The fortunes of print media, in many ways, mirror those of the traditional British pub – sales are inexorably flagging, its products are more expensive than ever, the remaining customers feel underwhelmed by the whole experience, yet understand there’s something much worse waiting to replace it.
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.
Flash of colour
My first encounter with Red Pepper was in W H Smiths at the turn of the millennium – 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 – together with Hilary, Siobhán, Amy and Michael, each of us from divergent political traditions – we oversaw the production of a magazine that wished to be both nourishing and pluralistic, believing an energised ‘popular front’ would help hold back populism’s reactionary creep.
As a writer, I had forever been uninterested in submitting ‘online only’ articles, with digital media’s inability to replicate the feel of a page between your fingers, or the scan across a magazine’s 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.
In the years since I departed, my print diet has diminished – 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 and the FT Weekend, though at the airport I’ll buy copies of Private Eye and Viz, little changed in a quarter of a century. As a monoglot, I subscribe to Le Monde Diplomatique’s English language edition and half a dozen or so American periodicals, which seem to have better adapted to a changing media landscape.
Digital slop
Silicon Valley’s 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 – lurid headlines, unverified breaking news, pseudoscience, trivial gossip, sham expertise – to lure in readers.
Their techniques were aped across the Atlantic by Britain’s new press barons. Though figures like fascist admiring brothers Lord Northcliffe and Lord Rothermere (whose descendant Jonathan Harmsworth is the billionaire current owner of the Daily Mail) would come to dominate the nation’s media in the early 20th century, there remained signs of print’s radical, even revolutionary potential.
In 1920, Sylvia Pankhurst’s offices at Workers’ Dreadnought (formerly The Woman’s Dreadnought) were raided by police, as she was charged for publishing material ‘calculated and likely to cause sedition among His Majesty’s forces, in the Navy, and among the civilian population’. Pankhurst, a militant agitator for women’s suffrage, used her pages to advocate for feminism and anti-imperialism, while unafraid to challenge left-wing orthodoxies – the Jamaican-born poet Claude McKay remembered his colleague ‘always jabbing her hat pin into the hides of the smug and slack labour leaders’.
Silicon Valley’s determined drive to serve up AI-generated digital slop in place of physical print has historic precedent
Slightly over half a century later, under a sclerotic Labour government, the teenage curators of DIY fanzine Guttersnipe, 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 ‘obscene’ and ‘utter filth’. Printed by schoolchildren at Telford Community Arts from 1978 to 1980 and featuring articles on mental health, abortion and the twin scourges of unemployment and the National Front, Guttersnipe transcended different subcultures – skins, mods, rude boys and punks – catering for local youth who found the mainstream music journalism of the time pretentious and out of touch.
During a later era of globalisation, digital communications networks – once heralded for their potential to radically democratise the public sphere – were swiftly captured by the enemies of social progress. Big tech and its billionaires’ ascendancy should have had us polishing our pitchforks, yet the power they’re 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.
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!
