Where does the underground live?

Social media has made it clear that without a community, advertisement efforts become a mere black hole for the marketing budget. There is an irony in this for the cynical. Or perhaps it is hope for the newspeak savvy. Clearly, corporations recognize the value of social engagement while still opposing socialism. "Community" has become the approved word to admit that society is larger than its individuals, with or without fortunes.

“Community is definitely a buzz word. Even corporations use it!” said the Communards, twitching in their tombs.

Despite social media’s relative novelty, there is nothing new about community. In our domain, it has actually been a key ingredient for a very long time. Music has rallied people around scenes, created, reinvented, or reinforced identities, and animated causes long before the Internet was born. During its infancy, the Internet was a fine place to seek out the oddly familiar and the different.

However, something happened during the web’s teenage years. Complexity was broken down, and its currents were consolidated, centralized, and rallied into monolithic services offering convenience. This was perfect for the mainstream. But because the technical expertise of underground record labels was understandably low (record labels are not sys-admins, after all), the underground and the mainstream started to coexist on the same stage.

Have you heard the new insert underground label release? I saw it in my Facecrook™ feed; the video is sick!

The internet is a highway of information that may technically still offer equal opportunity to everyone (although that is a debatable claim). But what about the meta-feeds thriving on it? By meta-feed, I mean the highways of information within the highway of information: big tech as a service through which we reach whatever it is we are looking for, either by search queries or recommendations. Attention is a raw material on mainstream social media, and as a consequence, organic reach is being throttled. We are told organically viral content is dangerous because it makes us believe in things that are not real. Or that, since attention is the vital source of revenue for the companies operating the meta-feeds, it is their right to profit from it.

I am not sure either of those two assumptions is pertinent. But I know I have felt hurt the few times a respectable independent label reached me through sponsored content. Empathetically speaking, they spent money to reach me: someone who would eventually have sought them out.

Maybe it is just a sign of my age: the vestiges of my past, when novelties would reach my peers or me through word of mouth or excursions to physical hubs renowned for gathering fanzines, artifacts, and records from foreign places and scenes. But what if it was another phenomenon?

After all, the distribution of music, art, or simply alternative narratives has changed radically and profoundly, both because of and thanks to the Internet. New record labels are born every day, and the quality of their content has not degraded in any way. At worst, it has changed, which to me seems like a rather good thing. They are born pretty much the same way as always: find a name, a symbol, build a brand, a reputation, an “etiquette.” Yet all of those brands or images circulate encapsulated in someone else’s dream, someone else’s platform, someone else’s company, someone else’s profit.

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Almost all of them give up everything that forms their identity in exchange for a vague promise of an audience. Their colors, their banners, their shapes, their frames or lack thereof. They settle for services that supposedly provide them with an audience, an opportunity to place a catchy image in a square, and a player that “should work on most devices.”

I dreamed Basspistol up. I wanted it to be the contrary of everything I despised in the music industry: to replace individualism with community, bad deals with DIY, favoritism with cooperation. I was not alone, at first. At the time, I was benefiting from some sort of momentum that I obviously did not control: a collection of coincidences. I am not sure I did things right or invested it wisely. But one thing I am certain I did well was to keep a kind of confidence, trust in my own direction, looking for the wheels wherever I was presented with convenience.

The big tech narrative is strong. You can hear it coming from the fiercest and biggest influences, the very essence and vital raw material that big tech needs to live: “Without big tech we cannot exist in cyberspace. It is like that old dilemma: can a tree falling in an empty wood be heard?” Those who answer “no” forget about the fauna.

Frankly speaking, I still have no idea where this Basspistol adventure is heading. I have a huge backlog of things to do and pretty much no one particularly interested in investing energy in it. But I know the Fediverse has given me new energy. The Internet can be fun again. It can be open to the wide and curated at the same time. A community can own its narrative without shutting its doors to the world. The hubs might not be physical locations, but they can facilitate connections away from keyboard. And the expression of music can be more than a convenient player with a square image.

I might not be able to control it. Obviously. Who can? But I can set my own terms under which it influences my life and my consciousness’s bandwidth. And I will find ways to include you.

The adventure has just restarted.