4 They Came from the Basement: Tactics of Secrecy in New Brunswick’s Underground Punk Community
Going to a punk rock show in New Brunswick, New Jersey, is not like going to punk shows in most other places. To attend a basement show, you head to a one- or two-story house on a tree-lined street in a residential neighborhood. Passing a few college-age smokers out front, you find your way to the backyard of the house. At the basement entrance, someone collects money, usually around $5. If you happen to be reluctant to pay the cover charge, whether because the band is unknown or you are short of cash, you are reminded that all money goes to bands to cover food and gas and that payment is an important part of keeping the scene alive. Paying bands even a modest amount encourages other acts to book shows in New Brunswick over other cities in the Philadelphia to New York corridor and to play in a house basement rather than at a bar or a club. Past the door, you move downstairs to join the crowd of other music enthusiasts, steps away from the musicians. The basement walls are probably lined with mattresses or padded envelopes (courtesy of the U.S. Postal Service) for sound insulation and decorated with blinking strands of lights and collages of stickers with band names and logos. Sometimes the crowds are large, and the basement feels cramped and claustrophobic. At other times, performers and audience members are in equal number, which can feel either intimate or awkward. People smoke and drink, ashing cigarettes and dropping bottles onto the floor. Fans, band members, and basement hosts occasionally circulate with zines or flyers for upcoming shows.
If one term sums up the aesthetics and politics of New Brunswick’s basement community, it is do-it-yourself (DIY), which refers to an ethic of favoring self-sufficiency over commercialized products and services. Students from the nearby university often form local bands, and the scene operates without formal venues or professional bookers. Yet hundreds of bands come through town each year, playing in a dozen or so houses that make up a loose network of informal venues that change from one year to the next. The same DIY ethics that lead New Brunswick punks to host shows in their houses and run their own labels also applies to the norms and politics of how they use technologies, shape the physical spaces of basements as venues, and carry out the everyday practices of communication and information sharing. Methods of using digital technologies in the basement community reflect DIY values and a particular attitude toward communication about shows. New Brunswick punks have developed (and enforced) a rigorous set of controls around sharing information about shows to avoid unwanted attention from the police and other local authorities. These rituals of communication work across a range of digital and nondigital technologies to thwart attempts to shut down shows and solidify a sense of countercultural identity.
As a locus of punk music and practice, New Brunswick’s basement community sees itself as countercultural because of its quasi-legality, which relies on DIY organization and employs information tactics of secrecy. The illegality or quasi-legality of shows stems from a number of factors.1 Show houses are residences, not professional venues, and do not possess licenses to host events that charge money for attendance. At most shows, alcohol flows freely, minimal attempts are made to curtail underage drinking, and people often smoke, even when basements are crowded and soundproofed with highly flammable materials. These conditions risk disapproval from neighbors, landlords, fire marshals, and police, so avoiding official detection of shows has become a critical feature of the community’s relationship to digital technologies.
Given these motivations for maintaining control over show information, New Brunswick’s basement community provides a valuable opportunity for examining tactical flexibility, information sharing, and online technologies in terms of secrecy. Secrecy is often important to countercultural communities, either because their activities operate in a legal gray area (the case for both New Brunswick basement punks and the practitioners of heavy body modification procedures who are discussed in the previous chapter) or because they prefer that their activities take place without mainstream awareness. The sociotechnical tactics of secrecy in the basement community, supported by both DIY and punk values, defy certain expectations of digitally mediated communication. In a share-everything paradigm of online communication, the basement community presents a share-some-things ethic, supported both by DIY and punk values.
Because New Brunswick’s basement community is populated largely by young people, it is a particularly interesting site for studying practices of self-censorship and media reduction. Although a dominant narrative of college students depicts them as being permanently wired, social media dependent, and hyperindividualized, members of the basement scene are committed to the mindful use of both online and offline communication tools in the service of a collective need for keeping secrets. This chapter looks at the various tactics that have developed and endured within the community, both to avoid police detection of shows and to police each other. I concentrate on the range of tactics (both online and offline) that members use to protect the community from law enforcement and maintain its countercultural exclusivity.
Fieldwork for this project, which started when I was a graduate student living in New Brunswick, was deeply collaborative. I first began exploring this field site with my fellow graduate students Aaron Trammell and Nathan Graham and assistant professors Joe Sanchez and Mor Naaman. As a New Jersey native and longtime punk enthusiast, Aaron was our entry point into the community as the work grew into a multifaceted project on information practices and secrecy (Lingel, Trammell, Sanchez, and Naaman 2012). Researching the basement community had three basic parts—participant observation, a focus group with longtime community members, and individual interviews with scene newcomers, band members, and people who hosted shows in their houses. The bulk of this research was conducted collectively between 2009 and 2010, and I revisited the sites independently in 2014 and 2015 for further observation.
After providing some background information on New Brunswick as a geographically and temporally bound locus of punk music, I address concepts of DIY and secrecy, both of which are vital to understanding why this community operates as it does. I describe online and offline tactics for avoiding unwelcome attention to music events and describe two occasions when these tactics were either ignored or set aside, demonstrating the consequences for violating community norms and values. This chapter examines the sociotechnical practices of the New Brunswick basement community to show how digital technologies can be used in the service of secrecy and where these practices fall short. In contrast to the inflexibility and illegibility of dominant social media platforms, sociotechnical networks and assemblages of the punk community are characterized by a high degree of malleability and localized values.
Context: New Brunswick’s Geography and DIY Ethics
Although there are fairly consistent, identifiable rules for how basement shows operate, it is more difficult to obtain a clear understanding of how the community began. One participant cited a backyard performance by the 1980s hardcore band Black Flag as integral to the scene’s genesis. Another participant pointed to the DIY praxis of the punk band Minutemen (also from the 1980s) as an influential model of values and ethics for building a sustained punk community. Still others argued that the community was fueled by small bands that played shows in New Brunswick as they traveled between New York and Philadelphia.
Without denying the significance and influence of bands like Black Flag and the Minutemen, I find the geographic explanations particularly persuasive. New Brunswick marks a halfway point between the sizable cultural centers of New York and Philadelphia, meaning that large bands tend to skip over it in favor of large venues (and fan bases) and small bands use the city as a stopping point between these large scenes. Home to Rutgers, the state’s largest university, New Brunswick counts approximately forty thousand college students among its eighty thousand residents. Unlike many college towns (like Lawrence, Kansas, or Madison, Wisconsin), New Brunswick, New Jersey, has few professional venues for live music, particularly for people who are under age twenty-one. At the time of this writing, only the long-established Court Tavern offered shows for people age eighteen and over, leaving a sizable population of college students in search of local entertainment. The basement community helps mitigate this shortage, and New Brunswick enjoys a reputation as a breeding ground for launching relatively successful indie and punk bands (such as the Bouncing Souls, Gaslight Anthem, and the Screaming Females), where part of the origin stories of these bands draws on the community’s commitment to DIY organization. Together, the different components of New Brunswick’s geography make it a logical place to host live music for the benefit of a fairly large audience of college-age people. In the absence of official concert locations, private house basements fill the vacuum, relying on a DIY mentality of collective commitments to under-the-radar shows.
Members of the New Brunswick scene are proud of their community and its reputation. As one participant, Jay, observed:
People in the know, all across the country and even internationally, look at New Brunswick as a destination. Many are the times when they’re like, “We just couldn’t wait to get to New Brunswick”—those who had been there before. We make a concerted effort through the quality of the shows, through the quality of the party we throw them afterwards when they stay here. We try to send every touring band off to saying: “Wow, New Brunswick rules!”
The community’s self-regard, which stems from both the quality of the shows and the ways that they are produced, reenforces members’ determination to maintain their social commitments to DIY values and technological tactics of secrecy.
Broadly defined, DIY holds that the act of “producing is as crucial as what is produced” (Rivett 1999, 43), meaning that maintaining community control over how production (of media, information, or tools) takes place is as important as the results of these efforts. Steven Gelber (1997) traces DIY values to postwar home improvement projects, although the main contemporary associations with DIY are with zine (Duncombe 1997), anarchist (Portwood-Stacer 2013), and punk (Waksman 2004) communities. DIY also has connections to maker spaces (Fox, Ulgado, and Rosner 2015) and other forms of media activism, like alternative radio (Dunbar-Hester 2010, 2014; Pursell 1993; Turner 2006; see also a collection on DIY citizenship edited by Ratto and Boler 2014). In all of these projects, learning how to use and build media technologies can enable a group to control its own content and open up access to other communities, dialogues, and resources. Within New Brunswick’s basement community, the dominant conceptualizations of DIY are tied to a loosely Marxist critique of capitalist systems of labor, where anticorporate commitments are fundamentally understood as a collective rather than individual project. And yet there is also a way in which the basement community’s DIY practices are playful, a form of improvisation and experimentation that reflects collective creativity and skills. DIY values (of self-sufficiency, playful arrangements of technology, and bottom-up organization tactics) are deeply embedded into the community’s practices and self-perceptions.
Context: Secrecy/Privacy
Throughout this chapter, I use the words secrecy and privacy, which have important differences in meaning. Existing research on online technologies have made privacy a focal point, reflecting social and political concerns about maintaining privacy while using online platforms to communicate, document everyday life, complete business transactions, and engage culturally (see Cohen 2012; Livingstone 2008; Nissenbaum 2010). Following Don E. Merten (1999), I use the word secrecy to refer to information that is tied to a group. It is distinct from the word privacy, which refers to information that is grounded in the personal. In other words, secrecy involves keeping what we do secret, whereas privacy is concerned with keeping what I do secret (Lingel, Trammell, Sanchez, and Naaman 2012). But what does it mean for something to be secret?
Etymologically, the word secret came into use in the fifteenth century and is drawn from the Latin secretus, meaning “separated, divided”—in the context of dividing wheat from chaff (Prost and Vincent 1991, 63). In the basement community, secrecy endures as a form of separation, separating people who have access to information about basement music shows from those who do not. This separation does not occur incidentally or abstractly but rather through a set of decisions and norms that spring up around a given technology—what Henry Jenkins (2006) calls technological protocols.
In the next section, I discuss the various technological protocols of secrecy that are at work in the basement community. They emphasize flexibility (in a collective willingness to improvise and appropriate) and authenticity (in a commitment to local DIY and punk values and in shared concerns for determining authentic interests in the community). As a field study, the basement community allows us to think about the ways that countercultural spaces themselves are reshaped by commitments to secrecy and to explore the sociotechnical assemblages that have emerged to support the punk scene. In contrast to the fixity and top-down organization of technologies like Facebook, the basement community values flexibility and fluidity, which are visible in the physical structures of show spaces as well as collective practices of communicating online.
Sociotechnical Tactics of Basement Secrecy
As is described at the start of this chapter, New Brunswick’s basement community has developed distinct practices that shape how, when, and where music shows take place. Although I had participated in punk communities for many years, New Brunswick punk shows felt different to me because it was immediately apparent that a distinct set of rules governs the interactions between the show hosts, fans, bands, and performance spaces. The community’s rules are tied to members’ concerns about avoiding detection of shows by law enforcement agencies. Lacking all but the most rudimentary sound-control tactics, basement performances are often very loud, thereby risking noise violations. Alcohol circulates freely at shows, exposing the hosts to potential charges for facilitating underage drinking. A show’s attendance can range from four or five people to dozens, and participants described receiving warnings from fire marshals about the danger of large crowds in basements that typically have only one exit route. The tacit acceptance of smokers at shows—particularly given the use of objects like mattresses, newspapers, and packaging materials to muffle sound—further increases possibility of charges stemming from fire code violations. The threat of law enforcement does not always come directly. Disapproving show-house landlords who learn about performances might use the prospect of police and fire marshal sanctions to discourage future shows or even threaten eviction.
The above factors contribute to basement enthusiasts’ perception that they are under constant surveillance, which they attempt to disrupt in how they use digital technologies like social media. The following brief account describes the key online platforms that are used to circulate information about New Brunswick basement music shows as organizers simultaneously promote shows to fans and attempt to dodge police interventions. I also list some offline tactics that are used to keep shows secret, such as reworking basement spaces to meet community needs. From there, I turn to the rules and norms that guide flows of information, including tactics for occluding addresses of shows and attempts to evaluate whether requests for information come from police officers or community members. All of these practices reflect the community’s commitment to DIY values and its dual investment in flexibility and authenticity as the guiding principles for keeping insiders informed and outsiders excluded.
Online Platforms
New Brunswick’s basement punk music community is dominated by young people. As is the case for many young adults, New Brunswick punks use a range of online platforms and mobile devices in their everyday lives, most of which they also use for their interactions within the basement community. The two social media sites most frequently referenced during interviews were Facebook and Myspace. One focus group participant listed flyers and texting as tools of communication and then admitted, “To be honest, even more than flyers I use Facebook. I invite all my friends who normally come, and then through that they can invite everyone to the Facebook event too.” Even as participants often criticized the site as mainstream and capitalist, they also expressed resignation about their dependence on Facebook invites and fan pages to communicate about shows. The prevalence of Facebook use among members of their target audience made avoiding it all but impossible.
Although Myspace no longer enjoys the widespread popularity of now-dominant Facebook, the platform still had a significant presence in 2010, particularly among the indie bands that dominate New Brunswick basement shows. As one participant claimed in a 2010 interview, “If a show wasn’t listed [on Myspace], people just wouldn’t go. People would go, ‘Oh, I didn’t know about it.’” However, as far back as my initial interviews in 2009, participants saw Myspace as less important than Facebook for circulating information about the community and were dismissive of the platform’s general relevance even as they acknowledged that many local bands and some show houses maintained Myspace profiles. By 2015, the platform had nearly dropped out of the social media landscape. A third social networking service used by the basement community is Reddit. Although the site was rarely mentioned by participants, I found a healthy discussion of New Brunswick’s music scene in which bands posted about upcoming shows and addressed queries about the history and politics of the community.2
In addition to the mainstream online platforms described above, several online message boards have hosted discussions of the local music scene.3 Some have been active for years, while others only emerged recently. According to interviewees, these sites were used for a range of activities, including archiving show flyers, discussing recent releases of albums, and posting information about upcoming basement shows. Message boards marked one of the key distinctions between long- and short-term members of the scene, with longtimers using them much more often than short-timers, who were often unaware of message boards. This reflected in part my use of snowball sampling. Because several participants were friends with each other, when one of them used a message board, the rest soon followed, and the message board became a way of maintaining friendships.
Offline Tactics of Secrecy
In addition to digital technologies, the New Brunswick basement music community has developed other tools of secrecy that I describe briefly to provide a richer description of how it feels to participate in the community’s nightlife. Understanding these offline tactics provides a broader context for examining the community’s relationship to technology in terms of secrecy.
Insulation
Most of the basements being used as music show spaces in the New Brunswick area are informally soundproofed to reduce the noise of live performances. Show-house residents use a variety of materials to create a layer of insulation around the perimeter of basement interiors. As one participant (and show-house resident) explained, “You can get free priority [U.S. Post Office mailing] boxes—like five hundred free priority boxes. If you stack them against the wall, they trap all the sound waves, especially the bass.” Another participant noted that the basement location and the audience itself offer the most effective soundproofing: “The only real good soundproofing is … the basement. … The house that just got condemned: the basement was fully underground. Also people: like, if there’s a lot of people in a basement, that will stop sound more than anything.”
Figure 4.1 From a 2010 Screaming Females show. Note that the basement walls are lined with mattresses to provide sound insulation. Photo credit: Aaron Trammell.
Stay off the Porch
Basement show hosts face the challenge of keeping audience and band members either inside the basement or in the backyard during shows, which helps to maintain the illusion that the house is “normal” rather than a site for live music performances. This tactic is important because punks who loiter in front of a house are a clear tipoff for any patrolling police officers that an illegal show is being held in the house. One participant who lived in a show house explained, “The backyard is a good thing. Our house doesn’t have one, so we have to yell at people nonstop for people to stay off the front porch so the police don’t file.”
10 pm
Unusually for most live music events, basements shows in New Brunswick end early, typically before 10 pm. Several participants joked that while “punk time” generally refers to people or events running late, in New Brunswick it reflects a tendency toward punctuality. A common belief among show promoters was that New Brunswick’s noise ordinance rules do not go into effect until 10 pm, although participants differed on the specifics of rule enforcement. Whether because of concerns that the noise ordinance will be enforced or that neighbors are more likely to report loud noises to the police after a certain time, show promoters typically choose to begin and end shows early. An excerpt from the focus group discusses the evolution of the 10 pm ending time:
Richard:
I don’t even know if it’s true, but [I heard that] after 10 the noise violation ticket goes up [in cost].
Metal:
Not true. To get rid of the frat on College Ave. [a main street in the middle of campus], they made it a twenty-four-hour noise violation. You can get it at any time.
McCoy:
It’s just kind of a logic thing. People that would be prone to call the cops probably wouldn’t call them until 9:30 or 10 o’clock.
Many of these practices are likely to be familiar to anyone who has held band practices at their home or repeatedly hosted house parties in a residential area, although the above tactics were much more consistently (and stringently) enforced at shows I attended than they are at most house parties.
The New Brunswick basement community has developed some less familiar tactics related to avoiding detection of shows by local authorities. Arguably the most singular mechanism for avoiding police detection involves treating house addresses as secret. As Tim explained, “The information that’s exchanged is basically when, how much, and who’s playing. Never a where.” Two distinct models emerged for keeping this information secret—code names and “ask a punk.”
Figure 4.2 From a 2010 Screaming Females show. As a local band that was gathering increasing national attention, Screaming Females drew a large crowd. This photo shows a crowded venue where spectators see very little of the band, even though it is only a few feet away from them. Photo credit: Aaron Trammell.
Code Names and “Ask a Punk”
During my fieldwork, I noted a shift in how information was exchanged about upcoming shows, reflecting the idea that practices of secrecy are ongoing and adaptable (Dourish et al. 2004, 328). During the first year that I attended basement shows, houses were referred to by code names rather than by addresses. Predictably, these code names often mentioned punk or obscure cultural references (for example, the Gutter, Ramones House, and the Bread Box). Lacey described the rationale for code names as follows: “I think [code names] are very necessary just because of cops. Cops like breaking up shows, and we don’t want cops at our shows.” Code names allow members of the punk community to rechristen houses as firmly entrenched punk locales, where names perform local identity and provide a measure of security. Eventually, however, the community suspected that local police had become aware of the house code names, and the ask-a-punk model emerged.
“Ask a punk” refers to the replacement of code names on promotional materials with the direction to ask a punk for information regarding show locations. Ask a punk replaces disguise through pseudonyms with the direct intervention of a human gatekeeper. Lowell confirmed the shift to the new model: “A lot of places have stopped using the code name and have started using ask a punk. ... There’s only one other house I can think of that uses a code name … so I think the code name thing is going out.” Brady explained further: “Recently, people stopped even giving their houses’ names ’cause a lot of people believed cops even found out about that. I don’t know how true that is. So a lot of times now it just says, ‘Ask me for address,’ or, like, ‘Email this for address.’” Tim, a longtime member of the community, described changes in information practices over the years: “In 1999, we would have no problem putting up the whole address on a flyer. Now you can’t do that. A lot of the times, it has to do with the flyer just says ‘Ask someone’ where the show is.” Increased security is ascribed to the ask-a-punk model over code names, as Midori suggested: “I think actually [a friend’s] house is now ‘Ask a punk.’ That’s their technical house title. But now everyone just uses it. It’s just more security, more secretive that way.”
Having most recently attended shows in spring 2015, I found that both ask a punk and code names were used but with the added twist that a code name now referred to a number of physical locations—perhaps the most literal demonstration of flexibility that I encountered at this field site. These multiple locations were typically clustered close together, with shows alternating between houses operating under the same name. The expansion of code names to include several sites was a display of flexibility, but the tactical transition more broadly reflected the basement community’s commitment to flexibility—that is, to manage strategic obstacles to communication by shifting practices of communication.
In terms of how these tactics play out online, organizers inform their networks of fans and bands about upcoming events on Facebook, which is widely understood as a critical promotional tool. However, the platform’s utility reaches its limit when it comes to show addresses. It is not necessarily impossible to find secure ways of using Facebook, but it is generally perceived as being insecure. Unlike text messaging, which is felt to be a safe method of communicating privileged information, events that are posted on Facebook are treated as unsafe. Rules against listing show house addresses also are maintained on message boards. To find the address, potential audience members are required to contact the band’s or the show’s organizers, typically by direct messaging on Facebook, texting, or face-to-face communication.
Figure 4.3 A flyer from a 2010 basement show. Note that the time, cost, and bands are listed but that the location says only “Ask the punx.”
After participating in punk and indie music scenes elsewhere, I was initially taken aback by the extensive measures that the New Brunswick community took to control local flows of information. Their protocols contradicted a basic premise of event promotion—that show information should be as accessible as possible to draw the largest possible audience to an event. Instead of eliminating hurdles to entry in a bid to attract more people, a New Brunswick basement norm was to erect sociotechnical barriers to inclusion. With all of the tactics described here for keeping shows secret (but particularly the practices of code names and ask a punk), there is a tension of exclusivity versus publicity, echoing the membership tensions described in the previous chapter. A key difference between BME and New Brunswick is the taken-for-grantedness of membership attrition. The community’s proximity to Rutgers University means that there is a predictable turnover in participants. Membership turnover results in a continual process of enculturating newcomers by exposing them to the fine line between committed community secrecy and arbitrary social exclusivity. In a small community that did not have a constant flow of potential new members, it would be more problematic to insist on rigid information practices, and there would be consequences for excluding people arbitrarily. But with a steady supply of new people to the area, New Brunswick punks have—to some extent—the luxury of embracing exclusivity.
Participants voiced varying degrees of concern about the community’s exclusivity. Referring to ask a punk, Brady said, “I don’t think it’s supposed to be like, ‘Hey you’re not punk. You don’t know anything.’ It’s not discriminating against anybody. It’s just a little phrase that became the thing to put on a flyer.” Brady’s comment both highlights the transitory nature of information practices (“It’s just a little phrase that became the thing”) and downplays the possibility of alienation (“It’s not discriminating against anybody”). Tim expressed a similar view: “There’s no one walking around like, ‘Oh, I was going to go to that show, but I didn’t know where it was.’ That never happens.”
Brady’s and Tim’s comments reflect long-timers’ perspectives on the scene, but others had difficulty finding a show’s location, even if they knew the date, time, and names of the bands that were playing. For example, Lowell described his experience: “So when I first moved here, I would go to Myspace, and I would search the New Brunswick zip code to see if there was anything going on. And then from there, there would be a struggle to find an address because I didn’t know where anything was because this was when I first moved down here. I didn’t know any code names. I didn’t know anyone really. I just tried to figure it out.” This description illustrates how social media sites enable outsiders to access some (but not all) of the information that is required for show attendance. Mahdu offered a more measured view of the possible effects of ask a punk on the scene’s inclusivity: “I thought it was the dumbest thing ever at first. People were like, ‘Ask someone where the show is,’ and I was like, ‘Well, that’s stupid because why should I have to go out of my way to find out where the show is?’ And I did it, ’cause I wanted to go to these shows, but then I realized that it’s important that we keep what we do a secret.” Even if they were initially dubious of the necessity for tactical secrecy, participants often said they were willing to adhere to these practices due to community pressure, which was most frequently justified by the need to evade police.
Legitimate Secrecy: Cops and Noobs
Throughout the basement community, there is a widely held belief that the local police are committed to shutting down punk shows. One fear, which was related to online practices of secrecy, was that the police were using social media sites to obtain show information. As described by Tim: “Somebody on the police force made a Myspace page saying that this was going to be the official New Brunswick punk scene Myspace page and they wanted you to send them all the shows that were coming up so that they could post them—kind of like posing as someone in the punk scene.” Mahdu related a similar experience:
Cops have definitely contacted me before, trying to figure out where shows are. I won’t email them back. If I get an email from someone, I always search their email on Facebook or Myspace, cause a lot of times, it’ll come up “Not found.” I don’t email them. If I see that it’s a kid, I’ll email them. If I see that it’s not a kid—’cause you wouldn’t believe how many dumb cops there are; their email is just whatever they have on Facebook—I’ll email them back like, “Sorry, show’s canceled.” I’ll just tell them that the show is canceled. That’s happened a lot of times.
In this instance, Facebook is used not to share information but to evaluate requests for information and determine whether requesters are police officers or newcomers.4 The legitimacy of an information request is tested through ad hoc sociotechnical norms that lead show organizers to evaluate the legitimacy of a query based on social and linguistic cues that the request is legitimate (from a punk) or illegitimate (from the police). Message boards enjoy a small but dedicated following in the basement community, partly because participants feel that the police are not aware that the boards exist. As Matt pointed out: “We know that we can trust [that the boards are] being read by thirty different people and none of them are cops.”
Given the regularity with which this suspicion of law enforcement infiltration was expressed, I asked participants how basement community members determined that an inquiry from a stranger was not genuine. Responses emphasized displays of social capital and local knowledge. For example, in a 2011 interview, Matt described an online encounter with someone he believed was an impostor:
The profile was new. There weren’t any pictures of the person on it. They had like five friends. … And it was just strange. You know, like the old Supreme Court definition of pornography: like, I can’t say what it is, but I know what it is when I see it. It was like that. There was really no one thing in particular that was, like, “Oh, caught you red-handed.” It was just uncomfortable.
The community’s awareness of various information practices and social protocols (some of which involved granular and subjective displays of language and vernacular) provided metrics for inclusion, which in turn produced a collective sense of comfort.
The ask-a-punk model itself is a ritualized information practice that signals membership within the community. Madhu, a longtime participant and band member, questioned whether the need for such rituals was more manufactured than necessary: “I think some people embrace the sexiness of the whole thing—like, ‘Oh, man, the cops are on our ass, [but] we gotta do this show.’ It’s really juvenile, but I think some people find a romanticism in that.” Regardless of whether Mahdu’s doubts are well founded, the community’s implementation of this particular ritual of secrecy contributes to the establishment of social norms, allowing members to gain or maintain cultural capital and inclusion in the counterculture.
New Brunswick’s sociotechnical tactics for ensuring secrecy developed pragmatically out of the need to avoid the attention of law enforcement, but the practices have two additional objectives that relate to alterity and authenticity. First, by setting up an us-versus-them division, New Brunswick punks position themselves in continual opposition to local authorities, who are powerful symbols of the enforcement of mainstream norms of behavior, and this supports the basement community’s sense of alterity. DIY ethics also matter here, in that the decentralized, horizontal networks that sustain the basement community contrast sharply with the strong tendency toward hierarchy and vertical command structures that is found in institutions like the police.
Second, threats of police intervention allow community members to exclude people that they simply might not like or want in the community. Like most countercultural movements, punk has been critiqued for reproducing the same strategies of exclusion and discrimination that it was originally intended to subvert. Laura Portwood-Stacer (2013) notes that anarchist groups often struggle to avoid setting up interpersonal hierarchies of substantive versus superficial commitment to anarchist values, sometimes determined by fairly shallow indications (such as how someone is dressed or what foods she eats). Similar to the ways that hairstyles, clothing, and demeanor have long characterized punk aesthetics (Hebdige 1995), fluency in locally accepted social media practices is required for obtaining online information about New Brunswick’s underground network of shows. With resonances to BME in the previous chapter, tensions of membership emerge around whether practices of secrecy are unnecessary, counterproductive, overly restrictive, or inconsistent with DIY ethics of inclusion and participation.
All of the practices described here are tactical, in that they have arisen as flexible solutions to everyday problems through playful improvising within institutional(izing) structures. Indeed, sociotechnical tactics of secrecy in the basement community can be reframed entirely in terms of strategies and tactics—where alcohol licenses, event permits, and neighborhood noise ordinances are viewed as prohibitive strategies and where DIY insulation projects, early show times, and secretive practices of information exchange are viewed as tactics of resistance. For Michel de Certeau (1984), the construct of tactics is a useful way to theorize everyday life in terms of maintaining individual identity within dominant, mainstream culture. De Certeau was interested in daily acts of resistance from hegemonic institutions of state control, which he viewed as both ubiquitous and totalizing. For the basement community, the constant specter of police intervention has led to a shared culture of secrecy about where shows take place and a tendency toward exclusivity about who can obtain some kinds of knowledge.
Concerns of police detection were voiced so consistently within the community that some participants questioned the extent to which the fear of police detection was rooted in a legitimate threat and suggested that the tactics of secrecy actually were based on a romanticized construct that reinforced a sense of marginalization and alterity. Even if police detection was not as much of a threat as participants typically perceived, the police are still a symbol of (capitalist, hegemonic) authority and in that sense critical to understanding the community’s tactics of secrecy.5 The DIY and punk culture’s anti-industry, anticapitalist values are deeply ingrained and are made visible in the basement community’s antipolice rhetoric and the tactics that it used to control flows of information. These tactics also play a role in the realm of the personal, affecting aspects of community life such as individual judgment calls about whether and with whom to share information.
Upending Protocols: Consequences for Violating Basement Norms
The New Brunswick basement community’s deep commitment to DIY ethics has given rise to particular sociotechnical tactics for managing information. But other than the threat of police detection, why would community members adhere to a somewhat onerous set of norms for communication? And what are the stakes for violating these tactics? To address these questions, I compare two breakdowns of community norms of secrecy that demonstrate the social and technological ramifications of subverting or setting aside existing practices. The first example involves a basement newcomer, Tom, who attempted to aggregate information about shows into a single online source and in doing so found himself ostracized from the basement community. The second example examines the decision to publicize a benefit show called Hub City Hardcore Fest (HCHF) to raise money for a community member’s medical bills. When the police used online tools to investigate the concert—tracking down the exact location of show houses in the process—the community responded with a renewed commitment to tactics of secrecy. Tom’s website is an example of an individual who transgresses against group norms and subsequently is disciplined by the community. HCHF is an example of community members who violate their own cultural norms, with lasting repercussions for the community’s technological protocols. Both examples illustrate the technological limits of secrecy and reveal the crucial role of social norms and structures in countercultural communities.
The Limits of Sharing: Newcomer Missteps
Tom came to Rutgers University as an undergraduate, and as a fan of indie and punk music he was interested in attending local live shows. Because he was neither in a band nor a resident of a show house, Tom’s access to information about basement performances was at first limited, similar to the experience of other newcomers. Tom eventually met a classmate who was involved in the community and started taking him to shows. After a few months, Tom grew frustrated with the limitations of relying on a single individual to obtain information and decided to circumvent existing tactics of information control by creating a website that provided show information. As Tom described it, “I decided that I was going to take it into my own hands and see if I could get some new kids there.” For Tom, one consequence of information control was that as a group, the basement community felt homogeneous and unvaried. This supports my earlier point that the tactics of secrecy that are developed to avoid police detection also contribute to exclusivity, allowing for the expression of personal bias in determining who looks “punk enough” to become involved in the community.
Tom’s website preserved the basement scene norm of not providing addresses for houses and listed only upcoming shows by date, time, band name, and house code name. He explained, “That would be enough for someone to be, like, able—if they really wanted to go to a show—[to] find the name of the house, ask a kid, whatever. At least they had a starting point, so they could, you know, go experience the show.” Despite the fact that addresses were withheld, preserving a core technical element of basement tactics, Tom’s website lacked adequate countercultural credentials and generated hostile reactions. Tom related an incident in which punk community members confronted him at a basement show, saying, “You don’t have permission to do this. Why are you doing this?” The comments were accompanied by threats of physical violence and forcible removal from shows. This anecdote points to both a hierarchical structure (permission) and a lack of inclusiveness (epitomized by threats of excommunication from the community).
The negative responses to Tom’s site were due in part to his insufficient reputation in the basement punk scene—what Sarah Thornton (1996) would call subcultural capital. Adapting Pierre Bourdieu’s (2011) work on cultural capital and doing extensive fieldwork with club kids and ravers in England led Thornton to develop an analysis of how members of underground music scenes use insider knowledge to signal their belonging within a group. Tom’s intervention would likely have found some sympathy from others who felt that the basement community was overly strict in its practices of information control. But although the ends of his website might have been welcome to some, the means of implementation lacked evidence of adequate subcultural capital. I read Tom’s website as an intrusion into existing practices, so when longtime members of the community evaluated his implied criticism of the status quo, they felt that he lacked adequate capital within the local community to intervene in its practices.
Another and related factor was that Tom acted alone in a community whose DIY values stressed collaborative deliberation and bottom-up decision making. As a relative newcomer to the scene, Tom’s actions were met with suspicion. He stated that he had “a lot of trouble because people … [didn’t trust me] having this information.” Without layers of trust built through extended time in the community, Tom lacked local support for his project and could not figure out how to get it. He eventually took down the site, and although he continued to go to shows on occasion, he always felt like an outsider in the community. The dismantled site remained up for several years, blank except for a single line of text: “Ask punk kids where to find shows.” Ironically, these instructions essentially reinforce the same information practices that Tom initially set out to challenge.
The Limits of Mutual Aid: The Failure of Hub City Hardcore Fest
In summer 2009, members of the New Brunswick basement music community organized a series of benefit shows that collectively were labeled Hub City Hardcore Fest (HCHF) to raise funds for a community member who was diagnosed with cancer. Festival organizers prioritized their objective of raising money and decided to set aside existing norms of secrecy. Presale tickets were sold online, the addresses of the basement venues were printed on each ticket, and the event was covered in local newspapers and websites. As a result, the local police soon became aware of the shows. In some ways, HCHF reveals what happened when the basement community attempted to operate formally rather than informally, above ground rather than underground.
Well before the scheduled date of the benefit performances, problems arose for HCHF organizers. Police officers who previously were unable to locate show houses purchased tickets online as a way to identify the residences that were being used as illegal venues. One research participant explained: “The cops bought all of the tickets to get all of the addresses. So now they had the name of the house and the address, and that fucked everyone.”
Taking preventative measures, the police contacted the landlords of houses where the promoters planned to host shows and promised citations if the shows continued. Alarmed landlords threatened their tenants with eviction, which brought HCHF planning efforts to a halt. In an effort to salvage what was left of the festival, organizers consolidated the performances into a single event and relocated to the Court Tavern (the only eighteen-and-over venue in town). Audience confusion over the changes, the costs of securing the new venue, and the general timbre of police awareness resulted in decreased revenue for the benefit, deepening the organizers’ frustration. Beyond the event itself, the breach in information practices temporarily put basement shows on hiatus while community members waited for police attention to be diverted elsewhere. Show organizers attempted to recuperate stability through a renewed commitment to word-of-mouth rather than online communication networks, a defensive move toward tactics of keeping information secret and holding newcomers in suspicion.
Tom’s website failed because it violated implicit norms of social control, even as he included the explicit mechanisms of information control that had been established by community standards. His exclusion and ostracization resulted not because he had information but because he tried to disseminate information in a way that was in conflict with the cultural norms of the basement community. In the case of HCHF, collective secrecy practices were violated within the community itself in an effort to pursue a common economic goal. Although that goal was consistent with the DIY value of mutual aid, the project fell short of success when organizers departed from the community’s secrecy norms and then found themselves unable to shield show houses from police detection.
Both Tom’s encounter with community resistance and the community’s return to word-of-mouth promotion after it used public information channels for a charity event are examples of community self-policing in the face of (real or perceived) threats of police intervention. Online technologies did not introduce tensions of secrecy and surveillance to this countercultural community, but they did sharpen the contours of decision points surrounding the social and technological practices of secrecy.
Conclusions
Given that New Brunswick, New Jersey, is home to a large university, it is not surprising that an active community of young people supports local live entertainment. What is surprising are the technologies and online platforms that are deployed within this community as part of its commitment to localized values of secrecy. We tend to think of young people as fluent in and dependent on digital media for self-expression and social connection (although the inaccuracies of this logic are well documented: see boyd 2014 and Vaidhyanathan 2008). New Brunswick’s basement community provides an example of young people who have collectively committed to using social media in a way that often involves personal inconvenience and technological redundancy. The payoff for committing to these tactics is a feeling of actively contributing to the long-term survival of local punk music.
Learning social norms and subsequently adhering to them is critical to membership in any group. In their research on risk in leisure groups, Gary Alan Fine and Lori Holyfield (1996, 28) argue that obtaining information, which requires both social and technical skills, is one of the first goals of group membership. Similarly, in New Brunswick’s basement community, membership is about both access to information and fluency with information. By conforming to community norms of secrecy through tactics like code names and ask a punk, newcomers signal their shared values and countercultural savviness. Technology allows members to demonstrate their fluency in tactics of disseminating information appropriately (or in Tom’s case, inappropriately), but technology can also allow members to determine whether a claim to community information is valid (as when several participants reported using platforms like Facebook to authenticate an unfamiliar name on message boards or in email requests for information about shows).
Community procedures for authentication point to what Elfreda A. Chatman (1999) calls the performative nature of information. In her work with inmates at a women’s maximum security prison, Chatman (1999, 208) argues that information is “really a performance. It carries a specific narrative that is easily adaptable to the expectations and needs of members of a small world.” Chatman’s insight is to point out the ways that information is never just about content; it also is about context. Evaluating the usefulness of information is often a matter of whether information is valid, but Chatman adds the crucial point that interpreting information is also about the social context in which it is received and circulated—how it is performed. In the basement community, information is performed on flyers and Facebook invitations via code names and ask a punk, tactics that have taken shape within both larger narratives of DIY and punk values and the contingent narratives of secrecy. In addition to these communication performances, requests for information about basement shows are also evaluated in terms of whether they adequately perform localized norms.
Although the basement community’s tactics for secrecy are rooted in avoiding threats of detection from the authorities, their methods of exclusion also support the community’s interest in seeing itself as countercultural. As David Muggleton (2000, 63–64) notes in his work on secrecy, “invoking a reference group enables certain individuals to emphasize their ‘insider’ status as members of an esoteric scene through self-exclusion from a larger category of uninitiated ‘outsiders.’” When New Brunswick punks invoke the police as a reference group in their commitment to secrecy, they set up a relationship to information that is performative, signaling their opposition to the police and mainstream rules of social behavior in general. In terms of how digital technologies support the basement community, the performative dimension of information, both online and off, becomes a way of operationalizing a collective commitment to DIY values.
Part of the performative nature of information and technology in the basement community relies on a backdrop of punk and DIY as countercultural identity. It also relies on a set of expectations about how young people use technology. Rather than tools of self-promotion and oversharing, platforms like Facebook and Reddit become media of secrecy, which Graham M. Jones (2014, 56) describes as “the vehicles through which relations of inclusion and exclusion or similarity and difference are modulated via communicative practices of concealment, revelation, revelation of concealment, and concealment of revelation.” In this countercultural context, it is not just a matter of whether to use technologies but how to use them. Ben Light (2014) argues that simple binary of connecting and disconnecting does not do justice to the complexities of everyday online life, which tend to involve multiple platforms and profiles whose arrangements can change frequently.6 Light’s unpacking of the different assumptions that are embedded in touting connectivity resonate with New Brunswick punks’ collective commitment to secrecy and their use of a range of technologies to meet a specific set of goals.
Returning to the three-part framework that I use throughout this book—legibility, flexibility, and authenticity—one way of thinking about the failure of Tom’s website is that it lacked authenticity. Tom’s interests in punk were sincere, but his objectives and his website were interpreted as illegitimate because he failed to follow existing social structures for information sharing. Basement punks did not see clear signals that their local values were embedded in the sites. Instead, they saw interference from an interloper. I have defined the word secrecy as fundamentally collective—a group commitment to protecting shared practices and activities. Because Tom acted alone rather than with others in the community, his website was doomed to be censured.7 Although the information that he presented on his website was identical to that found at other sources, he lacked adequate enculturation to perform and narrate this information among his peers.
Although this chapter does not talk much about legibility, issues of legibility might have contributed to the demise of Tom’s site. One problem was that community members rejected as inauthentic Tom’s claims to information. A separate problem was that the community found it difficult to address Tom’s newcomer information needs. Although Tom failed to solicit community feedback before acting, he was never clear about how he could have asked permission (and thus acted within the community’s social and information norms). No legible structure was in place for adjudicating existing practices of information sharing or for requesting significant changes to information flows within the community. Tom’s website brings into relief the risks of prioritizing secrecy over legibility—such as potentially alienating newcomers with genuine interests in the community and reinforcing structures of control and hierarchy that many countercultures seek to contest.
Participants invoked the example of the Hub City Hardcore Fest as a justification for practices of secrecy, but these tactics have important consequences. One is that these practices exclude people who have legitimate interests in punk but may simply not appear that way (online or off) to current community members. Another is that determining whether to share information stems from trying to avoid police detection of shows and can be a subjective decision. Community members can exclude others for personal or arbitrary reasons under the veil of adhering to values of protecting community viability. Questions of legitimacy surface across different countercultural tactics in this community—in deciding whether to use Facebook, Myspace, or text messages to distribute information about a show; in using norms of social media activity to determine whether someone is a cop or a newcomer; or in evaluating whether a technological intervention is welcome or grounds for ostracization. The differing mechanisms of performing and evaluating legitimate interests in New Brunswick punk demonstrate the limits of a purely technological approach to secrecy. Because membership in a countercultural community is socially determined, information that is made available only to members will always require social as well as technological determinations of access.
In some ways, the basement community’s ability to enforce exclusivity through the various tactics of determining membership that are identified in this chapter can be seen as a luxury. Show organizers can afford to be selective about whom they invite—and how they invite them—because basement performances are so often (literally) the only show in town. The small, cramped nature of basements means that a show can feel full with just a dozen people. Although I’ve been to several underattended shows, I have also been to performances that felt uncomfortably crowded. It takes work to organize well-attended basement shows, but New Brunswick enjoys the advantage of a stable population of young people who have limited options for local entertainment. Moreover, young people are more likely to submit to the rigors of performing countercultural alterity than other age groups, simply because they lack access to other registers of status (such as having a family or a career, for example).8
A second characteristic of how technological alterity takes shape in the basement community relates to flexibility, where countercultural tactics adapt with emerging technologies and against shifting strategies of infiltration. Returning to Chatman’s (1999, 208) point about information as performance, she writes that information “is easily adaptable to the expectations and needs of members of a small world.” This reference to adaptability dovetails with my own emphasis on flexibility as a sociotechnical tactic that benefits communities of alterity. The basement community has expectations and needs (secrecy and ideological affiliation with punk and DIY values) that manifest in a shifting array of flexible tactics. Flexibility is valued in practices that reflect countercultural values (such as taking advantage of the DIY viewpoint that technologies are always subject to appropriation by insulating basements) as well as the adoption of new norms of codifying secret information (such as shifting from code names to ask a punk).
Online communication tactics are in many ways less flexible than their offline counterparts, in part because digital platforms themselves are leaky and easily subject to infiltration. It is easier for police to spend an hour fishing on Facebook than show up at shows disguised as punk rockers. Unlike basements themselves, the infrastructure of Facebook cannot be tweaked or modified, at least not at the immediate demands of New Brunswick punk enthusiasts. Unable to soundproof Facebook invites from unwelcome listening, the community relies on online communications without publicizing the most vulnerable information—the addresses of show houses. The practice of occluding addresses persists on sites where community members hold sway over design, like message boards and locally run show sites. Yet what is interesting to me is that despite the rhetoric of the Internet as endlessly adaptable and programmable—evident in dogmatic statements like “information wants to be free” and the emphasis on participatory media—for countercultural communities that seek to keep secrets about their activities and maintain their sense of alterity, online platforms can feel frustratingly inflexible.
The New Brunswick basement community demonstrates how even inflexible platforms that come with known security risks can be fit into a wider assemblage of technologies and practices and become flexible through technological protocols and collective appropriation. Instead of rejecting mainstream information and communication technologies wholesale, members of the basement community rely on collectively honed tactics of secrecy to leverage the convenience of online communication without entirely sacrificing security. As a community, New Brunswick punk persists partly because of local factors (a steady supply of university students, a physical proximity to New York and Philadelphia, a paucity of local venues to hear live music) and partly through the collective adoption of and commitment to sociotechnical tactics of secrecy.
