Politics in the ruins of digital interactivity: Digital detox and permacomputing
Keywords:
ruination, infrapolitics, ultrapolitics, digital detox, permacomputing, platformisationAbstract
Digital infrastructures increasingly serve people other than those whose everyday lives they infrastructure. This talk proposes infrapolitics (everyday politics too small to be seen) and ultrapolitics (politics of infrastructures too large and ubiquitous to register as political issues) as a way to look for non-nostalgic political options in the ruins of the 1990s promises of digital liberation, captured by platforms after 2000. Two cases are explored: digital detox, through 49 Guardian articles from 2011–2026, which after 2018 turns from commodified self-care toward infra- and ultrapolitical responses; and the permacomputing movement, which combines descent-ready everyday practice with political agitation and a concern for collapse, reckoning with ruins rather than returning to a life without digital tools. (abstract prepared with the help of gen AI, the manuscript itself is 100% written "manually")
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