content/shard/underground.md

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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?
-