The fortunes of print media, in many ways, mirror those of the traditional British pub \u2013 sales are inexorably flagging, its products are more expensive than ever, the remaining customers feel underwhelmed by the whole experience, yet understand there\u2019s something much worse waiting to replace it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The modern p(r)int consumer bathes in nostalgia for the good old days. As a teenager, there was little to do but ingest as much culture as you could, then talk about it with your friends. A rabid reader of magazines, I would buy several from the corner shop each week, reading them cover to cover. These were cherished objects designed to be shared and passed around, informing us of all the things taking place outside dreary suburbia. For me, magazines were a gateway drug to politics, containing ideas about the world I felt the need to think about, grapple with, defend or oppose.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
My first encounter with Red Pepper<\/em> was in W H Smiths at the turn of the millennium \u2013 the flash of colour in its title banner catching my eye one day after school. A decade and a half later, I joined its editorial collective. For a few years \u2013 together with Hilary, Siobh\u00e1n, Amy and Michael, each of us from divergent political traditions \u2013 we oversaw the production of a magazine that wished to be both nourishing and pluralistic, believing an energised \u2018popular front\u2019 would help hold back populism\u2019s reactionary creep.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As a writer, I had forever been uninterested in submitting \u2018online only\u2019 articles, with digital media\u2019s inability to replicate the feel of a page between your fingers, or the scan across a magazine\u2019s contents to see your name jump out. What a privilege it was to commission others to experience the same, their texts fitted into finite boxes, accompanied by image and design, slotted alongside the work of a diverse range of writers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the years since I departed, my print diet has diminished \u2013 the mass market music and film magazines I grew up with all folded, and flicking through the daily newspapers seems an arcane practice, like wiping down your front step. The only Britain based publications I regularly read are the London Review of Books<\/em><\/a> and the FT Weekend<\/em><\/a>, though at the airport I\u2019ll buy copies of Private Eye<\/em><\/a> and Viz<\/em><\/a>, little changed in a quarter of a century. As a monoglot, I subscribe to Le Monde Diplomatique<\/em><\/a>\u2019s English language edition and half a dozen or so American periodicals, which seem to have better adapted to a changing media landscape.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Silicon Valley\u2019s determined drive to serve up AI-generated digital slop in place of physical print has historic precedent. Towards the end of the 19th century, a time of quickening technological advance following an era of inexpensive and popular grassroots pamphleteering, American publishing magnates began to innovate. Newspapers deployed sensation \u2013 lurid headlines, unverified breaking news, pseudoscience, trivial gossip, sham expertise \u2013 to lure in readers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Their techniques were aped across the Atlantic by Britain\u2019s new press barons. Though figures like fascist admiring<\/a> brothers Lord Northcliffe and Lord Rothermere (whose descendant Jonathan Harmsworth is the billionaire current owner of the Daily Mail<\/em>) would come to dominate the nation\u2019s media in the early 20th century, there remained signs of print\u2019s radical, even revolutionary potential.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In 1920, Sylvia Pankhurst\u2019s offices at Workers\u2019 Dreadnought<\/em><\/a> (formerly The Woman\u2019s Dreadnought<\/em>) were raided by police, as she was charged for publishing material \u2018calculated and likely to cause sedition among His Majesty’s forces, in the Navy, and among the civilian population\u2019. Pankhurst, a militant agitator for women\u2019s suffrage, used her pages to advocate for feminism and anti-imperialism, while unafraid to challenge left-wing orthodoxies \u2013 the Jamaican-born poet Claude McKay<\/a> remembered his colleague \u2018always jabbing her hat pin into the hides of the smug and slack labour leaders\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Silicon Valley\u2019s determined drive to serve up AI-generated digital slop in place of physical print has historic precedent<\/p>\n\n\n\n Slightly over half a century later, under a sclerotic Labour government, the teenage curators of DIY fanzine Guttersnipe<\/em><\/a>, one of many such magazines in the era of punk self-publishing, drew complaints from the authorities. Headmasters and magistrates, clergymen and councillors queued up to brand the publication \u2018obscene\u2019 and \u2018utter filth\u2019. Printed by schoolchildren at Telford Community Arts<\/a> from 1978 to 1980 and featuring articles on mental health, abortion and the twin scourges of unemployment and the National Front, Guttersnipe<\/em> transcended different subcultures \u2013 skins, mods, rude boys and punks \u2013 catering for local youth who found the mainstream music journalism of the time pretentious and out of touch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n During a later era of globalisation, digital communications networks \u2013 once heralded for their potential to radically democratise the public sphere \u2013 were swiftly captured by the enemies of social progress. Big tech and its billionaires\u2019 ascendancy should have had us polishing our pitchforks, yet the power they\u2019re now able to wield would have been unimaginable to the media moguls of yesteryear. We might not be able to outwit our own personalised algorithm, but to design and distribute dissenting text remains a subversive act.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So, to those wishing to unsettle the established order: step away from the screen and start your own print collective. Fire up the community press as a necessary corrective to desolate doom scrolling. Usher in a new age of pamphleteering as modern-day Thomas Paines. Publish, And Be Damned!<\/p>\n\n\n\n Former Red Pepper editor K Biswas reflects on the ebb and flow of media fortunes and how a drive to print continues to galvanise the left<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":44901,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[685,2529],"tags":[3012],"class_list":["post-44961","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-media","category-socialism","tag-k-biswas"],"yoast_head":"\nDigital slop<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
This article first appeared in Issue #247 The Last Issue?<\/em> Subscribe<\/a> today to support independent socialist media and get your copy hot off the press!<\/h3>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"