Print is forever

This story was first published in Gazetteer SF's inaugural print issue.

It was spring in West Berkeley, and Robin Sloan had begun an experiment: He was going to create something to outsmart artificial intelligence.

Inside his small, sunlit printing studio that he calls The Lab, the bestselling sci-fi author Wired recently called “the tech world’s greatest living novelist,” spent days toggling between tabs, testing font after font against ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. He was looking for typefaces so visually obscure that their messages could slip past the models undetected. He found that he could beat two of them, but one — usually Gemini, whose “eyes are very sharp,” Sloan noticed — was able to read it.

Finally, Sloan unearthed from his font archive an old blackletter typeface so excessively flourished that he suspects it was made as a joke, a work art for art’s sake that would never be used to write something legible; but that, for the purposes of Sloan’s experiment, was the point. 

It worked. 

Soon, Sloan’s Risograph printer spat out 1,000 broadsides later trifolded into zines. On one side, Sloan proposed a set of strategies “for artists of all kinds” to confound and rebuke AI scrapers. On the cover, that spindly blackletter declared the most important directive: “KEEP IT SECRET.”

Sloan titled his publication The Secret Playbook.

The Secret Playbook exists only in print. I only had to ask, and Sloan dropped a copy (plus a different one, just for fun) in the mail. Soon, the elegant designs of the US Postal Service delivered the materials to me within the week.

“There’s this awe, this really appropriate and unsettling awe, at the increasing capabilities of these models and systems,” Sloan told me when I visited him at The Lab a few days later. “You’re like, ‘What can’t they do? What can’t they figure out?’” Sloan realized that the things AI can’t figure out are always the things inaccessible to them.

Sloan isn’t the only person to try to create things outside of the all-consuming maw of generative AI and the corporate behemoths behind them. In the isolating, brain-melting age of AI, all sorts of people across the Bay Area were turning — or, returning — to print.

This year, the San Francisco Zine Fest saw “an explosion of interest in zines” and a record number of exhibitor applications. It was the same story at the San Francisco Art Book Fair, which was bigger than it’s ever been, expanding across four venues in Dogpatch. Startups and pranksters alike are stapling flyers to telephone polls to get the word out about their products and events. Coffee shops are hosting zine pop-ups and Substackers are throwing magazine parties. A group of established Bay Area writers began circulating a print-only “organizing pamphlet-meets-literary magazine” called The Approach, which joins San Francisco Review of Whatever, Unscene, and other titles printed on pages available across the city.

“The value of print is actually not about paper. It's about the set of demands and offerings that that paper has,” Sloan posited. “Privacy, stability, reliability, sovereignty.”

Sloan offered other adjectives, too: Print was tactile, giftable, collectible, durable. Print can also be a little mischievous, whether as notes passed in class or samizdat circulated under authoritarian regimes.

In the spirit of the very offline project, I won’t share all the strategies outlined in The Secret Playbook, but they include keeping things secret, playing with scale, and having fun — the last one being very important in a time largely defined by emergency. “Obviously, a lot of it is playful,” Sloan explained of The Secret Playbook’s down-with-the-system posturing, but underneath is a real sense of alarm.

One engine undoubtedly driving the print revival is the surveillance state. No longer a sci-fi nightmare, the concept of “if a product is free, you are the product” is now common knowledge; the enduring tech business model is to sell our information to other tech companies, the whole slimy process enabled by the insistence that everyone wants convenience and instant gratification, no matter the cost.

Print, however, moves at a more human speed. “I think the desire for instant access has been a little overstated,” Sloan said. “

For those in what remains of the media industry in 2025, the rise of AI slop is another strong argument in print’s favor.

After years of companies prioritizing their digital arms, magazines such as Spin, Nylon, and Ebony revived their print operations to entice advertisers struggling with the diminishing efficacy of web ads. In these magazines and advertorial publications, advertisers can reach more engaged audiences, even if they have to sacrifice some access to the hypergranular data they’ve grown accustomed to.

“The median value of a word on the internet is going to zero,” said Alexis Madrigal, Sloan’s good friend and the co-host of the popular KQED show Forum. And he’s right: Reading online is a deeply corrupted experience with websites littered with pop-ups ads. On mobile, pages auto-refresh constantly, foisting new ads upon your eyeballs. Less cluttered, uninterrupted reading experiences are often locked behind paywalls. “The attention and financial economics of writing things on the internet has kind of broken down entirely,” Madrigal said.

Sloan put it this way: “If there was a system for writing and publishing that was going to work on the internet, we would have it by now.” 

Sloan and Madrigal are both in their mid-40s and came up when the media ecosystem was less decimated. Madrigal lamented Twitter’s death march from a lively place to “write for other writers,” to Elon Musk’s alt-right echo chamber. Bluesky, Threads, and Substack all try to be homes for writers, but no platform seems able to resist the siren song of endless feeds or vertical video. The pace and privacy of print media appear to run counter to the fundamental machinations of the tech industry.

And yet, another boomlet of magazines and journals has come from the tech world, where paper is suddenly an exciting new platform. In this scene, print is not a tool to reject the digital world but, rather, a way to to extend it.

Sitting at Stoa Bar in Lower Haight, Jasmine Sun, a 26-year-old writer and former Substack product manager, sipped a dainty cocktail of sherry and chartreuse as she explained how the conflicts between the tech and media industries set the stage for a techno-print revival.

In 2020, Sun founded Kernel, a futurist publication that comes out annually. She used to describe the Kernel worldview as “techno-optimist” but later rebranded without the label to avoid association with the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, who took to using the phrase in a manifesto he posted in 2023.

According to Sun, the tech industry has become very interested in creating its own culture industry, especially in the last five years or so. “People describe it as, like, ‘telling our own story,’” she said. In tech circles, they also call it “going direct.”

“Tech really doesn’t trust the mainstream media. There’s been kind of a movement within the tech community [by] investors, CEOs, whatever to build their own media platforms to sort of supplant the New York media,” Sun said.

This is nothing new. Tech companies have been going direct with print publications almost since the advent of the consumer internet: Yahoo partnered with media company Ziff Davis to launch Yahoo! Internet Life back in 1996. Later, like all media, they reoriented their business strategies and prioritized digital content; now, as some consumers return to print, the companies are back on the presses once again, putting out sleek, branded magazines and books that build out a world with their products at the center.

Stripe launched Stripe Press in 2018; in 2023, fintech company Mercury turned its editorial vertical Meridian into a print product. In May this year, Hinge and Substack collaborated on a sacchrine print campaign; in August, Microsoft put out a corporate publication called Signal.

The worldview Sun espouses in her magazine is not exactly corporate, but it does advance a vision of the tech industry and a print ecosystem living in harmony. In fact, Kernel began as a Substack newsletter called Reboot, which Sun launched with a friend as a sociology major at Stanford and bored at her home just outside Seattle during the pandemic. Part of her motivation was dissatisfaction with the tech journalism coming out of mainstream publications. “It was either extremely pessimistic or extremely optimistic in a way that we didn’t feel like was very nuanced,” Sun said.

So, she went direct. 

Eventually, the community Sun built on Substack spun off into a Discord server, which now has hundreds of members. Then, in 2021, she brought it into the real world. She invited ten writers she admired — some friends, some distant Twitter mutuals — to “a writer’s retreat in the woods” (they rented a house and brought their computers) in Asheville, N.C., to make their first print magazine.

When she landed at Substack the same year, she said, she realized that the Silicon Valley approach to reading and writing was “kind of unsentimental”; it was another consumer product to monetize and scale. Email newsletters were the right platform to reach the largest audience possible; later, a microblogging feed was added to bring users to the app, as well as a short-form video feature to keep them there. Whatever works. 

This is, in Sun’s words, a rational approach to publishing, a subtle but important contrast to what Sun sees in the “literary folks [who] have both an aesthetic and a sentimental attachment to print that’s not exactly quote-unquote ‘rational.’”

But even at Substack, print beckons. “Every time we had a hackathon [at Substack], at least one person builds a print thing where it's like, ‘Convert your Substack post into zine,” Sun recalled. “I would not be surprised at all if in three years Substack has a print operation.”

A Substack press likely would not be financially viable on its own. Kernel isn’t. (Sun called it a “money-losing operation” that’s funded mostly by grants from places like the Responsible Tech Youth Power Fund and the Omidyar Network.) None of the publishing operations spun up during this print revival are. This time, in a publishing landscape where the systems of production and distribution have been hollowed out, print isn’t about leveraging profits; print is about leveraging cool. “Print objects have an aura that brings people to them,” Madrigal said. “You're not gonna print out a story you published online and hand it over,” he laughed. 

“It’s more fun making a zine and giving it to your friends as a gift,” Madrigal said. “You're making an object. You're making a thing that it just has, honestly, more intrinsic value than words on a screen. Something that is so deeply underrated in media creation is that shit's just fun sometimes.”

Both Sloan and Sun's print projects espouse lofty ambitions. In their pages they ask existential questions about how print might survive in the age of AI; in their forms, they try to answer. I am sure Sloan and Sun both believe their visions for print are more than just “fun.” Still, I do not find Sun’s use of print to “go direct” on behalf of the tech industry very hopeful for humanity or its culture, nor do I find Sloan’s conviction, that the qualities of the print object can protect it against capitalism, totally airtight. The huge turnout at this year’s Zine Fest did not convince me that simply being in rooms with people will slow tech’s corrosion of culture. And yet, in a world upended by loneliness crises and AI delusions and plummeting literacy rates, to have more print floating around in the world is probably a good thing.

Three months after I read The Secret Playbook, Sloan sent me, unprompted, his most recent zine. Another beautiful trifold broadside, it was dotted with a brilliant shade of Risograph pink that a screen cannot capture. In it, Sloan proposes a new idea to fix the e-book economy by making it more, as he likes to say, “printy.” The model would do away with e-reader accounts and user data and give every physical book or magazine a QR code, allowing purchasers to access and freely share a digital version up to 100 times.

Sloan argues this is the way to bring the qualities of print — the privacy, accessibility, giftability, everything but the physicality — to the digital world. It would also reposition the digital world as an extension of the physical one, as we all once conceived it to be.

I don’t know if this would work, or how it might get adopted by businesses. If it could slip through profit incentives and consumer apathy, I am sure some people would enjoy the print-ified digital format.

For me, I try to avoid reading on my phone as much as I can. Even a PDF makes me feel a little ill these days. Mostly, I was just happy the Postal Service had moved this interesting and beautiful piece of mail through the world, from his studio in Berkeley to me at my desk.

Editor's note: This story has been updated to correct the number of subscribers to Jasmine Sun’s Discord channel. It also updated an interpretation of her description of how Substack handles words and writing.