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

WIRED

5 hours ago

Jun 16, 2025 6:00 AM At a time of fleeting memes and cultural platforms operated by multibillion-dollar companies, an old mode of creativity and community-building gets a second life. Illustration: Shirley Chong
One sunny afternoon in May, a century-old power plant in Brooklyn was buzzing—not with electricity, but with hundreds of creatives congregating at the Black Zine Fair. Handmade booklets piled up on table after table, forming vast paper topographies of politics and activism and culture. Marginalized groups in skating! Fictional characters 'that probably made me queer'! Someone else presented zines dedicated to all the TV shows they had recorded onto VHS. Still more tables hosted zine assembly. Everyone seemed to have stickers for sale. The scene evoked New York in the 1980s or '90s, when the city was home to a thriving DIY zine culture built on late nights at Kinko's. Only now many of the zine makers swapped online handles along with their analog wares.
For over a decade, social media platforms have served as cultural loci, and in many ways still do, but recent events have deepened the notion that digital spaces aren't safe or effective for everyone. Once beloved platforms like Twitter have been overtaken by white supremacist speech. Meta now allows users to call gay and trans people mentally ill. TikTok has been on the verge of being banned in the US for years now. Meanwhile, the US Department of Homeland Security has announced its plans to screen the social media of immigrants and visa applicants. What's next? Even if the bigotry and surveillance don't bother you, major platforms often feel like content wells for advertisers and AI scavengers, picking through the detritus of influencers chasing engagement. Breaking through seems impossible.
For those looking for alternatives, zines have taken on new importance as a way to spread ideas outside the easy reach of unfriendly eyes and unhelpful algorithms. Organizer Mariame Kaba, who cofounded the Black Zine Fair in 2024, says she's seen lots more interest in the medium lately, especially from Gen Z. About 1,200 people attended the fair this year, and similar gatherings and workshops are happening around the world. Online, people who want to talk about abortion access or queer rights or the war in Gaza are 'feeling like they can't say certain things,' Kaba says. Zines allow them to 'share personal experiences, to make connections with other people, to fight censorship, to evade the surveillance that's consistent and constant when you are on digital platforms.'
With the Trump administration and GOP lawmakers limiting access to certain kinds of health care in the US, for example, zines about DIY health care for trans people or pamphlets about self-managed abortions could become even more prevalent. 'If they start criminalizing that kind of information, how will you access that information, if not literally somebody passing you a pamphlet or a flyer or a zine?' Kaba asks. 'For folks who are on the left, we better figure out how we're going to transmit information about important things to each other that is not using social media.'
Zines, and their predecessors, have a long history of political and cultural impact, particularly in the US. In the 18th and 19th centuries, pamphlets helped spread messages about the abolitionist movement. LGBTQ+ people made paper booklets to share information during the AIDS crisis. Riot grrrls used them to spread feminist messages in the '90s, the last time zines saw a huge boom.
Graphic novelist and documentary filmmaker James Spooner was just a high schooler when he stumbled upon his first zine: an anarcha-feminist zine called 'Aim Your Dick' that Mimi Nguyen made in 1993. 'It introduced me to the idea that a teenager could have a voice that the world outside of school would be interested in hearing,' Spooner says. He quickly made a zine of his own.
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.'
'For folks who are on the left, we better figure out how we're going to transmit information about important things to each other that is not using social media.'
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