Leila Johnston: 'Digital culture has created a new outsider'

Hack Circus: walking the line between the critical and the whimsical. Photograph: Hack Circus

Last week, I followed a link to Never try to do what I’m doing, an exhausted and dispirited post from one of the more interesting people in my extended social circle: Leila Johnston, a freelance writer who used her three-month residency at Brighton's Lighthouse Studio to launch Hack Circus, a nearly indefinable magazine and event-series and podcast devoted to weird things that attempt something I can best describe as "serious delightfulness".

Some of Johnston's best-known work is her comedy – I loved her 2009 book Enemy of Chaos, a choose-your-own-adventure book about gaming and nerdiness; you might also know her her Shift Run Stop. Now she’s walking a razor-edge line between art and commerce, integrity and realism, and criticality and whimsy. The second issue of the improbable and beautiful Hack Circus magazine just shipped. On that august occasion, I asked Leila if she would let me interview her for this column:

Q. Is it fair to call Hack Circus "an effort to find a business-model for idle, useless, diversion?" That is, are you looking for a way to make just fooling around and being silly into a sustainable practice?

A. I don't think there's anything idle about it – the ideas are challenging and the overall editorial message of pushing your understanding of what is real and what can be trusted, is highly critical. In contrast to a commercial world where tech, art and design have to appropriated into utility and capitalist service, it is in part a useless, or "art" case for tech projects. But it's no more useless than any other entertainment and a good deal more informative than most.

The opposite of useful is not always useless, as such. The opposite of reportage is not always silliness, and the opposite of consumer messaging is not always fooling around. Playboy is one of the most successful media enterprises of all time, so presumably people don't want entertainment for functional reasons. Perhaps fooling around can be a very effective business model.

The events are fun, but they are reality-distorting rather than "comedy". They are funny because the clever, strange people who like Hack Circus are naturally funny and have done such wonderfully surprising things, not because they've written a routine. I don't want to do a science comedy night for sceptics and atheists – there's plenty of that around. I'm far more interested in, and identify far more strongly with, the credulous than the sceptical, and I'm consciously working against the resistance to imagination that scepticism presents.

Q. Is Hack Circus "living like it was the first days of a better nation" in which you can woo the muse of the odd not in spite of the fact that there's no money in being weird and speculative, but because of that fact?

A. You know, I'd love for that to be the case. I'm conflicted because I need both sides. I heard a charity campaigner saying her business was other people's pain. Without the poison industry, you can't have the antidote business. I need there to be a fringe or underworld, because that's where Hack Circus comes from – that's where I live – but I also need an establishment to react to. Rightly or wrongly, the inside helps us to contextualise those inherent outsider feelings we've always had…

Content is very easily appropriated, no one reads anything properly – as you said, people don't have time. People certainly don't have your best interests at heart; whatever you say they will take from it what suits them. But there is something beyond content that may have a hope of leading a change: its container. Digital culture has created a new outsider: there is a new sense of statement about an object. Nowadays it is so expensive and weird to make media in the real world that an object has to have a point. That's why print design is so much more beautiful and complete than web design; it's not the fault of web designers, who are ingenious within their extraordinary constraints. But websites are so enormously compromised, so crushingly shareable on every level, every pixel, that it is much harder to allow digital the basic privilege of its own voice. In short, I think we might be able to use the physicality of magazines and events to gain a bit of ground that has been lost by digital because the meaning of physicality has changed.

Q. I always thought that the thing that made zines so valuable while they lasted was that they were uncommodifiable in that a trained commercial designer would probably rather gouge her out eyes out before making things that were that heroically ugly (at least until a new generation of designers emerged from zine culture). The same was true for Geocities pages and Myspace pages.

One problem with "bohemian" projects is that they can be moved from the underground to the high street in seconds. How do you put a defensive ring around your noncommercial, anti-utilitarian technology?

A. I think a lot of ziners would argue their work is/was a kind of artful "poverty design" – the beauty and ingenuity of making do with what you have, and I absolutely appreciate that and can relate to it with Hack Circus. And I agree that the Myspace and Geocities days were definitely the inheritors of that spirit. But the fact it looks like a style (even an ugly one) means it looks like a dream, and the resulting glorification of amateurism and its associated poverties comes with a danger. Because it reinvents quality along lines that have no external measure, and in doing so devalues everything, including itself. Websites used to be something people visited, left a note on, and left. The reader had limited agency, and we were constantly aware there was an invisible barrier between author and reader; that the internet was a series of destinations, not just a flip book with us at the middle of every page.

I think the almost comically extreme trend towards online shareability is partly about our desperation to be noticed by anyone, now that the internet is so crowded.

To meet people halfway means finding a common language, and beautiful, evocative design is one way to do that very quickly. I believe it's a lot easier to achieve that connection through print, paradoxically because it slightly pushes the viewer into a role – it sets them back into a read-only mode. So I think physical magazines are conversational, but in a slightly more subtle way. I mean, people absolutely love magazines. And advertisers love what people love, and that's why mags have weathered the rise of digital better than newspapers. Beautiful magazines arrive like magic in the world, especially ones which come through your letterbox. Online magazines are not just 'magazines on a screen', they are a totally different beast – they're less magical, less personal. You know everyone else is looking at your dream at the same time. You can see them being constructed in front of you, and that's a different kind of voyeurism.

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