3/4 Of course, we shouldn’t get carried away about all this activity. It's not entirely new. There’s a long history of para-academics operating in the 'third' spaces between the university and mainstream, including independent bookshops, cafés, bars and back rooms of pubs. Nor should we get swept up by the romance of it all. A lot of this energy is about finding – or forging – a means for some kind of individualistic expression of ‘who I really am’ in a cultural economy that increasingly refuses to offer secure, liveable wages for work that's interesting and fulfilling, let alone critical and creative.

Consequently, it isn't an arena free of ‘artrepreneurs’ either: people acting as entrepeneurs of themselves, their lives and ideas. But events like these create a collective space to gather, to experiment, to have fun and play together — and so can be seen as a means of pushing back against the individualism and ‘main character energy’ that saturate cultural life, online and off.