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)

Big shoutout to the good folks at @igd_news for sharing the full text of my essay “Stitching Together Other Worlds” and a downloadable zine version on their website, which is filled with daily nourishment in the form of anarchistic news, ideas, and alternatives. Follow and support IGD; contribute to it, too, whether your own writings and report backs and/or financially.

#MakeMediaMakeTrouble
#MakeMediaSharePossibilties

#ConstellationsOfCare
#TryAnarchismForLife

https://itsgoingdown.org/stitching-together-other-worlds/

Writing is a funny thing.

Sometimes you look back at something you wrote and cringe. “I would never say that now.” Alas, one’s past words, when published, feel set in stone, denying the dynamism that we as humans tend to exhibit over the course of years and experiences, so rather than seeing it as good growth, you may feel embarrassed.

At other times, perhaps far less often, you happen to glance backward at an older piece of your prose and feel, “Damn, that’s even more relevant and compelling now. I’d write it all over again.”

That can elicit a different feeling from embarrassment: bittersweetness. For as anarchist authors, writers, scribes, and storytellers, we don’t want a lot of the pain of this world to continue to “hold up well” over time. We want to see liberatory social transformation, and use our pens as one weapon in the fight for it, and thus have our written musings about some contemporary horror feel like ancient history.

Still, sometimes the grief of this social order takes many years to end, after much resistance and many more loses, and it’s “good” when our words can aid, even a little, in carrying that burden collectively so we don’t feel so alone. Or can hold space for feeling and processing. Or can make visible what systemic violence wants to continue to hide, precisely so we can mourn and organize against those murderous forces.

On May 26, 2023, I wrote one of my little picture-posts here on IG: “How’s your COVID grief?”

On September 11, 2024, @kit__bla reminded me of this short exposition, and in re-reading it, I’d still ask the same thing.

So big thanks to @kit__bla for bringing my words further afield by turning them into a mini zine, riso printing a batch, and taking them to the beautiful @zagreb_anarchist_bookfair (I’m there in spirit!).

Hopefully this mini zine can be a prompt, filled with rebel love and abundant empathy, for you to ask your friends, coworkers, neighbors, and others, “How’s your COVID grief?,” and as a portal opening up our hearts to tangible practices of communal care.

If you’d like the PDF of this zine to then print and freely gift to others, email me at cbmilstein [at] yahoo.

#MaskUp
#MakeMediaMakeTrouble

Following today’s awesome (aka accessible, helpful, and anarchist) Boston Anarchist Bookfair workshop on the Fediverse for anarcha-newbies here like me, I wanted to send heaps of thanks and love to the @fedizine and others folks who shared their passion for Mastodon as anarchist infrastructure and social fabric.

I learned a lot. But more than that, I marveled yet again that “we have everything we need,” including each other, to build our own worlds. And ones, as the workshop folks underscored, grounded in our own anarchistic ethics and practices.

#CareNotCapitalism
#FederationNotFascism
#MakeMediaMakeTrouble
#SolidarityNotStates

(photo: one of numerous circle A hearts seen in October 2022 spray painted across concrete barriers put up this summer by cops (or cop allies) to block an entry to @stopcopcity aka #DefendAtlantaForest and mysteriously moved the same night so as to free up the entry again)

“Old news,” because this issue of the dope DOPE newspaper published by the equally dope @dogsectionpress came put over a month ago, but this rad, gorgeous periodical (whose main purpose in life is to support folks without homes) never gets old! And in this issue, besides incredible art—including a poster—I happily have an excerpt from my forthcoming book #TryAnarchismForLife (@tangledwild), and am joined on the pages by amazing friends/folks like @nobonzo, @PeterGelderloos, @surmise_cc, and many more!

You can read it for free via dogsection.org, where you’ll find 19 issues of DOPE, many books that make you want to #AlwaysCarryABook, and anarchist merch.

Alt text: red and black poster on the cover of DOPE magazine that reads “Already against the next war.”

#MakeMediaMakeTrouble