Paratactic commoning: collective knowledge production networking as political struggle

Abstract

Today we are confronted with an ever-increasing tactical control of rights to access, use and store data as a shared resource. Control of commons and commoning has never before been this computed, obfuscated and systematized in the history of mass communication. This article explores collective knowledge production networking, and self-organized community building, which are grounded on commons-based artistic intervention and political struggle. Focusing on the practices of Networks of Dispossession (2013–present), which collectively compiles publicly available data and maps the exploitative and tactically obfuscated relations of capital and power in Turkey, findings reveal an emerging way of commoning that produces situated knowledges by information artifacts, material evidence, aesthetic forms and civic resistance. Departing from Science, Technology and Society (STS) studies, the article explores and introduces a distinctive notion of commoning, which is conceptualized as paratactic commoning.