In the mid-90s when I first put on club nights in Leeds, I’d wake up far earlier than my student routines demanded and spend hours stapling rudimentary photocopied posters to the trees that lined the main route to campus. I knew they’d be removed by the end of each day, but if I could just get the message out to a university’s worth of bleary-eyed students each morning we might just manage to assemble an audience at the other end of the night.

It was the closest we ever got to a targeted advertising campaign, the likes of which Trump, leave.eu, and seemingly every political party uses Facebook for these days. The good thing was we didn’t have to steal any data to do so; the downside was we had no idea who was coming until the night. Our posters were a one–way broadcast with no satisfying feedback loop reassuring us of success. So it’s no wonder that now I’ve graduated to running Borealis, a multi-venue Norwegian experimental music festival, the Facebook event page and all the advertising potential that comes with it has become one of the mainstays of our event marketing, and a more convenient, and arguably more effective, platform for building audiences than those early morning staple gun sorties.

That so many avant garde communities rely on a corporate platform seems anathema to what the underground stands for

This is a scenario that has been troubling me for a while, and, ironically, I discover through a quick Facebook survey, it’s been troubling a whole host of composers, promoters, musicians and artists too. As the clamour to #deletefacebook grows louder following daily evidence of data breaches, the fact that so many niche, experimental, supposedly avant garde music communities rely so heavily on a single corporate platform such as Facebook to not only promote their events, but host conversations and build audiences, seems anathema to everything the experimental arts and musical underground stands for. More than the loss of the holiday humblebrag or the high school reunion, I often wonder how our audience numbers at Borealis would fare if we left Facebook. The anguish that trickles through the status updates of musicians and composers I know all says the same thing: “I’d love to leave, but I don’t know how I would work.”

It didn’t used to be this way. Leafing through Napalm Death founder Nic Bullen’s archive of 1980s alternative music memorabilia, it’s striking how the network of handcrafted posters, zines and badges, with messages such as “Police Bastard”, “McRip-Off”, and “No Cruise Missiles”, constituted a non–conformist action even while acting as promotional material. It’s hard to feel the same way today about anything that is posted on a social network that mines all images for trend and lifestyle data, and tracks page likes as fodder to sell on to eager marketeers. Physical gig posters and flyers still survive, but Facebook has seen off a variety of music community meeting points – the bulletin board and listserv (distributed email list) have all but disappeared, Myspace and last.fm are evaporating, and, perhaps most worryingly, the shift to Facebook marketing has left any number of specialist music publications and platforms in a perilous financial state thanks to plummeting advertising revenue.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Radical Hospitality by SLÁTUR, at the 2017 Borealis festival. Photograph: Klaudia Kot

According to the Quietus editor Luke Turner, the combination of algorithms prioritising viral content and the music industry shifting the bulk of its online ad spend to social media platforms has made the future of high-quality, editorial music publishing more precarious than ever – and that means a diminishing number of nuanced, independent voices. The dilemma for those who want to leave Facebook is that thanks to all our naive early-adopter enthusiasm, there may soon be nowhere left to return to.

The argument for staying could be framed through philosopher Chantal Mouffe’s theories of agonistic spaces, in which artists have a role to be subversive within the walls of the institution, to present alternative opinions to “subvert the dominant hegemony and contribute to the construction of new subjectivities”. If music and the experimental arts jump ship, perhaps this online institution (that in reality is probably not going to sink), will become a poorer place for those who are left.

Until now, Facebook’s ubiquity and transnationality have been its great gift to our small communities, allowing us to have big artistic discussions and hear a multiplicity of opinions, to promote an event and easily get the message out to more than just the small, exclusive group of fans who would be coming anyway. The precarious truth underlying this, though, is that while Facebook helps build open communities, with one tweak of its algorithm, the visibility of our posts – and even the composition of these communities – also changes.

This feels bleak, but it is worth remembering that however much it is appropriated, the richness of our cultural discourse is not the property of Facebook. It is the birthright of any vibrant community. If we want it enough we can take this energy with us. Look harder and in cities such as London and Berlin new listings sites and community tools such as We Break Strings and Experimental.Berlin are being beta tested, based on fairer, non–corporate ideals. If we all #deletefacebook our cultural communities don’t die; it might just take a little more effort to foster this same satisfying feedback loop in real life.