[Hamsini - Non-core post 5] Summoning Florence/The Machine Breaks Down

The power went out in Hollywood on Saturday around 8:45pm -- this I know because I was at the Hollywood Bowl, waiting for Florence + The Machine to come on for the last concert of her US tour. An audience of hundreds groaned loudly when an announcer came on to say the power had gone out but they were working to restore it; speculation ran rampant about what had happened, whether there were back-up generators (...in India, there are always back-up generators, cf. Edwards' neat little note sidestepping infrastructure and breakdown in the Global South), and whether the concert would even happen. 

Then, all of a sudden, people began to cheer. Shrilly. The wave started somewhere in the back-right of the amphitheater, and rippled through the crowd. Over and over. For 20 minutes. Until at last, we heard loud static and the four monitors around the sides of the bowl came to life to show -- not Florence, but the Windows desktop of some dude named Norm Levin. And this is how I found myself at a Florence + The Machine concert chanting "NORM NORM NORM" instead of "Florence." 

This was, indeed, our signal that power had been restored -- but it still took several minutes for the concert to come back "online" as it were. Nonetheless, people in the crowd, in true witchy fan fashion, took credit for the fix, for...summoning electricity? Through the sheer crackling power of...The wave. Crowds are weird! Anyway, the concert finally went on, Florence as unearthly as ever -- but now everyone could see the glitches. Literally, on the screens that continued to malfunction; elementally, when a light drizzle (tame even by LA standards) led Florence to dreamily complain that producers were telling her to rein it in (in what must've given several people heart attacks, she still took off racing through the Bowl.)

Just a quick story that this week's readings on infrastructure and breakdown brought to mind. What can breakdowns, failures, glitches, etc. tell us about the digital?