+++
title = "Underground"
glassblowers = ["felixstalder.md"]
+++

For much of the second half of the 20th century, radical culture in the
West was organized as “underground”.  Small, self-organized units,
(publishers, venues for performances, distribution mechanism, shops,
cinemas, bars etc.) that allowed for the production, circulation, and
reception of cultural forms and ways of living separate from hegemonic
culture. The underground was often self-consciously exclusionary,
meaning there was no desire to grow, be open to, or include, everyone.
Rather, it was by the people who wanted to for the people who needed it.
The prohibitive economies of physical production and distribution
contributed to confining underground culture to small niches. There was
also an ethos around this, favoring freedom and community over reach,
and moving to larger scales (e.g., major record labels, big production
budgets, commercial galleries) was often regarded as “selling out”.
There is a certain overlap between “underground” and “avant-garde”, but
whereas the former indicated self-styled rejection of the “mainstream”,
the latter implied a linear progression in which the mainstream would
eventually catch up. 

In the 1990s, both of these terms lost currency and were replaced with
the promise of “global reach” enabled by the internet and the low/no
costs of production and distribution. This inspired new aspirations of
openness and inclusivity, and exclusion was no longer seen as a
necessary precondition of experimentation, but as an elitist stance. It
turned out, the economics of global communication were also prohibitive,
but this time not on the level of costs for production/distribution, but
on the level of protocols and infrastructures for interconnectivity. The
price of leaving the self-marginalization of the old underground
paradigm as the subsumption under hegemonic communication protocols. For
a while, this seemed like a fair trade-off.  As demands for
profitability of the providers of protocols increased, the trade-off
become worse → ![](shard:enshittification.md).

As the global infrastructures of mass self-communication are declining,
and the search for alternatives has become stronger, the tension between
the logic of the underground and that of global interconnectivity is
re-articulated. An example is the debate over whether to include
(federate with) Fediverse nodes runs by large, social media corporations
(e.g., Meta’s Threads). The question seems to be: is there a way of
combining some aspects of each paradigm?

