Abstract
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.
Keywords
Facebook’s mission is to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.
Just as the groundedness of virtuality ties it to a specificity of location so too spaces and places are altered in their physicality and in their meaning through their embeddedness in networks of communication.
Introduction
This paper emerged from an interest in how two “digital commons”—online spaces collectively governed around sharing knowledge, support, and resources—remain tied to physical places. Digital platforms like Facebook promise to connect the world and, in doing so, to overcome the distance between people: to conquer geography. But as Doreen Massey reminds us, “the world” Facebook aims to “bring. . .closer together” is inextricably bound to physical places, which are altered—but certainly not dissolved—through their interwovenness with digital technologies. When digital space becomes a site of commoning, as in the cases which motivated our study, this placedness would seem to provide an important mechanism for organizing and sustaining them, particularly in light of the commodification and enclosures of digital space characterizing platform capitalism.
Clashes between commons and enclosure, which became an organizing force in the 16th century (Linebaugh, 2014), have generated a vibrant debate in organization studies about how contemporary commons—and the practice of commoning—contribute to the formation of alternative economies (De Angelis, 2007; De Angelis et al., 2014; Fournier, 2013), including through studies of digital platforms (e.g. Kostakis et al., 2018; Ossewaarde and Reijers, 2017; Papadimitropoulos, 2018, 2024; Wittel, 2013). However, this “platformization” (Helmond, 2015), or “platform capitalism” (Srnicek, 2017) is also heavily reliant on enclosing the “digital commons”—extracting common digital labor from users (e.g. online content creation), tracking online activity through digital surveillance, and monetizing that activity through paywalls or advertisements (Pignot, 2023; Shoshana, 2019). Put differently, while digital space may enable us to “communicate with nearly anyone across the globe” through the affordances of digital technologies, we generally “can’t determine the conditions in which we connect” (Muldoon, 2022: 2).
We approach this tension through an understanding that digital activity bears consequences for the organization of physical spaces and places (Beverungen et al., 2019; Beyes et al., 2022; Kostakis et al., 2018). Specifically, we foreground the interplay of physical places “offline” with digital technologies as a process which organizes both digital and physical places (Burke et al., 2023; Dacin et al., 2024; Halegoua, 2020; Halegoua and Polson, 2021; Husted and Plesner, 2017), wherein commoning is understood as a social process, underpinned by affective and material relationships and activities. This enables investigating a twofold problematic: the contradiction of commoning in digital spaces that are enclosed by capitalist organizations and concomitant question of commons enacted within enclosures and beyond them (De Angelis, 2007); and the extent and ways in which digital commoning connects to physical places “offline.” Our paper therefore asks: How does commoning occurring in digital enclosures relate to physical places?
To respond, we make a theoretical contribution to understanding the relationship between commoning in digital enclosures and physical places as a recursive process: successive commoning practices occurring both online and offline mutually influence each other, strengthen ties, and organize those involved. To do so, we build on existing studies of how organizing unfolds as a relation between digital and physical places (Burke et al., 2023; Husted and Plesner, 2017). We show how this relationship is one characterized by extension, whereby physical places are amplified, and reshaped, through a digital medium, while the digital commons is simultaneously influenced by what happens in physical places, creating new constellations of governance, labor, and resources to organize the commons across digital and physical place.
Empirically, we contribute to understanding 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. Our investigation into digital-physical recursivity involves inquiry into what is, in its primary function, a capitalist digital platform: Facebook. We examine the processes of commoning enacted in two Facebook “Groups”—one for fans of the band Idles and another for residents of a housing estate—and explore how these connect to offline places. These are exemplary of how digital commoning relates to places: each clearly articulates and enacts a “front-end” digital common within the “back-end” enclosure of Facebook (Bauwens et al., 2019) and, more importantly, both are reliant upon ties to physical places: concerts and fan meet-ups on the one hand, and everyday activities of the housing estate on the other. Each case inflects organizing toward a mode of being-in-common desirable for the participants that, as we show, recursively cascades across (at least) three moments: (a) the ways digital commons are governed through a set of informal rules and norms, (b) how commoning online materializes in places “offline,” and (c) the influence of organizing in physical places on digital commons. Through this, we discuss how the governance, labor, and resources of these digital-physical commons are organized through maintenance of place, a relational care for collective wellbeing, and a mundane, everyday politics.
The paper proceeds as follows. We first outline key conversations in organization studies concerning the formation of commons and the tension between digital commoning and enclosure. We then address the connections between digital commoning and physical places, drawing on organization scholars’ theorizations of place to propose the recursive nature of this digital-physical organizing. To examine this empirically, we next introduce the two cases studied and our approach to understanding how they organize in both digital and physical terms, before presenting a narrative of each case. This leads us to illuminate the recursive digital-physical commoning practices involved, and how these make visible processes of commons maintenance, relational care for collective wellbeing, and a mundane politics. We conclude by considering implications for the ongoing enclosures of digital space and the broader political economy of platforms, social media, and the Internet.
Digital commons, commoning, and enclosures
Digitally mediated communication offers unprecedented opportunities for non-hierarchical forms of organizing to emerge and thrive. Yet, digital technologies are also facing growing commodification and enclosure under platform capitalism (Srnicek, 2017). Our interest here is in one such form of non-hierarchical organizing, the “digital commons,” which has been increasingly integrated into capitalist production and market logics (Levine and Prietula, 2014; Ossewaarde and Reijers, 2017; Pignot, 2023; Walker et al., 2021). Given capitalism’s increasing dominance of digital space, there is therefore a need to understand the implications of digital commons for the organization of social life.
The commons refer to “forms of direct access to social wealth, access that is not mediated by competitive market relations” (De Angelis, 2003: 7). Relatedly, ‘commoning’ involves the ongoing work of creating and maintaining the commons, a process characterized by principles of accessibility, participation, and cooperation. Commoning therefore implies a group of people sharing resources (e.g. land, water; cf. Fournier, 2013), governing their own relations and (re)production processes in self-managed, horizontal ways (De Angelis, 2003, 2017). As such, commoning can be understood as the social organization of the commons through which a group can both distribute resources in common and sustain or reproduce itself through use in-common; commoning is a process of organizing both for the commons and of the commons (Fournier, 2013). It is an activity conducted “through labor with other resources”; it does not make a division between “labor” and “natural resources”” (Linebaugh, 2014: 13). Broadly speaking then, the “commons” refers to resources which are collectively managed through “commoning” activities by a collective rather than being privately or publicly owned, with an emphasis on shared assets that contribute to collective well-being.
Contemporary digital platforms are undergoing ongoing commodification processes through enclosure as digital activities, relationships, and resources are “enclosed” and turned into commodities (Fournier, 2013). Yet, in the digital sphere as well as the physical, the commons have an ambivalent relationship with capitalism. Namely, the commons are viewed as essential to both capitalist reproduction and to the development of anti-capitalist alternatives (e.g. De Angelis, 2007). In the context of platform capitalism, this ambiguity bears particular relevance as the digital commons “embody communitas and are characterized by rapidly evolving liminal or not so liminal structures, constantly interacting with the dominant capitalist superstructures” (Kostakis, 2018: 815). These interactions mean that commoning processes emerging within or organizing through digital infrastructure are often mediated by capitalist platforms of, for example, Facebook, while still mobilizing those digital spaces to organize in-common (Bauwens et al., 2019).
Bauwens et al. (2019) have further outlined the emergence of commoning in user-oriented digital enclosures can be understood through two layers of the platforms. The back-end layer of platforms such as Facebook entails the technological infrastructure which allows the platform to function, while the front-end provides the interface(s) where user interaction takes place. Most importantly for this paper, the back-end infrastructure is largely invisible yet sets limits on what is possible for front-end users. In terms of the question of commoning in enclosures, activities of commoning are still possible in the front-end but may face limitations due to the back-end infrastructure. It is in this fashion that commoning activities on platforms such as Facebook are constantly interacting with capitalist infrastructure (Kostakis, 2018) and therefore can be considered to emerge within enclosure.
Organization scholars have studied a range of possibilities for creating commons in the digital sphere. Older, open-source Internet cultures which emerged around message boards, Wikipedia, Pirate Bay, and the Creative Commons have been considered to provide examples of knowledge- or information-based forms of digital commons (Kostakis, 2018; Reijers and Ossewaarde, 2018; Wittel, 2013). Such examples arguably provided a more robust mode of commoning, with less capitalist limitations in the back-end infrastructure impacting the front-end user (Bauwens et al., 2019) But, as these commons have been increasingly integrated into capitalist modes of production and consumption, which colonize digital spaces and harness them to market logics, attention has shifted to commons that emerge through capitalist digital platforms (Ossewaarde and Reijers, 2017; Walker et al., 2021). This attention has led to debates in organization studies concerning rentier platforms and the sharing economy (Kostakis et al., 2018; Ossewaarde and Reijers, 2017; Pignot, 2023; Walker et al., 2021). Such scholarship has highlighted that platforms such as Airbnb or Uber transcend the digital and shape urban space, illustrating an increasing concern for the overlaps between digital activity and the physical world (Kostakis, 2018; Ossewaarde and Reijers, 2017; Reijers and Ossewaarde, 2018), which we return to subsequently.
However, there has been relatively little analysis of commoning as it emerges within the front-end of enclosed social media platforms, such as Facebook, nor how digital activity in these platforms’ common spaces is established and shaped in relation to physical places. Thus, our paper is motivated by an interest in the many digital commons which necessarily operate through capitalist enclosures, while also increasingly interrelating with physical places. We next develop a theorization of how the organization of commons is extended and amplified in ways that bridge the digital and the physical.
Organizing commons: from digital to physical place (and back)
The connections between places and processes of organization are an increasing area of research interest in organization studies (e.g. Courpasson et al., 2017; Crevani, 2019; Guthey et al., 2014; Stephenson et al., 2020). Historically, place has been understood as a geographical location—a physical or material form (Gieryn, 2000)—and “a center of meaning constructed by experience” (Tuan, 1975: 151). For example, Nash (2020) identifies place as having symbolic and material significance to understanding the lived power relations in an everyday context, focusing on how place-based experiences enable finance workers in the City of London to make sense of their shared work setting. However, the proliferation of digital technologies has prompted new ways of conceptualizing place and its significance for organizing (Dacin et al., 2024). The complexities of place, extending both online and offline, create a more complex meaning structure and “polymorphic” understanding that moves beyond a digital-physical opposition and toward a multilayered sensitivity to place in studies of organizing (ibid.; cf. Vandeventer et al., 2024a).
In reviewing recent organization scholarship on place, Dacin et al. (2024) note a trend toward understanding digital places as an amplifier for the experience of physical places. Indicatively, Burke et al. (2023) study the “online-offline translation” of interactions on Facebook into support for others in physical places during the Covid-19 pandemic, arguing that this enabled a better distribution of decision-making to places in need. Husted and Plesner (2017) similarly note the “oscillation” between online and offline spaces in organizing a radical political party, which requires navigating openness and closure. Approaching this digital-physical relationship differently, we suggest that the nature of ties between digital places and physical places is more reciprocal (Massey, 2005) and is characterized by a recursive relationship.
We propose that organizing in digital places—such as commoning—certainly augments physical places (Dacin et al., 2024), but experiences offline subsequently also feed into and (re)organize digital commoning, which then provides a resource for successive organizing in physical places, and so forth. These organizational geographies exhibit a ‘relational digital-physical dynamic’ that can be traced in specific cases. Thus, organizing digital commons tied to physical places has (at least) three moments, which are recursively linked: (i) the making of a digital common place within capitalist enclosures such as Facebook; (ii) the ways this digital commoning influences physical places; and (iii) the reciprocal impact of physical places on their associated digital commons. We briefly elaborate on each of these in turn.
Digital commoning as making place in enclosure Collectively governing spaces and sharing resources (i.e. commoning) can occur within the back-end constraints of capitalist digital platforms, such as Facebook, that serve as enclosures—spaces controlled and monetized by corporate entities. Despite existing within these enclosures, digital commoning carves out a unique place within the front-end of the platform that resists capitalist logic by sharing resources and facilitating collective action (Halegoua, 2020). This process involves reclaiming and repurposing digital spaces to serve collective, rather than purely commercial, goals. While the front-end digital commons exist within these back-end capitalist enclosures, they challenge and subvert them by nurturing non-market, community-driven activities and fostering a sense of belonging and purpose that transcends the platform’s intended use (Halegoua and Polson, 2021). Thus, enclosure, while at times a precondition for digital commoning, does not define and predetermine the places that come to exist there.
The influence of digital commoning on physical places Digital commoning not only creates shared digital places for users, but can also influence physical places with which these users are associated. This is a “hybrid” form of commons (Reijers and Ossewaarde, 2018), where digital and physical commoning are intertwined in an ongoing “translation” of online activities to an offline place (Burke et al., 2023). While Reijers and Ossewaarde (2018) focus on the hybridity of the Airbnb platform, other platforms like Facebook allow for the amplification of organizing efforts in physical places by facilitating support networks, enabling wayfinding, and fostering care (Burke et al., 2023). The digital commons can thus enhance the visibility and effectiveness of place-based organizing by providing tools for communication, coordination, and mobilization, leading to a more dynamic and relational understanding of place that transcends traditional geographical boundaries.
The impact of physical places on digital commons Characteristics of physical places are often reflected in the digital commons associated with them, influencing online interactions, practices of digital communities, and the nature of digital places themselves. For example, the cultural, historical, social, and material features of a place can inform the norms, values, artifacts, and practices within an associated digital place (e.g. Mahmoudi Farahani, 2016). In other words, organizing in physical places plays an important role in shaping a corresponding digital commons. Importantly, as many place-based communities may lack the resources or expertise to develop their own back-end digital infrastructure (e.g. open source tools), they instead rely on existing capitalist platforms that may not fully capture or reflect the nuances of their place-based identity. Thus, the features of offline places serve to counter the fact of organizing in digital enclosures, imparting on digital places-in-common the experiences and expressions of physical places. In this sense, the mundane politics which occur in physical and digital places can cascade into one another and therefore inform and shape the activities or actions of users across these forms of commoning.
The above can be considered a framework for investigating the relations between digital commons and places. Such an understanding runs counter to the view, held by many capitalist platforms, that physical places—and most notably the distances separating them—are a burden to be overcome. Promises to connect people from all over the world overlook and obviate the importance and “pleasure” (Massey, 2005: 94) of experiences in physical places, as well as their relevance for shaping digital places.
Before proceeding, it is important to note that we are not suggesting an opposition between digital and physical. Rather, we direct attention to the multiple layers to place created by digital-physical relationality, as has been observed by others (e.g. Burke et al., 2023; Husted and Plesner, 2017). As such, we build on previous debates regarding the organizational possibilities of commoning as a self-managed activity interwoven between digital activity and the physical world (Kostakis, 2018; Reijers and Ossewaarde, 2018; Wittel, 2013). If the digital affords communicative possibilities which facilitate the emergence and maintenance of relationships across geographical boundaries, then when relationally tied to physical places, both the digital and physical can become places organized together through a recursive process. Yet, as outlined previously, the commoning dynamics of shared governance, labor, and resources, which materialize across different digital and physical places, frequently and necessarily operate through capitalist enclosures such as Facebook (e.g. Kostakis, 2018). Thus, our framework builds on place-sensitive research in organization studies by taking an interest in the medium itself, foregrounding Facebook as an enclosure within which commoning occurs that is characterized by recursive ties to place-based organizing offline.
Research context and method
To investigate how digital commons are recursively tied to physical places, we draw on two projects which involved researching Facebook Groups that have connections with offline places, albeit to varying degrees. In the following, we first highlight the context of Facebook as a site for research, justifying our interest in linking commoning practices on this platform to physical places. We then outline the process of data collection and analysis for the two case studies.
Context: Digital commoning on Facebook linked to physical places
Like most capitalist infrastructure, Facebook relies on the extraction and enclosure of common resources: user’s data and content are captured, and their interactions tracked, enabling Facebook to monetize their user base through selling targeted advertising. As with many other social media platforms, Facebook has been critiqued for imposing data driven models on social life (Lovink, 2019; Simanowski, 2018) through its back-end infrastructure. Yet, Facebook nevertheless wholly relies on social interaction through more visible front-end features, where users interact and which is interwoven with everyday life, politics, and shared experiences, both in digital and physical contexts. To date, the relationship of Facebook to physical places, as a factor of everyday urban life, is not well understood (Ballatore et al., 2024).
Our study focused on a specific subset of front-end Facebook use, the “Group” function (Ballatore et al., 2024), which allows for large scale communication and the sharing of experiences among Group members (Zingale, 2013). This function has previously been identified as a digital infrastructure whereby people can come to know, experience, live, and work in urban environments, already highlighting the interconnection between Facebook Groups and places of urban life (Ballatore et al., 2024). 1 Thus, it is in this context—the Group function as a subset of Facebook—that we analyze the tension between the platform capitalist economy and the ongoing emergence and enclosure of digital commons, which are recursively linked to physical places.
We bring together two empirical studies that foreground this dynamic. The first focused on fans of the band Idles, an English rock band that is known for taking a socio-political stance in their music. The band has an avid following among fans, including through digital spaces like their fan-organized Facebook Group. The second engaged with residents of a Manchester (UK) housing estate, called “the Redbricks,” located in the historically radical neighborhood of Hulme. Redbricks residents, as in many other neighborhoods, use a Facebook Group to stay in touch with neighbors—although the nature of online (and offline) activity retains elements of Hulme’s radical character.
Both Groups were selected as their organizing extends and amplifies (Burke et al., 2023; Dacin et al., 2024; Husted and Plesner, 2017) an inherent, mundane politics of the physical places that Idles fans and Redbricks residents inhabit. Idles fans and music emphasize unity and solidarity, as well as social and political critique, drawing on influences from DIY, punk, Indie and otherwise alternative music culture. 2 Similarly, residents of the Redbricks engage in activities—including gardening, communal meals, political activism, cooperatively owned internet access, and more—that reflect an everyday politics of the estate (Vandeventer et al., 2024b). This politics of both groups, which is fostered in offline places where they gather, provides an essential catalytic mechanism for the digital Groups on Facebook which has significance because of this relationship between the digital and physical. This extends beyond isolated exchanges during uses of the platform (Ballatore et al., 2024) to enact a sustained relationality constituting digital-physical commoning.
Our cases are exemplary of how Facebook as a digital enclosure forms a shared backdrop within which commoning occurs and through ties to physical places. Still, there were differences, most notably arising from the nature of the contexts studied. In particular, the groups’ respective ties to physical place differed: one mobile (venues for Idles concerts) and the other fixed (the housing estate itself). Therefore, both instances of commoning in the front-end of Facebook’s digital enclosure enables us to observe the shared, as well as diverging, effects this digital placemaking has in different offline contexts.
Importantly, our case studies are enabled by the specific features of Facebook: namely, a stable Group page and controlling membership and access (via administrators, or “admins”), which already create the conditions for “bounding” particular Groups as commons. Arguably, this is an older generation of digital enclosure, which offer possibilities for commoning that are fewer (or perhaps even absent) in newer digital spaces like Instagram and TikTok. In the latter, social relations are algorithmically controlled via users’ feed as the main mode of relating. While Facebook also has a feed, we consider Groups to be a countermeasure that facilitates practices of commoning in enclosures as they operate differently. For example, Group moderation takes place by admins, who can express agreed rules for the Group and approve/remove posts, and can “ban” members. Groups retain an innately human—rather than data-driven—dimension to governing Groups as a digital commons, which reflects the sociality and mundane politics of their physical places (Ballatore et al., 2024).
However, it must be acknowledged that while the front-end aspect of Facebook, in the form of Groups, is the focus of the study, this is still tied to the back-end, capitalist and data-driven infrastructure which operates along the same or similar principles as newer platforms. As such, while the Group function enables a human dimension, it is only a limited countermeasure to the platform in the facilitation of commoning as a more mundane politics. It is therefore restricted in its transformative impact for the Facebook platform itself to provide a more overt political impact, as more “explicit” politics across the front-end can be quickly shut down through changes to the back-end infrastructure. We speculate that the political impacts of digital commons are more likely to emerge in the (recursive) relationship between the digital Group and the users’ experiences of physical place, through which this mundane politics cascades to generate new constellations of resistance. We return to this point in our conclusions.
Methods and data analysis
Both cases included ethnographic methods—participant observation, document and archival research, and interviews—that empirically engaged with the respective Groups and corresponding physical places offline. Data collection took place between October 2021–October 2022 (Idles) and November 2017–November 2018 (the Redbricks). Following Kozinets (2020) ethical guidelines for online research, each researcher contacted a Group admin to ensure they consented to inclusion in the research, then made an introductory post to each Group informing members of the research taking place. Data collection (see Table 1) included each researcher maintaining a fieldnote “immersion journal” (Kozinets, 2020), consisting of observations and reflections made during online interactions in the Groups. This was supplemented by collecting archival materials, in particular contextualized screenshots of Groups’ posts.
Data collection methods.
In online observations, both researchers identified a recurrent practice of posting about events or activities that were taking place offline (e.g. personal or social problems; cats; upcoming gigs or events). Therefore, online observations and archival research were supplemented in two ways. First, in-person observations were made of how members in both Groups interacted in physical places (Idles concerts, Redbricks residents’ activities), which were also recorded in the field notebook. Second, interviews were undertaken with members of both Groups, seeking to gain insights into the relationship between organizing online and physical places. Quotes in the findings are taken from interviews or posts in the respective Facebook Groups. Identifiable information has been removed, with pseudonyms used to preserve the anonymity of participants in the presentation of our findings.
Both cases were identified for other research purposes; however, each project uncovered unexpected instances of commoning occurring across digital and physical space. As a result, critical discussions (Skoglund and Holt, 2021: 1015) between the authors enabled a sensemaking exercise around these unexpected examples of commoning and their implications for understandings of organization. Data from the two cases were analyzed first through a mapping exercise in November 2023 to identify common conceptual overlaps with the existing studies. Following this initial analysis, we presented our findings at a workshop on the topic of “commoning” in June 2024, which allowed us to validate our work in dialogue with experts in the field. We subsequently applied a narrative approach (e.g. Czarniawska, 1998) to analyze the datasets, gathering relevant stories of digital commoning’s recursive ties to place, drawn from our fieldwork, seeking to develop a coherent and plausible story of the recursive digital-physical commoning involved in each case.
Findings
Below, we present each case study, integrating narrative description and anonymized quotes from posts and interviews. Then, we discuss how both cases demonstrate the recursive relation between digital commoning and physical places.
Case 1—idles fan group: a stable digital place to bridge ephemerality and distance
The Idles fan Facebook Group serves as a self-organized place-in-common. The Group page facilitates the sharing of personal content, emotional and social support, as well as the organization of accommodation and tickets for attending shows and in-person meetups.
A particularly interesting feature of the Idles fans’ Facebook Group is the way members share intimate stories of their social and emotional experiences. This is in part due to the lyrics of many Idles songs, covering left wing political sentiments and struggles with toxic masculinity, addiction, and mental health, yet it also appears to have organically emerged through the group itself. In an interview, Trevor describes the Group as a “big playground for people who are friendly’, where “. . . sometimes it’s about the band, sometimes it isn’t. And it’s just like, it’s a group of likeminded people. And sometimes the band is like secondary to that.” The Group offers “a sort of safe space. . . that you just see people being open and honest about stuff that they’re feeling, and then being able to deal with it” (Trevor).
Due to this, the Facebook Group provides a place for “likeminded” people to share their struggles and seek support, as opposed to only discussing the band or music. Within the enclosure of Facebook, a Group originally centered on the exchange of music recommendations and general discussion has therefore developed a more concerted approach of organizing this commons that transcends its initial purpose. In the same interview, Trevor states that this is because: “Kind of like a problem shared is a problem halved kind of thing… sometimes you can tell once people reply to it, that you really see them… realize they should have been able to do this before or that they’ve got a space for, like, if they feel like that, again, there’s a place that they can let it out.” (Trevor)
The above highlights the importance of the digital space (a Facebook Group) becoming a place for members to turn to; a place where they can bring questions or problems that are difficult to discuss or resolve in other social situations. But what makes this possible is a culture and mode of self-governance in which members hold and meet collective expectations concerning responses to such “problems.” This is further described by Amanda and Jim, who indicate during interviews how the group facilitates members confronting mental health struggles and challenges around toxic masculinity, as well as how this overall experience of commoning can contrast to broader experiences of contemporary society and provide a sense of communality: “From the very start, I did see that it was a community that in which you could be completely vulnerable, and, and never have to worry about being judged or harassed or anything like that. . . it’s so it’s so nice to be part of a community where all the men are trying to support like, all the men are feminist. . . this group is trying to make it better for all the marginalized communities . . . and so that has been evidenced from day one of my participation in this group.” (Amanda) “It’s not a scary place. You know, everybody’s allowed to speak and everybody’s cared for and we care about each other, and we allow people to speak and there’s nothing that’s out of bounds. You know, if something’s bothering you, you can speak about it. And that, in today’s society, that’s really important. Really important.” (Jim)
In more extreme examples, members share stories which they hadn’t previously told their close friends or family members, and which transcend the subject matter of Idles or their associated music scenes entirely. While there was a plethora of music and Idles-based interactions, the Group page as a safe space for emotional and social support serves as a foundation for the shared analysis of issues (e.g. identity, mental health) that the users face in society. This is made possible because they “allow people to speak and there’s nothing out of bounds,” while ensuring people felt they could be “vulnerable” because they were “cared for.” Moreover, there is a political edge to this aspect of the group, as a common resource which is deemed important in “today’s society,” due to a lack of similar places elsewhere. Here, a digital space becomes defined by those who occupy it through their actions; the Group offers a place-in-common for members to organize themselves not only around their common interest, but also their common needs.
Additionally, the Group facilitates self-organization across other platforms and in members’ offline lives, which occur in relatively fragmented and ephemeral places like gig venues and pubs. For many members, this support is essential for organizing attendance to live performances: almost daily posts offer meetups when Idles or similar/associated acts are on tour. In the Group, posts advertising spare tickets often offer them in good faith, asking in some cases that it be “paid forward in whatever way brings you joy” or with donations to charities (and occasionally, in the form of “a pint of dry cider”). Others offer tickets “free to someone in this group so that it isn’t wasted.” Rather than seeking to monetize tickets, Group members redistribute them—often to people who couldn’t otherwise be able to go due to financial constraints, with instances also occurring whereby members directly purchased tickets for others who otherwise could not attend. While the Group emerged as a commons grounded in social relationships, this is extended in the redistribution of additional resources, facilitating other members’ access to cultural experiences in physical places.
Moreover, this occupation of physical places by members operates as a tangible experience, which in some ways stands in for the lack of a singular physical meeting place. The bonds and relationships which constitute the group come to define various physical places that they temporarily occupy. These ephemeral physical experiences stand out as different from other modes of social activity. For instance, Melissa traveled to the UK from South Africa on multiple occasions to attend meetups. As she explains, meeting the people from the Group felt “an honor” and “special”: “. . .we’ve been together to one of the Idles group meetups, actually two of them. And the one was in Bristol, and that one was Sheffield, I think. Yeah, and the people are I must say, . . . they’re just such lovely, kind, I don’t know, interesting people. You know. . . it’s a bit of like an honor to meet people like that. I mean, your day-to-day life is not filled with people like that. I mean, they’re special.” (Melissa)
Similarly, when interviewed, Zoe outlines the feeling of having something “in common” with others attending events: “We must have known 50 people, and they feel like your best friends because you’ve got so much in common because within the group you know, even though there’s 30,000 in the group, you’ve all got the same or similar beliefs, political the same taste of music.” (Zoe)
This feeling of being “best friends,” as well as the shared political beliefs and taste in music, provides a sense of intimacy despite the size of the overall group membership. Zoe also highlights an important characteristic: that the initial interest in common (i.e. Idles music) brings with it a specific notion of like-mindedness (of political opinions and beliefs) that may not be consistent in other places. This too contributes to the intimacy which is essential for establishing the Group as a “place”—and for the success of their physical events, the experiences of which in turn are shaped through the intimacy that forms in the online group.
Jim further expands on the emancipatory effects of these physical events, which for him were a transformative social experience. At first, Jim explains during an interview how he was anxious around attending meet ups: “And I think ultimately that’s what that place is, is a place where anybody can go. And no matter what you’re feeling, how you’re feeling, you’re guaranteed that other people will be there supporting you, [. . .] I went to my first gig in Manchester my daughter came with me because I couldn’t go on my own and yeah, I just met with open arms. Just met with open arms. Yeah.” (Jim)
But he goes on to liken the experience of attending group meetings to that of MDMA club culture in the 1990s. As he continued to attend, Jim recounts in an interview that this resulted in being welcomed into the private physical places of others from the Group: “I just started meeting people and started talking to people and again [. . .] see the film human traffic [. . .] there’s a scene . . . about the 90s rave scene. it . . . basically the MDMA culture and people were able to talk and it was all about one love and everything. . . the thing about that is, is that you’re not guarded anymore. . .Because you can trust implicitly the people that are there because you know, when they speak, they’re being honest, open and genuine so yeah, I’ve met loads of people. I’ve been down to Bristol, I’ve been, you know, to Leeds to Sheffield. I’ve stayed at other guys, people’s houses. You know. . .growing friendships.” (Jim)
For Jim, the digital place serves as an amplifier for his experience of physical places, whether gigs or others’ homes. This is quite common: the strength of online ties leads to members traveling across (sometimes vast) geographical distances and relying on members who were otherwise strangers to provide places to stay. These experiences of sharing housing resources or the social and emotional capacities to enable members to attend concerts and meetups reflect how Idles fans maintain a thriving digital and physical commons.
Evident throughout the above is the socially generative character of physical events, regardless of their ephemerality, as common resources of accommodation and shared feelings of conviviality occur within them. From the more constant digital place, where social and emotional support occur, relationships and bonds are translated to shape and, to an extent, sustain these ephemeral physical places. Therefore, the pubs, venues, and festivals that host Idles Group members temporarily become an extension of the digital place and the relationships or activities that define it. Moreover, the experiences of physical place in turn strengthen the sense of digital place for the Group, as multiple members recall in interviews: “. . .all over my Facebook this morning, our group photographs from the meetup of everybody that was there. . .And some people turn up to the meetups, even if they haven’t got tickets for the gig, if it happens to be local to them.” (Zoe) “. . .I posted in the group. Yeah, I told them. I was, I was going for my first concert in three years and a half living here. . .I remember saying to my husband. Oh, my God, you are like famous in the Facebook now? Because I had a lot of reactions and comments.” (Rosie)
Idles Group members experience a collective intimacy that brings members together across distance and difference, with the digital serving to memorialize and amplify these relations. Offline events, whether at meetups or concerts, provide an additional layer of shared experience which strengthens the Groups feeling of intimacy and affect, underscoring the conviviality of activities in the online Group. Thus, online and offline organizing are interwoven, imparting both with a sense of place-in-common.
Case 2—A residents’ group: Amplifying local organizing online
Residents of the Redbricks regularly offer posts and commentary about activities on the estate through their Facebook Group. One longstanding thread of conversation relates to cats, who assert their claims to the estate through relentless patrolling. Feline activity is regularly reported: cats creating new mobile territories, occasionally fighting to defend them, transgressing boundaries imposed by fences or walls, and appearing unexpectedly and without an identifiable owner. Far from playful, moments of hissing and yowling, often after dark, belie the seriousness that cats afford to their right to exist and to access communal areas of the Redbricks. More troubling are cats that have gone missing, or even the death of a cat that was struck by a car. These and other feline events are regularly discussed in posts on the Facebook Group: “Sending this to the wider community, please look out for [cat’s name] the cat who’s gone missing early this morning. He always stays close to my. . .garden. . .I think he may have been spooked by something, run off and got lost. I’ve checked everywhere including binsheds so please keep an eye out.” [4 reactions, 5 comments] “Update on [another cat’s name]. She’s been eating a couple of bowls of food a day and is putting on weight. Seems much happier and is getting around a lot better. Her owner is taking her to the vet for a checkup next week.” [7 reactions]
Regularly during fieldwork, cats would wander through the estate, reinforcing the affinity of such online discussions with residents’ daily lives. What is at stake in this melding together of everyday animal life and a Facebook Group? It is certainly more than simply greater awareness or surveillance of animals. On the one hand, exchanges on Facebook allow for greater attention to wandering cats, subtly reforging residents’ relationship with the place they live toward care—as when residents are spurred to “keep an eye out” or feed an unwell cat. At the same time, the very features of the estate—including three large gardens, a pedestrianized street, and cul-de-sac roads—afford cats spaces to wander. In this sense, the places of the estate help constitute the estate’s digital commons on Facebook through these feline subjects.
Many more experiences in the physical places of the Redbricks are shared on the Facebook Group, including: upcoming activities organized on the estate (e.g. gardening days, communal meals, group sewing sessions); events deemed noteworthy (e.g. fundraisers or events at local venues, flyers for protests, police activity, suspicious individuals on the estate), requests for spare household items (e.g. a garden hose, tools), free food and furniture, and so on. In all such cases, the Group both supports residents to attach to the place they live and reinforces that this online Group is first and foremost of a place. As two residents who live together describe in a joint interview: “Ah yeah, so one example. We had Simon around and he was mendin’ our door, and obviously he was like whackin’ through the – he was whackin’ through the lock and like, obviously we’ve got five other neighbors, and like three of them came down to check, you know, cuz they were worried we were getting, um, broken into. . . .I don’t think you’d have that in like other places in Manchester. You know what I mean.” (Sasha) “Yeah people seem very concerned. And I think like that’s what’s good about the, like the Facebook group and stuff is people can kind of keep an eye out for each other and share that information. Like I think. . .it allows people to kind of be aware of that stuff, which I guess makes it less concerning?” (Katie)
The intimacy between digital and physical place is such that the residents move smoothly from discussing neighbors’ concern about a break-in at their flat to how Facebook facilitates ameliorating such concerns more widely. Here, Facebook again functions as a way to “keep an eye out for each other,” becoming infused with care for other residents (not just cats).
Significant events for residents are also shared online, such as posts about resident-organized parties, communal meals, or other collective activities. This memorializing process also extends to residents who have died, as in the following Facebook post: “Hi all. We will be scattering [deceased resident’s] ashes at 2pm on Saturday 19th May on Letsbe. We are making a mosaic sign. . .to put up at the same time. . .″ [5 reactions, 1 comment]
The mosaic, installed following the ash-scattering ceremony, captures the articulation between the physical place and the Facebook Group, which returns to the place again as a material change through the signage and a wildflower meadow planted beneath it. This ongoing relational connection co-constitutes both the estate and its digital counterpart.
Certainly, varied views exist about the increasing digital-physical melding that is unfolding. When asked in an interview how word of a gardening day is spread, a resident explains: “This is one of my big bugbears at the minute, that I think we’re not doing very well on [laughs]. And that’s partly due to with, um, technical Ludditeism [laughs] and other stumblin blocks. Um, so there’s a Facebook group, . . .so we’re tryin to get stuff to go on that. So some people will find out about stuff from that, there’s a texting group thing that [a resident] set up about 2 years ago. So she can send out a text to a whole load of people that will get that. And then there’s the Twitter and stuff that [a resident] sort of manages and if we tell him there’s a message then he’ll tweet that out, and quite a lot of people are on that. And then, actually, when we have them, and I say to people ‘how did you find out about what we’re doing?’ actually the most effective method has been my handwritten notes put on all four corners of the estate, that what the people who come actually see and go ‘oh, it’s happening this weekend.” (Ann)
Questioning the estate’s digital presence is quite common, with some residents hesitant to engage in Facebook at all, often out of concerns for privacy. Responding to the latter, during fieldwork the sudden decision was made by administrators to make the Group “private” rather than “public.” This ambivalence does not, however, hinder either the frequency of near-daily posts on the Group or the multiple channels for digital communication, as Ann explains above. Yet, the effectiveness of “handwritten notes”—in actual fact, posters—does raise questions about the extent or limits of creating a digital common place for the estate.
Indeed, the mutual digital-physical extension of the commons also raises troubling possibilities. Certainly, organizing across physical and digital space facilitates residents re-using household items, locating others with handyman skills, sharing questions about unexpected parties and sounds (e.g. fireworks, roadworks), suggesting questions to be discussed with the landlord, and so on. But it is not only a benevolent process. Dark and dangerous matters must be confronted, beyond the loss of pets or death of residents. Frequently, heroin needles are found, including several that have pierced gardeners’ fingers, and drug use on the estate is frustratedly discussed on Facebook. Speculation also occurs, for example, about how the estate’s white streetlights help with shooting heroin, making it a desirable place for users (as opposed to blue lights, which do not reveal veins and thereby deter intravenous drug use). Or consider how a resident explained on Facebook that they had called police to report a neighbor’s likely domestic abuse. This entanglement of a physical place with a digital commons thus also has haunting, rippling effects: heightened fear, greater caution, perhaps even a deeper polarization are all possible consequences when the physical and digital merge.
Recursive ties between digital commoning and physical place
In this paper, we set out to examine tensions between commoning and enclosures within capitalist digital platforms (Kostakis et al., 2018; Ossewaarde and Reijers, 2017; Papadimitropoulos, 2018; Wittel, 2013), focusing on how digital commoning activity is related to the organization of physical places (Beverungen et al., 2019; Beyes et al., 2022; Kostakis et al., 2018). The cases of Groups for both Idles fans and Redbricks residents show the process of braiding together digital commons with physical places through the medium of Facebook. This involves not just a “translation” (Burke et al., 2023) or “oscillation” (Husted and Plesner, 2017) between digital and physical, but rather an extension whereby places are amplified, and reshaped, through a digital medium, while organizing the digital commons is simultaneously influenced by what happens in physical places. This recursive relationship between digital and physical places is rooted in the commoning practices that sustain the Idles and Redbricks Groups, which exert influence in three ways: (a) the organization of Facebook Groups themselves, (b) how digital activity extends to physical places, and (c) the incorporation of experiences in physical places back into the digital commons. Yet, each line of influence also (re)shapes commoning practices themselves, which in turn impact on the other dimensions of this digital-physical relationship. For example, Idles fans and Redbricks residents constitute a commons in Facebook Groups where norms of care, sharing, and respect govern online interactions, but this is also shaped by experiences in physical places, whether at gigs or among neighbors on the housing estate, which in turn reinforce how participants enact social relations in the digital commons. This ongoing, recursive relationship we capture in Table 2.
The recursive relationship of digital commoning and physical place.
Our findings therefore point to the continuous interweaving of digital technologies with physical places: digital commoning in the enclosure of Facebook strengthens the process of organizing places-in-common, which reinforces placemaking of a digital commons, and so on. Table 2 captures the recursivity to this organizational process, whereby commoning practices ((1) and (2a) and (2b)) are evident in (3) the digital commons (4a), digital-physical extensions (4b), and physical-digital influence (4c), which impact on successive instances of commoning (5) in a self-reinforcing process.
Clearly, then, digital commoning is not confined to online interactions, even within a capitalist enclosure like Facebook that aims to extract value and profit from such interactions. Instead, the making of a digital common place is a constitutive element to the social (re)production of Idles and Redbricks Groups in both their online and offline manifestations. This digital-physical, recursive commons is (re)shaped through self-governance of each Group, the organization of resources, and shared knowledge and experiences. So, while Facebook’s back-end enclosure of digital space forms the backdrop for (some of) these relations, commoning as a practice of organizing also distorts and subverts the platform’s imperatives for profit and growth through the recursive ties to physical places. This involved both affective investment and material activity as practices of support, recognition, and care contribute to the governance of the digital and physical spaces occupied, as well as the resources exchanged within them. Our cases therefore point to the potential for a recursive digital-physical placemaking—or perhaps better placetaking—within digital enclosures as a mode of resistance by asserting momentary claims to enclosed space despite the conditions of their production.
This process of commoning in digital enclosures must navigate barriers in order to ensure its continuity, barriers which are overcome through the very recursivity of digital-physical commoning. Our analysis points to several dimensions of this process that are particularly relevant.
First, while commons are constituted through modes of governance, labor, and resources (De Angelis, 2007), they fundamentally rely on maintaining a shared place—the commons itself. For Idles fans, a predominantly online place-in-common manifests in often ephemeral experiences in physical common places where Group members seek to meet. In contrast, the Redbricks is a more conventional, physical place-in-common, existing amidst the urban fabric of a city. Yet, maintaining such common places remains central to the commoning practices in both cases. Self-governance of the Idles group unfolds against its formation around an interest in common, which provided a foundation for likeminded people with similar politics to develop it into a place of safety and resource sharing. If the governance of the Redbricks’ commons is at times more complex—even questioned by its participants—the relationships which interweave between the estate’s digital and physical places still center around confronting the multiple (i.e. both generative and haunting) consequences of organizing common places in order to ensure their maintenance.
Second, within the digital-physical commoning taking place, variant forms of care—both material and affective—contribute to collective wellbeing, highlighting an interesting dimension of the recursivity we’ve identified. Certainly, self-organizing (both online and offline) serves as a resource for its own reproduction through the social and emotional labor of those involved (Linebaugh, 2014). But from this foundation, a convivial culture emerges, as fans and residents support one another and come together in physical spaces—whether pubs, concert venues, gardens, or neighborhood events. Moreover, both cases also depart from conventional modes of capitalist production and market logics, including a general lack of competition and emphasis on shared resources, including housing, household items, and concert tickets or emotional support given freely between Group members. Indeed, a defining feature is how social activities, relationships, and resources are explicitly not “enclosed” and turned into commodities (Fournier, 2013), instead becoming a central means for managing the Groups, and the places they occupy, in common. Through this, affective and material connections are strengthened and arguably provoke an alternative subjectivity of these commoners, one which recursively traverses the boundaries of digital and physical in experimental and unexpected ways.
Third, while the Groups function as an alternative to capitalism in a certain sense—fostering a more cooperative mode of organizing grounded in care, conviviality, and solidarity—they were not overt political statements as such. The Idles fans and Redbricks Groups therefore reinforce the ambiguity of commons’ role in both capitalist reproduction and the development of anti-capitalist alternatives (e.g. De Angelis, 2007). This suggests the need to account for commons organizing not only in terms of alternative (Kostakis et al., 2018; see also Pignot, 2023) or dominant (Kostakis, 2018; Ossewaarde and Reijers, 2017) digital platforms, but also to direct attention to the more mundane political possibilities occurring within capitalist enclosures themselves. We are not contesting previous assertions of surveillance (Shoshana, 2019; Zuboff, 2019) or platform (Srnicek, 2017) capitalism. Facebook as a platform still functions in its commercial back-end form of tracking and collecting data around interactions and content. What we highlight is practical insight into how users organize within the cracks of manipulative strategic infrastructures through the creative use of their functions (Darmody and Zwick, 2020). As such, these examples can still be understood to operate in conditions beyond their full control (Muldoon, 2022) and run the risk of future, further enclosure as the platform changes over time. In this sense, any direct or overt political action in the group as a front-end aspect of the Facebook enclosure can be limited or shut down through the back-end infrastructure on the platform. Yet, in the same way the online groups provide a means of navigating issues users face in the physical world, there is a possibility that a more explicit politics can occur through recursive relationship to emerge in the physical places the members of the Groups also occupy, whether ephemerally in the places of Idles meet ups or within the localized physical place of the Redbricks. In this sense the mundane politics of the Groups cascades between physical and digital space recursively as a necessary response to the relative limitations of enclosure.
Conclusions
By way of conclusion, it warrants asking: Could we imagine our two cases sustaining themselves without recourse to digital commoning in Facebook Groups? Certainly. Both would continue to create commons in the shared places of concert venues or the housing estate. Yet, we have observed how the amplification (Dacin et al., 2024) of digital commoning through recursive ties to physical places augments and fortifies offline and online activities of fans and residents. The result can be considered an ongoing reconstitution of subjectivities and experimentation with new politics as everyday practices are enacted through the enclosure of Facebook—a prefigurative doing of what García-López et al. (2021) describe as “sustaining or generating other-than-capitalist subjectivities, relations and imaginaries” (cf. Davis, 2025). Organizing online overflows into physical places as Idles fans facilitate others’ access to tickets or as Redbricks residents remember past events, both of which etch solidarity into the fabric of places. While concerts or housing estates wouldn’t disappear in the absence of digital commoning, our findings show how commoning is dynamically remolding both physical places and those digital places within capitalist enclosures, even as the latter increasingly exert control over both online and offline social life.
We have argued that digital Groups within Facebook’s capitalist enclosure recursively interact with both stable and ephemeral physical places and, in doing so, exhibit characteristics of maintaining the commons, collectively providing care and wellbeing, and performing a mundane politics. Together, these constitute a novel form of resistance, where the ties to physical places (Gieryn, 2000; Tuan, 1975) provide essential nourishment for sustaining digital commoning. This is particularly so as digital arenas are increasingly dominated and enclosed by capitalist organization across the back-end and front-end—or both (Bauwens et al., 2019).
As the pervasiveness of digital life seems only set to deepen, perhaps greater attention to how digital commoning in enclosures is inextricably and recursively linked to physical places can illuminate novel constellations of resistance. We speculate that organizing such resistance will require commons-oriented modes of governance, labor, and resources that are solidified and extended through recursive ties to physical places. Our findings highlight the organization of these digital-physical commons, in their recursive articulations, through maintenance, with a relational care, and via a mundane politics. However, there are surely other ways physical places are amplifying digital commoning. We encourage further place-sensitive research on the amplifications (Dacin et al., 2024) and organizational geographies (Vandeventer et al., 2024a) of commoning within and despite the prevailing enclosures of digital capitalism, particularly as 21st century commoning evolves and new potentialities actualize that span digital and physical places.
Facebook offers a promising arena for studying this phenomenon, not least because aspects of the platform’s front-end enable Groups to form around shared interests, experiences, and places. Our findings suggest that Facebook’s front-end offers specific affordances for overcoming barriers in physical places—while barriers in the digital are also overcome by organizing in the physical world. Theorizing this as a recursive process points to interesting possibilities for understanding constellations of resistance—and politics—that (might) emerge amidst contemporary digital capitalisms. However, we are more skeptical as to whether newer generations of digital enclosures (e.g. Instagram, TikTok) offer similar possibilities for commoning, though online posts there are still inevitably tied to places (e.g. through location tags). In contrast, the proliferation of Large Language Models—and so-called Generative AI—rely on the enclosure of new back-end common resources (i.e. published knowledge, including perhaps this paper) and the physical presence of server farms in places, while the front-end remains thoroughly enclosed for individual users. These present opportunities for further research, including to consider how the design and algorithmic control (Pignot, 2023) exerted through these new platforms are explicitly oriented against providing conditions for commoning. Or, more optimistically, maybe recognition that the digital is sustained by places in the physical world will offer a means for creatively organizing new recursive digital-physical commons through such platforms. Similarly, the endurance of open source and worker cooperatives operating digital infrastructures are promising examples for scrutinizing how back-end commons are implicated in organizing physical places and thereby sustaining these commons. We invite further inquiry into these questions.
Thus, bridging debates about organizing commons (Kostakis, 2018; Ossewaarde and Reijers, 2017; Pignot, 2023) and studies of organization as an articulation of digital and physical places (Burke et al., 2023; Dacin et al., 2024; Husted and Plesner, 2017), we have contributed theoretically to understanding the recursive process of organizing digital commons in enclosures tied to physical places. Empirically, our contribution is encapsulated in our cases’ demonstration of this recursive digital-physical commoning through maintenance, collective care, and mundane politics. We hope to have opened further avenues for exploring digital commons both within and beyond enclosures through recursive ties to physical places. Such avenues would extend our paper’s interest in the ways everyday tactics of anarchic resistance unfold through recursive relations between digital commoning and physical places, and how these resist the strategies of enclosure that have sustained capitalism since it first emerged.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
We wish to acknowledge the participants in both research projects discussed in this paper. We also thank the organizers and participants of the 2024 “Commoning beyond growth” workshop in Nottingham (UK) for their feedback on an earlier draft of this paper. Both authors contributed equally to the paper.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.