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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.