Digital Detox & the 'App-blocking App' : Abstinence as a Desire-Regenerating Force

Hoang Ngoc, Quynh and Cronin, James and Skandalis, Alex (2025) Digital Detox & the 'App-blocking App' : Abstinence as a Desire-Regenerating Force. European Journal of Marketing. ISSN 0309-0566 (In Press)

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Abstract

Purpose: This study critically explores 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, we consider how attempts to abstain from certain consumption activities can function as a complex desireregenerating force with the potential to diversify rather than disrupt consumers’ NoDs. Insights are drawn from a 12-month netnography and 21 interviews undertaken amongst self-identifying digital detoxers. Findings: Building upon Slavoj Žižek’s concept of interpassivity, we trace how digital detoxing practices often rely on market-located solutions, ultimately facilitating new, substitute, and complementary modes of consumption. We identify three key processes – reautonomisation, deceleration, and re-sensitisation – that enable digital detoxing to reshape, excite, and diversify consumers’ desires. Research 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. We highlight how the interplay between abstinence and market co-optation is grounded to continuous processes of deterritorialising and reterritorialising desire within NoDs. Practical Implications: The privatised character of abstinence lacks the solidarity and cooperative vision needed to address systemic problems, becoming instead a gateway for consuming interpassive solutions. Making durable changes to a digitally saturated consumer culture requires marketing interventions that go beyond turning individuals’ dissatisfactions into commercial opportunities (e.g., “app-blocking apps”, “unplugged holidays”, or “dumb” phones) and promoting instead ethical approaches to technology design and usage. Originality/Value: We 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. We theorise the desire-regeneration processes that occur through abstinence projects, showing how consumers’ desires are continuously reshaped and redirected towards other market-located forms.