Counter-domestication through infrastructural inversion: User empowerment in digital platforms

This chapter discusses how the domestication of media and technologies in the form of digital platforms might facilitate a state of unaware data subjecthood and thereby increased exposure towards data capture and dataveillance. We investigate if and how the opposite of “counter-domestication” might be of help to strengthen empowerment and mitigate disempowerment. Our analysis builds on insights from media and communication studies as well as science and technology studies. The key ideas of ontological security and models of trust are complemented with the notions of “active non-participation” and “infrastructural inversion” to conceptually develop and substantiate “counter-domestication.” We aim to go beyond framing the popular notion of digital disconnection as a goal in itself. Our perspective should be seen as a means for helping users to engage more critically with – and even resist – data-driven media technologies (like messaging apps) that have become entangled social and corporate-computational infrastructures of everyday life. With this approach, we aim to re-instate domestication – in particular the opposite of counter-domestication – as a critical perspective on the role and meaning of media and technologies in everyday life. We conclude by embedding our approach within a broader multi-level approach for strengthening public interest values in the platform society.