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 in consumption 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 personal 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. The same grammar of inclusion operates when a system assembles an approach around a person from predicted susceptibility: an advertising network as commerce and fraud as an unsolicited service rank fear, shame, greed, or latent preference and present a stimulus. 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, where 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 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 when computational output is accepted as a call to action, and schedules, access, and evaluation are rebuilt around it.

Where a hypothesis has a metric, an error has a price, and a failed decision has a rollback, work with data remains an organizational tool. Psychological safety breaks differently: after work, people read others’ traces in a feed, long pauses, and profiles as a ready verdict on invitation, trust, and belonging, without a shared examination of grounds or a path to correct a wrong reading. Ranking and visibility come from the platform; decisions about a person are made by people. Digitism takes hold when those decisions recognize only a registered state.

A person can remain the one who signs while already sitting inside a field assembled in advance from classifications, similar cases, and a recommended inspection. The Wisconsin Supreme Court in 2016 allowed a COMPAS risk score to be considered at sentencing while leaving the formal decision with the judge (State v. Loomis, 2016); the District Court of The Hague in 2020 stopped the Dutch SyRI system, which selected people for welfare-fraud inspection through a risk model the court found insufficiently transparent (Rechtbank Den Haag, 2020). Order No. 621 of the Prosecutor General of Russia, dated 11 September 2025, provides for automated detection of patterns corresponding to violations and for the preparation of recommendations for inspection (Order No. 621, §2). I call that condition vibe justice and take it up in Vibe Justice: a formally human legal decision produced inside a computationally prepared field.

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, a non-living field of signals and records through which people explore, meet, and share across distance, sustain friendship, teach movement, and preserve a voice. Life and emotion stay with the people who enter and leave that field.

Over those years of programming, I have watched living material pressed into conventional shapes so that systems can store and exchange it. A form field, a permitted kind of value, an agreed message format, and a screen that accepts only certain answers buy that compatibility by discarding distinctions they cannot hold. 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 takes the distinction between an event and its digital trace developed in Executable Traces and adds an institutional test of jurisdiction, asking who may judge the source by the trace and what befalls someone who leaves no machine-readable footprints. When generative conditions make a single representation cheaper and less conclusive as proof of presence, as Post-Simulacrum Self-Service Without Contact and Inferentia & Probabilisticum already examine, organized settings raise the demand for continuous machine-readable presence so recognition can still be administered.

At a juggling jam I have long done it this way: another person’s photographs, video, and sound leave from here only with their explicit consent, and the right to define themselves or to leave themselves undefined remains theirs (Recommendations on Collective Practices). Consent to a file remains a separate step once the person is already here. At the 2025 IJA Festival, participants are asked for permission before touching, before using someone else’s props or belongings, and before taking photographs or video; personal taping in the gym is allowed with the consent of those who appear in the frame (IJA Festival, 2025; IJA Video Policy, 2025). The 2025 European Juggling Convention requires a visitor’s permission to record other people and at the same time folds the organiser’s promotional recording into the ticket (EJC 2025, §§6.14, 10.2).

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. Édouard Glissant demanded a right to opacity as a ground of Relation in which a person remains opaque to another’s translation (Glissant, 1997). Bogna Konior adds a machine addressee to that opacity. Online speech already addresses people and models, because activity becomes training data (Konior, 2026). The right to remain unreadable then includes what a person is willing to give the next inference.

After the door is closed, the system still holds the person in an assembled field and completes them from residue, other people’s traces, similar cards, and the gap itself. Vibe Justice already shows this as a search for analogues and a draft measure that a person then signs. Silence becomes a readable state, and a sparse trail is enough because the model fills the picture from neighbouring cases.

On the device itself this residue appears before anything is posted: ordinary use of contemporary software writes logs, caches, and analytics files, and a complete disconnect from the internet leaves that layer in place. Apple Handoff moves current work and clipboard contents over Bluetooth and peer-to-peer Wi-Fi between nearby devices on one account (Apple Platform Security). On supported iPhones the Find My network allows the device to be located without Wi-Fi or cellular, and for up to 24 hours after it is turned off (iPhone User Guide).

The right not to use work devices after the shift and not to read or answer work messages protects rest; the institution, meanwhile, assembles the person from an administrative archive into which they posted nothing.

The same opacity receives an institutional continuation in which the system may not take residue and a gap as knowledge of a life. The General Data Protection Regulation protects inferences about a person more weakly than data the person entered (Wachter and Mittelstadt, 2019). A person who supplies a fuller portrait so the system will classify them better gives it more material for inference. The equivalent route this essay already asks for receives one more condition here: the institution does not reconstruct a person from a gap.

Article 22 restrains a decision based solely on automated processing that produces legal or similarly significant effects (Regulation (EU) 2016/679, Art. 22), and ordinary administration treats a signature on an already assembled file as involvement that takes the decision outside that rule; European guidance requires that a person with authority be able to change the outcome (Article 29 Working Party, 2018).

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 a personal compatible device and a personal account with 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.

An answer to processing leaves a record. Article 7(1) of the General Data Protection Regulation requires the controller to be able to demonstrate that consent was given (Regulation (EU) 2016/679, Art. 7). The controller who demonstrates consent keeps a record of who answered, when, and to which wording. A person who answers processing with a checkbox leaves a machine-readable state. In Freedom, Consumerism, and the Price of Traces I left open which traces I was willing to carry that week. An equivalent route lowers the price of refusal at the door; the fee for participating in shared life is still chosen through the traces a person is willing to carry now.

The detour already has dated cases. Denmark made Digital Post obligatory for most residents in 2014 while creating an exemption procedure (Danish Agency for Digital Government). Finland’s Digital First programme and related 2026 budget work treat electronic services as the intended baseline for people already using digital channels, advance digital official communication as the primary route for those users, and leave paper as the continuing route for residents outside e-services, while people already inside those channels may return to paper for a year at a time (Finnish Ministry of Finance; Digital and Population Data Services Agency). 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, where 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 that take a missing trace or a picture completed from analogues as knowledge of the person 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, including digital modes that complete the same task without continuous behavioural logging. A public institution that saves through a single channel transfers waiting time, the price of a personal 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.

Antidigitism takes a limited position inside the older dispute over machines: it focuses 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. Access and transparency can perfect mediation while leaving the exclusive digital door in place; refusal and reconfiguration ask whether the entrance should exist in that form (James et al., 2023).

Turn the printed sheet over and the crossed-out eye symbol, cables, cassette, and switch gather neighbouring political histories on one surface. Historical Luddism resisted the owner's use of machinery to lower wages, weaken skill, and reorganize authority (Randall, 1995); Neo-Luddism and Chellis Glendinning's 1990 manifesto widened the object to technologies as political arrangements (Glendinning, 1990). Marxism keeps technique inside a dispute over power, where social ownership can change who holds a platform while leaving the same machine-readable jurisdiction at the door (Marx, 1857–58; Marx, 1867). Anarchist lines range from emancipatory infrastructure to suspicion of large technical systems; Uri Gordon described activists who resist technological power while programming and maintaining autonomous networks (Gordon, 2009), and anarchist HCI evaluates tools by whether participants can understand rules, alter infrastructure, and continue after one service is abandoned (Keyes et al., 2019). When such a tool becomes the only channel of recognition, it intensifies the exclusive jurisdiction of the record.

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 to machine-readable recognition across work, services, relationships, and political voice.

In the same year Jonathan Bowen and Tula Giannini used digitalism for the nearly unnoticed ubiquity of digital devices, in which computational mediation is taken for granted and an activity that can take digital form tends to do so and occupy the place of the previous one (Bowen and Giannini, 2014). They describe the smartphone as an extension and projection of the self and notice how an encounter with a work already includes a record of that encounter. Their digitalism reaches the point where the digital form becomes the ordinary environment of life; digitism in this essay names the next step at the door, where a machine-readable state receives the authority to decide what counts. A doctor asks how many hours a person spent at a screen and how they slept. At the door they ask whether a record exists, even if the screen stayed almost closed that day.

Capture, representation, quantification, networking, inference about possible next states, reproduction, and action upon those inferences remain different transformations, though people often call these steps by the single word “digitisation.” Antidigitism asks whether a person retained the possibility of refusing this transformation and remaining recognisable. The social legibility of a practice increasingly depends on a digital representation, and presence begins to be read through the formula “digital, therefore I exist.”

Digitism can serve different regimes because it sets an infrastructural norm of representability: advertising profiling and labour management under liberal capitalism, eligibility under the administrative state, surveillance and punishment under authoritarian power. Generative advertising and fraud-as-a-service require continuous machine-readable presence so susceptibility can be ranked and stimulated; antidigitism contests the presumption that a person must remain a digitally available surface for those systems. The UN report shows the same legibility inside digital welfare through identity verification, eligibility, calculation, fraud detection, risk classification, and official communication (United Nations, 2019).

Deleuze described access controlled by codes in 1992, and Lessig showed that software architecture regulates conduct in 1999 (Deleuze, 1992; Lessig, 1999). Digital-by-default public services and surveillance-capitalist mediation then converged identity, payment, eligibility, employment, and appeal into connected records (Cabinet Office, 2010; Zuboff, 2015). Cultural-geography writing on AI refusal frames the present intensification 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 personal smartphone and a personal digital identity, 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, digital modes without continuous behavioural logging, 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 still sits before the device, in our shared capacity to decide where a digital intermediary may claim continuous jurisdiction over a person, and which equivalent routes keep a function available with comparable comfort after that claim is refused.

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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