealed by familiarity. Star provides a way to examine scale without abandoning situated knowledge, tracing how local practices connect to extensive technical networks. Infrastructure becomes both ecological and historical: embedded in conventions, learned through membership and vulnerable to uneven forms of access and breakdown.