Antidigitism

The sign-in button preserves the appearance of formal choice while refusal begins to cost time, money, professional visibility, or other people’s patience. A public service remains available by telephone, but the call takes hours; a workplace permits the absence of an account, but decisions happen in a closed channel; a community requires no publication, but people recognise newcomers through video materials, and the cost of each detour reveals the distribution of power.

A mapping review of 138 empirical disconnection studies found that socioeconomic and intersectional differences remain under-researched (Altmaier et al. 2024). An ethnography of digital welfare in Denmark shows one concrete cost: mandatory self-service transferred access labour to individuals, families, and third-sector organizations, while marginalized groups faced greater difficulty obtaining benefits (Carreras 2024). Personal restraint and digital minimalism can tune individual habits, while antidigitism directs attention toward full social routes for people who choose another mode of participation.

Partial refusal allows somebody to use email and avoid a social network, publish a static website and decline a daily profile, employ a model in one task and exclude it from another, forming a boundary that requires the right to choose intermediaries domain by domain and preserves freedom from one digital identity with its whole package of conditions.

The difference between use and exposure becomes visible far beyond a screen when a person avoids generative models and later reads their text in a workplace document, hears a synthetic voice in customer service, or receives a decision prepared by a system they never saw. A teacher can decline automated assessment and still review work produced with its help; an artist can remain off a platform while an organizer evaluates them through a profile found there; a resident can avoid installing an app after the nearest service desk was closed because most users had moved to a digital channel.

This produces involuntary inclusion, in which other people’s use of a technology alters the common environment and places a refuser inside its consequences. The choice not to press a button remains, while the choice to live under the earlier conditions disappears because an organization has redistributed staff, a community has moved its memory, an editor has changed the pace, and a market has adopted a new expectation of productivity. Work on AI refusal treats refusal as cultural politics precisely because individual non-use encounters a collectively produced environment.

Exclusion through refusal forms the reverse side: a person maintains a boundary and loses a form of participation that did not previously require its violation. The loss often appears voluntary because refusal really was the user’s final action, but the structure of the choice arrived earlier through the closing of a desk, migration of a conversation, compulsory identification, or a professional norm of permanent availability. The political question concerns the distribution of costs between an organization that selected a single channel and a person asked to pay personally for the detour.

When digitisation began becoming compulsory, I recognised depression as a feeling of complicity and powerlessness: for more than twenty years I had programmed, maintained systems, and participated in building an environment that I could now barely alter alone. Ordinary workplace decisions turn other people into involuntary participants in a digital environment: computational output is accepted as a call to action, and schedules, access, and evaluation are rebuilt around it.

A computer works with materials available to it: files, messages, identifiers, links, timestamps, measurements, and models. These records form a registered and therefore partial layer of an event through which people sustain friendship across distance, teach movement, and preserve a voice.

Across twenty years of programming, I have understood formatting as a compromise: a field, type, protocol, and interface provide compatibility at the cost of discarded distinctions. The idea of computationally “understanding a person” continues the same agreement because a constantly changing life enters processing through a fixed snapshot and categories available in advance. Ethics and culture become conditions for applying the result, while empathy begins by acknowledging an incomplete representation and remaining willing to continue the relationship beyond its format.

The problem sharpens when the registered layer gains jurisdiction over its source: a profile determines admission; activity proves whether somebody worked; a clip decides whether they belong to a practice; a metric announces whether an action deserves continuation. Antidigitism adds a test of power to the distinction between an event and its digital trace already developed in Executable Traces: who may judge the source by the trace, and what happens to the person who leaves no digital footprints?

Compulsory visibility works without a direct order because a system maintains recognisability through new registered states and thereby makes silence gradually more expensive. Privacy lets a person decide which information to disclose; a person may also leave part of life untranslated into data and illegible to the system.

Follow the detour to an ordinary service door, where a telephone nobody answers, a paper form with a month-long delay, and a staffed desk in another city preserve a route only in documentation. The person standing there discovers whether access has comparable quality, speed, and cost, and whether entry depends on compatible consumer hardware or an account controlled by a private identity provider; the state, an employer, a bank, a school, and a healthcare system determine through these practical details who can participate in shared life.

The same person may use an account for a tax declaration and keep transport, libraries, and public discussion outside that identity. Agreement to a digital channel can remain local to one task, allowing decisions to change gradually while work, relationships, and institutional access continue through other routes.

The detour now carries dates on its tickets: Denmark made Digital Post obligatory for most residents in 2014 while creating an exemption procedure (Danish Agency for Digital Government). Finland's 2026 budget separately makes comprehensive electronic services the baseline supplemented by in-person service and advances digital official communication as the primary channel (Finnish Ministry of Finance). Article 5a(15) of the European digital-identity regulation makes wallet use voluntary, prohibits disadvantage to non-users, and preserves existing identification routes (European Union, 2024). Together these arrangements show the disputed boundary in law and administration: a digital route can expand while the force of refusal depends on the route that remains.

At a meeting the person may leave without producing a record, pass through silence without acquiring a suspicious status, and use an essential function without construction of a behavioural profile. Data minimisation, limited retention, freedom from continuous identification, and protection from decisions based solely on a missing trace give that unregistered interval practical room.

When a machine state blocks the next door, human review gives the person a route for challenging a false link, missing record, automated classification, or incompatible format before somebody authorised to consider circumstances and correct the result. Review requires time and actual authority; an appeal button followed by an automated answer merely repaints the blocked entrance.

Before leaving, the person needs contacts, texts, images, correspondence, and records of their work in an intelligible format; a community making the same move needs its shared memory. Portability and local copies let several forms of participation support one another and keep any provider from holding exclusive authority over presence.

Keeping these routes alive requires money and labour. A public institution that saves through a single channel transfers waiting time, the price of a device, training, dependence on a helper, and the risk of losing access into the user’s life, where each cost continues after disappearing from the institutional budget.

One person’s detour rarely changes the environment, while workers demanding a channel without surveillance, residents seeking staffed service, authors negotiating publication without constant personal promotion, and a community welcoming people without profiles can change the design of access together. What looked like a series of private absences becomes a shared negotiation over the entrance.

During a network failure, lost phone, identification error, abuse by a controlling partner, or cognitive overload, the reserve route becomes a condition of safety for people with every possible attitude toward technology. Meaningful refusal reveals dependency while there is still time to maintain another way through.

Sometimes another pair of hands completes the route, and an institution can accept lawfully expressed intent without making a trusted representative share every password or create a fictitious account in the absent user’s name, preserving accountability while care passes through the door.

Writers reveal this price with unusual clarity because a work can be finished, given an address, and left available without the author’s daily presence, while a platform profession asks for another job beside it: grow an audience, select excerpts, issue reminders, maintain discussion, and turn a biography into a continuing channel.

Intermediaries have always stood between manuscript and reader, including editors, publishers, bookshops, libraries, the press, and live events, while a digital environment has redistributed their work. Part of selection, advertising, and attention maintenance passed to the author together with access to independent publication; the writer gained a route around the older gates and arrived at a new door opened by the size of a personal audience and the regularity of public presence.

A publisher may sincerely seek a strong book and still ask about follower counts because a bookseller estimates future sales, an advertising budget is limited, and an existing audience reduces risk. Each link follows an intelligible economy, but their combination makes prior visibility a condition for circulating the work and asks the author to produce a market for a text before the text has had a chance to meet readers.

Criticism of platform dependence becomes especially difficult to circulate when participation in its channels counts as evidence of professional realism. An author is asked to maintain the infrastructure of attention for years in order to speak about its cost, while an absent profile is treated as an absent readership, although libraries, newsletters, static sites, independent bookshops, and personal recommendation still form a slower circuit of circulation.

In 2018 PEN America described social media as a professional imperative for many writers and journalists. In an Authors Guild survey, 84 percent of respondents marketed their work; full-time traditionally published authors averaged seven hours a week and self-published authors 12.4 hours (Authors Guild 2020). The Guild later held a 2026 event about promoting books without social media. Asking a writer to become digital material so that criticism of the attention economy can circulate reveals how professional access has already been built into the platform.

A static website offers a modest alternative inside the same infrastructure: a document persists while its author is silent, RSS announces a new text and then goes quiet, and a reader arrives a year later and meets a work apart from the daily performance of a personality. Servers, browsers, and search engines continue working under a different temporal contract between the work and the person.

Turn the printed sheet over and the crossed eye, cables, cassette, and switch gather several political histories on one surface. The word Luddite arrives carrying the textile worker who understood the machine and resisted the way an owner used it to lower wages, weaken skill, and reorganize authority; historical research places machinery inside this conflict over labour and political economy (Randall, 1995). Neo-Luddism widened the object toward destructive technological systems, and Chellis Glendinning's 1990 manifesto treated technologies as political arrangements carrying particular interests, scales, and forms of social organization (Glendinning, 1990).

The same sheet meets anarchism through autonomy, free association, and suspicion of power hidden inside an ordinary arrangement, although those principles have produced several positions on technology. One line sees emancipatory possibility in technology distorted by capitalist ownership, military application, labour management, and centralized infrastructure; Uri Gordon described this ambivalence through the activist who resists technological power while programming, using networks, and maintaining autonomous infrastructure.

Anti-civilizational and anarcho-primitivist currents locate the problem more deeply by connecting large technical systems to divisions of labour, resource extraction, dependence on specialists, and a scale of administration that reproduces domination under any ownership. From this position, transferring a platform to a cooperative changes its owner while retaining the material network and social specialization that sustain its power, so the dispute concerns the design of technology and the social conditions of its reproduction.

Anarchist HCI develops another practical line by evaluating design through emancipatory autonomy, unequal distributions of power, and the ability to build counterpower. Encryption, distributed communication, independent publishing, free software, and digital-security tools can enlarge the space of association, especially where states or companies control primary channels. Their political value depends on participants being able to understand rules, alter infrastructure, move data, and continue collective action after one service is abandoned.

The name has a narrower precedent in media criticism: Dean Starkman used “digitism” in 2014 for a journalism ideology that discarded traditional reporting forms when digital business models could not accommodate them (Starkman, 2014). This essay extends the term from the institutional form of journalism to machine-readable recognition across work, services, relationships, and political voice.

Antidigitism takes a limited position inside this dispute, focused on compulsory datafication and machine legibility as a source of jurisdiction. Dataism treats datafication as an ontology and epistemology, a belief José van Dijck traces through the trust granted to corporate and public institutions that handle data (van Dijck, 2014); digitism appears at the door, where the processed record decides what counts. Intensive technological use can satisfy the antidigitist test while people retain meaningful refusal, and conflict begins when a machine-readable state becomes the condition of work, service, friendship, or political voice. This position leaves the wider dispute about civilization open while offering a testable criterion for a particular organized setting and point of entry.

Digitism can serve different regimes because it establishes an infrastructural norm of representability whose political purpose comes from whoever controls the system. Liberal capitalism connects it to advertising profiles, labour management, and the conversion of behaviour into a commodity; the administrative state connects a record to eligibility for services and promises uniform application of rules; authoritarian power uses the same legibility for surveillance, restrictions on movement, and punishment. The UN report shows how this machine legibility operates inside the digital welfare state through identity verification, eligibility assessment, benefit calculation, fraud detection, risk classification, and communication between authorities and beneficiaries (United Nations, 2019).

Capitalism combined with digitism turns every action into a potential source of value and trains institutions, employers, and communities to regard unpublished life as wasted material. A more historically precise account treats this infrastructure as capable of entering distinct political regimes and serving their different purposes. A machine-readable record acquires jurisdiction when eligibility for a service, the validity of a payment, the fact of attendance, and the lawfulness of a request are confirmed by system state; practical authority then belongs to whoever defines the schema, controls the infrastructure, and decides whether a person may correct its result. This frame preserves the differences among regimes and isolates their shared administrative legibility.

The route toward this door was already marked in the twentieth century: Gilles Deleuze described access controlled by codes in 1992, and Lawrence Lessig showed that software architecture regulates conduct in 1999 (Deleuze, 1992; Lessig, 1999). In 2010 the UK announced digital-by-default public services (Cabinet Office, 2010), and by 2015 Shoshana Zuboff had described the global architecture of computer mediation behind surveillance capitalism (Zuboff, 2015). The present transformation lies in convergence: identity, communication, payment, eligibility, employment, and appeal increasingly pass through connected records while staffed alternatives lose capacity.

The expansion of generative software intensifies conflict over the share of human judgement in production because industry pays for automation, predictability, and datafication. Research already describes AI refusal as a cultural politics (Lynch and Dekeyser 2026), while disability and digital-rights activists have long contested compulsory self-service. Antidigitism draws the boundary where a machine-readable state begins determining a person's right to participate.

A practical test asks who controls the intermediary, whether participants can discuss and alter its terms, whether a compatible route exists without it, and whether people can still act together after leaving, since a formal delete button means little when relationships and services close behind it.

People with Spark examines a situation in which a form begins to outrank the person it was meant to support; here the same conflict appears at the level of compulsory infrastructure.

I value who I have become and what I have in my life; at the same time, I try to resist the transformation of the digital environment into a compulsory order in which refusal of a generative system becomes incompatible with a profession, a service is unavailable without a smartphone, silence in a feed is interpreted as a loss of belonging, and a practice without digital evidence is treated as incomplete. That resistance draws support from several forms of entry, staffed channels, portable data, local copies, shared spaces, and people authorised to resolve a question without a machine state.

The printed image remains on the table, where we can discuss its origin and put the sheet away or keep it. The most important switch sits before the device, in our shared capacity to decide where a digital intermediary assists an encounter and which forms of encounter remain after its refusal.

The next article, Continuity, separates three times that digital systems tend to conflate: registered activity, the life of a practice in a person, and memory held in relationships.

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