Zines as Social Media

Language matters; it shifts our perceptions and practices. For instance, in the early days of the pandemic, the powers-that-be admonished us to social distance,” causing many of us to feel profoundly alone. Instead, I and others rigorously used the phrase “physical distance,” because we desperately needed sociality in various forms such as mutual aid to survive.

So why have we let ourselves, myself included, cede terrain on the term “social media”? Online platforms, while they can lead to social connections, by and large are “asocial” or “antisocial media,” or simply, “online media”—often also leaving us feeling profoundly alone and/or bad/worse at actual social relations and social fabrics.

Quite to the contrary, zines are social media—for starters because they exist in three-dimensional life.

They are social too, though, because we anticipate them leading to face-to-face social interactions, whether between zine maker and zine appreciator, or zine distro’er and zine receiver, or in social spaces like info shops, rad bookstores, anarchist bookfairs, and reading circle, or on the streets during a mutual aid festival, solidarity apothecary setup, or uprising. And those interweavings are as meaningful as the zines themselves—often separably so. I vividly recall the first anarchist who gave me a zine and then invited me to a study group, cementing my anarchist politics and many friendships.

Or take how I met and became friends with @stormbringer_press, who I’ve since shared so many Jewish anarchist rebellious ritual and other spaces with via @ratzonpgh. She sent a zine to @firestormcoop almost two years ago; my friend there asked if I knew her; I didn’t, so I reached out, and soon after, met in real life—and have contributed to each other’s social media: zines!

So #MakeMediaMakeFriends and … #MakeMediaMakeTrouble, and let’s take back embodied media that’s social, in the flesh-and-blood sense, not remote-and-screen sense, all the while aimed at transforming our social relations for the better.

https://archive.org/details/covid-grief-mini-zine_202509

(photo: my words, “How’s Your COVID Grief?,” made into mini-zine by @kit__bla, who also took this photo)