The Immutable Underground: Riot Grrrl, Blockchain and Movements That Last

The greatest subcultures have always been temporary, destined to burn out, get co-opted or fade away. But what if they don't have to?

I was born in the 90s and approached my teens nostalgic for a time I couldn’t remember. After playing Nevermind for the 1072nd time, debating whether to don a full hazmat suit to protest the Iraq war (we were to break into the Navy base as “weapons inspectors”) I wondered what else I’d missed from this halcyon era, where activism, music and fashion were indistinguishable parts of the same identity. Where to be misunderstood was to be understood, if you just knew where to look.

It was the 00s and the media had already taught me women should stay as small as possible - figuratively and literally. There were few celebrated women whose image hadn’t been constructed by men, and who weren’t still being torn down for everything at every opportunity. “Girl Power” was a tagline created to sell records. So when I stumbled across Riot Grrrl (did you know Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna gave Kurt the name Smells Like Teen Spirit?) I was quickly besotted.

Riot Grrrl was more than a feminist punk movement. It was an uprising against the rampant misogyny of the early 90s, a call to take up space. Like hardcore, it was heavily rooted in music, grassroots, DIY and somewhere to finally feel at home, but it forced far less acceptable, far more uncomfortable realities into the open. It was dangerous to be a frontwoman in a way it would never be for a frontman.

Its success depends on who you ask: it was a true revolution, but discriminatory and marginalising in its own ways. As we’ll explore, Riot Grrrl was nearly a shining example of a decentralised movement, but in rejecting institutional gatekeepers, it became bottlenecked by its own.

Technology won’t solve everything, but we do finally have tools capable of amplifying our humanity rather than erasing it; a way to incubate what made movements like Riot Grrrl radical and to address their limitations.

Zines vs. smart contracts

Zines were the backbone of Riot Grrrl: fast to make, cheap to distribute and radically permissionless. You could cut, paste and Xerox a manifesto straight into the ecosystem. Self-publishing was a political act, a generation setting their own terms without waiting for The Industry to validate them.

Riot Grrrl spent four years in media blackout, to distance itself from reductive stereotyping, and to control its own narrative. But controlling the narrative didn’t necessarily protect its contributors. Despite its radical intentions, the movement was predominantly white and middle-class. Many women of colour and women who had to work to support themselves, were quietly shut out.

Onchain publishing doesn’t fix social exclusion but it can fix erasure. Every contribution is transparent and immutable. Once the movement has faded from human memory, the primary sources are preserved in their entirety for anyone who cares to look.

Zines were inherently collective. A single issue was a collage of voices, and new issues often built on existing ideas by responding to, cutting up and remixing previous work.

Smart contracts are a way to automatically handle agreements without intermediaries - and they can act as a neutral publisher. They are shared, transparent containers. When you mint a poem, an artwork, a sound on an open protocol, you are pasting your page into a collective zine. But here, the contribution is timestamped and discoverable in perpetuity. The scene is able to build on top of itself and outwards, infinite and permissionless.

A paper zine is fragile; who knows how much history is rotting away right now, forgotten, in an Olympia basement. But with onchain artefacts, you can see exactly where a project started, who contributed, how it evolved. The paper trail is replaced by a cryptographic one that can’t be misplaced or censored into an incomplete biography.

Code cannot replace the tactile soul of the zine, or what it meant to be there, but it can protect it, form armour around it - so decades into the future it can be rediscovered, whole.

“I was there”

Riot Grrrl spread through small rooms - shows, meetings and workspaces both incubating and amplifying the message. Your reputation was directly correlated to your contribution - it wasn’t an aesthetic you could just adopt, it was effort, care and practical support gluing the scene together. The record of who was there lives in the memory of those who were also there. It’s romantic, but fallible - such memories are vulnerable when only a handful of narrators write the history books.

In crypto, every participating individual is represented by a wallet - their account address. Wallet clusters and transaction history build a picture of a scene that‘s not only a memory, but a living web. We can measure individual impact, tracing any contribution that’s produced an onchain action. Publishing, funding, collecting, adding to a project, supporting a shared ideology, these all weave their own threads in the web. We can live-track who contributes, who supports, who returns.

This builds a social graph. Certain groups of people support the same creators, fund the same projects, and move through the same networks. Certain people are the creators, the core of the movement and the message. These graphs are digital scenes, unbound by geography, based on collective participation: layers of emotional, social, practical and financial investment. People get to know each other in the digital ecosystem, before meeting in person and evolving the physical scene.

Wallet activity obviously can’t recreate the feeling of a room full of people, but it can lead to one. It graphs the ethos that defines those rooms: show up, contribute, support, commit - and makes it programmable.

Officially bootlegged

Riot Grrrl was open source before the term existed, with fans invited to use lyrics, art, and slogans freely. You could scrawl “Girls to the front” on your arm, print it on a shirt, or cut it into a new zine. This was not viewed as copyright infringement, but as amplification, letting the message spread as far and as fast as possible.

We can now hardcode this instinct. We have CC0 (complete freedom of use) or permissive licensing (that allows remixing and reuse) but now it has built-in attribution.

A bootleg has always been proof of the original’s resonance - here we can prove its origin and its most impactful iterations. The girls screaming lyrics in the front row, in their homemade merch, with their spin-off zine, don’t cease to exist when the show ends. Their contribution is measured and they can hold a proper stake in the culture they’re helping to propagate.

Today, a band could release a symbol, a slogan or a song as a digital primitive that anyone can use, while the ledger tracks who did what with it. When that symbol takes off, when someone’s remix goes viral or the original gets licensed, there’s a record of who built that momentum and the ability to give credit and route royalties accordingly. Everyone who did the cultural work can benefit from it, socially and financially.

Financialisation is already here

We’re living in the age of hyperfinancialisation, and counter-culture is no exception. Every subculture that gains traction eventually becomes commodified - this is unavoidable.

What can be rewritten is how that happens and who benefits when it does. The traditional path is extraction. A scene builds momentum in basements and DIY spaces. Someone with capital notices and packages it up into something scalable. The profits flow out of the scene and the people who built it get priced out. What made the scene jagged and real is sanded down to make it marketable.

Culture needs physical spaces for people and ideas to collide - but this needs resources, especially now. Gone are the days of art squats, food co-ops and a hacked electricity meter. The cities where youth culture has always thrived now price out both youth and culture. Space costs money. Time costs money. Organising a scene while working three jobs to pay rent isn’t sustainable. The ideological purity of “making money = selling out” is a privilege most can’t afford.

Technology, up until now, has made things even harder. Social media lets subcultures spread faster but also rapidly dilutes them down to an empty aesthetic. The physical rooms, where counter-culture actually happens, have been left empty, in favour of online signalling.

We now have something different: a way for technology to reinforce physical collision instead of replacing it.

Riot Grrrl relied on merch tables, donations, fundraisers. Cash passed hand to hand at shows, whatever could be scraped together to print the next zine or fund the next tour. We can put this same DIY ethos on cryptographic rails. A venue can issue tokens that give early supporters a stake in keeping it alive. Fans can profit from their own merch designs, whilst routing royalties back to the artists and the scene. The punk spirit of self-funding remains, but there’s a new opportunity to scale it - meaningfully enough that even the artists without rich parents can afford to keep creating.

The financialisation happens, but the terms are set by the subculture itself, not the institutions that show up later. The money circulates within the network instead of flowing up and out. Incentives are designed to keep the scene rich and alive and meaningful.

The shows still happen in basements. The work is still physical, messy, sometimes dangerous. But the people doing it can afford to keep showing up. Rather than hollowing out the scene, technology - and money - becomes the thing that helps it survive.

Anonymous and accountable

Pseudonyms are about more than hiding - they enable freedom of expression. In the Riot Grrrl era, they allowed women to speak freely about abuse, politics and anger without risking their safety. Alter-egos also separate the art from the celebrity of the artist - the focus remains on the message, not the personality. But anonymity can also be a hindrance, making it hard to build lasting trust or coordinate on a large scale.

A wallet address offers a radical upgrade - it gives the pseudonym a permanent home. In Web2, an anon account is precarious. It can be banned, shadowbanned, or deleted at the whim of a platform, taking its audience and history with it. A pseudonymous handle connected to a wallet is owned by the user. It cannot be revoked.

This solves the paradox of trust. Traditionally, we trust people because we know who they are. With blockchain, we trust the history. We can see what a wallet has created, what it has supported and how it has behaved over time. An artist can remain completely anonymous while building an ironclad reputation. They are accountable not to a legal system or a platform policy, but to their own onchain record - and by extension, to the culture.

The art of forking

The Riot Grrrl movement was a sprawling, messy network of local chapters. Olympia had a scene, D.C. had a scene, the UK had a scene; and each operated by its own local rules. To the media, internal arguments and splinter groups looked like failure - but really these were adaptations. When a scene became too rigid or exclusionary, it mutated. People took the core ethos, walked away, and started a new branch that better served their reality. Unlike grunge, which was institutionalised into corporate rock, or hip-hop, which was centralised into a commercial machine, the movement did not scale up into a monolith. It scaled out into hundreds of connected micro-scenes - and when the Riot Grrrl label eventually became baggage, the scenes continued without it.

In code, we call this survival mechanism forking. “Forkability” is a feature. If a community disagrees with the direction of a protocol, or if a platform ignores the needs of its users, the code is open source. Anyone can spin it out into a version that better serves them - without burning down what’s already been built. You can’t expect a global community to remain fully unified - this model allows for nuance within a shared ethos, which helps it remain future-proof.

Growth happens through participation rather than centralisation. It allows for a Darwinian evolution of ideas, where the strongest variations survive and the mistakes are visible for the next generation to learn from.

Riot Grrrl survived because it refused to become a single, easy-to-digest brand (once it did, it was already over). Onchain movements can stay distributed while coordinating at scale - too decentralized to kill, but a collective force when needed.

The memory machine

When we talk about bringing counter-culture to the blockchain, the sceptical jaw-tightening is palpable. To be clear: this is not about a DAO voting on a band’s lyrics. It’s not about turning all the raw energy of the underground into a series of financial transactions. It’s certainly not about feeding human creativity into an AI remix pipeline to generate content.

The goal is simply infrastructure: a memory machine. We lay down rails that preserve attribution, agency, and participation. We create a system where the incentives are aligned so that the people building the value - the fans, the archivists, the creators - are the ones who retain it. We build a container for the culture, not a substitute for it.

These tools are amplifiers, not saviours; they make the invisible visible - whether that’s credit and contribution, or bias and discrimination. They offer a way to protect the work from being co-opted or erased, but they cannot dictate the soul of the movement. That part is still up to us.

The immutable underground

I made it to the top of the gates at the Navy base. The hazmat suit went back into the wardrobe, and eventually, the teenage nostalgia faded into adulthood. I realised that trying to recreate the energy of 1993 was futile. You cannot copy paste a moment in time. But the principles? Yes.

For decades, we’ve accepted that subcultures are destined to be temporary. They burst into life, get co-opted by the industry and the mainstream, and fade away. The history gets written by the winners, and the participants are left with nothing but memories.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

We now have the tools to keep the culture alive. We can ensure that the people who do the work are recognised and rewarded. The next generational counter-culture movement could still be made of paper and glue - but also of cryptographic proofs and shared code.

The technology is ready, if we’re brave enough to use it for something more than speculation. If we are, we might just build something worthy of the (provably accurate) history books.

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