Print has now outlived the compact disc, the DVD, the personal blog, Google Reader, and most of the apps that were supposed to replace it. If this is a corpse, it is a suspiciously productive one.
The prediction failed for a reason nobody priced in: scarcity became the feature. When everything is a file, the object is the flex. A riso zine with a run of ninety is the last medium that can honestly say it cannot be pirated at scale, because the artifact is the edition.[1]
When everything is a file, the object is the flex.COPIER ROOM DOCTRINE
This newspaper is a website, and says so proudly — the web is the newsprint of the present tense. But we file this report from a building whose basement contains a working letterpress, and we note for the record that the machine has outlived every CMS we have ever used. Score one for the corpse.
NOTES & ERRATA — FILED BY THE DESK
- Risograph duplicators were built for church bulletins and school worksheets. Their second life as the engine of an entire art-book economy is the most cheerful hardware story of the century. ↩