Making the Most of the ‘Crisortunity’: Multidisciplinary Provocations on Techno-fixes and Precarity

Provocations on Techno-xes and Precarity 2What does a robust and useful technological response to a crisis, aware and attentive to the biases and messages of digital media, look like?This paper responds to provocations and questions posed during our panel, Emergent-cy: Critical Digital Humanities in the Time of COVID at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute 2021 Conference & Colloquium, by attendees who particularly responded to the notion of "crisortunity" raised by Arun Jacob during the panel.This paper centres on crisortunity, a neologism coined by the cartoon The Simpsons in episode 11 of season 6 ("Fear") and since expanded upon by scholars like Tanner Mirrlees, within our different disciplines ("Ghoulish").Crisortunity-a crisis situation that also presents the opportunity for someone to gain something in return-unifies our offerings to the digital humanities.While contributors to this paper come from a range of fields-museum studies, journalism studies, media studies, and research creation-our responses are linked by an attentiveness to the uneven precarities and vulnerabilities so often symptomatic of institutional responses to crises, as well as the production, circulation, and management of information.Building on critical work that explores the ways that technologies from electronic monitoring of those serving parole or awaiting trial (Benjamin) to electronic benefits transfer systems in the United States social service system (Eubanks) are mobilized to fix social problems, we argue that techno-fixes often fail to fix; instead, they reinstate unequal and inequitable relations in the name of repair.In contrast, when communities organize to respond to crises on their own, tensions may arise between attempts for selforganization and anti-capitalist modes of creating and community.This paper thus explores the implications of qualifying something as a "crisis" with a discrete beginning and end, and what it might mean to offer fixes to something that is broken rather than curating, managing, repairing, or caring for something that is not yet irreparable (Gál).By leveraging this concept across our four disciplines, we hope to explore the various uses of terming something a "crisis."While in the present context, the term crisis might bring to mind the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, crises can be financial, institutional, and/or architectural.For whom do crises toll?And for whom are they not crises at all, but opportunities to further leverage power, influence, and resources in the name of protecting investments?As we explore, care infrastructures are often depleted in favour of technofixes and precarious labour that continue, rather than break from, pre-crisis power structures and institutional modes.In our first section, Haley Bryant tackles the question of remediation during the COVID-19 pandemic in the museum field, where an accelerated focus on digital solutions warns of an increasing reliance on precarious labour and compromised practices of museological care.In the following section, Nelanthi Hewa examines how Substack and other newsletter platforms have positioned themselves as the saviours of journalism to ask whose crisis is solved, and whose is extended, when journalism is platformed.Camille Intson reflects on a research creation endeavour and international digital media gallery entitled Intermissions: Works for a New World, which emerged in response to the pandemic's impact on art and culture.In the final section, Arun Jacob discusses the infrastructural politics of the inherent techno-solutionism in crisis architecture.

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