Paper short abstract:

I explore how the autorickshaw-mounted panic button's promise to facilitate protection of anyone, anytime, anywhere through the deployment of locational data and digital communications capabilities anchors complex engagements with the materiality of failure as an idiom of democratic discourse.

Paper long abstract:

Since 2012, autorickshaw fare meters in Delhi, India have been equipped with panic buttons, integrating GPS receivers and SIM cards that make the real-time production and communication of locational data possible, embodying a promise of security to anyone, anywhere, anytime within the city. However, when asked engineers working with these systems generally agreed they were not functional. While such an observation on bureaucratic failure is common enough, it is complicated by forms of technological error associated with the panic button’s communicative architecture and the digital infrastructures in which it is embedded. Though error can be mitigated in various ways, it is an irreducible aspect of any complex system, complicating standing questions of agency and accountability by introducing a distinction between contingent and necessary failures. In the context of a promise to protect all persons, wherever they are, all the time, error imparts a quality of necessity to the inevitable instances of failure to keep that promise. Oddly enough, this necessary possibility of failure is socially contextualized by means of an object unrelated to the panic button’s digital architecture – a metal box in which meters are often housed that may restrict access to the panic button itself. In this paper, I will explore how the box multiplies the sites of the panic button’s failure, paradoxically preserving the universality and egalitarianism of its promise made possible through digital mediation by staging failure as a technical affordance rather than an unfortunate outcome.