I heard a story from Slavov Zizek once on the internet. ‘A tale from soviet times.’ he spits out from the interview in Europe, through the laptop screen, to my face in Iowa.
It sticks with me.
Allow me to butcher it:
"Two friends are being separated by the gulag. One will be locked up, never to be seen again, and the other friend stays behind in society. They’re able to write letters to one another, though, despite the gulag having to check the contents of the letter. The gulag can’t have word of their crimes reach the public! So, the friends decide to create a code in their letters: if something is written in blue ink, then that is true. If something is written in red ink, then it is false, despite what the words themselves may say.
"And, so, the time has come. The friends are separated, and the one who stays behind is waiting eagerly for a letter in the mail. After some months, it’s arrived! They open the letter. Streaks of blue ink flash the eyes. Not a lick of red to be found! the letter says:
“Hello, my friend. You must be worried sick about me.
"Rest assured, I am okay. More than okay, really. Everything is great here in the gulag! I get to eat three square meals a day! I’ve made such wonderful friends here! They show beautiful, uncensored American movies! I’m treated like a king. I don’t miss being out in society one bit!
"But what really sucks, my friend, is that the only thing they don’t have is red ink.”
~~~
The state of trans-wellness in the United States is going further and further into life support.
National legislators are dubbing “transgenderism” a terrorist group. The University of Oklahoma, as of writing, is caving into the 21st Century lavender-scare: Low-effort, hateful (nonetheless, ideologically in-line) ideas are being protected from the threat that is empirical evidence, proper citations, and (worst of all!) a trans professor.
But, there’s a very high chance you don’t need me to tell you this. Any of this. You know it already.
If you are a proud Iowa-Citian, an artist, or a student, I implore you to read on.
One of Iowa City’s largest bastions of its culture and intellect — the University of Iowa — I’m afraid, is going down the same slide. This comes especially disappointing to say as a UI student who is trans. Protections from civil rights abuses on the basis of gender identity were erased from the University of Iowa’s nondiscrimination policy — a change that was made before the state law had required them to. Some could say that this was just a preemptive measure to avoid legislative pushback. But, considering the university’s history of platforming nazis and ultra-right talking heads, I have a hard time believing that the institution has our backs. The ‘Center for Intellectual Freedom’ is being crafted in the image of ideologues such as Governor Kim Reynolds and David Barker — a post-secondary assistant from the Trump Administration — hellbent on scrubbing the university of any intelligence: transforming a school regarded for its Creative Writing and Nursing programs into a ‘re-education’ program, trying to indoctrinate its students. Or, what conservative speaker Christopher Rufo said at the Center’s event in the Old Capitol: “To unlock the freedom of thinking and to reorient the university toward the highest good” against ‘DEI.’
As traditional institutions like the University of Iowa are starting to become hijacked, so to speak, we must realize that the typical internet — the Instagrams and Googles of it all — are turning a similar leaf. Artificial Intelligence has been running amuck through our conventional internet. AI ‘Slop’ is invading our social media feeds, and it has become increasingly difficult for us to trust what is ‘real’ or not without suspicion. Meta is underway in reading our Facebook and Instagram messages to feed its AI dataset — and users must dig through so many forms just to deny their messages be fed. Meta and many other big-tech corporations have already scraped our art from the internet — all without our permission.
Where are we, Iowa City creators under a watchful eye of ideological and corporate vultures, to write freely? To create freely? To express ourselves freely?
What’s fascinating me to start Red Ink (and, most relevantly, write this to you) is the community’s lack of a co-operative, free magazine: made by and for each and every person belonging to racial, social, and ideological peripheries, published entirely in print. A magazine rushing head-on in encouraging provocative, authentic, boundary-pushing art. One that is not belonging to any institution, any state-regulated conditions, or inadvertently associating with re-education programs, but belonging to everyone who writes for it and reads it. The working-class, the trans, the Black, the immigrants. Including these groups, but not limited to them, lord knows!
In short: the people.
~~~
This is not necessarily meant to fully pull our talents, opinions, art, or attention away from any institution or our internet spheres, oh no! If anything, we must keep an even more critical eye as we defend our universities, and in a broader sense, defend the physical and virtual communities we’re participating in.
What this magazine sets out to do is to set our sights on a new path. Creating our own means of publishing our art, guaranteed without hate and without any data scraping. In the age of AI and of an attack on our universities, we the people cannot fully trust the conventional Internet, or even our local institutions, to platform our self-expression by themselves. My hope is that magazines such as this will give a solid ground for artists — and anyone in the community! — to reject the blue ink we’re being given and start writing with a new pen entirely.
This, in essence, is Red Ink.
- Eleanor