Prompt: In November 1999, the Seattle IMC helped cover and coordinate the protests against the World Trade Organization (WTO) meetings in Seattle. During the four days of the meetings, the new IMC website received over 1.5 million hits, outpacing CNN for the same amount of time. The protests put Indymedia on the map. The model captured the imagination of activists and journalists, leading to the rapid development of local IMCs from Seoul to São Paulo and the birth of the global Indymedia network.  Indymedia was at once local and global, online and offline. At the base of the network were the local IMCs in cities like Seattle or Buenos Aires, each with their own website. The local sites sent their newsfeeds directly to national sites like Indymedia US or Indymedia Argentina, which in turn sent their newsfeeds to the global Indymedia website. At each level of the network there were editorial teams. The local editorial teams would choose stories to feature from the user-generated content in their open-publishing feeds, the national editorial teams would choose stories to feature from the local newsfeeds, and the global editorial team would choose stories to feature from the national newsfeeds.  Indymedia also had a presence beyond the web, with print, radio, and video projects. And, importantly, in many parts of the world, local IMCs had physical offices where activists and media-makers came together to make decisions, create media, and build community projects. Within five years of launching in 1999, the Indymedia network claimed over 200 locally based “citizen newsrooms,” publishing news (internet, radio, print, and TV) in thirty languages on six continents.  The people who took part in Indymedia saw themselves as participants in the social movements of the day. Paying homage to the Zapatistas, they referred to themselves as IMCistas. Building on the Zapatista concept of “many yeses,” Indymedia emphasized building connections between different movements and struggles. The media infrastructure would be a connective tissue, linking a plurality of voices, histories, and visions into a global “movement of movements” mobilized against capital.

Response: Hashtag Revolutionaries (2005–Present) Indymedia peaked around 2005 and then began to decline. The biggest reason was the rise of corporate social media platforms. These platforms also deployed user-generated content and the power of networked communication. Their primary goal was not to connect people for the purpose of political struggle, however, but rather to monetize these connections.  Faced with a well-funded corporate adversary, Indymedia quickly lost ground. In the decade between 2004 to 2014, as Eva Giraud notes, nearly 70 percent of IMCs previously functioning were offline or inactive, with others posting just a handful of posts per day. Regionally, that left IMCs across Africa and Asia shuttered, and the numbers dwindling in Latin America, Europe, Oceania, and North America. In roughly the same period, adult engagement with social media grew from 5 percent to 80 percent in the United States. In 2006, Time magazine declared “You” as its Person of the Year, celebrating the growth and influence of user-generated content on platforms like MySpace and Facebook. In 2011, Time’s person of the year was “The Protestor,” celebrating the seemingly ubiquitous digital activist as an agent of change.  This same period saw the emergence of a cycle of social media-powered protests—often known as the “Twitter revolutions.” This cycle began with the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings in 2009 and 2010. The Arab Spring uprisings, in turn, stoked simmering anti-austerity movements across southern Europe and the Mediterranean. In Spain, a mobilization known as the Indignados occupied the main squares of major cities, proposing radical experiments in direct democracy. This, famously, inspired the assemblies that gave birth to Occupy Wall Street in 2011.  While these movements made use of social media, they often also retained elements of the Indymedia model. The Occupy encampments had their own self-organized media teams, which prioritized grassroots journalism and saw storytelling as a means to deepen people’s political commitments and strengthen their bonds with one another. Social media was important, but not yet hegemonic: it was seen as a bulletin board for announcements of upcoming demonstrations and meetings, as well as requests for support.


Prompt: As such, Occupy acted as a bridge between two movement media paradigms, combining aspects of the Indymedia model with the tactical use of social media. But in subsequent years, as Occupy receded, the last vestiges of the Indymedia legacy would disappear. As social media’s dominance grew, it began to take on an ever greater role in the media strategy of social movements, from Black Lives Matter in 2013 to Standing Rock in 2016, all the way through the 2020 uprising against the murder of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery. The dependence on social media came to be total.

Response: Superficial Solidarities Social media has obvious advantages for organizers. It can be used to galvanize attention around an issue and scale up a protest quickly. New participants can be inspired to take action as activist-commentators at unprecedented speed and scale, and in the process, generate extensive global solidarity. As Sarah J. Jackson, Moya Bailey, and Brooke Foucault Welles argue in #HashtagActivism, social media also gives movements the chance to make important narrative interventions. In some cases, movement use of social media can change the very terms used to frame issues, as with the George Floyd rebellion, which ushered in the wider acceptance of “white supremacy” as part of the conversation surrounding police violence.  But social media also exposes movements to many vulnerabilities. The solidiarities it generates are often superficial: movement use of social media can easily devolve into repetitive messaging in echo chambers without collective gains in narrative power—a change in the stories and values that hold sway in society—or a translation to real-world militancy. In all cases, the logic is determined not by a radical politics of participation and organization, as in the Indymedia model, but by the individual user’s decision to follow, like, comment—in short, pick and choose (within the ruse of algorithmic “choice”) which leaders to listen to and which profiles to amplify. This short-circuits the important but slower work of belonging to—and being responsible to—a movement culture. The small doses of interpersonal connection that social media platforms are built to deliver stand in for collective gains of social power.  Corporate social media platforms are governed by a capitalist logic that exists to make profit, while rewiring our emotional and cognitive dependencies toward that end. Social movements may recruit people through social media, but without real relationship-building, without a sense of shared responsibility, the commitments it mobilizes are weak. Moreover, the information that activists share on social media flows within a broader stream of information about anything and everything, which risks distraction, trivialization, and co-optation. On social media, movements must deal with the constant threat of having their agenda and messaging hijacked by corporate interests, politicians, funding foundations, and mainstream media—all of which was on full display during the George Floyd rebellion.


Prompt: A further challenge is that the attention economy of the corporate platforms is inherently skewed toward promoting hateful and divisive politics. As Safiya Umoja Noble shows in Algorithms of Oppression, the algorithms that organize these platforms reflect and reproduce gender and racial oppression. They also amplify oppression by creating fertile ground for oppressive forces. To take one example, Jack Z. Bratich’s On Microfascism documents how contemporary far-right mobilizations are often preceded by the networked “microfascism” of loner men who find themselves through the “manosphere,” a collection of online spaces that encourages the performance of misogyny and racial hatred. These dynamics are foundational to the success of far-right movements in the US and internationally.

Response: For the left, this means that social media is not simply neutral terrain to be traversed. Rather, it has a structural bias toward hyperindividualism, demagoguery, and reactionary politics. Creating a resilient movement culture that is sustained by strong personal relationships and a spirit of collective action is difficult to do in such an environment.  Most crucially, when movements become dependent on corporate social media platforms, the capacity to build self-determined media power of their own wanes. And without that power, movements that arise quickly often evaporate just as quickly. This was particularly pronounced in the George Floyd rebellion, which initially put police abolition under a mainstream spotlight, only to be swiftly reduced to reformist talking points. Without their own media infrastructure, movements are at the mercy of corporate media systems of one kind or another, which strongly favor the maintenance of existing hierarchies.  Back to Black If one thing is clear from the last thirty years, it’s that media plays an important role in how movements are made. Social media has offered movements some advantages, but on balance, the disadvantages are far greater. It has impeded the ability for organizers to build lasting relationships between different people and between different struggles. As a result, we see a more fragmented and fragile social movement landscape than the one inhabited by the anti-globalization and anti-war movements of the late 1990s and early 2000s. The different levels of coherence reflect, in large part, the different media paradigms. In the Indymedia era, organizers built their own media infrastructure and created a set of organizational structures to govern it. In the social media era, by contrast, the strategy shifted from “be the media” to “get the message out as widely as possible” on corporate platforms.  Today, social media’s dominance in movement communication and coordination means that we lack the ability to build collective self-determination around narrative, news, and analysis. There are indeed important activist media projects such as Unicorn Riot, but they are few and far between, and their capacity is limited by the lack of movement infrastructure. To build a stronger Left, we need to reimagine our media strategy. In particular, we need to learn from the legacy of Indymedia, and recreate an independent media network that can scale from the local to the national to the global while cohering multiple fronts of struggle into a unified opposition.


Prompt: But we can’t simply abandon social media. It is too dominant, too ubiquitous, and, occasionally, too useful. For instance, its use in connecting friends and families in a time of mass migration and refugee resettlement, driven by climate catastrophe and war, remains an essential lifeline. Rather, we should aim to loosen our dependencies on the corporate platforms while also rebuilding our autonomy by developing collectively managed media infrastructures—ones that can sustain a new movement of movements and resurrect the old Zapatista dream of an “intercontinental network of alternative communication.” It’s no longer a matter of choice, but necessity.

Response: Retros: Intro There is a lot of labor that goes into founding and running a magazine, and few if any guides to help one understand what choices matter and how to consider them. Many times through our growing pains as a DIY publishing project, we talked about the idea of having the equivalent of a “developer blog” to share what we learned, as we evolved from only sort of knowing what we were doing to finally figuring a few things out. We never got around to it, but better to do it retrospectively than not at all.


Prompt: In agile software development, there is a practice of “retros”—structured meetings where the team reflects on what went well, what didn’t go so well, and what to change next time around. On the occasion of the magazine transitioning from one era to the next, members of the Logic founding team took some time to talk through our accomplishments and our failures, and to reflect on some of the key themes that have guided Logic as an aesthetic and political project. We also invited some friends of the project to reminisce along with us. We tried not to be sentimental but did not always succeed.

Response: In the spring of 2016, I had the privilege of sitting in on early meetings with a number of Logic’s co-founders, Ben, Christa, Jim, and Moira, as they talked through their ambitions for the magazine and tinkered with a mission statement. Like many small publications, Logic came together over takeout containers in various living rooms and at rickety tables in dive bars—there was no budget, no office, no staff, no immediately obvious readership, even though we all suspected, correctly, that the magazine would find its people. This was pre-election, and pre-“techlash”—most mainstream publications were only just beginning to depart from triumphalist and uncritical narratives about Silicon Valley. The founders wanted Logic to be a bridge of sorts: between industry and media, between software engineers and academics. They wanted it to be critical, to interrogate the industry’s history, mores, and ideologies—to say nothing of its relationship to rising authoritarianism and deepening inequality—without losing sight of technology’s humanistic and political potential, its magic. Locally, they wanted to build community; what small magazine doesn’t? This seemed classically idealistic until the steamy, oversubscribed launch party in early 2017, where it immediately became clear that there were a lot of tech workers in San Francisco seeking more rigorous, critical engagement with their industry than the industry would ever offer. As a member of this group, I found the camaraderie cathartic and exhilarating. It is probably an indictment of the broader culture that it also felt so rare.


Prompt: There is more space in the culture these days for thoughtful writing and discourse on technology and Silicon Valley. This is unequivocally a good thing, even when certain varieties of tech criticism inevitably overshoot and miss the mark. What looked like a niche in early 2016 has grown into a beat of sorts: podcasts and newsletters abound. The boundaries of the conversation are stretching. Small institutions survive by staying nimble, and it’s a smart moment to try something new. Logic fulfilled its early mission to build bridges; it seems only appropriate to hand the magazine over to a second generation of editors, who will explore new angles, new passages, new collaborators. I can’t wait to see what they’ll build, and where they’ll go.

Response: Jim Fingal (JF): For most people, their experience of editing is self-editing: you write a draft of an essay for school and then you spend some time moving the words around until you’re done. But it seems like the process of working with a magazine editor to develop a piece is a much more structured, multiphase, complex activity. I’d be curious to hear more about what that process looks like—and what’s special about how we’ve done it at Logic? Ben Tarnoff (BT): A large part of the purpose of the Logic project has been to bring different constituencies together: to connect tech workers with organizers with academics. But, in order to do so, you need to create connective tissue. And one of the ways to create connective tissue is by developing an editorial process that will make these different groups comprehensible to one another.  Logic, at its best, is a magazine for people who don’t usually read, written by people who don’t usually write. That’s a bit of an exaggeration, but a useful one. We’re not based in New York. We don’t inhabit a clearly defined literary or intellectual scene. Our readership, at least our imagined readership, is composed largely of tech workers (defined in the broadest sense) and organizers, activists, people doing different kinds of political work. This isn’t the typical little magazine audience. And our contributors are mostly specialists of one kind or another—academics or technologists—which means they don’t usually have much experience writing for a general audience, or sometimes even writing at all.  As a result, our editorial process is particularly labor-intensive. That’s not to say that experienced writers don’t need editing, too. They do, but they’re familiar with the conventions, with the rhythms of an editorial relationship. When you’re working with someone who hasn’t really been edited before, you’re teaching them how to be edited in addition to editing them.  JF: One way to make different groups of people comprehensible to one another is to homogenize them—to make them all sound alike. I don’t think that’s what our project is, though. We’re not trying to make an academic sound like a tech worker or vice-versa, but we do want to bring the conversation together into a common register. How do we do that?


Prompt: BT: We don’t want to homogenize, but we do want to find a consistent tone for the magazine. That’s a struggle, because our contributors come from a range of backgrounds and a range of intellectual traditions. And while we aspire to make our prose as approachable as possible, some pieces are inevitably going to be a bit more advanced than others. There are tech workers who are only beginning to ask the very first questions about the kind of work they do and how their workplaces are organized. Conversely, there are those who have spent years working to develop a sophisticated analysis of those issues. You have to find a way to create a magazine that will be inviting and engaging to those different kinds of readers. That’s hard to do, and I’m not sure we always succeed.

Response: Moira Weigel (MW): Bringing together these different kinds of expertise doesn’t necessarily imply a hierarchy of expertise. I often fall back on the metaphor of the party, of convening people in space. You want to create an atmosphere that’s coherent but not all the same.  JF: There are fascinating things to be gleaned from people who come from different domains and with different levels of experience with writing. But I imagine that means there are different approaches that the editorial team has to take, depending on the background of the contributor and where they are in their journeys as writers. What are those different approaches? How do you adapt your style of editing to the individual writer? Alex Blasdel (AB): Regardless of the writer, I tend to lean on the genre conventions of the sort of magazine writing that I’ve been trained in. Those conventions exist for good reason.


Prompt: JF: What are those conventions? AB: Maybe the most important one is that the opening section of a piece should do three things. The first is to draw readers in—maybe the opening has some of the piece’s most interesting material or it’s the scene that opens a narrative or it illustrates in miniature the problem that the rest of the piece is going to address. There are infinite ways of pulling readers in. One of our pieces began with an evocative description of the course of the Colorado River. But you need to find a way to dramatize the stakes right off the bat.  The second thing the opening section needs to do is to situate the piece within a broader context and make the stakes explicit. You’ve tried to draw readers in, now you need to tell them why they should go beyond being interested to really care about the subject of the piece. I thought Brian Justie did an excellent job on this in his piece from Issue 13: “Distribution,” by arguing for the significance of the struggles between labor and automation at the US Postal Service, which employs half a million workers and has the third-largest information technology infrastructure in the world.

Response: Then the third thing an opening section should do is to make some sort of claim for the significance of the piece itself—yes, the topic is important, but why should people read this particular article about it? What is our piece going to offer in the way of insight that other articles can’t? Often, it tells the reader, “I’m going to help you think about this topic in a new and worthwhile way.” Veena Dubal’s piece on the history of gig work in Issue 10: Security is a masterclass in how to do this.


Prompt: Once you’ve done those three things—sparked a reader’s interest, established the stakes of the topic, and made an argument for why the piece itself is worth reading—the rest of the piece basically writes itself. (Not really, lol.) JF: Ben, you have often talked about “the stakes” as a critical consideration for which pieces to commission in the first place. So it’s not just something you try to develop in the editing, but also has to be present in some form in the pitch.  BT: Yes, defining the stakes is crucial because it’s a way to define what we mean by writing that is addressed to a non-specialist. If you’re a specialist, you are used to addressing an audience that shares your interest in a subject. You cannot, in the pages of our magazine, assume that your reader shares your interest in a subject. You have to tell the reader why they should care. And that is a convention of the type of magazine writing that Alex is describing.

Response: I want to underscore something else that was implicit in what Alex said, which is the importance of structure. He and I share the belief that structure is the alpha and omega of writing, and it’s the one thing that nearly all writers need help with, even very experienced writers.  Thinking is not linear. We don’t think in a straight line. But writing is linear. It’s a sequence of words, a sequence of sentences, a sequence of paragraphs, a sequence of pages. So you have to find a way to wrangle a non-linear thought process into the linear sequences of text. That’s a difficult process, and it’s probably what we spend most of our time working on with our contributors.  MW: As an academic who struggles with structure, I think it’s partly because we’re trained to think of our work as adding our little flower to the field that is our area of expertise. Whereas with Logic pieces, the point is to hold your reader’s hand and run across the field.


Prompt: When you’re writing for a non-specialist audience, and you can’t presume either knowledge of or investment in your topic, you need to create the momentum to take someone on a journey with you. The stakes don’t have to be life or death. But you have to create movement, flow. And that is ultimately an effect of the structure.

Response: Coach, Cheerleader, Psychiatrist Xiaowei Wang (XW): Part of our audience is tech folks. And one of the genres of computer science paper that they might be used to reading is, “Here’s the problem, and here’s the answer that’s going to solve the problem.” As you’ve been putting together the editorial tone of Logic, how do you react to the idea that every piece has to present a solution to a problem?  BT: I remember having a conversation with Meredith Whittaker some years ago in which she pointed out this tendency among tech people to demand that any diagnosis of a problem be accompanied by a solution. So she’d raise concerns about the social effects of a particular ML system and they’d say, “Well, what’s the solution?” And that was a way of shutting down the conversation. Because the solution they wanted was a straightforward technical one—a tweak to the algorithm, not some kind of complicated political project.


Prompt: We’ve published a range of pieces, and some do point toward possible solutions. But, as editors, I hope we’ve discouraged our writers from claiming any easy victories. If you’re going to propose a solution, we want it to feel earned. We want it to feel specified.  AB: The solution is often the least interesting part. One of the maxims that I use is that you have to start where your readers are. And our readers don’t even necessarily know what the problem is. Why are the genealogies of machine learning datasets a problem, for example? What are the dimensions of the problem? Why have other solutions fallen short? We want as fine-grained a mapping of the terrain as possible.  JF: I know we’ve sometimes discussed the tendency of certain pieces to seek a solution where there isn’t an easy one, a piece that can be really illuminating in its analysis of a problem, before ending with a paragraph that basically concludes: “The solution is that we have to fundamentally overhaul everything about our society, economics, and culture.” It’s like: sure, maybe that is a solution, but it’s an unsatisfying way to end a piece.

Response: MW: It’s true, as Ben says, that we don’t occupy a traditional literary scene. But we do have a certain literary streak to us, and that’s expressed in our shared desire to create a space for writing about technology that doesn’t demand simple solutions, whether it’s swapping algorithm A for algorithm B or, you know, full communism.


Prompt: I’m thinking of Alyssa Battistoni’s piece for us on Biosphere 2, or Miriam Posner’s piece for us on supply chain software. Those pieces have a normative and critical dimension, but they’re mostly trying to describe how a system works.  AB: There’s always an argument you’re making implicitly along the way, just by virtue of the facts that you marshal and the way that you organize them. All of those choices are motivated. And you want to be in charge, as a writer and an editor, of the effects those choices have on the reader. Even a piece that, on the surface, may seem purely descriptive can make a very serious argument about the way the world is ordered. Every piece is an opinion piece to a certain extent.

Response: JF: As editors, how do you motivate writers to make that journey? I sometimes feel like you have to play the role of coach, cheerleader, and psychiatrist all at the same time. I know that you spent a lot of time having conversations with people even before they had something to pitch—just to hear about what they were working on, and plant the seeds for future pieces.


Prompt: MW: Especially at the beginning, you just have to get people excited about an idea. I often feel like a therapist. I’ll tell people, “Just talk to me.” And then after twenty or thirty minutes, I’ll reflect back to them the themes that I’ve heard. Then I might ask them to write a paragraph that captures the idea, and captures what excites them about the idea. That paragraph serves as a touchstone they can come back to later on, to help them understand why they wanted to write the piece.

Response: Especially early on, when we were willing Logic into existence, we would have meetings as a team to figure out the topics we thought were interesting or important, and go through our mental databases of people who were working on those topics. Then we would reach out to them to see if they’d be interested in writing.  And that was a whole process. Because you’d go to Person X and say, “You wrote about this thing, we’re interested in that thing.” And they’d say, “Oh, I don’t want to write exactly about that. But there’s this other adjacent thing.” So you’d talk about that. And you’d get into a collaboration. For me, that was always the most exciting part of the magazine.  BT: The editorial relationship is a collaborative one in the sense that you are helping to guide someone’s writing process and engaging in varying degrees of co-writing with them. But it’s also a managerial relationship. You’re kind of like the person’s boss.  Now, that dynamic is somewhat diminished in our case because we frankly can’t pay people enough for it to be that important for their livelihood. Nevertheless, there is a power dynamic present: you’re giving them deadlines, you’re giving them direction. And you’re asking them to do a lot of work without much in the way of monetary reward. Which means you need to find a way to motivate them.


Prompt: We’ve been talking about the importance of stakes. But you don’t just have to define the stakes of a piece for the reader. You also have to define the stakes for a writer. Why is the writer writing this piece? What is the source of their commitment? It’s our responsibility as editors to help them answer that question, and then to use that answer to propel them through what is often a fairly laborious writing and editing process.  AB: I don’t think I have the best bedside manner as an editor. And having three children has made it even worse. My ability to tolerate situations in which people don’t do what I ask them to do has really gone downhill.  Because of the dynamics that Ben is talking about, I try to be very upfront about how much work it’s going to be. I try to explain that writing is not just something the writer does, but an act of co-creation between the writer and the editor. We’re working together to make the piece as good as possible and together we own the finished product. The writer owns it. The editor owns it. The magazine owns it.

Response: But, you know, neither the writer nor the editor knows in advance what the finished product will look like. It’s only through the difficult process of writing and editing that you figure out what the piece is supposed to be about. It might not be until the third or fourth draft that you’re like, “Oh, I see it.” Scar Tissue JF: What’s different about what we publish in Logic from other magazines? What makes a piece of writing feel like it’s Logic-y? AB: When deciding upon pieces we try to ask ourselves certain questions. Where’s our contribution as a magazine and what’s most interesting for our readers? Where is the new thinking? I think a good Logic piece also revels in the technical details. I loved pushing writers to really explain how the technologies that we’re surrounded by actually work to shape the world. Rodrigo Ochigame’s piece “The Informatics of the Oppressed,” which Ben edited, was a wonderful example of this.


Prompt: MW: I think we wanted to see a certain commitment to precision and specificity, along with some ethical and political orientation, but not in a dogmatic or party-line sort of way. AB: I’d be interested to have a longer conversation sometime about the politics of the magazine. What were the politics of the magazine, and how were they expressed in the pieces? XW: Ben and I had a conversation with some folks from Reboot, and he summarized Logic’s politics as, “We’re creating a big tent, with generally leftist politics under the tent.” MW: We were trying to capture a piece of the world. I always think of our anonymous interview with an Amazon engineer. All these people on Twitter were like, “This guy’s a jerk. He’s just mouthing off.” And I was like, “Yeah, obviously he’s mouthing off! That’s the point.”  Our anonymous interviews exemplified a central goal of Logic, which was to capture very specific and textured voices from the world of technology, and not necessarily in the service of an argument.

Response: AB: Of course, the best writing has always been the editorial notes in the front of the book.  MW: That’s not true.  AB: It always blows me away that you’re able to come up with these beautiful and moving introductions to the issue within the space of forty-eight hours. MW: I do think the editorial note that has to go down in history is the one I wrote on my phone with Ben’s help for Issue 9: “Nature” before getting my C-section with our first kid. I was lying there in the paper dress, and Ben and I were like, “Shit, we better finish this before this baby arrives.”  AB: Something else I want to touch on is the question of what made this whole endeavor worthwhile for me personally. I respect the magazine and love the work, but a big part of what made it enjoyable was discussing pieces with Ben. We had a lot of fun working together.


Prompt: XW: Alex, how do you think your experience with Logic will stick with you? How will it shape your future editing? AB: Oh, to be honest, I’m never going to edit anyone ever again.  XW: Oh my God, did we scar you that badly? AB: No, it’s just—time now feels very short, for lots of reasons, mostly having to do with kids and being lazy. I just want to focus on my own writing, for what it’s worth.  As Ben pointed out in his postscript to the editorial note in Issue 15: “Beacons,” there wasn’t anything like Logic when you guys started it. And now there’s a lot more valuable tech critique out there. So I’m excited about handing over this project to you and Khadijah, so you can renew and reshape it. Not everyone gets to walk away from a magazine and have it take on a wonderful new life.

Response: At a time when the default assumption was that a new publishing project would start out online, Logic chose a print-first mindset from the start. This wasn’t the easiest choice: a lot of labor goes into making a 8.5”x5.5” perfect-bound black and white book printed on 60 lb offset paper. And that labor is often purposefully invisible, in order to minimize distractions and maximize the pleasure of the reading experience.  Logic’s creative director Xiaowei Wang caught up with Jim Fingal and Christa Hartsock, two founding members of the magazine who have done the most to define the physical form of the magazine, and how it gets to our readers. They talked about how Logic as a print artifact materialized from an idea discussed over drinks and takeout dinners, why we chose to make a print artifact in the first place, and the surprises and learnings encountered along the way.


Prompt: Starting out Xiaowei Wang (XW): Let’s talk about how Logic got started. How did we kick off the Agile Publishing Revolution? Jim Fingal (JF): [Laughs] The “Agile Publishing Revolution” was a joke early on, because a lot of us had worked in software before, and connected to the agile mindset of shipping the smallest thing that was functional, and iterating from there. That was very much the approach that we took–we figured out a lot as we went along.  Christa Hartsock (CH): When we were starting up the magazine, we talked a lot about the DIY ethos, zine culture, and the idea that anyone should be able to start a publication. There are similar ideas to agile in that, but also just the fundamental sense that you can have an idea, you can get together with your friends, and you can put something physical into the world, and then go from there.  XW: I think one of the first times I met Christa was at a zine skillshare at the Democracy Center in Cambridge.  CH: Because many of us were working on tech, there are pieces of agile that speak to the same idea, and it was funny for us to talk about “agile publishing”. But DIY was the underlying current that actually informed how we got together–Jim and I met doing college radio, and that’s how we know Ben too.  JF: Ben and I bonded over a mutual love for hardcore music in the early 2000s.  CH: That also related to our idea of Logic as a political project, of how we thought about money and how we structured paying people. We sort of said early on that we didn’t individually intend on making a profit from the project, and as a core team don’t intend to rely on it to make money.

Response: JF: Not that that’s ultimately a recipe for a sustainable institution, but it reduced the barrier to starting out. Tech mag in meatspace XW: I guess that’s a good way of pivoting to the question of Logic as a physical object and the process of putting together that first issue. We were all working in tech, spending our time in the realm of the virtual, and then decided to make a physical magazine.  CH: One of the questions that we got a lot early on was–you’re starting a magazine in 2016 about technology, why is it a print publication, why not just have it online?  At the very beginning, I remember there was a brief moment where we considered not having a website at all–that it would just be a thing that would purely exist in physical form, and you’d have to come upon it in physical space to engage with it. We didn’t go that route, but we decided that the physicality of the book was really important.  What does it mean to have a physical magazine? It means you can give it to people. It has a weight to it, it lasts and we weren’t going to be worried about it falling off the front page of an algorithmic feed. You could steal it, you could reverse shoplift it into the lobbies of tech companies.  We admired other tech-focused print zines, like the earlier Processed World and more recent Recompiler.


Prompt: But also, a physical object connects you to a physical place and a physical community. To me, that was something that was really compelling. We got started in San Francisco. If we had a physical book, it was a way to make friends with other people who were in the same physical space, and also be a part of the city’s literary history, whether that is having your book be in City Lights, or giving an excuse to talk shop with other small presses. Those are connections that I think wouldn’t have been made if we just produced digital work.

Response: Also, we weren’t that interested in the pace that came along with online publishing.  JF: We all had day jobs and didn’t have unlimited hours to work on this project. When you are doing it in your spare time, putting together a print object three times a year can actually fit into your schedule. Depending on what you’re doing for it, there’s a lot of spiky work, but you also get lots of breaks in between it. The relentless pace of online publishing–the expectation of commissioning and editing and publishing new content every week–did not align with where we as individuals were at, in terms of the time that we had to commit to the project.  CH: From the beginning we always wanted to make sure we paid contributors. Whether or not we’ve been able to pay enough is another thing, but when we thought about online publishing, it was pretty clear that the internet had not figured out how to monetize content outside of selling ads, and we didn’t want to sell ads, or have a paywall. So creating this physical object was the way that we were able to at least sustain the finances that we had–people are willing to pay for physical texts much more readily than digital ones.  JF: Print is an enduring technology that has the wondrous property that you can turn ideas into a product that people are willing to pay money for. That is not necessarily the case with online formats.  XW: I think another thing we slowly found out is that there are some contexts in which print is actually more accessible than online. We often think of online as the ultimate accessibility–it’s the internet, everyone can go online! But that’s actually not true. By virtue of being a print book, we are accessible to people who don’t use the internet very much–we can be in places like prison libraries as well.


Prompt: JF: I think the final thing I’ll say on the “why print” topic is–a number of us starting the magazine just had an affinity for the world of small magazines and literary publishing. Many of us had worked with and were attracted to the feel of something like the Paris Review, or Granta, or early McSweeneys–that kind of softcover, perfect bound, largely black and white book. We based a lot of the physical specs of Logic on Animal Shelter by Semiotex(t)e, which we really liked from a design perspective. It was intentionally a different approach from the big, bright, design-forward, in-your-face aesthetic of something like Wired.

Response: Luckily for us, it was also massively less expensive to print a black and white book versus a full color glossy magazine format. Bootstrapping Everything XW: Can you talk a bit about our process of choosing a printer, and laying out the book?  JF: We use InDesign to lay out the magazine. I can’t remember where the original layouts and the template pages came from. I eventually got more involved in operationalizing things but wasn’t that involved with the original design.


Prompt: CH: I think it was Xiaowei and I collaborating–I remember a lot of back and forth, one person making significant additions to the book, and then pulling those changes into templates and trying to make it more standardized going forward. We had a lot of learnings along the way. Tech Against Trump, which came out between our first and second issues, was incredibly painful because of the footnotes–our original footnote design was really beautiful, but it required manually moving text boxes around. After that, we decided we needed to change the designs so that they’re easier to lay out and figure out some efficiencies that would take out some of the manual labor.  XW: When I talk to folks who are doing print publications now they often use Figma or Canva. It’s wild that just in seven years it’s changed so much.

Response: JF: Another thing you need to worry about when having a print object is making sure there’s a barcode for retailers to scan. The unique identifier for the barcode is called an ISBN, and is specific to the format—you’ll need one for print, one for digital. You can buy the ISBNs online, which we did at first one-by-one even though they’re cheaper in bulk because we had a very limited budget. Then, we just used a free online barcode generator to slap it on the cover.


Prompt: CH: On top of laying things out, we had to decide how to actually print the books. There’s a cost continuum in printing from print on demand, to digital printing, to offset printing. Print on demand is much more expensive on a per unit basis, and there’s not much discount really as you print more copies.  Then there is digital printing, which costs less than print on demand, and doesn’t have a large setup cost, but there is a limit to how low the cost per unit gets when printing in bulk.  Offset printing has a larger up-front cost, but then after that your cost per unit is really low. There’s an inflection point in terms of cost, which I think for us was around 1,000 copies, where below that it makes sense to print digital due to the lower setup costs, and above it makes sense to do offset because of the lower price per unit.

Response: JF: We decided early on to just not do print on demand. I got advice from our friend Gabe Durham who runs Boss Fight Books. He used a lot of print on demand services early on, then eventually moved on to do larger print runs, both because printing individual books is expensive and the quality of print on demand was pretty variable.  We decided to look for a printer that we could do small runs with. I ended up reaching out to folks at presses whose books I admired–Timeless Infinite Light, Song Cave, Justin Carder who ran Wolfman at the time. They were very super helpful and generous with their recommendations. A few of them recommended McNaughton and Gunn, which is a printer in Michigan, and ended up going with them, initially doing digital printing runs. We were pretty happy with the quality, especially the “luxury matte finish” covers–a lot of people commented on the silky hand-feel of the books.


Prompt: For the first issue, we printed 500 copies. It was around $1,350 at the time for the print run, and then another almost $300 to freight to our house. So order of magnitude, it was a little more than $3 a book to print, in addition to the commissioning fees, packaging materials, and postage to mail it out. We ended up setting the cover price as $15. That decision was pretty unscientific, but was similar to how much other small magazines cost, and a back-of-the-envelope calculation told us it would allow us to cover our costs, pay writers, and at least not lose money.  CH: When we initially talked about starting Logic, we really weren’t sure how many issues to print in that first run? If you’re going from zero to nothing, it’s like: who knows, are five or a thousand people going to buy it? There was no real way of knowing. So early on we stood up a website with just our manifesto and a sign-up box for our mailing list. Sign ups for that mailing list gave us a sense of how many people were interested and we used that in part to figure out how many issues to print.

Response: JF: We also then set up a BigCartel shop, which was a very 2000s emo move.  CH: Having a web store and directly selling issues to our readers early on was pretty important. When you sell stuff from your own web store, you keep all of the money from the sales minus your costs. Whereas if you go through distributors or to bookstores, you usually make at most half the cover price of each book that you sell. Other smaller publishers like Verso, Haymarket, and the like do really significant sales in their online stores, which I assume is partly how they can do such amazing seasonal discounts. The fact that we were selling directly online in the beginning allowed us to build a financial base that would have been hard if we’d started only in bookstores, because the profit margin is just so much lower even if you’re selling to them directly and not going through a distributor to place in their stores.


Prompt: JF: Yeah, with physical magazine distribution there’s usually a 50-50 split with the distributor, and then it’s expected that they’ll sell about 50% of those, meaning you usually expect to make 25% of cover price at best as the producer. It’s standard for it to be a quasi-consignment set up with the distributor where they don’t pay for stock upfront. They are charged only for what is sold, then whatever is not sold is just destroyed, they’re not sent back to you. You’re paid only when the magazine comes off the shelf. So for us, publishing three times a year, it’s nearly a year after we finish an issue that we get paid.

Response: CH: Things are even more complicated for magazines, since the previous issue basically deadstock once the next issue arrives. They don’t have the shelf life of books in the eyes of distributors. Anne Trubek who runs Belt Publishing writes a lot about the economics of small publishers, including working with distributors and the challenges of unknowable delayed income and remainder practices. It was totally eye opening for me.  JF: I think we always just assumed physical distribution would mostly be a way of advertising the magazine. We didn’t even really try it for our first issue–our initial distribution was just me carrying a box of books over to Peter Maravelis at City Lights.  CH: We love bookstores and we love the community and depth of expertise that they cultivate. City Lights has always been a huge supporter. We’ve done amazing events at Green Apple in the Park. But for us, it was clear selling in bookstores alone wasn’t a way to financially sustain the magazine.


Prompt: Sending things out into the world XW: So what happened after someone placed an order on the web store? I remember when we started, we were fulfilling every order by hand.  JF: Yep–we had a system called Pulley for digital fulfillment, but shipping books involved a lot of manual exporting of data and spreadsheet wrangling, packing, shipping.  CH: Fulfilling things by hand is obviously a very manual process. You get the issues shipped by pallet to you, you have to unload them, you have to store them, you have to bring them up stairs, you have to pack them up, then you have to bring them back downstairs and take them to the Post Office.

Response: Some of the stuff that was surprisingly annoying early on was things like formatting shipping labels. We went through different methods of formatting and printing the labels. I think Jim had a special Google sheet where he had a formula that would format all the addresses that then we could copy and paste into an InDesign document.  For some reason, I was like, you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to write a Ruby app to generate printing labels. And so I wrote something that took a CSV, and because of the time I was doing a bunch of stuff with PDFs for work, I made a Ruby app that made a web server that used CSS to print a sheet of labels based on the CSV.  JF: I think we used that like once or twice.  CH: It was terrible to use it, so we never used it again.  As a rule, at Logic, we’ve avoided building technology, because as technologists, we know how much work it is to maintain it.  Initially whenever we would receive an issue, we had shipping parties with friends, which was partially out of necessity and partially just a fun activity. When we were in LA, we did a few Boss Fight shipping parties with Gabe. I remember sitting in his living room, just chatting while stuffing envelopes and putting labels on them. And we were like, wasn’t that fun? And so for us, we ended up inviting friends over, like you and Ian, I remember Adrian Daub, Wendy Liu, and Jim’s sister Jen coming over at some point and helping out with the assembly line.


Prompt: JF: There’s a real pleasure in getting people together, feeding them pizza, and packing bubble envelopes. And always debating the most “efficient” way to do it. CH: Another thing that was surprisingly annoying for us was printing postage. At the very beginning we would take the packages to the post office at the old People’s Temple site in the Fillmore, which was terrible for our purposes. There was no parking outside. We had to temporarily park in a loading zone, and took incredibly heavy Ikea bags full of envelopes in, and then we printed the postage on site using the postage machine since we didn’t know how to do it at home.

Response: JF: We could only print like ten stamps at a time. There was a limit of how many stamps you could print at once, and total dollar limit of per card swipe, and we had to keep retyping the postage amount for Media Mail every time. That was truly a huge pain in the ass. CH: At some point multiple of our cards got marked for fraud while we were using the terminal and we couldn’t use them anymore. At that point it was like, well, shit, this is terrible and needs to change. We figured out how to pre-print postage from home, which was glorious, and started dropping them off at the post office in the Haight, which was smaller but easier to get to.  As we started to scale–the people who worked at the post office were just so lovely, but also when they saw us coming in with boxes and boxes of envelopes, they were just like, please, no. They would open up the back and have us dump them directly into the mail carts. Then they were just like: please, arrange a pickup, don’t bring it here. We can’t fit it all on the truck.  JF: We did try many times to order a pickup, and it never worked out.


Prompt: CH: Yeah, the truck just never showed up.  JF: We did a good job creating a veneer of a professionally run magazine when, in fact, for most of Logic’s history most of fulfillment has been me fielding messages in our gmail, and then hand-packing every order. To make sure people understand it’s basically one guy in charge of shipping their magazine, I’m typically extremely informal in email responses. I eventually wrote on the web store something to the effect of: we ship at an extremely casual rate, please allow three weeks for processing and then another couple of weeks for shipping.

Response: CH: We always hoped that one of the things that people understood about Logic was that it was just a group of friends doing this, and we tried to make sure that was a part of the public face.  On social media and in our email newsletters we tried to give a human face to the operation, tweeting out pictures of the packing parties to remind people that we’re not Amazon. You’re not going to get this in a day or two because we have all of these stacks of envelopes in our apartment and there is a lot of human labor that goes into the production of something like this. I think that’s something that resonated with people, and wish that grace we received for all people trying to compete with the expectations of next-day delivery.


Prompt: And now we party CH: After having our packing parties–then we had an actual party. I always loved our issue launch parties because Logic as a source of physical community is so important and special for me. Launch parties were a way for us to do that. When we knew that we had a print date, we would reach out to different bookstores, different community spaces, and just try to figure out what kind of launch event we could do. Sometimes it would be readings–authors who are in the area or who’d be visiting reading from their pieces at the event. Sometimes we would try to host panels.

Response: Events were an opportunity for us to get books into the hands of people, but I think more importantly, it was an opportunity for people to hear directly from the folks creating the magazine, to have a connection with the contributors and with panelists and people doing work and organizing in the world. And also for them to feel as if they were a part of a community–I think so much of reading can be an isolating experience, but with events you could meet people who had similar interests to you.  Having events in a neutral space was really important. I remember we had folks offer to connect us to event spaces tech offices like GitHub–which are really nice spaces, but also they require you to sign an NDA and to register your name and all that. That wasn’t something we were interested in, the idea that people would have to do that and be surveilled just didn’t feel right, in addition to there being conflicts of interest with tech companies.  Events were a great opportunity for us to help build community and also join and bridge existing communities, whether that be City Lights or the Eric Quezada Center or B4BEL4B. I think about all the amazing organizations that invited us in, and it just makes me feel warm and fuzzy. I miss it. Online events are really great, especially for accessibility and access, but there is a special feeling of being in a sweaty room with a bunch of different people that’s hard to replicate.


Prompt: JF: The first launch party was an extremely pre-pandemic packed sweaty room, in the poetry room at City Lights.  CH: It’s such a struggle, though–an anxiety and frustration I always had was how hard it always was to find accessible venues. I love City Lights and am so grateful for their support, but every time we ended up having an event in the Poetry room, all I thought about was that the only way you could get up there was through the stairs. There are very few venues in the city that are handicap-accessible, near transit, inexpensive or free for hosting, all ages, and don’t require signup to be in the space.

Response: XW: It did feel really good that, for all that tech had been gobbling up the Bay Area, we could find spaces we wanted to support, and could play a part in bringing people in to buy books at City Lights. I feel like post-pandemic, spaces like B4BEL4B are winding down and many folks are getting squeezed out. To be part of all of those spaces for even a brief moment in time feels pretty nourishing.  CH: I feel that too. I hope it helped the people who attended to feel like they were a part of that community or legacy, to make a connection to these spaces that helped them feel responsible or accountable to them, if that makes sense.


Prompt: We always had really great conversations with people after events. I always remember talking to Ellen Ullman at Vesuvio after a City Lights event about the times when City Lights almost died and just barely pulled through. And about how there is this historical continuum of similar projects–meeting with Chris Carlson from Processed World and talking to him about the group of folks who started that magazine in the early eighties.  If we had just started Logic as a website, it would be really hard for me to feel connected to that history.  JF: I loved those late night Vesuvio conversations with the authors or whoever wanted to hang out and chat. Those were so affirming of the project. I remember Alexis Madrigal coming to an early event and being really excited about Logic, and then another time getting a beer with Fred Turner and how supportive he was of the project–which was fun because we saw his work as a precursor to ours. Those nights at Vesuvio or the Little Shamrock after Green Apple events really helped create a deeper connections with people.

Response: XW: Don’t forget the time we went to the Ruby Room after our B4BEL4B event and had a very East Bay night. CH: That was great, I forgot about that. I don’t know, this is making me actually really sad, because I’ve missed that through the pandemic–that’s one of the things that’s been hardest about Logic for me over the last few years. Without the in-person events, I’ve struggled with it as a project because it’s so much effort for everyone, and there is something missing to not have that personal connection.  JF: Part of the story of this phase of the magazine winding down is that the core group spread out across the country, and we stopped having in-person events because of the pandemic. Early on we would have meetings over dinner at our apartment, three hour or more sessions where we would eat Mama Ji’s and have really expansive conversations and then get loopy by the end–but at some point we were no longer living in the same place and just had been doing it long enough that we got efficient enough to handle everything asynchronously, so more or less stopped meeting. Without the project providing a direct connection with readers, and then even with each other, it started to feel less like fun and more like work.


Prompt: CH: I’m really happy about the work you’re doing with Logic School, Xiaowei, and how you’ve managed to create and foster a community remotely–I think that’s incredibly difficult and special. Community enables people to be like–you know what? I’m gonna make different life decisions, I’m going to go deeper on this thing I’ve been feeling for a long time.

Response: For Logic as a magazine, I like to think the in-person events did that; Logic School has been like a really beautiful example of how it doesn’t require being in person to do it, but it’s only because you’ve been so intentional with that space. It’s hard to do.  Making stuff better XW: So the magazine launched, we had a party, we found readers. And then over time we evolved how we did things–starting out is always an exciting time, but I think there are interesting things to talk about for how the different facets of the operations got better over time. Where do you think we should start with that? JF: The initial way we designed the book was not the most efficient format for producing it going forward. One of the things that we did was to streamline the process by improving how we were using our existing tools, things like turning whatever we could into a paragraph style or a character style in InDesign, and relentlessly standardizing the way the pages were laid out.  CH: One other thing that happened is that Celine Nguyen joined our team and shaped up our layouts and typography, in addition to designing some of the covers and interstitials. Process-wise, when she started to contribute we really had to think more about how to have one or two people working on the same file. You treat it differently if you’re using it as a team, versus one person just sort of pushing around your footnotes forever.  JF: With a lot of producing a print object, there’s just so many tiny fiddly things that go into proofreading and layouts, and if you get any of them wrong, it looks egregiously silly or unprofessional. So over time I also made these fifty-item runbooks of things to do and check for every issue–you know, making sure the numbers align in the table of contents, making sure the issue number on the spine is right, that all of the ellipses in the book are the ellipses character and not three dots, things like that.  XW: Beyond laying out the magazine–could you talk about how our practices evolved with printing and getting the book out there into the world?


Prompt: JF: We kept working and scaling with McNaughton and Gunn for some time. As the subscribers went up we started printing more copies per issue and eventually switched over from digital to offset printing. We improved a lot of little things one at a time and they added up–we got a stamps.com account, we started shipping issues directly to our garage rather than my office.

Response: But, we hit a point where we were dealing with too many books to do everything by hand, and felt it wasn’t going to work if we kept on that trajectory. Similar to when we were getting started, we ended up reaching out to other folks involved in magazines to get advice. I think Ben and Moira connected us to Mark Krotov from N+1, and we had a really helpful conversation with Flynn Murray who was at Dissent at the time. We described our setup and both of them had a very similar recommendation which was: you want the printer to directly mail things to people, instead of freighting it to your house and paying for shipping and then packing it back up and paying for postage to send it back in the mail. I didn’t know that was an option! They both recommended Sheridan Press for that.


Prompt: It was super fun for the first few years having the pizza parties to pack up issues, but it got old after a while. It’s kind of like when you move a bunch in your 20s and you have a crew of friends who all help each other get their couches up and down stairs. But then like, the third or fourth time the same people are moving the same count, it’s time to start thinking about hiring movers.

Response: CH: We also just ran into space constraints. I remember that last round of distribution we did, when we loaded up all the stuff in the car, we were 100% full. We have a station wagon with a lot of storage, and literally could not fit any more books in it. It was going to start being a two trip affair if we wanted to take things to the post office, and they were not thrilled about us in the first place. We also had a small garage that barely could fit the car in that old San Francisco apartment building way, and it was filling up with all of the back issues. All those were great ways to start out, that ended up being incredibly inefficient as we scaled.


Prompt: Through talking with Flynn and Mark we learned that the printers get commercial bulk discounts on sending mail that were better than the media mail rates we could get on our own. Part of that discount was because it required an address validation offered by USPS that reduced the amount of returned mail, which was a recurring problem for us.  As an added bonus, Sheridan could handle international orders, which we had always found prohibitively expensive and time consuming to fulfill. So there were a lot of things in there that made it make sense to switch up how we did things.

Response: JF: There was one particularly dark issue where you were traveling, and I had to send out the whole issue by myself, packing and addressing and stamping every book. It was like a three day affair. XW: Oh, man, I’m so glad that you guys don’t have to deal with that anymore.  JF: It was fun when people said that they were a Logic subscriber to be able to say: yeah, I recognize your name, I shipped you your issue from my dining room. But I’m glad that phase is over.  XW: You mentioned that we didn’t have a proper way to have subscriptions at the beginning. How did our handling of subscriptions change over time? JF: When we started out our subscriptions were just one-off items in our webstore that were tracked by one big google sheet that we managed ourselves. Not having a way to let people automatically resubscribe was a big challenge for us that first year, and we ended up moving to software called Chargebee. That ended up working well and handled a lot of the problems that I didn’t even know we’d encounter–notifying people multiple times that their subscriptions were renewing, sending out bulk emails, handling what happened if people’s cards expired, what happened if there were chargebacks or people wanted refunds.


Prompt: CH: Once we were solid and in a good place with subscribers, we decided that we wanted to get into more bookstores besides just the one that we could drop off books to personally. We got advice on what our options were, and then got connected with Small Changes, a small distributor that operates primarily on the West Coast that works with many small magazines like ours. We started working with them to get into bookstores–they’re a small distributor and their reach is geographically limited so that’s also why we don’t have distribution yet across the US or globally.

Response: JF: It’s still a special feeling to see our books pop up in places we didn’t directly coordinate with, like seeing it in Left Bank Books when visiting Seattle, or seeing it at Point Reyes Books or Dog Eared. CH: I do love having the distributor, but there is always something special about the personal touch where we’d hear about people seeing our book at places like Powerhouse Books in New York, and it was because someone associated with Logic took it there by hand.


Prompt: JF: I think Xiaowei you dropped off some at Wolfman. I don’t know if we ever figured out invoicing them, but that was fine too.  XW: It’s true. I would just keep on giving them to Justin.  JF: Even with the unfavorable economics of distribution for a small magazine, it’s a good way to just raise awareness about the magazine. I still think there are many more people in the world who would be interested in subscribing to the magazine, but they have to know that we exist first.  CH: People buying things in newsstands are great, but also all of those things we mentioned make it very hard economically to run a business off of it. That’s why often you get things like ads; other small magazines we talked to have foundations and do fundraising as a way to stay afloat.

Response: JF: We were too lazy to do either when we started out.  I think we started out with a 501c3 and then eventually became a full nonprofit, knowing that at some point we’d want to be able to get institutional backing. But like with many of these things, we had a limited budget of night and weekend hours to spend on it and decided we would rather spend the time working on the magazine than raising money to scale it.


Prompt: But, as we are handing off Logic and making it more sustainable, that’s changing. We do want it to be able to meaningfully support the people working on it and related projects going forward, which is why we’re so excited about the work you have been doing connecting to funders and institutions bringing it to the next level.

Response: In an industry that measures impact through KPIs (key performance indicators), it’s hard to quantify, or even start to explain, what the effects of creating a print magazine are. When we first launched Logic in early 2017, we weren’t sure who would read it. But over the years, we gradually found an audience, and managed to both irritate and inspire some number of readers.


Prompt: We’ve always been particularly interested in how our work was being received by younger people. How do they engage with Logic? Do they find it useful? To help explore these questions, and to reflect on the story of Logic thus far, Ben Tarnoff and Xiaowei Wang from Logic sat down with Jasmine Sun, Jessica Dai, and Emily Liu from Reboot. Reboot is a community for young technologists that is active on many fronts, from hosting events to running an email newsletter to publishing a print magazine. Logic has tried to do its part to advance the ruthless criticism of all that exists; we turned to our friends at Reboot to help put ourselves under the microscope. If Logic did have to come up with KPIs, we could do worse than measuring our success by the amount of criticism we get from the next generation.

Response: Ben Tarnoff (BT): As we transition to Logic’s next chapter, we wanted to create space in this issue to reflect on the project so far: what we’ve achieved, where we’ve failed, how and why we did what we did. And we thought of you all at Reboot as ideal conversation partners for that reflection, because our projects feel like such kindred spirits. We’ve tried to make similar interventions, I think. But with important differences. And one of those differences is generational: we’re a bit older, you’re a bit younger.


Prompt: Xiaowei Wang (XW): We are middle-aged. BT: Yes. I have not fully accepted that. But Moira has been telling me that every day. So yeah, we’re middle-aged. We don’t know what’s going on. We’re cheugy. Jasmine Sun (JS): We’re very excited to be doing this. We have all been Logic fangirls from a while back. Logic was a substantial part of the inspiration for Reboot.

Response: Jessica Dai (JD): I first found out about Logic in 2018. I was an undergrad at Brown and one of my professors, Wendy Chun, told me I might like Logic. So I got on the train and came up to Cambridge for the issue four launch party. That event was pivotal for Reboot existing in the way that it does now. I was in college spending my days on CS problem sets, but I felt like something was missing. And I realized that the type of work that Logic produced could fill that gap for me.


Prompt: BT: I’m so glad to hear that. Events were a big part of the Logic project from the beginning. We wanted to bring people from different backgrounds together not only in the pages of the magazine but also in physical space. In particular, the constituencies we had in mind were tech workers, scholars and researchers, and organizers and others doing political work. Out of that mix, we wanted to cohere a new public. You don’t create a little magazine for an audience—you create your audience through the magazine. Events always felt like the most satisfying way to do that. For me, some of the life went out of the project when we slowed down our pace of events and then stopped altogether. Something was lost.

Response: JS: I very distinctly remember Jessica’s messages from when she went to the Cambridge event. And when she told me about it, I was like, “This is so cool. How come no one told us about Logic? How come our friends at school don’t know about it? How come other CS students and young tech workers aren’t reading it?” Emily Liu (EL): At the time, I was in college in Durham, and I was feeling pretty frustrated about the state of “tech ethics” discourse on campus. So I went to Twitter to find people who shared my frustration, and that’s where I first met Jasmine.


Prompt: XW: When I was in college, there was no “tech ethics” discourse at all. It was such a different landscape. So I’m curious if you could tell us more about how that discourse is developing in CS departments, and how Reboot relates to it. EL: My school had a CS ethics course that wasn’t mandatory for the major, but it did fulfill a writing requirement, so CS majors often took it for that reason. I remember sitting in the lecture hall and the professor was talking about the COMPAS recidivism algorithm—one of the most canonical “tech ethics” examples—and people had never heard of it before. It kind of shocked me. I was like, “You’re about to graduate and enter the workforce?” For me, Reboot felt like a way to fill the gaps that were left by my college education.

Response: JD: I had the opposite problem. When I was a junior, Brown CS implemented an intensive ethics program (now called Socially Responsible Computing) where they embedded ethics content into almost every single course. So we talked about all of the canonical examples—predictive policing, dark patterns in UI, you name it.


Prompt: I was one of the TAs who helped run the program in the first year, and I ended up writing a whole diatribe about its limitations. My problem was that the program structure meant that it was hard to think systematically—never thinking about the why. Why does DoorDash steal tips? That’s a question that can’t be answered within the boundaries of any CS department.

Response: JS: When you take a class as part of your CS curriculum, you see it as giving you units of knowledge that you consume. It’s just another thing you learn—you get a grade and move on. With Reboot, we’re trying to do something different. We want to create an identity around being a technologist who is interested in political transformation, both within and beyond the tech industry. That’s what Reboot as a community is trying to do. So when people make friends with each other in our Discord or in person, that’s an important part of the project. It’s not just about consuming content. It’s about becoming a different kind of person by joining a community where we’re all figuring it out together.


Prompt: Doing Hard Things Together XW: You mentioned that Reboot is above all a community, but it’s also a publishing project. You recently started a print magazine, Kernel. We know from experience how much blood, sweat, and tears it takes to run a magazine. And you have so many other initiatives going on. So why do a print publication? EL: I think there are a couple of reasons. First, we want writing that is timeless. We want writing that is not tied to a particular trend or something that fades in a week or two. We want to be able to open an issue of Kernel three years from now and have the ideas there still ring true. There’s also something to the weightiness of a physical artifact. This year’s annual issue of Kernel is 164 pages, and it feels, literally, like a hefty piece of intellectual work. I think the physical aspect also helps as a signal.

Response: JS: A lot of Kernel’s writers are already members of the Reboot community. They’re people who have attended or hosted an event, or are active in our Discord. So the magazine is also a way of bringing people together by working on a big, ambitious project that creates an artifact that everyone can feel proud of.


Prompt: One of the books that has been really influential for my thinking is Twitter and Tear Gas by Zeynep Tufekci. She makes the point that, in the social media era, it becomes too easy to gather people together. You no longer have to hand out fliers, or hold all these meetings to work out the logistics. But those slower methods are valuable, because they help build trust. They make people feel personally invested in a project. And that’s ultimately what enables a group to stay together in the long term.

Response: Running Kernel requires a deep collaboration over both the lofty intellectual ideas that we’re trying to put into the magazine and all the nitty-gritty that’s required to actually make the magazine. Which printer should we use? How do we get the right kind of paper? Doing all that, and doing it together, strengthens our sense of community and brings new people into the community. So, yes, Kernel is hard. But that’s kind of the point.


Prompt: BT: I love the emphasis on community. We hoped to create some kind of community with Logic, especially through events, but we were always primarily a print magazine. At times, we wondered whether we could do more to actively convene people—we toyed with the idea of running reading groups, like Jacobin did some years ago. One of the reasons we didn’t was because it felt like those conversations were already happening without our help, particularly in the first years of the magazine.

Response: In early 2017, when we published our first issue, we were all living in San Francisco, in the midst of a wave of politicization within the white-collar tech workforce in response to Trump’s victory. Our world was filled with organizing meetings, with people pouring themselves into different kinds of political work. So we could simply insert Logic into those spaces—we didn’t need to create those spaces from scratch.


Prompt: Over time, the political momentum diminished. Moira and I moved away from San Francisco, had kids, Covid happened, and we stopped doing events. The project began to feel less rooted. I started to have less of a sense of where Logic fit in, what kind of conversations it was creating. And that bothered me. Because if Logic is just a bundle of paper out in the world, that’s not enough for me.

Response: JS: Did that feeling contribute to the decision to pivot to new leadership? How did you all arrive at that decision? BT: I came up in the punk rock scene. And in that scene, sometimes you see a band that just shouldn’t be playing music anymore. You gotta know when to call it. Little magazines are similar. Little magazines are creatures of a particular moment in time. They draw their strength from that moment. And when that moment passes, they become zombies. If you try to cheat death, if you try to live past the context that gave you life, you become a zombie. I won’t name any names, but I can think of a few projects that fit that description.


Prompt: Logic came together at a particular moment in time. And, over the years, the moment changed—the broader political context, the broader context of writing about technology. Eventually, I started to feel like we had outlived our usefulness. Earlier this year, I brought that feeling to the core Logic team, and everyone broadly agreed. Our initial thought was to shut down the magazine. Then Khadijah and Xiaowei came up with a proposal to continue the magazine by reinventing it. And we all loved the idea.

Response: XW: Honestly, a big issue is just time. A lot of Logic pieces are edited by Ben while he’s not watching his children. Not that I want to say that Ben’s a negligent father. BT: But it’s true. And we should get that on record. XW: There’s a lot of free labor involved. And that leads to burnout. Finding writers, growing writers—that stuff takes an enormous amount of time. So does building and running all of the invisible infrastructure around maintaining editorial calendars, lining up copyeditors, and so on. And everyone’s doing it on top of the job that pays the bills. So, at a certain point, you either have to find a bunch of money or come to terms with the fact that it can’t last forever.


Prompt: JS: That makes sense. But I’m also curious about the politics of the transition. It’s one thing to say the team is burned out, so we need to raise funding to pay people more fairly. But it also seems like, at least from my reading of “Logic(s): The Next Chapter,” that there is an ideological shift at work. Xiaowei, you and Khadijah write about wanting to focus on queer, black, and Asian identities, to bring in perspectives outside of the tech industry, and to engage with international issues. Is that in response to a new political moment? And how does that relate to the previous iteration of Logic? XW: We’re in a moment where there’s a lot of critical tech discourse that talks about the poor impacted people in a super patronizing way. Then you have groups like Allied Media Conference and the Detroit Community Technology Project that have a very different perspective, which is that people outside of the tech industry, people from marginalized backgrounds, actually have a lot of insights to bring to the discourse and are building new technologies. So part of our hope with the next chapter of Logic is to build community with that in mind, and shine a light on those who are already doing that work. And that can take different forms: as long as I’ve been part of Logic, it’s always felt like a place where multiple political threads could coexist.

Response: BT: Xiaowei touches on an important continuity between the two eras of Logic, which is the emphasis on the agency, and indeed the wisdom, of people who are affected by technology. That is, not seeing them as objects or victims, but rather as agents, as experts, as subjects of their own liberation and of everybody’s liberation.


Prompt: Now, that emphasis can accommodate a variety of ideological strains. As Xiaowei said, Logic has always been somewhat polyvalent politically. I think my own political orientation is different from that of Xiaowei and Khadijah. And I know our publisher Jim has a perspective that’s different from mine. But, over the years, we’ve all managed to cohabitate and create something that feels not only complementary but more than the sum of its parts. We’ve also made space for contributors who come from a range of positions, from center-left reformist liberal types to anarchists. Broadly, I’d say our big tent is anti-capitalism, or at the very least anti-neoliberalism, but within that, there’s quite a lot of room for disagreement.

Response: The Oedipal Stuff BT: If you don’t mind, I’d like to get to the meat. What did we do wrong? We’re looking for the Oedipal stuff. XW: I know. BT: Right? Just kill the father already. XW: Yeah, pretend that y’all are on TikTok and making a video about Logic. Go in. JD: For the record, I am not on TikTok.


Prompt: JS: I’m not sure I’d frame it as a critique of Logic, but one difference between your project and ours is that Reboot’s tent is a bit bigger and a bit more industry-friendly. We want to be palatable to your median CS student or young software engineer who might, like, vote Democrat, but not really engage with critique or theory. A lot of our subscribers are tech workers who would not call themselves tech workers. The Reboot newsletter is the most political thing they read.

Response: So what does it take to politicize, or even begin to engage, that kind of person? Many of our readers are starting from a few steps back. XW: Whenever I’ve seen Jasmine describe Reboot in person, she says, “It’s like Logic but, you know, less academic.” BT: Wow. XW: And I always wonder, what does “academic” mean? BT: I’m glad you smuggled in the spice at the end of the conversation. I was worried we wouldn’t get there.


Prompt: Over the years, I’ve put a lot of thought into how Logic can remain approachable to a wide range of readers. We try to produce prose that is readable. But the reality is that not every piece is for every reader. Each issue should have at least some pieces that are accessible to the type of reader who is not conversant with the different intellectual traditions that inform the magazine—the median CS student, say. Those will be pieces that don’t assume any prior knowledge of a subject, and don’t use technical language.

Response: We want to create those entry points. But not every piece can be like that, because it’s a quite constrained mode of writing: if you have to spell everything out, if you can’t, truly can’t, assume any prior knowledge, then you can’t go into very much depth. So we also want to create space for people who are doing more advanced work and writing for a more advanced reader. It’s a balance and, honestly, a struggle.


Prompt: As for what it would mean to call Logic “academic”: as Xiaowei suggests, it’s a word that is used in so many different ways. One way is literal: “academic” as in academia. It’s true that many of our contributors have been academics. It’s sort of inevitable, given the fact that academics typically have more time to develop subject matter expertise, and more time to write, than anyone else. Still, it’s not a pattern that I feel particularly proud of. The lazy version of Logic is the para-academic journal—that’s what happens when we’re not working hard enough. We have published many wonderful pieces by academics. But when an issue is mostly composed of academic contributors, then it’s a sign that we’re not doing enough to discover and develop the kind of voices that ultimately differentiate our project.

Response: People can also use the term “academic” to refer to technical language. Sometimes, as I said, such language is unavoidable. You wouldn’t expect a physicist or a car mechanic to describe the behavior of some complex system without using specialized terms; the same goes for those who write social commentary and critique. All you can do as an editor is to make sure it’s earned—that difficult language reflects a genuine conceptual difficulty—and that the prose is as legible as possible to nonspecialists.


Prompt: JD: Something else I wonder about is, What happens when you publish social commentary and critique that is true but not necessarily actionable? What does the reader do out in the world after they’ve read the piece? That’s something we’ve thought about a lot while running the newsletter and Kernel. EL: When we were soliciting pitches for Kernel, we said, you don’t need to be techno-optimistic, it’s okay if you feel negatively about tech—but we do want your writing to leave readers with some sense of agency, so that they feel they can actually do something about whatever you’re writing about. We don’t want our readers to feel like, “The world is so fucked and there’s nothing we can do about it.” The theme for the first issue of Kernel was, “Where do we go from here?” And the theme for our upcoming issue is “How do we get there?” Those are the questions we’re trying to answer. What are the people, tools, and ideas that can lead us to a better future? BT: In organizing, it’s a great sin to agitate someone without providing a channel through which to convert their agitation into action. So you shouldn’t approach your coworker and get into a conversation about how much you both hate your terrible sexist boss if you’re just going to walk away afterward. You should be getting them to sign a union card, or join the organizing committee, or something. A good organizer never stimulates righteous anger without providing a direction for it to become politically constructive.

Response: But I think the work we do is distinct, because neither Reboot nor Logic are organizing projects. They’re intellectual projects, cultural projects, community building projects. So our obligations are different. I should also say that my views on this have evolved over the years. When we started Logic in early 2017, I had more of a taste for polemical writing that pointed toward a particular solution. Over time, I’ve become less interested in reading, writing, and editing that sort of thing, and more interested in residing in the contradictions and the ambiguities and the uncertainties and the difficulties. My basic political commitments haven’t changed. But these days I’m more content to see where the lines of inquiry lead. I don’t want to know the destination in advance.


Prompt: XW: I disagree—I think both Reboot and Logic are organizing projects. There’s many different types of organizing. And, at its heart, organizing is about community building. If you’re trying to organize your workplace, you’re trying to build trust with your coworkers—that’s building community, right? And that’s what you’re doing at Reboot. Also, different kinds of organizing inform each other. I know there are people who started organizing their workplace because they read an article in Logic.

Response: BT: I think this was an excellent struggle session. Though there wasn’t as much struggle as I had hoped. XW: We want criticism. We’re lucky that you all have criticism, because that’s how projects and movements grow, through dialogue of this kind. So thank you.