Babble, 2025-07-27, 09:27h – zinefests and cruel optimism

Continuing my griping for the morning, I'd like to complain about "zinefests". It's just... wild how commercial zines have become. I can't believe people drive to other cities to sell their zines. Like, it reminds me of political radicals who use international air travel to go on "solidarity trips," as though that isn't just leftist tourism. Zines come from an era of photocopiers and fax machines: physical transporting them between regions, not for free mass distribution, is a weird contemporary thing.

Like it just seems like a very unnecessary thing, given that we have telecommunications - not to mention the Internet - to have zine conventions, unless they're for a very specific group of people to socialize and economize together.

I mean, most of the folk I've known who make zines, don't have the means to travel, even for a weekend, to another state. Selling zines might make the money necessary, but jobs aren't always so stable.

That's not even mentioning that COVID is still syndemic, and no zinefest I'm aware of is requiring masks - only one, the one in Lincoln Nebraska, encourages masks, and a lot have food trucks or otherwise promise beverages and snacks, which will encourage not-masking.

I know several people who are attending or organizing these events, and it sucks because that just affirms my belief that these zinefests are part of a counterinsurrectionary commercialization of Hegelian discourse. For a lot of folk, a combination of zine sales, grants, and Patreon end up making up a significant portion, if not the whole of, a persons income.

And it's just... weird to see these folk write aesthetic fluffy page after page about how important care is, while simultaneously taking every precaution to avoid feeling pressure toward caring about how money might be affecting their praxes and beliefs.

I mean, if some ways of acting politically are economically incentivized, that's... worth taking seriously. Especially if you're going to judge the praxes of folk who don't have access to those same economic incentives, for not doing those praxes. Which, for the most part, they do: at least when it comes to me, a lot of these folk have judged me for not putting out my own zines and selling them, to improve my own economic standing.

Which completely erases any conditions that might make that impossible or undesirable.

That is to say, it sucks seeing people advertise that they will be engaging in colonialism in order to fund their climate breakdown adaptations, because it means the discourse, too, is largely colonial and doesn't really allow for any way of living but colonialism.

I guess I should be excited that people are realizing, "we're going to be facing some extreme shocks to supply and distribution chains even here in the United States in the next ten years or so," but, the way they are reacting is to throw parties and sell zines.

Which, again, not like THAT is inherently bad? But, at the point where zines and parties are being prioritized over water security and food security (in every sense of the phrase), I think we should be allowed to call it out as a self-centered privatized refusal of social responsibility.

And yet... it's portrayed as the exact opposite! Caring. Being responsible.

This is where it gets into cruel optimism.

It's hard to see how exactly, but this all works in a way, in that it makes some people feel better about the life they have been compelled to live... but it doesn't actually leave any room open for people who would want to live differently.

I know I've talked about this a lot, but I'm still processing it, and trying to find the right frame to break it out from being an attitude into a position — ideally, one suited for helping shift discourse toward some emphasis on actual survival, mutual survival, and wonder.

At least something that might help avert the worst of the affects of cruel optimism and COINTELPRO's relations to Gramsci's ideas.

But it feels like all anyone hears when I say this is, "I feel like I'm a good person for doing the exact things you're telling me I might be a bad person for. Those feelings feel more real than you and your ideas, because they are supported by the world around me in ways that your ideas aren't. I know that's a critical part of what you're saying is why I need to interrogate these feelings, but I just feel good about this, and life is too hard and bad for me to risk destabilizing anything I can presently identify as good."

It should be within the realm of friendly discourse to entertain the idea that shutting down a zinefest for not requiring masks might be accomplish better the goals the zinefest states it is for than the zinefest can.

I'm not even saying like, lets shut down the zinefests. I'm just saying, I think a prerequisite on polite unity, uncritically supporting anyone doing anything they think is good, because that's better than acting without a care for good, has kind of precluded us from having the kinds of conversations that might help us see what effects we're actually having on the world and people around us.

(Also, the whole, "trying to do good is worth everything," is very much a moral value handed down from Christianity and lots of other ways of being don't center intentionality in the same way. Mandating this as the basic foundation of American leftist mutualism, which has quietly become the case, keeps us centered around liberal values in ways that educated liberals should be better about understanding and accepting.)

If I do bring up "why not shut down the zinefest," every time, I get told, "Well, there's like, Republican events going on just down the block, why not shut them down instead?"

To which I wonder... yeah, why are you holding a zinefest at the same time the Republicans are holding a fundraiser? And with that being the case, is it really that hard to see the similarities between your two events?

And I also wonder... what do these folk think propaganda is for? Like, who do you think is more likely to be able to understand, "We are shutting this event down out of respect for the disabled, etc., and to move us toward spaces where greater mutualism is possible?"

Because, to me, that sounds like something I would hope that a group hoping to attend a zinefest might listen to. Especially if it came with a packet of zines that helped explain the point.

And suddenly, we have a direction for an entirely different model of zinefest, one that looks to inherit a lot more from distroism than business conventions!

A whole new directionality of work, infrastructure to build, things that would help highlight the flaws - and strengths! - of the convention model.

But, because it comes from a place of criticizing whether folk with good intentions could realize those better, rather than criticizing people for having what comes off as bad intentions, the whole line of thought is usually dismissed before it can get off the ground... under the assumption that disrupting unity is a "bad intention..."

...thus putting the person trying to get good intention to lead to good results in the same boat - from the perspective of the American leftist - as anyone else with bad intentions.

And so the whole thing becomes much more about how much money can you throw at what is socially affirmed as well-intentioned, than how much good can you point back at having done, or how much good you can point forward to having created space for.

And that's... simply nothing to do with leftism, radicalism, mutualism, decolonization, or any of these other words that are forming the backbone of the new American moralizing jargon.

It's just viscerally weird seeing folk who claim to understand what it means that America might be in a militarized total civil war within a decade, not be able to deal with receiving indirect criticism about whether or not profiting off the hand-delivery of industrially-produced texts is really an appropriate way to prepare themselves and others for this contingency.

Also, I don't have a clean segue but from that idea I want to point out that I see one of the big reasons why this approach to commercial, industrial mutualism is so emotionally powerful to its participants: it defers the crises that would otherwise spark such militant courses.

That is, as long as we're a country where we have zinefests, we aren't a country in civil war. Thus, preventing civil war can be done by having zinefests.

This is, of course, really shoddy logic that treats the world like some static thing that they can manipulate, not a vast network of actors all operating on the same network, constantly changing its shape.

But it is the logic, and it's very powerful: Every indulgence of today's normal is an investment against tomorrow's collapse.

But the exact opposite is true, and nearly every piece of theory involved in these concepts says so.