In Wild Tides, Patrick Brodie maps the shifting fortunes of the Irish economy before the 2008 financial crisis up to 2020, outlining how the Irish state moved from rampant and irresponsible financialized development to incentivizing private media infrastructure and policy as instruments for economic recovery. Brodie contends that, while the Irish state’s investment in creative and technological sectors of media was supposed to bring resources back into the country and stabilize the economy, it instead rendered the country even more vulnerable to future instability and transferred wealth into the hands of multinational corporations. Through ethnographic work and close engagement with the Irish state’s policy and planning across a number of key media infrastructure sites, Brodie unfolds the very real environmental and social impacts of Ireland’s naturalized model of financialized, foreign direct investment-led infrastructural development. Richly researched and comprehensively argued, Wild Tides reveals the multifarious, unexpected ways that financialization reaches into the daily life of a nation.

Patrick Brodie is Assistant Professor in the School of Information and Communication Studies at University College Dublin.

Introduction. A Rising Tide Lifts All Boats  1
1. Turbulent Waters: Media Infrastructure and the World Economy  35
2. Ghostly Currents and Creative Erosion  74
3. Waves of Austerity: Film Policy and the Infrastructural Geographies of Media Labor  117
4. Storm Clouds: Technology Industries and the Climate of Crisis  159
Conclusion. Calmer Seas  208
Acknowledgments  225
Notes  229
Bibliography  245
Index