What's a zine?

RELease 1.0, June 23, 1995 by Jerry Michalski

The killer app

The companies looking for ways to conquer chaos ignore one abundant source of energy, judgment, intelligence and perspective: human beings. These companies seem to share the unspoken assumption that human labor is too expensive to devote to these tasks, and that these services can and will be performed by bots (short for software robots) of varying intelligence.

Whether one needs to navigate through information, entertainment or conversation spaces, making sense of it all and putting it together in a compelling way is difficult. There isn't enough artificial intelligence out there to do it well, consistently. There's plenty of the natural variety to go around and a need for new jobs.

People already help each other get around with the clunky tools they have at hand. They publish their hot lists on the Web and use e-mail messages to send each other pointers to useful or fun new things. They could use a far more powerful vehicle, as well as a way to get paid for doing so, when it's appropriate. The tools to build such a vehicle exist, but nobody's integrated them and defined the new entity yet.

Think of this vehicle as a hopped-up electronic zine. First, though, some background on traditional zines.

Zines, e-zines and perzines

Zines probably started in the science-fiction world as "fanzines." Now they cut across all topic areas and forms of expression, from poetry to prose and pop-up paper cutouts. Most zines are labors of passion, not profit. They exist because their authors can't help but create them -- over and over. That's a large part what makes them compelling and useful.

One reason zines don't make much money is that their attention/cost ratio is rotten. They rely on word-of-mouth marketing and paper distribution. Also, there are small but significant transaction costs to subscribers (write a check, lick a stamp) and to publishers (process the checks and deposit them; maintain the subscription list). When each check is $15 or $20, the labor adds up. Finally, of course, many zines are fringe publications. Regardless how magical a medium or advertising campaign one could create, they would still find only a few readers.

Many zines have gone to the Web, which offers them vastly larger audiences and a publishing environment that's less flexible in some ways (it's hard to transmit the coffee stains, wrinkled pages of thrice-recycled paper and bent staples over the Web) and more flexible in others (hacking the Web can be fun). Once a publisher has a PC, electronic publishing is significantly cheaper than the paper kind.

The principal compilation of zine activity is Factsheet Five (F5), a newsletter that catalogs thousands of paper and electronic zines and is run by Jerod Pore and Seth Friedman. F5 offers some editorial on each of the zines, but little editorial comparing them, so it can be time-consuming to locate things of interest. John Labovitz maintains a list of electronic zines (see Resources, page 23). He's co-publisher of a zine called Crash and on sabbatical from the Web-based Global Network Navigator (which O'Reilly & Associates recently sold to AOL). Labovitz also avoids editorial, though he quotes others' comments on various zines. His e-zine list points to Webbed zines titled Intrr Nrrrd, Ooze, biancaTroll productions, Justin's Links from the Underground, The Morpo Review, geekgirl and Depth Probe, among many others.