Introduction

A glitch is a surprise. It emerges from among a system's designed features to suggest something new and unforeseen, yet it also remains distinct from the system- crippling bug, what Vavarella (2015: 10) describes as an ‘uncaptured error’ which ‘refuses to collaborate with anything or anyone’ and can bring the whole thing to a halt. For Lauren Berlant (2015: 393), glitches appear within digital systems, but also the many sociomaterial infrastructures ‘that link ongoing proximity to being in a world- sustaining relation’. A glitch involves ‘the revelation of an infrastructural failure’, and its repair raises questions about new ways of doing things, ‘the potential for new organizations of life’ (Berlant, 2015). The ambiguous, mischievous and irruptive problem of a glitch can be seen as generative of new possibilities within sociomaterial entanglements, which provides space for practices of glitching – the playful and speculative use of a glitch to create something new (see Rivers and Söderlund, 2016: 139– 40).

This chapter explores the glitch specifically as a generative problem, one capable of introducing unanticipated possibilities and futures into an otherwise prescribed situation. These problems and possibilities invite – or demand – a response, and are therefore capable of ‘provoking political and ethical imagination in the present’ as we take these new possibilities into account in our ‘mundane doings of maintenance and repair that sustain everyday life’ (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017: 169– 72). Following Maria Puig de la Bellacasa (2017: 7), this makes the glitch a site of ‘critical speculative thought’, in which questions of repair do not seek to return to a previous state, but rather respond to and work with new possibilities introduced within a glitchy moment (see also Wilkie et al, 2017).

Taking glitches as sociomaterial encounters rather than merely technical errors, we consider two very different case studies in which unexpected problems provoke those involved to speculate playfully and practically about new possibilities. In the first case, a malfunctioning ‘Teacherbot’ incites new challenges and pedagogical opportunities in an online learning environment. In the second, Hungarian activists creatively use infrastructural and political problems to make new spaces of protest and to press the government to respond to their concerns.