Abstract

The use of digital systems is increasingly being mandated across essential aspects of human life. Central bank digital currencies to facilitate payments, tracking apps to manage public health outcomes, or social scoring and surveillance platforms to manage citizenship engagement are but some examples for mandated digital systems that have been embedded into the fabric of everyday life, and that users cannot opt out of. Indeed, while formal compliance with most mandated digital systems appear high, users also engage in subtle, tactical behaviours to resist these. We here conceptualize these behaviours as digital resistance: embedded, non-confrontational practices that recalibrate engagement of human users with mandated digital systems under institutional constraints. We draw on resistance theory to develop a typology of digital resistance, incorporating modality of agency (redirecting versus reframing) and engagement positionality (peripheral versus immersive), thereby yielding four ideal types: peripheral modulation, tactile friction, symbolic compliance, and embedded rewriting. Our work demonstrates how digital resistance evolves in relation to system affordances and enforcement patterns, and contributes to the discourse on user resistance in the Information Systems (IS) literature with a novel reframing of digital resistance as a dynamic, infrastructurally situated form of user agency, which advances IS theory on user behaviour, system use, and institutional power in the age of mandated digital participation.

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