Social Media Replaced Zines. Now Zines Are Taking the Power Back

But within a decade of Spooner’s discovery, the internet reached the mainstream, and zines were drowned out by digital culture. Diehards kept making paper handouts, but most people with ideas or messages to share went on social media. The prospect of a digital public square where anyone could broadcast their thoughts to the world was new and exciting. Since then, however, Americans’ perceptions of social media have darkened.

Zines, meanwhile, are seeing a resurgence, popping up in museum collections and, in at least one instance, online comics. They are taking on new forms, modified by a generation seeking to make something that won’t go the way of Tumblr.

“By producing physical, tangible objects that don’t exist on the internet, you can circumvent or avoid feeding into that machine,” says Kyle Myles, a photographer who sells zines out of his Baltimore shop. “I think a lot of people worry that when they share things on, say, Instagram, suddenly it’s the property of Mark Zuckerberg or Meta.”

Last year at the Black Zine Fair, Jennifer White-Johnson, a designer known for creating the Black Disabled Lives Matter symbol, presented a zine-making workshop; for this year’s event, held in May, they distributed copies of “A Black Neurodivergent Artist’s Manifesto.” (It sold out.) Several years ago, after their son was diagnosed with autism, White-Johnson created an advocacy photo zine called “KnoxRoxs.” They’ve often organized gatherings to create zines with other caregivers for autistic kids. Making zines, White-Johnson says, provides “a powerful act of collective liberation and a radical practice of self and community care.”

White-Johnson’s zine was one of many at this year’s fair focused on solidarity and social justice. Several were historical, like Kaba’s “Arrested at the Library: Policing the Stacks” about the history of law enforcement’s presence in libraries. Some zines were structured like newspapers; some took the form of grade school art. Others channeled the format’s earlier punk aesthetics.

Many zines bridged the gap between analog and digital. An independent publisher called Haters Cafe presented “10 Anarchist Theses on Palestine Solidarity in the United States,” one of several works also hosted on the publisher’s website. One of its creators, who asked not to be identified, tells WIRED that while the internet has allowed Haters’ zines to spread far, their somewhat untraceable physical forms appeal to people who are concerned about repression. “In certain spaces, I cover my face; I wear a mask,” they say. Anonymous zines serve a similar function. “We’re trying to broaden cultural distaste for surveillance.”

Which is to say, modern zine makers aren’t anti-technology. They’re opposed to what often comes with its use. If anything, they’re incorporating analog creations into digital ones, like people who post about woodworking or knitting on Reddit.

Zines are taking hold in fields outside politics and culture, too. Like science. During the 2024 meeting in Mexico of the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution, a respected computational biologist named Pleuni Pennings did away with handing out a sedate paper containing her research and instead distributed a stylized zine, illustrated with hand-drawn diagrams and figures, to accompany her presentation on antimicrobial resistance.

Pennings says she hoped audience members would be inspired to show the zine to other people, like their colleagues, and spread her work that way. “I mean, that’s what we all want when we give a talk, right?”

Communication constantly evolves, along with the way people want to receive information. As social media replaced zines, the messages traveled farther, but their permanence dissipated. Friendster fizzled. Tumblr will never be what it was. Posts on X or TikTok get drowned in the churn of what’s trending or what platform owners want to boost. Handmade zines can last much longer. “Writing things down on paper has value,” Spooner says. “It’s more permanent.”

As fears of surveillance and authoritarianism grow, the zine community may provide a means to organize under the algorithmic radar, in a format less beholden to the whims of multibillion-dollar social media companies. A vision of the future copied from the past.

Additional reporting by Angela Watercutter