Zine Publishers & Ideal Economic Strategies for the Next Capitalist Century

The zine publishing movement is one of the bona fide bust-out cultural movements of the 1990s. Though American zines trace their roots back to mimeographed sci-fi publications of the 1940s, the current mix of personal, non-traditional sex, fringe political, punk music, Jesus freak religious, sicko comix, conspiracy theorist, and work-is-hell zines has grown to huge proportions. And huge proportion in 1990s America of course means inevitable co-optation by corporate America. Many trees have been chopped down in the service of the Great Sellout Debate. The arguments usually go like this:

On the zine side:

Zine publishers are the last of the True Believers in a world full of fakes and sell-outs. They toil over their little zines, keeping it real and not bowing down before The Man. They design their publications in a graphic attempt to deflect the attention of mass media and frat-boy coolies looking for street cred. The content is often obscure and disturbing for the same cocoonish reasons. When the media calls to research their Lifestyle-section trend pieces they either lie outright or hang up the phone. They don't accept advertising from sell-out record companies or corporate b.s. artists. Happiness is achieved by staying small, allowing only the select few cool people into their thumb-nosing club.

On the sell-out side:

Zine publishers labor in lonely obscurity for years. When the dominant culture arrives in the form of advertising execs, New York Times interviewers, and book company reps, they should jump at the chance to do what they want and get paid for it. The prevailing rationale for this group is that if they can have some effect on the dominant culture by making them more aware of the joys of thrift store shopping or liberal politics or whatever their own particular interest happens to be, then they will be proud to "work from the inside" to boldly change The System.

A good handle on the Great Sellout Debate can be had by reading back issues of Factsheet 5, the zine review magazine out of San Francisco that serves as the guidebook of the zine movement.

But the Great Sellout Debate, like most arguments producing more heat than light, focuses on a wrong-headed dynamic-the movement of people from the zine underground to the dominant culture and the co-optation of the zine underground by the dominant culture. The debate presupposes that there are static worlds of the real and the fake-the underground contains zines called "Murder Is Fun" and the dominant culture beams out William Burroughs posing in NIKE ads.

But these arguments are based on a Founding Fallacy that the two worlds are separated to begin with. Real life is not so tidy.

I say that zine publishers are the primary examples of a new category of capitalist, purveyors of a unique form of capitalist individualism that will thrive in the next century of American-style "free"-market democracy. This scenario is much more chaotic than the simple movement between Underground and Dominant cultures. The world economy is so all-inclusive that it embraces both good and evil. No one can do good, like clothe themselves and feed their children, w/o bowing down before the presence of evil. I mean no one- not factory workers @ cigarette plants and not zine publishers who smoke the ciggies that drive up health care costs for everyone. Anyone who pours ketchup out of a bottle and thinks they are untouchable is fooling themselves. Every single economic activity is a portion of the overall economy with potentially good and evil effects. And everything in late 90s America is an economic activity.

The fundamental fact to begin with is that everyone, from publishers of nipple-piercing zines to Mail Boxes Etc. franchisees, needs to eat food in order to live. Almost as important as food is a modicum of self-worth to impel oneself out of bed every day. So obtaining enough calories for oneself and one's family while performing economic activities that don't promote self-loathing is the state of grace that most people are looking for.

The truth is that zine publishers have independently developed, in some Darwinian unselfconsciousness, a unique set of traits that will be very useful for success in the economy of the next century. The next century will house a world in which the dominant culture will function much more like the zine world than the zine world will adapt to fit the dominant culture. A world in which zines aren't just considered a minor-league development zone for the dominant culture. A world in which the dominant culture is redefined to include a zillion customized worlds.

Zine publishers possess a discreet set of characteristics that make them model capitalists for the next century: rejection of dominant media, truly independent ownership, appropriation of existing content, small-cell distribution of highly specialized products, and a de-emphasis on privacy and decorum.

Managing the 15-minute media beast

The true believers of zine publishing refuse to cooperate with the dominant media. Generally, zine publisher's main imperative is to provide content missing from the dominant media. Their mission is in direct opposition to the crap machine of daily media. And they don't usually look kindly at the media's attempt to contact them and shine light on their scene. Of course this endlessly perplexes the reporters and TV crews who come knocking to bag a story. They're used to the populace knocking down babies and grandmothers just to get a chance to wave at the red light on the top of a camera.

But zine publishers are on to something that I am convinced will be a commonly accepted notion in the next century: The media cycle does nothing but build and destroy. That which it builds it destroys. If one critic raves about you, another will howl at you. If you end up in the news too long, they'll devise survey questions that are designed to produce unfavorable results, like "Are you tired of hearing about the Nanny Trial?" after 167 straight hours of Nanny Trial coverage.

When Andy Warhol made his statement about 15 minutes of fame, he presented it almost as a victimless crime, with no moral component whatsoever. But if you examine the 15 minutes cliché you see how quaint and misguided it is.

The media beast swoops up new subjects every 15 minutes, chews them up, and digests them. The beast strips the goodness from each individual and turns it into the nutrients in the form of ratings and commercial time. Then the beast passes a stool every quarter hour and searches for more.

James Cameron, director of Titanic, stood up in front of the TV world at the Oscars and proclaimed that he was in fact "King of the World". More like flavor of the month. His 15 minutes may have lasted longer than most, but eventually a towering prince like "Lost In Space" comes along to whop off the head of the king. Working outside of the mainstream promotion/ destruction system, the zine publisher is not slimed by this bilious system.

De-consolidation and individual ownership

Having your own business is one of the great American orgasms, right along with home ownership. Of course most "home owners" actually own a mortgage, not a home. A mortgage is just the right to pay a bank basically double what your house is worth over the course of 30 years or so. That's the kind of mumble-speak that passes itself off every day as the Holy Grail of American life.

Owning a business is often the same thing. Pick up a magazine like Franchising Today. You'll see straight-faced exultations to "work for yourself" by paying a $15-80,0000 up-front fee for the right to open up a business that sells burgers made with the same recipe that tens of thousands of other people "working for themselves" are making all over the world. Sure. Work for yourself, but wipe your mouth with my napkins, wash your floor with my mops, put my name on the sign out in front, and oh, by the way, cough up 9% of gross sales every month or we'll cancel your ass.

Zine publishers don't have to pay royalties to anyone. They publish to please themselves. They write about what interests them, reprint what tickles them, and never have to answer to the front office. They are the front office. They can print as often or as infrequently as they like, and they don't have to go into deficit spending to get their zine printed. They may have layout conventions-layered texts and photos, saddle-stitching, &etc., but those are driven more by an inward aesthetic and production limitations than any sense of conformity. And unlike grossly misnamed "independent labels" of the music industry that are wholly-owned subsidiaries of multinational corporations, zine publishers usually control all aspects of the manufacture & distribution processes.

Despite, or maybe because of, the global trend toward corporate consolidation, an explosion of this type of individualistic capitalism seems inevitable. The Internet is a great leveler of the business climate. Big companies might be able to spend more money on a website, but any decent webmaster can get his or her hands on the exact same features like animation, sound, video, and so on. No matter how much money you throw at a website, as of now you can still only view one web page at a time. Any small-time operation that can compete.

Steal This Means of Production

Most of the capitalist world gets pretty uptight about private ownership of intellectual property. Companies like Walt Disney pay millions of dollars a year to lawyers who pump out "cease and desist" letters to mom and pop stores who put a picture of a mouse up in their windows.

But again, the Internet is piercing a hole in the old way of doing things. You can find fan-run websites devoted to pop TV shows like Seinfeld and Friends where people compose entire new episodes using the proprietary characters of the NBC series. Web-surfing is built for theft. Any time you see some content you like-whether it's a newspaper story or a chat room transcript-quicker than you can say "Apple-A/ Apple C/ Apple V", you've captured the content and placed on your hard drive. No payment, no problem.

The zine world had been working with looser standards of re-appropriation long before the advent of the three Ws. Casual flouting of copyright law is a badge off honor to zine publishers. The ethic amongst themselves is that you can reprint whatever you want, as long as you attribute the source, including address.

The Code of the Small

The incredible variety of zines is a perfect example of supermarket America. There is literally something for everyone. Nothing is revered more in a capitalist economy than choice. People demand a wide variety of toilet paper and breakfast cereal. There's fragrant and unscented. Nice colors and dye-free. Single rolls and Economy Packs. Sugary and wheat. Purple and heart-shaped.

It's the same thing with zines. You've got right-wing paramilitary tracts and anarchist cookbooks. Jewish culture zines and Armageddon warning leaflets. Racist zines and love zines. Zine publishers think nothing of bailing on their zine about Barbie dolls and starting a zine about travel to Asia. The ability to switch gears quickly is one of the central skills of the new economy.

Another valuable service in the economy of the next century is the ability to deliver customized goods and services quickly. Zine publishers have the goods on that count.

Privacy is Not a Virtue

Americans have a strange psychosis about privacy that is on its way out as far as I'm concerned. Bill Clinton had the various locations of his penis broadcast ad infinitum and no one cared. Cash machine computers, highway toll-collecting transponders, and traffic video cameras constantly track our location and make life easier. The American public seems to be perfectly willing to trade privacy for convenience.

The Perzine, or personal zine, is a chatty/ confessional type of zine whose only subject is the zine publisher. A great example is Pathetic Life, a zine started by a guy in California after his girlfriend dumped him because he was too fat and watched too much TV. Almost every zine starts with a personal note from the publisher which reveals a lot of personal details.

So, again, zine publishers are up ahead of the curve on the cultural/ capitalist continuum, primed to make a living with the traits they've developed on the economy's fringes. No more sell out. The world economy is sliding up next to them, individualists who can stay that way and still find enough to eat.

© 2003 Daniel X. O'Neil

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