Pagan Kennedy in the House of Broken Machines

I brought Pagan Kennedy onto The Kandy Fontaine Show with the kind of recognition that comes from shared lineage. She opened with a line that made me laugh: “I’m amused by the errors that pop up in my Wikipedia page, and I encourage them.” That was Pagan in a nutshell — embracing the glitch, the misprint, the mutation.

I told her about my own zine days, how I used to grab Fact Sheet Five off the newsstand and ask myself, “Who can I send stuff to?” One of the first places I mailed work was Dark Angel Magazine in Melbourne, which, years later, “wound up being archived at the National Universe Library of Victoria and of Australia.” I said, “Some of the stuff that we did we didn’t think was ever going to make any significant difference,” and Pagan nodded, because she lived that too.

When she looked back on “the zine revolution of the late 80s and 1990s, “to my mind, it’s sort of the internet before the internet. You know, we were doing on paper what people do on the internet now… documenting our lives and delving into weird obsessions and things like that.”

She remembered trying to explain to “normal people” that she had her own magazine, and they’d ask, “Wait, what? Why? Why do you do this?” Then, she said, “10 years later, everybody was on the internet making their own media.”

But she didn’t romanticize what came next. “Now it’s just completely jumped the shark and gone… been monetized and turned into something so commercial.”

She added, “Of course, there’s still many wonderful things going on on the internet, but… I think it had its amazing zine moment in the late 90s, early 2000s.”

Then she dropped the line that cracked the whole thing open: “I’m not pro Section 230. I think that was kind of the end of the non‑commercial internet.” She explained, “It was a law that was pushed through in the middle of the night in Congress… and it means that the platforms have no legal responsibility for whatever happens on them.” She didn’t mince words: “That’s why you can have people planning mass shootings on Facebook… genocides can be discussed… people can be harassed, libeled, threatened with murder.”

She contrasted it with traditional media: “Unlike a newspaper… or a book publisher… if you publish something that libels somebody or threatens somebody, you can be held accountable.” But online? “You can almost monetize being a Nazi… or somebody like Alex Jones can just say that Sandy Hook didn’t happen and make millions of dollars.”

We talked about the collapse of alt‑press. “The internet kind of killed off all the alt newspapers,” she said. “My career as a working writer and journalist, I’ve just watched the business model fall apart piece by piece… so many talented people have been laid off, and so many great magazines, and even websites… just can’t make a go of it anymore.”

Growing up, she said, “There was always a sense of high and low culture, straight and weird,” but by the time she worked for the New York Times, “they really were weird, or they were interested in rap, underground culture.”

Then she took me into Building 20 at MIT — the legendary, asbestos‑lined, falling‑apart wartime structure. “It was built during World War II to house the radar research,” she said. “It was never intended to really be a building that lasted. It was covered in asbestos tiles and falling apart by the time I got there.”

MIT stuck “random interesting people who didn’t fit anywhere” there, and it became “the perfect incubator for interesting things.”

She described the MITers club: “They lived there… they scavenged stuff off the streets… all this tech, and they would build stuff… eating dumpster‑dived food. It was this amazing community where… you’d go in there and they had floor‑to‑ceiling cubby holes with every kind of machine, computer part, machine part you can imagine.”

Then came the Sweet’n Low story — pure cyberpunk. “3D printers didn’t really exist yet,” she said. “They were trying to build them in an official way at MIT, but Tim and Jim [residents] just decided to build their own for a party because they wanted to scan people and make tiny versions of people.” They used “old teletype printers which spewed ink, but you could put other things in them.”

First they tried kitty litter: “That didn’t really work.” Then they tried Sweet’n Low: “It clumped together, it was non‑toxic, and it was extremely precise and fast.” The result: “They built the world’s fastest, at the time, 3D printer and inadvertently made a lot of money.”

From punk tech we moved to forensic tech. Pagan said, “I don’t throw shade on DNA identification… it’s done so much to really help us solve… especially find serial predators.” But she added, “Even now, digital evidence is really superseding DNA evidence, because… like it or not, everything we do is recorded and filmed… our social interactions, conversations are filmed.”

She talked about Uber: “They have all kinds of complaints filed… they can see what happened in the car… where the car went… and they have hidden that information.”

Now that it’s been forced out, she said, “They’re pulling the same tricks as always happens with sexual assault… asking what people were wearing.”

She told me about domestic‑abuse tech labs: “There are tech labs that help domestic abuse survivors… they can remove spyware.” And about new forensic software: “There’s some computer labs that are trying to build entirely new software that would verify the digital evidence… so you can see it’s not made up by the victim… and allow it all to be gathered and entered into court in a way that would help win cases.”

She described victims who “might have 2,000 emails or text messages” from a stalker. “They hand that over to the judge, and the judge… is just like, I can’t, I can’t with this.”

We talked about surveillance and power. She said, “You can already see, like, these flock cameras and everything under the control of police departments… a lot of things can go very wrong.”

Her question was simple and devastating: “How do you really use that to support powerless people instead of the powerful?”

Listening to Pagan, I felt my own origin story — the zines, the photocopiers, the weird obsessions, the birth of Kandy Fontaine — click into place with hers. She reminded me why I started making my own media in the first place: to document lives, delve into weird obsessions, and build something that might, years later, end up in a library we never imagined. To follow the glitch. To stay in the house of broken machines and see what they’re trying to tell us.

About Alex S. Johnson

Praised for his radical hybrid texts by the likes of feminist science fiction pioneer Dr. Marleen S. Barr, John Shirley (The Crow; cyberpunk progenitor); R.U. Sirius (Mondo 2000), Paul Di Filippo (Nebula, World Fantasy and Hugo Award-nominated author) and Jeffrey Thomas (New Weird icon), Alex S. Johnson’s work is archived at Harvard’s Widener Library and used as course curricula at USC. His previous interview subjects include Norma Jean Almodovar, Diamanda Galas, Nina Hartley, Caitlin R. Kiernan and Mimi Pond. He lives in Carmichael, California with his family and runs Nocturnicorn Books, featuring Lasara Firefox Allen, David J. (Bauhaus; Bela Lugosi’s Dead) and Bibbe Hansen (Black Fag; Andy Warhol’s Restaurant with Edie Sedgewick).