Failure

by Arjun Appadurai, Neta Alexander

Wall Street and Silicon Valley – the two worlds this book examines – promote the illusion that scarcity can and should be eliminated in the age of seamless “flow.” Instead, Appadurai and Alexander propose a theory of habitual and strategic failure by exploring debt, crisis, digital divides, and (dis)connectivity. Moving between the planned obsolescence and deliberate precariousness of digital technologies and the “too big to fail” logic of the Great Recession, they argue that the sense of failure is real in that it produces disappointment and pain. Yet, failure is not a self-evident quality of projects, institutions, technologies, or lives. It requires a new and urgent understanding of the conditions under which repeated breakdowns and collapses are quickly forgotten.  By looking at such moments of forgetfulness, this highly original book offers a multilayered account of failure and a general theory of denial, memory, and nascent systems of control.

120 pages, Paperback

Published November 4, 2019

About the author

Arjun Appadurai is an Indian-American anthropologist recognized as a major theorist in globalization studies. In his anthropological work, he discusses the importance of the modernity of nation states and globalization

Reviews

[Glen McGhee · Rating 3 out of 5]

For a work that focuses on digital latency and circling GIF-loading icons, the authors fail to notice and comment on the mythical and archetypal dimensions of the uroborus image that now serves as the ubiquitous dynamic rendering of "buffering."
I was also disappointed that "buffering" in "Failure" excluded and neglected the post-modern treatment of "deferral": ex., Derrida (différance), Lyotard (truth deferred), Deleuze (reality itself as deferred becoming), Foucault and Rorty. Although mentioned on practically every page, somehow the importance assigned to "buffering" by the authors eluded me.
Needless to say, I felt like I was caught in endless "buffering" while reading "Failure" -- with the book in one hand, and AI open on my screen in the other, trying to expand and flesh out promising references that never quite panned out. "Affective economy" is an undeveloped concept -- as is the "naturalization" of failure. Heidegger's critique of technology (ready-to-hand versus present-at-hand) is left hanging; and really awesome insights into how "sociality" (social structures) are devoured as techno-capitalism continues to expand are, sadly, barely touched on. What a shame! Where is Robert Putnam when we need him?
Some of the sentences just string words together -- and self-referential 'hooks' littered every other page, sometimes referring to either a past chapter or an upcoming discussion both on the same page. This was both annoying and distracting, I thought.
I greatly valued discussion that unpacked economist Joseph Schumpeter's notion of creative destruction, which he identified as the heartbeat of modern capitalism, because Appadurai and Alexander draw attention to the crucial role played by debt production in the cycle of innovation and business decline. Christensen's version is the idea of "disruptive innovation" -- once so wildly popular with entrepreneurs and venture capitalists -- that conveniently hides the downside of these "systems of debt production" now enslaving us all.
In this regard, a radical decentering of Weber's accumulative asceticism opens up to David Graeber's expanding universe of Debt. [Another missed opportunity, I thought, was not mentioning how Dasein's primordial "immer schon schultig" overlaps with viewing "debt as a natural fact" (110).]
But how this discussion leads to semiotic derivatives is something I did not understand.

"Convenience" -- digital convenience -- leads discussion in another direction about how all these developments distort the experience of time, compressing and accelerating it, and the role that technology plays in warping time (112), especially now in the Era of AI (which began the year this book was published, 2020).

Another failing, in my opinion, was the lack of an "Index" to help navigate this short book.

Unfortunately, "debt refusal" or opting-out (the only alternatives mentioned by the authors) are simply not plausible.

[Tara Brabazon · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a ripper of a book. I also want to note that Good Reads has not mentioned the co-author on this book: Neta Alexander.

An innovative interpretation of failure, there is a focus on Wall Street and Silicon Valley, and how the failure that is configured in these hyper-neoliberal 'industries' has had a destructive effect on the economy and social relationships. Locating, "the uniqueness of failure in the entrepreneurial age," they show that failure has been colonized and clustered with innovation and risk. Therefore techno failure and market failure are minimized through "the illusion of choice."

This is a fascinating study of how finance capitalism and techno-capitalism have perpetuated obsolescence and a forgetting and minimizing of market failure, while focusing on 'user error' and the failures of citizen-consumers to embrace and reach 'happiness.

Fabulous. Recommended.

[Christina McNeice]

Found it very dry