The following is half-book review, half-interview with one of the book’s authors.
Failure by Neta Alexander and Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge, UK: 2019)
Publisher’s web page: https://politybooks.com/bookdetail/?isbn=9781509504718
In Arjun Appadurai and Neta Alexander’s co-written book, Failure, the duo examine regimes of technological/computational failure as well as the protocols producing these regimes. In particular, there is particular interest in those protocols that bolster today’s gig economy, including the monetization of waiting and latency, considered vis-à-vis the rise of the derivative contractual promise. Borrowing from Karl Popper’s work on failure-as-method and Schumpeter’s work on creative destruction, the two travail the history of capitalism with particular interest in the latticework tying Silicon Valley to Wall Street; there is, also, a concomitant influence from queer studies (particularly Sara Ahmed, Lauren Berlant, Jack Halberstam and Ann Cvetkovich’s discourse on “toxic positivity” and “cruel optimism”). Failure, as such, is pitted against the “happiness directive” and capitalism’s idea of a productive, dutiful and typically heteronormative consumer-subject.
Methodologically, Appadurai and Alexander also draw from infrastructure studies and, more specifically, the growing literature on maintenance and repair (e.g., Andrew L. Russell and Lee Vinsel’s historical study of maintenance and repair), extending this to digital technics. As such, Failure takes as its subject the habitual failure perpetuated by both Wall Street (which monetizes financial innovation) and Silicon Valley (which monetizes technological innovation), considering failure as an epistemology directed by an affective economy. Consider, for instance, how Wall Street and Silicon Valley comprise mutually dependent parts of a shared and symbiotic economy. Silicon Valley is characterized by liquidated pools of capital that are invested strategically and shift rapidly; Wall Street’s innovations in digital technology are predicated upon expediting trades and increasing the volume of financial transactions so as to protect propriety financial information and to improve financial tools. As the authors state, failure, as a commodity, has been “achieved by building a machine of broken promises aimed at denying or dismissing the existence of failure whenever it is experienced by the 99 percent” (Appadurai et al. 2019, 11). Conceived of as such, failure is inherent to the market logic of capitalism and its dependency on credit, debt and derivatives
Nowhere is this more evident today in buffering times and false latency, albeit these two manifestations of failure follow in a long history of waiting, lag times and delays embedded within both technological systems and technologization as a financial practice. For instance, consider YouTube’s “buffering ads,” which are cached and localized, turning viewers into debtors seeking instant gratification. There is a curious genealogical link between the YouTube ad-viewer or, better yet, the survey-respondent (who needs to fill out the survey in question to continue to their choice content) and the waiting times of a doctor’s office or bank, where a patient or investor or account-holder may be expected to denote personalized data with a questionnaire. Notably, streaming services and compression technologies are inherently imbued with “digital dams,” a biased algorithmic routine distinct from the “breakdown”—because the former is monetized and not the product of socio-political and governmental circumscriptions, it tactically carves a dialectic and fetishized ideal of improved infrastructure and compression algorithms to cloak failure’s instrumental contingency. As the authors note, with intentional performance controls, planned obsolescence, or “security checks,” there is the looming promise of trustworthiness. For example, tax-preparation software like TurboTax extend the wait time of users while they “maximize” refunds; similarly, Facebook slows down users’ ability to log in to their accounts from different geo-locales by implanting verification quizzes. Embedded and concealed within these “wait times” is delayed gratification—such is the “affectual” proclivity of failure.
In the epoch of cloud computing, “seamless” information connectivity seems to be ever-more expected. With the “gig-economy,” we see the amplification of quantification (e.g., Uber’s star-rating system) accompanied by the mereological diffraction of the individual-cum-“dividual” as a datafied self. As Deleuze noted in his 1990 “Postscript to Societies of Control,” digitization accompanies dividualization, wherein the breakdown of the individual into scores, ranks, features, attributes and dimensions renders them most productive for predictive finance mechanisms (risk-ratings, credit scores, consumer profiling; 55). Indeed, the individual was once regarded as the central agent of property regimes (through possessive individualism), the key bearer of rights in liberal democratic discourse, and the irreducible ground for ethical action. Through “dividualization,” or by making numerical dimensions of the individual more critical than the total assemblage, contemporary finance changes the nature of human subjectivity to make it easier to aggregate, recombine, monitor, predict and exploit subjects for the purposes of financial markets (primarily by making score-able and rank-able “dividuals” the sources of debt). In turn, we see the end of Foucauldian bio-power and the rise of what Bernard Stiegler, following Deleuze, terms psychopower, which sees the rise of what John Cheney-Lippold refers to as the increasingly layered “algorithmic identity” (Cheney-Lippold 2017, 3—5). Accordingly, “[t]o incur debt, you need no special ethical, biological, or racial capacities,” as one solely needs “to be a debt-worthy dividual” (62; emphasis added).
As endogenous renewal continually configures the essence of our market economy, innovation becomes increasingly understood as intrinsic to technical progress. Furthermore, the Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft (the “Big 5”) operate through value-extraction, which is more highly rewarded than value-creation; thus, these companies are, in their core, meta-data mechanisms premised upon strategic failure.
Thus, this distinction between failure and use-value becomes all the more exacerbated within moments of failure or breakdown—as Appadurai and Alexander recall, this is precisely what Heidegger, speaking of tools rendered useless through breakage, termed Vorhanden (“present-at-hand”/”objectively present”), wherein the relational function of an object/objects becomes visible once they fail (Appadurai et al. 2019, 25). What, then, can we say of the legitimacy of the “anti-social” posture, wherein one resists the ubiquitous digital regimes of surveillance, connectivity and e-bonding? According to Finn Brunton and Helen Nissenbaum, and as Appadurai and Alexander remind us, “opting out” of the digital ecosystem exists as more of a fantasy than a true possibility, as a surveillance-free life is impossible to obtain and most are chosen asymmetrically and strategically.[1]
Thus, monetization of risk is key in the sociological operation of debt qua failure; the seizure and appropriation of the production of debt has become central to transforming finance capitalism, such that those of us who produce debt can also become the main beneficiaries of its monetization, forging a closed loop. This is, of course, asymmetric: while the producers of exploitable debt are local, the financial markets/networks/corporations through which “failure” operates are global. The authors offer the aphorism that “all debt is local, but all debt markets are global” (112). The consumer-debtor is, today, transmuted into the perennial beta-tester of Silicon Valley; the authors offer that, instead of the inevitable and infrequent result of excessive speculation, inadequate regulation or unscrupulous bankers, market failure is a systematic feature of the connection of markets to wider aspects of our social and technological lives under advanced capitalism:
“[…] is not the failure of the smartphone simply the failure of the iron hammer as the wooden handle breaks? The answer is “no,” as habitual failure in the age of digital and financial markets holds unique patterns […] our failed technologies and markets do not teach us something new about our world; their repeated breakdowns do nothing more than further obstruct the underlying logic and hidden infrastructures that sustain them” (120).
The authors prompt that the “key to transforming the current form of financial capitalism is to seize and appropriate the means of the production of debt, in the interest of the vast class of debt manipulators” (121). Nonetheless, the problem remains that the producers of exploitable debt value (through their labor) are local while financial markets, networks, and corporations are global. Thus, the “local always loses” (122), and asymmetrical relationships are further cultivated. In order to further query the political, historical and genealogical archeology of this project, I have, below, included a conversation between myself and one of the authors, Neta Alexander.
EE: This reverberates of the ethos of Whole Earth Catalog; how would this reappear today without depending on the networks of the global debtor-vectorial class? If buffering does not shield us from harm but, instead, habituates us to forget the memory of “the last harm so as to be innocent and hopeful when we experience the next one” (123), is making this “harm” more explicate a viable political technique (would this merely prompt “opting out” or appropriation vis-a-vis “the commons”)? Or would this “making explicit” lapse simply into the impulse for “creative destruction” that troubles “toxic positivity” (as in the work of Halberstam)? That this would allow us to “remember failure better” (124) or make “failure, remembered” (125) an ingrained memory?
NA: “We should strive to develop digital and algorithmic literacy that can help us to “un-black box” our opaque devices and to better understand the infrastructures they rely on; if we do “not know how to craft new regulatory policies” and this is a space for collaboration between state and civil society, is legislative widening (i.e. voting on algorithmic policy/usages so as to invert “platform capitalism’s” opacity) viable?
EE: In the text you and Appadurai ask, if habitual failure doesn’t make a difference, how can we isolate, identify and mitigate its potentially destructive effect on our lives? That is, how can we better remember the failures of the recent past and resist the monetization of those that are yet to come? However, through the aperture of queer theory, you resist the standard model of positivity and future-oriented thought. Instead of re-appropriating failure then, is there any way for, perhaps, such literature as yours to underscore the symptoms of the relational function of objects to not only demonstrate their distinctions but make the “machine of broken promises” so explicit that consumers don’t “opt out” but seek out algorithmic literacy. However, it seems that this path also bears the brunt of the accelerationist solution (of exacerbating conditions). Can you speak to the inherent shortcomings and possible advantages of both the refusal and reappropriation arguments?
NA: First, it is important to stress that we draw inspiration from queer studies of failure. In our introduction, we identify queer scholars like Sara Ahmed, Jack Halberstam, and Lauren Berlant as important thinkers convincingly pushing against a cult of “toxic positivity” or “cruel optimism.” What they offer us are new temporalities of failure that expand our understating of failure as repetition, rather than difference.
As you rightfully observe, however, we also critique the binary model of failure/success that calls on us to “fail better” (as both Mark Zuckerberg and Samuel Beckett did). The reappropriation model encouraging us to celebrate, embrace, or joyfully practice failure risks perpetuating the idea that failure is an individual act, rather than a political and communal judgment. Failure is also a privilege, as some people fail up while others — women, people of color, immigrants — are heavily punished for minor mistakes.
The refusal model we develop in Failure seeks to leave such discourses as productivity or self-help behind in order to shift our attention from questions of individual agency (how can I fail better?) to the careful exploration of collective “failure protocols and regimes” — the ways in which we judge something as failure or success. Algorithmic literacy is a helpful tool in this regard, since it can help us understand how the inherent failure of digital systems and infrastructure has come to define our lives. Take buffering, for example. The reappropriation model might encourage us to develop our buffering endurance, as it were, so we will learn to accept those moments of latency and delay as harmless. Drawing on algorithmic literacy, however, can serve to reveal the ways in which false latency is being strategically introduced in order to monetize speed (e.g. by way of premium services or expensive data packages). While we find the reappropriation model to be rich, thought-provoking, and crucial to our understanding of failure, we also wish to move beyond it so we could hold tech companies and governmental agencies accountable for the daily failures we endure both in the stock market and in our engagement with digital and mobile technologies. By doing so, we adopt the idea that opting out is increasingly unattainable. We draw on Finn Brunton’ and Helen Nissenbaum’s critique of “the fantasy of opting out” by claiming that while the algorithmic systems tracking our behavior are voluntary, they constitute “asymmetrical relationships.” Algorithmic literacy, regulation, and activism are the most effective tools to fight back against this asymmetry. The European General Data Protection Regulation, the call to limit the power of the Big Five through antitrust laws in the United States, or the recent backlash against Big Tech (which manifested, among other ways, in the Google walkout and #delete_facebook hashtag) are all examples of what can be done when opting out is no longer a viable option.
EE: You make the erudite case that latency is crucial to digital economies, which function within “web continuity” and create pleasurable habits-cum-addiction. There is the argument, upheld by Bernard Stiegler, Gertrud Koch and Thomas Pringle (amongst others) that new media technics, particularly those that are based on locutionary self-annotation (smart watches, oura sleep-tracking rings, etc.) not only are based on externalization (the old thesis that begins with Ernst Kapp’s organ projection and is continued by Arnold Gehlen but perhaps finds its most popular sentiments with McLuhan) but also directly affect mental processes. Do you see the habituation of failure as having any psychological affect, other than our becoming accustomed/habituated?
NA: In our first chapter, we discuss three different approaches to the study of failure, one of which is “failure as an affective economy.” We build on Sara Ahmed — who, in turn, builds on Freudian depth psychology — to explore the need for repression. This is a process by which an emotion is perceived but its origin is left unconscious. As a result, Ahmed writes, “what is repressed from consciousness is not the feeling as such, but the idea to which the feeling may have been first (but provisionally) connected.” While it is often ignored or forgotten, digital or financial failure might also be acknowledged while its true cause is concealed or denied in order to avoid the anxiety it might evoke.
As the book demonstrates by closely exploring several case studies, failure functions as an affective economy when the idea it might reveal is instantaneously replaced with another, less threating idea. In Chapter 3, we apply this argument to buffering and other unexpected digital lags, arguing that these moments of delay and suspended time might be attached to reassuring ideas like “this temporary disturbance will soon end.” What remains concealed is the idea that buffering induces a “perpetual anxiety” because of its liminal sphere of activity and passivity, helplessness and control, and viewing as waiting. In a 2017 essay, I argued that this perpetual anxiety recasts buffering as a technical, soon-to-disappear nuisance (therefore involving the very same system of “difference and displacement” described by Ahmed). When it comes to digital culture, perpetual anxiety always lurks in the back of users’ minds: whether it takes the form of connectivity anxiety, battery-life anxiety, or, with the emergence of connected homes and the Internet of Things, an entirely new set of anxieties. In that sense, the affective economy that buffering might reveal is only one example for an anxiety caused by the combination of the need to wait for an unpredictable length and an excruciating feeling of helplessness.
This model focuses less on externalization and more on internalization: how do we internalize moments of failure in order to attribute them to ourselves rather than to Silicon Valley or Wall Street? We are, therefore, more interested in Marxist and Althusserian traditions of interpellation than in the media theory explored by McLuhan and many others.
EE: Is it possible that failure also functions as pharmakon—that is, both poison and cure; if seamlessness, digital dams, and security checks were fully integrated (completely “concealing” their source), such that failure not only was taken for granted (as it is today) but actually became thoroughly outpouched to imperceptible background noise, the full scale of metadata collection would become more dangerous? Or is this still a fantasy and an untimely prognostication of sorts that lapses into the same sentiments as Netflix’s Hastings contest—is failure still too critical and essential for creating the debtor class? Is there the possibility of “failure” maintained but made more enjoyable or (illusively) participatory, something that modifies the model of interactive ads, perhaps?
NA: The danger of failure becoming a constant background noise – always there, yet never acknowledged – is one we are fascinated by. We agree with you that this black box design is inseparable from our current surveillance capitalism. The more users (or investors) become indifferent to failure, the easier it becomes to collect their data, perform A/B testing via beta versions of apps and services, and convince them that they are solely accountable for security breaches and other inherent vulnerabilities. The promise of convenience, which we explore in the book, provides a possible explanation for the allure of these digital services, especially Netflix and those services focusing on entertainment and the illusion of personalization. The dark side of personalization, however, is that it makes it harder to identify failure as a political issue, since it promotes the logic of individuation and fragmentation.
EE: Speaking of the debtor class, can you speak more on how different socio-economic strata in different countries engage in failure uniquely? In Turkey, where I am from, for instance, I have noticed that failure is perhaps more commonplace with greater waiting times than in the US. What do these different degrees of failure imply and is there the possibility that increased and less fluid models of failure allot more reappropriation of the mechanisms of debt? Of course, there are types of failure that prompt many in the poorer villages of Turkey to “opt out” (particularly possible due to unreliable internet, where it is available at all), but this is becoming increasingly rare (more and more villagers every year have smart phones).
NA: As we chose to tackle as broad a topic as failure, we decided to limit our investigation to the American context, where we offer a close analysis of two coastal cultures: Silicon Valley and Wall Street. That said, one of the contributions we were hoping to make is to bring together the study of waiting with the study of debt. Your example from Turkey can serve to demonstrate this idea: waiting is part of a temporal system of power relations. There are those who wait and those who don’t.
Moments of waiting and failure are constantly being monetized. Slowness and latency are supposedly eliminated in the digital age, with its emphasis on acceleration. In practice, however, waiting is the key link between the two worlds this book studies: waiting for credit approvals, waiting for the gap between receiving loans and paying interest for them, waiting for the reloading to be complete, waiting for the interruption to be resolved, waiting for the black box to restore itself so as to disappear from our attention. Waiting and queuing are widely known to be conditions of subordination, inequality, and discipline. So also with Wall Street and Silicon Valley. We are trained to wait as viewers and debtors, often in states of anxiety and anger, for the next moment of gratification, and we are trained to forgive and forget the endless recurrence of traumatic buffering periods. Failure maps the paradox by which waiting is crucial for supporting business models that hail speed and instant gratification. To that extent, reappropriating or refusing debt — assuming these are even possible — are not enough without a more systemic change.
EE: According to your analysis, a quite unique one that ties the arachnean latticework between Wall Street and Silicon Valley, the individual was, in an earlier epoch, regarded as both the central agent of property regimes (through possessive individualism) and the key bearer of rights in liberal democratic discourse. Through “dividualization,” Deleuze’s term for the total datafication and numerically disassembled-cum-datafied person, contemporary finance capitalism changes the nature of human subjectivity to make it easier to aggregate, recombine, monitor, predict, and exploit subjects for the purposes of financial markets, primarily by making score-able and rank-able “dividuals” the sources of debt. As you remark “[t]o incur debt, you need no special ethical, biological, or racial capacities. One needs to be a debt-worthy dividual” whose “algorithmic identity” radically reshapes their understanding to social structures, blurring the ontological delineation between human and bot. I use the term ontological here because this does relate to the nature of being, but also how being is accommodated for and manipulated (the ontic). Do you believe that this process of datafication through dividualization reshapes the traditional terms of Foucauldian biopower, towards something that is more so based on one’s noetic/psychological being (“psychopower” or “noopower”)? More broadly, what significant ontological patterns do you believe that this model of failure prompts?
NA: To answer this question, we must first understand the logic and effects of what we call “habitual failure”. It is a contrasting logic to that of trauma, where the victim is encouraged to give voice to her suffering, process her feelings, or—in some cases—to reenact the traumatizing event in order to move forward with her life. Even with all the horror it induces, trauma is also often described as an opportunity to grow. It is, to borrow from Gregory Bateson’s famous definition of information, the “difference that makes a difference.” Habitual failure, as both Wall Street and Silicon Valley perpetuate it, however, is the difference that doesn’t make a difference. It is that which changes nothing; the non-event or the rapidly dismissed encounter with the helplessness of users and consumers who have all been transformed into potential or actual debtors.
Yet, this doesn’t mean that habitual failure has no ontological meaning. In fact, we argue the opposite: the ubiquity of failure creates new ontologies and new relationships between humans and their tools. Due to their black box design, we lost the ability to easily distinguish humans and tools, which stood at the center of Heidegger’s conceptualization of techne. In short, our failed technologies and markets do not teach us something new about our world; their repeated breakdowns do nothing more than to further obstruct the underlying logic and hidden infrastructures that sustain them. At the same time, these failures are being commoditized, studied and fed into the perpetual cycle of feedback and testing. Put differently, there are two reasons why failure no longer functions as an epistemological apparatus: first, we can no longer separate tools, bodies, and environments; second, even when our technological tools break, they do not become transparent, as their underlying logic and inner working remain hidden from the user. Due to the rising complexity of networks and algorithmic systems, the engineers or designers behind these devices often remain in the dark themselves, a notion that will only grow stronger in a world based on machine-learning algorithms and AI.
As many scholars have argued, the Foucauldian idea of biopower has lost its accuracy and allure in the age of surveillance capitalism. Deleuze’s “dividual” is more promising, as the decomposition of the individual is crucial for risk-ratings, credit scores, consumer profiling, and other operations on which contemporary finance depends. There is a growing recognition that the reduction of the individual to the dividual is a momentous development, which signals the end of a central idea of Western modernity in which personality, agency, motivation, interest, and the body were encased in a single envelope. This individual was earlier regarded as both the central agent of property regimes (through possessive individualism), the key bearer of rights in liberal democratic discourse, and the irreducible ground of ethical action and responsibility. Without this idea of the individual, Western modernity loses its most critical presumption. The question of how dividual failures are monetized, therefore, stands in the center of our book. We study the user, investor and debtor who has been habituated to turn a blind eye on inherent failures such as planned obsolescence, the broken promise of the derivative form, or the unproductiveness of waiting and delay. This is an urgent and difficult task. By mapping habitual failure, we hope to inspire future studies of its existential and ontological effects.
References
Alexander, N. and Arjun Appadurai (2019) Failure, Cambridge, UK: 2019.
Cheney-Lippold, J. We Are Data: Algorithms and the Making of Our Digital Selves. New York, NYU Press: 2017
Notes
[1] “For all the dramatic language about prisons and panopticons, the sorts of data collection we describe here—the kinds to which obfuscation is a response—are, in democratic countries, still theoretically voluntary. But the costs of refusal are high and getting higher: a life lived in ramifying social isolation, using any pay phones you can find (there are half as many in New York City as there were just five years ago) or mobile “burners,” able to accept only very particular forms of employment, living far from centers of business and commerce, without access to many forms of credit, insurance, or other significant financial instruments, not to mention the minor inconveniences and disadvantages—long waits at road toll cash lines, higher prices at grocery stores, inferior seating on airline flights—for which disclosure is the unspecified price (16). It isn’t possible for everyone to live on principle; as a practical matter, many of us must make compromises in asymmetrical relationships, without the control or consent for which we might wish.” See: Finn Brunton and Helen Nissenbaum, Obfuscation: A User’s Guide for Privacy and Protest (Cambridge, MA: 2015, 55).