Myanmar's Brutal Crackdown Intensifies: The military crackdown on anti-coup protesters reached its deadliest peak, with reports of 38 protesters shot dead in a single day. A campaign manager for Aung San Suu Kyi's party died in police custody.
COVID-19 Vaccine Campaigns Face Hurdles: While vaccine campaigns expanded globally in countries like Nigeria and Rwanda, setbacks occurred. Hong Kong and Macao suspended BioNTech vaccines due to packaging defects, and India experienced a massive surge of 260,000 new cases in one week.
US Passes Massive Relief Package: The US Senate passed President Biden's $1.9 trillion relief package as the economic fallout from the pandemic continued, with Brazil's economy shrinking by 4.1% in 2020.
Violence and Protests Erupt Globally: Explosions in Equatorial Guinea killed at least 20, fighting in Yemen killed 90 in 24 hours, and protests against the restriction of women's rights and protest rights turned violent in Turkey and the UK.
The signal for March 2021 was one of catastrophic, physical blockage. For a week, the entire abstract system of global trade—a flow of data, currency, and goods—was brought to a grinding halt by a single, massive object physically stuck in the Suez Canal. It was a perfect, almost comical, metaphor for the jams occurring elsewhere: stalled vaccine rollouts, legislative gridlock, and the brutal suppression of democratic movements.
The glitch for this era is the System Jam. It's the moment a digital, abstract world is reminded of its clumsy, physical reality. It's the failure of flow.
This artifact simulates that global data jam. Information packets representing the month's headlines flow across the screen, a river of data, until they hit the immovable blockage and pile up in a chaotic mess. The ghost in this machine is the illusion of frictionless progress. Your cursor is a futile attempt to apply pressure, to push the signal through the bottleneck, but the system is simply too congested. It is a reflection on how a single point of failure can cause a cascading, systemic collapse.