Bugreporting at The End of the World

The desire to fix what is broken, means to trust that there is a reasonable way to explain why something does not work, and how it could be repaired. It assumes that we have a reciprocal relation to the world we try to mend, and it binds us to wanting to stay bound to this world. But what if we need to refuse systems and logics altogether, and collectively undo what they do, rather than work towards their improvement? How might we develop durable, pleasurable practices for debugging at the end of the world, beyond repairative fantasies?

The Institute for Technology in the Public Interest (TITiPI) has been experimenting with different forms of bug reporting, to collective articulate what is going on with the digital transformation of public institutions. In this talk, TITiPI reports from their experiments with Infrables, a joyful method for un-fixing bug reports as a solidary praxis. Infrables tell of oppressive digital infrastructures or tools, but they also make space for other technological attitudes, new anchors for reciprocity between us and our technological worldings. It takes up bugs of disrepair, without imagining we can hold on to the world, including the grip of refusal.