Consent Culture
The robust and rigorously exercised culture of ongoing, explicit, situated agreement that defines protocol undergrounds and constitutes the ground on which all other underground values rest. Against the 20th-century patriarchal establishment’s ambivalence toward consent, undergrounds have been avant-gardes of mutually affirmed consent — not as a legal or bureaucratic formality but as a living, continuous, participatory practice.
The S&M scene’s “two squeezes” technique is the emblematic example: a proactive measure supplementing safewords, providing active and continual consent throughout a session — asking “are you OK?” through touch, and reading the quality of the response (two brisk squeezes = alert; two long slow squeezes = deep under). “The technique provides a simple, workable way for both parties to communicate that they are all right without either having to break the mood verbally.” This level of protocol development around consent is characteristic of underground scenes operating under legal persecution: prohibition drives protocolization.
Consent culture is defined in opposition to the “interpretive labor” of institutional settings — where the opacity of structural violence creates ambiguity about what is coercive and what is voluntary. In extitutional settings, consent is not delegated to institutional guarantees but maintained through mutual expectation and continuous renegotiation.
In the web3 frame, consent culture is translated into cryptographic and smart-contract terms: “an absolutely non-coercive context” in which coordination depends on mathematics and thermodynamics rather than weapons and terror. “Vibes are network forms, and supremacy is a dead ecology.” (— Sketches Toward a Theory of the Protocol Underground)