This thesis is prompted by the first formally recognized instance of deliberate disconnection in Indonesia’s digital transformation agenda. In this context, internet access is framed as a universal necessity and an instrument of progress and nation-building, promoted through “internetification” programs. Amidst this push, the Indigenous Baduy Dalam community recently requested that their territory be designated as an internet “blank spot.” This request was accommodated by the government, challenging the assumption that connectivity is universally beneficial and offering an important empirical case for analyzing the relations between the government and Indigenous communities in Indonesia.
Guided by the main research question: “How is the Baduy community’s refusal of internet connectivity understood, negotiated, and accommodated within Indonesia’s digital governance framework?”, I employed the Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Discourse (Keller, 2011; 2013) to identify multiple meanings of the internet across actor groups, drawing on semi-structured interviews and field observations. The analysis shows that while some meanings remained internal to specific groups, others circulated through processes of translation, giving rise to three discourse coalitions: a nation-building coalition framing the internet as a driver of integration and development; an adat-sovereignty coalition viewing it as a violation of sacred order and a source of external threat; and an intermediary coalition, composed of journalists, local experts, local officials, and activists, bridging the two through translation.
The intermediary coalition enabled the blank spot accommodation by translating the Baduy’s cosmologically grounded refusal into a rationale of moral protection and visibility risk, more closely aligned with the national government’s narratives. This translation allowed the refusal to be accepted as a culturally sensitive adaptation within the digital nation-building agenda, but in doing so, it stripped the refusal of its ontological depth. The result is a fragile discursive compromise, the success of which depends on how it is interpreted by different actors. This outcome reflects broader relational dynamics between Indigenous communities and the Indonesian government, which rest on a fragile equilibrium of partial inclusion contingent on alignment with dominant imaginaries and conditional recognition.
From these findings, there is a need for digital governance frameworks that recognize refusal as a legitimate stance, rather than subsuming Indigenous worlds into a singular vision of progress. I therefore call for the acknowledgement of ontological non-use in policy, which refers to refusal rooted in fundamentally different worldviews about technology’s place in life. This concept opens possibilities for sovereignty grounded in ontological differences and redefines user-technology relations, which, in turn, can contribute to a more contextualized digital transformation agenda based on a pluriversal approach.
Keywords: Baduy Dalam; Digital governance; Internet refusal; non-use; Discourse coalitions; Indigenous sovereignty; Pluriversal approach