Rich Text #1

Rich Text is a tiny zine that reflects on the politics of rich text formatting, the form of text file that as well as the letters and words themselves contains styling options for bold, italic, colours and fonts. It’s another example of independent print questioning the relentless rush toward an uncontrolled digital utopia.

This first issue, subtitled ‘Clickbait,’ maps a lineage from early printing presses and the typographers’ unions that fought automation to today’s slick WYSIWYG software and AI‑generated prose. A series of artworks, essays and poetry position simple rich text formatting as a site of resistance against the complex algorithmic infrastructure of the digital world. 

Its black and white newsprint pages feature Fiona Glen‘s ‘Tentacle-Link’, leaning heavily into online fan-fiction aesthetics and surreal online physicalities; Zak‘s ‘The Rise of the Melanati’, imagining a fictional internet subculture revering Black women; and Elida Silvey‘s ‘You won‘t believe what this woman did after the cameras stopped’, a text-art piece aggressively mirroring the layout of literal clickbait. 

Rich Text questions our relationship with technology and asks if its promised conveniences actually expand possibilities or limit our imaginations and political expression. Alongside this wonderfully anti-algorithmic little zine, publishers Studio Strike also offer a WordPress tool that transforms your blog into a zine, complete with a QR-code bibliography.