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 and failures the space for creativity the system's smoothness would foreclose.
In the AI Story
De Certeau's analysis of the Luddites, implicit throughout his work and explicit in his readings of industrial history, frames machine-breaking as strategic resistance: an attempt to alter the system on the system's terms through direct confrontation. The gesture was visible, dramatic, and catastrophic—it invited retaliation, justified legal suppression, and accelerated the very mechanization it opposed. De Certeau did not romanticize the Luddites' defeat, but he did observe that another form of resistance persisted: workers who used the machines. Not to produce what the factory owner wanted, or not only that, but to produce what the workers wanted—using the machines during off-hours, repurposing materials, redirecting outputs. This resistance was invisible to the factory owner because it did not disrupt production. It simply appropriated the means of production for ends the owner did not control.
The AI platform wants engagement. It wants data to improve the model. It wants users to operate within designed parameters, to use the tool as intended, to generate the metrics that demonstrate the product's value. The user who complies with these wants is not resisting. She is serving the platform's strategic purposes, even if she also serves her own. But the user who discovers unintended capabilities, who repurposes the model for tasks its designers did not contemplate, who finds in the model's architecture possibilities that exceed the platform's official vision—that user is practicing resistance through use. She is redirecting the platform's resources toward purposes the platform did not design for, using the tool in ways that generate value for herself without generating equivalent value for the platform.
The most significant contemporary form of this resistance is the creative misuse of AI tools. The teacher who uses a general-purpose model to create highly specialized educational materials adapted to one student's learning difficulties. The designer who uses a text model to generate structural suggestions for visual layouts. The researcher who uses a coding assistant to write poetry. Each appropriates the tool for a purpose it was not specifically designed for, producing outcomes that the platform's strategic logic did not anticipate. The resistance is invisible—the platform's analytics record engagement, prompts, outputs—but the meaning of the engagement, the practitioner's redirection of the tool toward her own purposes, is invisible to the strategic gaze that monitors from above.
Origin
De Certeau's focus on everyday resistance emerged from his studies of French workers in the 1970s and from his engagement with Antonio Gramsci's concept of hegemony—the idea that power operates not only through coercion but through the production of consent. Resistance, for de Certeau, is not the spectacular refusal but the daily, dispersed, nearly invisible deviation from the system's intended use.
Key Ideas
Resistance does not require refusal. The worker uses the machine; the use is what resists. Compliance in appearance, redirection in substance.
Invisible to power, real to the practitioner. The strategic system monitors outputs but cannot see the tactical redirection that transforms use into appropriation.
Creative misuse is paradigmatic resistance. Using AI tools for purposes they were not designed for—the teacher, the poet, the builder who discovers capabilities the platform did not advertise.
The Luddites chose strategic resistance and failed. The workers who survived found tactical resistance—using the factory's means for their own ends without confronting its power directly.
Appears in the Orange Pill Cycle
Further reading
- Michel de Certeau, "The Wig" section in The Practice of Everyday Life
- James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance (Yale University Press, 1990)
- Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith
- Robin D.G. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class