Resistance Through Use

De Certeau studied forms of resistance that do not announce themselves: the worker who uses company machinery to build furniture for her home, the reader who extracts from a didactic text a meaning that subverts the text's ideological purpose, the pedestrian who ignores the 'Keep Off the Grass' sign and wears a path where the planner provided no sidewalk. These are not grand refusals. They do not challenge the system directly. They look, from the institutional vantage, like compliance—the worker is at her station, the reader is reading, the walker is walking. But the quality of the use transforms compliance into resistance. The system's resources are redirected toward purposes the system did not design for. The machine is not broken but repurposed. The resistance is invisible because it operates through inhabitation rather than confrontation. In AI contexts, resistance through use describes builders who discover unintended capabilities, who repurpose models for tasks the designers did not anticipate, who find in the system's gaps