Wednesday Investigations 2.0 [003]: As close to a gift guide as I may ever write

On the end of Web 2.0, and some 2022 releases from Nonmachinable

It’s been interesting to see some members of the pundit class arguing that the social media era—the fullest manifestation of what we used to call “Web 2.0”—may be coming to an end. To me, this argument feels premature: Twitter seems to have dodged the major post-layoff outages that many predicted, and while it feels, some days, like everyone is jumping ship, the overall numbers of monthly active users don’t reflect that, at least not yet. Meanwhile, Facebook’s own monthly user numbers don’t exactly look healthy—they look like they’re plateauing—but I don’t see evidence that they have declined.

Nevertheless, it has been an interesting thought experiment to consider what might come next. Some are proposing that the trajectory of the Web is going to run from “read” to “write” to “own”—in other words, if “Web 1.0” was about “reading” things, on static webpages, and “Web 2.0” was about “writing” things, or otherwise uploading user-generated content to dynamic webpages (beginning with blogs), then the emerging “Web 3.0” will be about “owning” things. This conceptualization draws a tidy categorical loop around a lot of murky, complicated, somewhat disreputable-seeming things—blockchain protocols, decentralized finance, cryptocurrencies, token-based economies, NFTs, hexagonal profile badges, “play to earn” videogames, the idea that you could buy Ralph Laurent clothes for your Roblox avatar, etc. etc. Read, write, own: as a shorthand, sure, it works. However, as a vision of the future, it isn’t exactly enticing. I love reading, and I love writing, but I’m not as keen on owning, and a vision of the future based on increasingly byzantine systems of financial speculation feels grim to me.

This is, admittedly, an odd way to begin a newsletter that purports to be a gift guide. But bear with me.

I turned 50 on Black Friday. Fifty is an… interesting age. Half a century! I’ve always prided myself on being future-minded, a person who tries to peek around the corner and see what is coming next. But 50 may be a good age to also do the work of looking back, to see what aspects of the past you might want to endeavor to carry forward. There’s a part of me that wants less grasping for novelty, and more ongoing stewardship; this summer, I phrased this as a call for less entrepreneurship, more maintenance. I am indebted to Mierle Laderman Ukeles for inspiring this line of thinking: in her “Manifesto for Maintenance Art,” written all the way back in 1969, she calls for artists to “preserve the new; sustain the change; protect progress; defend and prolong the advance; renew the excitement; repeat the flight.”

When I think of what I’d like to do as a practice of ongoing stewardship—the change I’d like to sustain, the advance I’d like to prolong—I think of independent print culture, or zine culture. Talking with people, this past month, about what a post-social media future might look like—just entertaining the idea as a thought experiment—I remarked that if my time in zine culture circa 1990-2000 taught me anything, it was how to help nurture a distributed network, how to facilitate the exchange of creative work, information, and ideas, without the help of Internet-dependent social media. If the capacity to write to the web disappeared tomorrow, ethered by someone’s disruptive whim, I claimed, I could always use the older and sturdier postal network to keep my little corner of some interesting network alive.

A bit of a cavalier remark, perhaps, but it has one foot in reality. As the taste of the social media era has begun to sour in my mouth this year, I’ve been increasingly seeing signs of energy, health, and vitality in zine culture. And, as some of you may know, in March of this year, my collaborator allison anne and I began Nonmachinable, a distributor of “optically interesting” zines and artists’ publications. The name, you will notice, contains within it a stance of refusal; this is no accident.

In any case! We’re having a sale! It began on my birthday—our checkout code is BIRTHDAY—and it’ll end at the end of the day Wednesday. So if you’re reading this newsletter on the day it dropped, the code should still be valid.

We have over 100 different publications there, and we’re happy to mail any of them to you. I’d love to talk your ear off about all of them, but spatial constraints demand that I limit myself to just a few. So here are three of which I am especially proud.

▰ ▰ ▰ ▰

First up is ADDITIONS, which… isn’t a zine, but is rather a deck of cards that are designed for creative reuse. Taking inspiration from deck-based artist’s tools like the Oblique Strategies and curated collections of collage materials such as Mary Lamb’s terrific monthly zine Common Source, ADDITIONS presents the user with 96 formally elegant, grid-based collages made by allison and myself:

The imagery from the cards is derived entirely from the public domain, and while the cards are (in my opinion) beautiful enough to be appreciated as individual works of art, our intention is for people to cut them up, tear them apart, glue them together, remix them in a hundred different ways.

We initially released these about a year ago, and have been pleased to see the response from artists around the globe. This summer, we released EDITIONS, an anthology zine of work made from the cards, which contains work made by 22 artists from three different continents.

The full 96-card deck is available in a deluxe boxed edition, and we also offer a 48-card “starter deck,” or a $5 8-pack. Cheaper and more interesting than most stocking stuffers (plus 20% off right now)!

▰ ▰ ▰ ▰

In June of 2022 we published our first chapbook, Thirty Cent Stitches from Gretchen Korsmo. Gretchen is an an intermedia artist, musician, and architect based in Littlefield, Texas. She first came on my radar because she does the design, layout, and much of the cover art for the terrific label Full Spectrum Records, which is worth checking out. Here’s her art for one of my favorite Full Spectrum releases, Maya Weeks’ Tethers:

(To give Tethers its proper due would really require a whole separate installment of this newsletter: for now, suffice it to say it is a very short and very potent album made by a marine geographer, consisting primarily of recordings made at two locations on the California coast paired with snippets of voice memos reflecting gnomically on capitalism and disaster. If that sounds like it might be your thing, I promise it will be worth your sixteen minutes!)

Regardless. We reached out to Gretchen to see if she had a zine we could stock in the Nonmachinable shop; she didn’t. Talks ensued, and in the end Gretchen made us sixteen works, from delicate paper and thread: “an exercise in iterative, intuitive artmaking.”

It’s gorgeous:

We printed the works in a hand-numbered edition of 70: full color on 40 lb matte paper, and bound with a paper obi. ($10, here, 20% with code BIRTHDAY.) A few little luxe touches, yes, though the zine retains a handmade look-and-feel: the intention, in Gretchen’s words, is for the work “to be part of the everyday; easily accessible and embedded into routine life.” Toward that end, here’s a shot of me in my apartment, preparing to put them together:

▰ ▰ ▰ ▰

The other fun project we took on was working with the digital and video artist Sarah GHP, who creates glitchy process-based visual work of which I had been a longtime admirer. When allison and I approached her about doing a zine with us, she also directed us to her writing, in particular her short polemic “Seven Points for a Computer-Critical Computer Art;” a critique of computing’s overreach. She posited that the critical writing might form an interesting accompaniment to the visual work, and vice versa—that the document could be both an “art-rebuke” to tech-industry novelty while also serving as a vivid realization of the work that can result when we are “purposeful about what we build on.” Suffice it to say, we agreed:

Part of what was fun about putting this one together is that Sarah encouraged us to be inventive and even aggressive with the page layouts, so I got to have fun laying out the text carefully and classically and then demolishing it with my arsenal of glitchmaking techniques, essentially annotating Sarah’s points with their own ruined, ghostly duplicates. The end result, I feel, supplements her work nicely without being overly intrusive:

This… would make a perfect gift for the person in your life who loves tech yet also kinda hates it? $16, here, but remember it’s 20% off with code BIRTHDAY, at least till the end of the day!

▰ ▰ ▰ ▰

We’ve got more exciting things to come in 2023. Give us a follow at Instagram or Twitter if you’re so inclined.

---

Writing out that line about “people who love tech yet also kinda hate it” reminded me that there’s a whole generation of people who were deeply inspired by Elon Musk who are now having the complicated emotion of falling out of love with him. This is… not really my subject position, but if you want to hear it articulated with precision and verve, may I suggest giving a listen to Penelope Scott’s “Rät.”

---

—JPB, writing from Chicago, IL, in the week ending Wednesday, November 30