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This paper explores the animating ethos of digital unemployment services. Unlike human‐to‐human services, where the intention of policy is normally mediated by professionals, digital services are fully designed in the policy imagination. As a result, it is a pressing issue to understand the ethos that animates their development. To address this, we report on design thinking focus groups undertaken to support the development of a disruptive digital unemployment service that sought the views and responses of three different groups—senior policymakers, caseworkers and unemployed people in four European countries. Without prompting, each conversation variously problematised the imputed motivations of unemployed people, suggesting a form of paternalistic motivation that should only risked in‐person. From this, we suggest that the design of digital unemployment services may well be dominated by the axiomatic, uncritical mobilisation of motivation theory. Going further, we offer a brief genealogy of the form of motivation theory that surfaced in the study, highlighting its interesting, shared history in seminal studies on unemployment. As a result, we conclude, that rather than altering welfare, digitisation may reanimate, essentialise and make durable activation in new ways that deepen longstanding processes of “double activation”—activating public employment services as well as the unemployed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]