This article examines how an ambitious public sector digitalization strategy, focused on motivating and enabling citizens to take up digital self-service, changes the nature of everyday encounters between citizens and frontline staff in public offices. Based on an ethnographic study from a citizen service centre in a Danish municipality, our analysis shows how the sense of time and space in these encounters is radically changed, and how the relationship between private and public is reframed in this context. In contrast to the idea of digital technologies as a neutral upgrade of the state administration leading to more efficient welfare provision, the article highlights the unintended effects of digitalization, showing how the traditional ideal of bureaucracy reflected in Weber’s legal-rational model, which described bureaucracy as hierarchical, rule-enforcing and impersonal, is reversed. We argue that attention to how digitalization changes daily bureaucratic encounters and the relation between public authorities and citizens, is lacking, both in policy and in the literature on digitalization and e-government.

Whether because of the structure of the apparatus or because of the structure of memory, it is certain that the noises of the first telephone conversations echo differently in my ear from those of today. They were nocturnal noises. No muse announces them. The night from which they came was the one that precedes every true birth.[…] Not many of those who use the apparatus know what devastation it once wreaked in family circles. The sound with which it