Introduction: The Difference that Doesn't Make a Difference

Commoditizing Failure

Mortal creatures that we are, humans are lamentably destined to fail. Yet, failure has recently emerged from the world of ordinary language and become a subject of both celebration and scrutiny. This book is a critical exercise in understanding the discourse of failure in our times, but it does not aim to reduce the idea of failure to an artifact of language, culture, or history, or to a social construction in the usual sense. We believe that the sense of failure is real and that it produces disappointment, regret, remorse, and other costly effects on individuals and groups. Yet, failure is not a self-evident property or quality of projects, institutions, technologies, or lives. Rather, it is a product of judgments that reflect various arrangements of power, competence, and equity in different places and times. As such, failure produces and sustains cultural fantasies and regimes of expectations. By reading failure as a judgment, we reveal its relation to memory, storytelling, and capital. This book therefore sets out to ask which failures are being forgotten, and which failures enter the collective memory and reshape our understanding of the world.

If we accept provisionally the idea that failure is not an immanent feature of any human artifact (such as a project, a technology, an institution, or a career), but is in fact a judgment that something is a failure, we are led inevitably to ask what events produce these judgments (history), who is authorized to make them (power), what form they must take in order to appear legitimate and plausible (culture), and what tools and infrastructures mediate these failures or make them ubiquitous (technology). Together, these factors generate what we call a "regime of failure," in which a certain epistemology, political economy, and dominant technology come together to naturalize and limit potential judgments about failure.

Our aim in this book is thus to show how such judgment protocols produce regimes of failure. We are especially interested in the ways in which contemporary capitalism configures financial and technological systems into an interconnecting apparatus that produces and naturalizes failure and creates the pervasive sense that all successes are the result of technology and its virtues, and that all failure is the fault of the citizen, the investor, the user, the consumer. This ideology can be summed up in the proposition that technology is always effective, if only its users were not so fallible. It is a "solutionism" forever trying to solve technological limitations or malfunctions by investing more capital in designing new technologies (Morozov 2013). From this perspective, we argue that looking at failure in our digitized world offers a novel point of entry into an immanent critique of the growing dependency on digital networks and mobile technologies - and of the opaque infrastructures that sustain them. More specifically, this book describes how some forms of failure operate within North America's finance and tech worlds, which are metonymies as the bi-coastal worlds of Wall Street and Silicon Valley. By limiting our investigation of failure to these two cultures, we hope to reveal how they monetize both forgetfulness and ignorance. The following chapters will therefore map the similarities between digital technologies and the financial market, studying the so-called "gig economy" (chapter 2), the monetization of waiting and latency (chapter 3), and the rise of the derivative form (chapter 4).

These case studies build on what one of us previously termed failure studies (Alexander 2017). One of the challenges in any attempt to study failure is that the term itself is often used interchangeably with a garden variety of other terms, among which are "accident," "disaster," "breakdown," and even "trauma." Reviewing each of these categories is beyond the scope of this work. Instead, we wish to isolate four schools of thought that will help us think creatively about failure: science, business, queer studies, and infrastructure studies.

The first field is modern science, where failures (in experiments, calculations, replicability) are treated as vital and indispensable features of the progress of the field, with the most explicit formulation about failure being Karl Popper's famous ideas about conjecture and falsifiability as the key hallmarks of fruitful hypotheses in the exact sciences (Popper 1963). With its emphasis on empirical falsification, Popperian thought was crucial to the development of a theory of science based on refutability. An experiment is successful if it refutes a false hypothesis and forces scientists to come up with a new, and often better, explanation for the same phenomenon. Failure is thus an essential and to some extent desired outcome; without it, progress is unattainable. In Silicon Valley, this model of scientific progress has been expended to include a blind faith in technological innovation (as we shall see in chapter 2).

The second major contribution to the study of failure has been made by the field of business studies (bridging technology, entrepreneurship, and investment), in which failure is increasingly acknowledged as something to encourage, cultivate, expect, and examine, especially where technical and commercial innovations are concerned. Much of the business literature is littered with clichés about learning from failure. Searching the word "failure" on Amazon generates over 20,000 books that proudly feature the F-word in their title. These include entrepreneurial guides such as Failing Forward: Turning Mistakes into Stepping Stones for Success (Maxwell 2000), The Ten Commandments for Business Failure (Keough 2011), and WTF?! (Willing to Fail): How Failure Can Be Your Key to Success (Scudamore and Williams 2018). The explosion of similar how-to-fail-better guides attests to Silicon Valley's ethos of failure as key to success. This need to celebrate failure could be explained by looking at the failure rates of startup companies. A 2016 industry report by leading venture capital firm Horsley Bridge Partners (HBP), based on aggregate data of over 7,000 investments made between 1985 and 2014, concluded that "Around half of all investments (in VC-backed startups) returned less than the original investment" (Evans 2016). According to Benedict Evans, an author and partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, the HBP report revealed the extent to which failure is essential to the innovation economy and its dependency on "unicorns" or extremely successful bets: "We try to create companies, products and ideas, and sometimes they work, and sometimes they change the world. And so, we see, in our world around half such attempts fail completely, and 5% or so go to the moon" (Evans 2016). Despite these paeans to failure, the links between business failures and innovation often remain as obscure as they were to such pioneers of social science as Frank Knight, Joseph Schumpeter, and Max Weber, who were interested in risk, profit, and innovation.

More recently, there has been a series of interventions by economists, sociologists, and other social scientists seeking to tackle the new innovation economy exemplified by Silicon Valley. These interventions are all indebted in some way to the work of Schumpeter on innovation and creative destruction in the history of capitalism, discussed more fully in chapter 2. The insights that emerge from this recent body of work include the following. The first is that the processes of investment, speculation, and innovation in the new economy are characterized not so much by rational expectations but rather by "fictions" (Beckert 2016), which can be defined as characterizations of the economic future which have no basis in empirical fact and seek to make the future the source for profit-making decisions. The second insight is that the production of value in this new economy has become increasingly skewed toward downstream value (value produced by speculative financial interests, short-term profiteering, and the rapid sale of potentially profitable enterprises in initial public offerings, or IPOs) rather than on upstream value, which is based on genuine scientific or technological discoveries (Janeway 2012). The third insight is that mainstream neoclassical economics has lost sight of the dynamics of these new economies, in which value is produced by massive financialization, along with its disruption and volatility, and not by the logic of supply, demand, and equilibrium (Mazzucato 2016). Each of these insights, which collectively support the argument that financial markets require more - rather than less - state regulation and supervision, also cast light on the cult of failure which reigns in the new economy, especially in Silicon Valley.

In order to move beyond the oversimplistic division between success and failure, the third field we will build on is queer studies. In recent years, queer scholars like Sara Ahmed, Lauren Berlant, Jack Halberstam, and Ann Cvetkovich have been convincingly pushing against a cult of "toxic positivity" or "cruel optimism" (Ahmed 2010; Berlant 2011; Halberstam 2011; Cvetkovich 2012). These various projects all aim to uncover the ways in which the neoliberal "promise of happiness" (Ahmed 2010) paradoxically results in increased anxiety, moments of breakdown, and "wounded...