> What does it mean to publish if what's recorded is never read? The old WORN drive joke (write once, read never) has fangs.
The mere act of publishing itself is a form of capital and political and social exercise regardless of who reads it.
This is a deep rabbit hole and I don't have time to go into here (there's 2 chapters in this mythical book I speak of on it) but I'll point you in two directions, both centered on xerox
1. As a brief premiere look up the scholarly work 'Xerox Project: Photocopy Machines as a Metaphor for an “Open Society”' - or look into how the open society foundation supposedly helped defeat apartheid south africa and bring down the soviets via copy machines and cottage publications.
2. As a cornerstone of the first step of the modern LGBT rights movement in the 1950s. "ONE magazine", one of the first LGBT magazines using a specific Xerox machine as best I can determine either in Mar Vista or Venice california. Shortly there after, the Mattachine society, a second LGBT rights group, used the same copy machine to do their publication as well. The machine was also used to fight anti-mccarthyist blacklisting publications for the film industry as well. A similar effort happened for civil rights in Jim Crow south (I live in LA so I can do better research on the LGBT stuff since I can drive to the physical archives)
Even if nobody ever read any of these and the publications went into the garbage can, the maturation of thought and the coalition building as a function of the geographic space necessitated by the access to the machines had meaningful political ramifications.
You can also read the book 'Notes from Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture' for a decent deep dive on this.
The mere act of publishing itself is a form of capital and political and social exercise regardless of who reads it.
This is a deep rabbit hole and I don't have time to go into here (there's 2 chapters in this mythical book I speak of on it) but I'll point you in two directions, both centered on xerox
1. As a brief premiere look up the scholarly work 'Xerox Project: Photocopy Machines as a Metaphor for an “Open Society”' - or look into how the open society foundation supposedly helped defeat apartheid south africa and bring down the soviets via copy machines and cottage publications.
2. As a cornerstone of the first step of the modern LGBT rights movement in the 1950s. "ONE magazine", one of the first LGBT magazines using a specific Xerox machine as best I can determine either in Mar Vista or Venice california. Shortly there after, the Mattachine society, a second LGBT rights group, used the same copy machine to do their publication as well. The machine was also used to fight anti-mccarthyist blacklisting publications for the film industry as well. A similar effort happened for civil rights in Jim Crow south (I live in LA so I can do better research on the LGBT stuff since I can drive to the physical archives)
Even if nobody ever read any of these and the publications went into the garbage can, the maturation of thought and the coalition building as a function of the geographic space necessitated by the access to the machines had meaningful political ramifications.
You can also read the book 'Notes from Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture' for a decent deep dive on this.
It's all fascinating stuff.