Beyond the user and the tool: subjectivity, materiality & the commons in transforming digital futures
The Digital Collective (DC) is an interdisciplinary research platform on digitalisation at the University of Twente, the Netherlands. DC consists of social scientists and philosophers specialised in digitalisation and with domain expertise in health, higher education, artificial intelligence, and sustainability. 
Transcending these domains, DC unites around the commons as a framework for promoting digitalisation as a public good. To do so, DC aims to problematise the user- and tool-centric thinking that predominates in digitalisation research with the effect of individualising digital subjects and obscuring the broader social, political, economic, and ecological relations of digitality. In research and outreach, DC moves beyond engrained notions of ‘the user’ and ‘the tool’ with philosophical and social scientific perspectives that focus on digital subjectivities and digital infrastructures toward a vision of the digital commons.
Subjectivities beyond user and tool
The development and use of data in (self)governance can make it more efficient and effective. But datafication also excludes realities and subjectivities that do not match the narrow category of the ‘digital user’. In the healthcare sector, for instance, illness and disease become defined in quantitative terms to the neglect of qualitative experience. The necessarily experiential subject – partially captured by patient testimony – is then given insufficient attention in favour of data correlations, which can result in epistemic injustice (Fricker 2007) and the neglect of the moral subject. 
In higher education, the datafication of scientists leads to epistemic injustice too. The distribution of research budgets over departments based on measurable performance criteria – i.e. algorithmic allocation – amplifies a competitive market logic that does not take scientists’ normative considerations into account (Dix et al. 2019). In AI, training is oftentimes based on unreliable models or bias in data gathering. When undetected and unaccounted for, bias in AI leads to the perpetuation of stereotypes with real-world consequences. Finally, the user framing can be disempowering as it presents individuals as passive consumers of digital tools rather than active and creative citizens – political subjects – with an interest in collaboratively shaping the digitalization process (Lynch 2020).
These issues of citizenship, bias, and epistemic injustice do not stand alone. They are bound up with a narrow conception of ‘the digital user’ as a container term of behavioural tendencies and passive experiences which excludes moral, political and epistemic realities and subjectivities. As a collective, we seek to open the discourse to embrace subjectivities beyond the model of static and single dimensional users by investigating the limitations of the user framing in medical models, higher education metrics, AI, and digital sustainability solutions. More positively, DC aims to investigate how people can take an active role in digital tool development through citizen science and collaborative design informed by an ethics of care (Rainey, Erden & Resseguier 2022).
Socio-materiality of digital tools and digital use
A second shortcoming of the user/tool framing is that it restricts research on digitalisation to moments of design and use. This restriction obscures the extensive social and ecological costs that come with the material and logistical networks of digital infrastructure. 
DC highlights the socio-material reality of digital infrastructure and waste. It is geared towards digital futures that remain within planetary boundaries and seeks out infrastructures and lifestyles centred on basic digital needs and sufficiency. Two research directions stand out.
A focus on the socio-materiality of digital infrastructure underscores the experiences of specific groups of ‘affected non-users’ and the geographic inequities in costs and benefits of digitalisation. One can think, for instance, of the burden for people at sites of infrastructure construction and dismantling such data centre development, e-waste, or mining sites (Levenda and Mahmoudi 2019). It also draws focus to those performing the invisible labour required to power digitalisation (Gray and Suri 2019). These groups confront the downsides of digitalization even when they themselves will not use a particular digital tool or service.
Second, the socio-materiality of digital infrastructures leads beyond specific groups of non-users towards ‘all affected’. Zooming out, there is a more general tension between the powerful economic interests in the expansion of digital infrastructure and the interests of humanity in lower resource extraction and energy use to ensure a just and habitable world for all (Brevini 2020). These enormous social and ecological pressures draw focus to the systemic failures of current digitalisation models and the need to explore digital futures that are compatible with global justice, resource constraints and energy reduction.
Our common digital future
Bringing together novel insights around digital subjectivities and digital infrastructures, DC aims to articulate a vision of the digital commons in contrast to the predominant individualistic, private-sector models. A commons approach reframes several key debates around digitalisation. For instance, privacy is often posited in opposition to surveillance as a goal in digital policy and activism. 
Privacy, however, is often posited as an individual rather than a collective value, disconnected from political values like digital justice and democracy. Likewise in healthcare, digital technologies often aim at improving the health of the abstract, datafied individual instead of treating health as a collective, public good shaped by social relations (Sharon 2017). Digital health technology can thereby increase the degree of responsibility that users are considered to have for their own health, and to shift responsibility for wellbeing from the industries that create or perpetuate illness through overwork or poor health provision (Davies 2015). Although it is difficult to move beyond private interests, DC challenges big tech’s imaginaries of the digital future and its relentless pursuit of growth. Moving toward the digital commons requires exploring new collaborative and grassroots forms of innovation, new economic models, and new social and political orientations toward digitalisation in policy, education, and other spheres. All such developments require a fundamental shift in the dominant user-tool framing of digitalization research and debate.