Normal Accidents in the Digital Age

Abstract

In the early 1980s, sociologist Charles Perrow set out to understand what went wrong at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant when it experienced a partial meltdown resulting in one of the worst nuclear accidents in history. A presidential commission and a host of other experts had previously reviewed the disaster, each setting out to identify mistakes and assign blame. Perrow arrived at a much more provocative and, to many, troubling thesis, which was that disasters are simply an expected feature of some kinds of societal enterprises, or “systems.” They are, he said, “normal accidents.” Contemporary digital advertising platforms share many of the features Perrow identified as hallmarks of systems destined for normal accidents. But where a normal accident at a nuclear plant might lead to a horrifying explosion, in digital advertising they present in smaller ways—problematic ad placements or fraudulent ad impressions—that nonetheless compound into serious societal problems. Because of the tremendous scale of digital advertising, in which billions of ad impressions are sold each hour, these seemingly small errors collectively result in tens of millions of dollars in revenues taken in by sites hawking disinformation and hate speech, as well as billions of dollars lost to fraud. This essay looks at digital advertising through the lens of normal accident theory, including some of the hard questions it poses about whether some types of systems are unfixable and might best be abandoned.