Delores Phillips and Cultural Studies Association’s New Media and Digital Cultures Working Group Co-Host Reed Van Schenck discuss AI literacy, digital politics, and the 2024 US presidential election with authors Elizabeth Losh (William and Mary) and Rita Raley (UC Santa Barbara). This podcast is accompanied by a scholarly commentary by Stefania Milan.

Discussion of Disorienting Politics: Chimerican Media and Transpacific Entanglements with author Fan Yang

The local, global, and transnational impact of cruise ships and the tourism industry

The Caribbean as an abyssal concept

New work on Samuel Beckett, disability, and relaxed performance.

Andrew Culp and Cultural Studies Association’s Black and Race Studies Working Group Co-Host Shauna Rigaud discuss The World as Abyss: The Caribbean and Critical Thought in the Anthropocene (University of Westminster Press, 2023) with authors Jonathan Pugh and David Chandler. This podcast is accompanied by a scholarly commentary by Richard T. Stafford.

Andrew Culp and Cultural Studies Association's New Media and Digital Cultures Working Group Co-Chair Claudia Skinner take a look into Adi Kuntzman and Esperanza Miyake’s new book Paradoxes of Digital Disengagement: In Search of the Opt-Out Button, published by University of Westminster Press (2022). Accompanied by a scholarly essay by Tero Karppi.

By Tero Karppi

“This is often how our work is misunderstood: as that we are calling people to live in the woods and kind of get off the grid,” explains Adi Kuntsman towards the end of this episode of Positions. Kunstman together with Esperanza Miyake is the author of a recent book Paradoxes of Digital Disengagement and in this episode, they characterize the state of our current digital dependency. The fallacy Kuntsman’s statement above outlines—that academic studies of digital refusal are simultaneously driving an abstention from technology—is important because it shows a tendency to give an oversimplistic solution to a complex problem. The acts of switching off, imposing a moratorium, or moving to a blackout zone all seem like acts of instrumental rationality, but the reasoning only applies if technology is external, like an add-on feature, to our culture and not its constitutive part. In other words, to imagine that one can switch off technology is to imagine that one can switch off culture. Through this lens, I will discuss some of the ways the podcast articulates the challenges of studies of our dependencies with Internet-based culture. 

Tiziana Terranova quickly recaps the origin story of our cultural moment from the perspective of a network: the Internet begun as “a set of interoperable network protocols governed by a series of public and/or voluntary non-profit organizations” and after the network was commercialized, it gave power to big companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Meta.1 Individuals and businesses alike found themselves being bonded with digital services in different walks of their lives. Being always on and actively engaging on social media, what Ludmilla Lupinacci calls “compulsory continuous connectedness,”2 became a necessity for thriving, and in some cases surviving in the changing media environment. Some users turned into influencers and started making money through social media. Others followed, not the influencers’ paths, but their daily Instagram and TikTok feeds. 

Kuntsman and Miyake, however, go beyond social media and maintain that the state of “compulsory digitality” characterizes our living in modern society in general. The digital is our relationships maintained on social media, the digital is our mortgage handled through electronic banking, and the digital is Uber’s algorithm that determines who gets the next ride and when. The term “digital” works as an abstraction of all the practical and sometimes impractical ways our lives are connected to the Internet and its online services. In their book, Kuntsman and Miyake explain that compulsory digitality peaked during the COVID-19 pandemic when individuals and organizations shifted “most everyday activities online, to facilitate social distancing and minimise exposure to coronavirus.”3 While many of us may be actively trying to forget life under COVID-19—according to World Health Organization it is not currently a global health emergency—the state of compulsory digitality is here to stay. The pandemic was by no means its cause but a specific moment in a much longer evolution where, as Miyake notes in the podcast, everything becomes digitized under the mandate of efficiency. The digital enter our economic, social, and political spheres to the extent that the idea of getting off the grid, disconnecting, and living in the woods is a choice for only a privileged few. For most of us, disengagement becomes a non-choice. 

Yet, many of us try to manage our connectivity by disconnecting at least temporarily. Kuntsman and Miyake approach the state of compulsory digitality through the notion of digital disengagement. Simultaneously they warn us not to solely focus on individual practices of opting out. Behind the individualized practices of disconnection—Kuntsman and Miyake quite rightfully argue—is the big picture: how digital connectivity has been systematically built into the functions of modern society. The actual practices of deleting our social media profiles, locking our smartphones into a Faraday box, or cutting our credit cards, are ways to resist the digital in our lives, but they can also be analyzed as incisions that cut the fabric of our society held together by computational technologies. This big picture is sometimes hard to see when disconnection is being individualized. To be clear, the refocusing does not try to throw shade on the nascent field of disconnection studies—which is often interested in individual practices of disconnection—but rather tries to steer the questions from the individual to the systemic. 

In the book, Kuntsman and Miyake want to move us “beyond the focus on disconnective practices into challenging the compulsory digitality on an economic, cultural, social and technical level.”4 Along these lines, Miyake challenges us by saying that one can disconnect from connectivity but how about sociality? In other words, if digital is the default for social like it was during the pandemic, how do you opt out of that? The answer the authors imply in the podcast episode is simply that you cannot. We are in this together to the extent that an outside exists as a viable option only for a selected few who have wealth and social capital. To dream of an outside is to misunderstand both the role and importance of connectivity in our society and our power to resist. Digital has become the default.  

We should not misunderstand this as a totalizing condition. If there is no outside, then the resistance must emerge from within.5 We need a better understanding of the situation we are in. Digital literacy is needed to map what the different digital technologies do, what they solve, and to whom they work. Kuntsman lays out the questions we should be equipped to ask when we are faced with a new technology: Do we need the technology? Who is the technology going to harm? How do we defend ourselves?

The discussion in this podcast episode sees self-defense as the favorable framework through which resistance against compulsory digitality can be conceived. The narrative is established through building oppositions; Kuntsman places self-defense against the field of cybersecurity and points out that the former is a bottom-up approach while the latter comes from a militarized logic. Yet, focusing on self-defense feels counterintuitive to the proposition of resisting the individualization of digital disengagement and focusing on the systemic instead. Is not self-defense the tactic of the neoliberal individual to whom the responsibility is always assigned? And is not the capacity to self-defend unequally distributed (echoing the many occasions when, even in this podcast, it is acknowledged that our capacities to operate in the digital world are not equal)? Self-defense—a term treacherously close to individualized practices of disconnection.

The defensive techniques, if one listens to the podcast carefully, are not limited to self-defence and cybersecurity. Digital disengagement acknowledges the potential of collective organization and labor. As Valérie Bélair-Gagnon and her colleagues have noted we should not misunderstand disconnection as a creator of negative space but “part of a continuum of situated practices that engender different relational ways of being with and in online spaces and communities.”6 Disconnection here is a shared relation. The second point is about replaceability. As the authors point out in the episode, we are still prone to misunderstanding the materiality of compulsory digitality: that the software applications we use, devices we own, and the online services we subscribe to have their material basis. The example mentioned in the podcast is the Fairphone, which is designed against being disposable. The components of the phone can be replaced if needed. The question is, what needs to be replaced so that the same old is not replicated? 

The reversal of the roles between culture and technology, that technology is not the product of culture but culture’s producer, was one of Friedrich Kittler’s clever stratagems.7 If self-defence is a bottom-up approach and cyber security is a top-down approach, maybe we need a ground-up approach that replaces the technology behind this all: the Internet. It is easy to take the Internet, its physical architecture, its standards and protocols, and the way it controls the transmission of information as given. Yet, it is not. As Alexander Galloway already in 2004 pointed out: it is a specific diagram, technology, and management style.8 Following Britt Paris, Corinne Cath, and Sarah Myers West, “Internet infrastructure is built slowly, over time, protocol by protocol, in response to many different technical, social, political, environmental, and economic imperatives.”9 As such, the Internet has shaped our world in a very specific way unique to how the network operates and is designed. And even the Internet, its standards and protocols, can be changed, transformed, and replaced. “To best reconstruct the way out of a labyrinth . . . one doesn’t need to sketch the still visible connecting walls, rather their inverse: the invisible passages between path and door,” Kittler writes.10 If we cannot get rid of compulsory digitality, perhaps changing the model of the labyrinth beneath it would release some of its most problematic tensions.

Produced by Mark Nunes and Elaine Venter.
Hosted by Andrew Culp, Claudia Skinner, and the CSA New Media & Digital Cultures Working Group.
Production by Elaine Venter, Nick Corrigan, and Lucy Mar.
Editorial by Mark Nunes, Jeff Heydon, Evan Moritz, Hui Peng, and Richard Simpson.
Music by Matt Nunes.

[Editors’ note: This work has undergone post-publication peer review through a published scholarly commentary and public comments.]