Sensory infrastructure is the name the model gives to the institutions that let a civilization sense its own condition: journalism, research, auditing, whistleblowing, local reporting, scientific publication, public data, and independent investigation. Read through the distributed sensory system, these are not merely businesses, professions, or political goods — they are organs of perception, and their shared function is precise:
Keep the shared map close enough to reality that distributed navigation remains possible.
That reframes their value. Journalism defended only as a business or a partisan institution is easy to discount; journalism understood as sensory infrastructure is load-bearing, because when it fails the whole field navigates from a map that no longer matches the terrain. The same lens explains why concentrated ownership or capture of these organs is so dangerous — it does not just bias opinion, it degrades the civilization’s ability to perceive — and why their independence is a condition of a self-steering ecology rather than a luxury of a comfortable one. See The Self-Steering Ecology.