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Short abstract

This presentation showcases collaborative zine-making from the pliegos.net project as practices of critical literacy about AI and platform power. Participatory workshops combine analog publishing with experimental tools for zine pagination and PDF obfuscation to resist automated content extraction

Long abstract

Recent activist and investigative zines addressing AI-powered surveillance and border enforcement circulate both as printed artifacts and as digital files (https://www.aimustdie.info/; https://www.404media.co/icezine/), while in some contexts zines themselves have been treated as incriminating materials in repression cases (https://freedes.net/). These situations reveal a paradox: even small-scale analog media practices are entangled with infrastructures shaped by / for platform monopolies, automated content extraction and expanding surveillance regimes. At the same time, their material circulation creates forms of communicative opacity that can partially evade algorithmic monitoring, recalling historical underground networks like Soviet 'samizdat'.

This contribution discusses a set of zines and publishing experiments developed within the pliegos.net project (Senabre Hidalgo & Espelt, 2025), examining how collaborative zine-making can function as a form of critical literacy about / against tech-intensive futures. Rather than approaching zines primarily as historical artifacts of subcultural media, our presentation focuses on their contemporary re-emergence as participatory practices through which communities reflect on, question and respond to technological systems and narratives of (digital) inevitability.

The showcased materials emerge from participatory action research conducted through collaborative zine-making workshops combining analog co-writing, on-site printing and immediate physical distribution. The presentation also reflects on emerging threats to zine circulation, introducing ongoing experiments with open-source tools for zine pagination and PDF obfuscation designed to complicate automated content extraction and enable digital files to “jump back” into physical circulation.

Ref: Senabre Hidalgo, E., & Espelt, R. (2025). Chapbooks against the machine: analog co-writing and publishing as a collective geography of AI refusal. cultural geographies, https://doi.org/10.1177/14744740251355281