So I've been a "smol internet" person for years now (...which reminds me
I'm still grumpy that my capsule went down as I was leaving town when
I'd just checked it that morning. I haven't wanted to deal with the
hassle of setting it up so I can ssh into it outside my own wifi but
maybe I will in the future.) and my partner tor has been into 'zine
making for about as long
I sometimes think about the fact that we're both trying to get at the
same thing: ways of communicating with others that feel less like grist
for ad company scraping or discourse grift engines.
Now, okay, to be clear I'm not saying either of us wants to be edgelords
or anything but, like, we both tend to talk about things we care about
it in ways that are very personal and very nuanced: the exact kinda
thing that gets wrecked by context collapse.
Tor writes about their experience with familial abuse and violence,
about the ways even in-community narratives around queerness and
transness have made it hard to express themselves. I write about, well,
witchcraft, anti-psych, veganism, and various anarchafeminist rants in
addition to my broader tech criticism.
We're both prime "main character" material for the Big Internet in a lot
of ways, only avoiding it because we're both really careful in how we
talk and couch things. But that stinks, right? Like I'm not a wholesale
subscriber of the "dark forest" theory of internet where we have to be
silent in little isolated communities to stay safe *because* I think you
can build broad community in ways hostile to rapid sharing, context
collapse, and Main Character-ing people.
And for me that's gopher and gemini, obviously, and for tor that's
making zines that they only distribute as physical copies. They
sometimes even get asked for digital copies of their zines, and
obviously they have them those are the files they print!, but they only
sell them as physical artifacts so that they are things that can't
really escape the context of who they're *for*. If you're the hate
reading type you're not exactly going to buy a physical copy of a 'zine.
By the time it gets mailed to you the discourse engines will have moved
onto a different topic entirely!
So, yeah, I don't know I don't have any grand conclusions here these
were just the thoughts bouncing around in my head as I was heading over
to check out the 'zine fest and relieve tor from their table for a few
minutes while they walk outside and eat. The joys of still wearing masks
indoors everywhere.
