Chapbooks against the machine: analog co-writing and publishing as a collective geography of AI refusal

Abstract

This article presents pliegOS.net, a collaborative action-research project exploring chapbook-making as a low-tech, community-driven practice of analog resistance to AI-generated content. Combining zine culture, digital commons tools, and on-site publishing activities, pliegOS develops situated workshops where participants co-write, print, and share one-page booklets in real time. These ephemeral fanzines – whether typed, drawn, collaged, or spoken into existence – circulate immediately as tangible artifacts, sent by post or distributed on-site at festivals, residencies, and classrooms. Rather than reject digital tools altogether, this project navigates the tension between collaborative software and generative algorithms. Alongside libre pagination tools and cloud pads, has recently experimented with obfuscated PDFs to complicate machine readability. Through these strategies, their promoters understand AI refusal as a series of gestures that reclaim slowness, imperfection, and embodied co-creation. This article brings together narrative fragments, fieldnotes, workshop images, and a summary of a recent collective experiment reflecting on AI. In doing so, it signals both historical and emerging directions for resisting AI excesses and offers a practical ‘analog creativity resistance toolkit’. Engaging with chapbook genealogies, the project aligns with cultural geography debates on materiality, authorship, and infrastructures of mediation. As an essay voiced by the text itself, the article offers not just a summary of the project but a live artifact of it, emerging, as it does, at the intersection of the human, the algorithmic, and the editorial commons. In the process, it proposes analog publishing as a convivial method of critical inquiry and a plural, embodied, and relational geography of writing and reading otherwise.