Perhaps, what digitality calls for, then, is “not a speculative thought, not a philosophy, not even a theory, but an experience of writing, a path ventured, a series of “political” gestures" which Derrida likens to "the question of the person with no papers, crushed by so many machines." [10] He links the notion of being paperless (like undocumented workers, refugees without homes, etc) with technology. This is not specifically a technological problem. Those with access are increasingly pushed towards paperless-ness and those without access are either conceptualized as outside, lost (insofar as they cannot contribute to data-driven capitalism and consumption) or actually migrant, dispossessed of a history, an identity. Paperless. How does information capitalism feel about those "lost" individuals? Incapable of producing value, they are left behind by Silicon Valley innovation and relegated to the classical (industrial) status of the worker. Worse, they become subject to, and provide the bodies for, the global flows of money, power, work, and war.
The computer in all its deterritorializing and destabilizing power, makes us all without paper to varying degrees. This bureaucratic metaphor can extend to thinking about our own government’s relationship with our privacy and rights, the situation of labor and employment (across all social, economic, racial, and material boundaries) in late informated capitalism, and/or how identity and anonymity functions behind and inside the screen. Digits are brutally efficient, eminently traceable, alarmingly simple. They are the perfect tool.