Situating and pluralising the digital involuntary

Abstract

In this paper we revisit the Ricœur-inspired concept of the digital involuntary. First, we consider its implications for how we understand the changing nature of consciousness in a time of deepening A.I. influence on our lifeworld. Second, we explore the importance of moving beyond a concern for individual freedom to consider collectivised responses to the digital involuntary. Third, we consider how questions of digital freedom can be situated so as to better understand the differential social experience of the digital involuntary. Finally, we reflect on the implications of the reappropriation of the self within digital geography we originally proposed.

Introduction: The digital involuntary – Restating the case

We are grateful to Paolo Furia, Maximilian Gregor Hepach, Thomas Keating, Tess Osborne, and Paul Simpson for their generous, considered and stimulating commentaries on our original paper. Each commentary has generated a significant deepening of our own thinking about the emerging practices of freedom in a digital age and led us to understand more clearly the parameters, implications and limitations of our arguments. Our primary aim in writing the original paper was to establish a context for a critical human geography of digital life that neither eviscerates the subject, within a post-human account of technologically degraded agency, nor relies on an intellectually lazy foundation of digitally reinscribed subjectivity. Central to this project is the concept of the digital involuntary. For Ricœur (2007), the involuntary was primarily a bio-psychological realm of existence which encompassed character, the unconscious, and bodily functions and reflexes, all of which enable agency to be expressed but on terms that are not of human choosing. Introducing the notion of the digital involuntary was important to us for two reasons. As an intellectual position it insists on the inescapable dependence of the voluntary on the involuntary: the necessary is the precondition of the chosen. In this context, the digital involuntary enables us to maintain a focus on the human subject while not ascribing it an essentialised sovereignty. It also, helpfully, introduces the digital as a vital technological element of the embodied involuntary. This is not a technological element which thus supersedes, or acts in isolation from the bodily involuntary, but one which is tightly tied (through ever more intimate digital technologies) to the bio-psychological involuntary of Ricœur.

The paper's focus on social media platforms channelled our analysis in certain directions. We focused on the addictive network effects of digital platforms, the distributed authorship of the digital self, and the forms of predictions which emerge from these processes. Since completing the research associated with this paper (several years ago) and the writing of the article (over a year ago), we are aware that discussion of the impacts of smart technology on systems of freedom can now seem at best quaint, and at worst outdated. The rapid rise of A.I. has, however, clearly heightened the significance, and potential utility, of the idea of the digital involuntary. In seeking to automate complex decision-making, A.I. boosters appear to be constructing a new infrastructure of the digital involuntary which will not only impact upon individual agency but shape political, economic, military and cultural life for many years to come. Considering the A.I. Spring through the analytical lens we propose raises novel concerns that are not wholly anticipated within our initial speculations. The evermore complex digital neurology of A.I. systems, combined with their expanding capacity for data acquisition and learning is making it increasingly difficult for individuals, and society at large, to understand and challenge their insights and predictions. We are also concerned by the ways in which A.I. systems appear keen to deny the human inputs on which they rely. This appears to reflect a renunciation of a human involuntary resource which A.I.s cannot control or do without.

It is interesting to see how emerging critiques of the impacts of A.I. on the human experience implicitly invoke questions of freedom and the involuntary. In his analysis of consciousness in a time of A.I., Michael Pollan implicitly invokes the digital involuntary in interesting ways (2026). Consciousness reflects the complex interplay between the voluntary and involuntary. As a form of relentless cognitive noise, consciousness is not something we can easily control (Pollan, 2026). It is involuntary to the extent that it is prompted by contextual stimuli beyond our control and characterised by psychological ruminations we are swept along with. Yet it is clearly possible to direct our consciousness in pursuit of desired tasks and goals. For Pollan, a key ethical question for the individual is the degree to which we can own the noise of our consciousness (2026). The extent to which we can direct our consciousness in an age of A.I. rests, in part, on our awareness of how little (technological or psychological) control of our consciousness we have. To put things another way, the extent to which our agency can be expressed in and through our consciousness depends on our awareness of the digital (and indeed biological/psychological) involuntary. Pollan argues that the whole history of technology is a history marked by the increasing ability of humans to not have to engage our focused consciousness (this is a freedom from consciousness that other members of the animal kingdom do not have lest they get eaten). So, technology gives us the freedom to not always have to be conscious, and with the rise of A.I. this freedom from consciousness extends even into relatively advanced cognitive tasks. Pollan (2026) introduces the intriguing notion of consciousness hygiene as an antidote to the worst effects of the digital involuntary on the human condition. Hygiene in this context does not mean maintaining a technologically pure consciousness but being vigilant about how, with the rise of A.I. and attendant digital systems, our consciousness could be subject to manipulation. Again, this is not to suggest that our consciousness is not being constantly manipulated but to understand the difference between a voluntary opening of consciousness to influence (as, Pollan suggests, in reading), and the hidden manipulation of individual and collective consciousness within the digital involuntary. In this context, as an attempt to draw attention to the conditions under which we consent to digital technology (as opposed to rejecting and resisting it) the underlying purpose of our paper appears to be of growing urgency.

In the remainder of this article we offer rejoinders to the five commentaries on the original paper. These responses have been organised in two sections, with the first exploring questions of situating and collectivising the digital involuntary and the second exploring the reappropriation of the self within digital geography.

Situating, co-existing and the digital involuntary as a collective problem

It is, perhaps, inevitable that in exploring questions of freedom through a loosely phenomenologist framework that the individualising problematics of such an approach would surface in our analysis. We are thus grateful to Simpson (2026), Keating (2026) and Osborne (2026) who together suggest ways of pluralising and situating accounts of (post)phenomenological freedom. Simpson persuasively outlines the value of subjecting our Ricœurian approach to a co-existential reading of the digital voluntary and involuntary. Drawing on Jean-Luc Nancy's (2000) co-existential ontology and Esposito's (2013) explorations of community and immunity, Simpson encourages us to think of freedom less as an individual possession and more as a plural opening. We acknowledge that in focusing on the human negotiation of freedom within digital life that our approach focused on individually reported experience. Nevertheless, the reason we utilised a SenseMaker survey tool was, in part, because it could visualise different clusters of human experience. This method could, however, only offer a relatively superficial account of the collective experience of digital life and freedom. It is undoubtedly important to consider the impacts which digital technology has on our sense of community and obligation and the related forms of collective agency which arise from these pluralities. Asking ‘what it is like to be with digital others’ is a critical perspective to bring to bear within emerging analyses of the digital involuntary and its impacts on our associations and capacities for collective action (Simpson, 2026). Our discussion of Cheney-Lippold's (2017) digital self is instructive in this context. Despite its name, the digital self is always already an algorithmically orchestrated plurality of selves: reflecting as it does a predictive resource that is calibrated not only on the basis of our own previous actions but also on the actions of others. The digital self thus amalgamates while keeping us apart – it offers a communion with no obligation or possibility for collective agency.

Simpson's reflections on speaking as a ‘we’ connects with Keating's observations of the ethical and normative dimensions of the digital involuntary. Drawing on the insights of Bernard Stiegler (2009, 2013), Keating argues that the needs and desires for and of freedom are technologically conditioned experiences that are never contained within the individual subject. Echoing Pollan's observation (above), we support Keating's insistence (following Stiegler) that freedom cannot be parsed out from the technological: it is always a pre-existing condition of the technological. Keating's primary challenge to our analysis is to ask how we can know when changing our relation to the digital involuntary (as opposed to changing it in itself) is good enough. Changing norms around digital privacy in this regard are particularly salutary. Following the sharing cultures of smart technology and the digital scraping cultures of A.I., will future generations even be able to perceive the value of privacy as it once was? From a normative perspective, changing our own awareness of the implications of the digital involuntary is very unlikely to be enough to move the dial (or even hold the line) of human freedom in the Silicon Age. We thus agree with Keating that ultimately ‘freedom is a collective problem of cultivating conditions for thinking otherwise’ (2026). We, nevertheless, maintain that even as a collective action problem the freedom conditioning power of the digital involuntary rarely bypasses the human altogether (despite the illusions of fauxtomation pedalled by technologists). Establishing greater individual awareness of our collective consent to the digital involuntary is thus a critical foundation for collective change. Changing it for myself does not have to be a defeatist position of conformity, it may be a requisite for changing it for ourselves.

Simpson and Keating's reflections suggest the importance of situating our experience of the digital involuntary within collective social frames. Osborne (2026) also argues for a more ‘situated’ account of the digital involuntary. Osborne outlines the value of a socially differentiated and patterned analysis of the interplay of the digital voluntary and involuntary. We agree with Osborne that the digital involuntary is socially produced and historically conditioned and, as such, is experienced by different social groups in very different ways. As mentioned previously, our choice of a SenseMaker survey tool was in part an attempt to map out this varied social experience of the digital involuntary and thus avoid a standard, ‘averaged-out’ account. We acknowledge the bias within our survey sample and that those that we surveyed are likely to have much more digital agency and freedom than many of the most marginalised in society. However, while we support more situated, ethnographic, studies of the differentiated experiences of the digital involuntary, we are keen to ensure that accounts of the involuntary do not become subsumed within a deterministic sea of social and historical explanation.

Reappropriating the self

Taken together the reflections of Furia (2026) and Hepach (2026) offer salutary insights into our attempts to reappropriate the self within critical (but not apocalyptic) accounts of digital life. Furia shrewdly traces our particular use of the Kantian-inspired tendencies of the young Ricœur. Ricœur's work is particularly important in this regard because in its insistence on a conditional reappropriation of the self it facilitates an analytical perspective that is neither technophobic (focusing on the threat of the technological to the freedom of the subject) nor technophilic (revealing the enhanced subjective agency associated with the technological). Furia's comparison of the digital involuntary with the preceding era of the televisual is instructive in this regard. Comparing the digital involuntary, with its cultures of interactive sharing and heightened sense of choice, with the televisual era's more passive cultures of mass consumption reminds us of the ethically contingent and uncertain impacts of the technological on emergent experiences in the digital lifeworld.

Hepach's analysis of the connections between the digital involuntary and memory offers a fascinating working through of the conditionally reappropriated technological subject we attempted to excavate. Hepach positions memory at the intersection of the Ricœurian voluntary and involuntary. As Freud revealed, our inability to voluntarily forget is a defining characteristic of the human (psychological) condition. And yet, involuntary forgetting is equally vital to human functioning (less we be subject to stifling rumination). As Hepach artfully reveals, the rise of digital technology further complicates the conditions of remembering and forgetting. For many, it has now become routine to consent to the involuntary, automatic acts of remembering facilitated by digital technology. But when we digitally outsource memory these acts become complicit within the forging of new forms of subjectivity, identity and decision-making. These new systems of digital memory are potentially empowering, but as Hepach points out they are also open to manipulation and gaslighting as we struggle to know precisely how it is we come to remember certain things and not others and why we remember them in the specific ways we do. We acknowledge Hepach's critique that we are too firm in our assertion of the infallibility of digital remembering. The hallucinations of A.I. are a constant reminder that if memory is a techno-biological process the technological has frailties (albeit different frailties) just like the biological. What appears to be clear, however is that the reappropriation of the subject in the age of smart tech and A.I. is clearly a subject whose patterning of memory and identity is experientially inseparable from the digital involuntary.