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Paper short abstract

This presentation develops digital resilience as a sensitizing concept for STS analyses of contemporary digitalisation. The aim is to suggest an approach for critical studies of how societies can shape digital futures in ways that are more socially and ecologically viable.

Paper long abstract

While digital resilience is used in policy debates and scholarship on generative AI—typically to denote the public’s capacity to withstand disinformation—arguably, it has broader potential. By comparing digital resilience to related concepts such as democratic resilience and digital sovereignty, I want to introduce digital resilience as sensitizing concept for a research agenda on 'democratically sustainable' digitalisation. While STS scholarship on digitalisation has thoroughly documented dependencies and problems, less is known about how to get more independent and how resistance can succeed. Such investigations could foreground not only political and epistemic dynamics but also ecological conditions and constraints.

I propose to distinguish between two strands of digital resilience: resistance and endurance. First, digital resilience as resistance can zero in on every day and collective practices aimed at withdrawing from digital infrastructures. Examples include digital disconnection in daily life, as well as organized mobilizations such as parental activism against school digitalisation. Examining how such actions catch on, opens analytical space for understanding how citizens negotiate and shape the trajectories of digitalisation.

Second, digital resilience as endurance concerns the capacity of democratic institutions to maintain despite structural pressures linked to tech monopolies. Here, resilience becomes a matter of politics; topics can encompass the distribution of power in data center politics or the dominance of techno-optimistic sociotechnical imaginaries in policymaking. This perspective invites inquiry into what forms of knowledge, critique, and institutional design are required to maintain democratic technology development and use amid digital dependencies, and how to achieve greater independence.