Paradoxes of Digital Disengagement

Front matter

ADI KUNTSMAN & ESPERANZA MIYAKE

PARADOXES OF DIGITAL DISENGAGEMENT

IN SEARCH OF THE OPT-OUT BUTTON

Contents

List of Figures

Preface Introduction

In Search of the Opt-Out Button Digital Disengagement Beyond Social Refusals Digital Disengagement Beyond Motivations and Practices

Part I: Where Is the Opt-Out?

Introduction NHS Digital and the App Library: What Is One Opting Out Of? Between the Local and the Global, the Legal and the Technical Contact Tracing Apps and Performative Data Consciousness Individual and Collective Opt-Outs Conclusion: From Data Rights to Data Justice Bibliography 2. Automated Governance: Digital Citizenship in the Age of Algorithmic Cruelty

The State's New Digital Clothes

The State's New Digital Weapons

Imagining Alternatives

Conclusion: From Digital Violence to Digital Self-Defence ix xi

3. Education in the Age of ‘Corporate YouTube: Big Data Analytics Meets Instafamous

Panopto: The ‘Corporate YouTube’

Educational Analytics: Data Mining and Measuring Pedagogical Success Insta-Teacher: Performance Monitoring the Performance of Pedagogy Opting In for Digital Disengagement

Lecture Capture and the Captive ‘Data Double’: The Persistence of Data and Digital Rights

Conclusion: We Don't Need No Education?

Part II: Digital Disengagement between Co-optation and Resistance Cyclic Digital Double-Bind

Consuming Digital Disengagement During Covid-19: Social Distancing and Contactless Connectivity

Conclusion: The Self-Fulfilling and Self-Consuming Prophecy of Opting Out

Bibliography 5. The Labour of Digital Disengagement: Time and the Luxury of Opting Out

Moment Family: Digital and Affective Labour

The Labour of Digital Re-Engagement

The Luxury of Opting Out: Who Has the Time?

Covid-19: The Visibility of Privilege

Conclusion: The Hamster Work-Wheel of Digital Disengagement

Bibliography 6. Digital Disengagement and the Environment: Solutionism, Greenwashing and Partial Opt-Outs

59 60 61 64 68

71 73 75

81 82

92 92

98 102 103 106 108 109

113 113

Escaping the Digital into the Pastoral: The Semiotic Extractivism of Digital Detoxes

Are Digital Technologies Here to Save the Planet? Environmental Sustainability and Digital Solutionism

Partial Refusals The Pandemic and Beyond Conclusion: Digital Disengagement as Radical Environmental Responsibility Bibliography Conclusion: Paradoxes and the Elastic Continuum of Digital Disengagement

So Is There an Opt-Out Button?

Beyond Disconnection

Revisiting Paradoxes of Digital Disengagement: Resistance, Compulsory Connectivity and Co-optation

An Elastic Continuum Revisited: Expanding and Shrinking Possibilities of Opt-Out

Opt-Out as a Path Towards Collective Justice Future Pathways Beyond Digital Inevitability Bibliography

Index

119 123 127

128 130

137 141

144 147 150 152

1.1 2.1

6.1 6.2

6.3

List of Figures

Deleting your data screenshot 31 ‘Measure and evaluate your performance, from Social Media

Playbook, Government Digital Service 46 Google Image search results for the term ‘digital detox’ 114

Image preview and ‘related images in Google Image search results for the term ‘digital detox’ 115

Image preview and ‘related images’ in Google Image search results for the term ‘digital detox’ 116

Preface

As long-term colleagues and collaborators, we began working on the topic of disconnection and opt-out in 2015. Being long-standing, self-professed digital junkies and scholars of digital and media technologies, we have both spent nearly two decades studying how the digital and technological brings people together or tears them apart. Both individually and in collaboration, we have been exploring how digital subjectivities and identities evolve and change; and how relations between technological affordances, social inequalities and political injustices are shaped through each other. And yet, we also began to witness an incredible and often paradoxical transformation occurring in the digital landscape. In amongst the rapid digitalisation of just about everything in life, we also noticed a marked culture of disconnection emerging that excited, terrified, troubled, fascinated and concerned us deeply. As soon as we did, we both came to realise that our own two-decades worth of thinking about the digital needs revisiting; and that digital saturation needs to be challenged and denaturalised - and possibly even refused. This is how we have coined the term ‘digital disengagement, and why for us, the possibility and impossibility of opting out has become such a central concern.

Since then, we have explored and critiqued the various problematic paradoxes and conundrums of digital disengagement through a range of funded projects addressing different sites and dilemmas of refusal and opt-out, and we have benefitted from several incredible and inspiring collaborations. In 2018, we worked with Sam Martin - a digital sociologist and a digital analyst with years of expertise in creative digital methods and Big Social Data - on a British Academy/Leverhulme project that explored difficulties of opting out of digital health. This phase in our research forms the basis of Chapter 1. Working together with Sam not only expanded our own methodology and conceptual framework substantially, but also led to ongoing collaboration in research and publications on digital health, data justice and digital methods.

In 2018, we also collaborated with Anya Shchetvina and Polina Kolozaridi, coordinators of the Moscow Club for internet and society enthusiasts. Together with Anya, Polina and other colleagues, we addressed the discourses and practices of digital disengagement in Russia, including the challenges of translation in decolonial cross-cultural theorising. In 2019, Adi worked with Imogen xii Paradoxes of Digital Disengagement: In Search of the Opt-Out Button

Rattle, a then graduate student and now a Research Fellow and an expert in environmental politics, sustainability and energy geography, on two separate studies. The first one, in collaboration with the Moscow Club for internet and society, looked at narratives of IT professionals in Russia and the UK who choose to reduce their use of online communication and opt out of social media and other platforms. The second explored current scholarship on environmental sustainability and its unwillingness to consider digital refusal to support the environment. The second project has inspired Chapter 6 of the book.

Bringing all the different strands of our work on digital disengagement together, in 2019 we decided to sit down to write this book ... and then the Covid-19 pandemic hit. Completed during the first two years of the pandemic, this book is not explicitly about pandemic digitalities. Yet, the timing of our writing has sharpened the concerns that motivated us to write it in the first place. With the lockdowns, social distancing and remote working came an unprecedented digital surge, and all the questions we have been asking for years now feel prophetic, and even more urgent. What are the personal, social, political and environmental costs of compulsory digitality? What are the relations between compulsory digitality and social injustice? What are the legal, technical, cultural and political barriers to opting out of digital sociality? And finally, can we imagine otherwise - can we imagine our present and future free from digital coercion?

The book would not have been possible without the help and support we received along the way. We are grateful to the Communities and Culture Network+ at Leeds University, which funded our two initial pilot studies in 2015 and 2016. Our project on digital health was supported by a British Academy/ Leverhulme Small Research Grant in 2018. Finally, we have benefitted from the continuous support of the Research Centre for Applied Social Sciences (RCASS) at Manchester Metropolitan University which funded the project on digital disengagement and the environment, and the project on digital disengagement and IT professionals. RCASS has also funded the final preparations of the manuscript in 2021, as part of their ‘Covid recovery’ research support. We are grateful to Manchester Metropolitan students who provided research assistance along the way: we thank Edward Johnson for his help with collecting and overviewing data about the national data opt-out service by NHS Digital; and Amy Luck and Charlotte Gislam for copyediting and formatting the final manuscript. Finally, since starting the book, Esperanza moved to the University of Strathclyde as a Chancellor’s Fellow, leaving Manchester Metropolitan University in 2020. She would like to thank her colleagues in Journalism, Media and Communication, and the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Strathclyde for all the incredible support she has received which enabled her to work on this book.

An earlier version of the Introduction has previously been published as Kuntsman, Adi and Miyake, Esperanza. 2019. “The Paradox and Continuum of Digital Disengagement: Denaturalising Digital Sociality and Technological

Preface xiii

Connectivity. Media Culture and Society, 41(6), pp. 901-913. https://doi.org /10.1177/0163443719853732.

An earlier version of Chapter 1 has been published as Kuntsman, Adi, Miyake, Esperanza and Martin, Sam. 2019. ‘Re-thinking Digital Health: Data, Appisation and the (Im)Possibility of “Opting Out”. Digital Health. https:// doi.org/10.1177/2055207619880671.

Adi Kuntsman and Esperanza Miyake, April 2022

In Search of the Opt-Out Button

Today, digital communication technologies are increasingly embraced by industries, governments and everyday users. As both people and public services are imagined as digital or networked ‘by default’ (Fotopoulou 2016; Mejias 2013; GOV.UK 2013, 2017), engagement - whether civic, consumerist or otherwise - is now predominantly understood as digital. Those disconnected from the digital are seen as ‘at risk’ of being ‘left behind’ (Helsper and Galacz 2009; Straumann and Graham 2016). The global Covid-19 pandemic forced societies further into digital reliance, both in tackling the virus via contact tracing and other forms of digital surveillance of public health, and in shifting most everyday activities online, to facilitate social distancing and minimise exposure to coronavirus. Since the outbreak of the pandemic in 2019, individuals, institutions, businesses and organisations have found themselves facing a world where digitality has rapidly become compulsory. It was not necessarily the best suitable choice, nor one most considerate of access, equality or efficiency. Rather, it was broadly seen as essential for the necessity, survival and social responsibility of protecting human life. And now, those outside the digital world - disconnected due to lack of access to suitable devices or internet connectivity or forced to the frontlines of the physical world as essential workers - are facing an entirely new form of risk. The risk is no longer solely about being left out of civic or consumerist engagement, rather, it is also about the physical risk of navigating pandemic spaces, times and practices. Concurrent with the push towards a digital-by-default society, and already occurring before the pandemic, the last decade has also seen a rise in calls to reduce both the range of digital devices and communication platforms, and time spent using them. Such calls are usually issued by those who are already connected, digitally savvy and feel there is too much digital connection. Activists

Kuntsman, A. and Miyake, E. 2022. Paradoxes of Digital Disengagement: In Search of the Opt-Out Button. Pp. 1-18. London: University of Westminster Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.16997/book61.a. License: CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 have sought ways to resist platform labour or evade state, corporate and social media surveillance by switching off, adjusting digital tools, and/or moving to non-digital forms of communication. Bloggers have written about putting down their phones to (better) connect to family and friends. Initiatives such as ‘digital diets’ and ‘unplugging days’ have mushroomed. Populist experts have warned about ‘digital addiction, to which businesses have responded with commercial packages offering ‘digital detoxes’ and other ‘disconnection commodities’ - from smartphone ‘killswitches’ to cosmetic products branded ‘Unplugged’ and ‘Offline’ (Karppi et al. 2021).

In the context of new pandemic digitalities, the calls to disconnect, albeit temporarily, have intensified. Mentions of ‘zoom fatigue’ have proliferated, acknowledging the necessity of video calls yet noting the accumulating negative impact they pose on communication practices, attention, focus, wellbeing and mental health (Jiang 2020). Disability justice advocates have noted that while remote communication has been highly beneficial for some, it has brought new (or intensified old) forms of ableist exclusion (Beery 2020; DARU 2020). Finally, digital responses to the pandemic - such as contact tracing apps and digital health tools — have also raised legal and ethical concerns over digital invasion, surveillance, and other data rights.

Whether these concerns are understood as neoliberal demands for a ‘better life’ or as political resistance against the growing power of digitisation, we must take them seriously. In particular, we must ask why the digital still remains the normative point of reference. Today, more than ever, it is an urgent question to consider, and we must rethink the conceptual normalisation of the digital as both the best solution to any emerging problem or crises, and as an assumed, expected form of mediation of social life.

Calling for a more critical approach to digitality and the contemporary compulsion to unnecessarily ‘fix things’ in our daily lives through technologies and digital ‘innovation’ (what he calls ‘technological solutionism’), Morozov (2013) relates this contemporary propensity to privilege technologies, and the internet in particular, in all spheres of our lives. Referring to ‘smart’ technologies as offering solutions to remedy ‘flawed’ human conditions from obesity, to environmental issues, to fitness, Morozov argues that integral to the idea and ideological state of ‘internet-centrism’ is an underlying core belief that the internet is ‘the ultimate technology and ultimate network (2013, 23: emphasis added). Hence, ‘solutionists’ can find even more ways to ‘solve problems’ enabled by the internet through technological and networked mediation.

Throughout this book, we will show the pervasive nature of what we call digital solutionism, to paraphrase and expand on Morozov’s formulation. We evoke here Morozov’s inspiring statement on ‘internet-centrism’ to address a general problematic trend within academic and popular discourses concerning ‘the digital. Scholarship of digital media and society has long focused on various forms of engagement with digital communication technologies, devices and platforms. It has described how we engage as patients, citizens, educators and learners, consumers, workers and activists. It has analysed the ways we use and interact with digital platforms and communication devices in public, semi-public and private spaces. It has documented the ways we live with ‘smart’ technologies that are near, on, or inside our bodies. The possibility of disconnection, refusal or non-use, on the one hand, has only been viewed as an afterthought, an addition, or an exception. Dis-engagement from the digital, on the other hand, is rarely considered as anything but an aberration, whether spatio-temporal, demographic, or ideological - but always on the margins, as an oddity that reflects and reaffirms the norm. When looking at a new platform, device or any other techno-social arrangement, most work in digital, internet and social media studies rarely pauses to challenge the digital itself and ask: are these technologies desirable? Can they be escaped? In other words, where is the opt-out button?

Answering these questions is the driving force behind our book. We are writing at a crucial point in time, when the rapid spread of platforms, apps, algorithms and AI are raising fundamental questions regarding datafication, digital rights, individual and collective freedoms, and planetary degradation. In the world of digital saturation - and now that the Covid-19 pandemic has both exacerbated and complicated these points even further - we are situating our book within the emerging field of opting out, refusal, disconnection and voluntary non-use. Scholars in this field have recently begun exploring different ways in which those who are already involved and integrated into the digital world - as opposed to those deliberately neglected and excluded - seek to reduce or even cease their use of devices and communication platforms, usually within a particular context, and with a particular aim (Light 2014; Kitchin and Fraser 2020; Brennen 2019).

While insightful and rapidly developing, current scholarship on the topic as it stands today still has three main limitations, which we will explore in further detail in the following sections of this chapter. Firstly, disconnection is mostly conceptualised in relation to social media, with a heavy focus on Facebook. Secondly, most research to date has focused excessively on user practices and experiences of disconnection, rather than on the technical, economic and political infrastructures that shape the (im)possibilities of opting out. Finally, while addressing a broad range of examples of disconnection, non-use and refusal, what is rarely considered in relation to opting out is the power and agency of the technologies themselves, which inhabit heavily regulated, networked ecosystems of digitality and platform synchronicity.

To address these gaps and offer a paradigmatic framework for the complexity of disconnection, we propose the concept of ‘digital disengagement. Digital disengagement as we coin it here is a term that simultaneously unravels the assumption that social engagement is always necessarily digital and challenges the forced incorporation - engagement - of livelihoods, experiences, relations, services, economies and freedoms into compulsory digitality and connectivity (Hesselberth 2018; van Dijck 2013). This book positions digital disengagement as simultaneously a matter of political economy, cultural formations, materiality, technology, legal frameworks and everyday actions. We focus on these formations as they take shape within a Western-centred, capitalist and neoliberal context of digital communication - the politics of disconnection can and does look different elsewhere and requires a separate discussion, beyond the scope of this book.

In our discussion, the emphasis on Western neoliberalism, capitalism and the global digital economy (Chen 2016; Fuchs 2015; Qiu 2016) is crucial for understanding the conditions in which digitality is normalised and enforced. Digital economy, for example, profits not only from the exploitative production of digital devices (e.g., smartphones, tablets, computers), or the ever-growing communication infrastructures (e.g., Wi-Fi, broadband, mobile data) and services (e.g., platforms, apps, the Cloud). Most crucially, we are seeing the rise of ‘digital labour’ within highly digitised societies: the generation of profit from digital content, subscription services, and, most critically, from data monetisation in what Zuboff (2019) has aptly coined ‘surveillance capitalism:

At the same time, the neoliberal capitalist culture of life and work in a digital economy often invisibilises both the labour itself and the architecture of exploitation, be it through the practices of ‘playbour’ (Kiicklich 2005; Scholz 2013) or the rise of the ‘gig economy’ (Woodcock 2017) that traffic in hopes of flexible employment while brutally degrading working conditions and evading both tax and employment laws. In this context, digital engagement (and disengagement!) become necessarily tied to corporate regimes that regulate and control global capitalist economies through an internet-centric logic that capitalises on data aggregation. This in turn, requires constant participation and dependency on digital technologies, while their exploitative nature is often skilfully hidden. For example, digital capitalism becomes translated into individualised technopractices of entrepreneurialism; the economy of compulsory connectivity presents as self-care aided by digital technologies; and data monetisation and profitable surveillance disappear from view when endless ‘agreements’ and ‘acceptance of terms’ render datafication as users’ own responsibility.

Our book is thus informed by, and moves beyond, the extensive, and growing, body of scholarship on the digital economy, digital capitalism and digital labour. Throughout all the chapters, we demonstrate that while opportunities to disconnect and opt out are generally shrinking, the impact of compulsory digitality is not the same on everyone. Digital society, we argue, always classes, races and genders digital architectures and technopractices of digital engagement and refusal. Understanding the deep interrelatedness of enforced digitality and social marginality is key here - as Gangadharan poignantly notes, the impact of ‘digital coercior (Gangadharan 2020a, 125-126) is always uneven and tends to reproduce and intensify existing marginalisation and injustice.

Our analysis is therefore not just about questioning how and why digitality is normalised. Rather, our work is also, first and foremost, justice oriented. We ask: who does normalised digitality serve? Who is its captive audience, its unpaid labourer, its depleted resource, its dependent, its victim? Who has the freedom to disengage from the digital, and at what cost?

Our approach here goes beyond individual rights (including those defined by various legal frameworks), placing digital justice at the centre of digital disengagement. While remaining attentive to the importance of the right to disconnect and opt out, we argue that individual digital rights alone can offer only a partial and flawed framework in the era of large-scale datafication and automated decision-making. A collective digital justice is imperative when compulsory digitisation segments groups and populations and targets marginalised individuals and communities for surveillance and policing; when it punishes and rewards based on big data analytics; and when it traffics in the collective, accumulated value of digital labour, be it from content production, engagement data or other forms of behavioural profitisation.

Beyond its ability to describe the range and degrees of rights, disconnectivities, contexts, and spatio-temporal formations, digital disengagement thus offers a new critical theoretical paradigm to be used in critical digital and social media studies to denaturalise and destabilise the digital. By searching for our theoretical opt-out button, we centre digital dis-engagement, conceptualising it not as an aberration, but as a starting point in thinking about sociality, agency, justice and everyday life.

Digital Disengagement Beyond Social Refusals

The last decade has seen a steady growth of academic interest in digital refusal or withdrawal of those living digitally saturated lives; “Disconnection Studies’ is a fast-growing area of research. With only a few publications focusing specifically on devices such as tablets and smartphones (Emek 2014; Maxwell and Miller 2020; Mowlabocus 2016), most research to date attends to digital disengagement in relation to online communication, with a heavy emphasis on social media, especially Facebook (Baumer et al. 2013; Gershon 2011; John and Dvir-Gvirsman 2015; Karppi 2011, 2014; Kaun and Schwartzenegger 2014; Light 2014; Light and Cassidy 2014; Portwood-Stacer 2012a, 2012b, 2012c, 2013, 2014). This is true not only for the body of published work, but for the overall academic discourse - tellingly, whenever we discuss our research on digital disengagement with other researchers or students, the conversation always moves to social media, with someone always declaring that they have just deleted their Facebook account.

A conflation of the ‘digital? with ‘social media’/social networking services (SNS) reflects on the pervasive nature of social networking, beyond the widespread use of actual platforms and its consequent theoretical understanding.

This is true for academic research but also, as Mejias (2013) argues, is part of the pervasive conflation of ‘networks’ with sociality more broadly. The increasing normalisation of the digital, coupled with the simultaneous social mediafication of all areas in our lives, has two implications for academic research that we wish to challenge in this book. Firstly, we argue that we need to question the ways digital disengagement has become inseparable with the idea of social disengagement. Within such a formulation, the digital and the social collapse into a singular, interchangeable concept leading to what Lights (2014) seminal work described as ‘disconnective practice’ which involves ‘potential modes of disengagement with the connective affordances of SNSs in relationship to a particular site, between and amongst different sites and in relation to the physical world’ (2014, 17). In other words, digital connectivity and engagement are defined and naturalised through the concept of social practice. In this context, withdrawal - the practice of digital disengagement - becomes concerned with the resulting issues and consequences upon users’ social relationships (friends, partners, family and work). We argue that digital disengagement can refer to ‘disconnective practices’ from social media, but also that the concept of the digital itself must first be divorced - denaturalised - from the question of social engagement and social media. Digital disengagement is not always about disengagement from sociality; and social disengagement, in turn, is not always a digital one. Such a separation will open up new ways of thinking about digitality and the ways digital disengagement might have other, broader, social and political implications.

Secondly, and relatedly, an additional conflation resulting from the naturalised link between digitality and sociality which we wish to challenge is the dominance of Facebook as the social media site for digital disengagement. With the exception of a small number of studies such as that of Sasaki, Kawai and Kitamura’s (2016) examination of ‘unfriending’ and processes of digital disengagement on Twitter, very few scholars to date discuss digital disengagement on other social media platforms. Even in Light’s (2014) work, which explores the migration of disconnective practices played out across various social media platforms, both the results and discussion indicate that Facebook is almost always the starting and comparative reference point: Facebook is presented as the dominant standard for all social media platforms. Empirically, this may be because for many, Facebook has become an environment which ruins and damages, rather than fosters and supports social connections. Conceptually, however, the result is that digital disengagement becomes tied to not only social disengagement, but also to Facebook disengagement. Within this context, digital disengagement can only be understood if the concept of the digital is aligned to sociality and networked connectivity and, by the same token, sociality is tied to Facebook as a prime communication platform. What does digital disengagement look like on other platforms? Can Facebook ever be the secondary or even tertiary social media site people migrate to rather than from having disengaged elsewhere? And more importantly, what are other forms of digital disengagement, beyond social media?

Digital Disengagement Beyond Motivations and Practices

Another characteristic that unites the majority of recent scholarship on disconnection and refusal is the fixation on motivations and practices. Why do individuals leave or opt out, and how do they do it? In Opting Out of Digital Media, Brennen (2019) discusses why people choose to reject some technologies while embracing others. Several years earlier, Portwood-Stacer (2012a, 2012b, 2012c) documented a range of media discourses, which explain reasons and motivations for media refusal. Our own work on the topic began with documenting the variety of reasons for disconnection and disengagement (Kuntsman and Miyake 2015; Kuntsman et al. 2019). Other researchers, similarly, played close attention to the extremely diverse nature of motivations for opting out; while some are individualised and self-centred, others are driven by collective, social and political concerns (Andersson 2016; Casemajor et al. 2015; Hesselberth 2018; Portwood-Stacer 2014).

In addition to motivations, scholarship in the field points to a diverse range of experiences and practices that are involved in disengaging. For example, in their discussion of mediated political action, Casemajor et al. distinguish between passive non-participation (the inability to use technology due to incidental or imposed reasons) and active non-participation as ‘politically wilful engagement in a platform in order to disrupt it’ (refusing to provide platforms with personal data or using platforms against their original aims) (2015, 856). Here, active non-participation, and especially deliberate departure, equates to resistance and refusal - akin to Facebook suicide as a form of protest (Karppi 2011). At the same time, deliberate disconnection can be seen as something positive that ‘adds value to our engagement with SNS’ (Light 2014, 20-21). Furthermore, many instances of disengagement are both ‘active’ and ‘passive; transgressive and reaffirming. Or rather, they are multi-dimensional because they might involve the conscious decision to withdraw - physically, emotionally, socially and so on - from certain normative spaces and forms of sociality and behaviour, whilst also having the ability to negotiate one’s connection to and through technology.

The multi-directionality of digital disengagement occurs across time and space, responding to changing pressures of digital use. Light's (2014) aforementioned ‘disconnective practice’ is particularly interesting here as he discussed the ‘personal level of disconnection’ and disconnection at work or in public space outside of home and work. The multiplicity of disengagement practices indeed needs to be understood as dynamic and situational, as for example is seen in Light’s pioneering work (2014, 17). Similarly, other scholars have noted the temporality of disconnective practices, which are rarely irreversible and unidirectional. With the exception of dramatic and one-time events such as ‘Facebook suicides, digital disengagement as described in current research is seldom about a one-off moment. Nor is it necessarily about steadily moving further and further away from the digital. Baumer et al. (2013), for example, note ‘resisting, leaving, relapsing, and limiting’ as the four main practices of not engaging with Facebook, where ‘relapsing’ refers to returning after a period of non-use. Such a return can occur due to changing one’s decision because of personal reasons, peer pressure or professional demands; or perhaps because the disconnection itself was time-specific. Similarly, others describe practices of temporary or relational withdrawal: ‘unfriending’ some people on Facebook (Gershon 2011; John and Dvir-Gvirsman 2015); or reducing the use of devices whilst on a holiday (Mowlabocus 2016).

Despite the empirical richness of studies on motivations, reasons and practices of digital disengagement and the contexts in which they occur, the contain a number of critical weaknesses. Firstly, the focus on practices, while ethnographically insightful, shifts the conversation away from the question of rights - the right to disconnect, the right to not be engaged, and the right to sociality that is not digital. Secondly, and relatedly, discussions focusing mainly on practices and motivations, are in danger of prioritising individual agency at the expense of a structural analysis of political and economic forces, both those that shape collective digital cultures and societies more broadly, and those that specifically constitute possibilities and (im)possibilities of opting out. As Hesselberth (2018) notes in her critical overview of research on technology non-use, scholarship that focuses on motivations for, and practices of, non-use ‘lend themselves to a narrative of personal responsibility and the neoliberalist model of governmentality it taps into, in which individuals are unapologetically held accountable for their own (mis)use of technology’ (2018, 1998). In light of these shortcomings, our book takes on Gangadharan’s (2020a, 2020b) powerful reminder that any discussions of disengagement and refusal need to consider the corporate and political forces that shape both the global digital economy and our everyday digitalities.

Following Gangadharan, we will demonstrate throughout this book that the multi-directionality and ambiguity of digital disengagement is technological, structural and political where any act of disengagement reinforces the very digitality one attempts to escape. For example, as Karppi noted a decade ago in his discussion of Facebook suicide (2011), disconnection from the platform is never fully possible, not only because leaving itself is premediated and controlled by Facebook, but also because the data left behind continues to be used by the platform. Karppi’s early note of caution regarding the power of platform and data aggregation, and the limitations of human resistance, is further developed in his recent book (2018), which focuses on the technological and affective bonds used by Facebook precisely to keep its users from disconnecting. Shifting the focus from experiences and practices to the difficulty and the impossibility of disconnections is acutely relevant today when algorithms and data mining infringe powerfully and persistently on individual and collective freedoms. As such, whether it is the socio-cultural structure of demands of connectivity that create a pressure to return (van Dijck 2013); the economic system within which such a return might be enforced at any time after disengagement, by an individual employer and the labour market more broadly (Hesselberth 2018); the structure of a platform (Karppi 2018); or the legal demands imposed by states and institutions, digital disengagement is a complex socio-technical trap. To unravel it, we must pay attention not only to the social institutions that may govern technologies and their users, but also to the technologies themselves.