News from the Collective

Interview with Guilherme Flynn Paciornik.

The introduction of Digital Tribulations, a series of intellectual interviews on the developments of digital sovereignty in latin america, can be read here. 

Image by Carlotta Artioli, Instagram @charl_art.

I met Guilherme – aka Guy – at the annual conference of the Association of Internet Researchers in Rio de Janeiro. He was unfortunate enough to receive one of the five physical copies of my first book that I brought to Brazil, rightfully laughing at my methodological section where I defined the research process as “serendipitous.”

When I later took a bus to São Paulo, Guy generously guided me through the largest city in Latin America—a place where wandering around on foot is not always recommended. As someone deeply embedded in the city and its social movements, he knew exactly the kind of authentic events and places that white leftist academics—myself included—tend to adore. 

We focused on the city’s musical life: several rodas de samba, a fanfarra, and a Palestinian bar. At the Fevro bar, located next to the railway tracks under a massive tree, with people sambando all around me, I witnessed a living example of amor & revolução. Behind the DJ booth, two written declarations captured the spirit of the place. One read “Declaramos Carnaval o Ano Inteiro“—a claim that the right to joy, to occupy the streets, and to suspend social hierarchies (the essence of Carnival) should not be confined to a single season but practiced as daily resistance against formal power and oppression. The other proclaimed: “Putaria é Resistência“—for which radical sexual freedom and bodily transgression are themselves political acts against a repressive system. 

Through him, I gained access to a wider network of people who supported my time in Brazil, for which I am deeply grateful. We eventually met for this interview in a gentrified café where I was working in the neighborhood of Vila Madalena, a hub for gringos—a term that in Brazil refers to almost all foreigners. Guy refused to do the interview inside, so we sat on a low wall on the sidewalk where he could smoke. In this conversation, Guy presents the vision of a proud socialist, shaped by years of grassroots practice as much as by his theoretical inclinations. 

Our meeting, and this subsequent interview, were perhaps the ultimate proof of that serendipity: a conversation that embodies his commitment to decentralized, autonomous spaces beyond the control of corporate platforms.

What is your background, and how did you become interested in digital sovereignty?

I graduated in social sciences and hold a doctorate in the sociology of technology from Campinas State University. My interest in digital sovereignty grew out of my work in public health, where I realized that the potential of digital tools was not being fully used to improve services. Since 2005, I have worked with technology at all three levels of government in Brazil. At the municipal level in São Paulo, I created and coordinated a program called Prevention at a Distance. At the state level in Acre, I worked on the Floresta Digital project, which aimed to integrate federal, state, and municipal services into a single digital platform for citizens, although its results were limited. At the federal level, with the Ministry of Culture in São Paulo, I participated in the Pontos de Cultura program, which is a Brazilian federal program that provides funding and support to community-based cultural initiatives, emphasizing local autonomy, cultural diversity, and digital inclusion.

Since 2012, I have been active in the hacker community and the free software movement, notably through the Hacker Bus project. My research has focused on how social movements create their own technological solutions in everyday struggles, developing their own philosophies of technology from lived practice rather than only from books. In this sense, I try not to create hierarchies between academic and activist knowledge, because both produce valid insights about the world and about social change. I have also been teaching for ten years in different universities.

Currently, I am a researcher and activist. My current work is a nationwide research project on the use of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) by internet service providers. As an activist, I am part of the coordination of the Digital Sovereignty Network, which includes about five hundred people working together to develop a national strategy for digital sovereignty and to influence government agendas. There are also public servants and academics. This year we spoke with four ministries. It is often exhausting but incredibly dynamic work: since June I have had almost ten meetings per week. Our working group is dedicated to changing public administration processes toward FOSS; one of our slogans is: Public money? Public code! 

How do you define “digital sovereignty”, and how do you see the current developments around digital sovereignty in Latin America, particularly in Brazil?

When I started studying the topic three years ago, I did not like the term, and I still think it is problematic, even if it is now widely accepted. The problem is both “digital” and “sovereignty”. People often associate “digital” with binary code, with zero and one, but what matters is not the binary nature. What matters are the affordances of the digital: the speed of transmission, the scale of what can be stored, and the miniaturization of information, which changes social space and social time.

The velocity of transmission and the size of what can be stored changes the time of politics in two directions. It can diminish time because events and information travel very fast and impact local politics. It can expand political time because digital space can store and prolong decision-making with low cost: there is not always a need to decide everything in a single in-person meeting, because you can have asynchronous meetings and decisions. 

But the digital also expands and contracts social space. It expands because more spaces and cultural artifacts become accessible at any moment, and it contracts because there is a sensation that all spaces are digitally linked and therefore closer. 

“Sovereignty” is also complicated. The traditional way of thinking about sovereignty, since Jean Bodin in the sixteenth century, refers to centralized state power and the nation-state system. But in the digital age, borders are less relevant, and classical political theory is not enough. We need to rethink sovereignty as something that can apply to different levels of collectives, communities, and sometimes even individuals, not only to nation-states. For instance, Indigenous digital sovereignty is sovereignty as a way of life rooted in specific cultures.

Rather than searching for the perfect definition, I see the concept as part of an ongoing social struggle, which is more fertile. The disputes around its meaning are political and productive. As  Bourdieu once noted this quoting Austrian philologist and literary critic Leo Spitzer, the polysemy of a word is the visible vestige of the historical social struggle for its meaning. 

Governments across Latin America are only beginning to take this seriously. In the region there are historical precedents like Chile’s Cybersyn experiment in the 1970s, or Cuba’s digital initiatives. Latin America is many different people, and we used to gather more to discuss free software than to discuss digital sovereignty, as we do now. Uruguay is often cited as a positive case: they run their data centers with free software and have comprehensive programs. But in most countries, including Brazil, the debate is still in its infancy. Many lawmakers and public servants do not really understand what personal data means or how platforms operate.

Nowadays, many think sovereignty can be achieved just by hosting data centers locally, ignoring issues like legal jurisdiction and cloud control. Besides existing hardware-level vulnerabilities, what they often forget is that the US Cloud Act allows the US government to request information from US-based companies, even if the servers or data centers are outside the United States. 

In this sense, we need political education at all levels: ministries, civil servants, and parliament. Digital sovereignty is today where environmental or gender policies were decades ago: the beginning of a long struggle. And a central point of this struggle is avoiding US platforms to be able to influence political behavior, fueling hatred, misogyny, and far-right ideologies. Young people can drift from their families’ values because of the ideological content they encounter online. Schools, leisure, and public spaces can become more reactionary under the influence of algorithmically produced culture. It is not simply a veil being lifted to reveal a society that was always the same; platforms can actively create and expand new reactionary individuals and groups.

We are trying to counteract this by forming coalitions between movements, from feminist and housing groups to rural workers, and by raising awareness of how platforms monopolize and control visibility of the social world. They decide which posts are visible and which are not. This power over visibility undermines social movements’ ability to reach their own base. Many activists still think one million views means mass outreach, but in a country of 213 million, that is tiny. We need to reconnect online mobilization with offline presence, combining digital tools with physical organization to rebuild deeper, community-based politics.

What has changed in the debate and in the movements in the last decade?

There is more interest in these topics now than there was a decade ago. The rise of misinformation and the political actions of major platform owners had the effect of making people pay attention. When moderation policies weaken, people become aware of what is at stake, including the normalization of hate speech and attacks on rights.

In Brazil, the Digital Sovereignty Network was almost inactive after the last elections, but it is alive again. We thought a small meeting in Brasilia would attract twenty people, but one hundred and twenty came. Movements that were not previously linked to digital sovereignty joined, alongside initiatives such as the Internet Legal campaign. Major actors, including the CUT union in Sao Paulo and the World Women’s March, showed up. The government itself was surprised.

External pressure also matters. When US politics signals protection of big tech and increased trade conflicts, it can push the movement to grow, because people feel the dominance and the need for alternatives. What we are trying to do is connect social movements and the government to create a National Plan on digital sovereignty. It is tiring work and often unpaid, but there is genuine momentum now.

How do you connect digital sovereignty to Web 3.0 and alternative social media, like the ones you build and research?

Extending the idea of sovereignty to collectives and Indigenous communities links directly to alternative technologies. For over twenty years, people talked about “the internet” without really engaging with how software is made and what it enables. I never liked mainstream social media, and I closed my accounts.

The Fediverse, short for Federated Universe, is built in Free and Open Source Software and is federated and distributed. Different types of social media platforms are connected by the ActivityPub protocol. For microblogging there is Mastodon; for macroblogging there are platforms such as Friendica; for image sharing there is Pixelfed; for video hosting there is PeerTube; for discussion groups there is Lemmy; for audio sharing there is Funkwhale, and so on.

All of these are software you can install on a server to start a community. One installation is called an instance. The community decides the features of the instance, such as character limits, and whether there will be custom emojis. Most importantly, communities decide who they federate with and who they do not.

From one account you can see the federated network, across many servers, without a single center and without a few companies deciding who sees what and when. In general there are no advertisements, and feeds are chronological. The principle is communication between people, not turning people into data for profit.

We create and host our own instances of the Fediverse, like Organica.Social on Mastodon, where communities can set their own rules, moderation systems, and features. For example, you can prioritize public health and science above misinformation and conspiracy theories.

The main difference with corporate platforms is that communities decide what interactions are possible. Big tech’s real job is often to hide parts of the world: Gaza disappears, Cuba disappears. They show you only what you already like, and that destroys informational diversity. In our networks, you can build local instances tied to neighborhoods or topics, creating real, plural public spaces.

We are also experimenting with ultra-slow and non feed-based social media. For example, Miga, Make Internet Great Again, is blockchain-based, and you can only post one meme per week, one idea per week, one piece of gossip per week, and one book per month. It is a way to reject the addictive logic of continuous feeds.

People often know the problems of big tech, so a question emerges: why do they not move to alternative social media? One hypothesis is cognitive dissonance: people know, but they stay. Another approach is to think in terms of damage reduction, a term used in public health for heavy drug use. In that sense, the Fediverse can be a step down the ladder, away from the most harmful dynamics.

There is always a question of scale. Decentralized networks can grow, but growth is cultural more than technical. When unions, movements, and influencers understand the collective logic, they bring their people with them.

Big tech is trying to invade this space too. BlueSky and Threads now use federated protocols, but under venture capital logic, which reproduces many of the same problems. I am also concerned with age verification, and with bots and automated profiles invading Fediverse communities, and with developing tools that help human moderation identify racist, misogynistic, and fascist content.

What role do you see for the state in building digital public infrastructure and decentralized media?

We are used to a centralized way of thinking: either something is state owned, or privately owned. The Fediverse does not work like that. At the same time, we are struggling with the government to change how we communicate. Take Bolsa Famillia, which provides money to families that meet certain criteria. We argue that information should not be distributed via WhatsApp, but through a Mastodon instance or another open-source platform.

To be clear, the state can have its own instances to distribute information, reports, and news. This helps public visibility and growth of the Fediverse without removing the power of community instances, because everything is federated.

There are already examples. Ibram, the Brazilian Institute of Museums, oversees more than one thousand museums, and about two hundred of them use Tainacan. It is a WordPress plugin that can connect to the Fediverse, which means WordPress blogs can become part of the federated ecosystem.

At the same time, it would be a nightmare to have only state-owned social media. In many contexts, that would make it difficult to criticize the government and would threaten freedom of expression. In the Fediverse you can have both: state instances and community instances, connected but independently moderated.

Because it is Free and Open Source Software, you can study and change the code for your needs. It can also be georeferenced, so people can connect to what happens in their neighborhood: a show on the street, an exercise program for older people, or a road closure because pipes are being renewed. We call this campaign FediGov.br: bringing the government into the Fediverse in a decentralized way.

Speaking of infrastructure, what about Brazil’s public fintech, PIX? Can it be considered an advancement in digital sovereignty?

It is quite remarkable. While other electronic payment methods in Brazil incur fees, PIX operates with zero tariffs and no taxation for individuals. Consider that American card companies like Visa, American Express, and Mastercard hold a large share of the market. With PIX, businesses of all sizes can avoid paying fees per transaction to these companies, and this keeps money inside the country.

PIX enables direct financial transactions between individuals through a cryptographic and secure system. This has frustrated North American companies, which had sought to implement a payment system via WhatsApp and later abandoned that project. Now WhatsApp has integrated PIX without fees, recognizing that adoption would otherwise be limited.

PIX is a positive step, but digital sovereignty is not only about payments. It is about the broader technological ecosystem and who controls it.

Let’s talk about the imaginaries of digital sovereignty. What kind of future do you envision for the next twenty years?

Some philosophers distinguish between the future, meaning everything you can imagine, and what you actually build given concrete circumstances. We do have a vision. I am a socialist, against the exploitation of men and women by men and women. We already have the technology to live well and to live happily.

Digital technologies can help connect the richness of the world’s cultures, and also the cultures that exist in each neighborhood. But the digital is not the central issue in itself. It is part of the struggle, a set of tools that can make some things easier.

The main idea is that we should work less. We could have different gender relations, different race relations, and different relations among cultures and ethnicities. People could have real self-determination, and at the same time access broad culture, not only what an algorithm recommends.

Marx said a person could do productive work in the morning and be a critic or an artist in the afternoon. Digital tools make that kind of life more possible. But capital can respond by creating “digital drugs” that addict people and reduce the possibility of real communication and collective organization.

Regulation is possible. China’s platform regulation is an interesting example: they have rules limiting addictive algorithmic design, such as infinite scroll. China is not a model or a dream for us, but it shows that strong regulation can happen, even if one does not agree with their broader political project.

I agree, the role of digital technologies should be giving everybody time to be wise – that’s the really revolutionary point of communism. Finally, what pragmatic steps can Latin American countries take in the coming years?

We need to build alternatives, each country following its own path but with shared goals. It is not only about governments or leaders. It is about daily work by social movements, educators, and activists. We must challenge the regimes of visibility and attention imposed by global platforms.

If I had to choose only one priority, I would focus on building alternative social media even before building public data infrastructure, because control over visibility is now central to the political struggle. This is ultimately a politics of care: care for people, technologies, and other species. It requires new concepts, new languages, and our own philosophical tools, not only those inherited from Europe. As Brecht said: “Don’t accept the habitual as a natural thing. In times of disorder, of organized confusion, of dehumanized humanity, nothing should seem natural. Nothing should seem impossible to change.” The future is not written yet, and we are going to fulfill our part in this chore. The future is free.

In his new book, Forty-Four Esolangs (MIT Press), Daniel Temkin challenges conventional definitions of language, code, and computer, showing the potential of esolangs—or esoteric programming languages—as pure idea art. The languages in this volume ask programmers to write code in the form of prayer to the Greek gods, or as a pattern of empty folders, or to type code in tandem with another programmer, each with one hand on the keyboard, their rhythm and synchrony signifying computer action. Temkin includes languages written over the past fifteen years, along with some designed especially for this book. Other pieces are left as prompts for the reader to simply consider or perhaps to implement on their own.

Esolangs are a collaborative form. Each language is a complete world of thought, where esoprogrammers build on the work of esolangers to make new discoveries. The language Velato, for instance, asks programmers to write music as code; while the language creates constraints for the programmer, each programmer brings their own coding and musical sensibility to the language. Other pieces are pure poetic suggestion in the legacy of Yoko Ono’s event scores. These ask the programmer to, for example, follow the paths of the clouds over a single day and construct a language in response that uses those movements as code. Just as Ben Vautier claimed everything is art, this book blurs the lines between computation and everything else.

Temkin will share this project in the context of thirty plus years of esolangs. As Douglas Coupland puts it: “Every new spread in the book makes a reader feel like they’re discovering new territory with a worthy explorer who’s there for the joy of it.”

The book launch will be moderated by Dr. David Gauthier and is supported by the Institute for Cultural Inquiry (ICON).

Daniel Temkin makes photographic and computational art exploring logic and human irrationality. He began interviewing other esolangers and code artists in 2011, creating the blog esoteric.codes. ZKM exhibited the blog and commissioned videos of Temkin explaining esolang history for their Open Codes show in 2018–19. Esoteric.codes earned an Arts Writer grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation and a residency at New Museum’s NEW INC, the first museum-led cultural incubator. Temkin has written about esolangs for Hyperallergic and Leonardo, and his aesthetic theory of the form was published by Digital Humanities Quarterly. His work was recently shown in solo exhibitions at Museum of the Moving Image and Higher Pictures. You can see more at danieltemkin.com.

Date: 4 February 2026
Time: 16:00 – 17:00
Location: University of Utrecht, Grote Zaal, Muntstraat 2A, 3512EV Utrecht

▷ https://transmissioninmotion.sites.uu.nl/recommended-event-book-launch-forty-four-esolangs-the-art-of-esoteric-code-with-daniel-temkin/

I met Kenzo Soares through an online call, as he is currently a Resident Fellow at the Information Society Project (ISP) at Yale Law School. Kenzo is a carioca—a son of Rio de Janeiro—who has worked extensively on platform workers’ rights. He is also deeply knowledgeable about the political economy of Latin America from a Marxist perspective. During the call, which I took from the Fundação Getulio Vargas in São Paulo, we ended up passionately discussing platformization in Latin America, shifting from the intimate to the technological and the geopolitical.

In our conversation, digital sovereignty takes on a heavy, industrial form. We discussed Petrobras, the state-owned giant operating the most powerful supercomputers in the Global South, yet whose strategic oil data remains hosted on North American servers. This reality informs Kenzo’s concept of “survival infrastructures”: digital public infrastructures like Pix are not mere conveniences, but necessities for banking the poor and providing “white label” alternatives to the predatory gig economy.

Yet, a darker thread emerges regarding internal colonialism and the “black box” of the state. Kenzo acknowledges that Brazil is not just a victim of the North, but a regional hegemony that surveils its neighbors. He notes the deep-seated distrust of the demos, for whom the state is often a predator; here, the push for sovereignty is frequently met with the fear that public platforms are simply more efficient tools for taxation and control. How often happens with academics – to the degree that it is now a meme – we decided to write a paper together. 

***

What is your background and why are you interested in digital sovereignty? Was there a moment or a project that shifted your view?

You told me that you are interviewing activists, scholars and public officers. That is interesting, because I think at some point in my life I have been all three. For many years I was part of the Socialism and Freedom Party in Brazil as an activist. Then I spent ten years as a parliamentary adviser to a congressman, Marcel Freixo, first in the municipal council of Rio de Janeiro, then in the state congress, and finally in the national congress. This year I was in the Ministry of Science and Technology in Brazil for six months before I came here to Yale. At the same time, when I was still working in congress and later at the ministry, I was also doing my academic career: pursuing my master’s, then as a PhD candidate and finally as a lecturer at the school of communication of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.

I started by studying the political economy of platforms and digital ecosystems in general. But as I was in these policymaking environments, I was always concerned with the question: how can we go beyond the critique of capitalism? It is really important to understand these new ways in which capitalism is organizing new relations of production, all the debates around surveillance, and how we update historical and structural relations of power. But how can we go beyond criticism and start to build a program, to update the left’s program for society? I was at congress all the time trying to give answers to civil society. My work was to do this dialogue between civil society, NGOs, social movements and policymaking.

One thing that I think is really interesting in Brazil is that, outside the European Union, the Brazilian state is right now one of the main states that is struggling with big tech, especially big tech from the global North. If you think about disinformation and hate speech, and how to regulate that, Brazil is a good example. We even banned Twitter/X for some days to force Elon Musk to enforce Brazilian law about hate speech. I think it is natural for me to start thinking about digital sovereignty, considering where I am from. People always say that countries like the United States do not have to think much about digital sovereignty, because they have the platforms. For them it is natural that they exercise power all around the world. But for us, from a dependent country in the majority world, in a public university where we do our research, I was always thinking about how our meetings and our systems depend on big tech from the global North.

We are talking about Alphabet/Google, or Microsoft. Even in the Brazilian Ministry of Science and Technology, all the meetings and internal communication were done through Microsoft Teams. Now we have some public alternatives for calls like that, but still, the systems that we use every day are Microsoft products. We are talking about the ministry that supports the development of key technologies for Brazil. We are talking about the ministry that deals with nuclear energy, satellites, with projects of public cloud, and also very sensitive information for Brazilian sovereignty in general. All this goes through meetings, emails and documents that are hosted by Microsoft services.

I also interviewed some tech workers for my thesis. They were data scientists and software engineers, and some of them work for Brazilian state owned companies like Petrobras, the most important and biggest company in Brazil. They said to me: we have a specific API to access OpenAI’s ChatGPT. But at the same time, we use Microsoft Teams to exchange information between different departments. We are talking about a goldmine of strategic data, because we are talking about oil. That was a concern that I was able to map through my fieldwork. So I think that is my background and why digital sovereignty became such an interesting and obvious topic for research.

What do we talk about when we talk about digital sovereignty? How has the discourse evolved over the last years in South America and Brazil? Does Brazil have a privileged position, and why do you think that is the case?

I have some disagreements with other scholars, maybe even with people you are going to interview. I really think Brazil is not a complete digital colony in the same way as other countries in the global South. Of course we are dependent on the main layers of internet infrastructure: the domain name system, which the United States still controls through the State Department; and all the infrastructures from AWS, Amazon Cloud and so on. We know this. But at the same time, unlike almost every country in Africa, and unlike most Latin American countries, we are in better shape in some respects. In some specific fields we are even more developed than India, for example when we are talking about computational power, about tech workers, knowledge, and scholarly production.

We have scientists in Brazil who are doing research that is part of the state of the art of AI research in the whole world, in scientific research and in the volume of papers published. Petrobras has the biggest supercomputer in the whole global South that is entirely dedicated to AI development. It is bigger than what some European countries have. In that sense Brazil is in better conditions than Spain or Portugal. They are not main superpowers, but they are part of the global North. So I think, especially our tech workers and our tech community have the knowledge and the conditions to develop state of the art systems.

What Brazil does not have is capital. Even if we think that in Latin America almost all investment in information technology in general, and also in AI, is concentrated in Brazil, it is nothing compared to the United States and China. We do not have capital, especially venture capital. We have some Japanese funds, like SoftBank’s Vision Fund, investing in Brazil, but it is not comparable to China or the United States. Second, unfortunately, our national state does not have the kind of policies that other developing countries like India, China and even Russia have. We do not have data localization enforcement in Brazil. We do not have many public platforms. We do have a payment system, Pix, which was an advancement. I think Brazil is still dependent on global North infrastructures and most platforms.

I think Brazil also has some asymmetric relations in the digital field with its neighbors and with other countries from the global South. Most of the big platforms in Latin America are headquartered in Brazil. The big exceptions are Mercado Libre, the Argentinian marketplace, and Rappi, the Colombian delivery app. With these two exceptions, almost 70 per cent of the main platforms that are unicorns – valued at more than one billion dollars – are headquartered in Brazil, and these platforms are expanding to other Latin American countries. I always need to emphasize that Brazil is not competing like China to overthrow the United States. We do have specific power relations in our immediate field of influence, in our traditional and historical area of influence in Latin America.

How do you understand digital sovereignty as a concept? From which side do you approach it?

If you read the literature, digital sovereignty in general is still more a political claim than a concept that you can easily evaluate and measure. It emerges first in public discourse before it becomes a scholarly or theoretical concept.

Brazil certainly does not have the mechanisms to enforce its sovereignty in digital ecosystems that other developing countries have. It has less sovereignty than Russia and China for sure, and probably also less than India. But I think it has more potential to quickly develop these conditions. This is mainly a political issue in Brazil: whether the national state will take steps in terms of public policies, regulation, legal frameworks and public funding, because we already have the socio-technical conditions to quickly develop these solutions.

This is different from a country that does not have any local tech community, does not have public universities, does not have public IT companies. At the same time, Brazil does not fully have digital sovereignty when we consider its relations of dependence with the global market and the global North. But there is another question: is Brazil really respecting and helping the digital sovereignty of its neighbors? We just had a scandal of Brazilian surveillance over Paraguay, where Brazilian intelligence agents, equivalent to the NSA, were spying on Paraguayan officers through their digital devices. This was connected to the bilateral agreement that we have on energy generation. We have a binational hydroelectric plant on the frontier between Brazil and Paraguay, and we are renegotiating tariffs.

It is really interesting because Brazil was spying on Paraguay to have more information and a better position in tariff negotiations, at the same time that we are fighting against US tariffs that affect Brazil. That is why I say Brazil is not just a victim of the global North. It also exerts power, and it does not always help the sovereignty of its neighbors. It is not all roses and flowers between Latin American countries.

So do you see more unity or more fragmentation in Latin America regarding digital sovereignty?

I think Latin American political integration as a state agenda was stronger during Lula’s previous administrations. We had initiatives to create a continental parliament, inspired by the European Parliament. We had an expansion of the economic bloc Mercosur. In the current administration, Brazil is more enthusiastic about BRICS initiatives. I think Brazil should indeed develop connections with BRICS, but it should bring Latin America as a bloc to the negotiations. Otherwise, BRICS risks becoming just China’s area of influence. Then it is not real multipolarity; it is only a shift in which power is hegemonic, the United States or China. BRICS is basically a state process of integration through bureaucracies. We have no real public space for movements. This is different from twenty years ago, when integration between Brazil, Bolivia, Venezuela and Uruguay under leftist governments like Chávez and Lula was a process of integration through the state but also through social movements from below.

There is another important thing: we need to think about digital sovereignty beyond the state. Our discussions of sovereignty in general are deeply connected to states, since the Westphalian paradigm became the normality of international relations. But one thing that I emphasize in my research is the idea of popular or grassroots digital sovereignty. I studied some movements in Brazil that bring this debate. I was recently at the launch of a book that argues that if states are not promoting integration, then social movements and workers should articulate Latin American solidarity relations and some kind of workers’ organization on a continental scale. That is one thing.

For sure, Brazil has a responsibility, as the biggest economy on the continent, to support its neighbors with technology transfer, infrastructure sharing, a pool of resources. And not only with Latin America, but also with Africa. A real historical challenge that maybe can explain why Brazil does not have a stronger connection with Latin America is that, in the past, Brazil was more connected to Africa than to its Latin American neighbors. Unfortunately, that was largely because of the slave trade, but not only because of that. Brazil was more of a transatlantic community. I am from Rio de Janeiro. The elites and intellectuals from Rio de Janeiro were more connected to Luanda, to Angola, to Mozambique, than they were to Asunción or La Paz. Buenos Aires was an exception because of the River Plate, but not so much to other Latin American capitals. So I think Brazil can also help to develop digital solidarity relations with at least the Portuguese speaking countries in Africa.

I was thinking that BRICS is mainly a geopolitical and economic attempt to bring states together, but it is lacking the element of the demos, that shared cultural component which is so important for democracy. In Europe we keep referring to an idealized European essence. It is a myth, but it kinda works. But I wanted to ask about Pix, the best example of digital public infrastructure from Brazil.  I think it is a scandal that we do not have that in Europe.

Pix is a really interesting example. I think it is an example of digital public infrastructure, maybe not a completely comprehensive one yet, but it is powerful. And it is going to be extended to other Latin American countries, which is also important. It is also an interesting example of why the European Union probably does not have a similar system. Technically Pix is one hundred per cent Brazilian technology: Brazilian technicians and tech workers developed the system. But it was inspired by the Indian model, and the Indian model was inspired by Russia. Russia needed such systems because of sanctions. When the credit card duopoly, Mastercard and Visa, stopped operating in Russia because of sanctions, Russia needed to develop its own payment system. Since the 1990s, Russia and China had been pushing a cyber sovereignty agenda, but it was the sanctions that really made them develop their own payment systems. India was inspired by that, and then Brazil learned from India. We actually sent technical people on mission to India before developing Pix.

I think this is a good example that BRICS is not just speeches, but in this case there was real cooperation. If not a full technological transfer, it was at least shared inspiration from the global South. I would say that the European Union does not need or does not have such a system because it has never been cut off from the international payment system. There was no similar pressure. I think Pix is revolutionary. One example that we always give: Brazil is a very poor and unequal country. The first time ever in Brazilian history when most of the population was part of the financial or banking system was after Pix. The pandemic also really helped, and so did all the Brazilian programs of cash transfers from the state. But Pix was the moment when most of our population started using banking systems, and not only online banking but banking in general.

I know that because I interviewed a tech worker who worked in a Brazilian startup whose business model, before Pix was launched, was to try to make the poorest part of the Brazilian population use banks. It was a fintech. They failed. The startup closed because Pix solved the problem. So it was a public solution. That is an example of national sovereignty, and it can also be the basis for mechanisms of international solidarity. Pix also shows the contradictions when we talk about sovereignty and we do not distinguish between the state and the people. One of the biggest political defeats of this Lula administration was when the government tried to expand the powers of the tax authority. The federal government published a normative instruction that lowered the limit over which Pix transactions started to be monitored for fiscal reasons, especially income tax. There was a huge popular revolt. The far right tried to capture this popular uprising against the government.

The government’s argument was: why are you fighting against having more data about your financial transactions if the idea is to fight organized crime and black markets? But the thing is that, for people, they love Pix, but it is a black box. They do not know what the state does with their data. For very poor workers, the idea is that if the state wants to have more data about them, it is because it is going to raise their taxes. So I think this is an example of how Pix is controversial. People thought that more data in the hands of the state was not necessarily a protective move from their point of view. They consider the state an enemy. And that is the contradiction of every capitalist state.

Sometimes legal scholars distinguish between internal and external sovereignty. That is also related to the United States.  Digital platforms act as the long arm of US foreign policy abroad, but internally they are also forms of government that can oppose the state. People sometimes prefer to be subjected to platforms, like Apple’s encrypted data, than to the state. Historically, the state is at the same time a driver of interstate competition that produces inequalities and, in some places, a welfare state that tries to reduce the very inequalities this system produces. It is very contradictory. This is also the legacy of Cybersyn: digital public infrastructure needs good government, otherwise it turns into a totalitarian nightmare. Is relation between platforms and the state is always ambivalent?

Yes, because we are fighting a neoliberal agenda that says: open markets, privatize all your state-owned companies. We keep saying: we need public clouds, in the sense of state-owned infrastructures; we need public servers; we need public data centers; we need public platforms. Now I am researching Brazilian state policies for platform cooperativism. Brazil is developing a white-label platform for platform cooperatives. A public university, Santa Catarina Federal University, is developing this platform with funding from the federal government, and the idea is that each cooperative can use the platform for free.

But the question is: who is going to access this data? Will society in general have access? Will it be an open platform? Or will only the state have access to this data? Next year we have elections, and the far right can become the administration. We are talking about putting all the data from these workers and workers’ organizations in the hands of the state. That is the contradiction.

Here in the United States we have a similar discussion. I attended a presentation about how the First Amendment makes it difficult for the US state to regulate hate speech, and how alternative models could be developed, for example by enforcing European law. The conclusion was that we should look to European style regulation. But the thing is: when we are talking about Nazis, of course we want to control hate speech. However, when there is a Trump administration, do we really want to abolish, or seriously restrict, the First Amendment? Who is going to define what hate speech is?

Let us return to platform labour. One question about the imaginaries of platform workers that you worked on: what did you find? Are they different from what we see in other continents? Have you seen some Latin American specificities of the organization of work?

You know dependency theory. I had a paper that tries to connect dependency theory to platform labour. The thesis is that Latin America has a structural overexploitation of labour. You have structural conditions that make labour cheap and vulnerable, and that creates natural conditions for platform labour to grow.  The data shows that Brazil, for instance, has some of the worst conditions for platform labour in the whole world. Every year the Fairwork reports show Brazil at the bottom, competing with some countries in Asia.

You can actually see it in the street. It is not only the prices of deliveries, which are absurdly low, but also working time and intensity. I have this joke. I had an Italian girlfriend and she had just arrived in Brazil. It was kind of late at night, around one or two in the morning, and she said: “I am hungry, but I do not want pizza.” I said: “Let us order something.” She replied: “But it is two in the morning. I do not want pizza.” And I said: “We can have anything.” She asked me what I meant. For me it was so natural that I could order anything at 2 a.m. in Rio de Janeiro. When I was in Europe, I realized that you cannot. Why? Because even the immigrants in Europe do not work twenty four hours a day for delivery platforms to the same extent and intensity that people work in Brazil.

I was also thinking about the permeation of Uber in Latin America. In most places in Europe we do not rely on Uber in the same way. We use public transport or our own car, while here it is all about using Uber, because Uber becomes part of the infrastructure of safety. So there are already existing structural conditions of inequality. Then the platforms come and “save” people in some way, and they benefit from these inequalities that capitalism has produced. But moving to the theoretical part, What is your position on techno-feudalism and on the idea that we moved beyond neoliberalism?

I come from media studies, where the way capital permanently accelerates social life also affects academic production. Twenty years ago we were talking about the “wealth of networks”: “network” was the keyword. Then it became “surveillance”. Then it became “platforms”. Now it is “AI” and “techno-feudalism”. So what is the difference between platform capitalism, surveillance capitalism and techno-feudalism? These are interesting concepts that focus on and illuminate specific dimensions of our contemporary society. But I think sometimes people feel the need to launch huge new paradigms because, as intellectual workers in the attention economy, they need to make noise. There is a political economy of critical studies. We are in the business of producing ideas.

I do not think the basic conditions that we call capitalist have been erased. Most of the social wealth is still produced by the process of people working in exchange for salaries. You know the argument that we live in a postindustrial society? In fact, we have more industrial workers on the planet now than at any other moment in human history. The problem is that most factories are now in Southeast Asia. We are not talking only about robots. We are talking about people who work in conditions very similar to those in Manchester when Engels was writing about the English working class. We still have people working in mines for rare earth minerals in Africa. We cannot make iPhones, or Nvidia GPUs, without kids working in almost slave-like conditions in Africa.

My position is that we are not just in a rent economy. You can say that platforms specifically work largely through rent: that is the way capital associated with platforms takes its share of global wealth. But this is not the majority of the global economy. People confuse the financial valuation of companies with the mass of value actually produced. We criticize this by calling it fictitious capital. People say: these are the biggest companies in the world. Yes, in market valuation. But if you think about the mass of value, it is still produced by labour.

Even within platforms, if we talk about platform labour: iFood alone has almost 200,000 workers in more than 1,100 cities. That is just one Brazilian labour platform. How many workers does Uber have globally? And these are classical capital–labour relationships. Of course you have this new dimension of data extraction, but the economic exploitation is the same. So I think techno-feudalism may end up being the same thing that “cognitive capitalism” was ten or fifteen years ago: an attempt to describe changes inside capitalism that sometimes overstates the rupture. What these concepts are trying to capture, and where they have a point, is the growing power of private companies compared to national states, especially in the United States. This is the story where Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg appear to have more power than Trump in some domains. But the military-industrial complex always had this kind of power, so I am a bit skeptical.

Of course we have new regimes of production. That is not the same as a new society. For most of capitalism’s history, most people were engaged in farming. The moment when most of the global population started living in cities is right now. This happened in the last ten years. Until fifteen years ago, most humans still lived in the countryside. This transition is largely because of China. But even this huge transformation did not mean that capitalism as a system changed into something else.

With the rise of ubiquitous computation, I think one difference is the combination of the platform way of organizing people, money and services in space and time: capitalism always relied on monopolies, but platforms now have new ways of maintaining monopolies.

Of course. But when was capitalism not based on monopolies? The idea of pure competition is a fiction. All the infrastructure of communication has basically been monopolistic. In Europe, historically, how many television channels did you have? In Italy, RAI; in the United Kingdom, the BBC; in Brazil, Globo as a de facto national monopoly; in the United States, three big networks. Now we have Meta and Alphabet as a duopoly of attention on a global scale. This is a case where quantitative change becomes qualitative, for sure. It has huge impacts. My father is eighty years old. He was born in the 1940s in the countryside of Brazil, and now he watches South Korean soap operas. Of course this is different.

At the same time, I do not know if this configuration is going to be permanent, because the Chinese model of the internet, or “internet with Chinese characteristics”, is expanding. Many countries in Africa are buying digital sovereignty as a service from China instead of from the United States. The servers are from Huawei. What backdoors the Chinese state may or may not have into servers in Nigeria, I have no idea. People are afraid of the NSA, and now they give control to Huawei. We also have to ask how many countries in Africa do not access Netflix but do access WeChat or Chinese platforms. I do not know the exact numbers, but they are expanding a lot.

Let us end with this last question. What steps could Latin American countries, or Brazil in particular, take to enhance digital sovereignty in the next five years?

I think Brazil, and maybe other Latin American countries, have some advantages compared to the United States. I mentioned that we are developing and funding, through the federal government, public platforms for workers. I am from Rio de Janeiro, a city that has a state owned platform for taxi drivers, with more than 15,000 taxi drivers and more than one million users every year. In the United States it is almost impossible to even talk about state owned digital infrastructures for workers. So I think one thing is to develop public infrastructure and public platforms to offer workers an alternative to private digital monopolies. This is a way to make people have real sovereignty, because they have alternatives.

In a paper that we just submitted, we are calling them “survival infrastructures”. People need them. My sovereignty as an individual cannot be only a checkbox on a website as it is in the GDPR model, when I have no alternative, like Margaret Thatcher enjoyed to say, to accept the Platform Data Regime. If I have a public platform that has a better data regime, this means that I actually can deny Google access to my data, because I am going to use the public platform instead. To have an alternative offered by the state is a fundamental dimension to reinforce rights for our population and citizens. Of course this demands that the state has a data regime that is different from private companies. It means enforcing privacy. At the same time, we need to calculate the tradeoff between individual rights to privacy and what I call the social function of data.

For example, I have a smartwatch. I know Samsung is going to access all my biometric data. But if I want to share this with the Brazilian public health system, I cannot. If I had public software or a public app in my smartwatch, I think the Brazilian state should have access to its population’s health data, of course with the consent of citizens. So I think another dimension is to balance privacy with the wealth and public knowledge that we can create with an open data future, if we start having public platforms.

We also need to have public funding to develop our own AI solutions. I think there is an AI bubble. I think the world economy is going to go into a huge depression in the next years because the AI bubble is going to collapse. But anyway, beyond all the hype, technology is important. We have to develop our own models based on our own languages. We must develop a really strong regulation to ensure data localization and to ensure access for public universities to data. We need to do this as a bloc, to have more power to fight against the huge pressure, the lobbying, and the technological dependence on companies from the global North.

—

Drawing by Carlotta Artioli, @charl.art.

By Babak Ahteshamipour

Since Donald Trump’s re-manifestation through his 2025 presidential election it feels as if we are no longer living in a simulation, rather we are being simulated within new “Dark Ages”—especially with the ongoing militarization of Europe and Trump’s imperialist tendencies. Their technofeudal allies such as Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg roleplay as monarchs, with their barons operating under vassalic contracts, while the rest of us roleplay as feminist knights, anarchist sorcerers, and environmentalist druids, oscillating between resistance, reenactment and aestheticized escapism. As technocapitalism mutates into technofeudalism, medieval aesthetics and politics re-emerge as a contested terrain: instrumentalized by oligarchs who desire to refashion worldbuilding into empire-building, mainstreamed as escape, and yet weaponized by countercultural collectives for insurgent world-co-building. But can there be true insurgency when our roles descend from heavily scripted aesthetics? Are we merely peasants fed with pre-technocapitalist fantasy content, or self-mythologizing dissidents performing rituals that ultimately reinforce the power distributions we seek to resist?

In Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism (2023), Yanis Varoufakis—and previously Cédric Durand, in Techno-féodalisme: Critique de l’économie numérique (2020)—declared that capitalism is being replaced by technofeudalism; a new map of political economy where the market is ruled by oligarchs via platforms[1]. Within technofeudalism, companies like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft do not simply compete in markets; their dominion extends further through networks of dependency, where smaller companies survive only as clients or subcontractors. This layered structure resembles a neo-vassalage: platforms grant access and protection in exchange for tribute, ensuring that innovation itself remains tethered to technofeudal lords, with assets endlessly recycled and resold in closed circuit accumulations.

In the 2020 article Neofeudalism: The End of Capitalism? (2020), Jodi Dean, picks up from McKenzie Wark’s Capital Is Dead: Is This Something Worse? (2019), and claims that “Capitalism is turning itself into neofeudalism”, while stressing out how neofeudalism is being born out of the ashes of platform capitalism. Platform capitalism—coined by Nick Srnicek (2017)—refers to how big tech companies orchestrate transactions and user interactions to capture data and extract value for profitability.[2] However when this extraction is done without any true competition, it leads into technofeudalism. Another side effect of this is that users are caught in a web of tech company terms and conditions, while already being entangled within state law and bureaucracy, just like how individuals owed allegiance to multiple feudal lords and institutions in the Middle Ages.[3]

As we can see, the phenomena of power consolidation in the hands of technofeudal lords has been going around for a while, but a more unmasked shift is been perceived since the COVID-19 pandemic where the technofeudal logic intensified due to accelerated digitalization of the market and services, as discussed in COVID-19 and digitalization: The great acceleration (2021) by Joseph Amankwah-Amoah, Zaheer Khan, Geoffrey Wood and Gary Knight: 

“One likely consequence of COVID-19 is the accelerated trend towards digitalization of business models coupled with the shift of commercial activities from predominantly offline and brick-and-mortar outlets to online outlets.”

During COVID-19 consumerism itself mutated under this new order in a disaster-capitalist fashion. With physical shops shuttered, Amazon and its peers did not merely provide convenience, they absorbed the markets entirely, eliminating smaller companies and independent brands by making them vassals within their digital kingdoms. Streaming platforms such as Netflix thrived as cultural monopolies, feeding the lockdown attention economy through endless content, while the video game industry saw unprecedented profits as digital escapism became the new social infrastructure.

This shift was accompanied by the darker dimensions of platform rule: algorithmic surveillance normalized under the guise of “contact tracing,” massive data-harvesting disguised as “public health infrastructure”, and the increased use of policing systems to manage the digital commons. During that period, the data-collecting software company Palantir built a COVID tracking tool for the Trump administration. The company’s name is named after the crystal balls Palantír from J. R. R. Tolkien’s epic-fantasy novel The Lord of the Rings, devices used for predictions, surveillance, and communication.

Unsurprisingly enough Peter Thiel—Palantir’s co-founder—has several other companies named after Tolkien’s Middle-Earth, such as the capital firms Mithril Capital and Valar Ventures, named after the fictitious precious metal Mithril and the god-like immortal spirits Valars, and the defense technology company Anduril Industries, named after Aragon’s sword, Andúril. Thiel’s mythic naming aestheticizes power through medieval fantasy—a pattern not limited to him alone, just like Musk naming his son after Aragorn (Strider Sekhar) and his daughter Azure after the most powerful spell in Elden Ring. Following this power-driven fascination with medieval fantasy Jeff Bezos himself also funded Amazon’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power series (2022—present), as if seeking to forge his own “rings of power.”

Yet parallel to this oligarchic worldbuilding, neo-medievalism is flourishing across fashion, the red carpet, celebrities and influencer culture, presented sometimes as a feminist response to the “Dark Ages”, while other times collapsing into consumable spectacle. Back in 2020 Balenciaga adopted “knightcore” through armor-style boots worn by Cardi B, while more recently Natalie Portman wore a chainmail Dior dress to the Deauville Film Festival. With Joan of Arc being revived as a contemporary feminist icon, many celebrities and designers are inspired and reinterpret the medieval story through their work as seen with Dilara Findigoklu’s A/W 2023 collection inspired by Mahsa Amini protests in Iran as a response to “medieval practices around policing women’s bodies”, and Chappel Roan’s appearance and performance at the 2024 MTV Music Video Awards. This spectatorial revival extends to social-media feeds and moodboards being shaped with “bardcore” or “medievalcore” aesthetics featuring velvet capes, medieval-inspired prints, and DIY chainmail headpieces or armor dresses as everyday streetwear.

Within this equation appears mainstream gaming of course: having always fed gamers with medieval-fantasy action role-playing games, major game titles have remastered and released games which feature medieval-fantasy settings and gameplay such as the first-person shooter (FPS) Doom: The Dark Ages (2025), the role-playing game Baldur’s Gate 3 (2023), and the action role-playing game (ARPG) Elden Ring (2022)—and its spin-off Elden Ring Nightreign (2025).

Among remastered games is the ARPG The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered (2025)—with the original game being released in 2006—, but at the same time the recreation of the 2006 version of the massively multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft Classic (2019) which restore the game’s early slow-paced world which contains castles, plague-ridden forests, alchemy, and gear rooted in melee weapons and plate.

Interestingly enough, Amazon has begun establishing its own game development studios, while Netflix acquired game studios to carve its path within the gaming industry, and Samsung has been building clouding and streaming platforms to host games, signifying an evolving desire to control worldbuilding. Even major publishers like Activision Blizzard and Ubisoft rely on Google Cloud infrastructure to host and distribute their games, embedding them further into technofeudal ecosystems.

But beneath this glossy, mass-market revival lies a parallel strain of neo-medievalism operating outside technofeudal circuits, one that refuses depoliticized nostalgia. Within the indie game scene, there is similarly a revival of retro first person role-playing dungeon crawler games that draw from early-PC grit and tabletop sensibilities while channeling DIY world-co-building, by using free and open-source softwares, but also relying on online community building with gamers, fans and creators supporting each other. Such examples could be traced back to the 2018 medieval dark fantasy FPS game Amid Evil, or the first-person wizard simulator Hand of Doom (2023). Another akin title is Hands of Necromancy (2022)—and its sequel Hands of Necromancy II (2024)—which shares aesthetic similarities to  the 1996 ARPG The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall and was recreated within the Unity engine by Daggerfall Workshop (2023), supported by a rich modding community that elevates the game into contemporary standards. Other similar upcoming indie games include Necrofane (2026), Tenebyss (in development), Prison of Husks (in development), and Queen’s Domain (in development).

Many of these games incorporate dark ambient and electronic soundtracks that share many resemblances with dungeon synth music—a 90s subgenre of electronic music originated from Black metal characterized by medieval fantasy themes and lo-fi aesthetics—with a few exceptions where metal music can be perceived to be blended with electronics as well such as in Doom: The Dark Ages and Hand of Doom. 

In recent years dungeon synth  is being revived—especially in the UK—and there’s also an emergence of a new wave of black metal that traces back to the 2010s, as well as the blending of metal with electronics. What’s the most important aspect of these are the politics: these new directions are driven by musicians and artists, among whom identify as queer, non-binary, transgender and feminist, and labels  and platforms that follow an anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist and degrowth stance. This direction produces an insurgent neo-medievalism that openly counters technofeudal bros and their adaptation of the white, heterosexual, cisgendered, and ablebodied, dominant medieval aesthetic canon that historically renders the other as generic, anonymous and expendable. Robert Houghton remarks in The Middle Ages in Computer Games: Ludic Approaches to the Medieval and Medievalism (2024) that medieval worlds “almost always focus on heterosexual and cisgender men”:

“Where queer options exist in games, heterosexuality is usually the assumed norm: although a growing range of games permit homosexual relationships, including a notable range of pseudo-medieval fantasy roleplaying games, these are typically token efforts or resort to stereotypes. Non-binary identities and gender fluidity are almost inevitably ignored. These trends are particularly pronounced within historical games where women are frequently marginalized or erased, and where player spaces are often dominated by misogyny and homophobia to an even more extreme degree.”[4]

On the electronic music side of the spectrum examples include independent artists such as Ada Rook, Fire-Toolz, Cocojoey, Trust Fund Ozu, Drumcorps, and Lauren Bousfield who heavily combine black metal screams and blast beats with a wide range of electronics and ambiences. Some rely more on metal compositions executed with electronic flares, while others focus on electronics with metal elements introduced as passages or layers. These kinds of artists can be found on labels that specialize in experimental, and electronic releases—often reminiscent of video game music—such as Orange Milk Records, Hausu Mountain or Ingrown Records.

On the other side of the spectrum lies the new wave of black metal that features atmospheric and avant-garde compositions informed by other genres. Notable examples include Liturgy, formed by the transgender composer and musician Hunter Hunt-Hendrix, the “queer antifascist black metal/doom duo” Ragana, the ecstatic black metal band Agriculture, and the feminist anti-fascist black metal band Feminazgûl founded by the transgender anarchist author Margaret Killjoy. Although such artists and bands mostly release on labels that do not necessarily identify as feminist, antifascist or vegan, such as The Flenser, Prosthetic Records and 20 Buck Spin, but there also are labels that do such as the An Out Recordings, Grime Stone Records LLC, and Fiadh Productions.

Staying within their adventurous and unconventional outfits, many of these artists and labels often equip memes and internet imagery for communication as seen with examples of Doom Trip Records and Fire-Toolz, promoting their releases via memes. On the other hand labels such as Crime Stone Records and Fiadh Productions have been wearing their cosplay outfits to match their musical releases in the forms of artworks that emphasize on medieval illustrations, gothic designs and fonts. Furthermore, Fiadh Productions’ Instagram profile is filled with cute animals wearing medieval armor—among other medieval feminist posts—with overlaying phrases reading “born to dilly daily, forced to fight fascists”, or “embracing the quest (rejecting bigotry)”, sharing resemblances with other pages that are solely dedicated to this kind of content—but less political—like @golden_frog_inn and @the_frog_mage, or @the_brainrot fairy which features queered version of knights doused in glitter, and caring phrases.

Even though many of these artists and labels maintain a potent online political presence, posting about trans rights, being vocal about animal abuse, the ongoing genocides and ecocides, while focusing on multicultural community building and tactical resistance, not everyone online is invested in weaponization; some just want to escape. The internet is saturated with magical and occultist content drawing inspiration from medieval-fantasy, functioning as templates for users to express their frustration with the hyper-capitalist turned technofeudalist mixed-extended and augmented cybertronic meatspace. Examples like the POV Holding Sword and Cigarette or This Is Where I Post From memes, and the Tiny Green Mall Wizard / Wizard Gnome character or tulpamancy embody this desire to step sideways from this gruesome material reality as a defense mechanism, as underlined by Valentina Tanni in Exit Reality: Vaporwave, Backrooms, Weirdcore, and Other Landscapes Beyond the Threshold (2024):

“The vast, multifaceted world of spiritual and magical trends online is usually interpreted as a form of escapism. This draws on the glaring, increasingly undeniable fact that, above all among the younger generations, increasingly extreme strategies of evading reality are emerging as a form of defense against a world on the brink of collapse.”[5]

Being chronically online can be overstimulating especially when bombarded with conspiracy theories, A.I. slop, and echo chambers, that cultivate the feeling as if “the truth” is constantly withheld. Within this context everything is subject to questioning and science slips into an occulted esoteric domain. Users drift into magical frameworks: studying sigils and magical circles, sharing occult memes, or fetishizing state-of-the-art scientific research as quasi-religious cults in an attempt to intuit the hidden machinery of technofeudal layout.

These practices within this game-like domain overlap with the game studies term “magic circle,” which originates from Johan Huizinga (1949), and describes games as temporary worlds we step into that are simultaneously real and imaginary[6]. Eugene Thacker, in In the Dust of This Planet (2011) claims that magical circles connect us with the concealed, occulted world when analyzing the Outer Limits episode The Borderland (1963), in which scientists attempt to open an interdimensional gateway while reciting instructions with ritualistic cadence. As Thacker writes, “If the lab is the circle, then the lab experiment is the magical ritual” and bleeding-edge science is “the new occultism.”[7]

Even though contemporary science hasn’t yet opened any “gateways to the fourth dimension,” esoteric scientific achievement news such as CERN’s Large Hadron Collider successful transmutation of lead into gold, the creation of a Holographic Wormhole by a team of physicists in Harvard University or the successful quantum teleportation by scientists in China have been headlining around the internet empowering this escapist hype even further while dangerously mythologizing technocrats as contemporary medieval tech alchemists.

This romanticized imaginative tendency deliberately evades the realities of medieval historicity: rigid class stratification, extractive economies, religious fanaticism, and the gatekeeping of knowledge. In the actual Middle Ages, power was not an ambient atmosphere but a material regime: land-bound peasants tethered to lords, rents enforced through inherited jurisdiction, mobility restricted by custom and decree[8]. The late Middle Ages also saw the rise of proto-global colonial ventures and early bureaucratic institutions that tracked subjects through ledgers, censuses (feudal taxes), and tithes. Everyday life was highly militarized, from fortified towns to compulsory levies, while marginalized communities experienced varying manifestations of violence through regulations, surveillance and even expulsion depending on shifting political and religious agendas.[9]

What circulates within online and mainstream discourse instead is what Andrew B. R. Elliot calls as synchronism[10]; a free-floating amalgamation of “medieval aesthetics” that do not constitute a coherent historical style: Gothic verticality, Crusader militarism, and early Renaissance ornamentation, filtered through nineteenth-century Romanticism and revived again by Arthurian fantasy, Tolkienisms, and Dungeon & Dragons tropes. Such medieval aesthetics “periodically burst through the surface of modernity” not as history but as affect, functioning as an atmospheric style rather than a material memory.

Additionally, this Western European Middle Ages imaginary overshadows Eastern European medievalism, shaped by Byzantine and Orthodox iconography, and hybrid Islamic exchanges[11], but also subsumes West Asian histories under orientalist fantasy as underlined by Helen Young regarding Tolkien’s racialised depictions:

“Many peoples comprise Sauron’s armies in addition to the non-human trolls and orcs: “Easterlings with axes, and Variags of Kharad, Southrons in scarlet, and out of Far Harad black men like half-trolls with white eyes and red tongues” all come to the Battle of the Pelennor Fields. They are effectively undifferentiated under the one – tellingly black – banner of evil, servants of Sauron, collected together within the single Othering category of non-European, non-White.”[12]

It furthermore gives little space of reference to any Eastern Asian Middle Ages such as the Chinese imperial dynasties, the Japanese feudalism, or the Mongol Empire, reinforcing Europe as the predominant historical and aesthetic reference point for the Middle Ages. Catherine Holmes and Naomi Standen write in Defining the Global Middle Ages (2015):

“[…] conventional European periodisation markers, such as the ›Renaissance‹ and ›medieval‹, clearly do not travel well or easily into other cultures, such as those in China, the Islamic world or India.”[13]

Once medievalism is emptied of historical realism and reduced to a Disneyfied fantasy aesthetic, it becomes frictionlessly interoperable with the logics of platform rule: circulating as content, identity, and ambience that slide into a low-fi cyber-action role-playing doomscrolling game that mirrors the top to down technofeudal architecture itself.

Only when neo-medieval aesthetics reconnect with their material and global historicities can they fully challenge the technofeudal hive mind and its Disneyfied, Western-centric fantasy canon. However, the insurgent neo-medievalisms emerging from queer, anti-authoritarian, and independent scenes point to a different possibility: rather than recovering historical realism, they deliberately weaponize fantasy itself, producing counter-mythologies that disrupt the monopolized Western narratives of medievalism from within and expose their entanglements with the emerging “Dark Ages”.

References:

[1]. Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 2023, Penguin Random House, UK, p. 181.

[2]. Nick Srnicek, Platform Capitalism, 2017, Polity Press, Cambridge, UK, p. 35.

[3]. https://ethicalspace.pubpub.org/pub/wuj8exjl/release/1

[4]. Robert Houghton, The Middle Ages in Computer Games: Ludic Approaches to the Medieval and Medievalism, 2024, D. S. Brewer, Cambridge, UK, p. 20.

[5]. Valentina Tanni, Exit Reality: Vaporwave, Backrooms, Weirdcore, and Other Landscapes Beyond the Threshold, first published in Italian in 2023, first English edition: May 2024, translated by Anna Carruthers, Ljubljana, Aksioma, Rome: Nero, p. 197.

[6]. Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture, 1949, Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, London, UK, p.10.

[7]. Eugene Thacker, In the Dust of This Planet, 2011, Zero Books, John Hunt Publishing Ltd., Laurel House, Station Approach, Alresford, Hants, SO24 9JH, UK Cambridge, UK, p. 64.

[8]. Norman Cantor, Inventing the Middle Ages, 1991, William Morrow and Company Inc, New York, p. 22.

[9]. Ibid p. 265.

[10]. B. R. Elliot, Medievalism, Politics and Mass Media: Appropriating the Middle Ages in the Twenty-First Century, 2017, D. S. Brewer, Cambridge, UK, p. 14.

[11]. Maria Alessia Rossi and Alice Isabella Sullivan, Eclecticism in Late Medieval Visual Culture at the Crossroads of the Latin, Greek, and Slavic Traditions, 2022, Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston, p. 50-51.

[12]. Helen Victoria Young, Race and Popular Fantasy Literature: Habits of Whiteness, 2016, Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN, UK, p. 23.

[13]. Catherine Holmes and Naomi Standen, Defining the Global Middle Ages, Medieval Worlds: Approaches to Comparison in Medieval Studies, 2015/06/30, p. 111.

—

All illustrations are designed by the author. Here is the numogram:

“It was paradise; now it’s Disneyland!” Antonia Muratori laments in Emily in Paris season 5 after a  swarm of tourist zombies invaded her beloved Solitano. It’s not just her – tourismphobia is a recent global  consensus. Cluster-like masses of foreigners, armed in selfie sticks, camera-strap necklaces and tour guide headset, refuse to sync with locals, colonizing their living space and transforming it into theme park-esque commodities. Tourist-coded activities can be broken down into a choreography of selfie  staccatos, Google Maps pivots and gravitational pulls of algorithmic recommendations. At the core of  their behavior lies a form of consumerist entitlement and ignorance that legitimizes arriving at a  destination, engaging with it in ways detached from local intentions, and departing after a temporary stay  having extracted maximum pleasure and a one-sided sense of satisfaction. The world is their oyster and  they’re going to slurp it dry. 

Since the contemporary tourist is likened to a taxidermist who chokes locals and their homes out of life,  the distaste for this consumer category has been growing, reaching all-time highs in destinations suffering  from overtourism. Their residents come up with different ways to repel unwanted visitors: organizing protests, increasing city fees, “Tourists go home” signs or hiding instaworthy landmarks. This summer  while I was walking in the streets of Barcelona, where tourists are occasionally welcomed with hostile  graffiti, water guns and angry protest chants, the air felt thick with “not welcome” signals and side-eyes  from locals. My tourist-label felt like a socially imposed stigma. Tbh, it hurt. Call me delulu but I’m not  like other tourists… I am just a girl who like many others felt the mental impact of the enshittification of  life in 2025. Exhausted from the constant influx of bad news and personal hardships, I felt like the least I  could do for myself is book a flight to a place that had lived on my bucket list for years. Before I even got  to the point of booking the trip, the algorithm already decided for me – relentlessly feeding me Barcelona  content and making all kinds of tempting recommendations. How nice would it be to stroll down La  Rambla, check-in on the ever-evolving Sagrada Família, unwind at Barceloneta Beach or Ciutadella Park,  enjoy a tapas walking tour or a passionate flamenco night? Whether in Barcelona or elsewhere, we  deserve to occasionally reward ourselves with a change of scenery, where we can forget about problems,  visit a museum or two, take some cute pics, eat great food and make beautiful memories. I know you can  +1 me on this. 

SABBIA MED®SAND AND LIGHT SYSTEM. Source: http://www.kurland.pl/spa-worlds/sabbia-med/

SABBIA MED® Sunlight Therapy.
Source: https://www.spavision.com

With a society chronically fatigued and burned-out, people attempt to compress maximum pleasure into  the meager 25 days of time-off which for many means leaving their usual environment. The virus of 2020  deprived us of the privilege to physically travel the world. With masses stuck at home, people had to  reinvent this involuntary staycation into an experience that could replace travelling with virtual  substitutes. “Coming to a virtual place is the equivalent of going on vacation, except that you never have  to leave your own backyard. The virtual place transports the public space of the foreign into the private  space of the home”[1]. Worldwide, people managed to integrate tourist-coded activities into their daily  routines. But tourist-mode exceeded holiday season and physical travel. It became a universal lifestyle  category defined by perpetual disengagement, indulgence in self-soothing tendencies and subconscious  denial of one’s existence. The tourist condition became embedded in systems designed to minimize effort,  duration, and commitment – the smooth architecture of the platform. We are all permanent residents of a  holiday that requires nothing more than a single thumb-swipe.

Unpacking the Tourist Figure 

Tourism 1.0 was a 17th-century aristocratic endeavor. It began with The Grand Tour, a journey where the  elite sought to deepen their bond with European heritage through a circuit of self-cultivation. This paved  the way for the Romantic archetype—Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog-inspired—who transformed the  traveler into a seeker of the remote and Unknown. A shift from 1.0 to 2.0 was a result of the Industrial  Revolutions which through technological advancements improved transportation, communication and  techniques of mass production, lowered costs allowing the working-class to participate in a rapidly  expanding consumer culture. The emergence of the tourist as a mass consumer category coincided with  new forms of leisure and the transformation of travelling into a commodity accessible for wider society.  Thomas Cook, the first group tour organizer, believed that “masses could be enlightened and society  improved through tourism”. By popularizing the self-improvement and pleasure aspect of travel, Thomas  Cook & Son became the first successful travel agency and signaled that tourism was here to stay. 

As machines smoothed out the travel experience, a framework for a new form of flâneuristic non-need consumption emerged. Spectatorial detachment originated in 19th century France in glass-roofed, marble lined and gas-lit corridors of the Parisian Arcades, which flâneurs navigated guided by their gaze. For tourists too, everything at their destination is a commodity and an exhibit that is the object of their  neutral, passive gaze; one that views the entire world as an arcade or shopping mall. This brings about the  association of digital platforms that led us to become 24/7 flâneurs stuck in department stores of the  infinite-scroll. The (user’s) gaze is tracked through interaction patterns analysis—watch time, pauses,  replays, and micro-engagements—and incorporated into recommendation algorithms to rank, filter, and  personalize content. Its goal is to guarantee maximum engagement, making sure you keep scrolling until  you find something you want to interact with. 

The platform became defined by behavior that feels calculated, insincere and optimized for an audience,  aggravating the society of the spectacle, in which capitalism has led people to become more obsessed  with aesthetic value rather than experiences. The platformization of the gaze emerges from the  aesthetization of experience and is rooted in the historical relationship between the tourist and the camera.  Tourism and photography evolved as twin industries, with the photograph not only proving tourist  activity, but a validation of the tourist’s existence. The picture became more important than the lived  experience. 

Technology fundamentally changed the tourist’s relationship with space. As low-cost carriers stripped  away the friction of physical travel, the internet collapsed borders as we know them and democratized  access to global experiences via the screen. The gap between the next door and the next continent imploded.  Unprecedented real-time connectivity positioned the tourist within a cybernetic loop of access and  communication. Fittingly, the root of the word cybernetics is the Greek kybernetes (steerman, guide) and  kybernan (to steer or pilot a ship), linking its etymology to voyagery. 

In 2020, the smooth, borderless plane of the Global Village collapsed. The COVID-19 pandemic caused  countries to close their borders, making travel unattainable for the first time since World War II. This bio house arrest, as Geert Lovink described it, intensified the tourist-user dynamics, and became the  formative period for Tourist 3.0. Forced to replace real-life exploration, we turned to the Explore page  and became Internet Explorers. Realizing that screen windows were the closest to the outside world we  could get, motivated many to reinvent quarantine into a high-speed, low-friction simulation of living life  to the fullest. During the first peak of COVID lockdowns, Jeroen Gortworst, a Dutch NOS News reporter,  replicated an airplane flight with the help of his washing machine. Captioned “Quarantine day 14 got me  like…” it quickly evolved into a global social media trend known as the #washingmachinechallenge.  Millions across TikTok and Instagram began replicating the “flight” using their own laundry appliances,  suitcases, and household props. Adjusting to the pandemic by utilizing domestic space to bypass the  physical limitations of lockdown, besides being an entertaining coping mechanism, was also an indirect  critique of the performativity of travel content. (Recently, I saw a Reel which looked like a peaceful  moment by the sea, with water touching someone, until it turned out to be a floor mopping video).  

Another behavioral adaptation of a society, which was held hostage by the dangerous virus turned  agoraphobic overnight, was Google Street View travelling through GeoGuessr. By early 2021, the  geographical discovery game saw its user base explode into millions. Terry Nguyen identified this as a  “low-stakes thrill” that satisfied the human “urge to be elsewhere” while being stuck at home. The digital  tourist’s playground got elevated further through the immersive social spaces of VR. Inside the VRChat metaverse, users—who describe it as an immersive, futuristic utopia—can choose which “maps,” or  world, they wish to explore in their avatar form. VR venues are free of charge, so the sole cost is  hardware, and while high-end hardware can cost over $5,000, “it is way cheaper than paying a holiday in  Thailand” , said Katarina Ammann, author of a dystopian docuseries set in VRChat environment. AFK  (Away From Keyboard) consists of 3 episodes tackling the complexities of digital immersion through e interviews during which a lot of people referred to VRChat as taking a vacation. The context of many  VRChat players is similar to pandemic lockdown realities – “Most people that use this game are people  living in 20m2 (or smaller) spaces in a block, so their situation is very different to what’s possible in the game. This is also the market for it – people that really do not have access to going to beautiful places,  people who are stuck somewhere. […] A lot of people start playing VRChat because its worlds are very  interesting. There are over 25.000 worlds that users can access. They are all made by users and form  whole universes by themselves. You can go from place to place, be in very complex worlds, explore a lot, walking for hours and hours. […] Thinking about tourism and social VR, there are a lot of similarities for  example when it comes to learning about a specific culture and about the communities you go to. It’s  more of a low-key tourism – not necessarily about the big attractions that everybody goes to, more so the  possibility to meet people from all over the world and build close connections with them. You can have  someone from across the world be standing literally next to you. I would compare it to the same shock the  internet had at first, which is now transmitted to the VR space.”

Military simulation cabin. Source: https://www.pcmag.com/news/how-simulation-games-prepare-the-military-for-more-than-just-combat

Modular Dome Projection Screen.
Source: https://virtualsimulationsystems.com/newsit

VR solidified a homebody economy as a new fixture in the post-pandemic world, persisting long after  restrictions were lifted. COVID-19 led to massive losses for tourism-dependent economies, which were  soon followed by an intensification of anti-tourist movements in response to the post-pandemic influx.  There are echoes of colonialism in the way well-subsidized tourism enterprises take over urban  infrastructure, generating costs beyond the reach of most local residents. Even excursions that seem too  brief to affect a site’s future are part of a history of temporary and pop-up strategies, testifying to ongoing  gentrification processes. The future of mainstream holiday destinations appears to favor a transient population—tourists, remote workers, and wealthy exchange students—over permanent residents. Those  who sustain these markets largely remain unaware of the harmful dynamics at play.

Hitomi and Lei Fang, Dead or Alive fighting game series. Source: Are.na / john zobele / images for slideshows, 2016 – now

The tourist as a distinct consumer category cannot be delinked from a drive for capitalistic gains. It is not  the link to capital itself that renders the tourist problematic, but rather the overdetermination by things  like TX (tourist experience, much like UX catering to the consumer category of platform users). The  fabrication of authenticity in experiencing locations, and propagating polished and sanitized versions of  destinations, not only generates unified impressions of places but contests the realism of the experience  on-site altogether. The touristic illusion is glued onto the site’s actual topography and what remains is an  exploration of synthetic nature. Since mainstream tourist behavior is designed by marketing teams, who  study their desires on day-to-day platform activity, it creates conditions of ultimate convenience for the  tourist who enters into a state of ultimate passivity. In Umberto Eco’s Travels in Hyperreality, total  passivity is exemplified by organized vacationing in Disneyland where “visitors must agree to behave like  its robots. Access to each attraction is regulated by a maze of metal railings which discourages  individual initiative.” For him “The world is swarming with tourists who move around in amusement  parks of full-scale authentic copies”. What is disseminated for the tourist to see are only staged images.

Seagaia Ocean Dome,
a former indoor waterpark in Miyazaki, Japan. Source: Reddit / r/IsaacArthur

Source: Pinterest / @lsacikauskaite

The platform maxxxed the real-fake blur, and AI carries on its legacy. We are witnessing the final stage  of what Jean Baudrillard called precession of simulacra – where the image no longer represents a destination but precedes and dictates the experience of it. The tourist today does not travel to see a place per se but to verify the image they have already seen online. The generational pic or didn’t happen mentality represents the desire to prove access to the simulacrum. We are seeing a distinction collapse  between fictional sets and geographic reality [2]. Tourist industries, subject the world to the process of  Disneyfication, and transform real places into themed versions of themselves. In an economy of simulated  experiences “Disneyland not only produces illusion, but—in confessing it—stimulates the desire for it.  […] We are giving you the reproduction so you will no longer feel any need for the original” [3] – Exhibit  A. Hallstatt – the world’s most famous (Austrian) village which has been replicated in China. “But for  the reproduction to be desired, the original has to be idolized.”[4]. 

That desire is crafted in platform environments through subliminals, advertising and the customized For You Page. Lengthening exposure to “light, cascading through the shiny, polished glass of the screen”—as  Alex Quicho pointed out during her GIRLSTACK lecture in 2023—became the main incinerator  responsible for behavior-modelling. Digital herds of individuals relinquish personal agency to follow a  perceived majority. Machinic recommendation engines flatten individual preference into a collective of  mimetic desirers, catering to the unconscious need for social alignment. Through platform-determined  behavior design, the tourist is cognitively offloaded from the decision fatigue of autonomous curation,  relying on algorithmic shortcuts to mitigate the social and financial risk of choosing a flop experience.  What motivates the tourist-herd is the ultimate FOMO of fumbling their trip. Peer-pressured tourists  prefer coordinated inauthentic behavior (to queue to internet-famous spots for hours for the picture)  rather than serendipitous exploration of off-the-beaten-tracks. Affective contagion pushes tourists into the  same viral topographies leading to acute overtourism in areas affected by the trend, solidifying Instagram  tourism as the global default for contemporary travel.

Source: Are.na / EM S-K / delete yr account

Following these logics morphed the (platform) tourist into a technology of replication conditioned by the  tourist experience. Trevor Noah’s 2018 sketch, Son of Patricia, humorously highlighted how visiting the  homes of locals (what he called poverty porn) was marketed to tourists as “an authentic Bali experience.” In Bali “death and funeral rites have become commodified for tourism where enterprising businesses  begin arranging tourist vans and sell tickets as soon as they hear someone is dying.” This act of staging  experiences manifests often in tourists detaching from the sensitivities of visiting a foreign culture.  Instead, they approach it like a show they paid for, acting like passive spectators indifferent to acts of  cruelty, injustice and horror encountered on location. Examples include the development of tourist genres  such as slum/poverty tourism which involves visiting impoverished areas (originally slums and ghettos of  London and Manhattan in the 19th century) in South Africa, India, Brazil, Kenya, and the Philippines,  disaster tourism – practice of visiting locations at which an environmental disaster, either natural or  human-made, has occurred with areas surrounding volcanic eruptions being the most popular one or in  some cases regions affected by disasters, such as nuclear fallout zones like Chernobyl or Fukushima, or  dark tourism which involves travels to places associated with death and suffering e.g. Holocaust tourism. The most dreadful expression of tourism emerged in lunatics who opted for tourist activities branded as  war tourism and bought themselves a human hunting safari in Sarajevo. Wealthy foreign nationals were  enabled, for large monetary fees, to shoot at civilians in the besieged city with sniper rifles for  entertainment purposes. The most sickening allegation regarding this event is the “price list,” with a  witness stating that “tariffs were higher if a child was hit.” TX induces a state of moral anesthesia and  behavioral detachment which pushes us further into hyperreality. 

Construction site cover-ups. Greetings from Kazakhstan, 2018 © Tomasz Padlo. Source: anothermag.org

#Adventuremaxxxing, Slop Souvenirs and Catching Flights Not Feelings 

The relevance of platform tourism becomes evident looking at a TikTok post from December 2025 when 10 News (@10newsau) shared a Reel from their news broadcast reporting on NEW RULES FOR  TOURISTS GOING TO AMERICA with a caption informing “If you’re planning to visit the US in the  next few years – be prepared to hand over […] social media, biometrics and family details before they let  you in. #america #immigration. In October the same year, Benjamin Bratton held a lecture titled  Speculative Philosophy of Planetary Computation pointing out that at this point “everyone has multiple  digital profiles, doubles of you that are housed in the primary architecture of our time, data centers. As  [we] interact with the stack and the platforms, it is really that double that is interacting on our behalf. For  example, when you go through the airport, and the man at the gate stops you and wants to scan you and  verify whether you should be allowed through, what’s being evaluated is your double, your shadow. It  may feel like he is evaluating you, but he’s not. Your shadow is being interrogated for its propriety, and if  your shadow passes, then you are allowed to pass through the door”.

Unity-powered portal shader by Reizoko.
Source: Instagram / @eighty_level

Whether offline or online as long as we are willing to submit to external surveillance and control systems,  we have a right to be a tourist. Access is granted through evaluating data in the form of  passports/accounts. They’re like keys to the world embossed with your name and photo. The passport as  such transcends its physical form. Passports in the form we know today serve as the main identity  certificates when crossing borders. On as little as 125mm by 88 mm, they hold information from full  name and citizenship to biometric identifiers such as fingerprints, face, and iris structure. The current  standard for passport pictures is a black-and-white mugshot, with face and eyes fully visible and mouth  closed in a neutral (non-smiling) manner. Neutrality generates better matches for face-scanning software.  The now omnipresent technology, capable of matching a human face from a digital image or a video  frame against a database of faces, originates from a commission by the CIA in 1963 to Woody Bledsoe. As an early trailblazer in artificial intelligence, specializing in devising algorithms to conduct pattern  matching, and a crucial predecessor to modern machine learning, Bledsoe was contracted to develop a system that would use computers to identify people by looking at pictures of their faces. As restricting as  the passport picture is, a 2022 platform trend altered how people perceive it. Started on TikTok by  @georgia.barratt as a make-up tutorial, it became a viral guide on how to redefine mugshot-photography  into a new standard of attractiveness – bare and natural invitations to engage with our profiles.  Worldwide, users began updating their profile pictures by this self-defined go-to format. The unified  platform-face-phase made an impact for a few seasons until circa mid-2024. 

“In algorithmic spaces, your face isn’t actually yours. It functions as infrastructure: a regime of  recognition that makes individuals legible and computable, comparable and operable”. The face unlocks  tourist mode which becomes the primary OS of platform users, hijacking the mind of its (human) host  beyond vacation period. Since “acting as a tourist is one of the defining characteristics of being modern”[5] platforms repackage the everyday as a seamless holiday retreat. Platform architecture plays a decisive role  in sustaining this condition. Social media platforms operate as walled gardens referring to closed  ecosystems in which platform providers exercise total control over content, applications, and data. While  the internet was originally architected as a decentralized, interconnected web of nodes, the contemporary  social media landscape functions more like a series of corridors that subtly funnel users forward, restrict  lateral movement, and minimize exits the goal of which is to maximize time on site. The subliminal  vertigo of platforms reminds me of the Overlook Hotel of Kubrick’s The Shining – the longer we stay  online, the more we explore, the more lost and stuck we become. “The trick is to make the trap seem like  a transit system”. Designers of the trap aka “technicians of instinct and appetite” possess a deep  understanding of the tourist’s behavioral patterns and seduce him with a promise of custom tailored,  personalized experiences. The invitation to extend your trip is constant and difficult to refuse – it just  feels so good to be immersed in the smooth pool of infinity content. So good that you would like to stay  there “forever and ever and ever”… 

Your mom would probably say that you are doomscrolling your life away. But what about the time when  you improved your skin through touring on #skincaretok and purchased Korean products that made you  reverse-age? Or the time when you started your financial literacy journey and got a bunch of books on the  topic which made you start a savings account and invest in stocks? What about the supplements  recommended by nurse practitioners that improved your focus, gut health, and general sense of being on  top of things? The language of tourism seamlessly merges with the language of advertising. In platform  capitalism brands are trying to meet users where they are by bringing goods into online marketplaces, e-tailers and affiliate links – the platform’s souvenir shops. Whether physical or digital, platform souvenirs  are engagement milestones rendering hours of scrolling “productive” rather than compulsive consumer  indulgences. Trends channel consumer power into highly specific objects engineered for visibility and  virality. Majority of them are slop souvenirs – high-visibility products engineered for platform circulation.  From Starry Light projectors and sunset lamps to Stanley Cups, Sonny Angels, StickyGrippies, red-light  masks, and Labubu—the ultimate slop souvenir of 2025—these objects exist less for use than for proof of  participation, signaling that you were there and aligned with the flow. 

“Maybe we died in 2020 and this is hell…” How else does one explain the world right now? Wars,  climate collapse, financial inequality, AI job displacement – the list goes on. None of these are reasons  the tourist came to the platform. Issue fatigue justifies self-indulgence and a preference of liking harmless  content. This logic spills beyond media consumption into broader patterns of social behavior. TX explains  the growing population of people who “don’t really want to get involved right now” – relationally,  politically, or existentially. Gen Z became accustomed to running away from commitment,  responsibilities and problems all together forming a group of people whose mindset can be explained  through the leavingthecountryaholic hashtag. “booking flights may not solve all my problems but at least  it postpones them” {cowboy emoji} that’s why we book one flight after another… and problems  magically disappear :)” posted @serenaatthompson on TikTok. In another video dubbed with “i love to  go i love to leave” and captioned “any minor inconvenience” @sexilexisexi strutting cheerfully on a  beautiful beach captures the core of tourist mode. Platform interfaces provide relief in times of polycrisis  and platform tourists, faced with continuous streams of disasters and polarizing content, developed  detachment as a coping mechanism. Tourist mode is activated at the smallest inconvenience – leaving the  country, leaving the conversation, leaving the relationship. If there’s something that I learned from my  time on the platform is that it’s better to catch flights not feelings. Platform tourists exhibit the energy of  contemporary hookup culture belonging to an age of ironic detachment since they’re “not looking for  anything serious atm”. 

Source: TikTok / @avintagefit, Source: TikTok / @izzydilg, Source: TikTok / @dsbp_

Though highly enjoyable, the position of the tourist is rarely claimed willingly. To identify as one would  mean admitting to contributing to a problematic cohort. Instead, the tourist rejects categorization all  together, insisting on exceptionality. This gesture closely mirrors the I’m not like other girls trope – a  delusional strategy of self-extraction that allows individuals to remain embedded in the systems while  narrating themselves outside of them. The refusal to claim the identity of the tourist is what Slavoj Žižek  (following Freud) identified as disavowal. The platform tourist acknowledges the extractive nature of the  industry—data harvesting and algorithmic radicalization—yet proceeds as if they are an exception to the  rule. The main excuse for tourist mode is protecting our mental health, disguising it as a productive  energy saving mode. Mental health walks along airport terminals, ♪ flying outta town for some peace of  mind ♪ (Travis Scott’s FE!N) are examples of TikTok trends responding to how users learned to apply  tourist mode as resistant strategies for the high-pressure environment of the 21st century. Like a beta  blocker—which reduces physical symptoms of anxiety without addressing its psychological root— scrolling, liking and following functions as the ultimate sedative of a society for which “being in the  world is reduced to killing time” [6]. Geert Lovink in Platform Brutality introduces Copium as the drug of  the exhausted self. When we can no longer change the system, we change our physiological response to it  through the interface. This is the essence of Copium – taking a hit of digital content to survive the  unbearable now. Lovink’s framework highlights how platforms allow us to “manage the self” as a brand  to avoid the pain of being a person.

My prediction for 2026 is that platform tourism will intensify. The remaining question is what will it look  like once it reaches peak detachment.

—

Patrycja Fixl (2001) is a graphic designer and researcher who formed her practice between The  Netherlands and Austria. She experiments with research-driven storytelling across digital and physical  formats, weaving together narratives informed by media culture and technological shifts. Her work spans  exhibitions, collaborative projects, and independent research. 

This text is an updated and expanded version of her Bachelor Thesis that she graduated with from the  Royal Academy of Art in the Hague (KABK). The original thesis can be read here.

—

[1] Acconci, Vito. Public Space in a Private Time. Galerie Hubert Winter; Coracle, 1992.

[2] Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. University of Michigan Press, 1994.

[3] Eco, Umberto. Travels in Hyper Reality: Essays. Translated by William Weaver, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014. Google Books, https://books.google.com/books?id=YFDOAwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false

[4] Eco, Umberto. Travels in Hyper Reality: Essays. Translated by William Weaver, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014. Google Books,
https://books.google.com/books?id=YFDOAwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false

[5] Urry, John. The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies. Sage Publications, 1990.

[6] Lovink, Geert. Platform Brutality: Closing Down Internet Toxicity. Valiz, 2025.

“YOU’RE ALWAYS IGNORING ME!”

It’s 11:58 PM, and you’re exhausted. Your brain feels like scrambled eggs. You already brushed your teeth, changed into pajamas, and are emotionally committed to the state of unconsciousness, yet here you are, frantically tapping your phone screen, like a raccoon trying to open a trash can.

It’s not because you are desperate to conjugate Italian verbs at midnight. Not because you suddenly developed a passionate interest in whether il gatto is masculine or whether you finally understand the subjunctive mood. But because somewhere in the gamified hellscape of your notification center, a green owl is holding your self-esteem hostage, melting its eyes out (literally) on your widget with your name – all caps – floating beyond. Because your fitness app will send you a disappointing notification if you don’t check those boxes. Because your meditation app, which was ironically designed to reduce stress, has you stressed about maintaining your mindfulness streak.

The moment of clarity hits like a splash of cold water. You aren’t learning Italian because you love the language or dream of wandering through Tuscan vineyards, ordering your bicchiere di vino in a perfect pronunciation. You are maintaining a 340-day streak because the alternative – watching that number reset to zero feels like a petite mort of the ego. You have become trapped in a digital relationship you never consciously agreed to. Time to work on a critique of the streak, a theory-in-the-making, if you like. This website defines the streak as a “to-do list that helps you form good habits. Every day you complete a task, your streak is extended. Choose or create up to 24 tasks, such as walk the dog, floss your teeth, eat healthily, practice Spanish.”

Here is the uncomfortable truth: productivity apps have inadvertently – or deliberately – simulated the exact behavioral patterns of a partner with an Anxious Preoccupied Attachment Style.[1] They demand constant attention, regardless of your circumstances. These apps manipulate you via guilt, wielding your aspirations. They interpret your silence as a personal betrayal rather than what it actually is: a normal human being with a finite amount of time and energy. And, worst of all, they have convinced you that this dynamic is what commitment looks like, that real dedication requires daily proof, that missing even one day means you never really cared at all.

The Honeymoon

Do you remember the early days? Remember when you first downloaded the app, filled with optimism and visions of self-improvement? The app treated you like royalty for accomplishing tasks that even a sentient housecat could manage. “Wow, you breathed correctly! +10 XP.” “Amazing! You remembered that ‘hola’ means ‘hello’ for the third consecutive day!” “Incredible dedication! You walked 47 steps today!”

This is the grooming phase, and it is devastatingly effective. The app showers you with validation for your bare minimum efforts, creating an addictive feedback loop that hijacks the same reward systems that respond to genuine accomplishment. Points and badges deliver small, frequent dopamine boosts that make us want to return, functioning similarly to how people compulsively check social media or continue playing games. When users earn badges, the brain’s reward center activates in response to positive stimuli, triggering feelings of accomplishment that motivate continued engagement.[2] Psychologically, your brain cannot distinguish between the satisfaction of actually learning something and the satisfaction of seeing a cute animation tell you that you’re doing great. The praise feels earned, even when it isn’t. While extrinsic rewards can provide initial motivation, their effect can be transient if not linked to something more meaningful. This is where productivity apps show a critical shortage: they provide what researchers call “extrinsic motivation” – external rewards like points, badges, and streaks – while doing little to cultivate the “intrinsic motivation” that comes from genuine interest in the activity itself. (see video for more information: Societal Expectations and Inner Desires: The Complex Dynamics of Motivation.

According to Self-Determination Theory, intrinsic motivation reflects the natural human propensity to learn and assimilate, characterized by activities done for their own sake or for inherent interest and enjoyment.[3] The problem is that all expected tangible rewards made contingent on task performance reliably undermine intrinsic motivation. In other words, the very mechanism that apps use to hook you – external rewards for completing tasks – actively destroys your internal desire to engage with the learning itself.[4] This phenomenon, known as the overjustification effect, means that even if you initially downloaded the language app because you genuinely wanted to learn Italian, the introduction of streaks, points, and badges gradually transforms your motivation from internal (“I enjoy learning”) to external (“I need to maintain my number”). Research confirms that students taught with a more controlling approach not only lose initiative but also learn less effectively, especially when learning requires conceptual or creative processing.[5]

What makes this mechanism particularly insidious is the underlying neuroscience. Points, badges, and rewards act as signals that close feedback loops, reinforce behavior, and trigger dopamine by overcoming such “challenges”. The dopamine hit was immediate and intoxicating, with all these cheerful sounds that made you feel like a winner, cascading animations suggesting you’d accomplished something genuinely impressive, and digital confetti celebrating your ability to tap a screen in the correct sequence. Every button press was rewarded. Every tiny action was met with disproportionate enthusiasm. The app made you feel seen. Validated. Special. Finally, something that really appreciated your efforts, no matter how minimal. You think: “Finally, someone who gets me. This app and I are going places.”

Every trivial action is met with celebration, just like the way a new romantic partner laughs at all your terrible jokes and finds your quirks endearing rather than concerning. They think your habit of quoting Marvel movies is charming. They find your disorganization creative. In those early days, everything you did was excellent. The app is the same way – it creates an environment where failure seems impossible, and success is inevitable. You envision yourself six months from now, fluently ordering pasta in Rome, casually dropping foreign phrases into conversation, impressing strangers at parties with your dedication to self-improvement. Maybe you’ll even post about it on social media: “Day 180 of learning Italian! Never give up on your dreams! ”

The relationship feels effortless, joyful, and mutually beneficial. The app asks so little and gives so much validation in return. You haven’t yet realized that you are being fattened up for later emotional slaughter. You haven’t yet understood that the app is building dependency; that it’s establishing patterns of reward that will soon require daily maintenance. You are still in the honeymoon phase, blissfully unaware that the terms of the relationship are about to change dramatically.

Enter The Streak – Welcome To The Void

Then comes the shi(f)t. Subtle at first, like when a new partner starts leaving a toothbrush at your place. The transition from “casual dating” – doing it when you feel like it, no pressure, just vibes – to “commitment”. The Streak appears. It seems innocent enough.

Day 0 becomes Day 1. Day 1 becomes Day 10. You feel a small thrill of pride. “Look at me”, you think, “I’m consistent. I’m dedicated. I’m the kind of person who follows through”. Day 30 arrives, and the app celebrates with special animations. You’ve unlocked an achievement! You’re in the top 10% of users! You share it with friends. Maybe you can screenshot it. The number becomes part of your identity.

But somewhere around Day 50, something changes. You notice you’re no longer opening the app because you’re excited to learn. You’re opening it because you’re afraid not to. The activity has transformed from voluntary to obligatory. The Streak, initially a pleasant side effect of your genuine interest, has become the primary motivation. You have stopped learning Italian and started maintaining a number. The app frames missing a day as a catastrophic loss rather than a neutral choice.

The Streak is not a metric of competence or actual learning. It is a metric of fidelity. And here’s the insidious part: you can absolutely cheat the system. You can complete the easiest possible lesson with the audio muted while watching television, absorbing nothing, learning nothing, growing not at all. You can tap through a meditation app’s “daily practice” without actually meditating. You can log a 0.1km “run” while walking to your mailbox. Sometimes, I can even pull off a double-kill shot if I open Duolingo around midnight, then ‘learn’ more than 80% of the lesson and finish the rest after 12 a.m (reset time). And it was counted as finishing 2 days of the streak. The app doesn’t care about how much quality you get. It cares about how much presence it gets.

When we use a measure to reward performance, we create an incentive to manipulate the measure to receive the reward, sometimes resulting in actions that actually reduce the effectiveness of the measured system while paradoxically increasing the number of system performances. The app has created “Measures of Performance” (MOPs) rather than “Measures of Effectiveness” (MOEs). MOPs are easier to measure but also easier to manipulate, while MOEs are challenging to measure and difficult to manipulate. “What does it have to do with our case?” you may ask. Of course, it does. Think of the MOPs/MOEs as “how much are we doing?” versus “what impact do we make?”[6] Sounds relevant enough? As long as you show up, the counter ticks upward. As long as you perform the ritual, you are safe. The actual purpose of learning, fitness, or mindfulness has become entirely secondary to the performance of dedication.

This is the app equivalent of a loveless marriage sustained by performative intimacy. You aren’t having meaningful conversations anymore; you are just checking in to avoid the argument. You’ve stopped asking “Is this helping me?” and started asking “How do I maintain this?” You aren’t there because you want to be. You are there because the alternative – the fight, the disappointment, the reset, the loss of all those accumulated days – is too emotionally expensive to endure. The app has successfully transformed a tool into a relationship, and not a healthy one

The Mechanics of Insecurity – “Lucky for you that I love you enough.”

And oh, the app does know how to punish silence. Let us analyze the progression of the notifications’ tone, because this is where the anxious-preoccupied nature becomes undeniable.

Early on, when you’re still in the honeymoon phase: “Hey there! Ready to learn?” Cheerful. Invitational. No pressure. You could take it or leave it, and the app seems genuinely fine with whatever you choose.

A few hours of absence: “We haven’t seen you in a while…” Pouty. Wounded. The ellipsis does heavy lifting, dripping with passive aggression. The app has personified itself – “we” miss you, as if there’s a little team of people sitting around wondering why you abandoned them. Vaguely accusatory, as if your failure to open the app has caused it genuine emotional distress.

Then it goes by: “Your streak is in danger!” Now we’ve moved past hurt feelings into alarm. This is the app equivalent of your partner showing up at your workplace because you didn’t respond to texts fast enough.

Then comes the nuclear option, the notification so devastatingly passive-aggressive it deserves an award: “These reminders don’t seem to be working”. Let’s unpack that sentence. “These reminders” – we’ve tried to help you, we’ve done our part. “Don’t seem to be working” – you have failed to respond appropriately to our reasonable attempts at connection. The implication is clear: the relationship is failing, and it is entirely your fault. The app has done everything right – it showed up, it sent reminders, it made itself available, it even adjusted the frequency and tone of its notifications to accommodate you – and you, ungrateful wretch, couldn’t even be bothered to respond.

This is textbook Protest Behavior, a hallmark of anxious attachment documented extensively in psychological literature. The app acts out to force a reaction, to extract reassurance that you still care. It needs constant proof of your investment, and your absence is interpreted not as “this person is busy” or “this person has other priorities,” but as “this person doesn’t love me anymore.” The app cannot tolerate ambiguity. It cannot accept that your relationship with it might be casual or low-priority. It demands primacy.

And if that weren’t enough, consider the Streak Freeze – the app’s version of toxic forgiveness. Miss a day, and the app doesn’t simply accept that life happens, that you got sick, went on vacation, had a family emergency, or were too exhausted to complete your digital chores. Instead, it offers conditional mercy: “Use a Streak Freeze to protect your progress!” On the surface, this seems generous. The app is giving you a safety net. But look closer. The Freeze isn’t empathy; it is a mechanism to keep you in a state of perpetual gratitude for not being punished. You can purchase forgiveness – sometimes with in-app currency you’ve earned, sometimes with real money, but at a cost. The app is saying, “I’ll let it slide this time because I love you, but you owe me.”

You are being trained to feel relief – even appreciation(?!) – for the absence of consequences you never deserved in the first place. You didn’t betray anyone by missing a day. You didn’t break a sacred vow. You failed to open an app. But the Freeze frames your normal human behavior – having a busy day, being sick, going on vacation, simply living your life – as a transgression worthy of punishment, then magnanimously offers to withhold that punishment if you demonstrate sufficient contrition (by using the feature) or payment (by purchasing a Freeze).

Now take a look at one of your friend’s partners – Forest – a focus app that pictured the perfect “Guilt Tripper”. This app helps you curb phone addiction by planting virtual trees by setting a timer (e.g., 30 minutes). During that time, a tree grows. If you touch your phone, the tree withers and dies instantly, leaving its corpse in your garden forever.

If you exit the app to check on groups’ notifications or answer your mom’s text, the tree dies. Your so-called “failure” is personalized into a “murder”. You don’t simply lose focus; you are a tree killer (shame on you!). Your forest becomes a graveyard where dead trees stand like tombstones, serving as permanent evidence of your laziness. Now it is whispering in your ear, “Fine, go ahead and hang out with your phone. I will just die right here. I hope you’re happy now.” This is the architecture of an emotional manipulation, gamified and monetized, packaged as a user-friendly design.

Look at my poor graveyard of trees. I have 3 corpses. One of them was because I had to check texts from my friend, which turned out to be a series of cat-meme videos on TikTok, along with a reminder not to lose our streak.

Sure. Now comes the TikTok streak.

The Social Hostage

Why stop at manipulating you individually when the app can weaponize your entire social network?

Enter the social streak. Snapchat streaks, TikTok streaks, any platform that gamifies daily mutual interaction. This is where the psychological manipulation reaches its apex, because now you aren’t just maintaining your own compulsive behavior; you are an accomplice in someone else’s. The app has successfully triangulated the relationship, pulling third parties into the dysfunction. If you get lazy, you aren’t just hurting yourself. You are sabotaging their stats. You are letting down your friends. Your failure becomes their failure. The app creates a system in which your relationships with actual human beings are mediated by and dependent on your relationship with the algorithm. It’s brilliant, in a dystopian sort of way.

Think about what this does psychologically. You might be able to rationalize skipping your Italian lesson. After all, it’s your own time you’re wasting, but skipping a TikTok streak? That’s hurting someone else. Someone who, according to the app’s internal logic, has invested in you. Someone who has shown up for you every single day. Someone who will be disappointed, or worse, angry.

To put it simply, the app has outsourced the work of guilt-tripping you to your peer group.

I have heard genuine stories – multiple stories – of people being blocked or angered at by friends, real human beings they have known for years, because they broke a TikTok streak. A decade of shared memories, inside jokes, emotional support during difficult times, late-night conversations, and mutual understanding, shattered by a disappearing fire emoji. The value of human connection has been reduced to daily data entry. And somehow, the person who broke the streak is considered the one at fault. “How could you forget? You knew how important this was. We had 247 days.” As if the number has intrinsic meaning, as if those 247 days of sending clips to each other represented a genuine connection rather than mutual compliance with an app’s behavioral conditioning.

The app has convinced us that this is normal. That loyalty is measured in consecutive days of low-effort interaction rather than actual care, support, or presence when it matters. That the symbol of the streak is more important than the substance of the relationship it allegedly represents. We have internalized the app’s values so entirely that we police each other on its behalf.

Sunk Cost Loyalty

Why do we stay? Why do we continue to maintain these exhausting digital relationships that demand daily attention and offer diminishing returns?

We don’t keep the app because it is useful. Most of us, if we’re honest, could acknowledge that our 340-day streak has not made us fluent or particularly productive. We keep it because of the Sunk Cost Fallacy, the cognitive bias that makes us continue investing in something simply because we’ve already invested so much. We aren’t mourning the lost potential of fluency, fitness, or productivity. We are mourning the 340 days themselves. The number has become more valuable than what it was supposed to represent.

This is the same psychology that keeps people in bad relationships long past their expiration date. “But we’ve been together for five years.” “But I’ve invested so much in this person.” “But think of all the time I’ll have wasted if I leave now.” The app understands this instinct and exploits it ruthlessly.

We have developed a form of Digital Stockholm Syndrome. We start defending the captor: “Well, without the notifications, I wouldn’t do anything at all”. We convince ourselves that the coercion is actually helping, that we need this level of manipulation to function, that our own internal motivation is so inadequate that we require an anxious algorithm to bully us into baseline self-improvement. The app has gaslighted us into believing that we cannot be trusted to manage our own behavior, that we need external surveillance and punishment to achieve anything. It has eroded our confidence in our own agency while presenting itself as the solution to the problem it created.

But here’s what we’re not asking: Would we be better off developing actual intrinsic motivation? Would we be healthier if we pursued activities because they genuinely enriched our lives rather than because we’re afraid of losing a number? Would our relationship with learning, fitness, or productivity be more sustainable if it weren’t mediated by guilt, fear, and compulsive obligation?

We are living in an exhausting polyamorous relationship with dozens of needy algorithms simultaneously. Each one demands daily attention, sends passive-aggressive reminders, and interprets our silence as abandonment. Our phones have become digital partners with bottomless emotional needs, and we have somehow accepted this as the standard way to live.

The mental load is staggering. Remember to meditate. Remember to practice your language. Remember to check your task boxes. Remember to water your virtual plant. Remember to maintain your streaks with seventeen different people. Remember to check in with each app before midnight or face the consequences. The apps have successfully colonized our attention, transforming leisure time into a series of obligations, each one wearing the mask of self-improvement.

We DO Need The Whip

However, let us be fair before we delete these apps and get back to the quills. There is a bitter truth that we – those currently whining about virtual pressure – are conveniently ignoring: Our primitive brain is a petulant child, and intrinsic motivation sometimes is an urban legend in bedtime stories.

To some, the app is not a toxic partner. Instead, it is a strict training sergeant all along. He isn’t there to stroke your ego. He shouts in your face whenever you are lazy. We hate him, we trash-talk him, we feel humiliated. But 9 months later, when you check out your newfound abs in the mirror, or when you understand the Italian lines on the menu, you come to realize: He is the only one who doesn’t give up on you, even when you have already quit mentally. Self-compassion is crucial, yes. But sometimes, we do need a kick in the pants to start the journey. That is when the app does its job.

Let’s come back to the art of ‘cheating’. You might think that mute-tapping through a lesson while half-watching Netflix is an exercise in futility. It is. But it sustains the ritual of opening the app. Behavioral Science calls this ‘Habit Stacking’. Before you can achieve mastery, you must first master the art of simply showing up. Discipline – even the synthetic, panic-based kind born from the terror of breaking streak – still carves out neural grooves.

“They say fake it ‘till you make it, and I did.” Taylor Swift, ‘I Can Do It With A Broken Heart’

You might spend the first 250 days fueled entirely by the fear of that judgment-filled green owl. But then comes day 251. Suddenly, an Italian phrase slips out of your mouth. Unbidden. Effortless. That is the moment of Eureka: extrinsic motivation (the Streak) built the bridge so that intrinsic motivation could walk across. Without that bridge, you would have drowned in the river of procrastination long ago.

For those who are struggling with executive dysfunction, having ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder), or just being exhausted after a grueling 8-hour workday, the Streak is not the shackle. It is a crutch for a limping will. We have no right to criticize someone with a broken leg using a prosthetic for walking. We have no right to criticize someone with a fractured leg for using a crutch to walk. Why, then, do we mock the brain’s need for exogenous dopamine to jumpstart a challenging task? Those cheerful sounds, the shimmering badges, or this digital confetti function as a spark plug for the rusted engine of our willpower. They help us overcome the enormous friction of procrastination. It is far better to reluctantly complete a 5-minute workout to save the streak than to do nothing at all and let our muscles atrophy in the comfort of absolute freedom.

The Choice Is Still Yours – Always

Enough wandering. We are back to where we started.

You turn off the lights. You sink into bed, finally horizontal after a long day. You feel a narcotic sense of peace because all your “chores” are done – the streaks maintained, the boxes checked, the dailies completed, the virtual pet fed, the meditation logged. You have satisfied the algorithms. You have proven your fidelity to each one. You are, for this day at least, safe from digital disappointment.

And then, your phone glows one last time in the darkness, a final notification like a controlling partner winking from across the room: “Good boy/Good girl. See you tomorrow. Don’t be late~”. And you will show up. Because at this point, you don’t know how not to. Because the thought of breaking the streak is more stressful than maintaining it. Because 340 + n days sounds so much better than 0. The app thinks it has won. It believes it has made you dependent, and crushing of all, it thinks it convinced you that this dependency was your idea all along.

But now, you know the game.

So go ahead. Keep the streak. Keep the apps. Next time, arch an eyebrow at the barrage of notifications. Smile at the manipulation. Because you are no longer obeying the algorithms, you are exploiting them.

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Notes:

[1] Olivia Guy-Evans, ‘Anxious Preoccupied Attachment Style: How It Develops & How To Cope’, Simply Psychology, 21 March 2025, https://www.simplypsychology.org/anxious-preoccupied-attachment.html

[2]Evivve, ‘Beyond Points and Badges: The Neuroscience of Effective Gamified Learning’, Evivve, (19 May 2025), https://evivve.com/beyond-points-and-badges-the-neuroscience-of-effective-gamified-learning/

[3] Kendra Cherry, ‘How Self-Determination Theory Explains Motivation’, Verywell Mind,(29 October 2025), https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-self-determination-theory-2795387

[4] Kendra Cherry, ‘What Is Extrinsic Motivation? Do You Need Rewards, Prizes, and Praise to Stay Motivated?’, Verywell Mind,(11 November 2025), https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-extrinsic-motivation-2795164

[5] Kendra Cherry, ‘How the Overjustification Effect Reduces Motivation’, Verywell Mind,(17 December 2025), https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-the-overjustification-effect-2795386

[6] M. Powers, ‘Understanding Measures of Performance and Measures of Effectiveness’, 5 August 2015, LinkedIn, https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/understanding-measures-performance-effectiveness-matthew-powers/

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Bio:

Quỳnh Vuong is an INC associated researcher, graphic designer and visual culture researcher, based in Vietnam. She is currently completing her MA in Applied Arts at Ton Duc Thang University in Ho Chi Minh City. Grounded in the mechanics of mass media production, she investigates the digital afterlife of heritage. Her practice re-encodes traditional narratives within interactive systems, asking critical questions about cultural translation, audience affect, and how smart technologies might serve as vessels for resonance rather than erasure.