That Time I Got Yeeted From a Zine

Still Not Exactly Sure What Happened But Okay

I’m a controversial figure. That’s a known aspect of my character. As I’ve stated before in previous posts, my personality is “irreverent and incendiary.” I’m passionate, I’m dedicated, I have a lot of words, and I’m pretty damn good at getting my point across when I need to while also—usually inadvertently—causing as much fire and flood in my wake as possible. I’ve been known to not only ravage spaces that have become too restrictive based on in-group/out-group mentalities or those based on identity politicking (something I simply do not abide as it is largely performative and useless). It usually takes very little effort on my part to destabilize said spaces and that is largely the fault of those in charge of those spaces for having traded stability for literally anything else. In terms of zines, stability is traded for public visibility—and this is where they’re teetering and collapsing under their own expectations.

This didn’t really hit me until I’d laughingly posted the termination email that A Song of Brothers Zine sent me yesterday while sipping my morning coffee, still absolutely tickled to hell and back by the idea that they must have had a visual artist in charge of their Public Relations. No offense to visual artists but maybe stick to what you’re good at. Unsurprisingly, my friends got a heckin kick out of this terrible email and the manner in which the situation was handled. I’m not clear on the details since no one will actually talk to me (how professional!) but I can only assume it has something to do with The Liberator. Whatever happened, someone didn’t want to exist in the same space as I did. They didn’t want to simply politely ignore my presence and let me do my stuff while they did their stuff. And so…

YEET.

Feeling pretty okay about not having to commit to any amount of unpaid labor for someone else’s fancy little vanity project, I just decided to laugh about it…turns out some folks thought it was less funny than I did. The concept of giving actual real dollars to folks who can’t even write out an email that doesn’t make them look like closet white supremacists (or at least very inept communicators, as I can tell you right now that none of the moderators are at all even close to being white supremacists) was not exactly something folks wished to entertain. The optics of cutting off all contact and not at all even reaching out to me was bad, the text of the email and the vague, not-at-all-clarifying “explanation” on the Twitter account were worse. As the email very clearly indicated that there was no recourse for this, minds were made up very quickly: folks either were gonna stick with the zine or they were washing their hands of it—there was no in between.

So why did this situation create such a problem? Well…it comes down to visibility. This zine made the same mistake that every other zine makes when they set out to create a flashy, merch-filled, full-color art book that could not, in any length of the imagination, be actually classified as a “zine.” It traded stability for hype. The first red flag that any project has, I’ve decided, is an over-inflated sense of self-worth and an overly-complex network of moderation. If you’re running a zine like a company and not hiring lawyers or even making your contributors sign Non-Disclosure Agreements, then you shouldn’t have anywhere near 40+ contributors nor more than two mods. Total. Making a zine ultra visible with its own Twitter page, Google account, and highly-detailed discord pages with separate moderators for all your little things sounds so tempting for organizational-brained people. Branching out so many complicated pathways for your zine bureaucracy where all these different people have all these different tasks and there’s little to no oversight from one entity is, in practice, a fucking nightmare. Yeah, if you pull it off it looks glossy, trim, neat, and organized from the outside. If you fuck it up, its guts start spilling out.

A project that has too many moving parts and an unstable ideology is going to lose a few nuts and bolts. Lose too many and your project ends up a pile of illogical gears, springs, and rods without the ability to function. If you unveil your project and its structure isn’t stable, any kind of anomaly is going to cause it to start to disassemble. Sometimes it loses pieces and parts and you can still limp it over the expected goal. Sometimes you have it disintegrate in front of you. If your ideology supporting your group project has no room for the unfortunate realities of handling communication issues: you have no business running a group project. In fact, communication is probably the foremost issue that any project with more than one creator can have. Even communication between just two people is difficult and rife with complexity—your ideology and behavioral standards absolutely have to involve some type of mediation if your project isn’t taking a hands-off approach. What do I mean by the latter? Exactly what I said. My zine project I’m running with Krad as my Art Director (that’s fancy, right?) has 16-ish contributors and my expressed statement on disagreements is: “That’s a you problem. Work it out.” Fortunately, we don’t have those kinds of issues. If anyone hate anyone else, they’ve shut up about it, which is what I honestly expect out of most contributors.

What it all comes down to is that someone decided that their problem was the project’s problem, and the moderators ostensibly decided that it was totally okay for that person to put that burden on the zine. There were a lot of ways this could have been handled without all of this…whatever this is. I don’t take much personally when I’m approached as a human being—I could have just simply not spoken in the discord. I could have even submitted under a different name so that person didn’t have to have their name in a project alongside mine. I have no issues whatsoever in being anonymous or silent. In fact they could have even just asked me about whatever it was they were upset about (I have no recollection of whatever harassment was referenced) and worked something out, but they didn’t. They sent me a pretty final-sounding email and as it was pretty final-sounding, I decided to be irreverent. Because…that’s just who I am. It’s part of my charm. You send a poorly-worded email, I make fun of you for it. That’s a given.

Anyway, I don’t have any skin in the game here anymore, as my obligation to provide completely unpaid labor for an ex-mutual’s pet art book is now void. Would it have been a cool project? Maybe. I dunno anymore, and I’m sure as hell not gonna find out now.