Overgrounding
The act of making underground practices repeatable, memeable, and formally legible — without standardizing or institutionalizing them. To “overground” the underground is to take its values (high agency, consent culture, participatory aesthetics, ontological creativity) and create scaffolding through which they can circulate beyond the bounded contexts in which they developed, without losing the openness and pluralism that gave them their force.
The concept is introduced in “Sketches Toward a Theory of the Protocol Underground”: “In these introductory remarks, we can outline a couple key features of the protocol underground, in the hopes that by defining them, we might — in an action as magical as a visionary underground railroad — overground them, make of them repeatable and memeable practices, formalized without being standardized.”
Overgrounding is a deliberate act in the face of the underground’s self-imposed fatalism: many scene veterans accept that “to scale is to die,” since vertical scaling opens the door to the hazards of institutionalization (passive consumption, cults of personality, hierarchical capture). Overgrounding proposes a horizontal alternative: distributing the protocols rather than the organization, letting the practices spread through open circulation while the organizational containers remain minimal, ephemeral, and forkable.
Ethereum is presented as infrastructure for overgrounding: “Distributed Ledger Technologies may offer a chance to do the impossible, to scale the underground, embolden communities everywhere with participatory agency over the aesthetic environments they inhabit.” (— Sketches Toward a Theory of the Protocol Underground)