Between 2014 and 2022, asylum seekers on mainland Greece could only initiate their claims by calling the government on Skype—yet their calls were rarely answered. This book immerses readers in the Kafkaesque abandonment and absurdity structured by digital borders. Asylum applicants endured oppressive disorientation and neglect, trapped in endless queues of unanswered calls. This immaterial bureaucracy—simultaneously haunting and taunting—blocked attempts at meaning-making, human contact, and international protection. Advancing the concept of ‘digital pushback’, Damianos demonstrates how governments increasingly use unspectacular tools to generate spectacularly violent realities with little to no accountability. Asylum Is Unavailable provides both a vivid portrait of human suffering and an urgent warning about embracing technology at the expense of humanity.

Asylum Is Unavailable:Absence and Absurdity at the Digital Border is published by University of California Press in September 2026.

Stephen Damianos is currently Executive Director of the Neurorights Foundation and Lecturer in Ethics and Public Policy at Cornell University.