emsemioverse

Continuing my griping for the morning, I'd like to complain about "zinefests". It's just... wild how commercial zines have become. I can't believe people drive to other cities to sell their zines. Like, it reminds me of political radicals who use international air travel…

I would like to point out that a lot of the acting like nobody in the scene in the last few years has had any critique of post-COVID zinefests is untrue. I and others have raised critiques about masklessness, about commercialization, about how much the format replicates festivals and conventions more than it does the distribution of radical texts.

And yet, those critiques don't really land; they get treated as attacks on people's happiness, rather than attempts to protect the very people zines claim to be for. Those feelings feel more real than you and your ideas, because they are supported by the world around me in ways that your ideas aren't. I know that's a critical part of what you're saying is why I need to interrogate these feelings, but I just feel good about this, and life is too hard and bad for me to risk destabilizing anything I can presently identify as good.

It should be within the realm of friendly discourse to entertain the idea that shutting down a zinefest for not requiring masks might be accomplished better for the goals the zinefest states it is for, than the zinefest can.

I'm not even saying like, let's shut down the zinefests. I'm just saying, I think a prerequisite on polite unity, uncritically supporting anyone doing anything they think is good, because that's better than acting without a care for good, has kind of precluded us from having the kinds of conversations that might help us see what effects we're actually having on the world and people around us.

(Also, the whole, "trying to do good is worth everything," is very much a moral value handed down from Christianity and lots of other ways of being don't center intentionality in the same way. Mandating this as the basic foundation of American leftist mutualism, which has quietly become the case, keeps us centered around liberal values in ways that educated liberals should be better about understanding and accepting.)

If I do bring up "why not shut down the zinefest," every time, I get told, "Well, there's like, Republican events going on just down the block, why not shut them down instead?"

To which I wonder... yeah, why are you holding a zinefest at the same time the Republicans are holding a fundraiser? And with that being the case, is it really that hard to see the similarities between your two events?

And I also wonder... what do these folk think propaganda is for? Like, who do you think is more likely to be able to understand, "We are shutting this event down out of respect for the disabled, etc., and to move us toward spaces where greater mutualism is possible?"

Because, to me, that sounds like something I would hope that a group hoping to attend a zinefest might listen to. Especially if it came with a packet of zines that helped explain the point.

And suddenly, we have a direction for an entirely different model of zinefest, one that looks to inherit a lot more from distroism than business conventions!

A whole new directionality of work, infrastructure to build, things that would help highlight the flaws - and strengths! - of the convention model.

But, because it comes from a place of criticizing whether folk with good intentions could realize those better, rather than criticizing people for having what comes off as bad intentions, the whole line of thought is usually dismissed before it can get off the ground... under the assumption that disrupting unity is a "bad intention..."

...thus putting the person trying to get good intention to lead to good results in the same boat - from the perspective of the American leftist - as anyone else with bad intentions.

And so the whole thing becomes much more about how much money can you throw at what is socially affirmed as well-intentioned, than how much good can you point back at having done, or how much good you can point forward to having created space for.

And that's... simply nothing to do with leftism, radicalism, mutualism, decolonization, or any of these other words that are forming the backbone of the new American moralizing jargon.

It's just viscerally weird seeing folk who claim to understand what it means that America might be in a militarized total civil war within a decade, not be able to deal with receiving indirect criticism about whether or not profiting off the hand-delivery of industrially-produced texts is really an appropriate way to prepare themselves and others for this contingency.

Also, I don't have a clean segue but from that idea I want to point out that I see one of the big reasons why this approach to commercial, industrial mutualism is so emotionally powerful to its participants: it defers the crises that would otherwise spark such militant courses.

That is, as long as we're a country where we have zinefests, we aren't a country in civil war. Thus, preventing civil war can be done by having zinefests.

This is, of course, really shoddy logic that treats the world like some static thing that they can manipulate, not a vast network of actors all operating on the same network, constantly changing its shape.

But it is the logic, and it's very powerful: Every indulgence of today's normal is an investment against tomorrow's collapse.

But the exact opposite is true, and nearly every piece of theory involved in these concepts says so.

I got unfollowed by 3 people doing zinefests with no explanation of why I might be wrong about what I'm saying about an inability to engage with criticism except by running away, which kind of proves my point...