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+title = "Underground"
+glassblowers = ["felixstalder.md"]
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+
+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 → enshittification.
+
+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?
+