This is my editorial for the first-ever print issue of Yakuzuzu Magazine.
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The worst idea in the world is, if you ask me, to start yet another magazine. There are too many out there already and if not, everyone has a blog, Snapchat or Instagram just to make sure more content gets created than what gets consumed.
No one has time to read.
Twitter is the first social media that is written and read almost entirely by automated bots.
And then here’s the thing: all Yakuzuzu articles, everything that we’ve ever written and will ever write will be available for free on the interwebs. Not necessarily right away, not necessarily in the most convenient format available, but: freely accessible for everyone. It would be very much against our spirit to keep any piece of knowledge behind bars: the world is a much better place now than when I was born, exactly because of free information flow and open source.
With that we have: the content that’s available for free. A format that’s too expensive to create and is fairly bad for the environment. And yet, these ten grownups, our editorial team, decided to make it happen. Is it all ego? Is it all because we want to see our own work printed? Oh yes, you bet, some if it is ego.
And another part of it is the notion that we need to find the right space in our lives for reading. Spinning up is easy, it’s calming down that’s hard to do. The way we consume information seems to be optimised for speed: you read scrolling news headlines on CNN, while the anchor is talking, while you’re scraping Twitter on your phone.
I think this should be changed. In the spirit of slow living: what’s urgent is mostly not all that important. A book or an article is only as good as the thoughts it inspires, and for that, half the work happens in your mind.
So grab a tea, clear up your next hour or two, and enjoy reading, touching and smelling: Yakuzuzu Magazine, Volume One.