Withholding

Withholding is a cross-platform collective that interrogates the scrollable video form as an aesthetic / political site, and scrollable platforms (TikTok, Instagram Reels etc.) as domains that resemble the public square under contemporary technofeudal conditions.

To withhold is to refuse, to strike, to suspend participation in systems that metabolize attention into profit. Yet withholding is also what the scroll produces in us: sedentary, supine, disassociated. The project recognizes this contradiction and seeks to magnify it, making visible the hidden labor and compulsive gestures of scrolling until the nearly unbearable becomes fully unbearable.

The aim is to convert the passivity of private withdrawal into the passivity of collective refusal, where critique emerges from an acknowledgement of complicity rather than detachment.

Short-form works that expose and subvert the mechanics of scrolling, swiping, and commenting.