KTub8

Digital Solidarity
Forms of Solidarity
The most comprehensive new formations for organising
solidarity are developed through the renewal of the
idea and practice of the commons or commoning. These
are organised, long term processes by which a group of
people manages a physical or informational resource for
joint use. However, this is not the only form that can
be distinguished in an admittedly schematic inventory
of forms. Besides the commons, there are: assemblies,
non-hierarchical, usually physical gatherings focused
on consensus-based decision making; swarms, ad hoc,
self-steering collective actors; and weak networks, groups
constituted by extensive, yet casual and limited social
interaction.
There are certain cultural threads that can hold
these different forms together and make the movement
of peoples and ideas from one form to the other effortless.
I will return to those later. For now, I want to highlight
the differences between them in ideal-typical fashion
rather than through individual case studies. 39 This
is not to imply that empirical settings do not exhibit
hybrid forms, or that they do not change over time. But
it’s nevertheless worth distinguishing between them in
order to highlight the variety of potentials they might
embody.
Commons
Commons are long-term social and material processes.
They cannot be created overnight and in order to become
meaningful, they must exist over an extensive period
of time. That means that they require some kind of
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