45 lines
2.5 KiB
Markdown
45 lines
2.5 KiB
Markdown
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title = "Underground"
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glassblowers = ["felixstalder.md"]
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For much of the second half of the 20th century, radical culture in the
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West was organized as “underground”. Small, self-organized units,
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(publishers, venues for performances, distribution mechanism, shops,
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cinemas, bars etc.) that allowed for the production, circulation, and
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reception of cultural forms and ways of living separate from hegemonic
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culture. The underground was often self-consciously exclusionary,
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meaning there was no desire to grow, be open to, or include, everyone.
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Rather, it was by the people who wanted to for the people who needed it.
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The prohibitive economies of physical production and distribution
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contributed to confining underground culture to small niches. There was
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also an ethos around this, favoring freedom and community over reach,
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and moving to larger scales (e.g., major record labels, big production
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budgets, commercial galleries) was often regarded as “selling out”.
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There is a certain overlap between “underground” and “avant-garde”, but
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whereas the former indicated self-styled rejection of the “mainstream”,
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the latter implied a linear progression in which the mainstream would
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eventually catch up.
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In the 1990s, both of these terms lost currency and were replaced with
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the promise of “global reach” enabled by the internet and the low/no
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costs of production and distribution. This inspired new aspirations of
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openness and inclusivity, and exclusion was no longer seen as a
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necessary precondition of experimentation, but as an elitist stance. It
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turned out, the economics of global communication were also prohibitive,
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but this time not on the level of costs for production/distribution, but
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on the level of protocols and infrastructures for interconnectivity. The
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price of leaving the self-marginalization of the old underground
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paradigm as the subsumption under hegemonic communication protocols. For
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a while, this seemed like a fair trade-off. As demands for
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profitability of the providers of protocols increased, the trade-off
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become worse → .
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As the global infrastructures of mass self-communication are declining,
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and the search for alternatives has become stronger, the tension between
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the logic of the underground and that of global interconnectivity is
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re-articulated. An example is the debate over whether to include
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(federate with) Fediverse nodes runs by large, social media corporations
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(e.g., Meta’s Threads). The question seems to be: is there a way of
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combining some aspects of each paradigm?
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