Item: After ten years, there’s a new issue of 8-Track Mind on discerning newsstands as we speak. If you know what 8-Track Mind is, congratulations on being an old person. If you’re not an old person, zines are sort of like pogs in that they had a surprising amount of cultural impact in the 90s despite having such a stupid name. (With any luck you know what pogs are.) Also like pogs, they were paper products that inspired certain people to amass huge collections of them. Unlike pogs, they were meant to overthrow the dominant mass media.
8-Track Mind is a zine specifically by and for collectors of eight-track tapes, but in a broader sense it’s also for people who fetishize outdated technology as well as the consumer folkways from when that technology was current—basically the forebears of today’s cassette-tape revivalists and Lomographers. The new issue, its first since number 100 in 2001, dispenses with the eight-track talk completely and bluntly asks a panel of former zinesters whether they think the zine or the blog is the better format, which in effect stands in for the question of whether the past decade and the global Internet revolution have been good things.