One Small Message
- Tom T. Young
- Jul 9
- 6 min read
On Zines, Slow Comms, and Building What Lasts
A Campfire Audioessay by Tom T. Young and Flannel & Blade.
Listen Along Below (~9:00min)
One.
A Tiny Book, A Vast Universe
A few weeks ago, my husband and I sat at the kitchen table making a zine. Just a single sheet of paper, folded into a tiny book.
We painted the solar system in watercolors. We wrote short stanzas in Sharpie. Voyager drifts across every page, carrying humanity’s messages billions of miles into the dark.
When we handed the zines to our nieces, they dutifully held them all day.
The paper wrinkled in their small hands.
Later that night, their parents read aloud and introduced the girls to the sun and her planets.
It felt simple. Just a sweet project about space. But something stayed with me.
We had tried to condense a universe of wonder into eight small pages. And it was enough.
That’s the power of a zine. A handmade story. A moment of love. A reminder that communication doesn’t need permission or perfection.
In a world where everything moves faster and feels thinner, that felt radical.
Two.
Stories Under Siege
Step outside that small, handmade moment, and we’re living in a time when stories—and who controls them—shape everything we can see, do, and believe.
Everywhere we look, the crises are layered on top of each other. Rising seas and record heat. Forests on fire. Refugees forced from their homes. Genocides unfolding on our screens. A pandemic that never really ended.
Here at home, the Trump administration and its billionaire supporters are doubling down. Voter suppression, open threats of political violence, bans on books and medical care, neighbors ripped from their families.
At the same time, the tech oligarchs are buying up the platforms we use to communicate. They are turning our data and attention into a new kind of oil—profitable, extractive, and destructive.
It’s a system that rewards fear and division because it keeps radical thinkers passive, and its base angry and misinformed. A system that can decide, in an instant, to disappear your message.
We’ve seen it already. Algorithms that bury protests. Posts about Palestine flagged or deleted. Queer communities branded as dangerous or deviant.
If we’re serious about building a future beyond all this, we can’t keep relying on the tools of the people who are dismantling democracy and destroying the planet.
Slow communications go beyond nostalgia. They are a way to root our stories in relationships instead of algorithms. A way to build trust, share knowledge, and create networks that last longer than any platform.
And maybe most importantly: they remind us that even in a moment designed to isolate us, we can still choose to connect on our own terms.
Three.
A Quiet Refusal
When we say “slow communications” we don’t mean resorting to becoming a luddite (although there’s a solid movement for them these days). Slow comms are about remembering that we have other options.
They are communications rooted in intention rather than reaction. In trust rather than reach. In understanding that sometimes, the most powerful message is the one you hand to someone face to face.
When you sit at a table folding paper into a tiny book, you are doing work that can’t be automated. You are deciding what to leave in and what to leave out. You are making something that doesn’t need an algorithm to be seen.
This isn’t nostalgia. It’s a strategy. A way to stay human in systems designed to make us commodities.
There’s a long tradition behind it. When the first photocopiers appeared in libraries and offices, people started making zines because they finally had access to cheap, fast reproduction. They didn’t wait for funding. They didn’t ask permission. They just started.
We forget we can still do that.
Slow comms can look like a lot of things. A postcard mailed to a neighbor. A flyer wheat-pasted on a boarded-up shop. A community bulletin board that doesn’t care about engagement metrics. A teach-in or a gathering. Phone trees!
These practices aren’t new. But in this moment, they feel like a kind of quiet refusal.
A way to say: we don’t have to live entirely on our timelines, feeds, and FYPs.
Four.
Zines: Tiny Tools for Big Work
Zines have never really disappeared. They’ve just waited for each generation to remember them.
At their simplest, a zine is a small, self-published booklet—sometimes just a single sheet of paper, folded and cut into eight pages, filled with whatever words or images you want to share. They can be rough or polished, hand-drawn or photocopied, made alone or in community.
They started as science fiction newsletters passed hand to hand. Then they became the language of punk shows, riot grrrl collectives, and underground political movements. They were cheap to make, easy to share, and nearly impossible to censor.
Zines are small enough to slip into a pocket. But they’re big enough to hold an idea that can change someone’s mind.
I’ve seen it in my own life. The little solar system zine we made for my nieces. The one we’re working on about our dog Rusty, who chases a bee and learns about pollinators. The stack of zines I downloaded from my local DSA chapter and handed out at my local May Day rally.
The ones I’ve made with funders, to explain philanthropy and giving in plain language.
In each case, the process was the same: deciding what mattered, fitting it into a few pages, and making it feel human.
That discipline is part of what makes zines powerful. You have to think about the story from start to finish. You have to choose what stays and what goes. You have to design something people will want to pick up, to keep, to pass along.
And then there is the act of handing it over. That moment when you give someone a small, folded stack of paper that you made yourself. It’s simple. But in a time when AI can spit out infinite content in seconds, a handmade zine feels precious.
Zines are both artifact and strategy.
They are living, breathing tools for organizing, teaching, remembering, and imagining.
Five.
After the Feed
It’s easy to think of slow communications as a way to get through this moment. A survival strategy for an era of collapse and confusion.
But it can also be more than that. It can be the start of something that lasts.
Imagine communications built to outlive any platform. Local, resilient, and grounded in relationships.
Imagine if more of our work happened offline, where no algorithm decides what rises to the top. Where the person holding the wrinkled message can pass it directly into someone’s hand.
What would it look like if every campaign or organization had its own pop-up print station? If there were community zine libraries in every neighborhood? If we trusted postcards, wheat-pasted flyers, and bulletin boards as much as we trust email blasts and social feeds?
These practices aren’t lost. They’re just waiting to be picked up again.
When we choose to build them now, we’re seeding networks that can survive and grow through whatever comes next. Whether it’s another platform collapse, another surge of censorship, or something we can’t yet imagine.
And more importantly, we’re building ways to share joy, knowledge, and care that don’t depend on the same systems causing so much harm.
Because the future of communications doesn’t have to be frictionless or optimized. It can be local. Messy. Beautiful. Built for generational connection that outlasts any crisis or villain.
Six.
Make Something Together
It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the scale of it all. The crises. The noise. The speed.
But every time you make something by hand—every time you share a zine, a flyer, a postcard—you’re building a different future.
A future where we don’t have to ask permission to speak. Where we don’t have to wait for an algorithm to show our words to the right people. Where our stories can move through real hands, across real tables, into real lives.
So if you’re curious where to start, start small.
Make a zine about something you love.
Host a gathering.
Print a stack of flyers.
Send a postcard.
Fund or share community media.
Support artists and organizers who are already practicing this work.
And if you want help imagining what slow communications could look like in your organization, we’d love to talk.
Maybe years from now, my nieces will pull that little Voyager zine off the shelf. Maybe they’ll fold up their own story and hand it to someone they love.
Because in the end, that’s what this is: one small message passed forward.
From my FYP
(From my TikTok 'For You Page')
Keep Hope Services Short Zines and Comics ★ Beautiful Illustrations & Delivery ★ | Sewing Zines ★ Artistry and Information in One ★ | Decolonization Coven Free Zine Library ★ Operation Newsstand ★ |
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