Each era writes its own survival manuals. Some teach you how to live off the grid, how to meditate, how to make sourdough. Others promise to teach you how to publish.

This one is a little more ambitious. It asks what happens after we publish. After the tweet, the newsletter, the open call, the footnote, the podcast, the peer-reviewed article, the artist’s book. After the rush for relevance.

There’s no shortage of advice on how to publish more efficiently, more inclusively, more ethically, more sustainably. You won’t find any of that here. What you’ll find is a series of encounters. Situations. Fragments. Undisciplined thoughts, written too fast, kept too long, or left to ferment.

Sometimes, publishing is a whisper. Other times, a disappearance. And sometimes still, a question with no full stop.

What exactly is a “future of publishing”? A trend report? A prophecy? A threat? A lovely excuse to make one more thing? The phrase seems simple — almost utopian — but it carries the weight of entire infrastructures, ideologies, aesthetics, and affective economies.

This essay approaches the phrase sideways. It doesn’t see publishing as process, but as a state of mind. A pressure. A kind of collective performance with too many stages and too few exits.

And the future? The future remains, as always, a rehearsal.

For now, consider this an invitation.

A gesture toward other rhythms, other refusals, other forms of publishing — with or without ink, clicks, or audience.

PART I

Against the Impulse to Publish

The Compulsion to Be Seen

Publishing today is no longer limited to texts. It includes gestures, image miniatures, hashtags, scores, exhibitions, smells, installations, podcasts, NFTs, QR codes, risographs, tote bags, and workshops where you learn how to make all of this.

The scope is vast. Today, you can publish through a dance. Through a sourdough starter. Through a scent. Through a staged encounter between strangers. Through the shadow cast by a sculpture that only exists from 2:40 p.m. to 2:46 p.m. In this landscape, the line between publishing and simply appearing becomes dangerously thin.

The contemporary impulse to publish — in any medium — is not aesthetic. It is metabolic. We publish because we need to metabolize anxiety, relevance, identity. Publishing is no longer about communication: it’s about circulation. As long as something moves — even if no one receives it — we feel relief.

And so: the table becomes a publication. The meal, a platform. The zine fair, a performance. The spreadsheet, a work of art. The exhibition, a press release with spatial ambitions. Nothing escapes the publishing instinct — not even the act of not publishing, which now includes documentation, creation grants, and detailed footnotes.

This expansion is not neutral. It is not “liberating” to publish in multiple formats — it’s just more exhausting. We’re expected to be fluent in graphic design, typography, curatorial grammar, dramaturgy, screen resolutions, and PDF compression. We’re not multidisciplinary by choice — we’re polymorphic by institutional convenience.

The publishing impulse doesn’t just flood inboxes and timelines — it seeps into our bodies. Showing the process — the new grail of the contemporary artist or designer — is to convert oneself into form: slides, presentations, texts, prints, loops. The performance doesn’t end; it only updates.

Roland Barthes once wrote about the pleasure of the text. Today, it might be more accurate to speak of the panic of the interface. The fear that someone, somewhere, will interpret your silence as disinterest. Or worse — as incompetence.

In this climate, even the immaterial becomes productive. A sigh can be a sound intervention. A glitch can be reframed as critique. A delay becomes a durational piece. Publishing is no longer about saying something — it’s about proving you’re not absent from whatever it is that others seem to be doing.

This is how aesthetic production begins to resemble what David Graeber would call “delightfully useless labor”: full of activity, devoid of autonomy. One publishes not out of joy or discovery, but out of a quiet terror of falling behind. The zine must be released. The broadcast must be scheduled. The post must go live. Otherwise, the project risks becoming what no contemporary creative can allow: invisible.

Meanwhile, real encounters become harder and harder to stage. Everyone emits, few receive. Publishing becomes ambient murmur. A background hum serving as cultural proof of life.

And so we repeat the gesture. We document our movements. We laminate thought. We press flowers of relevance into formats that can be sent, archived, accounted for.

We call it creative freedom. But sometimes it feels more like a shared hallucination — maintained by habit, polite applause, and the terror of stopping.

Turn the page, if you want.
But read slowly. The most important parts might be hidden.

2. Publish or Perish: On the Aesthetics of Urgency

Somewhere along the way, publishing got confused with surviving.

We hear it in academic mantras: publish or perish. In the subtext of funding applications: outputs, impact, visibility. In the anxious whisper of contemporary creation: am I still in circulation?

Urgency has become the dominant aesthetic of our time — not because everything is urgent, but because everything is calibrated to seem like it might vanish. If you don’t publish now, someone else will. If you don’t claim the idea, it will be taken. If you don’t make the work known, maybe it never really existed.

So we accelerate. We condense. We compress ideas into formats made for circulation: tweets, slides, thumbnails, “contributions.” If something demands more than a few minutes of attention, it’s suspected of being irrelevant. Speed is the new literacy. Delay, a sin.

But the crisis isn’t one of time — it’s one of attention.

This is where publishing becomes a theatre of urgency. Everything must be dramatic, immediate, packaged as intervention. Even silence is staged: a “strategic withdrawal.” Even slowness has a logo.

Franco “Bifo” Berardi speaks of an exhausted subjectivity — accelerated, overexposed, unable to metabolize the intensity of its own experience. We no longer write, or design, or curate: we stage the trace of a productive self, haunted by the fear of disappearing.

And yet, the more we publish, the more ephemeral publication becomes.

Zines are printed to be forgotten.
Performances are documented to be ignored.
Publications dissolve into tote bags and Dropbox folders.

The format becomes fetish. The gesture — the launch, the drop, the share — replaces any notion of permanence.

This is publishing as affect: atmospheric, ambient, monetizable at a distance. A scent, a digital glitch, a speculative recipe — all become viable formats for “making something public.”

A workshop that leaves no trace still counts.
A performative dinner without a menu is still a contribution.
A ritual of invisibility can be archived as social sculpture.

Here we enter what Roland Barthes might call the “neutral” — not the absence of meaning, but the suspension of its urgency. A kind of presence that refuses to be “on time.”

It’s not slowness as lifestyle, but slowness as sabotage.

Resisting the aesthetics of urgency is not about stopping publication — it’s about publishing differently.

Exploring delay as a design principle.
Cultivating discomfort, silence, what is not yet ready.
Opening space for forms of publication that do not demand attention — or that risk not being repeatable.

Sara Ahmed reminds us that refusing the expected path is to sever a bond, a connection, a thread.

Not publishing can be a feminist killjoy practice — an interruption in the circuit of circulation.

A refusal to turn everything into product, process, or proposal.

In that sense, the truly radical gesture might not be publication itself, but the conditions it creates: slowness, opacity, mutual care — or even… forgetting.

Publishing with urgency is easy.

Publishing without urgency, staying in the discomfort of not knowing, risking irrelevance — perhaps that is the real future.

Or maybe the future has already passed.
And what we publish now are only its echoes.

On Not Publishing as Practice

There are many ways not to publish.

You can forget.
You can wait.
You can write something and delete it.
You can tell a story and leave no trace.
You can whisper an idea over dinner and never return to it.

The act of not publishing is rarely seen as a practice. It’s usually understood as absence, failure, laziness, or loss. But what if it were a form? What if it required discipline? What if it were a kind of poetics?

The contemporary landscape is saturated with works begging to be seen. But what goes unseen, what is delayed, what is withheld — these are not neutral acts. They shape space. They exert pressure. They hold power. They create conditions for desire, ambiguity, or myth.

Édouard Glissant spoke of the right to opacity — not as escape, but as resistance to overexposure. Remaining partially unreadable is not retreat; it’s protecting the complexity of form. Publishing, in this sense, can also be a gesture of disguise.

There is a politics here. As Sara Ahmed reminds us, refusal doesn’t just interrupt expectations — it breaks entire systems of visibility. Not publishing isn’t giving up. It’s changing the terms of the encounter. The slow “no.” The silent “maybe.” The “not yet” that never quite becomes “now.”

Ivan Illich dreamed of convivial tools — tools that didn’t scale, didn’t standardize, didn’t demand constant production. What would a convivial publication look like? One that appears without announcement, circulates without metrics, disappears without mourning.

It might take the form of a folded napkin with a drawing.
A solitary caption on a wall.
A printed page never distributed.
A recipe spoken only once.
A scent designed to fade.

This is not a rejection of the reader — quite the opposite.

It’s a gesture of trust: that the reader might not need to know everything.
That the most potent transmissions are not always archived, indexed, or downloadable.

Some call that magic — publishing worlds through presence, not proof.

There’s no need to abandon publishing to explore this territory.

You only need to publish differently:
Less clearly.
Less often.
With less desire for permanence.

Not publishing is not the same as doing nothing.

It’s doing something else.

Something that can’t be screenshotted, or footnoted.

A practice of disappearance.
A form of aesthetic refusal.

Not publishing can be an act of generosity.
A space left open.
A secret kept.
A fragment entrusted to time, instead of the algorithm.

It requires trust — in the work, in the world, and in the idea that not everything needs to become content.

Maybe the future of publishing begins when we stop trying to prove we have one.

PART II

Against the Form of Form

Models of Belonging

Format is a handshake.
It says: I know the rules. I speak the language. I’m one of you.

Before anyone reads your words, they read the form. Before your thought reaches a reader, it must pass through the geometry of acceptability: A4, 12pt font, double spacing, captioned, hyperlinked, peer-reviewed, typo-free, exported as PDF.

Form — whether it’s a book, a CV, a grant application, a white cube exhibition, or an Instagram carousel — is not neutral. It’s a mask. It signals fluency, seriousness, professionalism, belonging.

Designers know this well. So do artists, curators, writers, and academics. Entire careers unfold in the micro-metrics of format. We are judged not by what we say, but by how we say it. Does it look like a zine? A fundable project? A research output? An artwork? A “critical intervention”?

The rise of the template as ideology has turned publishing into a sequence of gestures of conformity. The open call has a format. The residency proposal has a format. The motivation letter — that tragic form of self-narration in late capitalism — must balance confidence, humility, and vague trauma with precision.

Even refusal has a format: lowercase, lo-fi, risograph, printed in a basement in two colours. Resistance that photographs well.

To be without format is to be unreadable. And to be unreadable is to be ineligible: for attention, for funding, for inclusion in the next biennial of speculative something with a basis in proto-socially-engaged-research.

In this regime, the template functions as a filtering tool. Not everyone knows how to write a research abstract. Not everyone can articulate their urgency in 200 words. Not everyone has the affective fluency to translate grief into a digestible pitch. But the form insists: you must know how.

There’s no space for ambivalence in the model.
There’s no box for “I’m still figuring out what this is.”
No field for “I’m not sure this should even exist.”
These categories are not fundable.

So we become fluent. We learn the tone. We sculpt our projects into modular paragraphs. We extract just the right dose of pain, the right dose of politics, the right dose of beauty to have it recognised as something of value.

That’s how belonging feels: formatting oneself to be accepted.

But something is lost in this process. Not just spontaneity, but friction. The possibility that a work might challenge the container that holds it. That form and content might exist in tension, not in harmony.

Publishing today often means conforming.
Aesthetic deviation risks bureaucratic invisibility.
If it doesn’t fit the model, it doesn’t make it through the door.

And so, more and more, we format not to express — but to be let in.

Square Thinking

Everything we publish is a square.
The page is a square. The post is a square. The screen, the slide, the flyer, the book, the frame, the booth, the label — square, square, square.

The square is not just a shape. It’s an epistemology, a politics of form. It offers legibility, control, containment — and with that, the silent tyranny of rationalism. In many ways, it is the operating system of modern knowledge.

We learn this early. At school, through templates, in layout software. Margins are not neutral. Alignment is ideology. As Vilém Flusser wrote, the typographic page served for centuries as a prosthesis for linear, historical, “civilised” thought. The alphabet marches across the rectangle in left-to-right submission. The shape of thought becomes the shape of the page.

The rectangle is the architecture of cognition — of memos, manifestos, contracts, and consensus. It demands order. It resists overflow. It frames knowledge as something extractable, transferable, printable or projectable.

And so we learn to fit. To shape our ideas into formats that can be bound, stacked, or shared. The limit isn’t conceptual — it’s spatial. If it doesn’t fit the form, it doesn’t fit the system.

As Joanna Drucker argues, visual formats don’t merely transmit ideas — they produce regimes of knowledge. Every composition is an argument. Every design decision encodes values, hierarchies, permissions. What sits at the centre, what is marginal, what may overflow, what gets cut — it all speaks.

This becomes evident in the “creative grid.” You look at an exhibition flyer. A research catalogue. A socially-disinterested publication in risograph pink. And what do you see? Repetition disguised as difference. The same modular structures. The same balance between white space and performative roughness. The same “experimental” typography that never quite breaks the grid. Even rebellion has margins.

As Roland Barthes observed, subversion has style. The new is often repetition in the aesthetic of rupture. What looks radical can be highly legible — especially to the institutions that fund, shape, and archive such gestures.

But not all knowledge fits the frame.
Some thoughts appear diagonally.
Some ideas vibrate, unravel, escape.

The square allows no room for what slips away.
It’s a gallery, not a forest.
A form of order that has internalised the aesthetics of control.

Fred Turner showed how the modernist dream of the “democratic surround” — clean lines, ordered images, harmonious geometry — was seen as a path to rational citizenship. Today, its residues survive in white cubes, Google Slides, and Instagram feeds. Liberal clarity, resized for touchscreens.

As Francis Picabia once said: “Our heads are round so our thoughts can change direction.”
The square, on the other hand, was not made for detours.

It is a tool of normalisation — efficient, persuasive, but fundamentally closed.

So what would publishing without the square look like?
Letting the work slip, leak, disperse?
Maybe it would mean publishing in modes that refuse containment — breath, vibration, humour, failure.

Maybe it would simply mean not publishing.

Resisting the square doesn’t mean rejecting form — it means recognising its politics.
Asking what forms are missing.
Which voices don’t scale.
Which thoughts die in A4.

Publishing outside the square is hard.
But living entirely inside it is worse.

Legibility Rehearsals

Publishing is, more often than not, a rehearsal for recognition.
You design a book that looks like a book. You stage a publication that behaves like a publication. You organise a “radical” event where the chairs and the concepts are perfectly aligned. Even the poster screams: we’re thinking differently — but cleanly, and in Helvetica Neue.

This is what passes for experimentation today. Legibility in disguise.

Contemporary publishing claims to stretch boundaries — but rarely the boundaries of form. The models shift subtly. The formats evolve politely. A zine becomes a toolkit, the toolkit becomes a curriculum, the curriculum becomes a critical platform. You can track the evolution by counting the icons.

There’s nothing wrong with familiarity.
But there’s something uncanny in the repetition of what’s called “critical design,” “speculative publishing,” or “expanded editorial practice.”

The same gestures recur — modular grids, two-tone colour schemes, lowercase ethics — all quietly obedient to the very systems they claim to critique.

Form critiques itself in a way that reassures the institution: don’t worry, this is still research.

You see it in captions like:
“This publication explores…”
“This intervention questions…”
“This work investigates…”

The verbs change, but the structure stays the same.
The format is stable. The typeface behaves. The subversion is padded.

We call it pre-approved dissent.

A kind of aesthetic conformity that preserves the aura of critique without risking incoherence.

After all, no one wants to lose their funding just because a publication refused to explain itself.

Being legible isn’t just about being understood.
It’s about being certifiable.

Producing something that can circulate in economies of credibility: academia, funding, curatorship, social networks.
A “radical” idea still needs footnotes.
A political gesture still has to be exported as a PDF.

As Judith Butler would say, legibility is a frame of recognition — a set of expectations that define what counts as real, coherent, intelligible.

In this context, format becomes a mode of governance.
A way of deciding which works enter the archive and which remain underground.

That’s why truly strange publications often go unrecognised.
They confuse the reader.
They use unreadable references.
They’re too visual, too silent, too fragmented, too bodily.
They reject the choreography of explanation.

They don’t look like research.
They don’t look like books.
They don’t even look like mistakes.

The risk of rehearsing legibility is forgetting how to stammer.
Forgetting that publishing can also mean stumbling, contradicting, retreating.

That the most alive formats are often those that crack under pressure.
The ones that resist documentation.
The ones that leave the reader not knowing where to look.

There’s a difference between structure and rigidity.
Between rhythm and repetition.
Between a publication that sustains meaning and one that merely performs it in familiar forms.

What would it mean to publish something that confuses before it convinces?
That invites misreading?
That needs to be touched, heard from afar, or cooked — instead of merely read?

These are not rhetorical questions.
They are speculative openings.

Possibilities — not just for “new formats,” but for other sensitivities.

Because when legibility becomes a rehearsal, the script is bound to be rewritten.
Or, with luck, torn up completely.

Strategies for Leaving the Page

Some ideas don’t want to be printed.
Some thoughts resist lamination.
Some urgencies won’t fit between a title and a spine.

And yet, we insist on the page.
It remains our stage of choice — white, bounded, numbered, ready.

We bind it, fold it, fetishise it. And then we call it freedom.
But freedom rarely arrives in flat format.

What if we thought of publishing not as content delivery, but as event?
Not as dissemination, but as encounter?

There are other exits.

An idea can emerge as vapour — scented air shared among bodies in the same room.
(Think of Koo Jeong A’s invisible installations, or Rirkrit Tiravanija’s shared meals, where presence is the message.)

It can manifest as vibration — a frequency too low to be archived.
(Think of Christina Kubisch’s electromagnetic walks, or Tarek Atoui’s sonic sculptures.)

It can unfold as ritual — a sequence that makes no sense outside its context.
(Marina Abramović’s durational works don’t inform; they transform.)

It can be gestural — a movement passed from person to person, without record.
(The choreographies of Trisha Brown lived more in the body than on stage.)

It can be edible, ephemeral, unreadable, infra-verbal, or simply unrepeatable.

These are not metaphors. They are editorial decisions.

Some of the most provocative publishing practices today happen through:
– A rumour whispered within a collective (like the underground networks mapped by Chto Delat)
– A textile embedding language in texture (like Otobong Nkanga’s woven vocabularies)
– A walk as territorial annotation (Phil Smith proposes “mythogeography” as counter-narrative)
– A fermenting object with microbial authorship (Cooking Sections turn food systems into performative publication)
– A space held, not filled — an expression that captures Francisco Laranjo’s approach to editorial withdrawal and solar cooking.

As he writes, “cooking with the sun becomes a way of rethinking editorial time, as an act of holding space rather than producing content” (Laranjo, 2022).

The sun sets the pace — not the editor.

Leaving the page is not fleeing from thought — it’s committing to other ways of thinking.

Publishing in a format that listens as much as it speaks.
That decays as part of its message.
That cannot be captured on a screen, footnoted, or liked.

It’s not about being obscure. It’s about recognising that the page has limits — not just technical, but ontological.

The page assumes clarity. It demands order. It favours those who know how to format their thinking in advance.

But what about those who think in spirals, in intervals, in atmospheres?
What forms are available to them? What stages receive them?

We must remember that opacity is not a failure of communication — it’s a right.

Leaving the page is claiming that right. Publishing not for legibility, but for relation.

Leaving the page is publishing in a minor key.
Not shouting from a pulpit, but murmuring in a register only some will hear — and only if they’re listening.

Of course, exits are never pure.
You leave the page and enter the frame. You leave the frame and fall into the feed.
You leave the feed and end up in a QR code in the corner of a poster.

But even partial exits count.
Even small corruptions of format.

A publication that fades.
A sentence composed to disappear.
A book that self-destructs after reading.
A gesture that happens only once.

This is not “innovation.”
It’s resistance by other means.

Publishing doesn’t need to scale.
It doesn’t need to circulate.

Sometimes, it just needs to happen.
And then vanish.

Future Fatigue

The future is exhausting.

Especially when it arrives with a title, a logo, a funding body, and a PDF full of “possibilities.”

Every year brings new calls to “reimagine,” “rethink,” or “redesign” the future of publishing — faster, fairer, greener, more inclusive. Prototypes proliferate. Toolkits circulate. White papers promise new paradigms. Somewhere, a speculative interface is being tested. The future is always in beta.

But the future, as it’s sold to us, feels strangely familiar.

It arrives in grids. It speaks fluent tech. It presents itself in colourful renderings with well-spaced optimism. It loves words like “interdisciplinary,” “open access,” “participatory,” and “next-generation.”

And above all, it must look good in a PowerPoint pitch.

This is not a critique of ambition — it’s a critique of futurity-as-performance: the way we’ve been trained to anticipate innovation through formats so predictable that even “disruption” feels like déjà vu.

Call it prediction fatigue: the psychic wear of constantly projecting, narrating speculative utopias, and submitting proposals for realities that remain forever postponed.

Much of this exhaustion is structural. Designers and cultural workers live off the promise of what’s next. The next phase. The next edition. The next horizon. Publishing becomes a treadmill of verbalized futures:

– This project will explore…
– This platform was designed to address…
– This publication imagines a world where…

All very possible. And all very exhausting.

As Lauren Berlant observed, we often cling to structurally unavailable futures. Optimism is not just cruel — it is managed. The more exhausted we are, the more futures we are asked to imagine.

Design, especially in its speculative or critical modes, has embraced this exhaustion enthusiastically. The “what if?” becomes ritual. The future becomes a medium. But few of these forward-facing projects truly challenge the infrastructures of the present. They remain polished simulations — safe, funded, formatted.

As Orit Halpern writes in Beautiful Data, our obsession with predicting and managing complexity through design says less about our visions than about our fear of the now. The future becomes an aesthetic strategy to avoid confronting present contradictions.

So how do we publish without promising a future?

How do we create editorial practices that coexist with uncertainty, with slow unfolding, with unfinished thought?

There are models:

– The pamphlet without a conclusion.
– The performance with no documentation.
– The oral history that cannot be cited.
– The collective project with no final result — just process, digression, residue.

These are not solutions. They are refusals to resolve.

Publishing without futurity is not giving up.
It is surrendering — to time, to context, to the unknown.
It’s stopping the design of the future just long enough to feel the now.

And maybe — just maybe — that’s the most radical prognosis of all.

When “Innovation” No Longer Means Anything

In every open call, there it is.
A golden word, proudly standing in the second paragraph:
Innovation.

We are told to chase it, prove it, demonstrate it.
Funders want innovation. Editors want innovation.
Conferences, résumés, residencies — all orbit this slippery promise.

A word that once meant rupture now means relevance.
A word that once opened cracks now serves to seal them.

So what does it mean to innovate in publishing today?

Apparently, it means:
– creating interactive PDFs,
– building open access platforms with labyrinthine menus,
– launching books with augmented reality filters,
– calling a two-colour risograph zine a “tactical editorial intervention.”

But beneath the glossy surface, the gesture remains the same.

A familiar performance of novelty, calibrated to the approval cycles of academia, design institutions, and cultural funding bodies.

As Evgeny Morozov argues, much of what we call innovation today is just surface variation in delivery — not a transformation of systems. The frame remains intact. The pace of production accelerates. We’re not breaking with the logic; we’re decorating it with new acronyms.

Even so-called “critical publishing” often follows this cycle. Titles proclaim “speculative,” “radical,” “experimental.” But inside, the formats are well-behaved. The layouts are balanced. The discourse is fluent. The footnotes are impeccable.

A critique that wants to be cited.

In this regime, “to innovate” becomes a moral obligation — a way of proving you’re still moving, still relevant, still in sync with institutional rhythms.

If you’re not innovating, you’re falling behind.
If you’re not redesigning, you must not care.

But this is a trap.

Because innovation, in its current usage, has become what Franco “Bifo” Berardi would call an ideology of acceleration — the belief that speed, novelty, and optimization are virtues in themselves, even when we are burning out trying to keep up.

Publishing becomes less about thought, more about throughput.
Less about relationship, more about reach.

We begin to measure value through metrics: downloads, citations, impressions, dissemination impact.

We publish to be seen, not to be transformed.
And this affects the form.

Books get shorter.
Interfaces are gamified.
Projects are designed not to hold meaning, but to capture attention.

Every publication becomes a pitch.

But there are other temporalities. Other logics.

Innovation doesn’t need to be visual. Or digital. Or productive.

Sometimes, it just means returning to the obvious:

– Being in a room with no recording devices.
– Speaking without notes.
– Editing by listening.
– Publishing by staying silent.

Sometimes, to innovate is to stop.

A publication that refuses speed, refuses clarity, refuses optimization — is also a form of resistance.

But that one won’t be shortlisted.
It won’t carry the “innovative” stamp.

And maybe that’s the best sign that you’re doing something truly new.

Dead Media, Slow Signals, and the Beauty of Obsolescence

We are told to keep up.
With platforms. With formats. With “best practices.”
To be up to date, clickable, in the cloud.

But what if we did the opposite?

What if we published like casting a message in a bottle — slow, wayward, with no specific recipient?

What if we embraced dead media?

The fax. The CD-ROM. The floppy disk. The dot matrix printer. The cassette.
Not as retro design gestures, but as acts of refusal.
Refusal to update. Refusal to optimize. Refusal to participate in the economy of constant refreshing.

As Jussi Parikka reminds us, media are not just channels — they are time capsules. They carry sedimented histories, glitches, ghosts. Publishing through dead media is not nostalgia. It’s archaeology. It allows content to move against the current, not with it.

Think of Zach Blas’s Contra-Internet Manifesto, distributed on USB sticks.
Or the Institute for Applied Autonomy’s pamphlets, delivered by robots in obsolete file formats.
Or Marta Peirano’s typewritten manifestos, photocopied and handed out in cafés.

These aren’t hipster gestures — they’re strategies of slowness, opacity, tactility.

Obsolescence, in this context, becomes a form of publishing that values what cannot be scaled.

The work doesn’t need to go viral.
It needs to persist — perhaps in a drawer, perhaps in a forgotten archive, perhaps in the memory of someone who once touched it.

There’s a certain relief in letting a publication disappear.
No analytics. No engagement metrics. No metadata.
Just the work — fragile, partial, unfinished — circulating through the cracks.

Publishing in obsolete formats is not about fetishizing the past.
It’s about reclaiming editorial sovereignty.
When you choose dead media, you choose the pace. You choose the friction. You choose who can access it — and who cannot.

In a world obsessed with reach, there’s something deeply subversive about limited editions, local transmissions, disappearing files.

As Geert Lovink writes, the future of publishing might not lie in platforms, but in networks of shared urgency — slow, affective infrastructures that bypass dominant circuits.

Sometimes, the most radical move isn’t to advance, but to divert.
A format that stutters.
A signal that fades.
A message that never fully arrives.

Let others chase innovation.
We’ll be here, whispering through disconnected lines.

How Not to Publish

In the end, this text fails to escape what it has most criticized.
It, too, wanted to exist.
It wanted to circulate.
It wanted to be legible, citable, shareable.
It wanted — with all the pretension possible — to say something that perhaps should have remained unsaid.

Maybe this essay is, at heart, a contradiction with a cover.
A critique that surrenders to the same logic it questions.
A choreography of refusal staged… through publication itself.

And maybe that’s what it is:
a publication about the desire not to publish.

A text written while hesitating.
A voice speaking amid the doubt of whether it should have said anything at all.

There are no lessons here.
No rules, no models, no clean exits.
Only one gesture:
to keep the space open.
Not for answers — but for hesitation, resistance, and incoherence.

It’s likely that all of this is unnecessary.
Or worse: dispensable.
And that the opinion expressed here may not even be mine — or only half mine, or belated, or accidental.

But maybe that’s the most honest part:
admitting that we publish out of weakness, out of impulse, out of a strange sense of urgency we can’t quite justify.

And even so,
not publishing remains a possibility —
a hypothesis that lingers, even after the last sentence.

So if you must publish,
do it like an elegant mistake.
Like an echo.
Like a breath that doesn’t need to be heard.

And if you don’t —
may that silence carry the weight of a whole gesture.

References

Ahmed, S. (2017). Living a feminist life. Duke University Press.

Barthes, R. (1977). Image–Music–Text. Fontana Press.

Berlant, L. (2011). Cruel optimism. Duke University Press.

Berardi, F. (2009). The soul at work: From alienation to autonomy. Semiotext(e).

Blas, Z. (2016). Contra-Internet Inversion Practice #3. Self-published USB project.

Drucker, J. (2014). Graphesis: Visual forms of knowledge production. Harvard University Press.

Flusser, V. (2011). Does writing have a future? University of Minnesota Press.

Glissant, É. (1997). Poetics of relation. University of Michigan Press.

Halpern, O. (2015). Beautiful data: A history of vision and reason since 1945. Duke University Press.

Lovink, G. (2019). Sad by design: On platform nihilism. Pluto Press.

Morozov, E. (2013). To save everything, click here: The folly of technological solutionism. PublicAffairs.

Parikka, J. (2012). What is media archaeology? Polity Press.

Turner, F. (2013). The democratic surround: Multimedia and American liberalism from World War II to the psychedelic sixties. University of Chicago Press.