111 lines
5.2 KiB
Plaintext
111 lines
5.2 KiB
Plaintext
---
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.title = "First Post: What's A Zine?",
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.date = @date("1990-01-01T00:00:00"),
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.author = "Sample Author",
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.layout = "post.shtml",
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.draft = false,
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---
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This is a sample first post for your blog.
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This post is defined in `content/blog/first-post/` and contains the following
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files:
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- `index.smd`
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- `fanzine.jpg`
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Another interesting thing about this post is that it uses the `layouts/post.shtml`
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template which adds at the bottom page navigation within the blog section.
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Enough about Zine, let's talk about zines.
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## Fanzines
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A zine (short for *fanzine*, from "fan" + "magazine") is a non-professional
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publication created by people that want to express themselves in paper form,
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usually in relation to a cultural phenomenon of some kind.
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[An example of zine from 1976.](<$image.asset("fanzine.jpg").alt("A photo of a black and white flyer. The main title reads 'A night of pure energy' and the rest of the page contains a mix of pictures of guitarists interleaved with other text snippets, some seemingly taken from a professional publication of some kind, and some handwritten to announce concert night dates, presumably for the musicians in the picture.")>)
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## Zines in the digital era
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In the digital age, some of the cultural impetus behind zines got redirected to
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personal blogs and similar digital, non-professional publications. The 90's and
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early 00's are famous for their whacky websites full of clip art, wordart text
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and "under construction" animated gifs.
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This initial organic exploration didn't last for too long as the rise of social
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media diverted a lot of self-expression energy towards walled gardens, a change
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that was also fueled by the much tighter and intense feedback loop that those
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platform enable.
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In the 90's the stongest dopamine hit you could get was adding a visit counter
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to your altavista website and watch it go up, slowly, mostly because of your own
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accesses. In modern times views are almost meaningless and interactions such as
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*likes*, *retweets* and *comments* provide much stronger positive feedback.
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An unfortunate side effect of this new cultural wave centered around social media
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is that not only you end up gifting your content to platform owners, but you also
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participate in a system where the *language* of the social media site shapes your
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thoughts and experience in specific, and often user-hostile, ways.
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Art, just like liquids, takes the shape of the container you put it in. A mobile
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game that lives off of in app purchases will never be truly great because of the
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tension between making the game entertaining enough to keep players engaged, and
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the need to make it boring enough so that they will want to buy upgrades to make
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the game more fun.
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Similarly, self-expression on Twitter is encouraged to take the shape of short,
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hyperbolic hot takes that forgo nuance in order to create catchy quips that can
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be used for hasty decision making.
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Likewise, [corpowave]($text.attrs('wave')) never goes out of style on LinkedIn.
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Spend enough time in there and you will become a character from Severance.
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## We're not in 1990 anymore
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Despite all the issues with social media, there is no point in thinking of the
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90's as a better time. It was not. And despite the winks at the past, Zine is
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not a tool for indulging in nostalgia.
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**The goal is to make art**: the act of inducing a change in others through
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our self-expression.
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You could argue that the 90's excelled at self-expression, but in doing so you
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would also have to accept that social media is infinitely more effective at
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inducing change in others (albeit at the expense of freedom of expression).
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Once you realize that, the path forward is clear:
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1. Own your content.
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2. Create new social systems that optimize for creating art over engagement.
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Owning your content means that you will be unaffected by enshittification of
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platforms that would otherwise keep your data hostage. It also is the single
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most effective thing you can do as an individual to take power away from
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platforms, all while protecting your own immediate interests.
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Creation of new social systems is a *slightly more hairy* problem than self
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hosting a static website, but it's something that can be done. Over the years
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we've had plenty of social outlets that have allowed people to socialize through
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their homemade games, music, drawings, fanfics, etc; and chances are that we
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have yet many more of these outlets ahead of us to create.
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Zine gives you a small puzzle piece to help you inch closer toward a better
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future, partially by providing you with a new iteration over tried and true
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patterns (e.g. by facilitating content creation by separating content from
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layouting concerns as much as possible), and also by being a bit experimental
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with the concept of a devlog, something that you wouldn't normally expect to
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find on a static website.
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Lastly, Zine makes sure your content (both blog and devlog, but also any
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other content format you might come up with yourself) is available via RSS
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syndication. RSS feeds are far from a winning technology in the fight against
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the ebb and *enshitty*flow of social media, but they are another small puzzle
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piece that costs nothing to maintain and that might turn out to be critical once
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enough other preconditions are met.
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With that in mind, **go make art with your words**.
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-- Loris
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