Offpunk Manifesto — Ideias de Chirico

Offpunk Manifesto<br>April 15, 2026

The revolution will not be digitized.

• Versão em português<br>• Version française

At a time when hyper-connectivity is pointed to as a symptom of an inescapable future, a shy and uncomfortable movement is insinuating itself: that of purposeful and intentional disconnection. The adoption of “dumb phones” has grown in recent years. Digital cameras are being used again. As are cassette tapes. And also typewriters... There is also a movement towards adopting the newspaper. Even the minidisc, forgotten because of the mp3 player, has risen from the ashes.

At the beginning of the century, the internet was the promise of the final act of the “Global Village,” advocated by Marshall McLuhan. Computers, expensive and scarce (hence, sometimes communal), were portals to an otherworld. Governments, spending considerable sums, sought to ensure that poor classes were digitally “included.”

We got there. We are now heading towards the mark of three connected devices per person worldwide, according to Cisco Visual Network Index estimates for the 2020s.

The digital is ubiquitous and taken for granted. Included digitally whether we like it or not, we no longer connect to the internet. We simply live in it.

As if wearing a uniform, we keep our phones in our pockets to work, to live, to love.

Digital technology has ceased to be a tool and has become an environment — an environment from which one cannot escape. That is, a prison.

“Ensuring the non-digital is a duty, not a return to the past,” Giulio Cavalli.

In this scenario of compulsory, sometimes unnecessary, connectivity, true dissent isn't bypassing the system — it's simply refusing to be part of it.

As the belgian sci-fi writer and software developer Ploum argues, the “punks” of our era are those who dare to live without a smartphone — or “offpunks,” as I now prefer to call them.

Connection as a Weapon of War

The result of centralized, monopolistic technological development, the distribution of internet or digital services has become a weapon of war. When countries with “hard power” enter conflict, they seek to disrupt not only water and gas supplies — they cut off the internet as a wartime tactic. Russia did so in offensives against Ukraine; Israel does so within Palestine.

At the end of 2025, French judge Nicolas Guillou of the International Criminal Court lost all access to several American digital services — such as hosting, online shopping, and banking — provided by American companies like Airbnb, Amazon, and PayPal. The United States justified this sanction because Guillou issued arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, due to Israeli attacks of a genocidal nature in Palestinian territory. The United States is the main country supporting Israel's actions in Central Asia.

The offpunk stance is born from a simple and uncomfortable observation: the digital realm is fragile. At the same time, all social life is forcibly embedded within this environment. Therefore, this stance takes into account that one must not depend entirely on virtual services, at the risk of one of them being sanctioned or becoming unavailable. Examples like the Microsoft server outage that impacted banking services worldwide in mid-2024, the sanction of Twitter/X by the Brazilian government in late 2024, and the global outage of Amazon and Cloudflare servers in late 2025, which took down numerous domains on the internet, laid bare not only its fragility but also our dependence on these services.

When the system goes down — due to political sanction, outage, or war — what exists online simply evaporates. You are left helpless if your only option is digital.

After all, uninterrupted connection is not a guarantee, especially in countries of the global South or those under internal or external political conflict, or even in peace situation ― in the city of São Paulo, Brasil, due to its policy of outsourcing its energy supply from Italy, there are frequent power outages on rainy days. In these countries, one must always count on analog as a Plan B.

Digital Minimalism and Offpunk

It's important not to confuse “offpunk” with digital minimalism.

Digital minimalism is a liberal approach to disconnection, entirely focused on individual agency, without criticizing power structures.

Since a peaceful offline life is not possible, it strips away all immersive (or “addictive”) digital elements from it, in order to configure connected environments to be simulacra of an analog life. Off, ma non troppo.

What we truly need is the possibility of total disconnection; the right of going around without the needing of carrying the newest smartphone and being available for 24/7 communication.

Trine Syvertsen demonstrates very well in her “Digital Detox: The Politics of Disconnecting” (2020) how digital minimalism participates in a neoliberal agenda of shifting the...