Commoning in enclosures? Recursive organizing of places in the digital age

Tales of the commons are interwoven with enclosure and resistance, and there is an ongoing ambiguity between commons within enclosures and beyond them. Most recently, scholars have turned attention to digital commons, including those enacted in the enclosures of platform capitalist organizations like Facebook. In this paper, we build on debates about organizing the commons by focusing on the interplay of physical places “offline” with digital commoning, a process which organizes both digital and physical places. We propose that this is characterized by a recursive relationship whereby successive commoning practices occurring both online and offline mutually influence each other across at least three moments. We focus on the practices of commoning enacted by two “Groups” within the digital enclosure of Facebook—fans of the band Idles and residents of a housing estate—and how these recursively connect to offline places. This makes visible the governance, labor, and resources required to sustain both digital and physical commons through maintenance, care, and mundane politics. We thus make a theoretical contribution to understanding the relationship between commoning in digital enclosures and physical places as a recursive process, while also contributing to empirical understandings of how commoning in enclosures makes visible modes of organizing resistance amidst the political economy of digital capitalism, a process which ties to physical places helps strengthen.