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Happy Labor Day. I wrote a Wikipedia article about the gay, anarchist, anti-profit publishing collective Come!Unity Press (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Come!Unity_Press) after stumbling across a poster they printed in 1971.
Serendipitously, while researching this article I came across a March 2024 talk about “Survival By Sharing” by Paul Soulellis , which features a photograph of a Community Memory terminal.
I'd come across some photos of these while looking for public domain photos of computers a couple weeks ago, and was disappointed at the time that I couldn't find a better photo than ones like this on Wikimedia Commons (derived from a scan of a 1974 newsletter):
Soulellis’ talk, however, features a much better photo of this very same terminal at Leopold's Records in Berkeley, CA, likely taken at the same time based on the outfit of the person featured in both shots!
The talk, which focuses on community and archives and collaborative art and resistance, has some really interesting throughlines with some of the things I’ve been thinking a lot about lately.
Commons photos are https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Community_Memory_terminal_at_Leopold%27s_Records.jpg and https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cm-1-2.png, and were released by Mark Szpakowski under the CC BY 2.5 and CC BY-SA 2.5 licenses (respectively)
The Signal Journal of International Political Graphics and Culture published an interview with an early member of the C!UP collective in issue 5. You can borrow it for free from the @internetarchive: https://archive.org/details/signaljournalofi0000dunn/page/n3/mode/1up
I was curious how the anarchists went from operating a printing press for a group of Quakers in exchange for free rent to running the whole shop. Turns out it came down to conflicts over topics including their nudism and a "political prisoner" (kitten) named Kropotkin.
There’s another story from an early member of the collective to be found in the comments of a site called The People’s Graphic Design Archive: “They liked th[e rainbow ink] effect so much that they charged extra to print plain black ink”.
@molly0xfff
Excellent work!
@molly0xfff Between these last two links I think I'm losing the entire next day to these sites
@molly0xfff this is so great, thanks so much for doing this work!
@molly0xfff This sounds like it might have involved split fountain printing (rather than something more chaotic)
@molly0xfff OMFG this sounds so much like C@talyst in Sydney in the 1990s... The collective created the first iteration of the Indymedia codebase for the global J18 demos and it ended up driving the Indymedia in Seattle.
https://web.archive.org/web/20001023093950/http://reflect.cat.org.au/main.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20001020144122/http://www.j18.cat.org.au/front2.html
@molly0xfff A kitten named Kropotkin…
@molly0xfff
Where can we read more about the kitten named Kropotkin?!?
@robertpi all i found was the brief mention in the Signal interview!
@molly0xfff
Ah, thanks! I just read the signal interview and enjoyed it very much.
@molly0xfff It is comforting to know that scene drama is timeless and of all ages.
Have you tried reaching out to Paul Soulellis and seeing if they'd be willing to free license that pic (and maybe other historic photos)?
@Infrogmation good idea! i doubt he owns the copyright to the photo, he could potentially help determine if it's public domain (which i suspect it is)
@molly0xfff I've wanted to make a modern version of community memory but I'm not sure where I'd put it.
@j2kun library, perhaps?
@molly0xfff oh man thats one of the original teletypewriter ones!
@molly0xfff thank you for reading and sharing! and I’m so happy that you made a C!UP Wikipedia entry.
I actually just visited the Community Memory papers at the Computer History Museum archive in California a couple of weeks ago. There’s so much there. Would love to chat more!
@soulellis would love to!
@molly0xfff @jeffjarvis you’d find this interesting
FREE PALESTINE @molly0xfff
Thanks for this! Looking at that poster I notice the 6 digit phone number - I had to look it up, but Manhattan only had the single 212 area code back then (thus, 6-digit dialing). They didn't add overlays until 1985 - that's kind of mindblowing.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area_codes_212,_646,_and_332
Damn, that lead me down the rabbit-hole of the political protest posters at the Oakland Museum of California (https://collections.museumca.org/?q=category/2011-schema/art/political-posters). Some great stuff there.
Nice vocabulary flex on palimpsestic, something this printing/graphics nerd did not know. 
@darryl_ramm thank you Dimension 20
@molly0xfff Now I'm imagining a Wikipedia editor as a character. A very knowledgeable druid who can pacify angry characters by talking to them, sometimes eventually putting them to sleep, or on the other win any argument they want to, wearing down the opposition until they just leave.
@darryl_ramm that's just me in real life