Situated digital involuntary: Intersectional digital freedom and agency

This commentary extends Whitehead and Hannah's account of the digital involuntary by situating it within the differentiated conditions of digital life. While their analysis reveals how freedom and compulsion are recursively produced through digital infrastructures, this commentary argues that such experiences are unevenly distributed. Drawing on Ricoeur's phenomenology of will and critical phenomenology's attention to difference, it develops the notion of a situated digital involuntary to show how freedom emerges through embodied, affective, and infrastructural conditions that are themselves socially patterned. Digital systems of recognition, verification, and automation materialise hierarchies, embedding inequality into the architectures of participation. The situated digital involuntary thus provides a way to conceptualise agency as both relational and stratified, capturing how digital infrastructures compel and enable differently across bodies and worlds, and how freedom itself is lived through these differentiated conditions.