Alexander - Rage Against The Machine

Society for Cinema & Media Studies
Rage against the Machine: Buffering, Noise, and Perpetual Anxiety in the Age of
Connected Viewing
Author(s): Neta Alexander
Source: Cinema Journal, Vol. 56, No. 2 (Winter 2017), pp. 1-24
Published by: University of Texas Press on behalf of the Society for Cinema & Media
Studies
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/44867506
Accessed: 14-11-2022 12:33 UTC
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms
Society for Cinema & Media Studies, University of Texas Press are collaborating with
JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Cinema Journal
This content downloaded from 129.125.19.61 on Mon, 14 Nov 2022 12:33:21 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
gg¿y
Rage against the Machine: Buffer-

ing, Noise, and Perpetual Anxiety
in the Age of Connected Viewing
by Neta Alexander
Abstract: Buffering, namely the need to preload data before streaming a video or audio
file, epitomizes the oft-ignored ruptures and disruptions of digital engagement. Whereas
buffering is often read as "noise" or as a technical nuisance awaiting a solution, a closer
look can challenge our notion of mediation, immersion, and control. By contextua I izing
the study of buffering within a rich history of spectatorial and sonic noise, this article
explores the unique "perpetual anxiety" it invokes and exposes, as well as the tension
between pleasure and pain embodied in recognizing the imperfections of a supposedly
seamless techno-utopia.
rarely explored: a never-ending, loopic, perpetual circle that oc-

casionally bears the words "loading" or "buffering" beneath it.
Why This casionally rarely Is GIF Buffering explored:This
informs bearsGIF
a the Being informs
us never-ending, that wordsus
Ignored?that
the "loading"the
streamed lostreamed
opic, It is world or a perpetualworld
ubiquitous "bufferiin
ng" in whiwhich
ch circle image wewe
beneath were
were that that imim-
- oc- it. is
mersed only seconds earlier has now been put on hold while the data is being sent
from one server to the next. We know not what to do, so we simply wait, putting
our trust in the most literal incarnation of deus ex machina. The god, we are hop-
ing, will come from the machine. In fact, in these brief moments of helplessness the
god is the machine: an omnipotent, invisible, and unknowable entity whose logic
and materiality are not entirely clear to us. Despite this abstraction - and perhaps
because of it - we are loyal disciples in the church of cyberspace and "on demand"
spectatorship. Is buffering a punishment? And if it is, what sin have we committed?
Following Wendy Hui Kyong Chun's conceptualization of software as based on a
"profound logic of 'sourcery' - a fetishism that obfuscates the vicissitudes of execu-
tion and makes our machines demonic," this religious terminology purposefully in-
ÍÜ
vokes notions of abstraction and animism.1 If, as Chun argues, software is "a visibly
CL
íS
X
invisible essence" that resonates with the mysticism of black magic, then buffering
t O
¡7)
(¡3
>
1 Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, "On 'Sourcery,' or Code as Fetish," Configurations 16, no. 3 (Fall 2008): 300.
'c
ID
d)
_c
Neta Alexander is a doctoral student in the Department of Cinema Studies at New York University. Her articles have
-O
r^.
appeared in Film Quarterly, Media Fields Journal, and Flow, and she has authored chapters in the forthcoming
o
(N
anthologies Compact Cinematics (Bloomsbury), The Netflix Effect (Bloomsbury), and Anthropology and Film
© Festivals (Cambridge Scholars). This essay won the 2016 SCMS Student Wrìting Award.
www.cmstudies.org 56 ! No. 2 ! Winter 201 7 1
Cinema Journal 56 ! No. 2 ! Winter 2017
can be described as a demon - a malicious entity that takes over the user's body and
mind when she least expects it.
A nuanced study of buffering can therefore show how it functions as a digital spec-
ter that haunts our vernacular experience. The notorious "loading" GIF appears on-
screen every time an Internet server is preloading data into a reserved area of memory
known as "the buffer." As defined by the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), a buffer can
be "a person or thing that prevents incompatible or antagonistic people or things from
harming each other." The word "buffer" therefore invokes a tension between contin-
gency and control. In digital networks, the buffer is the part that delays transmission
so that there is enough data for the streaming to occur without interruption. Ironically,
the same mechanism meant to prevent disruptions and protect us from harmful con-
tact now mostly functions as a constant source of anxiety and frustration.
The result is a moment of rupture consisting of suspended and therefore wasted
time. This "aesthetics of lag," to use Nicole Starosielski's description of the endless
instances in which web-based content is not efficiently transmitted, complicate our un-
derstanding of immediacy, agency, and control in the age of "connected viewing."2
Although concepts such as Jennifer Holt and Kevin Sanson's "connected viewing" or
Henry Jenkins's "convergence culture" stress the importance of choice, connectivity,
and interactivity, streaming services and compression technologies are inherently im-
bued with what I wish to call digital dams: various disruptions and "noises" resulting
from technological, legal, industrial, economic, or political structures and limitations.3
These moments of breakdown, failure, or "glitch" are fundamentally different from
earlier forms of spectatorial noise, such as the need to switch reels in the days of the
flammable celluloid filmstrip, the distortion and degeneration of the VHS tape, the
"clunky" experience of the DVD, and the commercial break on television and its "aes-
thetics of disruption and pollution."4 Many of these explorations of audiovisual noise
are indebted to the rich literature on sonic noises and delays as inherent to media his-
tories of telephony, radio broadcasting, or the music industry.5 The latter phenomena
2 Nicole Starosielski, "Fixed Flow: Undersea Network as Media Infrastructure," in Signal Traffic: Critical Studies
of Media Infrastructures, ed. Lisa Parks and Nicole Starosielski. Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield: University of
Illinois Press, 61. As defined by Jennifer Holt and Kevin Sanson, connected viewing is a concept describing a
"multi-platform entertainment experience." Accordingly, it is more than a digital distribution technique: "It is the
broader ecosystem in which digital distribution is rendered possible and new forms of user engagement take shape.
It is as much about the aesthetic and social experience of second-screen media as it is about the intermediaries
that deliver content to mobile devices, and the gatekeepers regulating our internet access." See Holt and Sanson,
Connected Viewing: Selling, Streaming, and Sharing Media in the Digital Age (Hoboken, NJ: Taylor and Francis,
2013), 1. As used throughout this article, "connected viewing" refers to the various methods of consumption of
audiovisual content via the web by using personal computers, mobile phones, laptops, and other wireless devices.
3 See ibid.; Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University
Press, 2006).
4 For a theorization of the VHS tape's "inherent vice" of degeneration, see Lucas Hilderbrand, Inherent Vice: Bootleg
Histories of Videotape and Copyright (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009); for an exploration of the DVD's
"clunky" effect, see Jo T. Smith, "DVD Technologies and the Art of Control," in Film and Television after DVD, ed.
James Bennett and Tom Brown (New York: Routledge, 2008), 129-148; for a study of televisual "pollution," see
Jason Jacobs, "Television, Interrupted: Pollution or Aesthetic?," in Television as Digital Media, ed. James Bennett and
Niki Strange (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 255-280.
5 See Mara Mills, "Deafening: Noise and the Engineering of Communication in the Telephone System," Grey Room
43, no. 7 (2011): 118-143; John Durham Peters, Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication
Cinema Journal 56 I No. 2 I Winter 2017
have been elaborately studied and theorized, but buffering, bandwidth, limited battery
life, and other digital dams have yet to receive the scholarly attention they deserve.
This scholarly lacuna is especially surprising considering the ubiquity of noise and
disruption in digital spectatorship. Even though every Internet "viewser" (to borrow
Dan Harries's amalgamation of "viewer" and "user") experiences buffering on a daily
or weekly basis, cinema and media scholars have mostly ignored it.6 In fact, streaming
as a concept has often been associated with efficiency, immediacy, and flow and cel-
ebrated as a new means to shift control from content makers and providers to viewers.7
As the story goes, the new "on-demand utopia" promoted by streaming conglomerates
such as Netflix and Amazon is capable of empowering the viewser in unprecedented
ways: offering "predictive personalization" by using big data, collaborative filtering,
and machine learning;8 introducing a wireless multiscreen viewing experience; and
enabling on-demand access to endless content libraries linked to cheap cloud storage.
If we are to believe Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, "waiting is dead."9
As a result of this celebratory discourse, buffering has been either ignored or
described in terms of a transitory nuisance - a problem awaiting a solution. Its
study has been mostly limited to IT journals and industry trade press, ignoring the
phenomenology and affective economy created by digital noise, the liminality of
waiting, and the neoliberal perpetual circle of crisis and upgrading.10 In recent years,
these technical and empirical analyses have inspired either data-driven examination
of bandwidth, latency, and Internet protocols or myriad essays on net neutrality and
legislation (especially following the Netflix-Comcast deal signed in February 20 15). 11
Building on previous studies of spectatorial and sonic noise, this article revolves
around two central questions: To what end are buffering and other digital dams
often trivialized or denied by both viewsers and media scholars? And what are the
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Caleb Kelly, Cracked Media: The Sound of Malfunction (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 2009). I thank Jonathan Sterne for drawing my attention to these histories.
6 In recent years various scholars have offered neologisms to distinguish between the predigitai "viewer" or "spectator"
and the connected Internet user. In "Cinema 3.0: The Interactive Image," Kristen Daly lists some of these terms -
from "(v)user" and "presumer" to "produser" - and argues that the term "viewser" "best represents the multitude
of interactions of a person with cinema across media platforms." See Daly, "Cinema 3.0: The Interactive-Image,"
Cinema Journal 50, no. 1 (2010): 81-98. For an overview of this concept, see also Dan Harries, "Watching the
Internet," in The New Media Book, ed. Dan Harries (London: British Film Institute, 2015), 171-183.
7 It is important to stress that this promise of greater control is not unique to digital technologies. In fact, the promise
of immersion and agency could be traced back to the invention of the remote control, the VCR, the DVD, and
pretty much any other new format for domestic consumption of audiovisual content. See, for example, Smith,
"DVD Technologies"; Caetlin Benson-Allott, Remote Control (Object Lessons) (New York: Bloomsbury Academic
Publishing, 2016).
8 For an overview and critique of predictive personalization and the myth of content libraries that can offer "endless
choice," see Neta Alexander, "Catered to Your Future Self: Netflix's 'Predictive Personalization' and the Mathemati-
zation of Taste," in The Netflix Effect: Technology and Entertainment in the 21st Century, ed. Kevin McDonald and
Daniel Smith-Rowsey (New York: Bloomsbury Academic Publishing, 2016), 81-100.
9 Nancy Hass, "And the Award for the Next HBO Goes to . . .," GQ, February 2013, http://www.gq.com/entertainment
/movies-and-tv/201302/netflix-founder-reed-hastings-house-of-cards-arrested development.
10 For an exploration of this idea, see Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016).
11 See, for example, Jens Loeffler, "The Mystery behind Live Streaming Delay," OverDigital, February 7, 2012, http://
www.overdigital.com/2012/02/07/the-mystery-behind-live-streaming-delay/.
Cinema Journal 56 ! No. 2 I Winter 201 7
narratives, practices, and socioeconomic conditions that create and sustain these forms
of cognitive denial and ideological erasure?
These questions serve to complicate our understanding of the pleasures and
anxieties of connected viewing by focusing on digital noise and the human-machine
affective relations it invokes and exposes. My main objective is to analyze buffering not
only as a technological or economic concern but also as a cultural phenomenon that
should be contextualized within a rich history of cinema, television, radio, and other
media industries. Much like the VHS "bootleg aesthetics," the recurring disruptions in
media consumption over the web change our understanding of the digital apparatus
and its contours.12
At the same time, when studying buffering we must be cautious not to naturalize
and generalize a specific spectatorial experience, masking over the particularities of
the precise kinds of encounters different viewsers engage with on a daily basis. As with
any other digital phenomenon, buffering holds a cultural specificity that - in the case
of the American spectator - cannot be distinguished from the political and economic
practices and agendas of neoliberalism, "a theory of political economic practices
that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual
entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized
by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade."13 Building on David
Harvey's conceptualization of neoliberalism and its dependency on constant crisis (in
the form of debt), the following analysis seeks to foreground the inherent failures and
limitations of digital technologies and to problematize the commercial and institutional
logic that hails wireless technology as the last stage of the information age - a Utopian
cyberspace of immediacy, personalization, and choice.14
To start mapping the techno-cultural phenomenon of buffering, I first unpack the
idea of seamlessness by exploring the structures that produce the tension between
continuity and fragmentation on which digital spectatorship is based. I then use
the paradigm of failure studies to examine digital spectatorship through the lens of
breakdown, helplessness, and lack of control and to further complicate the notion
of an on-demand culture. Finally, I explore how the unique affective reaction of
perpetual anxiety is being generated by the paradoxical logic of neoliberalism and the
"cruel optimism" on which it is based.15
Complicating Seamlessness: Five Degrees of Fragmentation. Similar to the

discourse of financial markets and economic infrastructures, the discourse surrounding
digital culture is based on abstraction and dematerialization. Building on Karl Marx's
12 For a study of bootleg aesthetics, see Hilderbrand, Inherent Vice.
13 David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 2.
14 The word "neoliberalism" is in itself a source of much controversy and debate. The essential problem seems to be
that many of the criteria attributed to neoliberalism could have been identified under earlier iterations of capitalism,
from post-Fordist capitalism to what Thomas Streeter describes as corporate liberalism. See Streeter, Selling the Air:
A Critique of Commercial Broadcasting in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 22-58.
As I later demonstrate, I decided to use this contested term because it very much informs the literature and critical
theory written within the discipline of "failure studies" that I present and survey in this article.
15 See Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).
Cinema Journal 56 I No. 2 ! Winter 2017
diagnosis of capital as fetish, Chun writes that "we 'primitive folks' worship source
code as a magical entity - as a source of causality - when in truth the power lies
elsewhere, most importantly in social and machinie relations."16 The ideology (or
myth) of immateriality is often used as the business model on which the digital industry
is based.17 As I later show, it creates an epistemological fragmentation that, in turn,
leads to a never-ending anxiety whose source is constantly denied.
This abstraction is communicated to the Internet user by using myriad metaphors
that draw on the predigitai world. The metaphor of streaming, for example, might
invoke a mental image of an eternal, sky-blue river peacefully moving through hills,
mountains, and meadows. These pastoral connotations serve to promote the myth
of seamless flow, much as cloud computing draws on aerial imagination and, as
Starosielski asserts, recasts servers "as hovering above the fixed realities of the material
world" while effectively denying the ever-growing environmental cost of "server
farms" (yet another misleading metaphor).18
To move away from this tendency toward abstraction, the following sections
map the five different aspects of digital fragmentation - technological, economic,
optical, epistemological, and temporal. This mapping is used as an entryway into
the discussion of buffering and digital dams by complicating our understanding of
streaming technologies and demystifying the digital infrastructure and architecture.
Technological Fragmentation: Decentralization, Packet Switching, and "Lossy

Compression." To begin with, the Internet is inherently based on the idea of decen-
tralization. Its origin story, albeit being told in endless different ways, begins in the late
1 950s, when the anxiety and fear of the Cold War led Paul Baran at the Rand Corpo-
ration "to create a computer network that was independent of centralized command
and control, and would thus be able to withstand a nuclear attack that targets such
centralized hubs."19 To achieve this ambitious goal, the new network was based on the
technology of packet switching, which enables digital data to travel from one server to
the next by first breaking it into small units, or packets. Because data are divided into
packets, they cannot be transformed in a single operation. Instead, the server sends
one packet upon request, and it is then forced to wait for approval before it can send
the buffer more data. Because of limited bandwidth and numerous other factors, this
communication process often results in what users experience as "buffering" - a delay
in the transmission and/or reception between one packet and the next.
16 Chun, "On 'Sourcery,'" 301.
17 For a useful exploration and historical overview of digital immateriality as an ideology and business strategy, see, for
example, Tung-Hi Hu, Prehistory of the Cloud (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015).
18 See Nicole Starosielski, "Fixed Flow: Undersea Cables as Media Infrastructure," in Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of
Media Infrastructures , ed. Lisa Parks and Nicole Starosielski (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015), 53-70.
19 Alexander Galloway, Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 4. As
Galloway reminds us, there are various other contradictory narratives surrounding the emergence of the Internet,
many of which "stress the altruistic concerns of academics rather than the strategic interests of the Department of
Defense" (4-5). For an alternate history of the Internet, see also Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
Cinema Journal 56 I No. 2 I Winter 201 7
In other words, the Internet's infrastructure, protocols, and mode of operation

require constant fragmentation and decentralization (which, as Alexander Galloway
and many others have argued, should not be equated with lack of control). This
structure is not necessarily new. In fact, network architecture is based on latency and
delay by definition: medieval pipe organs, transatlantic cable and telegraphs, electric
guitars, and long-distance telephony all had latencies.
Waiting for digital content to load, however, is different from waiting for a letter
to arrive. Theorizing delay in the specific context of buffering and other digital
dams should therefore focus on its cultural specificity and particular manifestations.
Alongside new technologies and transmission protocols, the Internet gave birth to
a political, historical, economic, and intellectual discourse based on the erasure of
materiality and contingency.20 Although delay is inherent to the system, and even
within computers there are latency issues as microprocessors "talk" to other parts of
the computer architecture, the digital sphere is often described as immaterial, a place
in which "waiting is dead."
In practice, abstraction not only is inaccurate but also holds political and
philosophical implications. Returning to the comparison between global finance and
Internet protocols, the discourse of immateriality is a crucial tactic for sustaining the
power of the economic and digital infrastructure and presenting it as an obscure,
infinite, and ahistorical system of access and control (as has been theorized by
Galloway, Tara McPherson, and others).21 One of the reasons digital immateriality
is such a prominent myth is that it helps users forget the physical, ever-expanding,
global infrastructure that makes surfing the web feasible. As media and infrastructure
scholars repeatedly stress, it is crucial to explore the material conditions on which
the Internet is based, whether they are tubes, oceanic fiber-optic cables, or server
farms.22
Simultaneously, the discourse of digital immateriality serves to deny the ubiquity

of digital dams while maintaining the illusion that buffering is the exception rather
than the rule. The problem of buffering can supposedly be solved by upgrading our
devices or subscriptions.23 However, video compression, by definition, is based on sev-
20 For a theorization of the denial of contingency in information capitalism, see Wendy Chun, Programmed Visions:
Software and Memory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011).
21 Galloway, Protocol ; Tara McPherson, "US Operating Systems at Mid-Century: The Intertwining of Race and UNIX,"
in Race after the Internet, ed. Lisa Nakamura and Peter Chow-White (New York: Routledge, 2012), 21-37.
22 Jean-Francois Blanchette, for example, warns us against the far-reaching implications of adopting the notion of
transparency when it comes to the digital infrastructure, as "this abstraction from the material can never fully suc-
ceed. . . . Information cannot exist outside of given instantiations in material forms, whether they are hard drive,
network wires, optical disk, etc." See Blanchette, "A Material History of Bits," Journal of the American Society for
Information Science and Technology 62, no. 6 (2011): 1042. See also Paul Dourish, "Protocols, Packets, and
Proximity: The Materiality of Internet Routing," in Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures, ed. Lisa
Parks and Nicole Starosielski (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015), 183-204.
23 Because of the limited scope of this article, I cannot offer an analysis of advertisements based on the promise
of instant streaming. To name but one example of this ever-growing trend, see the recent campaign for Vodafone
SuperNet. This viral campaign consists of a series of one-minute ads depicting family stories in which high-speed
Internet "saves the day" by providing access to detailed, high-resolution YouTube tutorials. See "Be a SuperDad with
Vodafone SuperNet," YouTube video, 1:00, posted by Vodafone India, April 29, 2016, https://www.youtube.com
/watch?v=iFRMh5kvl9k.
eral forms of erasure and selection. As defined by Lev Manovich, compression is "the
technique of making image files smaller by deleting some information."24 Further-
more, the transmission of digital data is based on lossy compression: "While in theory
computer technology entails the flawless replication of data, its actual use in contem-
porary society is characterized by loss of data, degradation, and noise."25
This process requires the elimination of supposedly redundant data while
envisioning an imagined, "distracted listener" or viewer consuming content in "less-
than-ideal conditions."26 In his book MP3: The Meaning of a Format , Jonathan Sterne
reminds us that while techno-utopias and the myth of progress go hand in hand with
the promise of greater verisimilitude, the result is often a considerable loss of the
original data: an MP3 audio file, for example, often contains as little as 1 2 percent of
the original file size.27 The presence of noise is therefore essential rather than accidental ,
both in terms of compression techniques and standardized formats and in terms of the
actual transmission protocols and packet switching.
Economic Fragmentation: The Digital Divide and an Economy of Access.

Apart from its particular aesthetics of lag, buffering also creates a new socioeconomic
division between spectators. Whereas the VCR era gave birth to new forms of
communal experience - from improvised cine-clubs to the "be kind, rewind" etiquette
of borrowed or rented videotapes - buffering essentially generates antagonistic
sentiments toward other Internet users owing to the shared dependency on limited
bandwidth.28 In the new digital economy of access, the Other is often imagined as a
bandwidth hog who slows the viewer down and disrupts her viewing experience.
This is achieved in two central ways: first, by constructing a digital divide based
on geographies of connectivity and Wi-Fi access that replace the Marxist distinction
between haves and have-nots with a nascent distinction between connected and
unconnected (or "users" and "nonusers"); and second, by establishing a market-driven

hierarchy of different data packages and bandwidths through premium services.29 As
summarized by Sean Cubitt, "The purpose of control over information is to delay
transmission. We think we pay more for premium service delivery of news and
entertainments; in fact, the money pays for timely arrival, and its absence ensures
a deliberately delayed and often downgraded delivery."30 Consequently, the digital
Other is vilified in a way that further individualizes users' media experiences. When
24 Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 54.
25 Ibid., 55.
26 Jonathan Sterne, MP3: The Meaning of a Formati Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 2.
27 Ibid.
28 For a historical overview of the emergence of domestic cine-clubs in the United States, see Barbara Klinger
the Multiplex: Cinema, New Technologies, and the Home (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).
29 These geographies of connectivity cannot be isolated from political systems and interests. To understand th
to which fiscal, political, and territorial control are intertwined, see Faye Ginsburg, "Rethinking the Digital A
The Media and Social Theory, ed. David Hesmondhalgh and Jason Toynbee (New York: Routledge, 2008), 1
30 Sean Cubitt, The Practice of Light: A Genealogy of Visual Technologies from Prints to Pixels (Cambridge,
Press, 2014), 4.
access replaces ownership, the faster the connection you have, the wealthier you seem
to become.
This can also explain why buffering is mostly being ignored: because viewsers
experience it in different times and different settings, it appears as an individual rather
than structural problem. The digital apparatus is a supposedly unbreakable system
that perpetually breaks; paradoxically, it never breaks down simply because it breaks
down all the time, for different users, in different moments.31
To move away from Utopian notions of connectivity, it is essential to stress that
"waiting" is a relative term; it can mean something different depending on different
expectations and circumstances. In parts of the world where grids go down regularly,
users wait for media quite differently, or they use different media (like cassettes, which
still require rewinding).32 In their anthology The Unconnected: Social Justice, Participation,
and Engagement in the Information Society , Paul M. A. Baker, Jarice Hanson, and Jeremy
Hunsinger urge media scholars to distinguish "connectivity" from "accessibility":
Even for those who may have nominal access to information, there are
barriers to full engagement in the information society. These barriers exist
not only in terms of connection but also in terms of awareness needed to be
able to engage in symbolic manipulation of information and the purposive
nature of that information for social cohesion (personal and public). In fact,
it can be argued that a superficial connectivity perversely accentuates the
condition of the unconnected.33
Thinking about the often-unacknowledged correlations between connectivity and

class, race, disability, geography, or age can help us explore digital dams behind the
confines of infrastructure studies, by studying political censorship, interface design,
or biased algorithmic systems (like Google's autocomplete, advertisements, or search
results).34 And although buffering is a routine and much-expected phenomenon in
countries or places without high-speed Internet, it demands a different reading and
theorization when encountered within the broader discourse of civic involvement and
users' agency in highly connected Western countries.

In the United States, for example, this economy of access results in new domestic
and public forms of digital divide based on what I call the geography of the router.
Because the viewser's ability to surf the web and stream audiovisual content is directly
related to her physical distance from the router, rooms and spaces without connectivity
quickly transform into no-man's-lands in ways that reshape architecture, habits,
familial life, and even relationships (think, for example, of a boyfriend or girlfriend
31 This argument draws on Dominic Pettman's book Infinite Distraction (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2016), and
specifically on his critique of the Internet as a place of desynchron ization and individualization (31-48).
32 The need to wait (for new movies, translations, or dubbing) also informs various forms of piracy, as has been demon-
strated in Brian Larkin's ethnography of the bootleg industry of film distribution in Nigeria. See his Signal and Noise:
Media , Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 217-241.
33 Paul M. A. Baker, Jarice Hanson, and Jeremy Hunsinger, eds., The Unconnected: Social Justice, Participation, and
Engagement in the Information Society ( New York: Peter Lang, 2013), 4.
34 For a study of algorithmic bias, see, for example, Frank Pasquale, The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That
Control Money and Information (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015).
who refuses to spend the night in an apartment without high-speed Internet). While
these considerations gradually shape our domestic behaviors and landscapes, buffering
endurance can also be described as a new form of social barometer. In a recent article
on Internet rage, Chelsea Wald wrote, "We now practically insist that web pages load
in a quarter of a second, when we had no problem with two seconds in 2009 and four
seconds in 2006. As of 2012, videos that didn't load in two seconds had little hope of
going viral."35 Americans are therefore growing ever more impatient with the need
to wait for online data - a fact that holds far-reaching implications in an attention
economy obsessed with generating traffic from "eyeballs."36
Outside the home, the geography of the router takes the form of invisible maps,
walls, and much-dreaded dead ends. Picture the countless New Yorkers who stop in
the middle of the staircase on their way to underground subway stations, trying to
locate the exact spot in which they might lose connectivity with the precision, anxiety,
and enthusiasm of gold diggers in the mid-nineteenth century. Once found, they
might stand in that uncomfortable, crowded spot for five or ten minutes in a desperate
attempt to send one last e-mail or text message before their inevitable descent into the
underground abyss.
In other words, there is a widening gap between the myths and metaphors sur-
rounding and sustaining the streaming revolution and the viewsers' daily experiences.
Internet users are led to believe that digital data is simultaneously everywhere and no-
where, while the sad truth is that they can "seamlessly" consume audiovisual content
only if they happen to live in a connected nation, pay premium fees for high-speed In-
ternet, and make sure they are surfing the web within a specified and limited distance
from the increasingly fetishized routers and Wi-Fi hot spots. And even when viewsers
are lucky enough to enjoy the impressive content libraries of streaming services like
Netflix or Hulu, they often pay a price in the form of ambiguous privacy settings. This
article cannot examine the ongoing debate on privacy and surveillance in the digital
age, but we should bear in mind that streaming technology is partially based on data-
mining methods that force users into a Faustian contract: "You're getting a free service,
and the cost is information about you."37
Optical Fragmentation: Browsing, Waiting, and Loopic Viewing. While digi-

tal spectatorship is made possible by imperceptible processes of packet switching and
a new economy of connectivity and access, its visual manifestation follows the logic of
browsing - the rapid, often jolting transition between one screen, tab, or window to the
next, often on different devices and platforms. What rhythm does the viewser or digital
knowledge worker follow? As the proliferation of GIFs, the "replay" function, and Vine
videos indicates, the cyclical loop is one of the digital rhythm's most prevalent mani-
festations. Buffering, the most ubiquitous digital specter, has been cleverly disguised by
35 Chelsea Wald, "Why Your Brain Hates Slowpokes," Nautilus, March 5, 2015, http://nautil.us/issue/22/slow
/why-your-brain-hates-slowpokes.
36 For an overview of the rise of the digital "attention economy" in recent years, see Matthew Crawford, The World
beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2015).
37 Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble: How the New Personalized Web Is Changing What We Read and How We Think (New
York: Penguin Press, 2011), 6.
Cinema Journal 56 i No. 2 i Winter 2017
webmasters and designers as a momentary loop - an animated wheel or spiral whose

perpetual motion opens a liminal sphere of activity and passivity, leisure and labor.
At the same time, buffering cuts into the content's meat; it divides it into fragments
whose length is unknown. This turns digital spectatorship into a substantially different
experience from immersing oneself in the televised "flow." Whereas one can guess
the length of a commercial break based on industry standards and a set of known
criteria (such as the distinction between prime time and other hours of the day), the
length of buffering is always unpredictable, which explains why users tend to react
to its appearance by switching between excessive passivity (e.g., staring at the screen,
freezing in their chairs) and excessive activity (e.g., texting, multitasking). It can thus be
considered simultaneously a distraction and a unique form of concentrated attention,
a duality that stands at its core and that is explored throughout this article.
Buffering's endless shapes and forms are often described in technology blogs and
popular media as "the spinning wheel of death."38 This correlation among waiting,
"wasted time," and lethality has recently morphed into a visual trope in Hollywood
films. In Unfriended (Levan Gabriadze, 2014), a horror film that takes place entirely
on the protagonist's desktop screen, a Skype group conversation is interrupted by
buffering whenever one of the characters is brutally murdered. The lost connection
becomes, literally, a loss of human life. In a similar manner, the star-studded thriller
Money Monster (Jodie Foster, 2016) transforms the aesthetic of digital noise into a
suspenseful narrative device. In this case, the opening montage includes a series of
digital glitches that interrupt news broadcasts reporting on a stock market collapse.
This disturbing aesthetic of lag foreshadows the threat to a television anchor, who is
about to be kidnapped and possibly killed by a bankrupted investor.
The correlation between digital dams, anxiety, and deadliness - which I explore
and develop later - has therefore been recognized recently by popular culture. To un-
derstand why it still remains an understudied phenomenon within cinema and media
studies, a discussion of the Internet's epistemological fragmentation is necessary.
Epistemologica! Fragmentation: "Black Boxes" and Interactive Scripted

Spaces. Digital dams confront us with our inability to fully understand the hidden
logic of both our electronic devices and the infrastructure on which they are depen-
dent, as well as with the fears and anxieties this realization might invoke. Our gadgets,
as we often learn the hard way, are unrepairable by design. Building "black boxes"
such as iPhones or MacBooks is an integral part of an information economy based on
a distinction between a "hidden kernel" and a "visible shell."39 The gap between the
observable user interface (UI) and the unseen software and algorithmic systems results
38 This expression can refer not only to buffering but also to the spinning wait cursor of the mouse pointer arrow,
used in Apple's OS X to indicate that an application is busy. It is thus one of the most ubiquitous visual sig-
nifies of waiting. See, for example, Lisa Eadicicco, "Apple Made a Subtle Change to the 'Spinning Wheel of
Death' in Its Big New Mac Update," Business Insider, October 1, 2015. http://www.businessinsider.com
/apple-spinning-wheel-mac-el-capitan-2015-10.
39 McPherson, "US Operating Systems," 21-37.
10
in a constant tension between omnipotence and anxiety, which tech companies use to
convince users to upgrade their devices instead of fixing them.40
While the hardware presents us with unrepairable closed systems, the software is
based on a distinction between the kernel and the shell. Writing about UNIX, Tara
McPherson asserts that computer software always follows what she calls a lenticular
logic. It is "a logic of the fragment or the chunk, a way of seeing the world as discrete
modules or nodes, a mode that suppresses relation and context. As such, the lenticular
also manages and controls complexity."41 The lenticular logic, in turn, requires a
separation of the (invisible) kernel and the (visible) shell (a logic that paves the way to
the myth of digital immateriality). In McPherson's words:
UNIX's intense modularity and information-hiding capacity were reinforced

by its design: that is, in the ways in which it segregated the kernel from the
shell. The kernel loads into the computer's memory at startup and is the
"heart" of UNIX . . . although it remains hidden from the user. The shells
(or programs that interpret commands) are intermediaries between the user
and the computer's inner workings. They hide the details of the operating
system from the user behind the shell, extending modularity from a rule of
programming in UNIX to the very design of UNIX itself.42
In other words, computer software is designed in a way that shadows the hidden
workings and set of underlying assumptions on which it is based. This tension between
the ubiquity of digital noise caused by lossy compression and the closed-system design
of wireless devices creates a set of visceral, emotional, and even existential anxieties
that are mostly ignored. And while Chun describes software in terms of sorcery and
black magic, Ian Bogost contends that hardware - and specifically gadgets like Apple's
iPhone or MacBook - are best understood as pets. By offering companionship, mobile
devices or personal laptops have come to function as "the geek's Chihuahua" - they
are "creatures that respond meaningfully to touch and voice and closeness, but only
sometimes. At other times, they retreat inextricably into their own minds."43 As if
their devices were misbehaved puppies, viewsers are quick to forgive them for failed
connections, sudden breakdowns, and buffering. They are, after all, ridiculously cute -
albeit unpredictable, demanding, and precarious - status symbols.
Another reason to forgive and forget your MacBook's latest mischief is that digital
spectatorship is characterized by a plethora of options and information. When viewsers
stream content on Netflix or Amazon, they have access to metadata (e.g., title, timeline
or countdown, genre, year, plot synopsis, user comments) in a way that evokes feelings
of empowerment and control. But streaming services are designed as "interactive
scripted spaces," and the content they can provide is finite, limited, and ever changing
40 At the same time, media conglomerates struggle to conceal the harmful physical conditions in which these gadgets
are being built, as well as the poisonous materials from which they are made. See, for example, Jeffery Mantz, "Im-
provisational Economies: Coltan Production in the Eastern Congo," Social Anthropology 16, no. 1 (2008): 34-50.
41 McPherson, "US Operating Systems," 26.

42 Ibid., 29.
43 Ian Bogost, The Geek's Chihuahua: Living with Apple (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 6.
11
(as a result of expired copyright agreements). Building on Norman Klein's study of

scripted spaces - that is, environments that generate an expected reaction from visitors
(e.g., Disneyland, Las Vegas) - Daniel Chamberlain explores streaming services and
other digital spaces as "a form of free destination, where the consumer 'acts out' the
illusion of free will."44 The invisibility of the software, the algorithmic system, and the
political economy on which the Internet is based turn our web browser navigation into
a predefined and limited experience.
This illusion of choice is partly based on, and sustained by, the difference between
the limited options offered by the design and function of the remote control and the
"endless" plasticity of the touchscreen or the mouse cursor, which open the door to
the world of a new political - and libidinal - economy of constant movement.45 The
irony is that while the choices seem limitless, viewers often find themselves obsessively
refreshing the same web page or news feed as the only solution for moments of
boredom, breakdown, or failure.
Temporal Fragmentation: The Cult of Speed and Network Time. These

different forms of fragmentation gave birth to new modes of temporality, theorized
within a rich literature on the nascent "network time." Robert Hasan, for example,
describes digital temporality as "connected asynchronicity" that connotes temporal
fragmentation. This is achieved by "smashing the uniform and universal linearity of
the clock into a billion different time contexts within the network."46 Once we go
online, we lose connection both to the natural cyclical time of day and night and to the
industrial clock time. Instead, we immerse ourselves in a subjective, fragmented, and
liquid "cybertime" (this might explain the rise and growing popularity of productivity
apps like Rescue Time or Cold Turkey , whose sole purpose is to set limitations on the time
we "waste" on social media, gaming, or other "nonproductive" online activities).
This fragmentation can be theorized as a tension between slowness (in the form
of waiting) and excessive speed. New spectatorial modes such as binge watching or
speed watching (i.e., the act of watching online videos at faster playback speeds than
normal) can be considered a counterreaction to a reality of temporal fragmentation
and unpredictable glitches or breakdowns. YouTube, for example, offers a feature that
enables viewers to adjust the playback speed, from a crawling 0.25x to a blistering 2x.
By watching a film at 2x speed, the viewser can consume a ninety-minute film in forty-
five minutes, then move on to the next deviant pleasure. This new cult of crunching
44 Daniel Chamberlain, "Television Interfaces and the Non-Places of Asynchronous Entertainment," in Television as
Digital Media, ed. James Bennet and Niki Strange (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 240.
45 This connection between tactile interfaces and erotic pleasure draws on Brandon Arroyo's essay on porn websites, in
which he asks, "Is the aim just to find that perfect video to orgasm to, or is there potential eroticism lurking some-
where in the kinetic clicking from site to site?" See "From Flow to Float: Moving through Porn Tube Sites," Porn
Studies (2016): 1.
46 Robert Hasan, 24/7: Time and Temporality in the Network Society (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007),
51.
12
Cinema Journal 56 i No. 2 i Winter 2017
further denies the reality of buffering and waiting by practicing new temporalities
based on sensory and cognitive endurance.47
A Brief History of Spectatorial Noise. In the case of buffering, digital dams such
as Internet providers and limited bandwidth are constant reminders of the precarious
nature of connected viewing. A closer look at buffering can therefore help us better
understand the mechanisms and contours of habitual new media and our daily
encounter with the cyberspace's black holes, limitations, and new class hierarchies
based on a geo-economic digital divide.
Because of its unpredictable length, buffering differs from bootleg aesthetics and
its specific nostalgic pleasure. Studying the VHS magnetic tape and its tendency for
disintegration, Lucas Hilderbrand argues that "the specificity of videotape becomes
most apparent through repeated duplication, wear, and technical failure: that is, we
recognize videotape as tape through its inherent properties of degeneration."48 By
focusing his attention on this aesthetic of failure, Hilderbrand follows Laura Marks's
study of the VHS's "effect of decay" and reclaims the analog image's "inherent vice"
of distortion as "beautiful, arousing, or even emotionally moving."49
The assumption both Hilderbrand and Marks share is that the low quality of the
videotaped image plays a significant role in the hidden pleasures of domestic media
consumption and bootleg fandom. By so doing they follow a rich history of sonic
and audio studies that challenges the binary distinction between noise and signal.
As David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny remind us in their introduction to the 2015
anthology Keywords in Sound , "[n]oise was repeatedly reconceptualized through the
Industrial Revolution and the growth of urban centers, and noise continues to mean
very different things for audio engineers, city and country residents, and avant-garde
composers; for animals, birds, and insects; and for recording machines and networks
of transmission. . . . Far from being constructed against noises, echoes, and silences,
the domain of sound is constituted by them."50
In a similar manner, the domain of connected viewing is constituted by buffering,
broken links, corrupted media files, and other "noises." But unlike the VHS degenera-
tion or the creative use of distortion and noise by experimental musicians, buffering
does not provide viewsers with a notion of nostalgia, a sense of intimacy, or artis-
tic pleasure. Instead of a trip down memory lane evoked by repeated duplication,
the unpredictable and unknowable length of the disruption can produce feelings of
frustration, anger, and sometimes even rage (especially if, and when, one expects the
transmission to always be seamless). And if the videotaped distortion of the visual
data might leave the audio track recognizable, buffering consumes both sound and im-
age. In that sense, its aesthetic and audioless nature demand our attention: instead of
47 For an overview of the emergence and uses of speed watching, see Neta Alexander, "Speed Watching, Efficiency, and
the New Temporalities of Digital Spectatorship," in Compact Cinematics: The Moving Image in the Age of the Bit-
Sized Media, ed. Pepita Hesselberth and Maria Poulaki (New York: Bloomsbury Academic Publishing, forthcoming).
48 Hilderbrand, Inherent Vice, 34.
49 Ibid., 71.
50 David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny, eds., Keywords in Sound ( Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 3.
13
enabling viewers to rebuild the fragmented image of the VHS cassette in their heads
on the basis of previous repeated viewings, buffering forces the user to stare at the
digital abyss and encounter uncanny silence instead of the constant digital murmur.
Given the good old phobia of dead air throughout the history of radio broadcasting,
it should not come as a surprise that these moments often trigger a set of anxieties and
fears.51
With the ubiquity of buffering, however, web designers are constantly trying
to come up with creative ways to distract us from this break in the matrix.52 The
graphic transformation of the "loading" sign from a simple black-and-white bar to a
customized rainbow-colored animated GIF tells the story of an industry dependent
on creating the illusion of seamless service and on-demand access. Even the term
"buffering" itself is a gerund; it is therefore a symbol of ongoing activity and action
that refuses to admit that it reveals itself only in moments of paralysis.
But not even colorful spinning wheels can hide the fact that buffering seems to
be devoid of any logic. Unlike the clunky viewing experience of the DVD, whose
segmentation was based on narrative logic and division into scenes or chapters,
buffering might rear its ugly head at the worst possible time: when Batman is about
to face Superman, when the identity of the serial killer is about to be revealed, when
the porn star is seconds away from the customary money shot, or when a six-hour
binge-watching marathon finally reaches the season finale. This utter disrespect
toward immersion, suspense, jouissance, or narrative development transforms digitally
consumed content into a delayed and fragmented experience. To push the metaphor
of streaming, the different units created by the disruption of buffering function more
like islands than segments. They float in the virtual space, waiting for the viewser to
reach their shores while constantly reconstructing a sense of narrative continuity.
Unlike the Brechtian exposure of the fourth wall, which serves as an ideological
and aesthetic device, buffering fractures the text instead of imbuing it with new layers
of meaning, reflexivity, and potentially subversive political wakefulness. Its recurrent
occurrences are not emotionally moving or physically arousing; instead of the analog
circulation of libido and pleasure described by Hilderbrand, many viewsers are
left gazing at the perpetual motion of the "loading" GIF while feeling isolated and
powerless.
These moments of disruption challenge our understanding of connected viewing
as a pollution-free environment. In his essay "Television, Interrupted: Pollution or
Aesthetic?" Jason Jacobs builds on numerous studies of televisual flow to isolate two
kinds of interruptions over which the television viewer has no control: "Textually, so
that what we want to continue watching is stopped while something else -is shown
(say, a commercial); or non-textually where the social world intrudes or otherwise
51 For an exploration of the myth of instantaneity in American radio broadcasting in the 1920s and 1930s, see Susan
Smulyan, Selling Radio: The Commercialization of American Broadcasting ; 1920-1934 (Washington, DC: Smithso-
nian Institution Press, 1994).
52 Another indication of the growing popularity of various "loading" GIFs can be found on websites such as Ajaxload or
SpiffyGif, which enable users without any background in coding or web design to build their own "loading" GIFs by
using "loading gif (GIF) generators." See, for example, http://www.ajaxload.info.
14
interrupts."53 This description corresponds to the familiar distinction between the

cinematic gaze and the televisual glance, or the dark, dreamlike environment of the
cinema theater versus the broad daylight of the domestic sphere.
With the advent of connected viewing, mobile devices, and personal screens, "the
idea of interruption as a feature of the medium is transformed into one of textual
pollution that can be removed, rather than an aspect of the medium that can be
endured, tolerated, or (in some cases) enjoyed."54 The inherent interruptibility of
television is described by Jacobs as an almost nostalgic relic, and viewsers are asked
to select, choose, and control their schedule and content as they please. However, he
complicates this widespread narrative by comparing connected viewing to in-flight
entertainment. In both cases, "interruptions happened either at my own volition or
because of interference from beyond the digital system."55 And while Jacobs mostly
focuses on "interruptions" created by biological needs like sleep or hunger, or daily
routines and commitments such as work, or social and familial engagements, his
analysis ignores the unique and new forms of digital pollution - from glitches to
buffering.
Although spectatorial noise is nothing new, its digital manifestations are quickly
repackaged within the broader discourse of technological progress and enhanced
agency. The next section therefore moves away from these ideas by applying the
framework of failure studies - a scholarly paradigm that offers us helpful methodologies
for the study of that which is systematically denied and forgotten.
An "On-Demand Utopia"? The Rise of Failure Studies. Confronted by various

myths of digital progress, media scholars can draw inspiration from an emerging
interdisciplinary body of literature I wish to call "failure studies." This category
includes the analysis and mapping of noise, ruptures, disconnection, and the limitations
of human perception, knowledge, sensorium, and agency, and it has been generating
myriad works in fields as different as philosophy, infrastructure studies, media studies,
film theory, disability studies, cybernetics, feminist theory, format studies, and queer
studies. In their essay "Out of Order: Understanding Maintenance and Repair,"
Stephen Graham and Nigel Thrift trace this scholarly tradition back to the work of
Heidegger.56 In Heideggerian thought, the world is ready- to-hand - it is revealed to
us by way of different practices and encounters with tools or objects. However, the
relational function of objects - the way they produce different substances and function
within a given environment - becomes visible only once they fail, in the moment in
which "the tool suddenly demands attention to itself."57 Heidegger uses the German
53 Jacobs, "Television, Interrupted," 259.

54 Ibid.
55 Ibid., 256.
56 Stephen Graham and Nigel Thrift, "Out of Order: Understanding Maintenance and Repair," Theory, Culture & Society
24, no. 3 (2007): 1-25. There also exists a long tradition of studying failure both in science, technology, and soci-
ety journals like Technology and Culture and in engineering disciplines. See, for example, Matthys Levy and Mario
Salvadori, Why Buildings Fall Down: How Structures Fail (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992).
57 Ibid., 8.
15
Cinema Journal 56 ! No. 2 I Winter 2017
word vorhanden , translated into English as "objectively present," to describe the moment
in which "the transparency transforms into opacity."58
The attempt to bring together rupture and epistemology - the moment of failure
and the production of knowledge - has since gained a dominant place in critical theory
and has taken on a new sense of urgency in the age of neoliberalism. Queer theory
scholars like Sara Ahmed, Jack Halberstam, Lauren Berlant, and Ann Cvetkovich
have recendy studied and problematized the neoliberal notions of success and
happiness by foregrounding and focusing their attention on moments of breakdown:
depression, anxiety attacks, writer's block, unfinished projects, or unemployment.59
As summarized by Ahmed, "Happiness scripts could be thought of as straightening
devices, ways of aligning bodies with what is already lined up."60 By forcefully
resisting the happiness directive and its idea of the "good" subject (i.e., productive,
dutiful, mostly heteronormative consumer), queer scholars call for a more nuanced
understanding of experience outside the framework of success or Facebook-worthy
life events (e.g., graduation, wedding, giving birth, starting a business).
This ever-growing body of literature is inspired by various historical, political,
economic, and social developments. It can be associated, for example, with the
recurring stock market collapses and recessions of the past two decades, as well as the
precariousness of work and the rise of unpaid (or underpaid) labor.61 Other influences
are the scale of environmental pollution and dystopias of extinction in the age of the
Anthropocene (or as theorized by Jussi Parikka, the Anthrobscene ) and, on the other
end, the techno-utopias of machine learning, AI, and the Internet of Things, with
their new logic of surveillance and automation.62 Finally, the ongoing commercial
success of positive psychology, the culture of self-care, and the neoliberal logic that all
transfer accountability from the state to the individual can also explain why the study
of depression, failure, and self-harm has seemed imperative and pressing.63
What these theories all have in common is the belief that capitalism's "calculating
attitude," as famously theorized by Max Weber, has been pushed to its extreme in
the past few decades.64 As a result, the self is now widely regarded "as a kind of
enterprise, seeking to enhance and capitalize on existence itself through calculated
acts and investments."65 Another idea that ties these phenomena together is that
58 Quoted in Graham and Thrift, "Out of Order," 8.
59 Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); Jack Halberstam, The Queer
Art of Failure (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011); Berlant, Cruel Optimism; Ann Cvetkovich, Depression: A
Public Feeling (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012).
60 Ah med , Promise of Happiness, 9 1 .
61 See, for example, Tiziana Terranova, "Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy," Social Text 18, no. 2
(2000): 33-58; Trebor Scholz, Digital Labor: The Internet as Playground and Factory (New York: Routledge, 2012).
62 Jussi Parikka, The Anthrobscene (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015).
63 See Nikolas Rose, The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine , Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007).
64 Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1978). For an exploration of this idea in the context of neoliberalism, see Natasha Schull, Addiction by Design:
Machine Gambling in Las Vegas (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012).
65 Nikolas Rose, Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999),
164, quoted in Schull, Addiction by Design, 191.
16
neoliberalism is an invisible system that, paradoxically, thrives on crisis.66 Writing

about neoliberalism's supposed vagueness, George Monbiot asserts:
So pervasive has neoliberalism become that we seldom even recognize it as an

ideology We appear to accept the proposition that this Utopian, millenarian
faith describes a neutral force; a kind of biological law, like Darwin's theory of
evolution. But the philosophy arose as a conscious attempt to reshape human
life and shift the locus of power. . . . Neoliberalism sees competition as the
defining characteristic of human relations. It redefines citizens as consumers,
whose democratic choices are best exercised by buying and selling, a process
that rewards merit and punishes inefficiency. It maintains that "the market"
delivers benefits that could never be achieved by planning.67
For media scholars, it is increasingly tempting to cast neoliberalism as "the root

of all our problems" (as the title of Monbiot's essay proclaims). But we must be
careful when analyzing or generalizing the logic of individualism, competition, and
privatization - which also characterized earlier forms of capitalism. Another danger
that merits our attention is the tendency toward technological determinism, which
casts buffering as an all-consuming, paralyzing occurrence devoid of any sense of
pleasure (or simply indifference).
One way to avoid these pitfalls and expand the discussion to include subversive
pleasures associated with digital noise is to read buffering alongside a growing literature
on glitch art - the creative translation of noise (e.g., pixelated images, disharmonious
sounds, other digital errors) into signal (artworks that circulate in the digital sphere). To
that end, Peter Krapp demonstrates how visual glitches came to define our encounter
with the Internet.68 In Noise Channels: Glitch and Error in Digital Culture , Krapp asserts that
studying new media through the lens of inefficiency could prove a fruitful scholarly
tool: "Rather than focus on how one might design the most ergonomie interface or
engineer trustworthy reciprocity of encoding and decoding under conditions of lossy
transmission, this book profiles a digital culture that goes against the grain of efficiency
and embraces the reserves that reside in noise, error, and glitch."69
To truly "embrace the residue," it can be productive to explore buffering as
something more than a transitory technical nuisance: within a Utopian discourse
and a business model based on the denial of contingency, buffering can be described
as the epitome of the ubiquity of programmability, the logic of computers. In her
book Programmed Visions: Software and Memory , Chun argues that this logic has radically
66 Various scholars have explored this argument. See Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Mo-
dernity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995); Harvey, Brief History of Neoliberalism; Chun, Updating to
Remain the Same.
67 George Monbiot, "Neoliberalism - the Ideology at the Root of All Our Problems," The Guardian, April 15, 2016,
https://www.theguardian.eom/books/2016/apr/l 5/neoliberalism-ideology-problem-george-monbiot. For an elabora-
tion of this critique, see Monbiot, How Did We Get into This Mess?{ New York: Verso Books, 2016).
68 The transformation of noise into artistic expression is nothing new. For an historical overview of how artists and
musicians manipulated and broke audio media technologies to produce novel sounds and performances during the
twentieth century, see Kelly, Cracked Media.
69 Peter Krapp, Noise Channels: Glitch and Error in Digital Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2011), ix.
17
shifted social structures, political institutions, and human thought. Denying the
unknowable nature of human experience, which incorporates a constant tension
between contingency and control, the framework of algorithms and computer codes
has become a dominant metaphor for our contemporary digital culture.70
The discourse of convergence effectively serves to deny contingency when faced
with a complex system whose logic and infrastructure are mosdy invisible to its
users (much like the economic infrastructure of credit and debt and the derivative
finance on which neoliberalism is based).71 It also conveys the illusion that buffering
is the exception rather than the rule and denies what I described as technological
fragmentation (e.g., limited connectivity, packet switching, lossy compression, the
digital divide). By focusing on the moments of failure, we can finally explore why -
and how - these breakdowns are mostly forgotten.
Selective Memory: Buffering and Habitual New Media. Functioning as a digital

specter, buffering raises a difficult philosophical question: why do viewsers tend to
quickly forget and mostly trivialize their myriad encounters with the precarious nature
of technology? The rest of this article is dedicated to offering several answers to the
question of selective digital memory and the perpetual anxiety it produces.
To begin with, buffering and the aesthetics of lag are not always identified as noise,
because they function within a larger framework of web continuity. Traditionally,
"continuity" is a term applied to the cinematic narrative. While cinema scholar David
Bordwell studied how editing techniques create the illusion of continuity within the
classical Hollywood film, buffering casts a different light on the problem of fragmented
spectatorship.72
As I demonstrated earlier, surfing the web is a fragmentized experience that
mixes together digital and physical worlds, occurrences, and audioscapes. Viewsers,
however, do not experience cyberspace as a place of radical dislocation - a jarring,
centerless series of jumps from one website to another. According to Galloway, this is
achieved by means of web continuity, a concept he defines as "the set of techniques
practiced by webmasters that, taken as a totality, create a pleasurable, fluid experience
for the user."73 The golden rule of web continuity is brilliantly simple: conceal the
source. As Galloway writes, "In classic Hollywood film, the apparatus is deliberately
removed from the image the same way that the process of production is removed
from the commodity. Although computers are very different, a similar logic is at
play."74 Ironically, the constant need not only to conceal the source but also to deny
that such a material source exists to begin with often evokes an affective response of
helplessness. The shift from a seamless, continuous stream of moving images to an
70 Chun, Programmed Visions.
7 1 See Arjun Appadurai, Banking on Words: The Failure of Language in the Age of Derivative Finance (Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 2016).
72 David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985).
73 Galloway, Protocol, 64.

74 Ibid., 65.
18
endless loop of "loading" exposes the digital infrastructure and destroys the illusion
of web continuity.
Still, while many users might be momentarily frustrated and anxious, as soon as
the content streams once again the illusion of web continuity and immateriality is
quickly restored. To understand this dual process of acknowledgment and denial, a
short discussion of the ontology of habit is required. As defined by Elizabeth Grosz,
habit is "an index not only of the internal organization of living being; it also signals
a milieu or environment that living beings must internalize in order to live in comfort
and with minimal energy expenditure."75 Building on two French philosophers -
Félix Ravaisson and Henri Bergson - Grosz argues that habit is a Pharmakon , both a
virtue and an addiction: "It produces a state or a set of desires somewhere in between
activity and passivity, reversing and transforming the energies of each toward a middle
ground, a common milieu."76
This description is particularly productive in the study of buffering and its
discontents. While the streaming revolution is based on the promise of on-demand
"liveness," buffering creates a phenomenological mode of waiting. Because of the
unpredictable length of buffering, viewsers' reactions involve a choice between
excessive activity and excessive passivity: on the one hand, they may be restless, trying
to use this suspended time to increase their productivity and atone for the sin of
mindless binge watching by cramming in as many chores as possible (e.g., writing
e-mails, checking the weather, making food); on the other hand, they may be helpless
to the point of paralysis.
Being habitual, these actions often do not produce new knowledge. As described by
Grosz, "[h]abit is the creation of a new bodily mode of existence, thé learning of a way
of simplifying action by selecting its key muscular efforts while hiding their conceptual
accompaniments."77 Our rooted assumptions regarding technology - the notion of a
digital utopia that always caters to our individual needs - are thus maintained because
of our habitual behavior. We might have waited for some time, but now we can hardly
recall why, when, or for how long this liminal mode of experience has lasted. To
understand this erasure, a distinction between habituation and sensitization is called
for: the former relates to the repetitiveness of the everyday - the need to perform the
same tasks over and over until they become "nonevents" - whereas the latter describes
our ability to build up endurance to unpleasant events. In the long term, unease or
frustration often turn into indifference, which transforms into forgetfulness.
At the same time, the fact that buffering has become habitual does not mean that it
no longer produces any response. In fact, our encounter with buffering is experienced
on three different levels: as a temporary emotional distress, as a disruption that trig-
gers various bodily reactions, and as an enduring and unrecognized affective response
of anxiety.
75 Elisabeth Grosz, "Habit Today: Ravaisson, Bergson, Deleuze and Us," Body& Society 19, nos. 2-3 (2013): 218.
76 Ibid., 220.
77 Ibid., 221.
19
The common emotional response to buffering can be categorized under the nascent
rubric of "Internet rage."78 This focus on rage, however, denies the particularities of
buffering and sees it as part of a broader tendency toward shorter attention spans
and a prominent ideology of ever-growing efficiency.79 But buffering demands a more
nuanced theorization. The last part of this article focuses on the affect of perpetual
anxiety, created by buffering's liminal sphere of activity and passivity, helplessness and
control, and viewing and waiting (or viewing as waiting).
Waiting, Affect, and Perpetual Anxiety. As mentioned earlier, the meaninglessness

of buffering may be deceiving. In fact, I wish to push this analysis further in the
opposite direction - arguing that buffering is much more meaningful than we might
imagine - by returning to the notion of existential anxiety. Unlike the Freudian
symptom, existential anxiety does not necessarily reveal anything "repressed" about
ourselves; rather, it reveals a specific logic or structure of meaning in our relation to
our world. What, therefore, is the logic or meaning buffering might reveal?
A possible answer is that it reveals the logic of anxiety itself: not only as a passing,
ephemeral psychological reaction to the machine's breakdown but also as an inherent,
inseparable quality of capitalist societies. The ways in which neoliberalism creates
what I wish to call perpetual anxiety have been mapped in a manifesto-like essay
titled "We Are All Very Anxious."80 This call for action was written in 2012 by Plan
C, a British collective of artists, scholars, and critical thinkers who - true to their
belief in collectivism and experimentation - have opted to remain anonymous and
posted the manifesto under the pseudonym Institute for Precarious Consciousness.
The manifesto's opening statement is "Each phase of capitalism has its own dominant
reactive affect." The writers then demonstrate how each affect functions as a "public
secret" meant to support and sustain a system of exploitation and control. In the
mid-twentieth century, for example, the affect was boredom: "This was an effect of
the Fordist system which was prevalent until the 1 980s - a system based on full-time
jobs for life, guaranteed welfare, mass consumerism, mass culture, and the co-optation
of the labor movement which had been built to fight misery. Job security and welfare
provision reduced anxiety and misery, but jobs were boring, made up of simple,
repetitive tasks."81
This, however, is no longer the case. In response to the threat of boredom,
neoliberalism gave birth to the idea of the social factory, defined by Plan C as "a field in
which the whole society is organized like a workplace. Precarity is used to force people
back to work within an expanded field of labor now including the whole of the social
78 Wald, "Why Your Brain Hates Slowpokes."
79 As reported in the Wall Street Journal, for example, a 201 1 study at the University of Hawaii quantified a "Pedestrian
Aggressiveness Syndrome Scale," which serves as a barometer for the rage felt when being slowed down by factors
out of an individual's control, such as other humans who share the sidewalk. See Shirley Wang, "Get Out of My Way,
You Jerk!," Wall Street Journal, February 15, 2011, http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748703786804
576138261177599114.
80 For the full text, see Institute for Precarious Consciousness, "We Are All Very Anxious," We Are Plan C, A
http://www.weareplanc.org/blog/we-are-all-very-anxious/.
81 Ibid.
20
factory." In simple words, labor and leisure are now almost interchangeable. When
we binge watch a series on Netflix, we produce value in several simultaneous and oft-
ignored ways: we establish ourselves as "cultural citizens," to use Toby Miller's useful
term invoking the interrelations between consumerism and citizenship; we enable
media conglomerates and governmental agencies to track our behavior patterns and
use them to collect big data or sell that data to advertisers; and we pay a monthly
subscription fee to Netflix.82
Binge watching is thus a nascent form of what may be called efficient laziness: it
simultaneously draws on the pleasure of media consumption and the notorious anxiety
of FOMO (fear of missing out).83 As mentioned earlier, buffering can also be perceived
as a devious form of pleasure - enabling us to take a much-needed break from our job
as devoted cultural citizens who must consume a thirteen-hour television series in one
weekend in order to successfully fulfill our role as cultural mediators. These viewing
practices remind us that the computer is a hyperspace - at once "a playground and a
factory."84 If the Fordist moment gave birth to the pursuit of hobbies and recreational
activities, the neoliberal age has turned leisure into an endless pursuit of productivity
and self-improvement.
Following Theodor Adorno, Tracey Potts's work on productivity tools in the digital
age reminds us that "free time" is in fact commodified, unfree, and "structured according
to a bi-polar and neurotic relation between punitive parent and undisciplined child."85
This "drudgery and reward" logic is in play once the machine breaks down and we
are faced with the dead time of waiting. Buffering therefore generates a spectatorial
experience in which viewing is waiting, much like our experiences in transitory spaces
such as waiting rooms, airports, or taxis - which have been richly theorized by Anna
McCarthy.86 In the case of buffering, the waiting can be pleasurable or painful,
depending on the context.
However, there is a crucial difference between gazing at a screen while waiting for
the dentist and encountering buffering on the computer screen: while we negotiate the
first with our eyes, we react to the latter with our bodies - and more specifically, our
hands. Every time our fingers either click the mouse or touch the screen, we try to gain
control by asserting our power over the machine. We thus fill - as well as feel - the
empty time with neurotic, anxious movements rather than immersing ourselves in the
endless loop of waiting room entertainment.
82 Toby Miller, Cultural Citizenship: Cosmopolitanism , Consumerism , and Television in a Neoliberal Age (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 2007).
83 In a recent study that found a strong correlation between social media engagement and the rise of FOMO, the
authors defined this phenomenon as "a pervasive apprehension that others might be having rewarding experiences
from which one is absent." See Andrew K. Przybylski, Kou Murayama, Cody R. DeHaan, and Valerie Gladwell, "Mo-
tivational, Emotional, and Behavioral Correlates of Fear of Missing Out," Computers in Human Behavior 29, no. 4
(2013): 1841-1848. However, the question of whether this is in fact a new and unique phenomenon still awaits
further theorization.
84 Scholz, Digital Labor.
85 Tracey Potts, "Life Hacking and Everyday Rhythm," in Geographies of Rhythm: Nature, Place, Mobilities, and Bod-
ies, ed. Tim Edensor (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010), 35.
86 Anna McCarthy, Ambient Television: Visual Culture and Public Space (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001).
21
Cinema Journal 56 I No. 2 Í Winter 2017
The question is therefore twofold: Why do viewsers tend to deny the importance of
waiting and insist on casting it as a temporary and insignificant unease? And what are
the factors that shape their waiting rituals and habits?
A possible answer is that the delay caused by buffering produces a nascent
manifestation of masochism: viewsers might feel rage against the machine, but they
will rarely unleash their aggression on their lovable electronic Chihuahuas by breaking
down their screens, hardware, or branded carriers. According to Bogost, since Steve
Jobs's products convinced us that gadgets are an extension of the self, "to do violence
to them amounts to self-harm rather than catharsis."87 This does not mean that the
anger and frustration disappear; they are simply being redirected toward ourselves (or
other unfortunate souls in our surroundings).
As a result, we are no longer bored but, rather, anxious. Anxiety, as Plan C asserts,
is the dominant reactive affect of the twenty-first century. To use the manifesto's
poetic language: "Anxiety has spread from its previous localized locations (such
as sexuality) to the whole of the social field. All forms of intensity, self-expression,
emotional connection, immediacy, and enjoyment are now laced with anxiety. It has
become the linchpin of subordination."88 When it comes to digital culture, perpetual
anxiety always lurks in the back of the viewsers' 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 "about the ways media
devices might be looking back at us."89
In that sense, the affective economy that buffering might reveal is only one example
of an anxiety caused by the combination of the need to wait for an unpredictable
length and an excruciating feeling of helplessness. As mentioned already, waiting and
anxiety are not unique to the digital era. If we were to believe Franz Kafka, waiting is
the key characteristic of modernity and its endless bureaucratic contexts.
And yet the anxiety-producing wait for digital content displays some particular
patterns, as it threatens to expose the tension between a prominent techno-utopian
discourse and the everyday lived experience of many Internet users. Take, for ex-
ample, a similar phenomenon to buffering that was recently given the name "typing
awareness indicator." As described in a New York Times article from August 2014, this
is a new source of anxiety and obsession torturing users of chat software and instant
messages. In the alarming account of the American writer Maryam Abolfazli, "The
three dots shown while someone is drafting a message in iMessage is quite possibly
the most important source of eternal hope and ultimate letdown in our daily lives.
It's the modern-day version of watching paint dry, except you might be broken up with
by the time the dots deliver."90
87 Bogost, Geek's Chihuahua, 67.

88 Institute for Precarious Consciousness, "We Are All Very Anxious."
89 Karen Petruska and John Vanderhoef, "TV That Watches You: Data Collection and the Connected Living Room,"
Spectator 34, no. 2 (2014): 33.
90 Jessica Bennet, "Bubbles Carry a Lot of Weight," New York Times, August 29, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com
/2014/08/3 1/fashion/texting-anxiety-caused-by-little-bubbles.html.
22
Whereas Abolfalzi refers to the waiting limbo as a subjective and psychological

problem that might lead to heartbreak, the manifesto written by Plan C can help us
understand perpetual anxiety as a social, political, and economic construct. Buffering,
a lag caused by the complexity of digital infrastructure, is being either ignored or
dismissed as an individual, temporary unease. When recognized, it is studied within
a larger framework of web continuity or analyzed by focusing on the emotional and
corporeal sensation of rage (e.g., increased blood pressure, nervousness). This, in turn,
might explain why toward the end of their manifesto, Plan C write that "today's main
forms of resistance still arise from the struggle against boredom, and, since boredom's
replacement by anxiety, they have ceased to be effective."91 A new form of resistance,
as Plan C claims, requires producing a new theory relating to experience: "We need
to reconnect with our experiences now - rather than theories from past phases. The
focus should be on those experiences which relate to the public secret."92
For this reason, studying the public secret of buffering can help us unpack the
paradoxical logic of neoliberalism, and vice versa. It can serve to demonstrate
how waiting functions as the underlying logic, ideology, and business strategy of
neoliberalism. Rather than a side effect, it is a mode of operation: we wait for e-mails,
for a tenure-track position, for the kids to grow up, for a promotion, for a loan approval,
for paying off our student debt, for a summer vacation, for a Tinder user who will
swipe our photo right.
Our ability to encounter endless disruptions and still put our faith in an invisible
digital god is therefore but one example of neoliberal "cruel optimism."93 Following
Lauren Berlant, Fiona Allon describes the paradox on which neoliberalism is based as
"a relation of attachment to compromised conditions of possibility, an attachment that
continues to elicit hopeful anticipation even when it only delivers continual failure. . . .
[OJur efforts to realize the promise invariably fall short but such failures have an
uncanny way of intensifying our attachment to it."94 This paradoxical logic can serve
to explain why the recurring moments of waiting eventually strengthen our faith in the
omnipotent nature of digital technology. We acknowledge and forget, become upset
and frustrated, but still hope that the streamed content will continue and our dreams
will once again become rewired.
Conclusion: Breaking the Machine of Perpetual Anxiety. Connected viewing

is often studied through the lens of efficiency, immediacy, and the blurring lines
between content providers and consumers. By applying the framework of failure
studies, this article has offered a different approach for understanding our digital
spectatorial experience. As demonstrated, focusing on digital noise and moments of
breakdown can open up an intriguing set of questions, the central of which is what
91 Institute for Precarious Consciousness, "We Are All Very Anxious."

92 Ibid.
93 Berlant, Cruel Optimism.
94 Fiona Allon, "On Capitalism's Emotional Logics," Progress in Political Economy, July 20, 2015, http://p
.net/on-capitalisms-emotional-logics/.
23
Cinema Journal 56 ! No. 2 I Winter 2017
mechanisms enable viewsers to ignore and forget the precarious nature of wireless
technology.
To that extent, buffering is a useful entryway into various concerns regarding our
ever-growing dependency on Internet connectivity: the new economy of access based
on the digital divide between geographical areas, national borders, and standard and
premium services; the loss of communal viewing experience due to the emergence of
an individualized habitual consumption of online content; and finally, the production
of an affective economy based on anxiety, helplessness, and the constant denial of
contingency and the unknowable nature of both our technology and our world.
Media scholars have much to gain from a rigorous investigation of digital
spectatorship and its dirty public secrets. Instead of desperately seeking web continuity,
a more productive approach would be to kill the god in the machine so we can start
exploring its earthly contours - not only its infrastructure, protocols, and undersea
cables but also how these material frameworks create a specific structure of meaning
in our relation to our world. If we were to believe Plan C, this endeavor is not only
scholarly or philosophical; it can - and should be - political. To break the machine of
perpetual anxiety, we should start by acknowledging its existence. ❖
I wish to thank my dissertation coadvisers, Anna McCarthy and Nicole Starosielski, for their ongoing support and mentorship,
as well as for their generous comments on earlier drafts of this article. I abo thank Jonathan Sterne for pointing out the sonic
hbtories of nobe and providing numerous insightful comments on thb piece.
24

Alexander - Rage Against The Machine

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Alexander - Rage Against The Machine

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Society for Cinema & Media Studies

Rage against the Machine: Buffer-

rarely explored: a never-ending, loopic, perpetual circle that oc-

www.cmstudies.org 56 ! No. 2 ! Winter 201 7 1

Complicating Seamlessness: Five Degrees of Fragmentation. Similar to the

12 For a study of bootleg aesthetics, see Hilderbrand, Inherent Vice.

Technological Fragmentation: Decentralization, Packet Switching, and "Lossy

16 Chun, "On 'Sourcery,'" 301.

In other words, the Internet's infrastructure, protocols, and mode of operation

Simultaneously, the discourse of digital immateriality serves to deny the ubiquity

Economic Fragmentation: The Digital Divide and an Economy of Access.

unconnected (or "users" and "nonusers"); and second, by establishing a market-driven

Thinking about the often-unacknowledged correlations between connectivity and

users' agency in highly connected Western countries.

Optical Fragmentation: Browsing, Waiting, and Loopic Viewing. While digi-

webmasters and designers as a momentary loop - an animated wheel or spiral whose

Epistemologica! Fragmentation: "Black Boxes" and Interactive Scripted

39 McPherson, "US Operating Systems," 21-37.

UNIX's intense modularity and information-hiding capacity were reinforced

41 McPherson, "US Operating Systems," 26.

(as a result of expired copyright agreements). Building on Norman Klein's study of

Temporal Fragmentation: The Cult of Speed and Network Time. These

48 Hilderbrand, Inherent Vice, 34.

interrupts."53 This description corresponds to the familiar distinction between the

An "On-Demand Utopia"? The Rise of Failure Studies. Confronted by various

53 Jacobs, "Television, Interrupted," 259.

58 Quoted in Graham and Thrift, "Out of Order," 8.

60 Ah med , Promise of Happiness, 9 1 .

62 Jussi Parikka, The Anthrobscene (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015).

neoliberalism is an invisible system that, paradoxically, thrives on crisis.66 Writing

So pervasive has neoliberalism become that we seldom even recognize it as an

For media scholars, it is increasingly tempting to cast neoliberalism as "the root

Selective Memory: Buffering and Habitual New Media. Functioning as a digital

70 Chun, Programmed Visions.

73 Galloway, Protocol, 64.

Waiting, Affect, and Perpetual Anxiety. As mentioned earlier, the meaninglessness

78 Wald, "Why Your Brain Hates Slowpokes."

84 Scholz, Digital Labor.

87 Bogost, Geek's Chihuahua, 67.

Whereas Abolfalzi refers to the waiting limbo as a subjective and psychological

Conclusion: Breaking the Machine of Perpetual Anxiety. Connected viewing

91 Institute for Precarious Consciousness, "We Are All Very Anxious."

93 Berlant, Cruel Optimism.

You might also like