Black metal has become a circus.

There's no point pretending otherwise. You turn on any streaming playlist and hear hundreds of clones that sound the same, look the same, and have nothing to say. Their opinions, if any, are limited to shouts of "hail satan." This isn't the same beast and machine that bit the hand that fed it in the '90s. Today, black metal, for many, is just an Instagram aesthetic, a hood from a chain store, and a logo that doesn't even need to be drawn by hand because a generator will do it.

We have a flood of pseudo-bands. Recording material used to require skill, determination, and equipment that cost sacrifice. Today, any kid with an audio interface and a VST plugin pretending to be "basement sound" produces an album in a weekend. And they flood the market with it. There's no selection. There's no entry point. This leaves the gems drowning in a cesspool of mediocrity. Quality used to be determined by cassette tapes, zines, and word of mouth – a slow but ruthless mechanism for poseurs. Today? All you have to do is buy likes from a farm in Asia and suddenly you're on stage.

I look at Facebook and see a paradox. On the one hand, yes, it helped at first. It was easier to organize a concert, easier to reach an agreement with a label halfway around the world. But the price we paid for it is absurd. We've surrendered all our independence to a single corporation. The black metal scene, which by definition was supposed to stand in opposition to the masses and the system, has locked itself in Zuckerberg's blue cage.

We are slaves to algorithms. You no longer decide who sees a poster for your concert or a review of your demo. That's decided by AI, crunching data in the background. The algorithm cuts your reach because you didn't pay the advertising fee or because it decided the cover was "too controversial" for the community's standards. And what do we do? We complain, but we still sit there. It's Stockholm syndrome.

What pisses me off most is the laziness in finding alternatives. People have forgotten what the internet was like before the era of social media. They don't see that their own website, newsletter, or even private forum are bastions of independence. They prefer to build a home on someone else's land (Facebook/Instagram), from which they can be kicked out with a single click of the admin. No one wants to build their own distribution channels because it takes work. It's easier to post a post and cry that 5% of your followers saw it.

We're in a completely different world than in the '90s. Back then, being part of the scene required commitment. You had to write letters, go to the post office, and build contacts. This built bonds and fanaticism. Now everything is handed to you on a silver platter, so no one respects it. Music has become the background for scrolling.

If you think you're rebelling against the system by posting on a platform that trades your data and censors content at the behest of advertisers, you have no idea what black metal was. What we see today is largely a commercial shell. The true underground must once again descend deeper, beyond the radar of algorithms, because only fashion remains on the surface.