Afterword: the waning power of the fix

This commentary offers some reflections on the ‘power of the fix' in cybersecurity and its wider implications for technological democracy. I begin with a discussion of the discrepancy between the discourse of solutionism and everyday practices of securing IT systems (Elgaard Jensen et al, 2026). Whereas the former posits that problems are neat and can be solved by means of technology, the latter must confront what Röhle (2021) has called the ‘permanent brokenness' of computational infrastructures. A peculiar form of ‘infrastructural reversal' can then be observed in the field of cybersecurity: here, disruption, breakdown and failure are not the exception, but the default (Collier et al, 2025; Fouad, 2025). This has implications for the role of public disclosure of technological vulnerabilities in the governance of digital systems (Bozzini, 2025). The endemic nature of disruption in computational infrastructures puts at risk the transformative capacities of publicity in technological politics. This also affects social studies of technology insofar as this field has long relied on disruption, failure and breakdown as empirical occasions for making visible how technology works and does not work in practice.