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Paper short abstract

This paper presents an ongoing interactive web countermap that uses glitch as a method to demystify the promise of seamless digital ID. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork across Asia, Europe, and Africa, the countermap stages breakdown by design to produce embodied and affective forms of knowing.

Paper long abstract

The imagination of “seamlessness” is central to how digital identification systems are globally proliferated today (e.g. Sustainable Development Goal 16.9; Digital Public Infrastructures). Digital IDs are imagined to place citizens only a few taps, pushes, and scrolls away from accessing services and entitlements. However, our ethnographic fieldwork in Estonia, Germany (and the EU), Indonesia, Malawi, and Sierra Leone shows that the infrastructuring of digital ID is marked by everyday frictions: technical breakdowns, bureaucratic mistranslations, and uneven implementation. We turn to multimodal ethnographic practice to demystify this promise of seamlessness by translating ethnographic insights into embodied and affective encounters. Inspired by Byung-Chul Han’s critique of neoliberal smoothness, Rosa Menkman and Legacy Russell’s glitch feminism, and anthropological studies of infrastructure, we design an interactive web countermap that intentionally glitches by design. The interface adopts a clean, developmentalist roadmap format and aesthetic as a façade to be destabilized through user interaction. Rather than treating glitch as a technical error to be fixed, we mobilize it as a method to disrupt narratives of seamlessness and to produce embodied and affective forms of knowing. By forcing users to repeatedly encounter breakdown, delay, and fragmentation, the countermap invites reflexivity through disorientation. The project demonstrates how multimodal ethnography can create shared experiential spaces between ethnographic interlocutors and audiences.