chapter four -> opaque by design
Platform capitalism succeeds by making things measurable, predictable, and — above all — profitable. It thrives on what one might call "compulsive legibility" — the drive to make every gesture, preference, and micro-decision visible to algorithmic processing. Any such processing must start with concrete, reliable data — maximum signal, minimum noise. The cleaner the dataset, the more seamlessly the system can model, predict, and manipulate its dependencies. If the algorithm could dream, it would dream of a dataset so clean that there is no more need for any space between one and zero.
In such conditions, rejecting the contract of transparency is not only appropriate but necessary for cultivating viable alternatives. It is the ineffable space of ritual that resists optimisation — and thus becomes effective on its own terms. By foregrounding practices that generate ambiguity, delay or indeterminacy, we can frustrate the platform’s demand for steady, high-resolution input and reclaim a margin of cognitive and social autonomy. The pages that follow trace how such opacity is produced in situated rituals and how it might be designed into future sociotechnical systems.
Horizontal Contagion
If platform capitalism spreads through vertical integration — absorbing competitors, standardising interfaces, centralising control — then any effective resistance must learn to grow differently. The rhizome offers one model: lateral expansion that refuses the usual single-trunk hierarchy. But even rhizomatic growth can be co-opted if it becomes too legible, too predictable. What we need is something more elusive: horizontal contagion that spreads through resonance rather than replication.
This kind of spread distributes principles rather than products, patterns rather than objects. The original cannot be commodified because there is no original in the usual, hierarchical way — there are many variations on a theme that emerges through practice, and every variation is as original (and unoriginal) as the last one. A vivid example of this process can be witnessed in most underground music scenes — they grow unpredictably and uncontrollably, remixing and resampling each other. By the time the music industry catches up, the scene has already moved on to something else. We have seen it unfold countless times when major pop artists attempt to commodify a grassroots genre — the cultural tone-deafness is so obvious that the public unanimously cringes (as with the gqom story from the previous chapter). The contagion spreads faster than the capture mechanisms can adapt.
In the digital realm, mesh networks operate on similar principles. Instead of routing everything through centralised servers, each node in a mesh can relay traffic to its neighbors. The network heals around damage, routes around censorship, and grows through peer-to-peer connection rather than corporate infrastructure. NYC Mesh, for instance, has grown from a handful of rooftop installations to hundreds of nodes across Brooklyn and Queens — not through venture capital or government funding, but through neighbor-to-neighbor expansion. Each new node increases the network's resilience while maintaining its distributed character.
The key insight is that horizontal systems scale through federation rather than consolidation. Instead of growing one big thing, they grow many small things that can communicate with each other. It is the quality of that communication that defines this kind of growth — not the size or even the number of the elements. Power remains distributed because there is no center to capture, the only way to compromise it would be to infiltrate the whole thing, which is often not worth the effort. This is why corporate platforms do not try to compete with federated alternatives like Mastodon or PeerTube — they can copy the features, but they cannot replicate the governance structure that makes those features meaningful. They only tolerate these alternatives as long as they stay small and harmless — a precarious equilibrium.
The Opaque as Immune System
For cultural structures constantly threatened by precarity, intentional opacity is a necessary defence mechanism. When something cannot be fully described, it cannot be fully controlled. This is why vibrant subcultures develop their own languages, why club events resist documentation, why the most effective forms of resistance often appear incoherent to outside observers. Their perceived mysteriousness is not an aesthetic choice — it is a survival tactic.
Consider the way Brazilian baile funk resisted commodification for decades. The music was inseparable from the baile itself — the street party, the sound system, the social dynamics of the favela. When international artists began sampling funk carioca in the 2000s, they extracted the rhythm but lost the context. The result was musically recognisable but socially hollow. The baile continued to evolve, developing new forms that could not be separated from their environment. It was not until platform capitalism learned to monetise context itself — through livestreaming, location-based features, and social media documentation — that the scene began to face more serious pressure. This battle is still ongoing: baile funk loops are frequent guests in "business techno" DJ sets, but the genre itself keeps mutating, and the sounds at its forefront keep successfully evading the mainstream gaze.
Intentional opacity provides temporary immunity, not permanent protection. Cultural practices that resist description can still be absorbed once the extraction mechanisms become sophisticated enough. Opacity alone is insufficient; true sustainability requires actively cultivating practices that become less meaningful, not more, when subjected to measurement and optimisation. A club event cannot be reverse-engineered from its components — the music, the audience, the space, the timing. It emerges from the interaction between these elements, from the specific alchemy of particular time and space. Promoters who try to measure and algorithmise their events usually end up killing what made them special in the first place. The magic lies in the spaces between: the moments of improvisation, the unexpected connections, the collective decision to let go of individual control and surrender to the chaotic dynamics of the group.
This is why documentation sometimes feels like a betrayal, and why opaque rituals like club events seem to resist it. The moment you try to capture the experience, you change it — in a quantum, untraceable way. Early European anthropologists who infiltrated indigenous rituals grasped function but missed meaning — their presence alone rendered the documentation inauthentic. No matter how well you hide your camera, the shift in participants' awareness changes the dynamic — even if imperceptibly at first, like the observer effect that puzzled early quantum physicists. The opaque is not just what cannot be described; it is what loses its essential quality when subjected to systematic observation.
Pararitual Infrastructures
If traditional rituals were often designed to connect communities to cosmic order, pararituals emerge to connect communities to each other in a cosmos that has been fragmented by digital acceleration. They are not pseudo or fake rituals; they are rituals adapted to conditions where the sacred has been commodified and the collective has been isolated.
One example of pararitual infrastructure is an illegal party— whether it is a Brazilian baile, a Beijing underground party or a Detroit warehouse rave. It exists in liminal space — neither fully legal nor illegal, neither public nor private. It operates on transformed timelines, beginning late and ending early, creating a temporal bubble outside normal schedules. It generates altered states through repetition, volume, collective movement, and often the use of psychoactive substances. Most importantly, it creates temporary community bound by shared experience rather than shared identity.
Not all illegal parties are pararituals, and not all pararituals require legal liminality. The term describes a set of effects — the scrambling of social norms, the creation of shared embodied states — that can emerge in many settings, but are especially vivid where formal structures break down. Unlike traditional rituals, which often reinforce existing social hierarchies, pararituals can scramble them. The club space becomes a territory where social rules are suspended and replaced by new ones — often unwritten, shared only by word of mouth. These transformations are temporary, but they leave traces: people remember what it felt like to be part of something larger than themselves — in a physical, embodied way.
This is why clubs have historically been crucial to marginalised communities. The ballroom scene, for instance, created spaces where Black and Latinx LGBTQ+ youth could form alternative kinship structures, with the club functioning as an affective household. The techno scene offered the working-class youth of post-industrial cities an escape pod into collective catharsis and shared futurism. Reggaeton and baile funk parties gave favela residents a space to reclaim visibility and agency on their own terms. In all of these cases, the music was only part of a ritual, inseparable from the social infrastructure that supported it.
But pararitual infrastructure is fragile. It depends on spaces that are liminal, temporary, and often precarious. It thrives in the gaps between official uses — abandoned warehouses, after-hours clubs, misused theatres, cinemas and churches. As cities get gentrified and surveillance increases, these spaces become hard to find and even harder to hold. The pararitual gets pushed further underground or absorbed into legitimate entertainment districts where it loses its transformative potential.
The question is not how to preserve these spaces (they are ephemeral by nature) but how to maintain the capacity to create new ones. This requires more than just location scouting; it demands social skills, technical knowledge, and financial resources that make pararitual infrastructure possible — which, in purely economic terms, almost never yields profit. In the particular case of club events, this means cultivating expansive networks of people who can organise teams, manage finances, set up sound systems, liaise with artists, negotiate with authorities, deal with taxes and licences, maintain safety protocols — the list goes on and on. For such a complex social technology, it is no surprise that amid political shifts, funding cuts, and accelerated gentrification, club culture appears to be in decline — in Berlin and far beyond.
The knowledge required to sustain the culturally relevant nightlife infrastructure is largely tacit and non-transferable through formal channels. But it does not mean that the underlying principles are lost — the collapse of one form of pararitual infrastructure often catalyses the emergence of others, as communities adapt their practices to new constraints and possibilities. The tactical knowledge developed in club organising — building trust networks, managing resources collectively, creating temporary autonomous zones, negotiating with hostile authorities — transfers across contexts, even when the specific venues disappear. Club culture may be crumbling as we knew it, but new ritual firewalls will emerge in its place, shaped by different tools and terrains.
Opaque Architectures
The most effective resistance to digital extraction may not be technological but architectural — designing spaces, events, and social structures that resist legibility to monitoring systems. This does not mean hiding (although sometimes it includes that, too) — it is more about cultivating complexity that cannot be reduced to simple metrics.
Consider the difference between a corporate music festival and an underground warehouse party. The festival is designed for maximum legibility: clear sight lines for security cameras, digital ticketing systems that track attendance, controlled entry and exit points, standardised vendor relationships. Every aspect is optimised for efficiency, safety, and profit. The warehouse party operates on different principles: multiple entry points, cash-only transactions, informal networks for promotion and security, space for spontaneous activity. It is not necessarily better, but it is much less susceptible to algorithmic optimisation — too chaotic to scale efficiently, and therefore not interesting for the venture capital that seeks predictable returns on investment. This principle extends beyond club events to broader questions of social architecture. How do we design communities that resist the flattening effects of platform capitalism? How do we build networks that can coordinate action without centralising control?
Perhaps, the answer lies partly in embracing messiness, friction, and inefficiency — not as bugs, but as features. Platform capitalism thrives on frictionless interaction — the one-click purchase, the infinite scroll, the auto-played next video, the auto-completed form. Resistance might look like intentionally adding friction back into our social systems: requiring people to show up in person, to engage in difficult conversations, to commit time and energy to collective projects, to go through the slow, sometimes annoying routines of building trust and establishing ritual practices that cannot be automated.
This cultivation of opacity should not come from a place of nostalgia for pre-digital life, but from a place of intentional self-awareness — human beings are not meant to be fully optimised, and neither are their social environments and collective rituals. The most resilient communities may be those that cultivate what we might call "productive opacity" — social practices that are rich and meaningful to participants but resist easy quantification by external systems. These communities develop their own languages, rhythms, and forms of value that cannot be easily captured or commodified. They create what anarchist scholar James C. Scott calls "hidden transcripts" — shared understandings that exist below the radar of dominant systems of power.
Alternative Spatial Logics
Hidden transcripts require space to flourish — not just conceptual space but actual physical and social environments where alternative logics can operate without immediate interference from systems of capture. The cultivation of productive opacity depends on creating alternative spatial logics — ways of organising space, time, and social relations that resist the flattening effects of algorithmic optimisation while fostering the conditions necessary for pararitual emergence.
Hakim Bey's concept of the Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ) describes spaces that temporarily escape existing power structures rather than permanently replacing them. A TAZ creates conditions where different rules apply and new possibilities can be explored, but its power lies precisely in its temporality. By dissolving before power can locate and control it, the TAZ avoids capture or institutionalisation while creating new experiences and relationships that persist in participants' memories.
This temporality connects to Michel Foucault's concept of heterotopias — real spaces that exist within society but operate according to different rules and logics. Unlike utopias, which are imaginary perfect places, heterotopias are actual "counter-sites" where conventional social orders are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted. The ritual gathering, the festival, the occupied square — these heterotopias temporarily suspend normal social hierarchies and economic relations, creating spaces where collective practices can emerge and flourish.
These spaces also function as what Mary Louise Pratt calls "contact zones" — social spaces where different cultures, communities, and classes encounter each other outside their usual contexts. A contact zone allows for new forms of connection across lines of difference that are usually policed by dominant social structures.
Another lens to view these spaces through is the Deleuzian assemblage — they bring together bodies, technologies, sounds, ideas, and stories in temporary configurations that produce effects larger than the sum of their parts. The ritual circle includes not just participants but the music / rhythm that guides them, the space that holds the gathering, the technologies that brought people together, and the altered states that transform consciousness. Each element affects the others in unpredictable ways, creating emergent properties that exist only in the moment of their coming together.
This assemblage logic helps explain why pararituals resist systematic capture. They cannot be replicated exactly because they depend on specific configurations of elements at particular moments. Corporate attempts to recreate underground culture typically fail because they can copy surface elements but cannot reproduce the assemblage itself — the collective mood, the social trust, the embodied knowledge that makes authentic pararitual experience possible.
The cumulative effect of these alternative spaces is not the creation of a parallel society but the expansion of what people believe is possible within existing society. Each temporary gathering demonstrates that other ways of being together are possible, that hierarchy and commodification are not inevitable features of social life.
This is why documentation and analysis of these spaces remain so challenging: the moment we try to systematise them, we risk destroying what makes them powerful. The point is not to create blueprints but to cultivate the capacity to recognise and create these spaces when conditions are right, maintaining the social knowledge necessary for pararitual infrastructure to emerge spontaneously in response to changing circumstances.
Scale Without Standardisation
The central challenge for any alternative to platform capitalism is how to scale without reproducing the extractive dynamics that make platforms problematic in the first place. Traditional capitalist scaling strategies — corporate acquisition, market expansion, venture capital — lead to centralisation and commodification by their design. How do we imagine forms of growth that preserve difference, autonomy, and opacity?
One answer is federation: connecting autonomous nodes without subordinating them to a central authority. This is the model behind decentralised social networks like Mastodon, distributed mesh networks, and horizontal organising principles used by movements like Occupy. Each node maintains its own character while participating in a larger network. But federation requires more than just technical protocols; it requires social protocols for managing conflict, sharing resources, and maintaining solidarity. It requires what software engineers call "interoperability" — the ability to work together without becoming the same — not just between systems but between communities.
This is one of the most interesting aspects of contemporary club culture: how local scenes maintain their distinctiveness while participating in global networks of exchange. The key is that influence flows in multiple directions rather than from center to periphery. The result is a network of scenes that are connected but not identical, each maintaining its own character while participating in a larger conversation.
Similar patterns emerge in other pararitual contexts. The global network of ecovillages operates through loose coordination rather than central control, with communities sharing knowledge and resources while maintaining their distinct approaches to sustainable living. Open-source software development shows how complex projects can emerge from distributed collaboration without corporate oversight, maintained by communities of practice rather than profit-driven organisations. Even in natural systems, we find analogues: mycorrhizal networks in forest ecosystems facilitate communication and resource exchange between diverse species, creating resilience through decentralised cooperation instead of hierarchy.
This federated logic can also be seen in more ephemeral contexts: street art scenes, permaculture networks, and mutual aid organisations all operate through horizontal coordination — practices and principles that spread through networks of influence rather than institutional channels. Knowledge travels through relationships, workshops, and temporary gatherings rather than standardised curricula or study plans. These distributed, adaptive systems offer a glimpse of how culture, like ecology, can flourish without centralisation. The task ahead is not to replicate the scale of platforms, but to nurture resilient networks that grow without erasing difference — networks that trade efficiency for autonomy, and metrics for meaning.
Chapter Conclusion: The Refusal to be Optimised
Strategic opacity is not a retreat from politics — it is its precondition. In a world where every gesture is monitored, every preference predicted, every interaction monetised, the capacity to remain partially opaque is not an aesthetic preference but a survival tactic. Any space where genuine choice is possible, where communities can form according to their own logic rather than algorithmic optimisation, has to be opaque — whether by accident or design.
Resistance to digital extraction requires more than just better technology; it requires the cultivation of practices, spaces, and relationships that resist optimisation. The pararitual infrastructures of club culture, the horizontal contagion of underground music scenes, the temporary autonomous zones of street gatherings and protests — these are not marginal diversions from mainstream culture and politics, but laboratories for developing new forms of collective life.
These practices’ perceived smallness and unseriousness might be their most important advantage — they are too chaotic to optimise and commodify, yet too small to bother destroying. The question is not how to scale them but how to maintain their capacity to emerge spontaneously, to quickly adapt to local conditions, to resist capture by systems that would turn them into products. This requires the deliberate cultivation of opacity — not as obscurantism, but as a kind of immune response.
The point of this response is not a rejection of technology but a demand for its repurposing, its redirecting toward flourishing rather than extraction. It is a call for systems that enhance rather than diminish our capacity for autonomous choice, genuine encounter, and collective meaning-making. Most importantly, it is a recognition that the most valuable aspects of human experience — agency, empathy, solidarity — cannot be commodified precisely because they are opaque, ineffable, and too complex to be reduced to data points.
Ultimately, resistance to digital extraction will never be absolute — digital infrastructures are too pervasive to abandon completely. The task ahead is not to escape digital systems entirely, but to maintain spaces within and alongside them where something irreducibly human persists — messy, inefficient, unpredictable, and collectively autonomous.