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repo={"frontmatter": {"draft":false,"glassblowers":["felixstalder.md"],"iscjklanguage":false,"title":"Underground"}, "content": "\nFor much of the second half of the 20th century, radical culture in the\nWest was organized as “underground”. Small, self-organized units,\n(publishers, venues for performances, distribution mechanism, shops,\ncinemas, bars etc.) that allowed for the production, circulation, and\nreception of cultural forms and ways of living separate from hegemonic\nculture. The underground was often self-consciously exclusionary,\nmeaning there was no desire to grow, be open to, or include, everyone.\nRather, it was by the people who wanted to for the people who needed it.\nThe prohibitive economies of physical production and distribution\ncontributed to confining underground culture to small niches. There was\nalso an ethos around this, favoring freedom and community over reach,\nand moving to larger scales (e.g., major record labels, big production\nbudgets, commercial galleries) was often regarded as “selling out”.\nThere is a certain overlap between “underground” and “avant-garde”, but\nwhereas the former indicated self-styled rejection of the “mainstream”,\nthe latter implied a linear progression in which the mainstream would\neventually catch up. \n\nIn the 1990s, both of these terms lost currency and were replaced with\nthe promise of “global reach” enabled by the internet and the low/no\ncosts of production and distribution. This inspired new aspirations of\nopenness and inclusivity, and exclusion was no longer seen as a\nnecessary precondition of experimentation, but as an elitist stance. It\nturned out, the economics of global communication were also prohibitive,\nbut this time not on the level of costs for production/distribution, but\non the level of protocols and infrastructures for interconnectivity. The\nprice of leaving the self-marginalization of the old underground\nparadigm as the subsumption under hegemonic communication protocols. For\na while, this seemed like a fair trade-off. As demands for\nprofitability of the providers of protocols increased, the trade-off\nbecome worse → .\n\nAs the global infrastructures of mass self-communication are declining,\nand the search for alternatives has become stronger, the tension between\nthe logic of the underground and that of global interconnectivity is\nre-articulated. An example is the debate over whether to include\n(federate with) Fediverse nodes runs by large, social media corporations\n(e.g., Meta’s Threads). The question seems to be: is there a way of\ncombining some aspects of each paradigm?\n\n", "path": "shard/underground.md", "relpermalink": "/shard/underground/" } |