Epilogue: Digital Disengagement – Questions of Pandemic and Post-Pandemic Digitalities

Summary

This book began with a critical question – ‘What is the place of digital refusal in the fabric of pandemic and post-pandemic life?’ – which emerged as part of our collective reflection on the rise in digitization during the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, and beyond. The process of answering this question was often accompanied by the rapidly diminishing possibility of stepping away from compulsory digitalities. Presenting the paradigm of digital disengagement that challenges the normalization of the digital (and of digital solutionism in particular) and foregrounds opting out and refusal as a starting point, the book thus explores a number of aspects of digital disengagement in pandemic and post-pandemic times. Some of our contributors have focused explicitly on the social and political effects of forced digital engagement; for example, Esperanza Miyake's discussion of its macro-level global economic and racializing power, or Serra Sezgin's analysis of its impact on micro-level working practices and work– life balance. Others have documented and analysed practices of disengagement and refusal, and the paradoxes they involve. Sam Martin's chapter explored digital disengagement, which relies on furthering one's digital skills and data literacy to avoid datafication, state surveillance and potential criminalization through use of fertility apps, whereas Chelsea Butkowski detailed how over-saturation with digital connectivity during the pandemic led many to step away from the digital almost entirely into the domain of pen and paper – only to share the results online afterwards. Continuing the topic of digital disengagement as a means of resistance to surveillance, Annika Richterich turned to hacker practices of data minimalism as a method to systematically, consistently and deliberately reduce the level of invasive datafication. Here, digital disengagement is less about a break away from the digital, but instead is about its systemic reduction. Moving to exploration of digital disengagement in the context of climate crisis and ecological harms, Adi Kuntsman's chapter looks at systemic forms of digital reduction to reduce the toll of pandemic digitization on the environment. Concluding and expanding the discussion of digital disengagement in contexts of systemic harms, Seeta Pena Gangadharan and Patrick Williams discuss the possibilities of digital disengagement as resistance to state power and the violence it inflicts on racialized communities.