Rage against the Machine: Buffering, Noise, and Perpetual Anxiety in the Age of Connected Viewing Neta Alexander Cinema Journal, Volume 56, Number 2, Winter 2017, pp. 1-24 (Article) Published by University of Texas Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/cj.2017.0000 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/645448 Access provided by The Society for Cinema and Media Studies (24 Jan 2017 20:39 GMT) Rage against the Machine: Buffering, 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 contextualizing 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. © 2017 by the University of Texas Press W hy Is Buffering Being Ignored? It is a ubiquitous image that is rarely explored: a never-ending, loopic, perpetual circle that occasionally bears the words “loading” or “bufering” beneath it. This GIF informs us that the streamed world in which we were immersed 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 hoping, 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 bufering 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 execution and makes our machines demonic,” this religious terminology purposefully invokes notions of abstraction and animism.1 If, as Chun argues, software is “a visibly invisible essence” that resonates with the mysticism of black magic, then bufering 1 Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, “On ‘Sourcery,’ or Code as Fetish,” Configurations 16, no. 3 (Fall 2008): 300. Neta Alexander is a doctoral student in the Department of Cinema Studies at New York University. Her articles have appeared in Film Quarterly, Media Fields Journal, and Flow, and she has authored chapters in the forthcoming anthologies Compact Cinematics (Bloomsbury), The Netlix Efect (Bloomsbury), and Anthropology and Film Festivals (Cambridge Scholars). This essay won the 2016 SCMS Student Writing Award. www.cmstudies.org 56 | No. 2 | Winter 2017 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 bufering can therefore show how it functions as a digital specter that haunts our vernacular experience. The notorious “loading” GIF appears onscreen every time an Internet server is preloading data into a reserved area of memory known as “the bufer.” As deined by the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), a bufer can be “a person or thing that prevents incompatible or antagonistic people or things from harming each other.” The word “bufer” therefore invokes a tension between contingency and control. In digital networks, the bufer 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 contact 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 eiciently transmitted, complicate our understanding 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 imbued 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 diferent from earlier forms of spectatorial noise, such as the need to switch reels in the days of the lammable celluloid ilmstrip, the distortion and degeneration of the VHS tape, the “clunky” experience of the DVD, and the commercial break on television and its “aesthetics 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 histories 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 2 Cinema Journal 56 | No. 2 | Winter 2017 have been elaborately studied and theorized, but bufering, 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 bufering 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 eiciency, immediacy, and low and celebrated 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 Netlix and Amazon is capable of empowering the viewser in unprecedented ways: ofering “predictive personalization” by using big data, collaborative iltering, 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 Netlix CEO Reed Hastings, “waiting is dead.”9 As a result of this celebratory discourse, bufering 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 afective 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 Netlix-Comcast deal signed in February 2015).11 Building on previous studies of spectatorial and sonic noise, this article revolves around two central questions: To what end are bufering 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 predigital “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 “prosumer” 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 Mathematization 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/. 3 Cinema Journal 56 | No. 2 | Winter 2017 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 afective relations it invokes and exposes. My main objective is to analyze bufering 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 bufering we must be cautious not to naturalize and generalize a speciic spectatorial experience, masking over the particularities of the precise kinds of encounters diferent viewsers engage with on a daily basis. As with any other digital phenomenon, bufering holds a cultural speciicity 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 bufering, I irst 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 afective 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 inancial 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). 4 Cinema Journal 56 | 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 machinic 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 predigital 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 low, much as cloud computing draws on aerial imagination and, as Starosielski asserts, recasts servers “as hovering above the ixed realities of the material world” while efectively 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 ive diferent aspects of digital fragmentation—technological, economic, optical, epistemological, and temporal. This mapping is used as an entryway into the discussion of bufering 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 decentralization. Its origin story, albeit being told in endless diferent ways, begins in the late 1950s, when the anxiety and fear of the Cold War led Paul Baran at the Rand Corporation “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 irst 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 bufer more data. Because of limited bandwidth and numerous other factors, this communication process often results in what users experience as “bufering”—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). 5 Cinema Journal 56 | No. 2 | Winter 2017 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 deinition: medieval pipe organs, transatlantic cable and telegraphs, electric guitars, and long-distance telephony all had latencies. Waiting for digital content to load, however, is diferent from waiting for a letter to arrive. Theorizing delay in the speciic context of bufering and other digital dams should therefore focus on its cultural speciicity 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 inance 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, ininite, 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 suring 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 iber-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 bufering is the exception rather than the rule. The problem of bufering can supposedly be solved by upgrading our devices or subscriptions.23 However, video compression, by deinition, is based on sev20 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 succeed. . . . 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=iFRMh5kv19k. 6 Cinema Journal 56 | No. 2 | Winter 2017 eral forms of erasure and selection. As deined by Lev Manovich, compression is “the technique of making image iles smaller by deleting some information.”24 Furthermore, the transmission of digital data is based on lossy compression: “While in theory computer technology entails the lawless replication of data, its actual use in contemporary 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 “lessthan-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 ile, for example, often contains as little as 12 percent of the original ile 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, bufering 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—bufering 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: irst, 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 diferent 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 viliied 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 Format (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, Beyond 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 the extent to which fiscal, political, and territorial control are intertwined, see Faye Ginsburg, “Rethinking the Digital Age,” in The Media and Social Theory, ed. David Hesmondhalgh and Jason Toynbee (New York: Routledge, 2008), 127–144. 30 Sean Cubitt, The Practice of Light: A Genealogy of Visual Technologies from Prints to Pixels (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014), 4. 7 Cinema Journal 56 | No. 2 | Winter 2017 access replaces ownership, the faster the connection you have, the wealthier you seem to become. This can also explain why bufering is mostly being ignored: because viewsers experience it in diferent times and diferent 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 diferent users, in diferent 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 diferent depending on diferent expectations and circumstances. In parts of the world where grids go down regularly, users wait for media quite diferently, or they use diferent 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 supericial 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 conines of infrastructure studies, by studying political censorship, interface design, or biased algorithmic systems (like Google’s autocomplete, advertisements, or search results).34 And although bufering is a routine and much-expected phenomenon in countries or places without high-speed Internet, it demands a diferent 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 desynchronization and individualization (31–48). 32 The need to wait (for new movies, translations, or dubbing) also informs various forms of piracy, as has been demonstrated 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). 8 Cinema Journal 56 | No. 2 | Winter 2017 who refuses to spend the night in an apartment without high-speed Internet). While these considerations gradually shape our domestic behaviors and landscapes, bufering 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 traic 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 ive 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 surrounding and sustaining the streaming revolution and the viewsers’ daily experiences. Internet users are led to believe that digital data is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere, 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 Internet, and make sure they are suring the web within a speciied 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 Netlix 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 datamining 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 digital 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 diferent 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 manifestations. Bufering, 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. 9 Cinema Journal 56 | No. 2 | 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, bufering cuts into the content’s meat; it divides it into fragments whose length is unknown. This turns digital spectatorship into a substantially diferent experience from immersing oneself in the televised “low.” 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 bufering 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. Bufering’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 ilms. In Unfriended (Levan Gabriadze, 2014), a horror ilm that takes place entirely on the protagonist’s desktop screen, a Skype group conversation is interrupted by bufering 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 understand why it still remains an understudied phenomenon within cinema and media studies, a discussion of the Internet’s epistemological fragmentation is necessary. Epistemological 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 dependent, 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 signifiers 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 Cinema Journal 56 | No. 2 | Winter 2017 in a constant tension between omnipotence and anxiety, which tech companies use to convince users to upgrade their devices instead of ixing 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 speciically gadgets like Apple’s iPhone or MacBook—are best understood as pets. By ofering 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 bufering. 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 Netlix 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 inite, 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, “Improvisational 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 Cinema Journal 56 | No. 2 | Winter 2017 (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 predeined and limited experience. This illusion of choice is partly based on, and sustained by, the diference between the limited options ofered 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 ind 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 diferent 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 diferent 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, ofers a feature that enables viewers to adjust the playback speed, from a crawling 0.25x to a blistering 2x. By watching a ilm at 2x speed, the viewser can consume a ninety-minute ilm in fortyive 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 somewhere 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 | No. 2 | Winter 2017 further denies the reality of bufering and waiting by practicing new temporalities based on sensory and cognitive endurance.47 A Brief History of Spectatorial Noise. In the case of bufering, digital dams such as Internet providers and limited bandwidth are constant reminders of the precarious nature of connected viewing. A closer look at bufering 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, bufering difers from bootleg aesthetics and its speciic nostalgic pleasure. Studying the VHS magnetic tape and its tendency for disintegration, Lucas Hilderbrand argues that “the speciicity 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 “efect 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 signiicant 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 diferent 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 bufering, broken links, corrupted media iles, and other “noises.” But unlike the VHS degeneration or the creative use of distortion and noise by experimental musicians, bufering does not provide viewsers with a notion of nostalgia, a sense of intimacy, or artistic 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, bufering consumes both sound and image. 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 BitSized 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 Cinema Journal 56 | No. 2 | Winter 2017 enabling viewers to rebuild the fragmented image of the VHS cassette in their heads on the basis of previous repeated viewings, bufering 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 bufering, 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 “bufering” 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 bufering 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, bufering 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 inally reaches the season inale. 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 diferent units created by the disruption of bufering function more like islands than segments. They loat 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, bufering fractures the text instead of imbuing it with new layers of meaning, relexivity, 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 low 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: Smithsonian 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 Cinema Journal 56 | No. 2 | Winter 2017 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-light 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 bufering. 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 ofers 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 ields as diferent as philosophy, infrastructure studies, media studies, ilm 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 diferent practices and encounters with tools or objects. However, the relational function of objects—the way they produce diferent 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 society 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 | 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 recently 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, uninished 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 inluences 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 Ahmed, Promise of Happiness, 91. 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 Cinema Journal 56 | No. 2 | Winter 2017 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 deining characteristic of human relations. It redeines citizens as consumers, whose democratic choices are best exercised by buying and selling, a process that rewards merit and punishes ineiciency. It maintains that “the market” delivers beneits 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 bufering as an all-consuming, paralyzing occurrence devoid of any sense of pleasure (or simply indiference). One way to avoid these pitfalls and expand the discussion to include subversive pleasures associated with digital noise is to read bufering 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 deine 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 ineiciency could prove a fruitful scholarly tool: “Rather than focus on how one might design the most ergonomic interface or engineer trustworthy reciprocity of encoding and decoding under conditions of lossy transmission, this book proiles a digital culture that goes against the grain of eiciency and embraces the reserves that reside in noise, error, and glitch.”69 To truly “embrace the residue,” it can be productive to explore bufering as something more than a transitory technical nuisance: within a utopian discourse and a business model based on the denial of contingency, bufering 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 Modernity (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.com/books/2016/apr/15/neoliberalism-ideology-problem-george-monbiot. For an elaboration 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 Cinema Journal 56 | No. 2 | Winter 2017 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 efectively serves to deny contingency when faced with a complex system whose logic and infrastructure are mostly invisible to its users (much like the economic infrastructure of credit and debt and the derivative inance on which neoliberalism is based).71 It also conveys the illusion that bufering 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 inally explore why— and how—these breakdowns are mostly forgotten. Selective Memory: Buffering and Habitual New Media. Functioning as a digital specter, bufering raises a diicult 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 ofering several answers to the question of selective digital memory and the perpetual anxiety it produces. To begin with, bufering and the aesthetics of lag are not always identiied 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 ilm, bufering casts a diferent light on the problem of fragmented spectatorship.72 As I demonstrated earlier, suring 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 deines as “the set of techniques practiced by webmasters that, taken as a totality, create a pleasurable, luid experience for the user.”73 The golden rule of web continuity is brilliantly simple: conceal the source. As Galloway writes, “In classic Hollywood ilm, 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 diferent, 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 afective response of helplessness. The shift from a seamless, continuous stream of moving images to an 70 Chun, Programmed Visions. 71 See Arjun Appadurai, Banking on Words: The Failure of Language in the Age of Derivative Finance (Chicago: University 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 Cinema Journal 56 | No. 2 | Winter 2017 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 deined 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 bufering and its discontents. While the streaming revolution is based on the promise of on-demand “liveness,” bufering creates a phenomenological mode of waiting. Because of the unpredictable length of bufering, 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, the learning of a way of simplifying action by selecting its key muscular eforts 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 indiference, which transforms into forgetfulness. At the same time, the fact that bufering has become habitual does not mean that it no longer produces any response. In fact, our encounter with bufering is experienced on three diferent levels: as a temporary emotional distress, as a disruption that triggers various bodily reactions, and as an enduring and unrecognized afective 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 Cinema Journal 56 | No. 2 | Winter 2017 The common emotional response to bufering can be categorized under the nascent rubric of “Internet rage.”78 This focus on rage, however, denies the particularities of bufering and sees it as part of a broader tendency toward shorter attention spans and a prominent ideology of ever-growing eiciency.79 But bufering demands a more nuanced theorization. The last part of this article focuses on the afect of perpetual anxiety, created by bufering’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 bufering may be deceiving. In fact, I wish to push this analysis further in the opposite direction—arguing that bufering 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 speciic logic or structure of meaning in our relation to our world. What, therefore, is the logic or meaning bufering 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 afect.” The writers then demonstrate how each afect functions as a “public secret” meant to support and sustain a system of exploitation and control. In the mid-twentieth century, for example, the afect was boredom: “This was an efect of the Fordist system which was prevalent until the 1980s—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 ight 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, deined by Plan C as “a ield in which the whole society is organized like a workplace. Precarity is used to force people back to work within an expanded ield 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 2011 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, April 4, 2014, http://www.weareplanc.org/blog/we-are-all-very-anxious/. 81 Ibid. 20 Cinema Journal 56 | No. 2 | Winter 2017 factory.” In simple words, labor and leisure are now almost interchangeable. When we binge watch a series on Netlix, we produce value in several simultaneous and oftignored 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 Netlix.82 Binge watching is thus a nascent form of what may be called eicient laziness: it simultaneously draws on the pleasure of media consumption and the notorious anxiety of FOMO (fear of missing out).83 As mentioned earlier, bufering 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 fulill 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 commodiied, 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. Bufering 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 bufering, the waiting can be pleasurable or painful, depending on the context. However, there is a crucial diference between gazing at a screen while waiting for the dentist and encountering bufering on the computer screen: while we negotiate the irst with our eyes, we react to the latter with our bodies—and more speciically, our hands. Every time our ingers either click the mouse or touch the screen, we try to gain control by asserting our power over the machine. We thus ill—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, “Motivational, 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 Bodies, 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 | No. 2 | 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 insigniicant unease? And what are the factors that shape their waiting rituals and habits? A possible answer is that the delay caused by bufering 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 afect of the twenty-irst 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 ield. 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 afective economy that bufering 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 example, a similar phenomenon to bufering 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 /2014/08/31/fashion/texting-anxiety-caused-by-little-bubbles.html. 22 Cinema Journal 56 | No. 2 | Winter 2017 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. Bufering, 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 efective.”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 bufering 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 efect, 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 of 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. . . . [O]ur eforts 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 eiciency, immediacy, and the blurring lines between content providers and consumers. By applying the framework of failure studies, this article has ofered a diferent 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://ppesydney .net/on-capitalisms-emotional-logics/. 23 Cinema Journal 56 | No. 2 | Winter 2017 mechanisms enable viewsers to ignore and forget the precarious nature of wireless technology. To that extent, bufering 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 inally, the production of an afective 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 speciic 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 also thank Jonathan Sterne for pointing out the sonic histories of noise and providing numerous insightful comments on this piece. 24