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Contribution short abstract

Based on three different cases of TechnoEnvironments, namely Organic Agriculture, Pencak Silat, and Puro Mangkunegaran, this paper analyses the un/commoning of social media and digital resources such as local knowledge and cultural values in Indonesia.

Contribution long abstract

Digital commons represent a field of tension in which people can benefit from enhanced participation, on the one hand, while technologies and media content, on the other, are increasingly being exploited, manipulated, and domesticated for political projects. In Indonesia, alternative imaginaries of cultural

modernization and modern TechnoEnvironments, (re-)produced by civil society actors via new, digital media technologies, are taken up by a very receptive Indonesian government but are not necessarily implemented in the imagined ways of those whose embodied knowledge and practice are being “harvested” for policy making. The process of national, political visions and strategies influencing public discourse and imaginaries, and vice versa, unfolds as circular reimagining of TechnoEnvironments.

With a focus on digital activism, digital commons (as a subset of the commons), with resources such as local knowledge and cultural values that are created and/or maintained online, get to the centre of attention. They present a suitable approach to investigating the organisation of collective action, placing it beyond market and state. Identifying practices and politics of un/communing digital resources – above all local knowledge and cultural values – in governance and social activism reveals how powerful social media discourses and imaginaries actually are.

Based on three different cases of TechnoEnvironments, namely Organic Agriculture, Pencak Silat, and Puro Mangkunegaran, this paper analyses the un/commoning of social media and digital resources such as local knowledge and cultural values in Indonesia. Taking Barendregt’s and Schneider’s (2020) call for a careful and ethnographically informed approach to digital activism seriously, the presented cases from Indonesia contribute to a better understanding of today’s forms of digital activism in Southeast Asia [and to its theorizing from a Southeast Asian perspective].