Digital detox and the ‘app-blocking app’: abstinence as a desire-regenerating force

Abstract

Purpose – This study aims to critically explore the role of abstinence in networks of desire (NoDs), examining how it shapes, curates and integrates emerging consumption passions. Design/methodology/approach – Using digital detoxing as an empirical context, the authors consider how attempts to abstain from certain consumption activities can function as a complex desire-regenerating force with the potential to diversify rather than disrupt consumers’ NoDs. Insights are drawn from a 12-month netnography and 21 interviews undertaken among self-identifying digital detoxers. Findings – Building upon Slavoj Žižek’s concept of interpassivity, the authors trace how digital detoxing practices often rely on market-located solutions, ultimately facilitating new, substitute and complementary modes of consumption. The authors identify three key processes – re-autonomisation, deceleration and re-sensitisation – that enable digital detoxing to reshape, excite and diversify consumers’ desires. Research limitations/implications – This study offers insights into how apolitical and pragmatic forms of abstinence – such as digital detoxing – contrast sharply with anti-consumption practices driven by shared political or ideological values. The authors highlight how the interplay between abstinence and market co-optation is grounded in continuous processes of deterritorialising and reterritorialising desire within NoDs. Practical implications – The privatised character of abstinence lacks the solidarity and co-operative vision needed to address systemic problems, becoming instead a gateway for consuming interpassive solutions. Making durable changes to a digitally saturated consumer culture requires interventions that go beyond turning individuals’ dissatisfactions into commercial opportunities (e.g. “app-blocking apps”, “unplugged holidays” or “dumb” phones) and move instead toward ethical technology design and broader structural and communal responses. Originality/value – The authors extend the theorisation of NoDs by showing how technocultural networks are sustained not just by consumers’ unfettered engagement with digital technologies but also by their ostensible resistance against them. The authors theorise the desire-regeneration processes that occur through abstinence projects, showing how consumers’ desires are continuously reshaped and redirected towards other market-located forms.