If you live in Portland, chances are good that you own a bicycle. And even more amazing, chances are that you ride it. As a Portlander for the foreseeable future, one of the top things on my to-do list was to buy a new-to-me bike. I picked up a pretty janky complete bike at the recent Portland Bicycle Swap Meet for $150, and I’ve got a budget of about $150 to get it in sweetly working order. Now, I could just take that $150, slap it in the hand of one of our many capable local bike mechanics, and get a light tuneup. Or I could replace my awful cottered cranks, repaint the bike, get new wheels & tires, and learn a ton about mechanical gear systems, bearings, materials, and save myself thousands of dollars in the long run. What is an engineer to do?!
My first purchase, for a measly $12, was to grab a copy of Chainbreaker, a book/collection of zines of the same name from the always excellent Microcosm Publishing. Having been away from Portland for so long, I forgot the joy of holding a piece of independent publishing in your hands, attempting to decipher handwritten typewriter corrections, and make out diagrams that have been xerox’d a dozen times too many. And it really got me thinking - what is so independent, progressive, anarchist, and sustainable about zines? Is it the fact that anyone can cut out pictures, mangle together type, and head over to Kinkos? Or is it the content, and that it is the voice of people mostly ignored by corporate society… and how will future technologies change this?
It’s clear that print publishing is dying, and it deserves to. The new technologies arriving on the scene make a newspaper look as clumsy as a rack of scrolls. And, of particular importance, why are we still cutting down trees and shipping them around the world, when the electron instantly transmits any kind of information imaginable. Suddenly, punk zines are unsustainable.
Of course, the environmental argument is not a particularly solid one. For all the talk about green technologies, Apple is still struggling with it’s shareholders to implement any kind of real changes to their sustainability policies. And the ecosystem surrounding electronic components is widely known as being polluting and unsustainable. But maybe the primitivists should take advantage, or at least notice of what is happening. Corporate publishers are reeling, and companies like Apple have lowered the bar for independent presses to compete with the big boys. So who is going to the be the first publisher to have their works in multi-format web apps, pdfs, and eBooks, for 99c or free, and reach millions of people that a 1000-copied zine never could. And which designers are going to be the first to experiment with beautiful zine style layout in digital form?
In Chainbreaker, the authors talk often about how the bicycle is a revolutionary device, and I believe it’s true. The low cost and enhanced mobility are, dollar for dollar, the best way for many to improve their lives, locally and globally. I believe that the computer, the tablet, the netbook, whatever, ALSO have the power to be revolutionary, although we aren’t quite there yet. Unfortunately, the paradigm of the computer has been modeled around a television rather than a book, but somehow, we’ve managed to bring it back around. In my lifetime, I’ve been privileged to see an invention of importance on par with the printing press come into existence, and even more so I’ve gotten to be a part of it. And the most beautiful part is that anyone who wants to be involved can join in.
