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I was reading about Oz magazine recently and wondering about the different ways that "authorities" deal with underground publications. Original hacker zines, P

I was reading about Oz magazine recently and wondering about the different ways that "authorities" deal with underground publications. Original hacker zines, Phrack, 2600 and the like were born within a very liberal and wild internet. We've lost something today with web, because locality and DNS makes for fragility and easy censorship.

TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
It's hard to stay a virgin when everyone wants to be a unicorn.
kradeelav 4y ago
Would be really curious to hear your thoughts on the censorship of underground zines. :o I find that a lot of kink art creatives run into similar problems with being deplatformed on social media, but there's a growing segment that's thriving on personal sites and webrings, ditto with similar topics to the old hacker zines.
- egypturnash 4y ago
  Don’t forget the constant cycle of “payment service starts up to service horny creators, payment service prospers, payment service gets big enough for Visa/MC to notice that it’s doing porn, payment service suddenly starts kicking off large swathes of the creators it helped”. OnlyFans is the latest in a long line of this.
- dfxm12 4y ago
  In meatspace, underground zines wouldn't be in Barnes & Nobel, they'd be in the independent book store or record shop. Mainstream shops never let just any material be sold (especially when they were leading the market compared to Amazon). So, is content really "underground" if it's on a social media site like Tumbler, FB/IG, etc.? "Underground" implies distribution via alternative channels, and in 2022, webrings are alternative (compared to mainstream social media sites).
- nonrandomstring 4y ago
  > Would be really curious to hear your thoughts on the censorship of underground zines. The really interesting ones were before my time, in the 60s. I first heard of electronic zines through university Unix systems in the 1980s. AFAIK they were around in BBS before that. We discovered things through the Newsgroups (nntp) back then, which was kinda like Twitter, but more mental. There was almost no censorship, but sysadmins would not copy news feeds they disliked.

TheOtherHobbes 4y ago

It's hard to stay a virgin when everyone wants to be a unicorn.

kradeelav 4y ago

Would be really curious to hear your thoughts on the censorship of underground zines. :o I find that a lot of kink art creatives run into similar problems with being deplatformed on social media, but there's a growing segment that's thriving on personal sites and webrings, ditto with similar topics to the old hacker zines.

egypturnash 4y ago
Don’t forget the constant cycle of “payment service starts up to service horny creators, payment service prospers, payment service gets big enough for Visa/MC to notice that it’s doing porn, payment service suddenly starts kicking off large swathes of the creators it helped”. OnlyFans is the latest in a long line of this.
dfxm12 4y ago
In meatspace, underground zines wouldn't be in Barnes & Nobel, they'd be in the independent book store or record shop. Mainstream shops never let just any material be sold (especially when they were leading the market compared to Amazon). So, is content really "underground" if it's on a social media site like Tumbler, FB/IG, etc.? "Underground" implies distribution via alternative channels, and in 2022, webrings are alternative (compared to mainstream social media sites).
nonrandomstring 4y ago
> Would be really curious to hear your thoughts on the censorship of underground zines. The really interesting ones were before my time, in the 60s. I first heard of electronic zines through university Unix systems in the 1980s. AFAIK they were around in BBS before that. We discovered things through the Newsgroups (nntp) back then, which was kinda like Twitter, but more mental. There was almost no censorship, but sysadmins would not copy news feeds they disliked.