you don't have to tell anyone anything; you can control the means of how you do so.
four thoughts about the distribution of ideas.
1.
I was signaling with my friend Adrian the other day, and he was sharing about the group he’s in, about a thing that happened where someone got excited about an email from someone from the press who wanted to do an interview.
“But we don’t talk to the press. We made a decision a long time ago we do not want to talk to the press. So we just don’t,” he said.
My brain flashed to something in the way-back hard drive, not opened for decades.
”Do you remember the riot grrl media blackout? Where back in the early 90s, they all agreed to not speak to the media at all?”
I did. I never went to meetings but I listened to the music and I read the zines. The blackout happened, as I remember it, because there was so much bullshit coverage that sensationalized ooooh angry young women, sexy, silly! and also made fun of teenage girls talking about rape and racism and singled out some “leaders” over others thus creating power struggles and drama, that riot grrl just decided to pull the plug on the media having access to them, period, and make zines instead.
How foreign these ideas sound now, even to me. The concept of just not speaking to the media, any kind of media, including social media. Ever. Not just about security things. But about any thing.
It’s like how dusty the concept of “selling out” is now. When I was coming up there were heated debates about it, but now it’s a given. Of course you want a big 5 publishing deal and to get picked up, that’s what success is. Of course you want the most followers, the most likes and reacts, the most exposure possible. Of course that’s how you do things that are real - you talk to the media. The big media and the social media. It’s like pics or it didn’t happen. Post or it’s not real.
But you can just. Not. Not even just about high security things but just about… anything. You can just not focus on coverage, at all. You can focus on doing your work.
It occurred to me that the group my friend is in is all people that are or have been criminalized. They are stressed out. They are working long hours at hard jobs to pay the rent. They don’t have a lot of time, or energy. Not talking to the press saves that energy and allows them to turn inward and keep their focus on themselves and the communities they are a part of and doing work within.
Which reminded me of a conversation me and M. were having potentially for the 98th time the other week about quitting social media for good, or at least IG, and how everyone says eh I want to, but I can’t, I need it to keep up with the news, or do the fundraising, or get my event blasted everywhere…. I’ll do harm reduction. I’ll just use it a little bit.
And people say they will, but none of us can keep to it because of how all those algos are set up to manipulate our brains and cortisol responses. Ping ping ping.
And one of us was like, how did people used to get the news.
And I was like, well, for me in my 20s in the 90s, it was the underground newspaper I worked on. The free weekly papers. The weekly Black and Caribbean paper in Toronto, Share. And the community radio station I worked at. Along with the CBC and the mainstream print and radio and TV press. We would tune in and listen to shows every week. We would prepare the news. We would interview people. We would go cover events.
People today say they have no time to make stuff like that happen and it’s not fast enough. And ok, I get it how getting rapidly updating news and getting the word out during the fast pace of emergencies is important. Look at the LA wildfires, look at any of the million crises going on at once, look at how the Trump/Vance/Musk government does fiftymillion pieces of bullshit a day that needs to be tracked.
But, also, a chunk of the fast social media news people see, it’s possible for it to be AI manipulation or screenshots that are inaccurate anyway. Or it’s coming so fast it’s impossible to process. Or we never see it to begin with because the algo keeps it from us.
And then there’s the ineffable- but is it?- strength of, when we made our own media, we controlled it. We were not using a corporate media space that both platformed and hid our content while datamining and stealing our information, all the while claiming to be “free.” We might have been hoping to get people’s attention, but we were not being used by “the attention economy.”
In terms of time, yes, we’re all overworked into exhaustion. However, I don’t know about you, but sometimes I spend roughly 20 hours a week cycling through my social media. If I quit all that, I might have room to work on a goddamn paper again. Or help start a radio station, or do a show on it, anyway.
Huh, I said to Adrian. I’m thinking about the time you save not talking to the media, and it’s not just the couple of hours spent getting interviewed - it’s all the shit around it, the edits, the correcting the things they get wrong, the dealing with whatever piece comes out, whether it’s accurate or not, and then there’s the potential doxxing and harassment and focus on you that you didn’t want, afterwards…
Yep.
So yeah. Just an idea to think about.
What if pictures mean it didn’t happen? What if we do things that are not observed, and observation is not the litmus test for their strength or reality?
I’m not saying don’t ever tell people about your writing or your work. But I’m suggesting that there’s power in knowing that not sharing about all of your work to everyone, to the media or social media, is a possibility. That you can withhold. That you can strike. That you can control, as best you can, how you get your thoughts out there.
***
2. the distribution of ideas
I am aware that it might look like they’re contradictions to what I’m saying. I’m a writer and performer. I think about things and organize things, alone and with other people. I want people to read my writing and come to events I’m part of and know about things I’m doing. This substack is a means of distributing my ideas that uses an imperfect platform I don’t own, and I likely will post about this piece selectively on social media to let people know I’ve written it. I’m not saying I will never speak to the press again. I want my ideas to be distributed. I just want to think through how we’re thinking about how that happens.
Distribution is an important facet of publishing that many people don’t know about- what the term means or how the process works. I’ve thought about it for a long time, on my own and with other people- my second paid on the books job when I was 16 was doing shipping and receiving in the basement of Tatnuck Books in Worcester, and I’ve been privvy to various book distributor systems as a zine maker and reader, a punk, a writer and worker in independent media and a bookseller off and on for over twenty years; recent conversations with friends including M. Téllez, Susan Raffo and other friends who work or have worked in books, writing, sales and cooperative econoics have informed this thinking.
For folks who aren’t familliar with distribution as a concept, aA simple way of breaking it down is, it’s any means/system of getting goods or ideas from the people who make them to the people who might want them. When I worked at a bookstore, I didn’t buy every single book we sold independently from the author or publisher who made them- that would take forever and be onerous. With some exceptions (at my last bookstore job we had a robust zine and self-published section, the information about who made the work, pricing and contact info and numbers sold was all organized on file cards), we ordered books and magazines wholesale from distributors, who carry a lot of books and magazines from a lot of presses.
In the 1960s-2010s and to now, successive waves of radical and independent publishing organized around creating our own distribution systems. Many of them, like Bookpeople, were cooperatively owned and operated and functioned like food co-ops, but for books. They were ways of collectively sharing the labor to get ideas and writing and books and magazines out there.
Distribution is crucial; Susie Bright writes about how with lesbian sex radical magazine On Our Backs some of their biggest struggles were around getting distributors and bookstores to agree to carry it. Distribution is what gets your ideas out there, or chokeholds anyone from being able to learn about them.
Radical distribution can be a mail order zine distro or someone mailing their zine from their kitchen table to people who send them stamps and two dollars in the mail. Or it can mean the creation of independent larger book distributors, defunct and still going- from Small Press Distro to Publishing Distribution Cooperative, Bookpeople to Pluto Press to Consortium to AK to ones I can’t remember- that got books wholesale to stores, did mail order, and were the places (like Small Press Distro when I lived in the Bay) where I could roll up to them and buy twenty copies of my small press poetry books for 40% of the cover price to sell at shows.
These methods still exist. But over the past decades I’ve been a writer and sometime bookseller, indie distribution has periodically crashed. I’ve seen the wreckage that happened every time an independent magazine or book distro closed. Amazon is one of the biggest distributor of books in the world right now.
Social media has been a form of writer-controlled distribution that in some ways filled that gap. With the closing of many independent presses and distros, or those never seeming accessible in the first place, of course many of us got seduced by the experiment of using social media as a form of distribution of our media and ideas. Of course it looked like (and was) an amazing hack, to get your words and ideas out there to tons of people you’d never met without going through an editor or a press.
When riot grrl made that choice to have a media blackout, it was complicated- some argued that they should use pieces in Seventeen or the New York Times or whatever as a means of reaching masses of people who weren’t already tapped in to queer/ punk/ feminism and wouldn’t know how to get their zine, and they had a valid point. Many of us hacked social media over the past decade in the hopes of using an imperfect medium to be a mass distributor of our ideas, even though most of us never used that word, without the middleperson of a press.
The problem is, of course, that the social media platform is the middleperson. And I would argue that the process is the product. Everything rigged and fucked about social media information distribution can affect how people access or understand the ideas we use social media to get out there, or never get to view them in the first place.
I do want people to know about my work, but bigger/ more/ everyone all the time/ all the bots and harassers isn’t necessarily better or more effective. Slower meant people can sit with and digest my work differently. This is why for the most part I’ve stopped posting on my public Instagram with 20k+ followers. It’s not worth it because hardly anyone sees it anyway because I’ve been shadowbanned for writing about Gaza, and public mass posting leaves me more open to Zionist and other harassment. Plus the level of engagement and the response rate to the writing I put out there for energy expended is bettter when I post about my work on platforms that are smaller and more private.
It’s a disabled theory of creative labor, I suppose.
As we divest from corporate surveillance state social media, we may need to relearn and practice older methods of information distribution. I hope we will also create new ones that don’t exist yet.
***
3. a tool
A site I am exploring: https://www.optoutproject.net/ and in particular this Cyber Cleanse. I appreciate that she’s like look, you don’t have to quit it all, but you can figure out a process of divesting and keeping your money and data away from Google and all the rest. And it is a process.
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4. Being the kind of CSA survivor I am, who was told we’ll kill you if you tell - not just about the sexual abuse, but about so many witness protection program things in my family- made me someone who defaulted to just saying whatever the hell I wanted. you’re only as sick as your secrets, etc. If I jerk my chin up and say that’s right and say every single thing you think I should be ashamed of, you’ll have nothing to hold over me. my father always used to grit discretion is the better part of valor between his teeth and it was just one more colonized by the british crisp metal teeth inflection but I rolled my eyes because I knew it just meant shut the hell up.
I got to grown knowing when to shut up about things that were private and criminalized, but also defaulting to spilling my own story, because big secrecy had always lead to big problems. sometimes I didn’t know that not everyone deserved all my truth.
It’s something, to relearn how to hold my fire, not as enforced silence of someone else sewing up my mouth, but as general strike. As owning what I can control in this moment where so much feels out of our control. My mouth, my words, this speech out of this body.
my friend Susan Raffo sent me a message that she ok'd being reposted here: "This is so important! i was just talking with a friend a few days ago about the radical/dyke infrastructure in the 70s where we had plumbers and carpenters and electricians and food growers and distributors and childcare collectives and everything that took the concept of mutual aid and working classified it (i could have a three hour conversation about my sometimes confusion about what is perceived as mutual aid right now).... i was like, these were concrete practical skills that were learned and then shared in support of liberation and not profit." and yeah that's the thing- building independent economic and skill networks, shared for liberation not profit or control.
she added, "i would add to what i said that it's important to notice how important it was for those focused on profit and the MAGA/Project 2025 agenda who have always been here that destroying this "alternative economy" - which is what it was called - was important. these structures disappeared because 1) the man, 2) the shit we carry inside so some BUT NOT ALL of those dykes became terfs and 3) as things like the internet and a credit economy and Reagan's feeding of the financial sector as the true job (god, i remember when no one got an MBA because BORING and then in the mid-80s all of these people started getting an MBA as their degree or a double degree and that was as intentional as the Flexner Report creating the pharmaceutical/MIC approach to healthcare.... but this was the economic/money management economy that I HATE.....and trade schools/vocational schools shut down as part of the strategy to undermine unions and on and on...."
This is how I feel every time someone from a group goes to me like oh you deserve to be heard or oh you deserve a platform. For what lol and who am I talking to? Media and distribution we don't control or help or harm and when there's a 50/50 chance it's almost always going to the harm side. I've been trying to get a couple groups I was in to do a zine to keep the community informed for years. No one wanted to hit the library or meet up largely because turns out everyone hated each other and was just sitting on it. We could have done it but. And when they don't want to do it they won't let you do it either. I keep trying to posit it tho and don't go solo only because I need help myself. I implore ppl to consider who they're talking to at any given time. I pray going folks learn from our occasional hubris.