Post-Propriety Print

This paper is a response to “Tete-a-Tete: Are All Memes Political?” a discussion between Al Hassan Elwan and Cem A. moderated by Stephanie Bailey for The Politics of Print: elephant in the room, staged in January 2026 as part of STPI’s annual Print Show & Symposium.

If I were a post in 2026, I’d wish I were print.

A post lives at the precarious mercy of systems it cannot see or address. It can get deleted by the press of a button, auto-flagged or demonetised, shadowbanned into oblivion, or worse, become viral for the wrong audience. Black-box algorithms engineered by a handful of tech corporations have completely reshaped the online public space that the early internet promised. A post is cursed by shrinking discoverability and instant feedback dopamine. It works overtime for visibility on endless feeds in constant motion, while print has the luxury to remain still.

Anyone who has struggled to end a conversation with ChatGPT knows that the digital will always respond. But print stops. Print can rest. It can be held. Posts yearn to escape this increasingly enshittified digital space. The “Showing Brainrot to Strangers” TikTok trend, where pranksters present print-outs of absurd “brainrot” memes to strangers in public while recording their reactions, attests to this.

Print is not necessarily paper, nor is a post necessarily pixels. Ultimately, post and print were never opposites, but media variants of the same act. Both stem from the same primordial urge: to publish. Publishing, as an impulse, precedes medium. At its most basic and etymologically naive level, to publish is simply to make something public – to externalise thought or expression into a space where it may be encountered by an other. To publish assumes a minimal trust: that what leaves the self can be seen, mirrored, or recognised beyond it.

Long before posts or print—before authorship, circulation, or permanence—publishing was the mind’s attempt at cognitive completion from the outside. Experience trapped within what Jacques Lacan calls “the Imaginary” (inner experience) decays, but to publish casts experience into “the Symbolic” (shared structures), in order to see if it survives. To publish, post, or print, is to test reality and break out of the cage of solipsism: the idea that nothing exists beyond the self.

The urge to publish can be traced back half a million years, to Java, Indonesia, and the Trinil Shell. This freshwater shell is engraved with a cute zigzag pattern authored by Homo erectus, the species from which modern humans evolved. Archaeologists believe the engraving is intentional rather than accidental, produced with a sharp tool and sustained attention. Homo erectus was a social species, living and acting in groups, making it far more likely that such an object was encountered by others than produced for solitary contemplation. What it signified, recorded or marked remains unknown, and cannot be confidently reconstructed. But the act itself is legible: a mental impulse was externalised into a durable surface and left exposed beyond the author. Whatever its original context, the gesture presumes an other—someone for whom the mark might matter, whether at the time or some 5,000 centuries later.

In this sense, the Trinil Shell marks an early instance of publishing understood as deliberate exposure; an attempt to move thought out of interiority and into social space. It is the first ever post, as far as we know.

If I post my own cute zigzag doodle tomorrow, how long would it last? As an Instagram Story, it would disappear in 24 hours; as a post, it would last longer. The oldest Instagram post—a picture of the founder’s girlfriend’s foot and his puppy—is 15 years old, and there’s already a platform error that reordered two other posts before it, prompting him to add a lousy clarification in the caption. Many still visit the post to this day to comment their name and date as if carving their initials onto pyramid stones.

But posts do not necessarily envy the print form for its longevity. If anything, posts should be proud of their ephemerality. The unprecedented monopolisation of digital spaces has hindered the post’s true publishing capacity: that loss of agency, and its subjugation to the whims of an invisible algorithm, is what ails the form.

By now we are all familiar with the reality of the so-called tech industry, which blogger and journalist Cory Doctorow summarised in one line: “These companies get to be too big to fail, that they become too big to jail, and then they become too big to care.”¹ Jeff Bezos’ “brilliant strategy,” according to Business Insider, is exemplified in The Gazelle Project: an internal Amazon initiative named after Bezos’s infamous quote about pursuing small publishers like a cheetah hunts a “sickly gazelle.”² The Gazelle Project focused on leveraging data to pressure vulnerable partners into unfavourable deals, discounts, and longer payment periods. If they refused, Amazon would wreck their performance on the marketplace. That tactic might have been new in the early 2000s, but it is now standardised on almost every platform.

The post, be it a tweet or an Amazon product, follows the same logic, because it has to first go through an opaque and automated system of prioritisation; often referred to as downranking, downweighting, visibility demotion, or shadowbanning. Because of these systems, a post is no longer really published. Rather, a post is submitted for review. It is subjected to automated selection and filtration whose mechanics, unlike print, we are not allowed to know.

The psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott famously described the infant’s attachment to transitional objects, like teddy bears, as a way to stabilise reality outside of the self. Print serves a similar function for adults: an external object that can hold experience without immediately dissolving it. The solid surface of print is a more likely transitional object, or adult teddy bear, than the liquid surface of the feed, whose device is a literal mirror. The digital now betrays the Lacanian promise of publishing – the bridge from the Imaginary to the Symbolic – for systemic personalisation, such as the ‘For You Page,’ which fractures the Symbolic as a field of shared structures, and instigates an echo-chamber bubble that inevitably leads you back to your own mind. This is a reversal of what publishing did, possibly since the Trinil Shell, which was to allow an other to assure you of an external reality outside of your self. We are trapped in interiority again. Primed to become lone data centre flesh extensions.

Shareholders have effectively stifled the post’s publishing potential. By contrast, print’s perceived obsolescence has allowed it to escape this dystopian digital capture, allowing for freer speech by default, just by existing outside the reach of rage-bait incentivised tech-bro social media networks. Print arguably also favours formal expression more, as the algorithmic throttle that prioritises specific slop formats is increasingly flattening the online’s visual and tonal language.

The ecological scales are shifting too. Data centres already consume roughly 4–5% of U.S. electricity, a figure projected to rise to 6.7% as AI expands;³ whereas the entire pulp and paper industry draws only about 1.4%iv from the grid as it generates the rest from its own biomass byproducts. Over the past decade, print’s environmental impact has been reliably declining, while the advent of generative AI is exponentially accelerating the energy cost of digital infrastructure. The post’s energy demand is perpetual, requiring 24/7 upkeep to stay up, while print requires a one-time production cost, and is biodegradable. I think it’s time to remove our “Please don’t print this email” sustainability email signatures, which we’ve had since the 2010s.

Physicality gives print relative sovereignty that a post could only yearn for. But if saying print is freer gives print too much credit, I can settle for “less programmed.” Print is regulated by its own self-inflicted, outdated modes of propriety, since print’s default setting is still set to serious. Print propriety exposes its politics. Print became “serious” not because it was naturally closer to truth, but because seriousness served as a filter: a way of governing through tone, form, and access. What looks like refinement is often a subtle mechanism of control. A Foucauldian panopticon par excellence. The post fears deletion but print’s enemy is inhibition. What we consider “proper” print is not a neutral aesthetic preference. It is a rule-set, from who gets to publish, to what fonts are used. 

Print’s formal regime excludes the unserious, which alienates the best posters. A fellow meme page admin messaged me recently—friendly, yet skeptical—about my print magazine, POSTPOSTPOST, because he didn’t feel that posting is “official” enough for print. While I believe his work deserves more than to remain under Zuckerberg’s regime of platform visibility, I understand how print’s inherited propriety exudes an atmosphere of high-stakes and hesitation. In the digital sphere, policing arrives externally through platforms. In print culture, it arrives internally through overbearing self-discipline.

Yet print has always had its own little insurgencies: moments where it breaks its own rules and rebuilds them. Take Penguin in 1935. Allen Lane, its founder, took respectable books out of the high-brow world of propriety and sold them as cheap paperbacks for the price of a pack of cigarettes – an affront to the entire idea that seriousness must be guarded by expense, scarcity, and institutional permission. His gesture wasn’t radical because it “democratised literature” in some abstract moral sense; it was radical because it redistributed legitimacy. It was, in other words, an early post-propriety move, which, of course, would unfortunately follow a familiar co-option arc. Penguin became institutionalised, turning into the gold standard of taste, authority, and approved legitimacy. Then, it entered a third phase, becoming absorbed into the corporate miasma: it is now a wholly-owned subsidiary of German media conglomerate, Bertelsmann.

Finstas offer a good model for post-propriety print. A finsta—short for “fake Instagram”—is a low-stakes, semi-private, semi-anonymous account where people post without performing legitimacy, optimising for reach, or trying to build a monetisable brand. Finsta print could mean small runs, niche limited editions and fast iteration. It celebrates a post’s unserious tone, offers a form of anonymous or low-identity publishing, and holds space for experimentation beyond unoptimised and unjustified text layouts. These unbothered, messy prototypes and redistribution-friendly formats are cheap, replicable, and fine to spill drinks on: it is publishing oriented towards exposure rather than performance, where contact matters more than credentials.

But before the puritans and the institutions panic about barbarians at the print gate, remember print’s main barrier of entry is still its monetary cost. Posts are still free (given users are the product), yet the loudest noise in the contemporary moment is coming from people searching for the next “anti-AI” aesthetic – collage, medieval revival, analogue texture, craft signifiers, and corporate lifestyle campaigns staged as resistance. Print does not need to pursue virality. It escaped the grip of capital precisely because it was declared irrelevant, and the goal is to utilise this neglect for sovereignty. 

We only have a small window before the tech oligarchy buys out all the print shops. Buying out Penguin today would cost around four billion dollars, while buying out Meta would cost over two trillion. Finsta-print is no solution, but it is a tactic: an attempt to carve out a space within print for unoptimised expression before it, too, becomes another captured interface. Maybe the author of the Trinil Shell was clouted and his zigzag was the Homo erectus equivalent of the Mona Lisa, but I’m more inclined to believe it was a finsta post.

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