Abstract
The dreaded moment of when you were just about to save your work on the computer and it all of a sudden crashes is a regular feature of our daily lives. Arjun Appadurai and Neta Alexander’s book deals with two types of failure: ‘techno-failure’ and ‘market failure’ with a focus on Silicon Valley and Wall Street. Their understanding of failure is not as of ‘an immanent feature of any human artefact (such as a project, a technology, an institution, or a career), but is in fact a judgment that something is a failure, we are led inevitably to as what events produce these judgements (history), who is authorized to make them (power), what form they must take in order to appear legitimate and plausible (culture), and what tools and infrastructures mediate these failures or make them ubiquitous (technology)’ (p. 2). The book is therefore interested in understanding of discourse of failure in our times, including failures that have been forgotten and others that have entered collective memory. The authors are highly critical of the contemporary capitalist framework, which presents failure as ‘the fault of the citizen, the investor, the user, the consumer’ while success is described as ‘the result of technology and its virtues’ (p. 2). The book is split into Introduction, four substantive chapters and Conclusion. Chapter 1, ‘The Promise Machine: Between “Techno-failure” and Market Failure’, conceptualises failure as epistemology, affect, and political economy. Chapter 2, ‘Creative Destruction and New Socialities’ focuses on the proliferation of the gig economy. Chapter 3, ‘Failure, Forgotten: On Buffering, Latency, and the Monetization of Waiting’, explores buffering and ‘“false latency” as part of a long history of waiting, lag, and delay in technological systems’ (p. 13). Chapter 4, ‘Too Big to Fail: Banks, Derivatives, and Market Collapse’, then shifts the focus from Silicon Valley to Wall Street by investigating the Great Recession and the logic of derivatives. All in all, this is a thought-provoking book that is definitely worth a read.