Abstract

This article addresses the seemingly paradoxical proliferation of coded systems designed to guarantee our safety and crises that endanger us. These two phenomena, it argues, are not opposites but rather complements; crises are not accidental to a culture focused on safety, they are its raison d'être. Mapping out the temporality of networks, it argues that crises are new media's critical difference: its exception and its norm. Although crises promise to disrupt memory – to disturb the usual programmability of our machines by indexing ‘real time’ – they reinforce codes and coded logic: both codes and crises are central to the production of mythical and mystical sovereign subjects who weld together norm with reality, word with action. Codes and states of exception are complementary functions, which render information and ourselves undead. Against this fantasy and against the exhaustion that crisis as norm produces, the article ends by arguing that we need a means to exhaust exhaustion, to recover the undecidable potential of our decisions and our information through a practice of constant care.