As part of an interview with The Onion A.V. Club website last June, Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk agreed to answer a few fan questions, including one from someone named MollyPocket, who wondered if true underground movements were still possible, or was "the Internet making everything too readily available to everyone?"

Palahniuk's answer, in short, was yes and no. "There will always be an underground," he replied, and predicted "a backlash of veiled, hidden societies" in response to the overload of information provided by reality television and confessional memoirs.

The underground, and especially the subcultures that inhabit it, have been much debated and examined since British academic Dick Hebdige published Subculture: The Meaning of Style (1979), a groundbreaking examination of the symbols and rituals of the punk subculture in London. Almost a decade after Subculture, in an essay reflecting on youth culture, Hebdige wrote: "Subculture forms up in the space between surveillance and the evasion of surveillance, it translates the fact of being under scrutiny into the pleasure of being watched. It is a hiding in the light."

Palahniuk's answer suggests that while the technological infrastructure of how culture is distributed has changed dramatically in the past 15 years, the psychology of subculture remains stable. But what if the pleasure of being watched has so thoroughly overwhelmed the evasive component of subculture as to make it non-existent? What if the problem with contemporary subcultures isn't only Google and YouTube and blogs and MySpace, but the participants themselves?

To better understand the relationship between technology and the underground, let's visit the blog Dead Things on Sticks. It is there that Toronto-based television writer Denis McGrath provides a useful reminder of how the cultural fringe operated in the 1980s.

"To a one, those high school teachers didn't understand this `humour,' this irony that we all were sucking up from Letterman like air," he writes.

"We were like ravenous zombies scouring the world for things to make us laugh... No Internet, no 176 cable channels devoted to our tiny slice of interest; no marketers catering directly to us. It was Letterman or teen ski-and-sex movies. That's it."

While it is difficult to argue for physical restrictions on cultural distribution, there is something to be said for the pre-DVD, pre-MP3, pre-binary era of culture. As McGill's Erin MacLeod writes in a 2004 article for the online journal FlowTV, "My somewhat fuzzy full season of The Ben Stiller Show was a prized possession that became worthless on 11 December 2003, the date that the complete 1992-93 season was released on DVD for the low price of $26.99."

MacLeod is not so much upset about the improved quality the DVD offered, but the loss of community it represents: "The community that is created as a result of love for a TV program –especially a short-lived one – is disrupted by this instantaneous availability."

Physical restrictions on cultural access in the pre-digital era not only created fan communities by necessity, but also influenced the politics of the end product. Punk, for example, was forced to create a parallel system of marketing and distribution, a series of nodes, be it mail order or alternate venues in order to be seen and heard.

While few yearn for a return to the age of VHS samizdat, something is lost in the otherwise superior delivery of culture provided by file-sharing networks and Netflix. However, if all YouTube and the ubiquitous file-sharing application BitTorrent do is make it easier to see old TV shows and movies, this article would end here. But this same technology is also altering the output of the current underground.





IN MARCH 2004, New York Times Magazine columnist Rob Walker described how a non-mainstream sensibility, combined with a file-sharing infrastructure, has led to the "mass underground." Using DJ Danger Mouse as an example, Walker argued that the Grey Album – the wonderful, illegal "mash-up" of Jay-Z's The Black Album and The Beatles' so-called "white album" – was easily accessible to anyone with Internet access and a bit of computer savvy, yet it still hovered below the mainstream radar.

The mass underground is filled with thousands of poorly kept secrets, a new cultural category that includes lonelygirl15, that OK Go video with the treadmills, and any number of legally free-for-the-taking words and music, such as Cory Doctorow's novel Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town and Nine Inch Nails' new album The Slip. These cultural expressions can be downloaded once, or a million times, at no additional cost to anyone. (As if to underscore the importance of this new cultural arena, New York's Parsons New School for Design has announced a course on being "Internet Famous.")

The mass underground sounds like a good idea, and suggests a kind of cultural meritocracy, where the best video or free song wins. But the mass underground distorts the equilibrium suggested by Hebdige's hiding in the light. Because built into the technology and logic of the mass underground is the possibility of blowing up huge. As the title of an October 2006 New Yorker article about YouTube fame suggests, "It Should Happen to You."

And it happened to Andrew Struthers, a Victoria-based filmmaker and journalist. In the summer of 2006, he went into his backyard with a Super-8 camera and created Spiders on Drugs, a funny and very short little film that cost $300 to make. It did well in film festivals, where, as he writes in a 2007 article for B.C. Web mag The Tyee, "it was seen by tens of people." But Struthers wanted to reach a larger audience, so in January 2007, he decided to post it to YouTube.

In less than a week, the spider flick received more than a million views, but not before Struthers had to shut down a rival YouTuber who had illegally claimed the spider video as his own. The success of the film was vindication for Struthers, who had the idea seven years ago but never convinced anyone to provide him with funding. YouTube gave his film the audience it deserved. Cue happy ending.

Except that the act of observing alters the thing being observed, along the lines of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. The "Total Plays" and "Views" counters on MySpace and YouTube are not neutral odometers, which helps to explain why Struthers' article reads like a frenzied day trader riding a volatile stock to success. "Six days in, the hit count was up to 750,0000 and I had over a thousand emails. I was shovelling them out like snow."





A FEW PARAGRAPHS later: "It's 3 p.m. on Tuesday, one week since I had the idea. I've just hit the million mark, and there are 55 pages of comments."

We're excited for spider guy, of course, but ultimately his YouTube rollercoaster is reduced to a numbers game. Spiders on Drugs was an offline piece of underground humour that exploded, unexpectedly, online. But what about Struthers' next short film?

For participants in the mass underground, the possibility of becoming a sensation can eventually be hardwired into the act of creation itself. That is, the cultural output of the mass underground internalizes the logic of Amazon.com sales rankings, or the most-emailed articles list from newspaper websites. In the mass underground, evading surveillance is neither possible nor desirable. Once subcultural expression is converted into binary format, the thinking goes, not only can everyone have access to it, but everyone should.

It would be wrong, however, to simply blame the technologies for eroding subcultural incubation. Ego and the desire for fame and fortune are hardly recent inventions. For Andrew Wernick, a professor at Trent University, the problem is that our desire for attention and fame is leeching into the creative groundwater. As he writes in his 1991 book Promotional Culture: "When a piece of music, or a newspaper article, or even an academically written book about promotional culture, is fashioned with an eye to how it will promote itself – and, indeed, how it will promote its author and distributor, together with all the other producers these named agencies may be identified with – such goods are affected by this circumstance in every detail of their production."

Thus, Terryworld, the 2004 coffee-table collection of work by cutting-edge fashion photographer Terry Richardson, includes a significant number of images of Richardson himself, posing with his models, because taking photographs of other people is passé in the world of promotional culture. A May 2007 Wall Street Journal article about expectant parents who are selecting baby names based on Googleability shows the extent of the promotional culture mentality. As reporter Kevin J. Delaney writes, "Many people aspire for themselves – or their offspring – to command prominent placement in the top few links on search engines or social networking sites' member lookup functions."

We imprint our desires onto technology as much as technology attempts to reshape our mental circuit boards. At the same time, Web 2.0 allows delusions of grandeur to float ever higher, and naturalizes the logic of promotional culture.

Or, to put it another way, Google can't force you to name your baby Featherblanket Smith. But the prominence and importance we place on Google search rankings means that if you do name your child Featherblanket, people might not think it's a bad idea.

The exception to the rule is graffiti artist and provocateur Banksy. His entire artistic practice is built around remaining anonymous, about managing to spray-paint works of art onto the sides of buildings without being caught. Of course, we reward his ability to avoid surveillance by paying thousands of dollars for his work, which is collected by celebrities such as Christina Aguilera and Angelina Jolie. His art is both a commentary on surveillance and a record of the process of avoiding it.

But Banksy is not hiding in the light (like Kurt Cobain did, when he appeared on the cover of the April 1992 issue of Rolling Stone wearing sunglasses and a T-shirt that said "Corporate magazines still suck") so much as hiding in plain sight, (which is what Jason Bourne does in The Bourne Supremacy when he eludes capture by arranging a meeting in Alexanderplatz, a large public square in Berlin).

Hiding in plain sight is also the idea behind TrackMeNot, a Firefox plug-in that automatically creates fake, random search strings for Google. The resulting info-garble is meant to scramble attempts at surveillance and data-profiling attempts. Specialized barcodes called Quick Response codes, meanwhile, are being used by marketers and subcultures alike to scramble information. These large barcodes, which can be "read" by cellphones with the right software, are another way of deflecting a bit of the light that shines on the underground.

Which means Palahniuk is wrong. The next subculture or underground movement will not be discovered behind the door of a secret handshake speakeasy somewhere in East Berlin, but in the center of Alexanderplatz; hiding in plain sight, everywhere and nowhere, simultaneously.





Note: Portions of this article appeared in a different form in Broken Pencil.



