"Wild Tides maps the shifting fortunes of the Irish economy prior to the 2008 global financial crisis, outlining how the Irish state moved from rampant and irresponsible real estate development to investing in media infrastructure to draw financial capital back into the country after the crisis. Patrick Brodie contends that while the Irish states investment in media-including in the technology, film and television, and financial sectors-was supposed to bring resources into the country and stabilize the economy, it had the opposite effect, rendering the country even more vulnerable to future crashes and transferring wealth into the hands of multi-national corporations. Through ethnographic work and close engagement with the Irish states policy and planning across several key media infrastructure sites, Brodie unfolds the very real environmental and social impacts of Irelands financialized infrastructure model. Within this matrix of financialization, Irish workers have been rendered precarious, and the country has become a site of extraction as large data centers take root there. Richly researched and capaciously argued, Wild Tides reveals the multifarious, unexpected ways that financialization reaches into the daily life of a nation"-- Provided by publisher.