like someone suffocating who suddenly breaks the surface
and the whole book hears it—
she is still here, she wants to bloom again
the wind, carrying her almost imperceptible scent
has barely moved her rigid body
—“Snap”
a sudden crash
everything returns to dead silence
before her fragile dream can wake
the book closes again
leaving only a petal
thinner, more obedient,
slowly waiting to rot,
no longer breathing
Wanchen Cao is a Chinese poet and creative writing researcher. She is the author of Seven O’Clock (Anhui Literature and Art Publishing House, 2018). Her work explores dreams, memory, embodied experience and self-writing. She holds an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Southampton.
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).
ARTIFICIAL SCARCITY: A Parenting Prescription for an Affluent Society
Dr. Jernail S. Anand
Artificial scarcity is a term used in economics and commerce to describe the hoarding of goods so that prices may be increased. It is an accepted, if unsocial, strategy of market behaviour. I employ the term here in an altogether different perspective, where it is akin to a transferred epithet — a sphere which has nothing to do with business sense.
This argument does not concern the millions of young men and women who graduate into unemployment and search for work under the weight of real, material scarcity. They enjoy no surplus of luxury, nor any excess that dulls ambition. The problem under consideration belongs instead to those families who possess surplus wealth, and their growing up generations do not need to work hard or spend sleepless nights worrying about tomorrow’s ration or an elderly parent’s medicine.
The Three-System Breakdown
In such affluent sections of society, three systems are found under stress but at huge social cost:
First, wealth. Rapid accumulation of wealth, though not universally so, often bypasses ethical constraints. When business is run without a sense of ethics, skyscrapers rise in record time and fortunes multiply through means barely transparent. Wealth amassed without accountability tends to affect the moral standards of those who inherit the unearned bounty.
Second, the young. When this wealth is placed at the restraintless disposal of adolescents and young adults, it creates havoc. Lives are wasted in indulgence on what may be ill-gotten wealth. Because wealth is rooted in power, there is little fear of law. If illegal acts are committed, influence can secure a safe passage. By placing excessive power and pelf in their hands without moral training or restraint, parents inadvertently push them toward a variety of crimes. Can we think of the nova rich kids without enjoying rave parties? Drinks and occasional fall into crime including killings of inconvenient partners?
Third, society. The real sufferer of these derailed lives is society itself. Imagine if these same young people had been well trained and made to work hard, they could have given the world researchers, entrepreneurs, and innovators. That option is now substantially closed, leading to a wastage of young power and energy.
The Principle of Artificial Scarcity
Here enters the idea of artificial scarcity by affluent parents, who must confront the stark fact that excessive provision, born of love, often serves to turn children toward deviance. Juvenile delinquency has much to do with overindulgence by parents who are unrestrained provocateurs of evil among growing minds. The only reliable recipe to make them good and worthwhile citizens is to create an atmosphere of artificial scarcity. Apart from this, the parents themselves these days are rooted in a eco-system which does not believe in restraint. Isn’t it an additional liability? What the parents do not believe, how can they impart that sense of restraint to their children?
The idea of Artificial Scarcity is a holistic measure to keep children from harm’s way. It does not at all mean neglect. It only means regulated flow. Parents can, and should, regulate money and comfort, and better still, require that their children earn their own living.
Mechanisms for Regulating the Flow:
The concept becomes practical only when we develop some mechanism to implement it.
Allowance with accountability: From age 10, we should tie pocket money to household or community responsibilities, with a condition for review.
Self-funding thresholds: Major purchases—a first car, foreign education, business capital—should require at least 50% self-funding through work, scholarships, or enterprise.
Mandatory work exposure: One summer job, internship, or rural/volunteer posting before college, with no parental bailout for failure.
Family business induction: If a family enterprise exists, entry only at the lowest rung, with promotion based on measurable performance, not surname.
If parents enforce these conditions and compel their children to work their way up, it will likely reduce a significant share of deviance and make society healthier. Moreover, when young people work as hard as the children of less privileged families, they generate new ideas and innovate. They become stronger mentally and intellectually. The only barrier between them and greatness is the flow of easy money, which distracts and derails.
This may sound idealistic, but affluent parents already witness how children slide into drugs, fraud, and violent conduct. The most effective check on that slide is to stop the unconditional flow of money and create artificial scarcity, so that they must work their way up. That discipline is, finally, a highly beneficial act for society as a whole.
Extension to Human Relations
The idea extends beyond money to human relations. Any child for whom parents lose their sense of balance and become overprotective ends up spoiled. If a girl is overprotected and supported in every fantasy by her mother, she may have a hard time setting up a stable home. Young boys, too, need a rationing of affection. They must be corrected, and no partiality should be shown if they overstep what is right. It is for parents to make them realize their limits.
Conclusion
Artificial scarcity is not deprivation; it is design. It is the conscious choice to replace indulgence with structure, entitlement with effort, and power without responsibility with earned merit. In an age of abundance for the few, restraint becomes a form of ethical parenting—and a public service. It can also answer the issue of social disparities in the grooming of youngsters.
—
Author Note
Dr. Jernail S. Anand, with 210 books to his credit including 20 epics, is a Chandigarh-based polymath and architect of 21st-century ethical literature. Founding President of the International Academy of Ethics and laureate of the Charter of Morava, Seneca, Franz Kafka [Germany, Ukraine, Czech Rep] and Maxim Gorky, his name is inscribed on the Poets’ Rock in Serbia. He is an Honorary Member of the Serbian Writers Association, Belgrade. Email: anandjs55@yahoo.com[Serbia][Italy][Russia]
