Corporate power, greed and profiteering is a much more substantial cause for the devastation of the "community". It used to be that hackers hacked (read the_uT prophile for a good definition on what hacking is) and -for the most part- stayed quiet. With everyone and his dog selling out to the highest bidder and maxing out self-promotion in his character sheet, that's certainly no longer the case. This is also reflected in (current) Phrack articles and authors, they're no longer an expression of the underground but of the corporate/infosec sphere that they belong to.
The underground these days is to be found on 4chan and other related (or not) subcultures, just like the_uT wrote more than 12 years ago, but certainly not in infosec.