They’re hungry, they’re critical, they’re creative, and they’re rising up against the status quo, the tried and true. Restaurants, fashion magazines, Hollywood and even plain and simple cash had better watch out as their power diminishes and a new order bubbles up.

Away from white-tablecloth restaurants, gourmands are gathering off the radar. They are learning how to slaughter a 70-kilogram boar at a guerrilla cooking school , or indulging in ambitious meals in unlicensed restaurants in apartments in cities like New Yorkand London.

“Mainstream it’s not ? and that’s just how the organizers like it,” wrote The Times’s Melena Ryzik.

These underground restaurants are run by groups like Whisk & Ladle and A Razor, a Shiny Knife in New York. The participants are not aspiring to become restaurateurs . They’re in it for the community and creative freedom, wrote Ms. Ryzik.

Those two ideals also motivate Polyvore, a usergenerated fashion Web site. Just as a Michelin-rated restaurant can be deemed mainstream, so too are the likes of Vogue and InStyle. But on Polyvore, users can play fashion editor and create collages with pictures of clothing and accessories from the Web. If readers click on a blouse, they are taken to the Web site that sells it. Polyvore tripled its traffic in the last year, while other fashion magazine sites have been struggling to maintain an audience.

“There’s this aspirational side and entertainment side, which none of the sites up until now have done a good job at tapping into,” Peter Fenton, a partner at Benchmark Capital, which invested $2.5 million in Polyvore, told The Times.

People want their glamour and glitz, but they want to be able to have more say in it. And that’s what’s happening in Hollywood. The standard movie ratings system by the Motion Picture Association of America ? G, PG, PG-13, R and NC-17 ? is coming under attack via the Web, and it has left Hollywood veterans fretting about a drop in attendance and profits, according to The Times. The system now competes with Internet-based ratings alternatives like SceneSmoking.org, which monitors tobacco use in movies, and Movieguide.org, which rates movies from a Christian perspective .

“We think there is a critical mass building against the M.P.A.A. on the Web that will hopefully result in major changes to its ratings practices,” Susan Linn, director of the advocacy group Campaign for a Commercial- Free Childhood, told The Times.

Maybe you don’t want to pay to go see that movie anyway. And you don’t have to, because you can barter for tickets instead. Postings on Craigslist’s barter section have increased, and the trading site U-Exchange.com has seen an influx of participants from Spain, South Africa, Britain and the United States, reported The Times.

One user, Rich Rowley, who owns R House Construction in Washington, offered remodeling and home repairs in exchange for dental care and a boat. “We have to learn to adapt to the changing landscape,” he told The Times. “Part of that is bartering. The exciting thing is this is another part of the puzzle that gets us to where we’re going.”

And that place just might be from the ground up.

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Why eat at a Michelin-rated restaurant when you can learn how to slaughter a boar? / JENNIFER MAY FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES