Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

Using 'friction' and 'seamlessness' to describe how moments of disruption become sites of ethical awareness through which people negotiate environments increasingly mediated by digital technologies. Thereby enabling people to repair the future by resisting integration into seamless systems.

Paper long abstract

This paper argues that contemporary digital technologies increasingly aspires not merely to efficiency, but to seamlessness and as a result sublimate governance to hidden strata below everyday life: the withdrawal of technological systems from everyday awareness such that digital infrastructures appear natural. While often framed as progress, this aspiration encodes particular moral demands via forms of diffuse disciplining that are only really opened up during moments of technical failure and breakdown. Thus, breakdowns provide space for critical and ethical reflection. It is within this frictional space that citizens can negotiate ethical futures through mundane acts of adjustment and repair. These practices reveal how subjects are neither passive recipients of technological futures nor empowered co-designers, but situated actors continually repairing the conditions of livability.

This paper discusses frictional aesthetics and seamlessness to describe how moments of inconvenience, irritation, or disruption become sites of ethical awareness through which people preserve autonomy, identity, and relational life in environments increasingly mediated by automated judgement and platform governance. Rather than treating friction as a design flaw, the paper argues that such interruptions enable people to repair the future by resisting total integration into seamless systems.

This paper therefore takes up the panel question 'what does it mean to “repair the future” ...?' seeking to provide a theoretical frame that, in the words of the panel 'views repair not as a sign of breakdown but as an ethic of living with technological uncertainty in a divided world.'