The Inclusion Office

The Danish welfare state is one of the most digitally advanced in the world, and with digitalization reaching the forefront of the political agenda, the citizen has been expected to perform a transformation similar to that of the state toward ‘becoming digital’ (see Pors 2005). Since 2014, when it became mandatory for all Danish citizens to communicate with the state through the digital infrastructure ‘Digital Post’, digital citizenship as such has become a mandatory part of being a Danish citizen. With this ideal of the Digital Citizen, new exclusionary mechanisms have emerged, as not all citizens manage to live up to the requirements of The Digital State.
In this paper, we use interviews and case stories to analyse the position of these partially or non-digital citizens vis-à-vis a state which is becoming increasingly concerned with including them, not least through the (re-)establishment of an ‘inclusion office’ in the national Digitalisation Agency. If this inclusion does not succeed, it is feared, the non-digital citizens will become invisible to the state, and the state in its new, digital reconfiguration will be out of reach for them. At the same time, for the digital citizen, the state has more entry points than ever before, giving rise to new forms of societal inequality. The renewed concern that the state shows these ‘problematic’ citizens, e.g., through its ‘inclusion office’, can be conceptualized as a type of ‘care’ with new, built-in power dynamics (Bellacasa 2010) that we wish to unpack.