Reading Mary Celeste Kearney’s writing on the “networked media economy” of Riot Grrrl reminds me how much the world I grew up in was shaped by the legacy of that particular subculture (and those it overlapped with). The all-ages clubs, the DIY spaces, the church halls, the free concerts in parks—in the mid-00s, the landscape produced in my home city of D.C.. by the aftermath of multiple punk flourishings was remarkably hospitable (and hugely educational) to a 14-year-old kid. Kearney doesn’t spend too much time making comparisons between Riot Grrrl and other punk formations, but one thing that seems to set it apart is its explicitly political aim of expanding its address, reaching folks in far-flung parts of the country via scrappy forms of distribution and media manipulation (Kearney 68). This expansiveness reroutes the dynamic of “incorporation” and media dispersal that Hebdige outlines, wherein a typically insular subculture first reaches most of its potential audience in a highly mediated, distorted form, typically framed through transgression (Hebdige 93). Remnants or successors of the “infrastructures” produced by Riot Grrrl’s various forms of “networking” were (and still are) in place as part of the broader ecosystem of DIY and small-scale independent music, paths that continue to be traveled (Kearney 70).
I mention this not just to acknowledge a debt, but also as a way into thinking about obstacles to small-scale and/or political cultural production that have emerged in the intervening decades, things that seem to have changed since my initial encounters with youth subculture. While it would take some proper (perhaps ethnographic) work to flesh out these observations, I think they might help reframe the questions of online collaboration vs. in-person participation raised by our engagement with Malcolm Gladwell’s (now-dated-seeming) contrast between the “strong-tie”-oriented activism of the Civil Rights era and the “weak-tie” world of online participation.
Looking back on the 2010s, the deadly 2016 fire at the DIY space Ghost Ship in Oakland looks like a defining event for certain forms of subculture in America: its aftermath altered the viability of underground performance (often living-performance) spaces, yielding crackdowns in most cities. DIY spaces have always been precarious or ephemeral, navigating a tenuous balance between a) making events accessible to members of the public not already included in an insular social sphere and b) not wanting to attract police attention or legal action. In this situation, spaces are forced either to retreat further underground, or to go legit, a process that requires access to capital or connections to existing organizations (and, in some cases, the loss of a certain ethos).
Alongside this struggle to produce physical spaces for subcultural activity, an enormous (increasing?) share of Internet time/space now happens on corporate-owned social media platforms, in the midst of flows structured subtly and not-so-subtly from above, as opposed to in web spaces controlled by individuals. DIY cultural production often makes use of these social networks (sometimes still Facebook, oddly), benefitting from their broad address and ease of use, but I wonder what alternatives might exist—what’s the contemporary equivalent of something like the feminist punk distro services of the early 90s (Kearney 72)? The options for activism aren’t (as Gladwell seems to suggest) divided between 1) boots on the ground, or 2) Twitter. There are networks to contest and produce online as well as in person, paths between the underground and the wider public in need of particular media formations.
Politics of Media 
I like your framing of the double-bind facing DIY scenes and media’s paradoxical stance within it. Most of the DIY spaces in Montreal and LA rely on email listservs to maintain networks, which seems oddly retro and possibly conformist now that I think about it, but it’s also a convenient mode of communication less vulnerable to the unpredictability of shifting media landscapes—makes it easy to maintain ties/contact. At the end of the day, it seems that from an underground purist perspective (in some ways its own ‘high culture’), any form of non-IRL communication—of mediation—carries the threat of co-optation. Perhaps one emerging exception is speaking on the phone, which may speak to differences in machine legibility, shifting cultural norms, and/or a sonic/optic distinction we could draw out.
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I’m thinking, too, about subcultures particularly invested in privacy (e.g. those who hang around Berlin hackerspaces), a huge chunk of the communication is over email, generally via a client like Thunderbird that supports encryption, and a lot of the culture is contingent on having a space in which to hang out in person. But not in a “boots on the ground” take-to-the-streets way—Gladwell types fetishize the notion of “face to face”ness but this isn’t really what I’m talking about. I think forms of ambient, undirected togetherness between people in a subculture or political movement (lurking on an IRC; gaming next to each other in a basement; loitering anywhere and everywhere; standing on the street outside house shows) have a place in a conversation about the mediation of political action
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Thanks for this Nick, Lily, and Sasha. To take up Nick’s question about contemporary equivalents of small scale distribution networks – I’ve always been impressed in the few cities I’ve lived in (Houston, Boston, Chicago) the amount of information about pretty micro cultural and political gatherings that manages to show up in what gets called the alt weekly press. I know in New York the Village Voice captures some of this. In Chicago, the South Side Weekly and the Reader perhaps? I think these have somewhat less of a direct connection to specifically DIY/Punk spaces, but they can often address similar functions for less underground but no more capitalized political and cultural groups.
I’d also like to make a case for the importance here of the dedicated informal cultural networkers/promoters and bloggers. I know this is a dying breed but I’ve come across several people over the years that manage to exist on the periphery of several scenes and aggregate information in whatever sphere their into (art, music, etc.) and constantly share it. Is this a scene “type” other people are familiar with? Again, probably the type of person we’d have to do ethnographic investigation of. Here’s something by Fred Turner vaguely along the lines I’m thinking of (but at a bigger scale): https://fredturner.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/Turner-Larson-Network-Celebrity-PC-2015.pdf
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