Zine: The Man Who Predicted the Downfall of Thinking

I love listening to podcasts while doing tedious household tasks, like cleaning the kitchen, doing the dishes, or organizing the junk drawer (just kidding, I don’t do that).

One of my favorites of the last couple of years is Julia Louis Dreyfus’ Wiser Than Me, a podcast where the actress (and former Seinfeld star) gets into deep conversations about life, love, work, and creativity with women in their elder years. If you haven’t listened to it, I highly, Highly! recommend it. It’s an easy listen, where conversation flows naturally and there’s plenty of laughing, crying, and exclaiming Wow! and Yes!And my personal favorite part is that there are plenty of F-bombs dropped by JLD, whose acceptance speech for the Webby she won for the show was a brief and potent “Listen. To. Old. Women. Mother. Fuckers.” Definitely my favorite award acceptance speech of all time.

Some podcasts, however, require deeper listening. I’m a big fan of conversations that explore politics, social and cultural issues, and technology with deep and critical thinking. When I listen to these, I often find myself having to stop what I’m doing to really take in what’s being said. And even then, if I want to really learn something, I often have to pause and replay an insightful section multiple times until it really sticks in my brain.

One such conversation I listened to recently was on the podcast Your Undivided Attention, a tech critical podcast hosted by Tristan Harris. In episode 105, “The Man Who Predicted the Downfall of Thinking,” Harris invites Sean Illing (host of The Gray Area podcast) and Professor Lance Strate to discuss the work of media theorist Neil Postman and how to apply his philosophy (much of which centered around TV at the time) to our current technological landscape, particularly the tenuous moment between social media and artificial intelligence (AI).

The conversation is dense and exciting. My brain (recently diagnosed with ADHD) was following insight after insight with great interest, but as for me, I kept wanting to slow everything down, to really learn what was being shared in each segment of the episode. I didn’t want to forget a single thing!

The following day, still chewing on all that I’d heard, I grabbed some pens and paper and headed to a nearby coffee shop with my headphones. I’d decided that I wanted to listen to the episode again (repetition/remembering), but that this time, I would turn the most salient parts of episode into something I could refer back to as many times as I wanted to: I was going to make a zine.

Making a zine about a podcast episode is so brilliantly simple, I can’t believe I’d never thought of it before. Admittedly, it’s been a long time since I made a zine, but I’ve always been someone who likes doing something with my hands while I’m listening and learning— dishes, laundry folding, knitting, doodling, taking copious notes. But turning my doodles and notes into a zine about what I was learning had never occurred to me.

Needless to say, I felt really excited as I sat in the sunny courtyard of the cafe and scrubbed through the episode to listen to the parts I wanted to try to capture in zine form. When I finished, I used a key card envelope from the hotel we were staying at to create a little book cover for my zine, so it looks like a real and tiny book.

Flipping through the zine-book, I felt such delight and satisfaction with what I’d made and what I’d discovered— a creative way to process learned information into a keepsake reference tool.

Back at the hotel, I requested two more key card envelopes and told them it was for an art project I was working on. My plan was to make a three-volume set of tiny zine-books that cover the most fundamental and thought-provoking insights of Episode 105 and what it teaches about Postman’s work, but I made the second zine, didn’t like it as much, and my ADHD kicked in and sent me on my way to the next project.

Anyway, here’s a little gif of the zine I made (also pictured, just because it’s tiny and adorable, the guidebook for the pocket-sized Archetypes oracle deck by Kim Krans of The Wild Unknown).

And if critical thinking podcasts about tech, society, and human culture interest you, check out Your Undivided Attention (brought to you by the Center for Humane Technology, who also created the tech critical documentary The Social Dilemma). And if you’re curious about the episode that inspired this zine, you can check it out here.