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Paper short abstract

This paper conceptualizes hostility as a consequence of architectural choices that organize cooperation. Drawing on Swiss cases, it shows how integration-oriented systems become hostile by denying institutional plurality, and explores distributed, non-integrative counter-hostile architectures.

Paper long abstract

Discussions of digital hostility focus on malicious intentions or exclusionary practices, locating hostility in the technology’s design or usage. This paper proposes a different perspective by conceptualizing digital hostility as a property of architectural choices that organize cooperation between institutional actors.

Drawing on cases of digital integration in Switzerland—farm data platforms, an e-ID infrastructure, and e-Health initiatives—we show how hostility emerges when digital architectures restrict institutional plurality and reconfigure boundaries of authority in the name of efficiency, sovereignty, or the wellbeing of citizens. We argue that integration-oriented architectures function as devices of forced pacification: they make cooperation conditional upon alignment, thereby marginalizing dissenting positions, chosen politico-juridical principles (e.g., subsidiarity), or pre-existing local arrangements.

By contrast, we explore distributed, non-integrative architectures that enable partial, situated, and reversible forms of cooperation, without imposing as a prerequisite the resolution or neutralization of institutional or jurisdictional divergences. Rather than eliminating antagonism, these approaches sustain cooperation by recognizing that some divergences are constitutive and need not be pacified in order for cooperation to occur. We conceptualize them as counter-hostile architectures: they do not abolish divergence, but they resist hostility in the form of architected denial of plurality.

This reframing contributes to STS debates on infrastructures and platforms as devices of governance, by showing that integration is not a neutral condition of cooperation. It is an architectural choice that can redistribute authority and responsibility among institutional actors.

Counter-hostile architectures that do not impose integration can constitute a political and infrastructural alternative to digital hostility.