The intimate politics of everyday digital practices: Entangling and disentangling

Abstract

The tactical struggle to carve out space-times free from the entangling logics of digital media attempts to reassert the sovereign subject. This project of disentangling goes beyond simply turning off, rejecting, or disconnecting from digital technologies. More ambitiously it works both within and against the logic of surveillance capitalism, an emerging regime which generates habits of attention as well as psychological and social forms of media dependence, in turn supplying third-party users with a durable supply of rendered behavioral data. Semi-structured interviews conducted with a sample of 20 subjects from North America reveal an ongoing quotidian struggle to maintain freedom, power, autonomy and self-direction while carving out a sort of hybrid territory around oneself. Excerpts from the interviews reveal a context-dependent set of practices, occurring in particular ways, at particular times, for particular purposes, with particular communications before and after. In addition, they show the provisional achievement of distance from entangling systems that seem to offer freedom to do things while in fact achieving microscopically targeted control. They reveal a spatial strategy involving a range of tactics for navigating the spaces of the attention/surveillance economy, appropriating digital media, and carving out spaces for personal agency in a mediatized society.