This paper explores the political potential of digital failure as a refusal to work in service of today’s dataveillance society. Moving beyond criticisms of flawed digital systems, this paper traces the moments of digital failure that seek to break, rather than fix, existing systems. Instead, digital failure is characterized by pesky data that sneaks through the cracks of digital capitalism and dissipates into the unproductive; it supports run-away data prone to misidentifications by digital marketers, coders, and content moderators; and it celebrates data predisposed to “back-talk” with playful irreverence toward those that seek to bring order through normative categorization and moderation. I call these data entropic, fugitive, and queer and explore their mischievous practices through three case studies: the unaccountable data in identity resolution, public shaming of the ImageNet training data, and reading practices of sex worker and influencer, @Charlieshe. Together these case studies articulate the political potential of digital failure as a process of unbecoming the good data subject by pushing past the margins of legibility, knowability, and thinkability, to reveal what is made illegible, unknowable, and unthinkable to data’s seeing eye. As predictive analytics, automated decision-systems, and artificial intelligence take on increasingly central roles in public governance, digital failure reveals how data itself is a flawed concept prone to political abuse and social engineering to protect the interests of the powerful, while keeping those marginalized over-surveilled and underrepresented.

本文探讨了数字故障作为拒绝服务于当今数据监视社会的政治潜力。除了批评有缺陷的数字系统外，本文还探讨了那些试图破坏而不是修复现有系统的数字故障时刻。取而代之的是，数字故障的特征在于讨厌的数据会潜入数字资本主义的缝隙，并消散到无用的生产中。它支持易于被数字营销人员，编码人员和内容审核人员误识别的失控数据；它以易于嘲弄的态度来庆祝那些倾向于通过“归类”进行对话的数据，这些数据试图通过规范化分类和审核来寻求秩序。我称这些数据为熵，逃犯和酷儿并通过三个案例研究探索他们的恶作剧行为：身份解析中不负责任的数据，ImageNet培训数据的公开羞辱以及性工作者和影响者@Charlieshe的阅读行为。这些案例研究共同阐明了数字失败作为不成熟过程的政治潜力通过超越易读性，可知性和可思考性的界限来揭示好的数据主体，以揭示什么使数据的眼球变得难以理解，不可知和难以想象。随着预测分析，自动化决策系统和人工智能在公共治理中扮演越来越重要的角色，数字故障揭示了数据本身是一个有缺陷的概念，易于受到政治滥用和社会工程学的影响，以保护强权者的利益，同时保持边缘化过度监视和代表性不足。