Zines Make the World Go Round
Going Offline Starts Here
Everyone’s telling you to get off social media. It’s Substack’s hot new topic.
Delete Instagram Delete Twitter
Get offline, don’t give Zuckerberg and Musk money. Don’t give them data. If you don’t give them time they cant control you if you stop you can reclaim yourself if you stop you can fight them if you stop you can break their control over your life if you stop you can learn if you stop you can find community if you stop you can live
If you stop, you can lose a lot.
I follow 224 accounts on Instagram. 57 of them are people I know personally. About 110 of them are music and visual art accounts. These, I can live without. The last 50-odd are what I cannot let go.
The last 57 accounts are accounts from all over the two cities I split my time between. These are creative collectives, organizing groups and spaces, direct action groups, activists, and writers. These are accounts that have allowed me to stay informed on local organizing efforts, donate to mutual aid when most necessary, and work towards change of all types.
It’s not that I am not involved in these scenes in real life. I am. I am also in the Telegrams, the Signals, the GroupMes. But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t learn about a litany of initiatives and organizations from reposts and tags. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t find a slew of revolutionary writing from paragraphs and recommendations posted to Instagram stories.
When we go offline, we lose so much of this connection. We once had paper trails and distribution networks. We replaced those with personal websites and a decentralized internet. We replaced that with social media and centralized blogs. We replaced all of that with,,, Instagram and Twitter. The paper trails and decentralized internet does not exist anymore for us to step back into. Getting off social media doesn’t come with the guarantee of other networks of connection to have survived for this long.
We have to rebuild them.
From zine festivals, to zine making workshops, zines are but an all familiar tool in organizing and creative spaces. First introduced in the early 20th century, the short, simple, creative mini magazines have have been a radical tool to self publish everything from art to writing to collage to poetry. Cheap to reproduce and easy to share, they are an incredible tool for disseminating information. One group in particular realized their maximum potential.
In the 1990s, tired of the sexism in their local punk scene, a group of female musicians in Olympia, Washington organized meetings to talk about the issues that plagued their community. These meetings grew, the desire to discuss feminist ideas with it, and the first zine from this community was born, titled “riot grrrl”. This zine, along with the many that accompanied, became an almost indestructible way to distribute, discuss, share, and organize around feminist ideas. These systems were decentralized and uncensored; all it took to share it further was to lend a copy or make your own copies for your friends. It became an entire movement.
It’s not just zines that riot grrrl got right. As they transitioned into the era of the internet, they got communication networks, and organizing in swaths right.
One of my favorite websites is The Global Grrrl Zine Network. A time capsule from 2002, the website organizes resources, information, and interviews on zine creation, zine distribution, feminism, activism. My personal favorite section is the message board. The postings span from 2002 to 2006, containing announcements of lectures and calls for zine submissions and requests for help. This website, to me, has figured it out.
We have a lot of work to do. Before we call for each other to go offline, we need to initiate these networks and build websites that are not at the hands of oligarchs. It makes it easier to go offline; it makes our communities resilient.
Many thought that Substack was this space. I don’t think it is. Substack deeply wants the evil that Meta and Amazon and Google have. It’s just not big enough yet.
When you go offline, don’t leave before building ties to those in your community. Find the ways of contacting them that cannot be censored, that cannot be ripped from us, that cannot be molded to meet the desires of one CEO or another. Collect emails, and mailing addresses. Make zines with your calls to action, your writing, your events, your thoughts. Mass email and mass mail and mass forward and mass reprint what you create and receive.
Build this system one copy at a time.
Thank you for reading! I’ve been thinking about this for a long time and think it is more important now than it has ever been to start building these networks. Below, I’ve linked some zines related items that have inspired me on Substack recently, as well as some other resources.
’s guide on how to make your own diary zine ’s Collective Imprint’s call to make zines in general’s goal to make zines to memory keep’s gratitude zine