[ Posted Tuesday, March 26, 2002 ]

ben is dead is not dead!

FEISTY '80S ZINE CULTURE LIVES ON THROUGH SITES LIKE ROBOTFRANK AND MEMEPOOL. IT'S MEDIA CRITICISM FOR THE COMMON MAN!

BY BILL LESSARD | A lot of people think that Web content is dead. Widely hyped indie webzines like Feed, Suck, and Word have died, with many of their founders returning to print. Nerve, originally conceived as a hipster lit journal about sex, lives on as essentially a personals site. It's corporate giants like AOL Time Warner and Microsoft (makers of Netscape and Internet Explorer, natch) that seem to be the only Web publishers left standing.

Yet from a creative standpoint, Web content is more alive today than during the so-called "boom." With people no longer working 90 hours a week building virtual shopping carts, dozens of quirky indie content sites like robotFrank, SomethingAwful.com, and Kuro5hin have cropped up in the dot-bomb's wake — proof positive that online content is not only alive and well, but flourishing with a grassroots intensity reminiscent of '80s zine culture. The folks behind these sites are the inheritors of that prickly movement. With the availability of free, open-source tools, independent publishers like Jim Romenesko (whose Obscure Store began as a zine in 1989) have moved online and connected with a global audience. No more mailing your screeds to a few hundred subscribers and a handful of independent bookstores. Just fire up your Net connection, code the site, and use your trusty email client to virally announce your creation to the world.

For those of too young to remember (or too busy watching Miami Vice), the '80s zine movement was a democratic rush into self-publishing thanks in part to the widespread adoption of a hot new technology known as the copy machine. (Although invented in 1959, the copy machine didn't reach critical mass until the advent of Kinko's in the 1970s.) With the efficiencies of PC-based desktop publishing, disaffected youth suddenly had access to a cheap printing press. The famous zines of yesteryear — Crank, Eye, Murder Can Be Fun — quickly took off (Zinebook.com has profiles of the best print zines), and though most of them petered out before the Web, their fiercely independent spirit, eccentric subject matter, and rough, homebrewed style still live on on the Internet. Unlike their determinedly detached, samizdat predecessors, however, today's webzines are acutely tuned into the mainstream — engaging it, critiquing it, and energetically taking it to task. In short: Media criticism for the common man.

Taking their cue from Factsheet Five, a legendary zine that reviewed other zines, blogs (or Weblogs) Memepool and MetaFilter serve up links to the latest and greatest do-it-yourself offerings. They're great places to start surfing the indie Web. On any given day, you can browse the entire editorial spectrum from bizarre news items to subversive Flash animations to straight-up oddities.

For old-school zine readers, such content may often seem ripped from the pages of Ben Is Dead or Duplex Planet, but thanks to our Republican administration and recent world events, the zeitgeist of 2002 isn't so dissimilar to that of 1982. Like their brothers and sisters huddled over toner cartridges in the middle of night all those years ago, the publishers of webzines don't want to settle for what the sterile mainstream media feeds them. They want to create their own media instead of simply consuming it.

Many webzines, armed with bulletin board software, also allow for instant reader interaction. Though in the minds of their cash-starved creators, such features are indeed an easy way to get free content, the larger change afoot is the breakdown of the traditional print barrier between the author and audience. The result can be a compelling combination of gonzo reporting, homespun media commentary, and thoughtful discussion — or else a virtual moshpit where anonymous users tear each other to pieces.

Zines are often crude affairs that will do almost anything to shock, and they certainly aren't for everyone. But if you're interested in what a lot of creative (often unemployed) people are up to, or need a mental vacation from The New Yorker, a trip to the indie Web will do you good. Like the grizzled road warriors from Mad Max, these upstarts are riding headlong into the future of the Net, shattered New Economy dreams in their rearview mirrors and the wind in their faces.

Bill Lessard is the co-author of NetSlaves: True Tales of Working the Web and the co-founder of NetSlaves.com, an independent site for technology workers.