Welcome back to the ABSOC Zine, after approximately 10 years of lying dormant in the interest of focusing on the label known as Aborted Society. It’s not entirely the reason why the zine was put on halt; J@ck and I both found ourselves getting really busy with new lines of work and both of us had a severe lack of spare time. While we loved spending hours creating the print run, and spending hours inside of a copy shop cutting and pasting pages for layouts, we kinda had to leave it behind for awhile.
Well lots of things have changed since those past issues; the last being the “Work Issue.” The era of print has all but completely vanished and we all now exist in a new digital paradigm, in both the relay of information and ideas, and the way people learn about music. Many of us have come to realize that this paradigm shift is both a beautiful and terrible thing. In the wake of this beautiful and terrible paradigm, after years of pirating music from the internet and all but completely giving up on reading zines and punk literature, many of us have come to realize that we’ve all lost something in ourselves over the past decade. A certain spark — something that we felt inside before our eyes glazed over from the excessive screen exposure; connections we felt with one another that were real, and not just simulacra of these connections in the form of social media. We are more connected with each other than ever before, yet many of us feel more isolated than ever.
How does this happen? In an age where we can so easily and readily keep in contact with the people we’ve met all over the world, where a band can reach thousands of people instantly with the click of a button, where there is this unseemingly endless array of available information at our fingertips… how can we feel isolated, frustrated, and alone? It’s this specific human condition that has lead me to re-instate this publication, albeit with the changing times, in a digital format.
That being said, there will still be a print run of this publication that will come out bi-annually; however that piece will be more consistent of the art and literature oriented content that is produced over various issues. The more general and timely column materials, reviews, and reports will be consigned to the digital pages of this website. The content that yearns for a printed page will get one.
The thing that will always stay consistent was the original ethos of the zine that carried through since its inception: punk is about more than towing a party line. The fact that so many of our flock have conscripted themselves to the vices of hype and hierarchical leader/followership is simply baffling. We have the resources and access to information that no generation could ever imagine. Any of us have the potential to innovate, to create, to inspire, to revolutionize. So why not start now?
Love,
Rob
ABSOC // April 7, 2013
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