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Hello, and welcome to my website. RANT is basically where I babble on about whatever I want - mostly punk rock, diy culture, anarcho-socialism, and general politics. There are no chats, no guestbooks, no comments sections - just RANTS.

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BT

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RANT #1

Zines Are Dead

Whenever I see some kid asking how to make a zine, I throw up in my mouth a little.

Not because they're asking for help. That's perfectly reasonable - putting together words and images, making sure that it stays in order when you put it together, all of that can be overwhelming to someone who's never made a zine before. No, I throw up in my mouth a little because the underlying assumption in most of these posts is that zines are supposed to be something specific.

And that something specific isn't diy, it isn't a freeform vomit-fest of words and images and whatever the fuck you want. No, the assumption is that zines are supposed to be ordered, pretty, printed out by some company in a nice little package and sent out to profit their creators.

Are zines dead? Dead as the punk distro rings? Dead as gig posters? The internet made these things easier when I first got on (this was in the early 2000s), but with capitalism's takeover of every single tiny space came the commodification of everything on it. If your zine isn't pretty, nobody's gonna buy it. If nobody's gonna buy it, what the fuck is the point of making it in the first place?

(Fun? Creativity? For the sake of creation? These aren't good enough excuses for content these days.)

More than that, the commodification of fucking everything doesn't give people the chance to learn, to make mistakes, to make shit art. Punk and diy was shit art - I'll admit that. It was made for a purpose, and that purpose was to be seen by a few people then thrown away. There was no fetishistic obsession with permanence, even though those temporary-by-design things stayed out in the world far longer than the few seconds it takes for your carefully crafted and curated thing to get bumped down the feed. You put in so much effort, but you're always yesterday's news. All hail your five milliseconds of fame!

So people say: how much does it cost? How much should I charge to make this worth it? It won't be worth it if I don't get something back - and a connection to other people isn't enough. And if I fuck up and make a typo, if my pictures are off-center, if this turns out less than absolutely camera-ready, buffed and shined to perfection - well, why bother? What's the point?

Zines are dead, and they won't live again until we reject commodification and capitalism in all its forms and make ugly, vital, living art.