Text page
Goodman - Programmed Catastrophe
A Steve Goodman text that turns accident, Y2K, and control architecture into a model of productive catastrophe.
Contextual work page available
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Archive condition
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Core idea
This page matters because it treats accident as something engineered into control systems rather than as an external interruption that arrives from nowhere.
Goodman links Y2K, feedback, and systems failure to show how catastrophe can be programmed by the very architectures meant to manage risk and coordination.
That matters because the geotraumatic line is extended into technics: disaster becomes a property of designed infrastructures, not just of natural upheaval or apocalyptic imagery.
How to read this text
Read for the way control language flips into catastrophe language. The essay is strongest when regulation and breakdown become inseparable.
Keep Y2K concrete. The text uses it not as period color but as a model of how systemic failure can be built into ordinary coordination.
Representative extracts
Definition · paragraph 2
Programmed Catastrophe: the accidental architecture of control Steve Goodman Cybernetic Culture Research Unit "it is no longer a question of hiding an accident or failure, but of making it productive. . ." (Paul Virilio The Primal Accident) "On receiving an interrupt, decrement the counter to zero" [William Gibson Count Zero] 1. Y2K: chronopolitical singularity . . .it's time. . .just like an accident waiting to happen. . .
Definition · paragraph 5
Programmed Catastrophe Such a realignment of perspective on Y2K has precursors in these theorists' approaches to the architecture of the carceral continuum, that networked archipelago of control institutions which constitute the regulatory cutting edge of social cybernetics.
Definition · paragraph 7
Y2K is a glitch in this matrix of control scrambling future forensics and pushing its computations into overload. The veneer of perfected control intelligence is eroded by fluid undercurrents continuously undermining attempts to superimpose simulation scenarios onto a y2paniKed populous. This is the darkside infrastructure of programmed catastrophe, the unintended consequences of turbulence simulation, interrupting the deification of high tech and breeding vortical collectivities whose time goes round and round.
Definition · paragraph 5
Programmed Catastrophe Such a realignment of perspective on Y2K has precursors in these theorists' approaches to the architecture of the carceral continuum, that networked archipelago of control institutions which constitute the regulatory cutting edge of social cybernetics. Indeed, the dominant logic of reactions to the millennium bug is highly consistent with a model of security which has been put in place, byte by byte for decades.
Definition · paragraph 5
Like an apocalypse that never comes and a 'plague that never ends', programmed catastrophe is a slow motion riot unfolding to the preset unpredictability of a simulated liquid. If turbulence simulation is the abstract dynamic of cybernetic control societies, then programmed catastrophe is control losing
Appears in sections
Geotrauma and the Outside Primary section
Molten earth, Barker, the inhuman Outside, and the archive's geological imagination.