“It’s a kind of mutual aid community”: community, commoning and contestations on online platforms for fare evaders in Brussels

This paper explores the potential of online fare evasion groups as a conduit for forming multiple publics and contesting mobility regimes. Using digital ethnography and qualitative interviews with members of the largest fare evasion Facebook group in Brussels, I explore users’ behavioural nuances and motivations and how online exchanges facilitate a balance between community building, knowledge sharing and entertainment. Although these online transport spaces lack the structured form of mobility contestation typical of more formalised political action, users’ participation and motivation can be understood, in line with Scott’s (2012) notion of infrapolitics, as acts of everyday resistance that contest mobility regimes as disorganised forms of collective action. It can be argued that online transport spaces provide a platform for users to challenge and contest dominant mobility regimes, share and create a range of knowledge, including lived expertise, and form networks of solidarity.