Ken Shipley is one of the founders of the Numero Group, an archival record label founded in 2003. I first found them tracing my favorite hip hop samples in high school, loving soul songs like The Ponderosa Twins Plus One’s “Bound” and Wee’s “Aeroplane (Reprise).”

In college, I found Duster, a 90s “space rock” band who, in spite of relative obscurity in their (initial) prime and 20 years of inactivity, had amassed a cult following online. The answer was The Numero Group, a label that’s made a name for itself re-issuing out-of-print, once-forgotten records in beautiful packaging, filled with essay-length liner notes and pictures of the music’s production.

In a culture that over-glorifies newness, we might get a lot from looking to the past to see what we missed, and what still stands the test of time. I’ve spent the last few years devouring Numero’s catalog, always pleasantly surprised by their breadth and quality, ranging anywhere from Hamlet Minassian’s self-explanatory Armenian Pop Music to California folk (Wayfaring Strangers: Ladies from the Canyon) and 90s dream pop (Ozean s/t). I keep a running playlist of all of my favorite songs that’s nearly 6 hours long now:

Numero envisions themselves as an “alternative history of popular music,” a rewriting of history without the same ‘winners,’ where different people were pop stars and different songs linger in our memory. Talking to Ken brought up a bunch of threads I think about a lot: the value of amateurism and persistence, ‘working artists’ and uneven stardom, technological change and the continued importance of craft. I DMed Ken on Instagram about an interview after running into him at the Numero pop-up store in SF in October. He graciously agreed, and we talked by phone on a Friday afternoon.

Interview, as always, has been edited for clarity and concision!

(P.S.: It’s been awhile since I published the last ZINE MUNCH, mostly because I’ve been super busy: I finished college and moved to San Francisco to work at a startup! If you’re in the area, I’d love to grab coffee!)

Mastery and rediscovery

Lucas Gelfond:

You’re talking about people who spend their time mastering a craft, and get very good over the course of a lifetime. You guys [often] find people who made music in their twenties or their early thirties or whatever. They stop being musicians and then you approach them later, with music of their youth. Is this by design? I’m also curious generally how people respond to your approaching them about work that often is from very very long ago.

Ken Shipley:

It really depends on the type of person and what the experience was with the work. Like I was saying earlier, a lot of people tend to fade away. It’s not necessarily because they’re not good at it, but because they didn’t find enough success in it, they’re not patient enough to seek it and it’s hard. Music is not for everyone, most people will not make it.

LG:

Yeah…

KS:

If you had a really negative experience around your art, there’s a tendency to dismiss it, or be suspicious of people who are interested in it. That sort of negativity will permeate a relationship.

If people feel that they’ve been horribly overlooked, they tend to have a bit more of a chip on their shoulder about it, and that requires a different approach with them and having different conversations with them. Not every relationship that you want to start with a client is a relationship that you are going to quite consummate with a deal. You might meet this person and you’re like: I can’t be in a relationship with this person, because it’s gonna be too toxic. Most people are super pleasant, I’m giving you the negative example.

There’s plenty of examples where you talk to someone and they’re like: "I've been waiting for you, “I said to myself, I’ll just wait.” You show up and you’re there at the right time in their lives. There’s people where it’s like “you want me? For what, why do you want to be in touch? Oh, yeah, that thing I did, that group I was in for eight months? That?”

So it’s all a matter of stories at this point. We’ve had so many people, there’s not one mold. It just depends on how they feel about it, because [sometimes] you meet someone and they’re like, “that band was the greatest six months of my life.”

LG:

Wow, yeah.

KS:

They’re going to be so excited to work with you because they remember that music being so deeply important to their identity, and they have waited. That’s the person that you want to work with, really, it’s someone who’s excited about their own art, and ideally they’d kept something.

That’s the other thing. You go, you meet, and you’re like “oh man, I love your stuff.” [They’re like] “well, there was the tornado back in ‘88.” Then the shit’s just gone. That’s always so heartbreaking. [It’s like]: “yeah, we had this studio, we must have recorded for four straight years, every band imaginable came in, but there was that flood so we don’t have any of it.”

It sucks because it’s just gone. You’ve exhausted all of the possibilities of being able to resuscitate something when it’s gone, and you’re like, “it’s okay, not everything gets saved, it washes away.” When we think about the idea of cave paintings, we think, “oh, these people are so artistic.” Like, they had to get it out on the wall of this cave. And it’s like: no man, people didn’t just live in caves. They lived in all sorts of homes that have just gotten washed away over time, so any art that was made there, there’s all kinds of art you just didn’t get to see.

On technological change

LG:

Reading all of these [old] interviews is really interesting, because you guys have been around for a period of incredible technical change. I think it was in Pitchfork, there’s this piece where you're skeptical of the iPod, then you’re skeptical of Spotify. [Now you’re everywhere,] and over time, I feel like you guys have been among the best adopters of new stuff.

I think a lot about how I discovered Duster on TikTok before I saw them anywhere else. How have you thought about technological change? Or: there’s something really interesting about bringing old works that are made in very physical and traditional ways to contemporary platforms.

KS:

When we started we were such a physical company. We were just like “this digital world is fine, but it doesn’t really represent the work that we’re doing.” We were a storyteller brand, and we continued that. We were on Spotify for years before we started our playlist ecosystem, and we were always available digitally, but the amount of income [digital] brought in was like five percent of our revenue. It was tough to take that kind of business seriously when it was not really making any money. [Note: Numero has many huge playlists now!]

We’d always been technologically interested. We had a Facebook account, we had a MySpace page, we had Instagram and Twitter as soon as they came out, we were always following what was happening. As you need to, right, because you’re a media-focused company.

I’ll say this. On the technology side of things, Spotify for us was a real blind spot until 2015. One of my partners was like: “you guys are so good at compiling things, you should really think about building a playlist. If you get 500 followers in a month, I’ll take you to a really nice dinner.”

I love a challenge, so that really drove me on towards wanting to get really deep into playlisting. I spent, I don’t know, three years of my life super deep learning about playlists. We developed a bunch of them and I learned to look at the data, really diving deep into how [and what] people were listening to.

Where the weak part [was], what genres were missing on Spotify became really important to me; where can we fit in between? Spotify has a top line playlist, we want to be below that. We want to be underground, we want to be that thing you’re going to because you don’t want to listen to the Spotify playlists.’

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Building out that architecture and infrastructure of like 300 playlists took a bunch of time. The funny thing about doing that: it ended up seeding us so much further into the digital future. All of a sudden we were looking at an audience that was a lot younger. When Duster did come along, we were already plugging into a much younger audience than a lot of our competitors. Numero had been very much, I think, a Gen X brand at this point, [people] who are [...] consuming older stuff they were adjacent to in their life.

Duster was the first when it was just like “no, there’s 17 year olds, there’s 16 year olds really getting into this thing and discovering Numero, and we have a responsibility to do cool stuff to ourselves and to this new audience.” [Editor’s Note: I was 19 when I first listened to Duster!]

We started thinking about what they would want, and not necessarily catering to them, [but] trying to understand. [We] recognize that: you’re into emo or Duster when you’re young, but by the time you’re 25 you probably listen to two different things. Maybe you got into indie rock after that, and then got into Big Star / Nick Drake type of stuff. Then by 25 you listen to soul music, by 30 you’re into gospel, and by 35 you’re getting into New Age or, whatever, jazz, there will always be these curves that the true music person will get into.

The people who stop listening to new music [were] never really into music. A true head will evolve, and Numero’s responsibility is to guide them to that next record. [We want to] be here when they do start getting into soul music, to have made cool records, and to reference different points of history for them: we want to be that next listen.

This started building all of that playlist infrastructure and understanding we had a younger audience. When Duster came out and [blew up] on YouTube, we [invested and YouTube] and TikTok. People want to be told “this is good” because there’s so much music, and [being] a tastemaker is a [great] position.

My thing has always been: we’re just the first step out. I want to be the people who take the thing from deep in the underground and push it up to that first layer. [...] It’s the rest of the world’s job, I think, to push it out there and to make it even bigger. We can’t control it to get to a certain point.

LG:

It’s a very interesting way of thinking about it, it makes a ton of sense, the idea you guys get it out from “very hidden “ and everyone else does the rest.

KS:

Yeah, everything’s shareable. That’s what you want, you want all of this music to get as far as it possibly can. I’m personally super psyched about Duster being a TikTok band, or a band that blew up on TikTok. Not every single person who listens to Duster on TikTok is gonna become a Duster fan, but you get this opportunity to reach all these people you weren’t gonna reach. You’re gonna catch some of them with the cool things that you do.

On re-issuing 90s bands

LG:

Obviously this sort of Duster, Codeine, 90s band thing is a later thing; the Numero bread and butter was all this 60s, 70s, 80s soul stuff at the beginning. I’m curious why that time period felt really conductive in this format, or why that made sense as your initial focus.

KS:

Again, it’s coming back to Tree Records, my first record label, and the kind of music I was interested in in the 90s, which was a lot of slowcore. I grew up with the guys from Duster, I played in bands with them, I’ve known them a very long time. I saw Codeine’s last show, their first round in 1994, I saw Unwound half a dozen times in their initial run. All these bands were things I had first-hand experience and liked. That’s what a record label is, it’s just taste. It’s coming in and saying, “this is the stuff I like, if you like this stuff, come along for the ride.”I thought they were great bands at their time, and we [offered] perspective. A lot of these artists were on record labels that weren’t really looking back at this in a historical sense.

Their catalogs had fallen out of [print, or] record labels had gone dormant or out of business. That’s the same thing we’re dealing with with an old soul label, right? Something has fallen away, and it needs some care to get back to a place where people are going to make it a regular part of their listening habits. There’s no difference to me. Just like when I talked to Bill Moss about Capsoul and saw Tree Records in Capsoul, it’s the same way I feel about all this 90s stuff. The bands were always good, it’s just [that] the access to the market was challenging, and now we have the flattest market possible.

Say what you will about Spotify, which definitely has its imperfections, but it is a democratic way to listen to music. If you want to listen to something, you can literally type it in, pull it up, and press play. No one’s stopping you from doing that. They may not be serving it to you, but if you find out about it, you can listen. Really, it’s just a matter of how you get somebody to find out about something.

I grew up in the era of CDs and tapes. A [store] had to have an album at the time that you were there and wanted it. There’s [now] an instantaneous way to be like, “I just heard this thing, I want to hear this music.”

That flattening of that, it’s really why all this archival music is going to continue to come to the surface. Julie Doiron is the new Duster. There’s going to be so many songs that just come out of the world that were always great songs and just didn’t have access to the amount of ears. Some of them are going to stick and have whole lives of their own, and some are just going to be trends that are over in six weeks.

Musical overproduction and MySpace archives

KS:

I listen to music all day long, and so I think about how much I haven’t gotten to, and how much there is to hear. If we just stopped, the world is gonna have years and years to catch up with, just of what we made in the last five years, let alone the previous 20. I think about the MySpace era, and how much music was made and distributed to MySpace, but then literally never made it because it was not big enough to get into iTunes, there wasn’t a TuneCore yet, and streaming didn’t exist, so it didn’t get there, it didn’t get to Bandcamp. There’s this whole little area of music that’s just fucking gone man.

LG:

This is also really interesting to me. The 60s and 70s and 80s were really great for you guys because there was still some amount of barrier to entry to producing music, right? You had to get a group together, you needed other people involved, there was some cost, so there’s a limit on how much music is produced. [Editor’s Note: I’m almost verbatim quoting Ken’s partner Rob Sevier in Spin: “That is a magical time frame when widespread recording technology became available, but there was still a barrier of entry.”]

You guys have moved towards 90s music, a part of me is like, at what point is Numero doing “2008 SoundCloud” or things that are on the internet. There’s just so much more music that’s produced…

KS:

We’re already moving there. There’s already things like: A.R.T Wilson is a great example. It’s a record from 2013, it was some shit I heard on YouTube and thought was super cool. It had come out in Germany, but the LP was super expensive. I was like: “if I pressed this record, I could sell thousands of copies of this, and I bet millions of people would stream it,” and I was right.

When you hear something good, you can’t really be bound by when it came out. I used to have more of a strict guideline for it, but now I just want to make the stuff that people missed. A.R.T Wilson, it’s classic music to me, and in 50 years you’re gonna look back and be like “that’s one of the greatest records of [2014].” Hopefully I’ll have done my part to keep it in print and to have pushed it up. I might not be on every leg of the journey of that record but I want to get it started.

LG:

Do you find a lot of stuff on YouTube these days?

KS:

I listen almost exclusively on youTube.

The “wild goose chase” theory of archival music

LG:

You were talking about how you found Bill Moss [founder of Capsoul Records, the basis of Numero’s first release] because you found his number in BMI [Editor’s Note: Broadcast Music Inc., a music royalties agency] and called him. I read the Spin profile where you guys go to New Orleans [and knock on doors of addresses from phone books or LP covers], do you still do this kind of thing?

KS:

I just did one.

LG:

Where were you? How was it?

KS:

We’ve been looking for this guy, I won’t say who it is.

LG:

Sure.

KS:

But we heard he worked at a grocery store in San Diego.

LG:

Oh wow!

KS:

I tried to call the grocery store and I confirmed [he worked there]. I kept trying to call him, like, can I get this guy on the phone at his place of work? It’s a really dicey thing to do, but I called him, and it happened.

They wouldn’t ever transfer, I couldn’t count on them ever. So I was like: okay, I’m gonna have to go to this grocery store. We were in San Diego for another meeting, and so I was like: “while we’re down here, we’re going to drop in on this guy’s work, even if we don’t know he’s here that day.”

So we went. We get in and this guy runs past us really quickly, he’s like “hold on I’ll be right back.” He comes back like 10 seconds later, but I’m looking and it’s fucking packed in this grocery store, man, like it is an enormous amount of people. I don’t know how I’m going to find this guy in this maze.

I’m like, “Hey, does blank blank work here?” and he’s like “yeah, you see that guy in the black hood sweatshirt over there?”

LG:

Woah.

KS:

That’s an example of—there’s different methods to it. Not all of it’s on the phone. Some of it’s in person. I mean—I’ve tried that guy, I’ve had his email, I’ve had so many different ways to access him, and I’ve never been able to do a face to face with him. I had to put that time in, eight or nine years to get that.

On learning how to dig

LG:

It’s just really amazing to read these stories of: you’re going to a barn, or you’re on these crazy wild goose chases. It’s just really fascinating. I don’t remember where I found it, but there’s this quote about some general intuition when you can tell there’s going to be ‘greatness in a box of tapes,’ or you have some sense when you’re looking at a record that there’s going to be something worth looking at there.

How have you gained this kind of intuition, or how do you think about this? Is it just purely a feel thing?

KS:

Man, I’ve just done it for so long. You just know what you’re looking for.

A great example, I was at the Long Beach Flea Market recently. I go there every month and I try to look at it. I look for a number of different things. Some people are like ‘oh, you’re probably looking for record sellers. I actually only look at very specific kinds of records. I’m not just gonna sit there and thumb through a bunch of chudded out Fleetwood Mac and Paul Butterfield blues band LPs that guys are trying to resell somewhere else. Don’t care about that at all.

My field of interest is things that people don’t know are valuable, things that have maybe been lost to time. I tend to go through garbage, boxes of things where people are just like “here’s a box of things.” If it’s a ‘box of things’ that means somebody hasn’t really organized that box, there’s something interesting in that box. With that in mind, the way I go through a flea market—I have a different way to think about it. I’m not always looking for records, but I’m always looking for master tapes. [Editor’s Note: master tapes are the source format and often the highest quality version of some recording.]

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I find master tapes all the time, but I found a guy who had just come across this storage locker, cracked it, brought out these tapes and I was the first person to get there and look at [them]. I just decided to buy all these tapes right then. I was like—you know what? I’m never gonna see these tapes again, I don’t even know what’s on them. I looked at Discogs, found the guy, and was like “okay, this guy’s doing something interesting.”

It’s really hard to stay doing music in your life. Most people quit because life gets in the way. I mean, think about how many garage bands, high school bands [there are] that have just broken up. Shit don’t last, things fall apart. With that in mind, most people don’t stay in music so they never had the chance to get good at it. All that is to say that the people that do stay end up becoming really good at their craft, and if you’re gonna do this, you’re gonna put money into it. At a certain point, you have to have some kind of success. People have to like it, something has to come of it.

The hobbyists tend to fade away, but the professionals, the people who are like “this is my life,” they get really good at their craft. So if you’re finding someone who’s spent their entire life working on a craft, there’s gotta be something interesting in there. I think that article you might be referencing is when I went into Chris Stein’s barn and saw all the Blondie tapes. [Editor’s Note: I was referencing something else! But this one is quite good as well.]

When I saw that I knew. It’s just like: “if I can’t make a record out of what I’m seeing here in front of me, then I shouldn’t be doing this job.”

The anti-Taylor Swift / the mythos of the pop star

LG:

I never really understood what you guys meant by this whole sort of “alternative history of popular music” thing, or the idea of the “aesthetic of failure.” How did that become a part of the label?

KS:

I mean, the aesthetic of failure is a really interesting idea, I’ve never really thought about it that way.

LG:
I totally stole that from one of your or Rob’s quotes, (laughs), just FYI, that’s not my idea. [Editor’s Note: this is actually from a (phenomenal) Spin profile about Numero. As David Peisner writes: “Slowly, a sort of defining aesthetic has emerged: Failure is more interesting than success. If history is written by the winners, Numero tells the stories of the beautiful losers.”]

KS:

I think that people resonate with the idea of failure. Most people’s story is the story of not having success. A pop star has a one in multi-million, one-in-a-billion chance to become Taylor Swift. It's so hard to do this thing, so most people’s experience of music is very grounded in reality. I think when you tell people that this is just normal people doing interesting things and it happens to be great, it’s maybe easier to digest.

LG:

There’s something very human or compelling about it: that these people were doing this thing they didn’t recognize was really amazing. I love that it comes back from the dead in some way, or that people eventually realize it is as good as it is. I don’t know. There’s also something very rousing about the idea that there’s all this amazing stuff out there that we haven’t seen because it’s bad, but just because stuff is not seen [by mass audiences] in a correct or linear way.

KS:

Coming back to the “alternative history of popular music,” thing, right, there’s a timeline that is known, and the timeline that you can recontextualize. We have an idea of history being written by the winners, because it is. When people went in and wrote the history books that you and I read in high school, it’s like: “here’s the story,” and that’s what we believe happened. As more information comes out, you can put context around it and understand the perspective of the winners better.

Like: Fleetwood Mac was a massive group in the 1970s, but only in the context of pop music reaching the very, very top of the market. Pop isn’t for everybody, it’s just the biggest thing, it’s not everything. There’s plenty of people who never listen to pop music, they only listen to country, or fucking bluegrass bands. There’s so many different people out there who listen to all these different things. It’s really taking it out of context and recognizing that, just because it wasn’t a multi-million seller does not mean it isn’t great. This song can be just as great, and if this song truly is great it doesn’t matter what genre or what year it’s from. It’s a great song forever.

On persistence

LG:

I feel like there’s this dominant talk in media businesses of, “you know, it’s all very power law, the only people who make money are the really big fishes, and with this long tail, there’s nothing.” It seems like, by design, you guys only focus on people who have not had enormous commercial success, but you’ve managed to build a really good business out of this.

I’d love to know more about how you guys have thought about this. I know you have referred to the “You and Me” [Editor’s Note: an amazing Penny and the Quarters song] business model before, which I thought was really fun, about the song. I’m curious how you guys have made this work because clearly it’s working, and it seems like a very hard thing to make work.

KS:

Part of it is that we were really ambitious when we started. When you have an enormous amount of time to put into something, it’s gonna succeed if you want it to. Rob and I were just so committed from the beginning. We quit our jobs in 2004. Doing that was the difference maker.

Most people aren't willing to do that, they’re not willing to give up the safety net to go after the thing. For me, I’d already lived on nothing. When I was doing Tree Records, I was living on four or five hundred dollars a month.

Once you figure out that you don’t need very much money to survive in this world, it becomes a lot easier to imagine not having any money and just putting all of your energy into it. I was up at 6am, we hit the pool at noon, and we’d go back to my place and work until 9, 10 pm, and then go to the bar, stay out until 2am, listen to records, and get up at 6am and start going again. It's because it’s what it took. I was in my 20s, and I just had an enormous amount of energy. If you’re an entrepreneur, you’re gonna do everything you can to make your thing happen.

I know I didn’t really answer your question about the “You and Me” business model, but I will say that we had a lot of ideas really early. Like sync, we’d always wanted to get into sync. I knew, because working at Rykodisc, the Pink Moon commercial for Nick Drake had been so massive to his career, and he sold like a half a million CDs. That was little more than a car commercial. [Editor’s Note: “sync” is an industry term for placing songs in TV/movies/advertisements].

On Numero shows

LG:

Can you talk about bringing all these people back? Another thing that was really cool to me: there’s so much prizing of youth and newness, and there's something very cool about bringing a bunch of people in their 60s or whatever to perform. I guess I’m thinking about the concerts in particular, when was that something you decided you wanted to do, and what has that been like?

KS:

We’ve been doing them for a really long time. We did the first one in 2009, this thing called Eccentric Soul Revue. It was like Syl Johnson, and the Notations, Renaldo Domino. We took them all around the country and did a bunch of shows with Syl as well, so we've always been doing shows for a long time. The 90s thing put a new wrinkle in it because it’s like “oh, these people are young enough to perform, they can get another run at this.”

We didn’t promote those [initial] Codeine shows, but that was the first band we worked with that said “we’re gonna do some shows.” We’re like, “cool, we’ll have this product down there with the shows, we’ll get this press out through these shows,” and it all worked out, and ended up being a really great trial balloon.

LG:

I guess it was also crazy to me that some of these bands have bigger audiences the second time around.

KS:

Yeah, I would say that the Everyone Asked About You audience is so much larger right now than it ever was. The first time around, nobody came to those shows.

These kids can go out and hear it, and go “oh, my friend from school was wearing this Everyone Asked About You t-shirt, who’s that, let me look it up on my phone.” The barrier to entry is so low. The music was always good, it’s just: how are you gonna get it to people?

If you made it to the end, thank you! This is the longest interview I’ve published here, but I kept thinking back to what JC Gabel said about Interview when I first talked to him: “if you had a good story with Tom Waits, you would just run 10,000 words of it because why not, it’s good.”

Anyways, thanks for making it to the end! I think Numero publishes some of the coolest music out right now, and, as a (hopefully self-evidently) huge fan, it was a real honor to get to talk with Ken. I’m not sure when the next ZINE MUNCH will come out but—I’m starting to get back into the swing of writing / publishing! Likely more soon. Thanks for reading!

(PS — thanks to Matthew, Karly, Swetabh, and Will for taking a peek at this / helping me clean up the transcript before it went out!)

Lucas

If you’re in New York City, we’re throwing a launch party at The Living Gallery, starting tomorrow at 7pm—you’re invited! Our first issue worth of pieces are up on our website (https://syntaxmag.online/), and we’d love it if you read some.

PS — more ZINE MUNCH soon!

Lucas

I met JC through Josh Glenn, the editor of Hermenaut and first guest on ZINE MUNCH. We meet when I’m home in Los Angeles for a week in June at Stories, a bookstore in Silverlake.

In the midst of talking, someone tries to get JC’s attention. “Excuse me,” they say, “I can’t help overhearing but you are really interesting, can I get your Instagram?” (I have never seen this happen before: when I ask JC, he also says this is a first!) We talk for almost two hours about the golden age of long form and the realities of publishing art books in the age of Amazon. 

Attention, longform, and ephemera

JC Gabel: I was just honored to give you something about this stuff. I guess we’re in the third decade of the post-digital age, and the common wisdom is that no one under 35 cares about or ephemera. 

Lucas Gelfond: My theory on all of this is that, because we move more quickly now, the stuff that was made more deliberately and with that slowness becomes more valuable. I’m writing something [author’s note: now published! here!] for a print magazine my friends are putting together, and the whole thing is very ‘anti-attention economy’—it is a totally different act to put together a magazine [once a year] when everything else moves so quickly. 

JG: I think the short attention span shit has gone too far for anyone who has any intellectual curiosity. We (and I’m sure Josh [Glenn, founding editor of Hermenaut] did too) made a lot of financial decisions that probably weren’t all that sound [in favor of long form] but it’s interesting. 

Stop Smiling, a brief history 

LG: Did you just start Stop Smiling, when did you…

JG: I was a kid when I started man, I was a punk kid, and I always did zines. The first couple I did with other people but it wasn’t really serious, where everyone gets super excited and would fizzle out after the second issue. [Stop Smiling] was almost like a response to what was becoming the ‘listicle’, or blurb culture. In the mid 90s, it was just beginning, but you could see it. 

Maxim was the number one magazine, and it was basically like softcore Playboy but without the good content. At least with Playboy, even if you didn’t agree with [Hugh] Hef[ner]’s weird misogyny, you could still claim you read it for the articles until a certain point, because they’d pay really good people to do interviews. He created the long form interview before Rolling Stone, the Playboy interview, like with Miles Davis in 1962.   

I did a [gap] year too because I got a job working at Merge Records [editor’s note: the label behind Arcade Fire, The Magnetic Fields, Caribou, Neutral Milk Hotel, and The Mountain Goats, among others!]. I moved because I was like ‘there’s no way I’m going to get to do this ever again, I should just move to North Carolina for six months.’ The first few issues of the magazine were built on touring around with all these bands in the mid-90s. [...] The magazines I was writing for in the nineties were all dying as the internet was coming out. I was like ‘we have to create something that’s like these things I want to write for, but for ourselves.’ There were other magazines at the time that were doing the same thing at the time that were kindred spirits, Space Age Bachelor, Giant Robot, Tokion, some of them are still going but most or not.

I think what really made Stop Smiling kick was the literati of New York sort of embracing what we were doing. Once Plimpton saw what we were doing and started inviting us to the Paris Review parties then we got to [Norman] Mailer and [Susan] Sontag and [Joan] Didion and [Kurt] Vonnegut and we ended up doing the last long form interviews with most of those people. I remember at the time everyone’s like “how the hell are you getting all these famous people?”  and I was like “wrote em a letter.” Not an email, a handwritten letter.

I think at the time they were like, “oh, people in their twenties aren’t dumb as shit and they actually care about things.” I became very close with Kurt Vonnegut in the last maybe five years of his life and we would talk on the phone all the time. I think he liked talking to me because I was young and actually engaged in things. I think a lot of the older generation had assumed that everyone was just a vapid shithead or something, that only cared about pop culture and video games with no intellectual pursuits, lowest common denominator shit. 

[...] I always used to say that we were trying to relive the glory days of magazine publishing, which for us was like, the first five years of Rolling Stone, most of the seventies run of National Lampoon, Playboy when you could claim you read it for the articles, sixties and seventies Esquire, the first 10 years of Interview when Andy Warhol was actually running it, where if you had a good story with Tom Waits, you would just run 10,000 words of it because why not, it’s good. 

We lucked out in that we got in on that last bastion of money before YouTube and Facebook came out. That was the final nail in the coffin for print advertising, because it was so much easier to measure your dollar spent in experiential marketing and internet marketing than you could in a print mag where it was very hard to see “are we getting anything for this $10,000 back cover or whatever it cost.” 

That was our model. We stood out to the advertisers because everything was becoming listicles and blurb culture. For a while they were supportive of it because i twas this outlier, but in the end the branded content stuff was just so sexy—if you can get a return on your investment, why would you care about Stop Smiling and an issue about auteur theory? 

The tyranny of advertisers  

JG: I’m a total social butterfly, and I like doing events, but the print advertisers started to use events as bait. It was like, ‘hey, we want to do a party at Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers’ house,’ and we basically became party planners. It was more about capitalizing on the audience of the magazine and tapping into the ‘hipster pyramid’ of that demographic than actually supporting the writing and work we were doing. It just got disheartening because it was like half of the week having a rooftop party in Manhattan instead of actually doing the magazine.

I was like ‘dude, we didn’t sign up for this shit.’ There’s always a certain amount of marketing things but it almost became a quid pro quo, ‘we’ll give you guys $50,000 next year but you have to do like X amount of parties’ and all of this stuff. All of the stuff would take so much time that, whatever we were charging, we should’ve charged them double, you know? 

[...] I’d like to do one publication a year or at least one every nine months where it’s a look back at a publication. I think it was the 20th century, early aughts, before the internet just came and crushed all of this stuff as a business. The most depressing stuff to me was the rise of so-called ‘branded content,’ the idea that you could have complete collusion with advertisers.

I think it completely backfired. There’s this notion that young people like yourself can’t tell the difference between branded content and real content. I think you can probably see it better than older people because you’ve been marketed to you since you’ve been born. 

LG: Yeah, everyone knows what a promotion looks like.

JG: I think the rise of the art book fairs—besides the two that Printed Matter hosts in New York and LA, they’ve all started up semi-autonomously—it’s proof positive that shitloads of Gen Z and millenials like print stuff. They’re not like ‘all I care about is the internet and doomscrolling.’ 

Independent publishing in the age of Amazon

JG: I’ve been going out of my way to make sure that [Hat and Beard] isn’t a day job, if only because we can keep the expenses low enough, where we can keep making really high quality stuff, pay three times the royalty rates of the bigger publishers, and avoid most of what is loosely called ‘late capitalism’ but I call it ‘the late capitalist shitshow of loss’ which is that all book distribution and magazine distribution is run through one company now. They are 100 percent in bed with Amazon, the whole thing is rigged, and they’re taking 75 percent of the sale. 

The store gets a 50 percent discount, free shipping, a hundred days to pay. It’s not even a real business model anymore, it’s just a joke. What you see in stores is kind of window dressing—the stores make twice as much off the book as the author and publisher do. 

No one likes to talk about this because it’s all the same endless debate of ‘Amazon ruined everything and the indie stores need to survive;’ the indie stores are getting double what they got 20 years ago from each sale. I obviously love indie stores and come to them all the time, we’re at one right now, but I think, at a certain point, if you make it impossible for the publishers to make books, there isn’t going to be anything to sell in the indie stores.

If you look around, anything that’s been started since 2000 has basically been started with someone’s immense family wealth. The one example that’s kind of well-known is Catapult Publishing which now owns Soft Skull Press and Counterpoint—that’s the Koch Brothers’ ‘black sheep’ sister; she also bankrolled bookshop.org. 

LG: Holy shit, that’s nuts. Isn’t Soft Skull like, left anarchist-y?

JG: Yeah, but she’s the black sheep sister, man. Elizabeth Koch, man, god bless her for fucking, just writing checks. [Editor’s (unfortunate) note: Soft Skull’s parent organization, Catapult, shuttered its online magazine and writing classes yesterday.]

[...] I was obsessed with trying to make an actual business model that other people could replicate if you didn’t have rich parents. Everything can’t be, ‘be born with rich parents or you can’t work in the arts,’ we’re going back to a second gilded age if we allow that to happen, where the arts are just for people who don’t really need jobs. 

There’s a great book actually that I’ve been trying to turn into, maybe not a documentary but a limited series. It's about a professor from Yale who a number of my friends had, he’s since quit academia, his name is William Deresiewicz.

LG:  He’s the Excellent Sheep guy!

JG: Yeah, he wrote the [The Disadvantages an Elite Education] first and his most recent book is called The Death of the Artists: How Creators Are Surviving in an Age of Billionaires and Big Tech. The book is a chapter-by-chapter breakdown about how the whole thing is a great shitshow. You can’t make any money as a musician anymore. You can’t make any money as an author because all of the mid-list stuff is kind of profitless, the bookstores make no money for the authors. You get ‘fuzzy math’ statements because everything’s being sold on Amazon, something like 75 percent of all books. 

We’ve been experimenting from day one where at most a half but at least a quarter of the copies go to a wholesaler, and we sell all the rest of the copies ourselves. It creates a lot more work for us, but it’s how we can make 2,000 copies of Josh’s book and still have an outcome where they get royalties in a year or two and we make money together. It comes down to the old-school grassroots of hand sellings.

A lot of people have said recently ‘I don’t understand how Hat and Beard is set up, it doesn’t function like any other publisher,’ and I think that’s kind of true. We all come from the music industry in the nineties, before the internet. At the indie labels of yore—I mean, if you were on an indie label in the nineties and sold 50,000 records, you could buy a house. There was an alternative system before the internet, there was an artist friendly way to do a lot of stuff.

Independent publishing before Amazon was a totally different animal too. A lot of [mass consolidation] can be traced back to the Telecommunications Act of 1996 which I only probably remember because I was in journalism school at the time and it was such a big deal. It allowed Rupert Murdoch and these people to buy everything. That’s why I think people love that show Succession, because it’s about one of these oligarchal families with a bunch of terrible children running this media empire into the ground or whatever.

It kind of lifted the cap off of everything, that's why there used to be ten big publishers and now there’s five, and it might be four because Simon and Schuster just fended off the corporate takeover from Penguin Random House and the government just shut it down. Usually when they push it through the second or third time, it goes through, because whatever the government stops for antitrust purposes, the lawyers figure out a way around. This is with every industry, not just publishing. 

LG: It’s nuts.

JG: I don’t know anyone in publishing that thinks one of the two biggest publishers buying the third biggest publisher is a good idea. I don’t know anybody, not any author, even people who sell tons of books, they’re like ‘that’s going to suck for everyone, there’s going to be a ton of people laid off, and it’s also going to create this boogeyman that will make Penguin Random House so much bigger.’ 

Even when Penguin and Random House merged it was like cats and dogs living together, because those people had been competitors for 75 years, like bloodsport competitors. I remember reading it and thinking ‘really?’ I guess the bean counters over there probably just did the math and were like, ‘look, Amazon’s got this big chunk, if we join forces we have a better shot.’ 

I think we’re going to end up in bed with one of the big five for distribution, Ingram being a monopoly themselves now, because they bought the last three or four independent booksellers in the last five years and consolidated power. If you had told me five years ago ‘the only way you’re ever going to make money off what's left in stores is to get in bed with Random House’ [I would have been shocked], but that’s what’s happening. I mean: powerHouse and Prestel are distributed by Random House, Thames and Hudson is distributed by WW Norton, David Zwirner Gallery is distributed by Simon and Shuster, so we’ll probably be distributed by one of the majors to what’s left of stores, and they’ll protect our product from the deep discounting of Amazon better than Ingram, because, although [the big five publishers] are a wholesaler, at least it’s another publisher and they see the diminishing returns of books being sold as a loss leader. 

It also is just kind of heart-wrenching, too. When we first started, we had a regular distributor, and it was the Slash book that was the early wake up call. That was the third book. It cost $60 and Amazon was selling it for like $33.50. We were like ‘okay, we’re going to have to pull out of this,’ because once it’s for sale for that little, nobody is going to pay the real price. We pulled out, and it was a lot of work, but I think it’s kind of been worth it.

We’re moving everything to a book club model, because I’m more comfortable with the subscription models anyways, coming from magazines. I also think it’s a great conversation piece—in the next couple of months, we’re going to make the story more about us. I don’t really like the story to be about me or Sybil or the other principals, but we almost have to tell the origin story of why we’re doing the book club. Everyone is like—why are you doing these book clubs? It’s because the whole system is profitless if we don’t do this, there’s no way it’s sustainable. There’s these guys in Denver that do this record thing called Vinyl Me Please…

LG: Yeah, Vinyl Me Please is awesome! 

JG: They’re acquaintances of ours [and we really like their model]. We’re not going to do monthly, it’s gonna be quarterly, and we’re starting with three genres—the California artist books, the pop culture books, we have a thing called the Midwest Initiative which is books about stuff I’m finding in the basements of museums and galleries that frankly, if they had been found on the coasts, would have come out 20 years ago, and we’ll have a UK series later this year and probably eventually have a New York series.  

[...] I think COVID has been a real game changer, because I think people started to see during COVID how real creators were getting hurt really bad by not being able to go on book tours, and now is the time to recalibrate people’s mentality about how to support a publisher like us. It’s not buying individual copies at stores where we make no money—people come up to me all the time like, “I bought this at Skylight [Books]” and I never have the heart to tell them “It doesn’t matter if you bought it at any store or Amazon, we make no money through this old system, you have to buy it through us.”

You can subscribe to Hat and Beard’s book club here!

I’m cheating a little bit with this ZINE MUNCH—I’ve been involved with Reboot for a few years, first as a participant in our student fellowship and now as an organizer, in addition to editing two pieces in Kernel’s first issue (Jasmine Sun’s "take back the future!” and Chris Painter’s “Unstoppable Mechanisms”), and contributing a piece, "Prison Phones and the Problem with Profits” for issue 2.

I was lucky enough to be in San Francisco for our in-person launch at The Commons earlier this month, but have been in New York for the past few weeks so we talked over Zoom last Saturday. All of the pieces for the issue unlocked online today, so you should definitely go and read them!

Lucas Gelfond: Can you tell the ‘Kernel origin story,’ or, I guess, how did you both get involved? 

Emily Liu: In 2021, Jasmine Sun and Jasmine Wang organized a group house / writing retreat; [the plan was] we’d all live together for a month, doing our jobs or schoolwork in the day, and do workshops or write together in the evenings and on weekends. There were 11 of us, and many of us didn’t know the other people in the house except through Twitter or friends of friends. Jasmine Sun and I were Twitter mutuals, she messaged me on Twitter and was like ‘hey, I’m organizing this, would you be down to join?’ and I was like, ‘yeah, let’s do it.’ After the retreat ended, a group of four of us — Jasmine Wang, Saffron Huang, Jessica Zhou, and myself — continued to work on this project to turn it into a print magazine. 

Jessica Dai: My version of the Reboot origin story is that, right before the pandemic, there were several books about technology that were coming out where the authors were supposed to do book tours that Jasmine [Sun, director of Reboot] and I were both excited about, because we’d both get to see them even though we lived in different cities. I think the specific books were Wendy Liu’s “Abolish Silicon Valley,” Anna Wiener’s “Uncanny Valley,” and Jenny Odell’s “How To Do Nothing.” Obviously these  tours got canceled and we were really sad, so we were like ‘what if we just emailed these authors and asked them to do a book event, just for us and our friends, and sent them a Zoom link—would they reply?’ 

Their answer was yes, and we just started to put it out publicly on Twitter and noticed some of our Twitter mutuals, like Emily, would repeatedly show up to these public events. Because we saw a cohesive group that was forming and there were always more people who wanted to come, we realized, ‘maybe there’s something here.’ Partially it was COVID and people were stuck at home, but we thought there really was this desire in general for a space or community outside of work or school to talk about more structural issues in “tech and society.”

There were many phases of Reboot, first just events, then the newsletter, then we did a fellowship for undergrads for the first time, and the end of the fellowship coincided really nicely with when the writer house started. 

LG: How did the magazine emerge from the writer house? What was most surprising about the process?

EL: It was a continuous process of Googling things, trying something and crossing your fingers that it works. Some of us had made zines before or written for various publications, but none of us had made a print publication ourselves of this scale. We had no idea what the overall timeline was supposed to look like because we didn’t know how long things would take. What printer do we use? What design software do we use? We didn’t know any of this. Through a lot of teamwork, research, and trial and error, we were able to print the inaugural issue of the magazine. But I also think it was very much made possible because we had friends at Logic Magazine and friends at other places that would always answer our questions and give us advice for how to get this thing up and running. 

LG: Reboot had an online presence before the magazine; What was the thought behind the print publication?

JD: The first reason is that it’s cool, and then all of the other substantive reasons are sort of counterfactual backfilled reasons for why it’s interesting: Print has more longevity, it’s more serious, you have more time and space to think about things, I think these are all true, but [the motivator] was definitely—it’s cool to have a physical object! 

LG: What do you consider peer publications, or, I guess, what do you consider publications that have influenced Kernel’s approach? 

EL: I feel like Logic is the closest match by far. The places that we all respect or respected (some of them have now shuttered) are probably Real Life, WIRED, and Input in terms of [general] publications on tech.

JD: We also really like Noema, Aeon, and The Drift. They aren’t explicitly about technology but the sort of work they produce is adjacent in some way to what we’re interested in, in terms of having space for longform analysis that’s not solely criticism. Some of the places I listed tend toward more criticism than we [have], but it’s some combination of academic theory that’s very ‘applied’ in these magazines. 

LG: Are there limits to the structural critique of things? What are the sort of things you want to make people aware of, in terms of articulating options?

EL: Sharp critique is useful — but I think positing an alternate vision is a necessary complement to that. I think media that only reacts and never articulates a path forward can leave people feeling stuck. Maybe those options look like joining a union or unionizing your workplace, writing and thinking in public, meeting like-minded folks and finding community around your values and priorities. I think those kinds of alliances are much stronger than a connection based solely on mutual distaste.

JD: Or, organize locally; your contribution to the world doesn’t need to be ‘writing code that solves poverty’ or whatever. (Which is also great!) 

Reboot

⚡️ Urgency and Agency in Technology Policy

This conversation is published in Kernel Magazine’s second issue, which we just released yesterday. We’re releasing just a few pieces this week; to read all of our released content so far, visit kernelmag.io. For access to all of our essays now, please purchase a copy of the magazine…

Read more

4 years ago · 13 likes · Matthew Sun

LG: What else does Kernel want to articulate that is not criticism? Or why is this a priority?

JD: The most basic, not intellectual answer to this is: I like reading criticism, but after the end I’m like ‘what am I supposed to do with this information?’ I think criticism can be useful to provide a new lens on a specific topic, but I always ask myself ‘what does this new lens provide me that I did not have before?’ Maybe people who are really into criticism will get mad at me, but I think most of it doesn’t go beyond that. 

This is not to say that Kernel’s pieces are necessarily actionable, but aspirationally, the type of work we want to have in Kernel is criticism not just for the sake of an intellectual game, it’s criticism towards the end of reformulating your orientation toward something substantive: ‘if this is true, then how does this implicate how do I go about my life or make certain decisions?’

JD: I think speaking for Reboot as a whole, we would characterize ourselves as political for sure, but we are pretty big tent in terms of the things we publish or people’s ideologies within our community. I don’t think we have Trump supporters, for example, but people [certainly] have different theories of change or different takes on what systems might be best for the world. We think that is good! Disagreement is good because it creates a process for coming to a more rigorous articulation of what we think is true, and I think that’s what Reboot in general is hoping to do.

As much as ‘consciousness raising’ has been critiqued for not leading to action, I think awareness [among tech workers] is really important because, as Emily said, they aren’t reading those publications or don’t necessarily have ‘critique brain,’ but that doesn’t mean that they don’t care about the world or can’t form their own opinions about what the future should like. It’s just that they haven’t either been forced to or had the opportunity to. This isn’t measurable, but our hope or goal is that people read our stuff and think critically about themselves, their own lives, and the role they want to play in the world.

Maybe that means people take action in certain directions. Maybe they quit their job. Maybe they don’t quit their job, but if they’re approached by an organizer, they have better context for how to think about that interaction within a system as opposed to being like, ‘why is someone asking me to do another meeting?’ Obviously the arrow between ideology and action is very ‘question mark’ but I think that’s the hope.

EL: It’s not like we have KPIs [editor’s note: key performance indices] [speaker’s note on final pass through transcript: term used ironically] for Kernel or something, so it’s hard to quantify when we do succeed. That said, when we hosted launch parties in San Francisco and New York this year, we were all kind of floored by how many people attended both of them. We’d never hosted a real life event of that scale before and we pretty much sold out both, for SF we had almost 170 people come, for New York we had 90 or so people come. 

JD: The alternate version of the Reboot origin story is that Jasmine [Sun] and I have been really close friends for a long time. All throughout college, I was studying computer science, and Jasmine was studying sociology, but at Stanford, so very much immersed in tech. We’d be constantly texting each other like ‘oh my god, what is this industry like?’ or ‘all of these horrible horrible things happen and everyone still wants to participate, why is nobody doing anything about it?’ Obviously, they were all very level zero or level 0.5 thoughts 19 year olds, but Jasmine and I, basically the whole time, were talking, exchanging readings and books and talking about them while we were in the middle of figuring out our mid-undergrad career crises. I feel very lucky because I think not everyone just happens to have a really good friend that will have these conversations with them, and this was ultimately super formative. People want to talk about these things, but it’s not easy to just bring that up organically with your friends, and that’s part of why we care so much about nurturing a community beyond just publishing written artifacts.

LG: It’s almost one step behind relational organizing or something […] How do you think doing technical work has shaped how you think about the magazine’s editorial direction, and vice versa? [editor’s note: Emily is a software engineer at the Washington Post, and Jessica is a computer science PhD student at the University of California, Berkeley, after spending two years at Arthur, a startup working on observability and reliability for machine learning.]

EL: I think working in tech gives our team more credibility to a mainstream tech audience. It feels like within tech, and maybe this is a flaw within the industry, people give more credibility to people who have technical knowledge or can demonstrate fluency in industry-specific topics..

[…] That said, we don’t just want to be a magazine where all of our authors work as software engineers or something.  When we say we’re a magazine by and for tech workers, we also mean people who use or are affected by tech, not necessarily just the “builders.” 

JD: There’s a ton of people who think ‘oh my god, the tech industry is so bad,’ but if you look at the undergrad level, so many kids are working so hard to get into a CS major, or to get a CS internship. As an external observer the culture of careerism might seem distasteful, but I don’t think we should write “tech people” off  as fundamentally or irredeemably anti-political. One, I just don’t think they are, a priori, but then also, if you want to have structural analysis of this, everyone is so pressed about going into tech because they have five or six digit student loans [or similar]. I guess this is the case for empathizing with—especially the youngest cohort of—people in tech. For new grads and students, there’s a very specific reason why tech culture is the way it is, and it’s important to recognize that. To bring it back to Reboot and Kernel, we want to catch them at this intervention stage. 

EL: Kernel exists because we saw two pre-existing buckets of tech thought, neither of which really resonated us, one on the left being super fatalistic, like, ‘the world is fucked, there’s nothing we can do about it’ kind of mentality, and the other side which is the hyper-optimistic, venture-backed ‘solutionism.’ We want to present a type of writing that thinks about all the ways tech has hurt people in the past, but also charts a  path forward. Our theme for Issue 2 is “how do we get there?” and the issue revolves around the question of “what are the people, tools, and ideas that can bring us to a better future.”

[…] For many other publications, I think their audience leans literary, like, people who read the Drift are likely to also be reading the New Yorker and other publications in that vein. For Kernel, we’re specifically trying to get an audience of people who build tech or are affected by tech or consider themselves tech-adjacent in some way. 

[Our thought] is very much about equipping technologists themselves to think more critically about the things that they’re making or the industry that they’re shaping. So much tech critique comes from the outside. What if it was people who were actually capable of making the change themselves within the tech industry reading the content? Ideally, Kernel can instill a sense of agency in its readers.

Reboot’s been a wonderful community for me—if you’re an undergrad (or know any undergrads!) interested in similar questions of tech, humanity, and power, keep an eye out for the next iteration of our student fellowship! You can also subscribe to get Reboot regularly in your inbox:

Reboot

Essays, events, and community about reimagining techno-optimism for a better collective future.

By Jasmine Sun

until the next!

~ lucas

She seemed like a perfect person to talk to, particularly given her listed interest in “activist librarianship” and the place of zines in the media. On my way to JFK (at the beginning of the summer! I’m catching up on transcripts! Note ‘irregularly published!’) I met her in front of Barnard’s Milstein Center, and she showed me around their collection, starting with a room of zines in circulation and later going to an underground archive with copies of each zine for preservation. 

We chat at a table outside the library. 

On LiveJournal, slow food, and intentionality in printed work

Lucas Gelfond: What do you think the difference is between a zine and, say, a community-driven online publication? 

Jenna Freedman: One thing I think differentiates the kinds of zines I love the most is their vulnerability, they’re not anything that you’d put online. I wasn’t really part of the circa 2000 LiveJournal communities where people really did share deep and personal things, because they trusted the lock.  [...] I was at a zine librarians event several years ago and a guy compared zines to the slow food movement. That was powerful to me, it’s just a different kind of nourishment. [...] You can’t just type a zine and it comes out, there’s layout and mailing, and there’s lots of barriers to just letting something rip directly from your psyche.

LG: Maybe the friction makes it more deliberate or something.

JF: Yeah, there's more deliberation, intention, or more chances to run away. I think I’m also contradicting myself, that there maybe is a greater vulnerability to putting something down on paper that maybe doesn’t have as wide of a reach, but has more lasting impact and is harder to control.

LG: That’s interesting, LiveJournal is an interesting one to explore. I feel like there are some communities that are still [that intimate], but it’s different, especially on platforms where there’s real name policies or [stuff of that nature].

JF: Yeah, and I’m sure there’s people on Tumblr who have these really deep, intense relationships with others. 

I don't mean to pit print vs. digital publishing Zine culture ebbs and flows. I don’t really love today’s aesthetic, [for example,] I don’t love Canva-designed zines. I have a student worker who made a zine for a zine-a-thon we hosted. She used a clip-art book and pressed flowers, and just made this gorgeous print zine. She did allow us to digitize it and put it online, but the fact that it was made on paper was so beautiful. I bet you there’s cognitive science for this, that when you’re doing physical layout, that your brain pathways are different. I'm not one of those ‘zine as artifact’ people, but one of my best friends, in her Twitter bio, referenced herself as a ‘book sniffer.’

On the F-Train zine residency

JF: We did a zine residency on the F Train. In [2014] when Amtrak announced its writers residency, if you read the fine print, they wanted to own whatever you wrote. So me and my friend Celia (who I referenced before, the book sniffer) were talking about doing our own residency, and somehow that evolved into doing a subway residency. My coworker at the time Shannon and I invited zine makers to get on the train, sit together, and make zines. At the time, the subways didn’t have internet access, so we found that we were all much more productive, even though we were together. I really want to challenge the word productive, but a lot of zines were made that day. 

On institutional archive-building

LG: How do you think your experience building an archive in an institutional context has differed from your friends outside of the academy? 

JF: I’m funded. I’ve been able to use that funding effectively, I hope—people always ask ‘is Barnard the biggest zine library’ which I think is the wrong question to ask. I like to say ‘it’s one of the best described libraries.’ I’m a second generation librarian, my dad was in technical services. It’s not like we talked about librarianship when I was, like, seven, but I grew up somehow really focused on the catalog as the center of the library. 

When I envisioned the [zine library] I imagined each zine being cataloged at what we call the ‘item’ level as opposed to in an archive where you just describe the whole collection. [...] We’ve been able to put a lot of resources into describing zines. I have student assistants whose job it is to read the zine and write descriptions. There’s a zine library staff, whereas at QZAP they have a collective, which is awesome in different ways. I also like to say that every zine library is the best zine library, we all have our own little gifts to give. 

I think the emphasis on cataloging is what’s been helpful. In the zine library community we’ve been talking about building a union catalog for zines since [roughly] 2009, and I went to pursue a masters in digital humanities with the specific thought of using that to build ZineCat [editor’s note: a ‘union catalog’ of zines across multiple libraries]. 

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On mail communities 

LG: I feel like I’ve sensed that a lot of the zine community has formed through mail networks—what do you think has changed in, I don’t know, the last 20 years or so?

JF: There’s no substitute for meeting people in person. “Virtual" is a good word for what it describes in this usage.. Mail exchanges deepen those relationships. For example, I Signal chat with Milo almost every day, we have a group text where we talk about our cats and sometimes zines.

LG: Zine cat super friends.

JF: (Laughs) exactly. But it helps that I’ve seen Milo before the pandemic once a year for zine librarian conferences, and they’ll [still], you know, mail us a jar of pickles. Going back to an earlier question, I think that [Zines Are Not Blogs] which I wrote in 2007 may have pitted zines and blogs against each other in a way I wouldn’t encourage if I wrote it now, it’s just that they have different purposes. To me, letter writing is therapeutic, it’s generous, it’s generative, it’s meditative.

On the importance of the zine

LG: I’m stealing someone else’s question, but why do you think zines are important?

JF: Zines are important because the creator thinks they are. I know that sounds like a glib or glorifying answer, but, when we were upstairs and I was like ‘look, here’s these zines about reproductive justice,’ and I could make that kind of display for just about anything that happens [note: this interview was recorded shortly after a draft opinion showed that Roe v. Wade would be overturned], although I was just thinking this morning that I don’t feel like a lot of folks have written about gun violence. 

Going back to the zines that I printed up upstairs, there’s this one called “What is this thing called? ME,” ME standing for menstrual extraction [note: a technique for early abortion without medical assistance], which I hadn’t heard of until I read that zine. Menstrual extraction is possibly going to become very important, and it’s something that peers can help each other do to end a pregnancy. 

We were talking about community before, and I feel like zines are written for a peer readership. I didn’t make this connection until right now, but mainstream publishing, academic publishing, they’re all written for peer communities, but those peerages are small, or are hard clubs to join. Zines also say things in really accessible ways, they’re little bites. 

[Zines] are important because they’re extending the historical record to include people that don’t have access to it. What is it, "history is not just written by the victors," it’s also written by the rich people, the educated people, the people who say what is in vogue at the moment. Zines say a lot of things that aren’t in vogue, or that you couldn’t get published [anywhere else]. 

Jenna’s Twitter bio reads ‘USPS Board of Governors wannabe’ but I missed the last word and thought she was actually a member. Regardless, the ZINE MUNCH editorial ‘staff’ heartily endorses Jenna for the position when it next opens up.

Have a bit more free time right now, so I’m typing up a bunch of interviews I recorded a little while ago. You’ll hear from me pretty soon again! Until the next!

~lucas 

This interview has been edited for accuracy, clarity, and concision.

Lucas Gelfond: What do you think were the magazine’s intellectual predecessors?

Alexander Star: Clearly there's all kinds of ways intellectual histories can be written in book form or magazine form. To take a random example, the writer Ved Mehta did a series of articles in the New Yorker some decades ago about Oxford philosophy and turned them into a book called Fly and the Fly-Bottle which is a lovely mix of impressionistic, atmospheric writing, personality profiles, and some reconstruction of the arguments.

Some of the more proximate influences on Lingua Franca before I arrived were rather different. The publisher (Jeffrey Kittay) had been in and around the academic world and enjoyed the quality, rhythm, and vitality of  backtalk and behind the scenes conversations. Essentially, he felt the proverbial watercooler conversation at an academic conference wasn't reflected in published sources. 

How do you get some of that energy into a magazine? [Kittay] was inspired by a magazine called The American Lawyer that the journalist Steven Brill had started not long before. It was about taking a seemingly stuffy (or at least once stuffy) profession (the law), and peeling back the curtain a bit to be irreverent but not debunking. There was also a little bit of the Spy-magazine kind of humor that had been a huge influence in the magazine world in the eighties, combined with intellectual ambitions to clarify that which might not be clear regardless of whether you were inside or outside of the academy. 

LG: What do you think was the lasting influence of Lingua Franca? I’ve heard people talk about its lasting influence on nineties magazine culture but generally what do you think were the ideas that came out of it?

AS: The ecology of the magazine world has changed dramatically—we made it into the early days of the internet and had a website that had articles up on it, but the culture of ‘what is a publication’ and how things are read is so different. So there aren’t so many lineal descendents, although I think the Chronicle of Higher Education has a very, very good Review section where they have longer pieces—some of the more narrative pieces remind me of Lingua Franca and I often admire them a great deal.

There’s also n+1, the Point, and the Drift doing variations that are less reported journalism and more essays in various tones looking at issues that are (at least with some of those publications) committed to very particular political projects. I like to say that Elif Batuman’s piece on an Isaac Babel conference at Stanford that appeared in an early issue of n+1 and later in her book, The Possessed was the best Lingua Franca piece even though it was not actually published in Lingua Franca, because it has so much of what  we were trying to accomplish. It’s an amazing narrative that goes deep inside an academic conference and a set of academic personalities. It’s also very funny but incredibly informative, not just about the culture of academe and the feuds and rivalries within it, but also about the subject of the conference, Isaac Babel, and his life and his writing. You get a view of the study of X and also of X. I don’t think Lingua Franca had to exist for her to write that piece but I enjoyed basking in the perceived affinities. 

Today we talk about the ‘culture wars’ and all the polarizations that go with them. That means a certain thing today, but in the mid to late nineties there was a different version of that with somewhat different actors and agendas. Lingua Franca was right at the intersection of debates over multiculturalism and political correctness (which is essentially what we mean by ‘wokeness’ today, I suppose), but also the literary canon, about ‘theory’ as an agenda and what that meant, and postmodernism. 

The magazine was at a very particular angle to that. To the people who were really into postmodern theory we could seem insufferably sympathetic to a sort of liberal humanism, to the people who are really into liberal humanism we seemed to take the postmodern theorists too seriously. We wanted to question academic orthodoxies both on the left and on the administrative center in different kinds of ways, so we were in and amidst all of those debates. I like to think at best there was a healthy skepticism and attempt to open up some fresh dimensions and thoughts to people who weren’t having them. That kind of sensibility remains appealing, important, and significant today when these questions of who feels ‘canceled’ or ‘not canceled’ by what are inescapable.

LG: One of my favorite parts about reading the magazine generally is these pieces that feel almost contrarian in avoiding a monolithic left or right view—I'm thinking about stuff around the Sokal hoax. It feels like you get to a more rigorous, nuanced piece that isn’t necessarily in the middle but subverts the dominant positions on both of them. When you talk about some of the more modern ‘public intellectualism’-type magazines having a political project, how did you think through that with the magazine?

AS: A little differently from year to year and always a little nervously. My colleagues and I each had our moral and political centers of gravity and you tried to operate from themt while being inclusive about ideas or arguments we found  interesting for any reason. I’m proud of pieces that were unexpected, such as profiles of religious thinkers like Stanley Hauerwas or Alasdair MacIntyre by Mark Oppenheimer and  Paul Elie respectively that were really terrific. We had James Surowiecki’s profile of Eugene Genovese, who had been a communist historian who would later become a supporter of Southern conservatism in an idiosyncratic way, there’d be pieces like this that would shake things up and that felt worthwhile. 

I wanted the politics to be more implicit than, say, in some of the n+1 magazine kind of magazines. It was just a different enterprise because reported journalism was also a craft and different kinds of journalists with different beliefs could write a good story and if it didn’t cross any horrifying red lines we’d want to publish it. Sokal is an interesting case because he was was embraced by all kinds of people across the political spectrum who were sick of what they thought was a certain kind of postmodern obscurantism, but he was quite assertive about being from the left having taught math for the Sandinistas and so forth. 

LG: How did you feel about the Aaron Swartz rehost? That was actually originally how I found the magazine.

AS: I think it was Rick [Perlstein, an editor at Lingua Franca] who told me he knew Aaron and showed me. He had just done this out of love and it was this magnificent thing, we were really happy about it even though it’s too bad there’s not a more official site. I still can’t quite believe what happened to him—if you think about it, his actions at MIT that led to his court case were performed in a similar spirit: making valuable scholarly or semi-scholarly information available to people. 

LG: How do you think the magazine changed in the years from when you started to the end?

AS: When I got there I was an earnest young man so I was sometimes embarrassed by the perception of the magazine as a little frivolous or silly—in hindsight it was not that much. I wanted to make Lingua Franca a little more serious without losing this general sense of fun, and over time I hope we didn’t bounce too far in the wrong direction. As time went by we wanted to expand the horizon beyond the cool theorist and the humanities culture wars debates to other realms. Some of that was in economics, religion, or more in the sciences. 

It was always a bit of a tug of war, but I think both Jeffrey and I also wanted to cover the administrative issues around the university. I was sometimes a little more resistant to that because I just wanted to read about professors and what they were writing about, but in retrospect this  was really important because, as the nineties went on, issues about the corporatization of the university and adjunctification of faculty and so on just became more and more burning. I’m not sure we fully registered their importance but we certainly made more and more efforts to do so. That was an important part of what we were doing, along with thinking about politics beyond the academy when it was appropriate.

One of our late pieces was about the World Trade Organization protests in Seattle and what that was about and what academics brought to it, so the debate about globalization was going to be really important to us. 

LG: What else did you take away from running the magazine?

AS: I loved the camaraderie of doing that kind of work with a small group of people. We published nine times a year - an academic idea of monthly. And I’ll never forget the two or three nights we’d spend closing each issue, which had the feel of a college newspaper—staying up until midnight or two in the morning in the design studio and ordering in takeout Thai food and figuring out those final touches to make the magazine look good and have each issue tell a story from one page to another. 

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Lingua Franca is one of my favorite magazines ever, and a central inspiration for this newsletter—I continue to aggressively recommend Quick Studies to my friends (and, now, you!) Anyways — until the next!

~lucas 

The archive is primarily focused on ephemera; it’s divided up into sets of boxes with labels like “stickers” and “media” along with sections for printed books and zines. It’s a blast to thumb through; I plan for a quick trip but we stay for almost two hours. 

I learn about the archive on the recommendations of Heather Cole (Brown’s zine librarian) and Lindsay Caplan, my art history professor last semester who, it turns out, has been friends with one of the archive’s founders, Josh MacPhee, for several years. Josh is also a member of Justseeds, a cooperative of socially engaged artists and printmakers, and has published books like Paper Politics: Socially Engaged Printmaking Today and seven volumes of Signal: A Journal of International Political Graphics and Culture through PM Press. He’s made zines since he was in high school, including a zine Fenceclimber while studying as an undergrad at Oberlin. After far too quick stops Monday morning at ABC No Rio (currently ‘in exile’ at the Clemente Soto Velez Cultural center while their old space is rebuilt) and Bluestockings (I must go back!) I meet Josh outside the archive and we spend a few hours walking through Park Slope.

This interview has been edited for accuracy, clarity, and concision.

Lucas Gelfond: What drew you to zines or DIY culture in general?

Josh MacPhee: Punk. I had friends that are musicians, but I’m functionally tone-deaf, and I wanted to be just as much a part of the community as they were. Because punk encourages a broad egalitarianism, I could do that  through publishing. 

The first zine I made was called Blub. It was with a group of friends, it was a weird mix of bad poetry, doodles, and music reviews. I had a friend, Dennis, whose parents ran an instant print place. This was pre-copy shop, the sort of place where you’d get business cards made or letterhead. We would go and lock ourselves in [the print shop] on a weekend or when they were closed, and spend the entire day there. We would make copies of everything, print them out, and build these layout sheets on physical forms that were the size of the page, and then throw them on the copy machine, make copies. I was doing that from 15 years old to 18 or 19. We would sell Blub in the cafeteria at school. I was in high school when the US invaded Iraq in 1990/1991, and I started to get into political stuff. The experience of that led to doing Fenceclimber which was much more punk-identified and political. It had interviews with bands, but also much more directly political writing, music reviews, concert reviews, and book reviews.  

LG: Even with access to a print shop like that, there has to be something that compels you to be in there, especially to take your Friday and Saturday—what motivated you to spend so much time printing stuff? 

JM: This feels like it’s a cliche, but the world has changed so much in the last 30 years. When I was 17, one certainly could express oneself but there was no public outlet for it. There was no social media, there was no email, so the way that you thought about communication was one-to-one, a direct relationship. It wasn’t that you were a transmitter and there would be this open field of receivers, but publishing was a way to start to approach that broader spectrum communication. 

Because there wasn’t this mesh of networked small-p publishing that was happening in the world, it was an exploratory process. It was like ‘for this set of ideas, as an artist and someone who’s sort of antagonistic to the status quo, who sees themselves as part of a counter culture—if these things matter, how do we communicate them to the world?’ Not only that, but how do we communicate internally as punks or political actors? That was a big part of zine culture.

LG: What do you think drives the connection between punk music and printed zines? 

JM: ‘Zine’ comes from fanzine, and original fanzines were mostly not musical. There were some, for bands that had cult followings like the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and the Grateful Dead, but there were a lot of zines that were about science fiction, or other genres like true crime that have become their own things online through fan fiction. That stuff started as part of zine culture, you’re not going to learn about what’s important to the people you see as your peers by reading Time Magazine.

All the media we had access to back then was so profoundly top-down, even more than mainstream media is now because there wasn’t the level of competition. Arguably, the media is more consolidated than it ever was, but at the same time, there’s an overwhelming number of outlets to get information from. None of that existed! 

I lived in a town that didn’t have regular access to a college radios station, because I was too far away from Boston to effectively tune in—at that point in the 90s, most college radio stations functionally had micro transmitters, and they hadn't become large enough to reach outside of the direct area they were in. I remember fiddling with a dial for what seemed like forever to tune in to just the edges of the Framingham State station, which was the closest college to where I lived in Massachusetts. [They broadcasted an] interview with Chomsky when the first Gulf War was starting, explaining why we were invading Iraq. There was easy no access to that information, you had to fight with a 1980s radio to be able to get that. 

It was all part of knowing, just knowing on a deep, profound level that there were people that thought like I did out in the world, but the only way to connect with them was to put yourself out there in some way. Making a zine was a way to do that. 

LG: I’d assume you’ve met people through zinemaking, but do you think it was through distribution, or did people contact you?

JM: Yeah, totally. In 1994, two friends and I drove from Washington, D.C. to Oakland through the southern route, and we had friends that were in bands or did zines who we stayed with along the whole route. When we got to Houston, the people we were gonna stay with totally ghosted.

At that point, there were no cell phones, you would have made all these plans ahead of time by sending letters back and forth. You’d also use payphones; we built these things called “dialers” using little boxes you would get at RadioShack that you could reprogram to replicate the sound of dropping a quarter in the payphone. The payphone would recognize it as you putting a quarter in—punk was all really integrated with scamming culture because none of us had any money. You would basically travel and stop anywhere there was a payphone to call people, and the people we were staying with in Houston didn’t pick up.

We were like, ‘what are we going to do?’ So we roll into Kinkos at like 11:30 at night in the outskirts of Houston and just started copying zines. We just figured we’d stay there until someone came in who was a punk, and that’s exactly what happened. This crew of kids came in to make copies for a flier for a show and we went up and talked to them. They gave us a place to stay, brought us to the show, fed us—we had no idea who they were, it was just a tribal thing. You could do that, you knew that if you went into a Kinkos in any urban area and stayed there long enough, you would find someone who was coming in to copy a zine or make a punk flier and you would be able to connect with them.

LG: It sounds like a blast.

JM: Yeah, it was a different time, but I do think publishing was a big part of it. It’s hyperbolic to say that it was as or more important than the music, but zines, writing, and ideas mattered in that community. For instance, the riot grrl movement, the reason it got so huge was because Bikini Kill was a massively popular band—there were a whole collection of bands, but [the movement] started out as a zine, and the publishing wing was really important. 

I was part of an infoshop in Washington D.C. called the Beehive, and one of the rooms was where Riot Grrl Press was. Young women across the country (and increasingly across the world) would send in what were called ‘flats,’ masters of zines that were stored in a central file cabinet. Anytime anyone wanted one of the zines, you’d just make a copy, it was a pre-internet open distribution model. People were experimenting with all this stuff; it was almost like print-on-demand, but it was physical, sitting in a file cabinet instead of on a server.

LG: What has changed about how you think through your own art and publishing practice? 

JM: […] There’s so many contradictions in all of this, because on one hand, as we were talking about earlier, part of what got me here was this experience in high school of needing to find an outlet for self-expression, and for the past decade I’ve really been on something of a crusade against self-expression.

That’s part of why I like to figure out ways to play with or challenge authorship, because there’s a set of less visible realities that are a product of the valorizing of self-expression: for example, erasing the fact that all ideas are communal and all information is social. We never think of something on our own, it always comes out of discourse, and so the whole idea of individually authoring an idea, or the academic fetishization of authorship, I think is not only absurd but fundamentally violent as it erases the social, the things that connect us to each other. 

The dominant discourse is a real head spinner, because on one hand it has valorized self-expression as the most cool, rebellious, radical thing you can do, and at the same time has precluded any other form of expression. If you take 30 seconds to think about it, it’s completely absurd. In some ways, individually it’s far more radical to just shut the fuck up. [And we certainly] live in a culture in which all forms of social expression are deeply policed and repressed.

LG: How do you think through effecting political change with publishing and media—is this a necessarily limited approach? What are some of the shortcomings of current approaches? 

JM: My orientation to politics started out very activist, you agitate for the changes you want to see, raise awareness, protest—in the last decade I’ve become much more oriented toward community organizing models and assessing how power is wielded; there’s a huge difference between rhetorical politics and real politics. There’s a big difference between saying one’s an abolitionist or putting forth a position that there shouldn’t be prisons, and getting into the nitty gritty of doing the work to pass a law that literally gets people out of jail, which may on the surface look less abolitionist but, as a result, can actually decarcerate rather than make a good argument about decarceration. 

We’ve seen that capitalism is very adept at skinning the surface off of almost anything and generating markets to sell it to. I think that identitarianism has profoundly influenced our society, but it hasn’t done an immense amount to shift actual power. Is it a good thing? In many ways, unquestionably. Should people be able to see representations of themselves or what they believe in the world? Absolutely. Is that different from actually having access to the capital and power necessary for your community to not be impoverished? Totally different things. I think that it’s ‘yes and’. We should influence the discourse, and we need to influence how power functions—we can’t accept rhetorical change in the place of structural change. These things are often pitted against each other, but we need both.

LG: Yeah, I worry some activism-oriented media can end up leaning fairly ‘folk-political.’

JM: Yeah, do you know Murray Bookchin? I’m probably butchering this at some level but he used to have this example involving an oak tree. If an oak tree drops an acorn, that may or may not grow into another oak tree, but it’s not going to grow into a car; we’re limited by the conditions that exist within it. There’s an embrace [in contemporary left politics] of magical thinking, which on one level is wonderful because it allows us to see outside the box to imagine new things, but that needs to be paired with a more dialectical way of understanding, something like ‘just because you want something to be doesn’t mean that it’s possible.’ Basically, the possible should not take the place of the imaginary, but the imaginary can’t take the place of the possible.

For me, building this archive of examples—Interference Archive—on one hand generates an imaginary, but on the other,  is—ideally—an entire curriculum of what is possible or not possible. The dominant way people absorb information is from images, but we aren’t taught image literacy; we’re watching without necessarily having the skillset to interpret. 

I see part of my role as teaching visual literacy to organizers so that they can understand how the language in their field is articulated and rearticulated all the time, and to [think through] ways to intervene into that. For example, when you can use images people already recognize or have relationships with, they’re more likely to connect to those images. In an art world context, the goal as a creator is coming up with something that’s novel, but it’s not the same for political organizing. While newness may be valorized in a movement context, there’s no inherent benefit; most often something that’s familiar is more effective at communicating your ideas.

justseeds

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I think a lot about contemporary meme culture when I teach people about image-making. Most of the value of a meme today is rooted in how esoteric it is. It becomes a marker of insider culture, because the more removed from its point of reference, and the more you need a lot more background to understand that, the cooler it seems to be. An insider culture, of course, is defined by the existence of an outsider culture, and to me this is a form of anti-politics. It’s a kind of nihilism, it accepts the idea that we couldn’t ever actually reach a critical mass of people who would be insider enough to ever change anything, so we just accept wallowing in the sort of humor and ‘coolness’ of how isolated we are. The political origins of meme culture are left iconography from the sixties, seventies, and eighties; all [of those contexts] acknowledged that more people recognizing an image makes it more valuable. Those movements trafficked in images that could be easily repurposed, reused, reinterpreted, and redeployed while maintaining a core goal of more justice for more people. We need more of that today. 

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You can follow Josh on Instagram, and also the Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative (which Josh founded) on Instagram and Twitter. You can also follow Interference Archive on Instagram and Twitter or visit (highly recommend!) their open hours in Brooklyn Fridays from 1-6pm, Saturdays from 12-5pm, and/or Sundays from 12-5pm. It’s really special to flip through some of this stuff physically, and to talk about the materials with others in their physical space—they’ve built a pretty remarkable community around it. What are your favorite physical artifacts or repositories of physical artifacts? (You can leave a comment or reply directly to this email!)

Until the next!

~lucas

This transcript has been edited for clarity, concision, and accuracy.

Lucas Gelfond: I read your piece in Input about the debates editors have about whether or not to delete certain pages. How do you think talk pages shape intellectual culture on the site?

Annie Rauwerda: There’s this really good stat, I don’t know where I found it, but for every word on Wikipedia there’s something like six or eight words more behind the scenes on project pages or talk pages; whenever people are working together on something there’s going to be disagreements and questions and Wikipedia is certainly no exception. Sometimes it’s really eye-opening to see what parts of an article warranted the most discussion, sometimes it’s not what you would expect. There’s the classic example of the Star Trek Into Darkness controversy, I don’t know if you’ve heard about it…

LG: I haven’t, say more! 

AR: There’s 40,000 words, people are spilling gallons of ink deciding whether to capitalize the “I” in the heading. It was ridiculous, but I think that Wikipedia editors tend to be more persnickety than most and with such attention to detail sometimes the editors will devolve into fairly inane debates, but other debates on talk pages are really wonderful and inspiring. 

depthsofwikipedia

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LG: What drove you to start the page?

AR: I didn’t start it with any intentions. It was just me being bored and thinking “I can’t believe nobody has made that on Instagram yet. As I started posting more I learned a lot more about Wikipedia, the open access movement, and the development of Wikis in general; I just read this book called The Wikipedia Revolution by Andrew Lih which came out in 2009, it talks more about the history of the technologies behind Wikipedia, and people like Ward Cunnningham [editor’s note: the developer of the first wiki], that was all really inspiring. 

When I founded it two years ago I didn’t have this passion for free knowledge, but I think it’s developed over time; I’ve liked Wikipedia for a while. There’s this journal entry I have when I was in 5th grade where I was like “I love Wikipedia, I just read the entire page about milk and I want to remember it so I can be an expert on milk. I'm going to do it again tomorrow but on McDonalds.”

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LG: Wikimedia’s brand director Zachary McCune once said about the account: “it’s a place where Wikipedia comes to life, like an after-hours tour of the best of Wikipedia.” How do you think @depthsofwikipedia interacts with the subculture of Wikipedia?

AR: I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea of a ‘Wikipedia fan’ because the Wikipedia editor base has been declining for the past five or ten years, and it would be very cool and helpful to recruit more people to edit. I’m not talking about day-in-day-out editing, but instead just looking at a typo and saying ‘oh that’s weird,’ being someone who looks at it and thinks ‘I should improve this’ or ‘oh, this isn’t sourced, I can add the source.’ 

There’s a lot of reasons why the editor base is declining. One that feels rather personal to me is that there’s a pretty steep learning curve when it comes to all of the guidelines. Like I said, the manual of style is pretty up for interpretation at a certain point, but when you’re a brand new editor, it’s very hard to master everything. Especially compared to the early days, like when you look at some of the edits from 2005, people are writing whatever they want. Whereas now if people go a little rogue and you know, maybe display the fact that they don't really understand what Wikipedia is, they're met with less grace and people aren’t really holding their hands as much. That’s one problem.

There’s a lot of people, like me two years ago, who would think ‘oh Wikipedia is awesome’ but I wouldn’t call myself an editor, even though I maybe have made a few edits here and there. If I can tap into those people, that would be really cool. Also, it’s really hard to estimate the genders of editors because you don’t even have to make an account to edit, but it’s somewhere between 80 and 90 percent male by recent estimates, so there’s a lot of efforts like Wiki Women in Red that are trying to close the gap there. 

depthsofwikipedia

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LG: How do you think about the community of @depthsofwikipeida interacting with the larger community of Wikipedia editors?

AR: I think that there’s a ton of overlap. I think that there are so many Wikipedia editors that are young and fairly irreverent, they’re not all buttoned up and stuffy, and I think people like that tend to enjoy Depths of Wikipedia.

depthsofwikipedia

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LG: Depths of Wikipedia might be seen as something like a curatorial project, how do you think about what to publicize or the impact on pages when you bring attention to lesser known ones?

AR: I used to not really care, if something was on Wikipedia, I figured ‘that’s permission to post it.’ Now I don’t do that, because sometimes people will edit a page to make it funny and then send it to me and be like ‘this is so funny, you have to look at it.’ Now I know better, so if something was just edited to be more cheeky or something, then I try to avoid it.

In terms of bringing light to lesser known pages, I think that there’s a lot of things on Wikipedia that need to be improved. Everything needs updating because everything is happening all the time, and there's so many topics, like tiny little stubs that need to be expanded, so there’s a lot of instances on Wikipedia where the writing is kind of bad and funny. If I post something like that, now I’ll try to have a call to edit. 

Recently I posted a photo of a little creature and it looked like a child’s drawing, it was funny because it was like ‘how is this seriously the best illustration we have of this.’ Then, I posted it on Twitter, and pretty soon this illustrator was like ‘oh, I should make a better one,’ and so she did. That felt good, but there’s certainly times where I post something and then it gets vandalized.  

LG: Do you see Wikipedia is a publication? You said once it has ‘more personality than Britannica’ what do you think is behind that? 

AR: Wikipedia has a manual of style which is very, very long. It’s supposed to have uniform style, which is really impressive. Before I started editing I was amazed—I can hardly keep the same style when I’m writing, and [Wikipedia] is really consistent while having so many editors. Honestly it’s like the Constitution, there are a few times where the manual of style is very open to interpretation, so different editors will go about things in different ways. Sometimes you see little bits of personality coming through. 

I think it’s hard to make a broad claim about what has more personality, I know I did that earlier, I just don’t have a good reason, maybe it’s that people who are working at Brittanica do it for their jobs. People on Wikipedia have so much passion, because that’s the whole model. Wikipedia is not a site where you get paid to edit, that’s just not what it’s built for, so people tend to gravitate towards topics they are absurdly passionate about, and then you see personality come through. If you look at user pages, there’s also very fun stuff there. 

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LG: How do you think being able to view entries with all of the work that went into them changes your experience of the site?

AR: It makes it far more credible. If you either don’t know how to [view them], or don’t know that the records of changes exist, it might seem like Wikipedia is this static document that’s declaring the state of the world, whereas when you look at all of the recent changes, particularly for really active news issues, there are edits happening sometimes every minute. 

There’s also an extension you can get for Wikipedia called Who Wrote That?, which is really fun because you can see where one editor might have really dominated an article. If you think they are biased, you can hover over [the article] and realize ‘oh, all of the parts that are really weird and positive are by this one editor.’ When you have the public record of edits you’re able to sniff out potential problems with the articles and overall I think that makes the whole thing more credible.

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LG: Do you think the collaborative nature of the site makes it more rigorous?

AR: For sure! This happens to me all the time, I’ll write something, I’ll think ‘meh, whatever,’ I’ll move on with my life, and then I’ll come back and look at it and somebody, from perhaps anywhere in the world, will improve it. Like, maybe I made a dumb typo or did something weird, people will come to change it and make it better, and I have no idea who they are—they could be 10, they could be 90. 

Another principle of Wikipedia is ‘assume good faith’ and I’ve found others are usually really good about that. I make mistakes all the time when I’m editing, and I’m a casual editor—I am not a hotshot on Wikipedia—but I think people are pretty good about knowing ‘okay, you tried your best and we’re all gonna work together to improve this because we have this common goal.’ 

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LG: I read that the genesis of Depths of Wikipedia came from excerpts in a friend’s zine? 

AR: Yeah! My friend Hajanyoo wanted to make a zine with the stuff all of our friends from high school were into in the early stages of COVID. I had just heard about Cool Freaks Wikipedia Club, group that with a similar premise [to Depths of Wikipedia]; I’m not sure if I was in it at the time, but I had done a few edits anonymously (as an IP address) and was thinking a lot about Wikipedia. So I screenshotted a few things I thought were cool on Wikipedia and just put them all onto a zine page.  

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Depths of Wikipedia is hosting another edit-a-thon in collaboration with the Smithsonian this fall, but Annie suggests that everyone “get their toes wet and start editing.” She also thinks everyone should check out Hatnote’s “Listen to Wikipedia,” a project which creates music based on Wikipedia’s recent change feed. Wikipedia has always stood out to me as one of the best affirmations of the usefulness of the internet, and a triumph of group collaboration. What are your favorite weird Wikipedia articles (you can reply to this email!)? I would personally submit either ummarell or 

until the next!

~lucas 

This transcript has been edited for clarity, concision, and accuracy.

Milo Miller: Full disclosure, I’m not sure this is necessarily a perfect fit, just from the text that I saw on your Substack front page, yeah, I was like, "oh, this kid's got some really interesting ideas, but also it's super way over intellectual for the type of material that we're talking about.

Lucas Gelfond: No, not at all, not at all!

MM: I saw that you've put in Christy Fife, who's super fucking rad. So I'm like, okay, that gives a balance. But then as I’m reading through it, when you mentioned things like the Baffler and stuff where I'm thinking ‘those aren't zines, they've got some bank behind them.’ I'm immediately suspicious because even though I work in academia and we do a lot of library shit with a lot of really, really smart folks, conversations can easily get too mired in policies or procedures or ideas about what constitutes a zine versus a magazine versus some other type of publication.

It's usually my job to grab on people's ankles and tug them way back down, to help ground folks in the notion that, for zine makers and communities, we’re not all “professional” in a traditional sense, and we have an obligation to try to keep access open to as wide of an audience as possible.

LG: That's good, that's definitely the right push. I definitely want to think pretty expansively about this stuff and am interested mostly in how groups reach a public in general. I guess specifically here, I’m curious about how queer zines functioned as information conduits within queer communities.

MM: We have a lot of zines like that, and we think of a lot of those materials as incredibly dangerous in a lot of ways.

LG: Say more!

MM: We’re fairly public at QZAP that, since our inception, we (mostly) have no idea who our users are. When we started QZAP we didn’t have a privacy policy because we didn’t know who our users were and we’ve never asked our users who they are or where they are coming from, because the material in our archive is dangerous. It’s awesome, it’s fun, it’s punk rock, it’s sexy as hell, and also, it’s dangerous.

LG: I actually had a question about this, because I was really struck by when you said something similar, I think in an interview with Our Lives Wisconsin. What dangerous stuff in zines sticks out to you?

MM: Let's say you wake up and it is the middle of May in 2022 and you are 17 years old, you're transgender, you live in a place that is not Boston or San Francisco or Chicago, and you come to our archive. I'm not going to say any more, that's fucking dangerous. If you stumble on our stuff and can get it past the censors at your high school library computer lab or the public library doesn’t shut your shit down right away, it's a blessing, but if you don't have a familial support network or your school doesn't support you, reading anything in our archive is going to be sort of dangerous.

One of the zines we have is called State of the Gay at Harding University and it was written in 2011. Harding University is a private, Christian university in Arkansas. Some kid wrote about being queer in an environment where there is an honor code [that forbids same sex relationships], where he can’t talk to his friends or the administration about it. That’s potentially dangerous, and I say it gleefully because I wish it weren’t [dangerous].

For a slightly different example, if you’ve been to our website recently enough, you’ve seen that there’s a blog post from just last year about four or five zines we have in our collection about where to find resources for DIY abortion—that’s multiply dangerous in this climate. 

LG: What has continued to draw you to queer zines?

MM: I was reading a description of Christopher Street Magazine where they basically said it was supposed to be like the homosexual New Yorker or Atlantic, really sort of highbrow. That's fine, but it's this really, really narrow viewpoint of folks who are mostly gay men, mostly white, certainly middle to upper class. That has been the dominant narrative since Stonewall, but once you start looking at queer zines suddenly it's like, ‘oh, that ain't shit, here are all of these stories.’

What gets me really jazzed about our archive and the work that we do now, it's not the activist part of it. It’s all of these amazing queer stories told in all of these different ways. They're not the stories that show up in mainstream publications at all.

LG: QZAP predates a lot of other internet archives, what drew you to the early web and digitization?

MM:  [Chris and I] met doing organizing work for this event called Queeruption 3, an international gathering of queer anarchists and punks and whatnot. During organizing meetings, lots questions around identity, accessibility, and racism came up. Because we were both zine makers and were working with other folks who had also been in the queer zine community, we (but mostly Chris and I because we had just started dating, and so we were kind of in that phase) would look at each other, and say, “Hey, didn't, so-and-so write about this?”

Fast forward two years, both he and I had moved to Milwaukee and we were like, “we have all of these zines, what if we start to put them online, how do we do that”? Nobody had done that, Google Books wasn't a project yet. For us, this was an activist question; we wanted people to be able to access this information.

[…] We looked at the early days of the archive and getting material online as comparable to ACT UP’s ‘drugs into bodies’ phase. [This was a reaction] to what it was like to watch all of the people around you get sick with absolutely no hope.

The government was fucking useless and the drug companies were fucking useless. Something would come out and it would seem promising, but their trials were super limited and whatnot. [The thought was] “hey testing it on laboratory mice is fine, but also half of the gay community in New York city is dying,” we need to get drugs into people’s bodies and then we’ll figure out what’s working and what’s not working. That was our model— we were mostly interested in getting queer zines online and accessible as possible.

LG: How do you think publishing interacts with building queer communities?

MM: Pre-internet, zines were really, really good for connecting people to each other; you might have a whole community of folks you have these incredible epistolary relationships with that are all based on printed material, in the same way that you might be part of a place that you feel comfortable with in other ways now. Now that might be a Discord community, or your circle of people on Twitter, or, I’m imagining there’s some way to carve out a similar space [on other platforms].

LG: How did this work in print specifically?

MM: A whole lot of zines had letter sections and review sections, so if things were music or pop culture oriented, you might have people writing about stuff that they picked up at the record store or shows that they went to. Also in those contexts people would say, “hey, I picked up this cool zine, if you want to get a copy of it, you can write to, you know, Semen Demon, PO Box 13 Hampshire College Western Mass” or “Fuh Cole, 2635 Oakland Ave, Apt #6, Milwaukee Wisconsin.” Fuh Cole is actually the title of one of the zines you can find in the archive, F-U-H-C-O-L-E.  I saw that you had, uh, a picture of Factsheet Five on the page…

LG: Yeah! [Note: Factsheet Five was a long-running zine that would review other zines sent to them.]

MM: Yeah, Larry-Bob Roberts, who published the zine Holy Titclamps, for a long while actually had a [similar] zine called Queer Zine Explosion. [It was] not even reviews but more like a two or three sentence description [of a zine], what the cover cost was, and how to get it, and it was page upon page of that. That’s how people would connect to each other; if nothing else you could always write to Larry-Bob and get a copy of Queer Zine Explosion. From there could write to other folks to request zines.

LG: How have you thought about building community around the archive, doesn’t QZAP have an artist residency?

MM: We meet people in all different contexts who say, “hey, I want to do a thing,” or “I want to do research,” or folks we’ve traded zines with for awhile that we think would be super interested and would get something out of it. We send them an invite and say, ‘hey, this time coming up, we’ve got a couple of slots open’ and ‘if you want to come spend a week here at the archive—which is in our house, in the downstairs level of our building. Basically, ‘we’d love to have you, here’s what to expect, here’s the costs,’ which are pretty minimal, you basically just have to get yourself to us and we’ll cover everything for the week.

Because we have all of this material, there’s no way we can know all of it really, really well. For us, it’s a chance to see our archive through someone else’s eyes. Folks come here and in the process we ask them “what are you interested in, what do you think the archive is going to show you” and then they get here and the archive takes them where the archive wants to take them.

LG: What is your definition of a zine?

MM: These days I default to Jenna’s [Freedman, of the Barnard Zine Archive] definition, because she put it in a way that’s so succinct.

LG: I’m actually going to the Barnard Zine Library in a few days! 

MM: Jenna is one of my besties. When we’re done with this, I’m going to very quickly hop on the cat chat and let her know that I got to talk to you.

LG: What is the cat chat?

MM: Oh, the cat chat is our, it started at the beginning of the pandemic, it’s a bunch of zine librarians across the country where we mostly share pictures of our cats. So I ultimately call it, ‘zine cat super friends’ or ‘super kitty zine friends’ or something.

I think archivists have uniquely broad perspective on zines / publishing culture, and I’ve reached out to a few more in coming weeks to chat with—in lieu of better public funding for archives, I’m consistently drawn to organizations like QZAP that do the sort of thankless, long term maintenance work that is essential to keeping track of a history. On a less serious note, I love odd preservation projects—what is your favorite? (You can respond to this email directly!). I’ll submit Gap In-Store Playlists 1992 to 2006, a work that needs no more introduction. Until the next! 

~lucas 

Lucas Gelfond: What’s your participation in the local scene like, and what motivated you to start the page? 

@meetmeintranspecos: [A friend and I] made the page on my birthday in 2018, when we were really stoned. We had been texting each other memes for awhile, mostly just stuff we had observed in the local DIY community that we wanted to be able to joke about, but it felt too risky to make those jokes coming from us, publicly as ourselves. We were just sorta like  “what do you think about making it more public, we should make it a page?”

I was really into indie rock at the time and we named it after Trans-Pecos because I’d go there all the time. Throughout college I wrote for a music magazine, so I would take pictures and cover shows, and through that [the friend I started the account with and I] met. Since then my taste has definitely evolved, I still listen to everything [and many genres of music] but since the page started I’ve gotten really into electronic music. There’s just as good of a DIY community in New York for electronic as there is for indie rock, and so I DJ, and I find it really natural to meet people at shows and form friendships over music. 

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LG: What has it been like building that sort of community online, with the account?

MMITP: It feels so good and it's led to so many amazing friendships and connections. [For example] I’ve become real life friends with Asquith who runs the Lobster Theremin record label, and we actually hung out in London and I went to Lobsterfest. Not that I’ve ever really felt alone in what I like, but it feels good to nerd out with other people. It's hard to meet people that like everything that you like, and by just posting really specific things about what you do, you build a community of people that also share those interests or have similar tastes. 

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LG: In an interview with BuiltIn you talked about Lizzy Goodman’s book Meet Me in the Bathroom and the 2000s NYC indie rock scene as inspiration for the page, how do you think community forms differently now around music?

MMITP: A few years ago there was a huge wave of DIY spaces shutting down in every city; most of the DIY spaces discussed in that book are gone now. There’s too many to list off the top of my head, like Silent Barn, Shea Stadium, 285 Kent, all of those spaces are gone, and not having those places to gather really put the damper on smaller bands. 

Miraculously Trans-Pecos has survived this whole arc, and I think it’s genuinely one of the most important places for building a DIY-oriented community, even though it’s a legit venue, like not technically someone’s apartment. I think smaller venues like that are really foundational to building a community that’s DIY-oriented. 

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LG: What kind of publications have you interacted with around music and how do you think they‘ve impacted how you approach it? 

MMITP: I loved Rookie Mag growing up, and that was really inspirational for thinking about my own experiences and how I could document them and talk about them. They wrote a lot about music as well. As far as print publications, I can’t say much; I feel like I really grew up in the Tumblr era, and of Pitchfork and Noisey and all of that. 

LG: You started with internet stuff on Tumblr, right?

MMITP: Yeah, I had a fashion Tumblr, it’s not like my meme account at all, but no matter what kind of Tumblr you have, and there were many ‘sectors’ of Tumblr, you got the same viral, funny posts and texts posts, and I think that shaped my humor a lot. 

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LG: Was there something that drew you to internet blogging or publishing?

MMITP: I made my first blog when I was in sixth grade, because it was a class assignment to have a Blogspot and publish writing on there. 

LG: We had one of those too!

MMITP: Yeah, it felt really cool and important to write something and post it online and realize “woah, other people can see this, that’s so cool.” I made a Tumblr pretty young, like 2011. I had a pretty decent following, like 10,000 followers, but I would literally just reblog fashion pictures and occasionally upload pictures I took. It wasn't anything revolutionary, but that was probably my first experience of having an online community, because I made friends through there as well that were into the same fashion as well.

At the same time as well, and I need to give this more credit, I was a One Direction stan in high school, and was on stan Twitter for them in like 2011. I was just always online because you obviously have to keep updated with what One Direction is doing. There were really genuinely funny stan accounts too, my best friend had a pretty popular one, and that exposed me to how you can leverage a specific kind of internet humor and apply it to an interest. That’s probably where most of my style comes from if I’m being honest. 

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LG: What was it like to have access to that kind of audience at that age and how old were you?

MMITP: I started my Tumblr when I was 14 and had 10,000 followers by the time I was 18. Being a ‘Tumblr influencer’ was definitely a thing, but it was still more anonymous, because most people’s Tumblrs were not pictures of them, that’s how Instagram is; your Instagram is you, but your Tumblr is more your interests and what you want to see pictures of or read about. Tumblr was really good for building community but it never felt like, or at least in the Tumblr spaces I was in, it never felt like an ego thing, it just felt like, ‘we all care about this specific thing.

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LG: Do you think running the page or participating in internet music communities has changed your music taste? 

MMITP: I honestly feel like it hasn’t, it’s just a reflection of my taste and has allowed me to find stuff that’s similar to my taste through other accounts that make memes that I like. Like another example is a meme account that just shows the best clips of the HÖR bathroom [editor’s note: @bathroomdjgreatesthits], just finding accounts like that which repost stuff that’s similar to what I’m into, that’s allowed me to discover new stuff for sure. I wouldn’t say that’s changed my taste, I think it’s just opened up more ways to find related music online. I would never trust the Spotify algorithm to expose me to something new, but if someone posts a meme about a Sheffield bass DJ that’s extremely specific, I’m like “okay, I have to be able to understand this joke and listen to this DJ so I can know what you’re talking about,” and that’s been my strategy for finding music always, just go down the furthest wormhole I can go down, and that’s usually where the best stuff is. I think that also just comes with being really online, but then you find cool stuff.

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LG: Yeah, that’s also my experience, I think I listened to Two Shell for the first time because of the ‘two shell is just overmono for heads’ tweet. 

MMITP: Yeah, I love Two Shell, Two Shell is great. 

LG: What are some of your other favorite pages or publications?

MMITP: Another passion of mine, which I haven’t made any memes about yet, is reality TV. I love the Housewives, I love Bravo, I love Vanderpump Rules. I feel like people often make assumptions about people that really like reality TV or they don’t see depth in it, but I think it’s really fascinating reflection of our society’s relationship with media. An account I’m obsessed with right now is @kardashiankolloquiam, where she uses the Kardashians as a prism to talk about, like, the internet, and parasocial relationships, and Baudrillard, and which is so interesting. 

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LG: How do you collaborate or interact with some of the other electronic pages, do you think there’s something resembling a scene around it?

MMITP: I’m in a group chat on instagram called meme gang and it’s all of the electronic meme accounts, some of the non-electronic ones as well, we just talk about electronic music all day, every day. That’s a good way for me to stay engaged with the electronic music world, with what’s going on in any news. We all just crack jokes in there constantly, like @catsquith is in there, and @bedroomdjfantasies and @businesstechnoinstitute, all of those guys are in there. That’s just a fun group chat to just goof off. Most of the Instagram group chat people don’t live in the US, but I do have a real life meme account friends as well who live in New York, like Eva who runs @soulseekingarrangement, Anna who runs @this.and.a.blunt, and Jamie and Kaitlin who run @katebush.420, we have a text group chat and all hang out pretty regularly. We all DJ as well and we’re all kind of involved in that community. We talk all the time about gigs and shows we want to go to, and when we hang out it’s not like we just talk about our meme accounts, we’re just friends, and it’s sort of incredible that a meme account can lead to that, because we all have the same interests but we’re all so different too. 

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I’m consistently interested in ‘hyperlocal’ or ‘hyperniche’ accounts and how they might represent both a continuation of and a break with more traditional printed zines or blogs, different in some of the aesthetics of shitposting but similar both in the way their creators assemble publics and communities, and the ways they make subcultures legible. What are your favorite small internet accounts? (You can reply directly to this email!)

Until the next!

~lucas

Previously, he was an artist in residence at the Internet Archive. He also curated The Download, a series of commissions for Rhizome that “considers posted files, the act of downloading, and the user’s desktop as a space for exhibition” from 2015 to 2017 and Library of the Printed Web, a physical archive focused on “web culture articulated as printed artifact” that was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art’s library in 2017.

He’s a prolific zinester (most recently: resting reader (2022), TINY DIGEST #1 (SPACE) (2021), and What is Queer Typography? (2021) and lectures frequently about experimental publishing and network culture.

Queer.Archive.Work hosts open hours every other Sunday; on May 1st I bike 20 minutes from my Brown dorm to their studio space in West Providence; Paul and I sit outside on chairs to chat.

This transcript has been edited for clarity, accuracy, and concision. 

Lucas Gelfond:  I loved your talk “Performing the Feed,” specifically your notes on “semantic-based curation,” and “material that’s been meaningfully selected by humans around its capacity to assemble publics and generate discourse.” How do you think through works and how their form shapes their interaction with a public? 

Paul Soulellis: We’re doing that all the time, whenever we circulate anything. “Publics and Counterpublics” by Michael Warner, do you know that piece?

LG: I’m vaguely familiar.

PS: That’s been huge for me. The ideas he sketches out there go beyond publishing, to addressivity and acts of speech. In the past I used to think about publishing, and I think many people still do, as the production of objects. Like: you make a zine, you make a digital file, you make a book. I guess one thing that changed for me with Michael Warner's [piece] was the idea of setting something into motion and forming a public through its circulation, and through the discourse that's created around that movement.

I started thinking about publishing in gestural and performative ways where that action, when you make objects move—sometimes literally physically moving from hand to hand or library to library et cetera, or on the network from server to sever—that is where the public, or a public, or multiple publics are being formed. That can happen with anything.

LG: Do you think that works do this at all themselves?

PS: On their own? I think there is the illusion of that in network culture. The illusion is that the post itself or the tweet or the thing itself is doing the assembling [of a public], when in fact it’s not, we’re doing it by sharing and passing things along. I guess maybe it’s a little different when we start talking about algorithmic forces, but still those are still engineered. 

I would definitely shy away from the idea that objects and things are doing any of the assembling itself. Even here at the Binch/Queer.Archive.Work studio, it’s only the people who are assembling in here that are making anything happen. If it was just me and that collection of a thousand zines sitting there, and no one cared [it wouldn’t matter]. It really comes down to acts of care and commitment that enable people to assemble around things.  

LG: I was reading about your work on The Download a bit, and was really struck by your note about how “downloading can transform a public post into private property; to download may be political”—say more! 

PS: I'm thinking again about movement and making apparent, what is otherwise frequently, an invisible, dynamic or act—the movement of digital files between servers to a desktop. In delivering something to an individual's desktop, the agency of someone opening up a zip file and ‘performing’  the work on one's own private computer, off of the network, for me that’s a political act because you are empowering your viewer to create the work with you or to finish the work or participate in the work. 

LG: Are there examples of politically charged or ‘activist downloading’ you’re thinking of? 

PS: I think of leaks, I think of information that is meant to be private and locked up or secure, and then suddenly it’s not, because a whistleblower has decided that the status of that information has to be flipped or reversed from private to public. That’s not inherently political, but it can be, I think.

LG: I was thinking of Aaron Swartz. 

PS: Yeah, absolutely. That was kind of an extreme case, but a very important one in terms of who and how someone has access to information, and what happens when you try to interrupt or resist that. 

LG: In a 2020 interview with Rebecca Wilkinson, you talk about how “community organizing, networking, and connection happens on digital platforms now.” What was your thinking regarding opening Queer.Archive.Work as an explicitly physical space?

PS: I’ve worked as a professional graphic designer for many years and have always had an artist studio, but that’s very much a private space focused on the individual. When I got a risograph [note: a printing machine frequently used in zine making], everything changed because I was suddenly in control of every aspect of making a publication, and it was really intense. I would be doing that for, say, three weeks nonstop, 24/7, but then there would be months where nobody's using the risograph. 

I thought: “wouldn't it be great if this could be a shared tool” and “how might others feel empowered by this thing in the way that I am?” That’s one part of it. Another part is that more and more over the last 10 years I have been making publications where the collaboration was key or central, where it was about others coming into the space of a publication to share ideas, to be in conversation with each other. I just sort of put two and two together when this moment happened, where I had to leave the last artist studio and thought, all right, we'll look for a new space, but what if it had a public element to it? What if there was a way that this space could be accessible and this machine, this risograph printer that I find so empowering could be accessible? 

I registered Queer.Archive.Work as a nonprofit as a way to decenter me from the project, so that it wasn't like ‘let's go in and share Paul's studio,’ but ‘let's create,’ where I'm participating, but others are also equally participating. 

LG: A lot of your recent work is centered on the speed of production, I'm thinking about the Urgency Reader series and resting reader. How do you think through immediacy with printed zines?

PS: That’s one of the beautiful things about zines, the immediacy. The ability, with access to a laser printer, a Xerox machine, or a risograph, to print one sheet, fold it in half, and call it a thing, and be able to hand that to somebody in the most basic way. In that essential way there’s something very fast about that process, although the ideas you’re spreading might not be something that’s happening very fast, maybe it’s something that’s building over a long period of time. Still, there’s something about the ability to immediately circulate and disseminate that slow information. It’s not unique to zines, but zines put it very close to the physicalness of the artists and the artists body, and give artists agency to control that process as opposed to academic or commercial publishing. 

With ZINE MUNCH I’m consistently interested in how the differing affordances of print/digital publications influence how we interact with them. What works do you think make best use of their digital (or physical) setting? You can reply directly to this email, very curious to hear thoughts! In any case, more soon :)

~ lucas

I found out about Hermenaut last year, seeing that n+1 (which I’d just begun seriously reading) cited them as influence. I was in the middle of a year off from school and, in some free time, cold-reached out to Josh about archiving or preserving Hermenaut, inspired by Aaron Swartz’s work re-hosting Lingua Franca. We’ve been working on the preservation project on and off ever since, and he's been a guide to me in my quest to learn more about the history of zines and little magazines; I ask him to be my first guest, and we talk via Zoom last Saturday.

This transcript has been edited for clarity and concision.

Lucas Gelfond: How did you get started with Hermenaut? 

Josh Glenn: When I was in graduate school and thinking about dropping out (I didn’t end up finishing), I realized “I'm immediately going to stop reading philosophy and theory if I don't stay in academia, but I don’t want to.” I liked grad school seminars, just being in a room full of interesting, smart people who cared about ideas, were wrestling with them, and wanted to apply them in the real world, I just didn't like all the other shit that went with it. I didn't like the pretentious jargon, I didn't like the politics of jockeying for positions and trying to find a job—and being required to move to a city where I didn’t want to live, in order to find work.

My thought was, “How can I make myself keep reading and thinking about this stuff?” Personally, I can't learn anything unless I write about it, so I wanted to require myself to write long-form essays. At the same time, I was wondering, “How do you get a free-range intellectual seminar going outside of academe?” In the past artistic and intellectual circles have coalesced around little magazines, so I’d started reading old issues of Partisan Review, Dissent, Dwight Macdonald’s Politics, Sartre’s Les Temps Modernes, Mencken’s The American Mercury—for inspiration. Most importantly, though, I was frustrated that the kind of intellectual journal that I wanted to read—one that was highbrow and lowbrow, but not middlebrow — did not seem to exist. So I started this photocopied zine, Hermenaut, in 1992.

LG: I loved the section of the magazine where you’d respond to letters to the editors. What was your thought process there? 

JG: I really liked National Lampoon as an adolescent. When I look back at the Lampoon now, of course, I cringe. But their letter section was fucking brilliant — because they just made up all the letters. They would just be terrible jokes. I was also inspired by the letter sections of those mid-century intellectual magazines I’ve mentioned — because debates would rage within and between little magazines via the letters — which contributed powerfully to the sense that this publication is participating in a living, breathing intellectual culture. We don’t even know how to have debates now. What’s so enjoyable about reading the letters in these midcentury journals is the sense of agonistic collegiality — we’re pushing each other really hard, but with respect too.

It wasn’t just the letters section that didn’t have to be boring. Why can't every section of a periodical be something that you would want to read? Like, the masthead, that should be interesting. And the advertising. One of Marshall McLuhan’s most interesting insights is that when people read magazines, what they're really reading is the advertising — because it’s the ads that tell readers who the magazine thinks they are. I may be misremembering the quote.

I started reading histories of independent American magazines that had succeeded — Playboy is one of the famous examples. It’s a reprehensible magazine in many ways, but I admire how strategic Hugh Hefner was when it came to the advertising. The ads in Playboy said to the reader, “By reading this publication, you can participate in the swinging, anti-uptight culture that is just beginning to emerge.” Rolling Stone did something very similar.

If you read literary and intellectual magazines today, it's mostly just ads from publishing houses and galleries, which is fine but it can feel too precious and rarefied. I wanted to have some of that stuff too, but we really wanted to have indie record labels and, like, weird stores from our neighborhood that we loved. Some of these establishments didn’t even have a marketing department, so we would create the ad for them. Richard Grijalva, who came on eventually to sell ad space in Hermenaut, would reach out to his favorite indie labels and say “You can pay any price. We just want an ad from you in our magazine.” Which is how we ended up running ads for Verso and Fantagraphics and Emperor Norton Records all on the same page. Also, I liked having a lot of ads in our pages — I don’t like the supposedly classy, ad-free look of most scholarly journals.

LG: I actually did notice this a lot, like, holy shit, Guided By Voices records are in here, but when they were actually releasing stuff in the nineties, it was really fun to peek through some of those ads. Were you ever on the other side of that, advertising Hermenaut anywhere?

JG: No, and that's the thing I've always been bad at. I can tell you a little anecdote. Once I was sitting at a coffee shop in Minneapolis, when I used to live there for a few years during the Nineties, and this guy I knew named Chank Diesel, who was the editor of a music magazine in town called Cake, he pulls up in his car and he's all excited. He opens the trunk and pulls out a big box of t-shirts that say “Fucker.com” on them with a little robot logo. 

This is in the early days of websites when all these domains are available. He’s like, “I can't believe I was able to register Fucker.com.” He starts handing out t-shirts to me and other people in the cafe and I’m like, “This is so cool, Chank, what are you going to publish on your new website?” and he's like, “I don't even know yet!” And I thought, “Ah! That’s the perfect way to do it, first publicize the thing and then figure out what it is.” But I'm always the other way around.

LG: Hermenaut was mostly a print publication, but then you started Hermenaut.com too, before most other little magazines had websites. What was the thought behind having an online presence?

JG: From 1994 through 1996 I worked at Utne Reader, an independent magazine in Minneapolis. The world wide web was still brand-new. We had a forward looking webmaster at the magazine who asked me, “Hey, did you know that you can have conferences online?” I thought, “That could be fucking amazing — to be able to share ideas with people who aren’t in the same space.” Of course, we all know now that online community is extremely tricky and fragile, and trolls have ruined everything — but in those days, if you moderated the conversation thoughtfully, online community still seemed very doable.

Because I’d taken an interest in online community, and because of my background in self-publishing, I was then hired as co-producer of Tripod.com, part of the first wave of user-generated content companies. I spent two years there learning more about the upsides and downsides of providing online spaces for discussion and debate. To answer your question about why we started Hermenaut.com, it’s because we wanted to host online conversations about ideas, and we wanted to publish more frequently and more easily and cheaply than we could do through the print medium, and we we also wanted to publicize our new issues, and parties we threw, and other things we were doing. To this day, I believe that the best use of the web is to support a real-life, physical-world endeavor or project.

LG: What were you reading at the time?

JG: I was really into Philip K. Dick, T.W. Adorno, Simone Weil, all these ‘outsider intellectuals' who I’d end up writing about in a regular Hermenaut feature called ‘Hermenaut of the Month.’ That was an intentionally silly title, inspired by Baskin-Robbins's Flavor of the Month. In fact, we didn’t publish the zine every month.

I wanted the zine to be pop culture-y and lowbrow at first glance. It was subtitled the “digest of heady philosophy for teens,” and its first covers were supposed to look like a teen fan magazine. So we had Luke Perry and other Beverly Hills 90210 stars on the cover. On the inside, there was a lot of midcentury sci-fi imagery — because pulp sci-fi magazines were another great inspiration to me. The message of the medium was this: There must be a way to bring the highbrow, edgy, spiky, difficult ideas and theory and philosophy into the world of the lowbrow, which is also edgy and spiky and strange, without having to rub the edges of either one of them off. To this day, I don’t think anyone has done this sort of thing better than Hermenaut.

PS — I’ll loop back with Josh in a few months to reflect on the project and for more about Hermenaut and 90s zine culture. Until the next!

~ lucas 

In parallel, the 20th century saw the explosion of the ‘zine,’ amateur (and often staple-bound), enthusiast publications that celebrated and canonized subcultures otherwise lacking platforms to reach a public. In an article for Punk & Post-Punk, digital information academic Kirsty Fife writes: “as evidence of networks, cultures, lingusitics and experiences of marginalized individuals and communities, zines often exist as the only representation of ephemeral and otherwise undocumented spaces;” they were the way scenes faced a public and welcomed in newcomers. For those excluded from traditional outlets, zines serve as critical forums for collaboration and experimentation, publishing works unfathomable anywhere else.

By the 1990s, a wave of “little magazines” followed that cited both as sources of influence. They paired the aesthetics (and, often, staff) of 80s punk fanzines with high minded goals of public intellectualism, pushing on the dense prose of their predecessors to bring big ideas into the mainstream. “Neither postpunk ‘zine nor scholarly journal, Hermenaut is, in fact, a bit of both. It reads like a cultural studies seminar being crashed by well-read bohemians who are resolutely unimpressed by mere academic protocol,” a profile in Lingua Franca reads. Hermenaut, alongside publications like n+1, the Baffler, and the Believer, continued this spirit. A 2005 A.O. Scott feature captures the extent of their ambition: “ringing, programmatic insistence on progress,” “defiant optimism,” and a “generational struggle against laziness and cynicism, to raise once again the banners of creative enthusiasm and intellectual engagement.”

Publications with similar ambitions launch (and die) nearly every year, some entirely beyond printed pages or longform writing. “Webzines” and a youth culture primarily disseminated through social media has flourished in the 2000s and 2010s. Some young internet users, acting through meme accounts and post comments, invoke the spirit of the New York Intellectuals. “At a time when the rest of social media had gathered into ideologically quarantined filter bubbles, Politigrammers were intentionally following their political opponents. They loved to argue,” online political subculture researcher Josh Citarella writes in Politigram & the Post-left. They meme about niche political ideologies (”anarcho-primitivism,” “cybernihilism”), critical theory, and current events. Who is to say this is not publishing or ‘media as politics’?

It is this history—of how people and publications (broadly construed) shape public discourse and culture—that is my central curiosity. Such a question necessarily raises many more: What does it mean to be embedded in subculture, and how do social dynamics shape (or produce) creative works? How are aesthetic movements and scenes canonized, how do they reach beyond their niche, and who decides who to celebrate or exclude? What is the past, present and future of the ‘zine,’ in all formulations? I’ve long wanted to learn more; with ZINE MUNCH, I’m (irregularly) publishing interviews with the editors, writers, artists, scholars, and zealots central to the development and study of the ‘zine,’ broadly construed, as a form and medium, to do so. ZINE MUNCH is a zine about zines, a publication about publications. I couldn’t be more excited.

PS—it’s pronounced “zeen!”

~ lucas

Acknowledgements: This text was animated by conversations about publishing and public writing with my friends, (namely Kenney Nguyen, Jasmine Sun, Rachel Carlson, Eleanor Avril, Amelia Wyckoff, and Anabelle Johnston) and mentors (namely Josh Glenn, Heather Cole, and Lawrence Stanley, including pieces I read in his course course “The Public Intellectual,” particularly by Mark Greif, Noah Berlatsky, and Gideon Strauss).