Free ‘zine & open thread

Good news. If you didn’t get a print copy of 404 Media’s ICE and surveillance technology zine, the outlet has released three free, downloadable, versions of the zine: A full sized English version, a small file version in English and a small file version in Spanish.

Never heard of 404 Media? Now you have. Outlets like this are why I get cranky when someone claims the free press is dead. The free press has continued to change, but some people won’t try to keep up.

At any rate. Before you download and read the zine, take a moment to read about the work that went into creating the print version.

Each of these zines was printed, assembled, and cut down to size by hand, and each of them was stuck in the mail by me or a friend of mine over the course of the last few weeks. We printed this on a riso printer, a Japanese duplicator from the early 1990s that anyone who is into will talk your ear off about endlessly, to the point that it has become a meme. I also printed all the envelopes on a riso printer from 1995 that I have painstakingly spent the last few months repairing.

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We could not have made this zine without the support of our subscribers, our friends, and our local community. The zine was laid out by our friend Ernie Smith, who is one of the best to ever do it. The cover art was done by Veri Alvarez, whose work you can find here and whose anti-ICE art is frankly very fucking good and who deserves your support. The printing and assembly of the zine was done by Karina Richardson at Punch Kiss Press in Los Angeles and a few of her friends. I met Karina at a print festival in Los Angeles a few months ago and then asked her if she could take on this very complicated project on a short timeline. I then asked her to more than triple the number of copies, all over the holidays.